Ex Libris > C. K. OGDEN THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GEORGE DYER FROM THE PICTURE IN THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA U)S ANGELES Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN t '7'j- THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA U)S ANGELES THE LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB THE LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB fietoln ^rrantjcU, fottl) EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES, BY ALFRED AINGER VOL. I. ILontJon MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAX COMPANY 1904 All rights rtstrvtd First Edition, March 1888 Reprinted September 1888, 1891, 1897 Second Edition 1904 College Library -v 45 To SAMUEL TAYLOR COIE- RIDGE .... To THOMAS MANNING To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLE- RIDGE .... To ME. RICKMAN . . . To WILLIAM GODWIN ! )l To ROBERT LLOYD ' ' To ROBERT SOUTHEY . To THOMAS MANNING To Miss WORDSWORTH To THOMAS MANNING To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH To WILLIAM HAZLITT *" . To THOMAS MANNING To WILLIAM HAZLITT To MR. RICKMAN To WILLIAM HAZLITT To MR. RICKMAN To WILLIAM HAZLITT To THOMAS MANNING To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH To THOMAS MANNING DATE PAGE Feb. 19, 1803 242 Mar. 1803 244 Mar. 20, 1803 245 April 13, 1803 247 April 23, 1803 248 May 27, 1803 250 July 16, 1803 252 July 27, 1803 253 Nov. 8, 1803 255 Nov. 10, 1803 255 Mar. 13, 1S04 258 Sept. 13, 1804 259 Nov. 7, 1804 260 Feb. 24, 1805 261 June 14, 1805 263 [July 27, 1805] 266 Sept. 28, 1805 266 Nov. 10, 1805 269 [Nov. 15, 1805] 271 Jan. 15, 1806 272 Jan. 25, 1806 273 Feb. 19, 1806 274 Mar. 1806 276 Mar. 15, 1806 277 May 10, 1806 278 June 26, 1806 280 June 1806 281 Dec. 5, 1806 285 CONTENTS. XIX LETTER DATE PAOE CL. To Miss STODDART . . Dec. 11, 1806 290 CLI. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Dec. 11, 1806 290 CLII. To WILLIAM GODWIN . 1806 291 CLIII. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Jan. 29, 1807 292 CLIV. To REV. W. HAZLITT. . Feb. 18, 1808 293 CLV. To THOMAS MANNING . Feb. 26, 1808 294 CLVI. To WILLIAM GODWIN . Mar. 11, 1808 298 *CLVII. To GEORGE DYER . . Dec. 5, 1808 299 CLVIII. To MRS. HAZLITT . . Dec. 10, 1808 300 CHAPTER III. 1809-1816. LETTERS TO MANNING, COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH, AND OTHERS. LETTER DATE PAOE *CLIX. To ROBERT LLOYD . . Feb. 25, 1809 301 CLX. To THOMAS MANNING . Mar. 28, 1809 302 CLXI. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLE- RIDGE .... June 7, 1809 304 *CLXII. To CHARLES LLOYD, THE ELDER .... July 31, 1809 307 CLXIII. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLE- RIDGE .... Oct. 30, 1809 309 CLXIV. To ROBERT LLOYD . . Jan. 1, 1810 310 CLXV. To THOMAS MANNING . Jau. 2, 1810 811 *CLXVI. To CHARLES LLOYD, THE ELDER . ' . . . Mar. 10, 1810 315 CLXVII. To JOHN MATHEW GUTCH . April 9, 1810 316 CLXVIII. To BASIL MONTAGU . . July 12, 1810 317 CLXIX. To WILLIAM HAZLITT . [Aug. 9, 1810] 318 XX CONTENTS. LETTER DATE PAGE CLXX. To Miss WORDSWORTH [Autumn 1810] 319 CLXXI. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Oct. 19, 1810 319 CLXXII. To Miss WORDSWORTH . Nov. 23, 1810 321 CLXXIII. To WILLIAM HAZLITT . Nov. 28, 1810 322 CLXXIV. To HEXRY CRABB ROBINSON [1810] 323 CLXXV. To WILLIAM HAZLITT . Oct. 2, 1811 324 CLXXVI. To WILLIAM GODWIN . [1811] 325 CLXXVII. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLE- RIDGE .... Aug. 13, 1814 326 CLXXVIII. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Aug. 14, 1814 328 CLXXIX. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLE- RIDGE .... Aug. 26, 1814 331 CLXXX. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Aug. 29, 1814 333 CLXXXI. ,, 1814 335 CLXXXII. ,, 1814 337 CLXXXIII. [1815] 340 CLXXXIV. ,, ,, 1815 343 CLXXXV. To ROBERT SOUTHEY . . May 6, 1815 347 CLXXXVI. . Aug. 9, 1815 349 CLXXXVII. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Aug. 9, 1815 351 CLXXXVIII. To Miss HUTCHINSON . Oct. 19, 1815 354 CLXXXIX. To THOMAS MANNING . Dec. 25, 1815 355 CXC. ,, . Dec. 26, 1815 357 CXCI. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH April 9, 1816 359 CXCII. April 26, 1816 361 CXCIII. To Miss MATILDA BETHAM June 1, 1816 363 CXCIV. To H. DODWELL . . July 1816 365 *CXCV. To JOHN RICKMAN . . Dec. 30, 1816 366 NOTES 369 SONNET TO ELIA. THOU gentle Spirit, sweet and pure and kind, Though strangely witted "high fantastical" Who clothest thy deep feelings in a pall Of motley hues, that twinkle to the mind, Half hiding, and yet heightening, what's enshrined Within ; who by a power unknown to all Save thee alone, canst bring up at a call A thousand seeming opposites, entwined In wondrous brotherhood fancy, wild wit, Quips, cranks, and wanton wiles, with deep sweet thought. And stinging jests, with honey for the wound ; All blent in intermixture full and fit, A banquet for the choicest souls : can aught Repay the solace which from thee I've found ? J. H. (JOHN HUNTER OF CRAIGCROOK) From Friendships Ofering, 1832. VOL. I. i INTKODUCTION As I have elsewhere told the story of Charles Lamb's life to the best of my ability, I have not thought it necessary, in editing his Letters, to tell it over again in my own words. The letters themselves contain his story at least from the year when he came of age and began in earnest the battle of his difficult and lonely life. From the year 1796 to a date preceding his death by only a few days, there are few incidents of that life that are not related or referred to in those letters. When read con- secutively, and with the help of such supplementary information as can be provided in notes, they form an almost complete biography. Material for a larger collection of Lamb's Letters has been gradually accumulating since the appearance of Talfourd's well-known volumes the Letters of Charles Lamb, urith a Sketch of his Life, in 1837, and the Final Memorials published after the death of Mary Lamb in 1848. It would take long to unfold the complicated history of the various editions of Lamb's correspondence that have since appeared. No change in the form of Talfourd's work would seem to have been made until the year 1868, when an edition of the writings of Lamb was published by Mr. Moxon, preceded by a collection of the Letters, freshly arranged according to the persons to whom they were addressed. This edition was in the first instance prefaced by an " Essay on the Genius of Lamb " from the hand of Mr. G. A. Sala. Two years later the first volume was withdrawn, and re-issued with a substi- XXIV INTRODUCTION. tuted Preface by Mr. Thomas Purnell. This edition was in its turn replaced in 1875 by another in six volumes, bearing the name of the same publishers, and under the editorship of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald. In this last-named edition the narrative portion of Talfourd's two works was retained, digested into one continuous narrative, with additions both in the text and notes. The Letters were separated from Talfourd's original matter, arranged (as in the two preceding editions) in groups the Letters to Coleridge being followed by those addressed to Southey, and so forth. Mr. Fitzgerald was able to announce that he had added forty new letters to the collection. More than ten years after Mr. Fitzgerald's edition, Mr. W. 0. Hazlitt edited for Mr. George Bell a fresh Life and Letters, announced as Talfourd's "carefully revised and greatly enlarged." The edition consists of Talfourd's text, freely interspersed with original matter, and the Letters rearranged, with certain additions to their number. The edition has this advantage over Mr. Fitzgerald's in that it aims at giving the Letters in chronological order, and not broken up into groups on any other plan. But I certainly cannot think that Talfourd's work, which, whatever be its defects, has long taken its place as an English Classic, should be re-issued under its author's name after additions and alterations so extensive have been introduced into it. I have preferred, therefore, to omit Talfourd's own narrative altogether, and to print the Letters only, with such additions to their number as I have been fortunate in obtaining, and in chronological order, so far as their dates are discoverable, reserving all elucidatory matter for the notes at the end of the respect- ive volumes. The editors of Lamb's Letters who have succeeded Talfourd have been, I think, unduly severe upon his methods of procedure. Mr. Fitzgerald, for instance, com- plains that in Talfourd's hands the Letters were edited " in accordance with his peculiar views being cut up, altered, and dealt with in very summary fashion." This may be INTKODUCmON. XXV correct, but it should not be forgotten that the former of Talfourd's two works the Life and Letters published in 1837 was produced under exceptionally difficult circum- stances. Charles Lamb's history was bound up with that of his sister, and with the consequences of one most terrible event in her life. As long as Mary Lamb sur- vived her brother, no letters, however interesting, which bore upon that calamity or the sacrifices it entailed, or upon the frequent recurrence of the malady in the life of the sister, could be printed without large omissions. Hence the Letters in the volumes of 1837 were in many cases fragments only, and made no claim to be anything else. After the death of Mary Lamb in 1847 the fuller narrative of the sad fortunes of the brother and sister, vaguely hinted in the Preface to the former volumes, became possible. It is easy to pronounce upon the course Talfourd ought to have pursued. He should have pre- pared a new edition of his former book, adding new letters and restoring the omitted passages with such additional explanatory matter of his own as would have made the whole intelligible. Talfourd was evidently aware that this would have been the simplest and most satisfactory course, and apologises for not adopting it on the ground that it would be unfair to purchasers of the former work. He therefore chose the alternative plan of a second collection of letters with fresh connecting matter. But unfortunately he too often supplied the missing por- tions of letters with no indication of those in his former book to which they belonged. This was, beyond all question, a grave error of judgment, and the conse- quence was that if Talfourd's former work had of neces- sity a " scrappy " character, for reasons that were entitled to all respect, the second work was more fragmentary still The charge against Talfourd of "cutting, and carving" must at least, therefore, be made with due allowance for the difficulties of his position. For Mr. Fitzgerald's further complaint that Talfourd "altered" XXVI INTRODUCTION. the Letters, a different defence must be found. It is certainly true that here and there, though very rarely, Lamb makes use in writing of certain freedoms of expres- sion principally of the expletive kind which were common enough in letters and in conversation eighty years since, but are now happily out of fashion. If Talfourd, on a principle long ago accepted as sound, that such expletives have " had their day," ventured to soften them down into more harmless equivalents, I yet cannot agree with Mr. Fitzgerald that any serious treason against Lamb was committed in so doing. As to the omissions or changes of other kinds of passages bearing upon persons then still living, or of intimate confidences as to the writer's own self, the publication of which must always be matter for editorial discretion Talfourd showed himself neither timid nor capricious. I am not speaking without good reason. The autographs of two of the most important series of letters those to Manning and those to Bernard Barton have been in my hands, and except for the mutilations already referred to, made necessary by the Mary Lamb difficulty, I can testify that omissions or changes due to Talfourd are not only insigni- ficant in amount, but were at the time amply justifiable. Many of such omissions have been since Talfourd's day supplied, and I have been able to restore some passages and correct others in the present edition. A more important defect in Talfourd's method as editor must, however, be admitted. It certainly could never have been an easy task to determine the dates of Lamb's various letters. He rarely dated a letter, especially in early life, and postmarks are too often torn or illegible To arrange the Letters, therefore, in anything like chrono- logical order must have been, as it is still, matter of great difficulty. But Talfourd, we must agree, might have come something nearer to success. Even where the post- marks existed, he does not seem to have noticed them, or to have cared for any more precise reference to a letter than that it was written " about this time." Sometimes, INTRODUCTION. XXvii even in the absence of both date and postmark, refer- ences in the Letters to incidents in the lives of Lamb or his correspondent might have saved the editor from many errors. A single illustration of this may suffice. In the summer of 1797 Coleridge was living at Nether Stowey, whither he had betaken himself, with his young friend Charles Lloyd, to be near Thomas Poole, who had his tannery hard by. Cruikshank and his wife were there, and Citizen Thelwall was not far off. Wordsworth and his sister, from Racedown, were on a visit, and Charles Lamb- little more than a youth of twenty- two joined the party to spend his brief holiday. It was during this visit that Coleridge, having injured his leg, and being thus prevented from joining his friends in an excursion, stayed at home and wrote the lines, familiar to all lovers of Coleridge and Lamb "This Lime-tree Bower my prison," containing touching reference to both Lamb and his sister. The poem was printed soon after in the Annual Anthology at Bristol, with a prefatory note relating the circumstances. After Lamb's return to London he writes Coleridge a letter (see vol. i. p. 81 of this edition) referring to this visit, to Coleridge's accident, to Poole, Wordsworth, and the rest, and to the incident of little Hartley Coleridge cutting his teeth. This letter Talfourd placed three years later, in 1800, and no subsequent editor has corrected the mistake. It must be admitted, however, that errors are not always so easy to amend as in this instance. In- ternal evidence is not always present to supplement the external, and after careful examination and balancing of probabilities, I have had to leave many letters, notably of the period between 1800 and 1802, with many misgiv- ings as to the place finally assigned to them. The originals of the Letters to Coleridge, I should add, are dispersed, and no longer accessible for purposes of collation. The autographs of the Manning Letters have been in my hands, through the kindness of their owner, the XXV111 INTRODUCTION. Rev. 0. R Manning, Hector of Diss, the nephew of the famous orientalist and traveller. Among these I have been so fortunate as to find several not before printed, one of singular interest, containing Lamb's criticism on the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads, and an account of the passage at arms between himself and the author of the volume. Talfourd suppressed the letter, there can be no doubt, because Wordsworth was then still living. Some new letters to Manning of later date will be found in their proper places. The Barton Letters I have also carefully examined with the valuable assistance of Bernard Barton's daughter, Mrs. Edward FitzGerald, who has also favoured me with much interesting information throwing light upon allusions occurring in the letters. To Mrs. Procter I have to express my warm acknowledgments for entrusting me with the originals of the letters to her husband ("Barry Cornwall "), from which I have been able to make both corrections and additions. To Mrs. Cowden Clarke (the Mary Victoria Novello of the Letters) I am also deeply indebted for her " cordial permission " to include in this edition the Letters of Lamb to her husband, and to her father, Viscount Novello, first printed in Mr. and Mrs. Cowden Clarke's interesting Recollections of Writers. Other letters, previously unpublished, will be found in the present edition. A series addressed to Mr. J. B. Dibdin I am able to include, by the kindness of his nephew, Mr. R. W. Dibdin. Readers of Lamb's correspondence may remember a reference to this gentleman, " the grandson of the songster," as having died early of consumption, after seeking in vain the restorative climate of Madeira. I have told in my notes the story of Lamb's chance introduction to the -young man, to whom he was thence- forth drawn by kindred literary tastes, and even more by that which always deeply moved Charles Lamb, the eight of patient suffering or struggle. Mr. Dibdin, a clerk in a city merchant's house, was often obliged to INTRODUCTION. XXIX visit some southern watering-place for his health, and most of the present letters were evidently composed by Lamb with the single object of amusing his friend, and relieving for a moment the tedium of his enforced idle- ness. It is as such that these letters must be judged. If their fun is at times of the most extravagant, the true kindness of heart that prompted them will not be over- looked. It will be seen that I have not attempted to make this edition of Lamb's Letters " complete," in the sense of having retained all the notes (or " notelets," as they have been called) included in former collections. It happens to any man of mark and genius, such as Charles Lamb, that his most trivial notes are naturally preserved by correspondents as autographs, but it assuredly does not follow that they are therefore worth printing. Dozens of hasty notes written by Lamb are extant, but it seems to me little short of an insult to his memory and to his readers to fill page after page with communications, of which the following is a sample : " DEAR A. I am better. Mary quite well We ex- pected to see you before. I can't write long letters. So a friendly love to you all." At the same time I have not lightly omitted any scrap of a note containing a characteristic flash of humour or felicity of expression, or supplying any link in the chain of incidents that made up his own life or Mary's. Even now, when finally parting from a task that has employed my leisure for some years, I feel reluctant altogether to omit certain fragments illustrations of that rare union of tenderness, humour, and invention that for various reasons have not found a place in the text of these volumes. In an early note to Manning (May 1800) occurs one more of the many touching tributes to his early friend, his "guardian angel": "I have given up my house and must look out for lodgings. I expect Mary will get better before many weeks are gone ; but XXX INTRODUCTION. at present I feel my daily and hourly prop has fallen from me. I totter and stagger with weakness, for nobody can supply her place to me. White has all kindness, but not sympathy. R. Lloyd, my only correspondent, you except, is a good being, but a weak one. I know not where to look but to you. If you will suffer me to weary your shoulders with part of my burden, I shall write again to let you know how I go on." He is in a more cheerful mood in another letter of the same year to the same correspondent, in which occurs this passage (not without interest just now in its pro- phecies and speculations) : " By the way, I am anxious to get specimens of all English turkeys. Pray send me at your leisure separate specimens from every county in Great Britain, including Wales, as I hate nationalities. The Irish turkeys I will let alone till the union is determined." And, finally, I cannot keep back the droll and wonderful imagination of the following an extract from a letter to Mr. Procter. Lamb, who was himself always writing verses for his young friends' albums, wanted Procter to do the same kind office for a young lady in whose veins was a tinge of blood darker than European. Assuming that Procter might make his verses a vehicle for some compliments, Lamb writes : " And now, Procter, I will tell you a story. Hierocles, the Sicilian Tyrant, who lived in the thirtieth Olympiad, just seven hundred and sixty years ante A.D., by the Gregorian Computation, having won the Prize in a Race of Mules, besought the Poet Simonides, with the incentive moreover of a donative of 1200 Sesterces, which might be about 12 : 7 : 3J of our money, to write him an Olympic Hymn in praise of the mules. But Simonides, declining to vulgarise his Muse with the mention of any such mongrels, the Tyrant (which signifies in the Greek of that age only king) rounds him in the ear that he shall have 8000 sesterces if he will touch up his beasts hand- somely. Whereupon Simonides the 'tender Simonides,' as antiquity delights to phrase him began to relent, and INTRODUCTION. XXxi stringing his golden lyre begins a lofty ode to the cattle with ' Hail ! daughters of the swift-winged steed. ' Sinking, you see, one part of their genealogy. Now for the application. What I told you, dear Procter, about my young friend was nothing but the exact truth. But I sunk the circumstance that her mother was a negro, or half-caste which convinces me, what I always thought, that something of the tender genius of Simonides lives again in my strains. Mary corrects me, and will have it that the lady's mother was a Hindostanee half-caste, and no negress, but was I to send you wool-gathering over the vast plains watered by the Ganges, or the more bewilder- ing wilds of Timbuctoo, to search for images ?" There is genius in nonsense such as this. I have willingly suppressed no " fooling " of this kind ; but notes of invitation to a supper party, or acceptance of one, have no justification for appearing merely because they were once in Charles Lamb's handwriting. I have elsewhere spoken of the peculiar value and interest of the literary and other criticism scattered through these Letters, and I may be permitted to repeat here a few sentences. It is remarkable that the intel- lectual accomplishment in Lamb which asserts itself earliest is just that which ordinarily it takes years, with their increased reading and experience, to mature the critical faculty. Lamb's earliest letters that have sur- vived begin when he was just of age, and his two chief correspondents for the next three years were young men like himself one his schoolfellow, Samuel Taylor Cole- ridge, three years his senior ; and the other, whom he had come to know through Coleridge, and who was associated with Coleridge by so many ties, Robert Southey. All three were starting on a literary career, full of ambition ; two of them with the intention of making it their pro- fession, the other, happily for himself, settling down to that desk in Leadenhall Street which was to prove, though he knew it not, his best blessing and safeguard XXX11 INTRODUCTION. for thirty years to come. Apart from the family matters sad and terrible they were discussed in these Letters, the chief topics dealt with are literary and critical. Coleridge and Southey forward to their friend their verses, their lyrics and eclogues, for his judgment and suggestions ; and he in turn submits to them his sonnets and elegies, plaintive and tender after his model, William Lisle Bowles. Coleridge and Southey, endowed with a poetic gift far stronger and richer than Lamb's, yet at once recognise in their companion no University man like themselves, lowly in his home and traditions, humble in his life's occupation this rare and precious gift of critical insight. These earliest letters of Lamb show how amply justified was their confidence in his powers. If the art or science of poetical criticism could be made matter of instruction, I know no better introduction to the study than these scattered criticisms of his, first upon Coleridge's and Southey's verse, then upon Wordsworth's, and generally upon all poetry ancient or modern quoted or referred to in the Letters. Lamb was one of the very first to detect the great powers and the real importance of Coleridge and Wordsworth before the wit of the Anti- Jacobin and " English Bards " had opened its batteries upon these poets, and while the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews were yet unborn. This boy of twenty-one was already showing that, together with the keenest eye for the weaker side of these poetical reformers, and with a true humorist's enjoyment of what was absurd or puerile in their methods, that enjoyment in no way disturbed his appreciation of their genius. With all his prejudices and petulances (and Lamb had plenty of these), the dis- tinguishing feature of his critical power is its width and its versatility. The deepest of all his literary affections, that for Milton, no more interfered with his intense enjoy- ment of Pope, than did his delight in Pope delay for an instant his recognition of the worth of Cowper, Burns, and their successors. Lamb is our best and wholesomest example of that rare capacity for valuing and enjoying INTRODUCTION. XXX111 one literary school without at the same time disparaging its opposites. And he could recognise that the same writer often rises above, and often sinks below, himself. He laughs as frankly at what was namby-pamby in Coleridge and Wordsworth as he descants with enthusiasm on the Ancient Marine)' and the " Lines written above Tintern Abbey." Nor is it only on the great men the Coleridges and Wordsworths that Lamb's criticism is so instructive. Scarcely anything was too poor or insignificant, if written by a friend or by one who needed his friendship, for him to exercise his critical faculty upon ; and if in the dead waste of Joseph Cottle's blank -verse a redeeming line appears, Lamb detects it on the spot, and by his words of approval almost imprints the stamp of classicality upon the poem. If he says almost the best thing possible about Cervantes, he does not disdain to do the same thing for the author of the Farmers Boy. But it is not only about books that Lamb's judgments are so acute. As we pass from letter to letter in this collection, nothing will strike us more than the transition from wildest burlesque to the nicest and most delicate estimates of human conduct. Even in the same letter, as in one to Mr. Basil Montagu on the proposal to erect a monu- ment to Clarkson in his lifetime, the two sides of the writer appear in a contrast almost startling. It is the letter in which he says that he should not like his name to be absent from the list of subscribers, if the project were carried out, but adds, "Otherwise I frankly own that to pillarise a man's good feelings in his life-time is not to my taste. Monuments to goodness, even after death, are equivocal. 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." This ethical good taste that appears whenever Lamb's opinion is seriously called for, is one of the many xxxiv INTRODUCTION. pleasures and surprises, if I am not mistaken, to be enjoyed by those who think of Lamb mainly as a jester, who did not always observe a corresponding moderation in his jests. In certain respects I have tried to improve upon Talfourd's method as an editor of these Letters. But I have little sympathy with those who have spoken slight- ingly of the obligations he has laid upon all lovers of Charles Lamb. Least of all can I understand the covert charges against him of having, in the interest of his friend, over-coloured his virtues or concealed any of his frailties or foibles. When Talfourd put together the Final Memorials after the death of Mary Lamb in 1847, he attempted a fresh estimate of Lamb's character, as affected by the evidence of facts then for the first time pub- lished to the world. He headed these last pages, " Lamb fully known." I believe that those who know Lamb best must acknowledge both the generosity and the discrimi- nating justice of this estimate. It may be true that a certain daintiness, a certain hothouse flavour, in Talfourd'e style is a little out of keeping with his subject, but it certainly is not for the critical fashions of this age to look back scornfully on the " preciosity " of forty years since. But if Talfourd wraps up his judgments with something of an over-elegant elaboration, these judgments appear to me for the most part admirable. And although the number of Lamb's collected letters has largely grown in the last forty years, and his scattered writings have been collected and published, no record has " leaped to light " which need in any degree modify the estimate then formed. It was remarked by Mr. Sala, that among the reasons for Lamb's memory enduring among us, is the circumstance that " he was passionately loved by his friends. He had, not one, but half-a-dozen Boswells." This is certainly true. We know Lamb as he was known to troops of friends the most various in character and genius. Either in prose or verse, or both, we possess descriptions, estimates, anecdotes of Lamb from Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hood, INTRODUCTION. XXXV Procter, Landor, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Talfourd, Patmore, and many others ; and through all these eyes, we see one and the same man. The same rare and sterling qualities impress all these alike. There are some forgotten verses by that friend of Lamb's earlier days, Charles Lloyd, written in 1820, verses often obscure and sounding curious depths of bathos, but not without gleams of poetry and genuine insight. They are called "Desultory thoughts in London," and include, among other such thoughts, an elaborate tribute to Coleridge, and a description of Lloyd's other dearest friend, Charles Lamb. No names are mentioned, but the allusions are unmis- takable. Lloyd could only then hint at the sorrows of his friend's early life : " He walked along his path in steadiness, In solitude, and in sublimity ; None ever knew his desolate distress, And none shall ever know it now from me." And when, after many stanzas of strange digression, he comes back to his theme : " And now, my friend, I turn again to thee, Thou pure receptacle of all that's good ! " he admits that Lamb has "contrived an art" he had never conceived as possible : " The child of impulse ever to appear, And yet through duty's path strictly to steer. Nay more, thou hast contrived to be that child, And not alone hast held, through duty's path, In lofty tmimpeachableness, and mild, Thy way but through strange suffering and scathe Of worldly comfort, hast been unbeguiled Of life's first innocence : God's blessing hath Like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego Through fiery furnace made thee safely go." There is no mistaking tributes such as these for the mere language of literary compliment. There was no conspiracy among Landor and Lloyd, Wordsworth and Thomas Hood, Coleridge and Procter, to uphold the XXXVI INTRODUCTION. reputation of a favourite member of their clique. Whe we read such words, we know that they mean wb they say, and that they are true. And it is because I believe that Talfourd justly interpreted the char- acter of his hero, and was in full harmony with the judgments of those other friends of Lamb, that I have ventured to add these few words in his vindication. To the names already mentioned of those to whom I am indebted for many kind services, I must add that of Mr. George Bentley of New Burlington Street, for the use of an unpublished letter ; of Mr. 0. Kegan Paul, for permission to include the Letters of Lamb to Godwin, originally printed in Mr. Paul's Life of William Godwin; of Messrs. Longmans, and the editor of the Century Magazine and Mr. B. S. Chilton, for a like per- mission to use letters addressed respectively to Miss Matilda Betham and to Mr. John Howard Payne. Mr. B. M 'George of Glasgow kindly collated two of the letters here given with originals in his possession ; and my old friend Dr. Edward Calvert of Shrewsbury has taken a lively interest in extracting meanings and allusions from some of Lamb's rather frolicsome Latin. And I owe a final word of special gratitude to Mr. James Dykes Campbell, who has allowed me to consult him throughout, and whose minute and exact knowledge of all matters touching Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Lamb, has materially enriched my notes. ALFRED AINGER. HAMPSTEAD, November 1887. LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. CHAPTEE I. 1796-1800. LETTERS TO COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY, ROBERT LLOYD, AND MANNING To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER I.] May 27, 1796. Dear Coleridge Make yourself perfectly easy about May. I paid his bill when I sent your clothes. I was flush of money, and am so still to all the purposes of a single life ; so give yourself no further concern about it. The money would be superfluous to me if I had it. When Southey becomes as modest as his predecessor, Milton, and publishes his Epics in duodecimo, I will read 'em ; a guinea a book is somewhat exorbitant, nor have I the opportunity of borrowing the work. The extracts from it in the Monthly Review, and the short passages in your Watchman, seem to me much superior to any thing in his partnership account with Lovell. Your poems I shall procure forthwith. There were noble lines in what you inserted in one of your Numbers from Religious Musings; but I thought them elaborate. I am some- what glad you have given up that paper : it must have VOL. i. & u 2 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. been dry, unprofitable, and of " dissonant mood " to your disposition. I wish you success in all your undertakings, and am glad to hear you are employed about the Evidences of Religion. There is need of multiplying such books a hundredfold in this philosophical age, to prevent converts to atheism, for they seem too tough disputants to meddle with afterwards. Le Grice is gone to make puns in Cornwall. He has got a tutorship to a young boy living with his mother, a widow lady. He will, of course, initiate him quickly in "whatsoever things are honest, lovely, and of good report." He has cut Miss Hunt completely: the poor girl is very ill on the occasion ; but he laughs at it, and justifies himself by saying, "she does not see me laugh." Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got some- what rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I was; and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told. My Sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which, if I finish, I publish. White is on the eve of publishing (he took the hint from Vortigem} " Original letters of .Falstaff, Shal- low," etc.; a copy you shall have when it comes out. They are without exception the best imitations I ever saw. Coleridge, it may convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy. The Sonnet I send you 'has small merit as poetry ; but you will be curious to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of my lucid intervals. TO COLERIDGE. 3 TO MY SISTER. If from my lips some angry accents fell, Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind, 'Twas but the error of a sickly mind And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well And waters clear of Reason ; and for me, Let this my verse the poor atonement be My verse, which thou to praise wert e'er inclined Too highly, and with a partial eye to see No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show Kindest affection ; and would'st oft-times lend An ear to the desponding love-sick lay, Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay But ill the mighty debt of love I owe, Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend. With these lines, and with that sister's kindest remembrances to C , I conclude. Yours sincerely, LAMB. Your Condones ad Pojytdum, are the most eloquent politics that ever came in my way. Write when convenient not as a task, for there is nothing in this letter to answer. We cannot send our remembrances to Mrs. C., not having seen her, but believe me our best good wishes attend you both. My civic and poetic compliments to Southey if at Bristol. Why, he is a very Leviathan of Bards ! the small minnow, I ! LETTER II.] June 1796. I am in such violent pain with the headache, that I am fit for nothing but transcribing, scarce for that. When I get your poems, and the Joan of Arc, I will exercise my presumption in giving you my opinion of 'em. The mail does not come in before to-morrow (Wednesday) morning. The following Sonnet was composed during a walk down into Hertfordshire early in last Summer : 4 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. The Lord of Light shakes off his drowsyhed. Fresh from his couch up springs the lusty sun, And girds himself his mighty race to run ; Meantime, by truant love of rambling led, I turn my back on thy detested walls, Proud City, and thy sons I leave behind, A selfish, sordid, money-getting kind, Who shut their ears when holy Freedom calls. I pass not thee so lightly, humble spire, That mindest me of many a pleasure gone, Of merriest days, of Love and Islington, Kindling anew the flames of past desire ; And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on, To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. The last line is a copy of Bowles's, "To the green Hamlet in the peaceful Plain." Your ears are not so very fastidious ; many people would not li.ce words so prosaic and familiar in a Sonnet as Islington and Hert- fordshire. The next was written within a day or two of the last, on revisiting a spot where the scene was laid of my first Sonnet that "mock'd my step with many a lonely glade." When last I roved these winding wood-walks green, Green winding walks, and shady pathways sweet, Oft-times would Anna seek the silent scene, Shrouding her beauties in the lone retreat. No more I hear her footsteps in the shade ; Her image only in these pleasant ways Meets me, self- wandering, where in happier days I held free converse with my fair-hair'd maid. I pass'd the little cottage which she loved, The cottage which did once my all contain : It spake of days that ne'er must come again ; Spake to my heart, and much my heart was moved. Now " Fair befall thee, gentle maid," said I ; And from the cottage turn'd me with a sigh. The next retains a few lines from a Sonnet of mine which you once remarked had no " body of thought " in it. I agree with you, but have preserved a part of it, and it runs thus. I flatter myself you will like it : A timid grace sits trembling in her eye, As loth to meet the rudeness of men's sight TO COLERIDGE. 5 Yet shedding a delicious lunar light, That steeps in kind oblivious ecstacy The care-crazed mind, like some still melody : Speaking most plain the thoughts which do possess Her gentle sprite, peace and meek quietness, And innocent loves, and maiden purity : A look whereof might heal the cruel smart Of changed friends, or Fortune's wrongs unkind ; Might to sweet deeds of mercy move the heart , Of him who hates his brethren of mankind. Tum'd are those beams from me, who fondly yet Past joys, vain loves, and buried hopes regret. The next and last I value most of all. Twas com- posed close upon the heels of the last, in that very wood I had in mind when I wrote "Methinks how dainty sweet." We were two pretty babes, the youngest she, The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween, And Innocence her name. The time has been We two did love each other's company ; Time was, we two had wept to have been apart : But when, with show of seeming good beguiled, I left the garb and manners of a child, And my first love for man's society, Defiling with the world my virgin heart, My loved companion dropp'd a tear and fled, And hid in deepest shades her awful head. Beloved ! who can tell me where thou art In what delicious Eden to be found That I may seek thee the wide world around ? Since writing it, I have found in a poem by Hamilton of Bangor, these two lines to " Happiness :" ' ' Nun, sober and devout, where art thou fled To hide iu shades thy meek, contented head?" Lines eminently beautiful ; but I do not remember having read them previously, for the credit of my tenth and eleventh lines. Parnell has two lines (which probably suggested the above) to "Contentment:" " Whither, ah ! whither art thou fled. To bide thy meek, contented head ?" 6 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Cowley's exquisite " Elegy on the death of his Mend Harvey," suggested the phrase of "we two." " Was there a tree that did not know The lov- betwixt us two 1" So much for acknowledged plagiarisms, the confession of which I know not whether it has more of vanity or modesty in it. As to my blank verse, I am so dismally slow and sterile of ideas (I speak from my heart) that I much question if it will ever come to any issue. I have hitherto only hammered out a few independent, uncon- nected snatches, not in a capacity to be sent. I am very ill, and will rest till I have read your poems, for which I am very thankful. I have one more favour to beg of you, that you never mention Mr. May's affair in any sort, much less think of repaying. Are we not flocci-nauci- what-d'ye-call-'em-ists ? We have just learned that my poor brother has had a sad accident : a large stone, blown down by yesterday's high wind, has bruised his leg in a most shocking manner ; he is under the care of Cruik- shanks. Coleridge ! there are 10,000 objections against my paying you a visit at Bristol ; it cannot be else ; but in this world 'tis better not to think too much of pleasant possibles, that we may not be out of humour with present insipids. Should anything bring you to London, you will recollect No. 7, Little Queen Street, Holborn. I shall be too ill to call on Wordsworth myself, but will take care to transmit him his poem, when I have read it. I saw Le Grice the day before his departure, and mentioned incidentally his " teaching the young idea how to shoot." Knowing him and the probability there is of people having a propensity to pun in his company, you will not wonder that we both stumbled on the same pun at once, he eagerly anticipating me, "he would teach him to shoot ! " Poor Le Grice ! if wit alone could entitle a man to respect, etc., he has written a very witty little pamphlet lately, satirical, upon college declamations. When I send White's book, I will add that I am sorry there should be any difference between you and Southey. TO COLERIDGE. 7 " Between you two there should be peace," tho' I must eay I have borne him no good will since he spirited you away from among us. What is become of Moschus 1 You sported some of his sublimities, I see, in your Watchman. Very decent things. So much for to- night from your afflicted, headachey, sorethroaty, humble servant, C. LAMB. Tuesday Night. Of your Watchmen, the Review of Burke was the best prose. I augured great things from the first Number. There is some exquisite poetry inter- spersed. I have re-read the extract from the Religious Musings, and retract whatever invidious there was in my censure of it as elaborate. There are times when one is not in a disposition thoroughly to relish good writing. I have re-read it in a more favourable moment, and hesitate not to pronounce it sublime. If there be any thing in it approaching to tumidity (which I meant not to infer, by elaborate I meant simply laboured), it is the gigantic hyperbole by which you describe the evils of existing society : " snakes, lions, hyenas, and behemoths," is carrying your resentment beyond bounds. The pictures of "The Simoom," of "Frenzy and Ruin," of "The Whore of Babylon," and " The Cry of the Foul Spirits disherited of Earth," and " the strange beatitude " which the good man shall recognise in heaven, as well as the particularising of the children of wretchedness (I have unconsciously included every part of it), form a variety of uniform excellence. I hunger and thirst to read the poem complete. That is a capital line in your sixth Number : " This dark, frieze-coated, hoarse, teeth -chattering month." They are exactly such epithets as Burns would have stumbled on, whose poem on the ploughed-up daisy you seem to have had in mind. Your complaint that of your readers some thought there was too much, some too little original matter in your Numbers, reminds me of 8 - LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. poor dead Parsons in the Critic. " Too little incident ! Give me leave to tell you, sir, there is too much incident." I had like to have forgot thanking you for that exquisite little morsel, the first Sclavonian Song. The expression in the second, "more happy to be unhappy in hell :" is it not very quaint ? Accept my thanks, in common with those of all who love good poetry, for "The Braes of Yarrow." I congratulate you on the enemies you must have made by your splendid invective against the barterers in human flesh and sinews. Coleridge, you will rejoice to hear that Cowper is recovered from his lunacy, and is employed on his translation of the Italian, etc., poems of Milton for an edition where Fuseli presides as designer. Coleridge, to an idler like myself, to write and receive letters are both very pleasant ; but I wish not to break in upon your valuable time by expecting to hear very frequently from you. Reserve that obligation for your moments of lassitude, when you have nothing else to do; for your loco-restive and all your idle propensities, of course, have given way to the duties of providing for a family. The mail is come in, but no parcel ; yet this is Tuesday. Farewell, then, till to-morrow; for a niche and a nook I must leave for criticisms. By the way, I hope you do not send your only copy of Joan of Arc : I will in that case return it immediately. Your parcel is come : you have been lavish of your presents. Wordsworth's poem I have hurried through, not with- out delight. Poor Lovell ! my heart almost accuses me for the light manner I lately spoke of him, not dreaming of his death. My heart bleeds for your accumulated troubles : God send you through 'em with patience. I conjure you, dream not that I will ever think of being repaid; the very word is galling to the ears. I have read all your Religious Musings with uninterrupted feelings of profound admiration. You may safely rest your fame on it. The best remaining things are what I have before read, and they lose nothing by my recolleo- TO COLERIDGE. 9 tion of your manner of reciting 'em, for I too bear in mind "the voice, the look" of absent friends, and can occasionally mimic their manner for the amusement of those who have seen 'em. Your impassioned manner of recitation I can recall at any time to mine own heart and to the ears of the bystanders. I rather wish you had left the monody on Chatterton concluding, as it did, abruptly. It had more of unity. The conclusion of your Religious Musings, I fear, will entitle you to the reproof of your beloved woman, who wisely will not suffer your fancy to run riot, but bids you walk humbly with your God. The last words, " I discipline my young and novice thought In ministries of heart-stirring song," ' though not now new to me, cannot be enough admired. To speak politely, they are a well-turned compliment to Poetry. I hasten to read Joan of Arc, etc. I have read your lines at the beginning of the second book : they are worthy of Milton ; but in my mind yield to your Religious Musings. I shall read the whole carefully, and in some future letter take the liberty to particularise my opinions of it. Of what is new to me among your poems next to the "Musings," that beginning "My Pensive Sara" gave me most pleasure : the lines in it I just alluded to are most exquisite ; they made my sister and self smile, as conveying a pleasing picture of Mrs. 0. checking your wild wanderings, which we were so fond of hearing you indulge when among us. It has endeared us more than any thing to your good lady ; and your own self-reproof that follows, delighted us. 'Tis a charming poem through- out (You have well remarked that charming, admirable, exquisite are the words expressive of feelings more than conveying of ideas ; else I might plead very well want of room in my paper as excuse for generalising.) I want room to tell you how we are charmed with your verses in the manner of Spenser, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. I am glad you resume the Watchman. Change the name ; leave out all articles of news, and whatever things an 10 LETTERS OP CHARLES LAMB. peculiar to newspapers, and confine yourself to ethics, verse, criticism ; or, rather do not confine yourself. Let your plan be as diffuse as the Spectator, and I'll answer for it the work prospers. If I am vain enough to think I can be a contributor, rely on my inclinations. Coleridge, in reading your Religious Musings I felt a transient superiority over you. I have seen Priestley. I love to see his name repeated in your writings. I love and honour him, almost profanely. You would be charmed with his Sermons, if you iiever read 'em. You have doubtless read his books illustrative of the doctrine of Necessity. Prefixed to a late work of his, in answer to Paine, there is a Preface, giving an account of the man, and his services to men, written by Lindsey, his dearest friend, well worth your reading. Tuesday Eve. Forgive my prolixity, which is yet too brief for all I could wish to say. God give you comfort, and all that are of your household 1 Our loves and best good wishes to Mrs. 0. C. LAMB. LETTEE III.] June 10, 1796. With Joan of Arc I have been delighted, amazed. 1 had not presumed to expect any thing of such excellence from Southey. Why, the poem is alone sufficient to redeem the character of the age we live in from the im- putation of degenerating in Poetry, were there no such beings extant as Burns, and Bowles, Cowper, and : fill up the blank how you please ; I say nothing. The subject is well chosen. It opens well. To become more particular, I will notice in their order a few passages that chiefly struck me on perusal Page 26, " Fierce and terrible Benevolence !" is a phrase full of grandeur and originality. The whole context made me feel possessed, even like Joan herself. Page 28, " It is most horrible with the keen sword to gore the finely-fibred human frame," and what follows, pleased me mightily. In the 2nd Book, the first forty lines in particular arc majestic TO COLERIDGE. 11 and high-sounding. Indeed the whole vision of the Palace of Ambition and what follows are supremely excellent. Your simile of the Laplander, "by Niemi lake Or Balda Zhiok, or the mossy stone Of Solfar-kapper," will bear comparison with any in Milton for fulness of cir- cumstance and lofty pacedness of versification. Southey's similes, though many of 'em are capital, are all inferior. In one of his books, the simile of the oak in the storm occurs, I think, four times. To return : the light in which you view the heathen deities is accurate and beautiful Southey's personifications in this book are so many fine and faultless pictures. I was much pleased with your manner of accounting for the reason why monarchs take delight in war. At the 447th line you have placed Prophets and Enthusiasts cheek by jowl, on too intimate a footing for the dignity of the former. Necessarian-like-speaking, it is correct. Page 98, " Dead is the Douglas ! cold thy warrior frame, illustrious Buchan," etc., are of kindred excellence with Gray's "Cold is Cadwallo's tongue," etc. How famously the Maid baffles the Doctors, Seraphic and Irrefragable, "with all their trumpery!" Page 126, the procession, the appearances of the Maid, of the Bastard Son of Orleans and of Tre- mouille, are full of fire and fancy, and exquisite melody of versification. The personifications from line 303 to 309, in the heat of the battle, had better been omitted ; they are not very striking, and only encumber. The converse which Joan and Conrade hold on the banks of the Loire is altogether beautiful. Page 313, the con- jecture that in dreams " all things are that seem," is one of those conceits which the Poet delights to admit into his creed; a creed, by the way, more marvellous and mystic than ever Athanasius dreamed of. Page 315, I need only mention those lines ending with " She saw a serpent gnawing at her heart !" They are good imitative lines, " he toiled and toiled, of toil to reap no end, but 12 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. endless toil and never-ending woe." Page 347, Cruelty is such as Hogarth might have painted her. Page 361, all the passage about Love (where he seems to confound conjugal love with creating and preserving love) is very confused, and sickens me with a load of useless personifi- cations ; else that ninth Book is the finest in the volume an exquisite combination of the ludicrous and the terrible : I have never read either, even iii translation, but such as I conceive to be the manner of Dante or Ariosto. The tenth Book is the most languid. On the whole, considering the celerity wherewith the poem was finished, I was astonished at the infrequency of weak lines. I had expected to find it verbose. Joan, I think, does too little in battle ; Dunois perhaps the same ; Conrade too much. The anecdotes interspersed among the battles refresh the mind very agreeably, and I am delighted with the very many passages of simple pathos abounding throughout the poem ; passages which the author of "Crazy Kate" might have written. Has not Master Southey spoke very slightingly, in his Preface, and dis- paragingly of Cowper's Homer? What makes him reluctant to give Cowper his fame? And does not Southey use too often the expletives "did," and "does?" They have a good effect at tunes, but are too inconsider- able, or rather become blemishes, when they mark a style. On the whole, I expect Southey one day to rival Milton: I already deem him equal to Cowper, and superior to all living poets besides. What says Coleridge ? The " Monody on Henderson " is immensely good : the rest of that little volume is readable, and above medi- ocrity. I proceed to a more pleasant task; pleasant because the poeins are yours ; pleasant because you impose the task on me ; and pleasant, let me add, because it will confer a whimsical importance on me to sit in judgment upon your rhymes. First, though, let me thank you again and again, in my own and my sister's name, for your invitations. Nothing could give us more pleasure than to come, but (were there no other reasons) while my TO COLERIDGE. 13 brother's leg is so bad it is out of the question. Poor fellow ! he is very feverish and light-headed ; but Cruik- ehanks has pronounced the symptoms favourable, and gives us every hope that there will be no need of amputation : God send, not ! We are necessarily confined with him all the afternoon and evening till very late, so that I am stealing a few minutes to write to you. Thank you for your frequent letters : you are the only correspondent, and I might add, the only friend I have in the world. I go nowhere, and have no acquaintance. Slow of speech, and reserved of manners, no one seeks or cares for my society ; and I am left alone. Allen calls very occasionally, as though it were a duty rather, and seldom stays ten minutes. Then judge how thankful I am for your letters ! Do not, however, burthen yourself with the correspondence. I trouble you again so soon, only in obedience to your injunctions. Complaints apart, proceed we to our task. I am called away to tea ; thence must wait upon my brother ; so must delay till to- morrow. Farewell ! Wednesday. Thursday. I will first notice what is new to me. Thirteenth page : " The thrilling tones that concentrate the soul " is a nervous line ; and the first six lines of page 14 are very pretty; the twenty-first effusion is a perfect thing. That in the manner of Spenser is very sweet, particularly at the close : the thirty-fifth effusion is most exquisite ; that line in particular, " And, tranquil, muse upon tranquillity." It is the very reflex pleasure that distinguishes the tranquillity of a thinking being from that of a shepherd, a modern one I would be under- stood to mean, a Damoetas, one that keeps other people's sheep. Certainly, Coleridge, your letter from Shurton Bars has less merit than most things in your volume ; personally, it may chime in best with your own feelings, and therefore you love it best. It has, however, great merit. In your fourth epistle, that is an exquisite paragraph, and fancy-full, of " A stream there is which 14 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. rolls in lazy flow," etc., etc. "Murmurs sweet under- song 'mid jasmine bowers " is a sweet line ; and so are the three next. The concluding simile is far-fetched " tempest-honoured " is a quaintish phrase. Of the Monody on Henderson I will here only notice these lines, as superlatively excellent. That energetic one, " Shall I not praise thee, scholar, Christian, friend," like to that beautiful climax of Shakspeare's "King, Hamlet, Royal Dane, Father;" "yet memory turns from little men to thee," " And sported careless round their fellow child." The whole, I repeat it, is immensely good. Yours is a poetical family. I was much surprised and pleased to see the signature of Sara to that elegant composition, the fifth epistle. I dare not criticise the Religious Musings : I like not to select any part, where all is excellent. I can only admire, and thank you for it in the name of a Christian, as well as a lover of good poetry : only let me ask, Is not that thought and those words in Young, "stands in the sun," or is it only such as Young, in one of his better moments, might have writ ? " Believe thou, my soul, Life is a vision, shadowy of Truth ; And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave, Shapes of a dream ! " I thank you for these lines in the name of a necessarian, and for what follows in the next paragraph, in the name of a child of fancy. After all, you cannot, nor ever will, write any thing with which I shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleed- ing with recent wounds. Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed hope. You had . . . " many an holy lay That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way." I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant on the sense. When I read in your little volume, your nineteenth effusion, or the twenty- TO COLERIDGE. 15 eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the " Sigh," I think I hear you again. I image to myself the little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy. When you left London I felt a dismal void in my heart. I found myself cut off, at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. " How blest with ye the path could I have trod of quiet life !" In your conversation you had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief. But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but feel a stupor that makes me in- different to the hopes and fears of this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind ; but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined, alas ! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my lethargy, and made me con- scious of existence. Indulge me in it : I will not be very troublesome. At some future time I will amuse you with an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy ; for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad ! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so. Excuse this selfish digression. Your " Monody " is so superlatively excellent, that I can only wish it perfect, which I can't help feeling it is not quite. Indulge me in a few conjectures. What I am going to propose would make it more compressed, and, I think, more energetic, though I am sensible at the expense of many beautiful lines. Let it begin " Is this the land of song-ennobled line?" and proceed to "Otway's famish'd form;" then, "Thee, Chatterton," to u blaze of Seraphim ;" then, " clad in Nature's rich array," to " orient day ;" then, " but soon the scathing 16 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. lightning," to "blighted land;" then, "sublime of thought," to "his bosom glows ;" then " But soon upon his poor unshelter'd head Did Penury her sickly mildew shed : Ah ! where are fled the charms of vernal Grace, And Joy's wild gleams that lighten'd o'er his face ?" Then "youth of tumultuous soul" to "sigh," as before. The rest may all stand down to " gaze upon the waves below." What follows now may come next as detached verses, suggested by the Monody, rather than a part of it. They are indeed, in themselves, very sweet : " And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng Hanging, enraptured, on thy stately song," in particular, perhaps. If I am obscure, you may under- stand me by counting lines. I have proposed omitting twenty-four lines. I feel that thus compressed it would gain energy, but think it most likely you will not agree with me ; for who shall go about to bring opinions to the bed of Procrustes, and introduce among the sons of men a monotony of identical feelings ? I only propose with diffidence. Reject, if you please, with as little remorse as you would the colour of a coat or the pattern of a buckle, where our fancies differed. The lines " Friend to the Friendless," etc., which you may think rudely dis- branched from the Chatterton, will patch in with the Man of Ross, where they were at once at home, with two more which I recollect, " And o'er the downed virgin's snowy cheek Bade bridal Love suffuse his blushes meek," very beautiful. The "Pixies" is a perfect thing; and so are the '' Lines on the Spring," page 28. The " Epitaph on an Infant," like a Jack-o'-lantern, has danced about (or like Dr. Forster's scholars) out of the Morning Chronicle into the Watchman, and thence back into your Collection. It is very pretty, and you seem to think so ; but, may be, o'erlooked its chief merit, that of filling up a whole TO COLERIDGE. 17 page. I had once deemed Sonnets of unrivalled use that way ; but your Epitaphs, I find, are the more diffuse. " Edmund " still holds its place among your best verses. " Ah ! fair delights " to " roses round," in your Poem called " Absence," recall (none more forcibly) to my mind the tones in which you recited it. I will not notice, in this tedious (to you) manner, verses which have been so long delightful to me, and which you already know my opinion of. Of this kind are Bowles, Priestley, and that most exquisite and most Bowles-like of all, the nineteenth effusion. It would have better ended with "agony of care :" the last two lines are obvious and unnecessary, and you need not now make fourteen lines of it : now it is rechristened from a Sonnet to an Effusion. Schiller might have written the twentieth Effusion : 'tis worthy of him in any sense. I was glad to meet with those lines you sent me, when my sister was so ill : I had lost the copy, and I felt not a little proud at seeing my name in your verse. The " Complaint of Ninathoma " (first stanza in particular) is the best, or only good imitation, of Ossian I ever saw, your " Restless Gale " excepted. " To an Infant " is most sweet. Is not " foodful," though, very harsh ? Would not " dulcet " fruit be less harsh, or some other friendly bi-syllable ? In " Edmund," " Frenzy, fierce-eyed child," is not so well as " frantic," though that is an epithet adding nothing to the meaning. Slander couching was better than "squatting." In the "Man of Ross " it was a better line thus : " If 'neath this roof thy wine-cheer' d moments pass," than as it stands now. Time nor nothing can reconcile me to the concluding five lines of " Kosciusko : " call it any thing you will but sublime. In my twelfth effusion I had rather have seen what I wrote myself, though they bear no comparison with your exquisite lines " On rose-leaf d beds, amid your faery bowers," etc. I love my Sonnets because they are the reflected images VOL. i. c 18 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. of my own feelings at different times. To instance, in the thirteenth " How reason reel'd," etc., are good lines, but must spoil the whole with me, who know it is only a fiction of yours, and that the "rude dashings" did in fact not "rock me to repose.'' I grant the same objection applies not to the former Sonnet ; but still I love my own feelings : they are dear to memory, though they now and then wake a sigh or a tear. "Thinking on divers things foredone," I charge you, Coleridge, spare my ewe lambs ; and though a gentleman may borrow six lines in an epic poem (I should have no objection to borrow five hundred, and without acknow- ledging), still, in a sonnet, a personal poem, I do not " ask my friend the aiding verse." I would not wrong your feelings by proposing any improvements (did I think myself capable of suggesting 'em) in such personal poems as "Thou bleedest, my poor heart!" 'od so, I am caught I have already done it ; but that simile I pro- pose abridging, would not change the feeling or introduce any alien ones. Do you understand me ? In the twenty- eighth, however, and in the " Sigh," and that composed at Clevedon, things that come from the heart direct, not by the medium of the fancy, I would not suggest an alteration. When my blank verse is finished, or any long fancy-poems, propino tibi alterandum, cut-up-andum, abridgandum, just what you will with it ; but spare my ewe lambs ! That to " Mrs. Siddons," now, you were welcome to improve, if it had been worth it ; but I say unto you again, Coleridge, spare my ewe lambs ! I must confess were they mine, I should omit, in editions secundd, Effusions two and three, because satiric, and below the dignity of the poet of Religious Musings, fifth, seventh, half of the eighth, that " Written in early youth," as far as "thousand eyes," though I part not unreluctantly with that lively line " Chaste joyance dancing in her bright blue eyes," TO COLERIDGE. 19 and one or two more just thereabouts. But I would substitute for it that sweet poem called *' Recollection," in the fifth Number of the Watchman/ better, I think, than the remainder of this poem, though not differing materially : as the poem now stands it looks altogether confused. And do not omit those lines upon the " Early Blossom," in your sixth Number of the Watchman : and I would omit the tenth Effusion or, what would do better, alter and improve the last four lines. In fact, I suppose, if they were mine, I should not omit 'em. But your verse is, for the most part, so exquisite, that I like not to see aught of meaner matter mixed with it. Forgive my petulance, and often, I fear, ill-founded criticisms ; and forgive me that I have, by this time, made your eyes and head ache with my long letter; but I cannot forego hastily the pleasure and pride of thus conversing with you. You did not tell me whether I was to include the Condones ad Populum in my remarks on your poems. They are not unfrequently sublime ; and I think you could not do better than to turn 'em into verse, if you have nothing else to do. Allen, I am sorry to say, is a confirmed Atheist. Stoddart, a cold-hearted, well-bred, conceited disciple of Godwin, does him no good. His wife has several daughters (one of 'em as old as himself). Surely there is something unnatural in such a marriage. How I sympathise with you on the dull duty of a reviewer, and heartily damn with you Ned Evans and the Prosodist. I shall, however, wait impatiently for the articles in the Critical Review, next month, because they are yours. Young Evans (W. Evans, a branch of a family you were once so intimate with) is come into our office, and sends his love to you ! Coleridge, I devoutly wish that Fortune, who has made sport with you so long, may play one freak more, throw you into London, or some spot near it, and there snug-ify you for life. 'Tis a selfish, but natural wish for me, cast as I am " on life's wide plain, friendless." Are you acquainted 20 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. with Bowles ? I see, by his last Elegy (written at Bath), you are near neighbours. Thursday. " And I can think I can see the groves again was it the voice of thee turns not the voice of thee, my buried friend who dries with her dark locks the tender tear," are touches as true to Nature as any in his other Elegy, written at the Hot Wells, about poor Russell, etc. You are doubtless acquainted with it. I do not know that I entirely agree with you in your stricture upon my Sonnet "To Innocence." To men whose hearts are not quite deadened by their commerce with the world, innocence (no longer familiar) becomes an awful idea So I felt when I wrote it. Your other censures (qualified and sweetened, though, with praises somewhat extravagant) I perfectly coincide with ; yet I choose to retain the word " lunar." Indulge a " lunatic " in his loyalty to his mistress the Moon. I have just been reading a most pathetic copy of verses on Sophia Pringle, who was hanged and burnt for coining. One of the strokes of pathos (which are very many, all somewhat obscure), is " She lifted up her guilty forger to heaven. " A note explains, by " forger," her right hand, with which she forged or coined the base metal. For " pathos " read bathos. You have put me out of conceit with my blank verse by your Religious Musings. I think it will come to nothing. I do not like 'em enough to send 'em. I have just been reading a book which I may be too partial to, as it was the delight of my childhood ; but I will recommend it to you : it is Izaak Walton's Complete Angler. All the scientific part you may omit in reading. The dialogue is very simple, full of pastoral beauties, and will charm you. Many pretty old verses are interspersed. This letter, which would be a week's work reading only, I do not wish you to answer it in less than a month. I shall be richly content with a letter from you some day early in July ; though, if you get anyhow settled before then, pray let me know it immediately ; 'twould give me so much satisfaction. Concerning the Unitarian chapel. TO COLERIDGE. 21 the salary is the only scruple that the most rigid moralist would admit as valid. Concerning the tutorage, is not the salary low, and absence from your family unavoidable' London is the only fostering soil for genius. Nothing more occurs just now ; so I will leave you, in mercy, one small white spot empty below, to repose your eyes upon, fatigued as they must be with the wilderness of words they have by this time painfully travelled through. God love you, Coleridge, and prosper you through life ; though mine will be loss if your lot is to be cast at Bristol, or at Nottingham, or anywhere but London. Our loves to Mrs. C . C. L. Friday, 10th June 1796. LETTER IV.] Monday Night, June 13, 1796. Unfurnished at present with any sheet-filling subject, I shall continue my letter gradually and journal-wise. My second thoughts entirely coincide with your comments on Joan of Arc, and I can only wonder at my childish judgment which overlooked the 1st book, and could pre- fer the 9th : not that I was insensible to the soberer beauties of the former ; but the latter caught me with its glare of magic : the former, however, left a more pleasing general recollection in my mind. Let me add, the 1st book was the favourite of my sister ; and / now, with Joan, often " think on Domremi and the fields of Arc." I must not pass over without acknowledging my obliga- tions to your full and satisfactory account of personifica- tions. I have read it again and again, and it will be a guide to my future taste. Perhaps I had estimated Southey's merits too much by number, weight, and measure. I now agree completely and entirely in your opinion of the genius of Southey. Your own image of Melancholy is illustrative of what you teach, and in itself masterly. I conjecture it is " disbranched " from one of your embryo "hymns." When they are mature of birth (were I you) I should print 'em, in one separate volume, 22 LFTTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. with Religious Musings and your part of the Joan of Arc. Birds of the same soaring wing should hold on their flight in company. Once for all (and by renewing the subject you will only renew in me the condemnation of Tantalus), I hope to be able to pay you a visit (if you are then at Bristol) some time in the latter end of August or beginning of September, for a week or fortnight : before that time office business puts an absolute veto on my coming. ' ' And if a sigh that speaks regret of happier times appear, A glimpse of joy that we have met shall shine and dry the tear." Of the blank verses I spoke of, the following lines are the only tolerably complete ones I have writ out of not more than one hundred and fifty. That I get on so slowly you may fairly impute to want of practice in composition, when I declare to you that (the few verses which you have seen excepted) I have not writ fifty lines since I left school. It may not be amiss to remark that my grandmother (on whom the verses are written) lived housekeeper in a family the fifty or sixty last years of her life that she was a woman of exemplary piety and goodness and for many years before her death was terribly afflicted with a cancer in her breast, which she bore with true Christian patience. You may think that I have not kept enough apart the ideas of her heavenly and her earthly master ; but recollect I have designedly given in to her own way of feeling ; and if she had a failing 'twas that she respected her master's family too much, not reverenced her Maker too little. The lines begin imperfectly, as I may probably connect 'em if I finish at all : and if I do, Biggs shall print 'em (in a more economical way than you yours), for, Sonnets and all, they won't make a thousand lines as I pro- pose completing 'em, and the substance must be wire- drawn. TO COLERIDGE. 23 LETTEB V.] Tuesday Evening, June 14, 1796. I am not quite satisfied now with the Chatterton, and, with your leave, will try my hand at it again. A master joiner, you know, may leave a cabinet to be finished by his journeyman, when his own hands are full. To your list of illustrative personifications, into which a fine imagination enters, I will take leave to add the following from Beaumont and Fletcher's Wife for a Month; 'tis the conclusion of a description of a sea fight: " The game of death was never played so nobly : the meagre thief grew wanton in his mischiefs ; and his shrunk, hollow eyes smiled on his ruins." There is fancy in these of a lower order, from Bonduca ; " Then did I see these valiant men of Britain, like boding owls creep into tods of ivy, and hoot their fears to one another nightly." Not that it is a personification ; only it just caught my eye in a little extract book I keep, which is full of quotations from Beaumont and Fletcher in par- ticular, in which authors I can't help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in any one, Shaks- peare excepted. Are you acquainted with Massingerl At a hazard I will trouble you with a passage from a play of his called A Very Woman. The lines are spoken by a lover (disguised) to his faithless mistress. You will remark the fine effect of the double endings. You will by your ear distinguish the lines, for I write 'em as prose. " Not far from where my father lives, a lady, a neighbour by, blest with as great a beauty as Nature durst bestow without undoing, dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then, and blest the house a thousand times she dwelt in. This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, when my first fire knew no adulterate incense, nor I no way to flatter but my fondness ; in all the bravery my friends could show me, in all the faith my innocence could give me, in the best language my true tongue could tell me, and all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, I sued and served. Long did I serve this lady, long was my travail, long my 24 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. trade to win her : with all the duty of my soul I SERVED HER." "Then she must love." "She did, but never me: she could not love me; she would not love, she hated, more, she scorn'd me ; and in so poor and base a way abwed me for all my services, for all my bounties, so bold neglects flung on me." "What out of love, and worthy love, I gave her (shame to her most unworthy mind!), to fools, to girls, to fiddlers, and her boys she flung, all in disdain of me." One more passage strikes my eye from Beaumont and Fletcher's Palamon and Arcite. One of 'em complains in prison : " This is all our world : We shall know nothing here but one another ; Hear nothing but the clock that tells our woes. The vine shall grow, but we shall never see it. " Is not the last circumstance exquisite ? I mean not to lay myself open by saying they exceed Milton, and perhaps Collins, in sublimity. But don't you conceive all poets, after Shakspeare, yield to 'em in variety of genius? Massinger treads close on their heels ; but you are most probably as well acquainted with his writings as your humble servant. My quotations, in that case, will only serve to show my barrenness of matter. Southey, in simplicity and tenderness, is excelled decidedly only, I think, by Beaumont and Fletcher in his " Maid's Tragedy " and some parts of " Philaster " in particular, and elsewhere occasionally ; and perhaps by Cowper in his " Crazy Kate," and in parts of his translation, such as the speeches of Hecuba and Andromache. I long to know your opinion of that translation. The Odyssey especially is surely very Homeric. What nobler than the appearance of Phoebus at the beginning of the Iliad the lines ending with " Dread sounding, bounding on the silver bow !" I beg you will give me your opinion of the translation ; it afforded me high pleasure. As curious a specimen of translation as ever fell into my hands is a young man's in our office, of a French novel. What in the original was TO COLERIDGE. 25 literally " amiable delusions of the fancy," he proposed to render "the fair frauds of the imagination!" I had much trouble iii licking the book into any meaning at all Yet did the knave clear fifty or sixty pounds by subscrip- tion and selling the copyright : the book itself not a week's work ! To-day's portion of my journalising epistle has been very dull and poverty-stricken. I will here end. Tuesday Night I have been drinking egg-hot and smoking Oronooko (associated circumstances, which ever forcibly recall to my mind our evenings and nights at the Salutation). My eyes and brain are heavy and asleep, but my heart is awake ; and if words came as ready as ideas, and ideas as feelings, I could say ten hundred kind things. Coleridge, you know not my supreme happiness at having one on earth (though counties separate us) whom I can call,a friend. Remember you those tender lines of Logan's ? " Our broken friendships we deplore, And loves of youth that are no more ; No after-friendships e'er can raise Th' endearments of our early days, And ne'er the heart such fondness prove As when we first began to love. " I am writing at random, and half-tipsy, what you may not equally understand, as you will be sober when you read it ; but my sober and my half-tipsy hours you are alike a sharer in. Good-night. " Then up rose our bard, like a prophet in drink, Craigdoroch, thou'lt soar when creation shall sink." BURNS. Thiirsday. I am now in high hopes to be able to visit you, if perfectly convenient on your part, by the end of next month perhaps the last week or fortnight in July. A change of scene and a change of faces would do me good, even if that scene were not to be Bristol, and those faces Coleridge's and his friends. In the words of Terence, a little altered, Tcedet me hujus quotidiani mundi, 26 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. I am heartily sick of the every-day scenes of life. I shall half wish you unmarried (don't show this to Mrs. C.) for one evening only, to have the pleasure of smoking with you and drinking egg-hot in some little smoky room in a pot-house, for I know not yet how I shall like you in a decent room and looking quite happy. My best love and respects to Sara notwithstanding. Yours sincerely, CHARLES LAMB. LETTER VI.] July 1, 1796. The first moment I can come I will ; but my hopes of coming yet a while yet hang on a ticklish thread. The coach I come by is immaterial, as I shall so easily, by your direction, find ye out. My mother is grown so entirely helpless (not having any use of her limbs) that Mary is necessarily confined from ever sleeping out, she being her bed-fellow. She thanks you though, and will accompany me in spirit. Most exquisite are the lines from Withers. Your own lines, introductory to your poem on " Self," run smoothly and pleasurably, and I exhort you to continue 'em. What shall I say to your " Dactyls"? They are what you would call good per se ; but a parody on some of 'em is just now suggesting itself, and you shall have it rough and unlicked. I mark with figures the lines parodied : 4. Sorely your Dactyls do drag along limp-footed. 5. Sad is the measure that hangs a clod round 'em so. 6. Meagre and languid, proclaiming its wretchedness. 1. Weary, unsatisfied, not little sick of 'em. 11. Cold is my tired heart, I have no charity. 2. Painfully travelling thus over the rugged road. 7. begone, measure, half Latin, half English, then. 12. Dismal your Dactyls are, God help ye, rhyming ones 1 I possibly may not come this fortnight ; therefore all thou hast to do is not to look for me any particular day, only to write word immediately, if at any time you quit TO COLERIDGE. 27 Bristol, lest I come aiid Taffy be not at home. I hope 1 can come in a day or two; but young Savory, of my office, is suddenly taken ill in this very nick of time, and I must officiate for him till he can come to work again. Had the knave gone sick, and died, and putrefied, at any other time, philosophy might have afforded one comfort ; but just now I have no patience with him. Quarles I am as great a stranger to as I was to Withers. I wish you would try and do something to bring our elder bards into more general fame. I writhe with indignation when, in books of criticism, where commonplace quotation is heaped upon quotation, I find no mention of such men as Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher, men with whom succeeding dramatic writers (Otway alone excepted) can bear no manner of comparison. Stupid Knox hath noticed none of 'em among his extracts. Thursday. Mrs. C can scarce guess how she has gratified me by her very kind letter and sweet little poem. I feel that I should thank her in rhyme ; but she must take my acknowledgment, at present, in plain honest prose. The uncertainty in which I yet stand, whether I can come or no, damps my spirits, reduces me a degree below prosaical, and keeps me in a suspense that fluctuates between hope and fear. Hope is a charming, lively, blue-eyed wench, and I am always glad of her company, but could dispense with the visitor she brings with her her younger sister, Fear, a white-livered, lily-cheeked, bashful, palpitating, awkward hussy, that hangs, like a green girl, at her sister's apron-strings, and will go with her whithersoever she goes. For the life and soul of me I could not improve those lines in your poem on the Prince and Princess ; so I changed them to what you bid me, and left 'em at Perry's. I think 'em altogether good, and do not see why you were solicitous about any alteration. I have not yet seen, but will make it my business to see, to-day's Chronicle, for your verses on Home Tooke. Dyer staiiza'd him in one of 28 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. the papers t'other day ; but, I think, unsuccessfully. Tooke's friends' meeting was, I suppose, a dinner ol condolence. I am not sorry to find you (for all Sara) immersed in clouds of smoke and metaphysics. You know I had a sneaking kindness for this last noble science, and you taught me some smattering of it. I look to become no mean proficient under your tuition. Coleridge, what do you mean by saying you wrote to me about Plutarch and Porphyry? I received no such letter, nor remember a syllable of the matter, yet am not apt to forget any part of your epistles, least of all, an injunction like that. I will cast about for 'em, tho' I am a sad hand to know what books are worth, and both worthy gentlemen are alike out of my line. To-morrow I shall be less suspensive, and in better cue to write ; so good-bye at present. Friday Evening. That execrable aristocrat and knave, Richardson, has given me an absolute refusal of leave. The poor man cannot guess at my disappoint- ment. Is it not hard, "this dread dependence on the low-bred mind 1" Continue to write to me tho', and I must be content. Our loves and best good wishes attend upon you both. LAMB. Savory did return, but there are two or three more ill and absent, which was the plea for refusing me. I will never commit my peace of mind by depending on such a wretch for a favour in future, so I shall never have heart to ask for holidays again. The man next him in office, Cartwright, furnished him with the objections. 0. LAMB. LETTER VII.] July 5, 1796. Let us prose. What can I do till you send word what priced and placed house you should like? Islington, possibly, you TO COLERIDGE. 29 would not like ; to me 'tis classical ground. Knights- bridge is a desirable situation for the air of the parks. St. George's Fields is convenient for its contiguity to the Bench. Choose ! But are you really coming to town 1 The hope of it has entirely disarmed my petty disappoint- ment of its nettles ; yet I rejoice so much on my own account, that I fear I do not feel enough pure satisfaction on yours. Why, surely, the joint editorship of the [Morning] Chronicle must be a very comfortable and secure living for a man. But should not you read French, or do you 1 and can you write with sufficient moderation, as 'tis called, when one suppresses the one half of what one feels or could say on a subject, to chime in the better with popular lukewarmness ? White's " Letters " are near publication. Could you review 'em, or get 'em reviewed? Are you not connected with the Critical Review ? His frontispiece is a good conceit : Sir John learning to dance to please Madame Page, in dress of doublet, etc., from the upper half ; and modern pantaloons, with shoes, etc., of the eighteenth century, from the lower half; and the whole work is full of goodly quips and rare fancies, "all deftly masqned like hoar antiquity" much superior to Dr. Kenrick's Falstafs Wedding, which you may have seen. Allen sometimes laughs at super- stition, and religion, and the like. A living fell vacant lately in the gift of the Hospital : White informed him that he stood a fair chance for it. He scrupled and scrupled about it, and at last, to use his own words, " tampered " with Godwin to know whether the thing was honest or not. Godwin said nay to it, and Allen rejected the living ! Could the blindest poor papist have bowed more servilely to his priest or casuist 1 Why sleep the Watchman's answers to that Godwin ? I beg you will not delay to alter, if you mean to keep, those last lines I sent you. Do that, and read these for your pains : 30 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. TO THE POET COWPER. Cowper, I thank my God that thou art heal'd I Thine was the sorest malady of all ; And I am sad to think that it should light Upon the worthy head ! But thou art heal'd, And thou art yet, we trust, the destined man, Born to reanimate the lyre, whose chords Have slumber'd, and have idle lain so long j To the immortal sounding of whose strings Did Milton frame the stately-paced verse ; Among whose wires with light finger playing, Our elder bard, Spenser, a gentle name, The lady Muses' dearest darling child, Elicited the deftest tunes yet heard In hall or bower, taking the delicate ear Of Sidney and his peerless Maiden Queen. Thou, then, take up the mighty epic strain, Cowper, of England's Bards, the wisest and the best, 1790. I have read your climax of praises in those three Reviews. These mighty spouters out of panegyric waters have, two of 'em, scattered their spray even upon me, and the waters are cooling and refreshing. Prosaically, the MonMy reviewers have made indeed a large article of it, and done you justice. The Critical have, in their wisdom, selected not the very best specimens, and notice not, except as one name on the muster-roll, the Religious Musings. I suspect Master Dyer to have been the writer of that article, as the substance of it was the very remarks and the very language he used to me one day. I fear you will not accord entirely with my sentiments of Cowper, as expressed above (perhaps scarcely just), but the poor gentleman has just recovered from his lunacies, and that begets pity, and pity love, and love admiration ; and then it goes hard with people, but they lie ! Have you read the Ballad called " Leonora," in the second Number of the Monthly Magazine ? If you have ! ! ! ! There is another fine song, from the same author (Burger), in the third Number, of scarce inferior merit ; and (vastly below TO COLERIDGE. 31 these) there are some happy specimens of English hexa- meters, in an imitation of Ossiau, in the fifth Number. For your Dactyls I am sorry you are so sore about 'em a very Sir Fretful ! In good troth, the Dactyls are good Dactyls, but their measure is naught. Be not your- self " half anger, half agony," if I pronounce your darling lines not to be the best you ever wrote you have written much. Have a care, good Master poet, of the Statute de Contumelid. What do you mean by calling Madame Mara " harlot " and other naughty things ? The good- ness of the verse would not save you in a Court of Justice. But are you really coming to town ? Coleridge, a gentle- man called in London lately from Bristol, and inquired whether there were any of the family of a Mr. Chambers living : this Mr. Chambers, he said, bad been the making of a friend's fortune, who wished to make some return for it. He went away without seeing her. Now, a Mrs. Reynolds, a very intimate friend of ours, whom you have seen at our house, is the only daughter, and all that survives, of Mr. Chambers; and a very little supply would be of service to her, for she married very unfor- tunately, and has parted with her husband. Pray find out this Mr. Pember (for that was the gentleman's friend's name); he is an attorney, and lives at Bristol. Find him out, and acquaint him with the circumstances of the case, and offer to be the medium of supply to Mrs. Rey- nolds, if he chooses to make her a present. She is in very distressed circumstances. Mr. Pember, attorney, Bristol. Mr. Chambers lived in the Temple; Mrs. Reynolds, his daughter, was my schoolmistress, and is in the room at this present writing. This last circumstance induced me to write so soon again. I have not further to add. Our loves to Sara. C. LAMB. Thursday. 32 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER VIII.] September 27, 1796. My dearest Friend White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines : My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses : I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris, of the Blue- coat School, has been very very kind to us, and we have no other friend ; but, thank God, I am very calm and com- posed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me " the former things are passed away," and I have something more to do than to feel. God Almighty have us all in His keeping ! C. LAMB. Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free leave) with- out name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you. Your own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this yet to your dear wife. You look after your family ; I have my reason and strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty love you and all of us ! C. LAMB. TO COLERIDGE. 33 LETTER IX.] October 3, 1796. My dearest Friend Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort to you, I know, to know that our prospects are somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty's judgments on our house, is restored to her senses, to a, dreadful sense and recollec- tion of what has past, awful to her mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judg- ment, which, in this early stage, knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother's murder. I have seen her. I found her, this morning, calm and serene ; far, very very far from an indecent forgetful serenity : she has a most affectionate and tender concern for what has happened. Indeed, from the beginning frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed I had confidence enough in her strength of mind and religious principle, to look forward to a time when even she might recover tranquillity. God be praised, Coleridge ! wonderful as it is to tell, I have never once been otherwise than collected and calm ; even on the dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference a tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was a religious prin- ciple that most supported me 1 I allow much to other favourable circumstances. I felt that I had something else to do than to regret On that first evening my aunt was lying insensible to all appearance like one dying ; my father, with his poor forehead plaistered over from a wound he had received from a daughter, dearly loved by him, and who loved him no less dearly; my mother a dead and murdered corpse in the next room ; yet was I wonderfully supported. I closed not my eyes in sleep that night, but lay without terrors and without despair. I have lost no sleep since. I had beeii long used not to VOL. i. D 34 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. rest in things of sense, had endeavoured after a compre- hension of mind, unsatisfied with the " ignorant present time ;" and this kept me up. I had the whole weight of the family thrown on me ; for my brother, little disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties, and I was now left alone. One little incident may serve to make you understand my way of managing my mind : Within a day or two after the fatal one, we dressed for dinner a tongue, which we had had salted for some weeks in the house. As I sat down, a feeling like remorse struck me : this tongue poor Mary got for me ; and can I partake of it now, when she is far away? A thought occurred and relieved me : if I give into this way of feeling, there is not a chair, a room, an object in our rooms, that will not awaken the keenest griefs. I must rise above such weaknesses. I hope this was not want of true feeling. I did not let this carry me, though, too far. On the very second day (I date from the day of horrors), as is usual in such cases, there were a matter of twenty people, I do think, supping in our room : they prevailed on me to eat with them (for to eat I never refused). They were all making merry in the room ! Some had come from friend- ship, some from busy curiosity, and some from interest. I was going to partake with them, when my recollection came that my poor dead mother was lying in the next room the very next room ; a mother who, through life, wished nothing but her children's welfare. Indignation, the rage of grief, something like remorse, rushed upon my mind. In an agony of emotion I found my way mechanically to the adjoining room, and fell on my knees by the side of her cofiin, asking forgiveness of Heaven, and sometimes of her, for forgetting her so soon. Tran- quillity returned, and it was the only violent emotion that mastered me. I think it did me good. I mention these things because I hate concealment, and love to give a faithful journal of what passes within TO COLERIDGE. 35 me. Our friends have been very good. Sam Le Grice, who was then in town, was with me the first three or four days, and was as a brother to me ; gave up every hour of his time, to the very hurting of his health and spirits, in constant attendance and humouring my poor father ; talked with him, read to him, played at cribbage with him (for so short is the old man's recollection, that he was playing at cards, as though nothing had happened, while the coroner's inquest was sitting over the way !) Samuel wept tenderly when he went away, for his mother wrote him a very severe letter on his loitering so long in town, and he was forced to go. Mr. Norris, of Christ's Hospital, has been as a father to me Mrs. Norris as a mother ; though we had few claims on them. A gentle- man, brother to my godmother, from whom we never had right or reason to expect any such assistance, sent my father twenty pounds ; and to crown all these God's blessings to our family at such a time, an old lady, a cousin of my father and aunt's, a gentlewoman of fortune, is to take my aunt and make her comfortable for the short remainder of her days. My aunt is recovered, and as well as ever, and highly pleased at thoughts of going and has generously given up the interest of her little money (which was formerly paid my father for her board) wholely and solely to my sister's use. Reckoning this, we have, Daddy and I, for our two selves and an old maid-servant to look after him, when I am out, which will be necessary, 170 (or 180 rather) a-year, out of which we can spare 50 or 60 at least for Mary, while she stays at Islington, where she must and shall stay during her father's life, for his and her comfort. I know John will make speeches about it but she shall not go into an hospital. The good lady of the madhouse, and her daughter, an elegant, sweet-behaved young lady, love her, and are taken with her amazingly ; and I know from her own mouth she loves them, and longs to be with them as much. Poor thing, they say she was but the other morning saying she knew she must go to Bedlam for 36 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. life ; that one of her brothers would have it so, but the other would wish it not, but be obliged to go with the stream ; that she had often as she passed Bedlam thought it likely, " here it may be my fate to end my days," con- scious of a certain flightiness in her poor head oftentimes, and mindful of more than one severe illness of that nature before. A legacy of 100, which my father will have at Christmas, and this 20 I mentioned before, with what is in the house, will much more than set us clear. If my father, an old servant-maid, and I, can't live, and live comfortably, on 130 or 120 a-year, we ought to burn by slow fires ; and I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me not leave one unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my brother. Since this has happened, he has been very kind and brotherly ; but I fear for his mind : he has taken his ease in the world, and is not fit himself to struggle with difficulties, nor has much accustomed himself to throw himself into their way ; and I know his language is already, " Charles, you must take care of yourself; you must not abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have been used to," etc. etc., and in that style of talking. But you, a Necessarian, can respect a difference of mind, and love what is amiable in a character not perfect. He has been very good ; but I fear for his mind. Thank God, I can unconnect myself with him, and shall manage all my father's moneys in future myself, if I take charge of Daddy, which poor John has not even hinted a wish, at any future time even, to share with me. The lady at this madhouse assures me that I may dismiss immediately both doctor and apothe- cary, retaining occasionally a composing draught or so for a v, hile ; and there is a less expensive establishment in her house, where she will only not have a room and nurse to herself, for 50 or guineas a-year the outside would be 60. You know, by economy, how much more even I shall be able to spare for her comforts. She will I fancy, if she stays, make one of the family, rather than of the patients ; and the old and young ladies I like TO COLERIDGE. 37 exceedingly, and she loves dearly; aiid they, as the saying is, take to her very extraordinarily, if it is extra- ordinary that people who see my sister should love her. Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most and thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, poor dear, dearest soul, in a future letter, for my own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly ; and, if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she will be found (I speak not with sufficient humility, I fear), but humanly and foolishly speaking, she will be found, I trust, uniformly great and amiable. God keep her in her present mind ! to whom be thanks and praise for all His dispensations to mankind. 0. LAMB. These mentioned good fortunes and change of prospects had almost brought my mind over to the extreme, the very opposite to despair. I was in danger of making myself too happy. Your letter brought me back to a view of things which I had entertained from the begin- ning. I hope (for Mary I can answer) but I hope that / shall through life never have less recollection nor a fainter impression of what has happened than I have now. 'Tis not a light thing, nor meant by the Almighty to be received lightly. I must be serious, circumspect, and deeply religious through life; and by such means may both of us escape madness in future, if it so please the Almighty. Send me word how it fares with Sara. I repeat it, your letter was, and will be, an inestimable treasure to me. You have a view of what my situation demands of me, like my own view, and I trust a just one. Coleridge, continue to write ; but do not for ever offend me by talking of sending me cash. Sincerely, and on my soul, we do not want it. God love you both ! I will write again very soon. Do you write directly. 38 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTEB X.] October 17, 1796. My dearest Friend I grieve from my very soul to observe you, in your plans of life, veering about from this hope to the other, and settling nowhere. Is it an un- toward fatality (speaking humanly) that does this for you a stubborn, irresistible concurrence of events ? or lies the fault, as I fear it does, in your own mind ? You seem to be taking up splendid schemes of fortune only to lay them down again ; and your fortunes are an ignis fatuus that has been conducting you, in thought, from Lancaster Court, Strand, to somewhere near Matlock ; then jumping across to Dr. Somebody's, whose son's tutor you were likely to be ; and would to God the dancing demon may conduct you at last, in peace and comfort, to the "life and labours of a cottager." You see, from the above awkward playfulness of fancy, that my spirits are not quite depressed. I should ill deserve God's blessings, which, since the late terrible event, have come down in mercy upon us, if I indulged regret or querulousness. Mary continues serene and cheerful. I have not by me a little letter she wrote to me; for, though I see her almost every day, yet we delight to write to one another, for we can scarce see each other but in company with some of the people of the house. I have not the letter by me, but will quote from memory what she wrote in it : "I have no bad terrifying dreams. At midnight, when I happen to awake, the nurse sleeping by the side of me, with the noise of the poor mad people around me, I have no fear. The spirit of my mother seems to descend and smile upon me, and bid me live to enjoy the life and reason which the Al- mighty has given me. I shall see her again in heaven : she will then understand me better. My grandmother, too, will understand me better, and will then say no more, as she used to do, ' Polly, what are those poor crazy moythered brains of yours thinking of always ?"' Poor Mary ! my mother indeed never understood her right. TO COLERIDGE 39 She loved her, as she loved us all, with a mother's love ; but in opinion, in feeling, and sentiment, and disposition, bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter, that she never understood her right; never could believe how much she loved her ; but met her caresses, her protesta- tions of filial affection, too frequently with coldness and repulse. Still she was a good mother. God forbid I should think of her but most respectfully, most affection- ately. Yet she would always love my brother above Mary, who was not worthy of one-tenth of that affection which Mary had a right to claim. But it is my sister's gratifying recollection that every act of duty and of love she could pay, every kindness (and I speak true, when I say to the hurting of her health, and, most probably, in great part to the derangement of her senses), through a long course of infirmities and sickness, she could show her, she ever did. I will, some day, as I promised, enlarge to you upon my sister's excellences : 'twill seem like exaggeration ; but I will do it. At present, short letters suit my state of mind best. So take my kindest wishes for your comfort and establishment in life, and for Sara's welfare and comforts with you. God love you ! God love us all ! ' * :; C. LAMB. LETTER XL] October 24, 1796. Coleridge, I feel myself much your debtor for that spirit of confidence and friendship which dictated your last letter. May your soul find peace at last in your cottage life ! I only wish you were but settled. Do continue to write to me. I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please us when you talk in a religious strain : not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy than con- sistent with the humility of genuine piety. To instance now, in your last letter you say, " It is by the press that 40 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. God hath given finite spirits, both evil and good (I suppose you mean simply bad men and good men), a portion as it were of His Omnipresence !" Now, high as the human intellect comparatively will soar, and wide as its influence, malign or salutary, can extend, is there not, Coleridge, a distance between the Divine Mind and it, which makes such language blasphemy 1 Again, in your first fine con- solatory epistle, you say, " you are a temporary sharer in human misery, that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine Nature." What more than this do those men say who are for exalting the man Christ Jesus into the second person of an unknown Trinity ? men whom you or I scruple not to call idolaters. Man, full of imperfec- tions at best, and subject to wants which momentarily remind him of dependence ; man, a weak and ignorant being, "servile" from his birth "to all the skiey in- fluences," with eyes sometimes open to discern the right path, but a head generally too dizzy to pursue it ; man, in the pride of speculation, forgetting his nature, and hailing in himself the future God, must make the angels laugh. Be not angry with me Coleridge : I wish not to cavil; I know I cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility which best becometh the Christian character. God, in the New Testament (our best guide), is represented to us in the kind, condescend- ing, amiable, familiar light of a parent ; and in my poor mind 'tis best for us so to consider of him, as our heavenly father, and our best friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of his nature. Let us learn to think humbly of ourselves, and rejoice in the appellation of " dear children," "brethren," and "coheirs with Christ of the promises," seeking to know no further. I am not insensible, indeed I am not, of the value of that first letter of yours, and I shall find reason to thank you for it again and again, long after that blemish in it is forgotten. It will be a fine lesson of comfort to us, whenever we read it ; and read it we often shall, Mary and I. TO COLERIDGE. 4 Accept our loves and best kind wishes for the welfare of yourself and wife and little one. Nor let me forget to wish you joy on your birthday, so lately past ; I thought you had been older. My kind thanks and remembrances to Lloyd. God love us all! and may He continue to be the father and the friend of the whole human race ! Sunday Evening. C. LAMB. LETTER XII.] October 28, 1796. My dear Friend I am not ignorant that to be "a partaker of the Divine Nature " is a phrase to be met with in Scripture : I am only apprehensive, lest we in these latter days, tinctured (some of us perhaps pretty deeply) with mystical notions and the pride of meta- physics, might be apt to affix to such phrases a meaning, which the primitive users of them, the simple fishermen of Galilee for instance, never intended to convey. With that other part of your apology I am not quite so well satisfied. You seem to me to have been straining your comparing faculties to bring together things infinitely distant and unlike, the feeble narrow-sphered operations of the human intellect and the everywhere diffused mind of Deity, the peerless wisdom of Jehovah. Even the expression appears to me inaccurate " portion of Omni- presence." Omnipresence is an attribute the very essence of which is unlimitedness. How can Omnipresence be affirmed of anything in part ? But enough of this spirit of disputatiousness. Let us attend to the proper business of human life, and talk a little together respecting our domestic concerns. Do you continue to make me ac- quainted with what you are doing, and how soon you are likely to be settled, once for all. I have satisfaction in being able to bid you rejoice with me in my sister's continued reason, and composed- ness of mind. Let us both be thankful for it. I continue to visit her very frequently, and the people of the house 42 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. are vastly indulgent to her. She is likely to be as com- fortably situated in all respects as those who pay twice or thrice the sum. They love her, and she loves them, and makes herself very useful to them. Benevolence sets out on her journey with a good heart, and puts a good face on it, but is apt to limp and grow feeble, unless she calls in the aid of self-interest, by way of crutch. In Mary's case, as far as respects those she is with, 'tis well that these principles are so likely to co-operate. I am rather at a loss sometimes for books for her : our reading is somewhat confined, and we have nearly exhausted our London library. She has her hands too full of work to read much ; but a little she must read, for reading was her daily bread. Have you seen Bowles's new poem on " Hope 1" What character does it bear ? Has he exhausted his stores of tender plaintiveness ? or is he the same in this last as in all his former pieces 1 The duties of the day call me off from this pleasant intercourse with my friend : so for the present adieu. Now for the truant borrowing of a few minutes from business. Have you met with a new poem called the Pursuits of Literature? From the extracts in the British Review I judge it to be a very humorous thing. In particular, I remember what I thought a very happy character of Dr. Darwin's poetry. Among all your quaint readings did your ever light upon Walton's Complete Angler ? I asked you the question once before : it breathes the very spirit of innocence, purity, and sim- plicity of heart. There are many choice old verses interspersed in it. It would sweeten a man's temper at any time to read it ; it would Christianise every discordant angry passion. Pray make yourself acquainted with it. Have you made it up with Southey yet 1 Surely one of you two must have been a very silly fellow, and the other not much better, to fall out like boarding-school misses. Kiss, shake hands, and make it up. When will he be delivered of his new epic 1 Madoc, TO COLERIDGE. 43 I think, is to be the name of it ; though that is a name not familiar to my ears. What progress do you make in your hymns ? What Review are you connected with ? If with any, why do you delay to notice White's book ? You are justly offended at its profaneness; but surely you have undervalued its urit, or you would have been more loud in its praises. Do not you think that in Blender's death and madness there is most exquisite humour, mingled with tenderness, that is irresistible, truly Shakspearian ? Be more full in your mention of it. Poor fellow, lie has (very undeservedly) lost by it ; nor do I see that it is likely ever to reimburse him the charge of printing, etc. Give it a lift, if you can. I suppose you know that Allen's wife is dead, and he, just situated as he was, never the better, as the worldly people say, for her death, her money with her children being taken off his hands. I am just now wondering whether you will ever come to town again, Coleridge ; 'tis among the things I dare not hope, but can't help wishing. For myself, I can live in the midst of town luxury and super- fluity, and not long for them, and I can't see why your children might not hereafter do the same. Remember, you are not in Arcadia when you are in the west of England, and they may catch infection from the world without visiting the metropolis. But you seem to have set your heart upon this same cottage plan : and God prosper you in the experiment ! I am at a loss for more to write about ; so 'tis as well that I am arrived at the bottom of my paper. God love you, Coleridge ! Our best loves and tendereet washes await on you, your Sara, and your little one. C. L. November 8, 1 796. My brother, my friend,- I am distress'd for you, believe me I am ; not so much for your painful, trouble- some complaint, which, I trust, is only for a time, as for 44 LETTERS OF CHAKLES LAMB. those anxieties which brought it oto, and perhaps even now may be nursing its malignity. Tell me, dearest of my friends, is your mind at peace 1 or has anything, yet unknown to me, happened to give you fresh disquiet, and steal from you all the pleasant dreams of future rest? Are you still (I fear you are) far from being comfortably settled? Would to God it were in my power to con- tribute towards the bringing of you into the haven where you would be ! But you are too well skilled in the philosophy of consolation to need my humble tribute of advice. In pain, and in sickness, and in all manner of disappointments, I trust you have that within you which shall speak peace to your mind. Make it, I entreat you, one of your puny comforts, that I feel for you, and share all your griefs with you. I feel as if I were troubling you about little things, now I am going to resume the subject of our last two letters ; but it may divert us both from unpleasanter feelings to make such matters, in a manner, of importance. Without further apology, then, it was not that I did not relish, that I did not in my heart thank you for those little pictures of your feelings which you lately sent me, if I neglected to mention them. You may remember you had said much the same things before to me on the same subject in a former letter, and I considered those last verses as only the identical thoughts better clothed ; either way (in prose or verse) such poetry must be welcome to me. I love them as I love the Confessions of Rousseau, and for the same reason : the same frankness, the same openness of heart, the same disclosure of all the most hidden and delicate affections of the mind. They make me proud to be thus esteemed worthy of the place of friend-confessor, brother-confessor, to a man like Coleridge. This last is, I acknowledge, language too high for friendship ; but it is also, I declare, too sincere for flattery. Now, to put on stilts, and talk magnificently about trifles, I condescend, then, to your counsel, Coleridge, and allow my first Sonnet (sick to death am I to make mention of my Sonnets, and I blush TO COLERIDGE. *5 to be so taken up with them, indeed I do) ; I allow it to ran thus : Fairy Land, etc. etc., as I last wrote it. The Fragments I now send you, I want printed to get rid of 'em ; for, while they stick burr-like to my memory, they tempt me to go on with the idle trade of versifying, which I long (most sincerely I speak it) I long to leave off, for it is unprofitable to my soul ; I feel it is ; and these questions about words, and debates about alterations, take me off, I am conscious, from the properer business of my life. Take my Sonnets, once for all ; and do not propose any reamendments, or mention them again in any shape to me, I charge you. I blush that my mind can consider them as things of any worth. And, pray, admit or reject these fragments as you like or dislike them, without ceremony. Call 'em Sketches, Fragments, or what you will ; but do not entitle any of my things Love Sonnets, as I told you to call 'em ; 'twill only make me look little in my own eyes; for it is a passion of which I retain nothing. 'Twas a weakness, concerning which I may say, in the words of Petrarch (whose Life is now open before me), " if it drew me out of some vices, it also prevented the growth of many virtues, filling me with the love of the creature rather than the Creator, which is the death of the soul." Thank God, the folly has left me for ever. Not even a review of my love verses renews one wayward wish in me ; and if I am at all solicitous to trim 'em out iu their best apparel, it is because they are to make their appearance in good company. Now to my fragments. Lest you have lost my " Grandame," she shall be one. 'Tis among the few verses I ever wrote, that to Mary is another, which profit me in the recollection. God love her ! and may we two never love each other less ! These, Coleridge, are the few sketches I have thought worth preserving. How will they relish thus detached ? Will you reject all or any of them 1 They are thine : do whatsoever thou listest with them. My eyes ache with 46 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. writing long and late, and I wax wondrous sleepy. God bless you and yours, me and mine ! Good-night. C. LAMB. I will keep my eyes open reluctantly a minute longer to tell you that I love you for those simple, tender, heart- flowing lines with which you conclude your last, and in my eyes best, "Sonnet" (so you call 'em) " So, for the mother's sake, the child was dear ; And dearer was the mother for the child." Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge; or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness ; for simplicity springs spon- taneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds, and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression. I allow no hot -beds in the gardens of Parnassus. I am unwilling to go to bed and leave my sheet unfilled (a good piece of night-work for an idle body like me), so will finish with begging you to send me the earliest account of your complaint, its progress, or (as I hope to God you will be able to send me) the tale of your recovery, or at least amendment. My tenderest remembrances to your Sara Once more, Good-night. LETTER XIV.] November 14, 1796. Coleridge, I love you for dedicating your poetry to Bowles. Genius of the sacred fountain of tears, it was he who led you gently by the hand through all this valley of weeping ; showed you the dark green yew trees, and the willow shades, where, by the fall of waters, you might indulge an uncomplaining melancholy, a delicious regret for the past, or weave fine visions of that awful future, " When all the vanities of life's brief day Oblivion's hurrying hand hath swept away, And all its sorrows, at the awful blast Of the archangel's trump, are but as shadows past." I have another sort of dedication in my head for my TO COLERIDGE. 47 few things, which I want to know if you approve of, and can insert. I mean to inscribe them to my sister. It will be unexpected, and it will give her pleasure ; or do you think it will look whimsical at all? As I have not spoke to her about it I can easily reject the idea. But there is a monotony in the affections, which people living together, or, as we do now, very frequently seeing each other, are apt to give in to ; a sort of indifference in the expression of kindness for each other, which demands that we should sometimes call to our aid the trickery of surprise. Do you publish with Lloyd, or without him 1 In either case my little portion may come last ; and after the fashion of orders to a country correspondent, I will give directions how I should like to have 'em done. The title-page to stand thus : POEMS BT CHARLES LAMB, OF THE INDIA HOUSE. Under this title the following motto, which, for want of room, I put over leaf, and desire you to insert, whether you like it or no. May not a gentleman choose what arms, mottoes, or armorial bearings the Herald will give him leave, without consulting his republican friend, who might advise none? May not a publican put up the sign of the Saracen's Head, even though his undiscern- ing neighbour should prefer, as more genteel, the Cat and Gridiron ? [MOTTO.] " This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, When my first fire knew no adulterate incense, Nor I no way to natter but my fondness, In the best language my true tongue could tell mo, And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, I sued and served. Long did I love this lady." MASSINGKR, 48 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. THE DEDICATION. THE FEW FOLLOWING POEMS, CREATURES OP THE FANCY AND THE FEELINU IN LIFE'S MORK VACANT HOURS, PRODUCED, FOR THE MOST PART, BT LOVE IN IDLENESS, ARE, WITH ALL A BROTHER'S FONDNESS, INSCRIBED TO MARY ANNE LAMB, THE AUTHOR'S BEST FRIEND AND SISTER. This is the pomp and paraphernalia of parting, with which I take my leave of a passion which has reigned so royally (so long) within me ; thus, with its trappings ot laureatship, I fling it off, pleased and satisfied with my- self that the weakness troubles me no longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father. Oh, my friend ! I think sometimes, could I recall the days that are past, which among them should I choose 1 not those " merrier days," not the "pleasant days of hope," not "those wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid," which I have so often and so feelingly regretted, but the days, Coleridge, of a mother's fondness for her school-boy. What would I give to call her back to earth for one day ! on my knees to ask her pardon for all those little asperities of temper which, from time to time, have given her gentle spirit pain ! and the day, my friend, I trust, will come. There will be " time enough " for kind offices of love, if " Heaven's eternal year" be ours. Hereafter, her meek spirit shall not reproach me. Oh, my friend, cultivate the filial feel- ings ! and let no man think himself released from the kind " charities " of relationship : these shall give him peace at the last ; these are the best foundation for every species of benevolence. I rejoice to hear, by certain channels, that you, my friend, are reconciled with all TO COLERIDGE. 49 your relations. 'Tis the most kindly and natural species of love, and we have all the associated train of early feelings to secure its strength and perpetuity. Send me an account of your health : indeed I am solicitous about you. God love you and yours. C. LAMB. LETTER XV.] December 2, 1796. I have delayed writing thus long, not having by me my copy of your poems, which I had lent. I am not satisfied with all your intended omissions. Why omit 40, 63, 84 ? Above all, let me protest strongly against your rejecting the " Complaint of Ninathoma," 86. The words, I acknowledge, are Ossian's, but you have added to them the " music of Caril." If a vicarious substitute be wanting, sacrifice (and 'twill be a piece of self-denial too), the "Epitaph on an Infant," of which its author seems so proud, so tenacious. Or, if your heart be set on perpetuating the four-line wonder, I'll tell you what to do ; sell the copyright of it at once to a country statuary. Commence in this manner Death's prime poet-laureate ; and let your verses be adopted in every village round, instead of those hitherto famous ones : " Afflictions sore long time I bore ; Physicians were in vain." I have seen your last very beautiful poem in the Monthly Magazine : write thus, and you most generally have written thus, and I shall never quarrel with you about simplicity. With regard to my lines "Laugh all that weep," etc., I would willingly sacrifice them ; but my portion of the volume is so ridiculously little, that, in honest truth, I can't spare 'em. As things are, I have very slight pre- tensions to participate in the title-page. White's book is at length reviewed in the Monthly ; was it your doing, or Dyer's, to whom I sent him ? or, rather, do you not write in the Critical ? for I observed, in an article of VOL. I. E 50 LETTERS OF OHAHLES LAMB. this month's, a line quoted out of that Sonnet on Mm Siddons, u With eager wondering, and perturb'd delight." And a line from that Sonnet would not readily have occurred to a stranger. That sonnet, Coleridge, brings afresh to my mind the time when you wrote those on Bowles, Priestley, Burke ; 'twas two Christmases ago, and in that nice little smoky room at the Salutation, which is even now continually presenting itself to my recollection, with all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, welsh-rabbit, metaphysics, and poetry. Are we never to meet again 1 How differently I am circumstanced now ! I have never met with anyone never shall meet with anyone who could or can compensate me for the loss of your society. I have no one to talk all these matters about to ; I lack friends. I lack books to supply their absence ; but these complaints ill become me. Let me compare my present situation, prospects, and state of mind, with what they were but two months back but two months ! my friend, I am in danger of forgetting the awful lessons then presented to me ! Remind me of them ; remind me of my duty ! Talk seriously with me when you do write ! I thank you, from my heart I thank you, for your solicitude about my sister. She is quite well, but must not, I fear, come to live with us yet a good while. In the first place, because, at present, it would -hurt her, and hurt my father, for them to be together; secondly, from a regard to the world's good report ; for, I fear, tongues will be busy whenever that event takes place. Some have hinted, one man has pressed it on me, that she should be in perpetual confine- ment : what she hath done to deserve, or the necessity of such an hardship, I see not ; do you ? I am starving at the India House, near seven o'clock without my dinner ; and so it has been, and will be, almost all the week. I get home at night o'erwearicd, quite faint, and then to cards with my father, who will not let me enjoy TO COLERIDGE. 51 a meal in peace ; but I must conform to my situation ; and I hope I am, for the most part, not unthankful. I am got home at last, and, after repeated games at cribbage, have got my father's leave to write awhile; with difficulty got it, for when I expostulated about play- ing any more, he very aptly replied, " If you won't play with me, you might as well not come home at all." The argument was unanswerable, and I set to afresh. I told you I do not approve of your omissions; neither do I quite coincide with you in your arrangements. I have not time to point out a better, and I suppose some self- associations of your own have determined their place as they now stand. Your beginning, indeed, with the Joan of A re lines, I coincide entirely with. I love a splendid outset a magnificent portico ; and the diapason is grand. When I read the Religious Musings, I think how poor, how unelevated, unoriginal, my blank verse is " Laugh all that weep," especially, where the subject demanded a grandeur of conception ; and I ask what business they have among yours ? but friendship covereth a multitude of defects. I want some loppings made in the " Chatter- ton :" it wants but a little to make it rank among the finest irregular lyrics I ever read. Have you time and inclination to go to work upon it 1 or is it too late 1 or do you think it needs none ? Don't reject those verses iu your Watchman, " Dear native brook," etc. ; nor I think those last lines you sent me, in which " all effort- less " is without doubt to be preferred to " inactive." If I am writing more than ordinarily dully, 'tis that I am stupefied with a tooth-ache. Hang it ! do not omit 48, 52, and 53 : what you do retain, though, call Sonnets, for heaven's sake, and not Effusions. Spite of your in- genious anticipation of ridicule in your Preface, the last five lines of 50 are too good to be lost ; the rest are not much worth. My tooth becomes importunate : I must finish. Pray, pray, write to me : if you knew with what an anxiety of joy I open such a long packet as you last sent me, you would not grudge giving a few minutes now 52 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. and then to this intercourse (the only intercourse I fear we two shall ever have) this conversation with your friend : such I boast to be called. God love you and yours ! Write to me when you move, lest I should direct wrong. Has Sara no poems to publish ? Those lines, 129, are probably too light for the volume where the Religious Musings are ; but I remember some very beautiful lines, addressed by somebody at Bristol to somebody in London. God bless you once more. Thursday Night. 0. LAMB. LETTEII XVI.] [Fragment] December 5, 1796. At length I have done with verse-making ; not that I relish other people's poetry less : theirs comes from 'em without effort ; mine is the difficult operation of a brain scanty of ideas, made more difficult by disuse. I have been reading " The Task " with fresh delight. I am glad you love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton ; but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the " divine chit-chat of Cowper." Write to me, God love you and yours ! 0. L. LETTER XVII.] December 10, 1796. I had put my letter into the post rather hastily, not expecting to have to acknowledge another from you so soon. This morning's present has made me alive again. My last night's epistle was childishly querulous : but you have put a little life into me, and I will thank you for your remembrance of me, while my sense of it is yet warm ; for if I linger a day or two I may use the same phrase of acknowledgment, or similar, but the feeling that dictates it now will be gone. I shall send you a caput mortuum, not a cor vivens. Thy Watchman's, thy bellman's verses, I do retort upon thee, thou libellous varlet ! Why you cried the hours yourself, and who made you so proud ! But I submit, to show my humility most implicitly to your dogmas. I reject entirely the TO COLERIDGE. 53 copy of verses you reject. With regard to iny leaving off versifying, you have said so many pretty things, so many fine compliments, ingeniously decked out in the garb of sincerity, and undoubtedly springing from a pre- sent feeling somewhat like sincerity, that you might melt the most uu-muse-ical soul did you not (now for a Row- land compliment for your profusion of Olivers !) did you not in your very epistle, by the many pretty fancies and profusion of heart displayed in it, dissuade and discourage me from attempting anything after you? At present I have not leisure to make verses, nor anything approach- ing to a fondness for the exercise. In the ignorant pre- sent time, who can answer for the future man? "At lovers' perjuries Jove laughs ;" and poets have sometimes a disingenuous way of forswearing their occupation. This though is not my case. The tender cast of soul, sombred with melancholy and subsiding recollections, is favourable to the Sonnet or the Elegy ; but from " The sainted growing woof The teasing troubles keep aloof." The music of poesy may charm for a while the importunate teasing cares of life ; but the teased and troubled man is not in a disposition to make that music. You sent me some very sweet lines relative to Burns, but it was at a time when in my highly agitated and perhaps somewhat distorted state of mind I thought it a duty to read 'em hastily and burn 'em. I burned all my own verses ; all my book of extracts from Beaumont and Fletcher and a thousand sources ; I burned a little journal of my foolish passion which I had a long time kept " Noting ere they past away The little lines of yesterday, " I almost burned all your letters, I did as bad, I lent 'em to a friend to keep out of my brother's sight, should he come and make inquisition into our papers ; for, much as he dwelt upon your conversation while you were among iia, and delighted to be with you, it has been his fashion 54 LETTERS OF CHARLES IAMB. ever since to depreciate and cry you down : you were the cause of my madness you and your "damned foolish sensibility and melancholy;" and he lamented, with a true brotherly feeling, that we ever met; even as the sober citizen, when his son went astray upon the mountains of Parnassus, is said to have "cursed Wit and Poetry and Pope." I quote wrong, but no matter. These letters I lent to a friend to be out of the way for a season ; but I have claimed 'em in vain, and shall not cease to regret their loss. Your packets, posterior to the date of my misfortunes, commencing with that valu- able consolatory epistle, are every day accumulating : they are sacred things with me. Publish your Burns when and how you like, it will be new to me : my memory of it is very confused, and tainted with unpleasant associations. Burns was the god of my idolatry, as Bowles is of yours. I am jealous of your fraternising with Bowles, when I think you relish him more than Burns, or my old favourite, Cowper. But you conciliate matters when you talk of the "divine chit- chat " of the latter : by that expression I see you thoroughly relish him. I love Mrs. Coleridge for her excuses an hundredfold more dearly than if she heaped " line upon line," out-Hannah-ing Hannah More ; and would rather hear you sing " Did a very little baby," by your family fire-side, than listen to you when you were repeating one of Bowles's sweetest sonnets, in your sweet manner, while we two were indulging sympathy, a solitary luxury, by the fire-side at the Salutation. Yet have I no higher ideas of heaven. Your company was one "cordial in this melancholy vale :" the remembrance of it is a blessing partly, and partly a curse. When I can abstract myself from things present, I can enjoy it with a freshness of relish ; but it more constantly operates to an unfavourable comparison with the uninteresting converse I always and only can partake in. Not a soul loves Bowles here ; scarce one has heard of Burns ; few but laugh at me for reading my Testament. They talk a TO COLERIDGE. 55 language I understand not. I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to them. I can only converse with you by letter, and with the dead in their books. My sister, indeed, is all I can wish in a companion ; but our spirits are alike poorly, our reading and knowledge from the self-same sources ; our communication with the scenes of the world alike narrow. Never having kept separate company, or any "company" "together" never having read separate books, and few books together what knowledge have we to convey to each other? In our little range of duties and connections, how few sentiments can take place, without friends, with few books, with a taste for religion, rather than a strong religious habit ! We need some support, some leading-strings to cheer and direct us. You talk very wisely ; and be not sparing of your advice. Continue to remember us, and to show us you do remember us : we will take as lively an interest in what concerns you and yours. All I can add to your happiness will be sympathy : you can add to mine more ; you can teach me wisdom. I am indeed an unreasonable correspondent ; but I was unwilling to let my last night's letter go off without this qualifier : you will perceive by this my mind is easier, and you will rejoice. I do not expect or wish you to write till you are moved ; and, of course, shall not, till you announce to me that event, think of writing myself. Love to Mrs. Coleridge and David Hartley, and my kind remembrance to Lloyd, if he is with you. C. LAMB. I will get Nature and Art : have not seen it yet, nor any of Jeremy Taylor's works. LETTER XVIII.] December 10, 1796. I am sorry I cannot now relish your poetical present so thoroughly as I feel it deserves ; but I do not the less thank Lloyd and you for it. 66 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. In truth, Coleridge, I am perplexed, arid at times almost cast down. I am beset with perplexities. The old hag of a wealthy relation who took my aunt off our hands in the beginning of trouble, has found out that she is " indolent and mulish " I quote her own words, and that her attachment to us is so strong that she can never be happy apart. The lady, with delicate irony, remarks, that if I am not an hypocrite I shall rejoice to receive her again ; and that it will be a means of making me more fond of home to have so dear a friend to come home to ! The fact is, she is jealous of my aunt's bestowing any kind recollections on us while she enjoys the patronage of her roof. She says she finds it inconsistent with her own " ease and tranquillity," to keep her any longer ; and, in fine, summons me to fetch her home. Now, much as I should rejoice to transplant the poor old crea- ture from the chilling air of such patronage, yet I know how straitened we are already, how unable already to answer any demand which sickness or any extraordinary expense may make. I know this ; and all unused as I am to struggle with perplexities, I am somewhat nonplussed, to say no worse. This prevents me from a thorough relish of what Lloyd's kindness and yours have furnished me with. I thank you though from my heart, and feel myself not quite alone in the earth. Before I offer, what alone I have to offer, a few obvious remarks on the poems you sent me, I can but notice the odd coincidence of two young men, in one age, carolling their grandmothers. Love, what L. calls the " feverish and romantic tie," hath too long domineered over all the charities of home : the dear domestic ties of father, brother, husband. The amiable and benevolent Cowper has a beautiful passage in his "Task," some natural and painful reflections on his deceased parents : and Hayley's sweet lines to his mother are notoriously the best things he ever wrote. Cowper's lines, some of them are TO COLERIDGE. 57 " How gladly would the man recall to life The boy's neglected sire ! a Mother, too, That softer friend, perhaps more gladly still, Might he demand them at the gates of death." I cannot but smile to see my granny so gaily decked forth : though, I think, whoever altered " thy " praises to "her" praises "thy" honoured memory to "her" honoured memory, did wrong; they best expressed my feelings. There is a pensive state of recollection in which the mind is disposed to apostrophise the departed objects of its attachment ; and, breaking loose from grammatical precision, changes from the first to the third, and from the third to the first person, just as the random fancy or the feeling directs. Among Lloyd's sonnets, the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and llth are eminently beautiful. I think him too lavish of his expletives : the do's and did's, when they occur too often, bring a quaintness with them along with their simplicity, or rather air of antiquity, which the patrons of them seem desirous of conveying. Another time, I may notice more particularly Lloyd's, Southey's, Dermody's Sonnets. I shrink from them now : my teasing lot makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things, too selfish for sympathy ; and these ill-digested, meaningless remarks, I have imposed on myself as a task, to lull reflection, as well as to show you I did not neglect reading your valuable present. Return my acknowledg- ments to Lloyd ; you two seem to be about realising an Elysium upon earth, and, no doubt, I shall be happier. Take my best wishes. Remember me most affection- ately to Mrs. C. , and give little David Hartley (God bless its little heart !) a kiss for me. Bring him up to know the meaning of his Christian name, and what that name (imposed upon him) will demand of him. God love you ! C. LAMB. I write, for one thing, to say that I shall write no 58 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. more till you send me word where you are, for you are so soon to move. My sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very often. God bless you : continue to be my correspondent, and I will strive to fancy that this world is not " all barrenness." LETTER XIX.] January 2, 1797. If the fraternal sentiment conveyed in the following lines will atone for the total want of anything like merit or genius in it, I desire you will print it next after my other Sonnet to my Sister. Friend of my earliest years and childish days, M y Jy s . m y sorrows, thou with me hast shared, Companion dear ; etc. This has been a sad long letter of business, with no room in it for what honest Bunyan terms heart-work. I have just room left to congratulate you on your removal to Stowey ; to wish success to all your projects ; to " bid fair peace " be to that house ; to send my love and best wishes, breathed warmly, after your dear Sara, and her little David Hartley. If Lloyd be with you, bid him write to me : I feel to whom I am obliged primarily for two very friendly letters I have received already from him. A dainty sweet book that Nature and Art is. I am at present re-re-reading Priestley's Examination of the Scotch Doctors : how the rogue strings 'em up ! three together ! You have no doubt read that clear, strong, humorous, most entertaining piece of reasoning. If not, procure it, and be exquisitely amused. I wish I could get more of Priestley's works. Can you recommend me to any more books, easy of access, such as circulating shops afford ? God bless you and yours. Monday Morning, at Office. TO COLERIDGE. 59 Poor Mary is very unwell with a sore throat and a slight species of scarlet fever. God bless her too. LETTER XX.] January 5, 1797. Sunday Morning. You cannot surely mean to degrade the Joan of Arc into a pot-girl. You are not going, I hope, to annex to that most splendid ornament of Southey's poem all this cock-and-a-bull story of Joan, the publican's daughter of Neufchatel, with the lamentable episode of a waggoner, his wife, and six children. The texture will be most lamentably disproportionate. The first forty or fifty lines of these addenda are, no doubt, in their way, admirable, too; but many would prefer the Joan of Southey. " On mightiest deeds to brood Of shadowy vastness, such as made my heart Throb fast ; anon I paused, and in a state Of half expectance listen'd to the wind ; " " They wonder'd at me, who had known me once A cheerful careless damsel ; " " The eye, That of the circling throng and of the visible world Unseeing, saw the shapes of holy phantasy ; " I see nothing in your description of the Maid equal to these. There is a fine originality certainly in those lines " For she had lived in this bad world As in a place of tombs, And touch'd not the pollutions of the dead ; " but your "fierce vivacity" is a faint copy of the "fierce and terrible benevolence " of Southey ; added to this, that it will look like rivalship in you, and extort a comparison with Southey, I think to your disadvantage. And the lines, considered in themselves as an addition to what 60 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. you had before written (strains of a far higher mood), are but such as Madame Fancy loves in some of her more familiar moods, at such times as she has met Noll Gold- smith, and walked and talked with him, calling him "old acquaintance." Southey certainly has no preten- sions to vie with you in the sublime of poetry ; but he tells a plain tale better than you. I will enumerate some woful blemishes, some of 'em sad deviations from that simplicity which was your aim. " Hail'd who might be near" (the "canvas-coverture moving," by the by, is laughable) ; u a woman and six children " (by the way, why not nine children 1 It would have been just half as pathetic again) : " statues of sleep they seem'd : " " frost- mangled wretch : " " green putridity : " " hail'd him im- mortal " (rather ludicrous again) : " voic'd a sad and simple tale " (abominable !) : " unprovender'd : " " such his tale : " " Ah ! suffering to the height of what was suffer'd" (a most insufferable line): "amazements of affright : " " the hot sore brain attributes its own hues of ghastliness and torture " (what shocking confusion of ideas !). In these delineations of common and natural feelings, in the familiar walks of poetry, you seem to resemble Montauban dancing with Eoubign^'s tenants, " much of his native loftiness remained in the execution" I was reading your Religious Musings the other day, and sincerely I think it the noblest poem in the language, next after the Paradise Lost ; and even that was not made the vehicle of such grand truths. " There is one mind," etc., down to "Almighty's throne," are without a rival in the whole compass of my poetical reading. " Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze Views all creation." I wish I could have written those lines. I rejoice that I am able to relish them. The loftier walks of Pindus are your proper region. There you have no compeer in TO COLERIDGE. 61 modern times. Leave the lowlands, unenvied, in posses- sion of such men as Cowper and Southey. Thus am I pouring balsam into the wounds I may have been inflicting on my poor friend's vanity. In your notice of Southey's new volume you omit to mention the most pleasing of all, the " Miniature " "There were Who form'd high hopes and flattering ones of thee, Young Robert, Spirit of Spenser ! was the wanderer wrong t " Fairfax I have been in quest of a long time. Johnson, in his "Life of Waller," gives a most delicious specimen of him, and adds, in the true manner of that delicate critic, as well as amiable man, " It may be presumed that this old version will not be much read after the elegant translation of my friend, Mr. Hoole." I endeavoured I wished to gain some idea of Tasso from this Mr. Hoole, the great boast and ornament of the India House, but soon desisted. I found him more vapid than smallest small beer " sun-vinegared." Your " Dream," down to that exquisite line " I can't tell half his adventures," is a most happy resemblance of Chaucer. The remainder is so so. The best line, I think, is, "He belong'd, I believe, to the witch Melancholy." By the way, when will our volume come out ? Don't delay it till you have written a new Joan of Arc. Send what letters you please by me, and in any way you choose, single or double. The India Company is better adapted to answer the cost than the generality of my friend's correspondents, such poor and honest dogs as John Thelwall, particularly. I cannot say I know Colson, at least intimately. I once supped with him and Allen : I think his manners very pleasing. I will not tell you what I think of Lloyd, for he may by chance come to see this letter, and that thought puts a restraint on me. I cannot think what subject 62 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. would suit your epic genius ; some philosophical subject, I conjecture, iu which shall be blended the sublime of poetry and of science. Your proposed "Hymns" will be a fit preparatory study wherewith " to discipline your young noviciate soul." I grow dull ; I'll go walk myself out of my dulness. Sunday Night. You and Sara are very good to think so kindly and so favourably of poor Mary ; I would to God all did so too. But I very much fear she must not think of coming home in my father's lifetime. It is very hard upon her ; but our circumstances are peculiar, and we must submit to them. God be praised she is so well as she is. She bears her situation as one who has no right to complain. My poor old aunt, whom you have seen, the kindest, goodest creature to me when I was at school ; who used to toddle there to bring me good things, when I, school-boy like, only despised her for it, and used to be ashamed to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps as you went into the old grammar- school, and open her apron, and bring out her bason, with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for me ; the good old creature is now lying on her death-bed. I can- not bear to think on her deplorable state. To the shock she received on that our evil day, from which she never completely recovered, I impute her illness. She says, poor thing, she is glad she is come home to die with me. I was always her favourite : " No after friendship e'er can raise The endearments of our early days, Nor e'er the heart such fondness prove, As when it first began to love." Lloyd has kindly left me, for a keep-sake, John Woolman. You have read it, he says, and like it. Will you excuse one short extract ? I think it could not have escaped you : " Small treasure to a resigned mind is sufficient How happy is it to be content with a little, TO COLERIDGE. 63 to live in humility, and feel that in us, which breathes out this language Abba ! Father ! " 1 am almost ashamed to patch up a letter in this miscellaneous sort ; but I please myself in the thought, that anything from me will be acceptable to you. I am rather impatient, childishly so, to see our names affixed to the same common volume. Send me two, when it does come out ; two will be enough or indeed one but two better. I have a dim recollection that, when in town, you were talking of the Origin of Evil as a most prolific subject for a long poem. Why not adopt it, Coleridge ? there would be room for imagination. Or the description (from a Vision or Dream, suppose) of an Utopia in one of the planets (the Moon, for instance). Or a Five Days' Dream, which shall illustrate, in sensible imagery, Hart- ley's five Motives to Conduct: 1. Sensation; 2. Im- agination ; 3. Ambition ; 4. Sympathy ; 5. Theopathy : First. Banquets, music, etc., effeminacy, and their insufficiency. Second. "Beds of hyacinth and roses, where young Adonis oft reposes ; " " Fortunate Isles ; " "The pagan Elysium," etc. ; poetical pictures; antiquity as pleasing to the fancy; their emptiness, madness, etc. Third. Warriors, Poets; some famous yet more forgotten ; their fame or oblivion now alike indifferent ; pride, vanity, etc. Fourth. All manner of pitiable stories, in Spenser-like verse ; love ; friendship, relationship, etc. Fifth. Hermits; Christ and his apostles; martyrs; heaven, etc. An imagination like yours, from these scanty hints, may expand into a thousand great ideas, if indeed you at all comprehend my scheme, which I scarce do myself. Monday Morn. " A London letter Ninepence half- penny ! " Look you, master poet, I have remorse as well as another man, and my bowels can sound upon occasion. But I must put you to this charge, for I cannot keep back my protest, however ineffectual, against the annexing your latter lines to those former this putting of new wine into old bottles. This my duty done, I will cease 64 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. from writing till you invent some more reasonable mode of conveyance. Well may the " ragged followers of the Nine " set up for flocci-nauci-what-do-you-call-'em-ists ! and I do not wonder that in their splendid visions of Utopias in America they protest against the admission of those ye^ott>-complexioned, copper-coloured, white-livered gentlemen, who never proved themselves their friends. Don't you think your verses on a "Young Ass" too trivial a companion for the " Religious Musings " ? " Scoundrel monarch," alter that ; and the " Man of Boss " is scarce admissible, as it now stands, curtailed of its fairer half: reclaim its property from the "Chat- terton," which it does but encumber, and it will be a rich little poem. I hope you expunge great part of the old notes in the new edition : that, in particular, most barefaced, unfounded, impudent assertion, that Mr. Rogers is indebted for his story to Loch Lomond, a poem by Bruce ! I have read the latter. I scarce think you have. Scarce anything is common to them both. The poor author of the Pleasures of Memory was sorely hurt, Dyer says, by the accusation of unoriginality. He never saw the poem. I long to read your poem on Burns ; I retain so indistinct a memory of it. In what shape and how does it come into public ? As you leave off writing poetry till you finish your Hymns, I suppose you print, now, all you have got by you. You have scarce enough unprinted to make a second volume with Lloyd. Tell me all about it. What is become of Cowper? Lloyd told me of some verses on his mother. If you have them by you, pray send 'em me. I do so love him ! Never mind their merit. May be / may like 'em, as your taste and mine do not always exactly identify. Yours, 0. LAMB. TO COLERIDGE. 65 LETTER XXI.] January 10, 1797. I need not repeat my wishes to have my little sonnets printed verbatim my last way. In particular, I fear lest you should prefer printing my first sonnet, as you have done more than once, " Did the wand of Merlin wave?" It looks so like Mr. Merlin, the ingenious successor of the immortal Merlin, now living in good health and spirits, and flourishing in magical reputation in Oxford Street; and, on my life, one half who read it would understand it so. Do put 'em forth, finally, as I have in various letters settled it ; for first a man's self is to be pleased, and then his friends ; and, of course, the greater number of his friends, if they differ inter se. Thus taste may safely be put to the vote. I do long to see our names together; not for vanity's sake, and naughty pride of heart altogether, for not a living soul I know, or am intimate with, will scarce read the book : so I shall gain nothing, quoad famam ; and yet there is a little vanity mixes in it, I cannot help denying. I am aware of the unpoetical cast of the six last lines of my last sonnet, and think myself unwarranted in smuggling so tame a thing into the book ; only the sentiments of those six lines are thoroughly congenial to me in my state of mind, and I wish to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor Mary. That it has no originality in its cast, nor anything in the feelings but what is common and natural to thousands, nor ought pro- perly to be called poetry, I see ; still it will tend to keep present to my mind a view of things which I ought to indulge. These six lines, too, have not, to a reader, a connectedness with the foregoing. Omit it, if you like. What a treasure it is to my poor, indolent, and unem- ployed mind, thus to lay hold on a subject to talk about, though 'tis but a sonnet, and that of the lowest order ! How mournfully inactive I am ! 'Tis night : Good-night. My sister, I thank God, is nigh recovered : she was seriously ill. Do, in your next letter, and that right VOL. L F 66 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. soon, give me some satisfaction respecting your present situation at Stowey. Is it a farm you have got 1 And what does your worship know about farming 1 Coleridge, I want you to write an epic poem. Nothing short of it can satisfy the vast capacity of true poetic genius. Having one great end to direct all your poetical faculties to, and on which to lay out your hopes, your ambition will show you to what you are equal By the sacred energies of Milton ! by the dainty, sweet, and soothing phantasies of honey-tongued Spenser ! I adjure you to attempt the epic, or do something more ample than writing an occasional brief ode or sonnet ; something, " to make yourself for ever known, to make the age to come your own." But I prate; doubtless you meditate something. When you are exalted among the lords of epic fame, I shall recall with pleasure, and exultingly, the days of your humility, when you disdained not to put forth, in the same volume with mine, your Religious Musings and that other poem from the Joan of Arc, those promising first-fruits of high renown to come. You have learning, you have fancy, you have enthusiasm, you have strength, and amplitude of wing enow for flights like those I recommend. In the vast and unexplored regions of fairy-land there is ground enough unfound and unculti- vated : search there, and realise your favourite Susque- hannah scheme. In all our comparisons of taste, I do not know whether I have ever heard your opinion of a poet, very dear to me, the now-out-of-fashion Gowley. Favour me with your judgment of him, and tell me if his prose essays, in particular, as well as no inconsiderable part of his verse, be not delicious. I prefer the graceful rambling of his essays, even to the courtly elegance and ease of Addison ; abstracting from this the tatter's exquisite humour. When the little volume is printed, send me three or four, at all events not more than six copies, and tell me if I put you to any additional expense, by printing with you. I have no thought of the kind, and in that case must reimburse you. TO COLERIDGE. 67 Priestley, whom I sin in almost adoring, speaks of "such a choice of company as tends to keep up that right bent and firmness of mind which a necessary intercourse with the world would otherwise warp and relax." " Such fellowship is the true balsam of life ; its cement is infinitely more durable than that of the friend- ships of the world ; and it looks for its proper fruit and complete gratification to the life beyond the grave." Is there a possible chance for such an one as I to realise in this world such friendships ? Where am I to look for 'em 1 What testimonials shall I bring of my being worthy of such friendship ? Alas ! the great and good go to- gether in separate herds, and leave such as I to lag far, far behind in all intellectual, and, far more grievous to say, in all moral accomplishments. Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance : not one Christian : not one but undervalues Christianity. Singly, what am I to do t Wesley (have you read his life ?) was he not an elevated character ? Wesley has said, " Religion is not a solitary thing." Alas ! it neces- sarily is so with me, or next to solitary. "Tis true you write to me ; but correspondence by letter, and personal in- timacy, are very widely different Do, do write to me, and do some good to my mind, already how much " warped and relaxed " by the world ! 'Tis the conclusion of another evening. Good night. God have us all in his keeping ! If you are sufficiently at leisure, oblige me with an account of your plan of life at Stowey your literary occupations and prospects ; in short, make me acquainted with every circumstance which, as relating to you, can be interesting to me. Are you yet a Berkleyan t Make me one. I rejoice in being, speculatively, a Necessarian. Would to God, I were habitually a practical one ! Con- firm me in the faith of that great and glorious doctrine, and keep me steady in the contemplation of it. You some time since expressed an intention you had of finish- ing some extensive work on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. Have you let that intention got 68 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Or are you doing anything towards it ? Make to yourself other ten talents. My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of nothing. But I must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it. It makes me think less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not totally disconnected from the better part of mankind. I know I am too dissatisfied with the beings around me ; but I cannot help occasionally exclaiming, " Woe is me, that I am constrained to dwell with Meshech, and to have my habitation among the tents of Kedar !" I know I am noways better in practice than my neighbours, but I have a taste for religion, an occasional earnest aspiration after perfection, which they have not. I gain nothing by being with such as myself : we encourage one another in medio- crity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself. All this must sound odd to you ; but these are my predominant feelings when I sit down to write to you, and I should put force upon my mind were I to reject them. Yet I rejoice, and feel my privilege with gratitude, when I have been reading some wise book, such as I have just been reading, Priestley on Philo- sophical Necessity, in the thought that I enjoy a kind of communion, a kind of friendship even, with the great and good. Books are to me instead of friends. I wish they did not resemble the latter in their scarceness. And how does little David Hartley? " Ecquid in antiqvam virtutem?" Does his mighty name work wonders yet upon his little frame and opening mind ? I did not distinctly understand you : you don't mean to make an actual ploughman of him ! Is Lloyd with you yet ? Are you intimate with Southey 1 What poems is he about to publish ? He hath a most prolific brain, and is indeed a most sweet poet But how can you answer all the various mass of interrogation I have put to you in the course of this sheet 1 Write back just what you like, only write something, however brief. I have now nigh finished my page, and got to the end of another evening (Monday evening), and my eyes are heavy and sleepy. TO COLERIDGE. 69 and my brain unsuggestive. I have just heart enough awake to say good-night once more, and God love you, my dear friend ; God love us all 1 Mary bears an affec- tionate remembrance of you. CHARLES LAMB. LETTER XXII.] January 18, 1797. Dear , You have learned by this time, with surprise, no doubt, that Lloyd is with me in town. The emotions I felt on his coming so unlocked for, are not ill expressed in what follows, and what (if you do not object to them as too personal, and to the world obscure, or otherwise wanting in worth) I should wish to make a part of our little volume. I shall be sorry if that volume comes out, as it necessarily must do, unless you print those very schoolboy-ish verses I sent you on not getting leave to come down to Bristol last Summer. I say I shall be sorry that I have addressed you in nothing which can appear in our joint volume ; so frequently, so habitu- ally, as you dwell in my thoughts, 'tis some wonder those thoughts came never yet in contact with a poetical mood. But you dwell in my heart of hearts, and I love you in all the naked honesty of prose. God bless you, and all your little domestic circle ! My tenderest remem- brances to your beloved Sara, and a smile and a kiss from me to your dear dear little David Hartley. The verses I refer to above, slightly amended, I have sent (forgetting to ask your leave, tho' indeed I gave them only your initials) to the Monthly Magazine, where they may possibly appear next month, and where I hope to recognise your poem on Burns. TO CHARLES LLOYD, AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR, Alone, obscure, without a friend, A cheerless, solitary thing, Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out I What offering can the stranger bring 70 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Of social scenes, home-bred delights, That him in aught compensate may For Stowey's pleasant winter nights, For loves and friendships far away, In brief oblivion to forego Friends, such as thine, so justly dear, And be awhile with me content To stay, a kindly loiterer, here ? For this a gleam of random joy Hath flush'd my unaccustomed cheek ; And, with an o'er-charged bursting heart, I feel the thanks I cannot speak. O ! sweet are all the Muse's lays, And sweet the charm of matin bird 'Twas long, since these estranged ears The sweeter voice of friend had heard. The voice hath spoke : the pleasant sounds, In memory's ear, in after time Shall live, to sometimes rouse a tear, And sometimes prompt an honest rhyme. For when the transient charm is fled, And when the little week is o'er, To cheerless, friendless solitude When I return, as heretofore Long, long, within my aching heart The grateful sense shall cherished be ; I '11 think less meanly of myself, That Lloyd will sometimes think on me. Coleridge, would to God you were in London with us, or we two at Stowey with you all ! Lloyd takes up his abode at the Bull and Mouth ; the Cat and Saluta- tion would have had a charm more forcible for me. nocte* coenceque Dedm I Anglice Welsh rabbit, punch, and poesy. Should you be induced to publish those very schoolboy-ish verses, print 'em as they will occur, if at all, in the Monthly Magazine ; yet I should feel ashamed that to you I wrote nothing better: but they are too personal, and almost trifling and obscure withal. Some TO COLERIDGE. 71 lines of mine to Cowper were in the last Monthly Maga- zine : they have not body of thought enough to plead for the retaining of 'em. My sister's kind love to you all. C. LAMB. LETTER XXIIL] February 13, 1797. Your poem is altogether admirable : parts of it are even exquisite ; in particular, your personal account of the Maid far surpasses anything of the sort in Southey. I perceived all its excellences, on a first reading, as readily as now you have been removing a supposed film from my eyes. I was only struck with a certain faulty dispropor- tion in the matter and the style, which I still think I perceive, between these lines and the former ones. I had an end in view : I wished to make you reject the poem only as being discordant with the other ; and, in subser- vience to that end, it was politically done in me to over- pass and make no mention of merit, which, could you think me capable of overlooking, might reasonably damn for ever in your judgment all pretensions, in me, to be critical There I will be judged by Lloyd, whether I have not made a very handsome recantation. I was in the case of a man whose friend has asked him his opinion of a certain young lady. The deluded wight gives judg- ment against her in toto doesn't like her face, her walk, her manners ; finds fault with her eyebrows ; can see no wit in her. His friend looks blank ; he begins to smell a rat ; wind veers about ; he acknowledges her good sense, her judgment in dress, a certain simplicity of manners and honesty of heart, something too in her manners which gains upon you after a short acquaintance; and then her accurate pronunciation of the French language, and a pretty uncultivated taste ia drawing. The recon- ciled gentleman smiles applause, squeezes him by the hand, and hopes he will do him the honour of taking a bit of dinner with Mrs. and him, a plain family dinner, some day next week; "for, I suppose, you 72 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. never heard we were married. I'm glad to see you like my wife, however ; you'll come and see her, ha ? " Now am I too proud to retract entirely 1 Yet I do perceive I am in some sort straitened. You are manifestly wedded to this poem; and what fancy has joined let no man separate. I turn me to the Joan of Arc, second book. The solemn openings of it are with sounds which, Lloyd would say, " are silence to the mind." The deep preluding strains are fitted to initiate the mind, with a pleasing awe, into the sublimest mysteries of theory con- cerning man's nature, and his noblest destination the philosophy of a first cause of subordinate agents in creation superior to man the subserviency of pagan worship and pagan faith to the introduction of a purer and more perfect religion, which you so elegantly describe as winning, with gradual steps, her difficult way north- ward from Bethabara. After all this cometh Joan, a publican's daughter, sitting on an ale-house bench, and marking the swingings of the signboard, finding a poor man, his wife, and six children, starved to death with cold, and thence roused into a state of mind proper to receive visions, emblematical of equality; which, what the devil Joan had to do with, I don't know, or indeed with the French and American revolutions ; though that needs no pardon, it is executed so nobly. After all, if you perceive no disproportion, all argument is vain : I do not so much object to parts. Again, when you talk of building your fame on these lines in preference to the Religious Musings, I cannot help conceiving of you, and of the author of that, as two different persons, and I think you a very vain man. I have been re-reading your letter. Much of it I could dispute ; but with the latter part of it, in which you compare the two Joans with respect to their pre- dispositions for fanaticism, I, toto corde, coincide ; only I think that Southey's strength rather lies in the description of the emotions of the Maid under the weight of inspira- tion. These (I see no mighty difference between her TO COLERIDGE. 73 describing them or your describing them), these if you only equal, the previous admirers of his poem, as is natural, will prefer his. If you surpass, prejudice will scarcely allow it, and I scarce think you will surpass, though your specimen at the conclusion (I am in earnest) I think very nigh equals them. And in an account of a fanatic or of a prophet, the description of her emotions is expected to be most highly finished. By the way, I spoke far too disparagingly of your lines, and I am ashamed to say, purposely. I should like you to specify or particularise. The story of the " Tottering Eld," of " his eventful years all come and gone," is too general. Why not make him a soldier, or some character, however, in which he has been witness to frequency of "cruel wrong and strange distress !" I think I should. When I laughed at the " miserable man crawling from beneath the coverture," I wonder I did not perceive that it was a laugh of horror such as I have laughed at Dante's picture of the famished Ugolino. Without falsehood, I perceive an hundred beauties in your narrative. Yet I wonder you do not perceive something out-of-the-way, something unsimple and artificial in the expression, " voiced a sad tale." I hate made-dishes at the muses' banquet. I believe I was wrong in most of my other objections. But surely " hailed him immortal," adds nothiug to the terror of the man's death, which it was your business to heighten, not diminish by a phrase which takes away all terror from it. I like that line, " They closed their eyes in sleep, nor knew 'twas death." Indeed there is scarce a line I do not like. " Turbid ecstacy," is surely not so good as what you had written, "troublous." Turbid rather suits the muddy kind of inspiration which London porter confers. The versification is, throughout, to my ears unexceptionable, with no disparagement to the mea- sure of the Religious Musings, which is exactly fitted to the thoughts. You were building your house on a rock when you rested your fame on that poem. I can scarce bring my- 74 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. self to believe that I am admitted to a familiar corres- pondence, and all the licence of friendship, with a man who writes blank verse like Milton. Now, this is delicate flattery, indirect flattery. Go on with your Maid of Orleans, and be content to be second to yourself. I shall become a convert to it when 'tis finished. This afternoon I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on Thursday. I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her days of suffering and infirmity. She was to me the " cherisher of infancy," and one must fall on those occasions into reflections, which it would be commonplace to enumerate, concerning death, " of chance and change, and fate in human life." Good God, who could have foreseen all this but four months back ! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt's living many years ; she was a very hearty old woman. But she was a mere skeleton before she died, looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks in the grave, than one fresh dead. " Truly the light is &weet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun; but if a man live many years and rejoice in them all, yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many." Coleridge, why are we to live on after all the strength and beauty of existence is gone, when all the life of life is fled, as poor Burns expresses it ? Tell Lloyd I have had thoughts of turning Quaker, and have been reading, or am rather just beginning to read, a most capital book, good thoughts in good language, William Penn's No Cross, no Crown. I like it immensely. Un- luckily I went to one of his meetings, tell him, in St. John Street, yesterday, and saw a man under all the agitations and workings of a fanatic, who believed him- self under the influence of some " inevitable presence." This cured me of Quakerism. I love it in the books of Penn and Woolman ; but I detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the Spirit, when what he says an ordinary man might say without all that quaking and trembling. In the midst of his inspiration (and the TO COLERIDGE. 75 effects of it were most noisy) was handed into the midst of the meeting a most terrible blackguard Wapping sailor. The poor man, I believe, had rather have been in the hottest part of an engagement, for the congregation of broad-brims, together with the ravings of the prophet, were too much for his gravity, though I saw even he had delicacy enough not to laugh out. And the inspired gentle- man, though his manner was so supernatural, yet neither talked nor professed to talk anything more than good sober sense, common morality, with now and then a declaration of not speaking from himself. Among other things, looking back to his childhood and early youth, he told the meeting what a graceless young dog he had been ; that in his youth he had a good share of wit. Reader, if thou hadst seen the gentleman, thou wouldst have sworn that it must indeed have been many years ago, for his rueful physiognomy would have scared away the play- ful goddess from the meeting, where he presided, for ever. A wit ! a wit ! what could he mean ? Lloyd, it minded me of Falkland in the Rivals, " Am I full of wit and humour 1 No, indeed you are not. Am I the life and soul of every company I come into ? No, it cannot be said you are." That hard-faced gentleman, a wit ! Why, Nature wrote on his fanatic forehead fifty years ago, " Wit never comes, that comes to all." I should be as scandalised at a bon mot issuing from his oracle-looking mouth, as to see Cato go down a country dance. God love you all ! You are very good to submit to be pleased with reading my nothings. 'Tis the privilege of friendship to talk non- sense, and to have her nonsense respected. Yours ever, 0. LAMB. LETTEK XXIV.] April 7, 1797. Your last letter was dated the 10th of February ; in it you promised to write again the next day. At least, I did not expect so long, so unfriend-like a silence. There was a time, Col., when a remissness of this sort in a dear friend would have lain very heavy on my mind ; but 76 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. latterly I have been too familiar with neglect to feel much from the semblance of it. Yet, to suspect one's self overlooked, and in the way to oblivion, is a feeling rather humbling ; perhaps, as tending to self-mortification, not unfavourable to the spiritual state. Still, as you meant to confer no benefit on the soul of your friend, you do not stand quite clear from the imputation of unkindliness (a word, by which I mean the diminutive of unkindness). Lloyd tells me he has been very ill, and was on the point of leaving you. I addressed a letter to him at Birmingham : perhaps he got it not, and is still with you. I hope his ill-health has not prevented his attending to a request I made in it, that he would write again very soon to let me know how he was. I hope to God poor Lloyd is not very bad, or in a very bad way. Pray satisfy me about these things. And then David Hartley was unwell ; and how is the small philosopher, the minute philosopher ? and David's mother 1 Coleridge, I am not trifling; nor are these matter-of-fact questions only. You are all very dear and precious to me. Do what you will, Coleridge, you may hurt me and vex me by your silence, but you cannot estrange my heart from you alL I cannot scatter friend- ships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand like hour-glass sand. I have but two or three people in the world to whom I am more than indifferent, and I can't afford to whistle them off to the winds. By the way, Lloyd may have told you about my sister. I told him. If not, I have taken her out of her confine- ment, and taken a room for her at Hackney, and spend my Sundays, holidays, etc., with her. She boards her- self. In a little half-year's illness, and in such an illness, of such a nature, and of such consequences, to get her out into the world again, with a prospect of her never being BO ill again, this is to be ranked not among the common blessings of Providence. May that merciful God make tender my heart, and make me as thankful, as in my distress I was earnest, in my prayers. Congratulate me TO COLERIDGE. 77 on an ever-present and never-alienable friend like her. And do, do insert, if you have not lost, my Dedication. It will have lost half its value by coming so late. If you really are going on with that volume, I shall be enabled in a day or two to send you a short poem to insert. Now, do answer this. Friendship, and acts of friendship, should be reciprocal, and free as the air. A friend should never be reduced to beg an alms of his fellow ; yet I will beg an alms : I entreat you to write, and tell me all about poor Lloyd, and all of you. God love and preserve you all ! C. LAMB. LETTES XXV.] April 15, 1797. The above you will please to print immediately before the blank verse fragments. Tell me if you like it I fear the latter half is unequal to the former, in parts of which I think you will discover a delicacy of pencilling not quite un-Spenser-like. The latter half aims at the measure, but has failed to attain the poetry of Milton in hie Comus, and Fletcher in that exquisite thing ycleped the Faithful Shepherdess, where they both use eight- syllable lines. But this latter half was finished in great haste, and as a task, not from that impulse which affects the name of inspiration. By the way, I have lit upon Fairfax's Godfrey of Bvllen, for half-a-crown. Rejoice with me. Poor dear Lloyd 1 I had a letter from him yesterday ; his state of mind is truly alarming. He has, by his own confession, kept a letter of mine unopened three weeka ; afraid, he says, to open it, lest I should speak upbraidingly to him ; and yet this very letter of mine was in answer to one, wherein he informed me that an alarming illness had alone prevented him from writing. You will pray with me, I know, for his recovery ; for surely, Coleridge, an exquiaiteness of feeling like this must border on derange- ment. But I love him more and more, and will not give up the hope of his speedy recovery, as he tells me he is under Dr. Darwin's regimen. 78 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. God bless us all, and shield us from insanity, which is " the sorest malady of all." My kind love to your wife and child. C. LAMB. Pray write now. LETTER XXVI.] June 13, 1797. I stared with wild wonderment to see thy well-known hand again. It revived many a pleasing recollection of an epistolary intercourse, of late strangely suspended, once the pride of my life. Before I even opened thy letter I figured to myself a sort of complacency which my little hoard at home would feel at receiving the new- comer into the little drawer where I keep my treasures of this kind. You have done well in writing to me. The little room (was it not a little one 1) at the Saluta- tion was already in the way of becoming a fading idea ! It had begun to be classed in my memory with those " wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid," in the recollection of which I feel I have no property. You press me, very kindly do you press me, to come to Stowey. Obstacles, strong as death, prevent me at present ; maybe I may be able to come before the year is out. Believe me, I will come as soon as I can ; but I dread naming a probable time. It depends on fifty things, besides the expense, which is not nothing. Lloyd wants me to come to see him ; but, besides that you have a prior claim on me, I should not feel myself so much at home with him, till he gets a house of his own. As to Richardson, caprice may grant what caprice only refused ; and it is no more hard- ship, rightly considered, to be dependent on him for pleasure, than to lie at the mercy of the rain and sun- shine for the enjoyment of a holiday : in either case we are not to look for a suspension of the laws of Nature. " Gryll will be Gryll." Vide Spenser. I could not but smile at the compromise you make with me for printing Lloyd's poems first ; but there is in TO COLERIDGE. 79 nature, I fear, too many tendencies to envy and jealousy not to justify you in your apology. Yet, if any one is welcome to pre-eminence from me, it is Lloyd, for he would be the last to desire it. So pray, let his name uniformly precede mine, for it would be treating me like a child to suppose it could give me pain. Yet, alas ! I am not insusceptible of the bad passions. Thank God, I have the ingenuousness to be ashamed of them. I am dearly fond of Charles Lloyd ; he is all goodness ; and I have too much of the world in my composition to feel myself thoroughly deserving of his friendship. Lloyd tells me that Sheridan put you upon writing your tragedy. I hope you are only Coleridgeising when you talk of finishing it in a few days. Shakspeare was a more modest man; but you best know your own power. Of my last poem you speak slightingly. Surely the longer stanzas were pretty tolerable : at least there was one good line in it, " Thick-shaded trees, with dark green leaf rich clad." To adopt your own expression, I call this a " rich " line, a fine full line. And some others I thought even beautiful. Believe me, my little gentleman will feel some repugnance at riding behind in the basket ; though, I confess, in pretty good company. Your picture of idiocy, with the sugar-loaf head, is exquisite; but are you not too severe upon our more favoured brethren in fatuity? Lloyd tells me how ill your wife and child have been. I rejoice that they are better. My kindest remembrances, and those of my sister. I send you a trifling letter ; but you have only to think that I have been skimming the superficies of my mind, and found it only froth. Now, do write again ! You cannot believe how I long and love always to hear about you. Yours most affectionately, CHARLES LAMB. Monday Night 80 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER XXVII.] June 24, 1797. Did you seize the grand opportunity of seeing Kos- ciusko while he was at Bristol ? I never saw a hero ; I wonder how they look. I have been reading a most curious romance -like work, called the Life of John JBuncle, Esq. 'Tis very interesting, and an extraordinary compound of all manner of subjects, from the depth of the ludicrous to the heights of sublime religious truth. There is much abstruse science in it above my cut, and an infinite fund of pleasantry. John Buncle is a famous fine man, formed in Nature's most eccentric hour. I am ashamed of what I write ; but I have no topic to talk of. I see nobody. I sit and read, or walk alone, and hear nothing. I am quite lost to conversation from disuse; and out of the sphere of my little family (who, I am thankful, are dearer and dearer to me every day) I see no face that brightens up at my approach. My friends are at a distance. Worldly hopes are at a low ebb with me, and unworldly thoughts are familiarised to me, though I occasionally indulge in them. Still I feel a calm not unlike content. I fear it is sometimes more akin to physical stupidity than to a heaven -flowing serenity and peace. What right have I to obtrude all this upon you ? and what is such a letter to you ? and if I come to Stowey, what conversation can I furnish to compensate my friend for those stores of knowledge and of fancy ; those delightful treasures of wisdom which I know he will open to me? But it is better to give than to receive; and I was a very patient hearer and docile scholar, in our winter evening meetings at Mr. May's ; was I not, Col. 1 What I have owed to thee, my heart can ne'er forget. God love you and yours ! 0. L. Saturday. LETTER XXVIII.] July 1797. I discern a possibility of my paying you a visit next TO COLERIDGE. 81 week. May I, can I, shall I come so soon 1 Have you room for me, leisure for me? and are you pretty well? Tell me all this honestly immediately. And by what day coach could I come soonest and nearest to Stowey 1 A few months hence may suit you better ; certainly me, as well. If so, say so. I long, I yearn, with all the longings of a child do I desire to see you, to come among you to see the young philosopher, to thank Sara for her last year's invitation in person to read your tragedy to read over together our little book to breathe fresh air to revive in me vivid images of " Salutation scenery." There is a sort of sacrilege in my letting such ideas slip out of my mind and memory. Still that Richardson remaineth a thorn in the side of Hope, when she would lean towards Stowey. Here I will leave off, for I dislike to fill up this paper (which involves a question so con- nected with my heart and soul) with meaner matter, or subjects to me less interesting. I can talk, as I can think, nothing else. Thursday. 0. LAMB. LETTER XXIX.] (Late in) July 1797. I am scarcely yet BO reconciled to the loss of you, or so subsided into my wonted uniformity of feeling, as to sit calmly down to think of you and write to you. But I reason myself into the belief that those few and pleasant holidays shall not have been spent in vain. I feel improvement in the recollection of many a casual conversation. The names of Tom Poole, of Wordsworth and his good sister, with thine and Sara's, are become "familiar in my mouth as household words." You would make me very happy if you think W. has no objection, by transcribing for me that Inscription of his. I have some scattered sentences ever floating on my memory, teasing me that I cannot remember more of it. You may believe I will make no improper use of VOL. i G 82 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. it. Believe me I can think now of many subjects on which I had planned gaining information from you ; but I forgot my " treasure's worth " while I possessed it. Your leg is now become to me a matter of much more importance ; and many a little thing, which when I was present with you seemed scarce to indent my notice, now presses painfully on my remembrance. Is the Patriot come 1 Are Wordsworth and his sister gone yet ? I was looking out for John Thelwall all the way from Bridgewater ; and had I met him, I think it would have moved almost me to tears. You will oblige me, too, by sending me my great-coat, which I left behind in the oblivious state the mind is thrown into at part- ing. Is it not ridiculous that I sometimes envy that great-coat lingering so cunningly behind ! At present I have none : so send it to me by a Stowey waggon, if there be such a thing, directing for 0. L., No. 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, near London. But above all, that Inscription ! It will recall to me the tones of all your voices, and with them many a remembered kindness to one who could and can repay you all only by the silence of a grateful heart. I could not talk much while I was with you ; but my silence was not Bullenness, nor I hope from any bad motive ; but, in truth, disuse has made me awkward at it. I know I behaved myself, particularly at Tom Poole's, and at Cruikshank's, most like a sulky child ; but company and converse are strange to me. It was kind in you all to endure me as you did. Are you and your dear Sara to me also very dear, because very kind agreed yet about the management of little Hartley 1 And how go on the little rogue's teeth ! I will see White to-morrow and he shall send you inform- ation on that matter ; but as perhaps I can do it as well, after talking with him, I will keep this letter open. My love and thanks to you and all of you. C. L. Wednesday Evening. TO COLERIDGE. 33 LETTKR XXX.] September 1797. WRITTEN A TWELVEMONTH AFTER THE EVENTS. [Friday next, Coleridge, is the day on which my Mother died.} Alas ! how I am changed ! Where be the tears The sobs, and forced suspensions of the breath And all the dull desertions of the heart With which I hung o'er my dear mother's corse ? Where be the blest subsidings of the storm Within ; the sweet resignedness of hope Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love, In which I bow'd me to my Father's will ? My God and my Redeemer, keep not thou My heart in brute and sensual thanklessness Seal'd up, oblivious ever of that dear grace, And health restor'd to my long-loved friend, Long-lov'd, and worthy known ! Thou didst not leave Her soul in death. leave not now, my Lord, Thy servants in far worse in spiritual death And darkness blacker than those feared shadows 0' the valley all must tread. Lend us thy balms, Thou dear Physician of the sin-sick soul, And heal our cleansed bosoms of the wounds With which the world hath pierc'd us thro' and thro' ! Give us new flesh, new birth ; Elect of heaven May we become, in thine election sure Contain'd, and to one purpose steadfast drawn Our souls' salvation. Thou and I, dear friend, With filial recognition sweet, shall know One day the face of our dear mother in heaven, And her remember'd looks of love shall greet With answering looks of love, her placid smiles Meet with a smile as placid, and her hand With drops of fondness wet, nor fear repulse. Be witness for me, Lord, I do not ask Those days of vanity to return again (Nor fitting me to ask, nor thee to give), Vain loves, and " wanderings with a fair-hair'd maid ;" (Child of the dust as I am), who so long My foolish heart steep'd in idolatry, And creature-loves. Forgive it, my Maker ! If in a mood of grief, I sin almost In sometimes brooding on the days long pact, g4 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. (And from the grave of time wishing them back), Days of a mother's fondness to her child Her little one ! Oh, where be now those sports And infant play -games ? Where the joyous troops Of children, and the haunts I did so love ? my companions ! ye loved names Of friend, or playmate dear, gone are ye now. Gone divers ways ; to honour and credit some ; And some, I fear, to ignominy and shame ! 1 only am left, with unavailing grief One parent dead to mourn, and see one live Of all life's joys bereft, and desolate : Am left, with a few friends, and one above The rest, found faithful in a length of years, Contented as I may, to bear me on, T' the not unpeaceful evening of a day Hade black by morning storms. The following I wrote when I had returned from Charles Lloyd, leaving him behind at Burton, with Southey. To understand some of it you must remember that at that time he was very much perplexed in mind. A stranger, and alone, I pass'd those scenes We pass'd so late together ; and my heart Felt something like desertion, as I look'd Around me, and the pleasant voice of friend Was absent, and the cordial look was there No more, to smile on me. I thought on Lloyd All he had been to me ! And now I go Again to mingle with a world impure ; With men who make a mock of holy things, Mistaken, and of man's best hope think scorn. The world does much to warp the heart of man ; And I may sometimes join its idiot laugh : Of this I now complain not. Deal with me, Omniscient Father, as thou judgest best, And in thy season soften thou my heart. I pray not for myself : I pray for him Whose soul is sore perplexed. Shine thou on him, Father of lights ! and in the difficult paths Make plain his way before him : his own thoughts May he not think his own ends not pursue So shall he best perform thy will on earth. Greatest and Best, Thy will be ever ours I The former of these poems I wrote with unusual TO COLERIDGE. 85 celerity t'other morning at office. I expect you to like it better than anything of mine; Lloyd does, and I do myself. You use Lloyd very ill, never writing to him. I tell you again that his is not a mind with which you should play tricks. He deserves more tenderness from you. For myself, I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher's to adapt it to my feelings : " I am prouder That I was once your friend, tho' now forgot, Than to have had another true to me." If you don't write to me now, as I told Lloyd, I shall get angry, and call you hard names Manchineel, and I don't know what else. I wish you would send me my great-coat. The snow and the rain season is at hand, and I have but a wretched old coat, once my father's, to keep 'em off, and that is transitory. " When time drives flocks from field to fold, When ways grow foul and blood gets cold," I shall remember where I left my coat. Meet emblem wilt thou be, old Winter, of a friend's neglect cold, cold, cold ! 0. LAMB. LETTER XXXI.] January 28, 1798. You have writ me many kind letters, and I have answered none of them. I don't deserve your attentions. An unnatural indifference has been creeping on me since my last misfortunes, or I should have seized the first opening of a correspondence with you. To you I owe much, under God. In my brief acquaintance with you in London, your conversations won me to the better cause, and rescued me from the polluting spirit of the world. I might have been a worthless character without you ; as it is, I do possess a certain improvable portion of devotional feelings, tho' when I view myself in the light of divine truth, and not according to the common measures of human judgment, I am altogether corrupt and sinful. This is no cant. I am very sincere. 86 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. These last afflictions, Coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my will. They found me unprepared. My former calamities produced in me a spirit of humility and a spirit of prayer. I thought they had sufficiently dis- ciplined me; but the event ought to humble me. If God's judgment now fail to take away from me the heart of stone, what more grievous trials ought I not to expect ? I have been very querulous, impatient under the rod full of little jealousies and heart-burnings. I had well- nigh quarrelled with Charles Lloyd; and for no other reason, I believe, than that the good creature did all he could to make me happy. The truth is, I thought he tried to force my mind from its natural and proper bent. He continually wished me to be from home ; he was drawing me from the consideration of my poor dear Mary's situation, rather than assisting me to gain a proper view of it with religious consolations. I wanted to be left to the tendency of my own mind, in a solitary state, which, in times past, I knew had led to quietness and a patient bearing of the yoke. He was hurt that I was not more constantly with him ; but he was living with White, a man to whom I had never been accustomed to impart my dearest feelings, tho' from long habits of friendliness, and many a social and good quality, I loved him very much. I met company there sometimes indiscriminate company. Any society almost, when I am in affliction, is sorely painful to me. I seem to breathe more freely, to think more collectedly, to feel more properly and calmly, when alone. All these things the good creature did with the kindest intentions in the world, but they produced in me nothing but soreness and discontent. I became, as he complained, "jaundiced " towards him . . . but he has forgiven me ; and his smile, I hope, will draw all such humours from me. I am recovering, God be praised for it, a healthiness of mind, something like calm- ness ; but I want more religion. I am jealous of human helps and leaning-places. I rejoice in your good fortunes. May God at the last settle you ! You have had many TO SOUTHEY. 87 aud painful trials ; humanly speaking they are going to end ; but we sLould rather pray that discipline may attend us thro' the whole of our lives. ... A careless and a dissolute spirit has advanced upon me with large strides. Pray God that my present afflictions may be sanctified to me ! Mary is recovering ; but I see no opening yet of a situation for her. Your invitation went to my very heart ; but you have a power of exciting interest, of lead- ing all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of Mary's being with you. I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness. I think you would almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice j she must be with duller fancies, and cooler intellects. I know a young man of this description, who has suited her these twenty years, and may live to do so still, if we are one day restored to each other. In answer to your suggestions of occupation for me, I must say that I do not think my capacity alto- gether suited for disquisitions of that kind. ... I have read little, I have a very weak memory, and retain little of what I read ; am unused to compositions in which any methodising is required ; but I thank you sincerely for the hint, and shall receive it as far as I am able ; that is, endeavour to engage my mind in some constant and innocent pursuit. I know my capacities better than you do. Accept my kindest love, and believe me yours, as ever. C. L. S. T. Coleridge, it the Reverend A. Roux'i, Shrewsbury. To ROBEKT SOUTHEY. LETTER XXXII.] July 28, 1798. Dear Southey I am ashamed that I have not thanked you before this for the Joan of Arc, but I did not know 88 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. your address, and it did not occur to me to write through Cottle. The poem delighted me, and the notes amused me ; but methinks she of Neufchatel, in the print, holds her sword too "like a dancer." I sent your notice to Phillips, particularly requesting an immediate insertion, but I suppose it came too late. I am sometimes curious to know what progress you make in that same " Calendar " : whether you insert the nine worthies and Whittington 1 what you do or how you can manage when two Saints meet and quarrel for precedency? Martlemas, and Candlemas, and Christmas, are glorious themes for a writer like you, antiquity-bitten, smit with the love of boars' heads and rosemary ; but how you can ennoble the 1st of April I know not. By the way, I had a thing to say, but a certain false modesty has hitherto prevented me : perhaps I can best communicate my wish by a hint. My birthday is on the 10th of February, New Style ; but if it interferes with any remarkable event, why rather than my country should lose her fame, I care not if I put my nativity back eleven days. Fine family patron- age for your "Calendar," if that old lady of prolific memory were living, who lies (or lyes) in some church in London (saints forgive me, but I have forgot what church), attesting that enormous legend of as many children as days in the year. I marvel her impudence did not grasp at a leap-year. Three hundred and sixty-five dedications, and all in a family ! You might spit, in spirit, on the oneness of Maecenas's patronage ! Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native Devonshire, emigrates to Westphalia : " Poor Lamb" (these were his last words), "if he wants any knowledge, he may apply to me." In ordinary cases I thanked him. I have an " Encyclopaedia " at hand ; but on such an occasion as going over to a German university, I could not refrain from sending him the following pro- positions, to be by him defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Gottingen. TO SOUTHEY. 89 THESES QILEDAM THEOLOGIC^. I. " Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?" u. " Whether the archangel Uriel could knowingly affirm an untruth, and whether, if he could, he would 1 " m. " Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather belonging to that class of qualities which the schoolmen term ' virtutes minus splendid*, et hominis et terrae nimis participes ' ? " rv. "Whether the seraphim ardentes do not manifest their goodness by the way of vision and theory? and whether practice be not a sub-celestial, and merely human virtue ? " v. "Whether the higher order of seraphim illuminati ever sneer ? " VL " Whether pure intelligences can love, or whether they can love anything besides pure intellect ? " VII. " Whether the beatific vision be anything more or less than a perpetual representment to each individual angel of his own present attainments, and future capabilities, something in the manner of mortal looking-glasses ? " VHL " Whether an ' immortal and amenable soul ' may not come to be damned at last, and the man never suspect it beforehand?" 90 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Samuel Taylor Coleridge hath not deigned an answer. Was it impertinent of me to avail myself of that offered source of knowledge ? yC. Wishing Madoc may be born into the world with as splendid promise as the second birth, or purification, of the Maid of Neufchatel, I remain yours sincerely, C. LAMB. I hope Edith is better ; my kindest remembrances to her. You have a good deal of trifling to forgive in this letter. " Love and remembrances to Cottle." LETTER XXXIII.] October 18, 1798. Dear Southey I have at last been so fortunate as to pick up Wither's Emblems for you, that " old book and quaint," as the brief author of Rosamund Gray hath it ; it is in a most detestable state of preservation, and the cuts are of a fainter impression than I have seen. Some child, the curse of antiquaries and bane of bibliopical rarities, hath been dabbling in some of them with its paint and dirty fingers ; and, in particular, hath a little sullied the author's own portraiture, which I think valuable, as the poem that accompanies it is no common one ; this last excepted, the Emblems are far inferior to old Quarles. I once told you otherwise, but I had not then read old Quarles with attention. I have picked up, too, another copy of Quarles for ninepence ! ! ! tem- pora ! lectores ! so that if you have lost or parted with your own copy, say so, and I can furnish you, for you prize these things more than I do. You will be amused, I think, with honest Wither's " Supersedeas to all them whose custom it is, without any deserving, to importune authors to give unto them their books." I am sorry 'tis imperfect, as the lottery board annexed to it also is. Methinks you might modernise and elegantise this Super- sedeas, and place it in front of your Joan of Arc, as a TO SOUTHEY. 91 gentle hint to Messrs. Parke, eta One of the happiest emblems, and comicalest cuts, is the owl and little chirpers, page 63. Wishing you all amusement, which your true emblem- fancier can scarce fail to find in even bad emblems, I remain your caterer to command, 0. LAMB. Love and respects to Edith. I hope she is well. How does your Calendar prosper ? LETTER XXXIV.] October 29, 1798. Dear Southey I thank you heartily for the Eclogue ; it pleases me mightily, being so full of picture work and circumstances. I find no fault in it, unless perhaps that Joanna's ruin is a catastrophe too trite ; and this is not the first or second time you have clothed your indigna- tion, in verse, in a tale of ruined innocence. The old lady, spinning in the sun, I hope would not disdain to claim some kindred with old Margaret. I could almost wish you to vary some circumstances in the conclusion. A gentleman seducer has so often been described in prose and verse. What if you had accomplished Joanna's ruin by the clumsy arts and rustic gifts of some country- fellow ? I am thinking, I believe, of the song " An old woman clothed in gray, Whose daughter was charming and young, And she was deluded away By Roger's false flattering tongue." A Roger-Lothario would be a novel character ; I think you might paint him very well. You may think this a very silly suggestion, and so indeed it is ; but, in good truth, nothing else but the first words of that foolish ballad put me upon scribbling my Rosamund. But I thank you heartily for the poem. Not having anything of my own to send you in return (though, to tell truth, I am at work upon something, which, if I were to cut away and garble, perhaps I might send you an extract or two that might not displease you ; but I will not do that ; 92 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. and whether it will come to anything I know not, for I am as slow as a Fleming painter, when I compose any- thing) I will crave leave to put down a few lines of old Christopher Mai-low's; I take them from his tragedy, Jew of Malta. The Jew is a famous character, quite out of nature; but, when we consider the terrible idea our simple ancestors had of a Jew, not more to be dis- commended for a certain discolouring (I think Addison calls it) than the witches and fairies of Marlow's mighty successor. The scene is betwixt Barabbas, the Jew, and Ithamore, a Turkish captive, exposed to sale for a slave. BARABBAS. (A precious rascal.) ' As for myself I walk abroad a-nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls ; Sometimes I go about, and poison wells ; And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves, I am content to lose some of my crowns, That I may, walking in my gallery, See 'm go pinion'd along by my door. Being young, I studied physic, and began To practise first upon the Italian : There I enrich'd the priests with burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in use With digging graves, and ringing dead men's knells : And after that was I an engineer, And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany, Under pretence of serving Charles the Fifth, Slew friends and enemy with my stratagems. Then after that was I an usurer, And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, And tricks belonging unto brokery, I fill'd the jails with bankrupts in a year, And with young orphans planted hospitals, And every moon made some or other mad, And now and then one hang himself for grief, Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll, How I with interest had tormented him." (Now hear Ithamore, the other geiitle nature.) TO SOUTHEY. 93 ITHAMORE. (A comical dog.) u Faith, master, and I have spent my time In setting Christian villages on fire, Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley slaves. One time I was an hostler at an inn, And in the night time secretly would I steal To travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats. Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel'd, I strew'd powder on the marble stones, And therewithal their knees would rankle so, That I have laugh'd a good to see the cripples Go limping home to Christendom on stilts." BARABBA8. " Why, this is something." There is a mixture of the ludicrous and the terrible in these lines, brimful of genius and antique invention, that at first reminded me of your old description of cruelty in hell, which was in the true Hogarthian style. I need not tell you that Marlow was author of that pretty madrigal, " Come live with me and be my Love," and of the tragedy of Edward II., in which are certain lines unequalled in our English tongue. Honest Walton men- tions the said madrigal under the denomination of " certain smooth verses made long since by Kit Marlow." I am glad you have put me on the scent after old Quarles. If I do not put up those eclogues, and that shortly, say I am no true-nosed hound. I have had a letter from Lloyd ; the young metaphysician of Caius is well, and is busy recanting the new heresy, metaphysics, for the old dogma, Greek. My sister, I thank you, is quite well. She had a slight attack the other day, which frightened me a good deal, but it went off unaccountably. Love and respects to Edith, Yours sincerely, 0. LAMB. LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER XXXV.] October 1798. My dear Robert I am a good deal occupied with a calamity near home, but not so much as to prevent my thinking about you with the warmest affection you are among my very dearest friends. I know you will feel deeply when you hear that my poor sister is unwell again ; one of her old disorders, but I trust it will hold no longer than her former illnesses have done. Do not imagine, Robert, that I sink under this misfortune ; I have been season'd to such events, and think I could bear anything tolerably welL My own health is left me, and my good spirits, and I have some duties to perform these duties shall be my object. I wish, Robert, you could find an object. I know the painfulness of vacuity, all its achings and inexplicable longings. I wish to God I could recommend any plan to you. Stock your mind well with religious knowledge ; discipline it to wait with patience for duties that may be your lot in life ; prepare yourself not to expect too much out of yourself; read and think. This is all commonplace advice, I know. I know, too, that it is easy to give advice which in like circumstances we might not follow ourselves. You must depend upon yourself there will come a time when you will wonder you were not more content. I know you will excuse my saying any more. Be assured of my kindest, wannest affection. 0. LAMB. LETTER XXX VI.] October (later) 1798. My dear Robert Mary is better, and I trust that she will yet be restored to me. I am in good spirits, so do not be anxious about me. I hope you get reconciled to your situation. The worst in it is that you have no TO ROBERT LLOYD. 95 friend to talk to but wait in patience, and you will in good time make friends. The having a friend is not indispensably necessary to virtue or happiness. Religion removes those barriers of sentiment which partition us from the disinterested love of our brethren we are commanded to love our enemies, to do good to those that hate us ; how much more is it our duty then to cultivate a forbearance and complacence towards those who only differ from us in dispositions and ways of thinking? There is always, without very unusual care there must always be, something of Self in friendship ; we love our friend because he is like ourselves; can consequences altogether unmix'd and pure be reasonably expected from such a source do not even the publicans and sinners the same ? Say, that you love a friend for his moral qualities, is it not rather because those qualities resemble what you fancy your own? This, then, is not without danger. The only true cement of a valuable friendship, the only thing that even makes it not sinful, is when two friends propose to become mutually of benefit to each other in a moral or religious way. But even this friendship is perpetually liable to the mixture of something not pure ; we love our friend, because he is ours so we do our money, our wit, our knowledge, our virtue ; and wherever this sense of APPROPRIATION and PROPERTY enters, so much is to be subtracted from the value of that friendship or that virtue. Our duties are to do good, expecting nothing again; to bear with contrary dispositions; to be candid and forgiving, not to crave and long after a communication of sentiment and feeling, but rather to avoid dwelling upon those feelings, however good, because they are our own. A man may be intemperate and selfish who indulges in good feelings for the mere pleasure they give him. I do not wish to deter you from making a friend, a true friend, and such a friendship, where the parties are not blind to each other's faults, is very useful and valuable. I perceive a tendency in you to this error, Robert I know you have chosen to take up an high 96 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. opinion of my moral worth, but I say it before God, and I do not lie, you are mistaken in me. I could not bear to lay open all my failings to you, for the sentiment of shame would be too pungent. Let this be as an example to you. Robert, friends fall off, friends mistake us, they change, they grow unlike us, they go away, they die ; but God is everlasting and incapable of change, and to Him we may look with cheerful, unpresumptuous hope, while we discharge the duties of life in situations more untowardly than yours. You complain of the impossi- bility of improving yourself, but be assured that the opportunity of improvement lies more in the mind than the situation. Humble yourself before God, cast out the selfish principle, wait in patience, do good in every way you can to all sorts of people, never be easy to neglect a duty tho' a small one, praise God for all, and see His hand in all things, and He will in time raise you up many friends or be Himself instead an unchanging friend. God bless you. 0. LAMB. LETTER XXXVII.] October (later) 1798. My dear Robert I acknowledge I have been sadly remiss of late. If I descend to any excuse (and all excuses that come short of a direct denial of a charge are poor creatures at best), it must be taken from my state of mind for some time past, which has been stupid rather, and unfilled with any object, than occupied, as you may imagine, with any favourite idea to the exclusion of friend Robert. You, who are subject to all the varieties of the mind, will give me credit in this. I am sadly sorry that you are relapsing into your old complaining strain. I wish I could adapt my consolations to your disease, but, alas ! I have none to offer which your own mind, and the suggestions of books, cannot better supply. Are you the first whose situation hath not been exactly squar"d to his ideas 1 or rather, will you find me that man who does not complain of the one TO ROBERT LLOYD. 97 thing wanting ? That thing obtained, another wish will start up. While this eternal craving of the mind keeps up its eternal hunger, no feast that my palate knows of will satisfy that hunger till we come to drink the new wine (whatever it be) in the Kingdom of the Father. See what trifles disquiet us. You are Unhappy because your Parents expect you to attend meetings. I don't know much of Quakers' meetings, but I believe I may moderately reckon them to take up the space of six hours in the week. Six hours to please your parents and that time not absolutely lost. Your mind remains, you may think, and plan, remember, and foresee, and do all human acts of mind sitting as well as walking. You are quiet at meeting: one likes to be so sometimes; you may advantageously crowd your day's devotions into that space. Nothing you see or hear there can be unfavour- able to it you are for that time at least exempt from the counting-house, and your parents cannot chide you there ; surely at so small expense you cannot grudge to observe the Fifth Commandment. I decidedly consider your refusal as a breach of that God-descended precept Honour and observe thy parents in all lawful things. Silent worship cannot be tfolawful ; there is no Idolatry, no invocation of saints, no bowing before the consecrated wafer in all this, nothing which a wise man would refuse, or a good man fear to do. What is it 1 Sitting a few hours in a week with certain good people who call that worship. You subscribe to no articles if your mind wanders, it is no crime in you who do not give credit to these infusions of the spirit. They sit in a temple, you sit as in a room adjoining, only do not disturb their pious work with gabbling, nor your own necessary peace with heart-burnings at your not ill-meaning parents, nor a silly contempt of the work which is going on before you. I know that if my parents were to live again, I would do more things to please them than merely sitting still six hours in a week. Perhaps I enlarge too much on this affair, but indeed your objection seems to me ridiculous, VOL. i u 98 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. and involving in it a principle of frivolous and vexatious resistance. You have often borne with my freedoms, bear with me once more in this. If I did not love you, I should not trouble myself whether you went to meeting or not whether you conform'd or not to the will of your father. I am now called off to dinner before one o'clock ; being a holyday we dine early, for Mary and me to have a long walk afterwards. My kindest remembrance to Charles. God give him all joy and quiet. Mary sends her LOVE. 0. L. To ROBERT SOUTHEY. LETTER XXXVIIL] November 3, 1798. I have read your Eclogue repeatedly, and cannot call it bald, or without interest; the cast of it and the design are completely original, and may set people upon thinking. It is as poetical as the subject requires, which asks no poetry; but it is defective in pathos. The woman's own story is the tamest part of it ; I should like you to remould that : it too much resembles the young maid's history; both had been in service. Even the omission would not injure the poem : after the words "growing wants," you might, not unconnectedly, intro- duce "look at that little chub" down to "welcome one." And, decidedly, I would have you end it somehow thus, " Qive them at least this evening a good meal. [Gives fier money. Now, fare thee well ; hereafter you have taught me To give sad meaning to the village bells," etc., which would leave a stronger impression (as well as more pleasingly recall the beginning of the Eclogue) than the present commonplace reference to a better world, which TO SOTTTHEY. 99 the woman "must have heard at church." I should like you too a good deal to enlarge the most striking part, as it might have been, of the poem " Is it idleness f " etc. : that affords a good field for dwelling on sickness, and inabilities, and old age. And you might also a good deal enrich the piece with a picture of a country wedding. The woman might very well, in a transient fit of oblivion, dwell upon the ceremony and circumstances of her own nuptials six years ago, the smugness of the bridegroom, the feastings, the cheap merriment, the welcomings, and the secret envy ings of the maidens; then dropping all this, recur to her present lot. I do not know that I can suggest anything else, or that I have suggested anything new or material. I do not much prefer this Eclogue to the last. Both are inferior to the former. " And when he came to shake me by the hand, And spake as kindly to me as he used, I hardly knew his voice " is the only passage that affected me. When servants speak, their language ought to be plain, and not much raised above the common, else I should find fault with the pathos of this passage, " And when I heard the bell strike out, I thought (what ?) that I had never heard it toll So dismally before." I like the destruction of the martins' old nests hugely, having just such a circumstance in my memory. I shall be very glad to see your remaining Eclogue, if not too much trouble, as you give me reason to expect it will be the second best. I shall be very glad to see some more poetry ; though, I fear, your trouble in transcribing will be greater than the service my remarks may do them. Yours affectionately, 0. LAMB. I cut my letter short because I am called off to business. 100 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER XXXIX.] Nmemler 8, 1798. I perfectly accord with your opinion of old Wither; Quarles is a wittier writer, but Wither lays more hold of the heart. Quarles thinks of his audience when he lectures; Wither soliloquizes in company from a full heart. What wretched stuff are the " Divine Fancies " of Quarles ! Religion appears to him no longer valuable than it furnishes matter for quibbles and riddles; he turns God's grace into wantonness. Wither is like an old friend, whose warm-heartedness and estimable qualities make us wish he possessed more genius, but at the same time make us willing to dispense with that want. I always love Wither, and sometimes admire Quarles. Still that portrait poem is a fine one; and the extract from "Shepherds' Hunting" places him in a starry height far above Quarles. If you wrote that review in the Critical Review, I am sorry you are so sparing of praise to the Ancient Marinere. So far from calling it as you do, with some wit, but more severity, a "Dutch Attempt," etc., I call it a right English attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate. I never so deeply felt the pathetic as in that part, " A spring of love gush'd from my heart, And I bless'd them unaware." It stung me into high pleasure through sufferings. Lloyd does not like it ; his head is too metaphysical, and your taste too correct ; at least I must allege something against you both, to excuse my own dotage " So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seem'd there to be ! " -etc. etc. But you allow some elaborate beauties : you should have extracted 'em. The Ancient Marinere plays more tricks TO ROBERT LLOYD. 101 with the mind than that last poem, which is yet one of the finest written. But I am getting too dogmatical; and before I degenerate into abuse, I will conclude with assuring you that I am Sincerely yours, 0. LAMB. I am going to meet Lloyd at Ware on Saturday, to return on Sunday. Have you any commands or com- mendations to the metaphysician ? I shall be very happy if you will dine or spend any time with me in your way through the great ugly city ; but I know you have other ties upon you in these parts. Love and respects to Edith, and friendly remembrances to Cottle. To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER XL.] November 13, 1798. Now 'tis Robert's turn. My dear Robert One passage in your Letter a little displeas'd me. The rest was nothing but kindness, which Robert's letters are ever brimful of. You say that " this World to you seems drain'd of all its sweets ! " At first I had hoped you only meant to insinuate the high price of Sugar ! but I am afraid you meant more. Robert, I don't know what you call sweet. Honey and the honey- comb, roses and violets, are yet in the earth. The sun and moon yet reign in Heaven, and the lesser lights keep up their pretty twinklings. Meats and drinks, sweet sights and sweet smells, a country walk, spring and autumn, follies and repentance, quarrels and reconcile- ments, have all a sweetness by turns. Good humour and good nature, friends at home that love you, and friends abroad that miss you, you possess all these things, and more innumerable, and these are all sweet things. . . . You may extract honey from everything; do not go a gathering after gall The Bees are wiser in their genera- 102 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. tion than the race of sonnet writers and complainers, Bowles's and Charlotte Smiths, and all that tribe, who can see no joys but what are past, and fill people's heads with notions of the unsatisfying nature of Earthly comforts. I assure you I find this world a very pretty place. My kind love to all your Sisters and to Thomas he never writes to me and tell Susanna I forgive her. C. LAMB. London, the 13th November 1798. ' LETTER XLL] November 20, 1798. As the little copy of verses I sent gave Priscilla and Robert some pleasure, I now send them another little tale, which is all I can send, for my stock will be exhausted. . . . 'Tis a tale of witchcraft, told by an old Steward in the family to Margaret, the ward of Sir Walter Woodvil. Who Sir Walter is you may come to know bye and bye, when I have finish'd a Poem, from which this and the other are extracts, and all the extracts I can make without mutilating : OLD STEWARD. One summer night Sir Walter, as it chanc'd, Was pacing to and fro in the avenue That westward fronts our house, Among those aged oaks said to have been planted Three hundred years ago By a neighb'ring Prior of the Woodvil name ; But so it was, Being o'er task'd in thought he heeded not The importune suit of one who stood by the gate, And begg'd an alms. Some say, he shov'd her rudely from the gate With angry chiding ; but I can never think, (Sir Walter's nature hath a sweetness in it,) That he could treat a woman, an old woman With such discourtesy, For old she was who begg'd an alms of him. Well, he refus'd her. (Whether for importunity I know not, Or that she came between his meditations,) TO ROBERT LLOYD. 103 Bat better had he met a Lion in the Streets, Than this old woman that night, For she was one who practis'd the black arts, And serv'd the Devil, being since burnt for witchcraft. She look'd at him like one that meant to blast him. And with a frightful noise, ('Twas partly like a woman's voice, And partly like the hissing of a snake,) She nothing spake but this : Sir Walter told the words, "A mischief, mischief, mischief, And a nine times killing curse, By day and by night, to the caitive wight, Who shakes the poor, like snakes, from his door, And shuts up the womb of his purse : And a mischief, mischief, mischief, And a ninefold with'ring curse For that shall come to thee, that will undo thee, Both all that thou fear'st and worst." These words four times repeated, she departed Leaving Sir Walter like a man, beneath Whose feet a scaffolding had suddenly fall'n. MARGARET. A terrible curse ! OLD STEWARD. Lady ! such bad things are said of that old woman, You would be loth to hear them ! As, namely, that the milk she gave was sour, And the babe, who suck'd her, shrivell'd like a mandrake* And things besides, with a bigger horror in them Almost, I think, unlawful to be told ! MAROARBT. Then I must never hear them. But proceed And say what follow'd on the witch's curse. OLD STEWARD. Nothing immediate ; but some nine months after Young Stephen Woodvil suddenly fell sick, And none could tell what ail'd him ; for he lay, And pin'd, and pin'd, till all his hair came off, And he, that was full flesh'd, became as thin As a two months' babe that has been starv'd in the nursing. And sure, I think, He bore his illness like a little child ; With such rare sweetness, and dumb melancholy, He strove to clothe his agony in smiles, Which he would force up in his poor pale cheeks, Like ill-tim'd guests that had no proper dwelling there. And, when they ask'd him his complaint, he laid His hand upon his heart to show the place 104 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Where Susan came to him a nights, he said, And prick'd him with a pin. And thereupon Sir Walter call'd to mind The beggar witch who stood in the gateway, And begg'd an alms. MARGARET. And so he died ? OLD STEWARD. 'Tis thought so. MARGARET. But did the witch confess ? OLD STEWARD. All this and more at her death. MARQARBT. I do not love to credit tales of magic. Heav'n's music, which is order, seems unstrung, And this brave world, Creation's beauteous workmanship, nnbeautify'd, Disorder'd, marr'd, where such strange things are acted. * A mandrake is a root resembling the human form, as sometimes a carrot does, and the old superstition is, that when the mandrake is torn out of the earth a dreadful shriek is heard, which makes all who hear it go mad. 'Tis a fatal poison besides. I will here conclude my tiny portion of Prose with hoping you may like the story, and my kind remembrances to all. C. LAMB. Write soon, Robert. To ROBERT SOUTHEY. LETTER XLII.] November 28, 1798. I can have no objection to your printing " Mystery of God" with my name, and all due acknowledgments for the honour and favour of the communication; indeed, 'tis a poem that can dishonour no name. Now, that is in the true strain of modern modestovanitas. . . . But for the sonnet, I heartily wish it, as I thought it was, dead and forgotten. If the exact circumstances under which I wrote could be known or told, it would be an interesting sonnet ; but to an indifferent and stranger reader it must appear a very bald thing, certainly inad- missible in a compilation. I wish you could affix a different name to the volume. There is a contemptible TO SOUTHEY. 105 book, a wretched assortment of vapid feelings, entitled Pratt'a Gleanings, which hath damned and impropriated the title for ever. Pray think of some other. The gentleman is better known (better had he remained unknown) by an Ode to Benevolence, written and spoken for and at the annual dinner of the Humane Society, who walk in procession once a year, with all the objects of their charity before them, to return God thanks for giving ; them such benevolent hearts. I like " Bishop Bruno," but not so abundantly as your " Witch Ballad," which is an exquisite thing of its kind. I showed my " Witch " and " Dying Lover " to Dyer last night ; but George could not comprehend how that could be poetry which did not go upon ten feet, as George and his predecessor had taught it to do ; so George read me some lectures on the distinguishing qualities of the Ode, the Epigram, and the Epic, and went home to illus- trate his doctrine, by correcting a proof sheet of his own Lyrics. George writes odes where the rhymes, like fashionable man and wife, keep a comfortable distance of six or eight lines apart, and calls that " observing the laws of verse ! " George tells you, before he recites, that you must listen with great attention, or you'll miss the rhymes. I did so, and found them pretty exact. George, speaking of the dead Ossian, exclaimeth, " Dark are the poet's eyes ! " I humbly represented to him that his own eyes were dark, and many a living bard's besides, and recommended "Closed are the poet's eyes." But that would not do. I found there was an antithesis between the darkness of his eyes and the splendour of his genius ; and I acquiesced. Your recipe for a Turk's poison is invaluable, and truly Marlowish. . . . Lloyd objects to "shutting up the womb of his purse " in my curse (which, for a Christian witch in a Christian country, is not too mild, I hope). Do you object ? I think there is a strangeness in the idea, as well as " shaking the poor like snakes from his door," which suits the speaker. Witches illustrate, as 106 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. fine ladies do, from their own familiar objects, and snakes and the shutting up of wombs are in their way. I don't know that this last charge has been before brought against 'em nor either the sour milk or the mandrake babe ; but I affirm these be things a witch would do if she could. My Tragedy will be a medley (as I intend it to be a medley) of laughter and tears, prose and verse, and in some places rhyme, songs, wit, pathos, humour, and, if possible, sublimity ; at least it is not a fault in my inten- tion if it does not comprehend most of these discordant atoms. Heaven send they dance not the "Dance of Death !" I hear that the Two Noble Englishmen have parted no sooner than they set foot on German earth ; but I have not heard the reason. Possibly to give moralists an handle to exclaim, " Ah me ! what things are perfect?" I think I shall adopt your emendation in the "Dying Lover," though I do not myself feel the objection against " Silent Prayer." My tailor has brought me home a new coat lapelled, with a velvet collar. He assures me everybody wears velvet collars now. Some are born fashionable, some achieve fashion, and others, like your humble servant, have fashion thrust upon them. The rogue has been making inroads hitherto by modest degrees, foisting upon me an additional button, recommending gaiters ; but to come upon me thus, in a full tide of luxury, neither becomes him as a tailor nor the ninth of a man. My meek gentleman was robbed the other day, coming with his wife and family in a one-horse shay from Hampstead. The villains rifled him of four guineas, some shillings and half-pence, and a bundle of customers' measures, which they swore were bank notes. They did not shoot him, and when they rode off he addrest them with profound gratitude, making a congee : " Gentlemen, I wish you good-night, and we are very much obliged to you that you have not used us ill !" And this is the cuckoo that has had the audacity to foist upon me ten buttons on a TO SOUTHEY. 107 side, and a black velvet collar ! A cursed ninth of a scoundrel ! When you write to Lloyd, he wishes his Jacobin cor- respondents to address him as Mr. 0. L. Love and respects to Edith. I hope she is well Yours sincerely, C. LAMB. LETTER XLIIL] December 27, 1798. Dear Southey Your friend John May has formerly made kind offers to Lloyd of serving me in the India House, by the interest of his friend Sir Francis Baring. It is not likely that I shall ever put his goodness to the test on my own account, for my prospects are very com- fortable; but I know a man, a young man, whom he could serve through the same channel, and, I think, would be disposed to serve if he were acquainted with his case. This poor fellow (whom I know just enough of to vouch for his strict integrity and worth) has lost two or three employments from illness, which he cannot regain; he was once insane, and, from the distressful uncertainty of his livelihood, has reason to apprehend a return of that malady. He has been for some time dependent on a woman whose lodger he formerly was, but who can ill afford to maintain him ; and I know that on Christmas night last he actually walked about the streets all night, rather than accept of her bed, which she offered him, and offered herself to sleep in the kitchen ; and that, in consequence of that severe cold, he is labour- ing under a bilious disorder, besides a depression of spirits, which incapacitates him from exertion when he most needs it. For God's sake, Southey, if it does not go against you to ask favours, do it now ; ask it as for me : but do not do a violence to your feelings, because he does not know of this application, and will suffer no disappoint- ment. What I meant to say was this, there are in the India House, what are called extra clerks, not on the establishment, like me, but employed in extra business, 108 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. by-jobs ; these get about 50 a year, or rather more, but never rise. A director can put in at any time a young man in this office, and it is by no means considered so great a favour as making an established clerk. He would think himself as rich as an emperor if he could get such a certain situation, and be relieved from those disquietudes which, I do fear, may one day bring back his distemper. You know John May better than I do, but I know enough to believe that he is a good man. He did make me that offer I have mentioned, but you will perceive that such an offer cannot authorise me in applying for another person. But I cannot help writing to you on the subject, for the young man is perpetually before my eyes, and I shall feel it a crime not to strain all my petty interest to do him service, though I put my own delicacy to the question by so doing. I have made one other unsuccessful attempt already. At all events I will thank you to write, for I am tormented with anxiety. 0. LAMB. LETTER XLIV.] January 21, 1799. I am requested by Lloyd to excuse his not replying to a kind letter received from you. He is at present situated in most distressful family perplexities, which I am not at liberty to explain, but they are such as to demand all the strength of his mind, and quite exclude any attention to foreign objects. His brother Robert (the flower of his family) hath eloped frora the persecutions of his father, and has taken shelter with me. What the issue of his adventure will be, I know not. He hath the sweetness of an angel in his heart, combined with admirable firm- ness of purpose ; an uncultivated, but very original, and I think superior, genius. But this step of his is but a small part of their family troubles. I am to blame for not writing to you before on my own account; but I know you can dispense with the expressions of gratitude, or I should have thanked you TO SOUTHEY. 109 before for all May's kindness. He has liberally supplied the person I spoke to you of with money, and had pro- cured him a situation just after himself had lighted upon a similar one, and engaged too far to recede. But May's kindness was the same, and my thanks to you and him are the same. May went about on this business as if it had been his own. But you knew John May before this, so I will be silent. I shall be very glad to hear from you when convenient. I do not know how your Calendar and other affairs thrive; but above all, I have not heard a great while of your " Madoc " the opus magnum. I would willingly send you something to give a value to this letter ; but I have only one slight passage to send you, scarce worth the sending, which I want to edge in somewhere into my play, which, by the way, hath not received the addition of ten lines, besides, since I saw you. A father, old Walter Woodvil (the witch's protege), relates this of his son John, who "fought in adverse armies," being a royalist, and his father a parliamentary man : 14 1 saw him in the day of Worcester fight, Whither he came at twice seven years, Under the discipline of the Lord Falkland (His uncle by the mother's side, Who gave his youthful politics a bent Quite from the principles of his father's house) ; There did I see this valiant Lamb of Mars, This sprig of honour, this unbearded John, This veteran in green years, this sprout, this Woodvil (With dreadless ease guiding a fire-hot steed, Which seem'd to scorn the manage of a boy), Prick forth with such a mirth into the field, To mingle rivalship and acts of war Even with the sinewy masters of the art. You would have thought the work of blood had Ijeen A play-game merely, and the rabid Mars Had put his harmful hostile nature off To instruct raw youth in images of war, And practice of the unedged players' foils. The rough fanatic and blood-practised soldiery Seeing such hope and virtue in the boy, 110 LETTERS OF CHARLES IAMB. Disclosed their ranks to let him pass unhurt, Checking their swords' uncivil injuries, As loth to mar that curious workmanship Of Valour's beauty portray'd in his face." Lloyd objects to "portray'd in his face," do you! 1 like the line. I shall clap this in somewhere. I think there is a spirit through the lines ; perhaps the 7th, 8th, and 9th owe their origin to Shakspeare, though no image is borrowed. He says in Henry the Fourth " This infant Hotspur, Mars in swathing clothes." But pray did Lord Falkland die before Worcester fight ? In that case I must make bold to unclify some other nobleman. Kind love and respects to Edith. 0. LAMB. LETTER XLV.] March, 15, 1799. Dear Southey I have received your little volume, for which I thank you, though I do not entirely approve of this sort of intercourse, where the presents are all one side. I have read the last Eclogue again with great pleasure. It hath gained considerably by abridgment, and now I think it wants nothing but enlargement. You will call this one of tyrant Procrustes's criticisms, to cut and pull so to his own standard ; but the old lady is so great a favourite with me, I want to hear more of her ; and of " Joanna " you have given us still less. But the picture of the rustics leaning over the bridge, and the old lady travelling abroad on summer evening to see her garden watered, are images so new and true, that I decidedly prefer this " Ruin'd Cottage " to any poem in the book. Indeed I think it the only one that will bear comparison with your "Hymn to the Penates," in a former volume. I compare dissimilar things, as one would a rose and a TO SOUTHEY. Ill star, for the pleasure they give us, or as a child soon learns to choose between a cake and a rattle ; for dis- similars have mostly some points of comparison. The next best poem, I think, is the first Eclogue ; 'tis very complete, and abounding in little pictures and realities. The remainder Eclogues, excepting only the " Funeral," I do not greatly admire. I miss one, which had at least as good a title to publication as the " Witch," or the "Sailor's Mother." You call'd it the "Last of the Family." The "Old Woman of Berkeley" comes next ; in some humours I would give it the preference above any. But who the devil is Matthew of West- minster? You are as familiar with these antiquated monastics, as Swedenborg, or, as his followers affect to call him, the Baron, with his invisibles. But you have raised a very comic effect out of the true narrative of Matthew of Westminster. 'Tis surprising with how little addition you have been able to convert, with so little alteration, his incidents, meant for terror, into cir- cumstances and food for the spleen. The Parody is not so successful ; it has one famous line, indeed, which conveys the finest death-bed image I ever met with : " The doctor whisper'd the nurse, and the surgeon knew what he said." But the offering the bribe three times bears not the slightest analogy or proportion to the fiendish noises three times heard ! In " Jaspar," the circumstance of the great light is very affecting. But I had heard you mention it before. The "Rose" is the only insipid piece in the volume ; it hath neither thorns nor sweet- ness ; and, besides, sets all chronology and probability at defiance. " Cousin Margaret," you know, I like. The allusions to the Pilgrim's Progress are particularly happy, and harmonise tacitly and delicately with old cousins and aunts. To familiar faces we do associate familiar scenes and accustomed objects : but what hath Apollidon and 112 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. his sea-nymphs to do in these affairs 1 Apollyon I could have borne, though he stands for the devil ; but who in Apollidon 1 I think you are too apt to conclude faintly, with some cold moral, as in the end of the poem called " The Victory " " Be thou her comforter, who art the widow's friend ;" a single commonplace line of comfort, which bears no proportion in weight or number to the many lines which describe suffering. This is to convert religion into mediocre feelings, which should burn, and glow, and tremble. A moral should be wrought into the body and soul, the matter and tendency of a poem, not tagged to the end, like a " God send the good ship into harbour," at the conclusion of our bills of lading. The finishing of the " Sailor " is also imperfect. Any dissenting minister may say and do as much. These remarks, I know, are crude and unwrought, but I do not lay much claim to accurate thinking. I never judge system-wise of things, but fasten upon par- ticulars. After all, there is a great deal in the book that I must, for time, leave unnientioned, to deserve my thanks for its own sake, as well as for the friendly remembrances implied in the gift. I again return you my thanks. Pray present my love to Edith. C. L. LETTER XLVI.] Mwrth 20, 1799. I am hugely pleased with your "Spider," "your old freemason," as you call him. The first three stanzas are delicious; they seem to me a compound of Burns and Old Quarles, the kind of home-strokes, where more is felt than strikes the ear ; a terseness, a jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter. The measure, too, is novel and pleasing. I could almost wonder Robert Burns in his lifetime never stumbled upon it. The fourth stanza is less striking, as being less original The fifth falls TO SOUTHEY. U3 off. It has no felicity of phrase, no old-fashioned phrase or feeling. " Young hopes, and love's delightful dreams," savour neither of Burns nor Quarles ; they seem more like shreds of many a modern sentimental sonnet. The last stanza hath nothing striking in it, if I except the two concluding lines, which are Burns all over. I wish, if you concur with me, these things could be looked to. I am sure this is a kind of writing, which comes tenfold better recommended to the heart, comes there more like a neighbour or familiar, than thousands of Hamnels, and Zillahs, and Madelons. I beg you will send me the " Holly Tree," if it at all resemble this, for it must please me. I have never seen it. I love this sort of poems, that open a new intercourse with the most despised of the animal and insect race. I think this vein may be further opened. Peter Pindar hath very prettily apostro- phised a fly ; Burns hath his mouse and his louse ; Coleridge less successfully hath made overtures of intimacy to a jackass, therein only following, at unresembling distance, Sterne, and greater Cervantes. Besides these, I know of no other examples of breaking down the partition between us and our "poor earth-born com- panions." It is sometimes revolting to be put in a track of feeling by other people, not one's own immediate thoughts, else I would persuade you, if I could (I am in earnest), to commence a series of these animals' poems, which might have a tendency to rescue some poor creatures from the antipathy of mankind. Some thoughts came across me : for instance to a rat, to a toad, to a cockchafer, to a mole. People bake moles alive by a slow oven fire to cure consumption. Rats are, indeed, the most despised and contemptible parts of God's earth. I killed a rat the other day by punching him to pieces, and feel a weight of blood upon me to this hour. Toads you know are made to fly, and tumble down and crush all to pieces. Cockchafers are old sport. Then again VOL. I. I 114 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. to a worm, with an apostrophe to anglers, those patient tyrants, meek inflictors of pangs intolerable, cool devils ; to an owl; to all snakes, with an apology for their poison ; to a cat in boots or bladders. Your own fancy, if it takes a fancy to these hints, will suggest many more. A series of such poems, suppose them accompanied with plates descriptive of animal torments, cooks roasting lobsters, fishmongers crimping skates, etc. etc., would take excessively. I will willingly enter into a partner- ship in the plan with you : I think my heart and soul would go with it too at least, give it a thought. My plan is but this minute come into my head ; but it strikes me instantaneously as something new, good, and useful, full of pleasure, and full of moral If old Quarles and Wither could live again, we would invite them into our firm. Burns hath done his part. Poor Sam Le Grice ! I am afraid the world, and the camp, and the university, have spoilt him among them. 'Tis certain he had at one time a strong capacity of turning out something better. I knew him, and that not long since, when he had a most warm heart. I am ashamed of the indifference I have sometimes felt towards him. I think the devil is in one's heart. I am under obligations to that man for the warmest friendship, and heartiest sympathy exprest both by word and deed and tears for me, when I was in my greatest distress. But I have forgot that ! as, I fear, he has nigh forgot the awful scenes which were before his eyes when he served the office of a comforter to me. No service was too mean or troublesome for him to perform. I can't think what but the devil, " that old spider," could have suck'd my heart so dry of its sense of all gratitude. If he does come in your way, Southey, fail not to tell him that I retain a most affectionate remembrance of his old friendliness, and an earnest wish to resume our intercourse. In this I am serious. I cannot recommend him to your society, because I am afraid whether he be quite worthy of it ; but I have no right to dismiss him from my regard. He TO SOUTHEY. 115 vras at one time, an'l in the worst of times, my own familiar friend, and great comfort to me then. I have known him to play at cards with my father, meal-times excepted, literally all day long, in long days too, to save me from being teased by the old man, when I was not able to bear it. God bless him for it, and God bless you, Southey. 0. L. LETTER XLVIL] April 20, 1799. The following is a second extract from my tragedy that M to be. 'Tis narrated by an old Steward to Margaret, orphan ward of Sir Walter WoodviL . . . This and the Dying Lover I gave you are the only ex- tracts I can give without mutilation. ... I expect you to like the old woman's curse : Old Steward. One summer night, Sir Walter, as it chanced, Was pacing to and fro in the avenue That westward fronts our house, Among those aged oaks, said to have been planted Three hundred years ago By a neighbouring Prior of the Woodvil name, etc. This is the extract I bragged of as superior to that I sent you from Marlow : perhaps you will smile. But I should like your remarks on the above, as you are deeper witch-read than I. Yours ever, C. LAMB. Rob. Southey, Esq., Mr. Cottle's, Bookseller, High Street, Bristol. LETTEE XLVIIL] May 20, 1799. Dear Southey I thank you heartily for your intended presents, but do by no means see the necessity you are under of burthening yourself thereby. You have read old Withers Supersedeas to small purpose. You object to my pauses being at the end of my lines ; I do not know 116 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. any great difficulty I should find in diversifying or chang- ing my blank verse ; but I go upon the model of Shak- speare in my Play, and endeavour after a colloquial ease and spirit, something like him. I could as easily imitate Milton's versification, but my ear and feeling would reject it, or any approaches to it, in the drama. I do not know whether to be glad or sorry that witches have been de- tected aforetimes in the shutting up of wombs. I cer- tainly invented that conceit, and its coincidence with fact is accidental, for I never heard it I have not seen those verses on Colonel Despard : I do not read any newspapers. Are they short to copy without much trouble ? I should like to see them. I just send you a few rhymes from my play, the only rhymes in it. A forest liver gives an account of his amusements : What sports have you in the forest ? Not many, some few, as thus, To see the sun to bed, to see him rise, Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes, Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him ; With all his fires and travelling glories round him ; etc. I love to anticipate charges of unoriginality : the first line is almost Shakspeare's : " To have my love to bed and to arise." A Midsummer Night's Dream. I think there is a sweetness in the versification not unlike some rhymes in that exquisite play, and the last line but three is yours : " An eye That met the gaze, or turn'd it knew not why." Rosamund's Episile. I shall anticipate all my play, and have nothing to show you. An idea for Leviathan : Commentators on Job have been puzzled to find out a meaning for Levia- than. 'Tis a whale, say some ; a crocodile, say others. In my simple conjecture, Leviathan is neither more nor less than the Lord Mayor of London for the time being. TO ROBERT LLOYD. 117 Rosamund sells well in London, Emigre* the non-reviewal of it. I sincerely wish you better health, and better health to Edith. Kind remembrances to her. 0. LAMB. My sister Mary was never in better health or spirits than now. To ROBERT LLOYD. LKTTEB XLIX.] September 1799. My dear Robert I suppose by this time you have returned from Worcester with Uncle Nehemiah. You neglected to inform me whether Charles is yet at Birm. I have heard here that he is returned to Cambridge. Give him a gentle tap on the shoulder to remind him how truly acceptable a letter from him would be. I have nothing to write about. Thomson remains with me. He is perpetually getting into mental vagaries. He is in LOVE ! and tosses and tumbles about in his bed like a man in a barrel of spikes. He is more sociable, but I am heartily sick of his domesticating with me ; he wants so many sympathies of mine, and I want his, that we are daily declining into civility. I shall be truly glad when he is gone. I find 'tis a dangerous experiment to grow too familiar. Some natures cannot bear it without converting into indifference. I know but one Being that I could ever consent to live perpetually with, and that is Robert. But Robert must go whither prudence and paternal regulations indicate a way. I shall not soon forget you do not fear that nor grow cool towards Robert. My not writing is no proof of these disloyalties. Perhaps I am unwell, or vexed, or spleen'd, or something, when I should otherwise write. Assure Charles of my unalterable affection, and present my warmest wishes for his and Sophia's happiness. How 118 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. goes on Priscilla? I am much pleased with his Poems in the Anthology One in Particular. The other is a kind and no doubt just tribute to Robert and Olivia, but I incline to opinion that these domestic addresses should not always be made public. I have, I know, more than once exposed my own secretest feelings of that nature, but I am sorry that I did. Nine out of ten readers laugh at them. When a man dies leaving the name of a great author behind him, any unpublished relicks which let one into his domestic retirements are greedily gathered up, which in his lifetime, and before his fame had ripened, would by many be considered as impertinent. But if Robert and his sister were gratify'd with seeing their brother's heart in Print, let the rest of the world go hang. They may prefer the remaining trumpery of the An- thology. All I mean to say is, I think I perceive an indelicacy in thus exposing one's virtuous feelings to criticism. But of delicacy Charles is at least as true a judge as myself. Pray request him to let me somehow have a sight of his novel. I declined offering it here for sale, for good reasons as I thought being unknown to Booksellers, and not made for making bargains ; but for that reason I am not to be punished with not seeing the book. I shall count it a kindness if Chas. will send me the manuscript, which shall certainly be returned. [The remainder of this letter has been torn off.] To ROBERT SOUTHEY. LETTER L.] October 31, 1799. Dear Southey I have but just got your letter, being returned from Herts, where I have passed a few red-letter days with much pleasure. I would describe the county to you, as you have done by Devonshire ; but alas 1 I am a poor pen at that same. I could tell you of an old TO MANNING. 119 house with a tapestry bedroom, the " Judgment of Solo- mon" composing one panel, and "Actaeon spying Diana naked " the other. I could tell of an old marble hall, with Hogarth's prints, and the Roman Caesars in marble hung round. I could tell of a wilderness, and of a village church, and where the bones of my honoured grandam lie ; but there are feelings which refuse to be translated, sulky aborigines, which will not be naturalised in another soil. Of this nature are old family faces, and scenes of infancy. I have given your address, and the books you want, to the Arches ; they will send them as soon as they can get them, but they do not seem quite familiar to their names. I have seen Gebor ! Gebor aptly so denominated from Geborish, quasi Gibberish. But Gebor hath some lucid intervals. I remember darkly one beautiful simile veiled in uncouth phrases about the youngest daughter of the Ark. I shall have nothing to communicate, I fear, to the Anthology. You shall have some fragments of my play, if you desire them ; but I think I would rather print it whole. Have you seen it, or shall I lend you a copy ? I want your opinion of it. I must get to business; so farewell. My kind re- membrances to Edith. C. LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER LI.] December 28, 1799. Dear Manning Having suspended my correspondence a decent interval, as knowing that even good things may be taken to satiety, a wish cannot but recur to learn whether you be still well and happy. Do all things con- tinue in the state I left them in Cambridge ? Do your night parties still flourish ? and do you con- tinue to bewilder your company with your thousand faces, running down through all the keys of idiotism (like Lloyd over his perpetual harpsichord), from the smile and the 120 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. glimmer of half-sense and quarter-sense, to the grin and hanging lip of Betty Foy's own Johnny ? And does the face-dissolving curfew sound at twelve 1 How unlike the great originals were your petty terrors in the postscript ! not fearful enough to make a fairy shudder, or a Lilli- putian fine lady, eight months full of child, miscarry. Yet one of them, which had more beast than the rest, I thought faintly resembled one of your brutifications. But, seriously, I long to see your own honest Manning-face again. I did not mean a pun, your man's face, you will be apt to say, I know your wicked will to pun. I cannot now write to Lloyd and you too ; so you must convey as much interesting intelligence as this may con- tain, or be thought to contain, to him and Sophia, with my dearest love and remembrances. By the by, I think you and Sophia both incorrect with regard to the title of the play. Allowing your objection (which is not necessary, as pride may be, and is in real life often, cured by misfortunes not directly originating from its own acts, as Jeremy Taylor will tell you a naughty desire is sometimes sent to cure it ; I know you read these practical divines) but allowing your objec- tion, does not the betraying of his father's secret directly spring from pride ? from the pride of wine, and a full heart, and a proud over-stepping of the ordinary rules of morality, and contempt of the prejudices of mankind, which are not to bind superior souls "as trust in the matter of secrets all ties of blood, etc. etc., keeping of pro- mises, the feeble mind's religion, binding our morning knowledge to the performance of what last nighfs ignor- ance spake " does he not prate, that " Great Spirits " must do more than die for their friend ? Does not the pride of wine incite him to display some evidence of friendship, which its own irregularity shall make great 1 This I know, that I meant his punishment not alone to be a cure for his daily and habitual pride, but the direct consequence and appropriate punishment of a particular act of pride. TO MANNING. 121 If you do not understand it so, it is my fault in not explaining my meaning. I have not seen Coleridge since, and scarcely expect to see him, perhaps he has been at Cambridge. Need I turn over to blot a fresh clean half-sheet, merely to say, what I hope you are sure of without my repeating it, that I would have you consider me, dear Manning, Your sincere friend, 0. LAMB. LETTER LTI.] December 1799. Dear Manning The particular kindness, even up to a degree of attachment, which I have experienced from you, seems to claim some distinct acknowledgment on my part. I could not content myself with a bare remem- brance to you, conveyed in some letter to Lloyd. Will it be agreeable to you, if I occasionally recruit your memory of me, which must else soon fade, if you consider the brief intercourse we have had. I am not likely to prove a troublesome correspondent. My scrib- bling days are past. I shall have no sentiments to com- municate, but as they spring up from some living and worthy occasion. I look forward with great pleasure to the performance of your promise, that we should meet in London early in the ensuing year. The century must needs commence auspiciously for me, that brings with it Manning's friend- ship, as an earnest of its after gifts. I should have written before, but for a troublesome inflammation in one of my eyes, brought on by night travelling with the coach windows sometimes up. What more I have to say shall be reserved for a letter to Lloyd. I must not prove tedious to you in my first outset, lest I should affright you by my ill-judged loquacity. I am, yours most sincerely, C. LAMB. CHAPTER IL 1800-1809. LETTERS TO COLERIDGE, MANNING, AND OTHERS. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTEK LI II.] January 2, 1800. DEAR COLERIDGE Now I write, I cannot miss this opportunity of acknowledging the obligations myself, and the readers in general of that luminous paper, the Morn- ing Post, are under to you for the very novel and exquisite manner in which you combined political with grammatical science in your yesterday's dissertation on Mr. Wyndham's unhappy composition. It must have been the death-blow to that ministry. I expect Pitt and Grenville to resign. More especially the delicate and Cottrellian grace with which you officiated, with a ferula for a white wand, as gentleman usher to the word " also," which it seems did not know its place. I expect Manning of Cambridge in town to-night. Will you fulfil your promise of meeting him at my house ? He is a man of a thousand. Give me a line to say what day, whether Saturday, Sunday, Monday, etc., and if Sara and the Philosopher can come. I am afraid if I did not at intervals call upon you, I should never see you. But I forget, the affairs of the nation engross your time and your mind. Farewell. C. L. TO MANNING. 123 To THOMAS MANNING. LJSTTBB LIV.] February 18, 1800. Dear Manning Olivia is a good girl, and if you turn to my letter you will find that this very plea you set up to vindicate Lloyd, I had made use of as a reason why he should never have employed Olivia to make a copy of such a letter ! a letter I could not have sent to my Enemy's B ^if she had thought proper to seek me in the way of marriage. But you see it in one view, I in another. Rest you merry in your opinion ! Opinion is a species of property ; and though I am always desirous to share with my friend to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keep some tenets, and some property, properly my own. Some day, Manning, when we meet, substituting Corydon and fair Amaryllis for Charles Lloyd and Mary Hayes, we will discuss together this question of moral feeling, " In what cases, and how far, sincerity is a virtue 1 " I do not mean Truth, a good Olivia-like creature, God bless her, who, meaning no offence, is always ready to give an answer when she is asked why she did so and so ; but a certain forward-talking half-brother of hers, Sin- cerity, that amphibious gentleman, who is so ready to perk up his obnoxious sentiments unasked into your notice, as Midas would his ears into your face, uncalled for. But I despair of doing anything by a letter in the way of ex- plaining or coming to explanations. A good wish, or a pun, or a piece of secret history, may be well enough that way conveyed ; nay, it has been known, that intelligence of a turkey hath been conveyed by that medium, without much ambiguity. Godwin I am a good deal pleased with. He is a very well-behaved, decent man ; nothing very brilliant about him or imposing, as you may suppose ; quite another guess sort of gentleman from what your anti-jacobin Christians imagine him. I was well pleased to find he has neither horns nor claws ; quite a tame creature, I 124 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. assure you : a middle-sized man, both in stature and in understanding ; whereas, from his noisy fame, you would expect to find a Briareus Centimanus, or a Tityus tall enough to pull Jupiter from his heavens. I begin to think you atheists not quite so tall a species ! Coleridge inquires after you pretty often. I wish to be the Pandar to bring you together again once before I die. When we die, you and I must part ; the sheep, you know, take the right-hand sign-post, and the goats the left. Stript of its allegory, you must know the sheep are I, the Apostles, and the martyrs, and the Popes, and Bishop Taylor, and Bishop Horsley, and Coleridge, etc., etc. The goats are the atheists, and adulterers, and fornicators, and dumb dogs, and Godwin, and M g, and that Thyestaean crew ! Egad, how my saintship sickens at the idea ! You shall have my play and the FalstafFs Letters in a day or two. I will write to Ll[oyd] by this day's Post. Pray, is it a part of your sincerity to show my letters to Lloyd ? for, really, gentlemen ought to explain their virtues upon a first acquaintance, to prevent mistakes. God bless you, Manning. Take my trifling as trifling ; and believe me, seriously and deeply, Your well-wisher and friend, C. L. LETTER LV.] March 1, 1800. I hope by this time you are prepared to say, the " Falstaff's letters " are a bundle of the sharpest, queerest, profoundest humours, of any these juice-drained latter times have spawned. I should have advertised you, that the meaning is frequently hard to be got at ; and so are the future guineas, that now lie ripening and aurifying in the womb of some undiscovered Potosi ; but dig, dig, dig, dig, Manning ! I set to, with an unconquerable propul- sion to write, with a lamentable want of what to write. My private goings on are orderly as the movements of the spheres, and stale as their music to angels' ears. TO MANNING. 125 Public affairs except as they touch upon me, and so turn into private, I cannot whip up my mind to feel any interest in. I grieve, indeed, that War, and Nature, and Mr. Pitt, that hangs up in Lloyd's best parlour, should have conspired to call up three necessaries, simple commoners as our fathers knew them, into the upper house of luxuries ; bread, and beer, and coals, Manning. But as to France and Frenchmen, and the Abbe" Sieyes and his constitutions, I cannot make these present times present to me. I read histories of the past, and I live in them ; although, to abstract senses, they are far less momentous than the noises which keep Europe awake. I am reading Burners History of his own, Times. Did you ever read that garrulous, pleasant history ? He tells his story like an old man past political service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions, when his " old cap was new." Full of scandal, which all true history is. No palliatives ; but all the stark wickedness, that actually gives the momentum to national actors. Quite the prattle of age, and out-lived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you perpetually in alto relievo. Himself a party man he makes you a party man. None of the cursed philosophical Humeian indifference, so cold, and unnatural, and inhuman ! None of the cursed Gibbonian fine writ- ing, so fine and composite ! None of Dr. Robertson's periods with three members. None of Mr. Roscoe's sage remarks, all so apposite, and coming in so clever, lest the reader should have had the trouble of drawing an infer- ence. Burnet's good old prattle I can bring present to my mind : I can make the revolution present to me : the French revolution, by a converse perversity in my nature, I fling as far from me. To quit this tiresome subject, and to relieve you from two or three dismal yawns, which I hear in spirit, I here conclude my more than commonly obtuse letter , dull, up to the dulness of a Dutch com- mentator on Shakspeare. My love to Lloyd and to Sophia. 0. L. 126 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER LVI]. March 17, 1800. Dear Manning I am living in a continuous feast. Coleridge has been with me now for nigh three weeks, and the more I see of him in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to love him, and believe him a very good man, and all those foolish impressions to the contrary fly off like morning slumbers. He is engaged in translations, which I hope will keep him this month to come. He is uncommonly kind and friendly to me. He ferrets me day and night to do something. He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressing occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip. Marry come up ; what a pretty similitude, and how like your humble servant ! He has lugged me to the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has sug- gested to me, for a first plan, the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the anatomist of melancholy. I have even written the introductory letter ; and if I can pick up a few guineas this way, I feel they will be most refreshing, bread being so dear. If I go on with it, I will apprise you of it, as you may like to see my things ! and the tulip, of all flowers, loves to be admired most. Pray pardon me, if my letters do not come very thick. I am so taken up with one thing or other, that I cannot pick out (I will not say time, but) fitting times to write to you. My dear love to Lloyd and Sophia, and pray split this thin letter into three parts, and present them with the two biggest in my name. They are my oldest friends ; but, ever the new friend driveth out the old, as the ballad sings ! God bless you all three ! I would hear from Lloyd if I could. Flour has just fallen nine shillings a sack : we shall be all too rich. Tell Charles I have seen his mamma, and have almost fallen in love with her, since I mayn't with Olivia. She is so fine and graceful, a complete matron-lady-quaker. She has given me two little books. Olivia grows a TO COLERIDGE. 127 charming girl full of feeling, and thiuner than she was ; but I have not time to fall in love. Mary presents her general compliments. She keeps in fine health. Huzza boys ! and down with the Atheists ! To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER LVII.] May 12, 1800. My dear Coleridge I don't know why I write, except from the propensity which misery has to tell her griefs. Hetty died on Friday night, about eleven o'clock, after eight days' illness. Mary, in consequence of fatigue and anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove her yesterday. I am left alone in a house with nothing but Hetty's dead body to keep me company. To-morrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite alone, with nothing but a cat, to remind me that the house has been full of living beings like myself. My heart is quite sunk, and I don't know where to look for relief. Mary will get better again, but her constantly being liable to such relapses is dreadful ; nor is it the least of our evils that her case and all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner marked. Excuse my troubling you, but I have nobody by me to speak to me. I slept out last night, not being able to endure the change and the stillness ; but I did not sleep well, and I must come back to my own bed. I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me to-morrow. I am completely shipwrecked. My head is quite bad. I almost wish that Mary were dead. God bless you ! Love to Sara and Hartley. CL LAMB. Monday. 128 LETTERS OP CHARLES LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTEK LVIII.] May 17, 1800. Dear Manning I am quite out of spirits, and feel as if I should never recover them. But why should not this pass away ? I am foolish, but judge of me by my situation. Our servant is dead, and my sister is ill so ill as to make a removal to a place of confinement absolutely necessary. I have been left alone in a house where but ten days since living beings were, and noises of life were heard. I have made the experiment and find I cannot bear it any longer. Last night I went to sleep at White's, with whom I am to be until I can find a settlement. I have given up my house, and must look out for lodgings. I expect Mary will get better before many weeks are gone, but at present I feel my daily and hourly prop has fallen from me. I totter and stagger with weakness, for nobody can supply her place to me. White has all kindness, but not sympathy. R Lloyd, my only correspondent, you except, is a good Being, but a weak one. I know not where to look but to you. If you will suffer me to weary your shoulders with part of my Burthen, I shall write again to let you know how I go on. Meantime a letter from you would be a consider- able relief to me. Believe me, yours most sincerely, 0. L. LETTEE LIX.] [Before June] 1800. Dear Manning I feel myself unable to thank you sufficiently for your kind letter. It was doubly accept- able to me, both for the choice poetry and the kind honest prose which it contained. It was just such a letter as I should have expected from Manning. I am in much better spirits than when I wrote last. I have had a very eligible offer to lodge with a friend ir town. He will have rooms to let at Midsummer; by which time I hope my sister will be well enough to join TO COLERIDGE. 129 me. It is a great object to me to live in town, where we shall be much more private, and to quit a house and a neighbourhood where poor Mary's disorder, so frequently recurring, has made us a sort of marked people. We can be nowhere private except in the midst of London. We shall be in a family where we visit very frequently ; only my landlord and I have not yet come to a conclusion. He has a partner to consult I am still on the tremble, for I do not know where we could go into lodgings that would not be, in many respects, highly exceptionable. Only God send Mary well again, and I hope all will be well ! The prospect, such as it is, has made me quite happy. I have just time to tell you of it, as I know it will give you pleasure. Farewell. C. LAMB. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER LX.] June 22, 1800. By some fatality, unusual with me, I have mislaid the list of books which you want. Can you, from memory, easily supply me with another ? I confess to Statius and I detained him wilfully, out of a reverent regard to your style. Statius, they tell me, is turgid. As to that other Latin book, since you know neither its name nor subject, your wants (I crave leave to apprehend) cannot be very urgent. Meanwhile, dream that it is one of the lost Decades of Livy. Your partiality to me has led you to form an erroneous opinion as to the measure of delight you suppose me to take in obliging. Pray be careful that it spread no further. 'Tis one of those heresies that is very pregnant Pray rest more satisfied with the portion of learning which you have got, and disturb my peaceful ignorance as little as possible with such sort of commissions. Did you never observe an appearance well known by the name of the man in the moon? Some scandalous old maids have set on foot a report that it is Emlymion. VOL. I. K 130 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Your theory about the first awkward step a man makes being the consequence of learning to dance, is not universal. We have known many youths bred up at Christ's, who never learned to dance, yet the world imputes to them no very graceful motions. I remember there was little Hudson, the immortal precentor of St. Paul's, to teach us our quavers ; but, to the best of my recollection, there was no master of motions when we were at Christ's. Farewell, in haste. C. L. To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER LXL] July 2, 1800. Dear Robert My mind has been so barren and idle of late, that I have done nothing. I have received many a summons from you, and have repeatedly sat down to write, and broke off from despair of sending you anything worthy your acceptance. I have had such a deadness about me. Man delights not me nor woman neither. I im- pute it in part, or altogether, to the stupefying effect which continued fine weather has upon me. I want some rains, or even snow and intense cold winter nights, to bind me to my habitation, and make me value it as a home a sacred character which it has not attained with me hitherto. I cannot read or write when the sun shines : I can only walk. I must tell you that, since I wrote last I have been two days at Oxford, on a visit (long put off) to Gutch's family (my landlord). I was much gratified with the Colleges and Libraries and what else of Oxford I could see in so short a time. In the All Souls' Library is a fine head of Bishop Taylor, which was one great induce- ment to my Oxford visit. In the Bodleian are many Portraits of illustrious Dead, the only species of painting I value at a farthing. But an indubitable good Portrait of a great man is worth a pilgrimage to go and see. Gutch's family is a very fine one, consisting of well-grown sons and daughters, and all likely and well-favourM. What is called a Happy family that is, according to my TO COLERIDGE. 131 interpretation, a numerous assemblage of young men and women, all fond of each other to a certain degree, and all happy together, but where the very number forbids any two of them to get close enough to each other to share secrets and befriends. That close intercourse can only exist (commonly, I think,) in a family of two or three. I do not envy large families. The fraternal affection by diffusion and multi- participation is ordinarily thin and weak. They don't get near enough to each other. I expected to have had an account of Sophia's being brought to bed before this time ; but I remain in con- fidence that you will send me the earliest news. I hope it will be happy. Coleridge is settled at Keswick, so that the probability is that he will be once again united with your Brother. Such men as he and Wordsworth would exclude solitude in the Hebrides or Thule. Pray have you seen the New Edition of Burns, includ- ing his posthumous works ? I want very much to get a sight of it, but cannot afford to buy it, my Oxford Journey, though very moderate, having pared away all superfluities. Will you accept of this short letter, accompanied with professions of deepest regard for you 1 Yours unalterably, C. LAM i:. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER LXIL] August 6, 1800. Dear Coleridge I have taken to-day, and delivered to L. and Co., Imprimis : your books, viz., three ponderous German dictionaries, one volume (I can find no more) of German and French ditto, sundry other German books unbound, as you left them, Percy's Ancient Poetry, and one volume of Anderson's Poets. I specify them, that you may not lose any. Secundo : a dressing-gown (value, fivepence) in which you used to sit and look like a con- jurer, when you were translating Wallenstein. A case of two razors, and a shaving-box and strap. This it has 132 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. cost me a severe struggle to part with. They are in a brown -paper parcel, which also contains sundry papers and poems, sermons, some few Epic Poems, one about Cain and Abel, which came from Poole, etc. etc., and also your tragedy ; with one or two small German books, and that drama in which Got-fader performs. Tertio : a small oblong box containing all your letters, collected from all your waste papers, and which fill the said little box. All other waste papers, which I judged worth sending, are in the paper parcel aforesaid. But you will find all your letters in the box by themselves. Thus have I discharged my conscience and my lumber-room of all your property, save and except a folio entitled Tyrrell's Bibliotheca Politico,, which you used to learn your politics out of when you wrote for the Post, mutatis mutandis, i.e., applying past inferences to modern data. I retain that, because I am sensible I am very deficient in the politics myself; and I have torn up (don't be angry, waste paper has risen forty per cent., and I can't afford to buy it) all Buonaparte's Letters, Arthur Young's Treatise on Corn, and one or two more light-armed infantry, which I thought better suited the flippancy of London discussion than the dignity of Keswick thinking. Mary says you will be in a passion about them, when you come to miss them ; but you must study philosophy. Read Albertus Magnus de Chartis Amissis five times over after phle- botomising, 'tis Burton's recipe, and then be angry with an absent friend if you can. Sara is obscure. Am I to understand by her letter, that she sends a kiss to Eliza Buckingham 1 Pray tell your wife that a note of interrogation on the superscription of a letter is highly ungrammatical : she proposes writing my name Lambe ? Lamb is quite enough. I have had the Anthology, and like only one thing in it, Lewti ; but of that the last stanza is detestable, the rest most ex- quisite : the epithet enviable would dash the finest poem. For God's sake (I never was more serious) don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in TO COLERIDGE. 133 print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five years ago when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets ; but, besides that, the meaning of " gentle " is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited ; the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think but you meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to believe that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer. I have hit off the following in imitation of old English poetry, which, I imagine, I am a dab at. The measure is unmeasurable ; but it most resembles that beautiful ballad, the " Old and Young Courtier ;" and in its feature of taking the extremes of two situations for just parallel, it resembles the old poetry certainly. If I could but stretch out the circumstances to twelve more verses, i.e., if I had as much genius as the writer of that old song, I think it would be excellent. It was to follow an imita- tion of Burton in prose, which you have not seen. But fate " and wisest Stewart " say No. I can send you 200 pens and six quires of paper immediately, if they will answer the carriage by coach. It would be foolish to pack 'em up cum multis libris et cceteris; they would all spoil. I only wait your commands to coach them. I would pay five-and-forty thousand carriages to read W.'s tragedy, of which I have heard so much and seen so little only what I saw at Stowey. Pray give me an order in writing on Longman for Lyrical Ballads. I have the first volume, and, truth to tell, six shillings is a broad shot. I cram all I can in, to save a multiplying of letters, those pretty comets with swinging tails. I'll just crowd in, God bless you ! C. LAMB. Wednesday night. 134 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTKE LXIIL] August 1800. Dear Manning I am going to ask a favour of you, and am at a loss how to do it in the most delicate manner. For this purpose I have been looking into Pliny's Letters, who is noted to have had the best grace in begging of all the ancients (I read him in the elegant translation of Mr. Melmoth), but not finding any case there exactly similar with mine, I am constrained to beg in my own barbarian way. To come to the point then, and hasten into the middle of things : have you a copy of your Algebra to give away? I do not ask it for myself; I have too much reverence for the Black Arts ever to approach thy circle, illustrious Trismegist ! But that worthy man, and excellent poet, George Dyer, made me a visit yesternight, on purpose to borrow one ; supposing, rationally enough, I must say, that you had made me a present of one before this ; the omission of which I take to have proceeded only from negligence ; but it is a fault. I could lend him no assistance. You must know he is just now diverted from the pursuit of the BELL LETTERS by a paradox, which he has heard his friend Frend (that learned mathematician) maintain, that the negative quantities of mathematicians were merce nugce, things scarcely in rerum naturd, and smack- ing too much of mystery for gentlemen of Mr. Trend's clear Unitarian capacity. However, the dispute once set a-going, has seized violently on George's pericranick ; and it is necessary for his health that he should speedily come to a resolution of his doubts. He goes about teasing his friends with his new mathematics : he even frantically talks of purchasing Manning's Algebra, which shows him far gone ; for, to my knowledge, he has not been master of seven shillings a good time. George's TO MANNING. 135 pockets and 's brain are two things in nature which do not abhor a vacuum. . . . Now, if you could step in, in this trembling suspense of his reason, and he should find on Saturday morning, lying for him at the Porter's Lodge, Clifford's Inn (his safest address), Manning's Algebra, with a neat manuscription in the blank leaf, running thus " FBOM THE AUTHOR," it might save his wits, and restore the unhappy author to those studies of poetry and criticism which are at present suspended, to the infinite regret of the whole literary world. N.B. Dirty backs, smeared leaves, and dogs' ears, will be rather a recommendation than otherwise. N.B. He must have the book as soon as possible, or nothing can withhold him from madly purchasing the book on tick. . . . Then shall we see him sweetly restored to the chair of Longinus to dictate in smooth and modest phrase the laws of verse ; to prove that Theocritus first introduced the Pastoral, and Virgil and Pope brought it to its perfection ; that Gray and Mason (who always hunt in couples in George's brain) have shown a great deal of poetical fire in their lyric poetry ; that Aristotle's rules are not to be servilely followed, which George has shown to have imposed great shackles upon modern genius. His poems, I find, are to consist of two vols. reasonable octavo; and a third book will exclusively contain criticisms, in which he asserts he has gone pretty deeply into the laws of blank verse and rhyme epic poetry, dramatic and pastoral ditto all which is to come out before Christmas. But, above all, he has touched most deeply upon the Drama, comparing the English with the modern German stage, their merits and defects. Apprehending that his studies (not to mention his turn, which I take to be chiefly towards the lyrical poetry) hardly qualified him for these disquisitions, I modestly inquired what plays he had read ? I found by George's reply that he had read Shakspeare, but that was a good while since : he calls him a great but irregular genius, which I think to be an original and just remark. 136 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ben Jonson, Shirley, Marlowe, Ford, and the worthies of Dodsley's Collection he confessed he had read none of them, but professed his intention of looking through them all, so as to be able to touch upon them in his book. So Shakspeare, Otway, and I believe Rowe, to whom he was naturally directed by Johnson's Lives, and these not read lately, are to stand him in stead of a general knowledge of the subject. God bless his dear absurd head ! By the by, did I not write you a letter with some- thing about an invitation in it 1 But let that pass ; I suppose it is not agreeable. N,B. It would not be amiss if you were to accom- pany your present with a dissertation on negative quantities. 0. L. LETTER LXIV.] 1800. George Dyer is an Archimedes, and an Archimagus, and a Tycho Brahe, and a Copernicus ; and thou art the darling of the Nine, and midwife to their wandering babe also ! We take tea with that learned poet and critic on Tuesday night, at half-past five, in his neat library. The repast will be light and Attic, with criticism. If thou couldst contrive to wheel up thy dear carcass on the Monday, and after dining with us on tripe, calves' kid- neys, or whatever else the Cornucopia of St. Clare may be willing to pour out on the occasion, might we not adjourn together to the Heathen's thou with thy Black Back, and I with some innocent volume of the Bell Letters, Shenstone, or the like : it would make him wash his old flannel gown (that has not been washed to my knowledge since it has been his Oh the long time!) with tears of joy. Thou shouldst settle his scruples and unravel his cobwebs, and sponge off the sad stuff that weighs upon his dear wounded pia mater. Thou shouldst restore light to his eyes, and him to his friends and the public. Parnassus should shower her civic crowns upon TO MANNING. 137 thee for saving the wits of a citizen ! I thought 1 saw a lucid interval in George the other night; he broke in upon my studies just at tea-time, and brought with him Dr. Anderson, an old gentleman who ties his breeches' knees with packthread, and boasts that he has been dis- appointed by ministers. The Doctor wanted to see me ; for I being a Poet, he thought I might furnish him with a copy of verses to suit his Agricultural Magazine. The Doctor, in the course of the conversation, mentioned a poem called the "Epigoniad," by one Wilkie, an epic poem, in which there is not one tolerable good line all through, but every incident and speech borrowed from Homer. George had been sitting inattentive, seemingly, to what was going on hatching of negative quantities when, suddenly, the name of his old friend Homer stung his pericranicks, and, jumping up, he begged to know where he could meet with Wilkie's works. It was a curious fact, he said, that there should be such an epic poem and he not know of it ; and he must get a copy of it, as he was going to touch pretty deeply upon the subject of the Epic and he was sure there must be some things good in a poem of 8000 lines ! I was pleased with this transient return of his reason and recurrence to his old ways of thinking : it gave me great hopes of a recovery, which nothing but your book can completely insure. Pray come on Monday, if you can, and stay your own time. I have a good large room with two beds in it, in the handsomest of which thou shalt repose a-nights, and dream of Spheroides. I hope you will understand by the nonsense of this letter that I am not melancholy at the thoughts of thy coming : I thought it necessary to add this, because you love precision. Take notice that our stay at Dyer's will not exceed eight o'clock ; after which our pursuits will be our own. But indeed I think a little recreation among the Bell Letters and poetry will do you some service in the interval of severer studies. I hope we shall fully discuss with George Dyer what I have never yet heard done to my 138 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. satisfaction, the reason of Dr. Johnson's malevolent stric- tures on the higher species of the Ode. LETTER LXV.] [August 9, 1800.] Dear Manning I suppose you have heard of Sophia Lloyd's good fortune, and paid the customary compli- ments to the parents. Heaven keep the new-born infant from star blasting and moon blasting, from epilepsy, marasmus, and the devil ! May he live to see many days, and they good ones ; some friends, and they pretty regular correspondents ! with as much wit and wisdom as will eat their bread and cheese together under a poor roof without quarrelling ! as much goodness as will earn heaven. Here I must leave off, my benedictory powers failing me. And now, when shall I catch a glimpse of your honest face -to -face countenance again? your fine dogmatical sceptical face by punch-light ? Oh ! one glimpse of the human face, and shake of the human hand, is better than whole reams of this cold, thin correspondence; yea, of more worth than all the letters that have sweated the fingers of sensibility, from Madame Se'vigne' and Balzac to Sterne and Shenstone. Coleridge is settled with his wife and the young philosopher at Keswick, with the Wordsworths. They have contrived to spawn a new volume of lyrical ballads, which is to see the light in about a month, and causes no little excitement in the literary world. George Dyer too, that good-natured heathen, is more than nine months gone with Ms twin volumes of ode, pastoral, sonnet, elegy, Spenserian, Horatian, Akensidish, and Masonic verse. Clio prosper the birth ! it will be twelve shillings out of somebody's pocket. I find he means to exclude "per- sonal satire," so it appears by his truly original advertise- ment. Well, God put it into the hearts of the English gentry to come in shoals and subscribe to his poems, for TO MANNING. 139 He never put a kinder heart into flesh of man than George Dyer's ! Now farewell, for dinner is at hand, 0. L. LETTER LXVL] August 11, 1800. My dear fellow (N.B. mighty familiar of late !) for me to come to Cambridge now is one of heaven's impos- sibilities. Metaphysicians tell us, even it can work nothing which implies a contradiction. I can explain this by telling you that I am engaged to do double duty (this hot weather !) for a man who has taken advantage of this very weather to go and cool himself in "green retreats " all the month of August. But for you to come to London instead ! muse upon it, revolve it, cast it about in your mind. I have a bed at your command. You shall drink rum, brandy, gin, aqua-vitae, usquebaugh, or whiskey a' nights ; and for the after-dinner trick, I have eight bottles of genuine port, which, mathematically divided, gives 1^ for every day you stay, provided you stay a week. Hear John Milton sing, " Let Euclid rest and Archimedes pause." Twenty-first Sonnet. And elsewhere, " What neat repast shall feast us, light l and choice, Of Attic taste, with wine,'-* whence we may rise To hear the lute well touch'd, or artful voice Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air ? " Indeed the poets are full of this pleasing morality, "Veni cito, Doniine Manning !" Think upon it. Excuse the paper ; it is all I have. C. LAMB. 1 We poets generally give light dinners. 2 No doubt the poet here alludes to port wine at 38s. the dozen. 140 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LBTTEE LXVIL] August 14, 1800. My head is playing all the tunes in the world, ringing such peals ! It has just finished the " Merry Christ Church Bells," and absolutely is beginning " Turn again, Whittington," Buz, buz, buz, bum, bum, bum, wheeze, wheeze, wheeze, fen, fen, fen, tinky, tinky, tinky, cr'annch. I shall certainly come to be condemned at last. I have been drinking too much for two days running. I find my moral sense in the last stage of a consumption, and my religion getting faint. This is disheartening ; but I trust the devil will not overpower me. In the midst of this infernal larum, Conscience is barking and yelping as loud as any of them. I have sat down to read over again your satire upon me in the Anthology, and I think I do begin to spy out something like beauty and design in it. I perfectly accede to all your alterations, and only desire that you had cut deeper, when your hand was in. In sober truth, I cannot see any great truth in the little dialogue called " Blenheim." It is rather novel and pretty, but the thought is very obvious and is but poor prattle, a thing of easy imitation. Pauper wit videri et est. In the next edition of the Anthology (which Phoebus avert, and those nine other wandering maids also !) please to blot out "gentle-hearted," and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, scld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question. And for Charles read Tom, or Bob, or Richard for mere delicacy. Hang you, I was beginning to forgive you, and believe iriTJarnest that the lugging in of my proper name was purely unintentional on your part, when looking back for further conviction, stares me in the face, "Charles Lamb of the India ffvuse." Now I am convinced it was all done in malice, TO COLERIDGE. 141 heaped sack-upon-sack, congregated, studied malice. You dog ! your 141st page shall not save you. I own I was just ready to acknowledge that there is a something not unlike good poetry in that page, if you had not run into the unintelligible abstraction-fit about the manner of the Deity's making spirits perceive his presence. God, nor created thing alive can receive any honour from such thin show-box attributes. By the by, where did you pick up that scandalous piece of private history about the angel and the Duchess of Devonshire ? If it is a fiction of your own, why truly it was a very modest one for you. Now I do affirm, that " Lewti " is a very beautiful poem. I ivas in earnest when I praised it. It describes a silly species of one not the wisest of passiona Therefore it cannot deeply affect a disenthralled mind. But such imagery, such novelty, such delicacy, and such versifica- tion never got into an Anthology before. I am only sorry that the cause of all the passionate complaint is not greater than the trifling circumstance of Lewti being out of temper one day. " Gaulberto " certainly has con- siderable originality, but sadly wants finishing. It is, as it is, one of the very best in the book. Next to " Lewti " I like the " Raven," which has a good deal of humour. I was pleased to see it again, for you once sent it me, and I have lost the letter which contained it. Now I am on the subject of Anthologies, I must say I am sorry the old pastoral way has fallen into disrepute. The gentry which now indite sonnets are certainly the legitimate descendants of the ancient shepherds. The same simpering face of description, the eld family face, is visibly continued in the line. Some of their ancestors' labours are yet to be found in Allan Ramsay's and Jacob Tonson's Miscellanies. But miscellanies decaying, and the old pastoral way dying of mere want, their successors (driven from their paternal acres) now-a-days settle and lie upon Magazines and Anthologies. This race of men are uncommonly addicted to superstition. Some of them are idolaters, and worship the moon. Others deify 142 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. qualities, as Love, Friendship, Sensibility ; or bare accidents, as Solitude. Grief and Melancholy have their respective altars and temples among them, as the heathens builded theirs to Mors, Febris, Pallor, etc. They all agree in ascribing a peculiar sanctity to the number 14. One of their own legislators amrmeth, that whatever exceeds that number "encroacheth upon the province of the elegy " vice versa, whatever " cometh short of that number abutteth upon the premises of the epigram." I have been able to discover but few images in their temples, which, like the caves of Delphos of old, are famous for giving echoes. They impute a religious importance to the letter 0, whether because by its round- ness it is thought to typify the moon, their principal goddess, or for its analogies to their own labours, all ending where they began, or for whatever other high and mystical reference, I have never been able to discover, but I observe they never begin their invocations to their gods without it, except indeed one insignificant sect among them, who use the Doric A, pronounced like Ah ! broad, instead. These boast to have restored the old Dorian mood. Now I am on the subject of poetry, I must announce to you, who doubtless in your remote part of the island have not heard tidings of so great a blessing, that George Dyer hath prepared two ponderous volumes full of poetry and criticism. They impend over the town, and are threatened to fall in the Winter. The first volume con- tains every sort of poetry, except personal satire, which George, in his truly original prospectus, renounceth for ever, whimsically foisting the intention in between the price of his book and the proposed number of subscribers. (If I can, I will get you a copy of his handbill.} He has tried his vein in every species besides the Spenserian, Thomsonian, Masonic, and Akensidish more especially. The second volume is all criticism ; wherein he demon- strates to the entire satisfaction of the literary world, iu a way that must silence all reply for ever, that the TO MANNING. 143 Pastoral was introduced by Theocritus, and polished by Virgil and Pope; that Gray and Mason (who always hunt in couples in George's brain) have a good deal of poetical fire and true lyric genius ; that Cowley was ruined by excess of wit (a warning to all moderns) ; that Charles Lloyd, Charles Lamb, and William Wordsworth, in later days, have struck the true chords of poesy. George, George ! with a head uniformly wrong, and a heart uniformly right, that I had power and might equal to my wishes : then I would call the gentry of thy native island, and they should come in troops, flocking at the sound of thy prospectus trumpet, and crowding who shall be first to stand in thy list of subscribers ! I can only put twelve shillings into thy pocket (which, I will answer for them, will not stick there long), out of a pocket almost as bare as thine. Is it not a pity so much fine writing should be erased? But, to tell the truth, I began to scent that I was getting into that sort of style which Longinus and Dionysius Halicarnassus aptly call "the affected." 0. L. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER LXVIII.] August 22, 1800. Dear Manning You needed not imagine any apology necessary. Your fine hare and fine birds (which are just now dangling by our kitchen blaze) discourse most eloquent music in your justification. You just nicked my palate. For with all due decorum and leave may it be spoken, my worship hath taken physic to-day, and being low and puling, requireth to be pampered. Foh ! how beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose ! For you know we extract a divine spirit of gravy from those materials, which, duly compounded with a consistence of bread and cream (y'clept bread- sauce), each to each giving double grace, do mutually illustrate and set off (as skilful gold foils to rare jewels^ 14.4 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. your partridge, pheasant, woodcock, snipe, teal, widgeon and the other lesser daughters of the ark. My friend- ship, struggling with my carnal and fleshly prudence (which suggests that a bird a man is the proper allotment in such cases), yearneth sometimes to have thee here to pick a wing or so. I question if your Norfolk sauces match our London culinaric. George Dyer has introduced me to the table of an agreeable old gentleman, Dr. Anderson, who gives hot legs of mutton and grape pies at his sylvan lodge at Isleworth ; where, in the middle of a street, he has shot up a wall most preposterously before his small dwelling, which, with the circumstance of his taking several panes of glass out of bed-room windows (for air), causeth his neighbours to speculate strangely on the state of the good man's pericranicks. Plainly, he lives under the reputation of being deranged. George does not mind this circumstance ; he rather likes him the better for it. The Doctor, in his pursuits, joins agricultural to poetical science, and has set George's brains mad about the old Scotch writers, Barbour, Douglas's ^neid, Blind Harry, etc. We returned home in a return postchaise (having dined with the Doctor), and George kept wondering and wondering, for eight or nine turnpike miles, what was the name, and striving to recollect the name, of a poet anterior to Barbour. I begged to know what was remaining of his works. "There is nothing extant of his works, Sir; but by all accounts he seems to have been a fine genius ! " This fine genius, without anything to show for it, or any title beyond George's courtesy, without even a name; and Barbour, and Douglas, and Blind Harry now are the predominant sounds in George's pia mater, and their buzzings exclude politics, criticism, and algebra the late lords of that illustrious lumber- room. Mark, he has never read any of these books, but is impatient till he reads them all at the Doctor's sug- gestion. Poor Dyer ! his friends should be careful what sparks they let fall into such inflammable matter. TO COLERIDGE. 145 Could I have my will of the heathen, I would lock him up from all access of new ideas ; I would exclude all critics that would not swear me first (upon their Virgil) that they would feed him with nothing but the old, safe, familiar notions and sounds (the rightful aborigines of his brain) Gray, Akenside, and Mason. In these sounds, reiterated as often as possible, there could be nothing painful, nothing distracting. God bless me, here are the birds, smoking hot ! All that is gross and unspiritual in me rises at the sight ! Avaunt friendship, and all memory of absent friends ! 0. LAMB. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTEB LXIX.] [Early in August] 1800. Dear Coleridge Soon after I wrote to you last, an offer was made me by Gutch (you must remember him, at Christ's ; you saw him, slightly, one day with Thomson at our house), to come and lodge with him, at his house in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. This was a very comfortable offer to me, the rooms being at a reason- able rent, and including the use of an old servant, besides being infinitely preferable to ordinary lodgings in our case, as you must perceive. As Gutch knew all our storv *md the perpetual liability to a recurrence in my sister's dis- order, probably to the end of her life, I certainly think the offer very generous and very friendly. I have jjot three rooms (including servant) under 34 a year. Here I soon found myself at home ; and here, in six weeks after, Mary was well enough to join me. So we are once more settled. I am afraid we are not plnced out of the reach of future interruptions. But I am determined to take what snatches of pleasure we can between the acts of our distressful drama. ... I have passed two days at Oxford, on a visit which I have long put off, to Gutch's family. The sight of the Bodleian Library, and, above all, a fine bust of Bishop Taylor, at All Souls', were par- VOL. i. L 146 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. ticularly gratifying to me. Unluckily, it was not a family where I could take Mary with me, and I am afraid there is something of dishonesty in any pleasures I take without her. She never goes anywhere. I do not know what I can add to this letter. I hope you are better by this time ; and I desire to be affectionately remembered to Sara and Hartley. I expected before this to have had tidings of another little philosopher. Lloyd's wife is on the point of favour- ing the world. Have you seen the new edition of Burns ? his posthum- ous works and letters ? I have only been able to procure the first volume, which contains his life very confusedly and badly written, and interspersed with dull pathological and medical discussions. It is written by a Dr. Currie. Do you know the well-meaning doctor? Alas, ne sutor ultra crepidam ! I hope to hear again from you very soon. Godwin is gone to Ireland on a visit to Grattan. Before he went I passed much time with him, and he has showed me par- ticular attentions : N.B. A thing I much like. Your books are all safe : only I have not thought it necessary to fetch away your last batch, which I understand are at Johnson's, the bookseller, who has got quite as much room, and will take as much care of them as myself ; and you can send for them immediately from him. I wish you would advert to a letter I sent you at Grassmere about Christabel, and comply with my request contained therein. Love to all friends round Skiddaw. C. LAMB. To J. M. GUTCH. LETTEE LXX.] [Probably Autumn of 1800.] Dear Gutch Anderson is not come home, and I am almost afraid to tell you what has happened, lest it should seem to have happened by my fault in not writing for you home sooner. This morning Henry, the eldest lad, was missing: we supposed he was only gone out TO COLERIDGE. 147 on a morning's stroll, and that he would return; but he did not return, and we discovered that he had opened your desk before he went, and I suppose taken all the money he could find, for on diligent search I could find none, and on opening your letter to Anderson, which I thought necessary to get at the key, I learn that you had a good deal of money there. Several people have been here after you to-day, and the boys seem quite frightened and do not know what to do. In particular one gentleman wants to have some writings finished by Tuesday. For God's sake, set out by the first coach ! Mary has been cryiug all day about it, and I am now just going to some law-stationer in the neighbourhood that the eldest boy has recommended, to get him to come and be in the house for a day or two to manage. I cannot think what detains Anderson. His sister is quite frightened about him. I am very sorry I did not write yesterday, but Henry persuaded me to wait till he could ascertain when some job must be done for Mr. Foulkes, and as nothing had occurred besides, I did not like to disturb your pleasures. I now see my error, and shall be heartily ashamed to see your (At this point the reader of the letter turns over the leaf, and finds) A BITE ! ! ! Anderson is come home, and the wheels of thy business are going on as ever ! The boy is honest, and I am thy friend ! And how does the coach-maker's daughter 1 Thou art her Phaeton, her Gig, and her Sociable. Commend me to Rob. Saturday. 0- LMB. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER LXXL] August 26, 1800. How do you like this little epigram ? It is not my writing, nor had I any finger in it. If you concur with me in thinking it very elegant and very original, I shall 148 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. be tempted to name the author to you. I will just hint that it is almost or quite a first attempt. HELEN. HIGH-BORN Helen, round your dwelling These twenty years I've paced in vain ; Haughty beauty, thy lover's duty Hath been to glory in his pain. High-born Helen, proudly telling Stories of thy cold disdain ; I starve, I die, now you comply, And I no longer can complain. These twenty years I've lived on tears, Dwelling for ever on a frown ; On sighs I've fed, your scorn my bread ; I perish now you kind are grown. Can I, who loved my beloved But for the scorn " was in her eye," Can I be moved for my beloved, When she "returns me sigh for sigh?" In stately pride, by my bed-side, High-born Helen's portrait's hung ; Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays Are nightly to the portrait sung. To that I weep, nor ever sleep, Complaining all night long to her, Helen, grown old, no longer cold, Said, " You to all men I prefer." By the by, I have a sort of recollection that some body, I think you, promised me a sight of Wordsworth's Tragedy. I should be very glad of it just now ; for 1 have got Manning with me, and should like to read it with him. But this, I confess, is a refinement. Under any circumstances, alone, in Cold-Bath prison, or in the desert island, just when Prospero and his crew had set off, with Caliban in a cage, to Milan, it would be a treat to me to read that play. Manning has read it, so has TO COLERIDGE. 149 Lloyd, and all Lloyd's family ; but I could not get him to betray his trust by giving me a sight of it. Lloyd is sadly deficient in some of those virtuous vices. I have just lit upon a most beautiful fiction of Hell punishments by the author of ffurlothrumbo, a mad farce. The inventor imagines that in Hell there is a great caldron of hot water, in which a man can scarce hold his finger, and an immense sieve over it, into which the probationary souls are put M And all the little souls Pop thro' the riddle holes !" George Dyer is the only literary character I am happily acquainted with. The oftener I see him, the more deeply I admire him. He is goodness itself. If I could but calculate the precise date of his death, I would write a novel on purpose to make George the hero. I could hit him off to a hair. George brought a Dr. Anderson to see me. The doctor is a very pleasant old man, a great genius for agriculture, one that ties his breeches-knees with pack- thread, and boasts of having had disappointments from ministers. The doctor happened to mention an epic poem by one Wilkie, called the Epigoniad, in which he assured us there is not one tolerable line from beginning to end, but that all the characters, incidents, etc., are verbally copied from Homer. George, who had been sitting quite inattentive to the Doctor's criticism, no sooner heard the sound of Homer strike his pericranicks, than up he gets, and declares he must see that poem immediately : where was it to be had 1 An epic poem of 8000 lines, and he not hear of it ! There must be some good things in it, and it was necessary he should see it, for he had touched pretty deeply upon that subject in his criticisms on the Epic. George has touched pretty deeply upon the Lyric, I find; he has also prepared a dissertation on the Drama and the comparison of the English and German theatres. As I rather doubted his competency to do the latter, knowing that his peculiar 150 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. turn lies in the lyric species of composition, I questioned George what English plays he had read. I found that he had read Shakspeare (whom he calls an original, but irregular, genius) ; but it was a good while ago ; and he has dipped into Howe and Otway, I suppose having found their names in Johnson's Lives at full length ; and upon this slender ground he has undertaken the task. He never seemed even to have heard of Fletcher, Ford, Mar- lowe, Massiuger, and the worthies of Dodsley's collection ; but he is to read all these, to prepare him for bringing out his "Parallel" in the Winter. I find he is also determined to vindicate poetry from the shackles which Aristotle and some others have imposed upon it, which is very good natured of him, and very necessary just now. Now I am touching so deeply upon poetry, can I forget that I have just received from Cottle a magnificent copy of his Guinea Alfred. Four-and-twenty books to read in the dog-days ! I got as far as the Mad Monk the first day, and fainted. Mr. Cottle's genius strongly points him to the Pastoral, but his inclinations divert him per- petually from his calling. He imitates Southey, as Rowe did Shakspeare, with his "Good morrow to ye; good master Lieutenant." Instead of a man, a woman, a daughter, he constantly writes, one a man, one a woman, one his daughter. Instead of the king, the hero, he con- stantly writes, he the king, he the hero ; two flowers of rhetoric, palpably from the "Joan." But Mr. Cottle soars a higher pitch : and when he is original, it is in a most original way indeed. His terrific scenes are inde- fatigable. Serpents, asps, spiders, ghosts, dead bodies, staircases made of nothing, with adders' tongues for bannisters. What a brain he must have ! He puts as many plums in his pudding as my grandmother used to do; and then his emerging from Hell's horrors into light, and treading on pure flats of this earth for twenty- three books together ! C. L. TO MANNING. 151 To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER LXXIL] October 5, 1800. C. L.'s moral sense presents her compliments to Doctor Manning, is very thankful for his medical advice, but is happy to add that her disorder has died of itself. Dr. Manning, Coleridge has left us, to go into the North, on a visit to "Wordsworth. With him have flown all my splendid prospects of engagement with the M&rning Post, all my visionary guineas, the deceitful wages of unborn scandal. In truth, I wonder you took it up so seriously. All my intention was but to make a little sport with such public and fair game as Mr. Pitt, Mr. Wilberforce, Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Devil, etc. gentry dipped in Styx all over, whom no paper-javelin- lings can touch. To have made free with these cattle, where was the harm? 'twould have been but giving a polish to lamp-black, not nigrifying a negro primarily. After all, I cannot but regret my involuntary virtue. Damn virtue that's thrust upon us; it behaves itself with such constraint, till conscience opens the window and lets out the goose. I had struck off two imitations of Burton, quite abstracted from any modern allusions, which it waa my intent only to lug in from time to time to make 'em popular. Stuart has got these, with an introductory letter ; but, not hearing from him, I have ceased from my labours, but I write to him to-day to get a final answer. I am afraid they won't do for a paper. Burton is a scarce gentleman, not much known, else 1 had done 'em pretty well I have also hit off a few lines in the name of Burton, being a " Conceit of Diabolic Possession." Burton was a man often assailed by deepest melancholy, and at other times much given to laughing and jesting, as is the way with melancholy men. I will send them to you : they 152 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. were almost extempore, and no great things ; but you will indulge them. Robert Lloyd is come to town. Priscilla meditates going to see Pizarro at Drury Lane to-night (from her uncle's), under cover of coming to dine with me ... heu tempora / heu mores ! I have barely time to finish, as I expect her and Robin every minute. Yours as usual. C. L. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER LXXIII.] October 9, 1800. I suppose you have heard of the death of Amos Cottle. I paid a solemn visit of condolence to his brother, accom- panied by George Dyer, of burlesque memory. I went, trembling to see poor Cottle so immediately upon the event. He was in black ; and his younger brother was also in black. Everything wore an aspect suitable to the respect due to the freshly dead. For some time after our entrance, nobody spake till George modestly put in a question, whether Alfred was likely to sell This was Lethe to Cottle, and his poor face, wet with tears, and his kind eye brightened up in a moment. Now I felt it was my cue to speak. I had to thank him for a present of a magnificent copy, and had promised to send him my remarks, the least thing I could do ; so I ventured to suggest, that I perceived a considerable improvement he had made in his first book since the state in which he first read it to me. Joseph, who till now had sat with his knees cowering in by the fireplace, wheeled about, and with great difficulty of body shifted the same round to the corner of a table where I was sitting, and first station- ing one thigh over the other, which is his sedentary mood, and placidly fixing his benevolent face right against mine, waited my observations. At that moment it came strongly into my mind, that I had got Uncle Toby before me, he looked so kind and so good. I could not say an TO COLERIDGE. 153 unkind thing of Alfred. So I set my memory to work to recollect what was the name of Alfred's Queen, and with some adroitness recalled the well-known sound to Cottle's ears of Alswitha. At that moment I could per- ceive that Cottle had forgot his brother was so lately become a blessed spirit. In the language of mathemati- cians the author was as 9, the brother as 1. I felt my cue, and strong pity working at the root, I went to work, and beslabber'd Alfred with most unqualified praise, or only qualifying my praise by the occasional politic inter- position of an exception taken against trivial faults, slips, and human imperfections, which, by removing the appear- ance of insincerity, did but in truth heighten the relish. Perhaps I might have spared that refinement, for Joseph was in a humour to hope and believe all things. What I said was beautifully supported, corroborated, and con- firmed by the stupidity of his brother on my left hand, and by George on my right, who has an utter incapacity of comprehending that there can be anything bad in poetry. All poems are good poems to George ; all men are fine geniuses. So what with my actual memory, of which I made the most, and Cottle's own helping me out, for I really had forgotten a good deal of Alfred, I made shift to discuss the most essential parts entirely to the satisfaction of its author, who repeatedly declared that he loved nothing better than candid criticism. Was I a candid grayhound now for all this 1 or did I do right 1 I believe I did. The effect was luscious to my conscience. For all the rest of the evening Amos was no more heard of, till George revived the subject by inquiring whether some account should not be drawn up by the friends of the deceased to be inserted in Phillips's Monthly Obituary; adding, that Amos was estimable both for his head and heart, and would have made a fine poet if he had lived. To the expediency of this measure Cottle fully assented, but could not help adding that he always thought that the qualities of his brother's heart exceeded those of his head. I believe his brother, when living, had formed 154 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. precisely the same idea of him ; and I apprehend the world will assent to both judgments. I rather guess that the Brothers were poetical rivals. I judged so when I saw them together. Poor Cottle, I must leave him after his short dream, to muse again upon his poor brother, for whom I am sure in secret he will yet shed many a tear. ITow send me in return some Greta news. 0. L. To WORDSWORTH. LETTER LXXIV.] October 13, 1800. Dear Wordsworth I have not forgot your commissions. But the truth is (and why should I not confess it ?) I am not plethorically abounding in cash at this present. Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded ; but it does not become me to speak of myself. My motto is " con- tented with little, yet wishing for more." Now, the books you wish for would require some pounds, which, I am sorry to say, I have not by me ; so I will say at once, if you will give me a draft upon your town banker for any sum you propose to lay out, I will dispose of it to the very best of my skill in choice old books, such as my own soul loveth. In fact, I have been waiting for the liquida- tion of a debt to enable myself to set about your commis- sion handsomely ; for it is a scurvy thing to cry, " Give me the money first," and I am the first of the family of the Lambs that have done it for many centuries ; but the debt remains as it was, and my old friend that I accom- modated has generously forgot it ! The books which you want, I calculate at about 8. Ben Jonson is a guinea book. Beaumont and Fletcher, in folio, the right folio, not now to be met with ; the octavos are about 3. As to any other dramatists, I do not know where to find them, except what are in Dodsley's Old Plays, which are about 3 also. Massinger I never saw but at one shop, and it is now gone ; but one of the editions of Dodsley contains TO MANNING. 155 about a fourth (the best) of his plays. Congreve, and the rest of King Charles's moralists, are cheap and acces- sible. The works on Ireland I will inquire after ; but I fear Spenser's is not to be had apart from his poems ; I never saw it. But you may depend upon my sparing no pains to furnish you as complete a library of old poets and dramatists as will be prudent to buy ; for, I suppose you do not include the 20 edition of Hamlet, single play, which Kemble has. Marlowe's plays and poems are totally vanished ; only one edition of Dodsley retains one, and the other two of his plays : but John Ford is the man after Shakspeare. Let me know your will and pleasure soon, for I have observed, next to the pleasure of buying a bargain for one's self, is the pleasure of per- suading a friend to buy it. It tickles one with the image of an imprudency, without the penalty usually annexed. 0. LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER LXXV.] October 16, 1800. Dear Manning Had you written one week before you did, I certainly should have obeyed your injunction ; you should have seen me before my letter. I will explain to you my situation. There are six of us in one department. Two of us (within these four days) are confined with severe fevers ; and two more, who belong to the Tower Militia, expect to have marching orders on Friday. Now six are absolutely necessary. I have already asked and obtained two young hands to supply the loss of the feverites. And, with the other prospect before me, you may believe I cannot decently ask leave of absence for myself. All I can promise (and I do promise, with the sincerity of St. Peter, and the contrition of sinner Peter if I fail) is that I will come the very first spare week, and go nowhere till I have been at Cambridge. No matter 156 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. if you are in a state of pupilage when I oome ; for I can employ myself in Cambridge very pleasantly in the morn- ings. Are there not libraries, halls, colleges, books, pictures, statues f I wish you had made London in your way. There is an exhibition quite uncommon in Europe, which could not have escaped your genius, a live rattle- snake, ten feet in length, and the thickness of a big leg. I went to see it last night by candlelight. We were ushered into a room very little bigger than ours at Pentonville. A man and woman and four boys live in this room, joint tenants with nine snakes, most of them such as no remedy has been discovered for their bite. We walked into the middle, which is formed by a half moon of wired boxes, all mansions of snakes whip-snakes, thunder-snakes, pig-nose-snakes, American vipers, and this monster. He lies curled up in folds. Immediately a stranger entered (for he is used to the family, and sees them play at cards,) he set up a rattle like a watchman's in London, or near as loud, and reared up a head, from the midst of these folds, like a toad, and shook his head, and showed every sign a snake can show of irritation. I had the foolish curiosity to strike the wires with my finger, and the devil flew at me with his toad-mouth wide open ; the inside of his mouth is quite white. I had got my finger away, nor could he well have bit me with hie/ big mouth, which would have been certain death in j&ve minutes. But it frightened me so much, that I did not recover my voice for a minute's space. I forgot, in my fear, that he was secured. You would have forgot too, for 'tis incredible how such a monster can be confined in small gauzy-looking wires. I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to heaven you could see it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large thigh. I could not retreat without infringing on another box ; and just behind, a little devil not an inch from my back had got his nose out, with some difficulty and pain, quite through the bars ! He was soon taught better manners. A.11 the snakes were curious, and objects of terror : but TO MANNING. 157 this monster, like Aaron's serpent, swallowed up the impression of the rest. He opened his cii r sH mouth, when he made at me, as wide as his head was broad. I hallooed out quite loud, and felt pains all over my body with the fright. I have had the felicity of hearing George Dyer read out one book of the Farmer's Boy. I thought it rather childish. No doubt, there is originality in it (which, in your self-taught geniuses, is a most rare quality, they generally getting hold of some bad models, in a scarcity of books, and forming their taste on them), but no selection. All is described. Mind, I have only heard read one book. Yours sin- cerely, Philo-Snake, C. L. LBTTEB LXXVI.] November 3, 1800. JEcquid meditatur Archimedes ? What is Euclid doingt What hath happened to learned Trismegist? Doth he take it in ill part, that his humble friend did not comply with his courteous invitation ? Let it suffice, I could not come. Are impossibilities nothing 1 be they abstractions of the intellect ? or not (rather) most sharp and mortify- ing realities 1 nuts in the Will's mouth too hard for her to crack 1 brick and stone walls in her way, which she can by no means eat through 1 sore lets, impedimenta viarum no thoroughfares 1 racemi nimium alte pendentes ? Is the phrase classic? I allude to the grapes in ^Esop, which cost the fox a strain, and gained the world an aphorism. Observe the superscription of this letter. In adapting the size of the letters, which constitute your name and Mr. Crisp's name respectively, I had au eye to your different stations in life. "Tis truly curious, and must lie soothing to an aristocrat. I wonder it has never been hit on before my time. I have made an acquisition latterly of a pleasant hind, one Rickman, to whom I was introduced by George Dyer, not the most flattering auspices under which one man can be introduced to 158 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. another. George brings all sorts of people together, setting up a sort of agrarian law, or common property, in matter of society ; but for once he has done me a great pleasure, while he was only pursuing a principle, as ignes fatui may light you home. This Rickman lives in our Buildings, immediately opposite our house ; the finest fellow to drop in a' nights, about nine or ten o'clock cold bread and cheese time just in the wishing time of the night, when you urish for somebody to come in, without a distinct idea of a probable anybody. Just in the nick, neither too early to be tedious, nor too late to sit a reasonable time. He is a most pleasant hand ; a fine rattling fellow, has gone through life laugh- ing at solemn apes ; himself hugely literate, oppressively full of information in all stuff of conversation, from matter of fact to Xenophon and Plato can talk Greek with Porson, politics with Thelwall, conjecture with George Dyer, nonsense with me, and anything with anybody; a great farmer, somewhat concerned in an agricultural magazine ; reads no poetry but Shakspeare ; very intimate with Southey, but never reads his poetry; relishes George Dyer ; thoroughly penetrates into the ridiculous wherever found ; understands the^rs^ time (a great desideratum in common minds) you need never twice speak to him ; does not want explanations, translations, limitations, as Professor Godwin does when you make an assertion ; up to anything; down to everything; whatever sapit hominem. A perfect man. All this farrago, which must perplex you to read, and has put me to a little trouble to select, only proves how impossible it is to describe a pleasant hand. You must see Kickman to know him, for he is a species in one ; a new class ; an exotic ; any slip of which I am proud to put in my garden-pot ; the clearest headed fellow ; fullest of matter, with least ver- bosity. If there be any alloy in my fortune to have met with such a man, it is that he commonly divides his time between town and country, having some foolish family ties at Christchurch, by which means he can only gladden TO MANNING. 159 our London hemisphere with returns of light He is now going for six weeks. At last I have written to Kemble, to know the event of my play, which was presented last Christmas. As I suspected, came an answer back that the copy was lost, and could not be found no hint that anybody had to this day ever looked into it with a courteous (reasonable !) request of another copy (if I had one by me), and a promise of a definite answer in a week. I could not resist so facile and moderate a demand ; so scribbled out another, omitting sundry things, such as the witch story, about half of the forest scene (which is too leisurely for story), and transposing that soliloquy about England getting drunk, which, like its reciter, stupidly stood alone, nothing prevenient or antevenient; and cleared away a 0od deal besides ; and sent this copy, written all out (with alterations, etc., requiring judgment) in one day and a half! I sent it last night, and am in weekly expectation of the tolling bell and death-warrant. This is all my London news. Send me some from the banks of Cam, as the poets delight to speak, especially George Dyer, who has no other name nor idea nor defini- tion of Cambridge. Its being a market town, sending members to Parliament, never entered into his definition. It was and is simply the banks of the Cam, or the fair Cam, as Oxford is the banks of the Isis, or the fair Isis. Yours in all humility, most illustrious Trismegist, C. LAMB. (Read on ; there's more at the bottom. ) You ask me about the Farmer's Boy. Don't you think the fellow who wrote it (who is a shoemaker) has a poor mind ? Don't you find he is always silly about poor Giles, and those abject kind of phrases, which mark a man that looks up to wealth ? None of Burus's poet dignity. What do you think 1 I have just opened him ; but he makes me sick. 160 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Dyer knows the shoemaker, a damn'd stupid hound in company] but George promises to introduce him indis- criminately to all friends. LETTER LXXVII.] November 28, 1800. Dear Manning I have received a very kind invitation from Lloyd and Sophia, to go and spend a month with them at the Lakes. Now it fortunately happens (which is so seldom the case) that I have spare cash by me, enough to answer the expenses of so long a journey ; and I am determined to get away from the office by some means. The purpose of this letter is to request of you (my dear friend), that you will not take it unkind if I decline my proposed visit to Cambridge for the present. Perhaps I shall be able to take Cambridge in my way, going or coming. I need not describe to you the expect- ations which such an one as myself, pent up all my life in a dirty city, have formed of a tour to the Lakes. Consider Grasmere ! Ambleside ! Wordsworth ! Cole- ridge ! I hope you will. Hills, woods, lakes, and mount- ains, to the devil. I will eat snipes with thee, Thomas Manning. Only confess, confess, a bite. P.S. I think you named the 16th ; but was it not modest of Lloyd to send such an invitation ! It shows his knowledge of money and time. I should be loth to think he meant " Ironic satire sidelong sklented On my poor pursie." BURNS. For my part, with reference to my friends northward, I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth, and sea, and sky (when all is said), is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly, and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring upon the gilded looking-glass (that strained my TO GODWIN. 161 friend's purse-strings in the purchase) nor his five-shilling print, over the mantelpiece, of old Nabbs the carrier (which only betrays his false taste). Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world ; eye-pamper- ing, but satisfies no heart. Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops spark- ling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat semp- stresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastrycooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchmen at night, with bucks reeling home drunk ; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of "Fire!" and "Stop thief!"; inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, " Jeremy Taylors," " Burtons on Melancholy," and "Religio Medicis," on every stalL These are thy pleasures, London ! with thy many sins. City, abounding in w . . ., for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang ! 0. L. To WILLIAM GODWIN. Thursday Morning, LETTER LXXVI1I.] December 4, 1800. Dear Sir I send this speedily after the heels of Cooper (0 ! the dainty expression) to say that Mary is obliged to stay at home on Sunday to receive a female friend, from whom I am equally glad to escape. So that we shall be by ourselves. I write, because it may make some difference in your marketing, etc. C. L. I am sorry to put you to the expense of twopence post- age. But I calculate thus : if Mary comes she will VOL. i. M 162 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. eat Beef 2 plates, . 4d. Batter Pudding 1 do. . . 2d. Beer, a pint, " * . . 2d. Wine, 3 glasses, . . lid. I drink no wine Chesnuts, after dinner, . 2d. Tea and supper at moderate calculation, . ; . 9d. 2s. 6d. From which deduct 2d. postage. 2s. 4d. You are a clear gainer by her not coming. Wednesday Morning, LETTER LXXIX.] December 11, 1800. Dear Sir I expected a good deal of pleasure from your company to-morrow, but I am sorry I must beg of you to excuse me. I have been confined ever since I saw you with one of the severest colds I ever experienced, occasioned by being in the night air on Sunday and on the following day very foolishly. I am neither in health nor spirits to meet company. I hope and trust I shall get out on Saturday night. You will add to your many favours by transmitting to me as early as possible as many tickets as conveniently you can spare, Yours truly, C. L. I have been plotting how to abridge the Epilogue. But I cannot see that any lines can be spared, retaining the connection, except these two, which are better out " Why should I instance, etc., The sick man's purpose, etc.," and then the following line must run thus, " The truth by an example best is shown." Excuse this important postscript. TO MANNING. J63 To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER LXXX.] December 13, 1800 I have received your letter this moment, not having been at the office. I have just time to scribble down the epilogue. To your epistle I will just reply, that I will certainly come to Cambridge before January is out ; I'll come when I can. You shall have an amended copy of my play early next week. Mary thanks you ; but her handwriting is too feminine to be exposed to a Cambridge gentleman, though I endeavour to persuade her that you understand algebra, and must understand her hand. The play is the man's you wot of; but for Heaven's sake do not mention it : it is to come out in a feigned name, as one Tobin's. I will omit the introductory lines which connect it with the play, and give you the concluding tale, which is the mass and bulk of the epilogue. The name is Jack Incident. It is all about promise-breaking : you will see it all, if you read the papers. u Jack, of dramatic genius justly vain, Purchased a renter's share at Drury Lane ; A prudent man in every other matter, Known at his club-room for an honest hatter ; Humane and courteous, led a civil life, And has been seldom known to beat his wife ; But Jack is now grown quite another man, Frequents the green-room, knows the plot and plan Of each new piece, And has been seen to talk with Sheridan t In at the play-house just at six he pops, And never quits it till the curtain drops, Is never absent on the author's night, Knows actresses and actors too by sight ; So humble, that with Suett he'll confer, Or take a pipe with plain Jack Bannister ; Nay, with an author has been known so free, He once suggested a catastrophe In short, John dabbled till his head was turn'd ; His wife remonstrated, his neighbours mourn'd, 164 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. His customers were dropping off apace, And Jack's affairs began to wear a piteous face. One night his wife began a curtain lecture ; ' My dearest Johnny, husband, spouse, protector, Take pity on your helpless babes and me, Save us from ruin, you from bankruptcy Look to your business, leave these cursed plays, And try again your old industrious ways.' Jack who was always scared at the Gazette, And had some bits of scull uninjured yet, Promised amendment, vow'd his wife spake reason, 1 He would not see another play that season ' Three stubborn fortnights Jack his promise kept, Was late and early in his shop, eat, slept, And walk'd and talk'd, like ordinary men ; No wit, but John the hatter once again Visits his club : when lo ! one fatal night His wife with horror view'd the well-known sight John's hat, wig, snuff-box well she knew his tricks- And Jack decamping at the hour of six ; Just at the counter's edge a playbill lay, Announcing that ' Pizarro ' was the play ' Johnny, Johnny, this is your old doing.' Quoth Jack, ' Why what the devil storm's a-brewing ? About a harmless play why all this fright ? I'll go and see it if it's but for spite Zounds, woman ! Nelson's to be there to-night.' " N.B. This was intended for Jack Bannister to speak ; but the sage managers have chosen Miss Heard, except Miss Tidswell the worst actress ever seen or heard. Now I remember I have promised the loan of my play. I will lend it instantly, and you shall get it ('pon honour !) by this day week. I must go and dress for the boxes ! First night ! Finding I have time, I transcribe the rest. Observe, you must read the last first ; it begins thus : (The names I took from a little outline G. gave me. I have not read the play.) " Ladies, ye've seen how Guzman's consort died, Poor victim of a Spaniard brother's pride, When Spanish honour through the world was blown, And Spanish beauty for the best was known. In that romantic, unenlighteu'd time, TO GODWIN. 165 A breach of promise was a sort of crime Which of you handsome English ladies here, But deems the penance bloody and severe ? A whimsical old Saragossa fashion, That a dead father's dying inclination, Should live to thwart a living daughter's passion : Unjustly on the sex ice men exclaim, Rail at your vices, and commit the same ; Man is a promise-breaker from the womb, And goes a promise-breaker to the tomb What need we instance here the lover's vow, The sick man's purpose, or the great man's bow ? The truth by few examples best is shown Instead of many which are better known, Take poor Jack Incident, that's dead and gone. Jack," etc. etc. etc. Now you have it all how do you like it? I am going to hear it recited ! ! 1 0. L. To WILLIAM GODWIN. LETTER LXXXL] Late o' Sunday, December 14, 1800. Dear Sir I have performed my office in a slovenly way, but judge for me. I sat down at six o'clock, and never left reading (and I read out to Mary) your play till 10. In this sitting I noted down lines as they occurred, exactly as you will read my rough paper. Do not be frightened at the bulk of my remarks, for they are almost all upon single lines, which, put together, do not amount to a hundred, and many of them merely verbal. I had but one object in view, abridgment for compression sake. I have used a dogmatical language (which is truly ludi- crous when the trivial nature of my remarks is considered) ; and, remember, my office was to hunt out faults. You may fairly abridge one half of them, as a fair deduction for the infirmities of Error and a single reading, which leaves only fifty objections, most of them merely against words, on no short play. Remember, you constituted me 166 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Executioner, and a hangman has been seldom seen to be ashamed of his profession before Master Sheriff. We'll talk of the Beauties (of which I am more than ever sure) when we meet. Yours truly, C. L. I will barely add, as you are on the very point of printing, that in my opinion neither prologue nor epilogue should accompany the play. It can only serve to remind your readers of its fate. Both suppose an audience, and, that jest being gone, must convert into burlesque. Nor would I (but therein custom and decorum must be a law) print the actors' names. Some things must be kept out of sight. I have done, and I have but a few square inches of paper to fill up. I am emboldened by a little jorum of punch (vastly good) to say that next to one, man, I am the most hurt at our ill success. The breast of Hecuba, where she did suckle Hector, looked not to be more lovely than Marshal's forehead when it spit forth sweat, at Critic-swords contending. I remember two honest lines by Marvel (whose poems by the way I am just going to " Where every Mower's wholesome heat Smells like an Alexander's sweat. " To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER LXXXIL] December 16, 1800. We are damn'd ! Not the facetious epilogue itself could save us ; for, as the editor of the Morning Post (quick-sighted gentleman !) hath this morning truly ob- served (I beg pardon if I falsify his words ; their profound sense I am sure I retain ;) both prologue and epilogue were worthy of accompanying such a piece ; and indeed (mark the profundity, Mr. Manning !) were received with proper indignation by such of the audience only as thought TO MANNING. 167 either worth attending to. Professor, thy glories wax dim ! Again, the incomparable author of the True Briton declareth in his paper (bearing same date) that the epilogue was an indifferent attempt at humour and character, and failed in both. I forbear to mention the other papers, because I have not read them. Professor, how different thy feelings now (quantum mutatus ab illo professore, qui in agris philosophice tantas victorias acquisivistt), how different thy proud feelings but one little week ago thy anticipations of thy nine nights those visionary claps, which have soothed thy soul by day and thy dreams by night ! Calling in accidentally on the Professor while he was out, I was ushered into the study ; and my nose quickly (most sagacious always) pointed me to four tokens lying loose upon thy table, Professor, which indicated thy violent and satanical pride of heart. Impi-imis, there caught mine eye a list of six persons, thy friends, whom thou didst meditate inviting to a sumptuous dinner on the Thursday, anticipating the profits of thy Saturday's play to answer charges : I was in the honoured file ! Next (a stronger evidence of thy violent and almost satanical pride) lay a list of all the morning papers (from the Morning Chronicle downwards to the Porcupine), with the places of their respective offices, where thou wast meditating to insert, and didst insert, an elaborate sketch of the story of thy play ; stones in thy enemy's hand to bruise thee with, and severely wast thou bruised, Professor ! nor do I know what oil to pour into thy wounds. Next (which convinced me to a dead conviction of thy pride, violent and almost satanical pride !) lay a list of books which thy un-tragedy- favoured pocket could never answer ; Dodsley's Old Plays, Malone's Shakspeare (still harpiug upon thy play, thy philosophy abandoned meanwhile to Christians and superstitious minds) ; nay, 1 believe (if I can believe my memory) that the ambitious Encyclopaedia itself was part of thy meditated acquisitions; but many a playbook was there. All these visions are damned; and thou, Professor, must read Shakspeare in 168 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. future out of a common edition ; and, hark ye ! pray read him to a little better purpose. Last and strongest against thee (in colours manifest as the hand upon Belshazzar's wall) lay a volume of poems by C. Lloyd and C. Lamb. Thy heart misgave thee, that thy assistant might possibly not have talent enough to furnish thee an epilogue ! Manning, all these things came over my mind ; all the gratulations that would have thickened upon him, and even some have glanced aside upon his humble friend ; the vanity, and the fame, and the profits (the Professor is 500 ideal money out of pocket by this failure, besides 200 he would have got for the copyright, and the Pro- fessor is never much beforehand with the world ; what he gets is all by the sweat of his brow and dint of brain, for the Professor, though a sure man, is also a slow) ; and now to muse upon thy altered physiognomy, thy pale and squalid appearance (a kind of blue sickness about the eyelids), and thy crest fallen, and thy proud demand of 200 from thy bookseller changed to an uncertainty of his taking it at all, or giving the full 50. The Professor has won my heart by this his mournful catastrophe. You remember Marshall, who dined with him at my house ; I met him in the lobby immediately after the damnation of the Professor's play, and he looked to me like an angel ; his face was lengthened, and all over perspiration. I never saw such a care-fraught visage ; I could have hugged him, I loved him so intensely. " From every pore of him a perfume fell." I have seen that man in many situations, and, from my soul, I think that a more god-like honest soul exists not in this world. The Professor's poor nerves trembling with the recent shock, he hurried him away to my house to supper, and there we comforted him as well as we could. He came to consult me about a change of catastrophe ; but alas ! the piece was condemned long before that crisis. I at first humoured him with a specious proposition, but have since joined his true frienda in advising him to give it up. He did it with a pang, and is to print it as his. L. TO MANNING. 169 LETTER LXXXIII.] December 27, 1800. At length George Dyer's phrenitis has come to a crisis ; he is raging and furiously mad. I waited upon the heathen, Thursday was a se'nnight. The first symptom which struck my eye, and gave me incontrovertible proof of the fatal truth, was a pair of nankeen pantaloons four times too big for him, which the said Heathen did perti- naciously affirm to be new. They were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages ; but he affirmed them to be clean. He was going to visit a lady that was nice about those things, and that's the reason he wore nankeen that day. And then he danced, and capered, and fidgeted, and pulled up his pantaloons, and hugged his intolerable flannel vestment closer about his poetic loins. Anon he gave it loose to the zephyrs which plentifully insinuate their tiny bodies through every crevice, door, window, or wainscot, expressly formed for the exclusion of such impertinents. Then he caught at a proof sheet, and catched up a laundress's bill instead made a dart at Bloomfield's Poems, and threw them in agony aside. I could not bring him to one direct reply ; he could not maintain his jumping mind in a right line for the tithe of a moment by Clifford's Inn clock. He must go to the printer's immediately: (the most unlucky accident !) he had struck off five hundred impressions of his Poems, which were ready for delivery to subscribers, and the Preface must all be expunged. There were eighty pages of Preface, and not till that morning had he discovered that in the very first page of said Preface he had set out with a principle of Criticism fundamentally wrong, which vitiated all his following reasoning. The Preface must be expunged, although it cost him 30, the lowest calculation, taking in paper and printing! In vain have his real friends remonstrated against this Midsummer madness. George is as obstinate is a Primitive Christian, and wards and parries off all 170 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. our thrusts with one unanswerable fence : " Sir, 'tis of great consequence that the world is not misled!" As for the other Professor, he has actually begun to dive into Tavernier and Chardin's Persian Travels for a story, to form a new drama for the sweet tooth of this fastidious age. Hath not Bethlehem College a fair action for non-residence against such professors ? Are poets so few in this age, that He must write poetry ? Is morals a subject so exhausted, that he must quit that line? Is the metaphysic well (without a bottom) drained dry 1 If I can guess at the wicked pride of the Professor's heart, I would take a shrewd wager that he disdains ever again to dip his pen in Prose. Adieu, ye splendid theories ! Farewell, dreams of political justice ! Law- suits, where I was council for Archbishop Fenelon versus my own mother, in the famous fire cause ! Vanish from my mind, professors, one and all ! I have metal more attractive on foot. Man of many snipes, I will sup with thee (Deo volente, et diabolo nolente,) on Monday night, the 5th of January, in the new year, and crush a cup to the infant century. A word or two of my progress : Embark at six o'clock in the morning, with a fresh gale, on a Cambridge one- decker ; very cold till eight at night ; land at St. Mary's lighthouse, muffins and coffee upon table (or any other curious production of Turkey, or both Indies), snipes exactly at nine, punch to commence at ten, with argu- ment ; difference of opinion is expected to take place about eleven ; perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve. N.E. My single affection is not so singly wedded to snipes ; but the curious and epicurean eye would also take a pleasure in beholding a delicate and well-chosen assortment of teals, ortolans, the unctuous and palate-soothing flesh of geese, wild and tame, night- ingales' brains, the sensoriuin of a young sucking pig, or any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the judgment of you and the cook of Gonville. C. LAMB. TO COLERIDGE. 17J To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER LXXXIV.] [No date end of 1800.] I send you, in this parcel, my play, which I beg you to present in my name, with my respect and love, to Wordsworth, and his sister. You blame us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley. The woman has been ten times after us about it, and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue ; but she would once write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. You read us a dismal homily upon " Realities." We know, quite as well as you do, what are shadows and what are realities. You, for instance, when you are over your fourth or fifth jorum, chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of realities. Shadows are cold, thin things, that have no warmth or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her friend, and a tribe of authoresses that come after you here daily, and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you, in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you ; but there are more burs in the wind. I came home t' other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, of the author but hunger about me ; and whom found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss Benjay or Benje ; I don't know how she spells her name. I just came in time enough, I believe, luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems she is one of your authoresses, that you first foster, and then upbraid us with. But I forgive you. " The rogue has given me potions to make me love him." Well ; go she would not, nor step a step over our threshold, till we 172 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. had promised to coine and drink tea with her next night. It had never seen her before, and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. We went, however, not to be impolite. Her lodgings are up two pair of stairs in East Street. Tea and coffee, and macaroons a kind of cake I much love. We sat down. Presently Miss Benjay broke the silence, by declaring herself quite of a different opinion from D'Israeli, who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the mere effect of organisation. She begged to know my opinion. I attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ, but that went off very flat. She immediately conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics ; and, turning round to Mary, put some question to her in French, possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French. The explanation that took place occasioned some embar- rassment and much wondering. She then fell into an insulting conversation about the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages, and concluded with asserting that the Saxon was esteemed the purest dialect in Germany. From thence she passed into the subject of poetry ; where I, who had hitherto sat mute, and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion, that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson's time. It seems the Doctor has suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way, by the severity of his critical strictures in his Lives of the Poets. I here ventured to question the fact, and was beginning to appeal to names, but I was assured " it was certainly the case." Then we discussed Miss More's book on education, which I had never read. It seems Dr. Gregory, another of Miss Benjay's friends, has found fault with one of Miss More's metaphors. Miss More has been at some pains to vindicate herself, in the opinion of Miss Benjay not without success. It seems the Doctor is invariably against the use of broken or mixed metaphor, which he reprobates, against the authority of Shakspeare TO COLERIDGE. 173 himself. We next discussed the question, whether Pope was a poet ? I find Dr. Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward does not at all concur with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative merits of the ten translations of Pizarro, and Miss Benjay or Benje advised Mary to take two of them home (she thought it might afford her some pleasure to compare them verbatim) ; which we declined. It being now nine o'clock, wine and macaroons were again served round, and we parted, with a promise to go again next week, and meet the Miss Porters, who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet us, because we are his friends. I have been preparing for the occasion. I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meet- ing, and I hope by these means to cut a tolerable second- rate figure. Pray let us have no more complaints about shadows. We are in a fair way, through you, to surfeit sick upon them. Our loves and respects to your host and hostess. Our dearest love to Coleridge. Take no thought about your proof sheets ; they shall be done as if Woodfall himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and little David Hartley, your little reality. Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at any- thing I have written. C. LAMB, Umbra. Land of Shadows, Shadow Month the 16th or 17th, 1800. Coleridge, I find loose among your papers a copy of Christabel. It wants about thirty lines ; you will very much oblige me by sending me the beginning as far as that line, " And the spring comes slowly up this way ;" and the intermediate lines between 174 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. " The lady leaps up suddenly, The lovely Lady Christabel ; " and the lines, "She folded her arms beneath her cloak, And stole to the other side of the oak." The trouble to you will be small, and the benefit to us very great. A pretty antithesis ! A figure in speech I much applaud. Godwin has called upon us. He spent one evening here : was very friendly : kept us up till midnight, drank punch, and talked about you. He seems above all men mortified at your going away. Suppose you were to write to that good-natured heathen : " Or is he a shadow?" If I do not write, impute it to the long postage, of which you have so much cause to complain. I have scribbled over a queer letter, as I find by perusal, but it means no mischief. I am, and will be, yours ever, in sober sadness, C. L. Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguae : in English illiterate, a dunce, a ninny. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LETTEE LXXXV.] January 30, 1801. I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere ; but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand TO WORDSWORTH. 175 and Fleet Street ; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town ; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles ; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night ; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street ; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee- houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes London itself a pantomime and a masquerade all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you ; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes ? My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books) for groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog (only exceeding him in knowledge), wherever I have moved, old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school, these are my mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains 1 I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind : and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him 176 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been coufinedly called ; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna. Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and your- self ; and a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play. 0. L. LETTER LXXXVI.] January 1801. Thanks for your letter and present. I had already borrowed your second volume. What most pleases me is, "The Song of Lucy." Simon's sickly daughter, in "The Sexton," made me cry. Next to these are the description of these continuous echoes in the story of "Joanna's Laugh," where the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem alive ; and that fine Shakspearian character of the " happy man," in the " Brothers," -" that creeps about the fields, Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles Into his face, until the setting sun Write Fool upon his forehead ! " I will mention one more the delicate and curious feeling in the wish for the " Cumberland Beggar," that he may have about him the melody of birds, although he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon herself, first substituting her own feeling for the Beggar's, and in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish. The " Poet's Epitaph " is disfigured, to my taste, by the common satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse epithet of " pin-point," in the sixth stanza. All the rest is eminently good, and your own. I will just add that it appears to me a fault in the " Beggar," that the instructions con- veyed in it are too direct, and like a lecture : they don't TO WORDSWORTH. 177 slide into the mind of the reader while he is imagining no such matter. An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, " I will teach you how to think upon this subject." This fault, if I am right, is in a ten- thousandth worse degree to be found in Sterne, and in many novelists and modern poets, who continually put a sign-post up to show where you are to feel. They set out with assuming their readers to be stupid ; very different from Robinson Crusoe, the Vicar of Wakefield, Roderick Random, and other beautiful, bare narratives. There is implied an unwritten compact between author and reader ; " I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it." Modern novels, St. Leons and the like, are full of such flowers as these "Let not my reader suppose," " Imagine, if you can, modest ! " etc. I will here have done with praise and blame. I have written so much, only that you may not think I have passed over your book without observation. ... I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his Ancient Marinere, a Poet's Reverie/ it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver's declaration that he is not a lion, but only the scenical representation of a lion. What new idea is gained by this title but one subversive of all credit which the tale should force upon us of its truth ! For me, I was never so affected with any human tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days. I dislike all the miraculous part of it ; but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery, dragged me along like Tom Pipe's magic whistle. I totally differ from your idea that the Marinere should have had a character and profession. This is a beauty in Gulliver's Travels, where the mind is kept in a placid state of little wonderments ; but the Ancient Marinere undergoes such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was like the state of a man in a bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness of personality is gone. Your other observation is, I think as well, a little unfounded : the " Marinere," from being VOL. i. N 178 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. conversant in supernatural events, has acquired a super- natural and strange cast of phrase, eye, appearance, etc., which frighten the " wedding guest." You will excuse iny remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary, with a prose apology, to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see. To sum up a general opinion of the second volume, I do not feel any one poem in it so forcibly as the Ancient Marinere, and the "Mad Mother," and the "Lines at Tintern Abbey " in the first. To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER LXXXVIL] February 7, 1801. Dear Robert I shall expect you to bring me a brim- ful account of the pleasure which Walton has given you, when you come to town. It must square with your mind. The delightful innocence and healthfulness of the Angler's mind will have blown upon yours like a Zephyr. Don't you already feel your spirit filled with the scenes 1 the banks of rivers the cowslip beds the pastoral scenes the neat alehouses and hostesses and milkmaids, as far exceeding Virgil and Pope, as the Holy Living is beyond Thomas & Kempis. Are not the eating and drinking joys painted to the Life ? Do they not inspire you with an immortal hunger ? Are not you ambitious of being made an Angler 1 What edition have you got 1 is it Hawkins's, with plates of Piscator, etc. 1 That sells very dear. I have only been able to purchase the last edition without the old Plates which pleased my childhood ; the plates being worn out, and the old Edition difficult and expensive to procure. The Complete Angler is the only Treatise written in Dialogues that is worth a halfpenny. Many elegant dialogues have been written (such as Bishop Berkeley's Minute Philosopher), but in all of them the Interlocutors are merely abstract arguments personify'd ; TO ROBERT LLOYD. 179 not living dramatic characters, as. in Walton, where every thing is alive ; the fishes are absolutely charactered ; and birds and animals are as interesting as men and women. I need not be at much pains to get the Holy Livings. We can procure them in ten minutes' search at any stall or shop in London. By your engaging one for Priscilla, it should seem she will be in Town is that the case ? I thought she was fix'd at the Lakes. I perfectly understand the nature of your solitariness at Birm., and wish I could divide myself, " like a bribed haunch," between London and it. But courage ! you will soon be emancipated, and (it may be) have a frequent power of visiting this great place. Let them talk of lakes and mountains and romantic dales all that fantastic stuff; give me a ramble by night, in the winter nights in London the Lamps lit the pavements of the motley Strand crowded with to and fro passengers the shops all brilliant, and stuffed with obliging customers and obliged tradesmen give me the old book-stalls of London a walk in the bright Piazzas of Covent Garden. I defy a man to be dull in such places perfect Mahometan paradises upon earth ! I have lent out my heart with usury to such scenes from my childhood up, and have cried with fulness of joy at the multitudinous scenes of Life in the crowded streets of ever dear London. I wish you could fix here. I don't know if you quite comprehend my low Urban Taste ; but depend upon it that a man of any feeling will have given his heart and his love in childhood and in boyhood to any scenes where he has been bred, as well to dirty streets (and smoky walls as they are called) as to green lanes, " where live nibbling sheep," and to the everlasting hills and the Lakes and ocean. A mob of men is better than a flock of sheep, and a crowd of happy faces justling into the playhouse at the hour of six is a more beautiful spectacle to man than the shepherd driving his " silly " sheep to fold. Come to London and learn to sympathise with my unrural notions. 180 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Wordsworth has published a second vol. Lyrical Ballads. Most of them very good, but not so good as first vol. What more can I tell you ? I believe I told you I have been to see Manning. He is a dainty chiel. 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. Yours as ever, C. L. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER LXXXVIII.] February 15, 1801. I had need be cautious henceforward what opinion I give of the Lyrical Ballads. All the North of England are in a turmoil. Cumberland and Westmoreland have already declared a state of war. I lately received from Wordsworth a copy of the second volume, accompanied by an acknowledgment of having received from me many months since a copy of a certain Tragedy, with excuses for not having made any acknowledgment sooner, it being owing to an " almost insurmountable aversion from Letter-writing." This letter I answered in due form and time, and enumerated several of the passages which had most affected me, adding, unfortunately, that no single piece had moved me so forcibly as the "Ancient Mariner," " The Mad Mother," or the " Lines at Tintern Abbey." The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost instantaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter- Writer, the purport of which was, that he was sorry his 2nd vol. had not given me more pleasure (Devil a hint did I give that it had not pleased me), -and "was compelled to wish that my range of sensibility was more extended, being obliged to believe TO MANNING. 181 that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy Thoughts " (I suppose from the L. B.) with a deal of stuff about a certain Union of Tenderness and Imagination, which in the sense he used Imagination was not the characteristic of Shakspeare, but which Milton possessed in a degree far exceeding other Poets : which Union, as the highest species of Poetry, and chiefly deserving that name, " He was most proud to aspire to ; " then illustrating the said Union by two quotations from his own 2nd vol. (which I had been so unfortunate as to miss). 1st Specimen a father addresses his son : " When thou First earnest into the World, as it befalls To new-born Infants, thou didst sleep away Two days : and Blessings from thy father's Tongue Then fell upon thee." The lines were thus undennarked, and then followed " This Passage, as combining in an extraordinary degree that Union of Imagination and Tenderness which I am speaking of, I consider as one of the Best I ever wrote ! " 2nd Specimen. A youth, after years of absence, revisits his native place, and thinks (as most people do) that there has been strange alteration in his absence : " And that the rocks And everlasting Hills themselves were changed." You see both these are good Poetry : but after one has been reading Shakspeare twenty of the best years of one's life, to have a fellow start up, and prate about some unknown quality which Shakspeare possessed in a degree inferior to Milton and somebody else! ! This was not to be all my castigation. Coleridge, who had not written to me some months before, starts up from his bed of sickness to reprove me for my hardy pre- sumption : four long pages, equally sweaty and more tedious, came from him ; assuring me that, when the works of a man of true genius such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should suspect the 182 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. fault to lie " in me and not in them," etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. What am I to do with such people ? I certainly shall write them a very merry Letter. Writing to you, I may say that the 2nd vol. has no such pieces as the three I enumerated. It is full of original thinking and an observing mind, but it does not often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression. And you sometimes doubt if Simplicity be not a cover for Poverty. The best Piece in it I will send you, being short. I have grievously offended my friends in the North by declaring my undue preference; but I need not fear you : " She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the Springs of Dove, A maid whom there were few (sic) to praise And very few to love. A violet, by a mossy stone, Half hidden from the eye. Fair as a star when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived imknown ; and few could know When Lucy ceased to be. But she is in the grave, and oh ! The difference to me." This is choice and genuine, and so are many, many more. But one does not like to have 'em rammed down one's throat. " Pray, take it it's very good let me help you eat faster." At length George Dyer's first vol. is come to a birth. One volume of three Subscribers being allowed by the Prospectus to pay for all at once (tho' it's very doubtful if the rest ever come to anything, this having been already some years getting out). I paid two guineas for you and myself, which entitle us to the whole. I will send you your copy, if you are in a great hurry. Meantime you owe me a guinea. George skipped about like a scorched pea at the receipt of so much cash. To give you a TO MANNING. 183 specimen of the beautiful absurdity of the Notes, which defy imitation, take one : " Discrimination is not the aim of the present volume. It will be more strictly attended to in the next." One of the sonnets purports to have been written in Bedlam ! This for a man to own ! The rest are addressed to Science, Genius, Melancholy etc. etc. two, to the River Cam an Ode to the Nightingale. Another to Howard, beginning " Spirit of meek Philanthropy ! " One is entitled The Madman " being collected by the author from several Madhouses." It begins "Yes, yes 'tis He!" A long poetical satire is addressed to "John Disney, D.D. his wife and daughter ! ! ! " Now to my own affairs. I have not taken that thing to Colman, but I have proceeded one step in the business. I have inquired his address, and am promised it in a few days. Meantime three acts and a half are finished galloping, of a Play on a Persian Story which I must father in April. But far, very far, from Antonio in composition. Jephtha, Judge of Israel, what a fool I was ! C. LAMB. LETTER LXXXIX.] [February or March] 1801. You masters of logic ought to know (logic is nothing more than a knowledge of words, as the Greek etymon implies) that all words are no more to be taken in a literal sense at all times than a promise given to a tailor. When I exprest an apprehension that you were mortally offended, I meant no more than by the application of a certain formula of efficacious sounds, which had done in similar cases before, to rouse a sense of decency in you, and a remembrance of what was due to me ! You masters of logic should advert to this phenomenon in human speech, before you arraign the usage of us dramatic geniuses. Imagination is a good blood mare, and goes well : but the misfortune is, she has too many paths before her. 'Tis true I might have imagined to myself ' 184 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. that you had trundled your frail carcass to Norfolk. I might also, and did imagine, that you had not, but that you were lazy, or inventing new properties in a triangle, and for that purpose moulding and squeezing Landlord Crisp's three-cornered beaver into fantastic experimental forms ; or, that Archimedes was meditating to repulse the French, in case of a Cambridge invasion, by a geometric hurling of folios on their red caps ; or, peradventure, that you were in extremities, in great wants, and just set out for Trinity Bogs when my letters came. In short, my genius (which is a short word, nowadays, for what-a- great-man-am-I) ! was absolutely stifled and overlaid with its own riches. Truth is one and poor, like the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that multiplies its oil ; and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not believe it could be put to such purposes. Dull pipkin, to have Elijah for thy cook ! Imbecile recipient of so fat a miracle ! I send you George Dyer's Poems, the richest production of the lyrical muse this century can justly boast : for Wordsworth's L. B. were published, or at least written, before Christmas. Please to advert to pages 291 to 296 for the most astonishing account of where Shakspeare's muse has been all this while. I thought she had been dead, and buried in Stratford Church, with the young man that kept her company, "But it seems, like the Devil, Buried in Cole Harbour, Some say she's risen again, 'Gone prentice to a barber." N.B. I don't charge anything for the additional manuscript notes, which are the joint productions of myself and a learned translator of Schiller, John Stoddart, Esq. N.B. the 2nd. I should not have blotted your book, but I had sent my own out to be bound, as I was in duty bound. A liberal criticism upon the several pieces, TO MANNING. 185 lyrical, heroical, amatory, and satirical, would be accept- able. So, you don't think there's a Word's worth of good poetry in the great L. B. ! I daren't put the dreaded syllables at their just length, for my back tingles from the northern castigation. I send you the three letters, which I beg you to return along with those former letters (which I hope you are not going to print, by your detention). But don't be in a hurry to send them. When you come to town will do. Apropos of coming to town : Last Sunday was a fortnight, as I was coming to town from the Professor's inspired with new rum, I tumbled down and broke my nose. I drink nothing stronger than malt liquors. I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable, at our Lady's next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out (when you stand a tip-toe) over the Thames and Surrey Hills ; at the upper end of King's Bench Walks, in the Temple. There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance, and shall be able to lock my friends out as often as I desire to hold free converse with my immortal mind ; for my present lodgings resemble a minister's levee, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call 'em) since I have resided in town. Like the country mouse, that had tasted a little of urbane manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self, without mouse-traps and time-traps. By my new plan, I shall be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the country ; and in a garden, in the midst of enchanting (more than Mahometan paradise) London, whose dirtiest drab-frequented alley, and her lowest bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. her lamps of a night ! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardwaremen, pastry-cooks, St. Paul's Churchyard, the Strand, Exeter Change, Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse ! These are thy gods, London ! A'ut you 186 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. mightily moped on the banks of the Cam 1 Had you not better come and set up here 1 You can't think what a difference. All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At least, I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal, a mind that loves to be at home in crowds. "Tis half-past twelve o'clock, and all sober people ought to be a-bed. Between you and me the L. Ballads are but drowsy performances. C. LAMB (as you may guess). To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER XC.] April 6, 1801. Fletcher's Purple Island is a tedious Allegory of the Parts of the Human body.. I would not advise you to lay out six pence upon it. It is not the work of Fletcher, the Coadjutor of Beaumont, but one Phineas, a kinsman of his. If by the work of Bishop Taylor, whose Title you have not given correctly, you mean his CONTEMPLATIONS on the State of Man in this Life and that which is to come, I dare hope you will join with me in believing it to be spurious. The suspicious circumstance of its being a posthumous work, with the total dissimilarity in style to the genuine works, I think evince that it never was the work of DOCTOR JEREMY TAYLOR, Late Lord Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland, and Administrator of the See of Dromore ; such are the titles which his sounding title-pages give him, and I love the man, and I love liis paraphernalia, and I like to name him with all his attributions and additions. If you are yet but lightly acquainted with his real manner, take up and read the whole first chapter of the Holy DYING ; in particular turn to the first paragraph of the second section of that chapter for a simile of a rose, or more truly many similes TO ROBERT LLOYD. 187 within simile ; for such were the riches of his fancy, that when a beauteous image offered, before he could stay to expand it into all its capacities, throngs of new coming images came up, and justled out the first, or blended in disorder with it, which imitates the order of every rapid mind. But read all the first chapter by my advice ; and I know I need not advise you, when you have read it, to read the second. Or for another specimen (where so many beauties crowd, the judgment has yet vanity enough to think it can discern a handsomest, till a second judgment and a third ad infinitum start up to disallow their elder brother's pretensions) turn to the story of the Ephesian Matron in the second section of the 5th chapter of the same Holy DYING (I still refer to the Dying part, because it contains better matter than the " Holy Living," which deals more in rules than illustrations I mean in comparison with the other only, else it has more and more beautiful illustrations than any prose book besides) read it your- self and show it to Plumstead (with my LOVE, and bid him write to me), and ask him if WILLY himself has ever told a story with more circumstances of FANCY and HUMOUR. The paragraph begins, "But that which is to be faulted," and the story not long after follows. Make these references while P. is with you, that you may stir him up to the Love of Jeremy Taylor, and make a con- vertite of him. Coleridge was the man who first solemnly exhorted me to " study " the works of Dr. Jeremy Taylor, and I have had reason to bless the hour in which he did it. Read as many of his works as you can get. I will assist you in getting them when we go a stall hunting together in London, and it's odds if we don't get a good Beaumt. and Fletcher cheap. Bp. Taylor has more and more beautiful imagery, and (what is more to a Lover of Willy) more knowledge and description of human life and manners than any prose book in the language : he has more delicacy and sweet- 188 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. ness than any mortal, the "gentle" Shakspeare hardly excepted, his similes and allusions are taken, as the bees take honey, from all the youngest, greenest, ex- quisitest parts of nature, from plants, and flowers, and fruit, young boys and virgins, from little children per- petually, from sucking infants, babies' smiles, roses, gardens, his imagination was a spacious Garden, where no vile insects could crawl in ; his apprehension a "COURT" where no foul thoughts kept "leets and holy- days." " Snail and worm, give no offence, Newt nor blind worm be not seen, Come not near our fairy queen." You must read Bishop Taylor with allowances for the subjects on which he wrote, and the age in which. You may skip or patiently endure his tedious discourses on rites and ceremonies, Baptism, and the Eucharist, the Clerical function, and the antiquity of Episcopacy, a good deal of which are inserted in works not purely con- troversial ; his polemical works you may skip altogether, unless you have a taste for the exertions of vigorous reason and subtle distinguishing on uninteresting topics. Such of his works as you should begin with, to get a taste for him (after which your Love will lead you to his Polemical and drier works, as Love led Leander "over boots " knee-deep thro' the Hellespont), but read first the Holy Living and Dying, and his Life of Christ and Sermons, both in folio. And, above all, try to get a beautiful little tract on the "Measures and offices of Friendship," printed with his opuscula duodecimo, and also at the end of his Polemical Discourses in folio. Another thing you will observe in Bp. Taylor, without which consideration you will do him injustice. He wrote to different classes of people. His Holy Living and Dying and Life of Christ were designed and have been used as popular books of family Devotion, and have been thumbed by old women, and laid about in the window seats of old houses in great families, like the Bible, and TO MANNING. 189 the "Queene-like-Closet or rare boke of Recipes in medicine and cookery, fitted to all capacities." Accordingly in these the fancy is perpetually applied to ; any slight conceit, allusion, or analogy, any " pretti- ness," a story true or false, serves for an argument adapted to women and young persons, and " incompetent judgments ; " whereas the Liberty of Prophecy (a book in your father's bookcase) is a series of severe and masterly reasoning, fitted to great Clerks and learned Fathers, with no more of Fancy than is subordinate and ornamental. Such various powers had the Bishop of Down and Connor, Administrator of the See of Dromore ! My theme and my story ! Farewell. C. LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER XCI.] April 1801. I was not aware that you owed me anything beside that guinea ; but I daresay you are right. I live at No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, a pistol-shot off Baron Maseres'. You must introduce me to the Baron. I think we should suit one another mainly. He lives on the ground floor, for convenience of the gout ; I prefer the attic story, for the air. He keeps three footmen and two maids ; I have neither maid nor laundress, not caring to be troubled with them. His forte, I understand, is the higher mathe- matics; my turn, I confess, is more to poetry and the belles lettres. The very antithesis of our characters would make up a harmony. You must bring the Baron and me together. N.B. When you come to see me, mount up to the top of the stairs I hope you are not asthmatical and come in flannel, for 'tis pure airy up there. And bring your glass, and I will show you the Surrey Hills. My bed faces the river, so as by perking up upon my haunches, and supporting my carcass with my elbows, without much wrying my neck, I can see the white sails 190 LETTERS OF CHAKLES LAMB. glide by the bottom of the King's Bench Walks as I lie in my bed. An excellent tiptoe prospect in the best room : casement windows, with small panes, to look more like a cottage. Mind, I have got no bed for you, that's flat ; sold it to pay expenses of moving, the very bed on which Manning lay ; the friendly, the mathematical Manning ! How forcibly does it remind me of the inter- esting Otway ! " The very bed which on thy marriage night gave thee into the arms of Belvidera, by the coarse hands of ruffians " (upholsterers' men), etc. My tears will not give me leave to go on. But a bed I will get you, Manning, on condition you will be my clay-guest. I have been ill more than a month, with a bad cold, which comes upon me (like a murderer's conscience) about midnight, and vexes me for many hours. I have succes- sively been dragged with Spanish licorice, opium, ipecacu- anha, paregoric, and tincture of foxglove (tinctura purpurse digitalis of the ancients). I am afraid I must leave off drinking. To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER XCIL] April 1801. I am not dead nor asleep. But Manning is in town, and Coleridge is in town, and I am making a thorough alteration in the structure of my play for Publication. My brain is overwrought with variety of worldly-inter- course. I have neither time nor mind for scribbling. Who shall deliver me from the body of this Death ? Only continue to write and to believe that when the Hour comes I shall strike like Jack of the Clock, id est, I shall once more become a regular correspondent of Robert and Plumstead. How is the benevolent, loud- talking, Shakspeare-loving Brewer 1 To your inquiry respecting a selection from Bp. Taylor I answer it cannot be done, and if it could, it would not take with John Bull. It cannot be done, for who can disentangle and unthread the rich texture of Nature TO ROBERT LLOYD. 191 and Poetry, sewn so thick into a stout coat of theology, without spoiling both lace and coat ? How beggarly and how bald do even Shakspeare's Princely Pieces look when thus violently divorced from connection and circumstance ! When we meet with " To be or not to be," or Jacques' moralisings upon the Deer, or Brutus and Cassius' quarrel and reconciliation in an Enfield Speaker, or in Elegant Extracts, how we stare, and will scarcely acknowledge to ourselves (what we are conscious we feel) that they are flat and have no power. Something exactly like this have I experienced when I have picked out similes and stars from " Holy Dying " and shown them per se, as you'd show specimens of minerals or pieces of rock. Compare the grand effect of the star-paved firmament, and imagine a boy capable of picking out those pretty twinklers one by one and playing at chuck-farthing with them. Every- thing in heaven and earth, in man and in story, in books and in fancy, acts by Confederacy, by juxtaposition, by circumstance and place. Consider a fine family (if I were not writing to you I might instance your own) of sons and daughters, with a respectable father and a handsome mother at their heads, all met in one house, and happy round one table. Earth cannot show a more lovely and venerable sight, such as the Angels in heaven might lament that in their country there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Take and split this Body into individuals show the separate caprices, vagaries, etc., of Charles,. Rob, or Plum, one a Quaker, another a Church- man. The eldest daughter seeking a husband out of the pale of parental faith another warping, perhaps the father a prudent, circumspective, do-me-good sort of a man blest with children whom no ordinary rules can circumscribe. I have not room for all particulars but just as this happy and venerable Body of a family loses by splitting and considering individuals too nicely, so it is when we pick out Best Bits out of a great writer. 'Tis the sum total of his mind which affects us. C. L. I 192 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. To WILLIAM GODWIN. LETTER XCIIL] June 29, 1801. Dear Sir Dr. Christy's Brother and Sister are come to town and have shown me great civilities. I in return wish to requite them, having, by God's grace, principles of generosity implanted (as the moralists say) in my nature, which have been duly cultivated and watered by good and religious friends, and a pious education. They have picked up in the northern parts of the island an astonishing admiration of the great author of the New Philosophy in England, and I have ventured to promise their taste an evening's gratification by seeing Mr. Godwin face to face ! ! / / / Will you do them, and me in them, the pleasure of drinking tea and supping with me at the old number 16 on Friday or Saturday next ? An early nomination of the day will very much oblige yours sincerely, CH. LAMB. To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER XCIV.] July 26, 1801. Cooke in " Richard the Third " is a perfect caricature. He gives you the monster Richard, but not the man Richard. Shakspeare's bloody character impresses you with awe and deep admiration of his witty parts, his consummate hypocrisy, and indefatigable prosecution of purpose. You despise, detest, and loathe the cunning, vulgar, low and fierce Richard, which Cooke substitutes in his place. He gives you no other idea than of a vulgar villain, rejoicing in his being able to overreach, and not possessing that joy in silent consciousness, but betraying it, like a poor villain, in sneers and distortions of the face, like a droll at a country fair : not to add that cunning so self-betraying and manner so vulgar could never have deceived the politic Buckingham nor the soft Lady Anne : both bred in courts, would have turned with * TO ROBERT LLOYD. 193 disgust from such a fellow. Not but Cooke has powers ; but not of discrimination. His manner is strong, coarse, and vigorous, and well adapted to some characters. But the lofty imagery and high sentiments and high passions of Poetry come black and prose-smoked from his prose Lips. I have not seen him in Overreach, but from what I remember of the character, I think he could not have chosen one more fit. I thought the play a highly finished one when I read it some time back. I remember a most noble image. Sir Giles, drawing his sword in the last scene, says : " Some undone widow sits upon mine arm, And takes away the use on't." This is horribly fine, and I am not sure that it did not suggest to me my conclusion of " Pride's Cure " ; but my imitation is miserably inferior : This arm was busy in the day of Naseby : 'Tis paralytic now, and knows no use of weapons. Pierre and Jaffier are the best things in Otway. Belvi- dera is a poor Creature, and has had more than her due fame. Monimia is a little better, but she whines. I like Calista in the " Fair Penitent " better than either of Otway's women. Lee's " Massacre of Paris " is a noble play, very chastely and finely written. His Alexander is full of that madness " which rightly should possess a poet's brain." "CEdipus" is also a fine play, but less so than these two. It is a joint production of Lee and Dryden. " All For Love " begins with uncommon Spirit, but soon flags, and is of no worth upon the whole. The last scene of " Young's Revenge " is sublime : the rest of it not worth Id. I want to have your opinion and Plumstead's on Cooke's " Richard the Third." I am possessed with an admiration of the genuine Richard, his genius, and his mounting spirit, which no consideration of his cruelties can depress. Shakspeare has not made Richard so black VOL. I. O 194 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMR a Monster as is supposed. Wherever he is monstrous, it was to conform to vulgar opinion. But he is generally a Man. Read his most exquisite address to the Widowed Queen to court her daughter for him the topics of maternal feeling, of a deep knowledge of the heart, are such as no monster could have supplied. Richard must have felt before he could feign so well ; tho' ambition choked the good seed. I think it the most finished piece of Eloquence in the world ; of persuasive oratory far above Demosthenes, Burke, or any man, far exceeding the courtship of Lady Anne. Her relenting is barely natural, after all ; the more perhaps S.'s merit to make impossible appear probable, but the Queen's consent (taking in all the circumstances and topics, private and public, with his angelic address, able to draw the host of [piece cut out of letter] Lucifer) is probable ; and [piece cut out of letter] resisted it. This observation applies to many other parts. All the inconsistency is, that Shak- speare's better genius was forced to struggle against the prejudices which made a monster of Richard. He set out to paint a monster, but his human sympathies pro- duced a man. Are you not tired with all this ingenious criticism 1 I am. Richard itself is totally metamorphosed in the wretched acting play of that name, which you will see, altered by Gibber. God bless you. C. LAMB. To ME. WALTER WILSON. LETTER XCV.] Aiujust 14, 1801. Dear Wilson I am extremely sorry that any serious differences should subsist between us, on account of some foolish behaviour of mine at Richmond ; you knew me well enough before, that a very little liquor will cause a considerable alteration in me. TO MANNING. 195 I beg you to impute my conduct solely to that, and not to any deliberate intention of offending you, from whom I have received so many friendly attentions. I know that you think a very important difference in opinion with respect to some more serious subjects between us makes me a dangerous companion ; but do not rashly infer, from some slight and light expressions which I may have made use of in a moment of levity, in your presence, without sufficient regard to your feelings do not conclude that I am an inveterate enemy to all religion. I have had a time of seriousness, and I have known the import- ance and reality of a religious belief. Latterly, I acknow- ledge, much of my seriousness has gone off, whether from new company, or some other new associations ; but I still retain at bottom a conviction of the truth, and a certainty of the usefulness of religion. I will not pretend to more gravity or feeling than I at present possess ; my intention is not to persuade you that any great alteration is probable in me ; sudden converts are superficial and transitory ; I only want you to believe that I have stamina of serious- ness within me, and that I desire nothing more than a return of that friendly intercourse which used to subsist between us, but which my folly has suspended. Believe me, very affectionately yours, C. LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER XCVI.] [August] 1801. Dear Manning I have forborne writing so long (and so have you for the matter of that), until I am almost ashamed either to write or to forbear any longer. But as your silence may proceed from some worse cause than neglect from illness, or some mishap which may have befallen you, I begin to be anxious. You may have been burnt out, or you may have married, or you may have 196 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. broken a limb, or turned country parson : any of these would be excuse sufficient for not coming to my supper. I am not so unforgiving as the nobleman in Saint Mark. For me, nothing new has happened to me, unless that the poor Albion died last Saturday of the world's neglect, and with it the fountain of my puns is choked up for ever. All the Lloyds wonder that you do not write to them. They apply to me for the cause. Relieve me from this weight of ignorance, and enable me to give a truly oracular response. I have been confined some days with swelled cheek and rheumatism : they divide and govern me with a viceroy- headache in the middle. I can neither write nor read without great pain. It must be something like obstinacy that I choose this time to write to you in after many months' interruption. I will close my letter of simple inquiry with an epigram on Mackintosh, the Vindicice Gallicce man who has got a place at last one of the last I did for the Albion : " Though thou'rt like Judas, an apostate black, In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack : When he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf, He went away, and wisely hang'd himself : This thou may'st do at last ; yet much I doubt, If thou hast any bowels to gush out ! " Yours, as ever, C. LAMB. LETTER XCVII.] August 31, 1801. I heard that you were going to China, with a commis- sion from the Wedgwoods to collect hints for their pottery, and to teach the Chinese perspective ; but I did not know that London lay in your way to Pekin. I am seriously glad of it, for I shall trouble you with a small present for the Emperor of Usbeck Tartary, as you go by his terri- tories : it is a fragment of a " Dissertation on the state of political parties in England at the end of the eighteenth century," which will no doubt be very interesting to hia TO MANNING. 197 Imperial Majesty. It was written originally in English for the use of the two and twenty readers of the Albion (this calculation includes a printer, four pressmen, and a devil) ; but becoming of no use when the Albion stopped, I got it translated into Usbeck Tartar by my good friend Tibet Kulm, who is to come to London with a civil invitation from the Cham to the English nation to go over to the worship of the Lama. The Albion is dead dead as nail in door and my revenues have died with it ; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of opening to the Morning Chronicle, by means of that common dispenser of benevolence, Mister Dyer. I have not seen Perry, the editor, yet : but I am preparing a specimen. I shall have a difficult job to manage, for you must know that Mr. Perry, in common with the great body of the Whigs, thinks the Albion very low. I find I must rise a peg or so, be a little more decent, and less abusive ; for, to confess the truth, I had arrived to an abominable pitch ; I spared neither age nor sex when my cue was given me. N'importe (as they say in French), any climate will suit me. So you are about to bring your old face-making face to London. You could not come in a better time for my purposes ; for I have just lost Bickman, a faint idea of whose character I sent you. He has gone to Ireland for a year or two to make his fortune ; and I have lost by his going what seems to me I can never recover a finished man. His memory will be to me as the brazen serpent to the Israelites, I shall look up to it, to keep me upright and honest. But he may yet bring back his honest face to England one day. I wish your affairs with the Emperor of China had not been so urgent, that you might have stayed in Great Britain a year or two longer, to have seen him; for, judging from my own experience, I almost dare pronounce you never saw his equal. I never saw a man that could be at all a second or substitute for him in any sort. Imagine that what is here erased was an apology and 198 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. explanation, perfectly satisfactory you may be sure for rating this man so highly at the expense of , and , and , and M , and , and , and . But Mr. Burke has explained this phenomenon of our nature very prettily in his letter to a Member of the National Assembly, or else in Appeal to the old Whigs, I forget which. Do you remember an instance from Homer (who understood these matters tolerably well), of Priam driving away his other sons with expressions of wrath and bitter reproach, when Hector was just dead ? I live where I did, in a private manner, because I don't like state. Nothing is so disagreeable to me as the clamours and applauses of the mob. For this reason I live in an obscure situation in one of the courts of the Temple. C. L. I send you all of Coleridge's letters to me, which I have preserved : some of them are upon the subject of my play. I also send you Kemble's two letters, and the prompter's courteous epistle, with a curious critique on "Pride's Cure," by a young physician from EDINBRO', who modestly suggests quite another kind of a plot. These are monuments of my disappointment which I like to preserve. In Coleridge's letters you will find a good deal of amusement, to see genuine talent struggling against a pompous display of it. I also send you the Professor's letter to me (careful Professor ! to conceal his name even from his correspondent), ere yet the Professor's pride was cured. Oh monstrous and almost satanical pride ! You will carefully keep all (except the Scotch Doctor's, which burn) in statu quo, till I come to claim mine own. C. LAMB. TO GODWIN. 199 To WILLIAM GODWIN. LETTER XCVIII.] [Margate!] September 9, 1801. Dear Sir Nothing runs in my head when I think of your story, but that you should make it as like the life of Savage as possible. That is a known and familiar tale, and its effect on the public mind has been very great. Many of the incidents in the true history are readily made dramatical. For instance, Savage used to walk backwards and forwards o' nights to his mother's window, to catch a glimpse of her, as she passed with a candle. With some such situation the play might happily open. I would plunge my Hero, exactly like Savage, into difficulties and embarrassments, the consequences of an unsettled mind : out of which he may be extricated by the unknown inter- ference of his mother. He should be attended from the beginning by a Friend, who should stand in much the same relation towards him as Horatio to Altamont in the play of the " Fair Penitent." A character of this sort seems indispensable. This Friend might gain interviews with the mother, when the son was refused sight of her. Like Horatio with Calista, he might wring her soul. Like Horatio, he might learn the secret first. He might be exactly in the same perplexing situation, when he had learned it, whether to tell it or conceal it from the Son (I have still Savage in my head), who might kill a man (as he did) in an affray he should receive a pardon, as Savage did and the mother might interfere to have him banished. This should provoke the friend to demand an interview with her husband, and disclose the whole secret. The husband, refusing to believe anything to her dishonour, should fight with him. The husband repents before he dies. The mother explains and confesses everything in his presence. The son is admitted to an interview with his now acknowledged mother. Instead of embraces, she 200 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. resolves to abstract herself from all pleasure, even, from his sight, in voluntary penance all her days after. This is crude indeed ! ! but I am totally unable to suggest a better. I am the worst hand in the world at a plot. But I understand enough of passion to predict that your story, with some of Savage's, which has no repugnance, but a natural alliance with it, cannot faiL The mystery of the suspected relationship the suspicion, generated from slight and forgotten circumstances, coming at last to act as Instinct, and so to be mistaken for Instinct the son's unceasing pursuit and throwing of himself in his mother's way, something like Falkland's eternal persecu- tion of Williams the high and intricate passion in the mother, the being obliged to shun and keep at a distance the thing nearest to her heart to be cruel, where her heart yearns to be kind, without a possibility of explana- tion. You have the power of life and death and the hearts of your auditors in your hands still Harris will want a skeleton, and he must have it. I can only put in some sorry hints. The discovery to the son's friend may take place not before the third act in some such way as this. The mother may cross the street he may point her out to some gay companion of his as the Beauty of Leghorn the pattern for wives, etc. etc. His companion, who is an Englishman, laughs at his mistake, and knows her to have been the famous Nancy Dawson, or any one else, who captivated the English king. Some such way seems dramatic, and speaks to the Eye. The audience will enter into the Friend's surprise and into the perplexity of his situation. These Ocular Scenes are so many great landmarks, rememberable headlands and lighthouses in the voyage. Macbeth's witch has a good advice to a tragic writer, what to do with his spectator. " Show Ms eyes, and grieve Ms heart." The most difficult thing seems to be, What to do with the husband 1 You will not make him jealous of his own sou 1 that is a stale and an unpleasant trick in Douglas, TO RICKMAN. 201 etc. Can't you keep him out of the way till you want him, as the husband of Isabella is conveniently sent off till his cue comes 1 There will be story enough without him, and he will only puzzle all. Catastrophes are worst of all. Mine is most stupid. I only propose it to fulfil my engagement, not in hopes to convert you. It is always difficult to get rid of a woman at the end of a tragedy. Men may fight and die. A woman must either take poison, which is a nasty trick, or go mad, which is not fit to be shown or retire, which is poor : only retiring is most reputable. I am sorry I can furnish you no better : but I find it extremely difficult to settle my thoughts upon anything but the scene before me, when I am from home : I am from home so seldom. If any the least hint crosses me, I will write again, and I very much wish to read your plan, if you could abridge and send it. In this little scrawl you must take the will for the deed, for I most sincerely wish success to your play. Farewell, C. L. To JOHN RICKMAN, Esq. LETTER XCIX.] [September 16, 1801.] Dear Rickman Your Letter has found me at Margate, where I am come with Mary to drink sea water and pick up shells. I am glad to hear that your new dignities sit so easy upon you. No doubt you are one of those easy " well dressed " gentlemen, that we may know at first sight to belong to the " Castle," when we meet them in the Park. Your Letter contains a very fair offer about my Play, which I must first dispatch. I seriously feel very much obliged to you and all that, but I have a scheme in my head to print it about Xmas time, when the Town is fuller ! ! about that time I expect the repayment of a Loan, which was bigger than I ought to 202 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. have trusted, but I hope not bigger than my borrowing friend will then be able to repay. If he should disappoint me, I may throw myself upon you : meantime I am too proud ever to etc. ... I do not write in any paper. George Dyer, that common Lyar of Benevolence, has taken some pains to introduce me to the Horning Chronicle, and I did something for them, but I soon found that it was a different thing writing for the Lordly Editor of the great Whig Paper to what it was scribbling for the poor Albion. More than three-fourths of what I did was superciliously rejected; whereas in the old Albion the seal of my well-known handwriting was enough to drive any nonsense current. I believe I shall give up this way of writing, and turn honest, scramble on as well as I can for a year, and make a Book, for why should every creature make books but I ? G. Burnett had just finished his Essay when I came away. Mushrooms scramble up in a night ; but diamonds, you know, lie a long while ripening in the bed. The purport of it is to persuade the world that opinions tending to the subversion of Established Religion and Governments, systems of medicine, etc., should not be rashly vented in every company : a good orthodox doctrine which has been preached up with the " holy text of Pike and Gun " with you in Ireland, and is pretty familiar in England, but it is novel to George ; at least he never wrote an Essay upon the subject before. Critics should think of this, before they loosely cry out, This is commonplace, what is there new in it? it may be all new to the Author, he may never have thought of it before, and it may have cost him as much brain-sweat as a piece of the most inveterate originality. However George is in pretty good keeping, while the merits of his essay He under consideration. He has got into joint rooms with a young Surgeon, whose Uncle is an eminent wine merchant, and gives his nephew long tick, so they drink two sorts of wine, and live happy. George was turned out of his White Friars Lodging because he wanted TO RICKMAN. 203 too much attendance. He used to call up the girl, and send her down again, because he had forgot what he wanted ; and then call her again, when his thought came back, to ask what a Clock it was. Fenwick has been urgent with me to write to you about his plan, and I gave him a drunken promise that I would, but you have saved me a disagreeable topic, for I know you have enough to do, and must serve him at your leisure. The Welfare of Ireland, perhaps of the whole world, must not stand still, while the interests of a newspaper are debating ! ! He is very sanguine, and if he tells true, he has had very important encouragement; but he always said and thought, that the Albion had very sufficient patronage. Some people can see anything but their own interest, and they chuse to look at that through glasses. Dr. Christie has transported his solemn physiognomy to Portsmouth in his way to India. He departed without calling upon me, tho' he never could have called upon a more welcome occasion ; consequently he did not get your letter, but I imparted its contents to his brother. I know no more news from here, except that the Professor (Godwin) is COURTING. The Lady is a Widow l with green spectacles and one child, and the Professor is grown quite juvenile. He bows when he is spoke to, and smiles without occasion, and wriggles as fantastically as Malvolio, and has more affectation than a canary bird pluming his feathers when he thinks somebody looks at him. He lays down his spectacles, as if in scorn, and takes 'em up again from necessity, and winks that she mayn't see he gets sleepy about eleven o' Clock. You never saw such a philosophic coxcomb, nor any one play the Romeo so unnaturally. His secotid play, my god-son, is flatly rejected by Harris, because it is a Persian story about Shaw Abbas and the valiant Sefi his son : but Harris has offered to pay him at all events, if he will take a domestic plain story, not heroic nor foreign ; so, after many indignant declarations that he could not bear such a creeping way (his expression) 1 A very disgusting woman. 204 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. his proud heart has come down to Harris's proposals ; so he is filching a tale out of one of Defoe's novels, and has made me write him hints. Floreat Tertia ! Margate, Wednesday, September 16, where I stay a week longer. And now farewell, Master Secretary ! and if your Diplomatic Majesty has any commissions for tape or bone lace, etc. in London, depend upon a faithful performance of the same. I could find matter for a longer Letter, and will another day, if you will find time to read it. Mean- time believe me, yours sincerely. Mary sends her kindest remembrances. No hurry for the Pork. C. LAMB. John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. To WILLIAM GODWIN. LETTER C.] Margate, September 17, 1801. [Fragment.] I shall be glad to come home and talk these matters over with you. I have read your scheme very attentively. That Arabella has been mistress to King Charles is suf- ficient to all the purposes of the story. It can only diminish that respect we feel for her to make her turn whore to one of the Lords of his Bedchamber. Her son must not know that she has been a whore : it matters not that she has been whore to a King : equally in both cases, it is against decorum and against the delicacy of a son's respect that he should be privy to it. No doubt, many sons might feel a wayward pleasure in the honourable guilt of their mothers ; but is it a true feeling 1 Is it the best sort of feeling? Is it a feeling to be exposed on theatres to mothers and daughters ? Your conclusion (or TO GODWIN. 205 rather Defoe's) conies far short of the tragic ending, which is always expected ; and it is not safe to disappoint. A tragic auditory wants blood. They care but little about a man and his wife parting. Besides, what will you do with the son, after all his pursuits and adventures 1 Even quietly leave him to take guinea-and-a-half lodgings with mamma in Leghorn ! impotent and pacific measures ! ... I am certain that you must mix up some strong ingredients of distress to give a savour to your pottage. I still think that you may, and must, graft the story of Savage upon Defoe. Your hero must kill a man or do something. Can't you bring him to the gallows or some great mischief, out of which she must have recourse to an explanation with her husband to save him. Think on this. The husband, for instance, has great friends in Court at Leghorn. The son is condemned to death. She cannot tease him for a stranger. She must tell the whole truth. Or she may tease him, as for a stranger, till (like Othello in Cassio's case) he begins to suspect her for her impor- tunity. Or, being pardoned, can she not tease her husband to get him banished? Something of this I suggested before. Both is best. The murder and the pardon will make business for the fourth act, and the banishment and explanation (by means of the Friend I want you to draw) the fifth. You must not open any of the truth to Dawley by means of a letter. A letter is a feeble messenger on the stage. Somebody, the son or his friend, must, as a coup de main, be exasperated, and obliged to tell the husband. Damn the husband and his " gentlemanlike qualities." Keep him out of sight, or he will trouble all. Let him be in England on trade, and come home as Biron does in Isabella, in the fourth act, when he is wanted. I am for introducing situations, sort of counterparts to situations which have been tried in other plays like, but not the same. On this principle I recommended a friend like Horatio in the "Fair Penitent," and on this principle I recommend a situation like Othello, with relation to Desdemona's intercession for Cassio. 206 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Bye-scenes may likewise receive hints. The son may see his mother at a mask or Feast, as Romeo, Juliet. The festivity of the company contrasts with the strong per- turbations of the individuals. Dawley may be told his wife's past unchastity at a mask by some witch-character, as Macbeth upon the heath, in dark sentences. This may stir his brain, and be forgot, but come in aid of stronger proof hereafter. From this what you will perhaps call whimsical way of counterparting, this honest stealing, and original mode of plagiarism, much yet, I think, re- mains to be sucked. Excuse these abortions. I thought you would want the draught soon again, and I would not send it empty away. Yours truly, WILLIAM GODWIN ! ! ! Somers Town, September 17, 1801. To JOHN RICKMAN, Esq. LETTER CI.] October 9, 1801. I called lately upon our common friend G. Dyer of Cliffords Inn. I found him inconsolable and very dirty. It seems that Gilbert Wakefield is dead, and George had not got his tribute ready for Mr. Phillips's magazine this month, and Dr. Aikin had sent a little tribute, and Miss Aikiu had also sent a tribute, and the world would expect a tribute from his pen. At first I imagined that George was touched with some sense of kindred mortality, such as Methusaleh himself must have felt, when he was qualmish ; but no, all that disturbed George was, that he had not got a tribute. George the second, George Burnett, supt with me last night. He is not got quite well of the metaphyz, but I hope and trust that last night's paroxysm will be the last, and that his disorder has come to its crisis. He maintained that if a highwayman, who is going to kill you, spares your life on your expressly TO RICKMAN. 207 promising to spare his, that is, not to prosecute, you are under no obligation to keep your word, because you were in a state of violence, when the promise was made, and the Good of the Whole, which may be partially endangered by suffering that man to live, is to be pre- ferred to any such promise in such circumstances made. If I ever turn freebooter, and light upon George Burnett in my travels, I shall remember what I have to trust to. But saving his metaphyz (which goes off after the first heats of youth like the green sickness) George the 2nd has good parts. He only wants fortune. He as ill be- comes adversity, as George the first would do prosperity, if any one should leave him a rich legacy. Another of fortune's humble servants is a visitor of mine, who in the language of antiquity would have been nominated Simonds-with-the-slit-lip. I cannot say his linen was of Tarsus, nor quite so robust as Russian, but it certainly craved bleaching, but saving his dirty shirt, and his physiognomy and his 'bacco box, together with a certain kiddy air in his walk, a man would have gone near to have mistaken him for a gentleman. He has a sort of ambition to be so misunderstood. It seems the Treasury does not pay with that weekly promptitude, and accommodating periodicalness, it was wont ; and some constitutions cannot wait. He craved the loan of a half guinea ; could I refuse a GENTLEMAN who seemed in distress 1 He dropt some words, as if he were desirous of trying what effect the Irish air would have upon a poor constitution. Couldn't you make him a door-keeper, or a game-keeper, or find some post for him, not altogether so brilliant as useful ? Some situation under the mint- master ? I leave him to your mercy and ability. There is no hurry, for what you have given him will keep him in work some time, and for pay, why 'tis just as his Majesty's ministers shall please. So, Cottle's Psalms are come out hot press'd for six shillings. Of course I shall send you a copy. " Poetry is never more delight- fully employed than when in the service of its Creator." 208 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Vide Preface to the Translation (if lie had writ one, but he has not). Quid majus! the Professor is not married,- the Plough is yet in posse peace is all the cry here fire- works, lights, etc., abound White stationed himself at Temple Bar among the boys, and threw squibs ; burned one man's cravat. This is the cream of London in- telligence you shall have the earliest tidings of all new movements. C. L. John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. LETTER OIL] Tuesday, November 24, 1801. D r Rickmau I have just put my finishing hand to my play to alter it for publishing. I have made a thorough chfhge in the structure of the latter part, omitting all those scenes which shew'd John under the first impression of his father's death. I have done this, because I had made him too weak, and to expose him- self before his servants, which was an indecorum ; and from a theory that poetry has nothing to do to give pain ; the imbecilities, and deformities, the dotages of human nature, are not fit objects to be shewn. Instead of these rejected scenes I have told his feelings in a narrative of the old servant to Margaret, which is a relief to the oppression of John so often talking in his own person. I have cut out all the interview of John and Simon, and they do not meet at all, and I hare expunged Simon's bloody resolution, which offended you so much from him. I have sent him to improve himself by travel, and it is explained that his presence (who is the good son in my parable} would have been too much of a reproach and a pain to my prodigal in the first hour of his grief. The whole ends with Margaret's Consola- tion, where it should end, without any pert incident of surprise and trick to make a catastrophe. Moreover, TO RICKMAN. 209 I have excluded the two tales of the Witch and the Gentleman who died for love, having since discovered by searching the parish register of St. Mary Ottery, that his disorder was a stranguary, tho' some rimes upon his grave-stone did a little lean to my hypothesis. More- over, I have gone through and cut out all the Ahs ! and Ohs ! and sundry weak parts, which I thought so fine three or four years ago. When it comes out you must let me know in what manner I can transmit you a copy or two. I have been so particular, because you have shewn more liking to my Margaret than most people, and my alterations were in part the offspring of your suggestions ; not wholly, for I have long smelt a jumble. I hope you will find it now nearly all of a piece. I am to christen it "John Woodvil" simply not "Pride's Cure." As Dyer says, " I am no enemy to candid and ingenuous criticism, I only deprecate the arrows of calumny " : vide most of the prefaces of G. Dyer. Dyer regularly dines with me when he does not go a visiting and brings his shilling. He has pick'd up amazingly. I never saw him happier. He has had his doors listed and his casements puttied, and bought a handsome screen of the last century. Only his poems do not get finished. One volume is printing, but the second wants a good deal doing to it. I do not expect that he will make much progress with his Life and Opinions, till his detestable Lyric Poetry is delivered to subscribers. I shall make him not deliver one vol. till both are ready, else he would infallibly have made two troubles and two ex- pences of it. He talks of marrying, but this en passant (as he says) and entre nous, for God's sake don't mention it to him, for he has not forgiven me for betraying to you his purpose of writing his own Life. He says, that if it once spreads, so many people will expect and wish to have a place in it, that he is sure he shall disoblige all his friends. G. Burnett shewed me your rouzing Letter. If I had not known your theory and design, I must have called it VOL. i. P 210 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. a very cruel Letter, and sure as I was that your general idea of the treatment, which is best for Burnetts and George the Seconds, was right, I could not help thinking you had gone too far, even so far that he could not put up with it or you ever after, without doing a moral injury to himself. But you must pursue your own course, which 9 times out of ten will be more judicious than mine. The less of interference in these cases, the better. I was principally (if not only) sorry, that you assured him of Southey's opinion of the mediocrity of his understanding perfectly agreeing with your own. Southey was the last plank of the scaffold which propt up George in his opinion of himself. But I dare not affirm you did wrong. I am not a teacher in Israel. Yours truly, C. LAMB. John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. LETTER GUI.] For John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. [1801.] 7 was the moon-struck man, that was inspired to write on the pacquet "for John Rickman," and must hasten to clear Burnett of that part of his Indictment. He brought to me his Letter and his Essay, or rather two Essays, and desired me to write myself and put up all together in a parcel. I had no leisure to write then, but I did up his things, and when I had done so the enormous bulk staggered me, and I preferred that obnoxious indorsement to enlarging it with another cover. I was guided by the usages of the India House, where I have often received superscriptions similar, and escaped shot-free. I will never practise upon your pocket in the like manner again, but Burnett stands acquitted. None but the Bishop could have composed that illustrious specimen of ignorance which you extract, and he alone, TO RICKMAN. 211 in all England, would not understand the absurdity of it, if it were to be pointed out. Still I wish something could be done for him, even if he waited six weeks, or a day over, for it. Methinks ! (as the Poets say) I see Preferment waiting at the door, afraid to come in, 'till his Worship has finished his Introduction, that she may not deprive the World of his matchless labours. I have nothing to communicate, but my thanks. I do assure you that I retain a very lively memory of our old Smoking Evenings in Southampton Buildings. G. Dyer, our illustrious Co-Pufter, has emigrated to Enfield, where some rich man, that has got two Country Houses, allows him the use of a very large one, with a library, where he is getting the final vol. of his Poems ready, and then I shall set him about his Life : by itse in a sentence back, I mean dirting and littering. Southey is not arrived. Yours sincerely, C. LAMB. I forgot to notice an anachronism in your 1st Letter, which I am glad to see you correct in a subsequent you accost me my dear SIR. By what twist of association in your unlucky Pericranium have you connected that Honor with my cognomen 1 Mary thanks you, but she prefers Rum. I have literally this moment rec d your packet for Southey. I mean Burnett's History of his own times. And your letter. For your kind mention of Slit-lips take my warmest thanks. He will have no objection to wait six weeks or a day over, tho' it may be damnably more inconvenient for him to wait, than for the Bishop. The fact of the " strange flesh " which he is reported to have eaten, astounds me, but I can believe and tremble. Never mind the ceremony of franking to me. John Company pays. 212 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER CIV.] [No date or post-mark, 1801.] I sincerely thank you for your repeated offer, but I have just received as much as 50, an old debt which I told you of, and that will a good deal and more than cover the expences of printing. I expect to be able to send you some copies in a few weeks. I have not had a proof sheet yet. I have nothing to claim upon Dyer's account. He paid me from the beginning as near as I can calculate, and I solemnly protest it, to a penny for all the expences he put me to, and whenever he dines with us he regularly brings his shilling, which is a fair average for what his gluttony devours. To be sure he has occasionally an eleemosynary whiff of tobacco, for which I cannot sconse the Poet. I am afraid he sometimes does not come when he has not got a shilling. I cannot force him, for now his health is come back, he is the most unmanageable of God's creatures. He goes about fetching and carrying for Ladies, and always thinking he must call upon this Lady and t'other Gentleman. His first vol. is nearly printed, but he is projecting new odes and impertinences for the 2d, and I cannot foresee a period. Still he seems by fits bent upon writing his Life, and will do it if the Prototype is not overtaken with death. I quite give up any hope of reducing him to common sense and human conduct. All that can be done is to bolster up his carcase by a daily habit of Dining, until he finishes his mortal pilgrimage. Poor G. Burnett is very ill and reduced. You would deposit your fierce anger if you saw the metaphysician. He has brought his Introduction to a finish at last, but he is not in a capacity to go on. Coleridge has recommended him to the Editor of the Morning Post, who has promised to employ him. But a Lion is in his foot-path, and he cannot begin yet. I suppose he will write to you, and it will be needless to say more of him here. The goul has a gouless and two, TO RICKMAN. 213 if not three young gouls. The goul has not paid me the pittance, for 'twas not much, he borrowed of me, but I have reason to believe his circumstances are so squalid, that it would be more to expect of him than can be expected from man or goul, to divert his Comings in from the service of genuine hunger and thirst. Fenwick's Plough (how one idea of Poverty introduces another !) is degenerated already from a daily to a weekly paper. I wish it may not vanish into thin air, or come out the same day as Burnett's Historia Romana issues from the press. I meantime have made some overtures to the Editor of the Morning Post thro' Coleridge, who writes for that paper, and hope I am on the point of being engaged. I have seen Southey several times. His wife is considerably improved, and will talk if she is talked to, but she bitterly complains that when literary men get together, they never speak to the women. Mrs. Lovel is also in town and Southey's mother, who is DYING : " So am not I, said the foolish fat scullion." Do you remember our unfeeling behaviour at the funeral of that dear young Lady, who was withered in her bloom by the untimely stroke of Death, and lies in what-d'ye-call- 'em Church yard ? The tear is falling while I remember don't you perceive the Ink is rather brackish? as G. Burnett asked in a company at my brother's the other day, whether the Thames Water at Blackfriars Bridge was not a little Brackish. The Professor has not yet thrown himself away. I am sorry to find he is about to commit a folly, for I hear that She has no fortune and has one child, and they propose that she shall ease the burden of the family expences by translating from the French. Fell, the inevitable shadow of everything which Godwin does, is absolutely writing a Play. It is a Comedy. It is just finished, and I go this evening in the hope to see it. It will have one trait in it. There can be no mirth in it. An Owl making a Pun would be no bad emblem of the unnatural attempt. To your enquiry whether Mary swallows certain mixed Liquors, 214 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. she answers that I unfortunately misunderstood that advice, as if it had been addrest to me, and have almost killed myself by the Blunder. But she will profit by the correction. She desires her love and remembrance. White often enquires after you, and as often desires to be mentioned to you, which I as regularly forget, Stoddart is going to begin the study of Civil Law at the Commons. Farewell, old Comrade and new Secretary, Thine, C. L. You must send up your St. Helena letter immediately, and I will drop it in our Box. I can't frank it, John Company never franks outwards. A ship, the Marquis of Ely, goes at Xmas. The Armston goes next Wednesday. Since I wrote last Leaf, I have read Fell's Comedy, and am surprized to find it contain, if not sterling wit or character, a liveliness and knowledge of the present popular taste, which has astonish'd me. The serious parts are damn'd flat. But I should not at all wonder, he having a pretty good introduction, even if it should please highly. He has been a minute observer of what takes in Reynolds's plays, and has had real actors continually in his view. Who knows, but Owls do make Puns, when they hoot by moonshine ? I shall hear from the Morning Post this day. and shall endeavour to get the Theatrical Reports, not all, but Kemble's chief characters, and Cooke's, etc. John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. TO RICKMAN. 215 LETTER CV.] January 9, 1802. Please to send me one Letter with the Broad Seal, for a friend who is curious iu impressions. I am to be sure much gratified with your use of Margaret as a kind of rack to extract confession from women. But don't give me out as your Rack-maker, lest the women retort upon me the fate of Perillus, which you may read in your Ainsworth under the article Phalaris; or you may find the story more at large by perusing the Controversy between Beutley and Boyle. I have delayed to write (I believe I am telling a Lye) until I should get a book ready to send (but I believe this has been all along a pretext recurred to, a kind of after-motive, when the resolution was taken a priori, rather than the true cause, which was mixed up of busy days and riotous nights, doing the Company's business in a morning, straining for Jokes in the afternoon, and retailing them (not being yet published) over punch at night. The Lungs of Stentor could not long sustain the Life I have led. I get into parties, or treat them with Pope Joan four times in a week. You have dropt in ere now when Norris was courting at such a Party, and you know the game. I stick to it like any Papist. Tis better than Poetry, Mechanics, Politics, or Metaphysics. That's a stop there's pope you did not take your ace what a magic charm in sounds. ... I begin not to wonder at the bloodshed which dyed Christian Europe concerning Omousia and Omoiousia. A party of people's faces about a fire grinning over cards and forgetting that they have got to go home is the supreme felicity, the Maximum Bonum. White has or is about to write you at my suggestion. We desire nothing so vigorously as to see Master Secretary in these parts. There are Liquors and 216 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. fumes extant, which have power to detain a Bachelor from his cold Bed till cock crow. Fenwick gives routs and balls and suppers (not balls) but splendid entertainments out of the first fruits of the Plow he had some hundreds of pounds from unthinking Nobility. It is no breach of charity to suppose that part is expended his wife and daughter have got magnificent Hats, which Mary waggishly has christen'd Northumber- land Hats, from his great Patron at Charing Cross. Dyer has at last met with a madman more mad than himself the Earl of Buchan, brother to the Erskines and eccentric biographer of Fletcher of Saltoun. This old man of near eighty is come to London in his way to France, and George and he go about everywhere. George brought the mad Lord up to see me I wan't at home but Mary was washing a pretty pickle to receive an Earl in ! Lord have mercy upon us ! a Lord in my garret ! My utmost ambition was some time or other to receive a Secretary ! Well, I am to breakfast with this mad Lord on Sunday. I am studying manners. George and my Lord of Buchan went on Thursday last to Kichmond in the Long Coach to pay their devotions to the shrine of Thomson ! The coldest day in the year. Enough to cool a Jerusalem-Padder. George is as proud as a Turkey Cock and can talk of nothing else ; always taking care to hedge in at the end that he don't value Lords, and that the Earl has nothing of the Lord about him. human nature ! human Nature ! for my part I have told every Body, how I had an Earl come to see me. . . . George describes the Earl as a very worthy man, who has his hobby horses ; for instance, George says, he will stop you in the street, when you are walking with him, and hold you by the button, and talk so loud, that all the Passers by look at you. So you may guess why he cleaves to George the first. If you have read the Post, you may have seen a dissertation on Cooke's Richard the 3d. which is the best thing I have done. It was in last Monday ; stray Jokes I will not mark, hoping you TO RICKMAN. 217 will always take the good ones to be mine, and the bad ones to be done by John a Nokes, etc. In haste. Happy New Year to Master Secretary. 0. L. I had, before your injunction came, given a hint to the Goul, that you were disposed to serve him ; this to rear him from the dreary state of despair he was in. But now, mum. I wish to God you may do any thing : for all the Elements have fought against him. My play will most likely accompany my next. Fell's goes on slow and sure, like his own long stories. It is much, much, better than I could believe. Some of it is very good farce, which is all a modern play need be. To John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. LETTER CVL] January 14, 1802. You may suspect as much as you please (suspicion ever haunts the guilty mind) that I did not do that thing about Richard, but I tell you I did, and I also made the Lord Mayor's Bed, which you are welcome to rumple as much as you please. I plead guilty to certain "felicities of phrase" Noviciate used as an adjective I myself suspected, but did not know that novice was any other than a substantive. But what the devil's all this coil for about delightful artifices and elastic minds ? and how should a man at Bantry Bay know any thing about good English ? the fact is, that it was but an unfinished affair at first, and by the intelligent artifice of the Editor it was made more chaotic still. As it stands, it is more than half introduction : half of which was to be note. But it is most probably the last theatrical morceau I shall do : for they want 'em done the same night, and I tried it once, and found myself non compos. I can't do a thing against time. If I use " do " and " did " to excess, 'tis 218 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. because I know 'em to be good English, that you can't deny. My Editor uniformly rejects all that I do consider- able in length. I shall only do paragraphs, with now and then a slight poem such as " Dick Strype," if you read it, which was but a long Epigram. So I beg you not to read with much expectation, for my poor paragraphs do only get in, when there are none of any body's else. Most of them are rejected ; all, almost, that are personal, where my forte lies. And I cannot get at once out of the delightful regions of scurrility, the "Delectable Mountains" of Albion where whilom I fed my sheep, into the kick- shaws of fashionable tittle-tattle, which I must learn. I cannot have the conscience to order a Paper for Xt Church, on the hypothesis that it is on my account (which is modest) for no paragraphs can be worth eight guineas a year. However I will try and see, if I can get it at an under price as you proposed. I sent 'em Mottoes for 12th Day at their own desire how did they serve me 1 ? the first day they put in mottoes by another (most stupid) hand, and the next day mottoes by ditto with some of mine tacked to 'em. They rejected a pretty good one on Dr. Solomon. My namesake, sprung from Jewish Breeder, Knew from the Hyssop to the Cedar, But I, unlike the Jewish Leader, Scarce know the Hyssop from the Cedar. Another of the rejected ones, on Count Rumford I deal in Aliments fictitious, And teaze the Poor with soups nutritious ; Of bones and flint I make dilution, And belong to the National Institution. Maybe you didn't see what were in of mine. The Best was ADDINQTON I put my night cap on my head, And went as usual to my bed, And most surprizing to relate ! I woke a Minister of State ! TO RICKMAN. 219 Another FHEBE AND CANNINO At Eton School brought up with dull boys, We shone like men among the school boys ; But since we in the world have been We are but schoolboys among men. Your advice about getting a share of the Post as fast as I can ! ! I shall certainly follow. I wish I may hold my two guinea matter. My scrawl costs you nothing ; and me only so much Ink. Mary's Love. We are just setting out on a night expedition freezing (the glass at 23 as I hear, for I don't know a thermometer from a barometer) to Pentonville to see Mister Comedy Fell and his pretty spouse. Yours etc. C. L. To John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. LETTER CVIL] January 18, 1802. George the 2nd has just arrived, has stayed over his time ! ! and written to Ld. Stanhope without telling his Ld.ship where to find him, accordingly must write again. Dear Rickman I have not been able to find a chap- man, who will pay half thy father's newspapers. I already read the Post upon nearly a similar Plan ; 7 or 8 of us subscribe. One keeps it and pays 1/2. But to avert thy wrath and indignation which I know will burn most furiously if I omit thy commission, I have ordered one at full cost, and there will go the first with the same Post which carries this. As Mary seldom sees a Paper she will thank your father for the liberty of reading it first, and take care only to send it by the same day's Post. She will pay such proportion as a Jury before Lord Kenyon shall award. Dinner is smoking. Yours truly, 0. LAMR To John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. 220 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER CVIII.] February 1, 1802. Dear Rickinan Not having known the sweet girl deceased, your humble servant cannot endite with true passion a suitable Epitaph. Here is a kind of substitute for feeling but your own Prose, or nakedly the Letter which you sent me, which was in some sort an Epitaph, and the best one, would do better on her grave stone than the cold Lines of a Stranger. A Heart which felt Unkindness, yet complain'd not ; A Tongue which spake the simple Truth, and feign'd not ; A Soul as white as the pure marble Skin (The beauteous Mansion it was lodged in) Which, unrespected, could itself respect : On Earth was all the Portion of a Maid, Who in this common Sanctuary laid Sleeps unoffended by the World's Neglect. I have not seen Southey to talk with him about it, but I conclude you addrest a Letter to that import to him, as his came along with mine. If you stay a little, perhaps he or I may hit upon a Better, for I suspect it sadly of common place. I had hoped ere this to send you a Book, but the Boarders are shockingly dilatory, and seem never to have heard of the fabulous stories of the Anxiety of Authors and Parents. You will see almost as soon as the Receipt of this a first Number of a Paper in the Morning Post, which I have undertaken solus, to be called the Londoner ; I think you will like the First Number, as it jumps with your Notions about a Country Life, etc. ... I have done no more, so I have all the world before me where to chuse. I think you could give me hints. I have seen light Papers in the Agricult. Mag. which would suit the Londoner to a tittle. G. Burnett surprized us with a visit yesterday. His Two young Lords have run away TO RICKMAN. 221 George deposes, that he was Teaching them their Lesson, when he was called down by Ld. Stanhope to be intro- duced to his Lordship's Mother ; when he returned his Pupils were flown. They had gone out of Window with their best Coats and Linen. The Eldest Son of Ld. S. served him exactly the same Trick, and his Lordship sets it down, that these striplings as well as the former (who never came back) were spirited away by the Pitt and Grenville Party, to whom he is allied by marriage. He says, that Pitt will make them Villains. Ministers have already bought off his Son and his Son-in-Law : and he meant to bring up these young ones (the eldest 16) to mechanics or manufactures. It is very probable what he says for the P's and G's (writing to a Secretary I dare not be more explicit) would go some steps to stop the growth of Democratic Peers. George declares that he is only sorry on Ld. Stanhope's account, who is much agitated, but on his own he don't care at all : nay I have no doubt he is ready to leap at his heart, for Lord S. desires he will stay in his house, and he will try to get him something. So George has got his old desirable prospect of food and clothing with no Duty to perform for it. I could fill vols. with a History of his absurdities since the date of my Last. . . . Take one or 2. Imprimis, he overstay'd his 3 weeks then he wrote to Lord S. from town to write to him, but forgot to mention his own address then he was forced to write again to say he forgot, and begg'd his Lordship to tell him the Exact situation where his Lordship's House stood, that he might have no trouble in finding it ! ! ! to write to a Peer of the Realm to tell the number of his house ! Then he determines to set off for Chevening next morning, and writes that he will come down by the 3 o'clock stage then he comes to us the night before at 1 1 and complains bitterly of the difficulty of getting up so early then he goes away, and White and I lay wagers that he won't go at all. Next morning 11 o'clock enter~~Oeo. the 2nd in a dirty neckcloth he could not go because he had no 222 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Linen, and he had not time to go to Southey and borrow it, and inadvertently slips out that to be sure there was a Coach went at | past 10. Then my Tutor gapes, and stares, and borrows a neckcloth and sets off with all proper humility to My Lord's in a Post Chaise drives up to the Door in Style and there I leave him bowing and gaping to see the fine Pictures. Yours truly, C. LAMB. Mary's grateful thanks for your indulgence by which she reads my works. To John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. LETTER CIX.] February 4, 1802. Dear Rickman I send you three Copies. Keep one yourself, and distribute the others. Perhaps you will send one to her, "whom you in sport do call your Margaret," but this is mere conjecture. G. Dyer is sitting by me, he begs to be kindly re- membered. He has brought news, that a Mr. Waine- wright, with a Mr. Frend the Pamphleteer, and Mr. Perry the Chronicleer, have set up as a Committee to procure him an annuity by subscription. Ld. Stanhope has sent 50. Talking of money, you owe me 22 which I paid in advance for your father's Papers. Yours truly, C. L. To John Rickman, Esq. Dublin Castle. TO RICKMAN. 223 LETTER CX.] February 14, 1802. " I take thy groat in earnest of Revenge." One-and- twenty Margarets fall to the disposal of your dainty Cousin. I sup with him at Southey's on Tuesday, God willing. Your guineas (which, let me tell you, are too much, but you shall have your way) are not absolutely mal-a-pros, for by a cruel reverse of Fortune, that Dame who is painted with a wheel to signify to you, that she is changes, and rollings, and mutabilities, I am no longer Paragraph spinner. The fact is, that Stuart was wonder- fully polite and civil at first, I suppose because Coleridge recommended me, from whose assistance in the Paper he expected great things, but Coleridge from ill health and unsettlement having hung back, I gradually got out of favor, and Stuart has at last twice told me that I must take more pains about my paragraphs, for he has not been able to draw above one in five from what I have sent him. This in connection with his altered behaviour was hint quite enough for me, who do not require hints as big as St. Paul's Church to make me understand a coldness, excited my magnanimous spirit to endite a valorous Letter of Resignation, which I did with some qualms, when I remembered what I gave up : but to tell truth, all the little I have done has been very irksome, and rendered ten times more so from a sense of my employer not being fully satisfied : and that little has subtracted from my pleasure of walking, reading, idling, etc., which are as necessary to me as the " golden vapour " of Life itself. My health (silly as it seems to relate) has suffered bitterly. My Spirits absolutely require freedom and leisure, and I think I shall never engage to do task work any more, for I am sick. I must cut closer. I am almost ashamed at my capriciousness, as must seem to 224 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. you, but upon a serious review I do approve of what I've done. I've foolishly involved you (I fear) in an expense of 8 guineas a year, which I think was on my acct. but as it is for whom it is, I must not call it foolish. A Paper in a Country Town is a kind of London. But I would gladly purchase your acquiescence by paying half, which I know you won't accept. I have given this up only two days, and I feel myself at elbow room, free and happy. I can scribble now at my heart's Leisure, if I have an impulse, and tho' I know I speak as a fool, I am sure I can write better gratis. Say no more about it. I have weighed my loss and my gain, and I write Profit. I may yet do the Londoners at my Leisure. This Letter is short for I have got a bad headache. Mr. Abbot's elevation, you may be sure, surprized me. I take it for granted you will not be a Loser. I am sure I shall be a gainer, if an Easterly wind wafts you to England. Frend was here yesterday. He desires me to set down every day Dyer dines with me, and the Committee will pay me, as George is to have no money of his own. George contrives constantly to dine here, when he says he shan't over night, which is very convenient, and vice versa. It is the damned Vanity of being supposed to be always engaged. Now he is got well, he is as freakish as King David at Gath. Nothing can be done with him ; save that the Committee will preserve him from felo cle se, that he shan't starve him- self. George the 2nd discharges his important Trust, of doing nothing for Ld. S. with fidelity and diligence. His Lordship sends him to town upon any fiddle-faddle errand, and George fancies himself essential to his Lordship's comfort. He looks more important than Mr. Dressin, King's messenger. Mary always desires to be most kindly remembered by you. She bids me not tell you that an Epigram TO MANNING. 225 called Helen, in my little Book, is of her writing. But it is, every tittle of it. I hope you do not dislike it. We remain yours truly, 0. L., M. L. To John Eickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER CXI.] February 15, 1802. Apropos, I think you wrong about my play. All the omissions are right. And the supplementary scene, in which Sandford narrates the manner in which his master is affected, is the best in the book. It stands where a hodge-podge of German puerilities used to stand. I insist upon it that you like that scene. Love me, love that scene. I will now transcribe the "Londoner" (No. 1), and wind up all with affection and humble servant at the end. [Here was transcribed the essay called "The Londoner," see Poems, Plays, and Essays in this Edition.] " What is all this about ? " said Mrs. Shandy. " A story of a cock and a bull," said Yorick : and so it is ; but Manning will take good-naturedly what God will send him across the water : only I hope he won't shut his eyes, and open his mouth, as the children say, for that is the way to gape, and not to read. Manning, continue your laudable purpose of making me your register. I will render you back all your remarks ; and /, not you, shall have received usury by having read them. In the meantime, may the great Spirit have you in his keeping, VOL. i, q 226 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. and preserve our Englishman from the inoculation of frivolity and sin upon French earth. Allans or what is it you say, instead of good-bye ? Mary sends her kind remembrance, and covets the remarks equally with me. C. LAMB. LETTER CXIL] February 1802. Not a sentence, not a syllable of Trismegistus shall be lost through my neglect. I am his word-banker, his storekeeper of puns and syllogisms. You cannot conceive (and if Trismegistus cannot, no man can) the strange joy which I felt at the receipt of a letter from Paris. It seemed to give me a learned importance, which placed me above all who had not Parisian correspondents. Believe that I shall carefully husband every scrap, which will save you the trouble of memory, when you come back. You cannot write things so trifling, let them only be about Paris, which I shall not treasure. In particular, I must have parallels of actors and actresses. I must be told if any building in Paris is at all comparable to St. Paul's, which, contrary to the usual mode of that part of our nature called admiration, I have looked up to with un- fading wonder, every morning at ten o'clock, ever since it has lain in my way to business. At noon I casually glance upon it, being hungry ; and hunger has not much taste for the fine arts. Is any night-walk comparable to a walk from St. Paul's to Charing Cross, for lighting and paving, crowds going and coming without respite, the rattle of coaches, and the cheerfulness of shops? Have you seen a man guillotined yet ? Is it as good as hanging 1 Are the women all painted, and the men all monkeys ? or are there not a few that look like rational of both sexes ? Are you and the first consul thick? All this expense of ink I may fairly put you to, as your letters will not be solely for my proper pleasure; but are to serve as TO MANNING. 227 memoranda and notices, helps for short memory, a kind of Rumfordising recollection, for yourself on your return. Your letter was just what a letter should be, crammed, and very funny. Every part of it pleased me till you came to Paris ; then your philosophical indolence, or indifference, stung me. You cannot stir from your rooms till you know the language ! What the devil ! are men nothing but word-trumpets? Are men all tongue and ear? Have these creatures, that you and I profess to know something about, no faces, gestures, gabble, no folly, no absurdity, no induction of French education upon the abstract idea of men and women, no similitude nor dis- similitude to English ! Why, thou cursed Smellfungus ! your account of your landing and reception, and Bullen, (I forget how you spell it, it was spelt my way in Harry the Eighth's time), was exactly in that minute style which strong impressions INSPIRE (writing to a Frenchman, I write as a Frenchman would). It appears to me as if I should die with joy at the first landing in a foreign country. It is the nearest pleasure which a grown man can substi- tute for that unknown one, which he can never know, the pleasure of the first entrance into life from the womb. I dare say, in a short time, my habits would come back like a " stronger man " armed, and drive out that new pleasure ; and I should soon sicken for known objects. Nothing has transpired here that seems to me of sufficient importance to send dry-shod over the water : but I sup- pose you will want to be told some news. The best and the worst to me is, that I have given up two guineas a week at the Post, and regained my health and spirits, which were upon the wane. I grew sick, and Stuart unsatisfied. Ludisti satis, tempus abire est ; I must cut closer, that's all. Mister Fell, or as you, with your usual facetiousness and drollery, call him, Mr. F + ll, has stopped short in the middle of his play. Some friend has told him that it has not the least merit in it. Oh that I had the rectifying of the Litany ! I would put in a libera nos (Scriptores videlicet) ab amicis t That's all 228 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. the news. Apropos : is it pedantry, writing to a French- man, to express myself sometimes by a French word, when an English one would not do as well? Methinks my thoughts fall naturally into it. In all this time I have doue but one thing, which I reckon tolerable, and that I will transcribe, because it may give you pleasure, being a picture of my humours. You will find it in my last page. It absurdly is a first Number of a series, thus strangled in embryo. More news ! The Professor's Kib has come out to be a disagreeable woman, so much so as to drive me and some more old cronies from his house. He must not wonder if people are shy of coming to see him because oi the "snakes." 0. L. To ME. RICKMAN. LETTER CXIII.] April 10, 1802. Dear Rickman The enclosed letter explains itself. It will save me the danger of a corporal interview with the man-eater, who, if very sharp set, may take a fancy to me, if you will give me a short note, declaratory of probabilities. These from him who hopes to see you once or twice more before he goes hence, to be no more seen : for there is no tipple nor tobacco in the grave, whereunto he hasteneth. C. LAMB. 16, Mitre Court Buildings, Inner Temple. How clearly the Ghoul writes, and like a gentleman ! To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER CXIV.] September 8, 1802. Dear Coleridge I thought of not writing till we had performed some of our commissions ; but we have been hindered from setting about them, which yet shall be done to a tittle. We got home veiy pleasantly on Sunday. Mary is a good deal fatigued, and finds the difference of TO MANNING. 229 going to a place, and coming from it. I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the last day I live. They haunt me perpetually. I am like a man who has been falling in love unknown to himself, which he finds out when he leaves the lady. I do not remember any very strong impression while they were present; but, being gone, their mementos are shelved in my brain. We passed a very pleasant little time with the Clarksons. The Wordsworths are at Montagu's rooms, near neigh- bours to us. They dined with us yesterday, and I was their guide to Bartlemy Fair ! To MRS. GODWIN. LETTER CXV.J [Early in September 1802 ?] Dear Mrs. G. Having observed with some concern that Mr. Godwin is a little fastidious in what he eats for supper, I herewith beg to present his palate with a piece of dried salmon. I am assured it is the best that swims in Trent. If you do not know how to dress it, allow me to add, that it should be cut in thin slices and broiled in paper previously prepared in butter. Wishing it exquisite, I remain, Much as before, yours sincerely, C. LAMB. Some add mashed potatoes. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER CXVI.] London, September 24, 1802. My dear Manning Since the date of my last letter I have been a traveller. A strong desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never to learn the language ; therefore that could be no objection. However, I am very glad I did not go, because you had left Paris (I see) before I could have set out. I believe, Stoddart promising to go with me another year prevented that plan. My 230 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. next scheme (for to my restless, ambitious miud London was become a bed of thorns) was to visit the far-famed peak in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, with- out breeches. This my purer mind rejected as indelicate. And my final resolve was, a tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to Keswick, without giving Coleridge any notice, for my time, being precious, did not admit of it. He received us with all the hospitality in the world, and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of the country. He dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable house, quite enveloped .on all sides by a net of mountains : great floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and asleep. We got in in the even- ing, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mount- ains into colours, purple, etc. etc. We thought we had got into fairyland. But that went off (as it never came again ; while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets), and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, etc. I never shall forget ye, how ye lay about that night, like an intrenchment ; gone to bed, as it seemed for the night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study ; which is a large antique, ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an ./Eolian harp, and an old sofa, half bed, etc. And all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw, and his broad -breasted brethren : what a night ! Here we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people, and most hospit- able, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been in London, and past much time TO MANNING. 231 with us : he is now gone into Yorkshire to be married. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater ; I forget the name ; to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before : they make such a spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them, till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the lamps do after an illumina- tion. Mary was excessively tired when she got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water she surmounted it most manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with a pro- spect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and ballad ! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure, in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three weeks ; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degrada- tion I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any one, to come home and work. I felt very little. I had been dreaming I was a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me. Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to those great places where I wandered about, participating in their greatness. After all, I could not live in Skiddaw. I could spend a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a fine 232 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. creature. My habits are changing, I think, i.e. from drunk to sober. Whether I shall be happier or not remains to be proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a morning ; but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat, and the marrow, and the kidneys, i.e. the night, glorious care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright and brilliant ! Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such shameworthy terms ? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying 1 The truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St. Gothard, but it is just now nearest my heart. Fenwick is a ruined man. He is hiding himself from his creditors, and has sent his wife and children into the country. Fell, my other drunken companion (that has been : nam hie ccestus artemque repono), is turned editor of a Naval Chronicle. Godwin continues a steady friend, though the same facility does not remain of visiting him often. That . . . has detached Marshall from his house; Marshall, the man who went to sleep when the "Ancient Mariner" was reading ; the old, steady, unalterable friend of the Pro- fessor. Holcroft is not yet come to town. I expect to see him, and will deliver your message. Things come crowding in to say, and no room for 'em. Some things are too little to be told, i.e. to have a preference ; some are too big and circumstantial. Thanks for yours, which was most delicious. Would I had been with you, be- nighted, etc. ! I fear my head is turned with wandering. I shall never be the same acquiescent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, for I shall not like to hazard a letter, not knowing where the fates have carried you. Farewell, my dear fellow. C. LAMB. TO COLERIDGE. 233 To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER CXVII.] October 9, 1802. CAROLU8 AQNUS COLERIDGIO 8UO 8. Carissime Scribis, ut nummos scilicet epistolarios solvam et postremo in Tartara abeam : immo tu potius Tartaricum (ut aiunt) deprehendisti, qui me vernacula mea lingua pro scribS, conductitio per tot annos satis eleganter usum ad Latine impure et canino fere ore latrandum per tuasmet epis tolas bene compositas et con- cinnatas percellere studueris. Conabor tamen : Attamen vereor, ut ^Edes istas nostri Christi, inter quas tanta diligentia" magistri improba bonis literulis, quasi per clysterem quendam injectis, infra supraque olim penitus imbutus fui, Barnesii et Marklandii doctissimorum virorum nominibus adhuc gaudentes, barbarismis meis peregrin is et aliunde qusesitis valde dehonestavero. Sed pergere quocunque placet. Adeste igitur, quotquot estis, conju- gationum declinationumve turmse, terribilia spectra, et tu imprimis ades, Umbra et Imago maxima obsoletse (Diis gratise) Virgae, qu& novissime in mentem recepta, horres- cunt subito natales, et parum deest quo minus braccas meas ultro usque ad crura demittam, et ipse puer pueriliter ejulem. Ista tua Carmina Chain ouniana satis grandia essc mihi constat ; sed hoc mihi nonnihil displicet, quod in iis illae montium Grisosonum inter se responsiones totidem reboant anglice, God, God, haud aliter atque temet audivi tuas montes Cumbrianas resonare docentem, Dodd, Dodd, nempe Doctorem infelicem : vocem certe haud Deum Sonantem. Pro cseteris plaudo. Itidem comparationes istas tuas satis callidas et lepidas certe novi : sed quid hoc ad verum 1 cum illi Consular! viro et mentem irritabilem istum Julianum : et etiam astutias friqididas quasdam Augusto propriores, nequa- 234 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. quam congruenter uno afflatu comparationis causa insedisse affirmaveris : necnon nescio quid similitudinis etiam cum Tiberio tertio in loco solicite produxeris. Quid tibi equidem cum uno vel altero Caesare, cum universi Duo- decim ad comparationes tuas se ultro tulerint t Prseterea, vetustati adnutans, comparationes iniquas odi. Istas Wordsworthianas nuptias (vel potius cujusdam Edmundii tui) te retulisse mirificum gaudeo. Valeas, Maria, fortunata nimium, et antiquse illae Mariae Virgini (comparatione plusquam Caesareana) forsitan comparanda, quoniam "beata inter mulieres:" et etiam fortasse Wordsworthium ipsum tuum maritum Angelo Salutatori sequare fas erit, quoniam e Coelo (ut ille) descendunt et Musse et ipsi Musicolae : at Wordsworthium Musarum observantissimum semper novi. Necnon te quoque affini- tate hac nova, Dorothea, gratulor: et tu certe alterum donum Dei. Istum Ludum, quern tu, Coleridgi, Americanum garris, a Ludo (ut Ludi sunt) maxime abhorrentem praetereo : nempe quid ad Ludum attinet, totius illae gentis Colum- bianae, a nostra gente, eadem stirpe orta, ludi singuli causa voluntatem perperam alienare? Quaeso ego materiam ludi : tu Bella ingeris. Denique valeas, et quid de Latinitate mea putes, dicas : facias ut opossum ilium nostrum volantem vel (ut tu malis) quendam Piscem errabundum, a me salvum et pulcherrimum esse jubeas. Valeant uxor tua cum Hartleiio nostro. Soror mea salva est et ego : vos et ipsa salvere jubet. Ulterius progrediri non liquet : homo sum aeratus. P.S. Pene niilu exciderat, apud me esse Libroruni a Johanno Miltono Latine scriptorum volumina duo, quae (Deo volente) cum caeteris tuis libris ocyils citius per Mariam ad te missura curabo ; sed me in hoc tali genere rerum nullo modo festinantem novisti : babes confitentem reum. Hoc solum dici restat, praedicta volumina pulchra esse et omnia opera Latina J. M. in se continere. Circa TO COLERIDGE. 235 defensionem istam Pro Pop . Ang. acerrimam in prsesens ipse praeclaro gaudio moror. Jussa tua Stuartina faciam ut diligenter colam. Iterum iteramque valeas : Et facias memor sis nostri. LBTTER CXVIIL] October 11, 1802. Dear Coleridge Your offer about the German poems is exceedingly kind : but I do not think it a wise specula- tion, because the time it would take you to put them into prose would be nearly as great as if you versified them. Indeed I am sure you could do the one nearly as soon as the other ; so that instead of a division of labour, it would be only a multiplication. But I will think of your offer in another light. I daresay I could find many things, of a light nature, to suit that paper, which you would not object to pass upon Stuart as your own, and I should come in for some light profits, and Stuart think the more highly of your assiduity. "Bishop Hall's Characters" I know nothing about, having never seen them. I will reconsider your offer, which is very plausible ; but as to the drudgery of going every day to an editor with my scraps, like a pedler, for him to pick out and tumble about my ribbons and posies, and to wait in his lobby, etc., no money could make up for the degradation. You are in too high request with him to have anything unpleasant of that sort to submit to. It was quite a slip of my pen, in my Latin letter, when I told you I had Milton's Latin Works. I ought to have said his Prose Works, in two volumes, Birch's edition, containing all, both Latin and English, a fuller and better edition than Lloyd's of Toland. It is completely at your service, and you must accept it from me ; at the same time I shall be much obliged to you for your Latin Milton, which you think you have at Howitt's ; it will leave me nothing to wish for but the History of England, which I shall soon pick up for a trifle. But you must 236 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. write me word whether the Miltons are worth paying carriage for. You have a Milton ; but it is pleasanter to eat one's own pease out of one's own garden, than to buy them by the peck at Oovent Garden ; and a book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog's-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum. But, Coleridge, you must accept these little things, and not think of returning money for them, for I do not set up for a factor or general agent. As for the fantastic debt of 15, I'll think you were dreaming, and not trouble myself seriously to attend to you. My bad Latin you properly correct ; but natales for nates was an inadvertency : I knew better. Progre- diri, or progredi, I thought indifferent, my authority being Ainsworth. However, as I have got a fit of Latin, you will now and then indulge me with an epistola. I pay the postage of this, and propose doing it by turns. In that case I can now and then write to you without remorse ; not that you would mind the money, but you have not always ready cash to answer small demands, the epistolarii nummi. Your " Epigram on the Sun and Moon in Germany " is admirable. Take 'em all together, they are as good as Harrington's. I will muster up all the conceits I can, and you shall have a packet some day. You and I together can answer all demands surely : you, mounted on a terrible charger (like Homer, in the Battle of the Books), at the head of the cavalry : I will lead the light horse. I have just heard from Stoddart. Allen and he intend taking Keswick in their way home. Allen wished particularly to have it a secret that he is in Scotland, and wrote to me accordingly very urgently. As luck was, I had told not above three or four ; but Mary had told Mrs. Green, of Christ's Hospital ! For the present, farewell : never forgetting love to Pipos and his friends. C. LAMB. TO COLERIDGE. 237 LKTTKE CXIX.] October 23, 1802. I read daily your political essays. I was particularly pleased with " Once a Jacobin :" though the argument is obvious enough, the style was less swelling than your things sometimes are, and it was plausible ad populum. A vessel has just arrived from Jamaica with the news of poor Sam Le Grice's death. He died at Jamaica of the yellow fever. His course was rapid, and he had been very foolish ; but I believe there was more of kindness and warmth in him than in almost any other of oui schoolfellows. The annual meeting of the Blues is to- morrow, at the London Tavern, where poor Sammy dined with them two years ago, and attracted the notice of all by the singular foppishness of his dress. When men go off the stage so early, it scarce seems a noticeable thing in their epitaphs, whether they had been wise or silly iii their lifetime. I am glad the snuff and Pi-pos's books please. " Goody Two Shoes" is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery ; and the shopman at Newberry's hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs. Barbauld's and Mrs. Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge insignificant and vapid as Mrs. Barbauld's books convey, it seems, must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like ; instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil 1 ? Think what you would have been now, if, instead of being fed with tales and old wires' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history 1 238 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Hang them ! I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child. As to the translations, let me do two or three hundred lines, and then do you try the nostrums upon Stuart in any way you please. If they go down I will bray more. In fact, if I got or could but get 50 a year only, in addition to what I have, I should live in affluence. Have you anticipated it, or could you not give a parallel of Buonaparte with Cromwell, particularly as to the contrast in their deeds affecting foreign States 1 Cromwell's interference for the Albigenses, Buonaparte's against the Swiss. Then religion would come in ; and Milton and you could rant about our countrymen of that period. This is a hasty suggestion, the more hasty because I want my supper. I have just finished Chap- man's Homer. Did you ever read it 1 ? it has the con- tinuous power of interesting you all along, like a rapid original, more than any ; and in the uncommon excellence of the more finished parts goes beyond Fairfax or any of 'em. The metre is fourteen syllables, and capable of all sweetness and grandeur. Cowper's blank verse detains you every step with some heavy Miltonism; Chapman gallops off with you his own free pace. Take a simile for example. The council breaks up " Being abroad, the earth was overlaid With flockers to them, that came forth ; as when of frequent beea Swarms rise out of a hollow rock, repairing the degrees Of their egression endlessly, with ever rising new From forth their sweet nest ; as their store, still as it faded, grew, And never would cease sending forth her clusters to the spring, They still crowd out so ; this flock here, that there, belabouring The loaded flowers. So," etc. etc. What endless egression of phrases the dog commands ! Take another, Agamemnon wounded, bearing his wound heroically for the sake of the army (look below), to a woman in labour. " He, with his lance, sword, mighty stones, pour'd his heroic wreak On other squadrons of the foe, whiles yet warm blood, did break TO COLERIDGE. 239 Thro* his cleft veins ; but when the wound was quite exhaust and crude, The eager anguish did approve his princely fortitude. As when most sharp and bitter pangs distract a labouring dame, Which the divine Ilithiae, that rule the painful frame Of human childbirth, pour on her ; the Ilithiae that are The daughters of Saturnia ; with whose extreme repair The woman in her travail strives, to take the worst it gives ; With thought, it must be, 'tis love's fruit, the end for which she lives ; The mean to make herself new born, what comforts will redound : So," etc. I will tell you more about Chapman and his pecu- liarities in my next. I am much interested in him. Yours ever affectionately, and Pi-Pos's. C. L. LETTER CXX.] November 4, 1802. Observe, there comes to you, by the Kendal waggon to-morrow, the illustrious 5th of November, a box, con- taining the Miltons, the strange American Bible, with White's brief note, to which you will attend; Baxter's Holy Commonwealth, for which you stand indebted to me 3s. 6d. ; an odd volume of Montaigne, being of no use to me, I having the whole ; certain books belonging to Wordsworth, as do also the strange thick-hoofed shoes, which are very much admired in London. All these sundries I commend to your most strenuous looking after. If you find the Miltons in certain parts dirtied and soiled with a crumb of right Gloucester, blacked in the candle (my usual supper), or peradventure a stray ash of tobacco wafted into the crevices, look to that passage more especially; depend upon it, it contains good matter. I have got your little Milton, which, as it contains " Sal- masius," and I make a rule of never hearing but one side of the question (why should I distract myself?), I shall return to you when I pick up the Latina opera. The first Defence is the greatest work among them, because it is uniformly great, and such as is befitting the very mouth of a great nation, speaking for itself. But the 240 LETTERS OP CHARLES LAMB. second Defence, which is but a succession of splendid episodes, slightly tied together, has one passage, which, if you have not read, I conjure you to lose no time, but read it : it is his consolations in his blindness, which had been made a reproach to him. It begins whimsically, with poetical flourishes about Tiresias and other blind worthies (which still are mainly interesting as displaying his singular mind, and in what degree poetry entered into his daily soul, not by fits and impulses, but engrained and innate), but the concluding page, i.e. of this passage (not of the Defensio), which you will easily find, divested of all brags and flourishes, gives so rational, so true an enumeration of his comforts, so human, that it cannot be read without the deepest interest. Take one touch of the religious part : "Et sane haud ultima Dei cura caeci we blind folks, I understand it (not nos for ego /) sumus ; qui nos, quominus quicquam aliud prater ipsum cernere valemus, eo clementius atque benignius respicere dignatur. Vae qui illudit nos, vae qui laedit, execratione publica devovendo ; nos ab injuriis hominum non modo incolumes, sed pene sacros, divina lex reddidit, divinus favor : nee tarn oculorum hebetudine quam coelestium alarum umbrd has nobis fecisse tenebras videtur, factas illustrare rursus interiore ac longe prsestabiliore lumine haud raro solet. Hue refero, quod et amici officiosius mine etiam quam solebant, colunt, observant, adsunt, quod et nonnulli sunt, quibuscum Pyladeas atque Theseaa alternare voces verorum amicorum liceat. " Vade gubernaculum mei pedis. Da manum ministro amico Da collo manum tuam, ductor autem viae ero tibi ego." All this, and much more, is highly pleasing to know. But you may easily find it ; and I don't know why I put down so many words about it but for the pleasure of writing to you, and the want of another topic. Yours ever, 0. LAMB. To-morrow 1 expect with anxiety S. T. C.'a letter to Mr. Fox. *' TO MANNING. 241 To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER CXXL] November 1802. My dear Manning I must positively write, or I shall miss you at Toulouse. I sit here like a decayed minute hand ; (I lie : that does not sit ;) and being myself the exponent of no time, take no heed how the clocks about me are going. You possibly by this time may have explored all Italy, and toppled, unawares,, into Etna, while you went too near those rotten-jawed, gap- toothed, old worn-out chaps of hell, while I am medi- tating a quiescent letter to the honest post -master of Toulouse. But in case you should not have been felo de se, this is to tell you, that your letter was quite to my palate : in particular your just remarks upon Industry, cursed Industry (though indeed you left me to explore the reason), were highly relishing. I have often wished I had lived in the golden age, when shepherds lay stretched upon flowers, and roused themselves at their leisure, the genius there is in a man's natural idle face, that has not learned his multiplication table ! before doubt, and pro- positions, and corollaries, got into the world ! Now, as Joseph Cottle, a Bard of Nature, sings, going up Malvern Hills, " How steep ! how painful the ascent ! It needs the evidence of close deduction To know that ever I shall gain the top." You must know that Joe is lame, so that he had some reason for so singing. These two lines, I assure you, are taken totidem literis from a very popular poem. Joe is also an Epic Poet as well as a Descriptive, and has written a tragedy, though both his drama and epopoiea are strictly descriptive, and chiefly of the Beauties of Nature, for Joe thinks man with all his passions and frailties not a proper subject of the Drama. Joe's tragedy hath the following surpassing speech in it. Some king is told that his enemy has engaged twelve archers to come over in a VOL. i. E " 242 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. boat from an enemy's country and waylay him ; he thereupon pathetically exclaims " Twelve, dost thou say ? Curse on those dozen villains ! " Cottle read two or three acts out to us, very gravely on both sides till he came to this heroic touch, and then he asked what we laughed at ? I had no more muscles that day. A poet that chooses to read out his own verses has but a limited power over you. There is a bound where his authority ceases. Apropos, if you should go to Florence or to Rome, inquire what works are extant in gold, silver, bronze, or marble, of Benvenuto Cellini, a Florentine artist, whose life, doubtless, you have read, or if not, without controversy you must read so haste ye, send for it immediately from Lane's circulating Library. It is always put among the Romances, but you have read it I suppose. In particular, inquire at Florence for his colossal bronze statue (in the Grand Square, or some- where) of Perseus. You may read the story in Tooke's Pantheon, Nothing material has transpired in these parts. Coleridge has indited a violent Philippic against Mr. Fox in the Morning Post, which is a compound of expressions of humility, gentleman -ushering -in most arrogant charges. It will do Mr. Fox no real injury among those that know him. LETTER CXXIL] February 19, 1803. My dear Manning The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity, but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake don't think any more of "Independent Tartary." What are you to do among such Ethiopians 1 Is there no lineal descendant of Prester John? Is the chair empty? Is the sword unswayed ? Depend upon it they'll never make you their king, as long as any branch of that great stock is remain- ing. I tremble for your Christianity. They will certainly circumcise you. Read Sir John Mandeville's travels to cure you, or come over to England. There is a Tartar- TO MANNING. 243 man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk with him, and hear what he says first. Indeed he is no very favourable specimen of his countrymen ! But perhaps the best thing you can do is to try to get the idea out of your head. For this purpose repeat to yourself every night, after you have said your prayers, the words In- dependent Tartary, Independent Tartary, two or three times, and associate with them the idea of oblivion ('tis Hartley's method with obstinate memories), or say, Inde- pendent, Independent, have I not already got an inde- pendence ? That was a clever way of the old puritans, pun-divinity. My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to bury such parts in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable, horse - belching, Tartar - people ! Some say, they are Cannibals ; and then, conceive a Tartar - fellow eating my friend, and adding the cool malignity of mustard and vinegar ! I am afraid 'tis the reading of Chaucer has misled you ; his foolish stories about Cambuscan, and the ring, and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such things, 'tis all the poet's invention; but if there were such darling things as old Chaucer sings, I would up behind you on the horse of brass, and frisk off for Prester John's country. But these are all tales ; a horse of brass never flew, and a king's daughter never talked with birds ! The Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchy set. You'll be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them. Pray try and cure yourself. Take hellebore (the counsel is Horace's, 'twas none of my thought originally). Shave yourself oftener. Eat no saifron, for saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar- like yellow. Pray, to avoid the fiend. Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. Shave the upper lip. Go about like an European. Read no books of voyages (they are nothing but lies), only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy under. Above all, don't go to any sights of wild beasts. That has been your ruin. Accustom your- self to write familiar letters, on common subjects, to your friends in England, such as are of a moderate understand- 244 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. ing. And think about common things more. There's your friend Holcroft, now, has written a Play. You used to be fond of the drama. Nobody went to see it. Not- withstanding this, with an audacity perfectly original, he faces the town down in a preface that they did like it very much. I have heard a waspish punster say, " Sir, why did you not laugh at my jest ? " But for a man boldly to face one out with " Sir, I maintain it, you did laugh at my jest," is a little too much. I have seen H. but once. He spoke of you to me in honourable terms. H. seems to me to be drearily dull. G is dull, then he has a dash of affectation, which smacks of the coxcomb, and your coxcombs are always agreeable. I supped last night with Rickman, and met a merry natural captain, who pleases himself vastly with once having made a pun at Otaheite in the 0. language. 'Tis the same man who said Shakspeare he liked, because he was so much of the gentleman. Rickman is a man " absolute in all numbers." I think I may one day bring you acquainted, if you do not go to Tartary first ; for you'll never come back. Have a care, my dear friend, of Anthro- pophagi ! their stomachs are always craving. 'Tis terrible to be weighed out at fivepence a-pound ; to sit at table (the reverse of fishes in Holland) not as a guest, but as a meat. God bless you : do come to England. Air and exercise may do great tilings. Talk with some minister. Why not your father 1 God dispose all for the best. I have discharged my duty. Your sincere friend, C. LAMB. LETTER CXXIIL] March 1803. Dear Manning I send you some verses I have made on the death of a young Quaker you may have heard me speak of as being in love with for some years while I lived at Pentonville, though I had never spoken to her in my life. She died about a month since. If you have interest with the Abbd de Lisle, you may get 'em trans- lated ; he has done as much for the Georgics. TO COLERIDGE. 245 To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LKTTBB CXXIV.] March 20, 1803. Mary sends love from home. Dear Coleridge I do confess that I have not sent your books as I ought to have done ; but you know how the human free will is tethered, and that we perform promises to ourselves no better than to our friends. A watch is come for you. Do you want it soon, or shall I wait till some one travels your way? You, like me, I suppose, reckon the lapse of time from the waste thereof, as boys let a cock run to waste ; too idle to stop it, and rather amused with seeing it dribble. Your poems have begun printing ; Longman sent to me to arrange them, the old and the new together. It seems you have left it to him ; so I classed them, as nearly as I could, accord- ing to dates. First, after the Dedication (which must march first), and which I have transplanted from before the Preface (which stood like a dead wall of prose between), to be the first poem; then comes " The Pixies," and the things most juvenile ; then on "To Chatterton," etc., on, lastly, to the " Ode on the Departing Year," and "Musings," which finish. Longman wanted the Ode first, but the arrangement I have made is precisely that marked out in the Dedication, following the order of time. I told Longman I was sure that you would omit a good portion of the first edition. I instanced several sonnets, etc. ; but that was not his plan, and, as you have done nothing in it, all I could do was to arrange 'em on the supposition that all were to be retained. A few I positively rejected ; such as that of " The Thimble," and that of " Flicker and Flicker's Wife," and that not in the manner of Spenser, which you yourself had stigma- tised and the "Man of Ross," I doubt whether I should this last. It is not too late to save it. The first proof is only just come. I have been forced to call that Cupid's Elixir, " Kisses." It stands in your first volume; 246 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. as an Effusion, so that, instead of prefixing " The Kiss " to that of " One Kiss, dear Maid," etc., I have ventured to entitle it "To Sara." I am aware of the nicety of changing even so mere a trifle as a title to so short a piece, and subverting old associations; but two called " Kisses " would have been absolutely ludicrous, and " Effusion " is no name, and these poems come close together. I promise you not to alter one word in any poem whatever, but to take your last text, where two are. Can you send any wishes about the book 1 Long- man, I think, should have settled with you ; but it seems you have left it to him. Write as soon as you possibly can ; for, without making myself responsible, I feel my- self, in some sort, accessory to the selection, which I am to proof-correct ; but I decidedly said to Biggs that I was sure you would omit more. Those I have positively rubbed off, I can swear to individually (except the " Man of Ross," which is too familiar in Pope), but no others you have your cue. For my part, I would rather all the Juvenilia were kept memoriae causd. Robert Lloyd has written me a masterly letter, con- taining a character of his father. See how different from Charles he views the old man ! (Literatim) : " My father smokes, repeats Homer in Greek, and Virgil, and is learn- ing, when from business, with all the vigour of a young man, Italian. He is, really, a wonderful man. He mixes public and private business, the intricacies of dis- ordering life, with his religion and devotion. No one more rationally enjoys the romantic scenes of Nature, and the chit-chat and little vagaries of his children ; and, though surrounded with an ocean of affairs, the very neatness of his most obscure cupboard in the house passes not unnoticed. I never knew any one view with such clearness, nor so well satisfied with things as they are, and make such allowance for things which must appear perfect Syriac to him." By the last he means the Lloydisms of the younger branches. His portrait of Charles (exact as far as he has had opportunities of TO COLERIDGE. 247 noting him) is most exquisite : " Charles is become steady as a church, and as straightforward as a Roman road. It would distract him to mention anything that was not as plain as sense ; he seems to have run the whole scenery of life, and now rests as the formal precisian of non-existence." Here is genius, I think, and 'tis seldom a young man, a Lloyd, looks at a father (so differing) with such good-nature while he is alive. Write I am in post-haste, 0. LAMB. Love, etc., to Sara, P., and H. LETTER CXXV.] April 13, 1803. My dear Coleridge Things have gone on better with me since you left me. I expect to have my old house- keeper home again in a week or two. She has mended most rapidly. My health too has been better since you took away that Montero cap. I have left off cayenned eggs and such bolsters to discomfort. There was death in that cap. I mischievously wished that by some inauspicious jolt the whole contents might be shaken, and the coach set on fire ; for you said they had that property. How the old gentleman, who joined you at Grantham, would have clapp'd his hands to his knees, and not know- ing but it was an immediate visitation of God that burnt him, how pious it would have made him ! him, I mean, that brought the Influenza with him, and only took places for one an old sinner ; he must have known what he had got with him ! However, I wish the cap no harm for the sake of the head it fits, and could be content to see it disfigure my healthy sideboard again. What do you think of smoking ? I want your sober, average, noon opinion of it. I generally am eating my dinner about the time I should determine it. Morning is a girl, and can't smoke she's no evidence one way or the other ; and Night is so evidently bought over, that he can't be a very upright judge. May be the 248 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrel- some, and that's the sum on't. But that is deciding rather upon rhyme than reason. . . . After all, our instincts may be best. Wine, I am sure good mellow, generous Port can hurt nobody, unless those who take it to excess, which they may easily avoid if they observe the rules of temperance. Bless you, old sophist, who next to human nature taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing ! And bless your Montero cap, and your trail (which shall come after you whenever you appoint), and your wife and children Pipos especially. When shall we two smoke again? Last night I had been in a sad quandary of spirits, in what they call the evening ; but a pipe, and some generous Port, and King Lear (being alone), had their effects as solacers. I went to bed pot-valiant. By the way, may not the Ogles of Somersetshire be remotely descended from King Lear? 0. L. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER CXXVL] April 23, 1803. My dear Manning Although something of the latest, and after two months' waiting, your letter was highly gratifying. Some parts want a little explication ; for example, " the god-like face of the first consul." What god does he most resemble, Mars, Bacchus, or Apollo? or the god Serapis, who, flying (as Egyptian chronicles deliver) from the fury of the dog Anubis (the hieroglyph of an English mastiff), lighted upon Monomotapa (or the land of apes), by some thought to be Old France, and there set up a tyranny, etc. Our London prints of him represent him gloomy and sulky, like an angry Jupiter. I hear that he is very small, even less than me. I envy you your access to this great man, much more than your TO MANNING. 249 stances and conversaziones, which I have a shrewd sus- picion must be something dull. What you assert concern- ing the actors of Paris, that they exceed our comedians, bad as ours are, is impossible. In one sense it may be true, that their fine gentlemen, in what is called genteel comedy, may possibly be more brisk and degage than Mr. Caulfield, or Mr. Whitfield ; but have any of them the power to move laughter in excess ? or can a Frenchman laugh ? Can they batter at your judicious ribs till they shake, nothing loth to be so shaken ? This is John Bull's criterion, and it shall be mine. You are Frenchified. Both your tastes and morals are corrupt and perverted. By and by you will come to assert that Buonaparte is as great a general as the old Duke of Cumberland, and deny that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen. Read Henry the Fifth to restore your orthodoxy. All things continue at a stay-still in London. I cannot repay your new novelties with my stale reminiscences. Like the prodigal, I have spent my patrimony, and feed upon the superannuated chaff and dry husks of repentance; yet sometimes I remember with pleasure the hounds and horses, which I kept in the days of my prodigality. I find nothing new, nor anything that has so much of the gloss and dazzle of novelty as may rebound in narrative, and cast a reflective glimmer across the channel. Some- thing I will say about people that you and I know. Fenwick is still in debt, and the Professor has not done making love to his new spouse. I think he never looks into an almanack, or he would have found by the calendar that the honeymoon was extinct a moon ago. Southey is Secretary to the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer; 400 a year. Stoddart is turned Doctor of Civil Law, and dwells in Doctors' Commons. I fear his commons are short, as they say. Did I send you an epitaph I scribbled upon a poor girl who died at nineteen 1 a good girl, and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, but strangely neglected by all her friends and kin. 250 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. " Under this cold marble stone Sleep the sad remains of one Who, when alive, by few or none Was loved, as loved she might have been, If she prosperous days had seen, Or had thriving been, I ween. Only tlds cold funeral stone Tells she was beloved by one, Who on the marble graves his moan." Brief, and pretty, and tender, is it not 1 I send yea this, being the only piece of poetry I have done since the Muses all went with T. M. to Paris. I have neither stuff in my brain, nor paper in my drawer, to write you a longer letter. Liquor and company and wicked tobacco, a'nights, have quite dispericraniated me, as one may say ; but you, who spiritualise upon Champagne, may continue to write long letters, and stuff 'em with amusement to the end. Too long they cannot be, any more than a codicil to a will, which leaves me sundry parks and manors not specified in the deed. But don't be two months before you write again. These from merry old England, on the day of her valiant patron St. George. C. LAMB. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER CXXVII.] May 27, 1803. My dear Coleridge The date of my last was one day prior to the receipt of your letter, full of foul omens. I explain this lest you should have thought mine too light a reply to such sad matter. I seriously hope by this time you have given up all thoughts of journeying to the green Islands of the Bless'd (voyages in time of war are very precarious) or at least, that you will take them in your way to the Azores. Pray be careful of this letter till it has done its duty, for it is to inform you that I have booked off your watch (laid in cotton like an untimely fruit), and with it Condillac, and all other books of yours which were left here. These will set out TO COLERIDGE. 251 on Monday next, the 29th May, by Kendal waggon, from White Horse, Cripplegate. You will make seasonable inquiries, for a watch mayn't come your way again in a hurry. I have been repeatedly after Tobin, and now hear that he is in the country, not to return till the middle of June. I will take care and see him with the earliest. But cannot you write pathetically to him, enforcing a speeding mission of your books for literary purposes ? He is too good a retainer to Literature to let her interests suffer through his default. And why, in the name of Beelzebub, are your books to travel from Barnard's Inn to the Temple, and thence circuitously to Cripplegate, when their business is to take a short cut down Holborn Hill, up Snow ditto, on to Wood Street, etc. ? The former mode seems a sad superstitious sub- division of labour. Well ! the " Man of Ross " is to stand ; Longman begs for it ; the printer stands with a wet sheet in one hand, and a useless Pica in the other, in tears, pleading for it ; I relent. Besides, it was a Salu- tation poem, and has the mark of the beast " Tobacco " upon it. Thus much I have done ; I have swept off the lines about widows and orphans in second edition, which (if you remember) you most awkwardly and illogic- ally caused to be inserted between two Ifs, to the great breach and disunion of said Ifs, which now meet again (as in first edition), like two clever lawyers arguing a case. Another reason for subtracting the pathos was, that the " Man of Ross " is too familiar to need telling what he did, especially in worse lines than Pope told it, and it now stands simply as " Reflections at an Inn about a known Character," and sucking an old story into an accommodation with present feelings. Here is no break- ing spears with Pope, but a new, independent, and really a very pretty poem. In fact 'tis as I used to admire it in the first volume, and I have even dared to restore " If neath this roof thy wine cheer' d moments pass," for " Beneath this roof if thy cheer'd moments past." 252 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. "Cheer'd" is a sad general word, "uuine-clieer'd" I'm sure you'd give me, if I had a speaking-trumpet to sound to you 300 miles. But I am your factotum ; and that (save in this instance, which is a single case, and I can't get at you) shall be next to a fac-nihil at most a fac- simile. I have ordered "Imitation of Spenser" to be restored on Wordsworth's authority ; and now, all that you will miss will be " Flicker and Flicker's Wife," " The Thimble," " Breathe dear harmonist" and / believe, " The Child that was fed with Manna." Another volume will clear off all your Anthologic Morning-Postian Epis- tolary Miscellanies ; but pray don't put " Christabel " therein ; don't let that sweet maid come forth attended with Lady Holland's mob at her heels. Let there be a separate volume of Tales, Choice Tales, "Ancient Mariners," etc. A word of your health will be richly acceptable. C. LAMB. To ME. RICKMAN. LETTER CXXVIII.] Saturday Morning, July 16, 1803. Dear Bickman I enclose you a wonder, a letter from the shades. A dead body wants to return, and be inrolled inter vivos. 'Tis a gentle ghost, and in this Galvanic age it may have a chance. Mary and I are setting out for the Isle of Wight. We make but a short stay, and shall pass the time betwixt that place and Portsmouth, where Fenwick is. I sadly wanted to explore the Peak this Summer ; but Mary is against steering without card or compass, and we should be at large in Darbyshire. We shall be at home this night and to-morrow, if you can come and take a farewell pipe. I regularly transmitted your Notices to the Morning Post, but they have not been duly honoured. The fault lay not in me. Yours truly, C. LAMB. TO BICKMAN. 253 To RICKMAN. LETTER CXXIX.] July 27, 1803. (The earlier part of this letter is by Captain Burney, and is in his handwriting.) Dear Rickman We are at Cowes the whole flock, Sheep and Lambs and in good pasturage for notwith- standing that I joined, or rather acquiesced, in your dispraise of Cowes, in a dry summer like this it is a very pleasant place. We were much harassed by hot travelling and uncertainties till we fixed at this haven ; and now I could feel myself thoroughly well disposed to indulge in a week of compleat idleness, if my senses were not invaded by the din of preparation, and the account which every day's paper brings of the universal bustle that prevails everywhere. We purpose however to stay here one week longer reckoning from this date, and then to return to the defence of the Capital after so well having guarded the sea coast. We have visited Newport and Carisbrook Castle where we saw a deep well and a cross old woman. We went by water, and friend Lamb (to give a specimen of his Seamanship) very ingeniously and unconsciously cast loose the fastenings of the mast, so that mast, sprit, sails, and all the rest tumbled overboard with a crash, and not less to his surprise than to the surprise of every other person in the boat. I doubt whether any of us will muster up sufficient activity to go to the South part of the Island. We do everything that is idle, such as reading books from a circulating library, sauntering, hunting little crabs among the rocks, reading Church yard poetry which is as bad at Cowes as any Church yard in the Kingdom can produce. Miss Lamb is the only person among us who is not idle. All the cares she takes into her keeping. At night however we do a little business in the smoking line, and Martin endeavours to make Conundrums, but alas ! he is not equal to the achieve- 254 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. ment. Such is the edifying life we lead at the Isle of Wight. Let us know how you take care of the Capital. An old sea saying is, " Give a sprat to catch a Mackarel," so pray send us your Mackarel and accept this sprat. [Lamb's part begins here.] I testify that this is a pretty good outline of our doings, but the filling it up requires the hand of a Master. A volume might be made of Martin's blunders which parental tenderness omits. Such as his letting the packet- boat's boat go without him from the quay at Southampton, while he stood hiatusing, smit with the love of a Naiad ; his tumbling back over a stone twice the height of himself, and daubing himself; his getting up to bathe at six o'clock, and forgetting it, and in consequence staying in his room in a process of annihilation, etc., etc., then the time expended in Martin being scolded would serve as great a sinner as Judas to repent in. In short nothing in this house goes right till after supper, then a gentle circumambience of the weed serves to shut out Isle of Wight impertinent scenery and brings us back in fancy to Mutton Lane and the romantic alleys ever green of nether-Holborn, green that owes nothing to grass, but the simple effect of cabbage-water, tripe-cauls, etc. The fact of my setting the mast upside down is partly true. Indeed it was never properly nailed down, or the accident could not have happened. Capt. Burney does nothing but teach his children bad habits. He surfeits them with cherries and black currants till they can eat no supper and then claps down the fruit expended to the common stock, and deducts what the surfeit saves from his part. There's a little girl he's brought with him that has cost I don't know what in codlings. No ordinary orchard would be a jointure for her. To add to our difficulties Martin has brought down a Terence, which he renders out loud into canine Latin at Breakfast and other meals, till the eyes of the infatuated Parent let slip water for TO GODWIN. 255 joy, and the ears of every body beside shed their wax for being tired. More I could add but it is unsafe. From the White Isle (date unknown). C. L. To John Rickman, Esq., Dublin Castle. To WILLIAM GODWIN. LETTER CXXX.] November 8, 1803. My dear Sir I have been sitting down for three or four days successively to the review, which I so much wished to do well, and to your satisfaction. But I can produce nothing but absolute flatness and nonsense. My health and spirits are so bad, and my nerves so irritable, that I am sure, if I persist, I shall tease myself into a fever. You do not know how sore and weak a brain I have, or you would allow for many things in me which you set down for whims. I solemnly assure you that I never more wished to prove to you the value which I have ,for you than at this moment; but although so seemingly trifling a service, I cannot get through with it : I pray you to impute it to this one sole cause, ill health. I hope I am above subterfuge, and that you will do me this justice to think so. You will give me great satisfaction by sealing my pardon and oblivion in a line or two, before I come to see you, or I shall be ashamed to come. Your, with great truth, C. LAMB. LETTER CXXXI.] November 10, 1808. Dear Godwin You never made a more unlucky and perverse mistake than to suppose that the reason of my not writing that cursed thing was to be found in your book. I assure you most sincerely that I have been greatly delighted with "Chaucer." I may be wrong, but I think there is one considerable error runs through it, which is a conjecturing spirit, a fondness for filling out the picture by supposing what Chaucer did and how 256 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. he felt, where the materials are scanty. So far from meaning to withhold from you (out of mistaken tender- ness) this opinion of mine, I plainly told Mrs. Godwin that I did find a fault, which I should reserve naming until I should see you and talk it over. This she may very well remember, and also that I declined naming this fault until she drew it from me by asking me if there was not too much fancy in the work. I then confessed generally what I felt, but refused to go into particulars until I had seen you. I am never very fond of saying things before third persons, because in the relation (such is human nature) something is sure to be dropped. If Mrs. God- win has been the cause of your misconstruction, I am very angry, tell her ; yet it is not an anger unto death. I remember also telling Mrs. G. (which she may have dropt) that I was by turns considerably more delighted than I expected. But I wished to reserve all this until I saw you. I even had conceived an expression to meet you with, which was thanking you for some of the most exquisite pieces of criticism I had ever read in my life. In particular, I should have brought forward that on " Troilus and Gressida " and Shakspeare which, it is little to say, delighted me, and instructed me (if not absolutely instructed me, yet put into full-grown sense many con- ceptions which had arisen in me before in my most dis- criminating moods). All these things I was preparing to say, and bottling them up till I came, thinking to please my friend and host the author, when lo ! this deadly blight intervened. I certainly ought to make great allowances for your misunderstanding me. You, by long habits of composition and a greater command gained over your own powers, cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common letter into sane prose. Any work which I take upon myself as an engagement will act upon me to torment, e.g. when I have undertaken, as three or four times I have, a schoolboy copy of verses for Merchant TO GODWIN. 257 Taylors' boys, at a guinea a copy, I have fretted over them in perfect inability to do them, and have made my sister wretched with my wretchedness for a week together. The same, till by habit I have acquired a mechanical command, I have felt in making paragraphs. As to reviewing, in particular, my head is so whimsical a head, that I cannot, after reading another man's book, let it have been never so pleasing, give any account of it in any methodical way. I cannot follow his train. Something like this you must have perceived of me in conversation. Ten thousand times I have confessed to you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any com- prehensive way what I read. I can vehemently applaud, or perversely stickle, at parts ; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader, however partial, can find any story. I wrote such stuff about Chaucer, and got into such digressions, quite irreducible into \\ column of a paper, that I was perfectly ashamed to show it you. However, it is become a serious matter that I should convince you I neither slunk from the task through a wilful deserting neglect, or through any (most imaginary on your part) distaste of " Chaucer " ; and I will try my hand again, I hope with better luck. My health is bad and my time taken up ; but all I can spare between this and Sunday shall be employed for you, since you desire it : and if I bring you a crude, wretched paper on Sunday, you must burn it, and forgive me ; if it proves anything better than I predict, may it be a peace-offering of sweet incense between us. C. LAMB. VOL. I. 258 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER CXXXII.] March 13, 1804. Dear Robert I received your notes safe, and thank you for them. It seems you are about to be married. Joy to you and uninterrupted satisfaction in that state. But who is the Lady ? It is the character of your letters that you omit facts, dates, names, and matter, and describe nothing but feelings, in which, as I cannot always partake, as being more intense in degree or different in kind from my own tranquil ones, I cannot always well tell how to reply. Your dishes are too much sauced and spiced and flavoured for me to suppose that you can relish my plain meats and vulgar aliment. Still, Robert, if I cannot always send you of the same, they have a smack and a novelty, a Robert-ism about them, that make them a dainty stimulus to my palate at times. I have little to tell you of. You are mistaken, I am disengaged from all newspaper connections, and breathe a freer air in consequence. I was bound, like Gulliver, in a multitude of little chains, which, by quotidian leasing swelled to a rack and a gibbet in the year's account. I am poorer but happier. Your three pounds came season- ably, but I doubt whether I am fairly entitled to them as a debt. I am obliged to break off here, and would not send this unfinished, but that you might otherwise be uneasy about the moneys. Am I ever to see you? for it is like letters to the dead, or for a friend to write to his friend in the Fortunate Isles, or the Moon, or at the Antipodes, to address a line to ONE in Warwickshire that I am never to see in London. I shall lose the very face of Robert TO ROBERT LLOYD. 259 by disuse, and I question, if I were a painter, if I could now paint it from memory. I could tell you many things, but you are so spiritual and abstracted, that I fear to insult you with tidings of this world. But may your approaching husband-hood humanise you. I think I see a dawn. I am sure joy is rising upon yon, and I stand a tiptoe to see the sun ascending till it gets up and up, and "while a man tells the story," shows at last a fair face and a full light. God bless you, Robt C. L. LETTER CXXXIII.] September 13, 1804. Dear Robert I was startled in a very pleasant manner by the contents of your letter. It was like your good self to take so handsome an opportunity of renewing an old friendship. I thank you kindly for your offers to bring me acquainted with Mrs. LI. I cannot come now, but assuredly I will some time or other, to see how this new relation sits upon you. I am naturally shy of new faces ; but the Lady who has chosen my old friend Robert cannot have a repelling one. Assure her of my sincere congratulations and friendly feelings. Mary joins in both with me, and considers herself as only left out of your kind invitation by some LAPSUS STYLI. We have already had all the holydays we can have this year. We have been spending our usual summer month at Richmond, from which place we traced the banks of the old Thames for ten and twenty miles, in daily walks or rides, and found beauties which may compare with Ulswater and Windermere. We visited Windsor, Hamp- ton, etc. etc. but this is a deviation from the subject with which I began my letter. Some day I certainly shall come and see you in your new light ; no longer the restless (but good) [ ? single] Robert; but now the staid, sober (and not less good) 260 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. married Robert. And how does Plumstead, the impetuous, take your getting the start of him? When will he subside into matrimony ? Priscilla has taken a long time indeed to think about it. I will suppose that her first choice is now her final ; though you do not expressly say that she is to be a Wordsworth. I wish her, and dare promise her, all happiness. All these new nuptials do not make me unquiet in the perpetual prospect of celibacy. There is a quiet dignity in old bachelorhood, a leisure from cares, noise, etc., an enthronisation upon the armed-chair of a man's feeling that he may sit, walk, read, unmolested, to none account- able but hush ! or I shall be torn in pieces like a churlish Orpheus by young married women and bride- maids of Birmingham. The close is this, to every man that way of life, which in his election is best. Be as happy in yours as I am determined to be in mine, and we shall strive lovingly who shall sing best the praises of matrimony, and the praises of singleness. Adieu, my old friend in a new character, and believe me that no " wounds " have pierced our friendship ; only a long want of seeing each other has disfurnished us of topics on which to talk. Is not your new fortunes a topic which may hold us for some months (the honey mouths at least) ? C. LAMB. To ROBERT SOUTHEY. LETTER CXXXIV.] November 7, 1804. Dear Southey You were the last person from whom we heard of Dyer, and if you know where to forward to him the news I now send I shall be obliged to you to lose no time. Dyer's sister-in-law, who lives in St. Dunstan's Court, wrote to him about three weeks ago to TO MANNING. 261 the Hoop Inn, Cambridge, to inform him that Squire Houlbert, or some such name, of Denmark Hill, has died, and left her husband a thousand pounds, and two or three hundred to Dyer. Her letter got no answer, and she does not know where to direct to him ; so she came to me, who am equally in the dark. Her story is, that Dyer's immediately coming to town now, and signing some papers, will save him a considerable sum of money ; how, I don't understand ; but it is very right he should hear of this. She has left me barely time for the post ; so I conclude with love to all at Keswick. Dyer's brother, who by his wife's account has got 1000 left him, is father of the little dirty girl, Dyer's niece and factotum. In haste, Yours truly, C. LAMR If you send George this, cut off the last paragraph. D.'s laundress had a letter a few days since; but George never dates. To THOMAS MANNING. 16, Mitre Court Buildings, LETTER CXXXV.] Saturday, February 24, 1805. Dear Manning I have been very unwell since I saw you : a sad depression of spirits, a most unaccountable nervousness ; from which I have been partially relieved by an odd accident. You knew Dick Hopkins, the swear- ing scullion of Cams? This fellow, by industry and agility, has thrust himself into the important situations (no sinecures, believe me) of cook to Trinity Hall and Cains College : and the generous creature has contrived, with the greatest delicacy imaginable, to send me a pre- sent of Cambridge brawn. What makes it the more extraordinary is, that the man never saw me in his life that I know of. I suppose he has lieard of me. I did not immediately recognise the donor; but one of Richard's cards, which had accidentally fallen iuto tht 262 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. straw, detected him in a moment. Dick, you know, was always remarkable for flourishing. His card imports, that "orders (to wit, for brawn) from any part of England, Scotland, or Ireland, will be duly executed," etc. At first, I thought of declining the present; but Richard knew my blind side when he pitched upon brawn. 'Tis of all my hobbies the supreme in the eating way. He might have sent sops from the pan, skimmings, crumpets, chips, hog's lard, the tender brown judiciously scalped from a fillet of veal (dexterously replaced by a salamander), the tops of asparagus, fugitive livers, runaway gizzards of fowls, the eyes of martyred pigs, tender effusions of laxa- tive woodcocks, the red spawn of lobsters, leverets' ears, and such pretty filchings common to cooks ; but these had been ordinary presents, the everyday courtesies of dish-washers to their sweethearts. Brawn was a noble thought. It is not every common gullet-fancier that can properly esteem it. It is like a picture of one of the choice old Italian masters. Its gusto is of that hidden sort. As Wordsworth sings of a modest poet, "you must love him, ere to you he will seem worthy of your love;" so brawn, you must taste it ere to you it will seem to have any taste at all. But 'tis nuts to the adept : those that will send out their tongue and feelers to find it out. It will be wooed, and not unsought be won. Now, ham-essence, lobsters, turtle, such popular minions, absolutely court you, lay themselves out to strike you at first smack, like one of David's pictures (they calf him Darveed) compared with the plain russet-coated wealth of a Titian or a Correggio, as I illustrated above. Such are the obvious glaring heathen virtues of a corporation dinner, compared with the reserved collegiate worth of brawn. Do me the favour to leave off the business which you may be at present upon, and go immediately to the kitchens of Trinity and Caius, and make my most respectful compliments to Mr. Kichard Hopkins, and assure him that his brawn is most excellent ; and that I am moreover obliged to him for his innuendo about salt TO MISS WORDSWORTH. 263 water and bran, which I shall not fail to improve. I leave it to you whether you shall choose to pay him the civility of asking him to dinner while you stay in Cam- bridge, or in whatever other way you may best like to show your gratitude to my friend, Richard Hopkins, considered in many points of view, is a very extraordinary character. Adieu. I hope to see you to supper in London soon, where we will taste Richard's brawn, and drink his health in a cheerful but moderate cup. We have not many such men in any rank of life as Mr. R. Hopkins. Crisp, the barber, of St. Mary's, was just such another. I wonder he never sent me any little token, some chestnuts, or a puff, or two pound of hair : just to remember him by. Gifts are like nails. Prcesens ut absens ; that is, your present makes amends for your absence. Yours, 0. LAMB, To Miss WORDSWORTH. LETTER CXXXVI.] June 14, 1805. My dear Miss Wordsworth Your long kind letter has not been thrown away (for it has given me great pleasure to find you are all resuming your old occupations, and are better) ; but poor Mary, to whom it is addressed, cannot yet relish it. She has been attacked by one of her severe illnesses, and is at present from home. Last Monday week was the day she left me, and I hope I may calculate upon having her again in a month or little more. I am rather afraid late hours have in this case contributed to her indisposition. But when she discovers symptoms of approaching illness, it is not easy to say what is best to do. Being by ourselves is bad, and going out is bad. I get so irritable and wretched with fear, that I con- stantly hasten on the disorder. You cannot conceive the misery of such a foresight. I am sure that, for the week before she left me, I was little better than light-headed. 264 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. I now am calm, but sadly taken down and flat. I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all her former oues, will be but temporary ; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gnne, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong ; so used am I to look up to her in the least and the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe, or even understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her ; for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, aud all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but SOT me ; and I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drink- ing and ways of going on. But even in this upbraiding of myself I am offending against her, for I know that she has cleaved to me for better, for worse ; and if the balance has been against her hitherto, it was a noble trade. I am stupid, and lose myself in what I write. I write rather what answers to my feelings (which are sometimes sharp enough) than express my present ones, for I am only flat and stupid. I am sure you will excuse my writing any more, I am so very poorly. I cannot resist transcribing three or four lines which poor Mary made upon a picture (a Holy Family) which we saw at an auction only one week before she left home. She was then beginning to show signs of ill boding. They are sweet lines and upon a sweet picture ; but I send them only as the latest memorial of her. " VIRGIN AND CHILD, L. DA VINCI. M Maternal Lady, with thy virgin grace, Heaven-born, thy Jesus seerueth sure, And thou a virgin pure. Lady most perfect, when thy angel face TO MISS WORDSWORTH. 265 Men look upon, they wish to be A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee." You had her lines about the "Lady Blanch." You have not had some which she wrote upon a copy of a girl from Titian, which I had hung up where that print of Blanch and the Abbess (as she beautifully interpreted two female figures from L. da Vinci) had hung in our room. "Tis light and pretty : " Who art thou, fair one, who usurp'st the place Of Blanch, the lady of the matchless grace ? Come, fair and pretty, tell to me Who in thy lifetime thou mightst be 1 Thou pretty art and fair, But with the Lady Blanch thou never must compare. No need for Blanch her history to tell, Whoever saw her face, they there did read it well ; But when I look on thee, I only know There lived a pretty maid some hundred years ago." - This is a little unfair, to tell so much about ourselves, and to advert so little to your letter, so full of comfort- able tidings of you all. But my own cares press pretty close upon me, and you can make allowance. That you may go on gathering strength and peace is my next wish to Mary's recovery. I had almost forgot your repeated invitation. Suppos- ing that Mary will be well and able, there is another ability which you may guess at, which I cannot promise myself. In prudence we ought not to come. This illness will make it still more prudential to wait. It is not a balance of this way of spending our money against another way, but an absolute question of whether we shall stop now, or go on wasting away the little we have got beforehand, which my wise conduct has already en- croach'd upon one half. My best love, however, to you all ; and to that most friendly creature, Mrs. Clarkson, and better health to her, when you see or write to her. CHABLKS LAMB. 266 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTKR CXXXVII. ] [July 27, 1805. ] Dear Archimedes Things have gone on badly with thy ungeometrical friend ; but they are on the turn. My old housekeeper has shown signs of convalescence, and will shortly resume the power of the keys, so I shan't be ' cheated of my tea and liquors. Wind in the West, which promotes tranquillity. Have leisure now to anticipate seeing thee again. Have been taking leave of tobacco in a rhyming address. Had thought that vein had long since closed up. Find I can rhyme and reason too. Think of studying mathematics, to restrain the fire of my genius, which G. D. recommends. Have frequent bleed- lings at the nose, which shows plethoric. Maybe shall try the sea myself, that great scene of wonders. Got incredibly sober and regular ; shave oftener, and hum a tune, to signify cheerfulness and gallantry. Suddenly disposed to sleep, having taken a quart of pease with bacon and stout. Will not refuse Nature, who has done such things for me ! Nurse ! don't call me unless Mr. Manning comes. What ! the gentleman in spectacles ? Yes. Dormit. C. L. Saturday, Hot Noon. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LETTKR CXXXVIIL] September 28, 1805. My dear Wordsworth (or Dorothy rather, for to you appertains the biggest part of this answer by right) I will not again deserve reproach by so long a silence. I have kept deluding myself with the idea that Mary would write to you, but she is so lazy (or, which T TO WORDSWORTH. 267 believe is the true state of the case, so diffident), that it must revert to me as usual. Though she writes a pretty good style, and has some notion of the force of words, she is not always so certain of the true orthography of them ; and that, and a poor handwriting (in this age of female calligraphy), often deters her, where no other reason does. We have neither of us been very well for some weeks past. I am very nervous, and she most so at those times when I am ; so that a merry friend, adverting to the noble consolation we were able to afford each other, denominated us, not unaptly, Gum-boil and Tooth-Ache, for they used to say that a gum-boil is a great relief to a tooth-ache. We have been two tiny excursions this Summer, for three or four days each, to a place near Harrow, and to Egham, where Cooper's Hill is : and that is the total history of our rustications this year. Alas ! how poor a round to Skiddaw and Helvellyn, and Borrowdale, and the magnificent sesquipedalia of the year 1802 ! Poor old Molly ! to have lost her pride, that " last infirmity of noble minds," and her cow. Fate need not have set her wits to such an old Molly. I am heartily sorry for her. Remember us lovingly to her; and in particular remember us to Mrs. Clarkson in the most kind manner. I hope, by " southwards," you mean that she will be at or near London, for she is a great favourite of both of us, and we feel for her health as much as possible for any one to do. She is one of the friendliest, comfortablest women we know, and made our little stay at your cottage one of the pleasantest times we ever past. We were quite strangers to her. Mr. C. is with you too ; our kindest separate remembrances to him. As to our special affairs, I am looking about me. I have done nothing since the beginning of last year, when I lost my newspaper job ; and having had a long idleness, I must do something, or we shall get very poor. Sometimes I think of a farce, but hitherto all schemes have gone off; an idle brag or 268 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. two of aii evening, vapouring out of a pipe, and goiug off in the morning; but now I have bid farewell to iny "sweet enemy," Tobacco, I shall perhaps set nobly to work. Hang work ! I wish that all the year were holiday; I am sure that indolence indefeasible indolence is the true state of man, and business the invention of the old Teazer, whose interference doomed Adam to an apron and set him a hoeing. Pen and ink, and clerks and desks, were the refinements of this old torturer some thousand years after, under pretence of " Commerce allying distant shores, promoting and diffusing knowledge, good," etc. etc. I wish you may think this a handsome farewell to my " Friendly Traitress." Tobacco has been my evening comfort and my morning curse for these five years ; and you know how difficult it is from refraining to pick one's lips even, when it has become a habit. This poem is the only one which I have finished since so long as when I wrote " Hester Savory." I have had it in my head to do it these two years, but tobacco stood in its own light when it gave me headaches that prevented my singing its praises. Now you have got it, you have got all my store, for I have absolutely not another line. No more has Mary. We have nobody about us that cares for poetry ; and who will rear grapes when he shall be the sole eater? Perhaps if you encourage us to show you what we may write, we may do something now and then before we absolutely forget the quantity of an English line for want of practice. The " Tobacco," being a little in the way of Wither (whom Southey so much likes), perhaps you will somehow convey it to him with my kind remembrances. Then, everybody will have seen it that I wish to see it, I having sent it to Malta. I remain, dear W. and D., yours truly, 0. LAMB. TO HAZLITT. 269 To WILLIAM HAZLITT. LETTER CXXXIX.] November 10, 1805. Dear Hazlitt I was very glad to hear from you, and that your journey was so picturesque. We miss you, as we foretold we should. One or two things have happened, which are beneath the dignity of epistolary communica- tion, but which, seated about our fireside at night (the winter hands of pork have begun), gesture and emphasis might have talked into some importance. Something about Rickman's wife ; for instance, how tall she is, and that she visits pranked up like a Queen of the May, with green streamers : a good-natured woman though, which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor. Some things too about Monkey, which can't so well be written : how it set up for a fine lady, and thought it had got lovers, and was obliged to be convinced of its age from the parish register, where it was proved to be only twelve ; and an edict issued, that it should not give itself airs yet these four years ; and how it got leave to be called Miss, by grace; these, and such like hows, were in my head to tell you; but who can write? Also how Manning is come to town in spectacles, and studies physic ; is melan- choly, and seems to have something in his head, which he don't impart. Then, how I am going to leave off smoking. la ! your Leonardos of Oxford made my mouth water. I was hurried through the gallery, and they escaped me. What do I say 1 I was a Goth then, and should not have noticed them. I had not settled my notions of beauty : I have now for ever ! the small head, the long eye, that sort of peering curve, the wicked Italian mischief; the stick-at-nothing, Herodias's daughter kind of grace. You understand me 1 But you disappoint me in passing over in absolute silence the Blenheim Leonardo. Didn't you eee it? Excuse a lover's curiosity. I have seen uo pictures of note since, 270 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. except Mr. Dawe's gallery. It is curious to see how differently two great men treat the same subject, yet both excellent in their way. For instance, Milton and Mr. Dawe. Mr. D. has chosen to illustrate the story of Samson exactly in the point of view in which Milton has been most happy : the interview between the Jewish hero, blind and captive, and Delilah, Milton has imagined his locks grown again, strong as horse-hair or porcupine's bristles ; doubtless shaggy and black, as being hairs "which, of a nation armed, contained the strength." I don't remember he says black ; but could Milton imagine them to be yellow ? Do you ? Mr. Dawe, with striking originality of conception, has crowned him with a thin yellow wig, in colour precisely like Dyson's ; in curl and quantity, resembling Mrs. Professor's ; his limbs rather stout, about such a man as my brother or Rickman, but no Atlas nor Hercules, nor yet so long as Dubois, the clown of Sadler's Wells. This was judicious, taking the spirit of the story rather than the fact ; for doubtless God could communicate national salvation to the trust of flax and tow as well as hemp and cordage, and could draw down a temple with a golden tress as soon as with all the cables of the British navy. Wasn't you sorry for Lord Nelson ? I have followed him in fancy ever since I saw him walking in Pall Mall (I was prejudiced against him before), looking just as a hero should look ; and I have been very much cut about it indeed. He was the only pretence of a great man we had. Nobody is left of any name at all His secretary died by his side. I imagined him a Mr. Scott, to be the man you met at Hume's ; but I learnt from Mrs. Hume that it is not the same. I met Mrs. H. one day, and agreed to go on the Sunday to tea, but the rain prevented us, and the distance. I have been to apologise, and we are to dine there the first fine Sunday. Strange perverse- ness ! I never went while you stayed here ; and now I go to find you ! What other news is there, Mary ? What puns have I made in the last fortnight? You never TO MANNING. 271 remember them. You have 110 relish for the comic. " Oh ! tell Hazlitt not to forget to send the American Farmer. I daresay it is not so good as he fancies ; but a book's a book." I have not heard from Wordsworth or from Malta since. Charles Kemble, it seems, enters into possession to-morrow. We sup at 109 Russell Street, this evening. I wish your brother would not drink. "Tis a blemish in the greatest characters. You send me a modern quotation poetical. How do you like this in an old play 1 Vittoria Corombona, a spunky Italian lady, a Leonardo one, nicknamed the White Devil, being on her trial for murder, etc. and questioned about seducing a duke from his wife and the state, makes answer : " Condemn you me for that the Duke did love me I So may you blame some fair and crystal river, For that some melancholic distracted man Hath drowu'd himself in it." N.B. I shall expect a line from you, if but a bare line, whenever you write to Russell Street, and a letter often when you do not. I pay no postage ; but I will have consideration for you until Parliament time and franks. Luck to Ned Search, and the new art of colour- ing. Monkey sends her love ; and Mary especially. Yours truly, C. LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER CXL.] [November 15, 1805.] Dear Manning Certainly you could not have called at all hours from two till ten, for we have been only out of an evening Monday and Tuesday in this week. But if you think you have, your thought shall go for the deed. We did pray for you on Wednesday night. Oysters unusually luscious ; pearls of extraordinary magnitude found in them. I have made bracelets of them ; given them in clusters to ladies. Last night we went out in despite, because you were not come at your hour. 272 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. This night we shall be at home ; so shall we certainly, both, on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Take your choice, mind I don't say of one : but choose which evening you will not come, and come the other four. Doors open at five o'clock Shells forced about nine. Every gentleman smokes or not as he pleases. 0. L. To WILLIAM HAZLITT. LETTBB CXLL] January 15, 1806. Dear Hazlitt Godwin went to Johnson's yesterday about your business. Johnson would not come down, or give any answer, but has promised to open the manuscript, and to give you an answer in one month. Godwin will punctually go again (Wednesday is Johnson's open day) yesterday four weeks next : i.e. in one lunar month from this time ; till when, Johnson positively declines giving any answer. I wish you joy on ending your Search. Mrs. H. was naming something about a "Life of Faw- cett," to be by you undertaken : the great Fawcett, as she explained to Manning, when he asked, " What Faw- cett ?" He innocently thought Fawcett the Player. But Fawcett the divine is known to many people, albeit unknown to the Chinese inquirer. I should think, if you liked it, and Johnson declined it, that Phillips is the man. He is perpetually bringing out biographies, Richardson, Wilks, Foot, Lee Lewis, without number: little trim things in two easy volumes, price 12s. the two, made up of letters to and from, scraps, posthumous trifles, anec- dotes, and about forty pages of hard biography. You might dish up a Fawcettiad in three months, and ask 60 or 80 for it. I should dare say that Phillips would catch at it. I wrote to you the other day in a great hurry. Did you get it t This is merely a letter of busi- ness at Godwin's request. Lord Nelson is quiet at last. His ghost only keeps a slight fluttering in odes and TO RICKMAN. 273 elegies in newspapers, aud impromptus, which could not be got ready before the funeral. As for news, Fenwick is coming to town on Monday (if no kind angel intervene) to surrender himself to prison. He hopes to get the rules of the Fleet. On the same, or nearly the same day, Fell, my other quondam co-friend and drinker, will go to Newgate, aud his wife and four children, I suppose, to the parish. Plenty of reflection and motives of gratitude to the wise Disposer of all things in us, whose prudent conduct has hitherto ensured us a warm fire and snug roof over our heads. Nullum numen abest si sit Prudentia. Alas ! Prudentia is in the last quarter of her tutelary shining over me. A little time and I ; but maybe I may, at last, hit upon some mode of collecting some of the vast superfluities of this money-voiding town. Much is to be got, and I do not want much. All I ask is time and leisure ; and I am cruelly off for them. When you have the inclination, I shall be very glad to have a letter from you. Your brother and Mrs. H., I am afraid, think hardly of us for not coming often er to see them ; but we are distracted beyond what they can conceive with visitors and visitings. I never have an hour for my head to work quietly its own workings ; which you know is as necessary to the human system as sleep. Sleep, too, I can't get for these winds of a night : and without sleep aud rest what should ensue ? Lunacy. But I trust it won't. Yours, dear H., C. LAMB. To ME. RICKMAN. LETTER CXLII.] January 25, 1806. Dear Rickman You do not happen to have any place at your disposal which would suit a decayed Literatus 1 I do not much expect that you have, or that you will go much out of the way to serve the object, when you hear it is Fell. But the case is, by a mistaking of his fr, VOL, J. T 274 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. as they call it, he is reduced, I am afraid, to extremities, and would be extremely glad of a place in an office. Now it does sometimes happen, that just as a man wants a place, a place wants him ; and though this is a lottery to which none but G. Burnett would choose to trust his all, there is no harm just to call in at Despair's office for a friend, and see if his number is come up (Burnett's further case I enclose by way of episode). Now, if you should happen, or anybody you know, to want a hand, here is a young man of solid but not brilliant genius, who would turn his hand to the making out of dockets, penning a manifesto, or scoring a tally, not the worse (I hope) for knowing Latin and Greek, and having in youth conversed with the philosophers. But from these follies I believe he is thoroughly awakened, and would bind himself by a terrible oath never to imagine himself an extraordinary genius again. Yours, etc., C. LAMB. To WILLIAM HAZLITT. LETTER CXLIIL] February 19, 1806. Dear H. Godwin has just been here in his way from Johnson's. Johnson has had a fire in his house ; this happened about five weeks ago ; it was in the daytime, so it did not burn the house down, but it did so much damage that the house must come down, to be repaired. His nephew that we met on Hampstead Hill put it out. Well, this fire has put him so back, that he craves one more month before he gives you an answer. I will certainly goad Godwin (if necessary) to go again this very day four weeks ; but I am confident he will want no goading. Three or four most capital auctions of pictures are advertised : in May, Wellbore Ellis Avar's, the first private collection in England, so Hoi croft says ; in March, Sir George Young's in Stratford Place (where Cosway TO HAZLITT. 275 lives), and a Mr. Hulse's at Blackheath, both very capital collections, and have been announced for some months. Also the Marquis of Lansdowne's pictures in March ; and though inferior to mention, lastly, the Tructhsessian Gallery. Don't your mouth water to be here ? T'other night Loftus called, whom we have not seen since you went before. We meditate a stroll next Wednesday, fast-day. He happened to light upon Mr. Holcroft, wife, and daughter, their first visit at our house. Your brother called last night. We keep up our intimacy. He is going to begin a large Madonna and child from Mrs. H. and baby. I fear he goes astray after ignes fatui. He is a clever man. By the by, I saw a miniature of his as far excelling any in his show cupboard (that of your sister not excepted) as that show cupboard excels the show things you see in windows an old woman (damn her name !), but most superlative ; he has it to clean I'll ask him the name but the best miniature I ever saw. But for oil pictures ! what has he to do with Madonnas 1 If the Virgin Mary were alive and visitable, he would not hazard himself in a Covent Garden pit-door crowd to see her. It isn't his style of beauty, is it 1 But he will go on painting things he ought not to paint, and not painting things he ought to paint. Manning is not gone to China, but talks of going this Spring. God forbid ! Coleridge not heard of. I am going to leave off smoke. In the meantime I am so smoky with last night's ten pipes, that I must leave off. Mary begs her kind remembrances. Pray write to us. This is no letter ; but I supposed you grew anxious about Johnson. N.B. Have taken a room at three shillings a week, to be in between five and eight at night, to avoid my nocturnal, alias knock- eternal, visitors. The first-fruits of my retirement has been a farce, which goes to manager to-morrow. Wish my ticket luck. God bless you ; and do write. Yours, fumosissimus, C. LAMB. 27 G LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. To MR. RICKMAN. LETTER CXLIV.] March 1806. Dear Eickman I send you some papers about a salfr water soap, for which the inventor is desirous of getting a parliamentary reward, like Dr. Jenner. Whether such a project be feasible, I mainly doubt, taking for granted the equal utility. I should suppose the usual way of paying such projectors is by patent and contracts. The patent, you see, he has got. A contract he is about with the Navy Board. Meantime, the projector is hungry. Will you answer me two questions, and return them with the papers as soon as you can 1 Imprimis, is there any chance of success in application to Parliament for a reward 1 Did you ever hear of the invention 1 You see its benefits and saving to the nation (always the first motive with a true projector) are feelingly set forth : the last paragraph but one of the estimate, in enumerating the shifts poor seamen are put to, even approaches to the pathetic. But, agreeing to all he says, is there the remotest chance of Parliament giving the projector anything 1 ! And when should application be made, now, or after a report (if he can get it) from the Navy Board? Secondly, let the infeasibility be as great as you will, you will oblige me by telling me the way of introducing such an application in Parliament, without buying over a majority of mem- bers, which is totally out of projector's power. I vouch nothing for the soap myself; for I always wash in fresh loater, and find it answer tolerably well for all purposes of cleanliness ; nor do I know the projector ; but a relation of mine has put me on writing to you, for whose parliamentary knowledge he has great veneration. P. S. The Capt. and Mrs. Buruey and Phillips take their chance at cribbage here on Wednesday. Will you and Mrs. R. join the party? Mary desires her compliments to Mrs. R., and joins in the invitation. Yours truly, C. LAMB. TO HAZLITT. 277 To WILLIAM HAZLITT. LETTEE CXLV.] March 15, 1806. Dear H. I am a little surprised at no letter from you. This day week, to wit, Saturday, the 8th of March, 1806, I booked off by the Wem coach, Bull and Mouth Inn, directed to you, at the Rev. Mr. Hazlitt's, Wem, Shropshire, a parcel containing, besides a book, etc., a rare print, which I take to be a Titian ; begging the said W. H. to acknowledge the receipt thereof; which he not having done, I conclude the said parcel to be lying at the inn, and may be lost ; for which reason, lest you may be a Wales-hunting at this instant, I have authorised any of your family, whosoever first gets this, to open it, that so precious a parcel may not moulder away for want of looking after. What do you in Shropshire when so many fine pictures are a-going a-going every day in London? Monday I visit the Marquis of Lansdowne's, in Berkeley Square. Catalogue 2s. 6d. Leonardos in plenty. Some other day this week I go to see Sir Wm. Young's, in Stratford Place. Hulse's, of Blackheath, are also to be sold this month ; and in May, the first private collection in Europe, Welbore Ellis Agar's. And there are you, perverting Nature in lying landscapes, filched from old rusty Titians, such as I can scrape up here to send you, with an addita- ment from Shropshire Nature thrown in to make the whole look unnatural. I am afraid of your mouth watering when I tell you that Manning and I got into Angerstcin's on Wednesday. Mon Dieu ! Such Claudes ! Four Claudes bought for more than 10,000; (those who talk of Wilson being equal to Claude are either mainly ignorant or stupid;) one of these was perfectly miraculous. What colours short of bond fide sunbeams it could be painted in, I am not earthly colourman enough to say ; but I did not think it had been in the possibility 278 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. of things. Then, a music piece by Titian, a thousand- pound picture, five figures standing behind a piano, the sixth playing none of the heads, as M. observed, indi- cating great men, or affecting it, but so sweetly disposed all leaning separate ways, but so easy like a flock of some divine shepherd ; the colouring, like the economy of the picture, so sweet and harmonious as good as Shaka- peare's Twelfth Night, almost, that is. It will give you a love of order, and cure you of restless, fidgety passions for a week after more musical than the music which it would, but cannot, yet in a manner does, show. I have no room for the rest. Let me say, Angerstein sits in a room his study (only that and the library are shown), when he writes a common letter, as I am doing, sur- rounded with twenty pictures worth 60,000. What a luxury ! Apicius and Heliogabalus, hide your diminished heads ! Yours, my dear painter, C. LAMB. Mr. Wm. Hazlitt, Wem, Shropshire. In his absence, to be opened immediately. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER CXLVL] May 10, 1806. My dear Manning I didn't know what your going was till I shook a last fist with you, and then 'twas just like having shaken hands with a wretch on the fatal scaffold, for when you are down the ladder you can never stretch out to him again. Mary says you are dead, and there's nothing to do but to leave it to time to do for us in the end what it always does for those who mourn for people in such a case. But she'll see by your letter you are not quite dead. A little kicking and agony, and then . Martin Burney took me out a walking that evening, and we talked of Manning; and then I came home and smoked for you ; and at twelve o'clock came TO MANNING. 279 home Mary and Monkey Louisa from the play, and there was more talk and more smoking, and they all seemed first-rate characters, because they knew a certain person. But what's the use of talking about 'em ? By the time you'll have made your escape from the Kalrnuks, you'll have stayed so long I shall never be able to bring to yout mind who Mary was, who will have died about a year before, nor who the Holcrofts were ! Me perhaps you will mistake for Phillips, or confound me with Mr. Dawe, because you saw us together. Mary (whom you seem to remember yet) is not quite easy that she had not a formal parting from you. I wish it had so happened. But you must bring her a token, a shawl or something, and remember a sprightly little mandarin for our mantel- piece, as a companion to the child I am going to purchase at the museum. She says you saw her writings about the other day, and she wishes you should know what they are. She is doing for Godwin's bookseller twenty of Shakspeare's plays, to be made into children's tales. Six are already done by her ; to wit, the Tempest, the Winter's Tale, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Cym- beline. The Merchant of Venice is in forwardness. I have done Othello and Macbeth, and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people, besides money. It is to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally, I think you'd think. These are the humble amusements we propose, while you are gone to plant the cross of Christ among barbarous pagan anthropophagi. Quam homo homini pnestat ! but then, perhaps, you'll get murdered, and we shall die in our beds with a fair literary reputation. Be sure, if you see any of those people whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, that you make a draught of them. It will be very curious. Oh Manning, I am serious to sinking almost, when I think that all those evenings which you have made so pleasant, are gone perhaps for ever. Four years, you talk of, may be ten, and you may 280 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. come back and find such alterations ! Some circum- stances may grow up to you or to me, that may be a bar to the return of any such intimacy. I daresay all this is hum ! and that all will come back ; but indeed we d5e many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick when I think that such a hold as I had of you is gone. I have friends, but some of 'em are changed. Marriage, or some circumstance, rises up to make them not the same. But I felt sure of you. And that last token you gave me of expressing a wish to have my name joined with yours, you know not how it affected me : like a legacy. God bless you in every way you can form a wish. May He give you health, and safety, and the accomplish- ment of all your objects, and return you again to us, to gladden some fireside or other (I suppose we shall be moved from the Temple). I will nurse the remembrance of your steadiness and quiet, which used to infuse some- thing like itself into our nervous minds. Mary called you our ventilator. Farewell, and take her best wishes and mine. Good-bye. C. L. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LETTER CXLVIL] June 26, 1806. Mary is just stuck fast in "All's Well that Ends Well." She complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boys' clothes. She begins to think Shakspeare must have wanted imagination ! I, to en- courage her (for she often faints in the prosecution of her great work), flatter her with telling her how well such a play and such a play is done. But she is stuck fast, and I have been obliged to promise to assist her. TO WORDSWORTH. 281 To do this it will be necessary to leave off tobacco. But I had some thoughts of doing that before, for I some- times thiuk it does not agree with me. Wm. Hazlitt is in town. I took him to see a very pretty girl, profes- sedly, where there were two young girls (the very head and sum of the girlery was two young girls) ; they neither laughed, nor sneered, nor giggled, nor whispered but they were young girls and he sat and frowned blacker and blacker, indignant that there should be such a thing as youth and beauty, till he tore me away before supper, in perfect misery, and owned he could not bear young girls ; they drove him mad. So I took him home to my old nurse, where he recovered perfect tranquillity. Independent of this, and as I am not a young girl my- self, he is a great acquisition to us. He is, rather imprudently I think, printing a political pamphlet on his own account, and will have to pay for the paper, etc. The first duty of an author, I take it, is never to pay anything. But non cuivis contigit adire Corinthum. The managers, I thank my stars, have settled that question for me. Yours truly, 0. LAMB. LETTER CXLVIII.] June 1806 Dear Wordsworth We are pleased, you may be sure, with the good news of Mrs. W . Hope all is well over by this time. " A fine boy. Have you any more 1 one more and a girl poor copies of me ! " vide Mr. H. t a farce which the proprietors have done me the honour ; but I will set down Mr. Wroughton's own words. N.B. The ensuing letter was sent in answer to one which I wrote, begging to know if my piece had any chance, as I might make alterations, etc. I writing on Monday, there comes this letter on the Wednesday. Attend ! 282 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. [Copy of a Letter from Mr. R. Wroughton.] " Sir Your piece of Mr. H., I am desired to say, is accepted at Drary Lane Theatre, by the proprietors, and, if agreeable to you, will be brought forwards when the proper opportunity serves. The piece shall be sent to you, for your alterations, in the course of a few days, as the same is not in my hands, but with the proprietors. " I am, sir, your obedient servant, " RICHARD WKOUGHTON. [Dated] " 66, Gower Street, "Wednesday, June 11, 1806." On the following Sunday Mr. Tobin comes. The scent of a manager's letter brought him. He would have gone further any day on such a business. I read the letter to him. He deems it authentic and peremptory. Our conversation naturally fell upon pieces, different sorts of pieces ; what is the best way of offering a piece, how far the caprice of managers is an obstacle in the way of a piece, how to judge of the merits of a piece, how long a piece may remain in the hands of the managers before it is acted; and my piece, and your piece, and my poor brother's piece my poor brother was all his life endeavour- ing to get a piece accepted. I am not sure that, when my poor brother bequeathed the care of his pieces to Mr. Tobin, he did not therein convey a legacy which in some measure mollified the otherwise first stupefactions of grief. It cannot be expected that the present Earl Nelson passes all his time in watering the laurels of the admiral with Right-Reverend Tears. Certainly he steals a fine day now and then to plot how to lay out the grounds and mansion at Burnham most suitable to the late Earl's taste, if he had lived, and how to spend the hundred thousand pounds which Parliament has given him in erecting some little neat monument to his memory. I wrote that in mere wantonness of triumph. Have TO WORDSWORTH. 283 nothing more to say about it. The managers, I thank my stars, have decided its merits for ever. They arc the best judges of pieces, and it would be insensible in me to affect a fake modesty after the very flattering letter which I have received. ADMIT TO BOXES. ME. H. Ninth Night. CHARLES LAMB. I think this will be as good a pattern for orders as I cau think on. A little thin flowery border, round, neat, not gaudy, and the Drury Lane Apollo, with the harp at the top. Or shall I have no Apollo 1 simply nothing 1 Or perhaps the comic muse 7 The same form, only I think without the Apollo, will serve for the pit and galleries. I think it will be best to write my name at full length ; but then if I give away a a great many, that will be tedious. Perhaps Ch. Lamb will do. BOXES, now I think on it, 111 have in capitals. The rest, in a neat Italian hand. Or better, perhaps BSoifg, in old English characters, like "Madoc" or "Thalaba?" A-propos of Spenser (you will find him mentioned a page or two before, near enough for an a-propos), I was discoursing on poetry (as one's apt to deceive one's self, and when a person is willing to talk of what one likes, to believe that he also likes the same, as lovers do) with a young gentleman of my office, who is deep read in Anacreon Moore, Lord Strangford, and the principal modern poets, and I happened to mention Epithalamiums, and that I could show him a very fine one of Spenser's. At the mention of this, my gentleman, who is a very fine gentleman, and is brother to the Miss Evans whom 284 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Coleridge so narrowly escaped marrying, pricked up his ears and expressed great pleasure, and begged that I would give him leave to copy it : he did not care how long it was (for I objected the length), he should be very happy to see anything by him. Then pausing, and look- ing sad, he ejaculated "POOR SPENCER!" I begged to know the reason of his ejaculation, thinking that time had by this time softened down any calamities which the bard might have endured. " Why, poor fellow," said he, "he has lost his wife!" "Lost his wife!" said I, "whom are you talking of?" "Why, Spencer," said he; "I've read the Monody he wrote on the occasion, and a very pretty thing it is" This led to an explanation (it could be delayed no longer) that the sound Spenser, which, when poetry is talked of, generally excites an image of an old bard in a ruff, and sometimes with it dim notions of Sir P. Sydney, and perhaps Lord Burleigh, had raised in my gentleman a quite contrary image of the Honourable William Spencer, who has translated some things from the German very prettily, which are published with Lady DL Beauclerk's designs. Nothing like defining of terms when we talk. What blunders might I have fallen into of quite inapplicable criticism, but for this timely explanation ! N.B. At the beginning of Edm. Spenser (to prevent mistakes), I have copied from my own copy, and primarily from a book of Chalmers's on Shakspeare, a sonnet of Spenser's never printed among his poems. It is curious, as being manly, and rather Miltonic, and as a sonnet of Spenser's with nothing in it about love or knighthood. I have no room for remembrances ; but I hope our doing your commission will prove we do not quite forget you. C. L. TO MANNING. 285 To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER CXLIX.] December 5, 1806. Manning, your letter dated Hottentots, August (the what -was -it?) came to hand. I can scarce hope that mine will have the same luck. China ! Canton ! Bless us how it strains the imagination and makes it ache ! I write under another uncertainty, whether it can go to- morrow by a ship which I have just learned is going off direct to your part of the world, or whether the despatches may not be sealed up and this have to wait, for if it is detained here, it will grow staler in a fortnight than in a five months' voyage coming to you. It will be a point of conscience to send you none but bran-new news (the latest edition), which, like oranges, will but grow the better for a sea voyage. Oh that you should be so many hemispheres off ! if I speak incorrectly you can correct me why the simplest death or marriage that takes place here must be important to you as news in the old Bastile. There's your friend Tuthill has got away from France ; you remember France ? and Tuthill ten to one but he writes by this post, if he don't get my note in time, apprising him of the vessel's sailing. Know then that he has found means to obtain leave from Buonaparte (with- out making use of any incredible romantic pretences as some have done, who never meant to fulfil them) to come home, and I have seen him here and at Holcroft's. Arn't you glad about Tuthill 1 Now then, be sorry for Holcroft, whose new play, called the Vindictive Man, was damned about a fortnight since. It died in part of its own weak- ness, and in part for being choked up with bad actors. The two principal parts were destined to Mrs. Jordan and Mr. Bannister, but Mrs. J. has not come to terms with the managers ; they have had some squabble ; and Bannister shot some of his fingers off by the going off of a gun. So Miss Duncan had her part, and Mr. de Camp 28 G LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. took his. His part, the principal comic hope of the play, was most unluckily Goldfinch, taken out of the Road to Ruin, not only the same character, but the identical Goldfinch the same as Falstaff is in two plays of Shak- speare's. As the devil of ill-luck would have it, half the audience did not know that Holcroft had written it, but were displeased at his stealing from the Road to Ruin ; and those who might have borne a gentlemanly coxcomb with his " That's your sort," " Go it " such as Lewis is did not relish the intolerable vulgarity and inanity of the idea stript of his manner. De Camp was hooted, more than hist, hooted and bellowed off the stage before the second act was finished ; so that the remainder of his part was forced to be, with some violence to the play, omitted. In addition to this, a whore was anothei principal character a most unfortunate choice in this moral day. The audience were as scandalised as if you were to introduce such a personage to their private tea- tables. Besides, her action in the play was gross wheedling an old man into marriage. But the mortal blunder of the play was that which, oddly enough, Hol- croft took pride in, and exultingly told me of the night before it came out, that there were no less than eleven principal characters in it, and I believe he meant of the men only, for the play-bill expressed as much, not reckon- ing one woman, and one whore ; and true it was, for Mr. Powell, Mr. Raymond, Mr. Bartlett, Mr. H. Siddons, Mr. Barrymore, etc. etc., to the number of eleven, had all parts equally prominent, and there was as much of them in quantity and rank as of the hero and heroine and most of them gentlemen who seldom appear but as the hero's friend in a farce, for a minute or two ; and here they all had their ten-minute speeches, and one of them gave the audience a serious account of how he was now a lawyer but had been a poet, and then a long enumeration of the inconveniences of authorship, rascally booksellers, reviewers, etc. ; which first set the audience a-gaping ; but I have said enough. You will be so sorry, TO MANNING. 287 that you will not think the best of me for ray detail ; but news is news at Canton. Poor Holcroft I fear will feel the disappointment very seriously in a pecuniary light. From what I can learn he has saved nothing. You and I were hoping one day that he had, but I fear he has nothing but his pictures and books, and a no very flourishing business, and to be obliged to part with his long-necked Guido that hangs opposite as you enter, and the game-piece that hangs in the back drawing-room, and all those Vandykes, etc. ! God should temper the wind to the shorn connoisseur. I hope I need not say to you, that I feel for the weather-beaten author, and for all his household. I assure you his fate has soured a good deal the pleasure I should have otherwise taken in my own little farce being accepted, and I hope about to be acted : it is in rehearsal actually, and I expect it to come out next week. It is kept a sort of secret, and the rehearsals have gone on privately, lest by many folks knowing it, the story should come out, which would infallibly damn it. You remember I had sent it before you went. Wroughton read it, and was much pleased with it. I speedily got an answer. I took it to make alterations, and lazily kept it some months, then took courage and furbished it up in a day or two and took it. In less than a fortnight I heard the principal part was given to Elliston, who liked it and only wanted a prologue, which I have since done and sent, and I had a note the day before yesterday from the manager, Wroughton (bless his fat face ! he is not a bad actor in some things), to say that I should be summoned to the rehearsal after the next, which next was to be yesterday. I had no idea it was so forward. I have had no trouble, attended no reading or rehearsal, made no interest. What a contrast to the usual parade of authors ! But it is peculiar to modesty to do all things without noise or pomp. I have some suspicion it will appear in public on Wednesday next, for Wroughton says in his note, it is so forward that if wanted it may come out next week, and a new 288 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. melodrame is announced for every day till then ; and " a new farce is in rehearsal," is put up in the bills. Now you'd like to know the subject. The title is Mr. H., no more. How simple, how taking ! A great H. sprawling over the play -bill and attracting eyes at every corner. The story is a coxcomb appearing at Bath, vastly rich all the ladies dying for him all bursting to know who he is ; but he goes by no other name than Mr. H. a curiosity like that of the dames of Strasburg about the man with the great nose. But I won't tell you any more about it. Yes, I will ; but I can't give you an idea how I have done it. I'll just tell you that after much vehement admiration, when his true name comes out, "Hogsflesh," all the women shun him, avoid him, and not one can be found to change their name for him. That's the idea. How flat it is here but how whimsical in the farce ! And only think how hard upon me it is that the ship is despatched to-morrow, and my triumph cannot be ascertained till the Wednesday after ; but all China will ring of it by and by. N.B. (But this is a secret). The Professor has got a tragedy coming out, with the young Roscius in it, in January next, as we say January last it will be with you and though it is a profound secret now, as all his affairs are, it cannot be much of one by the time you read this. However, don't let it go any further. I understand there are dramatic exhibitions in China. One would not like to be fore- stalled. Do you find in all this stuff I have written any- thing like those feelings which one should send my old adventuring friend, that is gone to wander among Tartars and may never come again ? I don't ; but your going away, and all about you, is a threadbare topic. I have worn it out with thinking : it has come to me when I have been dull with anything, till my sadness has seemed more to have come from it than to have introduced it. I want you, you don't know how much ; but if I had you here in my European garret, we should but talk over such stuff as I have written so. Those Tales from TO MANNING. 289 Shakspeare are near coming out, and Mary has begun a new work. Mr. Dawe is turned author; he has been in such a way lately Dawe, the painter, I mean he sits and stands about at Holcroft's and says nothing; then sighs and leans his head on his hand. I took him to be in love ; but it seems he was only meditating a work, " The Life of Morland." The young man is not used to composition. Rickman and Captain Burney are well ; they assemble at my house pretty regularly of a Wednesday a new institution. Like other great men I have a public day, cribbage and pipes, with Phillips and noisy Martin. Good God ! what a bit only I've got left ! How shall I squeeze all I know into this morsel ! Coleridge is come home, and is going to turn lecturer on Taste at the Royal Institution. I shall get 200 from the theatre if Mr. H. has a good run, and I hope 100 for the copy- right. Nothing if it fails ; and there never was a more ticklish thing. The whole depends on the manner in which the name is brought out, which I value myself on, as a chef-d'oeuvre. How the paper grows less and less 1 In less than two minutes I shall cease to talk to you, and you may rave to the great wall of China. N.B. Is there such a wall? Is it as big as old London Wall, by Bedlam ? Have you met with a friend of mine, named Ball, at Canton ! If you are acquainted, remember me kindly to him. May be you'll think I have not said enough of Tuthill and the Holcrofts. Tuthill is a noble fellow, as far as I can judge. The H.'s bear their dis- appointment pretty well, but indeed they are sadly morti- fied. Mrs. H. is cast down. It was well, if it were but on this account, that T. is come home. N.B. If my little thing don't succeed I shall easily survive, having, as it were, compared to H.'s venture, but a sixteenth in the lottery. Mary and I are to sit next the orchestra in the pit, next the tweedledees. She remembers you. You are more to us than five hundred farces, clappings, etc. Come back one day. C. LAJLB. VOL. I. U 290 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. To Miss STODDART. LETTER CL.] December 11, 1806. Don't mind this being a queer letter. I am in haste, and taken up by visitors, condolers, eta God bless you. Dear Sarah Mary is a little cut at the ill success of Mr. If., which came out last night and failed. I know you'll be sorry, but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoking man must write smoky farces. Mary is pretty well, but I persuaded her to let me write. We did not apprise you of the coming out of Mr. H. for fear of ill luck. You were much better out of the house. If it had taken, your partaking of our good luck would have been one of our greatest joys. As it is, we shall expect you at the time you mentioned. But when- ever you come you shall be most welcome. God bless you, dear Sarah, Yours most truly, 0. L. Mary is by no means unwell, but I made her let me write. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LETTER CLL] December 11, 1806. Mary's love to all of you I wouldn't let her write. Dear Wordsworth Mr. H. came out last night, and failed. I had'many fears ; the subject was not substantial enough. John Bull must have solider fare than a letter. We are pretty stout about it ; have had plenty of con- doling friends; but, after all, we had rather it should have succeeded. You will see the prologue in most of the morning papers. It was received with such shoute TO GODWIN. 291 as I never witnessed to a prologue. It was attempted to be encored. How hard ! a thing I did merely as a task, because it was wanted, and set no great store by ; and Mr. H. / / The number of friends we had in the house my brother and I being in public offices, etc. was astonishing, but they yielded at length to a few hisses. A hundred hissea ! (Damn the word, I write it like kisses how different !) a hundred hisses outweigh a thousand claps. The former come more directly from the heart. Well, 'tis withdrawn, and there is an end. Better luck to us. G. LAMB. [Turn over.] P.S. Pray, when any of you write to the Clarksons, give our kind loves, and say we shall not be able to come and see them at Christmas, as I shall have but a day or two, and tell them we bear our mortification pretty well. To WILLIAM GODWIN. LETTER CLIL] 1806. I repent. Can that God whom thy votaries say that thou hast demolished expect more? I did indite a splenetic letter, but did the black Hypocondria never gripe thy heart, till thou hast taken a friend for an enemy? The foul fiend Flibbertigibbet leads me over four- inched bridges, to course my own shadow for a traitor. There are certain positions of the moon, under which I counsel thee not to take anything written from this domi- cile as serious. / rank thee with Alves, Latint, Helvetius, or any of his accursed crew 1 Thou art my friend, and henceforth my philosopher. Thou shalt teach Distinction to the junior branches of my household and Deception to the gray-haired Janitress at my door. What ! Are those atonements ? Can Arcadias be brought upon knees, creeping and crouching? 292 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Come, as Macbeth's drunken porter says, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock seven times a day shalt thou batter at my peace, and if I shut aught against thee, save the Temple of Janus, may Briareus, with his hundred hands, in each a brass knocker, lead me such a life. C. LAMB. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LETTER CLIIL] Thursday, January 29, 1807. Dear Wordsworth We have book'd off from Swan and Two Necks, Lad Lane, this day (per Coach) the Tales from Shakspeare. You will forgive the plates, when I tell you they were left to the direction of Godwin, who left the choice of subjects to the bad baby, who from mischief (I suppose) has chosen one from damn'd beastly vulgarity (vide Merck. Venice) where no atom of authority was in the tale to justify it; to another has given a name which exists not in the tale, Nic Bottom, and which she thought would be funny, though in this I suspect his hand, for I guess her reading does not reach far enough to know Bottom's Christian name ; and one of Hamlet and grave-digging, a scene which is not hinted at in the story, and you might as well have put King Canute the Great reproving his courtiers. The rest are giants and giantesses. Suffice it, to save our taste and damn our folly, that we left it all to a friend, W. G., who in the first place cheated me into putting a name to them, which I did not mean, but do not repent, and then wrote a puff about their simplicity, etc., to go with the advertisement as in my name ! Enough of this egregious dupery. I will try to abstract the load of teasing circumstances from the stories and tell you that I am answerable for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tailpiece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts and all of the spelling. The rest is my Sister's. We think Pericles of hers the best, and Othello of mine ; but TO HAZLITT. 293 I hope all have some good. As you like It, we like least. So much, only begging you to tear out the cuts and give them to Johnny, as " Mrs. Godwin's fancy " ! ! 0. L. Our love to all. I had almost forgot, My part of the Preface begins in the middle of a sentence, in last but one page, after a colon, thus : which if they be Iiappily so done, etc. the former part hath a more feminine turn and does hold me up something as an instructor to young ladies : but upon my modesty's honour I wrote it not. Godwin told my Sister that the Baby chose the sub- jects : a fact in taste. To REV. W. HAZLITT. LETTER CLIV.] Temple, February 18, 1808. Sir I am truly concerned that any mistake of mine should have caused you uneasiness, but I hope we have got a clue to William's absence, which may clear up all apprehensions. The people where he lodges in town have received direction from him to forward some linen to a place called Winterslow, in the county of Wilts (not far from Salisbury), where the lady lives, whose cottage, pictured upon a card, if you opened my letter you have doubtless seen ; and though we have had no explanation of the mystery since, we shrewdly suspect that at the time of writing that letter which has given you all this trouble, a certain son of yours (who is both painter and author) was at her elbow, and did assist in framing that very cartoon which was sent to amuse and mislead us in town, as to the real place of his destination. And some words at the back of the said cartoon, which we had not marked so narrowly before, by the similarity of the hand- writing to William's, do very much confirm the suspicion. 294 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. If our theory be right, they have had the pleasure of their jest, and I am afraid you have paid for it in anxiety. But I hope your uneasiness will now be removed, and you will pardon a suspense occasioned by LOVE, who does so many worse mischiefs every day. The letter to the people where William lodges says, moreover, that he shall be in town in a fortnight. My sister joins in respects to you and Mrs. Hazlitt, and in our kindest remembrances and wishes for the restoration of Peggy's health. I am, Sir, your humble servant, CH. LAMB. Rev. W. Hazlitt, Wem, Shropshire. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTEK CLV.] February 26, 1808. Dear Missionary Your letters from the farthest ends of the world have arrived safe. Mary is very thankful for your remembrance of her ; and with the less suspicion of mercenariness, as the silk, the symbolum materiale of your friendship, has not yet appeared. I think Horace says somewhere, nox longa. I would not impute negli- gence or unhandsome delays to a person whom you have honoured with your confidence, but I have not heard of the silk, or of Mr. Knox, save by your letter. Maybe he expects the first advances ! or it may be that he has not succeeded in getting the article on shore, for it is among the res prohibitce et non nisi smuggle-ationis vid fruendce. But so it is, in the friendships between wicked men the very expressions of their goodwill cannot but be sinful. I suppose you know my farce was damned. The noise still rings in my ears. Were you ever in the pillory 1 being damned is something like that. A treaty of marriage is on foot between William Hazlitt and Miss Stoddart. Something about settlements only retards it. She has somewhere about 80 a year, to be 120 when her mother dies. He has no settlement except what he TO MANNING. 295 can claim from the Parish. Pauper est Cinna, sed amat. The thing is therefore in abeyance. But there is love a- both sides. Little Fenwick (you don't see the connection of ideas here ; how the devil should you ?) is in the rules of the Fleet. Cruel creditors ! operation of iniquitous laws. Is Magna Charta then a mockery 1 Why, in general (here I suppose you to ask a question) my spirits are pretty good ; but I have my depressions, black as a smith's beard, Vulcanic, Stygian. At such times I have recourse to a pipe, which is like not being at home to a dun: he comes again with tenfold bitterness the next day. (Mind, I am not in debt ; I only borrow a simili- tude from others ; it shows imagination.) I have done two books since the failure of my farce ; they will both be out this Summer. The one is a juvenile book the Adventures of Ulysses, intended to be an introduction to the reading of Telemachus! It is done out of the Odyssey, not from the Greek (I would not mislead you), nor yet from Pope's Odyssey, but from an older transla- tion of one Chapman. The Shakspeare Tales suggested the doing of it. Godwin is in both those cases my book- seller. The other is done for Longman, and is Specimens of English Dramatic Poets contemporary with Shakspeare. Specimens are becoming fashionable. We have " Speci- mens of Ancient English Poets," " Specimens of Modern English Poets," "Specimens of Ancient English Prose Writers," without end. They used to be called "Beauties." You have seen " Beauties of Shakspeare " 1 so have many people that never saw any beauties in Shakspeare. Long- man is to print it, and be at all the expense and risk, and I am to share the profits after all deductions ; i.e. a year or two hence I must pocket what they please to tell me is due to me. But the book is such as I am glad there should be. It is done out of old plays at the Museum, and out of Dodsley's collection, etc. It is to have notes. So I go creeping on since I was lamed with that cursed fall from off the top of Drury Lane Theatre into the pit, something more than a year ago. However, I have 296 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. been free of the house ever since, and the house was pretty free with me upon that occasion. Damn 'em, how they hissed ! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese, with roaring some- times, like bears, mows and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hiss'd me into madness. 'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should give his favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them ! Heaven be pleased to make the breath stink and teeth rot out of them all therefore : make them a reproach, and all that pass by them to loll out their tongue at them ! Blind mouths ! as Milton somewhere calls them. Do you like Braham's singing? The little Jew has bewitched me. I follow him like as the boys followed Tom the Piper. He cures me of melancholy as David cured Saul : but I don't throw stones at him as Saul did at David in payment. I was insensible to music till he gave me a new sense. Oh that you could go to the new opera of Kais to-night ! 'Tis all about Eastern manners ; it would just suit you. It describes the wild Arabs, wandering Egyptians, lying dervises, and all that sort of people, to a hair. You needn't ha' gone so far to see what you see, if you saw it as I do every night at Drury Lane Theatre. Braham's singing, when it is impassioned, is finer than Mrs. Siddons's or Mr. Kemble's acting ! and when it is not impassioned, it is as good as hearing a person of fine sense talking. The brave little Jew ! Old Sergeant Hill is dead. Mrs. Rickman is in the family way. It is thought that Hazlitt will have children if he marries Miss Stoddart. I made a pun the other day, and palmed it upon Holcroft, TO MANNING. 297 who grinned like a Cheshire cat. (Why do cats grin in Cheshire 1 Because it was once a county palatine, and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.) I said that Holcroffc, on being asked who were the best dramatic writers of the day, replied, " HOOK AND I." Mr. Hook is author of several pieces, Tekeli, etc. You know what hooks and eyes are, don't you? They are what little boys do up their breeches with. Your letter had many things in it hard to be understood : the puns were ready and Swift- like ; but don't you begin to be melancholy in the midst of Eastern customs 1 " The mind does not easily conform to foreign usages, even in trifles : it requires something that it has been familiar with." That begins one of Dr. Hawkesworth's papers in the Adventurer, and is, I think, as sensible a remark as ever fell from the Doctor's mouth. White is at Christ's Hospital, a wit of the first magni- tude, but would rather be thought a gentleman, like Congreve. You know Congreve's repulse which he gave to Voltaire, when he came to visit him as a literary man, that he wished to be considered only in the light of a private gentleman. I think the impertinent Frenchman was properly answered. I should just serve any member of the French Institute in the same manner, that wished to be introduced to me. Buonaparte has voted 5000 livres to Davy, the great young English Chemist ! but it has not arrived. Coleridge has delivered two lectures at the Royal Institution ; two more were attended, but he did not come. It is thought he has gone sick upon them. He isn't well, that's certain. Wordsworth is coming to see him. He sits up in a two pair of stairs room at the Courier Office, and receives visitors. . . . Does any one read at Canton? Lord Moira is President of the Westminster Library. I suppose you might have interest with Sir Joseph Banks to get to be president of any similar institution that should be set up at Canton. I think public reading-rooms the best mode of educating young men. Solitary reading is apt to give 298 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. the headache. Besides, who knows that you do read? There are ten thousand institutions similar to the Royal Institution which have sprung up from it. There is the London Institution, the Southwark Institution, the Russell Square Rooms Institution, etc. College quasi Conlege, a place where people read together. Words- worth, the great poet, is coming to town ; he is to have apartments in the Mansion House. He says he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakspeare, if he had a mind to try it. It is clear, then, nothing is wanting but the mind. Even Coleridge a little checked at this hardihood of assertion. Dyer came to me the other evening at 11 o'clock, when there was a large room full of company, which I usually get together on a Wednesday evening (all great men have public days), to propose to me to have my face done by a Miss Beetham (or Betham), a miniature painter, some relation to Mrs. Beetham the Profilist or Pattern Mangle woman opposite St. Dunstan's, to put before my book of Extracts. I declined it. Well, my dear Manning, talking cannot be infinite. I have said all I have to say ; the rest is but remem- brances of you, which we shall bear in our heads while we have heads. Here is a packet of trifles nothing worth; but it is a trifling part of the world where I live : emptiness abounds. But in fulness of affection, we remain yours, C. L, To WILLIAM GODWIN. LETTER CLVI. ] March 11,1808. Dear Godwin The giant's vomit was perfectly nau- seous, and I am glad you pointed it out. I have removed the objection. To the other passages I can find no other objection but what you may bring to numberless passages besides, such as of Scylla snatching up the six men, etc., that is to say, they are lively images of shocking things. If you want a book, which is not occasionally to shock, you should not have thought of a tale which was so full TO DYER. 299 of anthropophagi and wonders. I cannot alter these things without enervating the Book, and I will not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London booksellers should refuse it. But speaking as author to author, I must say that I think the terrible in those two passages seems to me so much to preponderate over the nauseous, as to make them rather fine than disgusting. Who is to read them, I don't know : who is it that reads " Tales of Terror " and " Mysteries of Udolpho " ? Such things sell I only say that I will not consent to alter such passages, which I know to be some of the best in the book. As an author, I say to you, an author : touch not my work As to a bookseller I say, Take the work such as it is, or refuse it. You are as free to refuse it as when we first talked of it. As to a friend I say, Don't plague yourself and me with nonsensical objections. I assure you I will not alter one more word. To GEORGE DYER. From my desk in Leadenhall Street, LETTER CLVIL] December 5, 1808. Dear Dyer Coleridge is not so bad as your fears have represented him : it is true he is Bury'd, although he is not dead; to understand this quibble you must know that he is at Bury St. Edmunds, relaxing after the fatigues of lecturing and Londonising. The little Rick- maness whom you inquire after so kindly, thrives and grows apace ; she is already a prattler, and 'tis thought that on some future day she may be a speaker. We hold our weekly meetings still at No. 16, where although we are not so high as the top of Malvern we are involved in almost as much mist. Miss B.'s merit "in every point of view " I am not disposed to question, although I have not been indulged with any view of that lady, back, side or front fie, Dyer, to praise a female in such common market phrases you who are so courtly and so attentive. My book is not yet out, that is, not my 300 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. Extracts; my Ulysses is, and waits your acceptance. When you shall come to town, I hope to present you both together, never thinking of your buying the Extracts half a guinea books were never calculated for my friends. More poets have started up since your departure ; William Hazlitt, your friend and mine, is putting to press a collection of verses, chiefly amatory, some of them pretty enough. How these painters encroach on our province ! There's Hopner, Shee, Westall, and I don't know who beside, and Tresham. It seems, on confession, that they are not at the top of their own art, when they seek to eke out their fame with the assistance of another's ; no large tea-dealer sells cheeses, and no great silversmith deals in razor-straps ; it is only your petty dealers who mix commodities. If Nero had been a great emperor he would never have played the violoncello. Who ever caught you, Dyer, designing a landscape or taking a likeness 1 I have no more to add, who am a friend of virtue, poetry, and painting, therefore, in an especial manner, unalterably thine, C. LAMB. To G. Dyer, Esq., Jas. Martin's Wood, Overbury, Worcestershire. To MRS. HAZLITT. LETTER CLVIII.] Saturday, December 10, 1808. There came this morning a printed Prospectus from " S. T. Coleridge, Grasmere," of a Weekly Paper, to be called The Friend; a flaming Prospectus. I have no time to give the heads of it. To commence the first Saturday in January. There came also notice of a turkey from Mr. Clarkson, which I am more sanguine in expect- ing the accomplishment of than I am of Coleridge's prophecy. C. LAMB. Mrs. Hazlitt, Winterslow, near Sarnm, Wilts. CHAPTER III. 1809-1816. LETTERS TO MANNING, COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH, AND OTHERS. To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER CLIX.] Saturday, February 25, 1809. Dear Robert A great gap has been filled up since our intercourse was broken off. We shall at least have some things to talk over when we meet. That you should never have been in London since I saw you last is a fact which I cannot account for on the principles of my own mental formation. You are worthy to be mentioned with Claudian's "Old Man of Verona." I forbear to ask you any questions concerning your family : who are dead, and who married ; I will not anticipate our meeting. I have been in total darkness respecting you all these years. I am just up ; and have heard, without being able to confirm the fact, that Drury Lane Theatre is burnt to the ground. Of Walton's Angler a new edition is just published with the original plates revived. I think of buying it. The old editions are two guineas, and two guineas and a half. I have not forgotten our ride from Saffron Walden, and the madness of young 302 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. parson Thomson of Cambridge, that I took your brother to see. He is gone as a missionary to the East. I live at present at No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, Inner Temple. I shall move at Lady Day, or a little later : if you don't find me in M.C.B., I shall be at No. 2 or 4 Inner Temple Lane, at either of which places I shall be happy to shake my old friend Robert by the hand. 0. L. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER CLX.] 34 Southampton Buildings, March 28, 1809. Dear Manning I sent you a long letter by the ships which sailed the beginning of last month, accompanied with books, etc. Since I last wrote Holcroft is dead. He died on Thursday last. So there is one of your friends whom you will never see again ! Perhaps the next fleet may bring you a letter from Martin Burney, to say that he writes by desire of Miss Lamb, who is not well enough to write herself, to inform you that her brother died on Thursday last, 14th June, etc. But I hope not. I should be sorry to give occasion to open a correspondence between Martin and you. This letter must be short, for I have driven it off to the very moment of doing up the packets ; and besides, that which I refer to above is a very long one ; and if you have received my books, you will have enough to do to read them. While I think on it, let me tell you, we are moved. Don't come any more to Mitre Court Buildings. We are at 34, Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, and shall be here till about the end of May ; then we remove to No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where I mean to live and die ; for I have such horror of moving, that I would not take a benefice from the King if I was not indulged with non- TO MANNING. 303 residence. What a dislocation of comfort is comprised in that word " moving " ! Such a heap of little nasty things, after you think all is got into the cart: old dredging-boxes, worn-out brushes, gallipots, vials, things that it is impossible the most necessitous person can ever want, but which the women, who preside on these occa- sions, will not leave behind if it was to save your soul. They'd keep the cart ten minutes to stow in dirty pipes and broken matches, to show their economy. Then you can find nothing you want for many days after you get into your new lodgings. You must comb your hair with your fingers, wash your hands without soap, go about in dirty gaiters. Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret. Our place of final destination I don't mean the grave, but No. 4, Inner Temple Lane looks out upon a gloomy churchyard-like court, called Hare Court, with three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it ? I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old. If you see newspapers you will read about Mrs. Clarke. The sensation in London about this nonsensical business is marvellous. I remember nothing in my life like it : thousands of ballads, carica- tures, lives of Mrs. Clarke, in every blind alley. Yet in the midst of this stir, a sublime abstracted dancing- master, who attends a family we know at Kensington, being asked a question about the progress of the examina- tions in the House, inquired who Mrs. Clarke was ? He had heard nothing of it. He had evaded this omni- presence by utter insignificancy ! The Duke should make that man his confidential valet. I proposed locking him up, tarring him the use of his fiddle and red pumps, until he had minutely perused and committed to memory the whole body of the examinations, which employed the House of Commons a fortnight, to teach him to be more attentive to what concerns the public. I think I told you of Godwin's little book, and of Coleridge's prospectus, 304 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. in my last ; if I did not, remind me of it, and I will send you them, or an account of them, next fleet. I have no conveniency of doing it by this. Mrs. Godwin grows every day in disfavour with me. I will be buried with this inscription over me : " Here lies C. L., the woman- hater : " I mean that hated one woman : for the rest, God bless them ! How do you like the Mandarinesses ? Are you on some little footing with any of them ? This is Wednesday. On Wednesdays is my levee. The Captain, Martin, Phillips (not the Sheriff), Rickman, and some more, are constant attendants, besides stray visitors. We play at whist, eat cold meat and hot potatoes, and any gentleman that chooses smokes. Why do you never drop in 1 You'll come some day, won't you ? C. LAMB, etc. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER CLXL] June 7, 1809. Dear Coleridge I congratulate you on the appearance of the Friend. Your first Number promises well, and I have no doubt the succeeding Numbers will fulfil the promise. I had a kind letter from you some time since, which I have left unanswered. I am also obliged to you, I believe, for a review in the Annual, am I not 1 The Monthly Review sneers at me, and asks " if Comus is not good enough for Mr. Lamb 1 ?" because I have said no good serious dramas have been written since the death of Charles the First, except Samson Agonistes. So because they do not know, or won't remember, that Comus was written long before, I am to be set down as an under- valuer of Milton ! Coleridge, do kill those reviews, or they will kill us ; kill all we like. Be a friend to all else, but their foe. I have been turned out of my TO COLERIDGE. 305 chambers in the Temple by a landlord who wanted them for himself, but I have got other at No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, far more commodious and roomy. I have two rooms on the third floor and five rooms above, with an inner staircase to myself, and all new painted, etc., and all for 30 a year ! I came into them on Saturday week ; and on Monday following Mary was taken ill with the fatigue of moving; and affected, I believe, by the novelty of the home she could not sleep, and I am left alone with a maid quite a stranger to me, and she has a month or two's sad distraction to go through. What sad large pieces it cuts out of life ! out of her life, who is getting rather old ; and we may not have many years to live together. I am weaker, and bear it worse than I ever did. But I hope we shall be comfortable by and by. The rooms are delicious, and the best look back- wards into Hare Court, where there is a pump always going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court trees come in at the window, so that 'tis like living in a garden. I try to persuade myself it is much pleasanter than Mitre Court ; but, alas ! the household gods are slow to come in a new mansion. They are in their infancy to me ; I do not feel them yet ; no hearth has blazed to them yet. How I hate and dread new places ! I was very glad to see Wordsworth's book advertised : I am to have it to-morrow lent me, and if Wordsworth don't send me an order for one upon Longman, I will buy it. It is greatly extolled and liked by all who have seen it. Let me hear from some of you, for I am desolate. I shall have to send you, iu a week or two, two volumes of Juvenile Poetry, done by Mary and me within the last six months, and that tale in prose which Wordsworth so much liked, which was published at Christmas, with nine others, by us, and has reached a second edition. There's for you. We have almost worked ourselves out of child's work, and I don't know what to do. Sometimes I think of a drama, but I have no head for play-making ; I can do the dialogue, and that's all. I am quite aground for VOL. L x 306 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. a plan ; but I must do something for money. Not that I have immediate wants, but I have prospective ones. money, money, how blindly thou hast been worshipped, and how stupidly abused ! Thou art health and liberty and strength ; and he that has thee may rattle his pockets at the Devil. Nevertheless, do not understand by this that I have not quite enough for my occasions for a year or two to come. While I think on it, Coleridge, I fetch'd away my books which you had at the Courier Office, and found all but a third volume of the old plays, containing the White Devil, Green's Tu Quoque, and the Honest Whore, perhaps the most valuable volume of them all that I could not find. Pray, if you can, remember what you did with it, or where you took it out with you a walking perhaps ; send me word, for, to use the old plea, it spoils a set. I found two other volumes (you had three), the Arcadia, and Daniel, enriched with manuscript notes. 1 wish every book I have were so noted. They have thoroughly converted me to relish Daniel, or to say I relish him, for after all, I believe I did relish him. You well call him sober-minded. Your notes are excellent. Perhaps you've forgot them. I have read a review in the Quarterly, by Southey, on the Missionaries, which is most masterly. I only grudge its being there. It is quite beautiful. Do remember my Dodsley ; and, pray, do write, or let some of you write. Clarkson tells me you are in a smoky house. Have you cured it ? It is hard to cure anything of smoking. Our little poems are but humble, but they have no name. You must read them, remembering they were task work ; and perhaps you will admire the number of subjects, all of children, picked out by an old Bachelor and an old Maid. Many parents would not have found so many. Have you read Ccelebs ? It has reached eight editions in so many weeks, yet literally it is one of the very poorest sort of common novels, with the draw-back of dull religion in it. Had the religion been high and flavoured, it would have been TO CHARLES LLOYD, THE ELDER. 307 something. I borrowed this Coelebs in Search of a Wife, of a very careful, neat lady, and returned it with this stuff written in the beginning : " If ever I marry a wife I'll marry a landlord's daughter, For then I may sit in the bar, And drink cold brandy and water." I don't expect you can find time from your Friend to write to me much ; but write something, for there has been a long silence. You know Holcroft is dead. God- win is well. He has written a very pretty, absurd book about sepulchres. He was affronted because I told him it was better than Hervey, but not so good as Sir T. Browne. This letter is all about books ; but my head aches, and I hardly know what I write, but I could not let the Friend pass without a congratulatory epistle. I won't criticise till it comes to a volume. Tell me how I shall send my packet to you ? by what conveyance ? by Longman, Short-man, or how? Give my kindest remembrances to Wordsworth. Tell him he must give me a book. My kind love to Mrs. W. and to Dorothy separately and conjointly. I wish you could all come and see me in my new rooms. God bless you all. C. L. To CHARLES LLOYD, THE ELDER. LETTER CLXII.] July 31, 1809. Dear Sir The general impression made by your Translation on the mind of my friend who kept your MS. so unreasonably long, as well as on another friend who read over a good part of it with me, was that it gave a great deal more of the sense of Homer than either of his two great modern Translators have done. In several expressions which they at first objected to, on 308 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. turning to the Greek they found it completely warranted you in the use of them ; and they were even surprised that you could combine so much fidelity with so much of the turn of the best modern improvements in the Couplet versification. I think of the two, I rather prefer the Book of the Iliad which you sent me, for the sound of the verse; but the difference of subject almost in- voluntarily modifies verse. I find Cowper is a favourite with nobody. His injudicious use of the stately slow Miltonic verse in a subject so very different, has given a distaste. Nothing can be more unlike to my fancy than Homer and Milton. Homer is perfect prattle, tho' exquisite prattle, compared to the deep oracular voice of Milton. In Milton you love to stop, and saturate your mind with every great image or sentiment; in Homer you want to go on, to have more of his agreeable narrative. Cowper delays you as much, walking over a Bowling Green, as the other does, travelling over steep Alpine heights, where the labour enters into and makes a part of the pleasure. From what I have seen, I would certainly be glad to hear that you continued your employ- ment quite through the Poem : that is, for an agreeable and honourable recreation to yourself; though I should scarce think that (Pope having got the ground) a transla- tion in Pope's Couplet versification would ever supersede his to the public, however faithfuller or in some respects better. Pitt's Virgil is not much read, I believe, though nearer to the Original than Dryden's. Perhaps it is, that people do not like two Homers or Virgils there is a sort of confusion in it to an English reader, who has not a centre of reference in the Original : when Tate and Brady's Psalms came out in our Churches, many pious people would not substitute them in the room of David's, as they call'd Sternhold and Hopkins's. But if you write for a relaxation from other sort of occupations I can only congratulate you, Sir, on the noble choice, as it seems to me, which you have made, and express my wonder at the facility which you suddenly have arrived TO COLERIDGE. 309 at, if (as I suspect) these are indeed the first specimens of this sort which you have produced. But I cannot help thinking that you betray a more practised gait than a late beginner could so soon acquire. Perhaps you have only resumed what you had formerly laid aside as in- terrupting more necessary avocations. I need not add how happy I shall be to see at any time what you may please to send me. In particular, I should be glad to see that you had taken up Horace, which I think you enter into as much as any man that was not born in his days, and in the Via Longa or Flaminia, or near the Forum. With many apologies for keeping your MS. so long, which my friend's engagements in business must excuse, I remain, Dear Sir, yours truly, 0. L. My kind respects to Mrs. LI., and my remembrances to Robert, etc. etc. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER CLXIIL] Monday, October 30, 1809. Dear Coleridge I have but this moment received your letter, dated the 9th instant, having just come off a journey from Wiltshire, where I have been with Mary on a visit to Hazlitt. The journey has been of infinite ser- vice to her. We have had nothing but sunshiny days, and daily walks from eight to twenty miles a day ; have seen Wilton, Salisbury, Stonehenge, etc. Her illness lasted but six weeks ; it left her weak, but the country has made us whole. We came back to our Hogarth Room. I have made several acquisitions since you saw them, and found Nos. 8, 9, 10 of the Friend. The account of Luther in the Warteburg is as fine as any- thing I ever read. God forbid that a man who has such things to say should be silenced for want of 100. This 310 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMR Custom-and-Duty Age would have made the Preacher on the Mount take out a licence, and St. Paul's Epistles would not have been missible without a stamp. that you may find means to go on ! But alas ! where is Sir G-. Beaumont ? Sotheby ? What has become of the rich Auditors in Albemarle Street? Your letter has saddened me. I am so tired with my journey, being up all night, that I have neither things nor words in my power. I believe I expressed my admiration of the pamphlet. Its power over me was like that which Milton's pamphlets must have had on his contemporaries, who were tuned to them. What a piece of prose ! Do you hear if it is read at all ? I am out of the world of readers. I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up unto the old things. I have put up shelves. You never saw a book-case in more true harmony with the contents than what I've nailed up in a room, which, though new, has more apti- tudes for growing old than you shall often see as one sometimes gets a friend in the middle of life, who becomes an old friend in a short time. My rooms are luxurious ; one is for prints and one for books ; a Summer and a Winter parlour. When shall I ever see you in them ? C. L. To ROBERT LLOYD. LETTER OLXIV.] January 1, 1310. Dear Robert In great haste I write. The Turkey is down at the fire, and some pleasant friends are come in to partake of it. The Sender's Health shall not be forgot. What you tell me of your Father's perseverance in his honourable task gives me great pleasure. Seven Books are a serious earnest of the whole, which I hope to see finish'd. TO MANNING. 311 We had a delightful month in Wiltshire, four weeks of uniform fine weather, the only fine days which had been all the summer. Saw Salisbury Cathedral, Stonehenge, Wilton, etc. etc. Mary is in excellent health, and sends her Love. Accept of mine, with my kind respects to Mrs. LI and to your father and mother. Coleridge's Friend is occasionally sublime. What do you think of that Description of Luther in his Study in one of the earlier numbers? The worst is, he is always promising something which never comes ; it is now 18th Number, and continues introductory ; the 17th (that stupid long letter) was nothing better than a Prospectus, and ought to have preceded the 1st Number. But I rejoice that it lives. When you come to London, you will find us at No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, with a few old Books, a few old Hogarths round the room, and the Household Gods at last establish'd. The feeling of Home, which has been slow to come, has come at last. May I never move again, but may my next Lodging be my Coffin. Yours truly, C. LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTER CLXV.] January 2, 1810. Dear Manning When I last wrote to you I was in lodgings. I am now in chambers, No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where I should be happy to see you any evening. Bring any of your friends, the Mandarins, with you. I have two sitting-rooms : I call them so par excellence, for you may stand, or loll, or lean, or try any posture in them, but they are best for sitting ; not squatting down Japanese fashion, but the more decorous use of the haunche* which European usage has consecrated. I have two of these rooms on the third floor, and five sleeping, cooking, 312 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. etc., rooms, on the fourth floor. In my best room is a choice collection of the works of Hogarth, an English painter of some humour. In my next best are shelves containing a small but well-chosen library. My best room commands a court, in which there are trees and a pump, the water of which is excellent cold, with brandy, and not very insipid without. Here I hope to set up my rest, and not quit till Mr. Powell, the undertaker, gives me notice that I may have possession of my last lodging. He lets lodgings for single gentlemen. I sent you a parcel of books by my last, to give you some idea of the state of European literature. There comes with this two volumes, done up as letters, of minor poetry, a sequel to " Mrs. Leicester " ; the best you may suppose mine ; the next best are my coadjutor's. You may amuse yourself in guessing them out ; but I must tell you mine are but one-third in quantity of the whole. So much for a very delicate subject. It is hard to speak of one's self, etc. Holcroft had finished his life when I wrote to you, and Hazlitt has since finished his life ; I do not mean his own life, but he has finished a life of Holcroft, which is going to press. Tuthill is Dr. Tuthill. I continue Mr. Lamb. I have published a little book for children on titles of honour ; and to give them some idea of the difference of rank and gradual rising, I have made a little scale, sup- posing myself to receive the following various accessions of dignity from the king, who is the fountain of honour As at first, 1, Mr. C. Lamb ; 2, C. Lamb, Esq. ; 3, Sir C. Lamb, Bart. ; 4, Baron Lamb, of Stamford ; 5, Viscount Lamb; 6, Earl Lamb; 7, Marquis Lamb; 8, Duke Lamb. It would look like quibbling to carry it on further, and especially as it is not necessary for children to go beyond the ordinary titles of sub-regal dignity in our own country; otherwise I have sometimes in my dreams imagined myself still advancing, as 9th, King Lamb; 10th, Emperor Lamb; llth, Pope Innocent; higher than which is nothing upon earth. Puns 1 have not made many (nor punch much) since the date of my TO MANNING. 313 last ; one I cannot help relating. A constable in Salis- bury Cathedral was telling me that eight people dined at the top of the spire of the cathedral; upon which I remarked, that they must be very sharp set. But in general I cultivate the reasoning part of my mind more than the imaginative. I am stuffed out so with eating turkey for dinner, and another turkey for supper yester- day (Turkey in Europe and Turkey in Asia), that I can't jog on. It is New Year here ; that is, it was New Year half a year back, when I was writing this. Nothing puzzles me more than time and space ; and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them. The Persian ambassador is the principal thing talked of now. I sent some people to see him worship the sun on Prim- rose Hill, at half-past six in the morning, 28th November ; but he did not come, which makes me think the old fire- worshippers are a sect almost extinct in Persia. The Persian ambassador's name is Shaw Ali Mirza. The common people call him Shaw Nonsense. While I think of it, I have put three letters, besides my own three, into the India Post for you, from your brother, sister, and some gentleman whose name I forget. Will they, have they, did they come safe ? The distance you are at, cuts up tenses by the root. I think you said you did not know Kate *********. I express her by nine stars, though she is but one. You must have seen her at her father's. Try and remember her. Coleridge is bringing out a paper in weekly Numbers, called the Friend, which I would send if I could ; but the difficulty I had in getting the packets of books out to you before, deters me ; and you'll want something new to read when you come home. It is chiefly intended to puff off Words- worth's poetry ; but there are some noble things in it by the by. Except Kate, I have had no vision of excellence this year, and she passed by like the Queen on her corona- tion day ; you don't know whether you saw her or not. Kate is fifteen : I go about moping, and sing the old pathetic ballad I used to like in my youth 314 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. "She's sweet fifteen, I'm one year more," Mrs. Bland sang it in boy's clothes the first time I heard it. I sometimes think the lower notes in my voice are like Mrs. Eland's. That glorious singer, Braham, one of my lights, is fled. He was for a season. He was a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel ; yet all these elements mixed up so kindly in him, that you could not tell which preponderated ; but he is gone, and one Phillips is engaged instead. Kate is vanished, but Miss B is always to be met with ! " Queens drop away, while blue-legg'd Maukin thrives ; And courtly Mildred dies while country Madge survives." That is not my poetry, but Quarles's ; but haven't you observed that the rarest things are the least obvious 1 Don't show anybody the names in this letter. I write confidentially, and wish this letter to be considered as private. Hazlitt has written a grammar for Godwin. Godwin sells it bound up with a treatise of his own on language ; but the gray mare is the better horse. I don't allude to Mrs. Godwin, but to the word grammar, which comes near to gray mare, if you observe, in sound. That figure is called paronomasia in Greek. I am some- times happy in it. An old woman begged of me lor charity. " Ah ! sir," said she, " I have seen better days." " So have I, good woman," I replied ; but I meant, literally, days not so rainy and overcast as that on which she begged : she meant more prosperous days. Mr. Dawe is made associate of the Royal Academy. By what law of association I can't guess. Mrs. Holcroft, Miss Hoi- croft, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin, Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt, Mrs. Martin and Louisa, Mrs. Lum, Capt. Burney, Mrs. Burney, Martin Burney, Mr. Rickman, Mrs. Rickman, Dr. Stoddart, William Dollin, Mr. Thompson, Mr. and Mrs. Norris, Mr. Fenwick, Mrs. Fenwick, Miss Fenwick, a man that saw you at our house one day, and a lady that heard me speak of you; Mrs. Buffara that heard TO CHARLES LLOYD, THE EIDER. 315 Hazlitt mention you, Dr. Tuthill, Mrs. Tuthill, Colonel Harwood, Mrs. Harwood, Mr. Collier, Mrs. Collier, Mr. Button, Nurse, Mr. Fell, Mrs. Fell, Mr. Marshall, are very well, and occasionally inquire after you. I remain yours ever, CH. LAMB. To CHARLES LLOYD, THE ELDER. LETTKK CLXVL] March 10, 1810. E. 1. Ho. My dear Sir The above are all the faults I, who profess myself to be a mere English Reader, could find after a scrupulous perusal twice over of your neat little Book. I assure you it gave me great pleasure in the perusal, much more in this shape than in the Manuscript, and I should be very sorry you should give up the finishing of it on so poor pretence as your Age [sixty- two], which is not so much by ten years as Dryden's when he wrote his fables, which are his best works allowed, and not more than Milton's when he had scarce entered upon his original Epic Poem. You have done nearly a third ; persevere and let us see the whole. I am sure I should prize it for its Homeric plainness and truth above the confederate jumble of Pope, Broome and Fenton which goes under Pope's name, and is far inferior to his ILIAD. I have picked out what I think blemishes, but they are but a score of words (I am a mere word-pecker) in six times as many pages. The rest all gave me pleasure, and most of all the Book [the Sixth] in which Ulysses and Nausicaa meet. You have infused a kind of biblical patriarchal manner into it, it reads like some story of Jacob and Rachel, or some of those primitive manners. I am ashamed to carp at words, but I did it in obedience to your desires, and the plain reason why I did not acknowledge your kind present sooner was that I had no criticisms of value to make. I shall certainly beg the opinion of my friend who read the two 316 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. first Books on this enlarged Performance, But he is so very much engaged that I cannot at present get at him, and besides him I have no acquaintance that takes much interest in Poetry, Greek or English. But I hope and adjure you to go on, and do not make excuses of Age till you have completed the Odyssey, and done a great part of Horace besides. Then you will be entitled to hang up your Harp. I am, Dear Sir, with Love to all your family, your hble. Serv., 0. LAMB. To JOHN MATHEW GUTCH. LETTEB CLXVIL] April 9, 1810. Dear Gutch I did not see your brother, who brought me Wither; but he understood, he said, you were daily expecting to come to town : this has prevented my writing. The books have pleased me excessively : I should think ycu could not have made a better selection. I never saw Philarete before judge of my pleasure. I could not forbear scribbling certain critiques in pencil on the blank leaves. Shall I send them, or may I expect to see you in town ? Some of them are remarks on the character of Wither and of his writings. Do you mean to have anything of that kind? What I have said on Philarete is poor, but I think some of the rest not so bad : perhaps I have exceeded my commission in scrawling over the copies ; but my delight therein must excuse me, and pencil-marks will rub out. Where is the Life? Write, for I am quite in the dark. Yours, with many thanks, 0. LAMB. Perhaps I could digest the few critiques prefixed to the Satires, Shepherds Hunting, etc., into a short ab- stract of Wither's character and works, at the end of his Life. But, may be, you don't want anything, and have said all you wish in the Life. TO MONTAGU. 317 To BASIL MONTAGU. Winterslow, near Sarum, LETTER CLXVIII.] July 12, 1810. Dear Montagu I have turned and twisted the MSS. in my head, and can make nothing of them. I knew when I took them that I could not, but I do not like to do an act of ungracious necessity at once ; so I am ever committing myself by half engagements, and total failures. I cannot make anybody understand why I can't do such things ; it is a defect in my occiput. I cannot put other people's thoughts together ; I forget every paragraph as fast as I read it ; and my head has received such a shock by an all-night journey on the top of the coach, that I shall have enough to do to nurse it into its natural pace before I go home. I must devote myself to imbecility ; I must be gloriously useless while I stay here. How is Mrs. M. 1 will she pardon my inefficiency ? The city of Salisbury is full of weeping and wailing. The bank has stopped payment ; and everybody in the town kept money at it, or has got some of its notes. Some have lost all they had in the world. It is the next thing to seeing a city with the plague within its walls. The Wilton people are all undone; all the manufacturers there kept cash at the Salisbury bank ; and I do suppose it to be the unhappiest county in England this, where I am making holiday. We propose setting out for Oxford Tuesday fortnight, and coming thereby home. But no more night travelling. My head is sore (understand it of the inside) with that deduction from my natural rest which I suffered coming down. Neither Mary nor I can spare a morsel of our rest : it is incumbent on us to be misers of it. Travelling is not good for us, we travel so seldom. If the sun be hell, it is not for the fire, but for the sempiternal motion of that miserable body of light. How much more dignified leisure hath a mussel glued to his unpassable rocky limit two inch square ! He hears 318 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. the tide roll over him, backwards and forwards twice a day (as the Salisbury long coach goes and returns in eight-and-forty hours), but knows better than to take an outside night place a top on't. He is the owl of the sea Minerva's fish the fish of wisdom. Our kindest remembrances to Mrs. M. Yours truly, 0. LAMB. To WILLIAM HAZLITT. LETTER CLXIX.] Thursday {August 9, 1810]. Dear H. Epistemon is not well Our pleasant excur- sion has ended sadly for one of us. You will guess I mean my sister. She got home very well (I was very ill on the journey) and continued so till Monday night, when her complaint came on, and she is now absent from home. I am glad to hear you are all well I think I shall be mad if I take any more journeys, with two experiences against it I found all well here. Kind remembrances to Sarah, have just got her letter. H. Robinson has been to Blenheim. He says you will be sorry to hear that we should not have asked for the Titian Gallery there. One of his friends knew of it, and asked to see it It is never shown but to those who inquire for it. The pictures are all Titians, Jupiter and Ledas, Mars and Venuses, etc., all naked pictures, which may be a reason they don't show them to females. But he says they are very fine ; and perhaps they are shown separately to put another fee into the shower's pocket Well, I shall never see it. I have lost all wish for sights. God bless you. I shall be glad to see you in London. Yours truly, 0. LAMB. Mr. Hazlitt, Winterelow, near Salisbury. TO WORDSWORTH. 319 To Miss WORDSWORTH. LETTKK CLXX.] [Autumn 1810.] Mary has left a little space for me to fill up with non- sense, as the geographers used to cram monsters in the voids of the maps, and call it Terra Incognita. She has told you how she has taken to water like a hungry otter. I too limp after her in lame imitation, but it goes against me a little at first. I have been acquaintance with it now for full four days, and it seems a moon. I am full of cramps and rheumatisms, and cold internally, so that fire won't warm me ; yet I bear all for virtue's sake. Must I then leave you, gin, rum, brandy, aqua-vitae, pleasant jolly fellows ? Damn temperance and he that first invented it ! some Anti-Noahite. Coleridge has powdered his head, and looks like Bacchus, Bacchus ever sleek and young. He is going to turn sober, but his clock has not struck yet ; meantime he pours down goblet after goblet, the second to see where the first is gone, the third to see no harm happens to the second, a fourth to say there is another coming, and a fifth to say he is not sure he is the last. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LETTBB CLXXI.] Friday, October 19, 1810. E. I. Ho. Dear W. Mary has been very ill, which you have heard, I suppose, from the Montagus. She is very weak and low-spirited now. I was much pleased with your continuation of the Essay on Epitaphs. It is the only sensible thing which has been written on that subject, and it goes to the bottom. In particular I was pleased with your translation of that turgid epitaph into the plain feeling under it. It is perfectly a test. But what is the reason we have no good epitaphs after all ? A very striking instance of your position might be found in the churchyard of Ditton-upon-Thames, if you 320 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. know such a place. Ditton-upon-Thames has been blessed by the residence of a poet, who for love or money I do not well know which has dignified every gravestone, for the last few years, with bran-new verses, all different, and all ingenious, with the author's name at the bottom of each. This sweet Swan of Thames has so artfully diver- sified his strains and his rhyme:;, that the same thought never occurs twice ; more justly, perhaps, as no thought ever occurs at all, there was a physical impossibility that the same thought should recur. It is long since I saw and read these inscriptions, but I remember the impres- sion was of a smug usher at his desk in the intervals of inp traction, levelling his pen. Of death, as it consists of dust and worms, and mourners and uncertainty, he had never thought ; but the word " death " he had often seen separate and conjunct with other words, till he had learned to speak of all its attributes as glibly as Unitarian Belsham will discuss you the attributes of the word "God" in a pulpit ; and will talk of infinity with a tongue that dangles from a skull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination two inches, or further than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to the sounding- board of the pulpit. But the epitaphs were trim, and sprag, and patent, and pleased the survivors of Thames-Ditton above the old mumpsimus of "Afflictions Sore." ... To do justice though, it must be owned that even the excellent feeling which dictated this dirge when new must have suffered something in passing through so many thousand applica- tions, many of them no doubt quite misplaced, as I have seen in Islington churchyard (I think) an Epitaph to an infant who died " ^Statis four months," with this season- able inscription appended, " Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land," etc. Sincerely wishing your children long life to honour, etc. I remain, C. LAMB. TO MISS WORDSWORTH. 321 To Miss WORDSWORTH. LRTTER CLXXII.] November 23, 1810. We are in a pickle. Mary, from her affectation of physiognomy, has hired a stupid big country wench, who looked honest, as she thought, and has been doing her work some days, but without eating eats no butter, nor meat, but prefers cheese with her tea for breakfast ; and now it comes out that she was ill when she came, with lifting her mother about (who is now with God) when she was dying, and with riding up from Norfolk, four days and nights in the waggon. She got advice yester- day, and took something which has made her bring up a quart of blood, and she now lies in her bed, a dead weight upon our humanity, incapable of getting up, refusing to go into an hospital, having nobody in town but a poor asthmatic uncle whose son lately married a drab who fills his house, and there is nowhere she can go, and she seems to have made up her mind to take her flight to heaven from our bed. Oh for the little wheel -barrow which trundled the hunchback from door to door to try the various charities of different professions of mankind ! Here's her uncle just crawled up. He is far liker Death than she. Oh the Parish, the Parish, the hospital, the infirmary, the charnel-house ! these are places meet for such guests, not our quiet mansion, where nothing but affluent plenty and literary ease should abound. Howard's House, Howard's House, or where the Paralytic descended through the skylight (what a God's gift !) to get at our Saviour. In this perplexity such topics as Spanish papers and Monkhouses sink into comparative insignificance. What shall we do 1 If she died, it were something : gladly would I pay the coffin-maker, and the bell-man and searchers. 0. L. To Miss Wordsworth, Grasmere, near Eendal, Westmoreland. VOL. I. Y 322 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. To WILLIAM HAZLITT. LETTER CLXXIIL] Wednesday, November 28, 1810. Dear Hazlitt I sent you on Saturday a Cobbett, con- taining your reply to the Edinburgh Review, which I thought you would be glad to receive as an example of attention on the part of Mr. Cobbett to insert it so speedily. Did you get it ? We have received your pig, and return you thanks ; it will be dressed in due form, with appropriate sauce, this day. Mary has been very ill indeed since you saw her ; that is, as ill as she can be to remain at home. But she is a good deal better now, owing to a very careful regimen. She drinks nothing but water, and never goes out ; she does not even go to the Captain's. Her indisposition has been ever since that night you left town ; the night Miss W[ordsworth] came. Her coming, and that d d Mrs. Godwin coming and staying so late that night, so overset her that she lay broad awake all that night, and it was by a miracle that she escaped a very bad illness, which I thoroughly expected. I have made up my mind that she shall never have any one in the house again with her, and that no one shall sleep with her, not even for a night ; for it is a very serious thing to be always living with a kind of fever upon her ; and therefore I am sure you will take it in good part if I say that if Mrs. Hazlitt comes to town at any time, however glad we shall be to see her in the daytime, I cannot ask her to spend a night under our roof. Some decision we must come to, for the harass- ing fever that we have both been in, owing to Miss Wordsworth's coming, is not to be borne ; and I would rather be dead than so alive. However, at present, owing to a regimen and medicines which Tuthill has given her, who very kindly volunteer'd the care of her, she is a great deal quieter, though too much harassed by company, who cannot or will not see how late hours and society teaze her. TO ROBINSON. 323 Poor Phillips had the cup dash'd out of his lips as it were. He had every prospect of the situation, when about ten days since one of the council of the R Society started for the place himself, being a rich merchant who lately failed, and he will certainly be elected on Friday next. P. is very sore and miserable about it. Coleridge is in town, or at least at Hammersmith. He is writing or going to write in the Courier against Cobbett, and in favour of paper money. No news. Remember me kindly to Sarah. I write from the office. Yours ever, C. LAMB. I just open'd it to say the pig, upon proof, hath turned out as good as I predicted. My fauces yet retain the sweet porcine odour. I find you have received the Cobbett. I think your paper complete. Mrs. Reynolds, who is a sage woman, approves of the Pig- Mr. Hazlitt, Winterslow, near Salisbury, Wilts. To HENRY CRABB ROBINSON. LBTTTER CLXXIV.] [1810.] Dear R. My brother, whom you have met at my rooms (a plump, good-looking man of seven-aud-forty) has written a book about humanity, which I transmit to you herewith. Wilson, the publisher, has put it into his head that you can get it reviewed for him. I dare say it is not in the scope of your review ; but if you could put it in any likely train, he would rejoice. For alas ! our boasted humanity partakes of vanity. As it is, he teazes me to death with choosing to suppose that I could get it into all the reviews at a moment's notice. / / / who have been set up as a mark for them to throw at, S24 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. and would willingly consign them all to Megsera's snaky locks. But here's the book, and don't show it to Mrs. Collier, for I remember she makes excellent eel soup, and the leading points of the book are directed against that very process. Yours truly, 0. LAMB. To WILLIAM HAZLITT. LETTER CLXXV.] October 2, 1811. Dear Hazlitt I cannot help accompanying my sister's congratulations to Sarah with some of my own to you on this happy occasion of a man child being born. Delighted fancy already sees him some future rich alderman or opulent merchant, painting perhaps a little in his leisure hours, for amusement, like the late H. Bunbury, Esq. Pray, are the Winterslow estates entailed? I am afraid lest the young dog when he grows up should cut down the woods, and leave no groves for widows to take their lonesome solace in. The Wem estate of course can only devolve on him in case of your brother's leaving no male issue. Well, my blessing and heaven's be upon him, and make him like his father, with something a better temper, and a smoother head of hair ; and then all the men and women must love him. Martin and the card -boys join in congratulations. Love to Sarah. Sorry we are not within caudle-shot C. LAMB. If the widow be assistant on this notable occasion, give our due respects and kind remembrances to her. Mr. Hazlitt, Winterslow, near Sarum, Wilts. TO GODWIN 325 To WILLIAM GODWIN. " Bis dat qui dat cito." LETTER CLXXVI.] [1811.] I hate the pedantry of expressing that in another language which we have sufficient terms for in our own. So in plain English I very much wish you to give your vote to-morrow at Clerkenwell, instead of Saturday. It would clear up the brows of my favourite candidate, and stagger the hands of the opposite party. It commences at nine. How easy, as you come from Kensington (ct propos, how is your excellent family?) to turn down Bloomsbury, through Leather Lane (avoiding Lay Stall St. for the disagreeableness of the name) ! Why, it brings you in four minutes and a half to the spot re- nowned on northern milestones, "where Hicks' Hall formerly stood." There will be good cheer ready for every independent freeholder ; where you see a green flag hang out, go boldly in, call for ham, or beef, or what you please, and a mug of Helix's best. How much more gentleman-like to come in the front of the battle, openly avowing one's sentiments, than to lag in on the last day, when the adversary is dejected, spiritless, laid low ! Have the first cut at them. By Saturday you'll cut into the mutton. I'd go cheerfully myself, but I am no freeholder : (Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium), but I sold it for 50. If they'd accept a copy-holder, we clerks are naturally copy-holders. By the way, get Mrs. Hume, or that agreeable Amelia or Caroline, to stick a bit of green in your hat. Nothing daunts the adversary more than to wear the colours of your party. Stick it in cockade-like. It has a martial and by no means disagreeable effect. Go, my dear freeholder, and if any chance calls you out of this transitory scene earlier than expected, the coroner ehall sit lightly on your corpse. He shall not too anxiously inquire into the circumstances of blood 326 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. found upon your razor. That might happen to any gentleman in shaving. Nor into your having been heard to express a contempt of life, or for scolding Louisa for what Julia did, and other trifling incoherences. Yours sincerely, C. LAMB. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER CLXXVIL] August 13, 1814. Dear Resuscitate There comes to you by the vehicle from Lad Lane this day a volume of German ; what it is I cannot justly say, the characters of those northern nations having been always singularly harsh and unpleasant to me. It is a contribution of Dr. Southey's towards your wants, and you would have had it sooner but for an odd accident. I wrote for it three days ago, and the Doctor, as he thought, sent it me. A book of like exterior he did send, but being disclosed, how far unlike ! It was the Well-bred Scholar, a book with which it seems the Doctor laudably fills up those hours which he can steal from his medical avocations. Chesterfield, Blair, Beattie, portions from the Life of Savage, make up a prettyish system of morality and the belles-lettres, which Mr. Mylius, a schoolmaster, has properly brought together, and calls the collection by the denomination above men- tioned. The Doctor had no sooner discovered his error than he dispatched man and horse to rectify the mistake, and with a pretty kind of ingenuous modesty in his note, seemeth to deny any knowledge of the Well-bred Scholar; false modesty surely, and a blush misplaced : for what more pleasing than the consideration of professional austerity thus relaxing, thus improving ! But so, when a child, I remember blushing, being caught on my knees to my Maker, or doing otherwise some pious and praise- worthy action : now I rather love such things to be seen. Henry Crabb Robinson is out upon his circuit, and his books are inaccessible without his leave and key. He is TO COLERIDGE. 327 attending the Norfolk Circuit, a short term, but to him, as to many young lawyers, a long vacation, sufficiently dreary. I thought I could do no better than transmit to him, not extracts, but your very letter itself, than which I think I never read anything more moving, more pathetic, or more conducive to the purpose of persuasion. The Crab is a sour Crab if it does not sweeten him. I think it would draw another third volume of Dodsley out of me; but you say you don't want any English books. Perhaps, after all, that's as well ; one's romantic credulity is for ever misleading one into misplaced acts of foolery. Crab might have answered by this time : his juices take a long time supplying, but they'll run at last I know they will pure golden pippin. A fearful rumour has since reached me that the Crab is on the eve of setting out for France. If he is in England your letter will reach him, and I flatter myself a touch of the persuasive of my own, which accompanies it, will not be thrown away; if it be, he is a sloe, and no true-hearted Crab, and there's an end. For that life of the German conjuror which you speak of, Colerus de Vitd Doctoris vix-Intelli- gibilis, I perfectly remember the last evening we spent with Mrs. Morgan and Miss Brent, in London Street, (by that token we had raw rabbits for supper, and Miss B. prevailed upon me to take a glass of brandy and water, which is not my habit), I perfectly remember reading portions of that life in their parlour, and I think it must be among their packages. It was the very last evening we were at that house. What is gone of that frank-hearted circle, Morgan, and his cos-lettuces 1 He ate walnuts better than any man I ever knew. Friend- ships in these parts stagnate. I am going to eat turbot, turtle, venison, marrow pudding, cold punch, claret, Madeira, at our annual feast, at half-past four this day. They keep bothering me (I'm at office), and my ideas are confused. Let me know if I can be of any service as to books. God forbid 328 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. the Architectonican should be sacrificed to a foolish scruple of some book proprietor, as if books did not belong with the highest propriety to those that under- stand 'em best 0. LAMB. To WILLIAM WOKDSWORTH. LETTER CLXXVIIL] August 14, 1814. Dear Wordsworth I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great armful of poetry which you have sent me ; and to get it before the rest of the world too ! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you, but M. Burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it, but we expect restitution in a day or two. It is the noblest conversational poem I ever read a day in Heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odour on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is the Tales of the Churchyard ; the only girl among seven brethren, born out of due time, and not duly taken away again, the deaf man and the blind man; the Jacobite and the Hanoverian, whom anti- pathies reconcile; the Scarron- entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude; these were all new to me too. My having known the story of Margaret (at the beginning), a very old acquaintance, even as long back as when I saw you first at Stowey, did not make her reappearance less fresh. I don't know what to pick out of this best of books upon the best subjects for partial naming. That gorgeous sunset is famous ; I think it must have been the identical one we saw on Salisbury Plain five years ago, that drew Phillips from the card- table, where he had sat from rise of that luminary to its unequalled set ; but neither he nor I had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the prophets saw them in that sunset the wheel, the potter's TO WORDSWORTH. 329 clay, the wash-pot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the basket of figs, the fourfold visaged head, the throne, and Him that sat thereon. One feeling I was particularly struck with, as what I recognised so very lately at Harrow Church on entering in it after a hot and secular day's pleasure, the instantaneous coolness and calming, almost transforming, properties of a country church just entered ; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness, or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being pure country, exactly what you have reduced into words ; but I am feeling that which I cannot express. Beading your lines about it fixed me for a time, a monument in Harrow Church. Do you know it 1 with its fine long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high site, as far as Salisbury spire itself almost. I shall select a day or two, very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more, for it will be a stock book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. There is a great deal of noble matter about mountain scenery, yet not so much as to overpower and discounte- nance a poor Londoner or south-countryman entirely, though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully, for it was her remark during reading it, that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that invisible part of us in her. Save for a late excursion to Harrow, and a day or two on the banks of the Thames this Summer, rural images were fast fading from my mind, and by the wise provi- sion of the Regent, all that was country-fyM in the Parks is all but obliterated. The very colour of green is vanished; the whole surface of Hyde Park is dry crumbling sand (Arabia Arenosa), not a vestige or hint of grass ever having grown there. Booths and drinking- places go all round it for a mile and half, I am confident I might say two miles in circuit. The stench of 330 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. liquors, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions, conquers the air, and we are stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park. Order after order has been issued by Lord Sidmouth in the name of the Regent (acting in behalf of his Royal father) for the dispersion of the varlets, but in vain. The vis unita of all the publicans in London, Westminster, Marylebone, and miles round, is too powerful a force to put down. The Regent has raised a phantom which he cannot lay. There they'll stay probably for ever. The whole beauty of the place is gone that lake-look of the Serpentine it has got foolish ships upon it ; but some- thing whispers to have confidence in Nature and ite revival At the coming of the milder day, These monuments shall all be overgrown. Meantime I confess to have smoked one delicious pipe in one of the cleanliest and goodliest of the booths ; a tent rather " Oh call it not a booth 1" erected by the public spirit of Watson, who keeps the Adam and Eve at Pancraa (the ale-houses have all emigrated, with their train of bottles, mugs, corkscrews, waiters, into Hyde Park whole ale-houses, with all their ale !), in company with some of the Guards that had been in France, and a fine French girl, habited like a princess of banditti, which one of the dogs had transported from the Garonne to the Serpentine. The unusual scene in Hyde Park, by candle-light, in open air, good tobacco, bottled stout, made it look like an interval in a cam- paign, a repose after battle. I almost fancied scars smarting, and was ready to club a story with my com- rades of some of my lying deeds. After all, the fireworks were splendid ; the rockets in clusters, in trees and all shapes, spreading about like young stars in the making, floundering about in space (like unbroke horses), till some of Newton's calculations should fix them ; but then they went out. Any one who could see 'em, and the still finer TO COLERIDGE. 331 showers of gloomy rain-fire that fell sulkily and angrily from 'em, and could go to bed without dreaming of the last day, must be as hardened an atheist as ... The conclusion of this epistle getting gloomy, I have chosen this part to desire our kindest loves to Mrs. Wordsworth and to Dorothea. Will none of you ever be in London again ? Again let me thank you for your present, and assure you that fireworks and triumphs have not distracted me from receiving a calm and noble enjoyment from it (which I trust I shall often), and I sincerely congratulate you on its appearance. With kindest remembrances to you and your house- hold, we remain, yours sincerely, C. LAMB and Sister. To SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. LETTER CLXXIX.] August 26, 1814. Let the hungry soul rejoice, there is corn in Egypt. Whatever thou hast been told to the contrary by design- ing friends, who perhaps inquired carelessly, or did not inquire at all, in hope of saving their money, there is a stock of "Remorse" on hand enough, as Pople con- jectures, for seven years' consumption; judging from experience of the last two years. Methinks it makes for the benefit of sound literature, that the best books do not always go off best. Inquire in seven years' time for the Rokebys and the Laras, and where shall they be found 1 fluttering fragmentary in some thread - paper ; whereas thy Wallenstein and thy Remorse are safe on Longman's or Pople's shelves, as in some Bodleian ; there they shall remain ; no need of a chain to hold them fast perhaps for ages tall copies and people shan't run about hunting for them as in old Ezra's shrievalty they did for a Bible, almost without effect till the great-great- 332 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. grand-niece (by the mother's side) of Jeremiah or Ezekiel (which was it 1) remembered something of a book, with odd reading in it, that used to lie in the green closet in her aunt Judith's bedchamber. Thy caterer, Price, was at Hamburgh when last Pople heard of him, laying up for thee like some miserly old father for his generous-hearted son to squander. Mr. Charles Aders, whose books also pant for that free circulation which thy custody is sure to give them, is to be heard of at his kinsmen, Messrs. Jameson and Aders, No. 7, Laurence Pountney Lane, London, according to the information which Crabius with his parting breath left me. Crabius is gone to Paris. I prophesy he and the Parisians will part with mutual contempt. His head has a twist Allemagne, like thine, dear mystic. I have been reading Madame Stael on Germany : an impudent clever woman. But if Faust be no better than in her abstract of it, I counsel thee to let it alone. How canst thou translate the language of cat-monkeys ? Fie on such fantasies ! But I will not forget to look for Proclus. It is a kind of book which, when we meet with it, we shut up faster than we opened it Yet I have some bastard kind of recollection that somewhere, some time ago, upon some stall or other, I saw it. It was either that or Plotinus, or Saint Augustine's City of God. So little do some folks value, what to others, sc. to you, " well used," had been the " Pledge of Immor- tality." Bishop Bruno I never touched upon. Stuffing too good for the brains of such a " Hare " as thou de- scribest. May it burst his pericranium, as the gobbets of fat and turpentine (a nasty thought of the seer) did that old dragon in the Apocrypha ! May he go mad in trying to understand his author ! May he lend the third volume of him before he has quite translated the second, to a friend who shall lose it, and so spoil the publication, and may his friend find it and send it him just as thou or some such less dilatory spirit shall have announced the whole for the press. So I think I have answered all thy TO WORDSWORTH. 333 questions except about Morgan's cos -lettuce. The first personal peculiarity I ever observed of him (all worthy souls are subject to J em) was a particular kind of rabbit- like delight in munching salads with oil without vinegar after dinner a steady contemplative browsiog on them didst never take note of it ? Canst think of any other queries in the solution of which I can give thee satisfac- tion? Do you want any books that I can procure for you 1 Old Jimmy Boyer is dead at last. Trollope has got his living, worth 1000 a year net. See, thou sluggard, thou heretic-sluggard, what mightest thou not have arrived at ! Lay thy animosity against Jimmy in the grave. Do not entail it on thy posterity. CHABLES LAMB. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LETTER CLXXX.] August 29, 1814. My dear W. I have scarce time or quiet to explain my present situation, how unquiet and distracted it is, owing to the absence of some of my compeers, and to the deficient state of payments at E. I. H., owing to bad peace speculations in the calico market. (I write this to W. W., Esq., Collector of Stamp Duties for the Conjoint Northern Counties, not to W. W., Poet.) I go back, and have for many days past, to evening work, generally at the rate of nine hours a day. The nature of my work, too, puzzling and hurrying, has so shaken my spirits, that my sleep is nothing but a succession of dreams of business I cannot do, of assistants that give me no assistance, of terrible responsibilities. I reclaimed your book, which Hazlitt has uncivilly kept, only two days ago, and have made shift to read it again with shattered brain. It does not lose rather some parts have come out with a promi- nence I did not perceive before but such was my aching head yesterday (Sunday), that the book was like a mount- ain landscape to one that should walk on the edge of a 334 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. precipice ; I perceive beauty dLzzily. Now, what I would say is, that I see no prospect of a quiet half-day, or hour even, till this week and the next are past. I then hope to get four weeks' absence, and if then is time enough to begin, I will most gladly do what is required, though I feel my inability, for my brain is always desultory, and snatches off hints from things, but can seldom follow a "work" methodically. But that shall be no excuse. What I beg you to do is, to let me know from Southey, if that will be time enough for the Quarterly, i.e. suppose it done in three weeks from this date (19th Sept): if not, it is my bounden duty to express my regret, and decline it. Mary thanks you, and feels highly grateful for your " Patent of Nobility," and acknowledges the author of the Excursion as the legitimate Fountain of Honour. We both agree that, to our feeling, Ellen is best as she is. To us there would have been something repugnant in her challenging her Penance as a Dowry : the fact is explicable ; but how few are those to whom it would have been rendered explicit ! The unlucky reason of the detention of the Excursion was Hazlitt and we having a misunderstanding. He blowed us up about six months ago, since which the union hath snapt ; but M. Burney borrowed it for him, and after reiterated messages I only got it on Friday. His remarks had some vigour in them ; particularly something about an old ruin being too modern for your Primeval Nature and about a lichen. I forget the passage, but the whole wore a slovenly air of despatch. That objection which M. Burney had imbibed from him about Voltaire I explained to M. B. (or tried) exactly on your principle of its being a characteristic speech. That it was no settled comparative estimate of Voltaire with any of his own tribe of buffoons no injus- tice, even if you spoke it, for I dared say you never could relish Candide. I know I tried to get through it about a twelvemonth since, and couldn't for the dulness. Now I think I have a wider range in buffoonery than you. Too much toleration perhaps. TO WORDSWORTH. 335 I finish this after a raw ill-baked dinner fast gobbled up to set me off to office again, after working there till near four. Oh how I wish I were a rich man ! even though I were squeezed camel-fashion at getting through that needle's eye that is spoken of in the Written Word. Apropos ; are you a Christian ? or is it the Pedler and the Priest that are 1 I find I miscalled that celestial splendour of the mist going off, a sunset. That only shows my inaccuracy of head. Do, pray, indulge me by writing an answer to the point of time mentioned above, or let Southey. I am ashamed to go bargaining in this way, but indeed I have no time I can reckon on till the first week in October. God send I may not be disappointed in that ! Coleridge swore in a letter to me he would review the Excursion in the Quarterly. Therefore, though that shall not stop me, yet if I can do anything when done, I must know of him if he has anything ready, or I shall fill the world with loud exclaims. I keep writing on, knowing the postage is no more for much writing, else so fagged and dispirited I am with cursed India House work, I scarce know what I do. My left arm reposes on the Excursion. I feel what it would be in quiet. It is now a sealed book. C. LAMB. LETTER CLXXXI.] 1814. Dear W. Your experience about tailors seems to be in point blank opposition to Burton, as much as the author of the Excursion does, toto coelo, differ in his notion of a country life from the picture which W. H. has exhibited of the same. But, with a little explanation, you and B. may be reconciled. It is evident that he con- fined his observations to the genuine native London tailor. What freaks tailor -nature may take in the country is not for him to give account of. And certainly 336 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. some of the freaks recorded do give an idea of the persona in question being beside themselves, rather than in har- mony with the common, moderate, self-enjoyment of the rest of mankind. A flying tailor, I venture to say, is no more in reinim naturd than a flying horse or a gryphon. His wheeling his airy flight from the precipice you men- tion had a parallel in the melancholy Jew who toppled from the monument. Were his limbs ever found ? Then, the man who cures diseases by words is evidently an inspired tailor. Burton never affirmed that the art of sewing disqualified the practiser of it from being a fit organ for supernatural revelation. He never enters into such subjects. 'Tis the common, uninspired tailor which he speaks of. Again, the person who makes his smiles to be heard is evidently a man under possession a demoniac tailor. A greater hell than his own must have a hand in this. I am not certain that the cause which you advocate has much reason for triumph. You seem to me to substitute light-headedness for light-heartedness by a trick, or not to know the difference. I confess, a grinning tailor would shock me. Enough of tailors ! The "'scapes" of the great god Pan, who appeared among your mountains some dozen years since, and his narrow chance of being submerged by the swains, afforded me much pleasure. I can conceive the water-nymphs pulling for him. He would have been another Hylas W. Hylas. In a mad letter which Capel Lofft wrote to M\onthly\ M\agazine\ Philips (now Sir Kichard), I remember his noticing a metaphysical article on Pan, signed H., and adding, " I take your correspondent to be the same with Hylas." Hylas had put forth a pastoral just before How near the unfounded conjecture of the certainly inspired Lofft (unfounded as we thought it) was to being realised ! I can conceive him being " good to all that wander in that perilous flood." One J. Scott (I know no more) is editor of the Champion. Where is Coleridge ? That Review you speak of, I am only sorry it did not TO WORDSWORTH. 337 appear last month. The circumstances of haste and peculiar bad spirits under which it was written would have excused its slightness and inadequacy, the full load of which I shall suffer from its lying by so long, as it will seem to have done, from its postponement. I write with great difficulty, and can scarce command my own resolution to sit at writing an hour together. I am a poor creature, but I am leaving off gin. I hope you will see good-will in the thing. I had a difficulty to per- form not to make it all panegyric ; I have attempted to personate a mere stranger to you ; perhaps with too much strangeness. But you must bear that in mind when you read it, and not think that I am, in mind, distant from you or your poem, but that both are close to me, among the nearest of persons and things. I do but act the stranger in the Review. Then, I was puzzled about extracts, and determined upon not giving one that had been in the Examiner; for extracts repeated give an idea that there is a meagre allowance of good things. By this way, I deprived myself of Sir Alfred Irthing, and the reflections that conclude his story, which are the flower of the poem. Hazlitt had given the reflections before me. Then it is the first review I ever did, and I did not know how long I might make it. But it must speak for itself, if Gifford and his crew do not put words in its mouth, which I expect Farewell. Love to all. Mary keeps very bad. 0. LAMB. LETTER CLXXXII.] 18H. Dear Wordsworth I told you my Review was a very imperfect one. But what you will see in the Quarterly is a spurious one, which Mr. Baviad Gifford has palmed upon it for mine. I never felt more vexed in my life than when I read it. I cannot give you an idea of what he has done to it, out of spite at me, because he once suffered me to be called a lunatic in his Review. The VOL. i. Z 338 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. language he has altered throughout. Whatever inade- quateness it had to its subject, it was, in point of com- position, the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ : and so my sister (to whom alone I read the MS.) said. That charm, if it had any, is all gone : more than a third of the substance is cut away, and that not all from one place, but passim, so as to make utter nonsense. Every warm expression is changed for a nasty cold one. I have not the cursed alteration by me ; I shall never look at it again ; but for a specimen, I remember I had said the poet of the Excursion " walks through common forests as through some Dodona or enchanted wood, and every casual bird that flits upon the boughs, like that miraculous one in Tasso, but in language more piercing than any articulate sounds, reveals to him far higher love-lays." It is now (besides half-a-dozen alterations in the same half-dozen lines) " but in language more intelli- gent reveals to him;" that is one I remember. But that would have been little, putting his damn'd shoemaker phraseology (for he was a shoemaker) instead of mine, which has been tinctured with better authors than his ignorance can comprehend ; for I reckon myself a dab at prose ; verse I leave to my betters : God help them, if they are to be so reviewed by friend and foe as you have been this quarter ! I have read " It won't do." But worse than altering words ; he has kept a few mem- bers only of the part I had done best, which was to explain all I could of your " Scheme of Harmonies," as I had ventured to call it, between the external universe and what within us answers to it. To do this I had accumulated a good many short passages, rising in length to the end, weaving in the extracts as if they came in as a part of the text naturally, not intruding them as speci- mens. Of this part a little is left, but so as, without conjuration, no man could tell what I was driving at. A proof of it you may see (though not judge of the whole of the injustice) by these words. I had spoken some- thing about "natural methodism;" and after follows, TO WORDSWORTH. 339 "and therefore the tale of Margaret should have been postponed " (I forget my words, or his words) ; now the reasons for postponing it are as deducible from what goes before as they are from the 104th Psalm. The passage whence I deduced it has vanished, but clapping a colon before a therefore is always reason enough for Mr. Baviad Gifford to allow to a reviewer that is not himself. I assure you my complaints are well founded. I know how sore a word altered makes one; but, indeed, of this review the whole complexion is gone. I regret only that I did not keep a copy. I am sure you would have been pleased with it, because I have been feeding my fancy for some months with the notion of pleasing you. Its imperfection or inadequateness in size and method I knew ; but for the writing part of it I was fully satis- fied ; I hoped it would make more than atonement. Ten or twelve distinct passages come to my mind, which are gone ; and what is left is, of course, the worse for their having been there; the eyes are pulled out, and the bleeding sockets are left. I read it at Arch's shop with my face burning with vexation secretly, with just such a feeling as if it had been a review written against myself, making false quota- tions from me. But I am ashamed to say so much about a short piece. How are you served ! and the labours of years turned into contempt by scoundrels ! But I could not but protest against your taking that thing as mine. Every pretty expression (I know there were many), every warm expression (there was nothing else), is vulgarised and frozen. But if they catch me in their camps again, let them spitchcock me ! They had a right to do it, as no name appears to it ; and Mr. Shoe- maker Gifford, I suppose, never waived a right he had since he commenced author. God confound him and all caitiffs ! C. L. 340 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER CLXXXIIL] [1816.] Dear Wordsworth You have made me very proud with your successive book presents. I have been care- fully through the two volumes, to see that nothing was omitted which used to be there. I think I miss nothing but a character in the antithetic manner, which I do not know why you left out, the moral to the boys building the giant, the omission whereof leaves it, in my mind, less complete, and one admirable line gone (or something come instead of it), "the stone-chat, and the glancing sand -piper," whicn was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand. I am glad that you have not sacri- ficed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stript shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice ; I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls. I am afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could fairly be said against it. You say you made the altera- tion for the " friendly reader," but the " malicious " will take it to himself Damn 'em, if you give 'em an inch, etc. The Preface is noble, and such as you should write. I wish I could set my name to it, Imprimatur, but you have set it there yourself, and I thank you. I would rather be a doorkeeper in your margin, than have their proudest text swelling with my eulogies. The poems in the volumes which are new to me are so much in the old tone that I hardly received them as novelties. Of those of which I had no previous know- ledge, the " Four Yew Trees," and the mysterious com- pany which you have assembled there, most struck me "Death the Skeleton and Time the Shadow." It is a sight not for every youthful poet to dream of; it is one of the last results he must have gone thinking on for TO WORDSWORTH. 341 years for. " Laodamia " is a very original poem ; I mean original with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation. Let me in this place, for I have writ you several letters naming it, mention that my brother, who is a picture-collector, has picked up an undoubtable picture of Milton. He gave a few shillings for it, and could get no history with it, but that some old lady had had it for a great many years. Its age is ascertamable from the state of the canvas, and you need only see it to be sure that it is the original of the heads in the Tonson editions, with which we are all so well familiar. Since I saw you I have had a treat in the reading way, which comes not every day, the Latin Poems of V. Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had ! all laid out upon town schemes, a proper counterpoise to some peoples rural extravaganzas. Why I mention him is, that your " Power of Music " reminded me of his poem of " The Ballad Singer in the Seven Dials." Do you remember his epigram on the old woman who taught Newton the A B C 1 which, after all, he says, he hesi- tates not to call Newton's " Principia." I was lately fatiguing myself with going through a volume of fine words by Lord Thurlow; excellent words; and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better regales ; but what an aching vacuum of matter ! I don't stick at the madness of it, for that is only a consequence of shutting his eyes and thinking he is in the age of the old Elizabeth poets. From thence I turned to Bourne. What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matter-ful creature ! sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything, his diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English. Bless him ! Latin wasn't good enough for him. Why wasn't he content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in ? I am almost sorry that you printed extracts from 342 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. those first poems, or that you did not print them at length. They do not read to me as they do altogether. Besides, they have diminished the value of the original, which I possess as a curiosity. I have hitherto kept them distinct in my mind as referring to a particular period of your life. All the rest of your poems are so much of a piece, they might have been written in the same week ; these decidedly speak of an earlier period. They tell more of what you had been reading. We were glad to see the poems " by a female friend." The one on the Wind is masterly, but not new to us. Being only three, perhaps you might have clapt a D. at the corner, and let it have past as a printer's mark to the uninitiated, as a delightful hint to the better instructed. As it is, expect a formal criticism on the poems of your female friend, and she must expect it. I should have written before, but I am cruelly engaged, and like to be. On Friday I was at office from ten in the morning (two hours dinner except) to eleven at night; last night till nine. My business and office business in general have increased so; I don't mean I am there every night, but I must expect a great deal of it. I never leave till four, and do not keep a holiday now once in ten times, where I used to keep all red-letter days, and some five days besides, which I used to dub Nature's holidays. I have had my day. I had formerly little to do. So of the little that is left of life, I may reckon two-thirds as dead, for time that a man may call his own is his life ; and hard work and thinking about it taints even the leisure hours, stains Sunday with work-day contemplations. This is Sunday : and the headache I have is part late hours at work the two preceding nights, and part later hours over a con- soling pipe afterwards. But I find stupid acquiescence coming over me. I bend to the yoke, and it is almost with me and my household as with the man and his consort " To them each evening had its glittering star, And every Sabbath Day its golden sun " TO WORDSWORTH. 343 to such straits am I driven for the life of life, Time ! that from that superfluity of holiday leisure my youth wasted, " Age might but take some hours youth wanted not !" N.B. I have left off spirituous liquors for four or more months, with a moral certainty of its lasting. Farewell, dear Wordsworth ! happy Paris, seat of idleness and pleasure ! from some returned English I hear that not such a thing as a counting-house is to be seen in her streets, scarce a desk. Earthquakes swallow up this mercantile city and its " gripple merchants," as Dray ton hath it " born to be the curse of this brave isle !" I invoke this, not on account of any parsimonious habits the mercantile interest may have, but, to confess truth, because I am not fit for an office. Farewell, in haste, from a head that is too ill to methodise, a stomach too weak to digest, and all out of tune. Better harmonies await you ! C. LAMB. LETTEE CLXXXIV.] Excuse this maddish letter : I am too tired to write in formd. 1815. Dear Wordsworth The more I read of your last two volumes, the more I feel it necessary to make my acknow- ledgments for them in more than one short letter. The " Night Piece," to which you refer me, I meant fully to have noticed ; but, the fact is, I come so fluttering and languid from business, tired with thoughts of it, fright- ened with the fears of it, that when I get a few minutes to sit down to scribble (an action of the hand now seldom natural to me I mean voluntary pen -work) I lose all presential memory of what I had intended to say, and say what I can, talk about Vincent Bourne, or any casual image, instead of that which I had meditated (by the way, I must look out V. B. for you). So I meant to mention " Yarrow Visited," with that stanza, " But thou 344 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. that didst appear so fair;" than which I think no lovelier stanza can be found in the wide world of poetry ; yet the poem, on the whole, seems condemned to leave behind it a melancholy of imperfect satisfaction, as if you had wronged the feeling with which, in what preceded it, you had resolved never to visit it, and as if the Muse had determined, in the most delicate manner, to make you, and scarce make you, feel it. Else, it is far superior to the other, which has but one exquisite verse in it, the last but one, or the last two : this is all fine, except perhaps that that of " studious ease and generous cares " has a little tinge of the less romantic about it. " The Fanner of Tilsbury Vale " is a charming counterpart to " Poor Susan," with the addition of that delicacy towards aberrations from the strict path, which is so fine in the "Old Thief and the Boy by his side," which always brings water into my eyes. Perhaps it is the worse for being a repetition ; " Susan " stood for the representative of poor Rus in Urbe. There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten ; " bright volumes of vapour," etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics ; but to term her " a poor outcast " seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to express. Robin Groodfellow supports himself without that stick of a moral which you have thrown away ; but how I can be brought in felo de omittendo for that ending to the Boy-builders is a mystery. I can't say positively now, I only know that no line oftener or readier occurs than that " Light- hearted boys, I will build up a Giant with you." It comes naturally, with a warm holiday, and the freshness of the blood. It is a perfect summer amulet, that I tie round my legs to quicken their motion when I go out a maying. (tf.B.) I don't often go out a mayiag; must TO WORDSWORTH. 345 is the tense with me now. Do you take the pun ? Young Romilly is divine ; the reasons of his mother's grief being remediless. I never saw parental love carried up so high, towering above the other loves. Shakspeare had done something for the filial, in Cordelia, and, by implica- tion, for the fatherly too, in Lear's resentment ; he left it for you to explore the depths of the maternal heart. I get stupid, and flat, and flattering. "What's the use of telling you what good things you have written, or I hope I may add that I know them to be good? Apropos when I first opened upon the just mentioned poem, in a careless tone, I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, " What is good for a bootless bene f" To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the jest-book has it), she answered, " a shoeless pea." It was the first joke she ever made. Joke the second I make. You distin- guish well, in your old preface, between the verses of Dr. Johnson, of the "Man in the Strand," and those from " The Babes in the Wood." I was thinking, whether taking your own glorious lines " And from the love which was in her soul For her youthful Romilly," which, by the love I bear my own soul, I think have no parallel in any of the best old ballads, and just altering them to " And from the great respect she felt For Sir Samuel Romilly," would not have explained the boundaries of prose expres- sion, and poetic feeling, nearly as well. Excuse my levity on such an occasion. I never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not make me feel, both lately and when I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more than I for a spiritual taste of that "White Doe" you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when drest, i.e. printed. All things read raw to me in MS. ; to compare magna panris, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. The only 346 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. one which I think would not very much win upon me in print is "Peter Bell." But I am not certain. You ask me about your preface. I like both that and the supple- ment, without an exception. The account of what you mean by imagination is very valuable to me. It will help me to like some things in poetry better, which is a little humiliating in me to confess. I thought I could not be instructed in that science (I mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene, beastly Peter Pindar, in a dis- pute on Milton, say he thought that if he had reason to value himself upon one thing more than another, it was in knowing what good verse was. Who looked over your proof sheets and left ordebo in that line of Virgil 1 My brother's picture of Milton is very finely painted ; that is, it might have been done by a hand next to Vandyke's. It is the genuine Milton, and an object of quiet gaze for the half-hour at a time. Yet though I am confident there is no better one of him, the face does not quite answer to Milton. There is a tinge of petit (or petite, how do you spell it ?) querulousness about it ; yet, hang it ! now I remember better, there is not ; it is calm, melancholy, and poetical. One of the copies of the poems you sent has precisely the same pleasant blending of a sheet of second volume with a sheet of first. I think it was page 245 ; but I sent it and had it rectified. It gave me in the first impetus of cutting the leaves, just such a cold squelch as going down a plausible turning and suddenly reading "No thoroughfare!" Robinson's is entire : I wish you would write more criticism about Spenser, etc. I think I could say something about him myself; but, Lord bless me ! these "merchants and their spicy drugs," which are so harmonious to sing of, they lime- twig up my poor soul and body, till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of a genius ! I can't even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper. I " engross " when I should "pen" a paragraph. Confusion blast all mer- cantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civiliea- TO SOUTHEY. 347 tion, and wealth, and amity, and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and getting a knowledge of the face of the globe ; and rotting the very firs of the forest, that look so romantic alive, and die into desks ! Vale. Yours, dear W., and all yours, C. LAMB. To ROBERT SOUTHEY. LETTER CLXXXV.] London, May 8, 1815. Dear Southey I have received from Longman a copy of Roderick, with the Author's Compliments, for which I much thank you. I don't know where I shall put all the noble presents I have lately received in that way : the Excursion, Wordsworth's two last vols., and now Roderick, have come pouring in upon me like some irruption from Helicon. The story of the brave Maccabee was already, you may be sure, familiar to me in all its parts. I have, since the receipt of your present, read it quite through again, and with no diminished pleasure. I don't know whether I ought to say that it has given me more pleasure than any of your long poems. Kehama is doubtless more powerful, but I don't feel that firm footing in it that I do in Roderick : my imagination goes sinking and floundering in the vast spaces of unopened- before systems and faiths ; I am put out of the pale of my old sympathies ; my moral sense is almost outraged ; I can't believe, or with horror am made to believe, such desperate chances against Omnipotence, such disturbances of faith to the centre ; the more potent the more painful the spell. Jove, and his brotherhood of gods, tottering with the giant assailings, I can bear, for the soul's hopes are not struck at in such contests; but your Oriental almighties are too much types of the intangible prototype to be meddled with without shuddering. One never connects what are called the attributes with Jupiter. I mention only what diminishes my delight at the wonder- workings of Kehama, not what impeaches its power, 348 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. which I confess with trembling ; but Roderick is a com- fortable poem. It reminds me of the delight I took in the first reading of the Joan of Arc. It is maturer and better than that, though not better to me now than that was then. It suits me better than Madoc. I am at home in Spain and Christendom. I have a timid imagina- tion, I am afraid. I do not willingly admit of strange beliefs, or out-of-the-way creeds or places. I never read books of travels, at least not farther than Paris or Rome. I can just endure Moors, because of their connection as foes with Christians; but Abyssinians, Ethiops, Esquimaux, Dervises, and all that tribe, I hate. I believe I fear them in some manner. A Mahometan turban on the stage, though enveloping some well-known face (Mr. Cook or Mr. Maddox, whom I see another day good Christian and English waiters, innkeepers, etc.), does not give me pleasure unalloyed. I am a Christian, Englishman, Londoner, Templar. God help me when I come to put off these snug relations, and to get abroad into the world to come ! I shall be like the crow on the sand, as Wordsworth has it ; but I won't think on it : no need, I hope, yet. The parts I have been most pleased with, both on first and second readings, perhaps, are Florinda's palliation of Roderick's crime, confessed to him in his disguise the retreat of the Palayos family first discovered his being made king " For acclamation one form must serve more solemn for the breach of old observances." Roderick's vow is extremely fine, and his blessing on the vow of Alphonso : ' Towards the troop he spread his arms, As if the expanded soul diffused itself, And carried to all spirits with the act Its affluent inspiration." It struck me forcibly that the feeling of these last lines might have been suggested to you by the Cartoon of Paul at Athens. Certain it is that a better motto or guide to that famous attitude can nowhere be found. J TO SOUTHEY. 349 shall adopt it as explanatory of that violent but dignified motion. I must read again Lander's Julian. I have not read it some time. I think he must have failed in Roderick, for I remember nothing of him, nor of any distinct char- acter as a character only fine-sounding passages. I remember thinking also he had chosen a point of time after the event, as it were, for Roderick survives to no use ; but my memory is weak, and I will not wrong a fine poem by trusting to it. The notes to your poem I have not read again : but it will be a take-downable book on my shelf, and they will serve sometimes at breakfast, or times too light for the text to be duly appreciated. Though some of 'em one of the serpent penance is serious enough, now I think on't. Of Coleridge I hear nothing, nor of the Morgans. I hope to have Mm like a reappearing star, standing up before me some time when least expected in London, as has been the case whilere. I am doing nothing (as the phrase is) but reading presents, and walk away what of the day hours I can get from hard occupation. Pray accept once more my hearty thanks, and expression of pleasure for your remembrance of me. My sister desires her kind respects to Mrs. S. and to all at Kcswick. Yours truly, 0. LAMB. The next present I look for is the White Doe. Have you seen Mat. Betham's Lay of Marie t I think it very delicately pretty as to sentiment, etc. R. Southey, Esq., Keswick, near Penrith, Cumberland. LETTER CLXXXVL] August 9, 1815. Dear Southey Robinson is not on the circuit, as I erroneously stated in a letter to W. W., which travels 350 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. with this, but is gone to Brussels, Ostend, Ghent, etc. But his friends, the Colliers, whom I consulted respecting your friend's fate, remember to have heard him say that Father Pardo had effected his escape (the cunning greasy rogue !), and to the best of their belief is at present in Paris. To my thinking, it is a small matter whether there be one fat friar more or less in the world. I have rather a taste for clerical executions, imbibed from early recollections of the fate of the excellent Dodd. I hear Buonaparte has sued his habeas corpus, and the twelve judges are now sitting upon it at the Eolls. Your boute-feu (bonfire) must be excellent of its kind. Poet Settle presided at the last great thing of the kind in London, when the pope was burnt in form. Do you provide any verses on this occasion? Your fear for Hartley's intellectuals is just and rational. Could not the Chancellor be petitioned to remove him 1 His lord- ship took Mr. Betty from under the paternal wing. I think at least he should go through a course of matter- of-fact with some sober man after the mysteries. Could not he spend a week at Poole's before he goes back to Oxford? Tobin is dead. But there is a man in my office, a Mr. Hedges, who proses it away from morning to night, and never gets beyond corporal and material verities. He'd get these crack-brain metaphysics out of the young gentleman's head as soon as any one I know. When I can't sleep o' nights, I imagine a dialogue with Mr. Hedges, upon any given subject, and go prosing on in fany with him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally found it answer. I am going to stand godfather; I don't like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions ; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt's marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral. Yet I can read about these ceremonies with pious and proper feelings. The realities of life only seem the mockeries. I fear I must get cured along with TO WORDSWORTH. 351 Hartley, if not too inveterate. Don't you think Louis the Desirable is in a sort of quandary ? After all, Buonaparte is a fine fellow, as my barber says, and I should not mind standing bareheaded at his table to do him service in his fall. They should have given him Hampton Court or Kensington, with a tether extending forty miles round London. Qu. Would not the people have ejected the Brunswicks some day in his favour 1 Well, we shall see. 0. LAMB. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LETTER CLXXXVII.] August 9, 1815. Dear Wordsworth We acknowledge with pride the receipt of both your handwritings, and desire to be ever had in kindly remembrance by you both and by Dorothy. Alsager, whom you call Alsinger (and indeed he is rather singer than sager, no reflection upon his naturals neither), is well, and in harmony with himself and the world. I don't know how he, and those of his constitution, keep their nerves so nicely balanced as they do. Or, have they any? Or, are they made of packthread? He is proof against weather, ingratitude, meat underdone, every weapon of fate. I have just now a jagged end of a tooth pricking against my tongue, which meets it half way, in a wantonness of provocation ; and there they go at it, the tongue pricking itself, like the viper against the file, and the tooth galling all the gum inside and out to torture ; tongue and tooth, tooth and tongue, hard at it ; and I to pay the reckoning, till all my mouth is as hot as brimstone ; and I'd venture the roof of my mouth, that at this moment, at which I conjecture my full- happiness'd friend is picking his crackers, not one of the double rows of ivory in his privileged mouth has as much as a flaw in it, but all perform their functions, and, having performed them, expect to be picked (luxurious 352 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. steeds !), and rubbed down. I don't think he could be robbed, or have the house set on fire, or ever want money. I have heard him express a similar opinion of his own impassibility. I keep acting here Heautontimorumenos. Mr. Burney has been to Calais, and has come a travelled Monsieur. He speaks nothing but the Gallic Idiom. Field is on circuit. So now I believe I have given account of most that you saw at our Cabin. Have you seen a curious letter in the Morning Chronicle, by C. L. [Capell Lofft,] the genius of absurdity, respecting Buonaparte's suing out his Habeas Corpus 1 That man is his own moon. He has no need of ascending into that gentle planet for mild influences. Mary and I felt quite queer after your taking leave (you W. W.) of us in St. Giles's. We wish we had seen more of you, but felt we had scarce been sufficiently acknowledging for the share we had enjoyed of your company. We felt as if we had been not enough expressive of our pleasure. But our manners both are a little too much on this side of too-much-cordiality. We want presence of mind and presence of heart. What we feel comes too late, like an afterthought impromptu. But perhaps you observed nothing of that which we have been painfully conscious of, and are every day in our inter- course with those we stand affected to through all the degrees of love. Robinson is on the circuit. Our panegyrist I thought had forgotten one of the objects of his youthful admiration, but I was agreeably removed from that scruple by the laundress knocking at my door this morning, almost before I was up, with a present of fruit from my young friend, etc. There is something inex- pressibly pleasant to me in these presents, be it fruit, or fowl, or brawn, or what not. Books are a legitimate cause of acceptance. If presents be not the soul of friendship, undoubtedly they are the most spiritual part of the body of that intercourse. There is too much narrowness of thinking in this point. The punctilio of acceptance, methinks, is too confined and strait-laced. I TO WORDSWORTH. 353 could be content to receive money, or clothes, or a joint of meat from a friend. Why should he not send me a dinner as well as a dessert ? I would taste him in the beasts of the field, and through all creation. Therefore did the basket of fruit of the juvenile Talfourd not dis- please me ; not that I have any thoughts of bartering or reciprocating these things. To send him anything in return, would be to reflect suspicion of mercenariness upon what I know he meant a freewill offering. Let him overcome me in bounty. In this strife a generous nature loves to be overcome. You wish me some of your leisure. I have a glimmering aspect, a chink -light of liberty before me, which I pray God may prove not fallacious. My remonstrances have stirred up others to remonstrate, and altogether, there is a plan for separating certain parts of business from our department ; which, if it take place, will produce me more time, i.e. my evenings free. It may be a means of placing me in a more con- spicuous situation, which will knock at my nerves another way, but I wait the issue in submission. If I can but begin my own day at four o'clock in the afternoon, I shall think myself to have Eden days of peace and liberty to what I have had. As you say, how a man can fill three volumes up with an essay on the drama is wonder- ful ; I am sure a very few sheets would hold all I had to say on the subject. Did you ever read " Charron on Wisdom " 1 or "Patrick's Pilgrim"? If neither, you have two great pleasures to come. I mean some day to attack Caryl on Job, six folios. What any man can write, surely I may read. If I do but get rid of auditing warehousekeepers' accounts and get no worse-harassing task in the place of it, what a lord of liberty I shall be ! I shall dance and skip, and make mouths at the invisible event, and pick the thorns out of my pillow, and throw 'em at rich men's night-caps, and talk blank verse, hoity-toity, and sing " A clerk I was in London gay," " Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban," like the emancipated monster, and go where I like, up VOL. i. 2 A 354 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. this street or down that alley. Adieu, and pray that it may be my luck. Good-bye to you all C. LAMB. To Miss HUTCHINSON. LETTER CLXXXVIII.] Thursday, October 19, 1815. Dear Miss H. I am forced to be the replier to your letter, for Mary has been ill, and gone from home these five weeks yesterday. She has left me very lonely and very miserable. I stroll about, but there is no rest but at one's own fireside, and there is no rest for me there now. I look forward to the worse half being past, and keep up as well as I can. She has begun to show some favour- able symptoms. The return of her disorder has been frightfully soon this time, with scarce a six months' interval. I am almost afraid my worry of spirits about the E. I. House was partly the cause of her illness, but one always imputes it to the cause next at hand ; more probably it comes from some cause we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts sad great slices out of the time, the little time, we shall have to live together. I don't know but the recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain her death better than if we had had no partial separations. But I won't talk of death. I will imagine us immortal, or forget that we are other- wise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be making our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the Pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them, at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget we are assailable ; we are strong for the time as rocks ; " the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs." Poor C. Lloyd, and poor Priscilla ! I feel I hardly feel enough for him ; my own calamities press about me, and involve me in a thick integument not to be reached at by other folks' misfor- TO MANNING. 355 tunes. But I feel all I can all the kindness I can, towards you all God bless you ! I hear nothing from Coleridge. Yours truly, 0. LAMB. To THOMAS MANNING. LETTBB CLXXXIX.] December 25, 1815. Dear old Friend and absentee This is Christmas Day 1815 with us; what it may be with you I don't know, the 12th of June next year perhaps ; and if it should be the consecrated season with you, I don't see how you can keep it. You have no turkeys ; you would not desecrate the festival by offering up a withered Chinese bantam, instead of the savoury grand Norfolcian holocaust, that smokes all around my nostrils at this moment from a thousand firesides. Then what puddings have you? Where will you get holly to stick in your churches, or churches to stick your dried tea-leaves (that must be the substitute) in ? What memorials you can have of the holy time, I see not. A chopped missionary or two may keep up the thin idea of Lent and the wilderness ; but what standing evidence have you of the Nativity ? 'Tia our rosy-cheeked, homestalled divines, whose faces shine to the tune of " Unto us a child was born," faces fragrant with the mince -pies of half a century, that alone can authenticate the cheerful mystery. I feel my bowels refreshed with the holy tide; my zeal is great against the unedified heathen. Down with the Pagodas down with the idols Ching-chong-fo and his foolish priest- hood ! Come out of Babylon, my friend ! for her time is come ; and the child that is native, and the Proselyte of her gates, shall kindle and smoke together ! And in sober sense what makes you so long from among us, Manning ? You must not expect to see the same England again which you left. Empires have been overturned, crowns trodden into 356 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. dust, the face of the western world quite changed. Your friends have all got old those you left blooming ; myself (who am one of the few that remember you), those golden hairs which you recollect my taking a pride in, turned to silvery and gray. Mary has been dead and buried many years : she desired to be buried in the silk gown you sent her. Bickman, that you remember active and strong, now walks out supported by a servant maid and a stick. Martin Burney is a very old man. The other day an aged woman knocked at my door, and pretended to my acquaintance. It was long before I had the most distant cognition of her ; but at last, together, we made her out to be Louisa, the daughter of Mrs. Topham, formerly Mrs. Morton, who had been Mrs. Keynolds, formerly Mrs. Kenney, whose first husband was Holcroft, the dramatic writer of the last century. St. Paul's Church is a heap of ruins ; the Monument isn't half so high as you knew it, divers parts being successively taken down which the ravages of time had rendered dangerous ; the horse at Charing Cross is gone, no one knows whither; and all this has taken place while you have been settling whether Ho-hing-tong should be spelt with a , or a . For aught I see you might almost as well remain where you are, and not come like a Struldbrug into a world were few were born when you went away. Scarce here and there one will be able to make out your face. All your opinions will be out of date, your jokes obsolete, your puns rejected with fastidiousness as wit of the last age. Your way of mathematics has already given way to a new method, which after all is I believe the old doctrine of Maclaurin, new-vamped up with what he borrowed of the negative quantity of fluxions from Euler. Poor Godwin ! I was passing his tomb the other day in Cripplegate churchyard. There are some verses upon it written by Miss , which if I thought good enough I would send you. He was one of those who would have hailed your return, not with boisterous shouts and clamours, but with the complacent gratulations of a TO MANNING. 357 philosopher anxious to promote knowledge as leading to happiness; but his systems and his theories are ten feet deep in Cripplegate mould. Coleridge is just dead, having lived just long enough to close the eyes of Words- worth, who paid the debt to Nature but a week or two before. Poor Col., but two days before he died he wrote to a bookseller, proposing an epio poem on the " Wander- ings of Cain," in twenty-four books. It is said he has left behind him more than forty thousand treatises in criticism, metaphysics, and divinity, but few of them in a state of completion. They are now destined, perhaps, to wrap up spices. You see what mutations the busy hand of Time has produced, while you have consumed in foolish voluntary exile that time which might have gladdened your friends benefited your country; but reproaches are useless. Gather up the wretched reliques, my friend, as fast as you can, and come to your old home. I will rub my eyes and try to recognise you. We will shake withered hands together, and talk of old things of St. Mary's Church and the barber's opposite, where the young students in mathematics used to assemble. Poor Crips, that kept it afterwards, set up a fruiterer's shop in Trumpington Street, and for aught I know resides there still, for I saw the name up in the last journey I took there with my sister just before she died. I suppose you heard that I had left the India House, and gone into the Fishmongers' Almshouses over the bridge. I have a little cabin there, small and homely, but you shall be welcome to it. You like oysters, and to open them yourself; I'll get you some if you come in oyster time. Marshall, Godwin's old friend, is still alive, and talks of the faces you used to make. Come as soon as you can. C. LAMB. LETTER CXC.] December 26, 1815. Dear Manning Following your brother's example, 1 have just ventured one letter to Canton, and am now 358 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. hazarding another (not exactly a duplicate) to St. Helena The first was full of improbable romantic fictions, fitting the remoteness of the mission it goes upon ; in the present I mean to confine myself nearer to truth as you come nearer home. A correspondence with the uttermost parts of the earth necessarily involves in it some heat of fancy ; it sets the brain agoing, but I can think on the half-way house tranquilly. Your friends then are not all dead or grown forgetful of you through old age, as that lying letter asserted, anticipating rather what must happen if you kept tarrying on for ever on the skirts of creation, as there seemed a danger of your doing ; but they are all tolerably well and in full and perfect comprehension of what is meant by Manning's coming home again. Mrs. Kenney never lets her tongue run riot more than in remembrances of you. Fanny expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her romantic nature. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran-new gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco ! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised. The soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain. One that you knew, and I think the only one of those friends we knew much of in common, has died in earnest. Poor Priscilla ! Her brother Robert is also dead, and several of the grown-up brothers and sisters, in the compass of a very few years. Death has not otherwise meddled much in families that I know. Not but he has his eye upon us, and is whetting his feathered dart every instant, as you see him truly pictured in that impressive moral picture, " The good man at the hour of death." I have in trust to put in the post four letters from Diss, and one from Lynn, to St. Helena, which I hope will accompany this safe, and one from Lynn, and the one before spoken of from me, to Canton. But we all hope that these TO WORDSWORTH. 359 letters may be waste paper. I don't know why I have forborne writing so long ; but it is such a forlorn hope to send a scrap of paper straggling over wide oceans ! And yet I know, when you come home, I shall have you sitting before me at our fireside just as if you had never been away. In such an instant does the return of a person dissipate all the weight of imaginary perplexity from distance of time and space ! I'll promise you good oysters. Corry is dead that kept the shop opposite St. Dunstan's ; but the tougher materials of the shop survive the perishing frame of its keeper. Oysters continue to flourish there under as good auspices. Poor Corry ! but if you will absent yourself twenty years together, you must not expect numerically the same population to con- gratulate your return which wetted the sea-beach with their tears when you went away. Have you recovered the breathless stone-staring astonishment into which you must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was living in St. Helena ? What an event in the solitude of the seas ! like finding a fish's bone at the top of Plinlimmon; but these things are nothing in our western world. Novelties cease to affect. Come and try what your presence can. God bless you. Your old friend, C. LAMB. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LETTER CXOI.] April 9, 1816. Dear Wordsworth Thanks for the books you have given me and for all the books you mean to give me. I will bind up the Political Sonnets and Ode according to your suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. 1 think I shall get a chain and chain them to my shelves, more Soctteiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow ; some 360 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. mean to read but don't read ; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it. Coleridge has been here about a fortnight. His health is tolerable at present, though beset with temptations. In the first place, the Covent Garden Manager has declined accepting his Tragedy, though (having read it) I see no reason upon earth why it might not have run a very fair chance, though it certainly wants a prominent part for a Miss O'Neil or a Mr. Kean. However, he is going to-day to write to Lord Byron to get it to Drury. Should you see Mrs. C., who has just written to 0. a letter, which I have given him, it will be as well to say nothing about its fate, till some answer is shaped from Drury. He has two volumes printing together at Bristol, both finished as far as the composition goes ; the latter containing his fugitive poems, the former his Literary Life. Nature, who conducts every creature, by instinct, to its best end, has skilfully directed 0. to take up his abode at a Chemist's Laboratory in Norfolk Street. She might as well have sent a Helluo Librorum for cure to the Vatican. God keep him inviolate among the traps and pitfalls ! He has done pretty well as yet. Tell Miss H[utchinson] my sister is every day wishing to be quietly sitting down to answer her very kind letter, but while C. stays she can hardly find a quiet time ; God bless him ! Tell Mrs. W. her postscripts are always agreeable. They are so legible too. Your manual-graphy is terrible, dark as Lycophron " Likelihood," for instance, is thua typified .... I should not wonder if the constant making out of such paragraphs is the cause of that weak- ness in Mrs. W.'s eyes, as she is tenderly pleased to express it. Dorothy, I hear, has mounted spectacles ; so you have deoculated two of your dearest relations in life TO WORDSWORTH. 361 Well, God bless you, and continue to give you power to write with a finger of power upon our hearts what you fail to impress, in corresponding lucidness, upon our out- ward eye-sight ! Mary's love to all ; she is quite well. I am called off to do the deposits on Cotton Wool ; but why do I relate this to you, who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of deposits, of interests, of warehouse rent, and contingent fund ? Adieu ! C. LAMB. A longer letter when 0. is gone back into the country, relating his success, etc. my judgment of your new books, etc. etc. I am scarce quiet enough while he stays. Yours again, C. L. LETTER CXCIL] Accountant's Office, April 26, 1816. Dear W. I have just finished the pleasing task of correcting the revise of the poems and letter. I hope they will come out faultless. One blunder I saw and shuddered at. The hallucinating rascal had printed battered for battened, this last not conveying any distinct sense to his gaping souL The Reader (as they call 'em) had discovered it, and given it the marginal brand, but the substitutory n had not yet appeared. I accompanied his notice with a most pathetic address to the printer not to neglect the correction. I know how such a blunder would "batter at your peace." With regard to the works, the Letter I read with unabated satisfaction. Such a thing was wanted called for. The parallel of Cotton with Burns I heartily approve. Izaak Walton hallows any page in which his reverend name appears. " Duty archly bending to purposes of general benevolence" is exquisite. The poems I endeavoured not to understand, but to read them with my eye alone, and I think I sue- 362 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMR ceeded. (Some people will do that when they come out, you'll say.) As if I were to luxuriate to-morrow at some picture gallery I was never at before, and going by to-day by chance, found the door open, and had but five minutes to look about me, peeped in ; just such a chastised peep I took with my mind at the lines my luxuriating eye was coursing over unrestrained, not to anticipate another day's fuller satisfaction. Coleridge is printing " Christabel," by Lord Byron's recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision, " Kubla Khan," which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it ; but there is an observation, " Never tell thy dreams," and I am almost afraid that " Kubla Khan " is an owl that won't bear daylight. I fear lest it should be discovered by the lantern of typography and clear reducting to letters no better than nonsense or no sense. When I was young I used to chant with ecstasy w MILD ARCADIANS EVER BLOOMING," till somebody told me it was meant to be nonsense. Even yet I have a lingering attachment to it, and I think it better than " Windsor Forest," "Dying Christian's Address," etc. Coleridge has sent his tragedy to D[rury] L[ane] T[heatre]. It cannot be acted this season; and by their manner of receiving, I hope he will be able to alter it to make them accept it for next. He is, at present, under the medical care of a Mr. Gillman (Killman ?) a Highgate apothecary, where he plays at leaving off laud m. I think his essentials not touched : he is very bad ; but then he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory ; an archangel a little damaged. Will Miss H. pardon our not replying at length to her kind letter ? We are not quiet enough ; Morgan is with us every day, going betwixt Highgate and the Temple. Coleridge is absent but four miles, and the neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. 'Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to TO MISS BETHAM. 363 possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him or the Author of the Excursion, I should, in a very little time, lose my own identity, and be dragged along in the current of other people's thoughts, hampered in a net. How cool I sit in this office, with no possible interruption further than what I may term material ! There is not as much metaphysics in thirty-six of the people here as there is in the first page of Locke's "Treatise on the Human Understanding," or as much poetry as in any ten lines of the " Pleasures of Hope," or more natural " Beggar's Petition." I never entangle myself in any of their speculations. Interruptions, if I try to write a letter even, I have dreadful. Just now, within four lines, I was called off for ten minutes to consult dusty old books for the settlement of obsolete errors. I hold you a guinea you don't find the chasm where I left off, so excellently the wounded sense closed again and was healed. N.B. Nothing said above to the contrary, but that I hold the personal presence of the two mentioned potent spirits at a rate as high as any ; but I pay dearer. What amuses others robs me of myself : my mind is positively discharged into their greater currents, but flows with a willing violence. As to your question about work, it is far less oppressive to me than it was, from circumstances. It takes all the golden part of the day away, a solid lump, from ten to four ; but it does not kill my peace as before. Some day or other I shall be in a taking again. My head aches, and you have had enough. God bless you I 0. LAMB. To Miss MATILDA BETHAM. LETTER CXOIII.] East India House, June 1, 1816. Dear Miss Betham All this while I have been tor- menting myself with the thought of having been ungracious 364 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. to you, and you have been all the while accusing yourself. Let us absolve one another, and be quiet. My head is in such a state from incapacity for business that I certainly know it to be my duty not to undertake the veriest trifle in addition. I hardly know how I can go on. I have tried to get some redress by explaining my health, but with no great success. No one can tell how ill I am because it does not come out to the exterior of my face, but lies in my skull, deep and invisible. I wish I was leprous, and black jaundiced skin over, and that all was as well within as my cursed looks. You must not think me worse than I am. I am determined not to be over- set, but to give up business rather, and get 'em to allow me a trifle for services past. Oh ! that I had been a shoemaker, or a baker, or a man of large independent fortune ! Oh ! darling laziness ! heaven of Epicurus ! Saint's Everlasting Rest ! that I could drink vast pota- tions of thee thro' unmeasured Eternity Otium cum, vel sine dignitate. Scandalous, dishonourable any kind of repose. I stand not upon the dignified sort. Accursed, damned desks, trade, commerce, business ! Inventions of the old original busy-body, brain -working Satan Sabbathless, restless Satan ! A curse relieves : do you ever try it ? A strange letter to write to a lady ; but more honeyed sentences will not distil I dare not ask who revises in my stead. I have drawn you into a scrape and am ashamed ; but I know no remedy. My unwellness must be my apology. God bless you (tho' He curse the India House, and fire it to the ground), and may no unkind error creep into " Marie "/ May all its readers like it as well as I do, and everybody about you like its kind author no worse ! Why the devil am I never to have a chance of scribbling my own free thoughts, verse or prose, again 1 Why must I write of tea and drugs, and price goods and the bales of indigo ? FarewelL 0. LAMB. Mary goes to her place on Sunday I mean your maid, foolish Mary ; she wants a very little brains only to be TO DODWELL. 365 an excellent servant ; she is excellently calculated for the country, where nobody has brains. Have you seen " Christabel " since its publication * To H. DODWELL. LETTEE CXCIV.] July 1818. My dear fellow I have been in a lethargy this long while, and forgotten London, Westminster, Marybone, Paddington they all went clean out of my head, till happening to go to a neighbor's in this good borough of Came, for want of whist players, we fell upon Commerce: the word awoke me to a remembrance of my professional avocations and the long -continued strife which I have been these 24 years endeavoring to compose between those grand Irreconcileables Cash and Commerce ; I instantly called for an almanack, which with some difficulty was procured at a fortune- teller's in the vicinity (for the happy holyday people here having nothing to do, keep no account of time), and found that by dint of duty I must attend in Leadenhall on Wednesy. morning next, and shall attend accordingly. Does Master Hannah give macaroons still, and does he fetch the Cobbetts from my Attic 1 Perhaps it wouldn't be too much trouble for him to drop the inclosed up at my aforesaid Chamber, and any letters, etc., with it; but the inclosed should go without delay. N.B. He isn't to fetch Monday's Cobbett, but it is to wait my reading when I come back. Heigh Ho ! Lord have mercy upon me, how many does two and two make? I am afraid I shall make a poor clerk in future, I am spoiled with rambling among haycocks and cows and pigs. Bless me ! I had like to have forgot (the air is so temperate and oblivious here) to say I have seen your brother, and hope he is doing well in the finest spot of the world. More of these things when I return. Remember me to the gentlemen, I forget names. Shall 366 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. I find all my letters at my rooms on Tuesday K If you forgot to send J em never mind, for I don't much care for reading aud writing now ; I shall come back again by degrees, I suppose, into my former habits. How is Bruce de Ponthieu, and Porcher and Co. 1 the tears come into my eyes when I think how long I have neglected . Adieu! ye fields, ye shepherds and herdesses, and dairies and cream-pots, and fairies and dances upon the green. I come, I come. Don't drag me so hard by the hair of my head, Genius of British India ! I know my hour is come, Faustus must give up his soul, Lucifer, Mephistopheles ! Can you make out what all this letter is about? I am afraid to look it over. CH. LAMB. Calne, Wilts, Friday, July something, old style, 1816. No new style here, all the styles are old, and some of the gates too for that matter. [Addressed] H. Dodwell, Esq., India House, Londoa In bii absence may be opened by Mr. Chambers. To JOHN EICKMAN. LETTER CXOV.] December 30, 1816. Dear R. Your goose found her way into our Larder with infinite discretion. Judging by her Giblets which we have sacrificed first, she is a most sensible Bird. Mary bids me say, first, that she thanks you for your remembrance, next that Mr. Norris and his family are no less indebted to you as the cause of his reverend and amiable visage being perpetuated when his Soul is flown. Finding nothing like a Subscription going on for the unhappy Lady, and not knowing how to press an actual Sum upon her, she hit upon the expedient of making TO JOHN RIOKMAN. 367 believe that Mr. N. wanted his miniature (which his chops did seem to water after, I must confess, when 'twas first proposed, though with a Nolo Pingier for modesty), and the likeness being completed, your 5 is to go as from him. This I must confess is robbing Peter, or like the equitable distribution in Alexander's Feast, "Love was crowned" though somebody else "won the cause." And Love himself, smiling Love, he might have sat for, so complacent he sat as he used to sit when in his days of Courtship he ogled thro' his Spectacles. I have a shrewd suspicion he has an Eye upon his Spouse's picture after this, and probably some collateral branches may follow of the Norris or Faint Stock, so that your forerunner may prove a notable Decoy duck. The Colliers are going to sit. Item, her knightly Brother in Ireland is soon coming over, apprized of her difficulties, and I confidently hope an emergence for her. But G. Dyer Executor to a Nobleman ! G. D. Residuary Legatee ! What whirligig of Fortune is this 1 Valet ima Summit. Strange world, strange kings, strange composition ! I can't enjoy it sufficiently till I get a more active belief in it. You've seen the will of Ld. Stanhope. Conceive his old floor strew'd with disjecta membra Poeseos, now loaden with codicils, deeds of Trust, Letters of attorney, Bonds, obligations, Forfeitures, Exchequer Bills, Noverint Universis. " Mr. Serjeant Best, pray take my arm-chair. My Lord Holland sit here, Lord Grantly will your Lord- ship take the other? Mr. Jekyll excuse my offering you the window seat We'll now have that clause read over again." B. and Fletcher describe a little French Lawyer spoilt by an accidental duel he got thrust into, from a Notable Counsellor turned into a Bravo. Here is G. D. more coutra-naturally metamorphosed. My life on it, hence- forth he explodes his old Hobby Horses. No more poring into Cambridge records here are other Title deeds to be looked into now can he make any Joan a Lady. And if he don't get too proud to marry, that long un- 368 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. solved Problem of G. LX is in danger of being quickly melted. They can't choose but come and make offer of their coy wares. I see Miss H. prim up her chin, Miss B-n-j-o cock her nose. He throws his dirty glove. G. D., Iratis Veneribw, marries, for my life on't. And 'tis odds in that case but he leaves off making Love and Verses. Indeed I look upon our friend as dead, dead to all his desperate fancies, pleasures, he has lost the dignity of verse, the dignity of poverty, the dignity of digging on in desperation through mines of Literature that yielded nothing. Adieu ! the wrinkled brow, the chin half shaved, the Ruined arm-chair, the wind-admitting and expelling screen, the fluttering Pamphlets, the lost Letters, the documents never to be found when wanting, the un- serviceable comfortable Landress. G. D.'s occupation's o'er ! Demptus per vim mentis gratissimus Error ! Hsec pauca de amico nostro antique accipe pro naeuiis, exequii* et ejusdem generis aliis. Vale noster G. D. From yours as he was, unchanged by Fortune. 0. L. John Rickman, Esq., New Palace Yard, Westminster. NOTES. CHAPTER L 1796-1800. THE Letters of this period are chiefly addressed to Coleridge, then at Bristol. They relate the sad fortunes of the Lamb family, arising out of the death of the mother in September 1796. They are also largely critical, and deal with Coleridge's first published poems, and the joint volume in which Lamb and Charles Lloyd made their earliest appearance in print. LETTER I (p. 1). Southey had just published his Joan of Arc, in quarto. He had produced two years before at Bristol, in conjunction with Robert Lovell, Poems by Bion and Moschus. Charles Valentine Le Grice, here mentioned, was schoolfellow with Lamb and Coleridge at Christ's Hospital, as also was James White. (For Le Grice, see Diet. Nat. Biog.) The latter published his Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff in this year. They were dedicated, in a manifestly satirical spirit, to "Master Samuel Irelaunde." The allusions in the letter to Coleridge's ' ' Numbers " are to the weekly issue of his Watch- man, which first appeared on March 1, 1796, and expired on May 13. Condones ad Populum, or, Addresses to the People, appeared in November 1795. LETTER II (p. 8). Poems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Cole- ridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge, was published this year, and it is to this volume, or the proof-sheets of it sent for inspec- tion, that Lamb here refers as "your poems." The volume contained four sonnets signed C. L., and Coleridge's Preface announced that they "were written by Mr. Charles Lamb of the India House." The other sonnets by Lamb here submitted to Coleridge's opinion appeared in the second edition of Cole- ridge's Poems, in 1797. The story of the preparation of these small volumes of verse may be read, concurrently with these VOL. I, 2$ 370 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. letters, in Joseph Cottle's Recollections of Coleridge, vol. i. Moschus was Robert Lovell, Southey's brother-in-law, several of whose sonnets were printed by Coleridge in his Watchman. He died of fever in this year. The " difference " which Lamb alludes to as having arisen between Coleridge and Southey was the split on the Pautisocratic Scheme which was to have been carried out by the young colonists on the banks of the Susquehanna. LETTER III (p. 10). The simile of the Laplander. . . . " by Niemi lake," is from Coleridge's Destiny of Nations. The allusion to the "Monody on Henderson" in this letter needs explanation. John Henderson was a singular genius and precocious scholar, the son of a Bristol schoolmaster, an account of whom will be found in the appendix to the second volume of Cottle's Eecollec- tions of Coleridge. Cottle was also the author of the ' ' Monody on Henderson " here referred to. It had appeared in a small volume of poems published, without Cottle's name, at Bristol in 1795. Coleridge had evidently forwarded this volume to Lamb for his opinion. The lines criticised by Lamb occur in the following passage : " As o'er thy tomb, my Henderson ! I bend, Shall I not praise thee ? scholar, Christian, friend ! The tears which o'er a brother's recent grave Fond nature sheds, those copious tears I gave ; But now that Time her softening hues has brought And mellowed anguish into pensive thought ; Since through the varying scenes of life I've passed, Comparing still the former with the last, I prize thee more ! The great, the learn'd I see, Yet memory turns from little men to thee." The other " Monody " here criticised is that of Coleridge on Chatterton. The first symptoms of the subsequent coolness between Coleridge and Lamb may here be detected. It had its source in a delicate matter Coleridge's alterations of Lamb's sonnets. The " Epitaph on an Infant" is the famous one " Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade ; " at which Lamb never tired of laughing, up to the day when he applied it, in his "Essay on Roast Pig," to the infant grunter. Dr. Forster was a popular corruption of Dr. Faustus in the old rhyme here alluded to : " Dr. Forster was a good man. He whipped his scholars now and then, And when he whipped them, he made them dance NOTES. 371 Out of Scotland into France, Out of France into Spain, And then he whipped them back again 1 " LETTEE IV (p. 21). Your part of the "Joan of Arc." " To the second book Coleridge contributed some four hundred lines, where Platonic philosophy and protests against the Newtonian hypothesis of aether are not very appropriately brought into connection with the shepherd-girl of Domremi. These lines disappeared from all editions after the first." (Dowden's Southey, in the "Men of Letters Series.") The verses on Lamb's grandmother are those afterwards entitled "The Grandame." See Poems, Plays, and Essays, vol ii. of this edition, p. 8. LETTER V (p. 23). The Salutation. The inn near Christ's Hospital where Lamb and Coleridge used occasionally to meet and discuss poetry after Coleridge's departure from school. See Lamb's Preface to the 1818 edition of his works. As curious a specimen of translation. A copy of this forgotten French novel is in my possession. It is entitled " Sentimental Tablets of the good Pamphile, written in the months of August, September, October, and November 1789, by M. Gorjy. Translated from the French by P. S. Dupuy, of the East India House, London, 1795." In the list of subscribers at the end of the volume appear many names connected with the India House, familiar to us through Lamb's correspondence, including Mr. Thomas Bye, Mr. Ball (afterwards of Canton), Charles and Frederick Durand, Mr. Evans, Mr. Savory (a brother of "Hester"), and "C. Lamb" himself. LETTER VI (p. 26). The Dactyls here parodied were by Southey, one stanza of them only being Coleridge's. They appear in South ey's Collected Poems as "The Soldier's Wife," and begin " Weary way- wanderer ! languid and sick at heart, Travelling painfully over the rugged road ; Wild-visaged wanderer ! God help thee, wretched one." It will be remembered as a curious coincidence that the same lines attracted the notice of the writers in the Anti-Jacobin, where a very humorous parody of them appears, which may be compared with Lamb's. Another like experiment in Latin metres by Southey was there transmuted into the more famous Knife- Cfrinder. Your own lines, introductory to your poem on " Self," run smoothly and pleasurably. I am inclined to think that the refer- 372 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. ence is to a Fragment by Coleridge called " Melancholy," and to a poem addressed to Lamb, entitled "To a Friend, together with an Unfinished Poem." I believe that the unfinished poem was the Fragment just mentioned. Both were written as early as 1794, and the Fragment first appeared in the Morning Chronicle. The poem referred to on the ' ' Prince and Princess " was that bearing the title "On a Late Connubial Rupture in High Life," now first submitted to Lamb in manuscript. Dyer stanza'd him. The first mention in these letters of George Dyer. See notes to "Oxford in the Vacation" (Essays ofElia). LETTER VII (p. 28). White's Falstaff Letters have been already referred to. Dr. Kenrick's Fatstajfs Wedding was published in 1760. See notes in Essays of Elia, to "Oxford in the Vacation." Biirger's Leonora, translated by William Taylor of Norwich, first appeared in this year. The Statute de Contumelid. See Coleridge's " Lines composed in a Concert Room. " In most editions of Coleridge these lines are dated 1799, but it will be seen that Coleridge submitted them to Lamb three years before. LETTERS VIII, IX, X, XI (pp. 32-39). The following letters tell the sad story of the death of Lamb's mother. Whether the Mr. Norris of Christ's Hospital, here mentioned, is the Mr. Randal Norris, afterwards Sub-Treasurer of the Inner Temple, and to the end of his life Lamb's faithful friend, I cannot say. But I believe him to have been the same, and to have been thus designated because Coleridge would best remember Mr. Norris by his frequent visits to Charles Lamb when at Christ's Hospital. See "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago" in Essays of Elia. Write as religious a letter as possible. Coleridge, we might be sure, obeyed this touching behest. In Gillman's unfinished Life of Coleridge there is given a letter by Coleridge addressed "To a friend in great anguish of mind on the sudden death of his mother." It is beyond all doubt the one addressed on this occasion to Lamb, for, as will be seen, it cites Lamb's particular request for "a religious letter. " It runs as follows : " Your letter, my frieiid, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon me and stupefied my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter : I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your anguish by any other consola- tion. Heaven knows that in the easiest fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit : much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation ; but in storms like these, that shake the dwelling and make the heart tremble, NOTES. 373 there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter of joy that your faith in Jesus has been preserved : the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But, as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour who was filled with bitterness and made drunken with wormwood, 1 conjure you to have recourse in frequent prayer to ' his God and your God,' the God of mercies aud Father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity : the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in Heaven. It is sweet to be roused from a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of the morning. Ah ! how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the blackness and amazement of a sudden horror by the glories of God manifest, and the hallelujahs of angels. " As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God : we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without, in some measure, imitating Christ. And they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts of His character, and, bowed down and crushed under foot, cry in fulness of faith, ' Father, Thy will be done.' " I wish above measure to have you for a little while here : no visitants shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings ; yon shall be quiet, and your spirit may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your father's helplessness prevent you, and unless you are necessary to him. If this be not the case, I charge you write me that you will come. " I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or despair : you are a temporary sharer in human miseries that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine Nature. I charge you, if by any means it is possible, come to me " (Gill- man s Life of Coleridge, vol. i p. 338). See, afterwards, poor Lamb's comments on the concluding sentences of this letter. LETTER XII (p. 41). Lamb begins to find an interest in books once more. William Lisle Bowles's Poem, Hope, appeared this year in handsome quarto. The Pursuits of Literature, by T. J. Mathias, was also just published in its complete form, but anonymously. LETTER XIII (p. 43). Coleridge had removed about Christ- mas of this year to a cottage at Nether-Stowey near Bristol, in order to be near his friend Thomas Poole. A letter written to Joseph Cottle, shortly after his arrival, tells the same story of deep melancholy as he had also apparently confided to Lamb : 374 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. "On the Saturday, the Sunday and ten days after my arrival at Stowey, I felt a depression too dreadful to be described, ' So much I felt my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat : Nature within me seemed In all her functions, weary of herself.' " Wordsworth's conversation aroused me somewhat, but even now I am not the man I have been, and I think never shall. A sort of calm hopelessness diffuses itself over my heart. In- deed every mode of life which has promised me bread and cheese, has been one after another torn away from me, but God remains." The rest of Lamb's letter refers to the arrangements in progress for the publication of the second edition (1797) of Cole- ridge's Poems, with others by Lamb and Lloyd. The sonnet ending "So, for the mother's sake," is that entitled "To a Friend who asked how I felt when the Nurse first presented my Infant to me." LETTER XIV (p. 46). Coleridge dedicated the volume of 1797 to his brother, George Coleridge of Ottery St. Mary ; but the sonnets contained in the volume were prefaced by one addressed to Bowles, beginning " My heart has thanked thee, Bowles ; " and to this sonnet Lamb here alludes. The lines cited by Lamb, beginning " When all the vanities of life's brief day," are unknown to me. His own motto, from Massinger, is from A Very Woman, or The Prince of Tarent. He quoted the scene in which it occurs, twelve years later, in his Dramatic Specimens. LETTER XV (p. 49). The forthcoming volume of 1797 is here under discussion. The numbers "40, 63," etc., refer to the pages in the first edition of Coleridge's Poems, 1796. " 40 " is " Absence, A Farewell Ode ; " " 63 " a sonnet, " To the Autumnal Moon ;" "84" "An Imitation from Ossian." Inspite of Lamb's remonstrances these were omitted from the second edition. Of the "Epitaph on an Infant," " Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade," Coleridge was indeed showing himself "tenacious." It had already appeared in the Morning Chronicle, and the Watchman. What lines of Lamb's are referred to, as beginning "Laugh all that weep," NOTES. 375 I cannot say. They did not appear in the forthcoming volume. The sonnet on Mrs. Siddons was a joint composition of Lamb and Coleridge. The lines "Dear native brook," published first in the Watch- man, are the well-known sonnet "To the River Otter." No. "48 " is the sonnet "To Priestley," beginning " Tho' roused by that dark Vizir Riot rude ; * " 52 " the sonnet "To Kosciusko ;" and "53 "that " ToFayettc." The last five lines of 50 are those which conclude the sonnet to Sheridan. Sara Coleridge had a share in one poem in the edition of 1796, that on page 129, here referred to, called " The Production of a Young Lady," on the subject of the loss of a silver thimble. LETTER XVI (p. 52). TJie "divine chit-chat of Cowper" was, as we learn from a sentence in the following letter, a phrase of Coleridge's own. Coleridge uses it again in a letter to John Thelwall of December 17 : "But do not let us introduce an Act of Uniformity against poets. I have room enough in my brain to admire, aye, and almost equally, the head and fancy of Akenside and the Jteart and fancy of Bowles, the solemn lordli- ness of Milton, and the divine chit-chat of Cowper, and whatever a man's excellence is, that will be likewise his fault " (S. T. C. to J. Thelwall, Bristol, December 17, 1796. Mr. Cosens's MSS. ) LETTER XVII (p. 52). " The sainted growing woof," etc. I have not traced this and the following quotation to their source. Coleridge's Lines on Burns, here referred to, were printed in a Bristol paper, and afterwards included in the poem, "To a friend who declared his intention of writing no more poetry." LETTER XVIII (p. 55). The odd coincidence of two young men. In the joint volume of 1797 Charles Lloyd republished a series of sonnets on the death of his grandmother, Priscilla Farmer. It will be remembered that Lamb's lines, "The Grandame," appeared in the same volume. LETTER XIX (p. 58). The lines to his sister were after- wards withdrawn by Lamb from the forthcoming volume, but were printed in the Monthly Magazine for October 1797, with the simple heading " Sonnet to a Friend." They will be found on page 4 of the second volume of this series. ' ' David Hartley Coleridge" was now in his second year, having been born September 19, 1796. Priestley's "Examination of the Scotch Doctors " was, I presume, his reply to Dr. Jamieson and others who had criticised his History oftiw Corruptions of Christianity. 376 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER XX (p. 59). Mention has been already made of Coleridge's contribution to Southey's Joan of Arc of certain lines in the second book. Coleridge in later years entirely endorsed his friend Lamb's opinion of the lines. On reading them again he says, " I was really astonished (1) at the school- boy, wretched, allegoric machinery ; (2) at the transmogrifica- tion of the fanatic virago into a modern novel-pawing proselyte of the Age of Reason a Tom Paine in petticoats ; (3) at the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb- down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the single lines." The lines were omitted from all editions of Southey's Poem after the first, but were reprinted by Coleridge under the title of " The Destiny of Nations : a Vision," in his Sibylline Leaves, in 1817, and will be found in all complete editions of Coleridge's Poems. Lamb, with characteristic certainty of taste, selects for praise the finest lines of the whole composition " For she had lived in this bad world As in a place of tombs, And touch'd not the pollutions of the dead." Montauban dancing with Roubignfs tenants, is an incident in Mackenzie's Julia de Roubignt the story which probably sug- gested to Lamb to attempt prose fiction. The poem of Coleridge's here referred to as the " Dream " is that afterwards entitled " The Raven : a Christmas Tale told by a schoolboy to his little brothers and sisters," first printed in the Morning Post of March 10, 1798, and afterwards reprinted in Annual Anthology, and in Sibylline Leaves. My poor old aunt. See Lamb's verses " Written on the Day of my Aunt's Funeral " (Poems, Plays, and Essays, p. 16). No after friendship e'er can raise from John Logan's poem ' ' On the death of a young lady. " John Woolman. Readers of the Essays ofElia will remember the reference to the writings of John Woolman, the Quaker, in the essay " A Quaker's Meeting." The poem in Southey's new volume which Lamb calls the "Miniature," was actually called "On my own miniature Picture," the "Robert" being of course Sou they himself. " Spirit of Spenser 1 was the wanderer wrong ? " is the last line of the poem. Flocci-naitci-what-do-you-call-'em-ists/m&j be deemed worthy of a note. " Flocci, nauci " is the beginning of a rule in the old Latin grammars, containing a list of words signifying "of no account," JUxxus being a lock of wool, and naucus a trifle. Lamb was recalling a sentence in one of Shenstone's Letters : NOTES. 377 " I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili- pili-fication of money." Mr. Rogers is indebted for his story. In a note to "An Effusion on an Autumnal Evening," in the first edition of his Poems, Coleridge had asserted that the tale of Florio in Rogers's Pleasures of Memory was to be found in the Lochleven of Bruce. As the fruit of Lamb's remonstrance in this letter Coleridge introduced a handsome apology to Rogers in the next edition (1797), admitting that, on a re-examination of the two poems, he had not found sufficient resemblance to justify the charge. LETTER XXI (p. 65). Did the wand of Merlin wave ? Lamb refers to his sonnet, beginning " Was it some sweet delight of Fairy ? " In the 1796 edition of Coleridge's Poems the passage had run thus : " Or did the wizard wand Of Merlin wave, impregning vacant air, And kindle up the vision of a smile In those blue eyes 1 " This, it seems, was an alteration of Coleridge's. In accordance with Lamb's instructions in this letter, the passage appeared in the 1797 edition without the "wizard wand of Merlin." See Poems, Plays, etc., by Ch. Lamb, p. 1. Mr. Merlin, the con- jurer, of Oxford Street, was a well-known person at the end of the eighteenth century. LETTER XXII (p. 69). Those very schoolboy-ish verses. See the lines " To Sara and her Samuel," Poems, Plays, etc., of Ch. Lamb, p. 6. LETTER XXIII (p. 71). Compare with previous letter of January 5, 1797. LETTER XXIV (p. 75). Charles Lloyd, the son of a banker at Birmingham, lived under Coleridge's roof at Bristol, and at Nether-Stowey from the autumn of 1796 to the close of 1797. He was all his life subject to ill-health and persistent melan- cholia. The "Dedication" to which Lamb refers is the one to his sister, which introduced his portion of the volume of 1797. It ran thus : "The few following poems, creatures of the Fancy and the Feeling, in life's more vacant hours ; produced for the most part by Love in Idleness, are, with all a brother's fond- ness, inscribed to Mary Ann Lamb, the author's best friend and sister." LETTER XXV (p. 77). The above was Lamb's poem, "A Vision of Repentance," published in an appendix to the volume of 1797. See Poems, Plays, etc., of Lamb, p. 13. 378 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER XXVI (p. 78)." Gryll will be Gryll, and keep his hoggish mind." S; snser, Faery Queen. Of my last poem. " The Vision of Repentance," mentioned in previous letter. Hiding behind in the basket alludes to its being relegated to an appendix, with certain others by his two companions. LETTER XXVII (p. 80). Life of John Buncle, by Amory. See reference to this book, a great favourite of Lamb's, in the Essay on ' ' Imperfect Sympathies. " LETTER XXVIII (p. 80). Our little book was the volume of 1797, which now appeared with the following title-page : "Poems, by S. T. Coleridge. Second edition. To which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd," followed by the Latin motto of Coleridge, from the imaginary Epistles of Groscollias : " Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiae et similium junctarumque Camenarum ; quod utinam neque mors sol vat, neque temporis longiuquitas. " The Richardson referred to in this and other letters was evidently some one in authority at the India House, who con- trolled the important matter of Lamb's occasional holidays. LETTER XXIX (p. 81). Written after Lamb's visit to Cole- ridge at Nether - Stowey. Talfonrd placed this letter in the jar 1800, and has been followed by all subsequent editors, et, strangely enough, the summer in which it was written is placed beyond all question by the letter itseli The visit to Coleridge of which it tells was for many reasons a memorable one. It was on the evening of Lamb's arrival that Coleridge met with the accident to his leg which prevented his ac- companying him on a walk, and drew from him the well-known lines, entitled "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison," containing the apostrophe to Lamb, " My gentle-hearted Charles," under which Lamb so often affected to wince. An allusion to Cole- ridge's injured leg, it will be seen, occurs in this letter ; and a further allusion to little Hartley cutting his teeth, adds a quite independent corroboration of the date. Thai Inscription. In all probability Wordsworth's lines ' ' Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree," printed in the following year in the Lyrical Ballads. LETTER XXX (p. 83). A little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher's. The lines thus altered are from the ' ' Maid's Tragedy " and run thus : "And am prouder That I was once your love (though now refused), Than to have had another true to me. " NOTES. 379 When time drives flocks from field to fold. A noteworthy instance of Lamb's random recollections. He has here blended a line of " The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd " in England's Helicon, with another from the song in Love's Labour's Lost. LETTER XXXI (p. 85). / had well-nigh quarrelled with Charles Lloyd. This sentence seems to throw light upon the origin of Lamb's beautiful verses, composed in this very month, "The Old Familiar Faces," and to suggest a different interpre- tation of them from that usually given. In my Memoir of Lamb ("Men of Letters Series "), I had supposed, in company with many others, that the allusion in the lines " I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man. Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces " was to Coleridge, between whom and Lamb the relations had, as we have seen, for some time been rather strained. But it has been pointed out to me by an obliging correspondent that the reference in the lines just quoted is more probably to this temporary rupture with Lloyd ; and that the " Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother," in the last stanza but one, is addressed to Coleridge. It is pleasant to think that this should be the true explanation, and I gladly accept my correspondent's correction. Coleridge, as the address at the end of the letter shows, was now at Shrewsbury, on a visit to the Unitarian minister, the Rev. Mr. Rowe, whom he then proposed to succeed in that office. LETTER XXXII (p. 87). Lamb had been introduced to Southey by Coleridge, as long back as 1795 ; but, according to Talfourd, "no intimacy ensued until he accompanied Lloyd in the summer of 1797 to the little village of Burton, near Christ Church in Hampshire, where Southey was then residing, and where they spent a fortnight as the poet's guests." Sir R. Phillips was the, proprietor of the Monthly Magazine. Coleridge, in company with Wordsworth and his sister, left England for Germany in September 1798. Coleridge was absent a little less than a year. It was perhaps well for the future relations between him and Lamb that this temporary separation took place. Poetic rivalry and poetic criticism freely indulged on both sides had left bitterness behind. The whole pitiable story may be read, if it is worth reading, in the pages of Cottle's Early Recollections of Coleridge. Cottle tells us that Coleridge forwarded to him Lamb's letter, containing the sarcastic Theses here propounded, adding "these young visionaries" (meaning Lamb and Lloyd) "will do each other no good." The Theses 380 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. were prefaced by the following remarks: "Learned Sir, my friend, presuming on our long habits of friendship, and em- boldened further by your late liberal permission to avail myself of your correspondence in case I want any knowledge (which I intend to do, when I have no Encyclopaedia or Ladies' Magazine at hand to refer to in any matter of science), I now submit to your inquiries the' above theological propositions, to be by you defended or oppugned (or both) in the schools of Germany, whither I am told you are departing, to the utter dissatisfaction of your native Devonshire, and regret of universal England ; but to my own individual consolation, if, through the channel of your wished return, learned Sir, my friend, may be transmitted to this our island, from those famous theological wits of Leipsic and Gottingen, any rays of illumination, in vain to be derived from the home growth of our English halls and colleges. Finally wishing, learned Sir, that you may see Schiller, and swing in a wood (vide Poems) and sit upon a tun, and eat fat hams of Westphalia, I remain your friend and docile pupil to instruct, CHAS. LAMB." LETTER XXXIII (p. 90). Rosamund Gray, by Charles Lamb, was published in this year, 1798. LETTER XXXIV (p. 91). The Eclogue here criticised was that entitled The Ruined Cottage. See note to " Rosamund Gray " in Poems, Plays, etc., p. 388. HOTJO does your Calendar prosper? There would seem to have been an idea of calling the Annual Anthology a Calendar or Almanack of the Muses. Southey thus opens his preface to the first volume of the work: "Similar collections to the present have long been known in France and Germany under the title of Almanacks oftJie Muses." LETTER XXXV (p. 94). The first of a remarkable series of letters to Charles Lloyd's brother, Robert, first printed in Charles Lamb and the Lloyds, a volume edited by Mr. E. V. Lucas in 1898. The reader is referred to that volume for full information as to the Lloyd family, and the remarkable dis- covery of these letters in 1894. LETTER XXXVIII (p. 98). Southey, who was now taking Coleridge's place as Lamb's chief literary correspondent, had sent two more Eclogues for his opinion The Wedding, and The Last of the Family. LETTER XXXIX (p. 100). The Lyrical Ballads, the joint production of Wordsworth and Coleridge, had just made its appearance, published by Joseph Cottle, at Bristol. It con- tained four poems by Coleridge, one being the " Ancient Mariner." NOTES. 381 Lamb's pre-eminence as a critic, at this early age of three-and- twenty, appears wonderfully in his remarks upon this poem. "That last poem, which is yet one of the finest written," evidently refers to Wordsworth's "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey," which come last in the little duodecimo volume. In the Critical Review for October 1798 Southey had reviewed the I/yrical Ballads. Of the Ancient Mariner he wrote, "We do not sufficiently understand the story to analyse it. It is a Dutch attempt at German sublimity. Genius has here been employed in producing a poem of little merit." LETTER XLII (p. 104). The lines entitled "Mystery of God," or "Living without God in the world," originally appeared in the first volume of Cottle's Annual Anthology, published this year, edited by Southey. They will be found in Poems, Plays, etc., p. 23. The sonnet referred to would seem to be the one to his sister, already given, " Friend of my earliest years." One of the titles proposed for the Anthology was "Gleanings." It was in fact a poetical miscellany to which Coleridge, Southey, Lloyd, and others, including the Cottles, contributed. Two volumes only were published. Pratt, the editor of Pratt's Gleanings through Wales, Holland, and West- phalia (1795), was a bookseller at Bath, who published novels and poems, as well as various compilations. Southey continued to send his poems, as he wrote them, for Lamb's criticisms. The ' ' Witch Ballad " was " The Old Woman of Berkeley," written in this year, as was also " Bishop Bruno." Lamb's "Witch" was the poem originally intended as an episode in John Woodvil, but afterwards withdrawn and printed separately. See Poems, Plays, etc., p. 66. The "Dying Lover " is the young Philip Fairford mentioned in the poem. George Dyer was at this time preparing a volume of poems. The lines criticised by Lamb occur in an ode "addressed to Dr. Robert Anderson" (Poems, by George Dyer: Longman and Co., 1801). Dyer did not accept his friend's correction. The line remains " Dark is the poet's eye but shines his name." The "two noble Englishmen" were of course Wordsworth and Coleridge. Coleridge, as is well known, parted from Words- worth and his sister while they were still at Hamburg. LETTER XLIII (p. 107). John May was a gentleman whose acquaintance Southey had made during his first visit to Por- tugal, and who was thenceforth one of Southey's most intimate friends and frequent correspondents. LETTER XLV (p. 1 10). Most of South ey's poems here referred to will bo found in vols. ii. and vi. of the ten-volume edition, 382 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. collected by himself, 1837. " The Parody " is the ballad called "The Surgeon's Warning." "Cousin Margaret" is the poem "To Margaret HUl." LETTER XLVI (p. 112). See Southey's lines " To a Spider," vol. ii. of the edition just named. Sam Le Grice. For some amusing particulars concerning him see Leigh Hunt's Autobiography, chap. iii. ' ' He was the maddest of all tho great boys in my time : clever, full of address, and not hampered by modesty. Remote rumours, not lightly to be heard, fell on our ears respecting pranks of his among the nurses' daughters. He had a fair handsome face, with delicate aquiline nose and twinkling eyes. I remember his astonishing me when I was 'a new boy,' with sending me for a bottle of water, which he proceeded to pour down the back of G., a grave Deputy Grecian. On the master asking him one day why he, of all the boys, had given up no exercise (it was a particular exercise that they were bound to do in the course of a long set of holidays) he said he had had a ' lethargy.' " He must, however, have had a good heart. See the previous letter of Lamb to Coleridge in which he tells of Sam Le Grice giving up every hour of his time to amuse the poor old father, in the sad period following the death of Lamb's mother. LETTER XLIX (p. 117). I am much pleased with his poems in the Anthology." See C. Lloyd's poem, " Lines to a Brother and Sister " (Annual Anthology, vol. i. 192). A sight of his novel Edmund Oliver, published in 1798. LETTER L (p. 118). Lamb had been visiting his old haunts, near Blakesware in Herts. See note to " Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire;" Essays of Elia, p. 409. Gebor is Lamb's spelling of " Gebir " Landor's poem, which was published in this year. LETTER LI (p. 119). Thomas Manning, whose name appears here for the first time as Lamb's correspondent, was so remarkable a man as to warrant my giving a few particulars of his life, taken from the Memoir prefixed to his "Journey to Lhasa," in 1811-12 (George Bogle and Thomas Manning's Journey to Thibet and Lhasa, by C. R. Markham, 1876). "He was the second son of the Rev. William Manning, Rector of Diss in Norfolk, and was born at his father's first living of Broome, in the same county, on the 8th of November 1772. Owing to ill- health in early life he was obliged to forego the advantages of a public school ; but under his father's roof he was a close student of both classics and mathematics, and became an eager disciple of the philosophy of Plato. On his recovery he went , NOTES. 383 to Caius College, Cambridge, and studied in- onsely, especially mathematics. While at Cambridge he put. .shed a work on Algebra, and a smaller book on Arithmetic. He passed the final examination, and was expected to be at least second wrangler, but his strong repugnance to oaths and tests debarred him from academic honours and preferments, and he left the university without a degree. " He continued to reside at Cambridge, as a private tutor at . < Caius, many years after the time when he should have graduated, ; and was there when Lamb first made his acquaintance, through the introduction of Charles Lloyd, in the autumn of 1799. , ; " After he had lived at Cambridge for some years he began to brood over the mysterious empire of China, and devoted his time to an investigation of the language and arts of the Chinese, and the state of their country. He resolved to enter the Celestial Empire at all hazards, and to prosecute his researches till death stopped him, or until he should return with success. To enable him to undertake this hazardous enterprise he studied the Chinese language under the tuition of Dr. Hagar in France, and afterwards, with the aid of a Chinese, in London. When the English travellers were seized by Napoleon on the breaking out of war in 1803, Manning obtained leave to quit France entirely owing to the respect in which his undertaking was held by the learned men at Paris. His passport was the only one that Napoleon ever signed for an Englishman to go to England after war began." The rest of Manning's adventures, and the result of his extraordinary expedition to Lhasa in 1811, as well as Manning's own Journal kept during his travels, will be found in Mr. Clements Markham's volume. Manning was afterwards Chinese Interpreter to Lonl Amherst'a Embassy in 1817. He then "returned to England, after an absence of nearly twelve years, apparently a disappointed man. He was in Italy from 1827 to 1829, and then went to live in strict retirement at Bexley, whence he removed to a cottage near Dartford, called Orange Grove. He led a very eccentric life. It is said that he never furnished his cottage, but only had a few chairs, one carpet, and a large library of Chinese books. He wore a milky-white beard down to his waist " He died at Bath on the 2nd of May 1840, aged sixty-eight. The Title of the Play. Lamb had at first intended to call his play, John Woodvil, by a different name Pride's Cure, 384 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. CHAPTER II. 1800-1809. LETTER LIII (p. 122). Mr. Wyndham's unhappy composi- tion. Coleridge's criticism on Wyndham's note, contributed to the Morning Post in January 1800, is reprinted in the Essays on his own Times (i. 261). Cottrellian grace. Doubtless an allusion to Sir Charles Cotterell, Master of the Ceremonies at the Court of Charles II. LETTER LIV (p. 123). My Enemy's B is, I am afraid, a variation upon "My enemy's dog" in a well-known speech from King Lear. Mary Hayes. Mary Hayes was an intimate friend of Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. She wrote in the Monthly Magazine, also a novel called Emma Courtenay. "An uncom- mon book. Mary Hayes is an agreeable woman and a God- winite." (Southey, Life and Correspondence, i. 305). LETTER LV (p. 124). "War, and Nature, and Mr. Pitt" Evidently some popular allegorical print of the day. LETTER LVI (p. 126). Supposed manuscript of Burton. See " Curious Fragments, extracted from a common-place book which belonged to Robert Burton " (Poems, Plays, and Essays, p. 197). Olivia was Charles Lloyd's sister. LETTER LVII (p. 127). Hetty died on Friday night. Charles and Mary's one servant. LETTER LIX (p. 128). To lodge with a friend in town. John Mathew Gutch, a schoolfellow of Lamb's at Christ's Hospital, afterwards the editor of Felix Farley's Bristol Journal. He was in partnership with a law-stationer in Southampton Buildings, Holborn. Lamb lodged there occasionally for several years to come. See Letter to Coleridge, later on, p. 145. LETTER LXII (p. 131). Lamb is quite enough. There was evidently a disposition in the early days of Lamb's friendships to spell his name with a final e. I have seen it thus mis- spelt in magazines of the time. By terming me gentle-hearted in print. See Coleridge's lines, "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison," first published in the Annual Anthology. NOTES. 385 I have hit off the following. See "A Ballad: Noting the Difference of Rich and Poor." Poems, Plays, and Essays, p. 68. W. 's tragedy. ' ' The Borderers. " The second edition of the Lyrical Ballads was published this year. LETTEK LXIII (p. 134). His friend Frend. The Rev. William Frend, who was expelled the University of Cambridge for tenets savouring of Unitarianism. George Dyer. See note to the Elia Essay, "Oxford in the Vacation." Essays of Elia, p. 379. LETTER LXIV (p. 136). Dr. Anderson. James Anderson (1739-1808), writer on Agriculture and Politico-Economical subjects. LETTER LXVII (p. 140). The references to poems in this letter are to the second volume of the Annual Anthology, just published. "Blenheim" is, of course, Southey's well-known ballad ; " Lewti " and the " Raven " are by-'Coleridge. Your 141st page refers to the poem " ' This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, 'a poem addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London," in which Lamb was styled, " my gentle-hearted Charles." LETTER LXIX (p. 145). On a visit to Grattan, Lamb's own slip of the pen for Curran. See Mr. Kegan Paul's Life of Godwin. LETTER LXX (p. 146). John Mathew Gutch, when Lamb lodged with him in Southampton Buildings, Holborn, was in business there as a law-stationer. He was at the time engaged to a Miss Wheeley, the daughter of a coach-builder at Birmingham, and it was during one of his occasional visits to his fiancee in that city that Lamb played upon him the very harmless practical joke contained in this letter. Gutch married Miss Wheeley in the following year. The letter was kindly placed at my disposal by a niece of Mr. Gutch. LETTER LXXI (p. 147). Helen. These verses were by Mary Lamb. Alfred, an epic poem by Joseph Cottle of Bristol, the book- seller and poet. Hurlothrumbo. For Samuel Johnson, author of this and other now forgotten extravagances, see Diet. Nat. Biography. The work referred to by Lamb is probably "A Vision of Heaven," published in 1738. LETTER LXXII (p. 151). A " Conceit of Diabolic Possession." Seethe lines afterwards entitled " Hypochondriacus " (Poems, Plays, and Essays, p. 204). VOL. L 2 386 LETTERS OP CHARLES LAMB. LETTER LXXVI (p. 157). A pleasant hand, one Rickman. John Rickman (1771-1840), for many years Clerk- Assistant at the Table of the House of Commons, an eminent statistician, and author of the system for taking the population census, besides many other inventions of greater or less utility. He became the intimate friend of Lamb, Southey, and others of that set. Mr. Crisp was a barber over whose shop Manning lodged, in St. Mary's Passage, Cambridge. My Play. ' ' John Woodvil. LETTER LXXIX (p. 162). How to abridge the Epilogue. The epilogue Lamb was writing for Godwin's play, Antonio. The next two or three letters deal with the production and the failure of the unfortunate drama. See Mr. Kegan Paul's Life of Godwin. LETTER LXXXIII (p. 169). The Preface must be expunged. In the British Museum is Lamb's copy of Dyer's Poems. It contains the cancelled preface, and on the margin of advertise- ment, explaining how the book begins at p. Lxix. instead of p. i., Lamb has written, "One copy of this cancelled Preface, snatched out of the fire, is prefixed to this volume." The can- celled preface ran to sixty-six pages, not eighty, as Lamb says to Manning. Writing to G. C. Bedford, 22nd March 1817, respecting one of his books then printing, Southey says, " Now, pray, be speedy with the cancels. On such an occasion Lamb gave G. Dyer the title of Cancellarius Magnus." (Letters of B. S. i. 428.) For this interesting reference I am indebted to my friend Mr. J. Dykes Campbell. LETTER LXXXIV (p. 171). Miss Wesley. Daughter of Samuel and niece of John Wesley. " Eccentric but estimable," says H. Crabb Robinson in Diary, 27th May 1812. One Miss Benjay. Miss Elizabeth Benger, authoress of vari- ous poems and histories. See Dictionary of National Biography, iv. 221. LETTER LXXXV (p. 174). Barbara Lewthwaite. The little heroine of Wordsworth's poem "The Pet Lamb." LETTER LXXXVI (p. 176). The "second volume" that Lamb had borrowed was the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads, then just published. The " Song of Lucy " is clearly the famous lyric beginning " She dwelt among the untrodden ways. " Lamb's criticism on the second title of the "Ancient Mariner" proved effectual in the end, but the title was retained until the NOTES. 387 publication of the Sibylline Leaves in 1817. The stanzas referred to by Lamb as "The Mad Mother," are those beginning with the words, " Her eyes are wild." Wordsworth in later editions dropped the original title. I totally differ from your idea. Wordsworth had appended a note to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (vol. i.), expressing his opinion on the Ancient Mariner, and the prob- able causes of its failure to please. The note is of such singular interest, and so little known, that I make no apology for giving it in full. "Note to the Ancient Mariner, p. 155. I cannot refuse my- self the gratification of informing such Readers as may have been pleased with this Poem, or with any part of it, that they owe their pleasure in some sort to me ; as the Author was himself very desirous that it should be suppressed. This wish had arisen from a consciousness of the defects of the Poem, and from a knowledge that many persons had been much displeased with it. The Poem of my Friend has indeed grave defects ; first, that the principal person has no distinct character, either in his profession of mariner, or as a human being who, having been long under the control of supernatural impressions, might be supposed himself to partake of something supernatural ; secondly, that he does not act, but is continually acted upon ; thirdly, that the events, having no necessary connection, do not produce each other ; and, lastly, that the imagery is somewhat too laboriously accumulated. Yet the Poem contains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed the passion is every- where true to nature ; a great number of the stanzas present beautiful images, and are expressed with unusual felicity of language ; and the versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied, exhibit- ing the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of which it is capable. It therefore appeared to me that these several merits (the first of which, namely, that of the passion, is of the highest kind) gave to the Poem a value which is not often possessed by better Poems. On this account I requested of my Friend to permit me to republish it." The coarse epithet of "pin-point." In the first version of the Poet's Epitaph, the line to which we are now accustomed " Thy ever-dwindling soul away," ran thus : "Thy pin-point of a soul away." LETTER LXXXV1II (p. 180). The greater portion of this letter was in earlier editions printed in the Notes. It b now 388 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. included in the Text, and a delightful paragraph about George Dyer is now restored. LETTEE LXXXIX (p. 183). George Dyer's Poems : Longman and Rees, 1801. The passage about Shakspeare from the long poem called "Poetic Sympathies" in this volume, beginning " Yet, muse of Shakspeare, whither wouldst thou fly With hurried step, and dove-like, trembling eye ! " ia hardly worth quoting further, but may be referred to by the curious. John Stoddart, Esq. John, afterwards Sir John, Stoddart, was the brother of Mrs. William Hazlitt (the first W. H. ). He was a writer in the Times quarrelled with Walter, and set up the New Times, a short-lived venture, and went to Malta, where he was Chief Justice. While there he invited S. T. Coleridge to visit him, and the invitation was accepted. My back tingles from the northern castigation. This alludes, of course, to the letter from Wordsworth referred to in the letter to Manning of Feb. 15, 1801. / am going to change my lodgings. The Lambs were now about to leave Southampton Buildings (see Letter LXIX) for Mitre Court Buildings, in the Temple, destined to be their home for the next eight years. LETTER XCI (p. 189). Baron Maseres, Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer. See the Elia Essay, "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple." LETTER XCV (p. 194). Walter Wilson, bookseller, and afterwards writer, best known as the author of the Memoirs of Defoe, to which Lamb was later to contribute some interesting critical matter. LETTER XCVI (p. 195). See Lamb's Essay on "News- papers Thirty-five Years Ago," and the note upon it in this edition. He there tells us that this epigram gave the unfor- tunate Albion its coup de grace. LETTER XCVIII (p. 199). your story. The story of Godwin's later play of Faulkener would seem to be indicated here. That play was built upon Defoe's Roxana, and Lamb here suggests that the strange history of Richard Savage's parentage might advantageously be borrowed. Faulkener was not produced till 1807, and then unsuccessfully. A subsequent letter (No. C. ) evidently refers to the plot of the same proposed drama. LETTER XCIX (p. 201). The first of a series of letters to Rickman here printed for the first time. Rickman had gone NOTES. 389 to Dublin as secretary to Charles Abbot (afterwards Lord Col- chester) who was made Chief Secretary for Ireland this year. Abbot held the office for only six months, being elected to the Speakership of the House of Commons in January 1802. Hick in an remained his secretary after the return to London, and rose to being First Clerk Assistant at tlie House of Commons. George Burnett. The son of a farmer in Somersetshire. He was sent to Balliol College, Oxford, and there made the acquaintance of Southey, who was at the same college. He subsequently joined Southey and Coleridge in their "Pantiso- cracy " scheme. Through these two friends he made the acquaintance of Lamb. He figures largely in these letters to Rickman, where he is commonly styled George the Second, in distinction from Dyer, George the First. The Professor is courting. Godwin married Mrs. Clairmont in December of this year. She was a widow with two children. The daughter came to play an important part in the lives of Shelley and Byron. Abbas, King of Persia, was the title of Godwin's second tragedy, which was not destined to be per formed. LETTER CIV (p. 212). The Goul and Gouless are Godwin and his new wife. " So am not I, said the foolish fat scullion." Tristram Shandy. LETTER CV (p. 215). Letter with the broad seal. Rickman was Deputy Keeper of the Privy Seal at the Castle. Earl of Buchan was only sixty years of age at this date. This eccentric nobleman, it will be remembered, was the owner of Dryburgh Abbey, and bestowed its sepulchral aisle upon Walter Scott in order that he might be there buried with his Haliburton ancestors. LETTER CVII (p. 219). Lord Stanhope. George Burnett had been chosen as tutor to Lord Stanhope's two sons. LETTER CVIII (p. 220). The sweet girl. See Note to Letter CXXVI. The young lady's name was Mary Druitt. His two young lords. This would seem to be a fairly accurate account of what happened. After the escapade of the two sons, Lord Stanhope paid Burnett a year's salary. Burnett did not long remain an inmate of Lord Stanhope's house, and became later a regimental surgeon. LETTER CXI (p. 225). My Play, "John Woodvil." The copy sent to Manning, mainly in the handwriting of Mary Lamb, with various omissions marked and corrections added in the 390 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. handwriting of Charles, is before me, kindly lent by Mr. C. R. Manning of Diss. In the inside cover of the MS. is pasted a sheet of paper, on which Lamb has written as follows : Mind this goes for a letter. (Acknowledge it directly, if only in ten words.) Dear Manning (I shall want to hear this comes safe.) I have scratched out a good deal, as you will see. Generally, what I have rejected was either false in feeling, or a violation of character mostly of the first sort. I will here just instance in the concluding few lines of the " Dying Lover's Story," which completely contradicted his character of silent and unreproach- ful. I hesitated a good deal what copy to send you, and at last resolved to send the worst, because you are familiar with it, and can make it out ; and a stranger would find so much difficulty in doing it, that it would give him more pain than pleasure. This is compounded precisely of the two persons' hands you requested it should be. Yours sincerely, C. LAMB. I will now transcribe the "Londoner." I have printed this letter, with the accompanying note by Talfourd, but in point of fact the "Londoner" was never published in the Reflector. See Poems, Plays, and Essays, p. 301. LETTER CXIV (p. 228). This letter is written to Coleridge on the return of Charles and Mary from paying him a holiday visit at Keswick. Thomas Clarkson was then residing in a cottage on Ulswater. See following letter to Manning. LETTER CXVI (p. 229). Fenwick is a ruined man. See Elia Essays, "The Two Races of Men," and "Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago." Fell, my other drunken companion. Mr. Ralph Fell, author of a Tour through the Batavian Republic according to Southey, a "dull book." LETTER CXVII (p. 233). The first of several letters in this sorrespondence written in Latin ; and in the present instance, as would appear, in reply to a challenge from Coleridge. The letter as hitherto printed is full of certain mistakes for which Lamb is clearly not responsible. These I have ventured to correct, but I have not thought it desirable to amend the Latinity otherwise in passages where it is certainly not im- maculate. The grammar and idiom are frequently so lax as to jeopardise the writer's meaning, but with the assistance of my friend Dr. Calvert of Shrewsbury, I hope I have disen- tangled most of Lamb's somewhat involved allusions. The letter is interesting as bearing reference to several events of NOTES. 391 interest in the lives of both Coleridge and Wordsworth. It bears date October 9, 1802. A few days earlier, on October 2, Wordsworth had been married to Mary Hntchinson. On the same day (possibly by mere coincidence) Coleridge had printed in the Morning Post the first version of his splendid Ode, entitled " Dejection." In this version the person addressed throughout is a certain "Edmund," and not, as in the later revision of the poem, the ' ' Lady, " addressed in the often quoted lines " Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our Life alone does Nature live." That " Edmund," the writer's dearest friend and a great poet, could be no other than Wordsworth we might be sure from internal evidence, even if we had not in this letter a curious confirmation. The Carmina Chamouniana refer to Coleridge's " Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni," then recently printed for the first time in the Morning Post. Lamb's allusions will be intelligible to those who recall the passage beginning " Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows ? Who with living flowers Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet ? God ! God ! the torrents, like a shout of nations, Utter ! the ice-plain bursts, and answers God ! " Although hitherto printed by Lamb's editors, Tod, Tod, the reading, I am convinced, should be Dodd, Dodd. There is a mountain near Skiddaw called Skiddaw Dodd, which Lamb doubtless remembered. Furthermore, the crime and punish- ment of "the unhappy Doctor," bearing the same name, was fresh in the memory of many persons then living. The comparisons of the First Consul with the Roman Emperors refer to a series of Essays then recently published by Coleridge in the Morning Post. They are reprinted in the Essays on his own Times: Pickering, 1850 (vol. ii. pp. 478-514). The allusion to the Ludus Americanus must perhaps remain un- solved. The " Flying Opossum" was little Derwent Coleridge, then just entering his third year. The child's vain attempts to pronounce the name of this creature in his picture-book, to which he never attained nearer than "Pi-pos," had fastened this nickname upon the little fellow. " Pi-pos " will recur in many of the succeeding letters. I append a translation, partly paraphrased, of the entire letter : My very dear Friend " Pay the post, and go to " you say ; i.e. to Tartarus. Nay ! but have you not rather caught a Tartar ? Here have I, for all these years, used my vernacular 392 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. with (for a writing-clerk) passable elegance ; and yet you are bent on goading me on with your neat and masterly letter, to yelp an answer in such dog-Latin as I may. However, I will try, though afraid my outlandish and far-fetched barbarisms will bring disgrace upon Christ's Hospital, the school still so proud of its learned Barnes and Markland, where in days gone by a wrong-headed master perseveringly drenched me with classical lore. But I must go on as best I can. Come then at my call, all ye troops of conjugations or declensions ! horrible spectres ! and come first and foremost thou mightiest shadow and image of the Rod now thank Heaven a thing of the past, the thought of which makes me howl as though I were a boy again ! Your lines written at Chamouni I certainly think very noble, but your English rendering of the echo among the Orisons (God ! God /) rather jars upon me. I cannot forget that in your own Cumbrian mountains I heard you rouse the echo (Dodd ! Dodd !) of the unfortunate Doctor's name, a sound by no means divine ! As to the rest, I entirely approve. Your comparisons also I recognise fully as witty and wise. But how about their truth ? I find you asserting in one breath quite inconsistently, merely for comparison's sake, that the First Consul is endowed with the "irritable mind" of Julius Caesar, as well as with a "constitutional coolness and politic craft" more appropriate to Augustus: and then in the third place you have taken much trouble to extract a resemblance to Tiberius. Why deal with one or two Csesars when the whole Twelve are only too ready to offer you their services for com- parison ? Besides I respect antiquity too much not to detest unfair parallels. I am wonderfully pleased to have your account of the marriage of Wordsworth, or perhaps I should say of a certain " Edmund " of yours. All blessings rest on thee, Mary ! too happy in thy lot. ... I wish thee also joy in this new alliance, Dorothy truly so named, that other " gift of God." The American ' ' Ludus " of which you prattle so much, Coleridge, I pass over, as utterly abhorrent from a "Ludus" (as such things go). For tell me, what "fun" is there in estranging from ourselves, sprung from the same stock (for the sake of one miserable jeu cFesprit), the whole of the Columbian nation. I ask you for a subject for something " Sportive," and you offer me " Bloody Wars." To wind up, good-bye, and let me know what yon think of my Latin style ; and wish for me all health and beauty to my "Flying Opossum," or as you prefer to call him the "Odd Fish." Best greetings to your wife and my good Hartley. We are well, self and sister, who desires her best wishes. No more at present. My time is not my own. NOTES. 393 I had almost forgotten to tell you that I have two volumes of John Milton's Latin Works, which (D. V. ) I will have sent with the rest of your books sooner or later by Mary. You know, however, that in such matters I am by no means in the habit of hurrying ; and I plead guilty. I have only to say further that they are handsome volumes, containing all J. M. s Latin works. I am just now myself engaged and deeply inter- ested in his very spirited Apology for the People of England. I will carefully observe your instructions about Stuart. Good-bye, once more ; and remember me. LETTER CXVIII (p. 235). Four offer about the German poems. Coleridge was to translate some of the best German lyrics into literal prose, and Lamb was then to turn them into verse. One experiment of the kind is Lamb's version of Thekla's Song in " Wallenstein." See Poems, Plays, and Essays, p. 69. Your ' ' Epigram on the Sun and Moon. " An epigram of Cole- ridge's contributed this month to the Morning Post : " On the curious circumstance that in the German language the sun is feminine and the moon masculine." Allen. The schoolfellow of Coleridge and Lamb at Christ's Hospital. Robert Allen went to University College, Oxford, in 1792 the year after Coleridge went to Jesus College, Cam- bridge. Coleridge visited Allen at Oxford in June 1794, and was introduced by him to Southey. Allen was one of the original Pantisocrats. He was very handsome. See anecdote of him in the Elia Essay, "Christ's Hospital five and thirty years ago." LETTER CXIX (p. 237). " Once a Jacobin." An essay of Coleridge's in the Morning Post for October 1802. " Once a Jacobin, always a Jacobin." Essays on his own Times, ii p. 542. Sam Le Grice. Lamb's schoolfellow at Christ's Hospital. See Elia Essay, "Christ's Hospital five and thirty years ago," and my notes thereon. LETTER CXX (p. 239). S. T. C.'s first letter to Mr. Fox was published in the Morning Post of Thursday, November 4, 1802. A second followed on November 9. Both are included in the Essays on his own Times, vol. ii. LETTER CXXI (p. 241). Joseph Cottle, the bookseller and publisher, was also, like his brother Amos, a poet He produced Malvern Hills in 1798. Alfred, an epic poem, in 1801. LETTER CXXII (p. 242).^ merry natural captain. Captain, 394 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. afterwards Admiral Burney, who sailed with Captain Cook in two of his voyages. LETTER CXXIII (p. 244). On the death of a young Quaker. See the beautiful verses entitled "Hester" (Poems, Plays, etc., p. 69). Miss Emma Savory of Blackheath, a niece of Hester Savory, has kindly supplied me with a few biographical details. "She (Hester) was the eldest sister of my father, A. B. Savory, and lived with him and his sisters, Anna and Martha, at Pen- tonville. She married Charles Stoke Dudley, and died, eight months after her marriage, of fever. I possess a miniature portrait of her which I greatly value. My mother used to say that her beauty consisted more in expression than in regularity of features." I may add that I have seen this miniature which, even after reading Lamb's tender and beautiful lyric, is any- thing but disappointing. It is a bright-eyed gypsy face such as we know so well from the canvas of Reynolds. Miss Savory adds, " I do not think our mother was aware of Charles Lamb's attachment to Hester Savory. Perhaps she did not know it herself." LETTER CXXIV (p. 245). This letter refers to the third edition (1803) of Coleridge's Poems, which he hadjplaced in Lamb's hands for revision. The poem called "The Silver Thimble" is that already referred 'to, in which Sara Coleridge had some small share. The verses on " Flicker and Flicker's Wife" were entitled simply, "Written after a Walk before Supper." They open thus "Tho" much averse, dear Jack, to flicker, To find a likeness for friend V ker, I've made this Earth and air and sea A voyage of Discovery ! And let me add (to ward off strife), For V ker, and for V ker's wife." Lamb's habitual inaccuracy comes out here also. As for the omission of this jeu d'esprit in the forthcoming edition, no one will be found to dissent from his judgment. LETTER CXXVI (p. 248). This letter is addressed to "Mr. T. Manning, Maison Magnan, No. 342 Boulevard Italien, Paris." An epitaph scribbled upon a poor girl. Written upon a young lady of the name of Mary Druitt, at Wimborne, Dorset- shire. This was done at the request of John Bickman. Lamb was not personally acquainted with the girl, but wrote the lines on Rickman's description. The late Mr. J. P. Collier gives a slightly different version of the lines in his ' ' Old Man's Diary " (privately printed). Mr. Collier says that the girl died at the NOTES. 395 Age of nineteen, of smallpox, and that the lines were engraved upon the tomb ; but I learn from members of the Druitt family still living at Wimborne that this latter statement is not correct. (See Letter CVI 1 1.) LETTER CXXXI (p. 255). Lamb's animadversions upon Godwin's lengthy Life of Chaucer are as usual admirably just. The work consisted of four -fifths ingenious guessing to one- fifth of material having any historic basis. Schoolboy copy of verses for Merchant Taylors' boys. The boys were allowed to get help from outside in the composition of their weekly epigrams. In later years we find him making aome for the late Archdeacon Hessey and his brother, when at that school. LETTER CXXXVIII (p. 266). Farewell to my "Friendly Traitress." The "Farewell to Tobacco." First published in Leigh Hunt's Reflector in 1811, and afterwards in Lamb's collected works in 1818. See Poems, Plays, etc., p. 70. LETTER CXXXIX (p. 269). Mr. Dawe. See the paper by Lamb, written long afterwards, " Recollections of a late Royal Academician." (Mrs. Leicester's School, etc., p. 307.) Lord Nelson, died October 21, 1805. Luck to Ned Search. The Light of Nature, by Edward Search, Esq. , was a work by Abraham Tucker, which Hazlitt was at this time engaged in abridging and editing. His abridg- ment appeared in 1807. The American Farmer. Letters from an American Farmer, Philadelphia, 1774, by Hector St. John Crevecceur. LETTER CXLI (p. 272). Life of Fawcett. "Report was rife that a life of the Rev. Joseph Fawcett, Mr. Hazlitt's early friend, might be expected from the same quarter ; but such was not the fact" (Memoir of Hazlitt, by his Grandson). Fawcett was a dissenting minister at Walthamstow, who published various Sermons, Poems, etc. LETTER CXLVI (p. 278). Addressed : "Mr. Manning, Passenger on Board the Thames, East Indiaman, Portsmouth." A short postscript to this letter was omitted by Talfourd : " One thing more, when you get to Canton you will most likely see a young friend of mine, Inspector of Teas, named Ball. He is a very good fellow, and I should like to have my name talked of in China. Give my kind remembrances to the same BalL" LETTER CXLVIII (p. 281). The good news of Mrs. W. Wordsworth's son Thomas was born on the 16th of June 1806. Mr. H. See Poems, Plays, etc. , p. 348 and note. 396 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. A young gentleman of my office. We shall have occasion here- after to mention this fellow-clerk of Lamb's. For an account of Coleridge's early passion for Evans's sister Mary, see Gill- man's Life of Coleridge and Cottle's Reminiscences. LETTER CLIII (p. 292). The Tales from Shakspeare. The plates referred to by Lamb were designed (as is believed) by William Mulready, then a yoiing man of twenty, and engraved by William Blake. The " bad Baby " was a familiar nickname for Mrs. Godwin. The subject from the Merchant of Venice was lettered, Gratiano and Nerissa desire to be married ; " the illustration to the Midsummer Night's Dream, bore for title " Nic Bottom and the Fairies." In spite of Lamb's objection to this latter, it is by far the best of aU the illustrations, both in design and drawing, and indicates very clearly the hand of Blake. The "giants and giantesses " of whom Lamb complains are certainly too frequent in these illustrations. LETTER CLIV (p. 293). The story of William Hazlitt's disappearance, which caused anxiety to his family, will be found in the Memoir of Hazlitt, by his grandson (chapter xi. ). LETTER CLV (p. 294). Talfourd omitted a few sentences from this letter, which may as well be restored. "Godwin keeps a shop in Skinner Street, Cornhill ; he is termed chil- dren's bookseller, and sells penny, twopenny, threepenny, and fourpenny books. Sometimes he gets an order for the dearer sort of books (mind, all that I tell you in this letter is true). " As the boys followed Tom the Piper. Edward FitzGerald, in a letter to Mr. Aldis Wright of March 1878, writes, apropos of this passage: " I had not thought who Tom was: rather ac- quiesced in some idea of the ' pied Piper of Hamelin ' ; and not half an hour after, chancing to take down Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, found Tom against the Maypole with a ring of Dancers about him. I suppose Tom survived in folk-lore till dear Lamb's time ; but how he, a Cockney, knew of it, I don't know." LETTER CLVI (p. 298). The passage about the "giant's vomit " was from the story of Polyphemus in Lamb's version of the Odyssey. LETTER CLVIII (p. 300). Coleridge's Friend made its first appearance on the 1st of June 1809, and its last on March 16, 1810. NOTES. 397 CHAPTER IIL 1809-1816. LETTER CLX (p. 302). Mrs. Clarke. The mistress of the Duke of York, second son of George III., and Commander- in-Chief of the Forces. ' ' It was established beyond the possi- bility of doubt that the Duke had permitted Mrs. Clarke to interfere in military promotions ; that he had given commissions at her recommendation ; and that she had taken money for the recommendations." In consequence of the public excitement and indignation on the subject, the Duke resigned his office on the 20th of March of this year. Godwin's little book. Godwin, On Sepulchres. LETTER CLXI (p. 304). Wordsworth's book. The Con- vention of Cintra. ' ' Concerning the relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal to each other, and to the common enemy at this crisis, and specifically as affected by the Convention of Cintra," etc. etc., by W. Wordsworth. Longmans. May 20, 1809. Daniel, enriched with manuscript notes. These are printed in Notes and Queries, 1st Series, vL 117. Two volumes of Juvenile Poetry. "Poetry for Children, entirely original." By the Author of Mrs. Leicester's School. In two volumes. London. Printed for M. J. Godwin at the Juvenile Library, No. 44, Skinner Street. 1809. Ccelebs. "Ccelebs in Search of a Wife," by Hannah More, published in 1809. LETTER CLXII (p. 307). For full information about Charles Lloyd, the father of Lamb's friends, Charles and Robert Lloyd, see Mr. E. V. Lucas's Charles Lamb and the Lloyds. LETTER CLXIII (p. 309). The rich Auditors in Albemarle Street. The audience at the Lectures by Coleridge, given at the Royal Institution the year before. My admiration of the pamphlet. Evidently refers to Words- worth's pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, mentioned in a preceding letter (No. CLXI). LETTER CLXV (p. 311). Dr. TtUhill, afterwards Sir 398 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. George L. Tuthill, M.D., Physician to Bethlehem, Bridewell, and Westminster Hospitals. Hazlitt has written a grammar. "A new and improved grammar of the English tongue for the use of schools ... to which is added a new guide to the English tongue, in a letter to Mr. W. F. Mylius, author of the School Dictionary, by Edward Baldwin, Esq. (Godwin)." 1810. LETTER CLXVII (p. 316). See Lamb's Essay "On the Poetical Works of George Wither " (Poems, Plays, and Essays, p. 295, and note upon it, p. 397). The annotated volume is now in the possession of Mr. A. 0. Swinburne, who has pub- lished a full and very interesting account of it (see Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1886). LETTER CLXVIII (p. 317). Winterslow, near Sarum. The residence of William Hazlitt, on the border of Salisbury Plain. Charles and Mary Lamb spent their summer holiday with Mr. and Mrs. Hazlitt this year. Basil Montagu had written to Lamb suggesting to him to revise a MS. treatise on the subject of Capital Punishment. LETTER CLXIX (p. 318). H. Robinson. Henry Crabb Robinson. See his delightful Diaries for frequent mention of Charles and Mary Lamb. LETTER CLXX (p. 319). Cram monsters in the voids of the maps. Lamb was thinking of Swift's lines (in the ' ' Ode to Poetry ") about the geographers who " On Afric downs Place elephants for want of towns." LETTER CLXXI (p. 319). Your continuation of the Essay on Epitaphs. Wordsworth had published the first part of this essay in Coleridge's Friend, February 22, 1810. He pub- lished it later in separate form with additions. The ' ' turgid epitaph" referred to was one from a churchyard in Westmore- land, of the year 1693, of which Wordsworth thought it worth while to compose a simpler version in prose. LETTER CLXXIII (p. 322). Four reply to the Edinburgh Review. "Reformist's reply to the Edinburgh Review," 1810. "A pamphlet," says Hunt in his Autobiography, "which I wrote in defence of the Review's own reforming principles, which it had lately taken into its head to renounce as im- practicable." LETTER CLXXIV (p. 323). John Lamb's brochure has at length come to light, and an account of it was first published NOTES. 399 by Mr. L. S. Livingston in the New York Bookman for January 1899. It is entitled, "A Letter to the Right Hon. William Windhara on his opposition to Lord Erskme's Bill for the Pre- vention of Cruelty to Animals, London, 1810." Mr. Windham had taken the line, in the House of Commons, that the subject was one not fitted for legislation. John Lamb, in his protest, expressly insists on man's cruelty to eels, and dilates on the theme with much rhetorical effusiveness. LETTER CLXXV (p. 324). The letter congratulates William Hazlitt on the birth of his first child, or at least the first which survived. H. Bunbury, Esq. (1750-1811). The caricaturist, friend of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Garrick. Martin and the card-boys. Martin Burney and the rest of the little whist-coterie. LETTER CLXXVI (p. 325). To give your vote to-morrow. H. Crabb Robinson, under date, March 16, 1811, writes: "C. Lamb stepped in to announce Dr. Tuthill's defeat as candidate for the post of physician to St. Luke's Hospital. " The contest, Mrs. Procter informed me, was very severe, and many friends of the candidates bought governorships at 50 for the sake of votes. Basil Montagu bought one for Lamb. LETTER CLXXV II (p. 326). The Well-bred Scholar. I do not find any work of this name assigned to W. F. Mylius, who was a diligent compiler of school-books. He was a master at Christ's Hospital. Dr. Southey was a brother of the poet. Going to eat turbot. At the annual dinner of old Christ's Hospital boys. LETTER CLXXVIII (p. 328). The noblest conversational poem. Wordsworth's Excursion, just published. The whole surface of Hyde Park is dry crumbling sand. Early in August 1814, the three London Parks were thrown open to the public, in celebration of the Peace between England and France. There were fireworks and illuminations ; Chinese Pagodas and "Temples of Concord" were erected; and the Parks were, in fact, converted into a vast Fair. It was two years before they recovered their usual verdure. "At the coming of the milder day." See Wordsworth'i Poem, " Hart- Leap Well" " She leaves these objects to a slow decay, That what we are, and have been, may be known ; But at the coming of the milder day These monuments shall all be overgrown." 400 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. LETTER CLXXIX (p. 331). "Remorse" Coleridge's tragedy, which, owing to the good offices of Lord Byron, had been brought out at Drury Lane, January 23, 1813, with a Prologue by Lamb. It ran twenty nights. Old Jimmy Boyer. Rev. James Boyer, the former Head- Master of Christ's Hospital, while Lamb and Coleridge were at the school. LETTER CLXXX (p. 333). Time enough for the Quarterly. Lamb's forthcoming Review of the Excursion. See the Review, and notes thereupon, in Mrs. Leicester's School and other Writings, etc., pp. 210 and 395. LETTER CLXXXI (p. 335). Your experience about tailors. Wordsworth may have told Lamb a story of some tailor in his neighbourhood who had thrown himself over a, precipice. If so, it is possible that James Hogg, in his volume of Parodies (the Poetic Mirror), published a year or more later, having heard the same story, called his Parody of the Excursion, the "Flying Tailor." Another explanation is possible. Lamb may already have seen Hogg's Parody in MS., and in this case the opening paragraph of this letter may be simple, and rather mischievous, badinage. The reference to Burton is obviously to Lamb's paper "On the Melancholy of Tailors," signed "Burton Junior," which appeared first in the Champion, Dec. 4, 1814. W. H. is William Hazlitt, who had lately reviewed Words- worth's Excursion in the Examiner. This Review was partially reprinted by Hazlitt in the Round Table, 1817. The melancholy Jew. A Jew of the name of Levi had lately flung himself from the monument in Fish Street Hill. Another Hylas. ' ' An interesting little love-adventure which he (Hazlitt) met with down at the Lakes while he was on his first experimental trip in search of sitters, is so distinctly alluded to in a letter from Lamb to Wordsworth, that I shall just give what Lamb says about it, premising that Patmore had heard in his time of some story of my grandfather being struck by the charms of a village beauty in Wordsworth's neighbour- hood, and of having narrowly escaped being ducked by the swains for his ill-appreciated attentions. Wordsworth had evidently described the whole affair in a letter to Lamb" (Memoirs of William Hazlitt, by W. C. Hazlitt, L 105, 106). LETTER CLXXXII (p. 337). 7 have read "It won't do." The first words of Jeffrey's famous Review of the Excursion in the Edinburgh, November 1814, "This will never do ! " LETTER CLXXXIII (p. 340). Your successive book presents. In 1816 Wordsworth published a New Edition of his Poems with NOTES. 401 the following title : Poems by William Wordsworth : includ- ing Lyrical Ballads, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author. With Additional Poems, a new Preface, and a Supplementary Essay. In two Volumes. Among the poems that appeared for the first time in this edition were "Yarrow Visited," "The Force of Prayer; or, The Founding of Bolton Abbey," "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale," "Laodamia," "Yew Trees," "A Night Piece," and others. It was naturally on these that Lamb made his comments. He also refers to the various changes of text made since the appearance of the previous edition in 1807. Some of the former readings Were restored in later editions, per- haps in consequence of Lamb's remonstrances. The admirable line " The stone-chat and the glancing sand-piper " (as Lamb truly says, "a line quite alive") is one of these. It occurs in the beautiful poem " Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew- tree," and in the 1815 edition had given place to the far inferior " The stone-chat, or the sand-lark, restless Bird, Piping along the margin of the lake." The "substitution of a shell" to which Lamb alludes was in the poem "The blind Highland Boy," where the vessel in which the poor boy embarked was originally a washing-tub, but which was now exchanged (at the request of friends whose self-respect was wounded) for a turtle-shell. The Preface is noble. The allusion in the words that follow is to a mention Wordsworth had made of Lamb, in citing a sentence from his Essay on Hogarth. He there speaks of Lamb as one of his " most esteemed friends. " The "printed extracts from those first poems " refers to the extracts from an " Evening Walk " and " Descriptive Sketches," early poems first published in 1793. The poems "by a female friend" were by Dorothy Wordsworth. "Three short pieces (now first published)," we read in the Preface, "are the work of a Female Friend, and the Reader to whom they may be acceptable is indebted to me for his pleasure," An undovbtable picture of Milton. This picture, which came into Charles Lamb's possession after his brother's death, was given by him to Emma Isola. The Latin Poems of V. Bourne. Cowper's friend, and Master at Westminster School. Lamb, as well as Cowper, wrote and printed various translations from Bourne's Latin Poems. " To them each evening had its glittering star" from the Excursion, Book V. "The man and his consort" are the VOL. I. 2 D 402 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. matron and her husband on whose industrious lives these lines are a comment. LETTER CLXXXIV (p. 343)." Yarrow Visited" The lovely stanza referred to I would almost hope there is no need to cite, but it is a pleasure to repeat it : " But thou that didst appear so fair To fond imagination, Dost rival in the light of day Her delicate creation." The poem called by Lamb the " Boy-builders" is that better known as " Rural Architecture." It was first printed in 1800, and had a final stanza, omitted in 1815, ending with the lines " Then, light-hearted boys, to the top of the crag, And I'll build up a giant with you." / don't often go out a " may "ing ; "must " is the tense with me now. It is interesting to remember that Hood uses this antithesis with exquisite effect in his "Ode to Melancholy" : "Even as the blossoms of the May, Whose fragrance ends in must." 1 ' JHwti is good for a bootless bene ? " The first line of the poem on Bolton Abbey : " ' What is good for a bootless bene ? ' With these dark words begins my tale ; And their meaning is, whence can comfort spring When Prayer is of no avail f " Who looked over your proof-sheets and left " ordebo " in that line of Virgil 1 Wordsworth had cited in his preface Virgil's lines in the first Eclogue about the shepherd and the goats : " Non ego vos posthac viridi projectus in antro Dumosa pendere procul de rupe videbo." LETTER CLXXXV (p. 347). Southey's Roderick, The Last of the Goths, was published in quarto, in 1814. LETTER CLXXXVI (p. 349). Hartley's intellectuals. Hartley Coleridge, now just nineteen years of age, was at Oxford. Spend a week at Poole's. Thomas Poole, a gentleman whose name has occurred already as the friend of Coleridge and Lamb. Poole succeeded to his father's business as a tanner at Nether- Stowey. Coleridge made his acquaintance, through friends in NOTES. 403 Bristol, as early as 1794 ; and it was to be near Poole that he went to live at Stowey in the winter of 1796-97. It was thus that Nether-Stowey became, as Mrs. Henry Sandford, Poole's relative, truly says, "a centre of the leading intellectual im- pulses of the time." Among other friends of Poole's were Sir Humphry Davy, the Wedgwood brothers, and John Kickman ; and in a less intimate degree Wordsworth, Southey, and Clark- son. Poole retired from business about the year 1804, and thenceforth devoted himself to the interests of his native place, and to all questions affecting the welfare of the labouring classes. He died in 1837. An admirable memoir of Poole has been written by Mrs. Henry Sandford in her book Thomas Poole and his Friends (Macmillan and Co.). LETTER CLXXXVII (p. 351). A Isager. Thomas Massa Alsager. For twenty-eight years attached to the 2'imes news- paper, in which he wrote the city and money articles. He further controlled the musical department of the paper. He did more than perhaps any man of his time to promote the study and performance of classical chamber music, especially Beethoven's Quartettes. Hence Lamb's allusion to the propriety of varying the spelling of his name. He died in 1846. Heautontimorumenos. "The Self- tormentor," the title of a comedy of Terence. Capell Loft (1751-1824). The Whig lawyer, writer on legal and political subjects, and poet. He was a native of Bury St. Edmunds, and brought into notice the Suffolk poet, Bloomtield. He sometimes printed sonnets with his initials C. L., to the disgust of Lamb, who bore the same. The juvenile Talfourd. This first mention of one who was afterwards to be Lamb's biographer deserves a word of comment. He was at this time a young man of twenty, living in chambers in Inner Temple Lane, ana reading with Mr. Joseph Chitty, the Special Pleader. Talfourd had just before this been intro- duced to Lamb at the house of Mr. William Evans, of the India House, and editor of the Pamphleteer. I shall have occasion hereafter to mention this latter gentleman in connection with Lamb and Joseph Cottle. LETTER CLXXXVIII (p. 864). Miss Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth's sister. LETTER CXCI (p. 359). The Political Sonnets and Ode. The ode was evidently Wordsworth's Thanksgiving Ode, composed on the morning of the day appointed for a General Thanksgiving, January 18, 1816. The Covent Garden Manager has declined accepting his Tragedy. Coleridge's play Zapolya. Though Byron's good 404 LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. ' offices were ineffectual in getting this second tragedy accepted by the managers, Byron introduced Coleridge to John Murray, which was the means (according to Moore) of its publication as A Christmas Tale a year later. At a Chemist's Laboratory in Norfolk Street. This was probably Lamb's joke. He assumes that Coleridge would naturally choose a chemist's laboratory as being handy for opium purchases. LETTER CXCII (p. 361). The revise of the poems and letter. The letter referred to was Wordsworth's Letter to a Friend of Burns, London, 1816. Wordsworth had been consulted by a friend of Burns as to the best mode of vindicating the reputation of the poet which, it was alleged, had been much injured by the publication of Dr. Currie's Life and Correspond- ence of Burns. Morgan is vrith us every day. John Morgan, Coleridge's old Bristol friend, and through life one of his kindest and staunchest supporters. He had a house at Calne, in Wiltshire, where Coleridge lived with him for many months at a time. Lamb was in all probability staying with Morgan when he wrote the letter that follows, dated from that town. LETTER CXCIII (p. 363). Marie. Miss Betham's "Lay of Marie " (1816). LETTER CXCIV (p. 365). Henry Doawell was a fellow- clerk of Lamb's in the India House. This exquisite letter was first printed by me in the Eversley Edition. I quoted a portion of it in the Notes to a previous volume of this edition. The " Cobbetts " are of course the " Political Registers." LETTER CXC V (p. 366). The unhappy lady. Matilda Betham, who painted miniatures as well as writing poems and compiling histories. "Her knightly brother " was Sir William Betham, at this time in Ireland, Deputy to the Ulster King of Arms. O. Dyer, Executor to a Nobleman. Dyer was one of Lord Stanhope's ten executors. In company with his colleagues he was bequeathed a share of the Earl's disposable property. BJTD OF VOL. I Printed by R. & R. CI.ARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh. The Eversley Series Continued. Globe &vo. Cloth. 4*. net per volume. French Poets and Novelists. By HENRY JAMES. Partial Portraits. By HENRY JAMES. Modern Greece. Two Lectures. By Sir RICHARD JEBB. Letters of John Keats to his Family and Friends. Edited by SIDNEY i COLVIN. The Works of Charles Kingsley. 13 Vols. WESTWARD Ho ! a Vols. HYPATIA. 2 Vols. YEAST, i VoL ALTON LOCKE. 2 Vols. Two YEARS AGO. 2 Vols. HEREWARD THE WAKE, a Vols. POEMS, a Vols. 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