LETTER 333
CHARLES LAMB TO J.B. DIBDIN
[P.M. October 28, 1823.]
My dear Sir—Your Pig was a picture of a pig, and your Picture a pig of a picture. The former was delicious but evanescent, like a hearty fit of mirth, or the crackling of thorns under a pot; but the latter is an idea, and abideth. I never before saw swine upon sattin. And then that pretty strawy canopy about him! he seems to purr (rather than grunt) his satisfaction. Such a gentlemanlike porker too! Morland's are absolutely clowns to it. Who the deuce painted it?
I have ordered a little gilt shrine for it, and mean to wear it for a locket; a shirt-pig.
I admire the petty-toes shrouded in a veil of something, not mud, but that warm soft consistency with [? which] the dust takes in Elysium after a spring shower—it perfectly engloves them.
I cannot enough thank you and your country friend for the delicate double present—the Utile et Decorum—three times have I attempted to write this sentence and failed; which shows that I am not cut out for a pedant.
Sir
(as I say to Southey) will you come and see us at our poor cottage of Colebrook to tea tomorrow evening, as early as six? I have some friends coming at that hour—
The panoply which covered your material pig shall be forthcoming— The pig pictorial, with its trappings, domesticate with me.
Your greatly obliged
ELIA.
Tuesday.
["Sir (as I say to Southey)." Elia's Letter to Southey in the London Magazine began thus.]
LETTER 334
CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HAZLITT
[No date. Early November, 1823.]
Dear Mrs. H.,—Sitting down to write a letter is such a painful operation to Mary, that you must accept me as her proxy. You have seen our house. What I now tell you is literally true. Yesterday week George Dyer called upon us, at one o'clock (bright noon day) on his way to dine with Mrs. Barbauld at Newington. He sat with Mary about half an hour, and took leave. The maid saw him go out from her kitchen window; but suddenly losing sight of him, ran up in a fright to Mary. G.D., instead of keeping the slip that leads to the gate, had deliberately, staff in hand, in broad open day, marched into the New River. He had not his spectacles on, and you know his absence. Who helped him out, they can hardly tell; but between 'em they got him out, drenched thro' and thro'. A mob collected by that time and accompanied him in. "Send for the Doctor!" they said: and a one-eyed fellow, dirty and drunk, was fetched from the Public House at the end, where it seems he lurks, for the sake of picking up water practice, having formerly had a medal from the Humane Society for some rescue. By his advice, the patient was put between blankets; and when I came home at four to dinner, I found G.D. a-bed, and raving, light-headed with the brandy-and-water which the doctor had administered. He sung, laughed, whimpered, screamed, babbled of guardian angels, would get up and go home; but we kept him there by force; and by next morning he departed sobered, and seems to have received no injury. All my friends are open-mouthed about having paling before the river, but I cannot see that, because a.. lunatic chooses to walk into a river with his eyes open at midday, I am any the more likely to be drowned in it, coming home at midnight.
I had the honour of dining at the Mansion House on Thursday last, by special card from the Lord Mayor, who never saw my face, nor I his; and all from being a writer in a magazine! The dinner costly, served on massy plate, champagne, pines, &c.; forty-seven present, among whom the Chairman and two other directors of the India Company. There's for you! and got away pretty sober! Quite saved my credit!
We continue to like our house prodigiously. Does Mary Hazlitt go on with her novel, or has she begun another? I would not discourage her, tho' we continue to think it (so far) in its present state not saleable.
Our kind remembrances to her and hers and you and yours.—
Yours truly, C. LAMB.
I am pleased that H. liked my letter to the Laureate.
[Addressed to "Mrs. Hazlitt, Alphington, near Exeter." This letter is the first draft of the Elia essay "Amicus Redivivus," which was printed in the London Magazine in December, 1823. George Dyer, who was then sixty-eight, had been getting blind steadily for some years. A visit to Lamb's cottage to-day, bearing in mind that the ribbon of green between iron railings that extends along Colebrooke Row was at that time an open stream, will make the nature of G.D.'s misadventure quite plain.
"Mary Hazlitt"-the daughter of John Hazlitt, the essayist's brother.
"I am pleased that H. liked my letter to the Laureate." Hazlitt wrote, in the essay "On the Pleasures of Hating," "I think I must be friends with Lamb again, since he has written that magnanimous Letter to Southey, and told him a piece of his mind!" Coleridge also approved of it, and Crabb Robinson's praise was excessive.
Here should come a note from Lamb to Mrs. Shelley dated Nov. 12, 1823, saying that Dyer walked into the New River on Sunday week at one o'clock with his eyes open.]
LETTER 335
CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY
E.I.H., 21st November, 1823.
DEAR Southey,-The kindness of your note has melted away the mist which was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow. That accursed "Quarterly Review" had vexed me by a gratuitous speaking, of its own knowledge, that the "Confessions of a Drunkard" was a genuine description of the state of the writer. Little things, that are not ill meant, may produce much ill. That might have injured me alive and dead. I am in a public office, and my life is insured. I was prepared for anger, and I thought I saw, in a few obnoxious words, a hard case of repetition directed against me. I wished both magazine and review at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister (though innocent) will be still more so; for the folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was absent at that time.
I will muster up courage to see you, however, any day next week (Wednesday excepted). We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a second mortification. She will hate to see us; but come and heap embers. We deserve it, I for what I've done, and she for being my sister.
Do come early in the day, by sun-light, that you may see my Milton.
I am at Colebrook Cottage, Colebrook Row, Islington. A detached whitish house, close to the New River, end of Colebrook Terrace, left hand from Sadler's Wells.
Will you let me know the day before?
Your penitent C. LAMB.
P.S.—I do not think your handwriting at all like Hunt's. I do not think many things I did think.
[For the right appreciation of this letter Elia's Letter to Southey must be read (see Vol. I. of the present edition). It was hard hitting, and though Lamb would perhaps have been wiser had he held his hand, yet Southey had taken an offensive line of moral superiority and rebuke, and much that was said by Lamb was justified.
Southey's reply ran thus:—
My Dear Lamb—On Monday I saw your letter in the London Magazine, which I had not before had an opportunity of seeing, and I now take the first interval of leisure for replying to it.
Nothing could be further from my mind than any intention or apprehension of any way offending or injuring a man concerning whom I have never spoken, thought, or felt otherwise than with affection, esteem, and admiration.
If you had let me know in any private or friendly manner that you felt wounded by a sentence in which nothing but kindness was intended—or that you found it might injure the sale of your book—I would most readily and gladly have inserted a note in the next Review to qualify and explain what had hurt you.
You have made this impossible, and I am sorry for it. But I will not engage in controversy with you to make sport for the Philistines.
The provocation must be strong indeed that can rouse me to do this, even with an enemy. And if you can forgive an unintended offence as heartily as I do the way in which you have resented it, there will be nothing to prevent our meeting as we have heretofore done, and feeling towards each other as we have always been wont to do.
Only signify a correspondent willingness on your part, and send me your address, and my first business next week shall be to reach your door, and shake hands with you and your sister. Remember me to her most kindly and believe me—. Yours, with unabated esteem and regards, Robert Southey.
The matter closed with this exchange of letters, and no hostility remained on either side.
Lamb's quarrel with the Quarterly began in 1811, when in a review of Weber's edition of Ford Lamb was described as a "poor maniac." It was renewed in 1814, when his article on Wordsworth's Excursion was mutilated. It broke out again in 1822, as Lamb says here, when a reviewer of Reid's treatise on Hypochondriasis and other Nervous Affections (supposed to be Dr. Gooch, a friend of Dr. Henry Southey's) referred to Lamb's "Confessions of a Drunkard" (see Vol. I.) as being, from his own knowledge, true. Thus Lamb's patience was naturally at breaking point when his own friend Southey attacked Elia a few numbers later.
"I do not think your handwriting at all like Hunt's." Lamb had said, in the Letter, of Leigh Hunt: "His hand-writing is so much the same with your own, that I have opened more than one letter of his, hoping, nay, not doubting, but it was from you, and have been disappointed (he will bear with my saying so) at the discovery of my error."]
LETTER 336
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. November 22, 1823.]
Dear B.B.—I am ashamed at not acknowledging your kind little poem, which I must needs like much, but I protest I thought I had done it at the moment. Is it possible a letter has miscarried? Did you get one in which I sent you an extract from the poems of Lord Sterling? I should wonder if you did, for I sent you none such.—There was an incipient lye strangled in the birth. Some people's conscience is so tender! But in plain truth I thank you very much for the verses. I have a very kind letter from the Laureat, with a self-invitation to come and shake hands with me. This is truly handsome and noble. 'Tis worthy of my old idea of Southey. Shall not I, think you, be covered with a red suffusion?
You are too much apprehensive of your complaint. I know many that are always ailing of it, and live on to a good old age. I know a merry fellow (you partly know him) who when his Medical Adviser told him he had drunk away all that part, congratulated himself (now his liver was gone) that he should be the longest liver of the two. The best way in these cases is to keep yourself as ignorant as you can—as ignorant as the world was before Galen—of the entire inner construction of the Animal Man—not to be conscious of a midriff—to hold kidneys (save of sheep and swine) to be an agreeable fiction—not to know whereabout the gall grows—to account the circulation of the blood an idle whimsey of Harvey's—to acknowledge no mechanism not visible. For, once fix the seat of your disorder, and your fancies flux into it like bad humours. Those medical gentries chuse each his favourite part—one takes the lungs—another the aforesaid liver—and refer to that whatever in the animal economy is amiss. Above all, use exercise, take a little more spirituous liquors, learn to smoke, continue to keep a good conscience, and avoid tampering with hard terms of art—viscosity, schirossity, and those bugbears, by which simple patients are scared into their grave. Believe the general sense of the mercantile world, which holds that desks are not deadly. It is the mind, good B.B., and not the limbs, that taints by long sitting. Think of the patience of taylors—think how long the Chancellor sits— think of the Brooding Hen.
I protest I cannot answer thy Sister's kind enquiry, but I judge I shall put forth no second volume. More praise than buy, and T. and H. are not particularly disposed for Martyrs.
Thou wilt see a funny passage, and yet a true History, of George Dyer's Aquatic Incursion, in the next "London." Beware his fate, when thou comest to see me at my Colebrook Cottage. I have filled my little space with my little thoughts. I wish thee ease on thy sofa, but not too much indulgence on it. From my poor desk, thy fellow-sufferer this bright November, C.L.
[Again I do not identify the kind little poem. It may have been a trifle enclosed in a letter, which Barton did not print and Lamb destroyed.]
LETTER 337
CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH India-House, 9th Dec., 1823.
(If I had time I would go over this letter again, and dot all my i's.)
Dear Sir,—I should have thanked you for your Books and Compliments sooner, but have been waiting for a revise to be sent, which does not come, tho' I returned the proof on the receit of your letter. I have read Warner with great pleasure. What an elaborate piece of alliteration and antithesis! why it must have been a labour far above the most difficult versification. There is a fine simile of or picture of Semiramis arming to repel a siege. I do not mean to keep the Book, for I suspect you are forming a curious collection, and I do not pretend to any thing of the kind. I have not a Blackletter Book among mine, old Chaucer excepted, and am not Bibliomanist enough to like Blackletter. It is painful to read. Therefore I must insist on returning it at opportunity, not from contumacity and reluctance to be oblig'd, but because it must suit you better than me. The loss of a present from should never exceed the gain of a present to. I hold this maxim infallible in the accepting Line. I read your Magazines with satisfaction. I throughly agree with you as to the German Faust, as far [as] I can do justice to it from an English translation. 'Tis a disagreeable canting tale of Seduction, which has nothing to do with the Spirit of Faustus— Curiosity. Was the dark secret to be explored to end in the seducing of a weak girl, which might have been accomplished by earthly agency? When Marlow gives his Faustus a mistress, he flies him at Helen, flower of Greece, to be sure, and not at Miss Betsy, or Miss Sally Thoughtless.
"Cut is the branch that bore the goodly fruit,
And wither'd is Apollo's laurel tree:
Faustus is dead."
What a noble natural transition from metaphor to plain speaking! as if the figurative had flagged in description of such a Loss, and was reduced to tell the fact simply.—
I must now thank you for your very kind invitation. It is not out of prospect that I may see Manchester some day, and then I will avail myself of your kindness. But Holydays are scarce things with me, and the Laws of attendance are getting stronger and stronger at Leadenhall. But I shall bear it in mind. Meantime something may (more probably) bring you to town, where I shall be happy to see you. I am always to be found (alas!) at my desk in the forepart of the day.
I wonder why they do not send the revise. I leave late at office, and my abode lies out of the way, or I should have seen about it. If you are impatient, Perhaps a Line to the Printer, directing him to send it me, at Accountant's Office, may answer. You will see by the scrawl that I only snatch a few minutes from intermitting Business.
Your oblig. Ser., C. LAMB.
[William Harrison Ainsworth, afterwards to be known as a novelist, was then a solicitor's pupil at Manchester, aged 18. He had sent Lamb William Warner's Syrinx; or, A Sevenfold History, 1597. The book was a gift, and is now in the Dyce and Foster library at South Kensington.
Goethe's Faust. Lamb, as we have seen, had read the account of the play in Madame de Staël's Germany. He might also have read the translation by Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, 1823. Hayward's translation was not published till 1834. Goethe admired Lamb's sonnet on his family name.]
LETTER 338
CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH
[Dated at end: December 29 (1823).]
My dear Sir—You talk of months at a time and I know not what inducements to visit Manchester, Heaven knows how gratifying! but I have had my little month of 1823 already. It is all over, and without incurring a disagreeable favor I cannot so much as get a single holyday till the season returns with the next year. Even our half-hour's absences from office are set down in a Book! Next year, if I can spare a day or two of it, I will come to Manchester, but I have reasons at home against longer absences.—
I am so ill just at present—(an illness of my own procuring last night; who is Perfect?)—that nothing but your very great kindness could make me write. I will bear in mind the letter to W.W., you shall have it quite in time, before the 12.
My aking and confused Head warns me to leave off.—With a muddled sense of gratefulness, which I shall apprehend more clearly to-morrow, I remain, your friend unseen,
C.L.
I.H. 29th.
Will your occasions or inclination bring you to London? It will give me great pleasure to show you every thing that Islington can boast, if you know the meaning of that very Cockney sound. We have the New River!
I am asham'd of this scrawl: but I beg you to accept it for the present.
I am full of qualms.
A fool at 50 is a fool indeed.
[W.W. was Wordsworth.
"A fool at 50 is a fool indeed." "A fool at forty is a fool indeed" was Young's line in Satire II. of the series on "Love of Fame." Lamb was nearing forty-nine.]
LETTER 339
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[January 9, 1824.]
Dear B.B.—Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day mare—a whoreson lethargy, Falstaff calls it—an indisposition to do any thing, or to be any thing—a total deadness and distaste—a suspension of vitality —an indifference to locality—a numb soporifical goodfornothingness—an ossification all over—an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events—a mind-stupor,—a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience—did you ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to water gruel processes?—this has been for many weeks my lot, and my excuse—my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it is three and twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet—I have not a thing to say—nothing is of more importance than another—I am flatter than a denial or a pancake—emptier than Judge Park's wig when the head is in it—duller than a country stage when the actors are off it —a cypher—an O—I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest—I am weary of the world—Life is weary of me— My day is gone into Twilight and I don't think it worth the expence of candles—my wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it—I inhale suffocation—I can't distinguish veal from mutton—nothing interests me—'tis 12 o'clock and Thurtell is just now coming out upon the New Drop—Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection— if you told me the world will be at end tomorrow, I should just say, "will it?"—I have not volition enough to dot my i's —much less to comb my EYEBROWS—my eyes are set in my head—my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again— my scull is a Grub street Attic, to let—not so much as a joint stool or a crackd jordan left in it—my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little when their heads are off— O for a vigorous fit of gout, cholic, tooth ache—an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs—pain is life—the sharper, the more evidence of life—but this apathy, this death—did you ever have an obstinate cold, a six or seven weeks' unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and every thing—yet do I try all I can to cure it, I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all only seem to make me worse, instead of better—I sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find any visible amendment.
Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
It is just 15 minutes after 12. Thurtell is by this time a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps, Ketch is bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat, the Jew demurs at first at three half crowns, but on consideration that he, may get somewhat by showing 'em in the Town, finally closes.—
C.L.
["Judge Park's wig." Sir James Alan Park, of the Bench of Common Pleas, who tried Thurtell, the murderer of Mr. William Weare of Lyon's Inn, in Gill's Hill Lane, Radlett, on October 24, 1823.]
LETTER 340
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. January 23, 1824.]
My dear Sir—That peevish letter of mine, which was meant to convey an apology for my incapacity to write, seems to have been taken by you in too serious a light. It was only my way of telling you I had a severe cold. The fact is I have been insuperably dull and lethargic for many weeks, and cannot rise to the vigour of a Letter, much less an Essay. The London must do without me for a time, a time, and half a time, for I have lost all interest about it, and whether I shall recover it again I know not. I will bridle my pen another time, & not teaze and puzzle you with my aridities. I shall begin to feel a little more alive with the spring. Winter is to me (mild or harsh) always a great trial of the spirits. I am ashamed not to have noticed your tribute to Woolman, whom we love so much. It is done in your good manner. Your friend Taylor called upon me some time since, and seems a very amiable man. His last story is painfully fine. His Book I "like." It is only too stuft with scripture, too Parsonish. The best thing in it is the Boy's own story. When I say it is too full of Scripture, I mean it is too full of direct quotations; no book can have too much of SILENT SCRIPTURE in it. But the natural power of a story is diminished when the uppermost purpose in the writer seems to be to recommend something else, viz Religion. You know what Horace says of the DEUS INTERSIT. I am not able to explain myself, you must do it for me.—
My Sister's part in the Leicester School (about two thirds) was purely her own; as it was (to the same quantity) in the Shakspeare Tales which bear my name. I wrote only the Witch Aunt, the first going to Church, and the final Story about a little Indian girl in a Ship.
Your account of my Black Balling amused me. I think, as Quakers, they did right. There are some things hard to be understood.
The more I think the more I am vexed at having puzzled you with that Letter, but I have been so out of Letter writing of late years, that it is a sore effort to sit down to it, & I felt in your debt, and sat down waywardly to pay you in bad money. Never mind my dulness, I am used to long intervals of it. The heavens seem brass to me—then again comes the refreshing shower. "I have been merry once or twice ere now."
You said something about Mr. Mitford in a late letter, which I believe I did not advert to. I shall be happy to show him my Milton (it is all the show things I have) at any time he will take the trouble of a jaunt to Islington. I do also hope to see Mr. Taylor there some day. Pray say so to both.
Coleridge's book is good part printed, but sticks a little for more
copy. It bears an unsaleable Title—Extracts from Bishop Leighton—but
I am confident there will be plenty of good notes in it, more of Bishop
Coleridge than Leighton, I hope; for what is Leighton?
Do you trouble yourself about Libel cases? The Decision against Hunt for the "Vision of Judgment" made me sick. What is to become of the old talk about OUR GOOD OLD KING —his personal virtues saving us from a revolution &c. &c. Why, none that think it can utter it now. It must stink. And the Vision is really, as to Him-ward, such a tolerant good humour'd thing. What a wretched thing a Lord Chief Justice is, always was, & will be!
Keep your good spirits up, dear BB—mine will return—They are at present in abeyance. But I am rather lethargic than miserable. I don't know but a good horse whip would be more beneficial to me than Physic. My head, without aching, will teach yours to ache. It is well I am getting to the conclusion. I will send a better letter when I am a better man. Let me thank you for your kind concern for me (which I trust will have reason soon to be dissipated) & assure you that it gives me pleasure to hear from you.—
Yours truly C.L.
["The London must do without me." Lamb contributed nothing between
December, 1823 ("Amicus Redivivus"), and September, 1824 ("Blakesmoor in
H——shire").
Barton's tribute to Woolman was the poem "A Memorial to John Woolman," printed in Poetic Vigils.
Taylor was Charles Benjamin Tayler (1797-1875), the curate of Hadleigh, in Suffolk, and the author of many religious books. Lamb refers to May You Like It, 1823.
"What Horace says":—
Nec deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus
Inciderit.
Ars Poetica, 191, 192.
Neither let a god interfere, unless a difficulty worth a god's unravelling should happen (Smart's translation).
"My Black Balling." Elia had been rejected by a Book Club in
Woodbridge.
"Coleridge's book"—the Aids to Reflection, 1825. The first intention
had been a selection of "Beauties" from Bishop Leighton (1611-1684),
Archbishop of Glasgow, and author, among other works, of Rules and
Instructions for a Holy Life.
"The Decision against Hunt." John Hunt, the publisher of The Liberal, in which Byron's "Vision of Judgment" had been printed in 1822, had just been fined £100 for the libel therein contained on George III.
Here should come a note from Lamb to Charles Ollier, thanking him for a copy of his Inesilla; or, The Tempter: A Romance, with Other Tales.]
LETTER 341
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. February 25, 1824.]
My dear Sir—Your title of Poetic Vigils arrides me much more than A Volume of Verse, which is no meaning. The motto says nothing, but I cannot suggest a better. I do not like mottoes but where they are singularly felicitous; there is foppery in them. They are unplain, un-Quakerish. They are good only where they flow from the Title and are a kind of justification of it. There is nothing about watchings or lucubrations in the one you suggest, no commentary on Vigils. By the way, a wag would recommend you to the Line of Pope
Sleepless himself—to give his readers sleep—
I by no means wish it. But it may explain what I mean, that a neat motto is child of the Title. I think Poetic Virgils as short and sweet as can be desired; only have an eye on the Proof, that the Printer do not substitute Virgils, which would ill accord with your modesty or meaning. Your suggested motto is antique enough in spelling, and modern enough in phrases; a good modern antique: but the matter of it is germane to the purpose only supposing the title proposed a vindication of yourself from the presumption of authorship. The 1st title was liable to this objection, that if you were disposed to enlarge it, and the bookseller insisted on its appearance in Two Tomes, how oddly it would sound—
A Volume of Verse in Two Volumes 2d edition &c—
You see thro' my wicked intention of curtailing this Epistolet by the above device of large margin. But in truth the idea of letterising has been oppressive to me of late above your candour to give me credit for. There is Southey, whom I ought to have thank'd a fortnight ago for a present of the Church Book. I have never had courage to buckle myself in earnest even to acknowledge it by six words. And yet I am accounted by some people a good man. How cheap that character is acquired! Pay your debts, don't borrow money, nor twist your kittens neck off, or disturb a congregation, &c.— your business is done. I know things (thoughts or things, thoughts are things) of myself which would make every friend I have fly me as a plague patient. I once * * *, and set a dog upon a crab's leg that was shoved out under a moss of sea weeds, a pretty little feeler.—Oh! pah! how sick I am of that; and a lie, a mean one, I once told!— I stink in the midst of respect.
I am much hypt; the fact is, my head is heavy, but there is hope, or if not, I am better than a poor shell fish—not morally when I set the whelp upon it, but have more blood and spirits; things may turn up, and I may creep again into a decent opinion of myself. Vanity will return with sunshine. Till when, pardon my neglects and impute it to the wintry solstice.
C. LAMB.
[The motto eventually adopted for Barton's Poetic Vigils was from
Vaughan's Silex Scintillans:—
Dear night! this world's defeat;
The stop to busie fools; care's check and curb;
The day of spirits; my soul's calm retreat
Which none disturb!]
LETTER 342
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. 24 March, 1824.]
DEAR B.B.—I hasten to say that if my opinion can strengthen you in your choice, it is decisive for your acceptance of what has been so handsomely offered. I can see nothing injurious to your most honourable sense. Think that you are called to a poetical Ministry—nothing worse—the Minister is worthy of the hire.
The only objection I feel is founded on a fear that the acceptance may be a temptation to you to let fall the bone (hard as it is) which is in your mouth and must afford tolerable pickings, for the shadow of independence. You cannot propose to become independent on what the low state of interest could afford you from such a principal as you mention; and the most graceful excuse for the acceptance, would be, that it left you free to your voluntary functions. That is the less light part of the scruple. It has no darker shade. I put in darker, because of the ambiguity of the word light, which Donne in his admirable poem on the Metempsychosis, has so ingeniously illustrated in his invocation
1 2 1 2 Make my dark heavy poem, light and light—
where the two senses of light are opposed to different opposites. A trifling criticism.—I can see no reason for any scruple then but what arises from your own interest; which is in your own power of course to solve. If you still have doubts, read over Sanderson's Cases of Conscience, and Jeremy Taylor's Ductor Dubitantium, the first a moderate Octavo, the latter a folio of 900 close pages, and when you have thoroughly digested the admirable reasons pro and con which they give for every possible Case, you will be—just as wise as when you began. Every man is his own best Casuist; and after all, as Ephraim Smooth, in the pleasant comedy of Wild Oats, has it, "there is no harm in a Guinea." A fortiori there is less in 2000.
I therefore most sincerely congratulate with you, excepting so far as excepted above. If you have fair Prospects of adding to the Principal, cut the Bank; but in either case do not refuse an honest Service. Your heart tells you it is not offered to bribe you from any duty, but to a duty which you feel to be your vocation. Farewell heartily C.L.
[In the memoir of Barton by Edward FitzGerald, prefixed to the Poems and Letters, it is stated that in this year Barton received a handsome addition to his income. "A few members of his Society, including some of the wealthier of his own family, raised £1200 among them for his benefit [not 2000 guineas, as Lamb says]. It seems that he felt some delicacy at first in accepting this munificent testimony which his own people offered to his talents." Birton had written to Lamb on the subject.]
LETTER 343
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[(Early spring), 1824.]
I am sure I cannot fill a letter, though I should disfurnish my scull to fill it. But you expect something, and shall have a Note-let. Is Sunday, not divinely speaking, but humanly and holydaysically, a blessing? Without its institution, would our rugged taskmasters have given us a leisure day, so often, think you, as once in a month?—or, if it had not been instituted, might they not have given us every 6th day? Solve me this problem. If we are to go 3 times a day to church, why has Sunday slipped into the notion of a _Holli_day? A Holyday I grant it. The puritans, I have read in Southey's Book, knew the distinction. They made people observe Sunday rigorously, would not let a nursery maid walk out in the fields with children for recreation on that day. But then—they gave the people a holliday from all sorts of work every second Tuesday. This was giving to the Two Caesars that which was his respective. Wise, beautiful, thoughtful, generous Legislators! Would Wilberforce give us our Tuesdays? No, d—n him. He would turn the six days into sevenths,
And those 3 smiling seasons of the year
Into a Russian winter.
Old Play.
I am sitting opposite a person who is making strange distortions with the gout, which is not unpleasant—to me at least. What is the reason we do not sympathise with pain, short of some terrible Surgical operation? Hazlitt, who boldly says all he feels, avows that not only he does not pity sick people, but he hates them. I obscurely recognise his meaning. Pain is probably too selfish a consideration, too simply a consideration of self-attention. We pity poverty, loss of friends etc. more complex things, in which the Sufferers feelings are associated with others. This is a rough thought suggested by the presence of gout; I want head to extricate it and plane it. What is all this to your Letter? I felt it to be a good one, but my turn, when I write at all, is perversely to travel out of the record, so that my letters are any thing but answers. So you still want a motto? You must not take my ironical one, because your book, I take it, is too serious for it. Bickerstaff might have used it for his lucubrations. What do you think of (for a Title)
RELIGIO TREMULI OR TREMEBUNDI
There is Religio-Medici and Laici.—But perhaps the volume is not quite Quakerish enough or exclusively for it—but your own VIGILS is perhaps the Best. While I have space, let me congratulate with you the return of Spring—what a Summery Spring too! all those qualms about the dog and cray-fish melt before it. I am going to be happy and vain again.
A hasty farewell C. LAMB.
["Southey's Book"—The Book of the Church.
"Would Wilberforce give us our Tuesdays?"—William Wilberforce, the abolitionist and the principal "Puritan" of that day.]
LETTER 344
CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. THOMAS ALLSOP
[P.M. April 13, 1824.]
Dear Mrs. A.—Mary begs me to say how much she regrets we can not join you to Reigate. Our reasons are —1st I have but one holyday namely Good Friday, and it is not pleasant to solicit for another, but that might have been got over. 2dly Manning is with us, soon to go away and we should not be easy in leaving him. 3dly Our school girl Emma comes to us for a few days on Thursday. 4thly and lastly, Wordsworth is returning home in about a week, and out of respect to them we should not like to absent ourselves just now. In summer I shall have a month, and if it shall suit, should like to go for a few days of it out with you both any where. In the mean time, with many acknowledgments etc. etc., I remain yours (both) truly, C. LAMB.
India Ho. 13 Apr. Remember Sundays.
LETTER 345
CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM HONE [No date. April, 1824.]
Dear Sir,—Miss Hazlitt (niece to Pygmalion) begs us to send to you for Mr. Hardy a parcel. I have not thank'd you for your Pamphlet, but I assure you I approve of it in all parts, only that I would have seen my Calumniators at hell, before I would have told them I was a Xtian, tho' I am one, I think as much as you. I hope to see you here, some day soon. The parcel is a novel which I hope Mr. H. may sell for her. I am with greatest friendliness
Yours C. LAMB.
Sunday.
["Pygmalion." A reference to Hazlitt's Liber Amoris; or, The New
Pygmalion, 1823.
Hone's pamphlet would be his Aspersions Answered: an Explanatory
Statement to the Public at Large and Every Reader of the "Quarterly
Review," 1824.
Here should come a note from Lamb to Thomas Hardy, dated April 24, 1824, in which Lamb says that Miss Hazlitt's novel, which Mr. Hardy promised to introduce to Mr. Ridgway, the publisher, is lying at Mr. Hone's. Hardy was a bootmaker in Fleet Street.]
LETTER 346
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
May 15, 1824.
DEAR B.B.—I am oppressed with business all day, and Company all night. But I will snatch a quarter of an hour. Your recent acquisitions of the Picture and the Letter are greatly to be congratulated. I too have a picture of my father and the copy of his first love verses; but they have been mine long. Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he be still living. He is the Robert [William] Blake, whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the "Night Thoughts," which you may have seen, in one of which he pictures the parting of soul and body by a solid mass of human form floating off, God knows how, from a lumpish mass (fac Simile to itself) left behind on the dying bed. He paints in water colours marvellous strange pictures, visions of his brain, which he asserts that he has seen. They have great merit. He has seen the old Welsh bards on Snowdon—he has seen the Beautifullest, the strongest, and the Ugliest Man, left alone from the Massacre of the Britons by the Romans, and has painted them from memory (I have seen his paintings), and asserts them to be as good as the figures of Raphael and Angelo, but not better, as they had precisely the same retro-visions and prophetic visions with themself [himself]. The painters in oil (which he will have it that neither of them practised) he affirms to have been the ruin of art, and affirms that all the while he was engaged in his Water paintings, Titian was disturbing him, Titian the III Genius of Oil Painting. His Pictures—one in particular, the Canterbury Pilgrims (far above Stothard's)—have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace. He has written a Catalogue of them with a most spirited criticism on Chaucer, but mystical and full of Vision. His poems have been sold hitherto only in Manuscript. I never read them; but a friend at my desire procured the "Sweep Song." There is one to a tiger, which I have heard recited, beginning—
"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,
Thro' the desarts of the night,"
which is glorious, but, alas! I have not the book; for the man is flown, whither I know not—to Hades or a Mad House. But I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age. Montgomery's book I have not much hope from. The Society, with the affected name, has been labouring at it for these 20 years, and made few converts. I think it was injudicious to mix stories avowedly colour'd by fiction with the sad true statements from the parliamentary records, etc., but I wish the little Negroes all the good that can come from it. I batter'd my brains (not butter'd them—but it is a bad a) for a few verses for them, but I could make nothing of it. You have been luckier. But Blake's are the flower of the set, you will, I am sure, agree, tho' some of Montgomery's at the end are pretty; but the Dream awkwardly paraphras'd from B.
With the exception of an Epilogue for a Private Theatrical, I have written nothing now for near 6 months. It is in vain to spur me on. I must wait. I cannot write without a genial impulse, and I have none. 'Tis barren all and dearth. No matter; life is something without scribbling. I have got rid of my bad spirits, and hold up pretty well this rain-damn'd May.
So we have lost another Poet. I never much relished his Lordship's mind, and shall be sorry if the Greeks have cause to miss him. He was to me offensive, and I never can make out his great power, which his admirers talk of. Why, a line of Wordsworth's is a lever to lift the immortal spirit! Byron can only move the Spleen. He was at best a Satyrist,—in any other way he was mean enough. I dare say I do him injustice; but I cannot love him, nor squeeze a tear to his memory. He did not like the world, and he has left it, as Alderman Curtis advised the Radicals, "If they don't like their country, damn 'em, let 'em leave it," they possessing no rood of ground in England, and he 10,000 acres. Byron was better than many Curtises.
Farewell, and accept this apology for a letter from one who owes you so much in that kind.
Yours ever truly, C.L.
[Lamb's portrait of his father is reproduced in Vol. II. of my large edition. The first love verses are no more.
William Blake was at this time sixty-six years of age. He was living in poverty and neglect at 3 Fountain Court, Strand. Blake made 537 illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts, of which only forty-seven were published. Lamb is, however, thinking of his edition of Blair's Grave. The exhibition of his works was held in 1809, and it was for this that Blake wrote the descriptive catalogue. Lamb had sent Blake's "Sweep Song," which, like "Tiger, Tiger," is in the Songs of Innocence, to James Montgomery for his Chimney-Sweepers' Friend and Climbing Boys' Album, 1824, a little book designed to ameliorate the lot of those children, in whose interest a society existed. Barton also contributed something. It was Blake's poem which had excited Barton's curiosity. Probably he thought that Lamb wrote it. Lamb's mistake concerning Blake's name is curious in so far as that it was Blake's brother Robert, who died in 1787, who in a vision revealed to the poet the method by which the Songs of Innocence were to be reproduced.
"The Dream awkwardly paraphras'd from B." The book ended with three "Climbing-Boys' Soliloquies" by Montgomery. The second was a dream in which the dream in Blake's song was extended and prosified.
"An Epilogue for a Private Theatrical." Probably the epilogue for the amateur performance of "Richard II.," given by the family of Henry Field, Barren Field's father (see Vol. IV. of the present edition).
"Another great Poet." Byron died on April 19, 1824.
"Alderman Curtis." See note above.]
LETTER 347
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
July 7th, 1824.
DEAR B.B.—I have been suffering under a severe inflammation of the eyes, notwithstanding which I resolutely went through your very pretty volume at once, which I dare pronounce in no ways inferior to former lucubrations. "Abroad" and "lord" are vile rhymes notwithstanding, and if you count you will wonder how many times you have repeated the word unearthly—thrice in one poem. It is become a slang word with the bards; avoid it in future lustily. "Time" is fine; but there are better a good deal, I think. The volume does not lie by me; and, after a long day's smarting fatigue, which has almost put out my eyes (not blind however to your merits), I dare not trust myself with long writing. The verses to Bloomfield are the sweetest in the collection. Religion is sometimes lugged in, as if it did not come naturally. I will go over carefully when I get my seeing, and exemplify. You have also too much of singing metre, such as requires no deep ear to make; lilting measure, in which you have done Woolman injustice. Strike at less superficial melodies. The piece on Nayler is more to my fancy.
My eye runs waters. But I will give you a fuller account some day. The book is a very pretty one in more than one sense. The decorative harp, perhaps, too ostentatious; a simple pipe preferable.
Farewell, and many thanks. C. LAMB.
[Barton's new book was Poetic Vigils, 1824. It contained among other poems "An Ode to Time," "Verses to the Memory of Bloomfield," "A Memorial of John Woolman," beginning—
There is glory to me in thy Name,
Meek follower of Bethlehem's Child,
More touching by far than the splendour of Fame
With which the vain world is beguil'd,
and "A Memorial of James Nayler." The following "Sonnet to Elia," from the London Magazine, is also in the volume: it is odd that Lamb did not mention it:—
SONNET TO ELIA
Delightful Author! unto whom I owe
Moments and moods of fancy and of feeling,
Afresh to grateful memory now appealing,
Fain would I "bless thee—ere I let thee go!"
From month to month has the exhaustless flow
Of thy original mind, its wealth revealing,
With quaintest humour, and deep pathos healing
The World's rude wounds, revived Life's early glow:
And, mixt with this, at times, to earnest thought,
Glimpses of truth, most simple and sublime,
By thy imagination have been brought
Over my spirit. From the olden time
Of authorship thy patent should be dated,
And thou with Marvell, Brown, and Burton mated.]
LETTER 348
CHARLES LAMB TO W. MARTER [Dated at end: July 19 (1824).]
Dear Marter,—I have just rec'd your letter, having returned from a month's holydays. My exertions for the London are, tho' not dead, in a dead sleep for the present. If your club like scandal, Blackwood's is your magazine; if you prefer light articles, and humorous without offence, the New Monthly is very amusing. The best of it is by Horace Smith, the author of the Rejected Addresses. The Old Monthly has more of matter, information, but not so merry. I cannot safely recommend any others, as not knowing them, or knowing them to their disadvantage. Of Reviews, beside what you mention, I know of none except the Review on Hounslow Heath, which I take it is too expensive for your ordering. Pity me, that have been a Gentleman these four weeks, and am reduced in one day to the state of a ready writer. I feel, I feel, my gentlemanly qualities fast oozing away—such as a sense of honour, neckcloths twice a day, abstinence from swearing, &c. The desk enters into my soul.
See my thoughts on business next Page.
SONNET
Who first invented work?—and bound the free
And holyday-rejoicing Spirit down
To the ever-haunting importunity
Of Business in the green fields, and the Town—
To plough, loom, [anvil], spade, and (oh most sad!)
To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood?
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good,
Sabbathless Satan! He, who his unglad
Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings,
That round and round incalculably reel—
For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel—
In that red realm from whence are no returnings;
Where toiling & turmoiling ever & aye
He and his Thoughts keep pensive worky-day.
With many recollections of pleasanter times, my old compeer, happily released before me, Adieu. C. LAMB.
E.I.H.
19 July [1824].
[Marter was an old India House clerk; we do not meet with him again. The sonnet had been printed in The Examiner in 1819. Lamb, who was fond of it, reprinted it in Album Verses, 1830.]
LETTER 349
CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN
[P.M. July 28, 1824.]
My dear Sir—I must appear negligent in not having thanked you for the very pleasant books you sent me. Arthur, and the Novel, we have both of us read with unmixed satisfaction. They are full of quaint conceits, and running over with good humour and good nature. I naturally take little interest in story, but in these the manner and not the end is the interest; it is such pleasant travelling, one scarce cares whither it leads us. Pray express our pleasure to your father with my best thanks.
I am involved in a routine of visiting among the family of Barren Field, just ret'd, from Botany Bay—I shall hardly have an open Evening before TUESDAY next. Will you come to us then?
Yours truly, C. LAMB.
Wensday
28 July 24.
[Arthur and the Novel were two books by Charles Dibdin the Younger, the father of Lamb's correspondent. Arthur was Young Arthur; or, The Child of Mystery: A Metrical Romance, 1819, and the novel was Isn't It Odd? three volumes of high-spirited ramblings something in the manner of Tristram Shandy, nominally written by Marmaduke Merrywhistle, and published in 1822.
Barron Field had returned from his Judgeship in New South Wales on June 18.]
LETTER 350
(Possibly incomplete)
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD [P.M. August 10, 1824.]
And what dost thou at the Priory? Cucullus non facit Monachum. English me that, and challenge old Lignum Janua to make a better.
My old New River has presented no extraordinary novelties lately; but there Hope sits every day, speculating upon traditionary gudgeons. I think she has taken the fisheries. I now know the reason why our forefathers were denominated East and West Angles. Yet is there no lack of spawn; for I wash my hands in fishets that come through the pump every morning thick as motelings,—little things o o o like that, that perish untimely, and never taste the brook. You do not tell me of those romantic land bays that be as thou goest to Lover's Seat: neither of that little churchling in the midst of a wood (in the opposite direction, nine furlongs from the town), that seems dropped by the Angel that was tired of carrying two packages; marry, with the other he made shift to pick his flight to Loretto. Inquire out, and see my little Protestant Loretto. It stands apart from trace of human habitation; yet hath it pulpit, reading-desk, and trim front of massiest marble, as if Robinson Crusoe had reared it to soothe himself with old church-going images. I forget its Christian name, and what she-saint was its gossip.
You should also go to No. 13, Standgate Street,—a baker, who has the finest collection of marine monsters in ten sea counties,—sea dragons, polypi, mer-people, most fantastic. You have only to name the old gentleman in black (not the Devil) that lodged with him a week (he'll remember) last July, and he will show courtesy. He is by far the foremost of the savans. His wife is the funniest thwarting little animal! They are decidedly the Lions of green Hastings. Well, I have made an end of my say. My epistolary time is gone by when I could have scribbled as long (I will not say as agreeable) as thine was to both of us. I am dwindled to notes and letterets. But, in good earnest, I shall be most happy to hail thy return to the waters of Old Sir Hugh. There is nothing like inland murmurs, fresh ripples, and our native minnows.
"He sang in meads how sweet the brooklets ran,
To the rough ocean and red restless sands."
I design to give up smoking; but I have not yet fixed upon the equivalent vice. I must have quid pro quo; or quo pro quid, as Tom Woodgate would correct me. My service to him. C.L.
[This is the first letter to Hood, then a young man of twenty-five, and
assistant editor of the London Magazine. He was now staying at
Hastings, on his honeymoon, presumably, and, like the Lambs, near the
Priory.
"Cucullus non facit Monachum"—A "Lamb-pun." The Hood does not make the monk.
"Old Lignum Janua"—the Tom Woodgate mentioned at the end of the letter, a boatman at Hastings. Hood wrote some verses to him.
"My old New River." This passage was placed by Hood as the motto of his verses "Walton Redivivus," in Whims and Oddities, 1826.
"Little churchling." This is Lamb's second description of Hollingdon
Rural. The third and best is in a later letter.
"There is nothing like inland murmurs." Lamb is here remembering
Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey lines:—
With a sweet inland murmur.
In the Elia essay "The Old Margate Hoy" Lamb, in speaking of Hastings, had made the same objection.
In a letter to his sister, written from Hastings at this time, Hood says:—
This is the last of our excursions. We have tried, but in vain, to find out the baker and his wife recommended to us by Lamb as the very lions of green Hastings. There is no such street as he has named throughout the town, and the ovens are singularly numerous. We have given up the search, therefore, but we have discovered the little church in the wood, and it is such a church! It ought to have been our St. Botolph's. … Such a verdant covert wood Stothard might paint for the haunting of Dioneus, Pamphillus, and Fiammetta as they walk in the novel of Boccacce. The ground shadowed with bluebells, even to the formation of a plumb-like bloom upon its little knolls and ridges; and ever through the dell windeth a little path chequered with the shades of aspens and ashes and the most verdant and lively of all the family of trees. Here a broad, rude stone steppeth over a lazy spring, oozing its way into grass and weeds; anon a fresh pathway divergeth, you know not whither. Meanwhile the wild blackbird startles across the way and singeth anew in some other shade. To have seen Fiammetta there, stepping in silk attire, like a flower, and the sunlight looking upon her betwixt the branches! I had not walked (in the body) with Romance before. Then suppose so much of a space cleared as maketh a small church lawn to be sprinkled with old gravestones, and in the midst the church itself, a small Christian dovecot, such as Lamb has truly described it, like a little temple of Juan Fernandes. I could have been sentimental and wished to lie some day in that place, its calm tenants seeming to come through such quiet ways, through those verdant alleys, to their graves.
In coming home I killed a viper in our serpentine path, and Mrs. Fernor says I am by that token to overcome an enemy. Is Taylor or Hessey dead? The reptile was dark and dull, his blood being yet sluggish from the cold; howbeit, he tried to bite, till I cut him in two with a stone. I thought of Hessey's long back-bone when I did it.
They are called adders, tell your father, because two and two of them together make four.]
LETTER 351
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. August 17, 1824.]
Dear B.B.—I congratulate you on getting a house over your head. I find the comfort of it I am sure. At my town lodgings the Mistress was always quarrelling with our maid; and at my place of rustication, the whole family were always beating one another, brothers beating sisters (one a most beautiful girl lamed for life), father beating sons and daughters, and son again beating his father, knocking him fairly down, a scene I never before witnessed, but was called out of bed by the unnatural blows, the parricidal colour of which, tho' my morals could not but condemn, yet my reason did heartily approve, and in the issue the house was quieter for a day or so than I had ever known. I am now all harmony and quiet, even to the sometimes wishing back again some of the old rufflings. There is something stirring in these civil broils.
The Album shall be attended to. If I can light upon a few appropriate rhymes (but rhymes come with difficulty from me now) I shall beg a place in the neat margin of your young housekeeper.
The Prometheus Unbound, is a capital story. The Literal rogue! What if you had ordered Elfrida in sheets! She'd have been sent up, I warrant you. Or bid him clasp his bible (i.e. to his bosom)-he'd ha clapt on a brass clasp, no doubt.—
I can no more understand Shelly than you can. His poetry is "thin sewn with profit or delight." Yet I must point to your notice a sonnet conceivd and expressed with a witty delicacy. It is that addressed to one who hated him, but who could not persuade him to hate him again. His coyness to the other's passion (for hate demands a return as much as Love, and starves without it) is most arch and pleasant. Pray, like it very much.
For his theories and nostrums they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is miching malice and mischief in 'em. But for the most part ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of 'em—Many are wiser and better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Sh——y.
I wonder you will sow your correspondence on so barren a ground as I am, that make such poor returns. But my head akes at the bare thought of letter writing. I wish all the ink in the ocean dried up, and would listen to the quills shivering [? shrivelling] up in the candle flame, like parching martyrs. The same indisposit'n to write it is has stopt my Elias, but you will see a futile Effort in the next No., "wrung from me with slow pain."
The fact is, my head is seldom cool enough. I am dreadfully indolent. To have to do anything-to order me a new coat, for instance, tho' my old buttons are shelled like beans— is an effort.
My pen stammers like my tongue. What cool craniums those old enditers of Folios must have had. What a mortify'd pulse. Well, once more I throw myself on your mercy— Wishing peace in thy new dwelling— C. LAMB.
[The Lambs gave up their "country lodgings" at Dalston on moving to
Colebrooke Row.
"The album." See next letter to Barton.
"The Prometheus Unbound." A bookseller, asked for Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's poem, had replied that Prometheus was not to be had "in sheets." Elfrida was a dramatic poem by William Mason, Gray's friend.
This is Shelley's poem (not a sonnet) which Lamb liked:—
LINES TO A REVIEWER
Alas! good friend, what profit can you see
In hating such an hateless thing as me?
There is no sport in hate, where all the rage
Is on one side. In vain would you assuage
Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,
In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile
Your heart by some faint sympathy of hate.
Oh conquer what you cannot satiate!
For to your passion I am far more coy
Then ever yet was coldest maid or boy
In winter-noon. Of your antipathy
If I am the Narcissus, you are free
To pine into a sound with hating me.
Hazlitt writes of Shelley in his essay "On Paradox and Commonplace" in Table Talk; but he does not make this remark there. Perhaps he said it in conversation.
"The next Number." The "futile Effort" was "Blakesmoor in H——shire" in the London Magazine for September, 1824.
Here should come a note from Lamb to Cary, August 19, 1824, in which Lamb thanks him for his translation of The Birds of Aristophanes and accepts an invitation to dine.]
LETTER 352
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[Dated at end: September 30, 1824.]
Little Book! surnam'd of White;
Clean, as yet, and fair to sight;
Keep thy attribution right,
Never disproportion'd scrawl;
Ugly blot, that's worse than all;
On thy maiden clearness fall.
In each Letter, here design'd,
Let the Reader emblem'd find
Neatness of the Owner's mind.
Gilded margins count a sin;
Let thy leaves attraction win
By thy Golden Rules within:
Sayings, fetch'd from Sages old;
Saws, which Holy Writ unfold,
Worthy to be writ in Gold:
Lighter Fancies not excluding;
Blameless wit, with nothing rude in,
Sometimes mildly interluding
Amid strains of graver measure:—
Virtue's self hath oft her pleasure
In sweet Muses' groves of leisure.
Riddles dark, perplexing sense;
Darker meanings of offence;
What but shades, be banish'd hence.
Whitest Thoughts, in whitest dress—
Candid Meanings—best express
Mind of quiet Quakeress.
Dear B.B.—"I am ill at these numbers;" but if the above be not too mean to have a place in thy Daughter's Sanctum, take them with pleasure. I assume that her Name is Hannah, because it is a pretty scriptural cognomen. I began on another sheet of paper, and just as I had penn'd the second line of Stanza 2 an ugly Blot [here is a blot] as big as this, fell, to illustrate my counsel.—I am sadly given to blot, and modern blotting-paper gives no redress; it only smears and makes it worse, as for example [here is a smear]. The only remedy is scratching out, which gives it a Clerkish look. The most innocent blots are made with red ink, and are rather ornamental. [Here are two or three blots in red ink.] Marry, they are not always to be distinguished from the effusions of a cut finger.
Well, I hope and trust thy Tick doleru, or however you spell it, is vanished, for I have frightful impressions of that Tick, and do altogether hate it, as an unpaid score, or the Tick of a Death Watch. I take it to be a species of Vitus's dance (I omit the Sanctity, writing to "one of the men called Friends"). I knew a young Lady who could dance no other, she danced thro' life, and very queer and fantastic were her steps. Heaven bless thee from such measures, and keep thee from the Foul Fiend, who delights to lead after False Fires in the night, Flibbertigibit, that gives the web and the pin &c. I forget what else.—
From my den, as Bunyan has it, 30 Sep. 24. C.L.
[The verses were for the album of Barton's daughter, Lucy (afterwards Mrs. Edward FitzGerald). Lucy was her only name. Lamb afterwards printed them in his Album Verses, 1830.]