have it on the authority of George Daniel, the antiquary, that with his
removal to Colebrooke Cottage began an interest in horticulture,
particularly in roses.
"Mr. Cary." The Rev. Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844), the translator of
Dante and afterwards, 1826, Assistant-Keeper of the Printed Books in the
British Museum. A regular contributor to the _London Magazine_.]
LETTER 325
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
[Dated at end: Sept. 6 (1823).]
Dear Alsop--I am snugly seated at the cottage; Mary is well but weak,
and comes home on _Monday_; she will soon be strong enough to see her
friends here. In the mean time will you dine with me at 1/2 past four
to-morrow? Ayrton and Mr. Burney are coming.
Colebrook Cottage, left hand side, end of Colebrook Row on
the western brink of the New River, a detach'd whitish house.
No answer is required but come if you can. C. LAMB.
Saturday 6th Sep.
I call'd on you on Sunday. Resp'cts to Mrs. A. & boy.
LETTER 326
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
[P.M. Sept. 9, 1823.]
My dear A.--I am going to ask you to do me the greatest favour which a
man can do to another. I want to make my will, and to leave my property
in trust for my sister. _N.B._ I am not _therefore_ going to die.--Would
it be unpleasant for you to be named for one? The other two I shall beg
the same favor of are Talfourd and Proctor. If you feel reluctant, tell
me, and it sha'n't abate one jot of my friendly feeling toward you.
Yours ever, C. LAMB.
E.I. House, Aug. [_i.e_., Sept.] 9, 1823.
LETTER 327
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
[P.M. September 10, 1823.]
My dear A.--Your kindness in accepting my request no words of mine can
repay. It has made you overflow into some romance which I should have
check'd at another time. I hope it may be in the scheme of Providence
that my sister may go first (if ever so little a precedence), myself
next, and my good Ex'rs survive to remembr us with kindness many years.
God bless you.
I will set Proctor about the will forthwith. C. LAMB.
[Here should come another note to Allsop dated Sept. 16, 1823, saying
that Mary Lamb is still ill at Fulham. Given in the Boston Bibliophile
edition.]
LETTER 328
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
[September, 1823.]
Dear A.--Your Cheese is the best I ever tasted; Mary will tell you so
hereafter. She is at home, but has disappointed me. She has gone back
rather than improved. However, she has sense enough to value the
present, for she is greatly fond of Stilton. Yours is the delicatest
rain-bow-hued melting piece I ever flavoured. Believe me. I took it the
more kindly, following so great a kindness.
Depend upon't, yours shall be one of the first houses we shall present
ourselves at, when we have got our Bill of Health.
Being both yours and Mrs. Allsop's truly. C.L. & M.L.
[Allsop and Procter may have been named as executors of Lamb's will at
one time, but when it came to be proved the executors were Talfourd and
Ryle, a fellow-clerk in the India House.]
LETTER 329
CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON
[P.M. September 17, 1823.]
Dear Sir--I have again been reading your stanzas on Bloomfield, which
are the most appropriate that can be imagined, sweet with Doric
delicacy. I like that
Our more chaste Theocritus--
just hinting at the fault of the Grecian. I love that stanza ending with
Words phrases fashions pass away;
But Truth and nature live through all.
But I shall omit in my own copy the one stanza which alludes to Lord
B.--I suppose. It spoils the sweetness and oneness of the feeling.
Cannot we think of Burns, or Thompson, without sullying the thought with
a reflection out of place upon Lord Rochester? These verses might have
been inscribed upon a tomb; are in fact an epitaph; satire does not look
pretty upon a tombstone. Besides, there is a quotation in it, always bad
in verse; seldom advisable in prose.
I doubt if their having been in a Paper will not prevent T. and H. from
insertion, but I shall have a thing to send in a day or two, and shall
try them. Omitting that stanza, a _very little_ alteration is want'g in
the beginn'g of the next. You see, I use freedom. How happily (I flatter
not!) you have bro't in his subjects; and, (_I suppose_) his favorite
measure, though I am not acquainted with any of his writings but the
Farmer's Boy. He dined with me once, and his manners took me
exceedingly.
I rejoyce that you forgive my long silence. I continue to estimate my
own-roof comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My
garden thrives (I am told) tho' I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny
sallad, and withered carrots. But a garden's a garden anywhere, and
twice a garden in London.
Somehow I cannot relish that word Horkey. Cannot you supply it by
circumlocution, and direct the reader by a note to explain that it means
the Horkey. But Horkey choaks me in the Text. It raises crowds of mean
associations, Hawking and sp-----g, Gauky, Stalky, Maukin. The sound is
every thing, in such dulcet modulations 'specially. I like
Gilbert Meldrum's sterner tones,
without knowing who Gilbert Meldrum is. You have slipt in your rhymes as
if they grew there, so natural-artificially, or artificial-naturally.
There's a vile phrase.
Do you go on with your Quaker Sonnets--[to] have 'em ready with
Southey's Book of the Church? I meditate a letter to S. in the London,
which perhaps will meet the fate of the Sonnet.
Excuse my brevity, for I write painfully at office, liable to 100
callings off. And I can never sit down to an epistle elsewhere. I read
or walk. If you return this letter to the Post Office, I think they will
return 4d, seeing it is but half a one. Believe me tho' entirely yours
C.L.
[Barton's "Verses to the Memory of Bloomfield, the Suffolk Poet" (who
died in August, 1823), were printed in book form in his Poetic Vigils,
1824. This is the stanza that Lamb most liked:--
It is not quaint and local terms
Besprinkled o'er thy rustic lay,
Though well such dialect confirms
Its power unletter'd minds to sway,
It is not _these_ that most display
Thy sweetest charms, thy gentlest thrall,--
Words, phrases, fashions, pass away,
But TRUTH and NATURE live through all.
The stanza referring to Byron was not reprinted, nor was the word
Horkey, which means Harvest Home in Suffolk. Gilbert Meldrum is a
character in one of Bloomfield's _Rural Tales_.
"Quaker Sonnets." Barton did not carry out this project. Southey's _Book
of the Church_ was published in 1824.
"I meditate a letter to S." The "Letter of Elia to Mr. Southey" was
published in the _London Magazine_ for October, 1823.]
LETTER 330
(_Fragment_)
CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES LLOYD
[No date. Autumn, 1823.]
Your lines are not to be understood reading on one leg. They are
_sinuous_, and to be won with wrestling. I assure you in sincerity that
nothing you have done has given me greater satisfaction. Your obscurity,
where you are dark, which is seldom, is that of too much meaning, not
the painful obscurity which no toil of the reader can dissipate; not the
dead vacuum and floundering place in which imagination finds no footing;
it is not the dimness of positive darkness, but of distance; and he that
reads and not discerns must get a better pair of spectacles. I admire
every piece in the collection; I cannot say the first is best; when I do
so, the last read rises up in judgment. To your Mother--to your
Sister--to Mary dead--they are all weighty with thought and tender with
sentiment. Your poetry is like no other:--those cursed Dryads and Pagan
trumperies of modern verse have put me out of conceit of the very name
of poetry. Your verses are as good and as wholesome as prose; and I have
made a sad blunder if I do not leave you with an impression that your
present is rarely valued.
CHARLES LAMB.
[This scrap is in _Selections from the Poems and Letters of Bernard
Barton_, 1849, edited by Edward FitzGerald and Lucy Barton. Lloyd says:
"I had a very ample testimony from C. Lamb to the character of my last
little volume. I will transcribe to you what he says, as it is but a
note, and his manner is always so original, that I am sure the
introduction of the merest trifle from his pen will well compensate for
the absence of anything of mine." The volume was _Poems_, 1823, one of
the chief of which was "Stanzas on the Difficulty with which, in Youth,
we Bring Home to our Habitual Consciousness, the Idea of Death," to
which Lloyd appended the following sentence from Elia's essay on "New
Year's Eve," as motto: "Not childhood alone, but the young man till
thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed,
and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life;
but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June, we
can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December."]
LETTER 331
CHARLES LAMB TO REV. H.F. CARY
India Office, 14th Oct., 1823.
Dear Sir,--If convenient, will you give us house room on Saturday next?
I can sleep anywhere. If another Sunday suit you better, pray let me
know. We were talking of Roast _Shoulder_ of Mutton with onion sauce;
but I scorn to prescribe to the hospitalities of mine host.
With respects to Mrs. C., yours truly, C. LAMB.
LETTER 332
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
[No date. ?Oct., 1823.]
Dear Sir--Mary has got a cold, and the nights are dreadful; but at the
first indication of Spring (_alias_ the first dry weather in Nov'r
early) it is our intention to surprise you early some even'g.
Believe me, most truly yours,
C.L.
The Cottage, Saturday night.
Mary regrets very much Mrs. Allsop's fruitless visit. It made her swear!
She was gone to visit Miss Hutchins'n, whom she found OUT.
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.--