Vincent Novello, wishes to shake hands with you. Make him play you a
tune. He is a damn'd fine musician, and what is better, a good man and
true. He will tell you how glad we should be to have Mrs. Dyer and you
here for a few days. Our young friend, Miss Isola, has been here
holydaymaking, but leaves us tomorrow.
Yours Ever CH. LAMB.
Enfield.
[_Added in a feminine hand_:] Emma's love to Mr. and Mrs. Dyer.
[The date of this note is pure conjecture on my part, but is
unimportant. Novello had become Charles Clarke's father-in-law in 1828,
and Emma Isola, who was now teaching the children of a clergyman named
Williams, at Fornham, in Suffolk, spent her Christmas holidays with the
Lambs that year.
Here, perhaps, should come an undated letter from Lamb to Louisa Martin.
Lamb begins "Dear Monkey," and refers to his "niece," Mrs. Dowden, and
some business which she requires him to transact, Mrs. Dowden being Mrs.
John Lamb's daughter-in-law. Lamb describes himself as "a sick cat that
loves to be alone on housetops or at cellar bottoms."]
LETTER 471
CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER
[19th Jan., 1829.]
My dear Procter,--I am ashamed to have not taken the drift of your
pleasant letter, which I find to have been pure invention. But jokes are
not suspected in Boeotian Enfield. We are plain people; and our talk is
of corn, and cattle, and Waltham markets. Besides, I was a little out of
sorts when I received it. The fact is, I am involved in a case which has
fretted me to death; and I have no reliance, except on you, to extricate
me. I am sure you will give me your best legal advice, having no
professional friend besides but Robinson and Talfourd, with neither of
whom at present I am on the best terms. My brother's widow left a will,
made during the lifetime of my brother, in which I am named sole
executor, by which she bequeaths forty acres of arable property, which
it seems she held under Covert Baron, unknown to my brother, to the
heirs of the body of Elizabeth Dowden, her married daughter by a first
husband, in fee-simple, recoverable by fine--_invested_ property, mind;
for there is the difficulty--subject to leet and quit-rent; in short,
worded in the most guarded terms, to shut out the property from Isaac
Dowden, the husband. Intelligence has just come of the death of this
person in India, where he made a will, entailing this property (which
seem'd entangled enough already) to the heirs of his body, that should
not be born of his wife; for it seems by the law in India, natural
children can recover. They have put the cause into Exchequer process,
here removed by Certiorari from the native Courts; and the question is,
whether I should, as executor, try the cause here, or again re-remove it
to the Supreme Sessions at Bangalore? (which I understand I can, or
plead a hearing before the Privy Council here). As it involves all the
little property of Elizabeth Dowden, I am anxious to take the fittest
steps, and what may be least expensive. Pray assist me, for the case is
so embarrassed, that it deprives me of sleep and appetite. M. Burney
thinks there is a case like it in Chapt. 170, sect. 5, in Fearne's
Contingent Remainders. Pray read it over with him dispassionately, and
let me have the result. The complexity lies in the questionable power of
the husband to alienate....
I had another favour to beg, which is the beggarliest of beggings.
A few lines of verse for a young friend's Album (six will be enough). M.
Burney will tell you who she is I want 'em for. A girl of gold. Six
lines--make 'em eight--signed Barry C----. They need not be very good,
as I chiefly want 'em as a foil to mine. But I shall be seriously
obliged by any refuse scrap. We are in the last ages of the world, when
St. Paul prophesied that women should be "headstrong, lovers of their
own wills, having Albums." I fled hither to escape the Albumean
persecution, and had not been in my new house twenty-four hours, when
the daughter of the next house came in with a friend's Album to beg a
contribution, and the following day intimated she had one of her own.
Two more have sprung up since. If I take the wings of the morning and
fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will Albums be. New
Holland has Albums. But the age is to be complied with. M.B. will tell
you the sort of girl I request the ten lines for. Somewhat of a pensive
cast, what you admire. The lines may come before the Law question, as
that can not be determined before Hilary Term, and I wish your
deliberate judgment on that. The other may be flimsy and superficial.
And if you have not burnt your returned letter, pray re-send it me, as a
monumental token of my stupidity. 'Twas a little unthinking of you to
touch upon a sore subject. Why, by dabbling in those accursed Albums, I
have become a byword of infamy all over the kingdom. I have sicken'd
decent women for asking me to write in Albums. There be "dark jests"
abroad, Master Cornwall; and some riddles may live to be clear'd up. And
'tis not every saddle is put on the right steed; and forgeries and false
Gospels are not peculiar to the Age following the Apostles. And some
tubs don't stand on their right bottoms. Which is all I wish to say in
these ticklish Times--and so your Servant,
CHS. LAMB.
[We do not know the nature of the "bite" that Procter had put upon Lamb;
but Lamb quickly retaliated with the first paragraph of this letter,
which is mainly invention. In his _Old Acquaintance_ Mr. Fields wrote:
"He [Procter] told me that the law question raised in this epistle was a
sheer fabrication of Lamb's, gotten up by him to puzzle his young
correspondent, the conveyancer. The coolness referred to between himself
and Robinson and Talfourd, Procter said, was also a fiction invented by
Lamb to carry out his legal mystification."
At the end of the first paragraph came some words in another hand: "_in
usum_ enfeoffments whereof he was only collaterally seized, &c.,"
beneath which Lamb wrote: "The above is some of M. Burney's memoranda
which he has left me, and you may cut out and give him."
Procter's verses for Emma Isola's album I have not seen, but Canon
Ainger says that they refer to "Isola Bella, whom all poets love," the
island in Lago di Maggiore.
This is a list of the contents of Emma Isola's Album, all autographs
(from Quaritch's catalogue, September, 1886):--
CHARLES LAMB. "What is an Album?" a poem addressed to
Miss Emma Isola.
"To Emma on her Twenty-first Birthday," May 25, 1830.
"Harmony in Unlikeness." Without date.
JOHN KEATS. "To my Brother," a sonnet on the birthday of his
brother Tom, dated Nov. 18 (? 1814 or 1815).
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. "She dwelt among the untrodden
ways," three verses of his poem on Lucy, copied in his
own hand on March 18, 1837.
"Blessings be with them, and enduring praise," five lines of
a sonnet dated Rydal, 1838.
ALFRED TENNYSON. "When Lazarus left his charnel-cave," four
stanzas, undated.
THOMAS MOORE. "Woman gleans but sorrow," and note to
Moxon, June, 1844.
LEIGH HUNT. "Apollo's Autograph," from an unpublished poem
called "The Feast of the Violets." Undated, _circa_ 1838.
THOMAS HOOD. "Dreams," a prose fragment, without date, _circa_
1840.
JAMES HOGG. "I'm a' gaen wrang," a song by the Ettrick Shepherd,
_circa_ 1830.
JOANNA BAILLIE. "Up! quit thy bower," a song, undated, _circa_
1830.
ROBERT SOUTHEY. Epitaph on himself, in verse, Feb. 18, 1837.
THOMAS CAMPBELL. "Victoria's sceptre o'er the waves," _circa_
1837.
ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. "The Pirate's Song," _circa_ 1838.
CHARLES DIBDIN. "An Album's like the Dream of Hope," _circa_
1827.
BERNARD BARTON. "To Emma," with a note by Charles Lamb
at foot, 1827.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. "To Emma Isola," _circa_ 1827.
BARRY CORNWALL. "To the Spirit of Italy," _circa_ 1827.
SAMUEL ROGERS. Two letters, and a poem, "My Last," 1829-36.
FREDERICK LOCKER (afterwards Locker-Lampson). A quatrain,
dated July, 1873.
George Dyer, J.B. Dibdin, George Darley, Matilda Betham, H.F.
Cary, Mrs. Piozzi, Edward Moxon, T.N. Talfourd, are
the other writers.]
LETTER 472
CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER
Jan. 22nd, 1829.
Don't trouble yourself about the verses. Take 'em coolly as they come.
Any day between this and Midsummer will do. Ten lines the extreme. There
is no mystery in my incognita. She has often seen you, though you may
not have observed a silent brown girl, who for the last twelve years has
run wild about our house in her Christmas holidays. She is Italian by
name and extraction. Ten lines about the blue sky of her country will
do, as it's her foible to be proud of it. But they must not be over
courtly or Lady-fied as she is with a Lady who says to her "go and she
goeth; come and she cometh." Item, I have made her a tolerable Latinist.
The verses should be moral too, as for a Clergyman's family. She is
called Emma Isola. I approve heartily of your turning your four vols.
into a lesser compass. 'Twill Sybillise the gold left. I shall, I think,
be in town in a few weeks, when I will assuredly see you. I will put in
here loves to Mrs. Procter and the Anti-Capulets, because Mary tells me
I omitted them in my last. I like to see my friends here. I have put my
lawsuit into the hands of an Enfield practitioner--a plain man, who
seems perfectly to understand it, and gives me hopes of a favourable
result.
Rumour tells us that Miss Holcroft is married; though the varlet has not
had the grace to make any communication to us on the subject. Who is
Badman, or Bed'em? Have I seen him at Montacute's? I hear he is a great
chymist. I am sometimes chymical myself. A thought strikes me with
horror. Pray heaven he may not have done it for the sake of trying
chymical experiments upon her,--young female subjects are so scarce!
Louisa would make a capital shot. An't you glad about Burke's case? We
may set off the Scotch murders against the Scotch novels--Hare, the
Great Un-hanged.
Martin Burney is richly worth your knowing. He is on the top scale of my
friendship ladder, on which an angel or two is still climbing, and some,
alas! descending. I am out of the literary world at present. Pray, is
there anything new from the admired pen of the author of the _Pleasures
of Hope_? Has Mrs. He-mans (double masculine) done anything pretty
lately? Why sleeps the lyre of Hervey, and of Alaric Watts? Is the muse
of L.E.L. silent? Did you see a sonnet of mine in Blackwood's last?
Curious construction! _Elaborata facilitas_! And now I'll tell. 'Twas
written for the "_Gem_;" but the editors declined it, on the plea that
it would _shock all mothers_; so they published "The Widow" instead. I
am born out of time. I have no conjecture about what the present world
calls delicacy. I thought "Rosamund Gray" was a pretty modest thing.
Hessey assures me that the world would not bear it. I have lived to grow
into an indecent character. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed,
"Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!"
_Erratum_ in sonnet:--Last line but something, for _tender_, read
_tend_. The Scotch do not know our law terms; but I find some remains of
honest, plain, old writing lurking there still. They were not so
mealy-mouthed as to refuse my verses. Maybe, 'tis their oatmeal.
Blackwood sent me £20 for the drama. Somebody cheated me out of it next
day; and my new pair of breeches, just sent home, cracking at first
putting on, I exclaimed, in my wrath, "All tailors are cheats, and all
men are tailors." Then I was better. [_Rest lost_.]
["Your four vols." Procter's poetical works, in three volumes, were
published in 1822. Since then he had issued _The Flood of Thessaly_,
1823. He was perhaps meditating a new one-volume selection.
"Anti-Capulets"--the Basil Montagus (Montacutes).
"Badman." Louisa Holcroft married Carlyle's friend Badams, a
manufacturer and scientific experimentalist of Birmingham, with whom the
philosopher spent some weeks in 1827 in attempting a cure for dyspepsia
(see the _Early Recollections_).
"Burke's case." William Burke and William Hare, the body-snatchers and
murderers of Edinburgh, who killed persons to sell their corpses to
Knox's school of anatomy. Burke was hanged a week later than this
letter, on January 28. Hare turned King's evidence and disappeared. A
"shot" was a subject in these men's vocabulary. The author of the
Waverley novels--the Great Unknown-- had, of course, become known long
before this.
"M.B."--Martin Burney. In 1818 Lamb had dedicated the prose volume of
his _Works_ to Burney, in a sonnet ending with the lines:--
Free from self-seeking, envy, low design,
I have not found a whiter soul than thine.
Hervey was Thomas Kibble Hervey (1799-1859), a great album poet.
"A sonnet of mine in Blackwood"--in the number for January, 1829 (see
below).
"Hessey"--of the firm of Taylor & Hessey, the late publishers of the
_London Magazine_.
Another letter from Lamb to Procter, repeating the request for verses,
was referred to by Canon Ainger in the preface to his edition of the
correspondence. Canon Ainger printed a delightful passage. It is
disappointing not to find it among the letters proper in his latest
edition.
Here (had I permission from its American owner to print it, which I have
not) I should place Lamb's instructions as to playing whist drawn up for
Mrs. Badams' use and as an introduction to Captain Burney's treatise on
the game. It is a very interesting document and England has never seen
it yet.
The Boston Bibliophile edition also gives a letter from Lamb to Badams
apologising for his heatedness yesterday and explaining it by saying
that he had been for some hours dissuading a friend from settling at
Enfield "which friend would have attracted down crowds of literary men,
which men would have driven me wild."]
LETTER 473
CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP
Jan. 28, 1829.
Dear Allsop--Old Star is setting. Take him and cut him into Little
Stars. Nevertheless the extinction of the greater light is not by the
lesser light (Stella, or Mrs. Star) apprehended so nigh, but that she
will be thankful if you can let young Scintillation (Master Star)
twinkle down by the coach on Sunday, to catch the last glimmer of the
decaying parental light. No news is good news; so we conclude Mrs. A.
and little a are doing well. Our kindest loves, C.L.
[I cannot explain the mystery of these Stars.]
LETTER 474
CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER
[? Jan. 29th, 1829.]
When Miss Ouldcroft (who is now Mrs. Beddome, and Bed--dom'd to her!)
was at Enfield, which she was in summertime, and owed her health to its
sun and genial influences, she wisited (with young lady-like
impertinence) a poor man's cottage that had a pretty baby (O the
yearnling!), and gave it fine caps and sweetmeats. On a day, broke into
the parlour our two maids uproarious. "O ma'am, who do you think Miss
Ouldcroft (they pronounce it Holcroft) has been working a cap for?" "A
child," answered Mary, in true Shandean female simplicity. "It's the
man's child as was taken up for sheep-stealing." Miss Ouldcroft was
staggered, and would have cut the connection; but by main force I made
her go and take her leave of her _protégée_ (which I only spell with a g
because I can't make a pretty j). I thought, if she went no more, the
Abactor or Abactor's wife (vide Ainsworth) would suppose she had heard
something; and I have delicacy for a sheep-stealer. The overseers
actually overhauled a mutton-pie at the baker's (his first, last, and
only hope of mutton-pie), which he never came to eat, and thence
inferred his guilt. _Per occasionem cujus_ I framed the sonnet; observe
its elaborate construction. I was four days about it.
THE GYPSY'S MALISON
Suck, baby, suck, Mother's love grows by giving,
Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting;
Black Manhood comes, when riotous guilty living
Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting.
Kiss, baby, kiss, Mother's lips shine by kisses,
Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings;
Black Manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses
Tend thee the kiss that poisons 'mid caressings.
Hang, baby, hang, mother's love loves such forces,
Choke the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging;
Black Manhood comes, when violent lawless courses
Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging.
So sang a wither'd Sibyl energetical,
And bann'd the ungiving door with lips prophetical.
Barry, study that sonnet. It is curiously and perversely elaborate. 'Tis
a choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed to the structure
of it. See you? and was this a fourteener to be rejected by a trumpery
annual? forsooth, 'twould shock all mothers; and may all mothers, who
would so be shocked, bed dom'd! as if mothers were such sort of
logicians as to infer the future hanging of _their_ child from the
theoretical hangibility (or capacity of being hanged, if the judge
pleases) of every infant born with a neck on. Oh B.C., my whole heart is
faint, and my whole head is sick (how is it?) at this damned, canting,
unmasculine unbawdy (I had almost said) age! Don't show this to your
child's mother or I shall be Orpheusized, scattered into Hebras. Damn
the King, lords, commons, and _specially_ (as I said on Muswell Hill on
a Sunday when I could get no beer a quarter before one) all Bishops,
Priests and Curates. Vale.
["Ainsworth." Referring to Robert Ainsworth's _Thesaurus_, 1736.
_Abactor_ (see Forcellini), a stealer or driver away of cattle.
Ainsworth gives only _abactus_--to drive away by force.
"The Gypsy's Malison." This is the sonnet in _Blackwood_ for January,
1829.]
LETTER 475
(_Fragment_)
CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER
[No date. Early 1829.]
The comings in of an incipient conveyancer are not adequate to the
receipt of three twopenny post non-paids in a week. Therefore, after
this, I condemn my stub to long and deep silence, or shall awaken it to
write to lords. Lest those raptures in this honeymoon of my
correspondence, which you avow for the gentle person of my Nuncio, after
passing through certain natural grades, as Love, Love and Water, Love
with the chill off, then subsiding to that point which the heroic suitor
of his wedded dame, the noble-spirited Lord Randolph in the play,
declares to be the ambition of his passion, a reciprocation of
"complacent kindness,"--should suddenly plump down (scarce staying to
bait at the mid point of indifference, so hungry it is for distaste) to
a loathing and blank aversion, to the rendering probable such counter
expressions as this,--"Damn that infernal twopenny postman" (words which
make the not yet glutted inamorato "lift up his hands and wonder who can
use them.") While, then, you are not ruined, let me assure thee, O thou
above the painter, and next only under Giraldus Cambrensis, the most
immortal and worthy to be immortal Barry, thy most ingenious and golden
cadences do take my fancy mightily. They are at this identical moment
under the snip and the paste of the fairest hands (bating chilblains) in
Cambridge, soon to be transplanted to Suffolk, to the envy of half of
the young ladies in Bury. But tell me, and tell me truly, gentle Swain,
is that Isola Bella a true spot in geographical denomination, or a
floating Delos in thy brain? Lurks that fair island in verity in the
bosom of Lake Maggiore, or some other with less poetic name, which thou
hast Cornwallized for the occasion? And what if Maggiore itself be but a
coinage of adaptation? Of this pray resolve me immediately, for my
albumess will be catechised on this subject; and how can I prompt her?
Lake Leman, I know, and Lemon Lake (in a punch bowl) I have swum in,
though those lymphs be long since dry. But Maggiore may be in the moon.
Unsphinx this riddle for me, for my shelves have no gazetteer. And
mayest thou never murder thy father-in-law in the Trivia of Lincoln's
Inn New Square Passage, where Searl Street and the Street of Portugal
embrace, nor afterwards make absurd proposals to the Widow M. But I know
you abhor any such notions. Nevertheless so did O-Edipus (as Admiral
Burney used to call him, splitting the diphthong in spite or ignorance)
for that matter. C.L.
["Above the painter"--James Barry, R.A., but I do not understand the
allusion here.
"Giraldus Cambrensis"--the historian, Giraldus de Barri.
Procter's poem for Emma Isola's album, as we have seen, mentions Isola
Bella, the island in Lago de Maggiore. Delos was the floating island
which Neptune fixed in order that Latona might rest there and Apollo and
Diana be born.
Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, was the murderer of his
father. Basil Montagu was Procter's father-in-law. Procter's address was
10 Lincolns Inn, New Square.
At the end of the letter came a passage which for family reasons cannot
be printed.]
LETTER 476
CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER
February 2, 1829.
Facundissime Poeta! quanquam istiusmodi epitheta oratoribus potiùs quam
poetis attinere facilè scio--tamen, facundissime!
Commoratur nobiscum jamdiu, in agro Enfeldiense, scilicet, leguleius
futurus, illustrissimus Martinus Burneius, otium agens, negotia
nominalia, et officinam clientum vacuam, paululum fugiens. Orat,
implorat te--nempe, Martinus--ut si (quòd Dii faciant) fortè fortunâ,
absente ipso, advenerit tardus cliens, eum certiorem feceris per literas
hûc missas. Intelligisne? an me Anglicè et barbarice ad te hominem
perdoctum scribere oportet?
Si status de franco tenemento datur avo, et in codem facto si mediate
vel immediate datur _haeredibus vel haeredibus corporis dicti avi_,
postrema, haec verba sunt Limitations, non Perquisitionis.
Dixi.
CARLAGNULUS.
[Mr. Stephen Gwynn has made the following translation for me:--
"Most eloquent Poet: though I know well such epithet befits orators
rather than poets--and yet, Most eloquent!
"There has been staying with us this while past at our country seat of
Enfield to wit, the future attorney, the illustrious Martin Burney,
taking his leisure, flying for a space from his nominal occupations, and
his office empty of clients. He--that is, Martin--begs and entreats of
you that if (heaven send it so!) by some stroke of fortune, in his
absence there should arrive a belated client, you would inform him by
letter here. Do you understand? or must I write in barbarous English to
a scholar like you?
"If an estate in freehold is given to an ancestor, and if in the same
deed directly or indirectly the gift is made to the heir or heirs of the
body of the said ancestor, these last words have the force of Limitation
not of Purchase.
"I have spoken.
CHARLES LAMB."
The last passage was copied probably direct from some law book of
Burney's, and is unintelligible except to students of law-Latin.]
LETTER 477
CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES COWDEN CLARKE
Edmonton, Feb. 2, 1829.
Dear Cowden,--Your books are as the gushing of streams in a desert. By
the way, you have sent no autobiographies. Your letter seems to imply
you had. Nor do I want any. Cowden, they are of the books which I give
away. What damn'd Unitarian skewer-soul'd things the general biographies
turn out. Rank and Talent you shall have when Mrs. May has done with
'em. Mary likes Mrs. Bedinfield much. For me I read nothing but
Astrea--it has turn'd my brain--I go about with a switch turn'd up at
the end for a crook; and Lambs being too old, the butcher tells me, my
cat follows me in a green ribband. Becky and her cousin are getting
pastoral dresses, and then we shall all four go about Arcadizing. O
cruel Shepherdess! Inconstant yet fair, and more inconstant for being
fair! Her gold ringlets fell in a disorder superior to order!
Come and join us.
I am called the Black Shepherd--you shall be Cowden with the Tuft.
Prosaically, we shall be glad to have you both,--or any two of you--drop
in by surprise some Saturday night. This must go off.
Loves to Vittoria. C.L.
["Rank and Talent"-a novel by W.P. Scargill, 1829.
Mrs. Bedinfield wrote _Longhollow: a Country Tale_, 1829.
"Astrea." Probably the romance by Honoré D'Urfé.