CHARLES LAMB.

It sounds paradoxical, but is not so in a bad sense, to say, that

in every literature of large compass some authors will be found to

rest much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential

_non_-popularity. They are good for the very reason that they

are not in conformity to the current taste. They interest because

to the world they are _not_ interesting. They attract by means

of their repulsion. Not as though it could separately furnish a

reason for loving a book, that the majority of men had found it

repulsive. _Prima facie_, it must suggest some presumption

_against_ a book, that it has failed to gain public attention.

To have roused hostility indeed, to have kindled a feud against its

own principles or its temper, may happen to be a good sign.

_That_ argues power. Hatred may be promising. The deepest

revolutions of mind sometimes begin in hatred. But simply to have

left a reader unimpressed, is in itself a neutral result, from

which the inference is doubtful. Yet even _that_, even simple

failure to impress, may happen at times to be a result from

positive powers in a writer, from special originalities, such as

rarely reflect themselves in the mirror of the ordinary

understanding. It seems little to be perceived, how much the great

scriptural [Endnote: 1] idea of the _worldly_ and the

_unworldly_ is found to emerge in literature as well as in

life. In reality the very same combinations of moral qualities,

infinitely varied, which compose the harsh physiognomy of what we

call worldliness in the living groups of life, must unavoidably

present themselves in books. A library divides into sections of

worldly and unworldly, even as a crowd of men divides into that

same majority and minority. The world has an instinct for

recognizing its own; and recoils from certain qualities when

exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy

as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance

of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired

self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards

grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions

of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at

all less in literature, than it does in the realities of life.

Charles Lamb, if any ever _was_ is amongst the class here

contemplated; he, if any ever _has_, ranks amongst writers

whose works are destined to be forever unpopular, and yet forever

interesting; interesting, moreover, by means of those very

qualities which guarantee their non-popularity. The same qualities

which will be found forbidding to the worldly and the thoughtless,

which will be found insipid to many even amongst robust and

powerful minds, are exactly those which will continue to command a

select audience in every generation. The prose essays, under the

signature of _Elia_, form the most delightful section amongst

Lamb's works. They traverse a peculiar field of observation,

sequestered from general interest; and they are composed in a

spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy

crowd, clamoring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy

itself, the pensiveness chequered by gleams of the fanciful, and

the humor that is touched with cross-lights of pathos, together

with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described,

whether men, or things, or usages, and, in the rear of all this,

the constant recurrence to ancient recollections and to decaying

forms of household life, as things retiring before the tumult of

new and revolutionary generations; these traits in combination

communicate to the papers a grace and strength of originality which

nothing in any literature approaches, whether for degree or kind of

excellence, except the most felicitous papers of Addison, such as

those on Sir Roger de Coverly, and some others in the same vein of

composition. They resemble Addison's papers also in the diction,

which is natural and idiomatic, even to carelessness. They are

equally faithful to the truth of nature; and in this only they

differ remarkably--that the sketches of Elia reflect the stamp and

impress of the writer's own character, whereas in all those of

Addison the personal peculiarities of the delineator (though known

to the reader from the beginning through the account of the club)

are nearly quiescent. Now and then they are recalled into a

momentary notice, but they do not act, or at all modify his

pictures of Sir Roger or Will Wimble. _They_ are slightly and

amiably eccentric; but the Spectator him-self, in describing them,

takes the station of an ordinary observer.

Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely in his

_Elia_, the character of the writer cooperates in an under

current to the effect of the thing written. To understand in the

fullest sense either the gaiety or the tenderness of a particular

passage, you must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the

writer's mind, whether native and original, or impressed gradually

by the accidents of situation; whether simply developed out of

predispositions by the action of life, or violently scorched into

the constitution by some fierce fever of calamity. There is in

modern literature a whole class of writers, though not a large one,

standing within the same category; some marked originality of

character in the writer become a coefficient with what he says to a

common result; you must sympathize with this _personality_ in

the author before you can appreciate the most significant parts of

his views. In most books the writer figures as a mere abstraction,

without sex or age or local station, whom the reader banishes from

his thoughts. What is written seems to proceed from a blank

intellect, not from a man clothed with fleshly peculiarities and

differences. These peculiarities and differences neither do, nor

(generally speaking)_could_ intermingle with the texture of

the thoughts so as to modify their force or their direction. In

such books, and they form the vast majority, there is nothing to be

found or to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (_Sit

venia verbo_!) But, in a small section of books, the objective

in the thought becomes confluent with the subjective in the

thinker--the two forces unite for a joint product; and fully to

enjoy that product, or fully to apprehend either element, both must

be known. It is singular, and worth inquiring into, for the reason

that the Greek and Roman literature had no such books. Timon of

Athens, or Diogenes, one may conceive qualified for this mode of

authorship, had journalism existed to rouse them in those days;

their "articles" would no doubt have been fearfully caustic. But,

as _they_ failed to produce anything, and Lucian in an after

age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose, perhaps we

may pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of writers in the

class described. In the century following _theirs_, came Sir

Thomas Brown, and immediately after _him_ La Fontaine. Then

came Swift, Sterne, with others less distinguished; in Germany,

Hippel, the friend of Kant, Harmann, the obscure; and the greatest

of the whole body--John Paul Fr. Richter. In _him_, from the

strength and determinateness of his nature as well as from the

great extent of his writing, the philosophy of this interaction

between the author as a human agency and his theme as an

intellectual reagency, might best be studied. From _him_ might

be derived the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this

absorption of the universal into the concrete--of the pure

intellect into the human nature of the author. But nowhere could

illustrations be found more interesting--shy, delicate,

evanescent--shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the

colored pencillings on a frosty night from the northern lights,

than in the better parts of Lamb.

To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his character

and temperament should be understood in their coyest and most

wayward features. A capital defect it would be if these could not

be gathered silently from Lamb's works themselves. It would be a

fatal mode of dependency upon an alien and separable accident if

they needed an external commentary. But they do _not_. The

syllables lurk up and down the writings of Lamb which decipher his

eccentric nature. His character lies there dispersed in anagram;

and to any attentive reader the regathering and restoration of the

total word from its scattered parts is inevitable without an

effort. Still it is always a satisfaction in knowing a result, to

know also its _why_ and _how_; and in so far as every

character is likely to be modified by the particular experience,

sad or joyous, through which the life has travelled, it is a good

contribution towards the knowledge of that resulting character as a

whole to have a sketch of that particular experience. What trials

did it impose? What energies did it task? What temptations did it

unfold? These calls upon the moral powers, which in music so

stormy, many a life is doomed to hear, how were they faced? The

character in a capital degree moulds oftentimes the life, but the

life _always_ in a subordinate degree moulds the character.

And the character being in this case of Lamb so much of a key to

the writings, it becomes important that the life should be traced,

however briefly, as a key to the character.

That is _one_ reason for detaining the reader with some slight

record of Lamb's career. Such a record by preference and of right

belongs to a case where the intellectual display, which is the sole

ground of any public interest at all in the man, has been intensely

modified by the _humanities_ and moral _personalities_

distinguishing the subject. We read a Physiology, and need no

information as to the life and conversation of its author; a

meditative poem becomes far better understood by the light of such

information; but a work of genial and at the same time eccentric

sentiment, wandering upon untrodden paths, is barely intelligible

without it. There is a good reason for arresting judgment on the

writer, that the court may receive evidence on the life of the man.

But there is another reason, and, in any other place, a better;

which reason lies in the extraordinary value of the life considered

separately for itself. Logically, it is not allowable to say that

_here;_ and, considering the principal purpose of this paper,

any possible _independent_ value of the life must rank as a

better reason for reporting it. Since, in a case where the original

object is professedly to estimate the writings of a man, whatever

promises to further that object must, merely by that tendency,

have, in relation to that place, a momentary advantage which it

would lose if valued upon a more abstract scale. Liberated from

this casual office of throwing light upon a book--raised to its

grander station of a solemn deposition to the moral capacities of

man in conflict with calamity--viewed as a return made into the

chanceries of heaven--upon an issue directed from that court to try

the amount of power lodged in a poor desolate pair of human

creatures for facing the very anarchy of storms--this obscure life

of the two Lambs, brother and sister, (for the two lives were one

life,) rises into a grandeur that is not paralleled once in a

generation.

Rich, indeed, in moral instruction was the life of Charles Lamb;

and perhaps in one chief result it offers to the thoughtful

observer a lesson of consolation that is awful, and of hope that

ought to be immortal, viz., in the record which it furnishes, that

by meekness of submission, and by earnest conflict with evil, in

the spirit of cheerfulness, it is possible ultimately to disarm or

to blunt the very heaviest of curses--even the curse of lunacy. Had

it been whispered, in hours of infancy, to Lamb, by the angel who

stood by his cradle--"Thou, and the sister that walks by ten years

before thee, shall be through life, each to each, the solitary

fountain of comfort; and except it be from this fountain of mutual

love, except it be as brother and sister, ye shall not taste the

cup of peace on earth!"--here, if there was sorrow in reversion,

there was also consolation.

But what funeral swamps would have instantly ingulfed this

consolation, had some meddling fiend prolonged the revelation, and,

holding up the curtain from the sad future a little longer, had

said scornfully--"Peace on earth! Peace for you two, Charles and

Mary Lamb! What peace is possible under the curse which even now

is gathering against your heads? Is there peace on earth for the

lunatic--peace for the parenticide--peace for the girl that,

without warning, and without time granted for a penitential cry to

heaven, sends her mother to the last audit?" And then, without

treachery, speaking bare truth, this prophet of woe might have

added--"Thou also, thyself, Charles Lamb, thou in thy proper

person, shalt enter the skirts of this dreadful hail-storm; even

thou shalt taste the secrets of lunacy, and enter as a captive its

house of bondage; whilst over thy sister the accursed scorpion

shall hang suspended through life, like Death hanging over the beds

of hospitals, striking at times, but more often threatening to

strike; or withdrawing its instant menaces only to lay bare her

mind more bitterly to the persecutions of a haunted memory!"

Considering the nature of the calamity, in the first place;

considering, in the second place, its life-long duration; and, in

the last place, considering the quality of the resistance by which

it was met, and under what circumstances of humble resources in

money or friends--we have come to the deliberate judgment, that the

whole range of history scarcely presents a more affecting spectacle

of perpetual sorrow, humiliation, or conflict, and that was

supported to the end, (that is, through forty years,) with more

resignation, or with more absolute victory.

Charles Lamb was born in February of the year 1775. His immediate

descent was humble; for his father, though on one particular

occasion civilly described as a "scrivener," was in reality a

domestic servant to Mr. Salt--a bencher (and therefore a barrister

of some standing) in the Inner Temple. John Lamb the father

belonged by birth to Lincoln; from which city, being transferred to

London whilst yet a boy, he entered the service of Mr. Salt without

delay; and apparently from this period throughout his life

continued in this good man's household to support the honorable

relation of a Roman client to his _patronus_, much more than

that of a mercenary servant to a transient and capricious master.

The terms on which he seems to live with the family of the Lambs,

argue a kindness and a liberality of nature on both sides. John

Lamb recommended himself as an attendant by the versatility of his

accomplishments; and Mr. Salt, being a widower without children,

which means in effect an old bachelor, naturally valued that

encyclopaedic range of dexterity which made his house independent

of external aid for every mode of service. To kill one's own mutton

is but an operose way of arriving at a dinner, and often a more

costly way; whereas to combine one's own carpenter, locksmith,

hair-dresser, groom, &c., all in one man's person,--to have a

Robinson Crusoe, up to all emergencies of life, always in waiting,

--is a luxury of the highest class for one who values his ease.

A consultation is held more freely with a man familiar to one's

eye, and more profitably with a man aware of one's peculiar habits.

And another advantage from such an arrangement is, that one gets

any little alteration or repair executed on the spot. To hear is to

obey, and by an inversion of Pope's rule--

"One always _is_, and never _to be_, blest."

People of one sole accomplishment, like the _homo unius libri,

_ are usually within that narrow circle disagreeably perfect,

and therefore apt to be arrogant. People who can do all things,

usually do every one of them ill; and living in a constant effort

to deny this too palpable fact, they become irritably vain. But Mr.

Lamb the elder seems to have been bent on perfection. He did all

things; he did them all well; and yet was neither gloomily

arrogant, nor testily vain. And being conscious apparently that all

mechanic excellencies tend to illiberal results, unless

counteracted by perpetual sacrifices to the muses, he went so far

as to cultivate poetry; he even printed his poems, and were we

possessed of a copy, (which we are _not_, nor probably is the

Vatican,) it would give us pleasure at this point to digress for a

moment, and to cut them up, purely on considerations of respect to

the author's memory. It is hardly to be supposed that they did not

really merit castigation; and we should best show the sincerity of

our respect for Mr. Lamb, senior, in all those cases where we

_could_ conscientiously profess respect by an unlimited

application of the knout in the cases where we could _not_.

The whole family of the Lambs seem to have won from Mr. Salt the

consideration which is granted to humble friends; and from

acquaintances nearer to their own standing, to have won a

tenderness of esteem such as is granted to decayed gentry. Yet

naturally, the social rank of the parents, as people still living,

must have operated disadvantageously for the children. It is hard,

even for the practised philosopher, to distinguish aristocratic

graces of manner, and capacities of delicate feeling, in people

whose very hearth and dress bear witness to the servile humility of

their station. Yet such distinctions as wild gifts of nature,

timidly and half-unconsciously asserted themselves in the

unpretending Lambs. Already in _their_ favor there existed a

silent privilege analogous to the famous one of Lord Kinsale. He,

by special grant from the crown, is allowed, when standing before

the king, to forget that he is not himself a king; the bearer of

that peerage, through all generations, has the privilege of wearing

his hat in the royal presence. By a general though tacit concession

of the same nature, the rising generation of the Lambs, John and

Charles, the two sons, and Mary Lamb, the only daughter, were

permitted to forget that their grandmother had been a housekeeper

for sixty years, and that their father had worn a livery. Charles

Lamb, individually, was so entirely humble, and so careless of

social distinctions, that he has taken pleasure in recurring to

these very facts in the family records amongst the most genial of

his Elia recollections. He only continued to remember, without

shame, and with a peculiar tenderness, these badges of plebeian

rank, when everybody else, amongst the few survivors that could

have known of their existence, had long dismissed them from their

thoughts.

Probably, through Mr. Salt's interest, Charles Lamb, in the autumn

of 1782, when he wanted something more than four months of

completing his eighth year, received a presentation to the

magnificent school of Christ's Hospital. The late Dr. Arnold, when

contrasting the school of his own boyish experience, Winchester,

with Rugby, the school confided to his management, found nothing so

much to regret in the circumstances of the latter as its forlorn

condition with respect to historical traditions. Wherever these

were wanting, and supposing the school of sufficient magnitude, it

occurred to Dr. Arnold that something of a compensatory effect for

impressing the imagination might be obtained by connecting the

school with the nation through the link of annual prizes issuing

from the exchequer. An official basis of national patronage might

prove a substitute for an antiquarian or ancestral basis. Happily

for the great educational foundations of London, none of them is in

the naked condition of Rugby. Westminster, St. Paul's, Merchant

Tailors', the Charter-House, &c., are all crowned with historical

recollections; and Christ's Hospital, besides the original honors

of its foundation, so fitted to a consecrated place in a youthful

imagination--an asylum for boy-students, provided by a

boy-king--innocent, religious, prematurely wise, and prematurely

called away from earth--has also a mode of perpetual connection

with the state. It enjoys, therefore, _both_ of Dr. Arnold's

advantages. Indeed, all the great foundation schools of London,

bearing in their very codes of organization the impress of a double

function--viz., the conservation of sound learning and of pure

religion--wear something of a monastic or cloisteral character in

their aspect and usages, which is peculiarly impressive, and even

pathetic, amidst the uproars of a capital the most colossal and

tumultuous upon earth.

Here Lamb remained until his fifteenth year, which year threw him

on the world, and brought him alongside the golden dawn of the

French Revolution. Here he learned a little elementary Greek, and

of Latin more than a little; for the Latin notes to Mr. Cary (of

Dante celebrity) though brief, are sufficient to reveal a true

sense of what is graceful and idiomatic in Latinity. _We_ say

this, who have studied that subject more than most men. It is not

that Lamb would have found it an easy task to compose a long paper

in Latin--nobody _can,_ find it easy to do what he has no

motive for habitually practising; but a single sentence of Latin

wearing the secret countersign of the "sweet Roman hand,"

ascertains sufficiently that, in reading Latin classics, a man

feels and comprehends their peculiar force or beauty. That is

enough. It is requisite to a man's expansion of mind that he should

make acquaintance with a literature so radically differing from all

modern literatures as is the Latin. It is _not_ requisite that

he should practise Latin composition. Here, therefore, Lamb

obtained in sufficient perfection one priceless accomplishment,

which even singly throws a graceful air of liberality over all the

rest of a man's attainments: having rarely any pecuniary value, it

challenges the more attention to its intellectual value. Here also

Lamb commenced the friendships of his life; and, of all which he

formed, he lost none. Here it was, as the consummation and crown of

his advantages from the time-honored hospital, that he came to know

"Poor S. T. C." [Greek text: ton thaumasiotaton.]

Until 1796, it is probable that he lost sight of Coleridge, who was

then occupied with Cambridge, having been transferred thither as a

"Grecian" from the house of Christ Church. That year, 1796, was a

year of change and fearful calamity for Charles Lamb. On that year

revolved the wheels of his after-life. During the three years

succeeding to his school days, he had held a clerkship in the South

Sea House. In 1795, he was transferred to the India House. As a

junior clerk, he could not receive more than a slender salary; but

even this was important to the support of his parents and sister.

They lived together in lodgings near Holborn; and in the spring of

1796, Miss Lamb, (having previously shown signs of lunacy at

intervals,) in a sudden paroxysm of her disease, seized a knife

from the dinner table, and stabbed her mother, who died upon the

spot. A coroner's inquest easily ascertained the nature of a case

which was transparent in all its circumstances, and never for a

moment indecisive as regarded the medical symptoms. The poor young

lady was transferred to the establishment for lunatics at Hoxton.

She soon recovered, we believe; but her relapses were as sudden as

her recoveries, and she continued through life to revisit, for

periods of uncertain seclusion, this house of woe. This calamity of

his fireside, followed soon after by the death of his father, who

had for some time been in a state of imbecility, determined the

future destiny of Lamb. Apprehending, with the perfect grief of

perfect love, that his sister's fate was sealed for life--viewing

her as his own greatest benefactress, which she really _had_

been through her advantage by ten years of age--yielding with

impassioned readiness to the depth of his fraternal affection, what

at any rate he would have yielded to the sanctities of duty as

interpreted by his own conscience--he resolved forever to resign

all thoughts of marriage with a young lady whom he loved, forever

to abandon all ambitious prospects that might have tempted him into

uncertainties, humbly to content himself with the

_certainties_ of his Indian clerkship, to dedicate himself for

the future to the care of his desolate and prostrate sister, and to

leave the rest to God. These sacrifices he made in no hurry or

tumult, but deliberately, and in religious tranquillity. These

sacrifices were accepted in heaven--and even on this earth they

_had_ their reward. She, for whom he gave up all, in turn gave

up all for _him_. She devoted herself to his comfort. Many

times she returned to the lunatic establishment, but many times she

was restored to illuminate the household hearth for _him_; and

of the happiness which for forty years and more he had, no hour

seemed true that was not derived from her. Hence forwards,

therefore, until he was emancipated by the noble generosity of the

East India Directors, Lamb's time, for nine-and-twenty years, was

given to the India House.

"_O fortunati nimium, sua si bona narint,_" is applicable to

more people than "_agricolae_." Clerks of the India House are

as blind to their own advantages as the blindest of ploughmen. Lamb

was summoned, it is true, through the larger and more genial

section of his life, to the drudgery of a copying clerk--making

confidential entries into mighty folios, on the subject of calicoes

and muslins. By this means, whether he would or not, he became

gradually the author of a great "serial" work, in a frightful

number of volumes, on as dry a department of literature as the

children of the great desert could have suggested. Nobody, he must

have felt, was ever likely to study this great work of his, not

even Dr. Dryasdust. He had written in vain, which is not pleasant

to know. There would be no second edition called for by a

discerning public in Leadenhall Street; not a chance of that. And

consequently the _opera omnia_ of Lamb, drawn up in a hideous

battalion, at the cost of labor so enormous, would be known only to

certain families of spiders in one generation, and of rats in the

next. Such a labor of Sysyphus,--the rolling up a ponderous stone

to the summit of a hill only that it might roll back again by the

gravitation of its own dulness,--seems a bad employment for a man

of genius in his meridian energies. And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps

the collective wisdom of Europe could not have devised for Lamb a

more favorable condition of toil than this very India House

clerkship. His works (his Leadenhall street works) were certainly

not read; popular they _could_ not be, for they were not read

by anybody; but then, to balance _that,_ they were not

reviewed. His folios were of that order, which (in Cowper's words)

"not even critics criticise." Is _that_ nothing? Is it no

happiness to escape the hands of scoundrel reviewers? Many of us

escape being _read;_ the worshipful reviewer does not find

time to read a line of us; but we do not for that reason escape

being criticised, "shown up," and martyred. The list of

_errata_ again, committed by Lamb, was probably of a magnitude

to alarm any possible compositor; and yet these _errata_ will

never be known to mankind. They are dead and buried. They have been

cut off prematurely; and for any effect upon their generation,

might as well never have existed. Then the returns, in a pecuniary

sense, from these folios--how important were _they!_ It is not

common, certainly, to write folios; but neither is it common to

draw a steady income of from 300 _l._ to 400 _l._ per

annum from volumes of any size. This will be admitted; but would it

not have been better to draw the income without the toil? Doubtless

it would always be more agreeable to have the rose without the

thorn. But in the case before us, taken with all its circumstances,

we deny that the toil is truly typified as a thorn; so far from

being a thorn in Lamb's daily life, on the contrary, it was a

second rose ingrafted upon the original rose of the income, that he

had to earn it by a moderate but continued exertion. Holidays, in a

national establishment so great as the India House, and in our too

fervid period, naturally could not be frequent; yet all great

English corporations are gracious masters, and indulgences of this

nature could be obtained on a special application. Not to count

upon these accidents of favor, we find that the regular toil of

those in Lamb's situation, began at ten in the morning and ended as

the clock struck four in the afternoon. Six hours composed the

daily contribution of labor, that is precisely one fourth part of

the total day. Only that, as Sunday was exempted, the rigorous

expression of the quota was one fourth of six-sevenths, which makes

sixty twenty-eighths and not six twenty-fourths of the total time.

Less toil than this would hardly have availed to deepen the sense

of value in that large part of the time still remaining disposable.

Had there been any resumption whatever of labor in the evening,

though but for half an hour, that one encroachment upon the broad

continuous area of the eighteen free hours would have killed the

tranquillity of the whole day, by _sowing_ it (so to speak)

with intermitting anxieties--anxieties that, like tides, would

still be rising and falling. Whereas now, at the early hour of

four, when daylight is yet lingering in the air, even at the dead

of winter, in the latitude of London, and when the _enjoying_

section of the day is barely commencing, everything is left which a

man would care to retain. A mere dilettante or amateur student,

having no mercenary interest concerned, would, upon a refinement of

luxury--would, upon choice, give up so much time to study, were it

only to sharpen the value of what remained for pleasure. And thus

the only difference between the scheme of the India House

distributing his time for Lamb, and the scheme of a wise voluptuary

distributing his time for himself, lay, not in the _amount_ of

time deducted from enjoyment, but in the particular mode of

appropriating that deduction. An _intellectual_ appropriation

of the time, though casually fatiguing, must have pleasures of its

own; pleasures denied to a task so mechanic and so monotonous as

that of reiterating endless records of sales or consignments not

_essentially_ varying from each other. True; it is pleasanter

to pursue an intellectual study than to make entries in a ledger.

But even an intellectual toil is toil; few people can support it

for more than six hours in a day. And the only question, therefore,

after all, is, at what period of the day a man would prefer taking

this pleasure of study. Now, upon that point, as regards the case

of Lamb, there is no opening for doubt. He, amongst his _Popular

Fallacies_, admirably illustrates the necessity of evening and

artificial lights to the prosperity of studies. After exposing,

with the perfection of fun, the savage unsociality of those elder

ancestors who lived (if life it was) before lamp-light was

invented, showing that "jokes came in with candles," since "what

repartees could have passed" when people were "grumbling at one

another in the dark," and "when you must have felt about for a

smile, and handled a neighbor's cheek to be sure that he understood

it?"--he goes on to say," This accounts for the seriousness of the

elder poetry, "viz., because they had no candle-light. Even eating

he objects to as a very imperfect thing in the dark; you are not

convinced that a dish tastes as it should do by the promise of its

name, if you dine in the twilight without candles. Seeing is

believing." The senses absolutely give and take reciprocally. "The

sight guarantees the taste. For instance," Can you tell pork from

veal in the dark, or distinguish Sherries from pure Malaga? "To all

enjoyments whatsoever candles are indispensable as an adjunct; but,

as to _reading_," there is, "says Lamb," absolutely no such

thing but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at

noon-day in gardens, but it was labor thrown away. It is a mockery,

all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem ever

owed its birth to the sun's light. The mild internal light, that

reveals the fine shapings of poetry, like fires on the domestic

hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Milton's morning hymn in

Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight; and

Taylor's rich description of a sunrise smells decidedly of the

taper. "This view of evening and candle-light as involved in

literature may seem no more than a pleasant extravaganza; and no

doubt it is in the nature of such gayeties to travel a little into

exaggeration, but substantially it is certain that Lamb's feelings

pointed habitually in the direction here indicated. His literary

studies, whether taking the color of tasks or diversions, courted

the aid of evening, which, by means of physical weariness, produces

a more luxurious state of repose than belong to the labor hours of

day, and courted the aid of lamp-light, which, as Lord Bacon

remarked, gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and pleasures, such

as would be vainly sought from the homeliness of day-light. The

hours, therefore, which were withdrawn from his own control by the

India House, happened to be exactly that part of the day which Lamb

least valued, and could least have turned to account.

The account given of Lamb's friends, of those whom he endeavored to

love because he admired them, or to esteem intellectually because

he loved them personally, is too much colored for general

acquiescence by Sergeant Talfourd's own early prepossessions. It is

natural that an intellectual man like the Sergeant, personally made

known in youth to people, whom from childhood he had regarded as

powers in the ideal world, and in some instances as representing

the eternities of human speculation, since their names had perhaps

dawned upon his mind in concurrence with the very earliest

suggestion of topics which they had treated, should overrate their

intrinsic grandeur. Hazlitt accordingly is styled "The great

thinker." But had he been such potentially, there was an absolute

bar to his achievement of that station in act and consummation. No

man _can_ be a great thinker in our days upon large and

elaborate questions without being also a great student. To think

profoundly, it is indispensable that a man should have read down to

his own starting point, and have read as a collating student to the

particular stage at which he himself takes up the subject. At this

moment, for instance, how could geology be treated otherwise than

childishly by one who should rely upon the encyclopaedias of 1800?

or comparative physiology by the most ingenious of men unacquainted

with Marshall Hall, and with the apocalyptic glimpses of secrets

unfolding under the hands of Professor Owen? In such a condition of

undisciplined thinking, the ablest man thinks to no purpose. He

lingers upon parts of the inquiry that have lost the importance

which once they had, under imperfect charts of the subject; he

wastes his strength upon problems that have become obsolete; he

loses his way in paths that are not in the line of direction upon

which the improved speculation is moving; or he gives narrow

conjectural solutions of difficulties that have long since received

sure and comprehensive ones. It is as if a man should in these days

attempt to colonize, and yet, through inertia or through ignorance,

should leave behind him all modern resources of chemistry, of

chemical agriculture, or of steam-power. Hazlitt had read nothing.

Unacquainted with Grecian philosophy, with Scholastic philosophy,

and with the recomposition of these philosophies in the looms of

Germany during the last sixty and odd years, trusting merely to the

unrestrained instincts of keen mother-wit--whence should Hazlitt

have had the materials for great thinking? It is through the

collation of many abortive voyages to polar regions that a man

gains his first chance of entering the polar basin, or of running

ahead on the true line of approach to it. The very reason for

Hazlitt's defect in eloquence as a lecturer, is sufficient also as

a reason why he could not have been a comprehensive thinker. "He

was not eloquent," says the Sergeant, "in the true sense of the

term." But why? Because it seems "his thoughts were too weighty to

be moved along by the shallow stream of feeling which an evening's

excitement can rouse,"--an explanation which leaves us in doubt

whether Hazlitt forfeited his chance of eloquence by accommodating

himself to this evening's excitement, or by gloomily resisting it.

Our own explanation is different, Hazlitt was not eloquent, because

he was discontinuous. No man can he eloquent whose thoughts are

abrupt, insulated, capricious, and (to borrow an impressive word

from Coleridge) non-sequacious. Eloquence resides not in separate

or fractional ideas, but in the relations of manifold ideas, and in

the mode of their evolution from each other. It is not indeed

enough that the ideas should be many, and their relations coherent;

the main condition lies in the key of the evolution, in the

_law_ of the succession. The elements are nothing without the

atmosphere that moulds, and the dynamic forces that combine. Now

Hazlitt's brilliancy is seen chiefly in separate splinterings of

phrase or image which throw upon the eye a vitreous scintillation

for a moment, but spread no deep suffusions of color, and

distribute no masses of mighty shadow. A flash, a solitary flash,

and all is gone. Rhetoric, according to its quality, stands in many

degrees of relation to the permanencies of truth; and all rhetoric,

like all flesh, is partly unreal, and the glory of both is

fleeting. Even the mighty rhetoric of Sir Thomas Brown, or Jeremy

Taylor, to whom only it has been granted to open the trumpet-stop

on that great organ of passion, oftentimes leaves behind it the

sense of sadness which belongs to beautiful apparitions starting

out of darkness upon the morbid eye, only to be reclaimed by

darkness in the instant of their birth, or which belongs to

pageantries in the clouds. But if all rhetoric is a mode of

pyrotechny, and all pyrotechnics are by necessity fugacious, yet

even in these frail pomps, there are many degrees of frailty. Some

fireworks require an hour's duration for the expansion of their

glory; others, as if formed from fulminating powder, expire in the

very act of birth. Precisely on that scale of duration and of power

stand the glitterings of rhetoric that are not worked into the

texture, but washed on from the outside. Hazlitt's thoughts were of

the same fractured and discontinuous order as his illustrative

images--seldom or never self-diffusive; and _that_ is a

sufficient argument that he had never cultivated philosophic

thinking.

Not, however, to conceal any part of the truth, we are bound to

acknowledge that Lamb thought otherwise on this point, manifesting

what seemed to us an extravagant admiration of Hazlitt, and perhaps

even in part for that very glitter which we are denouncing--at

least he did so in a conversation with ourselves. But, on the other

hand, as this conversation travelled a little into the tone of a

disputation, and _our_ frost on this point might seem to

justify some undue fervor by way of balance, it is very possible

that Lamb did not speak his absolute and most dispassionate

judgment. And yet again, if he _did_, may we, with all

reverence for Lamb's exquisite genius, have permission to say--that

his own constitution of intellect sinned by this very habit of

discontinuity. It was a habit of mind not unlikely to be cherished

by his habits of life. Amongst these habits was the excess of his

social kindness. He scorned so much to deny his company and his

redundant hospitality to any man who manifested a wish for either

by calling upon him, that he almost seemed to think it a

criminality in himself if, by accident, he really _was_ from

home on your visit, rather than by possibility a negligence in you,

that had not forewarned him of your intention. All his life, from

this and other causes, he must have read in the spirit of one

liable to sudden interruption; like a dragoon, in fact, reading

with one foot in the stirrup, when expecting momentarily a summons

to mount for action. In such situations, reading by snatches, and

by intervals of precarious leisure, people form the habit of

seeking and unduly valuing condensations of the meaning, where in

reality the truth suffers by this short-hand exhibition, or else

they demand too vivid illustrations of the meaning. Lord

Chesterfield himself, so brilliant a man by nature, already

therefore making a morbid estimate of brilliancy, and so hurried

throughout his life as a public man, read under this double

coercion for craving instantaneous effects. At one period, his only

time for reading was in the morning, whilst under the hands of his

hair-dresser; compelled to take the hastiest of flying shots at his

author, naturally he demanded a very conspicuous mark to fire at.

But the author could not, in so brief a space, be always sure to

crowd any very prominent objects on the eye, unless by being

audaciously oracular and peremptory as regarded the sentiment, or

flashy in excess as regarded its expression. "Come now, my friend,"

was Lord Chesterfield's morning adjuration to his author;" come

now, cut it short--don't prose--don't hum and haw. "The author had

doubtless no ambition to enter his name on the honorable and

ancient roll of gentlemen prosers; probably he conceived himself

not at all tainted with the asthmatic infirmity of humming and

hawing; but, as to "cutting it short," how could he be sure of

meeting his lordship's expectations in that point, unless by

dismissing the limitations that might be requisite to fit the idea

for use, or the adjuncts that might be requisite to integrate its

truth, or the final consequences that might involve some deep

_arriere pensee_, which, coming last in the succession, might

oftentimes be calculated to lie deepest on the mind. To be lawfully

and usefully brilliant after this rapid fashion, a man must come

forward as a refresher of old truths, where _his_ suppressions

are supplied by the reader's memory; not as an expounder of new

truths, where oftentimes a dislocated fraction of the true is more

dangerous than the false itself.

To read therefore habitually, by hurried instalments, has this bad

tendency--that it is likely to found a taste for modes of

composition too artificially irritating, and to disturb the

equilibrium of the judgment in relation to the colorings of style.

Lamb, however, whose constitution of mind was even ideally sound in

reference to the natural, the simple, the genuine, might seem of

all men least liable to a taint in this direction. And undoubtedly

he _was_ so, as regarded those modes of beauty which nature

had specially qualified him for apprehending. Else, and in relation

to other modes of beauty, where his sense of the true, and of its

distinction from the spurious, had been an acquired sense, it is

impossible for us to hide from ourselves--that not through habits

only, not through stress of injurious accidents only, but by

original structure and temperament of mind, Lamb had a bias towards

those very defects on which rested the startling characteristics of

style which we have been noticing. He himself, we fear, not bribed

by indulgent feelings to another, not moved by friendship, but by

native tendency, shrank from the continuous, from the sustained,

from the elaborate.

The elaborate, indeed, without which much truth and beauty must

perish in germ, was by name the object of his invectives. The

instances are many, in his own beautiful essays, where he literally

collapses, literally sinks away from openings suddenly offering

themselves to flights of pathos or solemnity in direct prosecution

of his own theme. On any such summons, where an ascending impulse,

and an untired pinion were required, he _refuses_ himself (to

use military language) invariably. The least observing reader of

_Elia_ cannot have failed to notice that the most felicitous

passages always accomplish their circuit in a few sentences. The

gyration within which his sentiment wheels, no matter of what kind

it may be, is always the shortest possible. It does not prolong

itself, and it does not repeat itself. But in fact, other features

in Lamb's mind would have argued this feature by analogy, had we by

accident been left unaware of it directly. It is not by chance, or

without a deep ground in his nature, _common_ to all his

qualities, both affirmative and negative, that Lamb had an

insensibility to music more absolute than can have been often

shared by any human creature, or perhaps than was ever before

acknowledged so candidly. The sense of music,--as a pleasurable

sense, or as any sense at all other than of certain unmeaning and

impertinent differences in respect to high and low, sharp or flat,

--was utterly obliterated as with a sponge by nature herself from

Lamb's organization. It was a corollary, from the same large

_substratum_ in his nature, that Lamb had no sense of the

rhythmical in prose composition. Rhythmus, or pomp of cadence, or

sonorous ascent of clauses, in the structure of sentences, were

effects of art as much thrown away upon him as the voice of the

charmer upon the deaf adder. We ourselves, occupying the very

station of polar opposition to that of Lamb, being as morbidly,

perhaps, in the one excess as he in the other, naturally detected

this omission in Lamb's nature at an early stage of our

acquaintance. Not the fabled Regulus, with his eyelids torn away,

and his uncurtained eye-balls exposed to the noon-tide glare of a

Carthaginian sun, could have shrieked with more anguish of recoil

from torture than we from certain sentences and periods in which

Lamb perceived no fault at all. _Pomp_, in our apprehension,

was an idea of two categories; the pompous might be spurious, but

it might also be genuine. It is well to love the simple--_we_

love it; nor is there any opposition at all between _that_ and

the very glory of pomp. But, as we once put the case to Lamb, if,

as a musician, as the leader of a mighty orchestra, you had this

theme offered to you--"Belshazzar the king gave a great feast to a

thousand of his lords"--or this," And on a certain day, Marcus

Cicero stood up, and in a set speech rendered solemn thanks to

Caius Caesar for Quintus Ligarius pardoned, and for Marcus

Marcellus restored "--surely no man would deny that, in such a

case, simplicity, though in a passive sense not lawfully absent,

must stand aside as totally insufficient for the positive part.

Simplicity might guide, even here, but could not furnish the power;

a rudder it might be, but not an oar or a sail. This, Lamb was

ready to allow; as an intellectual _quiddity_, he recognized

pomp in the character of a privileged thing; he was obliged to do

so; for take away from great ceremonial festivals, such as the

solemn rendering of thanks, the celebration of national

anniversaries, the commemoration of public benefactors, &c., the

element of pomp, and you take away their very meaning and life;

but, whilst allowing a place for it in the rubric of the logician,

it is certain that, _sensuously_, Lamb would not have

sympathized with it, nor have _felt_ its justification in any

concrete instance. We find a difficulty in pursuing this subject,

without greatly exceeding our limits. We pause, therefore, and add

only this one suggestion as partly explanatory of the case. Lamb

had the dramatic intellect and taste, perhaps in perfection; of the

Epic, he had none at all. Here, as happens sometimes to men of

genius preternaturally endowed in one direction, he might be

considered as almost starved. A favorite of nature, so eminent in

some directions, by what right could he complain that her bounties

were not indiscriminate? From this defect in his nature it arose,

that, except by culture and by reflection, Lamb had no genial

appreciation of Milton. The solemn planetary wheelings of the

Paradise Lost were not to his taste. What he _did_ comprehend,

were the motions like those of lightning, the fierce angular

coruscations of that wild agency which comes forward so vividly in

the sudden _peripetteia_, in the revolutionary catastrophe,

and in the tumultuous conflicts, through persons or through

situations, of the tragic drama.

There is another vice in Mr. Hazlitt's mode of composition, viz.,

the habit of trite quotation, too common to have challenged much

notice, were it not for these reasons: 1st, That Sergeant Talfourd

speaks of it in equivocal terms, as a fault perhaps, but as a

"felicitous" fault, "trailing after it a line of golden

associations;" 2dly, because the practice involves a dishonesty. On

occasion of No. 1, we must profess our belief that a more ample

explanation from the Sergeant would have left him in substantial

harmony with ourselves. We cannot conceive the author of Ion, and

the friend of Wordsworth, seriously to countenance that paralytic

"mouth-diarrhoea," (to borrow a phrase of Coleridge's)--that

_fluxe de bouche_(to borrow an earlier phrase of Archbishop

Huet's) which places the reader at the mercy of a man's tritest

remembrances from his most school-boy reading. To have the verbal

memory infested with tags of verse and "cues" of rhyme is in

itself an infirmity as vulgar and as morbid as the stableboy's

habit of whistling slang airs upon the mere mechanical excitement

of a bar or two whistled by some other blockhead in some other

stable. The very stage has grown weary of ridiculing a folly, that

having been long since expelled from decent society has taken

refuge amongst the most imbecile of authors. Was Mr. Hazlitt then

of that class? No; he was a man of great talents, and of capacity

for greater things than he ever attempted, though without any

pretensions of the philosophic kind ascribed to him by the

Sergeant. Meantime the reason for resisting the example and

practice of Hazlitt lies in this--that essentially it is at war

with sincerity, the foundation of all good writing, to express

one's own thoughts by another man's words. This dilemma arises. The

thought is, or it is not, worthy of that emphasis which belongs to

a metrical expression of it. If it is _not_, then we shall be

guilty of a mere folly in pushing into strong relief that which

confessedly cannot support it. If it _is_, then how incredible

that a thought strongly conceived, and bearing about it the impress

of one's own individuality, should naturally, and without

dissimulation or falsehood, bend to another man's expression of it!

Simply to back one's own view by a similar view derived from

another, may be useful; a quotation that repeats one's own

sentiment, but in a varied form, has the grace which belongs to the

_idem in alio_, the same radical idea expressed with a

difference--similarity in dissimilarity; but to throw one's own

thoughts, matter, and form, through alien organs so absolutely as

to make another man one's interpreter for evil and good, is either

to confess a singular laxity of thinking that can so flexibly adapt

itself to any casual form of words, or else to confess that sort of

carelessness about the expression which draws its real origin from

a sense of indifference about the things to be expressed. Utterly

at war this distressing practice is with all simplicity and

earnestness of writing; it argues a state of indolent ease

inconsistent with the pressure and coercion of strong fermenting

thoughts, before we can be at leisure for idle or chance

quotations. But lastly, in reference to No. 2, we must add that the

practice is signally dishonest. It "trails after it a line of

golden associations." Yes, and the burglar, who leaves an

army-tailor's after a midnight visit, trails after him perhaps a

long roll of gold bullion epaulettes which may look pretty by

lamplight. But _that_, in the present condition of moral

philosophy amongst the police, is accounted robbery; and to benefit

too much by quotations is little less. At this moment we have in

our eye a work, at one time not without celebrity, which is one

continued _cento_ of splendid passages from other people. The

natural effect from so much fine writing is, that the reader rises

with the impression of having been engaged upon a most eloquent

work. Meantime the whole is a series of mosaics; a tessellation

made up from borrowed fragments: and first, when the reader's

attention is expressly directed upon the fact, he becomes aware

that the nominal author has contributed nothing more to the book

than a few passages of transition or brief clauses of connection.

In the year 1796, the main incident occurring of any importance for

English literature was the publication by Southey of an epic poem.

This poem, the _Joan of Arc_, was the earliest work of much

pretension amongst all that Southey wrote; and by many degrees it

was the worst. In the four great narrative poems of his later

years, there is a combination of two striking qualities, viz., a

peculiar command over the _visually_ splendid, connected with

a deep-toned grandeur of moral pathos. Especially we find this

union in the _Thalaba_ and the _Roderick_; but in the

_Joan of Arc_ we miss it. What splendor there is for the fancy

and the eye belongs chiefly to the Vision, contributed by

Coleridge, and this was subsequently withdrawn. The fault lay in

Southey's political relations at that era; his sympathy with the

French Revolution in its earlier stages had been boundless; in all

respects it was a noble sympathy, fading only as the gorgeous

coloring faded from the emblazonries of that awful event, drooping

only when the promises of that golden dawn sickened under

stationary eclipse. In 1796, Southey was yet under the tyranny of

his own earliest fascination: in _his_ eyes the Revolution had

suffered a momentary blight from refluxes of panic; but blight of

some kind is incident to every harvest on which human hopes are

suspended. Bad auguries were also ascending from the unchaining of

martial instincts. But that the Revolution, having ploughed its way

through unparalleled storms, was preparing to face other storms,

did but quicken the apprehensiveness of his love--did but quicken

the duty of giving utterance to this love. Hence came the rapid

composition of the poem, which cost less time in writing than in

printing. Hence, also, came the choice of his heroine. What he

needed in his central character was, a heart with a capacity for

the wrath of Hebrew prophets applied to ancient abuses, and for

evangelic pity applied to the sufferings of nations. This heart,

with this double capacity--where should he seek it? A French heart

it must be, or how should it follow with its sympathies a French

movement? _There_ lay Southey's reason for adopting the Maid

of Orleans as the depositary of hopes and aspirations on behalf of

France as fervid as his own. In choosing this heroine, so

inadequately known at that time, Southey testified at least his own

nobility of feeling; [Endnote: 3] but in executing his choice, he

and his friends overlooked two faults fatal to his purpose. One was

this: sympathy with the French Revolution meant sympathy with the

opening prospects of man--meant sympathy with the Pariah of every

clime--with all that suffered social wrong, or saddened in hopeless

bondage.

That was the movement at work in the French Revolution. But the

movement of Joanne d'Arc took a different direction. In her day

also, it is true, the human heart had yearned after the same vast

enfranchisement for the children of labor as afterwards worked in

the great vision of the French Revolution. In her days also, and

shortly before them, the human hand had sought by bloody acts to

realize this dream of the heart. And in her childhood, Joanna had

not been insensible to these premature motions upon a path too

bloody and too dark to be safe. But this view of human misery had

been utterly absorbed to _her_ by the special misery then

desolating France. The lilies of France had been trampled under

foot by the conquering stranger. Within fifty years, in three

pitched battles that resounded to the ends of the earth, the

chivalry of France had been exterminated. Her oriflamme had been

dragged through the dust. The eldest son of Baptism had been

prostrated. The daughter of France had been surrendered on coercion

as a bride to her English conqueror. The child of that marriage, so

ignominious to the land, was King of France by the consent of

Christendom; that child's uncle domineered as regent of France; and

that child's armies were in military possession of the land. But

were they undisputed masters? No; and there precisely lay the

sorrow of the time. Under a perfect conquest there would have been

repose; whereas the presence of the English armies did but furnish

a plea, masking itself in patriotism, for gatherings everywhere of

lawless marauders; of soldiers that had deserted their banners; and

of robbers by profession. This was the woe of France more even than

the military dishonor. That dishonor had been palliated from the

first by the genealogical pretensions of the English royal family

to the French throne, and these pretensions were strengthened in

the person of the present claimant. But the military desolation of

France, this it was that woke the faith of Joanna in her own

heavenly mission of deliverance. It was the attitude of her

prostrate country, crying night and day for purification from

blood, and not from feudal oppression, that swallowed up the

thoughts of the impassioned girl. But _that_ was not the cry

that uttered itself afterwards in the French Revolution. In

Joanna's days, the first step towards rest for France was by

expulsion of the foreigner. Independence of a foreign yoke,

liberation as between people and people, was the one ransom to be

paid for French honor and peace. _That_ debt settled, there

might come a time for thinking of civil liberties. But this time

was not within the prospects of the poor shepherdess The field--the

area of her sympathies never coincided with that of the

Revolutionary period. It followed therefore, that Southey

_could_ not have raided Joanna (with her condition of feeling)

by any management, into the interpreter of his own. That was the

first error in his poem, and it was irremediable. The second

was--and strangely enough this also escaped notice--that the

heroine of Southey is made to close her career precisely at the

point when its grandeur commences. She believed herself to have a

mission for the deliverance of France; and the great instrument

which she was authorized to use towards this end, was the king,

Charles VII. Him she was to crown. With this coronation, her

triumph, in the plain historical sense, ended. And _there_

ends Southey's poem. But exactly at this point, the grander stage

of her mission commences, viz., the ransom which she, a solitary

girl, paid in her own person for the national deliverance. The

grander half of the story was thus sacrificed, as being irrelevant

to Southey's political object; and yet, after all, the half which

he retained did not at all symbolize that object. It is singular,

indeed, to find a long poem, on an ancient subject, adapting itself

hieroglyphically to a modern purpose; 2dly, to find it failing of

this purpose; and 3dly, if it had not failed, so planned that it

could have succeeded only by a sacrifice of all that was grandest

in the theme.

To these capital oversights, Southey, Coleridge, and Lamb, were all

joint parties; the two first as concerned in the composition, the

last as a frank though friendly reviewer of it in his private

correspondence with Coleridge. It is, however, some palliation of

these oversights, and a very singular fact in itself, that neither

from English authorities nor from French, though the two nations

were equally brought into close connection with the career of that

extraordinary girl, could any adequate view be obtained of her

character and acts. The official records of her trial, apart from

which nothing can be depended upon, were first in the course of

publication from the Paris press during the currency of last year.

First in 1847, about four hundred and sixteen years after her ashes

had been dispersed to the winds, could it be seen distinctly,

through the clouds of fierce partisanships and national prejudices,

what had been the frenzy of the persecution against her, and the

utter desolation of her position; what had been the grandeur of her

conscientious resistance.

Anxious that our readers should see Lamb from as many angles as

possible, we have obtained from an old friend of his a

memorial--slight, but such as the circumstances allowed--of an

evening spent with Charles and Mary Lamb, in the winter of 1821-22.

The record is of the most unambitious character; it pretends to

nothing, as the reader will see, not so much as to a pun, which it

really required some singularity of luck to have missed from

Charles Lamb, who often continued to fire puns, as minute guns, all

through the evening. But the more unpretending this record is, the

more appropriate it becomes by that very fact to the memory of

_him_ who, amongst all authors, was the humblest and least

pretending. We have often thought that the famous epitaph written

for his grave by Piron, the cynical author of _La Metromanie_,

might have come from Lamb, were it not for one objection; Lamb's

benign heart would have recoiled from a sarcasm, however effective,

inscribed upon a grave-stone; or from a jest, however playful, that

tended to a vindictive sneer amongst his own farewell words. We

once translated this Piron epitaph into a kind of rambling Drayton

couplet; and the only point needing explanation is, that, from the

accident of scientific men, Fellows of the Royal Society being

usually very solemn men, with an extra chance, therefore, for being

dull men in conversation, naturally it arose that some wit amongst

our great-grandfathers translated F. R. S. into a short-hand

expression for a Fellow Remarkably Stupid; to which version of the

three letters our English epitaph alludes. The French original of

Piron is this:

"Ci git Piron; qui ne fut rien;

Pas meme acadamicien."

The bitter arrow of the second line was feathered to hit the French

Acadamie, who had declined to elect him a member. Our translation

is this:

"Here lies Piron; who was--nothing; or, if _that_ could be,

was less:

How!--nothing? Yes, nothing; not so much as F. R. S."

But now to our friend's memorandum:

October 6, 1848.

MY DEAR X.--You ask me for some memorial, however trivial, of any

dinner party, supper party, water party, no matter what, that I can

circumstantially recall to recollection, by any features whatever,

puns or repartees, wisdom or wit, connecting it with Charles Lamb.

I grieve to say that my meetings of any sort with Lamb were few,

though spread through a score of years. That sounds odd for one

that loved Lamb so entirely, and so much venerated his character.

But the reason was, that I so seldom visited London, and Lamb so

seldom quitted it. Somewhere about 1810 and 1812 I must have met

Lamb repeatedly at the _Courier Office_ in the Strand; that

is, at Coleridge's, to whom, as an intimate friend, Mr. Stuart (a

proprietor of the paper) gave up for a time the use of some rooms

in the office. Thither, in the London season, (May especially and

June,) resorted Lamb, Godwin, Sir H. Davy, and, once or twice,

Wordsworth, who visited Sir George Beaumont's Leicestershire

residence of Coleorton early in the spring, and then travelled up

to Grosvenor Square with Sir George and Lady Beaumont; _spectatum

veniens, veniens spectetur ut ipse_.

But in these miscellaneous gatherings, Lamb said little, except

when an opening arose for a pun. And how effectual that sort of

small shot was from _him_, I need not say to anybody who

remembers his infirmity of stammering, and his dexterous management

of it for purposes of light and shade. He was often able to train

the roll of stammers into settling upon the words immediately

preceding the effective one; by which means the key-note of the

jest or sarcasm, benefiting by the sudden liberation of his

embargoed voice, was delivered with the force of a pistol shot.

That stammer was worth an annuity to him as an ally of his wit.

Firing under cover of that advantage, he did triple execution; for,

in the first place, the distressing sympathy of the hearers with

_his_ distress of utterance won for him unavoidably the

silence of deep attention; and then, whilst he had us all hoaxed

into this attitude of mute suspense by an appearance of distress

that he perhaps did not really feel, down came a plunging shot into

the very thick of us, with ten times the effect it would else have

had. If his stammering, however, often did him true "yeoman's

service," sometimes it led him into scrapes. Coleridge told me of a

ludicrous embarrassment which it caused him at Hastings. Lamb had

been medically advised to a course of sea-bathing; and accordingly

at the door of his bathing machine, whilst he stood shivering with

cold, two stout fellows laid hold of him, one at each shoulder,

like heraldic supporters; they waited for the word of command from

their principal, who began the following oration to them: "Hear me,

men! Take notice of this--I am to be dipped." What more he would

have said is unknown to land or sea or bathing machines; for having

reached the word dipped, he commenced such a rolling fire of

Di--di--di--di, that when at length he descended _a plomb_

upon the full word _dipped_, the two men, rather tired of the

long suspense, became satisfied that they had reached what lawyers

call the "operative" clause of the sentence; and both exclaiming at

once, "Oh yes, Sir, we're quite aware of _that_," down they

plunged him into the sea. On emerging, Lamb sobbed so much from the

cold, that he found no voice suitable to his indignation; from

necessity he seemed tranquil; and again addressing the men, who

stood respectfully listening, he began thus: "Men! is it possible

to obtain your attention?" "Oh surely, Sir, by all means." "Then

listen: once more I tell you, I am to be di--di--di--"--and then,

with a burst of indignation," dipped, I tell you,"--"Oh decidedly,

Sir," rejoined the men, "decidedly," and down the stammerer went

for the second time. Petrified with cold and wrath, once more Lamb

made a feeble attempt at explanation--" Grant me pa--pa--patience;

is it mum--um--murder you me--me--mean? Again and a--ga--ga--gain,

I tell you, I'm to be di--di--di--dipped," now speaking furiously,

with the voice of an injured man. "Oh yes, Sir," the men replied,

"we know that, we fully understood it," and for the third time down

went Lamb into the sea." Oh limbs of Satan!" he said, on coming up

for the third time, "it's now too late; I tell you that I am--no,

that I _was_--to be di--di--di--dipped only _once_."

Since the rencontres with Lamb at Coleridge's, I had met him once

or twice at literary dinner parties. One of these occurred at the

house of Messrs. Taylor & Hessey, the publishers. I myself was

suffering too much from illness at the time to take any pleasure in

what passed, or to notice it with any vigilance of attention. Lamb,

I remember, as usual, was full of gayety; and as usual he rose too

rapidly to the zenith of his gayety; for he shot upwards like a

rocket, and, as usual, people said he was "tipsy." To me Lamb never

seemed intoxicated, but at most arborily elevated. He never talked

nonsense, which is a great point gained; nor polemically, which is

a greater; for it is a dreadful thing to find a drunken man bent

upon converting oneself; nor sentimentally, which is greatest of

all. You can stand a man's fraternizing with you; or if he swears

an eternal friendship, only once in an hour, you do not think of

calling the police; but once in every three minutes is too much

(period omitted here in original, but there is a double space

following for a new sentence) Lamb did none of these things; he was

always rational, quiet, and gentlemanly in his habits. Nothing

memorable, I am sure, passed upon this occasion, which was in

November of 1821; and yet the dinner was memorable by means of one

fact not discovered until many years later. Amongst the company,

all literary men, sate a murderer, and a murderer of a freezing

class; cool, calculating, wholesale in his operations, and moving

all along under the advantages of unsuspecting domestic confidence

and domestic opportunities. This was Mr. Wainwright, who was

subsequently brought to trial, but not for any of his murders, and

transported for life. The story has been told both by Sergeant

Talfourd, in the second volume of these "Final Memoirs," and

previously by Sir Edward B. Lytton. Both have been much blamed for

the use made of this extraordinary case; but we know not why. In

itself it is a most remarkable case for more reasons than one. It

is remarkable for the appalling revelation which it makes of power

spread through the hands of people not liable to suspicion, for

purposes the most dreadful. It is remarkable also by the contrast

which existed in this case between the murderer's appearance and

the terrific purposes with which he was always dallying. He was a

contributor to a journal in which I also had written several

papers. This formed a shadowy link between us; and, ill as I was, I

looked more attentively at _him_ than at anybody else. Yet

there were several men of wit and genius present, amongst whom Lamb

(as I have said) and Thomas Hood, Hamilton Reynolds, and Allan

Cunningham. But _them_ I already knew, whereas Mr. W. I now

saw for the first time and the last. What interested me about

_him_ was this, the papers which had been pointed out to me as

his, (signed _Janus Weathercock, Vinklooms_, &c.) were written

in a spirit of coxcombry that did not so much disgust as amuse. The

writer could not conceal the ostentatious pleasure which he took in

the luxurious fittings-up of his rooms, in the fancied splendor of

his _bijouterie_, &c. Yet it was easy for a man of any

experience to read two facts in all this idle _etalage_; one

being, that his finery was but of a second-rate order; the other,

that he was a parvenu, not at home even amongst his second-rate

splendor. So far there was nothing to distinguish Mr. W--'s papers

from the papers of other triflers. But in this point there was,

viz., that in his judgments upon the great Italian masters of

painting, Da Vinci, Titian, &c., there seemed a tone of sincerity

and of native sensibility, as in one who spoke from himself, and

was not merely a copier from books. This it was that interested me;

as also his reviews of the chief Italian engravers, Morghen,

Volpato, &c.; not for the manner, which overflowed with levities

and impertinence, but for the substance of his judgments in those

cases where I happened to have had an opportunity of judging for

myself. Here arose also a claim upon Lamb's attention; for Lamb and

his sister had a deep feeling for what was excellent in painting.

Accordingly Lamb paid him a great deal of attention, and continued

to speak of him for years with an interest that seemed

disproportioned to his pretensions. This might be owing in part to

an indirect compliment paid to Miss Lamb in one of W--'s papers;

else his appearance would rather have repelled Lamb; it was

commonplace, and better suited to express the dandyism which

overspread the surface of his manner, than the unaffected

sensibility which apparently lay in his nature. Dandy or not,

however, this man, on account of the schism in his papers, so much

amiable puppyism on one side, so much deep feeling on the other,

(feeling, applied to some of the grandest objects that earth has to

show,) did really move a trifle of interest in me, on a day when I

hated the face of man and woman. Yet again, if I had known this man

for the murderer that even then he was, what sudden loss of

interest, what sudden growth of another interest, would have

changed the face of that party! Trivial creature, that didst carry

thy dreadful eye kindling with perpetual treasons! Dreadful

creature, that didst carry thy trivial eye, mantling with eternal

levity, over the sleeping surfaces of confiding household life--oh,

what a revolution for man wouldst thou have accomplished had thy

deep wickedness prospered! What _was_ that wickedness? In a

few words I will say.

At this time (October, 1848) the whole British island is appalled

by a new chapter in the history of poisoning. Locusta in ancient

Rome, Madame Brinvilliers in Paris, were people of original genius:

not in any new artifice of toxicology, not in the mere management

of poisons, was the audacity of their genius displayed. No; but in

profiting by domestic openings for murder, unsuspected through

their very atrocity. Such an opening was made some years ago by

those who saw the possibility of founding purses for parents upon

the murder of their children. This was done upon a larger scale

than had been suspected, and upon a plausible pretence. To bury a

corpse is costly; but of a hundred children only a few, in the

ordinary course of mortality, will die within a given time. Five

shillings a-piece will produce 25L annually, and _that_ will

bury a considerable number. On this principle arose Infant Burial

Societies. For a few shillings annually, a parent could secure a

funeral for every child. If the child died, a few guineas fell due

to the parent, and the funeral was accomplished without cost of

_his_. But on this arose the suggestion--Why not execute an

insurance of this nature twenty times over? One single insurance

pays for the funeral--the other nineteen are so much clear gain, a

_lucro ponatur_, for the parents. Yes; but on the supposition

that the child died! twenty are no better than one, unless they are

gathered into the garner. Now, if the child died naturally, all was

right; but how, if the child did _not_ die? Why, clearly this,

--the child that _can_ die, and won't die, may be made to die.

There are many ways of doing that; and it is shocking to know,

that, according to recent discoveries, poison is comparatively a

very merciful mode of murder. Six years ago a dreadful

communication was made to the public by a medical man, viz., that

three thousand children were annually burned to death under

circumstances showing too clearly that they had been left by their

mothers with the means and the temptations to set themselves on

fire in her absence. But more shocking, because more lingering, are

the deaths by artificial appliances of wet, cold, hunger, bad diet,

and disturbed sleep, to the frail constitutions of children. By

that machinery it is, and not by poison, that the majority qualify

themselves for claiming the funeral allowances. Here, however,

there occur to any man, on reflection, two eventual restraints on

the extension of this domestic curse:--1st, as there is no pretext

for wanting more than one funeral on account of one child, any

insurances beyond one are in themselves a ground of suspicion. Now,

if any plan were devised for securing the _publication_ of

such insurances, the suspicions would travel as fast as the grounds

for them. 2dly, it occurs, that eventually the evil checks itself,

since a society established on the ordinary rates of mortality

would be ruined when a murderous stimulation was applied to that

rate too extensively. Still it is certain that, for a season, this

atrocity _has_ prospered in manufacturing districts for some

years, and more recently, as judicial investigations have shown, in

one agricultural district of Essex. Now, Mr. W--'s scheme of murder

was, in its outline, the very same, but not applied to the narrow

purpose of obtaining burials from a public fund He persuaded, for

instance, two beautiful young ladies, visitors in his family, to

insure their lives for a short period of two years. This insurance

was repeated in several different offices, until a sum of 18,000

pounds had been secured in the event of their deaths within the two

years. Mr. W--took care that they _should_ die, and very

suddenly, within that period; and then, having previously secured

from his victims an assignment to himself of this claim, he

endeavored to make this assignment available. But the offices,

which had vainly endeavored to extract from the young ladies any

satisfactory account of the reasons for this limited insurance, had

their suspicions at last strongly roused. One office had recently

experienced a case of the same nature, in which also the young lady

had been poisoned by the man in whose behalf she had effected the

insurance; all the offices declined to pay; actions at law arose;

in the course of the investigation which followed, Mr. W--'s

character was fully exposed. Finally, in the midst of the

embarrassments which ensued, he committed forgery, and was

transported.

From this Mr. W--, some few days afterwards, I received an

invitation to a dinner party, expressed in terms that were

obligingly earnest. He mentioned the names of his principal guests,

and amongst them rested most upon those of Lamb and Sir David

Wilkie. From an accident I was unable to attend, and greatly

regretted it. Sir David one might rarely happen to see, except at a

crowded party. But as regarded Lamb, I was sure to see him or to

hear of him again in some way or other within a short time. This

opportunity, in fact, offered itself within a month through the

kindness of the Lambs themselves. They had heard of my being in

solitary lodgings, and insisted on my coming to dine with them,

which more than once I did in the winter of 1821-22.

The mere reception by the Lambs was so full of goodness and

hospitable feeling, that it kindled animation in the most cheerless

or torpid of invalids. I cannot imagine that any _memorabilia_

occurred during the visit; but I will use the time that would else

be lost upon the settling of that point, in putting down any

triviality that occurs to my recollection. Both Lamb and myself had

a furious love for nonsense, headlong nonsense. Excepting Professor

Wilson, I have known nobody who had the same passion to the same

extent. And things of that nature better illustrate the

_realities_ of Lamb's social life than the gravities, which

weighing so sadly on his solitary hours he sought to banish from

his moments of relaxation.

There were no strangers; Charles Lamb, his sister, and myself made

up the party. Even this was done in kindness. They knew that I

should have been oppressed by an effort such as must be made in the

society of strangers; and they placed me by their own fireside,

where I could say as little or as much as I pleased.

We dined about five o'clock, and it was one of the hospitalities

inevitable to the Lambs, that any game which they might receive

from rural friends in the course of the week, was reserved for the

day of a friend's dining with them.

In regard to wine, Lamb and myself had the same habit--perhaps it

rose to the dignity of a principle--viz., to take a great deal

_during_ dinner--none _after_ it. Consequently, as Miss

Lamb (who drank only water) retired almost with the dinner itself,

nothing remained for men of our principles, the rigor of which we

had illustrated by taking rather too much of old port before the

cloth was drawn, except talking; amoebaean colloquy, or, in Dr.

Johnson's phrase, a dialogue of "brisk reciprocation." But this was

impossible; over Lamb, at this period of his life, there passed

regularly, after taking wine, a brief eclipse of sleep. It

descended upon him as softly as a shadow. In a gross person, laden

with superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been

disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry

as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by

scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a network

of aerial gossamer than of earthly cobweb--more like a golden haze

falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling

upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust,

breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly alive, he

presented the image of repose midway between life and death, like

the repose of sculpture; and to one who knew his history a repose

affectingly contrasting with the calamities and internal storms of

his life. I have heard more persons than I can now distinctly

recall, observe of Lamb when sleeping, that his countenance in that

state assumed an expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual

beauty of outline, its childlike simplicity, and its benignity. It

could not be called a transfiguration that sleep had worked in his

face; for the features wore essentially the same expression when

waking; but sleep spiritualized that expression, exalted it, and

also harmonized it. Much of the change lay in that last process.

The eyes it was that disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb's waking

face. They gave a restlessness to the character of his intellect,

shifting, like northern lights, through every mode of combination

with fantastic playfulness, and sometimes by fiery gleams

obliterating for the moment that pure light of benignity which was

the predominant reading on his features. Some people have supposed

that Lamb had Jewish blood in his veins, which seemed to account

for his gleaming eyes. It might be so; but this notion found little

countenance in Lamb's own way of treating the gloomy medieval

traditions propagated throughout Europe about the Jews, and their

secret enmity to Christian races. Lamb, indeed, might not be more

serious than Shakspeare is supposed to have been in his Shylock;

yet he spoke at times as from a station of wilful bigotry, and

seemed (whether laughingly or not) to sympathize with the barbarous

Christian superstitions upon the pretended bloody practices of the

Jews, and of the early Jewish physicians. Being himself a Lincoln

man, he treated Sir Hugh [Endnote: 4] of Lincoln, the young child

that suffered death by secret assassination in the Jewish quarter

rather than suppress his daily anthems to the Virgin, as a true

historical personage on the rolls of martyrdom; careless that this

fable, like that of the apprentice murdered out of jealousy by his

master, the architect, had destroyed its own authority by

ubiquitous diffusion. All over Europe the same legend of the

murdered apprentice and the martyred child reappears under

different names--so that in effect the verification of the tale is

none at all, because it is unanimous; is too narrow, because it is

too impossibly broad. Lamb, however, though it was often hard to

say whether he were not secretly laughing, swore to the truth of

all these old fables, and treated the liberalities of the present

generation on such points as mere fantastic and effeminate

affectations, which, no doubt, they often are as regards the

sincerity of those who profess them. The bigotry, which it pleased

his fancy to assume, he used like a sword against the Jew, as the

official weapon of the Christian, upon the same principle that a

Capulet would have drawn upon a Montague, without conceiving it any

duty of _his_ to rip up the grounds of so ancient a quarrel;

it was a feud handed down to him by his ancestors, and it was

_their_ business to see that originally it had been an honest

feud. I cannot yet believe that Lamb, if seriously aware of any

family interconnection with Jewish blood, would, even in jest, have

held that one-sided language. More probable it is, that the fiery

eye recorded not any alliance with Jewish blood, but that

disastrous alliance with insanity which tainted his own life, and

laid desolate his sister's.

On awakening from his brief slumber, Lamb sat for some time in

profound silence, and then, with the most startling rapidity, sang

out--"Diddle, diddle, dumpkins;" not looking at me, but as if

soliloquizing. For five minutes he relapsed into the same deep

silence; from which again he started up into the same abrupt

utterance of--"Diddle, diddle, dumpkins." I could not help laughing

aloud at the extreme energy of this sudden communication,

contrasted with the deep silence that went before and followed.

Lamb smilingly begged to know what I was laughing at, and with a

look of as much surprise as if it were I that had done something

unaccountable, and not himself. I told him (as was the truth) that

there had suddenly occurred to me the possibility of my being in

some future period or other called on to give an account of this

very evening before some literary committee. The committee might

say to me--(supposing the case that I outlived him)--"You dined

with Mr. Lamb in January, 1822; now, can you remember any remark or

memorable observation which that celebrated man made before or

after dinner?"