"It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so
transcendently surpassed in execution the rest of his compositions, that
the world has agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter,
and to consign them to total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in
this, not to suffer the contemplation of excellencies of a lower
standard to abate or stand in the way of the pleasure it has agreed to
receive from the master-piece.
"Again, it has happened, that, from no inferior merit of execution in
the rest, but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject,
some single work shall have been suffered to eclipse and cast into shade
the deserts of its less fortunate brethren. This has been done with more
or less injustice in the case of the popular allegory of Bunyan, in
which the beautiful and Scriptural image of a pilgrim or wayfarer, (we
are all such upon earth,) addressing itself intelligibly and feelingly
to the bosoms of all, has silenced, and made almost to be forgotten, the
more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the 'Holy War made by
Shaddai upon Diabolus,' of the same author,--a romance less happy in its
subject, but surely well worthy of a secondary immortality. But in no
instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness
than against what may be termed the secondary novels or romances of De
Foe.
"While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the
'Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,' and shall continue to do so, we trust,
while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told that
there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer,--four of
them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less
felicitous choice of situation! 'Roxana.' 'Singleton,' 'Moll Flanders,'
'Colonel Jack,' are all genuine offspring of the same father. They bear
the veritable impress of De Foe. An unpractised midwife that would not
swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye of every one of them! They are
in their way as full of incident, and some of them every bit as
romantic; only they want the uninhabited island, and the charm that has
bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation.
"But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot
the heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone? Singleton on
the world of waters, prowling about with pirates less merciful than the
creatures of any howling wilderness,--is he not alone, with the faces of
men about him, but without a guide that can conduct him through the
mists of educational and habitual ignorance, or a fellow-heart that can
interpret to him the new-born yearnings and aspirations of unpractised
penitence? Or when the boy Colonel Jack, in the loneliness of the heart,
(the worst solitude,) goes to hide his ill-purchased treasure in the
hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses, and miraculously finds it
again--whom hath he there to sympathize with him? or of what sort are
his associates?
"The narrative manner of De Foe has a naturalness about it beyond that
of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of
true stories. It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them,
that a real person is not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what
really happened to himself. To this the extreme _homeliness_ of their
style mainly contributes. We use the word in its best and heartiest
sense,--that which comes _home_ to the reader. The narrators everywhere
are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they
tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,)
as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition,
and an overacted exactness, lest the hearer should not have minded, or
have forgotten, some things that had been told before. Hence the
emphatic sentences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type;
and hence, too, the frequent interposition of the reminding old
colloquial parenthesis, 'I say,' 'Mind,' and the like, when the
story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, might appear to have
been sufficiently insisted upon before: which made an ingenious critic
observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for the
kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of De Foe can never
again hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers than that
of the servant-maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough
prescription; Singleton, the pirate--Colonel Jack, the thief,--Moll
Flanders, both thief and harlot,--Roxana, harlot and something
worse,--would be startling ingredients in the bill-of-fare of modern
literary delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, and what
harlots is _the thief, the harlot_, and _the pirate_ of De Foe? We would
not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives
of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less
seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission,
or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening
flashes of religious visitation upon the rude and uninstructed soul more
meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to the
tenderness of Bunyan; while the livelier pictures and incidents in them,
as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish that fastidiousness to
the concerns and pursuits of common life which an unrestrained passion
for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing."
* * * * *
Lamb, in a letter to one of his correspondents, says, after speaking of
his recent contributions to the "London Magazine,"--"In the next number
I shall figure as a theologian, and have attacked my late brethren, the
Unitarians. What Jack-Pudding tricks I shall play next I know not; I am
almost at the end of my tether." Talfourd, of course, does not publish
the article, or even give its title, which is, "Unitarian Protests."
Those who would see how well or how ill Elia figures as a theologian
should read
* * * * *
"UNITARIAN PROTESTS: IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND OF THAT PERSUASION NEWLY
MARRIED.
"Dear M----,--Though none of your acquaintance can with greater
sincerity congratulate you upon this happy conjuncture than myself, one
of the oldest of them, it was with pain I found you, after the ceremony,
depositing in the vestry-room what is called a Protest. I thought you
superior to this little sophistry. What! after submitting to the service
of the Church of England,--after consenting to receive a boon from her,
in the person of your amiable consort,--was it consistent with sense, or
common good manners, to turn round upon her, and flatly taunt her with
false worship? This language is a little of the strongest in your books
and from your pulpits, though there it may well enough be excused from
religious zeal and the native warmth of Non-Conformity. But at the
altar,--the Church-of-England altar,--adopting her forms, and complying
with her requisitions to the letter,--to be consistent, together with
the practice, I fear, you must drop the language of dissent. You are no
longer sturdy Non-Cons; you are there Occasional Conformists. You submit
to accept the privileges communicated by a form of words exceptionable,
and perhaps justly, in your view; but so submitting, you have no right
to quarrel with the ritual which you have just condescended to owe an
obligation to. They do not force you into their churches. You come
voluntarily, knowing the terms. You marry in the name of the Trinity.
There is no evading this by pretending that you take the formula with
your own interpretation (and so long as you can do this, where is the
necessity of protesting?): for the meaning of a vow is to be settled by
the sense of the imposer, not by any forced construction of the taker:
else might all vows, and oaths too, be eluded with impunity. You marry,
then, essentially as Trinitarians; and the altar no sooner satisfied
than, hey, presto! with the celerity of a juggler, you shift habits, and
proceed pure Unitarians again in the vestry. You cheat the Church out of
a wife, and go home smiling in your sleeves that you have so cunningly
despoiled the Egyptians. In plain English, the Church has married you in
the name of so and so, assuming that you took the words in her sense;
but you outwitted her; you assented to them in your sense only, and took
from her what, upon a right understanding, she would have declined
giving you.
"This is the fair construction to be put upon all Unitarian marriages,
as at present contracted; and so long as you Unitarians could salve your
consciences with the _équivoque_, I do not see why the Established
Church should have troubled herself at all about the matter. But the
Protesters necessarily see further. They have some glimmerings of the
deception; they apprehend a flaw somewhere; they would fain be honest,
and yet they must marry notwithstanding; for honesty's sake, they are
fain to dehonestate themselves a little. Let me try the very words of
your own Protest, to see what confessions we can pick out of them.
"'As Unitarians, therefore, we' (you and your newly espoused bride)
'most solemnly protest against the service,' (which yourselves have just
demanded,) 'because we are thereby called upon, not only tacitly to
acquiesce, but to profess a belief, in a doctrine which is a dogma, as
we believe, totally unfounded.' But do you profess that belief during
the ceremony? or are you only called upon for the profession, but do not
make it? If the latter, then you fall in with the rest of your more
consistent brethren, who waive the Protest; if the former, then, I fear,
your Protest cannot save you.
"Hard and grievous it is, that, in any case, an institution so broad
and general as the union of man and wife should be so cramped and
straitened by the hands of an imposing hierarchy, that, to plight troth
to a lovely woman, a man must be necessitated to compromise his truth
and faith to Heaven; but so it must be, so long as you choose to marry
by the forms of the church over which that hierarchy presides.
"'Therefore,' say you, 'we protest.' O poor and much fallen word,
Protest! It was not so that the first heroic reformers protested. They
departed out of Babylon once for good and all; they came not back for an
occasional contact with her altars--a dallying, and then a protesting
against dalliance; they stood not shuffling in the porch, with a Popish
foot within, and its lame Lutheran fellow without, halting betwixt.
These were the true Protestants. You are--Protesters.
"Besides the inconsistency of this proceeding, I must think it a piece
of impertinence, unseasonable at least, and out of place, to obtrude
these papers upon the officiating clergyman,--to offer to a public
functionary an instrument which by the tenor of his function he is not
obliged to accept, but, rather, he is called upon to reject. Is it done
in his clerical capacity? He has no power of redressing the grievance.
It is to take the benefit of his ministry, and then insult him. If in
his capacity of fellow-Christian only, what are your scruples to him, so
long as you yourselves are able to get over them, and do get over them
by the very fact of coming to require his services? The thing you call a
Protest might with just as good a reason be presented to the
church-warden for the time being, to the parish-clerk, or the
pew-opener.
"The Parliament alone can redress your grievance, if any. Yet I see not
how with any grace your people can petition for relief, so long as, by
the very fact of your coming to church to be married, they do _bonâ
fide_ and strictly relieve themselves. The Upper House, in particular,
is not unused to these same things called Protests, among themselves.
But how would this honorable body stare to find a noble Lord conceding a
measure, and in the next breath, by a solemn Protest, disowning it! A
Protest there is a reason given for non-compliance, not a subterfuge for
an equivocal occasional compliance. It was reasonable in the primitive
Christians to avert from their persons, by whatever lawful means, the
compulsory eating of meats which had been offered unto idols. I dare say
the Roman Prefects and Exarchates had plenty of petitioning in their
days. But what would a Festus or Agrippa have replied to a petition to
that effect, presented to him by some evasive Laodicean, with the very
meat between his teeth, which he had been chewing voluntarily rather
than abide the penalty? Relief for tender consciences means nothing,
where the conscience has previously relieved itself,--that is, has
complied with the injunctions which it seeks preposterously to be rid
of. Relief for conscience there is properly none, but what by better
information makes an act appear innocent and lawful with which the
previous conscience was not satisfied to comply. All else is but relief
from penalties, from scandal incurred by a complying practice, where the
conscience itself is not fully satisfied.
"But, say you, we have hard measure: the Quakers are indulged with the
liberty denied to us. They are; and dearly have they earned it. You have
come in (as a sect, at least) in the cool of the evening, at the
eleventh hour. The Quaker character was hardened in the fires of
persecution in the seventeenth century,--not quite to the stake and
fagot, but little short of that: they grew up and thrived against
noisome prisons, cruel beatings, whippings, stockings. They have since
endured a century or two of scoffs, contempts; they have been a by-word,
and a nay-word; they have stood unmoved: and the consequence of long
conscientious resistance on one part is invariably, in the end,
remission on the other. The legislature, that denied you the tolerance,
which I do not know that at that time you even asked, gave them the
liberty which, without granting, they would have assumed. No penalties
could have driven them into the churches. This is the consequence of
entire measures. Had the early Quakers consented to take oaths, leaving
a Protest with the clerk of the court against them in the same breath
with which they had taken them, do you in your conscience think that
they would have been indulged at this day in their exclusive privilege
of affirming? Let your people go on for a century or so, marrying in
your own fashion, and I will warrant them, before the end of it, the
legislature will be willing to concede to them more than they at present
demand.
"Either the institution of marriage depends not for its validity upon
hypocritical compliances with the ritual of an alien church, and then I
do not see why you cannot marry among yourselves, as the Quakers,
without their indulgence, would have been doing to this day,--or it does
depend upon such ritual compliance, and then in your Protests you offend
against a divine ordinance. I have read in the Essex-Street Liturgy a
form for the celebration of marriage. Why is this become a dead letter?
Oh! it has never been legalized: that is to say, in the law's eye it is
no marriage. But do you take upon you to say, in the view of the gospel
it would be none? Would your own people, at least, look upon a couple so
paired to be none? But the case of dowries, alimonies, inheritances,
etc., which depend for their validity upon the ceremonial of the church
by law established,--are these nothing? That our children are not
legally _Filii Nullius_,--is this nothing? I answer, Nothing; to the
preservation of a good conscience, nothing; to a consistent
Christianity, less than nothing. Sad worldly thorns they are indeed, and
stumbling-blocks well worthy to be set out of the way by a legislature
calling itself Christian; but not likely to be removed in a hurry by any
shrewd legislators who perceive that the petitioning complainants have
not so much as bruised a shin in the resistance, but, prudently
declining the briers and the prickles, nestle quietly down in the smooth
two-sided velvet of a Protesting Occasional Conformity.
"I am, dear Sir,
"With much respect, yours, etc.,
"ELIA."
* * * * *
Lamb once said, of all the lies he ever put off,--and he put off a good
many,--indeed, he valued himself on being "a matter-of-lie man,"
believing truth to be too precious to be wasted upon everybody,--of all
the lies he ever put off, he valued his "Memoir of Liston" the most. "It
is," he confessed to Miss Hutchinson, "from top to toe, every paragraph,
pure invention, and has passed for gospel,--has been republished in the
newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the night, as an authentic
account." And yet, notwithstanding its incidents are all imaginary, its
facts all fictions, is not Lamb's "Memoir of Liston" a truer and more
trustworthy work than any of the productions of those contemptible
biographers--unfortunately not yet extinct--so admirably ridiculed in
the thirty-fifth number of the "Freeholder"? In fact, is not this "lying
Life of Liston" a very clever satire on those biographers who, like the
monkish historians mentioned by Fuller, in his "Church History of
Britain," swell the bowels of their books with empty wind, in default of
sufficient solid food to fill them,--who, according to Addison, ascribe
to the unfortunate persons whose lives they pretend to write works which
they never wrote and actions which they never performed, celebrate
virtues which they were never famous for and excuse faults which they
were never guilty of? And does not Lamb, in this work, very happily
ridicule the pedantry and conceit of certain grave and dignified
biographers whose works are to be found in most gentlemen's libraries?
Therefore, as a piece of most admirable fooling, as a bit of harmless,
good-natured pleasantry, as a specimen of pleasant satire, of subtile
irony, this "Memoir of Listen" is well worthy of a place in all editions
of Charles Lamb's writings.
* * * * *
"BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON.
"The subject of our Memoir is lineally descended from Johan de
L'Estonne, (see 'Domesday Book,' where he is so written,) who came in
with the Conqueror, and had lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent.
His particular merits or services Fabian, whose authority I chiefly
follow, has forgotten, or perhaps thought it immaterial, to specify.
Fuller thinks that he was standard-bearer to Hugo de Agmondesham, a
powerful Norman baron, who was slain by the hand of Harold himself at
the fatal Battle of Hastings. Be this as it may, we find a family of
that name flourishing some centuries later in that county. John
Delliston, Knight, was high sheriff for Kent, according to Fabian,
_quinto Henrici Sexti_; and we trace the lineal branch flourishing
downwards,--the orthography varying, according to the unsettled usage of
the times, from Delleston to Leston or Liston, between which it seems to
have alternated, till, in the latter end of the reign of James I., it
finally settled into the determinate and pleasing dissyllabic
arrangement which it still retains. Aminadab Liston, the eldest male
representative of the family of that day, was of the strictest order of
Puritans. Mr. Foss, of Pall Mall, has obligingly communicated to me an
undoubted tract of his, which bears the initials only, A.L., and is
entitled, 'The Grinning Glass: or Actor's Mirrour, wherein the
vituperative Visnomy of vicious Players for the Scene is as virtuously
reflected back upon their mimetic Monstrosities as it has viciously
(hitherto) vitiated with its vile Vanities her Votarists.' A strange
title, but bearing the impress of those absurdities with which the
title-pages of that pamphlet-spawning age abounded. The work bears date
1617. It preceded the 'Histriomastix' by fifteen years; and as it went
before it in time, so it comes not far short of it in virulence. It is
amusing to find an ancestor of Listen's thus bespattering the players at
the commencement of the seventeenth century:--
"'Thinketh He,' (the actor,) 'with his costive countenances, to
wry a sorrowing soul out of her anguish, or by defacing the divine
denotement of destinate dignity (daignely described in the face
humane and no other) to reinstamp the Paradice-plotted similitude
with a novel and naughty approximation (not in the first
intention) to those abhorred and ugly God-forbidden
correspondences, with flouting Apes' jeering gibberings, and
Babion babbling-like, to hoot out of countenance all modest
measure, as if our sins were not sufficing to stoop our backs
without He wresting and crooking his members to mistimed mirth
(rather malice) in deformed fashion, leering when he should learn,
prating for praying, goggling his eyes, (better upturned for
grace,) whereas in Paradice (if we can go thus high for His
profession) that devilish Serpent appeareth his undoubted
Predecessor, first induing a mask like some roguish roistering
Roscius (I spit at them all) to beguile with Stage shows the
gaping Woman, whose Sex hath still chiefly upheld these Mysteries,
and are voiced to be the chief Stage-haunters, where, as I am
told, the custom is commonly to mumble (between acts) apples, not
ambiguously derived from that pernicious Pippin, (worse in effect
than the Apples of Discord,) whereas sometimes the hissing sounds
of displeasure, as I hear, do lively reintonate that
snake-taking-leave, and diabolical goings off, in Paradice.'
"The Puritanic effervescence of the early Presbyterians appears to have
abated with time, and the opinions of the more immediate ancestors of
our subject to have subsided at length into a strain of moderate
Calvinism. Still a tincture of the old leaven was to be expected among
the posterity of A.L.
"Our hero was the only son of Habakkuk Liston, settled as an anabaptist
minister upon the patrimonial soil of his ancestors. A regular
certificate appears, thus entered in the Church-Book at Lupton
Magna:--'_Johannes, filius Habakkuk et Rebecccæ Liston, Dissentientium,
natus quinto Decembri_, 1780, _baptizatus sexto Februarii sequentis;
Sponsoribus J. et W. Woollaston, unâ cum Maria Merryweather_.' The
singularity of an Anabaptist minister conforming to the child-rites of
the Church would have tempted me to doubt the authenticity of this
entry, had I not been obliged with the actual sight of it, by the favor
of Mr. Minns, the intelligent and worthy parish-clerk of Lupton.
Possibly some expectation in point of worldly advantages from some of
the sponsors might have induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have
appeared, from the practice and principles of that generally rigid sect.
The term _Dissentientium_ was possibly intended by the orthodox
clergyman as a slur upon the supposed inconsistency. What, or of what
nature, the expectations we have hinted at may have been, we have now no
means of ascertaining. Of the Woollastons no trace is now discoverable
in the village. The name of Merryweather occurs over the front of a
grocer's shop at the western extremity of Lupton.
"Of the infant Liston we find no events recorded before his fourth year,
in which a severe attack of the measles bid fair to have robbed the
rising generation of a fund of innocent entertainment. He had it of the
confluent kind, as it is called, and the child's life was for a week or
two despaired of. His recovery he always attributes (under Heaven) to
the humane interference of one Doctor Wilhelm Richter, a German empiric,
who, in this extremity, prescribed a copious diet of _sauer-kraut_,
which the child was observed to reach at with avidity, when other food
repelled him; and from this change of diet his restoration was rapid and
complete. We have often heard him name the circumstance with gratitude;
and it is not altogether surprising that a relish for this kind of
aliment, so abhorrent and harsh to common English palates, has
accompanied him through life. When any of Mr. Listen's intimates invite
him to supper, he never fails of finding, nearest to his knife and fork,
a dish of _sauer-kraut_.
"At the age of nine we find our subject under the tuition of the Rev.
Mr. Goodenough, (his father's health not permitting him probably to
instruct him himself,) by whom he was inducted into a competent portion
of Latin and Greek, with some mathematics, till the death of Mr.
Goodenough, in his own seventieth, and Master Liston's eleventh year,
put a stop for the present to his classical progress.
"We have heard our hero, with emotions which do his heart honor,
describe the awful circumstances attending the decease of this worthy
old gentleman. It seems they had been walking out together, master and
pupil, in a fine sunset, to the distance of three-quarters of a mile
west of Lupton, when a sudden curiosity took Mr. Goodenough to look down
upon a chasm, where a shaft had been lately sunk in a mining speculation
(then projecting, but abandoned soon after, as not answering the
promised success, by Sir Ralph Shepperton, Knight, and member for the
county). The old clergyman leaning over, either with incaution or sudden
giddiness, (probably a mixture of both,) suddenly lost his footing,
and, to use Mr. Listen's phrase, disappeared, and was doubtless broken
into a thousand pieces. The sound of his head, etc., dashing
successively upon the projecting masses of the chasm, had such an effect
upon the child that a serious sickness ensued, and even for many years
after his recovery he was not once seen so much as to smile.
"The joint death of both his parents, which happened not many months
after this disastrous accident, and were probably (one or both of them)
accelerated by it, threw our youth upon the protection of his maternal
great-aunt, Mrs. Sittingbourn. Of this aunt we have never heard him
speak but with expressions amounting almost to reverence. To the
influence of her early counsels and manners he has always attributed the
firmness with which, in maturer years, thrown upon a way of life
commonly not the best adapted to gravity and self-retirement, he has
been able to maintain a serious character, untinctured with the levities
incident to his profession. Ann Sittingbourn (we have seen her portrait
by Hudson) was stately, stiff, tall, with a cast of features strikingly
resembling the subject of this memoir. Her estate in Kent was spacious
and well-wooded; the house, one of those venerable old mansions which
are so impressive in childhood, and so hardly forgotten in succeeding
years. In the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, among thick shades of
the oak and beech, (this last his favorite tree,) the young Listen
cultivated those contemplative habits which have never entirely deserted
him in after-years. Here he was commonly in the summer months to be met
with, with a book in his hand,--not a play-book,--meditating. Boyle's
'Reflections' was at one time the darling volume, which in its turn was
superseded by Young's 'Night Thoughts,' which has continued its hold
upon him through life. He carries it always about him; and it is no
uncommon thing for him to be seen, in the refreshing intervals of his
occupation, leaning against a side-scene, in a sort of
Herbert-of-Cherbury posture, turning over a pocket-edition of his
favorite author.
"But the solitudes of Charnwood were not destined always to obscure the
path of our young hero. The premature death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, at the
age of seventy, occasioned by incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in
her sleeping-chamber, left him in his nineteenth year nearly without
resources. That the stage at all should have presented itself as an
eligible scope for his talents, and, in particular, that he should have
chosen a line so foreign to what appears to have been his turn of mind,
may require some explanation.
"At Charnwood, then, we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic. From his
cradle averse to flesh-meats and strong drink; abstemious even beyond
the genius of the place, and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his
great-aunt, who, though strict, was not rigid; water was his habitual
drink, and his food little beyond the mast and beech-nuts of his
favorite groves. It is a medical fact, that this kind of diet, however
favorable to the contemplative powers of the primitive hermits, etc., is
but ill adapted to the less robust minds and bodies of a later
generation. Hypochondria almost constantly ensues. It was so in the case
of the young Liston. He was subject to sights, and had visions. Those
arid beech-nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into
an occiput already prepared to kindle by long seclusion and the fervor
of strict Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was
assailed by illusions similar in kind to those which are related of the
famous Anthony of Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude
themselves upon his sensorium. Whether he shut his eyes or kept them
open, the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his
cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions.
They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him,
hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first
was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better
society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in
what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his future destiny.
"On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, we find him received into the family
of Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin Lane,
London. We lose a little while here the chain of his history,--by what
inducements this gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his
house. Probably he had had some personal kindness for Mrs. Sittingbourn
formerly; but however it was, the young man was here treated more like a
son than a clerk, though he was nominally but the latter. Different
avocations, the change of scene, with that alternation of business and
recreation which in its greatest perfection is to be had only in London,
appear to have weaned him in a short time from the hypochondriacal
affections which had beset him at Charnwood.
"In the three years which followed his removal to Birchin Lane, we find
him making more than one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr.
Willoughby at the Porte. We could easily fill our biography with the
pleasant passages which we have heard him relate as having happened to
him at Constantinople, such as his having been taken up on suspicion of
a design of penetrating the seraglio, etc.; but, with the deepest
convincement of this gentleman's own veracity, we think that some of the
stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature,
which, however diverting, would be out of place in a narrative of this
kind, which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very
appearance of the contrary.
"We will now bring him over the seas again, and suppose him in the
counting-house in Birchin Lane, his protector satisfied with the returns
of his factorage, and all going on so smoothly that we may expect to
find Mr. Liston at last an opulent merchant upon 'Change, as it is
called. But see the turns of destiny! Upon a summer's excursion into
Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight of pretty Sally Parker,
as she was called, (then in the Norwich company,) diverted his
inclinations at once from commerce; and he became, in the language of
commonplace biography, stage-struck. Happy for the lovers of mirth was
it that our hero took this turn; he might else have been to this hour
that unentertaining character, a plodding London merchant.
"We accordingly find him shortly after making his _début_, as it is
called, upon the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, being then
in the twenty-second year of his age. Having a natural bent to tragedy,
he chose the part of Pyrrhus in the 'Distressed Mother,' to Sally
Parker's Hermione. We find him afterwards as Barnwell, Altamont,
Chamont, etc.; but, as if Nature had destined him to the sock, an
unavoidable infirmity absolutely discapacitated him for tragedy. His
person, at this latter period of which I have been speaking, was
graceful, and even commanding; his countenance set to gravity; he had
the power of arresting the attention of an audience at first sight
almost beyond any other tragic actor. But he could not hold it. To
understand this obstacle, we must go back a few years to those appalling
reveries at Charnwood. Those illusions, which had vanished before the
dissipation of a less recluse life and more free society, now in his
solitary tragic studies, and amid the intense calls upon feeling
incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold vividness. In
the midst of some most pathetic passage, the parting of Jaffier with his
dying friend, for instance, he would suddenly be surprised with a fit of
violent horse-laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before
him with emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque faces would peep out
upon him, and he could not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or
twice served his purpose; but no audiences could be expected to bear
repeatedly this violation of the continuity of feeling. He describes
them (the illusions) as so many demons haunting him, and paralyzing
every effect. Even now, I am told, he cannot recite the famous soliloquy
in 'Hamlet,' even in private, without immoderate bursts of laughter.
However, what he had not force of reason sufficient to overcome he had
good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined to make a
commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin for the
sock, and the illusions instantly ceased; or, if they occurred for a
short season, by their very cooperation added a zest to his comic
vein,--some of his most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little
more than transcripts and copies of those extraordinary phantasmata.
"We have now drawn out our hero's existence to the period when he was
about to meet for the first time the sympathies of a London audience.
The particulars of his success since have been too much before our eyes
to render a circumstantial detail of them expedient. I shall only
mention, that Mr. Willoughby, his resentments having had time to
subside, is at present one of the fastest friends of his old renegado
factor; and that Mr. Listen's hopes of Miss Parker vanishing along with
his unsuccessful suit to Melpomene, in the autumn of 1811 he married his
present lady, by whom he has been blest with one son, Philip, and two
daughters, Ann and Angustina."
* * * * *
"Ask anybody you meet," writes Lamb to Miss Wordsworth, then visiting
some friends in Cambridge, "who is the biggest woman in Cambridge, and
I'll hold a wager they'll say Mrs. ----. She broke down two benches in
Trinity Gardens,--one on the confines of St. John's, which occasioned a
litigation between the societies as to repairing it. In warm weather she
retires into an ice-cellar, (literally,) and dates from a hot Thursday
some twenty years back. She sits in a room with opposite doors and
windows, to let in a thorough draft, which gives her slenderer friends
toothaches. She is to be seen in the market every morning at ten,
cheapening fowls, which I observe the Cambridge poulterers are not
sufficiently careful to stump."
On the person thus briefly sketched Elia wrote an article for the
"London Magazine." As it is not to be found in the standard editions of
its author's works, we herewith present it to our readers. They will
find it to be a clever specimen of Lamb's peculiar and delightful humor.
In truth, it is one of the very best things he ever conjured up. We
observe he has changed the locality of the stout woman, and places her
in Oxford, instead of Cambridge.
* * * * *
"THE GENTLE GIANTESS.
"The widow Blacket, of Oxford, is the largest female I ever had the
pleasure of beholding. There may be her parallel upon the earth, but
surely I never saw it. I take her to be lineally descended from the
maid's aunt of Brainford, who caused Master Ford such uneasiness. She
hath Atlantean shoulders; and as she stoopeth in her gait,--with as few
offences to answer for in her own particular as any of Eve's
daughters,--her back seems broad enough to bear the blame of all the
peccadilloes that have been committed since Adam. She girdeth her
waist--or what she is pleased to esteem as such--nearly up to her
shoulders, from beneath which that huge dorsal expanse, in mountainous
declivity, emergeth. Respect for her alone preventeth the idle boys, who
follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up
and riding. But her presence infallibly commands a reverence. She is,
indeed, as the Americans would express it, something awful. Her person
is a burden to herself, no less than to the ground which bears her.
"To her mighty bone she hath a pinguitude withal which makes the depth
of winter to her the most desirable season. Her distress in the warmer
solstice is pitiable. During the months of July and August she usually
renteth a cool cellar, where ices are kept, whereinto she descendeth
when Sirius rageth. She dates from a hot Thursday, some twenty-five
years ago. Her apartment in summer is pervious to the four winds. Two
doors in north and south direction, and two windows fronting the rising
and the setting sun, never closed, from every cardinal point catch the
contributory breezes. She loves to enjoy what she calls a quadruple
draught. That must be a shrewd zephyr that can escape her. I owe a
painful face-ache, which oppresses me at this moment, to a cold caught,
sitting by her, one day in last July, at this receipt of coolness. Her
fan in ordinary resembleth a banner spread, which she keepeth
continually on the alert to detect the least breeze.
"She possesseth an active and gadding mind, totally incommensurate with
her person. No one delighteth more than herself in country exercises and
pastimes. I have passed many an agreeable holiday with her in her
favorite park at Woodstock. She performs her part in these delightful
ambulatory excursions by the aid of a portable garden-chair. She setteth
out with you at a fair foot-gallop, which she keepeth up till you are
both well breathed, and then she reposeth for a few seconds. Then she is
up again for a hundred paces or so, and again resteth,--her movement, on
these sprightly occasions, being something between walking and flying.
Her great weight seemeth to propel her forward, ostrich-fashion. In this
kind of relieved marching I have traversed with her many scores of acres
on those well-wooded and well-watered domains.
"Her delight at Oxford is in the public walks and gardens, where, when
the weather is not too oppressive, she passeth much of her valuable
time. There is a bench at Maudlin, or rather, situated between the
frontiers of that and ----'s College,--some litigation, latterly, about
repairs, has vested the property of it finally in ----'s,--where at the
hour of noon she is ordinarily to be found sitting,--so she calls it by
courtesy,--but, in fact, pressing and breaking of it down with her
enormous settlement; as both those Foundations, who, however, are
good-natured enough to wink at it, have found, I believe, to their cost.
Here she taketh the fresh air, principally at vacation times, when the
walks are freest from interruption of the younger fry of students. Here
she passeth her idle hours, not idly, but generally accompanied with a
book,--blest, if she can but intercept some resident Fellow, (as usually
there are some of that brood left behind at these periods,) or stray
Master of Arts, (to most of whom she is better known than their
dinner-bell,) with whom she may confer upon any curious topic of
literature. I have seen these shy gownsmen, who truly set but a very
slight value upon female conversation, cast a hawk's eye upon her from
the length of Maudlin Grove, and warily glide off into another
walk,--true monks as they are, and ungently neglecting the delicacies of
her polished converse, for their own perverse and uncommunicating
solitariness!
"Within doors her principal diversion is music, vocal and instrumental,
in both which she is no mean professor. Her voice is wonderfully fine;
but, till I got used to it, I confess it staggered me. It is for all the
world like that of a piping bulfinch, while from her size and stature
you would expect notes to drown the deep organ. The shake, which most
fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable
flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the
composition; so that her time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double
motion, like the earth,--running the primary circuit of the tune, and
still revolving upon its own axis. The effect, as I said before, when
you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is altogether new and
surprising.
"The spacious apartment of her outward frame lodgeth a soul in all
respects disproportionate. Of more than mortal make, she evinceth withal
a trembling sensibility, a yielding infirmity of purpose, a quick
susceptibility to reproach, and all the train of diffident and blushing
virtues, which for their habitation usually seek out a feeble frame, an
attenuated and meagre constitution. With more than man's bulk, her
humors and occupations are eminently feminine. She sighs,--being six
foot high. She languisheth,--being two feet wide. She worketh slender
sprigs upon the delicate muslin,--her fingers being capable of moulding
a Colossus. She sippeth her wine out of her glass daintily,--her
capacity being that of a tun of Heidelberg. She goeth mincingly with
those feet of hers,--whose solidity need not fear the black ox's
pressure.
"Softest and largest of thy sex, adieu! By what parting attribute may I
salute thee?--last and best of the Titanesses!--Ogress, fed with milk
instead of blood!--not least, or least handsome, among Oxford's stately
structures!--Oxford, who, in its deadest time of vacation, can never
properly be said to be empty, having thee to fill it!"
* * * * *