any man I ever knew. Friendships in these parts stagnate. the Doctor, as he thought, sent it me. A the persuasive of my own, which accompanies book of like exterior he did send, but being it, will not be thrown away; if it be, he is a disclosed, how far unlike! It was the Well- sloe, and no true-hearted crab, and there's bred Scholar,'-a book with which it seems an end. For that life of the German conthe Doctor laudably fills up those hours juror which you speak of, 'Colerus de Vitâ which he can steal from his medical avoca- Doctoris vix-Intelligibilis,' I perfectly retions. Chesterfield, Blair, Beattie, portions member the last evening we spent with from The Life of Savage,' make up a Mrs. Morgan and Miss Brent, in Londonprettyish system of morality and the belles- street,- (by that token we had raw rabbits lettres, which Mr. Mylne, a schoolmaster, for supper, and Miss B. prevailed upon me has properly brought together, and calls the to take a glass of brandy and water after collection by the denomination above men- supper, which is not my habit,)-I perfectly tioned. The Doctor had no sooner discovered remember reading portions of that life in his error, than he dispatched man and horse their parlour, and I think it must be among to rectify the mistake, and with a pretty their packages. It was the very last evening kind of ingenuous modesty in his note, we were at that house. What is gone of seemeth to deny any knowledge of the that frank-hearted circle, Morgan, and his 'Well-bred Scholar;' false modesty surely, cos-lettuces? He ate walnuts better than and a blush misplaced; for, what more pleasing than the consideration of professional austerity thus relaxing, thus im- "I am going to eat turbot, turtle, venison, proving! But so, when a child I remember marrow pudding,-cold punch, claret, Mablushing, being caught on my knees to my deira,-at our annual feast, at half-past four Maker, or doing otherwise some pious and this day. They keep bothering me, (I'm at praiseworthy action; now I rather love such office,) and my ideas are confused. Let me things to be seen. Henry Crabb Robinson know if I can be of any service as to books. is out upon his circuit, and his books are God forbid the Architectonican should be inaccessible without his leave and key. He sacrificed to a foolish scruple of some bookis attending the Norfolk Circuit, a short proprietor, as if books did not belong with term, but to him, as to many young lawyers, the highest propriety to those that understand a long vacation, sufficiently dreary.* I 'em best. C. LAMB." thought I could do no better than transmit to him, not extracts, but your very letter itself, than which I think I never read any "26th August, 1814. thing more moving, more pathetic, or more "Let the hungry soul rejoice, there is corn conducive to the purpose of persuasion. The in Egypt. Whatever thou hast been told to Crab is a sour Crab if it does not sweeten the contrary by designing friends, who perhim. I think it would draw another third haps inquired carelessly, or did not inquire volume of Dodsley out of me; but you say at all, in hope of saving their money, there you don't want any English books? Per- is a stock of 'Remorse' on hand, enough, as haps after all, that's as well; one's romantic Pople conjectures, for seven years' consumpcredulity is for ever misleading one into tion; judging from experience of the last misplaced acts of foolery. Crab might have two years. Methinks it makes for the benefit answered by this time: his juices take a of sound literature, that the best books do long time supplying, but they'll run at last, not always go off best. Inquire in seven -I know they will, - pure golden pippin. years' time for the 'Rokebys' and the A fearful rumour has since reached me that 'Laras,' and where shall they be found?— the Crab is on the eve of setting out for fluttering fragmentally in some thread-paper France. If he is in England your letter will-whereas thy Wallenstein,' and thy Rereach him, and I flatter myself a touch of morse,' are safe on Longman's or Pople's shelves, as in some Bodleian: there they shall remain; no need of a chain to hold them fast-perhaps for ages-tall copiesand people shan't run about hunting for * A mistake of Lamb's at which the excellent person referred to may smile, now that he has retired from his profession, and has no business but the offices of kindness. TO MR. COLERIDGE. them as in old Ezra's shrievalty they did for | want any books that I can procure for you? a Bible, almost without effect till the great- Old Jimmy Boyer is dead at last. Trollope great-grand-niece (by the mother's side) of Jeremiah or Ezekiel (which was it?) remembered something of a book, with odd reading in it, that used to lie in the green closet in her aunt Judith's bedchamber. "Thy caterer, Price, was at Hamburgh when last Pople heard of him, laying up for thee like some miserly old father for his generous-hearted son to squander. "Mr. Charles Aders, whose books also pant for that free circulation which thy custody is sure to give them, is to be heard of at his kinsmen, Messrs. Jameson and Aders, No. 7, Laurence Pountney-lane, London, according to the information which Crabius with his parting breath left me. Crabius is gone to Paris. I prophesy he and the Parisians will part with mutual contempt. His head has a twist Allemagne, like thine, dear mystic. "I have been reading Madame Stael on Germany. An impudent clever woman. But if Faust' be no better than in her abstract of it, I counsel thee to let it alone. How canst thou translate the language of cat-monkeys? Fie on such fantasies! But I will not forget to look for Proclus. It is a kind of book when one meets with it one shuts the lid faster than one opened it. Yet I have some bastard kind of recollection that some where, some time ago, upon some stall or other, I saw it. It was either that or Plotinus, or Saint Augustine's 'City of God.' So little do some folks value, what to others, sc. to you, 'well used,' had been the Pledge of immortality.' Bishop Bruno I never touched upon. Stuffing too good for the brains of such a Hare' as thou describest. May it burst his pericranium, as the gobbets of fat and turpentine (a nasty thought of the seer) did that old dragon in the Apocrypha! May he go mad in trying to understand his author! May he lend the third volume of him before he has quite translated the second, to a friend who shall lose it, and so spoil the publication, and may his friend find it and send it to him just as thou or some such less dilatory spirit shall have announced the whole for the press; lastly, may he be hunted by Reviewers, and the devil jug him. Canst think of any other queries in the solution of which I can give thee satisfaction? Do you has got his living, worth 1000l. a-year net. See, thou sluggard, thou heretic-sluggard, what mightest thou not have arrived at. Lay thy animosity against Jimmy in the grave. Do not entail it on thy posterity. www "CHARLES LAMB." CHAPTER X. [1815 to 1817.] LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, SOUTHEY, AND MANNING. It was at the beginning of the year 1815 that I had first the happiness of a personal acquaintance with Mr. Lamb. With his scattered essays and poems I had become familiar a few weeks before, through the instrumentality of Mr. Baron Field, now Chief Justice of Gibraltar, who had been brought into close intimacy with Lamb by the association of his own family with Christ's Hospital, of which his father was the surgeon, and by his own participation in the "Reflector." Living then in chambers in Inner Temple-lane, and attending those of Mr. Chitty, the special pleader, which were on the next staircase to Mr. Lamb's, I had been possessed some time by a desire to become acquainted with the writings of my gifted neighbour, which my friend was able only partially to gratify. "John Woodvil,” and the number of the "Reflector" enriched with Lamb's article, he indeed lent me, but he had no copy of "Rosamund Gray," which I was most anxious to read, and which, after earnest search through all the bookstalls within the scope of my walks, I found, exhibiting proper marks of due appreciation, in the store of a little circulating library near Holborn. There was something in this little romance so entirely new, yet breathing the air of old acquaintance; a sense of beauty so delicate and so intense; and a morality so benignant and so profound, that, as I read it, my curiosity to see its author rose almost to the height of pain. The commencement of the new year brought me that gratification; I was invited to meet Lamb at dinner, at the house of Mr. William Evans, a gentleman holding an office in Lamb insisted on my sitting with him while he smoked "one pipe" - for, alas! for poor human nature—he had resumed his acquaintance with his fair "traitress." How often the India House, who then lived in Weymouth-street, and who was a proprietor of the "Pamphleteer," to which I had contributed some idle scribblings. My duties the pipe and the glasses were replenished, I at the office did not allow me to avail myself of this invitation to dinner, but I went up at ten o'clock, through a deep snow, palpably congealing into ice, and was amply repaid when I reached the hospitable abode of my friend. There was Lamb, preparing to depart, but he staid half an hour in kindness to me, and then accompanied me to our common home- the Temple. countenance will not undertake to disclose; but I can never forget the conversation: though the first, it was more solemn, and in higher mood, than any I ever after had with Lamb through the whole of our friendship. How it took such a turn between two strangers, one of them a lad of not quite twenty, I cannot tell; but so it happened. We discoursed then of life and death, and our anticipation of a world beyond the grave. Lamb spoke of these awful themes with the simplest piety, but expressed his own fond cleavings to life-to all well-known accustomed things - and a shivering (not shuddering) sense of that which is to come, which he so finely indicated in his "New Year's Eve," years afterwards. It was two o'clock before we parted, when Lamb gave me a hearty invitation to renew my visit at pleasure; but two or three months elapsed before I saw him again. In the meantime, a number of the Pamphleteer" contained an Essay on the Chief Living Poets," among whom on the title appeared the name of Lamb, and some page or two were expressly devoted to his praises. It was a poor tissue of tawdry eulogies - a shallow outpouring of young enthusiasm in fine words, which it mistakes for thoughts; yet it gave Lamb, who had hitherto received scarcely civil notice from reviewers, great pleasure to find that any one recognised him as having a place among poets. The next time I saw him, he came almost breathless into the office, and proposed to give me what I should have chosen as the greatest of all possible honours and delights - an introduction to Wordsworth, who I learned, with a palpitating heart, was actually at the next door. I hurried out with my kind conductor, and a minute after was presented by Lamb to the person whom in all the world I venerated most, with this preface: Wordsworth, give me leave to introduce to you my only admirer." Methinks I see him before me now, as he appeared then, and as he continued, with scarcely any perceptible alteration to me during the twenty years of intimacy which followed, and were closed by his death. A light frame, so fragile that it seemed as if a breath would overthrow it, clad in clerk-like black, was surmounted by a head of form and expression the most noble and sweet. His black hair curled crisply about an expanded forehead; his eyes, softly brown, twinkled with varying expression, though the prevalent feeling was sad; and the nose slightly curved, and delicately carved at the nostril, with the lower outline of the face regularly oval, completed a head which was finely placed on the shoulders, and gave importance, and even dignity, to a diminutive and shadowy stem. Who shall describe his catch its quivering sweetness - and fix it for ever in words? There are none, alas! to answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep thought, striving with humour; the lines of suffering wreathed into cordial mirth; and a smile of painful sweetness, present an image to the mind it can as little describe as lose. His personal appearance and manner are not unfitly characterised by what he himself says in one of his letters to Manning of Braham-" a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel." He took my arm, and we walked to the Temple, Lamb stammering out fine remarks as we walked; and when we reached his staircase, he detained me with an urgency which would not be denied, and we mounted to the top story, where an old petted servant, called Becky, was ready to receive us. We were soon seated beside a cheerful fire; hot water Wordsworth, after his return to Westmoreand its better adjuncts were before us; and land from this visit: 66 The following letter was addressed to TO MR. WORDSWORTH. "Dear Wordsworth, "Aug. 9th, 1815. Mary and I felt quite queer after your taking leave (you W. W.) of us in St. Giles's. We wished we had seen more of you, but felt we had scarce been sufficiently acknowledging for the share we had enjoyed of your company. We felt as if we had been not enough expressive of our pleasure. But our manners both are a little too much on this side of too-muchcordiality. We want presence of mind and presence of heart. What we feel comes too late, like an after-thought impromptu. But perhaps you observed nothing of that which we have been painfully conscious of, and are every day in our intercourse with those we stand affected to through all the degrees of love. Robinson is on the circuit. Our panegyrist I thought had forgotten one of the objects of his youthful admiration, but I was agreeably removed from that scruple by the laundress knocking at my door this morning, almost before I was up, with a present of fruit from my young friend, &c. There is something inexpressibly pleasant to me in these presents, be it fruit, or fowl, or brawn or what not. Books are a legitimate cause of acceptance. If presents be not the soul of friendship, undoubtedly they are the most spiritual part of the body of that intercourse. There is too much narrowness of thinking in this point. The punctilio of acceptance, methinks, is too confined and strait-laced. I could be content to receive money, or clothes, or a joint of meat from a friend. Why should he not send me a dinner as well as a dessert? I would taste him in the beasts of the field, and through all creation. Therefore did the basket of fruit of the juvenile Talfourd not displease me; not that I have any thoughts of bartering or reciprocating these things. To send him anything in return, would be to reflect suspicion of mercenariness upon what I know he meant a free-will offering, Let him overcome me in bounty. In this strife a generous nature loves to be overcome. You wish me some of your leisure. I have a glimmering aspect, a chink-light of liberty before me, which I pray God prove not fallacious. My remonstrances have stirred up others to remonstrate, and, altogether, there is a plan for separating certain parts of business from our department; which, if it take place, will produce me more time, i. e. my evenings free. It may be a means of placing me in a more conspicuous situation, which will knock at my nerves another way, but I wait the issue in submission. If I can but begin my own day at four o'clock in the afternoon, I shall think myself to have Eden days of peace and liberty to what I have had. As you say, how a man can fill three volumes up with an essay on the drama, is wonderful; I am sure a very few sheets would hold all I had to say on the subject. "Did you ever read Charon on Wisdom?' or 'Patrick's Pilgrim?" If neither, you have two great pleasures to come. I mean some day to attack Caryl on Job, six folios. What any man can write, surely I may read. If I do but get rid of auditing warehousekeepers' accounts and get no worse-harassing task in the place of it, what a lord of liberty I shall be ! I shall dance, and skip, and make mouths at the invisible event, and pick the thorns out of my pillow, and throw 'em at rich men's night-caps, and talk blank verse, hoity, toity, and sing-A clerk I was in London gay,' 'Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban,' like the emancipated monster, and go where I like, up this street or down that alley. Adieu, and pray that it may be my luck. "Good bye to you all. C. LAMB," The following letter was inclosed in the same parcel with the last. TO MR. SOUTHEY. "Aug. 9th, 1815. "Dear Southey, - Robinson is not on the circuit, as I erroneously stated in a letter to W. W., which travels with this, but is gone to Brussels, Ostend, Ghent, &c. But his friends, the Colliers, whom I consulted respecting your friend's fate, remember to have heard him say, that Father Pardo had effected his escape (the cunning greasy rogue), and to the best of their belief is at present in Paris. To my thinking, it is a small matter whether there be one fat friar more or less in the world. I have rather a taste for clerical executions, imbibed from early recollections of the fate of the excellent Dodd. I hear Bonaparte has sued his habeas corpus, and the twelve judges are now sitting upon it at the Rolls. TO MR. SOUTHEY. "May 6th, 1815. "Your boute-feu (bonfire) must be excellent "Dear Southey, I have received from of its kind. Poet Settle presided at the last Longman a copy of Roderick,' with the great thing of the kind in London, when the author's compliments, for which I much pope was burnt in form. Do you provide thank you. I don't know where I shall put any verses on this occasion? Your fear for all the noble presents I have lately received Hartley's intellectuals is just and rational. in that way; the Excursion,' Wordsworth's Could not the Chancellor be petitioned to two last vols., and now 'Roderick,' have come remove him? His lordship took Mr. Betty pouring in upon me like some irruption from from under the paternal wing. I think at Helicon. The story of the brave Maccabee least he should go through a course of was already, you may be sure, familiar to me matter-of-fact with some sober man after in all its parts. I have, since the receipt of the mysteries. Could not he spend a week your present, read it quite through again, at Poole's before he goes back to Oxford? and with no diminished pleasure. I don't Tobin is dead. But there is a man in my know whether I ought to say that it has office, a Mr. H., who proses it away from given me more pleasure than any of your morning to night, and never gets beyond long poems. 'Kehama' is doubtless more corporal and material verities. He'd get powerful, but I don't feel that firm footing these crack-brain metaphysics out of the young gentleman's head as soon as any one I know. When I can't sleep o'nights, I imagine a dialogue with Mr. H., upon any given subject, and go prosing on in fancy with him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally found it answer. I am going to stand godfather; I don't like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt's marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony, Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral. Yet I can read about these ceremonies with pious and proper feelings. The realities of life only seem the mockeries. I fear I must get cured along with Hartley, if not too invete-delight at the wonder-workings of 'Kehama,' rate. Don't you think Louis the Desirable is in a sort of quandary? in it that I do in 'Roderick ;' my imagination goes sinking and floundering in the vast spaces of unopened-before systems and faiths; I am put out of the pale of my old sympathies; my moral sense is almost outraged; I can't believe, or, with horror am made to believe, such desperate chances against omnipotences, such disturbances of faith to the centre; the more potent the more painful the spell. Jove, and his brotherhood of gods, tottering with the giant assailings, I can bear, for the soul's hopes are not struck at in such contests; but your Oriental almighties are too much types of the intangible prototype to be meddled with without shuddering. One never connects what are called the attributes with Jupiter. I mention only what diminishes my not what impeaches its power, which I confess with trembling; but 'Roderick' is a comfortable poem. It reminds me of the delight I took in the first reading of the Joan of Arc.' It is maturer and better than that, though not better to me now than that was then. It suits me better than Madoc. I am at home in Spain and Christendom. I have a timid imagination, I am afraid. I do not willingly admit of strange beliefs, or outof-the-way creeds or places. I never read books of travels, at least not farther than Paris, or Rome. I can just endure Moors, because of their connection as foes with Christians; but Abyssinians, Ethiops, Esquimaux, Dervises, and all that tribe, I hate. |