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TO MR. MANNING.

"Dec. 16th, 1800. "We are damned! Not the facetious epilogue itself could save us. For, as the editor of the Morning Post, quick-sighted gentleman! hath this morning truly observed, (I beg pardon if I falsify his words, their profound sense I am sure I retain,) both prologue and epilogue were worthy of accompanying such a piece; and indeed (mark the profundity, Mr. Manning) were received with proper indignation by such of the audience only as thought either worth attending to. Professor, thy glories wax dim! Again, the incomparable author of the 'True Briton' declareth in his paper (bearing same date) that the epilogue was an indifferent attempt at humour and character, and failed in both. I forbear to mention the other papers, because I have not read them. O Professor, how different thy feelings now (quantum mutatus ab illo professore, qui in agris philosophiæ tantas victorias acquisivisti), how different thy proud feelings but one little week ago, thy anticipation of thy nine nights, those visionary claps, which have soothed thy soul by day, and thy dreams by night! Calling in accidentally on the Professor while he was out, I was ushered into the study; and my nose quickly (most sagacious always) pointed me to four tokens lying loose upon thy table, Professor, which indicated thy violent and satanical pride of heart. Imprimis, there caught mine eye a list of six persons, thy friends, whom thou didst meditate inviting to a sumptuous dinner on the Thursday, anticipating the profits of thy Saturday's play to answer charges; I was in the honoured file! Next, a stronger evidence of thy violent and almost satanical pride, lay a list of all the morning papers (from the Morning Chronicle' downwards to the Porcupine'), with the places of their respective offices, where thou wast meditating to insert, and didst insert, an elaborate sketch of the story of thy play; stones in thy enemy's hand to bruise thee with, and severely wast thou bruised, O Professor! nor do I know what oil to pour into thy wounds. Next, which convinced me to a dead conviction, of thy pride, violent and almost satanical pride- lay a list of books, which thy un-tragedy-favoured pocket could

never answer; Dodsley's Old Plays, Malone's Shakspeare (still harping upon thy play, thy philosophy abandoned meanwhile to Christians and superstitious minds); nay, I believe (if I can believe my memory), that the ambitious Encyclopedia itself was part of thy meditated acquisitions; but many a playbook was there. All these visions are damned; and thou, Professor, must read Shakspeare in future out of a common edition; and, hark ye, pray read him to a little better purpose! Last and strongest against thee (in colours manifest as the hand upon Belshazzar's wall), lay a volume of poems by C. Lloyd and C. Lamb. Thy heart misgave thee, that thy assistant might possibly not have talent enough to furnish thee an epilogue! Manning, all these things came over my mind; all the gratulations that would have thickened upon him, and even some have glanced aside upon his humble friend; the vanity, and the fame, and the profits (the Professor is 500l. ideal money out of pocket by this failure, besides 2007. he would have got for the copyright, and the Professor is never much beforehand with the world; what he gets is all by the sweat of his brow and dint of brain, for the Professor, though a sure man, is also a slow); and now to muse upon thy altered physiognomy, thy pale and squalid appearance (a kind of blue sickness about the eyelids), and thy crest fallen, and thy proud demand of 2007. from thy bookseller changed to an uncertainty of his taking it at all, or giving thee full 501. The Professor has won my heart by this his mournful catastrophe. You remember Marshall, who dined with him at my house; I met him in the lobby immediately after the damnation of the Professor's play, and he looked to me like an angel: his face was lengthened, and all over perspiration; I never saw such a care-fraught visage; I could have hugged him, I loved him so intensely. From every pore of him a perfume fell.' I have seen that man in many situations, and, from my soul, I think that a more god-like honest soul exists not in this world. The Professor's poor nerves trembling with the recent shock, he hurried him away to my house to supper, and there we comforted him as well as we could. He came to consult me about a change of catastrophe; but alas! the piece was condemned long before that crisis. I at

first humoured him with a specious proposi-a pleasure in beholding a delicate and welltion, but have since joined his true friends chosen assortment of teals, ortolans, the in advising him to give it up. He did it unctuous and palate-soothing flesh of geese, with a pang, and is to print it as his. wild and tame, nightingales' brains, the sensorium of a young sucking pig, or any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the judgment of you and the cook of Gonville. "C. LAMB."

"L."

In another letter, a few days after, Lamb thus recurs to the subject, and closes the century in anticipation of a visit to his friend at Cambridge.

TO MR. MANNING.

"Dec. 27th, 1800.

CHAPTER VII.

[1801 to 1804.]

JOHN WOODVIL REJECTED, PUBLISHED, AND RE-
VIEWED.

"As for the other Professor, he has actually LETTERS TO MANNING, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE; begun to dive into Tavernier and Chardin's Persian Travels for a story, to form a new drama for the sweet tooth of this fastidious age. Hath not Bethlehem College a fair action for non-residence against such professors? Are poets so few in this age, that He must write poetry? Is morals a subject so exhausted, that he must quit that line? Is the metaphysic well (without a bottom) drained dry?

"If I can guess at the wicked pride of the Professor's heart, I would take a shrewd wager, that he disdains ever again to dip his pen in Prose. Adieu, ye splendid theories! Farewell, dreams of political justice! Lawsuits, where I was counsel for Archbishop Fenelon versus my own mother, in the famous fire cause!

"Vanish from my mind, professors, one and all. I have metal more attractive on foot.

"Man of many snipes, I will sup with thee, Deo volente, et diabolo nolente, on Monday night, the 5th of January, in the new year, and crush a cup to the infant century.

"A word or two of my progress. Embark at six o'clock in the morning, with a fresh gale, on a Cambridge one-decker; very cold till eight at night; land at St. Mary's light-house, muffins and coffee upon table (or any other curious production of Turkey, or both Indies), snipes exactly at nine, punch to commence at ten, with argument; difference of opinion is expected to take place about eleven; perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve.-N. B. My single affection is not so singly wedded to snipes; but the curious and epicurean eye would also take

THE ominous postponement of Lamb's theatrical hopes was followed by their disappointment at the commencement of the century. He was favoured with at least one interview by the stately manager of Drury-lane, Mr. Kemble, who extended his high-bred courtesy even to authors, whom he invariably attended to the door of his house in Great Russell-street, and bade them "beware of the step." Godwin's catastrophe had probably rendered him less solicitous to encounter a similar peril; which the fondest admirers of "John Woodvil" will not regret that it escaped. While the occasional roughness of its verse would have been felt as strange to ears as yet unused to the old dramatists whom Lamb's Specimens had not then made familiar to the town, the delicate beauties enshrined within it would scarcely have been perceived in the glare of the theatre. Exhibiting "the depth, and not the tumults of the soul,"-presenting a female character of modest and retiring loveliness and noble purpose, but undistracted with any violent emotion,-and developing a train of circumstances which work out their gentle triumphs on the heart only of the hero, without stirring accident or vivid grouping of persons, it would scarcely have supplied sufficient of coarse interest to disarm the critical spirit which it would certainly have encountered in all its bitterness. Lamb cheerfully consoled himself by publishing it; and at the close of the year 1801 it appeared in a small volume of humble appearance, with the "Fragments of Burton," (to which Lamb alluded in one of his previous letters),

two of his quarto ballads, and the "Helen" been accustomed to damn all works of unof his sister.

Lamb's occasional connexion with newspapers introduced him to some of the editors and contributors of that day, who sought to repair the spirit wasted by perpetual exertion, in the protracted conviviality of the evening, and these associates sometimes left poor Lamb with an aching head, and a purse exhausted by the claims of their necessities upon it. Among those was Fenwick, immortalised as the Bigod of "Elia," who edited several ill-fated newspapers in succession, and was the author of many libels, which did his employers no good and his Majesty's government no harm. These connexions will explain some of the allusions in the following letters.

patronised genius in a more summary way, The daring peculiarities attracted the notice and after a duller fashion. These very critics of the Edinburgh reviewers, then in the wrought themselves into good-nature as they infancy of their slashing career, and the broke into deeper veins of thought; grew volume was immolated, in due form, by the gentler as they grew wiser: and sometimes, self-constituted judges, who, taking for their even when, like Balaam, they came to curse, motto "Judex damnatur cùm nocens absol- like him, they ended with "blessing altovitur," treated our author as a criminal con- gether," as in the review of the "Excursion," victed of publishing, and awaiting his doom which, beginning in the old strain, “This from their sentence. With the gay reckless- will never do," proceeded to give examples of ness of power, at once usurped and irrespon- its noblest passages, and to grace them with sible, they introduced Lord Mansfield's wild worthiest eulogy. And now, the spirit of construction of the law of libel into litera- the writers thus ridiculed, especially of ture; like him, holding every man primâ Wordsworth, breathes through the pages of facie guilty, who should be caught in the act this very Review, and they not seldom wear of publishing a book, and referring to the the "rich embroidery" of the language of court to decide whether sentence should be the poet, once scoffed at by their literary passed on him. The article on "John corporation as too puerile for the nursery. Woodvil," which adorned their third number, is a curious example of the old style of criticism vivified by the impulses of youth. We wonder now-and probably the writer of the article, if he is living, will wonder with us-that a young critic should seize on a little eighteen-penny book, simply printed, without any preface; make elaborate merriment of its outline, and, giving no hint of its containing one profound thought or happy expression, leave the reader of the review at a loss to suggest a motive for noticing such vapid absurdities. This article is written in a strain of grave banter, the theme of which is to congratulate the world on having a specimen of the rudest condition of the drama, "a man of the age of Thespis." "At length," says the reviewer, "even in composition a mighty veteran has been born. Older than Eschylus, and with all the spirit of originality, in an age of poets who had before them the imitations of some thousand years, he comes forward to establish his claim to the ancient hircus, and to satiate the most remote desires of the philosophic antiquary." On this text the writer proceeds, selecting Usbeck Tartary, as you go by his territories: for his purpose whatever, torn from its context, appeared extravagant and crude, and ending without the slightest hint that there is merit, or promise of merit, in the volume. There certainly was no malice, or desire to give pain, in all this; it was merely the result of the thoughtless adoption, by lads of gaiety and talent, of the old critical canons of the Monthly Reviews, which had

TO MR. MANNING.

"I heard that you were going to China,* with a commission from the Wedgewoods to collect hints for their pottery, and to teach the Chinese perspective. But I did not know that London lay in your way to Pekin. I am seriously glad of it, for I shall trouble you with a small present for the Emperor of

it is a fragment of a Dissertation on the state of political parties in England at the end of the eighteenth century,' which will no doubt be very interesting to his Imperial Majesty. It was written originally in English

* Mr. Manning had begun to be haunted with the

idea of China, and to talk of going thither, which he but a desire to see that great nation.

accomplished some years afterwards, without any motive

do you remember an instance from Homer, (who understood these matters tolerably well,) of Priam driving away his other sons with expressions of wrath and bitter reproach, when Hector was just dead.

for the use of the two and twenty readers of | Assembly, or else in Appeal to the old The Albion,' (this calculation includes a Whigs, I forget which printer, four pressmen, and a devil); but becoming of no use, when The Albion' stopped, I got it translated into Usbeck Tartar by my good friend Tibet Kulm, who is to come to London with a civil invitation from the Cham to the English nation to go over to the worship of the Lama.

-

"The Albion is dead dead as nail in door - and my revenues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of an opening to the Morning Chronicle!!! Mr. Manning, by means of that common dispenser of benevolence, Mister Dyer. I have not seen Perry, the editor, yet but I am preparing a specimen. I shall have a difficult job to manage, for you must know that Mr. Perry, in common with the great body of the Whigs, thinks 'The Albion' very low. I find I must rise a peg or so, be a little more decent, and less abusive; for, to confess the truth, I had arrived to an abominable pitch; I spared neither age nor sex when my cue was given me. N'importe, (as they say in French,) any climate will suit me. So you are about to bring your old face-making face to London. You could not come in a better time for my purposes; for I have just lost Rickman, a faint idea of whose character I sent you. He is gone to Ireland for a year or two, to make his fortune; and I have lost by his going, what seems to me I can never recover-a finished man. His memory will be to me as the brazen serpent to the Israelites,-I shall look up to it, to keep me upright and honest. But he may yet bring back his honest face to England one day. I wish your affairs with the Emperor of China had not been so urgent, that you might have stayed in Great Britain a year or two longer, to have seen him; for, judging from my own experience, I almost dare pronounce you never saw his equal. I never saw a man, that could be at all a second or substitute for him in any sort.

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"I live where I did in a private manner, because I don't like state. Nothing is so disagreeable to me as the clamours and applauses of the mob. For this reason I live in an obscure situation in one of the courts of the Temple. "C. L.

"I send you all of Coleridge's letters* to me, which I have preserved: some of them are upon the subject of my play. I also send you Kemble's two letters, and the prompter's courteous epistle, with a curious critique on 'Pride's Cure,' by a young physician from EDINBRO', who modestly suggests quite another kind of a plot. These are monuments of my disappointment which I like to preserve.

"In Coleridge's letters you will find a good deal of amusement, to see genuine talent struggling against a pompous display of it. I also send you the Professor's letter to me, (careful professor! to conceal his name even from his correspondent,) ere yet the Professor's pride was cured. Oh! monstrous and almost satanical pride!

"You will carefully keep all (except the Scotch Doctor's, which burn) in statu quo till I come to claim mine own.

"C. LAMB."

The following is in reply to a pressing invitation from Mr. Wordsworth, to visit him at the Lakes.

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"Jan. 30th, 1801.

"I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a

Lamb afterwards, in some melancholy mood, de

stroyed all Coleridge's Letters, and was so vexed with what he had done, that he never preserved any letters which he received afterwards.

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'Give my kindest love, and my sister's to D. and yourself. And a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite.† Thank you for liking my play! "C. L."

The next two letters were written to Manning when on a tour upon the Continent.

mountain in my life. I have passed all my him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon days in London, until I have formed as many me, from disuse, have been the beauties of and intense local attachments, as any of you Nature, as they have been confidently called; mountaineers can have done with dead so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all nature. The lighted shops of the Strand the inventions of men, and assemblies of and Fleet-street; the innumerable trades, men in this great city. I should certainly tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, have laughed with dear Joanna.* playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles-life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet-street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print-shops, the old-book stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes-London itself a pantomime and a masquerade-all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such

scenes?

"My attachments are all local, purely local -I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books,) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog, (only exceeding him in knowledge,) wherever I have moved, old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school,-these are my mistresses-have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof

TO MR. MANNING.

"Feb. 15th, 1802.

"Apropos, I think you wrong about my play. All the omissions are right. And the supplementary scene, in which Sandford narrates the manner in which his master is affected, is the best in the book. It stands where a hodge-podge of German puerilities used to stand. I insist upon it that you like that scene. Love me, love that scene. I will now transcribe the Londoner' (No. 1), and wind up with all with affection and humble servant at the end."

[Here was transcribed the essay called "The Londoner," which was published some years afterwards in "The Reflector," and which forms part of Lamb's collected works.] He then proceeds:

"What is all this about!' said Mrs. Shandy. A story of a cock and a bull,' said Yorick: and so it is; but Manning will take good-naturedly what God will send him across the water: only I hope he won't shut his eyes, and open his mouth, as the children say, for that is the way to gape, and not to read. Manning, continue your laudable purpose of making me your register. I will render back all your remarks; and I, not you shall have received usury by having read them. In the mean time, may the great Spirit have you in his keeping, and preserve

Alluding to the Inscription of Wordsworth's, entitled

beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the "Joanna," containing a magnificent description of the

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effect of laughter echoing amidst the great mountains of Westmoreland.

mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford + Alluding to Wordsworth's poem, "The Pet Lamb."

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