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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; 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 It is right to remind the reader of this, for a of Baptism had been prostrated. The daughreason applying forcibly to the present moment. ter of France had been surrendered on coerMichelet has taxed Englishmen with yielding to cion as a bride to her English conquerer. national animosities in the case of Joan, having no The child of that marriage, so ignominious to plea whatever for that insinuation but the single one drawn from Shakspeare's Henry VI. To this the the land, was king of France by consent of answer is-first, that Shakspeare's share in that tri-Christendom: that child's uncle domineered logy is not nicely ascertained. Secondly, that M. Michelet forgot (or, which is far worse, not forgetting it, he dissembled) the fact, that in undertaking a series of dramas upon the basis avowedly of national chronicles, and for the very purpose of profiting by old traditionary recollections connected with ancestral glories, it was mere lunacy to recast the circumstances at the bidding of antiquarian research, so as entirely to disturb these glories. Besides that to Shakspeare's age no such spirit of research had blosing itself in patriotism, for gatherings everysomed. Writing for the stage a man would have risked lapidation by uttering a whisper in that direction. And, even if not, what sense could there have been in openly running counter to the very motive that had originally prompted that particular class of chroni cle plays Thirdly, if one Englishman had, in a memorable situation, adopted the popular view of Joan's conduct, (popular as much in France as in England;) on the other hand, fifty years before M. Michelet was writing this flagrant injustice, another Englishman (viz. Southey) had, in an epic poem, reversed this misjudgment, and invested the shepherd girl with a glory nowhere else accorded to her, unless indeed by Schiller. Fourthly, we are not entitled to view as an attack upon Joanna, what, in the worst construction, is but an unexamining adop-quinades, is more shocking to the general sense of tion of the contemporary historical accounts. A poet justice than any special untruth as to Shakspeare or a dramatist is not responsible for the accuracy of can be to the particular nationality of an Englishchronicles. But what is an attack upon Joan, being

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, mask

where of lawless marauders; of soldiers that had deserted their banners; and of robbers by profession. This was the wo of France more even than the military dishonor. That dishonor had been palliated from the first by the genealogical pretensions of the Eng

briefly the foulest and obscenest attempt ever made to stifle the grandeur of a great human struggle, viz. the French burlesque poem of La Pucelle,-what memorable man was it that wrote that? Was he a Frenchman, or was he not? That M. Michelet should pretend to have forgotten this vilest of pas

man.

lish 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 of 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 raised 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 correspodence with Cole

ridge. 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 resist

ance.

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 1821-2. 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 own grave by Piron, the cynical author of La Métromanie, 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 même académicien."

ance of distress that he perhaps did not feel, down came a plunging shot into the very

The bitter arrow of the second line was feath-thick of us with ten times the effect it would

ered to hit the French Académie, who had declined to elect him a member. Our trans

lation 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 peatedly 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."

about 1810 and 1812 I must have met Lamb re

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 appear

often did him true "yeoman's service," some-
else have had. If his stammering, however,
times 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 roll-
ing fire of Di-di-di-di, that when at
length he descended à 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 “ opera-
tive" clause of the sentence; and both ex-
claiming 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-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. 66
'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."

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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 and 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 gaiety; and as usual he rose too rapidly to the zenith of his gaiety; he shot upwards like a rocket, and, as usual, people said he was "tipsy." To me Lamb never seemed intoxicated, but at most aerially 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. 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 any body 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 |

The

which had been pointed out to me as his, (signed Janus Weathercock, Vinkbooms, &c.,) were written in a spirit of coxcombry that did not so much disgust as amuse. 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 étalage-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 common-place, 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 revo

lution for man wouldst thou have accomplished had thy deep wickedness prospered! What was that wickedness? In a few words I will say.

tence.

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 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 preTo 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 £25 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 funeralthe 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 oc

cur 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 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 I 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

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