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FINAL MEMORIALS

OF

CHARLES LAMB.

CHAPTER I.

LETTERS OF LAMB TO COLERIDGE, IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1796.

In the year 1795, Charles Lamb resided with his father, mother, and sister, in lodgings at No. 7, Little Queen Street, Holborn. The father was rapidly sinking into dotage; the mother suffered under an infirmity which deprived her of the use of her limbs; and the sister not only undertook the office of daily and nightly attendance on her mother, but sought to add by needle work to their slender resources. Their income then consisted of an annuity which Mr. Lamb the elder derived from the old Bencher, Mr. Salt, whom he had faithfully served for many years; Charles's salary, which, being that of a clerk of three years' standing in the India House, could have been but scanty; and a small payment made for board by an old maiden aunt, who resided with them. In this year Lamb, being just

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twenty years of age, began to write verses, partly incited by the example of his only friend, Coleridge, whom he regarded with as much reverence as affection, and partly inspired by an attachment to a young lady residing in the neighbourhood of Islington, who is commemorated in his early verses as the fair-haired maid." How his love prospered we cannot ascertain; but we know how nobly that love, and all hope of the earthly blessings attendant on such an affection, were resigned on the catastrophe which darkened the following year. In the meantime, his youth was lonely-rendered the more so by the recollection of the society of Coleridge, who had just left London-of Coleridge in the first bloom of life and genius, unshaded by the mysticism which it afterwards glorified-full of boundless ambition, love, and hope! There was a tendency to insanity in his family, which had been more than once developed in his sister; and it was no matter of surprise that in the dreariness of his solitude it fell upon him; and that, at the close of the year, he was subjected for a few weeks to the restraint of the insane. The wonder is that, amidst all the difficulties, the sorrows, and the excitements of his succeeding forty years, it never recurred. Perhaps the true cause of this remarkable exemption—an exemption the more remarkable when his afflictions are considered in association with one single frailty-will be found in the sudden claim made on his moral and intellectual nature by a terrible exigency, and by his generous answer to that claim; so that a life of self-sacrifice was rewarded by the preservation of unclouded reason.

The following letter to Coleridge, then residing at Bristol, which is undated, but which is proved by circumstances to have been written in the spring of 1796, and which is probably the earliest of Lamb's letters which have been preserved, contains his own account of this seizure. Allusion to the same event will be perceived in two letters of the same year, after which no reference to it appears in his correspondence, nor can any be remembered in his conversations with his dearest friends.

TO MR. COLERIDGE,

1796.

"Dear C, make yourself perfectly easy about May. I paid his bill when I sent your clothes. I was flush of money, and am so still to all the purposes of a single life; so give yourself no further concern about it. The money would be superfluous to me if I had it.

"When Southey becomes as modest as his predecessor Milton, and publishes his Epics in duodecimo, I will read 'em; a guinea a book is somewhat exorbitant, nor have I the opportunity of borrowing the work. The extracts from it in the Monthly Reviews, and the short passages in your Watchman, seem to me much superior to anything in his partnership account with Lovell. Your poems I shall procure forthwith. There were noble lines in what you inserted in one of your numbers, from Religious Musings;' but I thought them elaborate. I am somewhat glad you have given up that paper; it must have been dry, unprofitable, and of dissonant mood to your disposition. I wish you success

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in all your undertakings, and am glad to hear you are employed about the Evidences of Religion.' There is need of multiplying such books a hundredfold in this philosophical age, to prevent converts to atheism, for they seem too tough disputants to meddle with afterwards.

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'Le Grice is gone to make puns in Cornwall. He has got a tutorship to a young boy living with his mother, a widow-lady. He will, of course, initiate him quickly in whatsoever things are lovely, honourable, and of good report.' Coleridge! I know not what suf fering scenes you have gone through at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I was! And many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told. My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which, if I finish, I publish. White is on the eve of publishing (he took the hint from Vortigern) 'Original Letters of Falstaff, Shallow,' &c., a copy you shall have when it comes out. They are without exception the best imitations I ever saw. Coleridge! it may convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.

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The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry;

but you will be curious to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of my lucid intervals.

TO MY SISTER.

"If from my lips some angry accents fell,
Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind,
'Twas but the error of a sickly mind

And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well,
And waters clear, of Reason; and for me
Let this my verse the poor atonement be—
My verse, which thou to praise wert e'er inclined
Too highly, and with a partial eye to see
No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show
Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend
An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,

Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.

"With these lines, and with that sister's kindest remembrances to C- I conclude. Yours sincerely,

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"LAMB."

"Your Conciones ad Populum' are the most eloquent politics that ever came in my way.

“Write when convenient—not as a task, for here is nothing in this letter to answer.

"We cannot send our remembrances to Mrs C., not having seen her, but believe me, our best good wishes attend you both.

"My civic and poetic compliments to Southey if at Bristol;-why, he is a very Leviathan of Bards-the small minnow, I!"

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