I shall select a day or two very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more; for it will be a stock book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. There is a great deal of noble matter about mountain scenery, yet not so much as to overpower and discountenance a poor Londoner, or south-countryman entirely,—though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully; for it was her remark, during reading it, that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that invisible part of us in her.

Save for a late excursion to Harrow, and a day or two on the banks of the Thames this summer, rural images were fast fading from my mind, and by the wise provision of the Regent all that was countrified in the parks is all but obliterated. The very colour of green is vanished; the whole surface of Hyde Park is dry, crumbling sand (Arabia Arenosa), not a vestige or hint of grass ever having grown there; booths and drinking-places go all round it, for a mile and a half, I am confident,—I might say two miles in circuit; the stench of liquors, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions, conquers the air, and we are all stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park [2]. Order after order has been issued by Lord Sidmouth in the name of the Regent (acting in behalf of his royal father) for the dispersion of the varlets; but in vain. The vis unita of all the publicans in London, Westminster, Marylebone, and miles round, is too powerful a force to put down. The Regent has raised a phantom which he cannot lay. There they'll stay probably forever. The whole beauty of the place is gone,—that lake-look of the Serpentine (it has got foolish ships upon it); but something whispers to have confidence in Nature and its revival,—

"At the coming of the milder day, These monuments shall all be overgrown."

Meantime I confess to have smoked one delicious pipe in one of the cleanliest and goodliest of the booths,—a tent rather,—

"Oh, call it not a booth!"

erected by the public spirit of Watson, who keeps the "Adam and Eve" at Pancras (the ale-houses have all emigrated, with their train of bottles, mugs, cork-screws, waiters, into Hyde Park,—whole ale-houses, with all their ale!) in company with some of the Guards that had been in France, and a fine French girl, habited like a princess of banditti, which one of the dogs had transported from the Garonne to the Serpentine. The unusual scene in Hyde Park, by candle-light, in open air,—good tobacco, bottled stout,—made it look like an interval in a campaign, a repose after battle. I almost fancied scars smarting, and was ready to club a story with my comrades of some of my lying deeds. After all, the fireworks were splendid; the rockets in clusters, in trees, and all shapes, spreading about like young stars in the making, floundering about in space (like unbroke horses), till some of Newton's calculations should fix them; but then they went out. Any one who could see 'em, and the still finer showers of gloomy rain-fire that fell sulkily and angrily from 'em, and could go to bed without dreaming of the last day, must be as hardened an atheist as—.

The conclusion of this epistle getting gloomy, I have chosen this part to desire our kindest loves to Mrs. Wordsworth and to Dorothea. Will none of you ever be in London again?

Again let me thank you for your present, and assure you that fireworks and triumphs have not distracted me from receiving a calm and noble enjoyment from it (which I trust I shall often), and I sincerely congratulate you on its appearance.

With kindest remembrances to you and household, we remain, yours sincerely,

C. LAMB and Sister.

[1] The Excursion.

[2] Early in 1814 the London parks were thrown open to the public, with fireworks, booths, illuminations, etc., in celebration of the peace between France and England, it was two or three years before they recovered their usual verdure.



LIV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

(1815)

Dear Wordsworth,—You have made me very proud with your successive book presents. [1] I have been carefully through the two volumes to see that nothing was omitted which used to be there. I think I miss nothing but a character in the antithetic manner, which I do not know why you left out,—the moral to the boys building the giant, the omission whereof leaves it, in my mind, less complete,—and one admirable line gone (or something come instead of it), "the stone-chat, and the glancing sandpiper," which was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand. I am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stripped shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice; I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls. I am afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could fairly be said against it. You say you made the alteration for the "friendly reader;" but the "malicious" will take it to himself. Damn 'em! if you give 'em an inch, etc. The Preface is noble, and such as you should write. I wish I could set my name to it, Imprimatur; but you have set it there yourself, and I thank you. I had rather be a doorkeeper in your margin than have their proudest text swelling with my eulogies. The poems in the volumes which are new to me are so much in the old tone that I hardly received them as novelties. Of those of which I had no previous knowledge, the "Four Yew-Trees" and the mysterious company which you have assembled there most struck me,—"Death the Skeleton, and Time the Shadow." It is a sight not for every youthful poet to dream of; it is one of the last results he must have gone thinking on for years for, "Laodamia" is a very original poem,—I mean original with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it, I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation.

Let me in this place, for I have writ you several letters naming it, mention that my brother, who is a picture-collector, has picked up an undoubtable picture of Milton. [2] He gave a few shillings for it, and could get no history with it, but that some old lady had had it for a great many years. Its age is ascertainable from the state of the canvas, and you need only see it to be sure that it is the original of the heads in the Tonson editions, with which we are all so well familiar. Since I saw you, I have had a treat in the reading way which conies not every day,—the Latin poems of V. Bourne, which were quite new to me. What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town scenes!—a proper counterpoise to some people's rural extravaganzas. Why I mention him is, that your "Power of Music" reminded me of his poem of "The Ballad-singer in the Seven Dials," Do you remember his epigram on the old woman who taught Newton the A B C, which, after all, he says, he hesitates not to call Newton's "Principia"? I was lately fatiguing myself with going through a volume of fine words by Lord Thurlow,—excellent words; and if the heart could live by words alone, it could desire no better regales. But what an aching vacuum of matter! I don't stick at the madness of it, for that is only a consequence of shutting his eyes and thinking he is in the age of the old Elizabeth poets. From thence I turned to Bourne. What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matter-ful creature, sucking from every flower, making a flower of everything, his diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English! Bless him! Latin wasn't good enough for him. Why wasn't he content with the language which Gay and Prior wrote in?

I am almost sorry that you printed extracts from those first poems, or that you did not print them at length. They do not read to me as they do altogether. Besides, they have diminished the value of the original (which I possess) as a curiosity. I have hitherto kept them distinct in my mind, as referring to a particular period of your life. All the rest of your poems are so much of a piece they might have been written in the same week; these decidedly speak of an earlier period. They tell more of what you had been reading. We were glad to see the poems "by a female friend." [3] The one on the Wind is masterly, but not new to us. Being only three, perhaps you might have clapped a D. at the corner, and let it have past as a printer's mark to the uninitiated, as a delightful hint to the better instructed. As it is, expect a formal criticism on the poems of your female friend, and she must expect it. I should have written before, but I am cruelly engaged, and like to be. On Friday I was at office from ten in the morning (two hours dinner excepted) to eleven at night, last night till nine; my business and office business in general have increased so; I don't mean I am there every night, but I must expect a great deal of it. I never leave till four, and do not keep a holiday now once in ten times, where I used to keep all red-letter days, and some few days besides, which I used to dub Nature's holidays. I have had my day. I had formerly little to do. So of the little that is left of life I may reckon two thirds as dead, for time that a man may call his own is his life; and hard work and thinking about it taint even the leisure hours,—stain Sunday with work-day contemplations. This is Sunday; and the headache I have is part late hours at work the two preceding nights, and part later hours over a consoling pipe afterwards. But I find stupid acquiescence coming over me. I bend to the yoke, and it is almost with me and my household as with the man and his consort,—

"To them each evening had its glittering star, And every sabbath-day its golden sun!" [4] to such straits am I driven for the life of life, Time! Oh that from that superfluity of holiday-leisure my youth wasted, "Age might but take some hours youth wanted not"! N.B.—I have left off spirituous liquors for four or more months, with a moral certainty of its lasting. Farewell, dear Wordsworth!

O happy Paris, seat of idleness and pleasure! From some returned English I hear that not such a thing as a counting-house is to be seen in her streets,—scarce a desk. Earthquakes swallow up this mercantile city and its "gripple merchants," as Drayton hath it, "born to be the curse of this brave isle"! I invoke this, not on account of any parsimonious habits the mercantile interest may have, but, to confess truth, because I am not fit for an office.

Farewell, in haste, from a head that is too ill to methodize, a stomach to digest, and all out of tune. Better harmonies await you!

C. LAMB.

[1] In 1815 Wordsworth published a new edition of his poems, with the following title: "Poems by William Wordsworth; including Lyrical Ballads, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author. With Additional Poems, a new Preface, and a Supplementary Essay. In two Volumes." The new poems were "Yarrow Visited," "The Force of Prayer," "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale," "Laodamia," "Yew-Trees," "A Night Piece," etc., and it was chiefly on these that Lamb made his comments.

[2] John Lamb afterwards gave the picture to Charles, who made it a wedding present to Mrs. Moxon (Emma Isola), It is now in the National Portrait Gallery.

[3] Dorothy Wordsworth.

[4] Excursion, book v.



LV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

Excuse this maddish letter; I am too tired to write in forma.

1815.

Dear Wordsworth,—The more I read of your two last volumes, the more I feel it necessary to make my acknowledgments for them in more than one short letter. The "Night Piece," to which you refer me, I meant fully to have noticed; but the fact is, I come so fluttering and languid from business, tired with thoughts of it, frightened with fears of it, that when I get a few minutes to sit down and scribble (an action of the hand now seldom natural to me,—I mean voluntary pen-work), I lose all presential memory of what I had intended to say, and say what I can, talk about Vincent Bourne or any casual image, instead of that which I had meditated (by the way, I mast look out V. B. for you). So I had meant to have mentioned "Yarrow Visited," with that stanza, "But thou that didst appear so fair:" [1] than which I think no lovelier stanza can be found in the wide world of poetry. Yet the poem, on the whole, seems condemned to leave behind it a melancholy of imperfect satisfaction, as if you had wronged the feeling with which, in what preceded it, you had resolved never to visit it, and as if the Muse had determined, in the most delicate manner, to make you, and scarce make you, feel it. Else, it is far superior to the other, which has but one exquisite verse in it,—the last but one, or the last two: this is all fine, except, perhaps, that that of "studious ease and generous cares" has a little tinge of the less romantic about it. "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale" is a charming counterpart to "Poor Susan," with the addition, of that delicacy towards aberrations from the strict path which is so fine in the "Old Thief and the Boy by his side," which always brings water into my eyes.

Perhaps it is the worse for being a repetition; "Susan" stood for the representative of poor Rus in Urbe. There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten,—"bright volumes of vapor," etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral conduct. Susan is a servant-maid. I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to term her "a poor outcast" seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be,—which I trust was not what you meant to express. Robin Goodfellow supports himself without that stick of a moral which you have thrown away; but how I can be brought in felo de omittendo for that ending to the Boy-builders [2] is a mystery. I can't say positively now, I only know that no line oftener or readier occurs than that "Light-hearted boys, I will build up a Giant with you." It comes naturally with a warm holiday and the freshness of the blood. It is a perfect summer amulet, that I tie round my legs to quicken their motion when I go out a-maying. (N. B.) I don't often go out a-maying; must is the tense with me now. Do you take the pun? Young Romilly is divine, the reasons of his mother's grief being remediless,—I never saw parental love carried up so high, towering above the other loves,—Shakspeare had done something for the filial in Cordelia, and, by implication, for the fatherly too in Lear's resentment; he left it for you to explore the depths of the maternal heart.

I get stupid and flat, and flattering; what's the use of telling you what good things you have written, or—I hope I may add—that I know them to be good? A propos, when I first opened upon the just-mentioned poem, in a careless tone I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, "What is good for a bootless bene?" [3] To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the jest-book has it) she answered, "A shoeless pea." It was the first joke she ever made. Joke the second I make. You distinguish well, in your old preface, between the verses of Dr. Johnson, of the "Man in the Strand," and that from "The Babes in the Wood," I was thinking whether, taking your own glorious lines,—

"And from the love which was in her soul For her youthful Romilly,"

which, by the love I bear my own soul, I think have no parallel in any of the best old ballads, and just altering it to,—

"And from the great respect she felt For Sir Samuel Romilly,"

would not nave explained the boundaries of prose expression and poetic feeling nearly as well. Excuse my levity on such an occasion. I never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not make me, both lately, and when I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more than I for a spiritual taste of that "White Doe" you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when dressed, i. e., printed. All things read raw to me in MS.; to compare magna parvis, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. The only one which I think would not very much win upon me in print is "Peter Bell;" but I am not certain. You ask me about your preface. I like both that and the supplement, without an exception. The account of what you mean by imagination is very valuable to me. It will help me to like some things in poetry better, which is a little humiliating in me to confess. I thought I could not be instructed in that science (I mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene, beastly Peter Pindar, in a dispute on Milton, say he thought that if he had reason to value himself upon one thing more than another, it was in knowing what good verse was. Who looked over your proof-sheets and left ordebo in that line of Virgil?

My brother's picture of Milton is very finely painted,—that is, it might have been done by a hand next to Vandyke's. It is the genuine Milton, and an object of quiet gaze for the half-hour at a time. Yet though I am confident there is no better one of him, the face does not quite answer to Milton. There is a tinge of petit (or petite, how do you spell it?) querulousness about it; yet, hang it! now I remember better, there is not,—it is calm, melancholy, and poetical. One of the copies of the poems you sent has precisely the same pleasant blending of a sheet of second volume with a sheet of first, I think it was page 245; but I sent it and had it rectified, It gave me, in the first impetus of cutting the leaves, just such a cold squelch as going down a plausible turning and suddenly reading "No thoroughfare." Robinson's is entire; I wish you would write more criticism about Spencer, etc. I think I could say something about him myself; but, Lord bless me! these "merchants and their spicy drugs," which are so harmonious to sing of, they lime-twig up my poor soul and body till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of a genius! I can't even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper, I engross when I should pen a paragraph. Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization, and wealth, and amity, and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and knowledge of the face of the globe; and rot the very firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks: Vale.

Yours, dear W., and all yours,

C. LAMB.

[1] "But thou, that didst appear so fair To fond imagination, Dost rival in the light of day Her dilicate Creation"

[2] Better known as "Rural Architecture."

[3] The first line of the poem on Bolton Abbey:—

"'What is good for a bootless bene?' With these dark words begins my fate; And their meaning is, whence can comfort spring When Prayer is of no avail?"



LVI.

TO SOUTHEY.

May 6, 1815.

Dear Southey,—I have received from Longman a copy of "Roderick," with the author's compliments, for which I much thank you. I don't know where I shall put all the noble presents I have lately received in that way; the "Excursion," Wordsworth's two last volumes, and now "Roderick," have come pouring in upon me like some irruption from Helicon. The story of the brave Maccabee was already, you may be sure, familiar to me in all its parts. I have, since the receipt of your present, read it quite through again, and with no diminished pleasure. I don't know whether I ought to say that it has given me more pleasure than any of your long poems. "Kehama" is doubtless more powerful, but I don't feel that firm footing 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 delight at the wonder-workings of "Kehama," 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 out-of-the-way creeds or places. I never read books of travel, 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; I believe I fear them in some manner. A Mahometan turban on the stage, though enveloping some well-known face (Mr. Cook or Mr. Maddox, whom I see another day good Christian and English waiters, innkeepers, etc.), does not give me pleasure unalloyed. I am a Christian, Englishman, Londoner, Templar, God help me when I come to put off these snug relations, and to get abroad into the world to come! I shall be like the crow on the sand, as Wordsworth has it; but I won't think on it,—no need, I hope, yet.

The parts I have been most pleased with, both on first and second readings, perhaps, are Florinda's palliation of Roderick's crime, confessed to him in his disguise; the retreat of Pelayo's family first discovered; his being made king,—"For acclamation one form must serve, more solemn for the breach of old observances." Roderick's vow is extremely fine, and his blessing on the vow of Alphonso,—

"Towards the troop be spread his arms, As if the expanded soul diffused itself, And carried to all spirits, with the act, Its affluent inspiration."

It struck me forcibly that the feeling of these last lines might have been suggested to you by the Cartoon of Paul at Athens. Certain it is that a better motto or guide to that famous attitude can nowhere be found. I shall adopt it as explanatory of that violent but dignified motion.

I must read again Landor's "Julian;" I have not read it some time. I think he must have failed in Roderick, for I remember nothing of him, nor of any distinct character as a character,—only fine-sounding passages. I remember thinking also he had chosen a point of time after the event, as it were, for Roderick survives to no use; but my memory is weak, and I will not wrong a fine poem by trusting to it.

The notes to your poem I have not read again; but it will be a take-downable book on my shelf, and they will serve sometimes at breakfast, or times too light for the text to be duly appreciated,— though some of 'em, one of the serpent Penance, is serious enough, now I think on't.

Of Coleridge I hear nothing, nor of the Morgans. I hope to have him like a reappearing star, standing up before me some time when least expected in London, as has been the case whilere.

I am doing nothing (as the phrase is) but reading presents, and walk away what of the day-hours I can get from hard occupation. Pray accept once more my hearty thanks and expression of pleasure for your remembrance of me. My sister desires her kind respects to Mrs. S. and to all at Keswick.

Yours truly,

C. LAMB.



LVII.

TO MISS HUTCHINSON. [1]

October 19, 1815.

Dear Miss H.,—I am forced to be the replier to your letter, for Mary has been ill, and gone from home these five weeks yesterday. She has left me very lonely and very miserable. I stroll about, but there is no rest but at one's own fireside; and there is no rest for me there now. I look forward to the worse half being past, and keep up as well as I can. She has begun to show some favorable symptoms. The return of her disorder has been frightfully soon this time, with scarce a six-months' interval. I am almost afraid my worry of spirits about the E. I. House was partly the cause of her illness: but one always imputes it to the cause next at hand,—more probably it conies from some cause we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts sad great slices out of the time, the little time, we shall have to live together. I don't know but the recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain her death, better than if we had had no partial separations. But I won't talk of death. I will imagine us immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be making our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them, at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget we are assailable; we are strong for the time as rocks,—"the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs." Poor C. Lloyd and poor Priscilla! I feel I hardly feel enough for him; my own calamities press about me, and involve me in a thick integument not to be reached at by other folks' misfortunes. But I feel all I can, all the kindness I can, towards you all. God bless you! I hear nothing from Coleridge.

Yours truly,

C. LAMB.

[1] Mrs. Wordsworth's sister.



LVIII.

TO MANNING.

December 25, 1815.

Dear Old Friend and Absentee,—This is Christmas Day, 1815, with us; what it may be with you I don't know,—the 12th of June next year, perhaps; and if it should be the consecrated season with you, I don't see how you can keep it. You have no turkeys; you would not desecrate the festival by offering up a withered Chinese bantam, instead of the savoury grand Norfolcian holocaust, that smokes all around my nostrils at this moment from a thousand firesides. Then what puddings have you? Where will you get holly to stick in your churches, or churches to stick your dried tea-leaves (that must be the substitute) in? What memorials you can have of the holy time, I see not. A chopped missionary or two may keep up the thin idea of Lent and the wilderness; but what standing evidence have you of the Nativity? 'Tis our rosy-cheeked, homestalled divines, whose faces shine to the tune of unto us a child was born,—faces fragrant with the mince-pies of half a century, that alone can authenticate the cheerful mystery. I feel, I feel my bowels refreshed with the holy tide; my zeal is great against the unedified heathen. Down with the Pagodas; down with the idols,—Ching-chong-fo and his foolish priesthood! Come out of Babylon, oh my friend, for her time is come, and the child that is native, and the Proselyte of her gates, shall kindle and smoke together! And in sober sense what makes you so long from among us, Manning? You must not expect to see the same England again which you left.

Empires have been overturned, crowns trodden into dust, the face of the Western world quite changed; your friends have all got old, those you left blooming, myself (who am one of the few that remember you)—those golden hairs which you recollect my taking a pride in, turned to silvery and gray. Mary has been dead and buried many years; she desired to be buried in the silk gown you sent her. Rickman, that you remember active and strong, now walks out supported by a servant-maid and a stick. Martin Burney is a very old man. The other day an aged woman knocked at my door and pretended to my acquaintance. It was long before I had the most distant cognition of her; but at last together we made her out to be Louisa, the daughter of Mrs. Topham, formerly Mrs. Morton, who had been Mrs. Reynolds, formerly Mrs. Kenney, whose first husband was Holcroft, the dramatic writer of the last century. St. Paul's church is a heap of ruins; the Monument isn't half so high as you knew it, divers parts being successively taken down which the ravages of time had rendered dangerous; the horse at Charing Cross is gone, no one knows whither,—and all this has taken place while you have been settling whether Ho-hing-tong should be spelled with a— or a—. For aught I see, you had almost as well remain where you are, and not come, like a Struldbrug, into a world where few were born when you went away. Scarce here and there one will be able to make out your face; all your opinions will be out of date, your jokes obsolete, your puns rejected with fastidiousness as wit of the last age. Your way of mathematics has already given way to a new method which, after all, is, I believe, the old doctrine of Maclaurin new-vamped up with what he borrowed of the negative quantity of fluxions from Euler.

Poor Godwin! I was passing his tomb the other day in Cripplegate churchyard. There are some verses upon it, written by Miss—, which if I thought good enough I would send you. He was one of those who would have hailed your return, not with boisterous shouts and clamors, but with the complacent gratulations of a philosopher anxious to promote knowledge, as leading to happiness; but his systems and his theories are ten feet deep in Cripplegate mould. Coleridge is just dead, having lived just long enough to close the eyes of Wordsworth, who paid the debt to nature but a week or two before. Poor Col., but two days before he died he wrote to a bookseller proposing an epic poem on the "Wandering of Cain," in twenty-four books. It is said he has left behind him more than forty thousand treatises in criticism, metaphysics, and divinity: but few of them in a state of completion. They are now destined, perhaps, to wrap up spices. You see what mutation the busy hand of Time has produced, while you have consumed in foolish, voluntary exile that time which might have gladdened your friends, benefited your country—But reproaches are useless. Gather up the wretched relics, my friend, as fast as you can, and come to your old home. I will rub my eyes and try to recognize you. We will shake withered hands together, and talk of old things,—of St. Mary's church and the barber's opposite, where the young students in mathematics used to assemble. Poor Crisp, that kept it afterwards, set up a fruiterer's shop in Trumpington Street, and for aught I know resides there still; for I saw the name up in the last journey I took there with my sister just before she died. I suppose you heard that I had left the India House and gone into the Fishmongers' Almshouses over the bridge. I have a little cabin there, small and homely; but you shall be welcome to it. You like oysters, and to open them yourself; I'll get you some if you come in oyster time. Marshall, Godwin's old friend, is still alive, and talks of the faces you used to make. [1]

Come as soon as you can.

C. LAMB.

[1] The reversal of this serio-humorous mingling of fiction and forecast will be found in the next letter.



LIX.

TO MANNING.

December 26, 1815.

Dear Manning,—Following your brother's example, I have just ventured one letter to Canton, and am now hazarding another (not exactly a duplicate) to St. Helena. The first was full of unprobable romantic fictions, fitting the remoteness of the mission it goes upon; in the present I mean to confine myself nearer to truth as you come nearer home. A correspondence with the uttermost parts of the earth necessarily involves in it some heat of fancy; it sets the brain agoing; but I can think on the half-way house tranquilly. Your friends, then, are not all dead or grown forgetful of you through old age,—as that lying letter asserted, anticipating rather what must happen if you keep tarrying on forever on the skirts of creation, as there seemed a danger of your doing,—but they are all tolerably well, and in full and perfect comprehension of what is meant by Manning's coming home again. Mrs. Kenney never let her tongue run riot more than in remembrances of you. Fanny expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her romantic nature. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran-new gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized. The soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain. One that you knew, and I think the only one of those friends we knew much of in common, has died in earnest. Poor Priscilla! Her brother Robert is also dead, and several of the grown-up brothers and sisters, in the compass of a very few years. Death has not otherwise meddled much in families that I know. Not but he has his horrid eye upon us, and is whetting his infernal feathered dart every instant, as you see him truly pictured in that impressive moral picture, "The good man at the hour of death." I have in trust to put in the post four letters from Diss, and one from Lynn, to St. Helena, which I hope will accompany this safe, and one from Lynn, and the one before spoken of from me, to Canton. But we all hope that these letters may be waste paper. I don't know why I have foreborne writing so long; but it is such a forlorn hope to send a scrap of paper straggling over wide oceans. And yet I know when you come home, I shall have you sitting before me at our fireside just as if you had never been away. In such an instant does the return of a person dissipate all the weight of imaginary perplexity from distance of time and space! I'll promise you good oysters. Cory is dead, that kept the shop opposite St. Dunstan's, but the tougher materials of the shop survive the perishing frame of its keeper. Oysters continue to flourish there under as good auspices. Poor Cory! But if you will absent yourself twenty years together, you must not expect numerically the same population to congratulate your return which wetted the sea-beach with their tears when you went away. Have you recovered the breathless stone-staring astonishment into which you must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was living at St. Helena? What an event in the solitude of the seas,—like finding a fish's bone at the top of Plinlimmon; but these things are nothing in our Western world. Novelties cease to affect. Come and try what your presence can.

God bless you! Your old friend,

C. LAMB.



LX.

TO WORDSWORTH

April 9, 1816.

Dear Wordsworth,—Thanks for the books you have given me, and for all the books you mean to give me. I will bind up the "Political Sonnets" and "Ode" according to your suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet; I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain and chain them to my shelves, more Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read but don't read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them; when they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it, Coleridge has been here about a fortnight. His health is tolerable at present, though beset with temptations. In the first place, the Covent Garden Manager has declined accepting his Tragedy, [1] though (having read it) I see no reason upon earth why it might not have run a very fair chance, though it certainly wants a prominent part for a Miss O'Neil or a Mr. Kean. However, he is going to write to-day to Lord Byron to get it to Drury. Should you see Mrs. C., who has just written to C. a letter, which I have given him, it will be as well to say nothing about its fate till some answer is shaped from Drury. He has two volumes printing together at Bristol, both finished as far as the composition goes; the latter containing his fugitive poems, the former his Literary Life. Nature, who conducts every creature by instinct to its best end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his abode at a Chemist's Laboratory in Norfolk Street. She might as well have sent a Helluo Librorum for cure to the Vatican. God keep him inviolate among the traps and pitfalls! He has done pretty well as yet. [2]

Tell Miss Hutchinson my sister is every day wishing to be quietly sitting down to answer her very kind letter; but while C. stays she can hardly find a quiet time. God bless him!

Tell Mrs. Wordsworth her postscripts are always agreeable. They are legible too. Your manual-graphy is terrible,—dark as Lycophron. "Likelihood," for instance, is thus typified.... I should not wonder if the constant making out of such paragraphs is the cause of that weakness in Mrs. W.'s eyes, as she is tenderly pleased to express it. Dorothy, I hear, has mounted spectacles; so you have deoculated two of your dearest relations in life. Well, God bless you, and continue to give you power to write with a finger of power upon our hearts what you fail to impress, in corresponding lucidness, upon our outward eyesight!

Mary's love to all; she is quite well.

I am called off to do the deposits on Cotton Wool. But why do I relate this to you, who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of deposits, of interest, of warehouse rent, and contingent fund? Adieu!

C. LAMB.

[1] Zapolya.

[2] Lamb alludes, of course, to Coleridge's opium habit.



LXI.

TO WORDSWORTH.

April 26, 1816.

Dear W.,—I have just finished the pleasing task of correcting the revise of the poems and letter. [1] I hope they will come out faultless. One blunder I saw and shuddered at. The hallucinating rascal had printed battered for battened, this last not conveying any distinct sense to his gaping soul. The Reader (as they call 'em) had discovered it, and given it the marginal brand; but the substitutory n had not yet appeared. I accompanied his notice with a most pathetic address to the printer not to neglect the correction. I know how such a blunder would "batter at your peace." With regard to the works, the Letter I read with unabated satisfaction. Such a thing was wanted, called for. The parallel of Cotton with Burns I heartily approve, Iz. Walton hallows any page in which his reverend name appears. "Duty archly bending to purposes of general benevolence" is exquisite. The poems I endeavored not to understand, but to read them with my eye alone; and I think I succeeded, (Some people will do that when they come out, you'll say.) As if I were to luxuriate to-morrow at some picture-gallery I was never at before, and, going by to-day by chance, found the door open, and having but five minutes to look about me, peeped in,—just such a chastised peep I took with my mind at the lines my luxuriating eye was coursing over unrestrained, riot to anticipate another day's fuller satisfaction. Coleridge is printing "Christabel," by Lord Byron's recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision, "Kubla Khan," which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlor while he sings or says it; but there is an observation, "Never tell thy dreams," and I am almost afraid that "Kubla Khan" is an owl that won't bear daylight. I fear lest it should be discovered, by the lantern of typography and clear reducting to letters, no better than nonsense or no sense. When I was young, I used to chant with ecstasy "MILD ARCADIANS EVER BLOOMING," till somebody told me it was meant to be nonsense. Even yet I have a lingering attachment to it, and I think it better than "Windsor Forest," "Dying Christian's Address," etc. Coleridge has sent his tragedy to D.L.T.; it cannot be acted this season, and by their manner of receiving I hope he will be able to alter it to make them accept it for next. He is at present under the medical care of a Mr. Gilman (Killman?) at Highgate, where he plays at leaving off laud—-m. I think his essentials not touched; he is very bad, but then he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory,—an archangel a little damaged. Will Miss H. pardon our not replying at length to her kind letter? We are not quiet enough; Morgan is with us every day, going betwixt Highgate and the Temple. Coleridge is absent but four miles; and the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. 'Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him or the Author of the "Excursion," I should, in a very little time, lose my own identity, and be dragged along in the current of other people's thoughts, hampered in a net. How cool I sit in this office, with no possible interruption further than what I may term material! There is not as much metaphysics in thirty-six of the people here as there is in the first page of Locke's "Treatise on the Human Understanding," or as much poetry as in any ten lines of the "Pleasures of Hope," or more natural "Beggar's Petition." I never entangle myself in any of their speculations. Interruptions, if I try to write a letter even, I have dreadful. Just now, within four lines, I was called off for ten minutes to consult dusty old books for the settlement of obsolete errors. I hold you a guinea you don't find the chasm where I left off, so excellently the wounded sense closed again and was healed.

N.B.—Nothing said above to the contrary, but that I hold the personal presence of the two mentioned potent spirits at a rate as high as any: but I pay dearer: what amuses others robs me of myself; my mind is positively discharged into their greater currents, but flows with a willing violence. As to your question about work, it is far less oppressive to me than it was, from circumstances; it takes all the golden part of the day away, a solid lump, from ten to four; but it does not kill my peace, as before. Some day or other I shall be in a taking again. My head aches, and you have had enough, God bless you!

C. LAMB.

[1] Wordsworth's "Letter to a Friend of Burns" (London, 1816).

"Wordsworth had been consulted by a friend of Burns as to the best mode of vindicating the reputation of the poet, which, it was alleged, had been much injured by the publication of Dr. Carrie's 'Life and Correspondence of Burns.'"—AINGER.



LXII.

TO H. DODWELL [1]

July, 1816.

My dear Fellow,—I have been in a lethargy this long while, and forgotten London, Westminster, Marybone, Paddington,—they all went clean out of my head, till happening to go to a neighbor's in this good borough of Calne, for want of whist-players we fell upon Commerce: the word awoke me to a remembrance of my professional avocations and the long-continued strife which I have been these twenty-four years endeavoring to compose between those grand Irreconcilables, Cash and Commerce; I instantly called for an almanac, which with some difficulty was procured at a fortune-teller's in the vicinity (for happy holiday people here, having nothing to do, keep no account of time), and found that by dint of duty I must attend in Leadenhall on Wednesy morning next; and shall attend accordingly. Does Master Hannah give maccaroons still, and does he fetch the Cobbetts from my attic? Perhaps it wouldn't be too much trouble for him to drop the enclosed up at my aforesaid chamber, and any letters, etc., with it; but the enclosed should go without delay. N.B.—He isn't to fetch Monday's Cobbett, but it is to wait my reading when I come back. Heigh-ho! Lord have mercy upon me, how many does two and two make? I am afraid I shall make a poor clerk in future, I am spoiled with rambling among haycocks and cows and pigs. Bless me! I had like to have forgot (the air is so temperate and oblivious here) to say I have seen your brother, and hope he is doing well in the finest spot of the world. More of these things when I return. Remember me to the gentlemen,—I forget names. Shall I find all my letters at my rooms on Tuesday? If you forget to send 'em never mind, for I don't much care for reading and writing now; I shall come back again by degrees, I suppose, into my former habits. How is Bruce de Ponthieu, and Porcher and Co.?—the tears come into my eyes when I think how long I have neglected—.

Adieu! ye fields, ye shepherds and—herdesses, and dairies and cream-pots, and fairies and dances upon the green.

I come, I come. Don't drag me so hard by the hair of my head, Genius of British India! I know my hour is come, Faustus must give up his soul, O Lucifer, O Mephistopheles! Can you make out what all this letter is about? I am afraid to look it over.

CH. LAMB.

[1] A fellow-clerk in the India House. This charming letter, written evidently during a vacation trip, was first published entire in Canon Ainger's edition (1887) of Lamb's Letters.



LXIII.

TO MRS. WORDSWORTH.

February 18, 1818.

My Dear Mrs. Wordsworth,—I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My sister should more properly have done it; but she having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia, cardamoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home is that I am never alone. Plato's—(I write to W.W. now)—Plato's double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in the system of its first creation than I sometimes do to be but for a moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so. I cannot walk home from office, but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with sum, and write "paid" against this, and "unpaid" against t'other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind "some darling thoughts all my own,"—faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent friend's voice,—a snatch of Miss Burrell's singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face. The two operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun's two motions (earth's I mean); or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlor, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the Belies Lettres,—the gay science,—who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, etc.,—what Coleridge said at the lecture last night,—who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible use reading can be to them but to talk of, might as well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should find it. These pests worrit me at business and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a moment. He at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication: knock at the door! In comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Martin Burney, or Morgan Demi-gorgon, [1] or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone,—a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion. Oh, the pleasure of eating alone! Eating my dinner alone,—let me think of it! But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange; for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters (God bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly); and with the hatred, a still greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening; but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go before bedtime. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always like, had I any mornings; but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth!) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in company; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to myself. I am never C.L., but always C.L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time; but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed, just close to my bed-room window is the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers—I take them to be chorus-singers of the two theatres (it must be both of them)—begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who, being limited by their talents to the burden of the song at the playhouses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop or some cheap composer, arranged for choruses, that is, to be sang all in chorus,—at least, I never can catch any of the text of the plain song, nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't, "That fury being quenched,'—the howl I mean,—a burden succeeds of shouts and clapping and knocking of the table. At length over-tasked nature drops under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel's father used (bless me! I have dipt in the wrong ink) to say every morning by way of variety when he awoke,—

"Every knell, the Baron saith, Wakes us up to a world of death,"—

or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to drive away the harpy Solitude from me. I like 'em, and cards, and a cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea, between office confinement and after-office society, how little time I can call my own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an inference. I would not, that I know of, have it otherwise. I only wish sometimes I could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome, and carried away, leaving regret, but more pleasure,—even a kind of gratitude,—at being so often favored with that kind northern visitation. My London faces and noises don't hear me,—I mean no disrespect, or I should explain myself, that instead of their return 220 times a year, and the return of W. W., etc., seven times in 104 weeks, some more equal distribution might be found. I have scarce room to put in Mary's kind love and my poor name.

C. LAMB.

W. H[azlitt]. goes on lecturing against W.W., and making copious use of quotations from said W.W. to give a zest to said lectures. S.T.C. is lecturing with success. I have not heard either him or H.; but I dined with S.T.C. at Oilman's a Sunday or two since; and he was well and in good spirits. I mean to hear some of the course; but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and you can't think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always in pain lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honor of me at the London Tavern. "Gentlemen," said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs. Wordsworth will/ go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the lakes once more, which never can be realized. Between us there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I hope, as there seemed to be between me and that gentleman concerned in the stamp-office that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon's. I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office, I hate all such people,—accountants' deputy accountants. The mere abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days, they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go,—they are the tyrants, not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this week, they have abridged us of the immemorially observed custom of going at one o'clock of a Saturday,—the little shadow of a holiday left us. Dear W.W., be thankful for liberty.

[1] John Morgan



LXIV.

TO WORDSWORTH.

May, 1819.

Dear Wordsworth.—I received a copy of "Peter Bell" [1] a week ago, and I hope the author will not be offended if I say I do not much relish it. The humor, if it is meant for humor, is forced; and then the price,—sixpence would have been dear for it. Mind, I do not mean your "Peter Bell," but a "Peter Bell," which preceded it about a week, and is in every bookseller's shop-window in London, the type and paper nothing differing from the true one, the preface signed W. W., and the supplementary preface quoting as the author's words an extract from the supplementary preface to the "Lyrical Ballads." Is there no law against these rascals? I would have this Lambert Simnel whipped at the cart's tail. Who started the spurious "P.B." I have not heard. I should guess, one of the sneering brothers, the vile Smiths; but I have heard no name mentioned. "Peter Bell" (not the mock one) is excellent,—for its matter, I mean. I cannot say the style of it quite satisfies me. It is too lyrical. The auditors, to whom it is feigned to be told, do not arride me. I had rather it had been told me, the reader, at once. "Hart-leap Well" is the tale for me; in matter as good as this, in manner infinitely before it, in my poor judgment. Why did you not add "The Wagoner"? Have I thanked you, though, yet for "Peter Bell"? I would not not have it for a good deal of money. Coleridge is very foolish to scribble about books.

Neither his tongue nor fingers are very retentive. But I shall not say anything to him about it. He would only begin a very long story with a very long face, and I see him far too seldom to tease him with affairs of business or conscience when I do see him. He never comes near our house, and when we go to see him he is generally writing or thinking; he is writing in his study till the dinner comes, and that is scarce over before the stage summons us away. The mock "P.B." had only this effect on me, that after twice reading it over in hopes to find something diverting in it, I reached your two books off the shelf, and set into a steady reading of them, till I had nearly finished both before I went to bed,—the two of your last edition, of course, I mean, And in the morning I awoke determined to take down the "Excursion." I wish the scoundrel imitator could know this. But why waste a wish on him? I do not believe that paddling about with a stick in a pond, and fishing up a dead author, whom his intolerable wrongs had driven to that deed of desperation, would turn the heart of one of these obtuse literary BELLS. There is no Cock for such Peters, damn 'em! I am glad this aspiration came upon the red-ink line. [2] It is more of a bloody curse. I have delivered over your other presents to Alsager and G. Dyer, A., I am sure, will value it and be proud of the hand from which it came. To G.D. a poem is a poem,—his own as good as anybody's, and, God bless him! anybody's as good as his own; for I do not think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem being better than another. The gods, by denying him the very faculty itself of discrimination, have effectually cut off every seed of envy in his bosom. But with envy they excited curiosity also; and if you wish the copy again, which you destined for him, I think I shall be able to find it again for you on his third shelf, where he stuffs his presentation copies, uncut, in shape and matter resembling a lump of dry dust; but on carefully removing that stratum, a thing like a pamphlet will emerge. I have tried this with fifty different poetical works that have been given G.D. in return for as many of his own performances; and I confess I never had any scruple in taking my own again, wherever I found it, shaking the adherences off; and by this means one copy of 'my works' served for G.D.,—and, with a little dusting, was made over to my good friend Dr. Geddes, who little thought whose leavings he was taking when he made me that graceful bow. By the way, the Doctor is the only one of my acquaintance who bows gracefully,—my town acquaintance, I mean. How do you like my way of writing with two inks? I think it is pretty and motley. Suppose Mrs. W, adopts it, the next time she holds the pen for you. My dinner waits. I have no time to indulge any longer in these laborious curiosities. God bless you, and cause to thrive and burgeon whatsoever you write, and fear no inks of miserable poetasters.

Yours truly,

CHARLES LAMB.

Mary's love.

[1] Lamb alludes to a parody, ridiculing Wordsworth, by J. Hamilton Reynolds, The verses were entitled "Peter Bell: A Lyrical Ballad;" and their drift and spirit may be inferred from the following lines from the preface: "It is now a period of one-and-twenty years since I first wrote some of the most perfect compositions (except certain pieces I have written in my later days) that ever dropped from poetical pen. My heart hath been right and powerful all its years. I never thought an evil or a weak thought in my life. It has been my aim and my achievement to deduce moral thunder from buttercups, daisies, celandines, and (as a poet scarcely inferior to myself hath it) 'such small deer,'" etc.

[2] The original letter is actually written in to inks,—alternate black and red.



LXV.

TO MANNING,

May 28, 1819,

My Dear M..—I want to know how your brother is, if you have heard lately. I want to know about you, I wish you were nearer. How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathampstead, and Farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman,

"Hail, Mackery End!" [1]

This is a fragment of a blank-verse poem which. I once meditated, but got no farther. The E. I. H. has been thrown into a quandary by the strange phenomenon of poor Tommy Bye, whom I have known, man and madman, twenty-seven years, he being elder here than myself by nine years and more. He was always a pleasant, gossiping, half-headed, muzzy, dozing, dreaming, walk-about, inoffensive chap, a little too fond of the creature,—who isn't at times? But Tommy had not brains to work off an overnight's surfeit by ten o'clock next morning, and unfortunately, in he wandered the other morning drunk with last night and with a superfoetation of drink taken in since he set out from bed. He came staggering under his double burden, like trees in Java, bearing at once blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard you or some other traveller tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament. Some wretched calico that he had mopped his poor oozy front with, had rendered up its native dye, and the devil a bit would he consent to wash it, but swore it was characteristic, for he was going to the sale of indigo; and set up a laugh which I did not think the lungs of mortal man were competent to. It was like a thousand people laughing, or the Goblin Page. He imagined afterwards that the whole office had been laughing at him, so strange did his own sounds strike upon his nonsensorium. But Tommy has laughed his last laugh, and awoke the next day to find himself reduced from an abused income of L600 per annum to one sixth of the sum, after thirty-six years' tolerably good service. The quality of mercy was not strained in his behalf; the gentle dews dropped not on him from heaven. It just came across me that I was writing to Canton. Will you drop in to-morrow night? Fanny Kelly is coming, if she does not cheat us. Mrs. Gold is well, but proves "uncoined," as the lovers about Wheathampstead would say.

I have not had such a quiet half hour to sit down to a quiet letter for many years. I have not been interrupted above four times. I wrote a letter the other day in alternate lines, black ink and red, and you cannot think how it chilled the flow of ideas. Next Monday is Whit-Monday. What a reflection! Twelve years ago, and I should have kept that and the following holiday in the fields a-maying. All of those pretty pastoral delights are over. This dead, everlasting dead desk,—how it weighs the spirit of a gentleman down! This dead wood of the desk instead of your living trees! But then, again, I hate the joskins, a name for Hertfordshire bumpkins. Each state of life has its inconvenience; but then, again, mine has more than one. Not that I repine, or grudge, or murmur at my destiny. I have meat and drink, and decent apparel,—I shall, at least, when I get a new hat,

A red-haired man just interrupted me. He has broke the current of my thoughts, I haven't a word to add, I don't know why I send this letter, but I have had a hankering to hear about you some days. Perhaps it will go off before your reply comes. If it don't, I assure you no letter was ever welcomer from, you, from Paris or Macao.

C. LAMB.

[1] See the Elia essay, "Mackery End, in H—-shire."



LXVI.

TO MISS WORDSWORTH.

November 25, 1819.

Dear Miss Wordsworth,—You will think me negligent, but I wanted to see more of Willy [1] before I ventured to express a prediction, Till yesterday I had barely seen him,—Virgilium tantum vidi; but yesterday he gave us his small company to a bullock's heart, and I can pronounce him a lad of promise. He is no pedant nor bookworm; so far I can answer. Perhaps he has hitherto paid too little attention to other men's inventions, preferring, like Lord Foppington, the "natural sprouts of his own." But he has observation, and seems thoroughly awake. I am ill at remembering other people's bon mots, but the following are a few. Being taken over Waterloo Bridge, he remarked that if we had no mountains, we had a fine river, at least,—which was a touch of the comparative; but then he added in a strain which augured less for his future abilities as a political economist, that he supposed they must take at least a pound a week toll. Like a curious naturalist, he inquired if the tide did not come up a little salty. This being satisfactorily answered, he put another question, as to the flux and reflux; which being rather cunningly evaded than artfully solved by that she-Aristotle Mary, who muttered something about its getting up an hour sooner and sooner every day, he sagely replied, "Then it must come to the same thing at last,"—which was a speech worthy of an infant Halley! The lion in the 'Change by no means came up to his ideal standard,—so impossible is it for Nature, in any of her works, to come up to the standard of a child's imagination! The whelps (lionets) he was sorry to find were dead; and on particular inquiry, his old friend the orang-outang had gone the way of all flesh also. The grand tiger was also sick, and expected in no short time to exchange this transitory world for another or none. But, again, there was a golden eagle (I do not mean that of Charing) which did much arride and console him. William's genius, I take it, leans a little to the figurative; for being at play at tricktrack (a kind of minor billiard-table which we keep for smaller wights, and sometimes refresh our own mature fatigues with taking a hand at), not being able to hit a ball he had iterate aimed at, he cried out, "I cannot hit that beast." Now, the balls are usually called men, but he felicitously hit upon a middle term,—a term of approximation and imaginative reconciliation; a something where the two ends of the brute matter (ivory) and their human and rather violent personification into men might meet, as I take it,—illustrative of that excellent remark in a certain preface about imagination, explaining "Like a sea-beast that had crawled forth to sun himself!" Not that I accuse William Minor of hereditary plagiary, or conceive the image to have come ex traduce. Rather he seemeth to keep aloof from any source of imitation, and purposely to remain ignorant of what mighty poets have done in this kind before him; for being asked if his father had ever been on Westminster Bridge, [2] he answered that he did not know!

It is hard to discern the oak in the acorn, or a temple like St. Paul's in the first stone which is laid; nor can I quite prefigure what destination the genius of William Minor hath to take. Some few hints I have set down, to guide my future observations. He hath the power of calculation in no ordinary degree for a chit. He combineth figures, after the first boggle, rapidly; as in the tricktrack board, where the hits are figured, at first he did not perceive that 15 and 7 made 22; but by a little use he could combine 8 with 25, and 33 again with 16,—which approacheth something in kind (far let me be from flattering him by saying in degree) to that of the famous American boy. I am sometimes inclined to think I perceive the future satirist in him, for he hath a sub-sardonic smile which bursteth out upon occasion,—as when he was asked if London were as big as Ambleside; and indeed no other answer was given, or proper to be given, to so ensnaring and provoking a question. In the contour of skull certainly I discern something paternal; but whether in all respects the future man shall transcend his father's fame, Time, the trier of Geniuses, must decide. Be it pronounced peremptorily at present that Willy is a well-mannered child, and though no great student, hath yet a lively eye for things that lie before him.

Given in haste from my desk at Leadenhall. Yours, and yours most sincerely,

C. LAMB.

[1] Wordsworth's third son. He was at the Charter-house School in London, and the Lambs had invited him to spend a half holiday with them.

[2] "William Minor" was evidently forgetful of the exquisite sonnet, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge."



LXVII.

TO COLERIDGE.

March 9, 1822.

Dear C.,—It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well, [1]—they are interesting creatures at a certain age; what a pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling—and brain sauce; did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly, with no Oedipean avulsion? Was the crackling the color of the ripe pomegranate? Had you no cursed complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire? Did you flesh maiden teeth in it? Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in my life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending away. Teals, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese,—your tame villatic things,—Welsh mutton collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an, affront, an undervaluing done to Nature, who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the bitterest pangs I ever felt of remorse was when a child. My kind old aunt [2] had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts,—a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity, I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt's kindness crossed me,—the sum it was to her; the pleasure she had a right to expect that I—not the old impostor—should take in eating her cake; the cursed ingratitude by which, under the color of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously that I think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.

But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavor to act towards it more in the spirit of the donor's purpose.

Yours (short of pig) to command in everything,

C. L.

[1] Some one had sent Coleridge a pig, and the gift was erroneously credited to Lamb.

[2] Elia: "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago."



LXVIII.

TO WORDSWORTH.

March 20, 1822.

My Dear Wordsworth,—A letter from you is very grateful; I have not seen a Kendal postmark so long. We are pretty well, save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor John's loss, and another accident or two at the same time, that has made me almost bury myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish. Deaths overset one and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died, within this last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other; the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a class of sympathies. There's Captain Burney gone! What fun has whist now? What matters it what you lead, if you can no longer fancy him looking over you? [1] One never hears anything, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence,—thus one distributes oneself about; and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve; I want individuals. I am made up of queer points, and I want so many answering needles. The going-away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them, as there was a common link. A, B, and C make a party. A dies. B not only loses A, but all A's part in C. C loses A's part in B, and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables. I express myself muddily, capite dolente. I have a dulling cold. My theory is to enjoy life; but my practice is against it. I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four, without ease or interposition. Taedet me harum quotidianarum formarum, these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. Oh for a few years between the grave and the desk! they are the same, save that at the latter you are the outside machine. The foul enchanter [Nick?], "letters four do form his name,"—Busirane [2] is his name in hell,—that has curtailed you of some domestic comforts, hath laid a heavier hand on me, not in present infliction, but in the taking away the hope of enfranchisement. I dare not whisper to myself a pension on this side of absolute incapacitation and infirmity, till years have sucked me dry,—Otium cum indignitate. I had thought in a green old age (oh, green thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End,—emblematic name, how beautiful!,—in the Ware Road, there to have made up my accounts with Heaven and the Company, toddling about between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching, on some fine Izaak Walton morning, to Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless as a beggar; but walking, walking ever, till I fairly walked myself off my legs,—dying walking! The hope is gone. I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing), with my breast against this thorn of a desk, with the only hope that some pulmonary affliction may relieve me. Vide Lord Palmerston's report of the clerks in the War-office (Debates in this morning's "Times"), by which it appears, in twenty years as many clerks have been coughed and catarrhed out of it into their freer graves. Thank you for asking about the pictures. Milton hangs over my fire-side in Covent Garden (when I am there); the rest have been sold for an old song, wanting the eloquent tongue that should have set them off! You have gratified me with liking my meeting with Dodd. For the Malvolio story,—the thing is become in verity a sad task, and I eke it out with anything. If I could slip out of it I should be happy; but our chief-reputed assistants have forsaken us. The Opium-Eater crossed us once with a dazzling path, and hath as suddenly left us darkling; and, in short, I shall go on from dull to worse, because I cannot resist the booksellers' importunity,—the old plea, you know, of authors; but I believe on my part sincere. Hartley I do not so often see, but I never see him in unwelcome hour. I thoroughly love and honor him. I send you a frozen epistle; but it is winter and dead time of the year with me. May Heaven keep something like spring and summer up with you, strengthen your eyes, and make mine a little lighter to encounter with them, as I hope they shall yet and again, before all are closed!

Yours, with every kind remembrance,

C. L.

[1] Martin Burney was the grimy-fisted whist-player to whom Lamb once observed, "Martin, if dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!"

[2] The enchanter in "The Faerie Queene."



LXIX.

TO JOHN CLARE. [1]

August 31, 1822.

Dear Clare,—I thank you heartily for your present. I am an inveterate old Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections I seem to be native to them and free of the country. The quality of your observation has astonished me. What have most pleased me have been "Recollections after a Ramble," and those "Grongar Hill" kind of pieces in eight-syllable lines, my favourite measure, such as "Cooper Hill" and "Solitude." In some of your story-telling Ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too profuse with them. In poetry slang of every kind is to be avoided. There is a rustic Cockneyism, as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone. The true rustic style I think is to be found in Shenstone. Would his "School-mistress," the prettiest of poems, have been better if he had used quite the Goody's own language? Now and then a home rusticism is fresh and startling; but when nothing is gained in expression, it is out of tenor. It may make folks smile and stare; but the ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted as you desire to be. Excuse my freedom, and take the same liberty with my puns.

I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of all sorts; there is a Methodist hymn for Sundays, and a farce for Saturday night. Pray give them a place on your shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of which I have a duplicate, that I may return in equal number to your welcome presents. I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the "London" for August.

Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs. The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for them. Make Mrs. Clare pick off the hind-quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and butter. The fore-quarters are not so good. She may let them hop off by themselves.

Yours sincerely,

CHAS. LAMB.

[1] The Northamptonshire peasant poet. He had sent Lamb his "The Village Minstrel, and other Poems."



LXX.

TO MR. BARRON FIELD.

September 22, 1822.

My Dear F.,—I scribble hastily at office. Frank wants my letter presently. I and sister are just returned from Paris! [1] We have eaten frogs. It has been such a treat! You know our monotonous general tenor. Frogs are the nicest little delicate things,—rabbity flavored. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit! They fricassee them; but in my mind, dressed seethed, plain, with parsley and butter, would have been the decision of Apicius.... Paris is a glorious, picturesque old city. London looks mean and new to it, as the town of Washington would, seen after it. But they have no St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey. The Seine, so much despised by Cockneys, is exactly the size to run through a magnificent street; palaces a mile long on one side, lofty Edinburgh stone (oh, the glorious antiques!) houses on the other. The Thames disunites London and Southwark. I had Talma to supper with me. He has picked up, as I believe, an authentic portrait of Shakspeare. He paid a broker about L40 English for it. It is painted on the one half of a pair of bellows,—a lovely picture, corresponding with the Folio head. The bellows has old carved wings round it and round the visnomy is inscribed, as near as I remember, not divided into rhyme,—I found out the rhyme,—

"Whom have we here Stuck on this bellows, But the Prince of good fellows, Willy Shakspere?"

At top,—

"O base and coward lack, To be here stuck!"

POINS.

At bottom,—

"Nay! rather a glorious lot is to him assign'd, Who, like the Almighty, rides upon the wind."

PISTOL,

This is all in old, carved wooden letters. The countenance smiling, sweet, and intellectual beyond measure, even as he was immeasurable. It may be a forgery. They laugh at me, and tell me Ireland is in Paris, and has been putting off a portrait of the Black Prince. How far old wood may be imitated I cannot say, Ireland was not found out by his parchments, but by his poetry. I am confident no painter on either side the Channel could have painted anything near like the face I saw. Again, would such a painter and forger have taken L40 for a thing, if authentic, worth L4000? Talma is not in the secret, for he had not even found out the rhymes in the first inscription. He is coming over with it, and my life to Southey's "Thalaba," it will gain universal faith.

The letter is wanted, and I am wanted. Imagine the blank filled up with all kind things.

Our joint, hearty remembrances to both of you. Yours as ever,

C. LAMB.

[1] The Lambs had visited Paris on the invitation of James Kenney, the dramatist, who had married a Frenchwoman, and was living at Versailles.



LXXI.

TO WALTER WILSON.

December 16, 1822.

Dear Wilson,—Lightning I was going to call you. You must have thought me negligent in not answering your letter sooner. But I have a habit of never writing letters but at the office; 'tis so much time cribbed out of the Company; and I am but just got out of the thick of a tea-sale, in which most of the entry of notes, deposits, etc., usually falls to my share.

I have nothing of De Foe's but two or three novels and the "Plague History." [1] I can give you no information about him. As a slight general character of what I remember of them (for I have not looked into them latterly), I would say that in the appearance of truth, in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather auto-biographies), but the narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in everything he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot choose but believe them. It is like reading evidence given in a court of justice. So anxious the story-teller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended that when he has told us a matter of fact or a motive, in a line or two farther down he repeats it with his favorite figure of speech, "I say" so and so, though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress who wishes to impress something upon their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed, it is to such principally that he writes. His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain and homely. "Robinson Crusoe" is delightful to all ranks and classes; but it is easy to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower conditions of readers,—hence it is an especial favorite with seafaring men, poor boys, servant-maids, etc. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while they are worthy, from their deep interest, to find a shelf in the libraries of the wealthiest and the most learned. His passion for matter-of-fact narrative sometimes betrayed him into a long relation of common incidents, which might happen to any man, and have no interest but the intense appearance of truth in them, to recommend them. The whole latter half or two-thirds of "Colonel Jack" is of this description. The beginning of "Colonel Jack" is the most affecting natural picture of a young thief that was ever drawn. His losing the stolen money in the hollow of a tree, and finding it again when he was in despair, and then being in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and several similar touches in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep knowledge of human nature, and putting out of question the superior romantic interest of the latter, in my mind very much exceed "Crusoe." "Roxana" (first edition) is the next in interest, though he left out the best part of it in subsequent editions from a foolish hypercriticism of his friend Southerne. But "Moll Flanders," the "Account of the Plague," etc., are all of one family, and have the same stamp of character. Believe me, with friendly recollections—Brother (as I used to call you), Yours,

C. LAMB.

[1] Wilson was preparing a Life of De Foe, and had written to Lamb for guidance.



LXXII.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

December 23, 1822.

Dear Sir,—I have been so distracted with business and one thing or other, I have not had a quiet quarter of an hour for epistolary purposes. Christmas, too, is come, which always puts a rattle into my morning skull. It is a visiting, unquiet, unquakerish season. I get more and more in love with solitude, and proportionately hampered with company. I hope you have some holidays at this period. I have one day,—Christmas Day; alas! too few to commemorate the season. All work and no play dulls me. Company is not play, but many times bard work. To play, is for a man to do what he pleases, or to do nothing,—to go about soothing his particular fancies. I have lived to a time of life to have outlived the good hours, the nine-o'clock suppers, with a bright hour or two to clear up in afterwards. Now you cannot get tea before that hour, and then sit gaping, music bothered perhaps, till half-past twelve brings up the tray; and what you steal of convivial enjoyment after, is heavily paid for in the disquiet of to-morrow's head.

I am pleased with your liking "John Woodvil," and amused with your knowledge of our drama being confined to Shakspeare and Miss Baillie. What a world of fine territory between Land's End and Johnny Groat's have you missed traversing! I could almost envy you to have so much to read. I feel as if I had read all the books I want to read. Oh, to forget Fielding, Steele, etc., and read 'em new!

Can you tell me a likely place where I could pick up cheap Fox's Journal? There are no Quaker circulating libraries? Elwood, too, I must have. I rather grudge that Southey has taken up the history of your people; I am afraid he will put in some levity. I am afraid I am not quite exempt from that fault in certain magazine articles, where I have introduced mention of them. Were they to do again, I would reform them. Why should not you write a poetical account of your old worthies, deducing them from Fox to Woolman? But I remember you did talk of something of that kind, as a counterpart to the "Ecclesiastical Sketches." But would not a poem be more consecutive than a string of sonnets? You have no martyrs quite to the fire, I think, among you, but plenty of heroic confessors, spirit-martyrs, lamb-lions. Think of it; it would be better than a series of sonnets on "Eminent Bankers." I like a hit at our way of life, though it does well for me,—better than anything short of all one's time to one's self; for which alone I rankle with envy at the rich. Books are good, and pictures are good, and money to buy them therefore good; but to buy time,—in other words, life!

The "compliments of the time" to you, should end my letter; to a Friend, I suppose, I must say the "sincerity of the season:" I hope they both mean the same. With excuses for this hastily penned note, believe me, with great respect,

C. LAMB.



LXXIII.

TO MISS WORDSWORTH.

Mary perfectly approves of the appropriation of the feathers, and wishes them peacock's for your fair niece's sake.

Christmas, 1822.

Dear Miss Wordsworth,—I had just written the above endearing words when Monkhouse tapped me on the shoulder with an invitation to cold goose pie, which I was not bird of that sort enough to decline. Mrs. Monkhouse, I am most happy to say, is better Mary has been tormented with a rheumatism, which is leaving her, I am suffering from the festivities of the season. I wonder how my misused carcase holds it out. I have played the experimental philosopher on it, that's certain. Willy shall be welcome to a mince-pie and a bout at commerce whenever he comes. He was in our eye. I am glad you liked my new year's speculations; everybody likes them, except the author of the "Pleasures of Hope." Disappointment attend him! How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked! They flatter me in magazines, newspapers, and all the minor reviews; the Quarterlies hold aloof. But they must come into it in time, or their leaves be waste paper. Salute Trinity Library in my name. Two special things are worth seeing at Cambridge,—a portrait of Cromwell at Sidney, and a better of Dr. Harvey (who found out that blood was red) at Dr. Davy's; you should see them. Coleridge is pretty well; I have not seen, him, but hear often of him, from Allsop, who sends me hares and pheasants twice a week; I can hardly take so fast as he gives. I have almost forgotten butcher's meat as plebeian. Are you not glad the cold is gone? I find winters not so agreeable as they used to be "when winter bleak had charms forme," I cannot conjure up a kind similitude for those snowy flakes. Let them keep to twelfth-cakes!

Mrs. Paris, our Cambridge friend, has been in town. You do not know the Watfords in Trampington Street. They are capital people. Ask anybody you meet, who is the biggest woman in Cambridge, and I 'll hold you a wager they'll say Mrs. Smith; 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 the returns of the years from a hot Thursday some twenty years back. She sits in a room with opposite doors and windows, to let in a thorough draught, which gives her slenderer friends tooth-aches. 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.

Having now answered most of the points contained in your letter, let me end with assuring you of our very best kindness, and excuse Mary for not handling the pen on this occasion, especially as it has fallen into so much better hands! Will Dr. W. accept of my respects at the end of a foolish letter?

C. L.



LXXIV.

TO MR. AND MRS. BRUTON. [1]

January 6, 1823.

The pig was above my feeble praise. It was a dear pigmy. There was some contention as to who should have the ears; but in spite of his obstinacy (deaf as these little creatures are to advice), I contrived to get at one of them.

It came in boots, too, which I took as a favor. Generally these petty-toes, pretty toes I are missing: but I suppose he wore them to look taller.

He must have been the least of his race. His little foots would have gone into the silver slipper. I take him to have beec a Chinese and a female.

If Evelyn could have seen him, he would never have farrowed two such prodigious volumes, seeing how much good can be contained in—how small a compass!

He crackled delicately.

I left a blank at the top of my letter, not being determined which to address it to j so farmer and farmer's wife will please to divide our thanks. May your granaries be full, and your rats empty, and your chickens plump, and your envious neighbors lean, and your laborers busy, and you as idle and as happy as the day is long!

VIVE L'AGRICULTURE!

How do you make your pigs so little? They are vastly engaging at the age. I was so myself. Now I am a disagreeable old hog, A middle-aged gentleman-and-a-half; My faculties (thank God!) are not much impaired.

I have my sight, hearing, taste, pretty perfect, and can read the Lord's Prayer in common type, by the help of a candle, without making many mistakes....

Many happy returns, not of the pig, but of the New Year, to both. Mary, for her share of the pig and the memoirs, desires to send the same.

Yours truly,

C. LAMB.

[1] Hertfordshire connections of the Lambs.



LXXV.

TO BERNARD BARTON. [1]

January 9, 1823.

Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you!

Throw yourself, rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you had but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto you have been at arm's length from them. Come not within their grasp. I have known many authors want for bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers,—what not,—rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found them. Oh, you know not—may you never know!—the miseries of subsisting by authorship. 'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or mine, but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a bookseller's dependant, to drudge your brains for pots of ale and breasts of mutton, to change your free thoughts and voluntary numbers for ungracious task-work. Those fellows hate us. The reason I take to be that, contrary to other trades, in which the master gets all the credit (a Jeweller or silversmith for instance), and the journeyman, who really does the fine work, is in the background, in our work the world gives all the credit to us, whom they consider as their journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the blood of as out, to put another sixpence in their mechanic pouches! I contend that a bookseller has a relative honesty towards authors, not like his honesty to the rest of the world. Baldwin, who first engaged me as Elia, has not paid me up yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying appeals). Yet how the knave fawned when I was of service to him! Yet I daresay the fellow is punctual in settling his milk-score, etc.