← catalogue

The Best Letters of Charles Lamb

by Charles Lamb · English · Gutenberg #10125 · 505,632 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Best Letters of Charles Lamb
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Best Letters of Charles Lamb

Author: Charles Lamb

Editor: Edward Gilpin Johnson


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10125]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10125

Credits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Sjaani, Tom Allen and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEST LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB ***

LAUREL-CROWNED LETTERS

CHARLES LAMB

It may well be that the "Essays of Elia" will be found to have kept
their perfume, and the LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB to retain their old
sweet savor, when "Sartor Resartus" has about as many readers as
Bulwer's "Artificial Changeling," and nine tenths even of "Don Juan"
lie darkening under the same deep dust that covers the rarely troubled
pages of the "Secchia Rapita."

A.C. SWINBURNE

No assemblage of letters, parallel or kindred to that in the hands
of the reader, if we consider its width of range, the fruitful period
over which it stretches, and its typical character, has ever been
produced.

W.C. HAZLITT ON LAMB'S LETTERS.

THE BEST LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB

Edited with an Introduction

BY EDWARD GILPIN JOHNSON

A.D. 1892.



CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION

LETTER
         I. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge
        II. To Coleridge
       III. To Coleridge
        IV. To Coleridge
         V. To Coleridge
        VI. To Coleridge
       VII. To Coleridge
      VIII. To Coleridge
        IX. To Coleridge
         X. To Coleridge
        XI. To Coleridge
       XII. To Coleridge
      XIII. To Coleridge
       XIV. To Coleridge
        XV. To Robert Southey
       XVI. To Southey
      XVII. To Southey
     XVIII. To Southey
       XIX. To Thomas Manning
        XX. To Coleridge
       XXI. To Manning
      XXII. To Coleridge
     XXIII. To Manning
      XXIV. To Manning
       XXV. To Coleridge
      XXVI. To Manning
     XXVII. To Coleridge
    XXVIII. To Coleridge
      XXIX. To Manning
       XXX. To Manning
      XXXI. To Manning
     XXXII. To Manning
    XXXIII. To Coleridge
     XXXIV. To Wordsworth
      XXXV. To Wordsworth
     XXXVI. To Manning
    XXXVII. To Manning
   XXXVIII. To Manning
     XXXIX. To Coleridge
        XL. To Manning
       XLI. To Manning
      XLII. To Manning
     XLIII. To William Godwin
      XLIV. To Manning
       XLV. To Miss Wordsworth
      XLVI. To Manning
     XLVII. To Wordsworth
    XLVIII. To Manning
      XLIX. To Wordsworth
         L. To Manning
        LI. To Miss Wordsworth
       LII. To Wordsworth
      LIII. To Wordsworth
       LIV. To Wordsworth
        LV. To Wordsworth
       LVI. To Southey
      LVII. To Miss Hutchinson
     LVIII. To Manning
       LIX. To Manning
        LX. To Wordsworth
       LXI. To Wordsworth
      LXII. To H. Dodwell
     LXIII. To Mrs. Wordsworth
      LXIV. To Wordsworth
       LXV. To Manning
      LXVI. To Miss Wordsworth
     LXVII. To Coleridge
    LXVIII. To Wordsworth
      LXIX. To John Clarke
       LXX. To Mr. Barren Field
      LXXI. To Walter Wilson
     LXXII. To Bernard Barton
    LXXIII. To Miss Wordsworth
     LXXIV. To Mr. and Mrs. Bruton
      LXXV. To Bernard Barton
     LXXVI. To Miss Hutchinson
    LXXVII. To Bernard Barton
   LXXVIII. To Mrs. Hazlitt
     LXXIX. To Bernard Barton
      LXXX. To Bernard Barton
     LXXXI. To Bernard Barton
    LXXXII. To Bernard Barton
   LXXXIII. To Bernard Barton
    LXXXIV. To Bernard Barton
     LXXXV. To Bernard Barton
    LXXXVI. To Wordsworth
   LXXXVII. To Bernard Barton
  LXXXVIII. To Bernard Barton
    LXXXIX. To Bernard Barton
        XC. To Southey
       XCI. To Bernard Barton
      XCII. To J.B. Dibdin
     XCIII. To Henry Crabb Robinson
      XCIV. To Peter George Patmore
       XCV. To Bernard Barton
      XCVI. To Thomas Hood
     XCVII. To P.G. Patmore
    XCVIII. To Bernard Barton
      XCIX. To Procter
         C. To Bernard Barton
        CI. To Mr. Gilman
       CII. To Wordsworth
      CIII. To Mrs. Hazlitt
       CIV. To George Dyer
        CV. To Dyer
       CVI. To Mr. Moxon
      CVII. To Mr. Moxon



INTRODUCTION.


No writer, perhaps, since the days of Dr. Johnson has been oftener
brought before us in biographies, essays, letters, etc., than Charles
Lamb. His stammering speech, his gaiter-clad legs,--"almost immaterial
legs," Hood called them,--his frail wisp of a body, topped by a head
"worthy of Aristotle," his love of punning, of the Indian weed, and,
alas! of the kindly production of the juniper-berry (he was not, he
owned, "constellated under Aquarius"), his antiquarianism of taste, and
relish of the crotchets and whimsies of authorship, are as familiar to
us almost as they were to the group he gathered round him Wednesdays at
No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the
rigor of the game" awaited them. Talfourd has unctuously celebrated
Lamb's "Wednesday Nights." He has kindly left ajar a door through which
posterity peeps in upon the company,--Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, "Barry
Cornwall," Godwin, Martin Burney, Crabb Robinson (a ubiquitous shade,
dimly suggestive of that figment, "Mrs. Harris"), Charles Kemble, Fanny
Kelly ("Barbara S."), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and
Wordsworth,--and sees them discharging the severer offices of the
whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds
over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics. Elia was no Barmecide host, and
the serjeant dwells not without regret upon the solider business of the
evening,--"the cold roast lamb or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking
roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter, often replenished from the
foaming pots which the best tap of Fleet Street supplied," hospitably
presided over by "the most quiet, sensible, and kind of women,"
Mary Lamb.

The _terati_ Talfourd's day were clearly hardier of digestion than
their descendants are. Roast lamb, boiled beef, "heaps of smoking
roasted potatoes," pots of porter,--a noontide meal for a hodman,--and
the hour midnight! One is reminded, _à propos_ of Miss Lamb's robust
viands, that Elia somewhere confesses to "an occasional nightmare;" "but
I do not," he adds, "keep a whole stud of them." To go deeper into this
matter, to speculate upon the possible germs, the first vague
intimations to the mind of Coleridge of the weird spectra of "The
Ancient Mariner," the phantasmagoria of "Kubla Khan," would be, perhaps,
over-refining. "Barry Cornwall," too, Lamb tells us, "had his tritons
and his nereids gambolling before him in nocturnal visions." No wonder!

It is not intended here to re-thresh the straw left by Talfourd,
Fitzgerald, Canon Ainger, and others, in the hope of discovering
something new about Charles Lamb. In this quarter, at least, the wind
shall be tempered to the reader,--shorn as he is by these pages of a
charming letter or two. So far as fresh facts are concerned, the theme
may fairly be considered exhausted. Numberless writers, too, have rung
the changes upon "poor Charles Lamb," "dear Charles Lamb," "gentle
Charles Lamb," and the rest,--the final epithet, by the way being one
that Elia, living, specially resented:

"For God's sake," he wrote to Coleridge. "don't make me ridiculous any
more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses.
It did well enough five years ago, when I came to see you, and was moral
coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines to feed upon such
epithets; but besides that the meaning of 'gentle' is equivocal at best,
and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is
abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished.
I hope my _virtues_ have done _sucking_. I can scarce think but you
meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to believe
that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a
cordial to some green-sick sonneteer."

The indulgent pity conventionally bestowed upon Charles Lamb--one of the
most manly, self-reliant of characters, to say nothing of his genius--is
absurdly' misplaced.

Still farther be it from us to blunt the edge of appetite by sapiently
essaying to "analyze" and account for Lamb's special zest and flavor, as
though his writings, or any others worth the reading, were put together
upon principles of clockwork. We are perhaps over-fond of these arid
pastimes nowadays. It is not the "sweet musk-roses," the "apricocks and
dewberries" of literature that please us best; like Bottom the Weaver,
we prefer the "bottle of hay." What a mockery of right enjoyment our
endless prying and sifting, our hunting of riddles in metaphors,
innuendoes in tropes, ciphers in Shakspeare! Literature exhausted, we
may turn to art, and resolve, say, the Sistine Madonna (I deprecate the
Manes of the "Divine Painter") into some ingenious and recondite rebus.
For such critical chopped-hay--sweeter to the modern taste than honey of
Hybla--Charles Lamb had little relish. "I am, sir," he once boasted to
an analytical, unimaginative proser who had insisted upon _explaining_
some quaint passage in Marvell or Wither, "I am, sir, a matter-of-lie
man." It was his best warrant to sit at the Muses' banquet. Charles Lamb
was blessed with an intellectual palate as fine as Keats's, and could
enjoy the savor of a book (or of that dainty, "in the whole _mundus
edibilis_ the most delicate," Roast Pig, for that matter) without
pragmatically asking, as the king did of the apple in the dumpling, "how
the devil it got there." His value as a critic is grounded in this
capacity of _naïve_ enjoyment (not of pig, but of literature), of
discerning beauty and making _us_ discern it,--thus adding to the known
treasures and pleasures of mankind.

Suggestions not unprofitable for these later days lurk in these traits
of Elia the student and critic. How worthy the imitation, for instance,
of those disciples who band together to treat a fine poem (of Browning,
say, or Shelley) as they might a chapter in the Revelation,--speculating
sagely upon the import of the seven seals and the horns of the great
beast, instead of enjoying the obvious beauties of their author. To the
schoolmaster--whose motto would seem too often to be the counsel of the
irate old lady in Dickens, "Give him a meal of chaff!"--Charles Lamb's
critical methods are rich in suggestion. How many ingenuous boys, lads
in the very flush and hey-day of appreciativeness of the epic virtues,
have been parsed, declined, and conjugated into an utter detestation of
the melodious names of Homer and Virgil! Better far for such victims had
they, instead of aspiring to the vanities of a "classical education,"
sat, like Keats, unlearnedly at the feet of quaint Chapman, or Dryden,
or even of Mr. Pope.

Perhaps, by way of preparative to the reading of Charles Lamb's letters,
it will be well to run over once more the leading facts of his life.
First let us glance at his outward appearance. Fortunately there are a
number of capital pieces of verbal portraiture of Elia.

Referring to the year 1817, "Barry Cornwall" wrote:

  "Persons who had been in the habit of traversing Covent
  Garden at that time of night, by extending their walk a few
  yards into Russell Street have noticed a small, spare man
  clothed in black, who went out every morning, and returned
  every afternoon as the hands of the clock moved toward
  certain hours. You could not mistake him. He was somewhat
  stiff in his manner, and almost clerical in dress, which
  indicated much wear. He had a long, melancholy face, with
  keen, penetrating eyes; and he walked with a short, resolute
  step citywards. He looked no one in the face for more than
  a moment, yet contrived to see everything as he went on.
  No one who ever studied the human features could pass him
  by without recollecting his countenance; it was full of
  sensibility, and it came upon you like new thought, which you
  could not help dwelling upon afterwards: it gave rise to
  meditation, and did you good. This small, half-clerical man
  was--Charles Lamb."

His countenance is thus described by Thomas Hood:

  "His was no common face, none of those willow-pattern
  ones which Nature turns out by thousands at her potteries,
  but more like a chance specimen of the Chinese ware,--one
  to the set; unique, antique, quaint, you might have sworn to
  it piecemeal,--a separate affidavit to each feature."

Mrs. Charles Mathews, wife of the comedian, who met Lamb at a dinner,
gives an amusing account of him:--

  "Mr. Lamb's first appearance was not prepossessing. His
  figure was small and mean, and no man was certainly ever
  less beholden to his tailor. His 'bran' new suit of black
  cloth (in which he affected several times during the day to
  take great pride, and to cherish as a novelty that he had
  looked for and wanted) was drolly contrasted with his very
  rusty silk stockings, shown from his knees, and his much too
  large, thick shoes, without polish. His shirt rejoiced in a wide,
  ill-plaited frill, and his very small, tight, white neckcloth was
  hemmed to a fine point at the ends that formed part of a little
  bow. His hair was black and sleek, but not formal, and
  his face the gravest I ever saw, but indicating great intellect,
  and resembling very much the portraits of Charles I."

From this sprightly and not too flattering sketch we may turn to
Serjeant Talfourd's tender and charming portrait,--slightly idealized,
no doubt; for the man of the coif held a brief for his friend, and was a
poet besides:--

  "Methinks I see him before me now as he appeared then,
  and as he continued without any perceptible alteration to me,
  during the twenty years of intimacy which followed, and were
  closed by his death. A light frame, so fragile that it seemed
  as if a breath would overthrow it, clad in clerk-like black,
  was surmounted by a head of form and expression the most
  noble and sweet. His black hair curled crisply about an
  expanded forehead; his eyes, softly brown, twinkled with
  varying expression, though the prevalent expression was
  sad; and the nose, slightly curved, and delicately carved at
  the nostril, with the lower outline of the face delicately oval,
  completed a head which was finely placed upon the shoulders,
  and gave importance and even dignity to a diminutive and
  shadowy stem. Who shall describe his countenance, catch its
  quivering sweetness, and fix it forever in words? There are
  none, alas! to answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep
  thought, striving with humor; the lines of suffering wreathed
  into cordial mirth, and a smile of painful sweetness, present
  an image to the mind it can as little describe as lose. His
  personal appearance and manner are not unjustly characterized
  by what he himself says in one of his letters to Manning, [1]
  'a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.'"

The writings of Charles Lamb abound in passages of autobiography. "I was
born," he tells us in that delightful sketch, "The Old Benchers of the
Inner Temple," "and passed the first seven years of my life in the
Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I
had almost said,--for in those young years what was this king of rivers
to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?--these are of my
oldest recollections." His father, John Lamb, the "Lovel" of the essay
cited, had come up a little boy from Lincolnshire to enter the service
of Samuel Salt,--one of those "Old Benchers" upon whom the pen of Elia
has shed immortality, a stanch friend and patron to the Lambs, the kind
proprietor of that "spacious closet of good old English reading" upon
whose "fair and wholesome pasturage" Charles and his sister, as
children, "browsed at will."

John Lamb had married Elizabeth Field, whose mother was for fifty years
housekeeper at the country-seat of the Plumers, Blakesware, in
Hertfordshire, the "Blakesmoor" of the Essays, frequent scene of Lamb's
childish holiday sports,--a spacious mansion, with its park and terraces
and "firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel and day-long murmuring
wood-pigeon;" an Eden it must have seemed to the London-bred child, in
whose fancy the dusty trees and sparrows and smoke-grimed fountain of
Temple Court had been a pastoral. Within the cincture of its excluding
garden-walls, wrote Elia in later years, "I could have exclaimed with
that garden-loving poet, [2]--

  "'Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines;
  Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
  And oh, so close your circles lace
  That I may never leave this place:
  But lest your fetters prove too weak,
  Ere I your silken bondage break,
  Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
  And, courteous briers, nail me through.'"

At Blakesware, too, was the room whence the spirit of Sarah Battle--that
"gentlewoman born"--winged its flight to a region where revokes and
"luke-warm gamesters" are unknown.

To John and Elizabeth Lamb were born seven children, only three of whom,
John, Mary, and Charles, survived their infancy. Of the survivors,
Charles was the youngest, John being twelve and Mary ten years his
senior,--a fact to be weighed in estimating the heroism of Lamb's later
life. At the age of seven, Charles Lamb, "son of John Lamb, scrivener,
and Elizabeth, his wife," was entered at the school of Christ's
Hospital,--"the antique foundation of that godly and royal child King
Edward VI." Of his life at this institution he has left us abundant and
charming memorials in the Essays, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital,"
and "Christ's Hospital Five-and-thirty Years Ago,"--the latter sketch
corrective of the rather optimistic impressions of the former.

With his schoolfellows Charles seems to have been, despite his timid and
retiring disposition (he said of himself, "while the others were all
fire and play, he stole along with all the self-concentration of a young
monk"), a decided favorite. "Lamb," wrote C. V. Le Grice, a schoolmate
often mentioned in essay and letter, "was an amiable, gentle boy, very
sensible and keenly observing, indulged by his schoolfellows and by his
master on account of his infirmity of speech.... I never heard his name
mentioned without the addition of Charles, although, as there was no
other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary; but there
was an implied kindness in it, and it was a proof that his gentle
manners excited that kindness."

For us the most important fact of the Christ's Hospital school-days is
the commencement of Lamb's life-long friendship with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, two years his senior, and the object of his fervent
hero-worship. Most of us, perhaps, can find the true source of whatever
of notable good or evil we have effected in life in the moulding
influence of one of these early friendships or admirations. It is the
boy's hero, the one he loves and reverences among his schoolfellows,--
not his taskmaster,--that is his true teacher, the setter of the
broader standards by which he is to abide through life. Happy the man
the feet of whose early idols have not been of clay.

It was under the quickening influence of the eloquent, precocious genius
of the "inspired charity boy" that Charles Lamb's ideals and ambitions
shaped themselves out of the haze of a child's conceptions. Coleridge at
sixteen was already a poet, his ear attuned to the subtlest melody of
verse, and his hand rivalling, in preluding fragments, the efforts of
his maturer years; he was already a philosopher, rapt in Utopian,
schemes and mantling hopes as enchanting--and as chimerical--as the
pleasure-domes and caves of ice decreed by Kubla Khan; and the younger
lad became his ardent disciple.

Lamb quitted Christ's Hospital, prematurely, in November, 1787, and the
companionship of the two friends was for a time interrupted. To part
with Coleridge, to exchange the ease and congenial scholastic atmosphere
of the Hospital for the _res angusta domi_, for the intellectual
starvation of a life of counting-house drudgery, must have been a bitter
trial for him. But the shadow of poverty was upon the little household
in the Temple; on the horizon of the future the blackening clouds of
anxieties still graver were gathering; and the youngest child was called
home to share the common burden.

Charles Lamb was first employed in the South Sea House, where his
brother John [3]--a cheerful optimist, a _dilettante_ in art, genial,
prosperous, thoroughly selfish, in so far as the family fortunes were
concerned an outsider--already held a lucrative post. It was not long
before Charles obtained promotion in the form of a clerkship with the
East India Company,--one of the last kind services of Samuel Salt, who
died in the same year, 1792,--and with the East India Company he
remained for the rest of his working life.

Upon the death of their generous patron the Lambs removed from the
Temple and took lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn; and for
Charles the battle of life may be said to have fairly begun. His work as
a junior clerk absorbed, of course, the greater part of his day and of
his year. Yet there were breathing-spaces: there were the long evenings
with the poets; with Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and
Cowley,--"the sweetest names, which carry a perfume in the mention;"
there were the visits to the play, the yearly vacation jaunts to sunny
Hertfordshire. The intercourse with Coleridge, too, was now occasionally
renewed. The latter had gone up to Cambridge early in 1791, there to
remain--except the period of his six months' dragooning--for the nest
four years. During his visits to London it was the habit of the two
schoolfellows to meet at a tavern near Smithfield, the "Salutation and
Cat" to discuss the topics dear to both: and it was about this time that
Lamb's sonnet to Mrs Siddons, his first appearance in print, was
published in the "Morning Chronicle."

The year 1796 was a terribly eventful one for the Lambs. There was a
taint of insanity in the family on the father's side, and on May 27,
1796, we find Charles writing to Coleridge these sad words,--doubly sad
for the ring of mockery in them:--

  "My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six
  weeks that finished last year and began this, your very
  humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at
  Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now and don't bite
  any one. But mad I was!" [4]

Charles, thanks to the resolution with which he combated the tendency,
and to the steadying influence of his work at the desk,--despite his
occasional murmurs, his best friend and sheet-anchor in life,--never
again succumbed to the family malady; but from that moment, over his
small household, Madness--like Death in Milton's vision--continually
"shook its dart," and at best only "delayed to strike." [5]

It was in the September of 1796 that the calamity befell which has
tinged the story of Charles and Mary Lamb with the sombrest hues of the
Greek tragedy. The family were still in the Holborn lodgings,--the
mother an invalid, the father sinking into a second childhood. Mary, in
addition to the burden of ministering to her parents, was working for
their support with her needle.

At this point it will be well to insert a prefatory word or two as to
the character of Mary Lamb; and here the witnesses are in accord. There
is no jarring of opinion, as in her brother's case; for Charles Lamb has
been sorely misjudged,--often, it must be admitted, with ground of
reason; sometimes by persons who might and should have looked deeper. In
a notable instance, the heroism of his life has been meanly overlooked
by one who preached to mankind with the eloquence of the Prophets the
prime need and virtue of recognizing the hero. If self-abnegation lies
at the root of true heroism, Charles Lamb--that "sorry phenomenon" with
an "insuperable proclivity to gin" [6]--was a greater hero than was
covered by the shield of Achilles. The character of Mary Lamb is quickly
summed Up. She was one of the most womanly of women. "In all its
essential sweetness," says Talfourd, "her character was like her
brother's; while, by a temper more placid, a spirit of enjoyment more
serene, she was enabled to guide, to counsel, to cheer him, and to
protect him on the verge of the mysterious calamity, from the depths of
which she rose so often unruffled to his side. To a friend in any
difficulty she was the most comfortable of advisers, the wisest of
consolers." Hazlitt said that "he never met with a woman who could
reason, and had met with only one thoroughly reasonable,--Mary Lamb."
The writings of Elia are strewn, as we know, with the tenderest tributes
to her worth. "I wish," he says, "that I could throw into a heap the
remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal
division."

The psychology of madness is a most subtle inquiry. How slight the
mysterious touch that throws the smooth-running human mechanism into a
chaos of jarring elements, that transforms, in the turn of an eyelash,
the mild humanity of the gentlest of beings into the unreasoning
ferocity of the tiger.

The London "Times" of September 26, 1796, contained the following
paragraph:--

  "On Friday afternoon the coroner and a jury sat on the
  body of a lady in the neighborhood of Holborn, who died in
  consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day.
  It appeared by the evidence adduced that while the family
  were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife
  lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little
  girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her
  infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and
  with loud shrieks approached her parent. The child, by her
  cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too
  late. [7] The dreadful scene presented him the mother lifeless,
  pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing
  over her with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father,
  weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from
  the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks
  she had been madly hurling about the room.

  "For a few days prior to this, the family had observed
  some symptoms of insanity in her, which had so much increased
  on the Wednesday evening that her brother, early the next
  morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn; but that gentleman was not at
  home.

  "The jury of course brought in their verdict,--_Lunacy_."

I need not supply the omitted names of the actors in this harrowing
scene. Mary Lamb was at once placed in the Asylum at Hoxton, and the
victim of her frenzy was laid to rest in the churchyard of St. Andrew's,
Holborn. It became necessary for Charles and his father to make an
immediate change of residence, and they took lodgings at Pentonville.
There is a pregnant sentence in one of Lamb's letters that flashes with
the vividness of lightning into the darkest recesses of those early
troubles and embarrassments. "We are," he wrote to Coleridge, "_in a
manner marked_."

Charles Lamb after some weeks obtained the release of his sister from
the Hoxton Asylum by formally undertaking her future guardianship,--a
charge which was borne, until Death released the compact, with a
steadfastness, a cheerful renunciation of what men regard as the
crowning blessings of manhood, [8] that has shed a halo more radiant even
than that of his genius about the figure--it was "small and mean," said
sprightly Mrs. Mathews--of the India House clerk.

As already stated, the mania that had once attacked Charles never
returned; but from the side of Mary Lamb this grimmest of spectres never
departed. "Mary A is again _from home_;" "Mary is _fallen ill_ again:"
how often do such tear-fraught phrases--tenderly veiled, lest! some
chance might bring them to the eye of the blameless sufferer--recur in
the Letters! Brother and sister were ever on the watch for the symptoms
premonitory of the return of this "their sorrow's crown of sorrows."
Upon their little holiday excursions, says Talfourd, a strait-waistcoat,
carefully packed by Miss Lamb herself, was their constant companion.
Charles Lloyd relates that he once met them slowly pacing together a
little footpath in Hoxton fields, both weeping bitterly, and found on
joining them that they were taking their solemn way to the old asylum.
Thus, upon this guiltless pair were visited the sins of their fathers.

With the tragical events just narrated, the storm of calamity seemed to
have spent its force, and there were thenceforth plenty of days of calm
and of sunshine for Charles Lamb. The stress of poverty was lightened
and finally removed by successive increases of salary at the India
House; the introductions of Coleridge and his own growing repute in the
world of letters gathered about him a circle of friends--Southey,
Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Manning, Barton, and the rest--more congenial, and
certainly more profitable, than the vagrant _intimados_, "to the world's
eye a ragged regiment," who had wasted his substance and his leisure in
the early Temple days.

Lamb's earliest avowed appearance as an author was in Coleridge's first
volume of poems, published by Cottle, of Bristol, in 1796. "The
effusions signed C.L.," says Coleridge in the preface, "were written by
Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House. Independently of the signature,
their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them." The
"effusions" were four sonnets, two of them--the most noteworthy--
touching upon the one love-romance of Lamb's life, [9]--his early
attachment to the "fair-haired" Hertfordshire girl, the "Anna" of the
Sonnets, the "Alice W---n" of the Essays. We remember that Ella in
describing the gallery of old family portraits, in the essay,
"Blakesmoor in H---shire," dwells upon "that beauty with the cool, blue,
pastoral drapery, and a lamb, that hung next the great bay window, with
the bright yellow Hertfordshire hair, _so like my Alice_."

In 1797 Cottle issued a second edition of Coleridge's poems, this time
with eleven additional pieces by Lamb,--making fifteen of his in
all,--and containing verses by their friend Charles Lloyd. "It is
unlikely," observes Canon Ainger, "that this little venture brought any
profit to its authors, or that a subsequent volume of blank verse by
Lamb and Lloyd in the following year proved more remunerative." In 1798
Lamb, anxious for his sister's sake to add to his slender income,
composed his "miniature romance," as Talfourd calls it, "Rosamund Gray;"
and this little volume, which has not yet lost its charm, proved a
moderate success. Shelley, writing from Italy to Leigh Hunt in 1819,
said of it: "What a lovely thing is his 'Rosamund Gray'! How much
knowledge of the sweetest and deepest part of our nature in it! When I
think of such a mind as Lamb's, when I see how unnoticed remain things
of such exquisite and complete perfection, what should I hope for myself
if I had not higher objects in view than fame?"

It is rather unpleasant, in view of this generous--if overstrained--
tribute, to find the object of it referring later to the works of his
encomiast as "thin sown with profit or delight." [10]

In 1802 Lamb published in a small duodecimo his blank-verse tragedy,
"John Woodvil,"--it had previously been declined by John Kemble as
unsuited to the stage,--and in 1806 was produced at the Drury Lane
Theatre his farce "Mr. H.," the summary failure of which is chronicled
with much humor in the Letters. [11]

The "Tales from Shakspeare," by Charles and Mary Lamb, were published by
Godwin in 1807, and a second edition was called for in the following
year. Lamb was now getting on surer--and more remunerative--ground; and
in 1808 he prepared for the firm of Longmans his masterly "Specimens of
the English Dramatic Poets contemporary with Shakspeare." Concerning
this work he wrote to Manning:--

  "Specimens are becoming fashionable. We have Specimens
  of Ancient English Poets, Specimens of Modern English
  Poets, Specimens of Ancient English Prose Writers,
  without end. They used to be called 'Beauties.' You have
  seen Beauties of Shakspeare? so have many people that
  never saw any beauties _in_ Shakspeare,"

From Charles Lamb's "Specimens" dates, as we know, the revival of the
study of the old English dramatists other than Shakespeare. He was the
first to call attention to the neglected beauties of those great
Elizabethans, Webster, Marlowe, Ford, Dekker, Massinger,--no longer
accounted mere "mushrooms that sprang up in a ring under the great oak
of Arden." [12]

The opportunity that was to call forth Lamb's special faculty in
authorship came late in life. In January, 1820, Baldwin, Cradock, and
Joy, the publishers, brought out the first number of a new monthly
journal under the name of an earlier and extinct periodical, the "London
Magazine," and in the August number appeared an article, "Recollections
of the South Sea House." over the signature _Elia_. [13] With this
delightful sketch the essayist Elia may be said to have been born. In
none of Lamb's previous writings had there been, more than a hint of
that unique vein,--wise, playful, tender, fantastic, "everything by
starts, and nothing long," exhibited with a felicity of phrase certainly
unexcelled in English prose literature,--that we associate with his
name. The careful reader of the Letters cannot fail to note that it is
_there_ that Lamb's peculiar quality in authorship is first manifest.
There is a letter to Southey, written as early as 1798, that has the
true Elia ring. [14] With the "London Magazine," which was
discontinued in 1826.

Elia was born, and with it he may be said to have died,--although some
of his later contributions to the "New Monthly" [15] and to the
"Englishman's Magazine" were included in the "Last Essays of Elia,"
collected and published in 1833. The first series of Lamb's essays under
the title of Elia had been published in a single volume by Taylor and
Hessey, of the "London Magazine," in 1823.

The story of Lamb's working life--latterly an uneventful one, broken
chiefly by changes of abode and by the yearly holiday jaunts,
"migrations from the blue bed to the brown"--from 1796, when the
correspondence with Coleridge begins, is told in the letters. For
thirty-three years he served the East India Company, and he served it
faithfully and steadily. There is, indeed, a tradition that having been
reproved on one occasion for coming to the office late in the morning,
he pleaded that he always left it "so very early in the evening." Poets,
we know, often "heard the chimes at midnight" in Elia's day, and the
plea has certainly a most Lamb-like ring. That the Company's directors,
however, were more than content with the service of their literate
clerk, the sequel shows.

It is manifest in certain letters, written toward the close of 1824 and
in the beginning of 1825, that Lamb's confinement was at last telling
upon him, and that he was thinking of a release from his bondage to the
"desk's dead wood." In February, 1825, he wrote to Barton,--

  "Your gentleman brother sets my mouth watering after
  liberty. Oh that I were kicked out of Leadenhall with
  every mark of indignity, and a competence in my fob! The
  birds of the air would not be so free as I should. How
  I would prance and curvet it, and pick up cowslips, and
  ramble about purposeless as an idiot!"

Later in March we learn that he had signified to the directors his
willingness to resign,

  "I am sick of hope deferred. The grand wheel is in agitation
  that is to turn up my fortune; but round it rolls,
  and will turn up nothing, I have a glimpse of freedom, of
  becoming a gentleman at large, but I am put off from day
  to day. I have offered my resignation, and it is neither accepted
  nor rejected. Eight weeks am I kept in this fearful
  suspense. Guess what an absorbing state I feel it. I am
  not conscious of the existence of friends, present or absent.
  The East India directors alone can be that thing to me. I
  have just learned that nothing will be decided this week.
  Why the next? Why any week?"

But the "grand wheel" was really turning, to some purpose, and a few
days later, April 6, 1825, he joyfully wrote to Barton,--

  "My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my
  recent emancipation that I have scarce steadiness of hand,
  much more mind, to compose a letter, I am free, B.B.,--free
  as air!

  "'The little bird that wings the sky
  Knows no such liberty,'

  I was set free on Tuesday in last week at four o'clock. I
  came home forever!"

The quality of the generosity of the East India directors was not
strained in Lamb's case. It should be recorded as an agreeable
commercial phenomenon that these officials, men of business acting in "a
business matter,"--words too often held to exclude all such Quixotic
matters as sentiment, gratitude, and Christian equity between man and
man,--were not only just, but munificent. [16] From the path of Charles
and Mary Lamb--already beset with anxieties grave enoughthey removed
forever the shadow of want. Lamb's salary at the time of his retirement
was nearly seven hundred pounds a year, and the offer made to him was a
pension of four hundred and fifty, with a deduction of nine pounds a
year for his sister, should she survive him.

Lamb lived to enjoy his freedom and the Company's bounty nearly nine
years. Soon after his retirement he settled with his sister at Enfield,
within easy reach of his loved London, removing thence to the
neighboring parish of Edmonton,--his last change of residence.
Coleridge's death, in July, 1834, was a heavy blow to him. "When I heard
of the death of Coleridge," he wrote, "it was without grief. It seemed
to me that he had long been on the confines of the next world, that he
had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve; but
since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit
haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or
books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the
proof and touchstone of all my cogitations." Lamb did not long outlive
his old schoolfellow. Walking in the middle of December along the London
road, he stumbled and fell, inflicting a slight wound upon his face. The
injury at first seemed trivial; but soon after, erysipelas appearing, it
became evident that his general health was too feeble to resist. On the
27th of December, 1834, he passed quietly away, whispering in his last
moments the names of his dearest friends.

Mary Lamb survived her brother nearly thirteen years, dying, at the
advanced age of eighty-two, on May 20, 1847. With increasing years her
attacks had become more frequent and of longer duration, till her mind
became permanently weakened. After leaving Edmonton, she lived chiefly
in a pleasant house in St. John's Wood, surrounded by old books and
prints, under the care of a nurse. Her pension, together with the income
from her brother's savings, was amply sufficient for her support.

Talfourd, who was present at the burial of Mary Lamb, has eloquently
described the earthly reunion of the brother and sister:--

"A few survivors of the old circle, then sadly thinned, attended her
remains to the spot in Edmnonton churchyard where they were laid above
those of her brother. In accordance with Lamb's own feeling, so far as
it could be gathered from his expressions on a subject to which he did
not often or willingly refer, he had been interred in a deep grave,
simply dug and wattled round, but without any affectation of stone or
brickwork to keep the human dust from its kindred earth. So dry,
however, is the soil of the quiet churchyard that the excavated earth
left perfect walls of stiff clay, and permitted us just to catch a
glimpse of the still untarnished edges of the coffin, in which all the
mortal part of one of the most delightful persons who ever lived was
contained, and on which the remains of her he had loved with love
'passing the love of woman' were henceforth to rest,--the last glances
we shall ever have even of that covering,--concealed from us as we
parted by the coffin of the sister. We felt, I believe, after a moment's
strange shuddering, that the reunion was well accomplished; although the
true-hearted son of Admiral Burney, who had known and loved the pair we
quitted from a child, and who had been among the dearest objects of
existence to him, refused to be comforted."

There are certain handy phrases, the legal-tender of conversation, that
people generally use without troubling themselves to look into their
title to currency. It is often said, for instance, with an air of
deploring a phase of general mental degeneracy, that "letter-writing is
a lost art." And so it is,---not because men nowadays, if they were put
to it, could not, on the average, write as good letters as ever (the
average although we certainly have no Lambs, and perhaps no Walpoles or
Southeys to raise it, would probably be higher), but because the
conditions that call for and develop the epistolary art have largely
passed away. With our modern facility of communication, the letter has
lost the pristine dignity of its function. The earth has dwindled
strangely since the advent of steam and electricity, and in a generation
used to Mr. Edison's devices, Puck's girdle presents no difficulties to
the imagination. In Charles Lamb's time the expression "from Land's End
to John O'Groat's" meant something; to-day it means a few comfortable
hours by rail, a few minutes by telegraph. Wordsworth in the North of
England was to Lamb, so far as the chance of personal contact was
concerned, nearly as remote as Manning in China. Under such conditions a
letter was of course a weighty matter; it was a thoughtful summary of
opinion, a rarely recurring budget of general intelligence, expensive to
send, and paid for by the recipient; and men put their minds and
energies into composing it. "One wrote at that time," says W.C. Hazlitt,
"a letter to an acquaintance in one of the home counties which one would
only write nowadays to a settler in the Colonies or a relative
in India."

But to whatever conditions or circumstances we may owe the existence of
Charles Lamb's letters, their quality is of course the fruit of the
genius and temperament of the writer. Unpremeditated as the strain of
the skylark, they have almost to excess (were that possible) the prime
epistolary merit of spontaneity. From the brain of the writer to the
sheet before him flows an unbroken Pactolian stream. Lamb, at his best,
ranges with Shakspearian facility the gamut of human emotion,
exclaiming, as it were at one moment, with Jaques, "Motley's the only
wear!"--in the next probing the source of tears. He is as ejaculatory
with his pen as other men are with their tongues. Puns, quotations,
conceits, critical estimates of the rarest insight and suggestiveness,
chase each other over his pages like clouds over a summer sky; and the
whole is leavened with the sterling ethical and aesthetic good sense
that renders Charles Lamb one of the wholesomest of writers.

As to the plan on which the selections for this volume have been made,
it needs only to be said that, in general, the editor has aimed to
include those letters which exhibit most fully the writer's distinctive
charm and quality. This plan leaves, of course, a residue of
considerable biographical and critical value; but it is believed that to
all who really love and appreciate him, Charles Lamb's "Best Letters"
are those which are most uniquely and unmistakably Charles Lamb's.

E. G. J. _September_, 1891.

[1] Letter L.

[2] Cowley.

[3] The James Elia of the essay "My Relations."

[4] Letter I.

[5] Talfourd's Memoir.

[6] Carlyle.

[7] It would seem from Lamb's letter to Coleridge (Letter IV.) that it
was _he_, not the landlord, who appeared thus too late, and who snatched
the knife from the unconscious hand.

[8] The reader is referred to Lamb's beautiful essay, "Dream Children."

[9] If we except his passing tenderness for the young Quakeress, Hester
Savory, Lamb admitted that he had never spoken to the lady in his life.

[10] Letter LXXXIII.

[11] Letters LXV IL., LXVIII., LXIX.

[12] W. S. Landor.

[13] In assuming this pseudonym Lamb borrowed the name of a fellow-clerk
who had served with him thirty years before in the South Sea House,--an
Italian named Elia. The name has probably never been pronounced as Lamb
intended. "_Call him Ellia_," he said in a letter to J. Taylor,
concerning this old acquaintance.

[14] Letter XVII.

[15] The rather unimportant series, "Popular Fallacies," appeared in the
"New Monthly."

[16] In the essay "The Superannuated Man" Lamb describes, with
certain changes and modifications, his retirement from the India House.



I.


TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

_May_ 27, 1796.

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

When Southey becomes as modest as his predecessor, Milton, and publishes
his Epics in duodecimo, I will read 'em; a guinea a book is somewhat
exorbitant, nor have I the opportunity of borrowing the work. The
extracts from it in the "Monthly Review," and the short passages in your
"Watchman," seem to me much superior to anything in his partnership
account with Lovell. [1] Your poems I shall procure forthwith.

There were noble lines in what you inserted in one of your numbers from
"Religious Musings," but I thought them elaborate. I am somewhat glad
you have given up that paper; it must have been dry, unprofitable, and
of dissonant mood to your disposition. I wish you success in all your
undertakings, and am glad to hear you are employed about the "Evidences
of Religion." There is need of multiplying such books a hundred-fold in
this philosophical age, to _prevent_ converts to atheism, for they seem
too tough disputants to meddle with afterwards....

Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at
Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks
that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent
very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now,
and don't bite any one. But mad I was and many a vagary my imagination
played with me,--enough to make a volume, if all were told. My sonnets I
have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day
communicate to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which, if I
finish, I publish. White [2] is on the eve of publishing (he took the
hint from Vortigern) "Original Letters of Falstaff, Shallow," etc.; a
copy you shall have when it comes out. They are without exception the
best imitations I ever saw. Coleridge, it may convince you of my regards
for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness as much almost
as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate
cause of my temporary frenzy.

The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry; but you will be curious
to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of
my lucid intervals.

TO MY SISTER.

  If from my lips some angry accents fell,
    Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind,
    'T was but the error of a sickly mind
  And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well
    And waters clear of Reason; and for me
    Let this my verse the poor atonement be,--
    My verse, which thou to praise wert e'er inclined
    Too highly, and with partial eye to see
  No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show
    Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend
    An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,
    Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay
  But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,
    Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.

With these lines, and with that sister's kindest remembrances to Cottle,
I conclude.

Yours sincerely,

LAMB.

[1] Southey had just published his "Joan of Arc," in quarto. He and
Lovell had published jointly, two years before, "Poems by Bion and
Moschus."

[2] A Christ's Hospital schoolfellow, the "Jem" White of the Elia essay,
"The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers."



II.


TO COLERIDGE.

(_No month_) 1796.

_Tuesday night_.--Of your "Watchman," the review of Burke was the best
prose. I augured great things from the first number. There is some
exquisite poetry interspersed. I have re-read the extract from the
"Religious Musings," and retract whatever invidious there was in my
censure of it as elaborate. There are times when one is not in a
disposition thoroughly to relish good writing. I have re-read it in a
more favorable moment, and hesitate not to pronounce it sublime. If
there be anything in it approaching to tumidity (which I meant not to
infer; by "elaborate" I meant simply "labored"), it is the gigantic
hyperbole by which you describe the evils of existing society: "snakes,
lions, hyenas, and behemoths," is carrying your resentment beyond
bounds. The pictures of "The Simoom," of "Frenzy and Ruin," of "The
Whore of Babylon," and "The Cry of Foul Spirits disinherited of Earth,"
and "The Strange Beatitude" which the good man shall recognize in
heaven, as well as the particularizing of the children of wretchedness
(I have unconsciously included every part of it), form a variety of
uniform excellence. I hunger and thirst to read the poem complete. That
is a capital line in your sixth number,--

  "This dark, frieze-coated, hoarse, teeth-chattering month."

They are exactly such epithets as Burns would have stumbled on, whose
poem on the ploughed-up daisy you seem to have had in mind. Your
complaint that of your readers some thought there was too much, some too
little, original matter in your numbers, reminds me of poor dead Parsons
in the "Critic." "Too little incident! Give me leave to tell you, sir,
there is too much incident." I had like to have forgot thanking you for
that exquisite little morsel, the first Sclavonian Song. The expression
in the second, "more happy to be unhappy in hell," is it not very
quaint? Accept my thanks, in common with those of all who love good
poetry, for "The Braes of Yarrow." I congratulate you on the enemies you
must have made by your splendid invective against the barterers in human
flesh and sinews. Coleridge, you will rejoice to hear that Cowper is
recovered from his lunacy, and is employed on his translation of the
Italian, etc., poems of Milton for an edition where Fuseli presides as
designer. Coleridge, to an idler like myself, to write and receive
letters are both very pleasant; but I wish not to break in upon your
valuable time by expecting to hear very frequently from you. Reserve
that obligation for your moments of lassitude, when you have nothing
else to do; for your loco-restive and all your idle propensities, of
course, have given way to the duties of providing for a family. The mail
is come in, but no parcel; yet this is Tuesday. Farewell, then, till
to-morrow; for a niche and a nook I must leave for criticisms. By the
way, I hope you do not send your own only copy of "Joan of Arc;" I will
in that case return it immediately.

Your parcel _is_ come; you have been _lavish_ of your presents.

Wordsworth's poem I have hurried through, not without delight. Poor
Lovell! my heart almost accuses me for the light manner I lately spoke
of him, not dreaming of his death. My heart bleeds for your accumulated
troubles; God send you through 'em with patience. I conjure you dream
not that I will ever think of being repaid; the very word is galling to
the ears. I have read all your "Religious Musings" with uninterrupted
feelings of profound admiration. You may safely rest your fame on it.
The best remaining things are what I have before read, and they lose
nothing by my recollection of your manner of reciting 'em, for I too
bear in mind "the voice, the look," of absent friends, and can
occasionally mimic their manner for the amusement of those who have seen
'em. Your impassioned manner of recitation I can recall at any time to
mine own heart and to the ears of the bystanders. I rather wish you had
left the monody on Chatterton concluding, as, it did, abruptly. It had
more of unity. The conclusion of your "Religious Musicgs," I fear, will
entitle you to the reproof of your beloved woman, who wisely will not
suffer your fancy to run riot, but bids you walk humbly with your God.
The very last words, "I exercise my young novitiate thought in
ministeries of heart-stirring song," though not now new to me, cannot be
enough admired. To speak politely, they are a well-turned compliment to
poetry. I hasten to read "Joan of Arc," etc. I have read your lines at
the beginning of second book; [1] they are worthy of Milton, but in my
mind yield to your "Religious Musings." I shall read the whole
carefully, and in some future letter take the liberty to particularize
my opinions of it. Of what is new to me among your poems next to the
"Musings," that beginning "My Pensive Sara" gave me most pleasure. The
lines in it I just alluded to are most exquisite; they made my sister
and self smile, as conveying a pleasing picture of Mrs. C. checking your
wild wanderings, which we were so fond of hearing you indulge when among
us. It has endeared us more than anything to your good lady, and your
own self-reproof that follows delighted us. 'T is a charming poem
throughout (you have well remarked that charming, admirable, exquisite
are the words expressive of feelings more than conveying of ideas, else
I might plead very well want of room in my paper as excuse for
generalizing). I want room to tell you how we are charmed with your
verses in the manner of Spenser, etc. I am glad you resume the
"Watchman." Change the name; leave out all articles of news, and
whatever things are peculiar to newspapers, and confine yourself to
ethics, verse, criticism; or, rather, do not confine yourself. Let your
plan be as diffuse as the "Spectator," and I 'll answer for it the work
prospers. If I am vain enough to think I can be a contributor, rely on
my inclinations. Coleridge, in reading your "Religious Musings," I felt
a transient superiority over you. I _have_ seen Priestley. I love to see
his name repeated in your writings. I love and honor him almost
profanely. You would be charmed with his _Sermons_, if you never read
'em. You have doubtless read his books illustrative of the doctrine of
Necessity. Prefixed to a late work of his in answer to Paine, there is a
preface giving an account of the man and his services to men, written by
Lindsey, his dearest friend, well worth your reading.

_Tuesday Eve_.--Forgive my prolixity, which is yet too brief for all I
could wish to say. God give you comfort, and all that are of your
household! Our loves and best good-wishes to Mrs. C.

C. LAMB.

[1] Coleridge contributed some four hundred lines to the second book of
Southey's epic.



III.


TO COLERIDGE.

_June_ 10, 1796.

With "Joan of Arc" I have been delighted, amazed, I had not presumed to
expect anything of such excellence from Southey. Why, the poem is alone
sufficient to redeem the character of the age we live in from the
imputation of degenerating in poetry, were there no such beings extant
as Burns, and Bowles, Cowper, and ----, ---- fill up the blank how you
please; I say nothing. The subject is well chosen; it opens well. To
become more particular, I will notice in their order a few passages that
chiefly struck me on perusal. Page 26: "Fierce and terrible
Benevolence!" is a phrase full of grandeur and originality, The whole
context made me feel _possessed_, even like Joan herself. Page 28: "It
is most horrible with the keen sword to gore the finely fibred human
frame," and what follows, pleased me mightily. In the second book, the
first forty lines in particular are majestic and high-sounding. Indeed,
the whole vision of the Palace of Ambition and what follows are
supremely excellent. Your simile of the Laplander, "By Niemi's lake, or
Balda Zhiok, or the mossy stone of Solfar-Kapper," [1] will bear
comparison with any in Milton for fulness of circumstance and
lofty-pacedness of versification. Southey's similes, though many of 'em
are capital, are all inferior. In one of his books, the simile of the
oak in the storm occurs, I think, four times. To return: the light in
which you view the heathen deities is accurate and beautiful. Southey's
personifications in this book are so many fine and faultless pictures. I
was much pleased with your manner of accounting for the reason why
monarchs take delight in war. At the 447th line you have placed Prophets
and Enthusiasts cheek by jowl, on too intimate a footing for the dignity
of the former. Necessarian-like-speaking, it is correct. Page 98: "Dead
is the Douglas! cold thy warrior frame, illustrious Buchan," etc., are
of kindred excellence with Gray's "Cold is Cadwallo's tongue," etc. How
famously the Maid baffles the Doctors, Seraphic and Irrefragable, "with
all their trumpery!" Page 126: the procession, the appearances of the
Maid, of the Bastard Son of Orleans, and of Tremouille, are full of fire
and fancy, and exquisite melody of versification. The personifications
from line 303 to 309, in the heat of the battle, had better been
omitted; they are not very striking, and only encumber. The converse
which Joan and Conrade hold on the banks of the Loire is altogether
beautiful. Page 313: the conjecture that in dreams "all things are that
seem," is one of those conceits which the poet delights to admit into
his creed,--a creed, by the way, more marvellous and mystic than ever
Athanasius dreamed of. Page 315: I need only _mention_ those lines
ending with "She saw a serpent gnawing at her heart!" They are good
imitative lines: "he toiled and toiled, of toil to reap no end, but
endless toil and never-ending woe." Page 347: Cruelty is such as Hogarth
might have painted her. Page 361: all the passage about Love (where he
seems to confound conjugal love with creating and preserving love) is
very confused, and sickens me with a load of useless personifications;
else that ninth book is the finest in the volume,--an exquisite
combination of the ludicrous and the terrible. I have never read either,
even in translation, but such I conceive to be the manner of Dante or
Ariosto. The tenth book is the most languid.

On the whole, considering the celerity wherewith the poem was finished,
I was astonished at the unfrequency of weak lines, I had expected to
find it verbose. Joan, I think, does too little in battle, Dunois
perhaps the same; Conrade too much. The anecdotes interspersed among the
battles refresh the mind very agreeably, and I am delighted with the
very many passages of simple pathos abounding throughout the
poem,--passages which the author of "Crazy Kate" might have written. Has
not Master Southey spoke very slightingly in his preface and
disparagingly of Cowper's Homer? What makes him reluctant to give Cowper
his fame? And does not Southey use too often the expletives "did" and
"does"? They have a good effect at times, but are too inconsiderable, or
rather become blemishes when they mark a style. On the whole, I expect
Southey one day to rival Milton; I already deem him equal to Cowper, and
superior to all living poets besides. What says Coleridge? The "Monody
on Henderson" is _immensely good_; the rest of that little volume is
_readable and above mediocrity?_ [2] I proceed to a more pleasant
task,--pleasant because the poems are yours; pleasant because you impose
the task on me; and pleasant, let me add, because it will confer a
whimsical importance on me to sit in judgment upon your rhymes. First,
though, let me thank you again and again, in my own and my sister's
name, for your invitations. Nothing could give us more pleasure than to
come; but (were there no other reasons) while my brother's leg is so
bad, it is out of the question. Poor fellow! he is very feverish and
light-headed; but Cruikshanks has pronounced the symptoms favourable,
and gives us every hope that there will be no need of amputation. God
send not! We are necessarily confined with him all the afternoon and
evening till very late, so that I am stealing a few minutes to write
to you.

Thank you for your frequent letters; you are the only correspondent and,
I might add, the only friend I have in the world. I go nowhere, and have
no acquaintance. Slow of speech and reserved of manners, no one seeks or
cares for my society, and I am left alone. Austin calls only
occasionally, as though it were a duty rather, and seldom stays ten
minutes. Then judge how thankful I am for your letters! Do not, however,
burden yourself with the correspondence. I trouble you again so soon
only in obedience to your injunctions. Complaints apart, proceed we to
our task. I am called away to tea,--thence must wait upon my brother; so
must delay till to-morrow. Farewell!--_Wednesday_.

_Thursday_.--I will first notice what is new to me. Thirteenth page:
"The thrilling tones that concentrate the soul" is a nervous line, and
the six first lines of page 14 are very pretty, the twenty-first
effusion a perfect thing. That in the manner of Spenser is very sweet,
particularly at the close; the thirty-fifth effusion is most
exquisite,--that line in particular, "And, tranquil, muse upon
tranquillity." It is the very reflex pleasure that distinguishes the
tranquillity of a thinking being from that of a shepherd,--a modern one
I would be understood to mean,--a Damoetas; one that keeps other
people's sheep. Certainly, Coleridge, your letter from Shurton Bars has
less merit than most things in your volume; personally it may chime in
best with your own feelings, and therefore you love it best. It has,
however, great merit. In your fourth epistle that is an exquisite
paragraph, and fancy-full, of "A stream there is which rolls in lazy
flow," etc. "Murmurs sweet undersong 'mid jasmin bowers" is a sweet
line, and so are the three next. The concluding simile is far-fetched;
"tempest-honored" is a quaintish phrase.

Yours is a poetical family. I was much surprised and pleased to see the
signature of Sara to that elegant composition, the fifth epistle. I dare
not _criticise_ the "Religious Musings;" I like not to _select_ any
part, where all is excellent. I can only admire, and thank you for it in
the name of a Christian, as well as a lover of good poetry; only let me
ask, is not that thought and those words in Young, "stands in the
sun,"--or is it only such as Young, in one of his _better moments,_
might have writ?

        "Believe thou, O my soul,
  Life is a vision shadowy of Truth;
  And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave,
  Shapes of a dream!"

I thank you for these lines in the name of a necessarian, and for what
follows in next paragraph, in the name of a child of fancy. After all,
you cannot nor ever will write anything with which I shall be so
delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came to town, and I
saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding with recent wounds.
Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed hope; you had

                           "Many an holy lay
  That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way."

I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant
on the sense. When I read in your little volume your nineteenth
effusion, or the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the
"Sigh," I think I hear _you_ again. I image to myself the little smoky
room at the "Salutation and Cat," where we have sat together through the
winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy. When you left
London, I felt a dismal void in my heart. I found myself cut off, at one
and the same time, from two most dear to me, "How blest with ye the path
could I have trod of quiet life!" In your conversation you had blended
so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief; but in your
absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did its worst
mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but feel a stupor
that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of this life. I
sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind; but habits are
strong things, and my religious fervours are confined, alas! to some
fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion,

A correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my
lethargy and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it; I will
not be very troublesome! At some future time I will amuse you with an
account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my frenzy
took. I look back upon it at times with, a gloomy kind of envy; for
while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not,
Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till
you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid,--comparatively so. Excuse
this selfish digression. Your "Monody" [3] is so superlatively excellent
that I can only wish it perfect, which I can't help feeling it is not
quite. Indulge me in a few conjectures; what I am going to propose would
make it more compressed and, I think, more energetic, though, I am
sensible, at the expense of many beautiful lines. Let it begin, "Is this
the land of song-ennobled line?" and proceed to "Otway's famished form;"
then, "Thee, Chatterton," to "blaze of Seraphim;" then, "clad in
Nature's rich array," to "orient day;" then, "but soon the scathing
lightning," to "blighted land;" then, "sublime of thought," to "his
bosom glows;" then

  "But soon upon his poor unsheltered head
  Did Penury her sickly mildew shed;
  Ah! where are fled the charms of vernal grace,
  And joy's wild gleams that lightened o'er his face."

Then "youth of tumultuous soul" to "sigh," as before. The rest may all
stand down to "gaze upon the waves below." What follows now may come
next as detached verses, suggested by the "Monody," rather than a part
of it. They are, indeed, in themselves, very sweet;

  "And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng,
  Hanging enraptured on thy stately song!"

in particular, perhaps. If I am obscure, you may understand me by
counting lines. I have proposed omitting twenty-four lines; I feel that
thus compressed it would gain energy, but think it most likely you will
not agree with me; for who shall go about to bring opinions to the bed
of Procrustes, and introduce among the sons of men a monotony of
identical feelings? I only propose with diffidence.

Reject you, if you please, with as little remorse as you would the color
of a coat or the pattern of a buckle, where our fancies differed.

The "Pixies" is a perfect thing, and so are the "Lines on the Spring."
page 28. The "Epitaph on an Infant," like a Jack-o'-lantern, has danced
about (or like Dr. Forster's [4] scholars) out of the "Morning Chronicle"
into the "Watchman," and thence back into your collection. It is very
pretty, and you seem to think so, but, may be, overlooked its chief
merit, that of filling up a whole page, I had once deemed sonnets of
unrivalled use that way, but your Epitaphs, I find, are the more
diffuse. "Edmund" still holds its place among your best verses, "Ah!
fair delights" to "roses round," in your poem called "Absence," recall
(none more forcibly) to my mind the tones in which you recited it, I
will not notice, in this tedious (to you) manner, verses which have been
so long delighful to me, and which you already know my opinion of. Of
this kind are Bowles, Priestley, and that most exquisite and most
Bowles-like of all, the nineteenth effusion. It would have better ended
with "agony of care;" the last two lines are obvious and unnecessary;
and you need not now make fourteen lines of it, now it is rechristened
from a Sonnet to an Effusion.

Schiller might have written the twentieth effusion; 't is worthy of him
in any sense, I was glad to meet with those lines you sent me when my
sister was so ill; I had lost the copy, and I felt not a little proud at
seeing my name in your verse. The "Complaint of Ninathoma" (first stanza
in particular) is the best, or only good, imitation of Ossian I ever
saw, your "Restless Gale" excepted. "To an Infant" is most sweet; is not
"foodful," though, very harsh? Would not "dulcet" fruit be less harsh,
or some other friendly bi-syllable? In "Edmund," "Frenzy! fierce-eyed
child" is not so well as "frantic," though that is an epithet adding
nothing to the meaning. Slander _couching_ was better than "squatting."
In the "Man of Ross" it _was_ a better line thus,--

  "If 'neath this roof thy wine-cheered moments pass,"

than as it stands now. Time nor nothing can reconcile me to the
concluding five lines of "Kosciusko;" call it anything you will but
sublime. In my twelfth effusion I had rather have seen what I wrote
myself, though they bear no comparison with your exquisite lines,--

  "On rose-leaf beds amid your faery bowers," etc.

I love my sonnets because they are the reflected images of my own
feelings at different times. To instance, in the thirteenth,--

  "How reason reeled," etc.,

are good lines, but must spoil the whole with me, who know it is only a
fiction of yours, and that the "rude dashings" did in fact not "rock me
to repose." I grant the same objection applies not to the former sonnet;
but still I love my own feelings,--they are dear to memory, though they
now and then wake a sigh or a tear, "Thinking on divers things fordone,"
I charge you, Coleridge, spare my ewe-lambs; and though a gentleman may
borrow six lines in an epic poem (I should have no objection to borrow
five hundred, and without acknowledging), still, in a sonnet, a personal
poem, I do not ask my friend the aiding verse; I would not wrong your
feelings by proposing any improvements (did I think myself capable of
suggesting 'era) in such personal poems as "Thou bleedest, my poor
heart,"--'od so,--I am caught,--I have already done it; but that simile
I propose abridging would not change the feeling or introduce any alien
ones. Do you understand me? In the twenty-eighth, however, and in the
"Sigh," and that composed at Clevedon, things that come from the heart
direct, not by the medium of the fancy, I would not suggest an
alteration.

When my blank verse is finished, or any long fancy poem, "propino tibi
alterandum, cut-up-andum, abridgeandum," just what you will with, it:
but spare my ewe-lambs! That to "Mrs. Siddons' now, you were welcome to
improve, if it had been worth it; but I say unto you again, Coleridge,
spare my ewe-lambs! I must confess, were the mine, I should omit, _in
editione secunda_, effusions two and three, because satiric and below
the dignity of the poet of "Religious Musings," fifth, seventh, half of
the eighth, that "Written in early youth," as far as "thousand
eyes,"--though I part not unreluctantly with that lively line,--

  "Chaste joyance dancing in her bright blue eyes,"

and one or two just thereabouts. But I would substitute for it that
sweet poem called "Recollection," in the fifth number of the "Watchman,"
better, I think, than the remainder of this poem, though not differing
materially; as the poem now stands, it looks altogether confused. And do
not omit those lines upon the "Early Blossom" in your sixth number of
the "Watchman;" and I would omit the tenth effusion, or what would do
better, alter and improve the last four lines. In fact, I suppose, if
they were mine, I should _not_ omit 'em; but your verse is, for the most
part, so exquisite that I like not to see aught of meaner matter mixed
with it. Forgive my petulance and often, I fear, ill-founded criticisms,
and forgive me that I have, by this time, made your eyes and head ache
with my long letter; but I cannot forego hastily the pleasure and pride
of thus conversing with you. You did not tell me whether I was to
include the "Conciones ad Populum" in my remarks on your poems. They are
not unfrequently sublime, and I think you could not do better than to
turn 'em into verse,--if you have nothing else to do. Austin, I am sorry
to say, is a _confirmed_ atheist. Stoddart, a cold-hearted, well-bred,
conceited disciple of Godwin, does him no good. His wife has several
daughters (one of 'em as old as himself). Surely there is something
unnatural in such a marriage.

How I sympathize with you on the dull duty of a reviewer, and heartily
damn with you Ned Evans and the Prosodist! I shall, however, wait
impatiently for the articles in the "Critical Review" next month,
because they are _yours_. Young Evans (W. Evans, a branch of a family
you were once so intimate with) is come into our office, and sends his
love to you. Coleridge, I devoutly wish that Fortune, who lias made
sport with you so long, may play one freak more, throw you into London
or some spot near it, and there snug-ify you for life. 'Tis a selfish
but natural wish for me, cast as I am on life's wide plain, friendless,"
Are you acquainted with Bowles? I see by his last Elegy (written at
Bath) you are near neighbors,--_Thursday_.

"And I can think I can see the groves again;" "Was it the voice of
thee;" "Turns not the voice of thee, my buried friend;" "Who dries with
her dark locks the tender tear,"--are touches as true to Nature as any
in his other Elegy, written at the Hot Wells, about poor Kassell, etc.
You are doubtless acquainted with it,

I do not know that I entirely agree with you in your stricture upon my
sonnet "To Innocence," To men whose hearts are not quite deadened by
their commerce with the world, innocence (no longer familiar) becomes an
awful idea. So I felt when I wrote it. Your other censures (qualified
and sweetened, though, with praises somewhat extravagant) I perfectly
coincide with: yet I choose to retain the word "lunar,"--indulge a
"lunatic" in his loyalty to his mistress the moon! I have just been
reading a most pathetic copy of verses on Sophia Pringle, who was hanged
and burned for coining. One of the strokes of pathos (which are very
many, all somewhat obscure) is, "She lifted up her guilty forger to
heaven." A note explains, by "forger," her right hand, with which she
forged or coined the base metal. For "pathos" read "bathos." You have
put me out of conceit with my blank verse by your "Religious Musings." I
think it will come to nothing. I do not like 'em enough to send 'em. I
have just been reading a book, which I may be too partial to, as it was
the delight of my childhood; but I will recommend it to you,--it is
Izaak Walton's "Complete Angler." All the scientific part you may omit
in reading. The dialogue is very simple, full of pastoral beauties, and
will charm you. Many pretty old verses are interspersed. This letter,
which would be a week's work reading only, I do not wish you to answer
in less than a month. I shall be richly content with a letter from you
some day early in July; though, if you get anyhow _settled_ before then,
pray let me know it immediately; 't would give me much satisfaction.
Concerning the Unitarian chapel, the salary is the only scruple that the
most rigid moralist would admit as valid. Concerning the tutorage, is
not the salary low, and absence from your family unavoidable? London is
the only fostering soil for genius. Nothing more occurs just now; so I
will leave you, in mercy, one small white spot empty below, to repose
your eyes upon, fatigued as they must be with the wilderness of words
they have by this time painfully travelled through. God love you,
Coleridge, and prosper you through life! though mine will be loss if
your lot is to be cast at Bristol, or at Nottingham, or anywhere but
London. Our loves to Mrs. C--. C. L.

[1] Lapland mountains. From Coleridge's "Destiny of Nations."

[2] The "Monody" referred to was by Cottle, and appeared in a volume of
poems published by him at Bristol in 1795. Coleridge had forwarded the
book to Lamb for his opinion.

[3] The Monody on Chatterton.

[4] Dr. Faustus's.



IV.


TO COLERIDGE,

_June_ 14, 1796,

I am not quite satisfied now with the Chatterton, [1] and with your leave
will try my hand at it again. A master-joiner, you know, may leave a
cabinet to be finished, when his own hands are full. To your list of
illustrative personifications, into which a fine imagination enters, I
will take leave to add the following from Beaumont and Fletcher's "Wife
for a Month;" 'tis the conclusion of a description of a sea-fight: "The
game of _death_ was never played so nobly; the meagre thief grew wanton
in his mischiefs, and his shrunk, hollow eyes smiled on his ruins."
There is fancy in these of a lower order from "Bonduca": "Then did I see
these valiant men of Britain, like boding owls creep into tods of ivy,
and hoot their fears to one another nightly." Not that it is a
personification, only it just caught my eye in a little extract-book I
keep, which is full of quotations from B. and F. in particular, in which
authors I can't help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical
fancy than in any one, Shakspeare excepted. Are you acquainted with
Massinger? At a hazard I will trouble you with a passage from a play of
his called "A Very Woman." The lines are spoken by a lover (disguised)
to his faithless mistress. You will remark the fine effect of the
double endings.

You will by your ear distinguish the lines, for I write 'em as prose.
"Not far from where my father lives, _a lady_, a neighbor by, blest with
as great a _beauty_ as Nature durst bestow without _undoing_, dwelt, and
most happily, as I thought then, and blest the house a thousand times
she _dwelt_ in. This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, when my first
fire knew no adulterate _incense_, nor I no way to flatter but my
_fondness_; in all the bravery my friends could _show me_, in all the
faith my innocence could _give me_, in the best language my true tongue
could _tell me_, and all the broken sighs my sick heart _lend me_, I
sued and served; long did I serve this _lady_, long was my travail, long
my trade to _win her_; with all the duty of my soul I SERVED HER." "Then
she must love." "She did, but never me: she could not _love me_; she
would not love, she hated,--more, she _scorned me_; and in so a poor and
base a way _abused me_ for all my services, for all my _bounties_, so
bold neglects flung on me." "What out of love, and worthy love, I _gave
her_ (shame to her most unworthy mind!), to fools, to girls, to fiddlers
and her boys she flung, all in disdain of me." One more passage strikes
my eye from B. and F.'s "Palamon and Arcite." One of 'em complains in
prison: "This is all our world; we shall know nothing here but one
another, hear nothing but the clock that tells us our woes; the vine
shall grow, but we shall never see it," etc. Is not the last
circumstance exquisite? I mean not to lay myself open by saying they
exceed Milton, and perhaps Collins in sublimity. But don't you conceive
all poets after Shakspeare yield to 'em in variety of genius? Massinger
treads close on their heels; but you are most probably as well
acquainted with his writings as your humble servant. My quotations, in
that case, will only serve to expose my barrenness of matter. Southey in
simplicity and tenderness is excelled decidedly only, I think, by
Beaumont and F. in his "Maid's Tragedy," and some parts of "Philaster"
in particular, and elsewhere occasionally; and perhaps by Cowper in his
"Crazy Kate," and in parts of his translation, such as the speeches of
Hecuba and Andromache. I long to know your opinion of that translation.
The Odyssey especially is surely very Homeric. What nobler than the
appearance of Phoebus at the beginning of the Iliad,--the lines ending
with "Dread sounding, bounding on the silver bow!"

I beg you will give me your opinion of the translation; it afforded me
high pleasure. As curious a specimen of translation as ever fell into my
hands, is a young man's in our office, of a French novel. What in the
original was literally "amiable delusions of the fancy," he proposed, to
render "the fair frauds of the imagination." I had much trouble in
licking the book into any meaning at all. Yet did the knave clear fifty
or sixty pounds by subscription and selling the copyright. The book
itself not a week's work! To-day's portion of my journalizing epistle
has been very dull and poverty-stricken. I will here end.

_Tuesday night_,

I have been drinking egg-hot and smoking Oronooko (associated
circumstances, which ever forcibly recall to my mind our evenings and
nights at the "Salutation"). My eyes and brain are heavy and asleep, but
my heart is awake; and if words came as ready as ideas, and ideas as
feelings, I could say ten hundred kind things. Coleridge, you know not
my supreme happiness at having one on earth (though counties separate
us) whom I can call a friend. Remember you those tender lines
of Logan?--

  "Our broken friendships we deplore,
  And loves of youth that are no more;
  No after friendships e'er can raise
  Th' endearments of our early days,
  And ne'er the heart such fondness prove,
  As when we first began to love."

I am writing at random, and half-tipsy, what you may not _equally_
understand, as you will be sober when you read it; but _my_ sober and
_my_ half-tipsy hours you are alike a sharer in. Good night.

  "Then up rose our bard, like a prophet in drink,
  Craigdoroch, thou'lt soar when creation shall sink."

BURNS.

[1] Coleridge's "Monody" on Chatterton.



V.


TO COLERIDGE.

_September_ 27, 1796.

My Dearest Friend,--White, or some of my friends, or the public papers,
by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have
fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor dear,
dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own
mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her
grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be
moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses,--I eat, and
drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor
father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my
aunt. Mr, Norris, of the Blue-coat School, has been very kind to us, and
we have no other friend; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed,
and able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter
as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me "the
former things are passed away," and I have something more to do than
to feel.

God Almighty have us all in his keeping!

C. LAMB.

Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past
vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish
mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a
book, I charge you.

Your own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this yet
to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have my reason and
strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of coming
to see me. Write. I will not see you, if you come, God Almighty love you
and all of us!

C. LAMB.



VI.


TO COLERIDGE.

_October_ 3, 1796.

My dearest friend,--Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. It
will be a comfort to you, I know, to know that our prospects are
somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest sister, the unhappy and
unconscious instrument of the Almighty's judgments on our house, is
restored to her senses, to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has
past, awful to her mind and impressive (as it must be to the end of
life), but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings of a
sound judgment, which in this early stage knows how to distinguish
between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy, and the terrible
guilt of a mother's murder. I have seen her. I found her, this morning,
calm and serene; far, very, very far, from an indecent, forgetful
serenity. She has a most affectionate and tender concern for what has
happened. Indeed, from the beginning, frightful and hopeless as her
disorder seemed, I had confidence enough in her strength of mind and
religious principle to look forward to a time when _even she_ might
recover tranquillity. God be praised, Coleridge, wonderful as it is to
tell, I have never once been otherwise than collected and calm; even on
the dreadful day and in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a
tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference,--a
tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was
a religious principle that _most_ supported me? I allow much to other
favorable circumstances. I felt that I had something else to do than to
regret. On that first evening my aunt was lying insensible, to all
appearance like one dying; my father with his poor forehead plastered
over, from a wound he had received from a daughter dearly loved by him,
and who loved him no less dearly; my mother a dead and murdered corpse
in the next room,--yet was I wonderfully supported, I dosed not my eyes
in sleep that night, but lay without terrors and without despair, I have
lost no sleep since, I had been long used not to rest in things of
sense,--had endeavored after a comprehension of mind unsatisfied with
the "ignorant present time;" and _this_ kept me up. I had the whole
weight of the family thrown on me; for my brother, [1] little disposed (I
speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old
age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such
duties; and I was now left alone.

One little incident may serve to make you understand my way of managing
my mind, Within a day or two after the fatal one, we dressed for dinner
a tongue which we had had salted for some weeks in the house. As I sat
down, a feeling like remorse struck me: this tongue poor Mary got for
me, and can I partake of it now, when she is far away? A thought
occurred and relieved me; if I give in to this way of feeling, there is
not a chair, a room, an object in our rooms, that will not awaken the
keenest griefs; I must rise above such weaknesses. I hope this was not
want of true feeling. I did not let this carry me, though, too far. On
the very second day (I date from the day of horrors), as is usual in
such cases, there were a matter of twenty people, I do think, supping in
our room; they prevailed on me to eat _with them_ (for to eat I never
refused). They were all making merry in the room! Some had come from
friendship, some from busy curiosity, and some from interest. I was
going to partake with them, when my recollection came that my poor dead
mother was lying in the next room,--the very next room; a mother who
through life wished nothing but her children's welfare. Indignation, the
rage of grief, something like remorse, rushed upon my mind. In an agony
of emotion I found my, way mechanically to the adjoining room, and fell
on my knees by the side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven, and
sometimes of her, for forgetting her so soon. Tranquillity returned, and
it was the only violent emotion that mastered me; and I think it did
me good.

I mention these things because I hate concealment, and love to give a
faithful journal of what passes within me. Our friends have been very
good. Sam Le Grice, [2] who was then in town, was with me the three or
four first days, and was as a brother to me, gave up every hour of his
time, to the very hurting of his health and spirits, in constant
attendance and humoring my poor father; talked with him, read to him,
played at cribbage with him (for so short is the old man's recollection
that he was playing at cards, as though nothing had happened, while the
coroner's inquest was sitting over the way!). Samuel wept tenderly when
he went away, for his mother wrote him a very severe letter on his
loitering so long in town, and he was forced to go. Mr. Norris, of
Christ's Hospital, has been as a father to me, Mrs. Norris as a mother,
though we had few claims on them. A gentleman, brother to my god-mother,
from whom we never had right or reason to expect any such assistance,
sent my father twenty pounds; and to crown all these God's blessings to
our family at such a time, an old lady, a cousin of my father and
aunt's, a gentlewoman of fortune, is to take my aunt and make her
comfortable for the short remainder of her days. My aunt is recovered,
and as well as ever, and highly pleased at thoughts of going, and has
generously given up the interest of her little money (which was formerly
paid my father for her board) wholely and solely to my sister's use.
Reckoning this, we have, Daddy and I, for oar two selves and an old
maid-servant to look after him when I am out, which will be necessary,
£170, or £180 rather, a year, out of which we can spare £50 or £60 at
least for Mary while she stays at Islington, where she roust and shall
stay during her father's life, for his and her comfort. I know John will
make speeches about it, but she shall not go into an hospital. The good
lady of the madhouse and her daughter, an elegant, sweet-behaved young
lady, love her, and are taken with her amazingly; and I know from her
own mouth she loves them, and longs to be with them as much. Poor thing,
they say she was but the other morning saying she knew she must go to
Bethlem for life; that one of her brothers would have it so, but the
other would wish it not, but be obliged to go with the stream; that she
had often, as she passed Bethlem, thought it likely, "here it may be my
fate to end my days," conscious of a certain flightiness in her poor
head oftentimes, and mindful of more than one severe illness of that
nature before. A legacy of £100 which my father will have at Christmas,
and this £20 I mentioned before, with what is in the house, will much
more than set us clear. If my father, an old servant-maid, and I can't
live, and live comfortably, on £130 or £120 a year, we ought to burn by
slow fires; and I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital.

Let me not leave one unfavorable impression on your mind respecting my
brother. Since this has happened, he has been very kind and brotherly;
but I fear for his mind. He has taken his ease in the world, and is not
fit himself to struggle with difficulties, nor has much accustomed
himself to throw himself into their way; and I know his language is
already, "Charles, you must take care of yourself, you must not abridge
yourself of a single pleasure you have been used to," etc., and in that
style of talking. But you, a necessarian, can respect a difference of
mind, and love what _is amiable_ in a character not perfect. He has been
very good, but I fear for his mind. Thank God, I can unconnect myself
with him, and shall manage all my father's moneys in future myself, if I
take charge of Daddy, which poor John has not even hinted a wish, at any
future time even, to share with me. The lady at this madhouse assures me
that I may dismiss immediately both doctor and apothecary, retaining
occasionally a composing draught or so for a while; and there is a less
expensive establishment in her house, where she will only not have a
room and nurse to herself, for £50 or guineas a year,--the outside would
be £60. You know, by economy, how much more even I shall be able to
spare for her comforts. She will, I fancy, if she stays, make one of the
family rather than of the patients; and the old and young ladies I like
exceedingly, and she loves dearly; and they, as the saying is, take to
her very extraordinarily, if it is extraordinary that people who see my
sister should love her.

Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most and
thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness, I will enlarge
upon her qualities, poor dear, dearest soul, in a future letter, for my
own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly; and if I mistake not, in
the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she will
be found (I speak not with sufficient humility, I fear, but humanly and
foolishly speaking),--she will be found, I trust, uniformly great and
amiable. God keep her in her present mind, to whom be thanks and praise
for all His dispensations to mankind!

C. LAMB.

These mentioned good fortunes and change of prospects had almost brought
my mind over to the extreme the very opposite to despair. I was in
danger of making myself too happy. Your letter brought me back to a view
of things which I had entertained from the beginning. I hope (for Mary I
can answer)--but I hope that _I_ shall through life never have less
recollection, nor a fainter impression, of what has happened than I have
now. 'T is not a light thing, nor meant by the Almighty to be received
lightly. I must be serious, circumspect, and deeply religious through
life; and by such means may _both_ of us escape madness in future, if it
so please the Almighty!

Send me word how it fares with Sara. I repeat it, your letter was, and
will be, an inestimable treasure to me. You have a view of what my
situation demands of me, like my own view, and I trust a just one.

Coleridge, continue to write, but do not forever offend me by talking of
sending me cash. Sincerely and on my soul, we do not want it. God
love you both!

I will write again very soon. Do you write directly.

[1] John Lamb, the "James Elia" of the essay "My Relations."

[2] A Christ's Hospital schoolfellow.



VII.


TO COLERIDGE,

_October_ 17, 1796.

My dearest friend,--I grieve from my very soul to observe you in your
plans of life veering about from this hope to the other, and settling
nowhere. Is it an untoward fatality (speaking humanly) that does this
for you,--a stubborn, irresistible concurrence of events,--or lies the
fault, as I fear it does, in your own mind? You seem to be taking up
splendid schemes of fortune only to lay them down again; and your
fortunes are an _ignis fatuus_ that has been conducting you in thought
from Lancaster Court, Strand, to somewhere near Matlock; then jumping
across to Dr. Somebody's, whose son's tutor you were likely to be; and
would to God the dancing demon _may_ conduct you at last in peace and
comfort to the "life and labours of a cottager"! You see from the above
awkward playfulness of fancy that my spirits are not quite depressed. I
should ill deserve God's blessings, which, since the late terrible
event, have come down in mercy upon us, if I indulge in regret or
querulousness. Mary continues serene and cheerful. I have not by me a
little letter she wrote to me; for though I see her almost every day,
yet we delight to write to one another, for we can scarce see each other
but in company with some of the people of the house. I have not the
letter by me, but will quote from memory what she wrote in it: "I have
no bad, terrifying dreams. At midnight, when I happen to awake, the
nurse sleeping by the side of me, with the noise of the poor mad people
around me, I have no fear. The spirit of my mother seems to descend and
smile upon me, and bid me live to enjoy the life and reason which the
Almighty has given me. I shall see her again in heaven; she will then
understand me better. My grandmother, too, will understand me better,
and will then say no more, as she used to do, 'Polly, what are those
poor crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking of always?'" Poor Mary!
my mother indeed _never understood_ her right. She loved her, as she
loved us all, with a mother's love; but in opinion, in feeling and
sentiment and disposition, bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter
that she never understood her right,--never could believe how much _she_
loved her, but met her caresses, her protestations of filial affection,
too frequently with coldness and repulse. Still, she was a good mother.
God forbid I should think of her but _most_ respectfully, _most_
affectionately. Yet she would always love my brother above Mary, who was
not worthy of one tenth of that affection which Mary had a right to
claim. But it is my sister's gratifying recollection that every act of
duty and of love she could pay, every kindness (and I speak true, when I
say to the hurting of her health, and most probably in great part to the
derangement of her senses) through a long course of infirmities and
sickness she could show her, she ever did. I will some day, as I
promised, enlarge to you upon my sister's excellences; 't will seem like
exaggeration, but I will do it. At present, short letters suit my state
of mind best. So take my kindest wishes for your comfort and
establishment in life, and for Sara's welfare and comforts with you. God
love you; God love us all!

C. LAMB.



VIII.


TO COLERIDGE.

_November_ 14, 1796.

Coleridge, I love you for dedicating your poetry to Bowles. [1] Genius of
the sacred fountain of tears, it was he who led you gently by the hand
through all this valley of weeping, showed you the dark green yew-trees
and the willow shades where, by the fall of waters, you might indulge in
uncomplaining melancholy, a delicious regret for the past, or weave fine
visions of that awful future,--

  "When all the vanities of life's brief day
  Oblivion's hurrying hand hath swept away,
  And all its sorrows, at the awful blast
  Of the archangel's trump, are but as shadows past."

I have another sort of dedication in my head for my few things, which I
want to know if you approve of and can insert. [2] I mean to inscribe
them to my sister. It will be unexpected, and it will gire her pleasure;
or do you think it will look whimsical at all? As I have not spoke to
her about it, I can easily reject the idea. But there is a monotony in
the affections which people living together, or as we do now, very
frequently seeing each other, are apt to give in to,--a sort of
indifference in the expression of kindness for each other, which demands
that we should sometimes call to our aid the trickery of surprise. Do
you publish with Lloyd, or without him? In either case my little portion
may come last, and after the fashion of orders to a country
correspondent, I will give directions how I should like to have 'em
done. The title-page to stand thus:--


POEMS

BY CHARLES LAMB, OF THE INDIA HOUSE.

Under this title the following motto, which, for want of room, I put
over-leaf, and desire you to insert whether you like it or no. May not a
gentleman choose what arms, mottoes, or armorial bearings the herald
will give him leave, without consulting his republican friend, who might
advise none? May not a publican put up the sign of the Saracen's Head,
even though his undiscerning neighbor should prefer, as more genteel,
the Cat and Gridiron?

[MOTTO.]

  "This beauty, in the blossom of my youth,
  When my first fire knew no adulterate incense,
  Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness,
  In the best language my true tongue could tell me,
  And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me,
  I sued and served. Long did I love this lady." [1]
                                              MASSINGER.

THE DEDICATION.

  THE FEW FOLLOWING POEMS,
  CREATURES OF THE FANCY AND THE FEELING
  IN LIFE'S MORE VACANT HOURS,
  PRODUCED, FOR THE MOST PART, BY
  LOVE IN IDLENESS,
  ARE,
  WITH ALL A BROTHER'S FONDNESS,
  INSCRIBED TO

  MARY ANN LAMB,

  THE AUTHOR'S BEST FRIEND ANB SISTER.

This is the pomp and paraphernalia of parting, with which I take my
leave of a passion which has reigned so royally (so long) within me;
thus, with its trappings of laureateship, I fling it off, pleased and
satisfied with myself that the weakness troubles me no longer. I am
wedded. Coleridge, to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father.
Oh, my friend, I think sometimes, could I recall the days that are past,
which among them should I choose? Not, those "merrier days," not the
"pleasant days of hope," not "those wanderings with a fair-hair'd
maid," [2] which I have so often, and so feelingly regretted, but the
days, Coleridge, of a _mother's_ fondness for her _schoolboy_. What
would I give to call her back to earth for _one_ day, on my knees to ask
her pardon for all those little asperities of temper which from time to
time have given her gentle spirit pain. And the day, my friend, I trust
will come; there will be "time enough" for kind offices of love, if
"Heaven's eternal year" be ours. Hereafter, her meek spirit shall not
reproach me. Oh, my friend, cultivate the filial feelings, and let no
man think himself released from the kind "charities" of relationship.
These shall give him peace at the last; these are the best foundation
for every species of benevolence. I rejoice to hear, by certain
channels, that you, my friend, are reconciled with all your relations.
'T is the most kindly and natural species of love, and we have all the
associated train of early feelings to secure its strength and
perpetuity. Send me an account of your health; _indeed_ I am solicitous
about you. God love you and yours!

C. LAMB.

[1] From "A Very Woman."

[2] An allusion to Lamb's first love,--the "Anna" of his sonnets, and
the original, probably, of "Rosamund Gray" and of "Alice W---n" in the
beautiful essay "Dream Children."

[3] The earliest sonnets of William Lisle Bowles were published in 1789,
the year of Lamb's removal from Christ's Hospital.

[4] Alluding to the prospective joint volume of poems (by Coleridge,
Lamb, and Charles Lloyd) to be published by Cottle in 1797. This was
Lamb's second serious literary venture, he and Coleridge having issued a
joint volume in 1796.



IX.

TO COLERIDGE.

[Fragment.]

_Dec_. 5, 1796.

At length I have done with verse-making,--not that I relish other
people's poetry less: theirs comes from 'em without effort; mine is the
difficult operation of a brain scanty of ideas, made more difficult by
disuse. I have been reading "The Task" with fresh delight. I am glad you
love Cowper. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton; but I would
not call that man my friend who should be offended with the "divine
chit-chat of Cowper." Write to me. God love you and yours!

C. L.



X.

TO COLERIDGE,

_Dec_. 10, 1796.

I had put my letter into the post rather hastily, not expecting to have
to acknowledge another from you so soon. This morning's present has made
me alive again. My last night's epistle was childishly querulous: but
you have put a little life into me, and I will thank you for your
remembrance of me, while my sense of it is yet warm; for if I linger a
day or two, I may use the same phrase of acknowledgment, or similar, but
the feeling that dictates it now will be gone; I shall send you a _caput
mortuum_; not a _cor vivens_. Thy "Watchman's," thy bellman's verses, I
do retort upon thee, thou libellous varlet,--why, you cried the hours
yourself, and who made you so proud? But I submit, to show my humility,
most implicitly to your dogmas, I reject entirely the copy of verses you
reject. With regard to my leaving off versifying [1] you have said so
many pretty things, so many fine compliments, Ingeniously decked out in
the garb of sincerity, and undoubtedly springing from a present feeling
somewhat like sincerity, that you might melt the most un-muse-ical soul,
did you not (now for a Rowland compliment for your profusion of
Olivers),--did you not in your very epistle, by the many pretty fancies
and profusion of heart displayed in it, dissuade and discourage me from
attempting anything after you. At present I have not leisure to make
verses, nor anything approaching to a fondness for the exercise. In the
ignorant present time, who can answer for the future man? "At lovers'
perjuries Jove laughs,"--and poets have sometimes a disingenuous way of
forswearing their occupation. This, though, is not my case. The tender
cast of soul, sombred with melancholy and subsiding recollections, is
favorable to the Sonnet or the Elegy; but from--

  "The sainted growing woof
  The teasing troubles keep aloof."

The music of poesy may charm for a while the importunate, teasing cares
of life; but the teased and troubled man is not in a disposition to make
that music.

You sent me some very sweet lines relative to Burns; but it was at a
time when, in my highly agitated and perhaps distorted state of mind, I
thought it a duty to read 'em hastily and burn 'em. I burned all my own
verses, all my book of extracts from Beaumont and Fletcher and a
thousand sources; I burned a little journal of my foolish passion which
I had a long time kept,--

  "Noting, ere they past away,
  The little lines of yesterday."

I almost burned all your letters; I did as bad,--I lent 'em to a friend
to keep out of my brother's sight, should he come and make inquisition
into our papers; for much as he dwelt upon your conversation while you
were among us, and delighted to be with you, it has been, his fashion,
ever since to depreciate and cry you down,--you were the cause of my
madness, you and your damned foolish sensibility and melancholy; and he
lamented with a true brotherly feeling that we ever met,--even as the
sober citizen, when his son went astray upon the mountains of Parnassus,
is said to have cursed wit, and poetry, and Pope. [2] I quote wrong, but
no matter. These letters I lent to a friend to be out of the way for a
season; but I have claimed them in vain, and shall not cease to regret
their loss. Your packets posterior to the date of my misfortunes,
commencing with that valuable consolatory epistle, are every day
accumulating,--they are sacred things with me.

Publish your _Burns_ [3] when and how you like; it will "be new to
me,"--my memory of it is very confused, and tainted with unpleasant
associations. Burns was the god of my idolatry, as Bowles of yours. I am
jealous of your fraternizing with Bowles, when I think you relish him
more than Burns or my old favorite, Cowper, But you conciliate matters
when you talk of the "divine chit-chat" of the latter; by the expression
I see you thoroughly relish him. I love Mrs. Coleridge for her excuses
an hundred-fold more dearly than if she heaped "line upon line,"
out-Hannah-ing Hannah More, and had rather hear you sing "Did a very
little baby" by your family fireside, than listen to you when you were
repeating one of Bowles's sweetest sonnets in your sweet manner, while
we two were indulging sympathy, a solitary luxury, by the fireside at
the "Salutation." Yet have I no higher ideas of heaven. Your company was
one "cordial in this melancholy vale,"--the remembrance of it is a
blessing partly, and partly a curse. When I can abstract myself from
things present, I can enjoy it with a freshness of relish; but it more
constantly operates to an unfavorable comparison with the uninteresting
converse I always and _only_ can partake in. Not a soul loves Bowles
here; scarce one has heard of Burns; few but laugh at me for reading my
Testament,--they talk a language I understand not; I conceal sentiments
that would be a puzzle to them. I can only converse with you by letter,
and with the dead in their books. My sister, indeed, is all I can wish
in a companion; but our spirits are alike poorly, our reading and
knowledge from the selfsame sources, our communication with the scenes
of the world alike narrow. Never having kept separate company, or any
"company _together_;" never having read separate books, and few books
_together_,--what knowledge have we to convey to each other? In our
little range of duties and connections, how few sentiments can take
place without friends, with few books, with a taste for religion rather
than a strong religious habit! We need some support, some
leading-strings to cheer and direct us. You talk very wisely; and be not
sparing of _your advice_. Continue to remember us, and to show us you do
remember us; we will take as lively an interest in what concerns you and
yours. All I can add to your happiness will be sympathy. You can add to
mine _more_; you can teach me wisdom. I am indeed an unreasonable
correspondent: but I was unwilling to let my last night's letter go off
without this qualifier: you will perceive by this my mind is easier, and
you will rejoice. I do not expect or wish you to write till you are
moved; and of course shall not, till you announce to me that event,
think of writing myself. Love to Mrs. Coleridge and David Hartley, and
my kind remembrance to Lloyd, if he is with you.

C. LAMB.

[1] See preceding letter.

[2] Epistle to Arbuthnot:--

  "Poor Cornus sees his frantic wife elope,
  And curses wit, and poetry, and Pope."

[3] The lines on him which Coleridge had sent to Lamb, and which the
latter had burned.



XI.


TO COLERIDGE.

_January_ 5, 1797.

_Sunday Morning_.--You cannot surely mean to degrade the Joan of Arc
into a pot-girl. [1] You are not going, I hope, to annex to that most
splendid ornament of Southey's poem all this cock-and-a-bull story of
Joan, the publican's daughter of Neufchâtel, with the lamentable episode
of a wagoner, his wife, and six children. The texture will be most
lamentably disproportionate. The first forty or fifty lines of these
addenda are no doubt in their way admirable too; but many would prefer
the Joan of Southey.

[1] Coleridge, in later years, indorsed Lamb's opinion of this
portion of his contribution to "Joan of Arc." "I was really astonished,"
he said, "(1) at the schoolboy, wretched, allegoric machinery; (2) at
the transmogrification of the fanatic virago into a modern novel-pawing
proselyte of the "Age of Reason,"--a Tom Paine in petticoats; (3) at the
utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb-down
of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle, and sinew in the
single lines."

      "On mightiest deeds to brood
  Of shadowy vastness, such as made my heart
  Throb fast; anon I paused, and in a state
  Of half expectance listened to the wind."

  "They wondered at me, who had known me once
  A cheerful, careless damsel."

                                      "The eye,
  That of the circling throng and of the visible world,
  Unseeing, saw the shapes of holy phantasy."

I see nothing in your description of the Maid equal to these. There is a
fine originality certainly in those lines,--

  "For she had lived in this bad world
  As in a place of tombs,
  And touched not the pollutions of the dead;"

but your "fierce vivacity" is a faint copy of the "fierce and terrible
benevolence" of Southey; added to this, that it will look like rivalship
in you, and extort a comparison with Southey,--I think to your
disadvantage. And the lines, considered in themselves as an addition to
what you had before written (strains of a far higher mood), are but such
as Madame Fancy loves in some of her more familiar moods,--at such times
as she has met Noll Goldsmith, and walked and talked with him, calling
him "old acquaintance." Southey certainly has no pretensions to vie with
you in the sublime of poetry; but he tells a plain tale better than you.
I will enumerate some woful blemishes, some of 'em sad deviations from
that simplicity which was your aim. "Hailed who might be near" (the
"canvas-coverture moving," by the by, is laughable); "a woman and six
children" (by the way, why not nine children? It would have been just
half as pathetic again); "statues of sleep they seemed;" "frost-mangled
wretch;" "green putridity;" "hailed him immortal" (rather ludicrous
again); "voiced a sad and simple tale" (abominable!); "unprovendered;"
"such his tale;" "Ah, suffering to the height of what was sufffered" (a
most _insufferable line_); "amazements of affright;" "The hot, sore
brain attributes its own hues of ghastliness and torture" (what shocking
confusion of ideas!).

In these delineations of common and natural feelings, in the familiar
walks of poetry, you seem to resemble Montauban dancing with Roubigné's
tenants [1], "_much of his native loftiness remained in the execution_."

I was reading your "Religious Musings" the other day, and sincerely I
think it the noblest poem in the language next after the "Paradise
Lost;" and even that was not made the vehicle of such grand truths.
"There is one mind," etc., down to "Almighty's throne," are without a
rival in the whole compass of my poetical reading.

  "Stands in the sun, and with no partial gaze
  Views all creation."

I wish I could have written those lines. I rejoice that I am able to
relish them. The loftier walks of Pindus are your proper region. There
you have no compeer in modern times. Leave the lowlands, unenvied, in
possession of such men as Cowper and Southey. Thus am I pouring balsam
into the wounds I may have been inflicting on my poor friend's vanity.

In your notice of Southey's new volume you omit to mention the most
pleasing of all, the "Miniature."

  "There were
  Who formed high hopes and flattering ones of thee,
  Young Robert!"

  "Spirit of Spenser! was the wanderer wrong?"

Fairfax I have been in quest of a long time. Johnson, in his "Life of
Waller," gives a most delicious specimen of him, and adds, in the true
manner of that delicate critic, as well as amiable man, "It may be
presumed that this old version will not be much read after the elegant
translation of my friend Mr. Hoole." I endeavored--I wished to gain some
idea of Tasso from this Mr. Hoole, the great boast and ornament of the
India House, but soon desisted. I found him more vapid than smallest
small beer "sun-vinegared." Your "Dream," down to that exquisite line,--

  "I can't tell half his adventures,"

is a most happy resemblance of Chaucer. The remainder is so-so. The best
line, I think, is, "He belong'd, I believe, to the witch Melancholy." By
the way, when will our volume come out? Don't delay it till you have
written a new "Joan of Arc." Send what letters you please by me, and in
any way you choose, single or double. The India Company is better
adapted to answer the cost than the generality of my friend's
correspondents,--such poor and honest dogs as John Thelwall
particularly. I cannot say I know Coulson,--at least intimately; I once
supped with him and Austin; I think his manners very pleasing. I will
not tell you what I think of Lloyd, for he may by chance come to see
this letter; and that thought puts a restraint on me. I cannot think
what subject would suit your epic genius,--some philosophical subject, I
conjecture, in which shall be blended the sublime of poetry and of
science. Your proposed "Hymns" will be a fit preparatory study wherewith
"to discipline your young novitiate soul." I grow dull; I'll go walk
myself out of my dulness.

_Sunday Night_,--You and Sara are very good to think so kindly and so
favorably of poor Mary; I would to God all did so too. But I very much
fear she must not think of coming home in my father's lifetime. It is
very hard upon her, but our circumstances are peculiar, and we must
submit to them, God be praised she is so well as she is. She bears her
situation as one who has no right to complain. My poor old aunt, whom
you have seen, the kindest, goodest creature to me when I was at school;
who used to toddle there to bring me good things, when I,
schoolboy-like, only despised her for it, and used to be ashamed to see
her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole steps as you went
into the old grammar-school, and open her apron, and bring out her
basin, with some nice thing she had caused to be saved for me, [2]--the
good old creature is now lying on her death-bed. I cannot bear to think
on her deplorable state. To the shock she received on that our evil day,
from which she never completely recovered, I impute her illness. She
says, poor thing, she is glad she is come home to die with me. I was
always her favourite;

  "No after friendship e'er can raise
  The endearments of our early days;
  Nor e'er the heart such fondness prove,
  As when it first began to love."

[1] In Mackenzie's tale, "Julia de Roubigné."

[2] See the essay, "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago."



XII.


TO COLERIDGE.

_January_ 10, 1797.

I need not repeat my wishes to have my little sonnets printed _verbatim_
my last way. In particular, I fear lest you should prefer printing my
first sonnet, as you have done more than once, "did the wand of Merlin
wave," it looks so like Mr. Merlin, [1] the ingenious successor of the
immortal Merlin, now living in good health and spirits, and flourishing
in magical reputation, in Oxford Street; and, on my life, one half who
read it would understand it so.

Do put 'em forth finally, as I have, in various letters, settled it; for
first a man's self is to be pleased, and then his friends,--and of
course the greater number of his friends, if they differ _inter se_.
Thus taste may safely be put to the vote. I do long to see our names
together,--not for vanity's sake, and naughty pride of heart altogether;
for not a living soul I know, or am intimate with, will scarce read the
book,--so I shall gain nothing, _quoad famam_; and yet there is a little
vanity mixes in it, I cannot help denying.--I am aware of the unpoetical
cast of the last six lines of my last sonnet, and think myself
unwarranted in smuggling so tame a thing into the book; only the
sentiments of those six lines are thoroughly congenial to me in my state
of mind, and I wish to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to
poor Mary. That it has no originality in its cast, nor anything in the
feelings but what is common and natural to thousands, nor ought properly
to be called poetry, I see; still, it will tend to keep present to my
mind a view of things which I ought to indulge. These six lines, too,
have not, to a reader, a connectedness with the foregoing. Omit it if
you like,--What a treasure it is to my poor, indolent, and unemployed
mind thus to lay hold on a subject to talk about, though 'tis but a
sonnet, and that of the lowest order! How mournfully inactive I
am!--'Tis night; good night.

My sister, I thank God, is nigh recovered; she was seriously ill. Do, in
your next letter, and that right soon, give me some satisfaction
respecting your present situation at Stowey. Is it a farm that you have
got? and what does your worship know about farming?

Coleridge, I want you to write an epic poem. Nothing short of it can
satisfy the vast capacity of true poetic genius. Having one great end to
direct all your poetical faculties to, and on which to lay out your
hopes, your ambition will show you to what you are equal. By the sacred
energies of Milton! by the dainty, sweet, and soothing phantasies of
honey-tongued Spenser! I adjure you to attempt the epic, or do something
more ample than the writing an occasional brief ode or sonnet; something
"to make yourself forever known,--to make the age to come your own." But
I prate; doubtless you meditate something. When you are exalted among
the lords of epic fame, I shall recall with pleasure and exultingly the
days of your humility, when you disdained not to put forth, in the same
volume with mine, your "Religious Musings" and that other poem from the
"Joan of Arc," those promising first-fruits of high renown to come. You
have learning, you have fancy, you have enthusiasm, you have strength
and amplitude of wing enow for flights like those I recommend. In the
vast and unexplored regions of fairy-land there is ground enough unfound
and uncultivated: search there, and realize your favorite Susquehanna
scheme. In all our comparisons of taste, I do not know whether I have
ever heard your opinion of a poet very dear to me,--the
now-out-of-fashion Cowley. Favor me with your judgment of him, and tell
me if his prose essays, in particular, as well as no inconsiderable part
of his verse, be not delicious. I prefer the graceful rambling of his
essays even to the courtly elegance and ease of Addison, abstracting
from this the latter's exquisite humor.

When the little volume is printed, send me three or four, at all events
not more than six, copies, and tell me if I put you to any additional
expense by printing with you, I have no thought of the kind, and in that
case must reimburse you.

Priestley, whom I sin in almost adoring, speaks of "such a choice of
company as tends to keep up that, right bent and firmness of mind which
a necessary intercourse with the world would otherwise warp and
relax.... Such fellowship is the true balsam of life; its cement is
infinitely more durable than that of the friendships of the world, and
it looks for its proper fruit and complete gratification to the life
beyond the grave." Is there a possible chance for such an one as I to
realize in this world such friendships? Where am I to look for 'em? What
testimonials shall I bring of my being worthy of such friendship? Alas!
the great and good go together in separate herds, and leave such as I to
lag far, far behind in all intellectual and, far more grievous to say,
in all moral accomplishments. Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated
character among my acquaintance,--not one Christian; not one but
undervalues Christianity. Singly what am I to do? Wesley (have you read
his life?), was _he_ not an elevated character? Wesley has said,
"Religion is not a solitary thing." Alas! it necessarily is so with me,
or next to solitary. 'T is true you write to me. But correspondence by
letter and personal intimacy are very widely different. Do, do write to
me, and do some good to my mind, already how much "warped and relaxed"
by the world! 'T is the conclusion of another evening. Good night; God
have us all in His keeping!

If you are sufficiently at leisure, oblige me with an account of your
plan of life at Stowey; your literary occupations and prospects,--in
short, make me acquainted with every circumstance which, as relating to
you, can be interesting to me. Are you yet a Berkleyan? Make me one. I
rejoice in being, speculatively, a necessarian. Would to God I were
habitually a practical one! Confirm me in the faith of that great and
glorious doctrine, and keep me steady in the contemplation of it. You
some time since expressed an intention you had of finishing some
extensive work on the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion. Have
you let that intention go? Or are you doing anything towards it? Make to
yourself other ten talents. My letter is full of nothingness. I talk of
nothing. But I must talk. I love to write to you. I take a pride in it.
It makes me think less meanly of myself. It makes me think myself not
totally disconnected from the better part of mankind. I know I am too
dissatisfied with the beings around me; but I cannot help occasionally
exclaiming, "Woe is me, that I am constrained to dwell with Meshech, and
to have my habitation among the tents of Kedar." I know I am noways
better in practice than my neighors, but I have a taste for religion, an
occasional earnest aspiration after perfection, which they have not. I
gain, nothing by being with such as myself,--we encourage one another in
mediocrity, I am always longing to be with men more excellent than
myself. All this must sound odd to you; but these are my predominant
feelings when I sit down to write to you, and I should put force upon my
mind, were I to reject them, Yet I rejoice, and feel my privilege with
gratitude, when I have been reading some wise book, such as I have just
been reading,--Priestley on Philosophical Necessity,--in the thought
that I enjoy a kind of communion, a kind of friendship even, with the
great and good. Books are to me instead of friends, I wish they did not
resemble the latter in their scarceness.

And how does little David Hartley? "Ecquid in antiquam virtutem?" Does
his mighty name work wonders yet upon his little frame and opening mind?
I did not distinctly understand you,--you don't mean to make an actual
ploughman of him? Is Lloyd with you yet? Are you intimate with Southey?
What poems is he about to publish? He hath a most prolific brain, and is
indeed a most sweet poet. But how can you answer all the various mass of
interrogation I have put to you in the course of the sheet? Write back
just what you like, only write something, however brief. I have now nigh
finished my page, and got to the end of another evening (Monday
evening), and my eyes are heavy and sleepy, and my brain unsuggestive. I
have just heart enough awake to say good night once more, and God love
you, my dear friend; God love us all! Mary bears an affectionate
remembrance of you.

CHARLES LAMB.

[1] A well-known conjuror of the time.



XIII.


TO COLERIDGE.

_February_ 13, 1797.

Your poem is altogether admirable--parts of it are even exquisite; in
particular your personal account of the Maid far surpasses anything of
the sort in Southey. [1] I perceived all its excellences, on a first
reading, as readily as now you have been removing a supposed film from
my eyes. I was only struck with a certain faulty disproportion in the
matter and the _style_, which I still think I perceive, between these
lines and the former ones. I had an end in view,--I wished to make you
reject the poem, only as being discordant with the other; and, in
subservience to that end, it was politically done in me to over-pass,
and make no mention of, merit which, could you think me capable of
_overlooking_, might reasonably damn forever in your judgment all
pretensions in me to be critical. There, I will be judged by Lloyd
whether I have not made a very handsome recantation. I was in the case
of a man whose friend has asked him his opinion of a certain young lady;
the deluded wight gives judgment against her _in toto_,--don't like her
face, her walk, her manners; finds fault with her eyebrows; can see no
wit in her. His friend looks blank; he begins to smell a rat; wind veers
about; he acknowledges her good sense, her judgment in dress, a certain
simplicity of manners and honesty of heart, something too in her manners
which gains upon you after a short acquaintance;--and then her accurate
pronunciation of the French language, and a pretty, uncultivated taste
in drawing. The reconciled gentleman smiles applause, squeezes him by
the hand, and hopes he will do him the honor of taking a bit of dinner
with Mrs. ---- and him--a plain family dinner--some day next week; "for,
I suppose, you never heard we were married. I'm glad to see you like my
wife, however; you 'll come and see her, ha?" Now am I too proud to
retract entirely? Yet I do perceive I am in some sort straitened; you
are manifestly wedded, to this poem, and what fancy has joined, let no
man separate, I turn me to the "Joan of Arc," second book.

The solemn openings of it are with sounds which, Lloyd would say, "are
silence to the mind." The deep preluding strains are fitted to initiate
the mind, with a pleasing awe, into the sublimest mysteries of theory
concerning man's nature and his noblest destination,--the philosophy of
a first cause; of subordinate agents in creation superior to man; the
subserviency of pagan worship and pagan faith to the introduction of a
purer and more perfect religion, which you so elegantly describe as
winning, with gradual steps, her difficult way northward from Bethabara.
After all this cometh Joan, a _publican's_ daughter, sitting on an
ale-house _bench_, and marking the _swingings_ of the _signboard_,
finding a poor man, his wife and six children, starved to death with
cold, and thence roused into a state of mind proper to receive visions
emblematical of equality,--which, what the devil Joan had to do with, I
don't know, or indeed with the French and American revolutions; though
that needs no pardon, it is executed so nobly. After all, if you
perceive no disproportion, all argument is vain; I do not so much object
to parts. Again, when you talk of building your fame on these lines in
preference to the "Religious Musings," I cannot help conceiving of you
and of the author of that as two different persons, and I think you a
very vain man.

I have been re-reading your letter. Much of it I _could_ dispute; but
with the latter part of it, in which you compare the two Joans with
respect to their predispositions for fanaticism, I _toto corde_
coincide; only I think that Southey's strength rather lies in the
description of the emotions of the Maid under the weight of inspiration.
These (I see no mighty difference between _her_ describing them or _you_
describing them),--these if you only equal, the previous admirers of his
poem, as is natural, will prefer his; if you surpass, prejudice will
scarcely allow it, and I scarce think you will surpass, though your
specimen at the conclusion (I am in earnest) I think very nigh equals
them. And in an account of a fanatic or of a prophet the description of
her _emotions_ is expected to be most highly finished. By the way, I
spoke far too disparagingly of your lines, and, I am ashamed to say.
purposely, I should like you to specify or particularize; the story of
the "Tottering Eld," of "his eventful years all come and gone," is too
general; why not make him a soldier, or some character, however, in
which he has been witness to frequency of "cruel wrong and strange
distress"? I think I should, When I laughed at the "miserable man
crawling from beneath the coverture," I wonder I did not perceive it was
a laugh of horror,--such as I have laughed at Dante's picture of the
famished Ugolino. Without falsehood, I perceive an hundred, beauties in
your narrative. Yet I wonder you do not perceive something
out-of-the-way, something unsimple and artificial, in the expression,
"voiced a sad tale." I hate made-dishes at the muses' banquet, I believe
I was wrong in most of my other objections. But surely "hailed him
immortal" adds nothing to the terror of the man's death, which it was
your business to heighten, not diminish by a phrase which takes away all
terror from it, I like that line, "They closed their eyes in sleep, nor
knew 'twas death," Indeed, there is scarce a line I do not like,
"_Turbid_ ecstasy" is surely not so good as what you had
written,--"troublous." "Turbid" rather suits the muddy kind of
inspiration which London porter confers. The versification is
throughout, to my ears, unexceptionable, with no disparagement to the
measure of the "Religious Musings," which is exactly fitted to
the thoughts.

You were building your house on a rock when you rested your fame on that
poem. I can scarce bring myself to believe that I am admitted to a
familiar correspondence, and all the license of friendship, with a man
who writes blank verse like Milton. Now, this is delicate flattery,
_indirect_ flattery. Go on with your "Maid of Orleans," and be content
to be second to yourself. I shall become a convert to it, when
'tis finished.

This afternoon I attend the funeral of my poor old aunt, who died on
Thursday. I own I am thankful that the good creature has ended all her
days of suffering and infirmity. She was to me the "cherisher of
infancy;" and one must fall on these occasions into reflections, which
it would be commonplace to enumerate, concerning death, "of chance and
change, and fate in human life." Good God, who could have foreseen all
this but four months back! I had reckoned, in particular, on my aunt's
living many years; she was a very hearty old woman. But she was a mere
skeleton before she died; looked more like a corpse that had lain weeks
in the grave, than one fresh dead. "Truly the light is sweet, and a
pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun: but let a man live
many days, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of
darkness, for they shall be many." Coleridge, why are we to live on
after all the strength and beauty of existence are gone, when all the
life of life is fled, as poor Burns expresses it? Tell Lloyd I have had
thoughts of turning Quaker, and have been reading, or am rather just
beginning to read, a most capital book, good thoughts in good language,
William Penn's "No Cross, no Crown;" I like it immensely. Unluckily I
went to one of his meetings, tell hire, in St. John Street, yesterday,
and saw a man under all the agitations and workings of a fanatic, who
believed himself under the influence of some "inevitable presence." This
cured me of Quakerism: I love it in the books of Penn and Woolman, but I
detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the Spirit, when what
he says an ordinary man might say without all that quaking and
trembling. In the midst of his inspiration,--and the effects of it were
most noisy,--was handed into the midst of the meeting a most terrible
blackguard Wapping sailor; the poor man, I believe, had rather have been
in the hottest part of an engagement, for the congregation of
broad-brims, together with the ravings of the prophet, were too much for
his gravity, though I saw even he had delicacy enough not to laugh out.
And the inspired gentleman, though his manner was so supernatural, yet
neither talked, nor professed to talk anything more than good sober
sense, common morality, with, now and then a declaration of not speaking
from himself. Among other things, looking back to this childhood and
early youth, he told the meeting what a graceless young dog he had been,
that in his youth he had a good share of wit. Reader, if thou hadst seen
the gentleman, thou wouldst have sworn that it must indeed have been
many years ago, for his rueful physiognomy would have scared away the
playful goddess from the meeting, where he presided, forever, A wit! a
wit! what could he mean? Lloyd, it minded me of Falkland in the
"Rivals," "Am I full of wit and humor? No, indeed, you are not. Am I the
life and soul of every company I come into? No, it cannot be said you
are." That hard-faced gentleman a wit! Why, Nature wrote on his fanatic
forehead fifty years ago, "Wit never comes, that comes to all." I should
be as scandalized at a _bon-mot_ issuing from his oracle-looking mouth
as to see Cato go down a country-dance. God love you all! You are very
good to submit to be pleased with reading my nothings. 'T is the
privilege of friendship to talk nonsense and to have her nonsense
respected. Yours ever,

C. LAMB.

[1] See Letter VIII.



XIV.


TO COLERIDGE.

_January_ 28, 1798.

You have writ me many kind letters, and I have answered none of them. I
don't deserve your attentions. An unnatural indifference has been
creeping on me since my last misfortunes, or I should have seized the
first opening of a correspondence with _you_. To you I owe much under
God. In my brief acquaintance with you in London, your conversations won
me to the better cause, and rescued me from the polluting spirit of the
world. I might have been a worthless character without you; as it is, I
do possess a certain improvable portion of devotional feelings, though
when I view myself in the light of divine truth, and not according to
the common measures of human judgment. I am altogether corrupt and
sinful. This is no cant. I am very sincere.

These last afflictions, [1] Coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my
will. They found me unprepared. My former calamities produced in me a
spirit of humility and a spirit of prayer. I thought they had
sufficiently disciplined me; but the event ought to humble me. If God's
judgments now fail to take away from the the heart of stone, what more
grievous trials ought I not to expect? I have been very querulous,
impatient under the rod, full of little jealousies and heartburnings. I
had wellnigh quarrelled with Charles Lloyd, and for no other reason, I
believe, than that the good creature did all he could to make me happy.
The truth is, I thought he tried to force my mind from its natural and
proper bent: he continually wished me to be from home; he was drawing me
_from_ the consideration of my poor dear Mary's situation, rather than
assisting me to gain a proper view of it with religious consolations. I
wanted to be left to the tendency of my own mind in a solitary state
which, in times past, I knew had led to quietness and a patient bearing
of the yoke. He was hurt that I was not more constantly with him; but he
was living with White,--a man to whom I had never been accustomed to
impart my _dearest feelings_; though from long habits of
friendliness, and many a social and good quality, I loved him very much,
I met company there sometimes,--indiscriminate company. Any society
almost, when I am in affliction, is sorely painful to me. I seem to
breathe more freely, to think more collectedly, to feel more properly
and calmly, when alone. All these things the good creature did with the
kindest intentions in the world, but they produced in me nothing but
soreness and discontent. I became, as he complained, "jaundiced" towards
him.... But he has forgiven me; and his smile, I hope, will draw all
such humors from me. I am recovering, God be praised for it, a
healthiness of mind, something like calmness; but I want more religion,
I am jealous of human helps and leaning-places. I rejoice in your good
fortunes. May God at the last settle you! You have had many and painful
trials; humanly speaking, they are going to end; but we should rather
pray that discipline may attend us through the whole of our lives.... A
careless and a dissolute spirit has advanced upon _me_ with large
strides. Pray God that my present afflictions may be sanctified to me!
Mary is recovering; but I see no opening yet of a situation for her.
Your invitation went to my very heart; but you have a power of exciting
interest, of leading all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of Mary's
being with you. I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness. I
think you would almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice;
she must be with duller fancies and cooler intellects. I know a young
man of this description who has suited her these twenty years, and may
live to do so still, if we are one day restored to each other. In answer
to your suggestions of occupation for me, I must say that I do not think
my capacity altogether suited for disquisitions of that kind.... I have
read little; I have a very weak memory, and retain little of what I
read; am unused to composition in which any methodizing is required. But
I thank you sincerely for the hint, and shall receive it as far as I am
able,--that is, endeavor to engage my mind in some constant and innocent
pursuit. I know my capacities better than you do.

Accept my kindest love, and believe me yours, as ever.

C. L.

[1] Mary Lamb had fallen ill again.



XV.


TO ROBERT SOUTHEY

(No month, 1798.)

Dear Southey,--I thank you heartily for the eclogue [1]; it pleases me
mightily, being so full of picture-work and circumstances. I find no
fault in it, unless perhaps that Joanna's ruin is a catastrophe too
trite; and this is not the first or second time you have clothed your
indignation, in verse, in a tale of ruined innocence. The old lady,
spinning in the sun, I hope would not disdain to claim some kindred with
old Margaret. I could almost wish you to vary some circumstances in the
conclusion. A gentleman seducer has so often been described in prose and
verse: what if you had accomplished Joanna's ruin by the clumsy arts and
rustic gifts of some country fellow? I am thinking, I believe, of
the song,--

  "An old woman clothed in gray,
    Whose daughter was charming and young,
  And she was deluded away
    By Roger's false, flattering tongue."

A Roger-Lothario would be a novel character; I think you might paint him
very well. You may think this a very silly suggestion, and so indeed it
is; but, in good truth, nothing else but the first words of that foolish
ballad put me upon scribbling my "Rosamund." [2] But I thank you heartily
for the poem. Not having anything of my own to send you in
return,--though, to tell truth, I am at work upon something which, if I
were to cut away and garble, perhaps I might send you an extract or two
that might not displease you; but I will not do that; and whether it
will come to anything, I know not, for I am as slow as a Fleming painter
when I compose anything. I will crave leave to put down a few lines of
old Christopher Marlowe's; I take them from his tragedy, "The Jew of
Malta." The Jew is a famous character, quite out of nature; but when we
consider the terrible idea our simple ancestors had of a Jew, not more
to be discommended for a certain discoloring (I think Addison calls it)
than the witches and fairies of Marlowe's mighty successor. The scene is
betwixt Barabas, the Jew, and Ithamore, a Turkish captive exposed to
sale for a slave.

BARABAS.

(_A precious rascal_.)

  "As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,
  And kill sick people groaning under walls;
  Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
  And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
  I am content to lose some of my crowns,
  That I may, walking in my gallery,
  See 'm go pinioned along by my door.
  Being young, I studied physic, and began
  To practise first upon the Italian;
  There I enriched the priests with burials,
  And always kept the sexton's arms in ure [3]
  With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells.
  And after that, was I an engineer,
  And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany,
  Under pretence of serving Charles the Fifth,
  Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.
  Then after that was I an usurer,
  And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
  And tricks belonging unto brokery,
  I fill'd the jails with bankrupts in a year,
  And with young orphans planted hospitals,
  And every moon made some or other mad;
  And now and then one hang'd himself for grief,
  Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll,
  How I with interest tormented him."

Now hear Ithamore, the other gentle nature, explain how he has spent his
time:--

ITHAMORE

(_A Comical Dog_.)

  "Faith, master, in setting Christian villages on fire,
  Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.
  One time I was an hostler in an inn,
  And in the night-time secret would I steal
  To travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats.
  Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel'd,
  I strewèd powder on the marble stones,
  And therewithal their knees would rankle so,
  That I have laugh'd a-good to see the cripples
  Go limping home to Christendom on stilts."

BARABAS.

"Why, this is something."

There is a mixture of the ludicrous and the terrible in these lines,
brimful of genius and antique invention, that at first reminded me of
your old description of cruelty in hell, which was in the true
Hogarthian style. I need not tell _you_ that Marlowe was author of that
pretty madrigal, "Come live with me, and be my Love," and of the tragedy
of "Edward II.," in which are certain _lines_ unequalled in our English
tongue. Honest Walton mentions the said madrigal under the denomination
of "certain smooth verses made long since by Kit Marlowe."

I am glad you have put me on the scent after old Quarles. If I do not
put up those eclogues, and that shortly, say I am no true-nosed hound. I
have had a letter from Lloyd; the young metaphysician of Caius is well,
and is busy recanting the new heresy, metaphysics, for the old dogma
Greek. My sister, I thank you, is quite well. She had a slight attack
the other day, which frightened me a good deal; but it went off
unaccountably. Love and respects to Edith.

Yours sincerely,

C. LAMB.

[1] The eclogue was entitled "The Ruined Cottage."

[2] His romance. "Rosamund Gray."

[3] Use.



XVI.


TO SOUTHEY.

_November_ 8, 1798.

I perfectly accord with your opinion of old Wither. Quarles is a wittier
writer, but Wither lays more hold of the heart. Quarles thinks of his
audience when he lectures; Wither soliloquizes in company with a full
heart. What wretched stuff are the "Divine Fancies" of Quarles! Religion
appears to him no longer valuable than it furnishes matter for quibbles
and riddles; he turns God's grace into wantonness. Wither is like an old
friend, whose warm-heartedness and estimable qualities make us wish he
possessed more genius, but at the same time make us willing to dispense
with that want. I always love W., and sometimes admire Q. Still, that
portrait is a fine one; and the extract from "The Shepherds' Hunting"
places him in a starry height far above Quarles, If you wrote that
review in "Crit. Rev.," I am sorry you are so sparing of praise to the
"Ancient Marinere;" [1] so far from calling it, as you do, with some wit
but more severity, "A Dutch Attempt," etc., I call it a right English
attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You have
selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by
fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate. I never so
deeply felt the pathetic as in that part,--

  "A spring of love gush'd from my heart,
  And I bless'd them unaware."

It stung me into high pleasure through sufferings. Lloyd does not like
it; his head is too metaphysical, and your taste too correct,--at least
I must allege something against you both, to excuse my own dotage,--

But you allow some elaborate beauties; you should have extracted 'em.
"The Ancient Marinere" plays more tricks with the mind than that last
poem, which is yet one of the finest written. But I am getting too
dogmatical; and before I degenerate into abuse, I will conclude with
assuring you that I am,

Sincerely yours,

C. LAMB.

[1] The "Lyrical Ballads" of Wordsworth and Coleridge had just appeared.
The volume contained four pieces, including the "Ancient Mariner," by
Coleridge.



XVII.


TO SOUTHEY.

_November_ 28, 1798.

         *       *       *       *       *
  I showed my "Witch" and "Dying Lover" to
  Dyer [1] last night; but George could not comprehend
  how that could be poetry which did not go
  upon ten feet, as George and his predecessors had
  taught it to do; so George read me some lectures
  on the distinguishing qualities of the Ode, the Epigram,
  and the Epic, and went home to illustrate his
  doctrine by correcting a proof-sheet of his own
  Lyrics, George writes odes where the rhymes, like
  fashionable man and wife, keep a comfortable distance
  of six or eight lines apart, and calls that "observing
  the laws of verse," George tells you, before
  he recites, that you must listen with great attention,
  or you 'll miss the rhymes. I did so, and found
  them pretty exact, George, speaking of the dead
  Ossian, exclaimeth, "Dark are the poet's eyes," I
  humbly represented to him that his own eyes were
  dark, and many a living bard's besides, and recommended
  "Clos'd are the poet's eyes." But that
  would not do, I found there was an antithesis between
  the darkness of his eyes and the splendor of
  his genius, and I acquiesced.

Your recipe for a Turk's poison is invaluable and truly Marlowish....
Lloyd objects to "shutting up the womb of his purse" in my Curse (which
for a Christian witch in a Christian country is not too mild, I hope):
do you object? I think there is a strangeness in the idea, as well as
"shaking the poor like snakes from his door," which suits the speaker.
Witches illustrate, as fine ladies do, from their own familiar objects,
and snakes and shutting up of wombs are in their way. I don't know that
this last charge has been before brought against 'em, nor either the
sour milk or the mandrake babe; but I affirm these be things a witch
would do if she could.

My tragedy [2] will be a medley (as I intend it to be a medley) of
laughter and tears, prose and verse, and in some places rhyme, songs,
wit, pathos, humor, and if possible, sublimity,--at least, it is not a
fault in my intention if it does not comprehend most of these discordant
colors. Heaven send they dance not the "Dance of Death!" I hear that the
Two Noble Englishmen [3] have parted no sooner than they set foot on
German earth; but I have not heard the reason,--possibly to give
novelists a handle to exclaim, "Ah me, what things are perfect!" I think
I shall adopt your emendation in the "Dying Lover," though I do not
myself feel the objection against "Silent Prayer."

My tailor has brought me home a new coat lapelled, with a velvet collar.
He assures me everybody wears velvet collars now. Some are born
fashionable, some achieve fashion, and others, like your humble servant,
have fashion thrust upon them. The rogue has been making inroads
hitherto by modest degrees, foisting upon me an additional button,
recommending gaiters; but to come upon me thus in a full tide of luxury,
neither becomes him as a tailor or the ninth of a man. My meek gentleman
was robbed the other day, coming with his wife and family in a one-horse
shay from Hampstead; the villains rifled him of four guineas, some
shillings and halfpence, and a bundle of customers' measures, which they
swore were bank-notes. They did not shoot him, and when they rode off he
addressed them with profound gratitude, making a congee: "Gentlemen, I
wish you good-night; and we are very much obliged to you that you have
not used us ill!" And this is the cuckoo that has the audacity to foist
upon me ten buttons on a side and a black velvet collar,--a cursed ninth
of a scoundrel!

When you write to Lloyd, he wishes his Jacobin correspondents to address
him as _Mr._ C. L. Love and respects to Edith. I hope she is well.

Yours sincerely,

C. LAMB.

[1] This quaint scholar, a marvel of simplicity and universal optimism,
is a constantly recurring and delightfully humorous character in the
Letters. Lamb and Dyer had been schoolfellows at Christ's Hospital.

[2] John Woodvil.

[3] Coleridge and Wordsworth, who started for Germany together.



XVIII.


TO SOUTHEY.

_March_ 20, 1799,

I am hugely pleased with your "Spider," "your old freemason," as you
call him. The three first stanzas are delicious; they seem to me a
compound of Burns and. Old Quarles, those kind of home-strokes, where
more is felt than strikes the ear,--a terseness, a jocular pathos which
makes one feel in laughter. The measure, too, is novel and pleasing. I
could almost wonder Rob Burns in his lifetime never stumbled upon it.
The fourth stanza is less striking, as being less original. The fifth
falls off. It has no felicity of phrase, no old-fashioned phrase
or feeling.

"Young hopes, and love's delightful dreams,"

savor neither of Burns nor Quarles; they seem more like shreds of many a
modern sentimental sonnet. The last stanza hath nothing striking in it,
if I except the two concluding lines, which are Burns all over. I wish,
if you concur with me, these things could be looked to. I am sure this
is a kind of writing which comes tenfold better recommended to the
heart, comes there more like a neighbor or familiar, than thousands of
Hamnels and Zillahs and Madelons. I beg you will send me the
"Holly-tree," if it at all resemble this, for it must please me. I have
never seen it. I love this sort of poems, that open a new intercourse
with the most despised of the animal and insect race. I think this vein
may be further opened; Peter Pindar hath very prettily apostrophized a
fly; Burns hath his mouse and his louse; Coleridge, less successfully,
hath made overtures of intimacy to a jackass,--therein only following at
unresembling distance Sterne and greater Cervantes. Besides these, I
know of no other examples of breaking down the partition between us and
our "poor earth-born companions." It is sometimes revolting to be put in
a track of feeling by other people, not one's own immediate thoughts,
else I would persuade you, if I could (I am in earnest), to commence a
series of these animal poems, which might have a tendency to rescue some
poor creatures from the antipathy of mankind. Some thoughts come across
me: for instance, to a rat, to a toad, to a cockchafer, to a
mole,--people bake moles alive by a slow oven-fire to cure consumption.
Rats are, indeed, the most despised and contemptible parts of God's
earth, I killed a rat the other day by punching him to pieces, and feel
a weight of blood upon me to this hour. Toads, you know, are made to
fly, and tumble down and crush all to pieces. Cockchafers are old sport;
then again to a worm, with an apostrophe to anglers,--those patient
tyrants, meek inflictors of pangs intolerable, cool devils; [1] to an
owl; to all snakes, with an apology for their poison; to a cat in boots
or bladders. Your own fancy, if it takes a fancy to these hints, will
suggest many more. A series of such poems, suppose them accompanied with
plates descriptive of animal torments,--cooks roasting lobsters,
fishmongers crimping skates, etc.,--would take excessively, I will
willingly enter into a partnership in the plan with you; I think my
heart and soul would go with it too,--at least, give it a thought. My
plan is but this minute come into my head; but it strikes me
instantaneously as something new, good, and useful, full of pleasure and
full of moral. If old Quarles and Wither could live again, we would
invite them into our firm. Burns hath done his part.

Poor Sam Le Grice! I am afraid the world and the camp and the university
have spoiled him among them. 'Tis certain he had at one time a strong
capacity of turning out something better. I knew him, and that not long
since, when he had a most warm heart. I am ashamed of the indifference I
have sometimes felt towards him. I think the devil is in one's heart. I
am under obligations to that man for the warmest friendship and
heartiest sympathy, [2] even for an agony of sympathy expressed both by
word and deed, and tears for me when I was in my greatest distress. But
I have forgot that,--as, I fear, he has nigh forgot the awful scenes
which were before his eyes when he served the office of a comforter to
me. No service was too mean or troublesome for him to perform. I can't
think what but the devil, "that old spider," could have suck'd my heart
so dry of its sense of all gratitude. If he does come in your way,
Southey, fail not to tell him that I retain a most affectionate
remembrance of his old friendliness, and an earnest wish to resume our
intercourse. In this I am serious. I cannot recommend him to your
society, because I am afraid whether he be quite worthy of it. But I
have no right to dismiss him from _my_ regard. He was at one time, and
in the worst of times, my own familiar friend, and great comfort to me
then. I have known him to play at cards with my father, meal-times
excepted, literally all day long, in long days too, to save me from
being teased by the old man when I was not able to bear it.

God bless him for it, and God bless you, Southey!

C. L.

[1] Leigh Hunt says: "Walton says that an angler does no hurt but to
fish; and this he counts as nothing.... Now, fancy a Genius fishing for
us. Fancy him baiting a great hook with pickled salmon, and, twitching
up old Izaac Walton from the banks of the River Lee, with the hook
through his ear. How he would go up, roaring and screaming, and thinking
the devil had got him!

  "'Other joys
  Are but toys.'

  WALTON."

[2] See Letter VI.



XIX.


TO THOMAS MANNING [1].

_March_ 1, 1800.

I hope by this time you are prepared to say the "Falstaff's Letters" are
a bundle of the sharpest, queerest, profoundest humors of any these
juice-drained latter times have spawned. I should have advertised you
that the meaning is frequently hard to be got at,--and so are the future
guineas that now lie ripening and aurifying in the womb of some
undiscovered Potosi; but dig, dig, dig, dig, Manning! I set to with an
unconquerable propulsion to write, with a lamentable want of what to
write. My private goings on are orderly as the movements of the spheres,
and stale as their music to angels' ears. Public affairs, except as they
touch upon me, and so turn into private, I cannot whip up my mind to
feel any interest in, I grieve, indeed, that War and Nature and Mr.
Pitt, that hangs up in Lloyd's best parlour, should have conspired to
call up three necessaries, simple commoners as our fathers knew them,
into the upper house of luxuries,--bread and beer and coals, Manning.
But as to France and Frenchmen, and the Abbé Siéyès and his
constitutions, I cannot make these present times present to me. I read
histories of the past, and I live in them; although, to abstract senses,
they are far less momentous than the noises which keep Europe awake. I
am reading Burnet's "Own Times." Did you ever read that garrulous,
pleasant history? He tells his story like an old man, past political
service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in
public transactions when "his old cap was new." Full of scandal, which
all true history is. No palliatives; but all the stark wickedness that
actually gives the _momentum_ to national actors. Quite the prattle of
age and outlived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you
perpetually in _alto relievo_. Himself a party man, he makes you a party
man. None of the cursed philosophical Humeian indifference, so cold and
unnatural and inhuman! None of the cursed Gibbonian fine writing, so
fine and composite. None of Dr. Robertson's periods with three members.
None of Mr. Roscoe's sage remarks, all so apposite, and coming in so
clever, lest the reader should have had the trouble of drawing an
inference. Burnet's good old prattle I can bring present to my mind; I
can make the Revolution present to me: the French Revolution, by a
converse perversity in my nature, I fling as far _from_ me. To quit this
tiresome subject, and to relieve you from two or three dismal yawns,
which I hear in spirit, I here conclude my more than commonly obtuse
letter,--dull up to the dulness of a Dutch commentator on Shakspeare. My
love to Lloyd and Sophia.

C. L.

[1] To this remarkable person we are largely indebted for some of the
best of Lamb's letters. He was mathematical tutor at Caius College,
Cambridge, and in later years became somewhat famous as an explorer of
the remoter parts of China and Thibet. Lamb had been introduced to him,
during a Cambridge visit, by Charles Lloyd, and afterwards told Crabb
Robinson that he was the most "wonderful man" he ever met. An account of
Manning will be found in the memoir prefixed to his "Journey to Lhasa,"
in 1811-12. (George Bogle and Thomas Manning's Journey to Thibet and
Lhasa, by C.R. Markham, 1876.)



XX.


TO COLERIDGE,

_May_ 12, 1800,

My Dear Coleridge,--I don't know why I write, except from the propensity
misery has to tell her griefs. Hetty [1] died on Friday night, about
eleven o'clock, after eight days' illness; Mary, in consequence of
fatigue and anxiety, is fallen ill again, and I was obliged to remove
her yesterday. I am left alone in a house with nothing but Hetty's dead
body to keep me company. To-morrow I bury her, and then I shall be quite
alone, with nothing but a cat to remind me that the house has been full
of living beings like myself. My heart is quite sunk, and I don't know
where to look for relief. Mary will get better again; but her constantly
being liable to such relapses is dreadful; nor is it the least of our
evils that her case and all our story is so well known around us. We are
in a manner _marked_. Excuse my troubling you; but I have nobody by me
to speak to me. I slept out last night, not being able to endure the
change and the stillness. But I did not sleep well, and I must come back
to my own bed. I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me
to-morrow. I am completely shipwrecked. My head is quite bad. I almost
wish that Mary were dead. God bless you. Love to Sara and Hartley.

C. LAMB.

[1] The Lambs' old servant.



XXI.


TO MANNING.

Before _June_, 1800.

Dear Manning,--I feel myself unable to thank you sufficiently for your
kind letter. It was doubly acceptable to me, both for the choice poetry
and the kind, honest prose which it contained. It was just such a letter
as I should have expected from Manning.

I am in much better spirits than when I wrote last. I have had a very
eligible offer to lodge with a friend in town. He will have rooms to let
at midsummer, by which time I hope my sister will be well enough to join
me. It is a great object to me to live in town, where we shall be much
more _private_, and to quit a house and neighborhood where poor Mary's
disorder, so frequently recurring, has made us a sort of marked people.
We can be nowhere private except in the midst of London. We shall be in
a family where we visit very frequently; only my landlord and I have not
yet come to a conclusion. He has a partner to consult. I am still on the
tremble, for I do not know where we could go into lodgings that would
not be, in many respects, highly exceptionable. Only God send Mary well
again, and I hope all will be well! The prospect, such as it is, has
made me quite happy. I have just time to tell you of it, as I know it
will give you pleasure. Farewell.

C. LAMB.



XXII.


TO COLERIDGE,

_August_, 6, 1800.

Dear Coleridge,--I have taken to-day and delivered to Longman and Co.,
_Imprimis_: your books, viz., three ponderous German dictionaries, one
volume (I can find no more) of German and French ditto, sundry other
German books unbound, as you left them, Percy's Ancient Poetry, and one
volume of Anderson's Poets. I specify them, that you may not lose any.
_Secundo_: a dressing-gown (value, fivepence), in which you used to sit
and look like a conjuror when you were translating "Wallenstein." A case
of two razors and a shaving-box and strap. This it has cost me a severe
struggle to part with. They are in a brown-paper parcel, which also
contains sundry papers and poems, sermons, _some few Epic_ poems,--one
about Cain and Abel, which came from Poole, etc., and also your tragedy;
with one or two small German books, and that drama in which Got-fader
performs. _Tertio_: a small oblong box containing _all your letters_,
collected from all your waste papers, and which fill the said little
box. All other waste papers, which I judged worth sending, are in the
paper parcel aforesaid. But you will find _all_ your letters in the box
by themselves. Thus have I discharged my conscience and my lumber-room
of all your property, save and except a folio entitled Tyrrell's
"Bibliotheca Politica," which you used to learn your politics out of
when you wrote for the Post,--_mutatis mutandis, i. e._, applying past
inferences to modern _data_. I retain that, because I am sensible I am
very deficient in the politics myself; and I have torn up--don't be
angry; waste paper has risen forty per cent, and I can't afford to buy
it--all Bonaparte's Letters, Arthur Young's Treatise on Corn, and one or
two more light-armed infantry, which I thought better suited the
flippancy of London discussion than the dignity of Keswick thinking.
Mary says you will be in a passion about them when you come to miss
them; but you must study philosophy. Read Albertus Magnus de Chartis
Amissis five times over after phlebotomizing,--'t is Burton's
recipe,--and then be angry with an absent friend if you can. Sara is
obscure. Am I to understand by her letter that she sends a _kiss_ to
Eliza Buckingham? Pray tell your wife that a note of interrogation on
the superscription of a letter is highly ungrammatical! She proposes
writing my name _Lambe? Lamb_ is quite enough. I have had the
Anthology, and like only one thing in it,--_Lewti_; but of that the
last stanza is detestable, the rest most exquisite! The epithet
_enviable_ would dash the finest poem. For God's sake (I never was more
serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted
in print, or do it in better verses. [1] It did well enough five years
ago, when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time
you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets: but, besides that, the
meaning of "gentle" is equivocal at best, and almost always means
"poor-spirited;" the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such
vile trumpetings. My _sentiment_ is long since vanished. I hope my
_virtues_ have done _sucking_. I can scarce think but you meant it in
joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to think you could think
to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some
green-sick sonneteer.

[1] An allusion to Coleridge's lines, "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison,"
wherein he styles Lamb "my gentle-hearted Charles."



XXIII.


TO MANNING.

_August_, 1800.

Dear Manning,--I am going to ask a favor of you, and am at a loss how to
do it in the most delicate mariner. For this purpose I have been looking
into Pliny's Letters, who is noted to have had the best grace in begging
of all the ancients (I read him in the elegant translation of Mr.
Melmoth); but not finding any case there exactly similar with mine, I am
constrained to beg in my own barbarian way. To come to the point, then,
and hasten into the middle of things, have you a copy of your Algebra [1]
to give away? I do not ask it for myself; I have too much reverence for
the Black Arts ever to approach thy circle, illustrious Trismegist! But
that worthy man and excellent poet, George Dyer, made me a visit
yesternight on purpose to borrow one, supposing, rationally enough, I
must say, that you had made me a present of one before this; the
omission of which I take to have proceeded only from negligence: but it
is a fault. I could lend him no assistance. You must know he is just now
diverted from the pursuit of BELL LETTERS by a paradox, which he has
heard his friend Frend [2] (that learned mathematician) maintain, that
the negative quantities of mathematicians were _merae nugae_,--things
scarcely _in rerum naturâ_, and smacking too much of mystery for
gentlemen of Mr. Frend's clear Unitarian capacity. However, the dispute,
once set a-going, has seized violently on George's pericranick; and it
is necessary for his health that he should speedily come to a resolution
of his doubts. He goes about teasing his friends with his new
mathematics; he even frantically talks of purchasing Manning's Algebra,
which shows him far gone, for, to my knowledge, he has not been master
of seven shillings a good time. George's pockets and ----'s brains are
two things in nature which do not abhor a vacuum.... Now, if you could
step in, in this trembling suspense of his reason, and he should find on
Saturday morning, lying for him at the Porter's Lodge, Clifford's
Inn.--his safest address,--Manning's Algebra, with a neat manuscriptum
in the blank leaf, running thus, "FROM THE AUTHOR!" it might save his
wits and restore the unhappy author to those studies of poetry and
criticism which are at present suspended, to the infinite regret of the
whole literary world. N.B.--Dirty books, smeared leaves, and dogs' ears
will be rather a recommendation than otherwise. N.B.--He must have the
book as soon as possible, or nothing can withhold him from madly
purchasing the book on tick.... Then shall we see him sweetly restored
to the chair of Longinus,--to dictate in smooth and modest phrase the
laws of verse; to prove that Theocritus first introduced the Pastoral,
and Virgil and Pope brought it to its perfection; that Gray and Mason
(who always hunt in couples in George's brain) have shown a great deal
of poetical fire in their lyric poetry; that Aristotle's rules are not
to be servilely followed, which George has shown to have imposed great
shackles upon modern genius. His poems, I find, are to consist of two
vols., reasonable octavo; and a third book will exclusively contain
criticisms, in which he asserts he has gone _pretty deeply_ into the
laws of blank verse and rhyme, epic poetry, dramatic and pastoral
ditto,--all which is to come out before Christmas. But above all he has
_touched_ most _deeply_ upon the Drama, comparing the English with the
modern German stage, their merits and defects. Apprehending that his
_studies_ (not to mention his _turn_, which I take to be chiefly towards
the lyrical poetry) hardly qualified him for these disquisitions, I
modestly inquired what plays he had read. I found by George's reply that
he _had_ read Shakspeare, but that was a good while since: he calls him
a great but irregular genius, which I think to be an original and just
remark. (Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ben Jonson, Shirley, Marlowe,
Ford, and the worthies of Dodsley's Collection,--he confessed he had
read none of them, but professed his _intention_ of looking through them
all, so as to be able to _touch_ upon them in his book.) So Shakspeare,
Otway, and I believe Rowe, to whom he was naturally directed by
Johnson's Lives, and these not read lately, are to stand him in stead of
a general knowledge of the subject. God bless his dear absurd head!

By the by, did I not write you a letter with something about an
invitation in it?--but let that pass; I suppose it is not agreeable.

N.B. It would not be amiss if you were to accompany your _present_ with
a dissertation on negative quantities.

C. L.

[1] Manning, while at Cambridge, published a work on Algebra.

[2] The Rev. William Frend, who was expelled from Cambridge for
Unitarianism.



XXIV.


TO MANNING.

1800.

George Dyer is an Archimedes and an Archimagus and a Tycho Brahé and a
Copernicus; and thou art the darling of the Nine, and midwife to their
wandering babe also! We take tea with that learned poet and critic on
Tuesday night, at half-past five, in his neat library; the repast will
be light and Attic, with criticism. If thou couldst contrive to wheel up
thy dear carcase on the Monday, and after dining with us on tripe,
calves' kidneys, or whatever else the Cornucopia of St. Clare may be
willing to pour out on the occasion, might we not adjourn together to
the Heathen's, thou with thy Black Backs, and I with some innocent
volume of the Bell Letters,--Shenstone, or the like; it would make him
wash his old flannel gown (that has not been washed, to my knowledge,
since it has been _his_,--Oh, the long time!) with tears of joy. Thou
shouldst settle his scruples, and unravel his cobwebs, and sponge off
the sad stuff that weighs upon his dear wounded pia mater; thou shouldst
restore light to his eyes, and him to his friends and the public;
Parnassus should shower her civic crowns upon thee for saving the wits
of a citizen! I thought I saw a lucid interval in George the other
night: he broke in upon my studies just at tea-time, and brought with
him Dr. Anderson, an old gentleman who ties his breeches' knees with
packthread, and boasts that he has been disappointed by ministers. The
Doctor wanted to see _me_; for, I being a poet, he thought I might
furnish him with a copy of verses to suit his "Agricultural Magazine."
The Doctor, in the course of the conversation, mentioned a poem, called
the "Epigoniad," by one Wilkie, an epic poem, in which there is not one
tolerable good line all through, but every incident and speech borrowed
from Homer.

George had been sitting inattentive seemingly to what was going
on,--hatching of negative quantities,--when, suddenly, the name of his
old friend Homer stung his pericranicks, and, jumping up, he begged to
know where he could meet with Wilkie's work. "It was a curious fact that
there should be such an epic poem and he not know of it; and he _must_
get a copy of it, as he was going to touch pretty deeply upon the
subject of the epic,--and he was sure there must be some things good in
a poem of eight thousand lines!" I was pleased with this transient
return of his reason and recurrence to his old ways of thinking; it gave
me great hopes of a recovery, which nothing but your book can completely
insure. Pray come on Monday if you _can_, and stay your own time. I have
a good large room, with two beds in it, in the handsomest of which thou
shalt repose a-nights, and dream of spheroides. I hope you will
understand by the nonsense of this letter that I am _not_ melancholy at
the thoughts of thy coming; I thought it necessary to add this, because
you love _precision_. Take notice that our stay at Dyer's will not
exceed eight o'clock, after which our pursuits will be our own. But
indeed I think a little recreation among the Bell Letters and poetry
will do you some service in the interval of severer studies. I hope we
shall fully discuss with George Dyer what I have never yet heard done to
my satisfaction,--the reason of Dr. Johnson's malevolent strictures on
the higher species of the Ode.

C. LAMB.



XXV.


TO COLERIDGE.

_August_ 14, 1800.

My head is playing all the tunes in the world, ringing such peals! It
has just finished the "Merry Christ Church Bells," and absolutely is
beginning "Turn again, Whittington." Buz, buz, buz; bum, bum, bum;
wheeze, wheeze, wheeze; fen, fen, fen; tinky, tinky, tinky; _cr'annch_.
I shall certainly come to be condemned at last. I have been drinking too
much for two days running. I find my moral sense in the last stage of a
consumption, and my religion getting faint. This is disheartening, but I
trust the devil will not overpower me. In the midst of this infernal
torture Conscience is barking and yelping as loud as any of them. I have
sat down to read over again, and I think I do begin to spy out something
with beauty and design in it. I perfectly accede to all your
alterations, and only desire that you had cut deeper, when your hand
was in.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now I am on the subject of poetry, I must announce to you, who,
doubtless, in your remote part of the island, have not heard tidings of
so great a blessing, that George Dyer hath prepared two ponderous
volumes full of poetry and criticism. They impend over the town, and are
threatened to fall in the winter. The first volume contains every sort
of poetry except personal satire, which George, in his truly original
prospectus, renounceth forever, whimsically foisting the intention in
between the price of his book and the proposed number of subscribers.
(If I can, I will get you a copy of his _handbill_.) He has tried his
_vein_ in every species besides,--the Spenserian, Thomsonian, Masonic,
and Akensidish more especially. The second volume is all criticism;
wherein he demonstrates to the entire satisfaction of the literary
world, in a way that must silence all reply forever, that the pastoral
was introduced by Theocritus and polished by Virgil and Pope; that Gray
and Mason (who always hunt in couples in George's brain) have a good
deal of poetical fire and true lyric genius; that Cowley was ruined by
excess of wit (a warning to all moderns); that Charles Lloyd, Charles
Lamb, and William Wordsworth, in later days, have struck the true chords
of poesy. Oh, George, George, with a head uniformly wrong and a heart
uniformly right, that I had power and might equal to my wishes; then
would I call the gentry of thy native island, and they should come in
troops, flocking at the sound of thy prospectus-trumpet, and crowding
who shall be first to stand in thy list of subscribers! I can only put
twelve shillings into thy pocket (which, I will answer for them, will
not stick there long) out of a pocket almost as bare as thine. Is it not
a pity so much fine writing should be erased? But, to tell the truth, I
began to scent that I was getting into that sort of style which Longinus
and Dionysius Halicarnassus fitly call "the affected."

C. L.



XXVI.


TO MANNING.

_August_ 22, 1800.

Dear Manning,--You need not imagine any apology necessary. Your fine
hare and fine birds (which just now are dangling by our kitchen blaze)
discourse most eloquent music in your justification. You just nicked my
palate; for, with all due decorum and leave may it be spoken, my worship
hath taken physic to-day, and being low and puling, requireth to be
pampered. Fob! how beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my
nose! For you must know we extract a divine spirit of gravy from those
materials which, duly compounded with a consistence of bread and cream
(yclept bread-sauce), each to each giving double grace, do mutually
illustrate and set off (as skilful gold-foils to rare jewels) your
partridge, pheasant, woodcock, snipe, teal, widgeon, and the other
lesser daughters of the ark. My friendship, struggling with my carnal
and fleshly prudence (which suggests that a bird a man is the proper
allotment in such cases), yearneth sometimes to have thee here to pick a
wing or so. I question if your Norfolk sauces match our London
culinarie.

George Dyer has introduced me to the table of an agreeable old
gentleman, Dr. Anderson, who gives hot legs of mutton and grape pies at
his sylvan lodge at Isleworth, where, in the middle of a street, he has
shot up a wall most preposterously before his small dwelling, which,
with the circumstance of his taking several panes of glass out of
bedroom windows (for air), causeth his neighbors to speculate strangely
on the state of the good man's pericranicks. Plainly, he lives under the
reputation of being deranged. George does not mind this circumstance; he
rather likes him the better for it. The Doctor, in his pursuits, joins
agricultural to poetical science, and has set George's brains mad about
the old Scotch writers, Barbour, Douglas's Æneid, Blind Harry, etc. We
returned home in a return postchaise (having dined with the Doctor); and
George kept wondering and wondering, for eight or nine turnpike miles,
what was the name, and striving to recollect the name, of a poet
anterior to Barbour. I begged to know what was remaining of his works.
"There is nothing _extant_ of his works, sir; but by all accounts he
seems to have been a fine genius!" This fine genius, without anything to
show for it or any title beyond George's courtesy, without even a name,
and Barbour and Douglas and Blind Harry now are the predominant sounds
in George's pia mater, and their buzzings exclude politics, criticism,
and algebra,--the late lords of that illustrious lumber-room. Mark, he
has never read any of these bucks, but is impatient till he reads them
_all_, at the Doctor's suggestion. Poor Dyer! his friends should be
careful what sparks they let fall into such inflammable matter.

Could I have my will of the heathen, I would lock him up from all access
of new ideas; I would exclude all critics that would not swear me first
(upon their Virgil) that they would feed him with nothing but the old,
safe, familiar notions and sounds (the rightful aborigines of his
brain),--Gray, Akenside, and Mason. In these sounds, reiterated as often
as possible, there could be nothing painful, nothing distracting.

God bless me, here are the birds, smoking hot!

All that is gross and unspiritual in me rises at the sight!

Avaunt friendship and all memory of absent friends!

C. LAMB.



XXVII.


TO COLERIDGE.

_August_ 26, 1800.

George Dyer is the only literary character I am happily acquainted with.
The oftener I see him, the more deeply I admire him. He is goodness
itself. If I could but calculate the precise date of his death, I would
write a novel on purpose to make George the hero. I could hit him off
to a hair.

George brought a Dr. Anderson [1] to see me. The Doctor is a very
pleasant old man, a great genius for agriculture, one that ties his
breeches-knees with packthread, and boasts of having had disappointments
from ministers. The Doctor happened to mention an epic poem by one
Wilkie, called the "Epigoniad," in which he assured us there is not one
tolerable line from beginning to end, but all the characters, incidents,
etc., verbally copied from _Homer_. George, who had been sitting quite
inattentive to the Doctor's criticism, no sooner heard the sound of
_Homer_ strike his pericraniks, than up he gets, and declares he must
see that poem immediately: where was it to be had? An epic poem of eight
thousand lines, and _he_ not hear of it! There must be some things good
in it, and it was necessary he should see it, for he had touched pretty
deeply upon that subject in his criticisms on the Epic. George had
touched pretty deeply upon the Lyric, I find; he has also prepared a
dissertation on the Drama, and the comparison of the English and German
theatres. As I rather doubted his competency to do the latter, knowing
that his peculiar _turn_ lies in the lyric species of composition, I
questioned George what English plays he had read. I found that he _had_
read Shakspeare (whom he calls an original, but irregular, genius), but
it was a good while ago; and he has dipped into Rowe and Otway, I
suppose having found their names in Johnson's Lives at full length; and
upon this slender ground he has undertaken the task. He never seemed
even to have heard of Fletcher, Ford, Marlowe, Massinger, and the
worthies of Dodsley's Collection; but he is to read all these, to
prepare him for bringing out his "Parallel" in the winter. I find he is
also determined to vindicate poetry from the shackles which Aristotle
and some others have imposed upon it,--which is very good-natured of
him, and very necessary just now! Now I am _touching_ so _deeply_ upon
poetry, can I forget that I have just received from Cottle a magnificent
copy of his Guinea Epic. [2] Four-and-twenty books to read in the dog
days! I got as far as the Mad Monk the first day, and fainted. Mr,
Cottle's genius strongly points him to the _Pastoral_, but his
inclinations divert him perpetually from his calling. He imitates
Southey, as Rowe did Shakspeare, with his "Good morrow to ye, good
master Lieutenant," Instead of _a_ man, _a_ woman, _a_ daughter, he
constantly writes "one a man," "one a woman," "one his daughter."
Instead of _the_ king, _the_ hero, he constantly writes, "he the king,"
"he the hero,"--two flowers of rhetoric palpably from the "Joan." But
Mr, Cottle soars a higher pitch; and when he _is_ original, it is in a
most original way indeed. His terrific scenes are indefatigable.
Serpents, asps, spiders, ghosts, dead bodies, staircases made of
nothing, with adders' tongues for bannisters,--Good Heaven, what a brain
he must have! He puts as many plums in his pudding as my grandmother
used to do; and, then his emerging from Hell's horrors into light, and
treading on pure flats of this earth--for twenty-three books together!

C. L.

[1] See preceding Letter.

[2] Alfred.



XXVIII.


TO COLERIDGE.

_October_ 9, 1800.

I suppose you have heard of the death of Amos Cottle. I paid a solemn
visit of condolence to his brother, accompanied by George Dyer, of
burlesque memory. I went, trembling, to see poor Cottle so immediately
upon the event. He was in black, and his younger brother was also in
black. Everything wore an aspect suitable to the respect due to the
freshly dead. For some time after our entrance, nobody spake, till
George modestly put in a question, whether "Alfred" was likely to sell.
This was Lethe to Cottle, and his poor face wet with tears, and his kind
eye brightened up in a moment. Now I felt it was my cue to speak. I had
to thank him for a present of a magnificent copy, and had promised to
send him my remarks,--the least thing I could do; so I ventured to
suggest that I perceived a considerable improvement he had made in his
first book since the state in which he first read it to me. Joseph, who
till now had sat with his knees cowering in by the fireplace, wheeled
about, and with great difficulty of body shifted the same round to the
corner of a table where I was sitting, and first stationing one thigh
over the other, which is his sedentary mood, and placidly fixing his
benevolent face right against mine, waited my observations. At that
moment it came strongly into my mind that I had got Uncle Toby before
me, he looked so kind and so good. I could not say an unkind thing of
"Alfred." So I set my memory to work to recollect what was the name of
Alfred's queen, and with some adroitness recalled the well-known sound
to Cottle's ears of Alswitha. At that moment I could perceive that
Cottle had forgot his brother was so lately become a blessed spirit. In
the language of mathematicians, the author was as 9, the brother as 1. I
felt my cue, and strong pity working at the root, I went to work and
beslabber'd "Alfred" with most unqualified praise, or only qualifying my
praise by the occasional polite interposition of an exception taken
against trivial faults, slips, and human imperfections, which, by
removing the appearance of insincerity, did but in truth heighten the
relish. Perhaps I might have spared that refinement, for Joseph was in a
humor to hope and believe _all things_. What I said was beautifully
supported, corroborated, and confirmed by the stupidity of his brother
on my left hand, and by George on my right, who has an utter incapacity
of comprehending that there can be anything bad in poetry. All poems are
_good_ poems to George; all men are _fine geniuses_. So what with my
actual memory, of which I made the most, and Cottle's own helping me
out, for I _really_ had forgotten a good deal of "Alfred," I made shift
to discuss the most essential parts entirely to the satisfaction of its
author, who repeatedly declared that he loved nothing better than
_candid_ criticism. Was I a candid greyhound now for all this? or did I
do right? I believe I did. The effect was luscious to my conscience. For
all the rest of the evening Amos was no more heard of, till George
revived the subject by inquiring whether some account should not be
drawn up by the friends of the deceased to be inserted in "Phillips's
Monthly Obituary;" adding, that Amos was estimable both for his head and
heart, and would have made a fine poet if he had lived. To the
expediency of this measure Cottle fully assented, but could not help
adding that he always thought that the qualities of his brother's heart
exceeded those of his head. I believe his brother, when living, had
formed precisely the same idea of him; and I apprehend the world will
assent to both judgments. I rather guess that the brothers were poetical
rivals. I judged so when I saw them together. Poor Cottle, I must leave
him, after his short dream, to muse again upon his poor brother, for
whom I am sure in secret he will yet shed many a tear. Now send me in
return some Greta news.

C. L.



XXIX.


TO MANNING.

_October_ 16, 1800.

Dear Manning,--Had you written one week before you did, I certainly
should have obeyed your injunction; you should have seen me before my
letter. I will explain to you my situation. There are six of us in one
department. Two of us (within these four days) are confined with severe
fevers: and two more, who belong to the Tower Militia, expect to have
marching orders on Friday. Now, six are absolutely necessary. I have
already asked and obtained two young hands to supply the loss of the
_feverites;_ and with the other prospect before me, you may believe I
cannot decently ask leave of absence for myself. All I can promise (and
I do promise with the sincerity of Saint Peter, and the contrition of
sinner Peter if I fail) [is] that I will come _the very first spare
week_, and go nowhere till I have been at Cambridge. No matter if you
are in a state of pupilage when I come; for I can employ myself in
Cambridge very pleasantly in the mornings. Are there not libraries,
halls, colleges, books, pictures, statues? I wish you had made London in
your way. There is an exhibition quite uncommon in Europe, which could
not have escaped _your genius_,--a live rattlesnake, ten feet in length,
and the thickness of a big leg. I went to see it last night by
candlelight. We were ushered into a room very little bigger than ours at
Pentonville. A man and woman and four boys live in this room, joint
tenants with nine snakes, most of them such as no remedy has been
discovered for their bite. We walked into the middle, which is formed by
a half-moon of wired boxes, all mansions of snakes,--whip-snakes,
thunder-snakes, pig-nose-snakes, American vipers, and _this monster_. He
lies curled up in folds; and immediately a stranger enters (for he is
used to the family, and sees them play at cards) he set up a rattle like
a watchman's in London, or near as loud, and reared up a head, from the
midst of these folds, like a toad, and shook his head, and showed every
sign a snake can show of irritation. I had the foolish curiosity to
strike the wires with my finger, and the devil flew at me with his
toad-mouth wide open: the inside of his mouth is quite white. I had got
my finger away, nor could he well have bit me with his big mouth, which
would have been certain death in five minutes. But it frightened me so
much that I did not recover my voice for a minute's space. I forgot, in
my fear, that he was secured. You would have forgot too, for 't is
incredible how such a monster can be confined in small gauzy-looking
wires. I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to Heaven you could see
it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large thigh.
I could not retreat without infringing on another box, and just behind,
a little devil, not an inch from my back, had got his nose out, with
some difficulty and pain, quite through the bars! He was soon taught
better manners. All the snakes were curious, and objects of terror; but
this monster, like Aaron's serpent, swallowed up the impression of the
rest. He opened his cursed mouth, when he made at me, as wide as his
head was broad. I hallooed out quite loud, and felt pains all over my
body with the fright.

I have had the felicity of hearing George Dyer read out one book of "The
Farmer's Boy." I thought it rather childish. No doubt, there is
originality in it (which, in your self-taught geniuses, is a most rare
quality, they generally getting hold of some bad models in a scarcity of
books, and forming their taste on them), but no _selection. All_ is,
described.

Mind, I have only heard read one book. Yours sincerely,

Philo-Snake, C. L.



XXX.


TO MANNING.

_November_ 3, 1800,

_Ecquid meditatur Archimedes?_ What is Euclid doing? What has happened
to learned Trismegist? Doth he take it in ill part that his humble
friend did not comply with his courteous invitation? Let it suffice, I
could not come. Are impossibilities nothing?--be they abstractions of
the intellects, or not (rather) most sharp and mortifying realities?
nuts in the Will's mouth too hard for her to crack? brick and stone
walls in her way, which she can by no means eat through? sore lets,
_impedimenta viarum_, no thoroughfares? _racemi nimium alte pendentes?_?
Is the phrase classic? I allude to the grapes in Aesop, which cost the
fox a strain, and gained the world an aphorism. Observe the
superscription of this letter. In adapting the size of the letters which
constitute _your_ name and Mr. _Crisp's_ name respectively, I had an eye
to your different stations in life. 'Tis really curious, and must be
soothing to an _aristocrat_ I wonder it has never been hit on before my
time. I have made an acquisition latterly of a _pleasant hand_, one
Rickman, [1] to whom I was introduced by George Dyer,--not the most
flattering auspices under which one man can be introduced to another.
George brings all sorts of people together, setting up a sort of
agrarian law, or common property, in matter of society; but for once he
has done me a great pleasure, while he was only pursuing a principle, as
_ignes fatui may_ light you home. This Rickman lives in our Buildings,
immediately opposite our house; the finest fellow to drop in a' nights,
about nine or ten o'clock,--cold bread-and-cheese time,--just in the
_wishing_ time of the night, when you _wish_ for somebody to come in,
without a distinct idea of a probable anybody. Just in the nick, neither
too early to be tedious, nor too late to sit a reasonable time. He is a
most pleasant hand,--a fine, rattling fellow, has gone through life
laughing at solemn apes; himself hugely literate, oppressively full of
information in all stuff of conversation, from matter of fact to
Xenophon and Plato; can talk Greek with Porson, politics with Thelwall,
conjecture with George Dyer, nonsense with me, and anything with
anybody; a great farmer, somewhat concerned in an agricultural magazine;
reads no poetry but Shakspeare, very intimate with Southey, but never
reads his poetry; relishes George Dyer, thoroughly penetrates into the
ridiculous wherever found, understands the _first time_ (a great
desideratum in common minds),--you need never twice speak to him; does
not want explanations, translations, limitations, as Professor Godwin
does when you make an assertion; _up_ to anything, _down_ to everything,
--whatever _sapit hominem_. A perfect _man_. All this farrago, which
must perplex you to read, and has put me to a little trouble to
_select_, only proves how impossible it is to describe a _pleasant
hand_. You must see Rickman to know him, for he is a species in one,--a
new class; an exotic, any slip of which I am proud to put in my
garden-pot. The clearest-headed fellow; fullest of matter, with least
verbosity. If there be any alloy in my fortune to have met with such a
man, it is that he commonly divides his time between town and country,
having some foolish family ties at Christchurch, by which means he can
only gladden our London hemisphere with returns of light. He is now
going for six weeks.

[1] John Rickman, clerk-assistant at the table of the House of Commons,
an eminent statistician, and the intimate friend of Lamb, Southey, and
others of their set.



XXXI.


TO MANNING.

_November_ 28, 1800

Dear Manning,--I have received a very kind invitation from Lloyd and
Sophia to go and spend a month with them at the Lakes. Now, it
fortunately happens (which is so seldom the case) that I have spare cash
by me enough to answer the expenses of so long a journey; and I am
determined to get away from the office by some means.

The purpose of this letter is to request of you (my dear friend) that
you will not take it unkind if I decline my proposed visit to Cambridge
_for the present_. Perhaps I shall be able to take Cambridge _in my
way_, going or coming. I need not describe to you the expectations which
such an one as myself, pent up all my life in a dirty city, have formed
of a tour to the Lakes. Consider Grasmere! Ambleside! Wordsworth!
Coleridge! Hills, woods, lakes, and mountains, to the devil! I will eat
snipes with thee, Thomas Manning. Only confess, confess, a _bite_.

P.S.--I think you named the 16th; but was it not modest of Lloyd to send
such an invitation! It shows his knowledge of _money_ and _time_. I
would be loth to think he meant

  "Ironic satire sidelong sklented
     On my poor pursie." [1]

For my part, with reference to my friends northward, I must confess that
I am not romance-bit about _Nature_. The earth and sea and sky (when all
is said) is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and
good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation, if they can
talk sensibly and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring upon
the gilded looking-glass (that strained my friend's purse-strings in the
purchase), nor his five-shilling print over the mantelpiece of old Nabbs
the carrier (which only betrays his false taste). Just as important to
me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world,--eye-pampering, but
satisfies no heart. Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres,
churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of
industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladles cheapening, gentlemen
behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George
Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night,
pastry-cooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville,
noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks
reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of "Fire!"
and "Stop, thief!" inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and
butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, Jeremy
Taylors, Burtons on Melancholy, and Religio Medicis on every stall.
These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins! O City abounding
in--, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!

C. L.

[1] Burns.



XXXII.


TO MANNING.

_December_ 27, 1800.

At length George Dyer's phrenitis has come to a crisis; he is raging and
furiously mad. I waited upon the Heathen, Thursday was a se'nnight; the
first symptom which struck my eye and gave me incontrovertible proof of
the fatal truth was a pair of nankeen pantaloons four times too big for
him, which the said Heathen did pertinaciously affirm to be new.

They were absolutely ingrained with the accumulated dirt of ages; but he
affirmed them to be clean. He was going to visit a lady that was nice
about those things, and that's the reason he wore nankeen that day. And
then he danced, and capered, and fidgeted, and pulled up his pantaloons,
and hugged his intolerable flannel vestment closer about his poetic
loins; anon he gave it loose to the zephyrs which plentifully insinuate
their tiny bodies through every crevice, door, window, or wainscot,
expressly formed for the exclusion of such impertinents. Then he caught
at a proof-sheet, and catched up a laundress's bill instead; made a dart
at Bloomfield's Poems, and threw them in agony aside. I could not bring
him to one direct reply; he could not maintain his jumping mind in a
right line for the tithe of a moment by Clifford's Inn clock. He must go
to the printer's immediately,--the most unlucky accident; he had struck
off five hundred impressions of his Poems, which were ready for delivery
to subscribers, and the Preface must all be expunged. There were eighty
pages of Preface, and not till that morning had he discovered that in
the very first page of said Preface he had set out with a principle of
criticism fundamentally wrong, which vitiated all his following
reasoning. The Preface must be expunged, although it cost him £30,--the
lowest calculation, taking in paper and printing! In vain have his real
friends remonstrated against this Midsummer madness; George is as
obstinate as a Primitive Christian, and wards and parries off all our
thrusts with one unanswerable fence,--"Sir, it's of great consequence
that the _world_ is not _misled!_"

       *       *       *       *       *

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

A word or two of my progress. Embark at six o'clock in the morning, with
a fresh gale, on a Cambridge one-decker; very cold till eight at night;
land at St. Mary's lighthouse, muffins and coffee upon table (or any
other curious production of Turkey or both Indies), snipes exactly at
nine, punch to commence at ten, with _argument_; difference of opinion
is expected to take place about eleven; perfect unanimity, with some
haziness and dimness, before twelve. N. B.--My single affection is not
so singly wedded to snipes; but the curious and epicurean eye would also
take a pleasure in beholding a delicate and well-chosen assortment of
teals, ortolans, the unctuous and palate-soothing flesh, of geese wild
and tame, nightingales' brains, the sensorium of a young sucking-pig, or
any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the judgment of you and the
cook of Gonville.

C. LAMB.



XXXIII.


TO COLERIDGE.

(End of 1800)

I send you, in this parcel, my play, which I beg you to present in my
name, with my respect and love, to Wordsworth and his sister. You blame
us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley; the woman has been ten
times after us about it, and we gave it her at last, under the idea that
no further harm would ensue, but she would _once_ write to you, and you
would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. You
read us a dismal homily upon "Realities." We

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/10125