The Best Letters of Charles Lamb Part 25

We shall be soon again at Colebrooke.

Dear B.B.,--You must excuse my not writing before, when I tell you we are on a visit at Enfield, where I do not feel it natural to sit down to a letter. It is at all times an exertion. I had rather talk with you and Anne Knight quietly at Colebrooke Lodge over the matter of your last.

You mistake me when you express misgivings about my relishing a series of Scriptural poems. I wrote confusedly; what I meant to say was, that one or two consolatory poems on deaths would have had a more condensed effect than many. Scriptural, devotional topics, admit of infinite variety. So far from poetry tiring me because religious, I can read, and I say it seriously, the homely old version of the Psalms in our Prayer-books for an hour or two together sometimes, without sense of weariness.

I did not express myself clearly about what I think a false topic, insisted on so frequently in consolatory addresses on the death of infants. I know something like it is in Scripture, but I think humanly spoken. It is a natural thought, a sweet fallacy, to the survivors, but still a fallacy. If it stands on the doctrine of this being a probationary state, it is liable to this dilemma. Omniscience, to whom possibility must be clear as act, must know of the child what it would hereafter turn out: if good, then the topic is false to say it is secured from falling into future wilfulness, vice, etc. If bad, I do not see how its exemption from certain future overt acts by being s.n.a.t.c.hed away at all tells in its favor. You stop the arm of a murderer, or arrest the finger of a pickpurse; but is not the guilt incurred as much by the intent as if never so much acted? Why children are hurried off, and old reprobates of a hundred left, whose trial humanly we may think was complete at fifty, is among the obscurities of providence, The very notion of a state of probation has darkness in it. The All-knower has no need of satisfying his eyes by seeing what we will do, when he knows before what we will do. Methinks we might be condemned before commission. In these things we grope and flounder; and if we can pick up a little human comfort that the child taken is s.n.a.t.c.hed from vice (no great compliment to it, by the by), let us take it. And as to where an untried child goes, whether to join the a.s.sembly of its elders who have borne the heat of the day,--fire-purified martyrs and torment-sifted confessors,--what know we? We promise heaven, methinks, too cheaply, and a.s.sign large revenues to minors incompetent to manage them. Epitaphs run upon this topic of consolation till the very frequency induces a cheapness. Tickets for admission into paradise are sculptured out a penny a letter, twopence a syllable, etc. It is all a mystery; and the more I try to express my meaning (having none that is clear), the more I flounder. Finally, write what your own conscience, which to you is the unerring judge, deems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our heart's desire. Taylor has dropped the "London." It was indeed a dead weight. It had got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand, like Christian, with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and everything that is bad. Both our kind _remembrances_ to Mrs. K. and yourself, and strangers'-greeting to Lucy,--is it Lucy, or Ruth?--that gathers wise sayings in a Book.

C. LAMB.

XC.

TO SOUTHEY.

_August_ 19, 1825.

Dear Southey,--You'll know whom this letter comes from by opening slap-dash upon the text, as in the good old times. I never could come into the custom of envelopes,--'tis a modern foppery; the Plinian correspondence gives no hint of such. In singleness of sheet and meaning, then, I thank you for your little book. I am ashamed to add a codicil of thanks for your "Book of the Church." I scarce feel competent to give an opinion of the latter; I have not reading enough of that kind to venture at it. I can only say the fact, that I have read it with attention and interest. Being, as you know, not quite a Churchman, I felt a jealousy at the Church taking to herself the whole deserts of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, from Druid extirpation downwards.

I call all good Christians the Church. Capillarians and all. But I am in too light a humor to touch these matters. May all our churches flourish!

Two things staggered me in the poem (and one of them staggered both of as): I cannot away with a beautiful series of verses, as I protest they are, commencing "Jenner," 'Tis like a choice banquet opened with a pill or an electuary,--physic stuff. T'other is, we cannot make out how Edith should be no more than ten years old. By 'r Lady, we had taken her to be some sixteen or upwards. We suppose you have only chosen the round number for the metre. Or poem and dedication may be both older than they pretend to,--but then some hint might have been given; for, as it stands, it may only serve some day to puzzle the parish reckoning. But without inquiring further (for 'tis ungracious to look into a lady's years), the dedication is eminently pleasing and tender, and we wish Edith May Southey joy of it. Something, too, struck us as if we had heard of the death of John May. A John May's death was a few years since in the papers. We think the tale one of the quietest, prettiest things we have seen. You have been temperate in the use of localities, which generally spoil poems laid in exotic regions. You mostly cannot stir out (in such things) for humming-birds and fireflies. A tree is a Magnolia, etc.--Can I but like the truly Catholic spirit? "Blame as thou mayest the Papist's erring creed,"--which and other pa.s.sages brought me back to the old Anthology days and the admonitory lesson to "Dear George" on "The Vesper Bell," a little poem which retains its first hold upon me strangely.

The compliment to the translatress is daintily conceived. Nothing is choicer in that sort of writing than to bring in some remote, impossible parallel,--as between a great empress and the in.o.btrusive, quiet soul who digged her noiseless way so perseveringly through that rugged Paraguay mine. How she Dobrizhoffered it all out, it puzzles my slender Latinity to conjecture. Why do you seem to sanction Landor's unfeeling allegorizing away of honest Quixote? He may as well say Strap is meant to symbolize the Scottish nation before the Union, and Random since that Act of dubious issue; or that Partridge means the Mystical Man, and Lady Bellaston typifies the Woman upon Many Waters. Gebir, indeed, may mean the state of the hop markets last month, for anything I know to the contrary. That all Spain overflowed with romancical books (as Madge Newcastle calls them) was no reason that Cervantes should not smile at the matter of them; nor even a reason that, in another mood, he might not multiply them, deeply as he was tinctured with the essence of them.

Quixote is the father of gentle ridicule, and at the same time the very depository and treasury of chivalry and highest notions. Marry, when somebody persuaded Cervantes that he meant only fun, and put him upon writing that unfortunate Second Part, with the confederacies of that unworthy duke and most contemptible d.u.c.h.ess, Cervantes sacrificed his instinct to his understanding.

We got your little book but last night, being at Enfield, to which place we came about a month since, and are having quiet holidays. Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days, and I my twenty on others. 'T is all holiday with me now, you know; the change works admirably.

For literary news, in my poor way, I have a one-act farce [1] going to be acted at Haymarket; but when? is the question, 'Tis an extravaganza, and like enough to follow "Mr. H." "The London Magazine" has shifted its publishers once more, and I shall shift myself out of it. It is fallen.

My ambition is not at present higher than to write nonsense for the playhouses, to eke out a something contracted income. _Tempus erat_.

There was a time, my dear Cornwallis, when the muse, etc. But I am now in Mac Flecknoe's predicament,--

"Promised a play, and dwindled to a farce." Coleridge is better (was, at least, a few weeks since) than he has been for years. His accomplishing his book at last has been a source of vigor to him. We are on a half visit to his friend Allsop, at a Mrs. Leishman's, Enfield, but expect to be at Colebrooke Cottage in a week or so, where, or anywhere, I shall be always most happy to receive tidings from you. G. Dyer is in the height of an uxorious paradise. His honeymoon will not wane till he wax cold.

Never was a more happy pair, since Acme and Septimius, and longer.

Farewell, with many thanks, dear S. Our loves to all round your Wrekin.

Your old friend,

C. LAMB.

[1] Probably "The p.a.w.nbroker's Daughter," which happily was not destined to be performed.--AINGER.

XCI.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

_March_ 20, 1826.

Dear B. B.,--You may know my letters by the paper and the folding. For the former, I live on sc.r.a.ps obtained in charity from an old friend, whose stationery is a permanent perquisite; for folding, I shall do it neatly when I learn to tie my neckcloths. I surprise most of my friends by writing to them on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pothooks and hangers. Sealing-wax I have none on my establishment; wafers of the coa.r.s.est bran supply its place. When my epistles come to be weighed with Pliny's, however superior to the Roman in delicate irony, judicious reflections, etc., his gilt post will bribe over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E. I. H. I never mended a pen; I now cut 'em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose-quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used to get for nothing. When Adam laid out his first penny upon nonpareils at some stall in Mesopotamos, I think it went hard with him, reflecting upon his old goodly orchard, where he had so many for nothing. When I write to a great man at the court end, he opens with surprise upon a naked note, such as Whitechapel people interchange, with no sweet degrees of envelope. I never enclosed one bit of paper in another, nor understood the rationale of it. Once only I sealed with borrowed wax, to set Walter Scott a-wondering, signed with the imperial quartered arms of England, which my friend Field bears in compliment to his descent, in the female line, from Oliver Cromwell.

It must have set his antiquarian curiosity upon watering. To your questions upon the currency, I refer you to Mr. Robinson's last speech, where, if you can find a solution, I cannot. I think this, though,--the best ministry we ever stumbled upon,--gin reduced four shillings in the gallon, wine two shillings in the quart! This comes home to men's minds and bosoms. My tirade against visitors was not meant _particularly_ at you or Anne Knight. I scarce know what I meant, for I do not just now feel the grievance. I wanted to make an _article_. So in another thing I talked of somebody's _insipid wife_ without a correspondent object in my head; and a good lady, a friend's wife, whom I really _love_ (don't startle, I mean in a licit way), has looked shyly on me ever since. The blunders of personal application are ludicrous. I send out a character every now and then on purpose to exercise the ingenuity of my friends.

"Popular Fallacies" will go on; that word "concluded" is an erratum, I suppose, for "continued." I do not know how it got stuffed in there. A little thing without name will also be printed on the Religion of the Actors; but it is out of your way, so I recommend you, with true author's hypocrisy, to skip it. We are about to sit down to roast beef, at which we could wish A. K., B. B., and B. B.'s pleasant daughter to be humble partakers. So much for my hint at visitors, which was scarcely calculated for droppers-in from Woodbridge; the sky does not drop such larks every day. My very kindest wishes to you all three, with my sister's best love.

C. LAMB.

XCII.

TO J. B. DIBDIN.

_June_, 1826.

Dear D.,--My first impulse upon seeing your letter was pleasure at seeing your old neat hand, nine parts gentlemanly, with a modest dash of the clerical; my second, a thought natural enough this hot weather: Am I to answer all this? Why, 't is as long as those to the Ephesians and Galatians put together: I have counted the words, for curiosity.... I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man. Your fair critic in the coach reminds me of a Scotchman, who a.s.sured me he did not see much in Shakspeare. I replied, I daresay _not_. He felt the equivoke, looked awkward and reddish, but soon returned to the attack by saying that he thought Burns was as good as Shakspeare. I said that I had no doubt he was,--to a _Scotchman_. We exchanged no more words that day.... Let me hear that you have clambered up to Lover's Seat; it is as fine in that neighborhood as Juan Fernandez,--as lonely, too, when the fishing-boats are not out; I have sat for hours staring upon a shipless sea. The salt sea is never as grand as when it is left to itself. One c.o.c.k-boat spoils it; a seamew or two improves it. And go to the little church, which is a very Protestant Loretto, and seems dropped by some angel for the use of a hermit who was at once parishioner and a whole parish. It is not too big. Go in the night, bring it away in your portmanteau, and I will plant it in my garden. It must have been erected, in the very infancy of British Christianity, for the two or three first converts, yet with all the appurtenances of a church of the first magnitude,--its pulpit, its pews, its baptismal font; a cathedral in a nutsh.e.l.l. The minister that divides the Word there must give lumping pennyworths. It is built to the text of "two or three a.s.sembled in my name." It reminds me of the grain of mustard-seed. If the glebe land is proportionate, it may yield two potatoes. t.i.thes out of it could be no more split than a hair. Its First fruits must be its Last, for 't would never produce a couple. It is truly the strait and narrow way, and few there be (of London visitants) that find it. The still small voice is surely to be found there, if anywhere. A sounding-board is merely there for ceremony. It is secure from earthquakes, not more from sanct.i.ty than size, for't would feel a mountain thrown upon it no more than a taper-worm would. _Go and see, but not without your spectacles_.

XCIII.

TO HENRY CRABB ROBINSON.

_January_ 20, 1827.

Dear Robinson,--I called upon you this morning, and found that you had gone to visit a dying friend. I had been upon a like errand. Poor Norris [1] has been lying dying for now almost a week,--such is the penalty we pay for having enjoyed a strong const.i.tution! Whether he knew me or not, I know not, or whether he saw me through his poor glazed eyes; but the group I saw about him I shall not forget. Upon the bed, or about it, were a.s.sembled his wife and two daughters, and poor deaf Richard, his son, looking doubly stupefied. There they were, and seemed to have been sitting all the week. I could only reach out a hand to Mrs.

Norris. Speaking was impossible in that mute chamber. By this time I hope it is all over with him. In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. He was my friend and my father's friend all the life I can remember.

I seem to have made foolish friendships ever since. Those are friendships which outlive a second generation. Old as I am waxing, in his eyes I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called me Charley. I have none to call me Charley now. He was the last link that bound me to the Temple. You are but of yesterday. In him seem to have died the old plainness of manners and singleness of heart. Letters he knew nothing of, nor did his reading extend beyond the pages of the "Gentleman's Magazine." Yet there was a pride of literature about him from being amongst books (he was librarian), and from some sc.r.a.ps of doubtful Latin which he had picked up in his office of entering students, that gave him very diverting airs of pedantry. Can I forget the erudite look with which, when he had been in vain trying to make out a black-letter text of Chaucer in the Temple Library, he laid it down and told me that "in those old books Charley, there is sometimes a deal of very indifferent spelling;" and seemed to console himself in the reflection! His jokes--for he had his jokes--are now ended; but they were old trusty perennials, staples that pleased after _decies repet.i.ta_, and were always as good as new. One song he had, which was reserved for the night of Christmas Day, which we always spent in the Temple. It was an old thing, and spoke of the flat-bottoms of our foes and the possibility of their coming over in darkness, and alluded to threats of an invasion many years blown over; and when he came to the part--

"We'll still make 'em run, and we'll still make 'em sweat, In spite of the devil and 'Brussels Gazette,'"--

his eyes would sparkle as with the freshness of an impending event. And what is the "Brussels Gazette" now? I cry while I enumerate these trifles. "How shall we tell them in a stranger's ear?" His poor good girls will now have to receive their afflicted mother in an inaccessible hovel in an obscure village in Herts, where they have been long struggling to make a school without effect; and poor deaf Richard--and the more helpless for being so--is thrown on the wide world.

My first motive in writing, and, indeed, in calling on you, was to ask if you were enough acquainted with any of the Benchers to lay a plain statement before them of the circ.u.mstances of the family. I almost fear not, for you are of another hall. But if you can oblige me and my poor friend, who is now insensible to any favors, pray exert yourself.

You cannot say too much good of poor Norris and his poor wife.

Yours ever,

CHARLES LAMB.

[1] Randal Norris, sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple, an early friend of the Lambs.

XCIV.

TO PETER GEORGE PATMORE.