The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume II Part 46

Page 217, line 22. _Glover ... Leonidas_. Richard Glover (1712-1785), the poet, author of _Leonidas_, 1737. I cannot find that he ever lived at Westbourne Green.

Page 218, foot. _The old ballad_. The old ballad "Waly, Waly." This was among the poems copied by Lamb into Miss Isola's Extract Book.

Page 219, line 8. _Tibbs, and Bobadil_. Beau Tibbs in Goldsmith's "Citizen of the World," and Bobadil in Ben Jonson's "Every Man in His Humour."

Page 219. THE SUPERANNUATED MAN.

_London Magazine_, May, 1825.

Except that Lamb has disguised his real employment, this essay is practically a record of fact. After thirty-three years of service at the East India House he went home "for ever" on Tuesday, March 29, 1825, with a pension of 441, or two-thirds of his regular salary, less a small annual deduction as a provision for his sister. At a Court of Directors held on that day this minute was drawn up: "Resolved that the resignation of Mr. Charles Lamb, of the Accountant General's office, on account of certified ill health, be accepted, and it appearing that he has served the Company faithfully for 33 years, and is now in receipt of an income of 730 per annum, he be allowed a pension of 450 ... to commence from this day." Lamb's letters to Wordsworth, April 6, 1825, to Barton, the same date, and to Miss Hutchinson, a little later, all tell the story. This is how Lamb put it to Barton:--

"DEAR B.B.--My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent emanc.i.p.ation, 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 4 o'clock.

"I came home for ever!...

"I went and sat among 'em all at my old 33 years desk yester morning; and deuce take me if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry sociable lads, at leaving them in the Lurch, f.a.g, f.a.g, f.a.g.

"I would not serve another 7 years for seven hundred thousand pound."

To Miss Hutchinson Lamb said; "I would not go back to my prison for seven years longer for 10000 a year."

In the _London Magazine_ the essay was divided into two parts, with the two quotations now at the head apportioned each to one part.

Part II. began at "A fortnight has pa.s.sed," on page 224. The essay was signed "J.D.," whose address was given as "Beaufort-terrace, Regent-street; late of Ironmonger-court, Fenchurch-street."

Page 220, line 3. _Recreation_. At "recreation," in the _London Magazine_, came the footnote:--

"Our ancestors, the n.o.ble old Puritans of Cromwell's day, could distinguish between a day of religious rest and a day of recreation; and while they exacted a rigorous abstinence from all amus.e.m.e.nts (even to the walking out of nursery maids with their little charges in the fields) upon the Sabbath; in the lieu of the superst.i.tious observance of the Saints days, which they abrogated, they humanely gave to the apprentices, and poorer sort of people, every alternate Thursday for a day of entire sport and recreation.

A strain of piety and policy to be commended above the profane mockery of the Stuarts and their Book of Sports."

Lamb had said the same thing to Barton in a letter in the spring, 1824, referring there to "Southey's book" as his authority--this being _The Book of the Church_, 1824.

Page 220, line 25. _Native ... Hertfordshire_. This was a slight exaggeration. Lamb was London born and bred. But Hertfordshire was his mother and grandmother's county, and all his love of the open air was centred there (see the essay on "Mackery End").

Page 221, line 1. _My health_. Lamb had really been seriously unwell for some time, as the _Letters_ tell us.

Page 221, line 6. _I was fifty_. Lamb was fifty on February 10, 1825.

Page 231, line 7. _I had grown to my desk_. In his first letter to Barton (September 11, 1822) Lamb wrote: "I am like you a prisoner to the desk. I have been chained to that galley thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood." Again, to Wordsworth: "I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my breast against this thorn of a Desk."

Page 222, line 7. _Boldero, Merryweather ..._ Feigned names of course.

It was Boldero that Lamb once pretended was Leigh Hunt's true name.

And in his fict.i.tious biography of Liston (Vol. I.) Liston's mother was said to have been a Miss Merryweather. In Lamb's early city days there was a banking firm in Cornhill, called Boldero, Adey, Lushington & Boldero.

Page 222, line 12 from foot. _I could walk it away_. Writing to Wordsworth in March, 1822, concerning the possibility of being pensioned off, Lamb had said:--"I had thought in a green old age (O green thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End--emblematic name--how beautiful! in the Ware road, there to have made up my accounts with heaven and the Company, toddling about between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching on some fine Izaac Walton morning, to Hoddsdon or Amwell, careless as a Beggar, but walking walking ever till I fairly walkd myself off my legs, dying walking."

And again, writing to Southey after the emanc.i.p.ation, he says (August, 1825): "Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days, and I twenty on others. 'Tis all holiday with me now, you know."

Page 224, line 9. _Ch----_. John Chambers, son of the Rev. Thomas Chambers, Vicar of Radway-Edgehill, Warwickshire, and an old Christ's Hospitaller, to whom Lamb wrote the famous letter on India House society, printed in the _Letters_, Canon Ainger's edition, under December, 1818. John Chambers lived until 1872, and had many stories of Lamb.

Page 224, line 9. _Do----_. Probably Henry Dodwell, to whom Lamb wrote the letters of July, 1816, from Calne, and that of October 7, 1827, thanking him for a gift of a sucking pig. But there seems (see the letter to Chambers above referred to) to have been also a clerk named Dowley. It was Dodwell who annoyed Lamb by reading _The Times_ till twelve o'clock every morning.

Page 224, line 10. _Pl----_. According to the late H.G. Bohn's notes on Chambers' letter, this was W.D. Plumley.

Page 224, line 18. My "_works_." See note to the preface to the _Last Essays of Elia_. The old India House ledgers of Lamb's day are no longer in existence, but a copy of Booth's _Tables of Interest_ is preserved, with some mock notices from the press on the fly-leaves in Lamb's hand. Lamb's portrait by Meyer was bought for the India Office in 1902.

Page 224, line 12 from foot. _My own master_. As a matter of fact Lamb found the time rather heavy on his hands now and then; and he took to searching for beauties in the Garrick plays in the British Museum as a refuge. The Elgin marbles were moved there in 1816.

Page 225, line 16 from foot. _And what is it all for_? At these words, in the _London Magazine_, came the pa.s.sage:--

"I recite those verses of Cowley, which so mightily agree with my const.i.tution.

"Business! the frivolous pretence Of human l.u.s.ts to shake off innocence: Business! the grave impertinence: Business! the thing which I of all things hate: Business! the contradiction of my fate.

"Or I repeat my own lines, written in my Clerk state:--

"Who first invented work--and bound the free And holyday-rejoicing spirit down To the ever-haunting importunity Of business, in the green fields, and the town-- To plough, loom, anvil, spade--and oh! most sad, To this dry drudgery of the desk's dead wood?

Who but the Being unblest, alien from good, Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings, That round and round incalculably reel-- For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel-- In that red realm from whence are no returnings; Where toiling, and turmoiling, ever and aye He, and his thoughts, keep pensive worky-day!

"O this divine Leisure!--Reader, if thou art furnished with the Old Series of the London, turn incontinently to the third volume (page 367), and you will see my present condition there touched in a 'Wish' by a daintier pen than I can pretend to. I subscribe to that Sonnet _toto corde_."

The sonnet referred to, beginning--

They talk of time and of time's galling yoke,

will be found quoted above, in the notes to "New Year's Eve." It was, of course, by Lamb himself. To the other sonnet he gave the t.i.tle "Work" (see Vol. IV.). Cowley's lines are from "The Complaint."

Page 225, line 14 from foot. _NOTHING-TO-DO_. Lamb wrote to Barton in 1827: "Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps--good works."

Page 226. THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING.

_New Monthly Magazine_, March, 1826, where it was one of the Popular Fallacies, under the t.i.tle, "That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are models of the Genteel Style in Writing.--We should prefer saying--of the Lordly and the Gentlemanly. Nothing," &c.

Page 226, beginning. _My Lord Shaftesbury_, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the grandson of the great statesman, and the author of the _Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times_, 1711, and other less known works. In the essay "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading" Lamb says, "Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me."

Page 226, beginning. _Sir William Temple._ Sir William Temple (1628-1699), diplomatist and man of letters, the patron of Swift, and the husband of the letter-writing Dorothy Osborne. His first diplomatic mission was in 1665, to Christopher Bernard von Glialen, the prince-bishop of Munster, who grew the northern cherries (see page 228). Afterwards he was accredited to Brussels and the Hague, and subsequently became English Amba.s.sador at the Hague. He was recalled in 1670, and spent the time between then and 1674, when he returned, in adding to his garden at Sheen, near Richmond, and in literary pursuits. He re-entered active political life in 1674, but retired again in 1680, and moved to an estate near Farnham; which he named Moor Park, laid out in the Dutch style, and made famous for its wall fruit. Hither Swift came, as amanuensis, in 1689, and he was there, with intervals of absence, in 1699, when Temple died, "and with him,"

Swift wrote in his _Diary_, "all that was good and amiable among men."

He was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his heart, by his special wish, was placed in a silver casket under the sun-dial at Moor Park, near his favourite window seat.