The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume IV Part 88

Page 120. _Song for the C----n_.

_The Champion_, July 15 and 16, 1820. Reprinted in _The Poetical Recreations of "The Champion,"_ 1822.

A song for the Coronation, which was fixed for 1821. Queen Caroline returned to England in June, 1820, staying with Alderman Wood (see page 361) in order to be on the spot against that event. Meanwhile the divorce proceedings began, but were eventually withdrawn. Caroline made a forcible effort to be present at the Coronation, on July 29, 1821, but was repulsed at the Abbey door. She was taken ill the next day and died on August 7. "Roy's Wife of Aldivalloch" is the Scotch song by Anne Grant.

Page 120. _The Unbeloved_.

_The Champion_, September 23 and 24, 1820. Reprinted in _The Poetical Recreations of "The Champion,"_ 1822. In _The Champion_ the last line was preceded by

Place-and-heiress-hunting elf,

the reference to heiress-hunting touching upon Canning's marriage to Miss Joan Scott, a sister of the d.u.c.h.ess of Portland, who brought him 100,000.

Line 4. _C----gh_. Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh and second Marquis of Londonderry (1769-1822), Foreign Secretary from 1812 until his death. He committed suicide in a state of unsound mind.

Line 6. _The Doctor_. This was the nickname commonly given to Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth.

Line 8. _Their chatty, childish Chancellor_. John Scott, afterwards Earl of Eldon (1751-1838), the Lord Chancellor.

Line 9. _In Liverpool some virtues strike_. Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool (1770-1828), Prime Minister at the time, and therefore princ.i.p.al scapegoat for the Divorce Bill.

Line 10. _And little Van's beneath dislike_. Nicholas Vansittart, afterwards Baron Bexley (1766-1851), Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Line 12. _H----t_. Thomas Taylour, first Marquis of Headfort (1757-1829), the princ.i.p.al figure in a crim. con. case in 1804 when he was sued by a clergyman named Ma.s.sey and had to pay 10,000 damages.

Page 121. _On the Arrival in England of Lord Byron's Remains_.

From a MS. book of William Ayrton's. In _The New Times_, October 24, 1825, the verses followed the "Ode to the Treadmill." The epigram, which was unsigned, then ran thus:--

THE POETICAL CASK

With change of climate manners alter not: Transport a drunkard--he'll return a sot.

So lordly Juan, d----d to endless fame, Went out a _pickle_--and comes back the same.

Lord Byron's body had been brought home from Greece, for burial at Hucknall Torkard, in 1824, and the cause of the epigram was a paragraph in _The New Times_ of October 19, 1825, stating that the tub in which Byron's remains came home was exhibited by the captain of the _Rodney_ for 2s. 6d. a head; afterwards sold to a cooper in Whitechapel; resold to a museum; and finally sold again to a cooper in Middle New Street, who was at that time using it as an advertis.e.m.e.nt.

The third line recalls Pope's line--

See Cromwell d.a.m.n'd to everlasting fame.

_Essay on Man_, IV., 284.

Page 121. _Lines Suggested by a Sight of Waltham Cross._

First printed in the _Englishman's Magazine_, September, 1831. Lamb sent the epigram to Barton in a letter in November, 1827. The body of Caroline of Brunswick, the rejected wife of George IV., was conveyed through London only by force--involving a fatal affray between the people and the Life Guards at Hyde Park corner--on its way to burial at Brunswick.

Page 122. _For the "Table Book."_

This epigram accompanies a note to William Hone. It was marked "For the _Table Book_," but does not seem to have been printed there.

Page 122. _The Royal Wonders._

_The Times_, August 10, 1830. Signed Charles Lamb. The epigram refers to the Paris insurrection of July 26, 1830, which cost Charles X. his throne; and, at home, to William IV.'s extreme fraternal friendliness to his subjects.

Page 122. _Brevis Esse Laboro._ "One Dip."

Page 123. _Suum Cuique._

These epigrams were written for the sons of James Augustus Hessey, the publisher, two Merchant Taylor boys. In _The Taylorian_ for March, 1884, the magazine of the Merchant Taylors' School, the late Archdeacon Hessey, one of the boys in question, told the story of their authorship.

It was a custom many years ago for Election Day at Merchant Taylors'

School to be marked by the recitation of original epigrams in Greek, Latin and English, which, although the boys themselves were usually the authors, might also be the work of other hands. Archdeacon Hessey and his brother, as the following pa.s.sage explains, resorted to Charles Lamb for a.s.sistance:--

The subjects for 1830 were _Suum Cuique_ and _Brevis esse latoro_.

After some three or four exercise nights I confess that I was literally "at my wits' end." But a brilliant idea struck me. I had frequently, boy as I was, seen Charles Lamb (Elia) at my father's house, and once, in 1825 or 1826, I had been taken to have tea with him and his sister, Mary Lamb, at their little house, Colebrook Cottage, a whitish-brown tenement, standing by itself, close to the New River, at Islington. He was very kind, as he always was to young people, and very quaint. I told him that I had devoured his "Roast Pig;" he congratulated me on possessing a thorough schoolboy's appet.i.te. And he was pleased when I mentioned my having seen the boys at Christ's Hospital at their public suppers, which then took place on the Sunday evenings in Lent. "Could this good-natured and humorous old gentleman be prevailed upon to give me an Epigram?" "I don't know," said my father, to whom I put the question, "but I will ask him at any rate, and send him the mottoes." In a day or two there arrived from Enfield, to which Lamb had removed some time in 1827, not one, but two epigrams, one on each subject. That on _Suum Cuique_ was in Latin, and was suggested by the grim satisfaction which had recently been expressed by the public at the capture and execution of some notorious highwayman. That on _Brevis esse laboro_ was in English, and might have represented an adventure which had befallen Lamb himself, for he stammered frequently, though he was not so grievous a _Balbulus_ as his friend George Darley, whom I had also often seen. I need scarcely say that the two Epigrams were highly appreciated, and that my brother and myself, for I gave my brother one of them, were objects of envy to our schoolfellows.

The death of George IV., however, prevented their being recited on the occasion for which they were written.

"_Suum Cuique_," which was signed F. Hessey, was thus translated by its presumptive author:--

A thief, on dreary Bagshot's heath well known, Was fond of making others' goods his own; _Meum_ was never thought of, nor was _Tuum_, But everything with him was counted _Suum_.

At length each gets his own, and no one grieves; The rope his neck, Jack Ketch his clothes receives: His body to dissecting knife has gone; Himself to Orcus: well--each gets his own.

The English epigram, which was signed J.A. Hessey, was a rhyming version of a story which Lamb was fond of telling. Three, at least, of his friends relate the story in their recollections of him: Mrs. Mathews in her life of her husband; Leigh Hunt in _The Companion_; and De Quincey in _Fraser's Magazine_. The incident possibly occurred to Lamb when as a boy--or little more--he stayed at Margate about 1790. Lamb must have written Merchant Taylors' epigrams before, for in 1803, in a letter to G.o.dwin about writing to order, he speaks of having undertaken, three or four times, a schoolboy copy of verses for Merchant Taylors' boys at a guinea a copy, and refers to the trouble and vexation the work was to him.

Writing to Southey on May 10, 1830, Lamb said, at the end:--"Perhaps an epigram (not a very happy-gram) I did for a school-boy yesterday may amuse. I pray Jove he may not get a flogging for any false quant.i.ty; but 'tis, with one exception, the only Latin verses I have made for forty years, and I did it 'to order.'

"CUIQUE SUUM

"Adsciscit sibi divitias et opes alienas Fur, rapiens, spolians quod mihi, quod-que tibi, Proprium erat, temnens haec verba, meum-que tuum-que Omne suum est: tandem Cui-que Suum tribuit.

Dat resti collum; restes, vah! carnifici dat; Sese Diabolo, sic bene; Cuique Suum."

Page 123. _On "The Literary Gazette"_.

_The Examiner_, August 22, 1830. This epigram, consisting only of the first four lines, slightly altered, and headed "Rejected Epigrams, 6"-evidently torn from a paper containing a number of verses (the figure 7 is just visible underneath it)--is in the British Museum among the letters left by Vincent Novello. It is inscribed, "In handwriting of Mr.

Charles Lamb." The same collection contains a copy, in Mrs. Cowden Clarke's handwriting, of the sonnet to Mrs. Jane Towers (see page 50).