The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume V Part 89

You ask how Coleridge maintains himself. I know no more than you do.

Strange to say, I have seen him but once since he has been at Highgate, and then I met him in the street. I have just been reading your kind letter over again and find you had some doubt whether we had left the Temple entirely. It was merely a lodging we took to recruit our health and spirits. From the time we left Calne Charles drooped sadly, company became quite irksome, and his anxious desire to leave off smoking, and his utter inability to perform his daily resolutions against it, became quite a torment to him, so I prevailed with him to try the experiment of change of scene, and set out in one of the short stage coaches from Bishopsgate Street, Miss Brent and I, and we looked over all the little places within three miles and fixed on one quite countrified and not two miles from Sh.o.r.editch Church, and entered upon it the next day. I thought if we stayed but a week it would be a little rest and respite from our troubles, and we made a ten weeks stay, and very comfortable we were, so much so that if ever Charles is superannuated on a small pension, which is the great object of his ambition, and we felt our income straitened, I do think I could live in the country entirely--at least I thought so while I was there but since I have been at home I wish to live and die in the Temple where I was born. We left the trees so green it looked like early autumn, and can see but one leaf "The last of its clan" on our poor old Hare Court trees. What a rainy summer!--and yet I have been so much out of town and have made so much use of every fine day that I can hardly help thinking it has been a fine summer. We calculated we walked three hundred and fifty miles while we were in our country lodging. One thing I must tell you, Charles came round every morning to a shop near the Temple to get shaved. Last Sunday we had such a pleasant day, I must tell you of it. We went to Kew and saw the old Palace where the King was brought up, it was the pleasantest sight I ever saw, I can scarcely tell you why, but a charming old woman shewed it to us. She had lived twenty six years there and spoke with such a hearty love of our good old King, whom all the world seems to have forgotten, that it did me good to hear her. She was as proud in pointing out the plain furniture (and I am sure you are now sitting in a larger and better furnished room) of a small room in which the King always dined, nay more proud of the simplicity of her royal master's taste, than any shower of Carlton House can be in showing the fine things there, and so she was when she made us remark the smallness of one of the Princesses' bedrooms, and said she slept and also dressed in that little room. There are a great many good pictures but I was most pleased with one of the King when he was about two years old, such a pretty little white-headed boy.

I cannot express how much pleasure a letter from you gives us. If I could promise my self I should be always as well as I am now, I would say I will be a better correspondent in future. If Charles has time to add a line I shall be less ashamed to send this hasty scrawl. Love to all and every one. How much I should like once more to see Miss Wordsworth's handwriting, if she would but write a postscript to your next, which I look to receive in a few days.

Yours affectionately M. LAMB.

[_Charles Lamb adds at the head:_--]

Mary has barely left me room to say How d'ye. I have received back the Examiner containing the delicate enquiry into certain infirm parts of S.

T. C.'s character. What is the general opinion of it? Farewell. My love to all.

C. LAMB.

["Miss Brent." Mrs. Morgan's sister.

Crabb Robinson had been in the Lake Country in September and October.

"To a shop near the Temple." Possibly to Mr. A---- of Flower-de-Luce Court, mentioned by Lamb in the footnote to his essay "On the Melancholy of Tailors" (see Vol. I.).

"Our good old King"--George III., then in retirement. Carlton House was the home of the Regent, whom Lamb (and probably his sister) detested--as his "Triumph of the Whale" and other squibs (see Vol. IV.) show.

Here should come a letter to Rickman, dated December 30, 1816. The chief news in it is that George Dyer has been made one of Lord Stanhope's ten Residuary Legatees. This, says Lamb, will settle Dyer's fate: he will have to throw his dirty glove at some one and marry.]

LETTER 234

MARY LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON [No date. ? Late 1816.]

My dear Miss Hutchinson, I had intended to write you a long letter, but as my frank is dated I must send it off with a bare acknowledgment of the receipt of your kind letter. One question I must hastily ask you. Do you think Mr. Wordsworth would have any reluctance to write (strongly recommending to their patronage) to any of his rich friends in London to solicit employment for Miss Betham as a Miniature Painter? If you give me hopes that he will not be averse to do this, I will write to you more fully stating the infinite good he would do by performing so irksome a task as I know asking favours to be. In brief, she has contracted debts for printing her beautiful poem of "Marie," which like all things of original excellence does not sell at all.

These debts have led to little accidents unbecoming a woman and a poetess to suffer. Retirement with such should be voluntary.

[_Charles Lamb adds:_--]

The Bell rings. I just s.n.a.t.c.h the Pen out of my sister's hand to finish rapidly. Wordsw'th. may tell De Q that Miss B's price for a Virgin and Child is three guineas.

Yours (all of you) ever C. L.

["De Q"--Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), the "opium-eater," then living at Grasmere. Lamb and De Quincey had first met in 1804; but it was not until 1821 that they became really intimate, when Lamb introduced him to the _London Magazine_.

Miss Betham painted miniature portraits, among others, of Mrs. S. T.

Coleridge and Sara Coleridge.

Here should come a note to William Ayrton dated April 18, 1817, thanking him for much pleasure at "Don Giovanni" (see note to next letter).

Somewhen in 1816 should come a letter from Lamb to Leigh Hunt on the publication of _The Story of Rimini_, mentioned in _Leigh Hunt's Correspondence_, of which this is the only sentence that is preserved: "The third Canto is in particular my favourite: we congratulate you most sincerely on the trait [? taste] of your prison fruit."]

LETTER 235

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM AYRTON EPISTLE TO WILL'M. AYRTON ESQ'RE.

Temple, May 12, 1817.

My dear friend, Before I end,-- Have you any More orders for Don Giovanni To give Him that doth live Your faithful Zany?

Without raillery I mean Gallery Ones: For I am a person that shuns All ostentation And being at the top of the fashion; And seldom go to operas But in forma pauperis.

I go to the play In a very economical sort of a way, Rather to see Than be seen.

Though I'm no ill sight Neither, By candle-light, And in some kinds of weather.

You might pit me For height Against Kean; But in a grand tragic scene I'm nothing:-- It would create a kind of loathing To see me act Hamlet; There'd be many a d.a.m.n let Fly At my presumption If I should try, Being a fellow of no gumption.

By the way, tell me candidly how you relish This, which they call The lapidary style?

Opinions vary.

The late Mr. Mellish Could never abide it.

He thought it vile, And c.o.xcombical.

My friend the Poet Laureat, Who is a great lawyer at Anything comical, Was the first who tried it; But Mellish could never abide it.

But it signifies very little what Mellish said, Because he is dead.

For who can confute A body that's mute?-- Or who would fight With a senseless sprite?-- Or think of troubling An impenetrable old goblin That's dead and gone, And stiff as stone, To convince him with arguments pro and con, As if some live logician, Bred up at Merton, Or Mr. Hazlitt, the Metaphysician-- Hey, Mr. Ayrton!

With all your rare tone.

For tell me how should an apparition List to your call, Though you talk'd for ever,-- Ever so clever, When his ear itself, By which he must hear, or not hear at all, Is laid on the shelf?

Or put the case (For more grace) It were a female spectre-- Now could you expect her To take much gust In long speeches, With her tongue as dry as dust, In a sandy place, Where no peaches, Nor lemons, nor limes, nor oranges hang, To drop on the drought of an arid harangue, Or quench, With their sweet drench, The fiery pangs which the worms inflict, With their endless nibblings, Like quibblings, Which the corpse may dislike, but can ne'er contradict-- Hey, Mr. Ayrton?

With all your rare tone-- I am.

C. LAMB.

[The text is from Ayrton's transcript in a private volume lately in the possession of Mr. Edward Ayrton, lettered _Lamb's Works_, Vol. III., uniform with the 1818 edition.

William Ayrton (1777-1858), a friend and neighbour of the Burneys, and a member of Lamb's whist-playing set, was a musical critic, and at this time director of the King's Theatre in the Haymarket, where he had just produced Mozart's "Don Giovanni." His wife was Marianne Arnold, sister of Samuel James Arnold, manager of the Lyceum Theatre.

"You might pit me for height against Kean." This was so. Edmund Kean was small in stature, though not so "immaterially" built as Lamb is said to have been.

"Mr. Mellish." Possibly the Joseph Charles Mellish who translated Schiller.

The Laureate, Southey, had first tried the lapidary style in "Gooseberry Pie"; later, without rhymes, in "Thalaba."

Some time in the intervening three months before the next letter the Lambs went to Brighton for their holiday.]

LETTER 236