The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume VI Part 19

I rejoyce that you forgive my long silence. I continue to estimate my own-roof comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger! My garden thrives (I am told) tho' I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny sallad, and withered carrots. But a garden's a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.

Somehow I cannot relish that word Horkey. Cannot you supply it by circ.u.mlocution, and direct the reader by a note to explain that it means the Horkey. But Horkey choaks me in the Text. It raises crowds of mean a.s.sociations, Hawking and sp-----g, Gauky, Stalky, Maukin. The sound is every thing, in such dulcet modulations 'specially. I like

Gilbert Meldrum's sterner tones,

without knowing who Gilbert Meldrum is. You have slipt in your rhymes as if they grew there, so natural-artificially, or artificial-naturally.

There's a vile phrase.

Do you go on with your Quaker Sonnets--[to] have 'em ready with Southey's Book of the Church? I meditate a letter to S. in the London, which perhaps will meet the fate of the Sonnet.

Excuse my brevity, for I write painfully at office, liable to 100 callings off. And I can never sit down to an epistle elsewhere. I read or walk. If you return this letter to the Post Office, I think they will return 4d, seeing it is but half a one. Believe me tho' entirely yours C.L.

[Barton's "Verses to the Memory of Bloomfield, the Suffolk Poet" (who died in August, 1823), were printed in book form in his Poetic Vigils, 1824. This is the stanza that Lamb most liked:--

It is not quaint and local terms Besprinkled o'er thy rustic lay, Though well such dialect confirms Its power unletter'd minds to sway, It is not _these_ that most display Thy sweetest charms, thy gentlest thrall,-- Words, phrases, fashions, pa.s.s away, But TRUTH and NATURE live through all.

The stanza referring to Byron was not reprinted, nor was the word Horkey, which means Harvest Home in Suffolk. Gilbert Meldrum is a character in one of Bloomfield's _Rural Tales_.

"Quaker Sonnets." Barton did not carry out this project. Southey's _Book of the Church_ was published in 1824.

"I meditate a letter to S." The "Letter of Elia to Mr. Southey" was published in the _London Magazine_ for October, 1823.]

LETTER 330

(_Fragment_)

CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES LLOYD

[No date. Autumn, 1823.]

Your lines are not to be understood reading on one leg. They are _sinuous_, and to be won with wrestling. I a.s.sure you in sincerity that nothing you have done has given me greater satisfaction. Your obscurity, where you are dark, which is seldom, is that of too much meaning, not the painful obscurity which no toil of the reader can dissipate; not the dead vacuum and floundering place in which imagination finds no footing; it is not the dimness of positive darkness, but of distance; and he that reads and not discerns must get a better pair of spectacles. I admire every piece in the collection; I cannot say the first is best; when I do so, the last read rises up in judgment. To your Mother--to your Sister--to Mary dead--they are all weighty with thought and tender with sentiment. Your poetry is like no other:--those cursed Dryads and Pagan trumperies of modern verse have put me out of conceit of the very name of poetry. Your verses are as good and as wholesome as prose; and I have made a sad blunder if I do not leave you with an impression that your present is rarely valued.

CHARLES LAMB.

[This sc.r.a.p is in _Selections from the Poems and Letters of Bernard Barton_, 1849, edited by Edward FitzGerald and Lucy Barton. Lloyd says: "I had a very ample testimony from C. Lamb to the character of my last little volume. I will transcribe to you what he says, as it is but a note, and his manner is always so original, that I am sure the introduction of the merest trifle from his pen will well compensate for the absence of anything of mine." The volume was _Poems_, 1823, one of the chief of which was "Stanzas on the Difficulty with which, in Youth, we Bring Home to our Habitual Consciousness, the Idea of Death," to which Lloyd appended the following sentence from Elia's essay on "New Year's Eve," as motto: "Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June, we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December."]

LETTER 331

CHARLES LAMB TO REV. H.F. CARY

India Office, 14th Oct., 1823.

Dear Sir,--If convenient, will you give us house room on Sat.u.r.day next?

I can sleep anywhere. If another Sunday suit you better, pray let me know. We were talking of Roast _Shoulder_ of Mutton with onion sauce; but I scorn to prescribe to the hospitalities of mine host.

With respects to Mrs. C., yours truly, C. LAMB.

LETTER 332

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP

[No date. ?Oct., 1823.]

Dear Sir--Mary has got a cold, and the nights are dreadful; but at the first indication of Spring (_alias_ the first dry weather in Nov'r early) it is our intention to surprise you early some even'g.

Believe me, most truly yours,

C.L.

The Cottage, Sat.u.r.day night.

Mary regrets very much Mrs. Allsop's fruitless visit. It made her swear!

She was gone to visit Miss Hutchins'n, whom she found OUT.

LETTER 333

CHARLES LAMB TO J.B. DIBDIN

[P.M. October 28, 1823.]

My dear Sir--Your Pig was a _picture_ of a pig, and your Picture a _pig_ of a picture. The former was delicious but evanescent, like a hearty fit of mirth, or the crackling of thorns under a pot; but the latter is an _idea_, and abideth. I never before saw swine upon sattin. And then that pretty strawy canopy about him! he seems to purr (rather than grunt) his satisfaction. Such a gentlemanlike porker too! Morland's are absolutely clowns to it. Who the deuce painted it?

I have ordered a little gilt shrine for it, and mean to wear it for a locket; a shirt-pig.

I admire the petty-toes shrouded in a veil of something, not _mud_, but that warm soft consistency with [? which] the dust takes in Elysium after a spring shower--it perfectly engloves them.

I cannot enough thank you and your country friend for the delicate double present--the Utile et Decorum--three times have I attempted to write this sentence and failed; which shows that I am not cut out for a pedant.

_Sir_

(as I say to Southey) will you come and see us at our poor cottage of Colebrook to tea tomorrow evening, as early as six? I have some friends coming at that hour--

The panoply which covered your material pig shall be forthcoming-- The pig pictorial, with its trappings, domesticate with me.

Your greatly obliged

ELIA.

Tuesday.