The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume VI Part 21

[Again I do not identify the kind little poem. It may have been a trifle enclosed in a letter, which Barton did not print and Lamb destroyed.]

LETTER 337

CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH India-House, 9th Dec., 1823.

(If I had time I would go over this letter again, and dot all my i's.)

Dear Sir,--I should have thanked you for your Books and Compliments sooner, but have been waiting for a revise to be sent, which does not come, tho' I returned the proof on the receit of your letter. I have read Warner with great pleasure. What an elaborate piece of alliteration and ant.i.thesis! why it must have been a labour far above the most difficult versification. There is a fine simile of or picture of Semiramis arming to repel a siege. I do not mean to keep the Book, for I suspect you are forming a curious collection, and I do not pretend to any thing of the kind. I have not a Blackletter Book among mine, old Chaucer excepted, and am not Bibliomanist enough to like Blackletter. It is painful to read. Therefore I must insist on returning it at opportunity, not from contumacity and reluctance to be oblig'd, but because it must suit you better than me. The loss of a present _from_ should never exceed the gain of a present _to_. I hold this maxim infallible in the accepting Line. I read your Magazines with satisfaction. I throughly agree with you as to the German Faust, as far [as] I can do justice to it from an English translation. 'Tis a disagreeable canting tale of Seduction, which has nothing to do with the Spirit of Faustus-- Curiosity. Was the dark secret to be explored to end in the seducing of a weak girl, which might have been accomplished by earthly agency? When Marlow gives _his_ Faustus a mistress, he flies him at Helen, flower of Greece, to be sure, and not at Miss Betsy, or Miss Sally Thoughtless.

"Cut is the branch that bore the goodly fruit, And wither'd is Apollo's laurel tree: Faustus is dead."

What a n.o.ble natural transition from metaphor to plain speaking! as if the figurative had flagged in description of such a Loss, and was reduced to tell the fact simply.--

I must now thank you for your very kind invitation. It is not out of prospect that I may see Manchester some day, and then I will avail myself of your kindness. But Holydays are scarce things with me, and the Laws of attendance are getting stronger and stronger at Leadenhall. But I shall bear it in mind. Meantime something may (more probably) bring you to town, where I shall be happy to see you. I am always to be found (alas!) at my desk in the forepart of the day.

I wonder why they do not send the revise. I leave late at office, and my abode lies out of the way, or I should have seen about it. If you are impatient, Perhaps a Line to the Printer, directing him to send it me, at Accountant's Office, may answer. You will see by the scrawl that I only s.n.a.t.c.h a few minutes from intermitting Business.

Your oblig. Ser., C. LAMB.

[William Harrison Ainsworth, afterwards to be known as a novelist, was then a solicitor's pupil at Manchester, aged 18. He had sent Lamb William Warner's _Syrinx; or, A Sevenfold History_, 1597. The book was a gift, and is now in the Dyce and Foster library at South Kensington.

Goethe's _Faust_. Lamb, as we have seen, had read the account of the play in Madame de Stael's _Germany_. He might also have read the translation by Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, 1823. Hayward's translation was not published till 1834. Goethe admired Lamb's sonnet on his family name.]

LETTER 338

CHARLES LAMB TO W. HARRISON AINSWORTH

[Dated at end: December 29 (1823).]

My dear Sir--You talk of months at a time and I know not what inducements to visit Manchester, Heaven knows how gratifying! but I have had my little month of 1823 already. It is all over, and without incurring a disagreeable favor I cannot so much as get a single holyday till the season returns with the next year. Even our half-hour's absences from office are set down in a Book! Next year, if I can spare a day or two of it, I will come to Manchester, but I have reasons at home against longer absences.--

I am so ill just at present--(an illness of my own procuring last night; who is Perfect?)--that nothing but your very great kindness could make me write. I will bear in mind the letter to W.W., you shall have it quite in time, before the 12.

My aking and confused Head warns me to leave off.--With a muddled sense of gratefulness, which I shall apprehend more clearly to-morrow, I remain, your friend unseen,

C.L.

I.H. 29th.

Will your occasions or inclination bring _you_ to London? It will give me great pleasure to show you every thing that Islington can boast, if you know the meaning of that very c.o.c.kney sound. We have the New River!

I am asham'd of this scrawl: but I beg you to accept it for the present.

I am full of qualms.

A fool at 50 is a fool indeed.

[W.W. was Wordsworth.

"A fool at 50 is a fool indeed." "A fool at forty is a fool indeed" was Young's line in Satire II. of the series on "Love of Fame." Lamb was nearing forty-nine.]

LETTER 339

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

[January 9, 1824.]

Dear B.B.--Do you know what it is to succ.u.mb under an insurmountable day mare--a wh.o.r.eson lethargy, Falstaff calls it--an indisposition to do any thing, or to be any thing--a total deadness and distaste--a suspension of vitality --an indifference to locality--a numb soporifical goodfornothingness--an ossification all over--an oyster-like insensibility to the pa.s.sing events--a mind-stupor,--a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience--did you ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to water gruel processes?--this has been for many weeks my lot, and my excuse--my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it is three and twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet--I have not a thing to say--nothing is of more importance than another--I am flatter than a denial or a pancake--emptier than Judge Park's wig when the head is in it--duller than a country stage when the actors are off it --a cypher--an O--I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest--I am weary of the world--Life is weary of me-- My day is gone into Twilight and I don't think it worth the expence of candles--my wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it--I inhale suffocation--I can't distinguish veal from mutton--nothing interests me--'tis 12 o'clock and Thurtell is just now coming out upon the New Drop--Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection-- if you told me the world will be at end tomorrow, I should just say, "will it?"--I have not volition enough to dot my i's --much less to comb my EYEBROWS--my eyes are set in my head--my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again-- my scull is a Grub street Attic, to let--not so much as a joint stool or a crackd jordan left in it--my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little when their heads are off-- O for a vigorous fit of gout, cholic, tooth ache--an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs--pain is life--the sharper, the more evidence of life--but this apathy, this death--did you ever have an obstinate cold, a six or seven weeks' unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and every thing--yet do I try all I can to cure it, I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quant.i.ties, but they all only seem to make me worse, instead of better--I sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find any visible amendment.

Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

It is just 15 minutes after 12. Thurtell is by this time a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps, Ketch is bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat, the Jew demurs at first at three half crowns, but on consideration that he, may get somewhat by showing 'em in the Town, finally closes.--

C.L.

["Judge Park's wig." Sir James Alan Park, of the Bench of Common Pleas, who tried Thurtell, the murderer of Mr. William Weare of Lyon's Inn, in Gill's Hill Lane, Radlett, on October 24, 1823.]

LETTER 340

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

[P.M. January 23, 1824.]

My dear Sir--That peevish letter of mine, which was meant to convey an apology for my incapacity to write, seems to have been taken by you in too serious a light. It was only my way of telling you I had a severe cold. The fact is I have been insuperably dull and lethargic for many weeks, and cannot rise to the vigour of a Letter, much less an Essay.

The London must do without me for a time, a time, and half a time, for I have lost all interest about it, and whether I shall recover it again I know not. I will bridle my pen another time, & not teaze and puzzle you with my aridities. I shall begin to feel a little more alive with the spring. Winter is to me (mild or harsh) always a great trial of the spirits. I am ashamed not to have noticed your tribute to Woolman, whom we love so much. It is done in your good manner. Your friend Taylor called upon me some time since, and seems a very amiable man. His last story is painfully fine. His Book I "like." It is only too stuft with scripture, too Parsonish. The best thing in it is the Boy's own story.

When I say it is too full of Scripture, I mean it is too full of direct quotations; no book can have too much of SILENT SCRIPTURE in it. But the natural power of a story is diminished when the uppermost purpose in the writer seems to be to recommend something else, viz Religion. You know what Horace says of the DEUS INTERSIT. I am not able to explain myself, you must do it for me.--

My Sister's part in the Leicester School (about two thirds) was purely her own; as it was (to the same quant.i.ty) in the Shakspeare Tales which bear my name. I wrote only the Witch Aunt, the first going to Church, and the final Story about a little Indian girl in a Ship.

Your account of my Black Balling amused me. _I think, as Quakers, they did right_. There are some things hard to be understood.

The more I think the more I am vexed at having puzzled you with that Letter, but I have been so out of Letter writing of late years, that it is a sore effort to sit down to it, & I felt in your debt, and sat down waywardly to pay you in bad money. Never mind my dulness, I am used to long intervals of it. The heavens seem bra.s.s to me--then again comes the refreshing shower. "I have been merry once or twice ere now."

You said something about Mr. Mitford in a late letter, which I believe I did not advert to. I shall be happy to show him my Milton (it is all the show things I have) at any time he will take the trouble of a jaunt to Islington. I do also hope to see Mr. Taylor there some day. Pray say so to both.

Coleridge's book is good part printed, but sticks a little for _more copy_. It bears an unsaleable t.i.tle--Extracts from Bishop Leighton--but I am confident there will be plenty of good notes in it, more of Bishop Coleridge than Leighton, I hope; for what is Leighton?

Do you trouble yourself about Libel cases? The Decision against Hunt for the "Vision of Judgment" made me sick. What is to become of the old talk about OUR GOOD OLD KING --his personal virtues saving us from a revolution &c. &c. Why, none that think it can utter it now. It must stink. And the Vision is really, as to Him-ward, such a tolerant good humour'd thing. What a wretched thing a Lord Chief Justice is, always was, & will be!