The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume VI Part 60

[No date. ? January, 1829.]

Dear Dyer, My very good friend, and Charles Clarke's father in law, Vincent Novello, wishes to shake hands with you. Make him play you a tune. He is a d.a.m.n'd fine musician, and what is better, a good man and true. He will tell you how glad we should be to have Mrs. Dyer and you here for a few days. Our young friend, Miss Isola, has been here holydaymaking, but leaves us tomorrow.

Yours Ever CH. LAMB.

Enfield.

[_Added in a feminine hand_:] Emma's love to Mr. and Mrs. Dyer.

[The date of this note is pure conjecture on my part, but is unimportant. Novello had become Charles Clarke's father-in-law in 1828, and Emma Isola, who was now teaching the children of a clergyman named Williams, at Fornham, in Suffolk, spent her Christmas holidays with the Lambs that year.

Here, perhaps, should come an undated letter from Lamb to Louisa Martin.

Lamb begins "Dear Monkey," and refers to his "niece," Mrs. Dowden, and some business which she requires him to transact, Mrs. Dowden being Mrs.

John Lamb's daughter-in-law. Lamb describes himself as "a sick cat that loves to be alone on housetops or at cellar bottoms."]

LETTER 471

CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER

[19th Jan., 1829.]

My dear Procter,--I am ashamed to have not taken the drift of your pleasant letter, which I find to have been pure invention. But jokes are not suspected in Boeotian Enfield. We are plain people; and our talk is of corn, and cattle, and Waltham markets. Besides, I was a little out of sorts when I received it. The fact is, I am involved in a case which has fretted me to death; and I have no reliance, except on you, to extricate me. I am sure you will give me your best legal advice, having no professional friend besides but Robinson and Talfourd, with neither of whom at present I am on the best terms. My brother's widow left a will, made during the lifetime of my brother, in which I am named sole executor, by which she bequeaths forty acres of arable property, which it seems she held under Covert Baron, unknown to my brother, to the heirs of the body of Elizabeth Dowden, her married daughter by a first husband, in fee-simple, recoverable by fine--_invested_ property, mind; for there is the difficulty--subject to leet and quit-rent; in short, worded in the most guarded terms, to shut out the property from Isaac Dowden, the husband. Intelligence has just come of the death of this person in India, where he made a will, entailing this property (which seem'd entangled enough already) to the heirs of his body, that should not be born of his wife; for it seems by the law in India, natural children can recover. They have put the cause into Exchequer process, here removed by Certiorari from the native Courts; and the question is, whether I should, as executor, try the cause here, or again re-remove it to the Supreme Sessions at Bangalore? (which I understand I can, or plead a hearing before the Privy Council here). As it involves all the little property of Elizabeth Dowden, I am anxious to take the fittest steps, and what may be least expensive. Pray a.s.sist me, for the case is so embarra.s.sed, that it deprives me of sleep and appet.i.te. M. Burney thinks there is a case like it in Chapt. 170, sect. 5, in Fearne's Contingent Remainders. Pray read it over with him dispa.s.sionately, and let me have the result. The complexity lies in the questionable power of the husband to alienate....

I had another favour to beg, which is the beggarliest of beggings.

A few lines of verse for a young friend's Alb.u.m (six will be enough). M.

Burney will tell you who she is I want 'em for. A girl of gold. Six lines--make 'em eight--signed Barry C----. They need not be very good, as I chiefly want 'em as a foil to mine. But I shall be seriously obliged by any refuse sc.r.a.p. We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul prophesied that women should be "headstrong, lovers of their own wills, having Alb.u.ms." I fled hither to escape the Alb.u.mean persecution, and had not been in my new house twenty-four hours, when the daughter of the next house came in with a friend's Alb.u.m to beg a contribution, and the following day intimated she had one of her own.

Two more have sprung up since. If I take the wings of the morning and fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will Alb.u.ms be. New Holland has Alb.u.ms. But the age is to be complied with. M.B. will tell you the sort of girl I request the ten lines for. Somewhat of a pensive cast, what you admire. The lines may come before the Law question, as that can not be determined before Hilary Term, and I wish your deliberate judgment on that. The other may be flimsy and superficial.

And if you have not burnt your returned letter, pray re-send it me, as a monumental token of my stupidity. 'Twas a little unthinking of you to touch upon a sore subject. Why, by dabbling in those accursed Alb.u.ms, I have become a byword of infamy all over the kingdom. I have sicken'd decent women for asking me to write in Alb.u.ms. There be "dark jests"

abroad, Master Cornwall; and some riddles may live to be clear'd up. And 'tis not every saddle is put on the right steed; and forgeries and false Gospels are not peculiar to the Age following the Apostles. And some tubs don't stand on their right bottoms. Which is all I wish to say in these ticklish Times--and so your Servant,

CHS. LAMB.

[We do not know the nature of the "bite" that Procter had put upon Lamb; but Lamb quickly retaliated with the first paragraph of this letter, which is mainly invention. In his _Old Acquaintance_ Mr. Fields wrote: "He [Procter] told me that the law question raised in this epistle was a sheer fabrication of Lamb's, gotten up by him to puzzle his young correspondent, the conveyancer. The coolness referred to between himself and Robinson and Talfourd, Procter said, was also a fiction invented by Lamb to carry out his legal mystification."

At the end of the first paragraph came some words in another hand: "_in usum_ enfeoffments whereof he was only collaterally seized, &c.,"

beneath which Lamb wrote: "The above is some of M. Burney's memoranda which he has left me, and you may cut out and give him."

Procter's verses for Emma Isola's alb.u.m I have not seen, but Canon Ainger says that they refer to "Isola Bella, whom all poets love," the island in Lago di Maggiore.

This is a list of the contents of Emma Isola's Alb.u.m, all autographs (from Quaritch's catalogue, September, 1886):--

CHARLES LAMB. "What is an Alb.u.m?" a poem addressed to Miss Emma Isola.

"To Emma on her Twenty-first Birthday," May 25, 1830.

"Harmony in Unlikeness." Without date.

JOHN KEATS. "To my Brother," a sonnet on the birthday of his brother Tom, dated Nov. 18 (? 1814 or 1815).

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," three verses of his poem on Lucy, copied in his own hand on March 18, 1837.

"Blessings be with them, and enduring praise," five lines of a sonnet dated Rydal, 1838.

ALFRED TENNYSON. "When Lazarus left his charnel-cave," four stanzas, undated.

THOMAS MOORE. "Woman gleans but sorrow," and note to Moxon, June, 1844.

LEIGH HUNT. "Apollo's Autograph," from an unpublished poem called "The Feast of the Violets." Undated, _circa_ 1838.

THOMAS HOOD. "Dreams," a prose fragment, without date, _circa_ 1840.

JAMES HOGG. "I'm a' gaen wrang," a song by the Ettrick Shepherd, _circa_ 1830.

JOANNA BAILLIE. "Up! quit thy bower," a song, undated, _circa_ 1830.

ROBERT SOUTHEY. Epitaph on himself, in verse, Feb. 18, 1837.

THOMAS CAMPBELL. "Victoria's sceptre o'er the waves," _circa_ 1837.

ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. "The Pirate's Song," _circa_ 1838.

CHARLES DIBDIN. "An Alb.u.m's like the Dream of Hope," _circa_ 1827.

BERNARD BARTON. "To Emma," with a note by Charles Lamb at foot, 1827.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. "To Emma Isola," _circa_ 1827.

BARRY CORNWALL. "To the Spirit of Italy," _circa_ 1827.

SAMUEL ROGERS. Two letters, and a poem, "My Last," 1829-36.

FREDERICK LOCKER (afterwards Locker-Lampson). A quatrain, dated July, 1873.

George Dyer, J.B. Dibdin, George Darley, Matilda Betham, H.F.

Cary, Mrs. Piozzi, Edward Moxon, T.N. Talfourd, are the other writers.]

LETTER 472

CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER

Jan. 22nd, 1829.