The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Part 49

Forgive me, BURNEY, if to thee these late And hasty products of a critic pen, Thyself no common judge of books and men, In feeling of thy worth I dedicate.

My _verse_ was offered to an older friend; The humbler _prose_ has fallen to thy share: Nor could I miss the occasion to declare, What spoken in thy presence must offend-- That, set aside some few caprices wild, Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days, In all my threadings of this worldly maze, (And I have watched thee almost from a child), Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a whiter soul than thine.

Martin Burney was the son of Rear-Admiral Burney, who had sailed with Cook, and was the nephew of Madame D'Arblay. He was a barrister and very nearly Lamb's contemporary. Both Charles Lamb and his sister had for him a deep affection, although they made fun of his oddities, many of which are recorded in the correspondence. Burney lived to attend, and weep distressingly at, Mary Lamb's funeral in 1847.

Lamb seems to have meditated a collected edition of his works as early as 1816, for we find him telling Wordsworth (Sept. 23, 1816), that he had offered the book to Murray through Barron Field, but that Gifford had opposed the project successfully.

Page 1. ROSAMUND GRAY.

First printed, 1798. Reprinted in the _Works_, 1818.

_Rosamund Gray_ was published in 1798 by Lee & Hurst under the t.i.tle _A Tale of Rosamund Gray and old Blind Margaret_, by Charles Lamb. It then had this dedication:--

THIS TALE

IS

INSCRIBED IN FRIENDSHIP

TO

MARMADUKE THOMPSON,

OF

PEMBROKE HALL,

CAMBRIDGE.

Thompson was at Christ's Hospital with Lamb. In the essay on that school in _Elia_, written in 1820, he is called "mildest of Missionaries" and the writer's good friend still, but there is no evidence that the intimacy was actively continued after the early days.

At the time that _Rosamund Gray_ was written Lamb was twenty-two to twenty-three. It was his first prose of which we know anything.

Lamb reprinted the story without the dedication, under the t.i.tle _Rosamund Gray, a Tale_, in his _Works_, 1818, the text of which is followed here. The differences of punctuation are numerous, but the text is mainly the same. In Chapter VI. (page 14, line 9) the phrase "take a cup of tea with her," ran, twenty years earlier, "drink a dish"; page 14, line 8 from foot, after "beauties of the season" old Margaret originally said, "I can still remember them with pleasure, and rejoice that younger eyes than mine can see and enjoy them. I shall be," etc.; and at the end of the same chapter (page 16), in the 1798 edition, came the quaintly particular pa.s.sage which I have thrown into italics:--

"Besides, it was Margaret's bed-time, for she kept very good hours--indeed, in the distribution of her meals, and sundry other particulars, she resembled the livers in the antique world, more than might well beseem a creature of this--_none but Rosamund could get her mess of broth ready, or put her night caps on--(she wore seven, the undermost was of flannel)--_

"_'You know, love, I can do nothing to help myself--here I must stay till you return.'_

"So the new friends parted for that night--Elinor having made Margaret promise to give Rosamund leave to come and see her the next day."

Sh.e.l.ley's praise of _Rosamund Gray_ has often been quoted: writing to Leigh Hunt, in 1819, he said, "What a lovely thing is _Rosamund Gray_!

How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest parts of our nature is in it!" Lamb mentions _Julia de Roubigne_ in the text, and there is little doubt that he was influenced by Mackenzie's story. The epistolary form into which _Rosamund Gray_ lapses is maintained throughout in _Julia de Roubigne_ (1777), and there is a similar intensity of emotion and suggestion of fatality in both correspondences. There is, however, in _Julia de Roubigne_ nothing of the sweet simplicity and limpid clarity of Lamb's earlier chapters; which may be described as his (perhaps unconscious) contribution to the revolt against convention that Coleridge and Wordsworth were leading in the same year in the _Lyrical Ballads_.

How far Lamb was recording fact in this story we do not know; but the letters seem to reflect his own frame of mind at that time--following upon his mother's death and his abandonment of his daydreams with the fair-haired maid of his sonnets. In this case we have the unusual spectacle of a masculine writer conveying his feelings through a feminine medium. But on pages 17-18 Lamb seems to be writing both as himself and his sister. Compare the pa.s.sage at the foot of page 17 with Lamb's letter to Coleridge of October 17, 1796, where he quotes his sister as saying, "The spirit of my mother seems to descend and smile upon me," and the last paragraph on page 17 is paraphrased in Lamb's lines (composed at the same time that he was working on _Rosamund Gray_) "Written soon after the Preceding Poem," October, 1797. Again, the second paragraph on page 21 must exactly represent Lamb's hopes and wishes in connection with his sister at that date.

Rosamund Gray and her grandmother (if they had any real existence) are said to have lived in one of the group of cottages called Blenheims, between Blakesware and Ware, in the days when Lamb visited his grandmother at Blakesware house. These cottages were pulled down in 1895. But then Lamb's Anna--of the love sonnets--is also said to have lived at Blenheims; and they cannot possibly be identical. Old Margaret and Mrs. Field, Lamb's grandmother, may have had some traits in common, and the description of Blakesware, where Mrs. Field was housekeeper, is recognisable; but these researches cannot be pursued to any real purpose. According to a letter to Southey in October, 1798, "nothing but the first words" of the ballad--

An old woman clothed in gray, Whose daughter was charming and young, And she was deluded away By Roger's false flattering tongue--

put Lamb "upon scribbling ... _Rosamund_." This is quite conceivably the case. Whether we are to suppose that Lamb took not only the motive of his story, but also the word Gray, from this stanza, cannot be said; but it is generally thought that he found the name Rosamund Gray in a song thus ent.i.tled in his friend Charles Lloyd's _Poems on Various Occasions_, 1795. There is a suggestion that Lloyd may have had particular interest in the book in the circ.u.mstance that copies exist bearing the imprint of Pearson, a bookseller at Birmingham, where Lloyd lived. The Birmingham edition indeed is considered to be the first.

Writing to Southey in May, 1799, Lamb says that _Rosamund_ sells well in London.

Old Thomas Billet (page 28) was not the true name of the Widford innkeeper. It was Clemitson (see the poem "Going or Gone"). Lamb again used the name Billet, for his father's old Lincoln friend, in "Poor Relations." Nor was Ben Moxam the name of the Blakesware gardener, but Ben Carter. The Wilderness was actually the name given to the wood at the back of Blakesware house.

On the pa.s.sage concerning the epitaphs, on pages 29-30, Talfourd wrote: "The reflections he [Lamb] makes on the eulogistic character of all the inscriptions are drawn from his own childhood; for when a very little boy, walking with his sister in a churchyard, he suddenly asked her, 'Mary, where do the naughty people lie?'"

Southey has a poem, "The Ruined Cottage," among his _English Eclogues_, which is practically a poetical paraphase of _Rosamund Gray_. I do not know whether Southey's version was taken from an independent source or whether it was a compliment to Lamb. Lamb's tale had, however, come first.

Finally, it may be remarked that in Barry Cornwall's _Poems_, Galignani, 1829, is a poem ent.i.tled "Rosamund Gray," which from the evidence of its few opening lines was to have been a blank verse adaptation of Lamb's theme.

Page 35. CURIOUS FRAGMENTS.

_John Woodvil_, 1802, and _Works_, 1818.

Lamb engaged upon these experiments in the manner of Burton, always a favourite author with him, at the suggestion of Coleridge. We find him writing to Manning (March 17, 1800): "He [Coleridge] has lugged me to the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me, for a first plan, the forgery of a supposed ma.n.u.script of Burton, the anatomist of melancholy." Writing again to Manning a little later, probably in April, 1800, Lamb mentions having submitted two imitations of Burton to Stuart, the editor of the _Morning Post_, and states also that he has written the lines ent.i.tled "Conceipt of Diabolic Possession"--originally, in the _John Woodvil_ volume, a part of these "Fragments," but afterwards, in the _Works_, separated from them. In August, 1800, Lamb tells Coleridge he has written the ballad in the manner of the "Old and Young Courtier," also originally part of these "Fragments," and mentions further that Stuart had rejected the proposed contribution.

Of Lamb's imitations the first two are most akin to the original in spirit, but the whole performance is curiously happy and a perfect ill.u.s.tration of his fellowship with the Elizabethans. Our language probably contains no more successful impersonation of any author: for the time being Lamb's mind approximated to that of Burton, while reserving enough individuality to make a new thing as well as a very subtle and exact echo. The Burton extracts and the _Letters of Sir John Falstaff_, written four or five years earlier (in which Lamb certainly had a hand: see pp. 225 and 491), represent in prose the same devotion to the Elizabethans that _John Woodvil_ represents in verse. With 1800, when Lamb was twenty-five, this immediately derivative impulse ceased; but it is certain that without such interesting exercises in the manner of his favourite period his ripest work would have been far less rich.

The differences in text between the 1802 and 1818 editions are very slight. They are merely changes of punctuation and spelling--some twenty-four in all--with the exception that on page 39, line 18 "common sort" was originally "mobbe." Concerning this change Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, in _The Athenaeum_, December 28, 1901, has an interesting note. Lamb, he says, made it "for the best of good reasons, because in the meantime he had recollected that to attribute the word _mob_ to the pen of Robert Burton was to commit a linguistic anachronism. The earliest known examples of _mob_ occur in Shadwell (1688) and Dryden (1690), whereas Burton died in January, 1640." I might add that "jokers"

was another anachronism; since, according to the _New English Dictionary_, its first use is in the works of T. Cooke, 1729.

"Inerudite" and "incomposite" seem to have been Lamb's coinage, but they are very Burtonian. The _New English Dictionary_ gives Lamb's reference alone to the word "hebetant," meaning making dull.

Lamb's affection for Burton was profound. His own copy was a quarto of 1621, which is now, I believe, in America. The following pa.s.sage from John Payne Collier's _An Old Man's Diary_ (for 1832) is interesting in this connection:--

This led him [Lamb] to ask me, whether I remembered two or three pa.s.sages in his book of books, Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, ill.u.s.trating Shakespeare's notions regarding Witches and Fairies. I replied that if I had seen them, I did not then recollect them. I took down the book, the contents of which he knew so well that he opened upon the place almost immediately: the first pa.s.sage was this, respecting Macbeth and Banquo and their meeting with the three Witches: "And Hector Boethius [relates] of Macbeth and Banco, two Scottish Lords, that, as they were wandering in woods, had their fortunes told them by three strange women." I said that I remembered to have seen that pa.s.sage quoted, or referred to by more than one editor of Shakespeare. "Have you seen this quoted," he inquired, "which relates to fairies? 'Some put our fairies into this rank, which have been in former times adored with much superst.i.tion, with sweeping their houses and setting of a pail of clean water, good victuals and the like; and then they should not be pinched, but find money in their shoes and be fortunate in their enterprises ... and, Olaus Magnus adds, leave that green circle which we commonly find in plain fields.' Farther on Burton gives them the very name a.s.signed to one of them by Shakespeare, for he adds, 'These have several names in several places: we commonly call them _Pucks_' (part i., sect. 2), which Ben Jonson degrades to _Pug_."

Page 41. EARLY JOURNALISM. I.--G. F. COOKE'S "RICHARD THE THIRD."

_Morning Post_, January 4, 1802. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This paper was printed by the late Mr. d.y.k.es Campbell in _The Athenaeum_, August 4, 1888, and was identified by him by means of a then unpublished letter of Lamb to John Rickman, January 9, 1802. Early in January, 1802, says Mr. Campbell, "Lamb ceased to contribute dramatic criticism to the _Morning Post_; the editor wanted the paragraphs to be written on the night of the performance for next day's paper; and this Lamb could not manage. He had tried it on one occasion [see below], but found he could not 'write against time.'"

Writing to Robert Lloyd at about the same time as this criticism, Lamb took up the subject again:--

"Cooke in 'Richard the Third' is a perfect caricature. He gives you the _monster_ Richard, but not the _man_ Richard. Shakespear's b.l.o.o.d.y character impresses you with awe and deep admiration of his witty parts, his consummate hypocrisy, and indefatigable prosecution of purpose. You despise, detest, and loathe the cunning, vulgar, low and fierce Richard, which Cooke subst.i.tutes in his place. He gives you no other idea than of a vulgar villain, rejoycing in his being able to over reach, and not possessing that joy in _silent_ consciousness, but betraying it, like a _poor_ villain, in sneers and distortions of the face, like a droll at a country fair: not to add that cunning so self-betraying and manner so vulgar could never have deceived the politic Buckingham nor the soft Lady Anne: _both_ bred in courts, would have turned with disgust from such a fellow. Not but Cooke has _powers_; but not of discrimination. His manner is strong, coa.r.s.e, and vigorous, and well adapted to some characters. But the lofty imagery and high sentiments and high pa.s.sions of _Poetry_ come black and prose-smoked from his prose Lips.... I am possessed with an admiration of the genuine Richard, his genius, and his mounting spirit, which no consideration of his cruelties can depress.

Shakespear has not made Richard so black a Monster as is supposed.

Where-ever he is monstrous, it was to conform to vulgar opinion.

But he is generally a Man. Read his most exquisite address to the Widowed Queen to court her daughter for him--the topics of maternal feeling, of a deep knowledge of the heart, are such as no monster could have supplied [see Act IV., Scene 4]. Richard must have _felt_ before he could feign so well; tho' ambition choked the good seed. I think it the most finished piece of Eloquence in the world; of _persuasive_ oratory far above Demosthenes, Burke, or any man, far exceeding the courtship of Lady Anne."

George Frederick Cooke who produced "Richard III." at Covent Garden on October 31, 1801, with great success, lived from 1756-1811.

I imagine that the following article on another performance of Cooke's, printed in the _Morning Post_ for January 9, 1802, is also Lamb's, probably written on the "one occasion" referred to above and the last that he wrote. No other bears so many signs of his authorship:--