The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Part 72

Page 391. THE LATIN POEMS OF VINCENT BOURNE.

_The Englishman's Magazine_, September, 1831.

This article was unsigned, but it is known to be by Lamb from internal evidence and from the following letter to Moxon, the publisher of the magazine:--

"DEAR M.,--I have ingeniously contrived to review myself.

"Tell me if this will do. Mind, for such things as these--half quotations--I do not charge _Elia_ price. Let me hear of, if not see you.

"PETER."

Lamb's _Alb.u.m Verses_, the book reviewed, had been published by Moxon a year earlier. It contained nine translations from Vincent Bourne.

Further particulars of Vincent Bourne (1695-1747), a master at Westminster, are given in the notes to Lamb's translations in the poetical volume. His _Poemata_ appeared in 1734, the best edition being that of the Rev. John Mitford, Bernard Barton's friend, published in 1840. Lamb first read Bourne as late as 1815. Writing to Wordsworth in April of that year he says of Bourne: "What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town scenes, a proper counterpoise to _some people's_ rural extravagances." And again in the same letter: "What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, _matter-ful_ creature, sucking from every flower, making a flower of every thing--his diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English." And in the _Elia_ essay "On the Decay of Beggars"

Bourne is called "most cla.s.sical, and at the same time, most English, of the Latinists!"

Page 391, foot. _Cowper ... out of the four._ Cowper, who was Bourne's pupil at Westminster, translated twenty-three of the poems, but there were only four in early editions of his works. Lamb and Cowper did not clash in their translations, except in the case of the lines on the sleeping infant quoted later in this essay. Cowper's version ran thus:--

Sweet babe, whose image here expressed, Does thy peaceful slumbers show, Guilt or fear, to break thy rest, Never did thy spirit know.

Softly slumber, soft repose, Such as mock the painter's skill, Such as innocence bestows, Harmless infant, lull thee still!

The line quoted by Lamb from Cowper is the first of "The Jackdaw."

Cowper's praise of Bourne resembles Lamb's. He writes: "I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in _his_ way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to _him_."

Page 392, line 4. _A recent writer._ Lamb himself.

Page 395, line 19. _There is a tragic Drama._ "The Wife's Trial" (see Vol. IV.). More properly a comic drama.

Page 395, line 27. _But if to write in Alb.u.ms be a sin._ A reference probably to the attack on Lamb's book made a year earlier in the _Literary Gazette_, which occasioned Southey's spirited lines to _The Times_ in defence of his friend.

Page 396, middle. _But the disease has gone forth._ Four years before, in 1827, Lamb had protested to Bernard Barton against the Alb.u.m exactions:--

"If I go to ---- thou art there also, O all pervading Alb.u.m! All over the Leeward Islands, in Newfoundland, and the Back Settlements, I understand there is no other reading. They haunt me. I die of Albophobia!"

Page 397. THE DEATH OF MUNDEN.

_The Athenaeum_, February 11, 1832, under the t.i.tle, "Munden, the Comedian." Signed "C. Lamb." Not reprinted by Lamb.

The article was preceded by this editorial note:--

A brief Memoir in a paper like the _Athenaeum_, is due to departed genius, and would certainly have been paid to Munden, whose fame is so interwoven with all our early and pleasant recollections, even though we had nothing to add to the poor detail of dates and facts already registered in the daily papers. The memory of a player, it has been said, is limited to one generation; he

"--struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more!"

But this cannot be true, seeing that many whose fame will soon be counted by centuries, yet live to delight us in Cibber; and that others of our latter days, have been enbalmed, in all their vital spirit, by Elia himself; in whose unrivalled volume _c.o.c.kletop_ is preserved as in amber, and where Munden will live for aye, making mouths at Time and Oblivion. We were thus apologizing to ourselves for the unworthy epithet we were about to scratch on perishable paper to this inimitable actor, when we received the following letter, which our readers will agree with us is worth a whole volume of bald biographies.

This preamble was probably written by Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789-1864), who became supreme editor of _The Athenaeum_ in 1830. Joseph Shepherd Munden died on February 6, 1832. He had first made his mark in 1780, when Lamb was five. His Covent Garden career lasted, with occasional migrations, from 1790 to 1811. Munden's first appearance at Drury Lane was in 1813. It was in 1815 that he created the part of Old Dozy, in T. Dibdin's "Past Ten O'clock and a Rainy Night." His farewell of the stage was taken in 1824.

Page 397, line 7. _Lewis._ "Gentleman" Lewis (1748?-1811), the original Faulkland in "The Rivals." It was he who said that Lamb's farce, "Mr.

H.," might easily have been turned into a success by a practical dramatist. Hazlitt called him "the greatest comic mannerist perhaps that ever lived." His full name is William Thomas Lewis.

Page 397, line 8. _Parsons, Dodd, etc._ See note on page 465. Parsons was at Drury Lane practically from 1762 to 1795 and Dodd from 1766 to 1796.

Page 398, line 4. "_Johnny Gilpin._" This benefit, for William Dowton (1764-1851), was held on April 28, 1817. The first piece was "The Rivals," with Dowton as Mrs. Malaprop. In "Johnny Gilpin" (Genest gives no author's name) Munden played Anthony Brittle.

Page 398, line 6. _Liston's Lubin Log._ This was one of Listen's great parts--in "Love, Law and Physic," by Lamb's friend, James Kenney (1780-1849), produced in 1812.

Page 398, at the end. _A gentleman ... whose criticism I think masterly._ This was Talfourd, who several years before had been dramatic critic to _The Champion_. I quote the first portion of his article: "Mr.

Munden appears to us to be the most _cla.s.sical_ of actors. He is that in high farce, which Kemble was in high tragedy. The lines of these great artists are, it must be admitted, sufficiently distinct; but the same elements are in both,--the same directness of purpose, the same singleness of aim, the same concentration of power, the same iron-casing of inflexible manner, the same statue-like precision of gesture, movement and att.i.tude. The hero of farce is as little affected with impulses from without, as the retired Prince of Tragedians. There is something solid, sterling, almost adamantine, in the building up of his most grotesque characters. When he fixes his wonder-working face in any of its most amazing varieties, it looks as if the picture were carved out from a rock by Nature in a sportive vein, and might last for ever.

It is like what we can imagine a mask of the old Grecian Comedy to have been, only that it lives, and breathes, and changes. His most fantastical gestures are the grand ideal of farce. He seems as though he belonged to the earliest and the stateliest age of Comedy, when instead of superficial foibles and the airy varieties of fashion, she had the grand asperities of man to work on, when her grotesque images had something romantic about them, and when humour and parody were themselves heroic."

Page 398. THOUGHTS ON PRESENTS OF GAME, &C.

_The Athenaeum_, November 30, 1833. Signed "Elia." Not reprinted by Lamb.

The quoted pa.s.sage at the head of this little essay is from Lamb's "Popular Fallacy," XV., "That we must not look a gift-horse in the mouth." It was probably placed there by the editor of _The Athenaeum_.

The present essay may be taken as a postscript to the "Dissertation on Roast Pig." The late Mr. Charles Kent, in his Centenary edition of Lamb, printed it next that essay, under the heading "A Recantation."

Page 399, line 1. _Old Mr. Chambers._ The Rev. Thomas Chambers, Vicar of Radway-Edgehill, in Warwickshire, and father of Charles and John Chambers, who were at Christ's Hospital, but after Lamb's day. John was a fellow clerk of Lamb's at the India House. A letter from Lamb to Charles Chambers is in existence (see Hazlitt's _The Lambs_, page 138), in which Lamb makes other ecstatic remarks on delicate feeding.

Incidentally he says that bullock's heart is a subst.i.tute for hare. Mr.

Hazlitt says that the Warwickshire vicar left a diary in which he recorded little beyond the dinners he used to give or eat.

Page 399, line 10. _Mrs. Minikin._ Writing to his friend Dodwell in October, 1827, concerning the gift of a little pig (which suggests that the "Recantation" was of more recent date than the reader is asked to suppose), Lamb uses "crips" again. "'And do it nice and _crips_.'

(That's the Cook's word.) You'll excuse me, I have been only speaking to Becky about the dinner to-morrow." This seems to establish the fact that Mrs. Minikin was Becky's name when she was exalted into print. Becky however had left long before 1833.

Page 400. TABLE-TALK BY THE LATE ELIA.

_The Athaeneum_, January 4, May 31, June 7, July 19, 1834. Not reprinted by Lamb.

The phrase, "the late Elia," has reference to the preface to the _Last Essays of Elia_, published in 1833, in which his death is spoken of.

Page 400, line 3 of essay. _'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar._ A different note is struck in the Elia essay "On the Decay of Beggars": "Reader, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposition, imposture--_give, and ask no questions_."

Page 400, line 4 from foot. _Will Dockwray._ I have not been able to find anything about this Will Dockwray. Such Ware records as I have consulted are silent concerning him. There was a Joseph Dockwray, a rich Quaker maltster, at Ware in the eighteenth century. In the poem "Going or Gone," which mentions many of Lamb's acquaintances in his early Widford days (Widford is only three miles from Ware), there is mentioned a Tom Dockwra, who also eludes research.

Page 401, line 15. "_We read the 'Paradise Lost' as a task._" Johnson, in his "Life of Milton," in the _Lives of the Poets_, says: "'Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure." For other remarks on Milton see page 428.

Page 401, foot. _So ends "King Lear."_ Lamb means that the tragedy is virtually done. There are of course some dozen lines more, after the last of those quoted in Lamb's piecemeal; which I have corrected by the Globe Edition. Lear's praise of Caius--"he's a good fellow ... and will strike"--was applied by Lamb to his father in the character sketch of him in the Elia essay "On the Old Benchers" (see also the essay on the "Genius of Hogarth," for earlier remarks, 1810, on this subject).

Page 402, first quotation. "_Served not for gain...._" From the Fool's song in "Lear," Act II., Scene 4:--