1796 DUPUY'S TRANSLATION 29 "Maid's Tragedy" and some parts of "Philaster" in particular, and elsewhere occasionally; and perhaps by Cowper in his "Crazy Kate," and in parts of his translation, such as the speeches of Hecuba and Andromache. I long to know your opinion of that translation. The Odyssey especially is surely very Homeric. What nobler than the appearance of Phoebus at the beginning of the Iliad the lines ending with "Dread sounding, bounding on the silver bow!" I I beg you will give me your opinion of the translation; it afforded me high pleasure. As curious a specimen of translation as ever fell into my hands, is a young man's in our office, of a French novel. What in the original was literally "amiable delusions of the fancy," he proposed to render "the fair frauds of the imagination!" had much trouble in licking the book into any meaning at all. Yet did the knave clear fifty or sixty pounds by subscription and selling the copyright. The book itself not a week's work! To-day's portion of my journalising epistle has been very dull and povertystricken. I will here end. Tuesday Night. I have been drinking egg-hot and smoking Oronooko (associated circumstances, which ever forcibly recall to my mind our evenings and nights at the Salutation); my eyes and brain are heavy and asleep, but my heart is awake; and if words came as ready as ideas, and ideas as feelings, I could say ten hundred kind things. Coleridge, you know not my supreme happiness at having one on earth (though counties separate us) whom I can call a friend. Remember you those tender lines of Logan ?— "Our broken friendships we deplore, And loves of youth that are no more; No after friendships e'er can raise And ne'er the heart such fondness prove, As when we first began to love." I am writing at random, and half-tipsy, what you may not equally understand, as you will be sober when you read it; but my sober and my half-tipsy hours you are alike a sharer in. Good night. "Then up rose our bard, like a prophet in drink, BURNS. Thursday [June 16, 1796]. I am now in high hopes to be able to visit you, if perfectly convenient on your part, by the end of next month-perhaps the last week or fortnight in July. A change of scene and a change of faces would do me good, even if that scene were not to be Bristol, and those faces Coleridge's and his friends. In the words of Terence, a little altered, "Tædet me hujus quotidiani mundi." I am heartily sick of the every-day scenes of life. I shall half wish you unmarried (don't show this to Mrs. C.) for one evening only, to have the pleasure of smoking with you, and drinking egg-hot in some little smoky room in a pot-house, for I know not yet how I shall like you in a decent room, and looking quite happy. My best love and respects to Sara notwithstanding. Yours sincerely, CHARLES LAMB. NOTE [Coleridge's image of melancholy will be found in the lines "Melancholy-a fragment." It was published in Sibylline Leaves, 1817, and in a note Coleridge said that the verses were printed in the Morning Chronicle in 1794. They were really printed in the Morning Post, December 12, 1797. Coleridge had probably sent them to Lamb in MS. The "hymns" came to nothing. "Disbranched" is a quotation from "Religious Musings ": "And if a sigh that speaks Newton: an Invitation into the Country." incorrectly quoted. "The Grandame " was "The following lines." Lamb's poem presumably included in this letter. I give the text as it was printed in Charles Lloyd's Poems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer later in the year : - THE GRANDAME On the hill top green Hard by the house of prayer (an humble roof, With what a zeal she serv'd her master's house; 1796 "THE GRANDAME" Delighted to recount the oft-told tale, Ceas'd she to praise her Maker, or withdrew Of Christ; much comfort she had thence deriv'd, 31 Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother, died July 31, 1792, aged seventynine, and was buried in Widford churchyard. She had been for many years housekeeper in the Plumer family at Blakesware. On William Plumer's moving to Gilston, a neighbouring seat, in 1767, she had sole charge of the Blakesware mansion, where her grandchildren used to visit her. Compare Lamb's Elia essays "Blakesmoor in H-shire" and "Dream-Children." N. Biggs was the printer of Coleridge's Poems, 1797. Lamb had begun his amendment of Coleridge's "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" in his letter of June 10. Coleridge's illustrative personifications, here referred to, are in that poem. The extract book from which Lamb copied his quotations from Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger was, he afterwards tells us, destroyed; but similar volumes, which he filled later, are preserved at Rowfant by Mr. Godfrey Locker-Lampson. The extract from "A Wife for a Month " is in Act VI., Scene 1. The extract from "Bonduca" is from Act I., Scene 1; the whole passage was included in Lamb's Dramatic Specimens, 1808. The extract from Palamon and Arcite ("The Two Noble Kinsmen ") is in Dramatic Specimens in full: from Act II., Scene 2. The passage from Massinger, which is also in Dramatic Specimens, we shall meet again as the motto to Lamb's part in Coleridge's Poems, second edition, 1797. Cowper's translation.-Writing to Charles Lloyd, sen., in 1809, Lamb says of Cowper as a translator of Homer that he "delays you... walking over a Bowling Green." Canon Ainger possessed a copy of the book translated by Lamb's fellow-clerk. It was called Sentimental Tablets of the Good Pamphile. "Translated from the French of M. Gorjy by P. S. Dupuy of the East India House, 1795." Among the subscribers names were Thomas Bye (5 copies), Ball, Evans, Savory (2 copies), and Lamb himself. , Logan's lines are in the "Ode on the Death of a Young Lady,” 8th Stanza, lines 3 and 4, and 9th Stanza, lines 1-4; Burns' in "The Whistle," Stanza 17. "Tædet me hujus quotidiani mundi." Terence's words are (Eunuchus, II., 3, 6): "Tædet quotidianarum harum formarum" -"I am aweary of these everyday shapes." Lamb was very fond of this quotation.] THE LETTER 5 CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE [Probably begun on Wednesday, June 29. P.M. July 1, 1796.] HE first moment I can come I will, but my hopes of coming yet a while yet hang on a ticklish thread. The coach I come by is immaterial as I shall so easily by your direction find ye out. My mother is grown so entirely helpless (not having any use of her limbs) that Mary is necessarily confined from ever sleeping out, she being her bed fellow. She thanks you tho' and will accompany me in spirit. Most exquisite are the lines from Withers. Your own lines introductory to your poem on Self run smoothly and pleasurably, and I exhort you to continue 'em. What shall I say to your Dactyls? They are what you would call good per se, but a parody on some of 'em is just now suggesting itself, and you shall have it rough and unlicked. I mark with figures the lines parodied. 4.-Sórely your Dáctyls do drág along limp-footed. 11.-Cóld is my tired heart, Í have no chárity. 2.-Páinfully tráv'lling thus óver the rugged road. 12.-Dismal your Dáctyls are, Gód help ye, rhyming Ones. I possibly may not come this fortnight-therefore all thou hast to do is not to look for me any particular day, only to write word immediately if at any time you quit Bristol, lest I come and Taffy be not at home. I hope I can come in a day or two. But young Savory of my office is suddenly taken ill in this very nick of time and I must officiate for him till he can come to work again. Had 1796 HOPE AND FEAR 33 the knave gone sick and died and putrefied at any other time, philosophy might have afforded one comfort, but just now I have no patience with him. Quarles I am as great a stranger to as I was to Withers. I wish you would try and do something to bring our elder bards into more general fame. I writhe with indignation when in books of Criticism, where common place quotation is heaped upon quotation, I find no mention of such men as Massinger, or B. and Fl, men with whom succeeding Dramatic Writers (Otway alone excepted) can bear no manner of comparison. Stupid Knox hath noticed none of 'em among his extracts. Thursday. Mrs. C. can scarce guess how she has gratified me by her very kind letter and sweet little poem. I feel that I should thank her in rhyme, but she, must take my acknowledgment at present in plain honest prose. The uncertainty in which I yet stand whether I can come or no damps my spirits, reduces me a degree below prosaical, and keeps me in a suspense that fluctuates between hope and fear. Hope is a charming, lively, blue-eyed wench, and I am always glad of her company, but could dispense with the visitor she brings with her, her younger sister, Fear, a white-liver'd, lilly-cheeked, bashful, palpitating, awkward hussey, that hangs like a green girl at her sister's apronstrings, and will go with her whithersoever she goes. For the life and soul of me I could not improve those lines in your poem on the Prince and Princess, so I changed them to what you bid me and left 'em at Perry's. I think 'em altogether good, and do not see why you were sollicitous about any alteration. I have not yet seen, but will make it my business to see, to-day's Chronicle, for your verses on Horne Took. Dyer stanza'd him in one of the papers t'other day, but I think unsuccessfully. Tooke's friends' meeting was I suppose a dinner of CONDOLENCE. I am not sorry to find you (for all Sara) immersed in clouds of smoke and metaphysic. You know I had a sneaking kindness for this last noble science, and you taught me some smattering of it. I look to become no mean proficient under your tuition. Coleridge, what do you mean by saying you wrote to me about Plutarch and Porphyry-I received no such letter, nor remember a syllable of the matter, yet am not apt to forget any part of your epistles, least of all an injunction like that. I will cast about for 'em, tho' I am a sad hand to know what books are worth, and both those worthy gentlemen are alike out of my line. To-morrow I shall be less suspensive and in better cue to write, so good bye at present. Friday Evening. That execrable aristocrat and knave Richardson has given me an absolute refusal of leave! The poor man VOL. VI.-3 |