THE LETTERS OF CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 1796-1820 LETTER 1 CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE [Postmark May 27, 1796.] EAR C make yourself perfectly easy about May. I paid his bill, when I sent your clothes. I was flush of money, and am so still to all the purposes of a single life, so give yourself no further concern about it. The money would be superfluous to me, if I had it. With regard to Allen,-the woman he has married has some money, I have heard about £200 a year, enough for the maintenance of herself & children, one of whom is a girl nine years old! so Allen has dipt betimes into the cares of a family. I'very seldom see him, & do not know whether he has given up the Westminster hospital. When Southey becomes as modest as his predecessor Milton, and publishes his Epics in duodecimo, I will read 'em,—a Guinea a book is somewhat exorbitant, nor have I the opportunity of borrowing the Work. The extracts from it in the Monthly Review and the short passages in your Watchman seem to me much superior to any thing in his partnership account with Lovell. Your poems I shall procure forthwith. There were noble lines in what you inserted in one of your Numbers from Religious Musings, but I thought them elaborate. I am somewhat glad you have given up that Paper-it must have been dry, unprofitable, and of "dissonant mood" to your disposition. I wish you success in all your undertakings, and am glad to hear you are employed about the Evidences of Religion. There is need of multiplying such books an hundred fold in this philosophical age to prevent converts to Atheism, for they seem too tough disputants to meddle with afterwards. I am sincerely sorry for Allen, as a family man particularly. Le Grice is gone to make puns in Cornwall. He has got a tutorship to a young boy, living with his Mother, a widow Lady. He will of course initiate him quickly in "whatsoever things are lovely, honorable, and of good report." He has cut Miss Hunt comVOL. VI.-1 pleatly, the poor Girl is very ill on the Occasion, but he laughs at it, and justifies himself by saying, "she does not see him laugh." Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol-my life has been somewhat diversified of late. The 6 weeks that finished last year and began this your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton-I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I was and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume if all told. My Sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which if I finish I publish. White is on the eve of publishing (he took the hint from Vortigern) Original letters of Falstaff, Shallow &c-, a copy you shall have when it comes out. They are without exception the best imitations I ever saw. Coleridge, it may convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another Person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy. The sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry but you will be curious to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of my lucid Intervals. TO MY SISTER If from my lips some angry accents fell, Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind, And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well, An ear to the desponding love sick lay, Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay With these lines, and with that sister's kindest remembrances to C I conclude Your Conciones ad populum are the most eloquent politics that ever came in my way. Write, when convenient-not as a task, for there is nothing in this letter to answer. 1796 COLERIDGE IN 1796 3 You may inclose under cover to me at the India house what letters you please, for they come post free. We cannot send our remembrances to Mrs. C-— not having seen her, but believe me our best good wishes attend you both. My civic and poetic compts to Southey if at Bristol.-Why, he is a very Leviathan of Bards-the small minnow I NOTE [This is the earliest letter of Lamb's that has come down to us. On February 10, 1796, he was just twenty-one years old, and was now living at 7 Little Queen Street (since demolished) with his father, mother, Aunt Sarah Lamb (known as Aunt Hetty), Mary Lamb and, possibly, John Lamb. John Lamb, senior, was doing nothing and had, I think, already begun to break up: his old master, Samuel Salt, had died in February, 1792. John Lamb, the son (born June 5, 1763), had a clerkship at the South-Sea House; Charles Lamb had begun his long period of service in the India House; and Mary Lamb (born December 3, 1764) was occupied as a mantua-maker. At this time Coleridge was twenty-three; he would be twentyfour on October 21. His military experiences over, he had married Sara Fricker on October 4, 1795 (a month before Southey married her sister Edith), and was living at Bristol, on Redcliffe Hill. The first number of The Watchman was dated on March 1, 1796; on May 13, 1796, it came to an end. On April 16, 1796, Cottle had issued Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects, containing also four "effusions" by Charles Lamb (Nos. VII., XI., XII. and XIII.), and the "Religious Musings." Southey, on bad terms with Coleridge, partly on account of Southey's abandonment of Pantisocracy, was in Lisbon. His Joan of Arc had just been published by Cottle in quarto at a guinea. Previously he had collaborated in The Fall of Robespierre, 1794, with Coleridge and Robert Lovell. Each, one evening, had set forth to write an act by the next. Southey and Lovell did so, but Coleridge brought only a part of his. Lovell's being useless, Southey rewrote his act, Coleridge finished his at leisure, and the result was published. Robert Lovell (1770 ?-1796) had also been associated with Coleridge and Southey in Pantisocracy and was their brother-in-law, having married Mary Fricker, another of the sisters. When, in 1795, Southey and Lovell had published a joint volume of Poems, Southey took the pseudonym of Bion and Lovell of Moschus. May was probably the landlord of the Salutation and Cat. The London Directory for 1808 has "William May, Salutation Coffee House, 17 Newgate Street." We must suppose that when Coleridge quitted the Salutation and Cat in January, 1795, he was unable to pay his bill, and therefore had to leave his luggage behind. Cottle's story of Coleridge being offered free lodging by a London inn-keeper, if he would only talk and talk, must then either be a pretty invention or apply to another landlord, possibly the host of the Angel in Butcher Hall Street. Allen was Robert Allen, a schoolfellow of Lamb and Coleridge, and Coleridge's first friend. He was born on October 18, 1772. Both Lamb and Leigh Hunt tell good stories of him at Christ's Hospital, Lamb in Elia and Hunt in his Autobiography. From Christ's Hospital he went to University College, Oxford, and it was he who introduced Coleridge and Hucks to Southey in 1794. Probably, says Mr. E. H. Coleridge, it was he who brought Coleridge and Stoddart (afterwards Sir John and Hazlitt's brotherin-law) together. On leaving Oxford he seems to have gone to Westminster to learn surgery, and in 1797 he was appointed Deputy-Surgeon to the 2nd Royals, then in Portugal. He married a widow with children; at some time later took to journalism, as Lamb's reference in the Elia essay on "Newspapers" tells us; and he died of apoplexy in 1805. The phrase "dissonant mood" (Samson Agonistes, line 662) had been used by Coleridge in line 6 of his Effusion 22, “To a Friend with an Unfinished Poem," the friend being Lamb. Coleridge's employment on the Evidences of Religion, whatever it may have been, did not reach print. Le Grice was Charles Valentine Le Grice (1773-1858), an old Christ's Hospitaller and Grecian (see Lamb's Elia essays on "Christ's Hospital" and "Grace before Meat "). Le Grice passed to Trinity College, Cambridge. He left in 1796 and became tutor to William John Godolphin Nicholls of Trereife, near Penzance, the only son of a widowed mother. Le Grice was ordained in 1798 and married Mrs. Nicholls in 1799. Young Nicholls died in 1815 and Mrs. Le Grice in 1821, when Le Grice became sole owner of the Trereife property. He was incumbent of St. Mary's, Penzance, for some years. Le Grice was a witty, rebellious character, but he never fulfilled the promise of his early days. It has been conjectured that his skill in punning awakened Lamb's ambition in that direction. Le Grice saw Lamb next in 1834, at the Bell at Edmonton. His recollections of Lamb were included by Talfourd in the Memorials, and his recollections of Coleridge were printed in the Gentleman's Magazine, December, 1834. I know nothing of Miss Hunt. "Whatsoever things are honest. . ." Of Lamb's confinement in a madhouse here told. It is conjectured that the See Philippians iv. 8. we know no more than is "other person to whom 1796 "FALSTAFF'S LETTERS " 5 Lamb refers a few lines later was Ann Simmons, a girl at Widford for whom he had an attachment that had been discouraged, if not forbidden, by her friends. This is the only attack of the kind that Lamb is known to have suffered. He once told Coleridge that during his illness he had sometimes believed himself to be Young Norval in Home's "Douglas." The poem in blank verse was, we learn in a subsequent letter, "The Grandame," or possibly an autobiographical work of which "The Grandame" is the only portion that survived. White was James White (1775-1820), an old Christ's Hospitaller and a friend and almost exact contemporary of Lamb. Lamb, who first kindled his enthusiasm for Shakespeare, was, I think, to some extent involved in the Original Letters, &c., of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends, which appeared in 1796. The dedication-to Master Samuel Irelaunde, meaning William Henry Ireland (who sometimes took his father's name Samuel), the forger of the pretended Shakespearian play "Vortigern," produced at Drury Lane earlier in the year-is quite in Lamb's manner (see Vol. I. of this edition, page 465). White's immortality, however, rests not upon this book, but upon his portrait in the Elia essay on "ChimneySweepers." The sonnet "To my Sister" was printed, with slight alterations, by Lamb in Coleridge's Poems, second edition, 1797, and again in Lamb's Works, 1818. Coleridge's Conciones ad Populum; or, Addresses to the People, had been published at Bristol in November, 1795. Close students of Lamb's Letters will observe that this, together with many of the early letters to Coleridge which follow, differs from the text of the other editions, new copies having been made from the originals in the Morrison Collection.] LETTER 2 CHARLES LAMB TO S. T. COLERIDGE [Probably begun either on Tuesday, May 24, or Tuesday, May 31, 1796. Postmark? June 1.] AM in such violent pain with the head ach that I am fit for I nothing but transcribing, scarce for that. When I get your poems, and the Joan of Arc, I will exercise my presumption in giving you my opinion of 'em. The mail does not come in before tomorrow (Wednesday) morning. The following sonnet was composed during a walk down into Hertfordshire early in last Summer. |