1816 A SUNDAY AT KEW 495 Mrs. Wordsworth's kind invitation and to feel a kind of latent hope of what might one day happen. You ask how Coleridge maintains himself. I know no more than you do. Strange to say, I have seen him but once since he has been at Highgate, and then I met him in the street. I have just been reading your kind letter over again and find you had some doubt whether we had left the Temple entirely. It was merely a lodging we took to recruit our health and spirits. From the time we left Calne Charles drooped sadly, company became quite irksome, and his anxious desire to leave off smoking, and his utter inability to perform his daily resolutions against it, became quite a torment to him, so I prevailed with him to try the experiment of change of scene, and set out in one of the short stage coaches from Bishopsgate Street, Miss Brent and I, and we looked over all the little places within three miles and fixed on one quite countrified and not two miles from Shoreditch Church, and entered upon it the next day. I thought if we stayed but a week it would be a little rest and respite from our troubles, and we made a ten weeks stay, and very comfortable we were, so much so that if ever Charles is superannuated on a small pension, which is the great object of his ambition, and we felt our income straitened, I do think I could live in the country entirely-at least I thought so while I was there but since I have been at home I wish to live and die in the Temple where I was born. We left the trees so green it looked like early autumn, and can see but one leaf "The last of its clan" on our poor old Hare Court trees. What a rainy summer!—and yet I have been so much out of town and have made so much use of every fine day that I can hardly help thinking it has been a fine summer. We calculated we walked three hundred and fifty miles while we were in our country lodging. One thing I must tell you, Charles came round every morning to a shop near the Temple to get shaved. Last Sunday we had such a pleasant day, I must tell you of it. We went to Kew and saw the old Palace where the King was brought up, it was the pleasantest sight I ever saw, I can scarcely tell you why, but a charming old woman shewed it to us. She had lived twenty six years there and spoke with such a hearty love of our good old King, whom all the world seems to have forgotten, that it did me good to hear her. She was as proud in pointing out the plain furniture (and I am sure you are now sitting in a larger and better furnished room) of a small room in which the King always dined, nay more proud of the simplicity of her royal master's taste, than any shower of Carlton House can be in showing the fine things there, and so she was when she made us remark the smallness of one of the Princesses' bedrooms, and said she slept and also dressed in that little room. There are a great many good pictures but I was most pleased with one of the King when he was about two years old, such a pretty little white-headed boy. I cannot express how much pleasure a letter from you gives us. If I could promise my self I should be always as well as I am now, I would say I will be a better correspondent in future. If Charles has time to add a line I shall be less ashamed to send this hasty scrawl. Love to all and every one. How much I should like once more to see Miss Wordsworth's handwriting, if she would but write a postscript to your next, which I look to receive in a few days. Yours affectionately For a Postscript, see the beginning. NOTE ["Miss Brent." Mrs. Morgan's sister. M. LAMB. Crabb Robinson had been in the Lake Country in September and October. "The last of its clan." From Coleridge's Christabel, line 49. "To a shop near the Temple." Possibly to Mr. A-- of Flowerde-Luce Court, mentioned by Lamb in the footnote to his essay "On the Melancholy of Tailors" (see Vol. I., page 174). "Our good old King "-George III., then in retirement. Carlton House was the home of the Regent, whom Lamb (and probably his sister) detested-as his "Triumph of the Whale" and other squibs (see Vol. V.) show. See Appendix II., page 973, for a letter to Rickman.] LETTER 222 MARY LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON [No date. ? Late 1816.] Y dear Miss Hutchinson, I had intended to write you a long My bare acknowledgment of the receipt of your kind letter. One question I must hastily ask you. Do you think Mr. Wordsworth would have any reluctance to write (strongly recommending to their patronage) to any of his rich friends in London to solicit employment for Miss Betham as a Miniature Painter? If you give me hopes that he will not be averse to do this, I will write to you more fully stating the infinite good he would do by performing so irksome a task as I know asking favours to be. In brief, she has contracted debts for printing her beautiful poem of "Marie," which like all things of original excellence does not sell at all. 1817 LEIGH HUNT'S PRISON FRUIT 497 These debts have led to little accidents unbecoming a woman and a poetess to suffer. Retirement with such should be voluntary. [Charles Lamb adds:— The Bell rings. I just snatch the Pen out of my sister's hand to finish rapidly. Wordswth, may tell De Q that Miss B's price for a Virgin and Child is three guineas. NOTE Yours (all of you) ever C. L. ["De Q"-Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), the “opium-eater," then living at Grasmere. Lamb and De Quincey had first met in 1804; but it was not until 1821 that they became really intimate, when Lamb introduced him to the London Magazine. Miss Betham painted miniature portraits, among others, of Mrs. S. T. Coleridge and Sara Coleridge. Here should come a note to William Ayrton dated April 18, 1817, not available for this edition, thanking him for much pleasure at "Don Giovanni" (see note to next letter). Somewhen in 1816 should come a letter from Lamb to Leigh Hunt on the publication of The Story of Rimini, mentioned in Leigh Hunt's Correspondence, of which this is the only sentence that is preserved: "The third Canto is in particular my favourite: we congratulate you most sincerely on the trait [? taste] of your prison fruit."] 1817 A RHYMED LETTER For who can confute And stiff as stone, To convince him with arguments pro and con, Bred up at Merton, Or Mr. Hazlitt, the Metaphysician— With all your rare tone. Or put the case It were a female spectre- Where no peaches, Nor lemons, nor limes, nor oranges hang, With their sweet drench, The fiery pangs which the worms inflict, Which the corpse may dislike, but can ne'er contradict Hey, Mr. Ayrton ? With all your rare tone I am. C. LAMB. 499 |