I do not think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem being better than another. The Gods by denying him the very faculty itself of discrimination have effectually cut off every seed of envy in his bosom. But with envy, they excided Curiosity also, and if you wish the copy again, which you destined for him, I think I shall be able to find it again for you-on his third shelf, where he stuffs his presentation copies, uncut, in shape and matter resembling a lump of dry dust, but on carefully removing that stratum, a thing like a Pamphlet will emerge. I have tried this with fifty different Poetical Works that have been given G. D. in return for as many of his own performances, and I confess I never had any scruple in taking my own again wherever I found it, shaking the adherencies off-and by this means one Copy of "my Works" served for G. D. and with a little dusting was made over to my good friend Dr. Stoddart, who little thought whose leavings he was taking when he made me that graceful bow. By the way, the Doctor is the only one of my acquaintance who bows gracefully, my Town acquaintance I mean. How do you like my way of writing with two Inks ? I think it is pretty and mottley. Suppose Mrs. W. adopts it, the next time she holds the pen for you. [The ink differs with every word of the following para. graph:-] My dinner waits. I have no time to indulge any longer in these laborious curiosities. God bless you and cause to thrive and to burgeon whatsoever you write, and fear no inks of miserable poetYours truly CHARLES LAMB. asters. Mary's love. NOTE [The Peter Bell to which Lamb refers was written by John Hamilton Reynolds (1796-1852), the friend of Keats, and later Hood's brother-in-law. The parody is a travesty of Wordsworth generally rather than of Peter Bell, which had not then been published. James and Horace Smith, of the Rejected Addresses, which contained a parody of Wordsworth under the title "The Baby's Debut," had nothing to do with it. Lamb's indignation was shared by Coleridge, who wrote as follows to Taylor and Hessey, the publishers, on April 16, 1819, on the announcement of Reynolds' work: DEAR SIRS, I hope, nay I feel confident, that you will interpret this note in th real sense-namely, as a proof of the esteem and respect which I entertain toward you both. Looking in the Times this morning I was startled by an advertisement of PETER BELL-a Lyrical Ballad-with a very significant motto from one of our Comedies of Charles the IInd's reign, tho' what it signifies I wish to ascertain. Peter Bell is a Poem of Mr. Wordsworth's-and I have not heard, that it has been published by him.-If it have, and with his name (I have reason to believe, that 1819 THE PETER BELLS AGAIN 521 he never published anonymously) and this now advertised be a ridicule on it-I have nothing to say-But if it have not, I have ventured to pledge myself for you, that you would not wittingly give the high respectability of your names to an attack on a Manuscript work, which no man could assail but by a base breach of trust. It is stated in the article on Reynolds in the Dictionary of National Biography that Coleridge asserted positively that Lamb was the objectionable parodist; but this letter suggests that that was not so. "Lambert Simnel"--one of the pretenders to the throne of Henry VII. "Peter Bell (not the mock one)." Crabb Robinson's Diary, in the original MS., for June 6, 1812, contains this passage : With C. Lamb. Lent him Peter Bell. To my surprise he finds nothing in it good. He complains of the slowness of the narrative, as if that were not the art of the Poet. W. he says has great thoughts, but here are none of them. He has no interest in the Ass. These are to me inconceivable judgments from C. L. whose taste in general I acquiesce in and who is certainly an enthusiast for W. Again, on May 11, 1819, after the poem was published, Robinson says: : L. spoke of Peter Bell which he considers as one of the worst of Wordsworth's works. The lyric narrative L. has no taste for. He is disgusted by the introduction, which he deems puerile and the story he thinks ill told, though he allows the idea to be good. 66 Rogers." At the end of Samuel Rogers' poem, Human Life, 1819, is a ballad, entitled "The Boy of Egremond," which has for subject the same incident as that in Wordsworth's "Force of Prayer"-beginning What is good for a bootless bene? -the death of the Young Romilly as he leapt across the Strid. In Wordsworth the answer to the question is "Endless sorrow." Rogers' poem begins: "Say what remains when hope is fled ?" She answered "Endless weeping." Wordsworth's Peter Bell was published a week after the mock one. To The Waggoner we shall come shortly. The significance of the allusion to Coleridge is not perfectly clear; but I imagine it to refer to the elaborate examination of Wordsworth's poetry in the Biographia Literaria. "These obtuse literary Bells." Peter Bell, in the poem, sounds the river with his staff, and draws forth the dead body of the ass's master. Lamb passes, in his curse, to a reference to St. Peter. "Taking my own again." This, if, as one may suppose, adapted from Molière's "Je reprendre mon bien partout où je le trouve," is an indication that Lamb knew the Frenchman's comedies.] LETTER 234 CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING May 28, 1819. My Mately. Want tot to know about you. I wish you were Y dear M.,-I want to know how your brother is, if you have heard nearer.1 I How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathamstead, and farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman. Hail, Mackeray End you This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but got no further. The E. I. H. has been thrown into a quandary by the strange phenomenon of poor Tommy Bye, whom I have known man and mad-man twenty-seven years, he being elder here than myself by nine years and more. He was always a pleasant, gossiping, half-headed, muzzy, dozing, dreaming, walk-about, inoffensive chap; a little too fond of the creature-who isn't at times? but Tommy had not brains to work off an over-night's surfeit by ten o'clock next morning, and unfortunately, in he wandered the other morning drunk with last night, and with a superfotation of drink taken in since he set out from bed. He came staggering under his double burthen, like trees in Java, bearing at once blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard or some other traveller tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament; some wretched calico that he had mopped his poor oozy front with had rendered up its native dye, and the devil a bit would he consent to wash it, but swore it was characteristic, for he was going to the sale of indigo, and set up a laugh which I did not think the lungs of mortal man were competent to. It was like a thousand people laughing, or the Goblin Page. He imagined afterwards that the whole office had been laughing at him, so strange did his own sounds strike upon his nonsensorium. But Tommy has laughed his last laugh, and awoke the next day to find himself reduced from an abused income of £600 per annum to one-sixth of the sum, after thirty-six years' tolerably good service. The quality of mercy was not strained in his behalf; the gentle dews dropt not on him from heaven. It just came across me that I was writing to Canton. How is Ball? "Mr. B. is a P—.” Will you drop in to-morrow night? Fanny Kelly is coming, if she does not cheat us. Mrs. Gold is well, but proves "uncoined," as the lovers about Wheathampstead would say. O hard hearted Burrell 1[See Appendix II., page 973.] 1819 MACKERY END 523 I have not had such a quiet half hour to sit down to a quiet letter for many years. I have not been interrupted above four times. I wrote a letter the other day in alternate lines, black ink and red, and you cannot think how it chilled the flow of ideas. Next Monday is Whit-Monday. What a reflection! Twelve years ago, and I should have kept that and the following holiday in the fields a-Maying. All of those pretty pastoral delights are over. This dead, everlasting dead desk-how it weighs the spirit of a gentleman down! This dead wood of the desk instead of your living trees! But then, again, I hate the Joskins, a name for Hertfordshire bumpkins. Each state of life has its inconvenience; but then, again, mine has more than one. Not that I repine, or grudge, or murmur at my destiny. I have meat and drink, and decent apparel; I shall, at least, when I get a new hat. A red-haired man has just interrupted me. He has broke the current of my thoughts. I haven't a word to add. I don't know why I send this letter, but I have had a hankering to hear about you some days. Perhaps it will go off, before your reply comes. If it don't, I assure you no letter was ever welcomer from you, from Paris or Macao. NOTE C. LAMB. [Manning, who had now settled in England, but in retirement, was living in Hertfordshire, at Totteridge. The Gladmans and Brutons are mentioned in the Elia essay "Mackery End in Hertfordshire" : "The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire; a farm-house, delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child, under the care of Bridget; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who had married my grandmother's sister. His name was Gladman. My grandmother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are still flourishing in that part of the country, but the Fields are almost extinct." The farm at Mackery End is now (1904) in other hands, but a Miss Sarah Bruton, the last of the flock, still lives at Wheathampstead. Tommy Bye we saw in the abstract of the letter to Chambers on page 518. 66 Over-night's surfeit"-Apemantus' phrase in "Timon,” IV., 3, 227, "O'er-night's surfeit." The Goblin Page is in Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. "The quality of mercy was not strained "—from Portia's speech in "The Merchant of Venice" (IV., 1, 184). "Mrs. Gold is well "-née Fanny Burrell (see note on page 513). "This dead wood of the desk." Lamb used this figure more than once, in his letters and elsewhere. In the Elia essay "The Super annuated Man" he says: "I had grown to my desk, as it were ; and the wood had entered into my soul."] LETTER 235 CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH MY [P.M. June 7, 1819.] Y dear Wordsworth, You cannot imagine how proud we are here of the dedication. We read it twice for once that we do the poem—I mean all through—yet Benjamin is no common favorite there is a spirit of beautiful tolerance in it-it is as good as it was in 1806—and will be as good in 1829 if our dim eyes shall be awake to peruse it. Methinks there is a kind of shadowing affinity between the subject of the narrative and the subject of the dedication-but I will not **** for enter into personal themes-else, substituting ******* Ben, and the Honble United Company of Merchts trading to the East Indies for the Master of the misused Team, it might seem by no far fetched analogy to point its dim warnings hitherward— but I reject the omen-especially as its import seems to have been diverted to another victim. Poor Tommy Bye, whom I have known (as I express'd it in a letter to Manning), man and mad man 27 years he was my gossip in Leadenhall St.-but too much addicted to turn in at a red lattice-came wandering into his and my common scene of business -you have seen the orderly place-reeling drunk at nine o Clockwith his face of a deep blue, contracted by a filthy dowlas muckinger which had given up its dye to his poor oozy visnomy—and short to tell, after playing various pranks, laughing loud laughters three -mad explosions they were in the following morning the "tear stood in his ee"-for he found his abused income of clear £600 inexorably reduced to £100-he was my dear gossip-alas! Benjamin ! I will never write another letter with alternate inks. You cannot imagine how it cramps the flow of the style. I can conceive Pindar (I do not mean to compare myself [to] him) by the command of Hiero, the Sicilian tyrant (was not he the tyrant of some place? fie |