on this occasion? Your fear for Hartley's intellectuals is just and rational. Could not the Chancellor be petitioned to remove him? His lordship took Mr. Betty from under the paternal wing. I think at least he should go through a course of matter-of-fact with some sober man after the mysteries. Could not he spend a week at Poole's before he goes back to Oxford? Tobin is dead. But there is a man in my office, a Mr. Hedges, who proses it away from morning to night, and never gets beyond corporal and material verities. He'd get these crack-brain metaphysics out of the young gentleman's head as soon as any one I know. When I can't sleep o' nights, I imagine a dialogue with Mr. H. upon any given subject, and go prosing on in fancy with him, till I either laugh or fall asleep. I have literally found it answer. I am going to stand godfather; I don't like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt's marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral. Yet I can read about these ceremonies with pious and proper feelings. The realities of life only seem the mockeries. I fear I must get cured along with Hartley, if not too inveterate. Don't you think Louis the Desirable is in a sort of quandary? After all, Bonaparte is a fine fellow, as my barber says, and I should not mind standing bareheaded at his table to do him service in his fall. They should have given him Hampton Court or Kensington, with a tether extending forty miles round London. Would not the people have ejected the Brunswicks some day in his favour? Well, we shall see. NOTE ["Father Pardo." I have not traced this fat friar. Qu. C. LAMB. "The excellent Dodd." The Rev. William Dodd (1729-1777), compiler of The Beauties of Shakespeare, was hanged for forgery in 1777, when Lamb was two years old. The case caused immense public interest. 66 Buonaparte." Waterloo had been fought on June 18. "Your boute-feu." The bonfire in honour of Waterloo flamed on Skiddaw on August 21. See Southey's description in his letter to his brother, August 23, 1815 (Life and Correspondence, Vol. IV., page 120). "Poet Settle." Elkanah Settle (1648-1724) was chief organiser of the procession on the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's birthday in 1680, when the Pope was burned in effigy. Hartley Coleridge, now almost nineteen, after having been to school at Ambleside, had been sent to Oxford through the instru 1815 ENTER TALFOURD 469 mentality of his uncle, Southey. At the time of Lamb's letter he was staying at Calne with his father. Mr. Betty was the Young Roscius, whom we have already seen, who, after retiring from the Phenomenon stage of his career in 1808, had since been to school and to Cambridge upon his earnings, and had now become an adult actor. Poole was Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, whom we have seen: Coleridge's old and very sensible friend. Tobin would probably be James Webbe Tobin, the brother of the dramatist. He had died in 1814 (see Letter No. 153). "I am going to stand godfather." To what child I do not know. "Louis the Desirable "-Louis XVIII., styled by the Royalists "Le Desiré."] LETTER 210 CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 9th Aug. 1815. DE [P.M. August 9, 1815.] EAR Wordsworth, We acknowlege with pride the receit of both your hand writings, and desire to be ever had in kindly remembrance by you both and by Dorothy. Miss Hutchinson has just transmitted us a letter containing, among other chearful matter, the annunciation of a child born. Nothing of consequence has turned up in our parts since your departure. Mary and I felt quite queer after your taking leave (you W. W.) of us in St. Giles's. We wishd we had seen more of you, but felt we had scarce been sufficiently acknowleging for the share we had enjoyed of your company. We felt as if we had been not enough expressive of our pleasure. But our manners both are a little too much on this side of too-much-cordiality. We want presence of mind and presence of heart. What we feel comes too late, like an after thought impromptu. But perhaps you observed nothing of that which we have been painfully conscious of, and are, every day, in our intercourse with those we stand affected to through all the degrees of love. Robinson is on the Circuit. Our Panegyrist I thought had forgotten one of the objects of his youthful admiration, but I was agreeably removed from that scruple by the laundress knocking at my door this morning almost before I was up, with a present of fruit from my young friend, &c.-There is something inexpressibly pleasant to me in these presents. Be it fruit, or fowl, or brawn, or what not. Books are a legitimate cause of acceptance. If presents be not the soul of friendship, undoubtedly they are the most spiritual part of the body of that intercourse, There is too much narrowness of thinking in this point. The punctilio of acceptance methinks is too confined and straitlaced. I could be content to receive money, or clothes, or a joint of meat from a friend; why should he not send me a dinner as well as a dessert? I would taste him in the beasts of the field, and thro' all creation. Therefore did the basket of fruit of the juvenile Talfourd not displease me. Not that I have any thoughts of bartering or reciprocating these things. To send him any thing in return would be to reflect suspicion of mercenariness upon what I know he meant a freewill offering. Let him overcome me in bounty. In this strife a generous nature loves to be overcome. Alsager (whom you call Alsingerand indeed he is rather singer than sager, no reflection upon his naturals neither) is well and in harmony with himself and the world. I don't know how he and those of his constitution keep their nerves so nicely balanced as they do. Or have they any? or are they made of packthread? He is proof against weather, ingratitude, meat under done, every weapon of fate. I have just now a jagged end of a tooth pricking against my tongue, which meets it half way in a wantonness of provocation, and there they go at it, the tongue pricking itself like the viper against the file, and the tooth galling all the gum inside and out to torture, tongue and tooth, tooth and tongue, hard at it, and I to pay the reckoning, till all my mouth is as hot as brimstone, and I'd venture the roof of my mouth that at this moment, at which I conjecture my fullhappinessed friend is picking his crackers, not one of the double rows of ivory in his privileged mouth has as much as a flaw in it, but all perform their functions, and having performed it, expect to be picked (luxurious steeds!) and rubbed down. I don't think he could be robbed, or could have his house set on fire, or ever want money. I have heard him express a similar opinion of his own impassibility. I keep acting here Heautontimorumenos. Burney has been to Calais and has come home a travelld Monsieur. He speaks nothing but the Gallic Idiom. Field is on circuit. So now I believe I have given account of most that you saw at our Cabin. Have you seen a curious letter in Morn. Chron., by C. Ll., the genius of absurdity, respecting Bonaparte's suing out his Habeas Corpus. That man is his own moon. He has no need of ascending into that gentle planet for mild influences. You wish me some of your leisure. I have a glimmering aspect, a chink-light of liberty before me, which I pray God may prove not fallacious. My remonstrances have stirred up others to remonstrate, and altogether, there is a plan for separating certain parts of business from our department, which if it take place will produce me more time, i.e. my evenings free. It may be a means of placing me in a more conspicuous situation which will knock at my nerves another M. 1815 DREAMS OF LIBERTY * 471 I mean way, but I wait the issue in submission. If I can but begin my own day at 4 o Clock in the afternoon, I shall think myself to have Eden days of peace and liberty to what I have had. As you say, how a man can fill 3 volumes up with an Essay on the Drama is wonderful. I am sure a very few sheets would hold all I had to say on the subject, and yet I dare say * * * [*] as Von Slagel.. Did you ever read Charron on Wisdom? or Patrick's Pilgrim? if neither, you have two great pleasures to come. some day to attack Caryl on Job, six Folios. What any man can write, surely I may read. If I do but get rid of auditing Warehousekeepers Accts, and get no worse-harassing task in the place of it, what a Lord of Liberty I shall be. I shall dance and skip and make mouths at the invisible event, and pick the thorns out of my pillow and throw 'em at rich men's night caps, and talk blank verse, hoity toity, and sing "A Clerk I was in London Gay," ban, ban, CaCaliban, like the emancipated monster, and go where I like, up this street or down that ally. Adieu, and pray that it may be my luck. Good be to you all. C. LAMB. NOTE ["A child born." This was George Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth's nephew. "Our Panegyrist "-Thomas Noon Talfourd. This is Lamb's first mention of his future biographer. Talfourd was then just twenty, had published some poems, and was reading law with Chitty, the special pleader. He had met Lamb at the beginning of 1815 through William Evans, owner of The Pamphleteer, had scoured London for a copy of Rosamund Gray, and had written of Lamb in The Pamphleteer as one of the chief of living poets. He then became an ardent supporter of Wordsworth, his principal criticism of whom was written later for the New Monthly Magazine. "If presents be not the soul of friendship." Lamb's "Thoughts on Presents of Game," written many years later for The Athenæum, carries on this theme (see Vol. I., page 343). "Alsager." Thomas Massa Alsager, a friend of Crabb Robinson, and through him of Lamb, was a strange blend of the financial and the musical critic. He controlled the departments of Money and Music for The Times for many years. "Heautontimorumenos "_"The Self-Tormentor." The name of a comedy by Terence. "Field "Barron Field (see note on page 502). "C. LI."-Capell Lofft (see note on page 451). He wrote to the Morning Chronicle for August 2 and 3, 1815, as Lamb says. The gist of his argument was in this sentence : [7th para.] Bonaparte with the concurrence of the Admiralty, is within the limits of British local allegiance. He is a temporary, considered as private, though not a natural born subject, and as such within the limits of 31 Car. II. the Habeas Corpus Act, [etc.]. On August 10 he wrote again, quoting the lines from "The Tempest": The nobler action is, In virtue than in vengeance:-He being here "An Essay on the Drama." on the Drama." This cryptic passage refers, I imagine, to a translation by John Black, afterwards the editor of the Morning Chronicle, of August Von Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 2 vols., 1815. Does Lamb mean "And yet, I dare say, I know as much as Von Slagel did." "Charron on Wisdom" and "Patrick's Pilgrim." Pierre Charron's De la Sagesse, and Bishop Patrick's Parable of the Pilgrim, 1664, a curious independent anticipation of Bunyan. Lamb had written of both these books in a little essay contributed in 1813 to The Examiner, entitled "Books with One Idea in them" (see Vol. I., page 153). "Caryl on Job"-Commentary on the Book of Job, 12 vols., 4o, 1651-1666, by Joseph Caryl. "Make mouths at the invisible event " ("Hamlet," IV., 4, 50). "A Clerk I was in London Gay." A song sung in Colman's "Inkle and Yarico," which Lamb actually did use as a motto for his Elia essay "The Superannuated Man," dealing with his emancipation, ten years later. "Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban." See "The Tempest," II., 2, 188.] LETTER 211 MARY AND CHARLES LAMB TO SARAH HUTCHINSON M [Dated at end: August 20, 1815.] Y dear friend, It is less fatigue to me to write upon lines, and I want to fill up as much of my paper as I can in gratitude for the pleasure your very kind letter has given me. I began to think I should not hear from you; knowing you were not fond of letter-writing I quite forgave you, but I was very sorry. Do not make a point of conscience of it, but if ever you feel an inclination you cannot think how much a few lines would delight me. I am happy to hear so good an account of your sister and child, and sincerely wish her a perfect recovery. I am glad you did not arrive sooner, you escaped much anxiety. I have just received |