1815 LEAVING OFF TOBACCO AGAIN 483 I of unprobable romantic fictions, fitting the remoteness of the mission it goes upon; in the present I mean to confine myself nearer to truth as you come nearer home. A correspondence with the uttermost parts of the earth necessarily involves in it some heat of fancy; it sets the brain agoing; but I can think on the half-way house tranquilly. Your friends, then, are not all dead or grown forgetful of you through old age, as that lying letter asserted, anticipating rather what must happen if you kept tarrying on for ever on the skirts of creation, as there seemed a danger of your doing-but they are all tolerably well and in full and perfect comprehension of what is meant by Manning's coming home again. Mrs. Kenney (cidevant Holcroft) never let her tongue run riot more than in remembrances of you. Fanny expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her romantic nature. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a new bran gown to wear when you come. am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised. The soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain. One that you knew, and I think the only one of those friends we knew much of in common, has died in earnest. Poor Priscilla, wife of Kit Wordsworth! Her brother Robert is also dead, and several of the grown-up brothers and sisters, in the compass of a very few years. Death has not otherwise meddled much in families that I know. Not but he has his damn'd eye upon us, and is w[h]etting his infernal feathered dart every instant, as you see him truly pictured in that impressive moral picture, "The good man at the hour of death." I have in trust to put in the post four letters from Diss, and one from Lynn, to St. Helena, which I hope will accompany this safe, and one from Lynn, and the one before spoken of from me, to Canton. But we all hope that these latter may be waste paper. I don't know why I have forborne writing so long. But it is such a forlorn hope to send a scrap of paper straggling over wide oceans. And yet I know when you come home, I shall have you sitting before me at our fire-side just as if you had never been away. In such an instant does the return of a person dissipate all the weight of imaginary perplexity from distance of time and space! I'll promise you good oysters. Cory is dead, that kept the shop opposite St. Dunstan's, but the tougher materials of the shop survive the perishing frame of its keeper. Oysters continue to flourish there under as good auspices. Poor Cory! But if you will absent yourself twenty years together, you must not expect numerically the same population to congratulate your return which wetted the sea-beach with their tears when you went away. Have you recovered the breathless stone-staring astonishment into which you must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was living in St. Helena? What an event in the solitude of the seas! like finding a fish's bone at the top of Plinlimmon; but these things are nothing in our western world. Novelties cease to affect. Come and try what your presence can. God bless you.-Your old friend, NOTE C. LAMB. [Robert Lloyd had died in 1811, and within a few days one of his brothers and one of his sisters. "The good man at the hour of death." I have not found the picture to which Lamb refers. Probably a popular print of the day, or he may have been incorrectly remembering Blake's "Death of the Good Old Man" in Blair's Grave. Manning, by changing his plans, did not reach St. Helena when he expected to; not, indeed, until July, 1817, when he met Napoleon.] LETTER 217 CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH [Dated at end: April 9, 1816.] EAR Wordsworth-Thanks for the books you have given me I will bind up the Political Sonnets and Ode according to your Suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till People have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain, and chain them to my shelves More Bodleiano, and People may come and read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow, some mean to read but don't read, and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money, they never fail to make use of it. Coleridge has been here about a fortnight. His health is tolerable at present, though beset with temptations. In the first place, the Cov. Gard. Manager has declined accepting his Tragedy, tho' (having read it) I see no reason upon earth why it might not have run a very fair chance, tho' it certainly wants a prominent part for a Miss Ŏ Neil or a Mr. Kean, However he is going to day to write to Lord Dand for all the Books you mean to give me. 1816 COLERIDGE IN TEMPTATION 485 Byron to get it to Drury. Should you see Mrs. C., who has just written to C. a letter which I have given him, it will be as well to say nothing about its fate till some answer is shaped from Drury. He has two volumes printing together at Bristol, both finished as far as the composition goes; the latter containing his fugitive Poems, the former his Literary Life. Nature, who conducts every creature by instinct to its best end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his abode at a Chemist's Laboratory in Norfolk Street. She might as well have sent a Helluo Librorum for cure to the Vatican. God keep him inviolate among the traps and pitfalls. He has done pretty well as yet. Tell Miss H. my Sister is every day wishing to be quietly sitting down to answer her very kind Letter, but while C. stays she can hardly find a quiet time, God bless him. Tell Mrs. W. her Postscripts are always agreeable. They are so legible too. Your manual graphy is terrible, dark as Lycophron. "Likelihood" for instance is thus typified [here Lamb makes an illegible scribble]. I should not wonder if the constant making out of such Paragraphs is the cause of that weakness in Mrs. W.'s Eyes as she is tenderly pleased to express it. Dorothy I hear has mounted spectacles; so you have deoculated two of your dearest relations in life. Well, God bless you and continue to give you power to write with a finger of power upon our hearts what you fail to impress in corresponding lucidness upon our outward eyesight. Mary's Love to all, She is quite well. I am call'd off to do the deposits on Cotton Wool-but why do I relate this to you who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of Deposits, of Interest, of Warehouse rent, and Contingent Fund-Adieu. C. LAMB. A longer Letter when C. is gone back into the Country, relating his success, &c.—my judgment of your new Books &c. &c.-I am scarce quiet enough while he stays. Yours again Tuesday 9 Apr. 1816. NOTE C. L. [Wordsworth had sent Lamb, presumably in proof (see next letter), Thanksgiving Ode, 18 Jan. 1816, with other short pieces chiefly referring to recent events, 1816-the subject of the ode being the peace that had come upon Europe with the downfall of Napoleon. It follows in the collected works the sonnets to liberty. "More Bodleiano." According to Macray's Annals of the Bodleian Library (second edition, 1890, page 121), books seem to have been chained in the Bodleian Library up to 1751. The process of removing the chains seems to have begun in 1757. In 1761 as many as 1,448 books were unchained at a cost of a id. a piece. A dozen years later discarded chains were sold at the rate of 2d. for a long chain, 14d. for a short one, and if one hankered after a hundred-weight of them, the wish could be gratified on payment of 14s. Many loose chains are still preserved in the library as relics. "For of those who borrow." Lamb's Elia essay, "The Two Races of Men," may have had its germ in this passage. Coleridge came to London from Calne in March bringing with him the manuscript of "Zapolya." He had already had correspondence with Lord Byron concerning a tragedy for Drury Lane, on whose committee Byron had a seat, but he had done nothing towards writing it. "Zapolya" was never acted. It was published in 1817. Coleridge's lodgings were at 43 Norfolk Street, Strand. See next letter for further news of Coleridge at this time. "A Helluo Librorum "-a book-glutton. Lycophron, the Greek poet and grammarian, called "Tenebrosus," on account of the obscurity of his poem Cassandra.] SIR, LETTER 218 CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH [April 26, 1816.] PLEASE to state the Weights and Amounts of the following Lots of sold Sale, 181 for Your obedient Servant, CHAS. LAMB. Accountant's Office, 26 Apr. 1816 DE EAR W. I have just finished the pleasing task of correcting the Revise of the Poems and letter. I hope they will come out faultless. One blunder I saw and shuddered at. The hallucinating rascal had printed battered for battened, this last not conveying any distinct sense to his gaping soul. The Reader (as they call 'em) had discovered it and given it the marginal brand, but the substitutory n had not yet appeared. I accompanied his notice with a most pathetic address to the Printer not to neglect the Correction. I know how such a blunder would "batter at your Peace." [Batter is written batten and corrected to batter in the 1816 "CHRISTABEL" 487 margin.] With regard to the works, the Letter I read with unabated satisfaction. Such a thing was wanted, called for. The parallel of Cotton with Burns I heartily approve; Iz. Walton hallows any page in which his reverend name appears. "Duty archly bending to purposes of general benevolence" is exquisite. The Poems I endeavored not to understand, but to read them with my eye alone, and I think I succeeded. (Some people will do that when they come out, you'll say.) As if I were to luxuriate tomorrow at some Picture Gallery I was never at before, and going by to day by chance, found the door open, had but 5 minutes to look about me, peeped in, just such a chastised peep I took with my mind at the lines my luxuriating eye was coursing over unrestrained, -not to anticipate another day's fuller satisfaction. Coleridge is printing Xtabel, by Ld Byron's recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision, Kubla Khan-which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it, but there is an observation "Never tell thy dreams," and I am almost afraid that Kubla Khan is an owl that won't bear day light, I fear lest it should be discovered by the lantern of typography and clear reducting to letters, no better than nonsense or no sense. When I was young I used to chant with extacy Mild Arcadians ever blooming, till somebody told me it was meant to be nonsense. Even yet I have a lingering attachment to it, and think it better than Windsor Forest, Dying Xtian's address &c.-C. has sent his Tragedy to D. L. T.-it cannot be acted this season, and by their manner of receiving it, I hope he will be able to alter it to make them accept it for next. He is at present under the medical care of a Mr. Gilman (Killman ?) a Highgate Apothecary, where he plays at leaving off Laud-m. I think his essentials not touched: he is very bad, but then he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged. Will Miss H. pardon our not replying at length to her kind Letter? We are not quiet enough. Morgan is with us every day, going betwixt Highgate and the Temple. Coleridge is absent but 4 miles, and the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of 50 ordinary Persons. "Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius, for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him or the author of the Excursion, I should in a very little time lose my own identity, and be dragged along in the current of other people's thoughts, hampered in a net. How cool I sit in this office, with no possible interruption further than what I may term material; there is not as much metaphysics in 36 of the people here as there is in the first page of Locke's |