April6, 1825
Dear Wordsworth,—I have been several times meditating a letter to you concerning the good thing which has befallen me; but the thought of poor Monkhouse [1] came across me. He was one that I had exulted in the prospect of congratulating me. He and you were to have been the first participators; for indeed it has been ten weeks since the first motion of it. Here am I then, after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o'clock this finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety: £441;i.e., £450, with a deduction of £9 for a provision secured to my sister, she being survivor, the pension guaranteed by Act Georgii Tertii, etc.
I came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me; it was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three,i.e., to have three times as much real time—time that is my own—in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift. Holidays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys,—their conscious fugitiveness; the craving after making the most of them. Now, when all is holiday, there are no holidays. I can sit at home, in rain or shine, without a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my own master as it has been irksome to have had a master. Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to us.
Leigh Hunt and Montgomery, after their releasements, describe the shock of their emancipation much as I feel mine. But it hurt their frames. I eat, drink, and sleep sound as ever, I lay no anxious schemes for going hither and thither, but take things as they occur. Yesterday I excursioned twenty miles; to-day I write a few letters. Pleasuring was for fugitive play-days: mine are fugitive only in the sense that life is fugitive. Freedom and life co-existent!
At the foot of such a call upon you for gratulation, I am ashamed to advert to that melancholy event. Monkhouse was a character I learned to love slowly; but it grew upon me yearly, monthly, daily. What a chasm has it made in our pleasant parties! His noble, friendly face was always coming before me, till this hurrying event in my life came, and for the time has absorbed all interest; in fact, it has shaken me a little. My old desk companions, with whom I have had such merry hours, seem to reproach me for removing my lot from among them. They were pleasant creatures; but to the anxieties of business, and a weight of possible worse ever impending, I was not equal. Tuthill and Gilman gave me my certificates; I laughed at the friendly lie implied in them. But my sister shook her head, and said it was all true. Indeed, this last winter I was jaded out; winters were always worse than other parts of the year, because the spirits are worse, and I had no daylight. In summer I had daylight evenings. The relief was hinted to me from a superior power when I, poor slave, had not a hope but that I must wait another seven years with Jacob; and lo! the Rachel which I coveted is brought to me.
[1] Wordsworth's cousin, who was ill of consumption in Devonshire. He died the following year.
April6, 1825.
Dear B.B.,—My spirits are so tumultuary with the novelty of my recent emancipation that I have scarce steadiness of hand, much more mind, to compose a letter. I am free, B.B.,—free as air!
"The little bird that wings the skyKnows no such liberty." [1]I was set free on Tuesday in last week at fouro'clock. I came home forever!
I have been describing my feelings as well as I can to Wordsworth in a long letter, and don't care to repeat. Take it, briefly, that for a few days I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change; but it is becoming daily more natural to me. I went and sat among 'em all at my old thirty-three-years' desk yester-morning; and, deuce take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry, sociable lads,—at leaving them in the lurch, fag, fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me anything but pleasure.
B.B., I would not serve another seven years for seven hundred thousand pounds! I have got £441 net for life, sanctioned by Act of Parliament, with a provision for Mary if she survives me. I will live another fifty years; or if I live but ten, they will be thirty, reckoning the quantity of real time in them,—i.e., the time that is a man's own, Tell me how you like "Barbara S.;" [2] will it be received in atonement for the foolish "Vision"—I mean by the lady?A propos, I never saw Mrs. Crawford in my life; nevertheless, it's all true of somebody.
Address me, in future, Colebrooke Cottage, Islington, I am really nervous (but that will wear off), so take this brief announcement.
Yours truly,
[1] "The birds that wanton in the air Know no such liberty." LOVELACE.
[2] The Elia essay. Fanny Kelly was the original of "Barbara S."
July2, 1825.
I am hardly able to appreciate your volume now; [1] but I liked thededication much, and the apology for your bald burying grounds. ToShelley—butthatis not new, To the young Vesper-singer, GreatBealings, Playford, and what not.
If there be a cavil, it is that the topics of religious consolation, however beautiful, are repeated till a sort of triteness attends them. It seems as if you were forever losing Friends' children by death, and reminding their parents of the Resurrection. Do children die so often and so good in your parts? The topic taken from the consideration that they are snatched away frompossible vanitiesseems hardly sound; for to an Omniscient eye their conditional failings must be one with their actual. But I am too unwell for theology.
Such as I am,
I am yours and A.K.'s truly,
[1] "Barton's volume of Poems."
August10, 1825.
We shall be soon again at Colebrooke.
Dear B.B.,—You must excuse my not writing before, when I tell you we are on a visit at Enfield, where I do not feel it natural to sit down to a letter. It is at all times an exertion. I had rather talk with you and Anne Knight quietly at Colebrooke Lodge over the matter of your last. You mistake me when you express misgivings about my relishing a series of Scriptural poems. I wrote confusedly; what I meant to say was, that one or two consolatory poems on deaths would have had a more condensed effect than many. Scriptural, devotional topics, admit of infinite variety. So far from poetry tiring me because religious, I can read, and I say it seriously, the homely old version of the Psalms in our Prayer-books for an hour or two together sometimes, without sense of weariness.
I did not express myself clearly about what I think a false topic, insisted on so frequently in consolatory addresses on the death of infants. I know something like it is in Scripture, but I think humanly spoken. It is a natural thought, a sweet fallacy, to the survivors, but still a fallacy. If it stands on the doctrine of this being a probationary state, it is liable to this dilemma. Omniscience, to whom possibility must be clear as act, must know of the child what it would hereafter turn out: if good, then the topic is false to say it is secured from falling into future wilfulness, vice, etc. If bad, I do not see how its exemption from certain future overt acts by being snatched away at all tells in its favor. You stop the arm of a murderer, or arrest the finger of a pickpurse; but is not the guilt incurred as much by the intent as if never so much acted? Why children are hurried off, and old reprobates of a hundred left, whose trial humanly we may think was complete at fifty, is among the obscurities of providence, The very notion of a state of probation has darkness in it. The All-knower has no need of satisfying his eyes by seeing what we will do, when he knows before what we will do. Methinks we might be condemned before commission. In these things we grope and flounder; and if we can pick up a little human comfort that the child taken is snatched from vice (no great compliment to it, by the by), let us take it. And as to where an untried child goes, whether to join the assembly of its elders who have borne the heat of the day,—fire-purified martyrs and torment-sifted confessors,—what know we? We promise heaven, methinks, too cheaply, and assign large revenues to minors incompetent to manage them. Epitaphs run upon this topic of consolation till the very frequency induces a cheapness. Tickets for admission into paradise are sculptured out a penny a letter, twopence a syllable, etc. It is all a mystery; and the more I try to express my meaning (having none that is clear), the more I flounder. Finally, write what your own conscience, which to you is the unerring judge, deems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our heart's desire. Taylor has dropped the "London." It was indeed a dead weight. It had got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand, like Christian, with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and everything that is bad. Both our kindremembrancesto Mrs. K. and yourself, and strangers'-greeting to Lucy,—is it Lucy, or Ruth?—that gathers wise sayings in a Book.
August19, 1825.
Dear Southey,—You'll know whom this letter comes from by opening slap-dash upon the text, as in the good old times. I never could come into the custom of envelopes,—'tis a modern foppery; the Plinian correspondence gives no hint of such. In singleness of sheet and meaning, then, I thank you for your little book. I am ashamed to add a codicil of thanks for your "Book of the Church." I scarce feel competent to give an opinion of the latter; I have not reading enough of that kind to venture at it. I can only say the fact, that I have read it with attention and interest. Being, as you know, not quite a Churchman, I felt a jealousy at the Church taking to herself the whole deserts of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, from Druid extirpation downwards. I call all good Christians the Church. Capillarians and all. But I am in too light a humor to touch these matters. May all our churches flourish! Two things staggered me in the poem (and one of them staggered both of as): I cannot away with a beautiful series of verses, as I protest they are, commencing "Jenner," 'Tis like a choice banquet opened with a pill or an electuary,—physic stuff. T'other is, we cannot make out how Edith should be no more than ten years old. By 'r Lady, we had taken her to be some sixteen or upwards. We suppose you have only chosen the round number for the metre. Or poem and dedication may be both older than they pretend to,—but then some hint might have been given; for, as it stands, it may only serve some day to puzzle the parish reckoning. But without inquiring further (for 'tis ungracious to look into a lady's years), the dedication is eminently pleasing and tender, and we wish Edith May Southey joy of it. Something, too, struck us as if we had heard of the death of John May. A John May's death was a few years since in the papers. We think the tale one of the quietest, prettiest things we have seen. You have been temperate in the use of localities, which generally spoil poems laid in exotic regions. You mostly cannot stir out (in such things) for humming-birds and fireflies. A tree is a Magnolia, etc.—Can I but like the truly Catholic spirit? "Blame as thou mayest the Papist's erring creed,"—which and other passages brought me back to the old Anthology days and the admonitory lesson to "Dear George" on "The Vesper Bell," a little poem which retains its first hold upon me strangely.
The compliment to the translatress is daintily conceived. Nothing is choicer in that sort of writing than to bring in some remote, impossible parallel,—as between a great empress and the inobtrusive, quiet soul who digged her noiseless way so perseveringly through that rugged Paraguay mine. How she Dobrizhoffered it all out, it puzzles my slender Latinity to conjecture. Why do you seem to sanction Landor's unfeeling allegorizing away of honest Quixote? He may as well say Strap is meant to symbolize the Scottish nation before the Union, and Random since that Act of dubious issue; or that Partridge means the Mystical Man, and Lady Bellaston typifies the Woman upon Many Waters. Gebir, indeed, may mean the state of the hop markets last month, for anything I know to the contrary. That all Spain overflowed with romancical books (as Madge Newcastle calls them) was no reason that Cervantes should not smile at the matter of them; nor even a reason that, in another mood, he might not multiply them, deeply as he was tinctured with the essence of them. Quixote is the father of gentle ridicule, and at the same time the very depository and treasury of chivalry and highest notions. Marry, when somebody persuaded Cervantes that he meant only fun, and put him upon writing that unfortunate Second Part, with the confederacies of that unworthy duke and most contemptible duchess, Cervantes sacrificed his instinct to his understanding.
We got your little book but last night, being at Enfield, to which place we came about a month since, and are having quiet holidays. Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days, and I my twenty on others. 'T is all holiday with me now, you know; the change works admirably.
For literary news, in my poor way, I have a one-act farce [1] going to be acted at Haymarket; but when? is the question, 'Tis an extravaganza, and like enough to follow "Mr. H." "The London Magazine" has shifted its publishers once more, and I shall shift myself out of it. It is fallen. My ambition is not at present higher than to write nonsense for the playhouses, to eke out a something contracted income.Tempus erat. There was a time, my dear Cornwallis, when the muse, etc. But I am now in Mac Flecknoe's predicament,—
"Promised a play, and dwindled to a farce." Coleridge is better (was, at least, a few weeks since) than he has been for years. His accomplishing his book at last has been a source of vigor to him. We are on a half visit to his friend Allsop, at a Mrs. Leishman's, Enfield, but expect to be at Colebrooke Cottage in a week or so, where, or anywhere, I shall be always most happy to receive tidings from you. G. Dyer is in the height of an uxorious paradise. His honeymoon will not wane till he wax cold. Never was a more happy pair, since Acme and Septimius, and longer. Farewell, with many thanks, dear S. Our loves to all round your Wrekin.
Your old friend,
[1] Probably "The Pawnbroker's Daughter," which happily was not destined to be performed.—AINGER.
March20, 1826.
Dear B. B.,—You may know my letters by the paper and the folding. For the former, I live on scraps obtained in charity from an old friend, whose stationery is a permanent perquisite; for folding, I shall do it neatly when I learn to tie my neckcloths. I surprise most of my friends by writing to them on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pothooks and hangers. Sealing-wax I have none on my establishment; wafers of the coarsest bran supply its place. When my epistles come to be weighed with Pliny's, however superior to the Roman in delicate irony, judicious reflections, etc., his gilt post will bribe over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E. I. H. I never mended a pen; I now cut 'em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose-quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used to get for nothing. When Adam laid out his first penny upon nonpareils at some stall in Mesopotamos, I think it went hard with him, reflecting upon his old goodly orchard, where he had so many for nothing. When I write to a great man at the court end, he opens with surprise upon a naked note, such as Whitechapel people interchange, with no sweet degrees of envelope. I never enclosed one bit of paper in another, nor understood the rationale of it. Once only I sealed with borrowed wax, to set Walter Scott a-wondering, signed with the imperial quartered arms of England, which my friend Field bears in compliment to his descent, in the female line, from Oliver Cromwell. It must have set his antiquarian curiosity upon watering. To your questions upon the currency, I refer you to Mr. Robinson's last speech, where, if you can find a solution, I cannot. I think this, though,—the best ministry we ever stumbled upon,—gin reduced four shillings in the gallon, wine two shillings in the quart! This comes home to men's minds and bosoms. My tirade against visitors was not meantparticularlyat you or Anne Knight. I scarce know what I meant, for I do not just now feel the grievance. I wanted to make anarticle. So in another thing I talked of somebody'sinsipid wifewithout a correspondent object in my head; and a good lady, a friend's wife, whom I reallylove(don't startle, I mean in a licit way), has looked shyly on me ever since. The blunders of personal application are ludicrous. I send out a character every now and then on purpose to exercise the ingenuity of my friends. "Popular Fallacies" will go on; that word "concluded" is an erratum, I suppose, for "continued." I do not know how it got stuffed in there. A little thing without name will also be printed on the Religion of the Actors; but it is out of your way, so I recommend you, with true author's hypocrisy, to skip it. We are about to sit down to roast beef, at which we could wish A. K., B. B., and B. B.'s pleasant daughter to be humble partakers. So much for my hint at visitors, which was scarcely calculated for droppers-in from Woodbridge; the sky does not drop such larks every day. My very kindest wishes to you all three, with my sister's best love.
June, 1826.
Dear D.,—My first impulse upon seeing your letter was pleasure at seeing your old neat hand, nine parts gentlemanly, with a modest dash of the clerical; my second, a thought natural enough this hot weather: Am I to answer all this? Why, 't is as long as those to the Ephesians and Galatians put together: I have counted the words, for curiosity…. I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man. Your fair critic in the coach reminds me of a Scotchman, who assured me he did not see much in Shakspeare. I replied, I daresaynot. He felt the equivoke, looked awkward and reddish, but soon returned to the attack by saying that he thought Burns was as good as Shakspeare. I said that I had no doubt he was,—to aScotchman. We exchanged no more words that day…. Let me hear that you have clambered up to Lover's Seat; it is as fine in that neighborhood as Juan Fernandez,—as lonely, too, when the fishing-boats are not out; I have sat for hours staring upon a shipless sea. The salt sea is never as grand as when it is left to itself. One cock-boat spoils it; a seamew or two improves it. And go to the little church, which is a very Protestant Loretto, and seems dropped by some angel for the use of a hermit who was at once parishioner and a whole parish. It is not too big. Go in the night, bring it away in your portmanteau, and I will plant it in my garden. It must have been erected, in the very infancy of British Christianity, for the two or three first converts, yet with all the appurtenances of a church of the first magnitude,—its pulpit, its pews, its baptismal font; a cathedral in a nutshell. The minister that divides the Word there must give lumping pennyworths. It is built to the text of "two or three assembled in my name." It reminds me of the grain of mustard-seed. If the glebe land is proportionate, it may yield two potatoes. Tithes out of it could be no more split than a hair. Its First fruits must be its Last, for 't would never produce a couple. It is truly the strait and narrow way, and few there be (of London visitants) that find it. The still small voice is surely to be found there, if anywhere. A sounding-board is merely there for ceremony. It is secure from earthquakes, not more from sanctity than size, for't would feel a mountain thrown upon it no more than a taper-worm would.Go and see, but not without your spectacles.
January20, 1827.
Dear Robinson,—I called upon you this morning, and found that you had gone to visit a dying friend. I had been upon a like errand. Poor Norris [1] has been lying dying for now almost a week,—such is the penalty we pay for having enjoyed a strong constitution! Whether he knew me or not, I know not, or whether he saw me through his poor glazed eyes; but the group I saw about him I shall not forget. Upon the bed, or about it, were assembled his wife and two daughters, and poor deaf Richard, his son, looking doubly stupefied. There they were, and seemed to have been sitting all the week. I could only reach out a hand to Mrs. Norris. Speaking was impossible in that mute chamber. By this time I hope it is all over with him. In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. He was my friend and my father's friend all the life I can remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships ever since. Those are friendships which outlive a second generation. Old as I am waxing, in his eyes I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called me Charley. I have none to call me Charley now. He was the last link that bound me to the Temple. You are but of yesterday. In him seem to have died the old plainness of manners and singleness of heart. Letters he knew nothing of, nor did his reading extend beyond the pages of the "Gentleman's Magazine." Yet there was a pride of literature about him from being amongst books (he was librarian), and from some scraps of doubtful Latin which he had picked up in his office of entering students, that gave him very diverting airs of pedantry. Can I forget the erudite look with which, when he had been in vain trying to make out a black-letter text of Chaucer in the Temple Library, he laid it down and told me that "in those old books Charley, there is sometimes a deal of very indifferent spelling;" and seemed to console himself in the reflection! His jokes—for he had his jokes—are now ended; but they were old trusty perennials, staples that pleased afterdecies repetita, and were always as good as new. One song he had, which was reserved for the night of Christmas Day, which we always spent in the Temple. It was an old thing, and spoke of the flat-bottoms of our foes and the possibility of their coming over in darkness, and alluded to threats of an invasion many years blown over; and when he came to the part—
"We'll still make 'em run, and we'll still make 'em sweat,In spite of the devil and 'Brussels Gazette,'"—
his eyes would sparkle as with the freshness of an impending event. And what is the "Brussels Gazette" now? I cry while I enumerate these trifles. "How shall we tell them in a stranger's ear?" His poor good girls will now have to receive their afflicted mother in an inaccessible hovel in an obscure village in Herts, where they have been long struggling to make a school without effect; and poor deaf Richard—and the more helpless for being so—is thrown on the wide world.
My first motive in writing, and, indeed, in calling on you, was to ask if you were enough acquainted with any of the Benchers to lay a plain statement before them of the circumstances of the family. I almost fear not, for you are of another hall. But if you can oblige me and my poor friend, who is now insensible to any favors, pray exert yourself. You cannot say too much good of poor Norris and his poor wife.
Yours ever,
[1] Randal Norris, sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple, an early friend of the Lambs.
LONDRES,Julie19_th_, 1827.
Dear P.,—I am so poorly. I have been to a funeral, where I made a pun, to the consternation of the rest of the mourners. And we had wine. I can't describe to you the howl which the widow set up at proper intervals. Dash [1] could; for it was not unlike what he makes.
The letter I sent you was one directed to the care of Edward White, India House, for Mrs. Hazlitt.WhichMrs. H. I don't yet know; but Allsop has taken it to France on speculation. Really it is embarrassing. There is Mrs. present H., Mrs. late H., and Mrs. John H.; and to which of the three Mrs. Wigginses it appertains, I know not. I wanted to open it, but 'tis transportation.
I am sorry you are plagued about your book. I would strongly recommend you to take for one story Massinger's "Old Law." It is exquisite. I can think of no other.
Dash is frightful this morning. He whines and stands up on his hind legs. He misses Becky, who is gone to town. I took him to Barnet the other day, and he couldn't eat his vittles after it. Pray God his intellectuals be not slipping.
Mary is gone out for some soles. I suppose 'tis no use to ask you to come and partake of 'em; else there is a steam vessel.
I am doing a tragi-comedy in two acts, and have got on tolerably; but it will be refused, or worse, I never had luck with anything my name was put to.
Oh, I am so poorly! Iwakedit at my cousin's the bookbinder, who is now with God; or if he is not,'tis no fault of mine.
We hope the Frank wines do not disagree with Mrs. Patmore. By the way, I like her.
Did you ever taste frogs? Get them if you can. They are like littleLilliput rabbits, only a thought nicer.
How sick I am!—not of the world, but of the Widow Shrub. She's sworn under £6,000; but I think she perjured herself. She howls in Ela, and I comfort her in B flat. You understand music?
If you haven't got Massinger, you have nothing to do but go to the first Bibliothèque you can light upon at Boulogne, and ask for it (Gifford's edition); and if they haven't got it, you can have "Athalie," par Monsieur Racine, and make the best of it. But that "Old Law" is delicious.
"No shrimps!" (that's in answer to Mary's question about how the soles are to be done.)
I am uncertain where this wandering letter may reach you. What you mean by Poste Restante, God knows. Do you mean I must pay the postage? So I do,—to Dover.
We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons. She was howling,—part howling, and part giving directions to the proctor,—when crash! down went my sister through a crazy chair, and made the clerks grin, and I grinned, and the widow tittered, and then I knew that she was not inconsolable. Mary was more frightened than hurt.
She'd make a good match for anybody (by she, I mean the widow).
"If he bring but arelictaway,He is happy, nor heard to complain."
Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence,—like his poetry, redundant. Hone has hanged himself for debt. Godwin was taken up for picking pockets. Moxon has fallen in love with Emma, our nut-brown maid. Becky takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam machine. The coroner found it "insanity." I should not like him to sit on my letter.
Do you observe my direction? Is it Gallic, classical? Do try and get some frogs. You must ask for "grenouilles" (green eels). They don't understand "frogs," though 't is a common phrase with us.
If you go through Bulloign (Boulogne), inquire if Old Godfrey is living, and how he got home from the Crusades. He must be a very old man.
[1] A dog given to Lamb by Thomas Hood. See letter to Patmore dated September, 1827.
August10, 1827.
Dear B. B.,—I have not been able to answer you, for we have had and are having (I just snatch a moment) our poor quiet retreat, to which we fled from society, full of company,—some staying with us; and this moment as I write, almost, a heavy importation of two old ladies has come in. Whither can I take wing from the oppression of human faces? Would I were in a wilderness of apes, tossing cocoa-nuts about, grinning and grinned at!
Mitford was hoaxing you surely about my engraving; 't is a little sixpenny thing, [1] too like by half, in which the draughtsman has done his best to avoid flattery. There have been two editions of it, which I think are all gone, as they have vanished from the window where they hung,—a print-shop, corner of Great and Little Queen Streets, Lincoln's Inn Fields,—where any London friend of yours may inquire for it; for I am (though youwon't understand it) at Enfield Chase. We have been here near three months, and shall stay two more, if people will let us alone; but they persecute us from village to village. So don't direct toIslingtonagain till further notice. I am trying my hand at a drama, in two acts, founded on Crabbe's "Confidant,"mutatis mutandis. You like the Odyssey: did you ever read my "Adventures of Ulysses," founded on Chapman's old translation of it? For children or men. Chapman is divine, and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of his divinity. When you come to town I'll show it you. You have well described your old-fashioned grand paternal hall. Is it not odd that every one's earliest recollections are of some such place? I had my Blakesware [Blakesmoor in the "London"]. Nothing fills a child's mind like a large old mansion; better if un—or partially—occupied,—peopled with the spirits of deceased members of the county and justices of the quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled solitudes of one, with my feelings at seven years old! Those marble busts of the emperors, they seemed as if they were to stand forever, as they had stood from the living days of Rome, in that old marble hall, and I too partake of their permanency. Eternity was, while I thought not of Time. But he thought of me, and they are toppled down, and corn covers the spot of the noble old dwelling and its princely gardens, I feel like a grasshopper that, chirping about the grounds, escaped the scythe only by my littleness. Even now he is whetting one of his smallest razors to clean wipe me out, perhaps. Well!
[Footnote 1:] An etching of Lamb, by Brooke Pulham, which is said to be the most characteristic likeness of him extant.
September18, 1827.
Dear Hood,—If I have anything in my head, I will send it to Mr. Watts. Strictly speaking, he should have all my album-verses; but a very intimate friend importuned me for the trifles, and I believe I forgot Mr. Watts, or lost sight at the time of his similar "Souvenir." Jamieson conveyed the farce from me to Mrs. C. Kemble; he will not be in town before the 27th.
Give our kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them that we have finally torn ourselves outright away from Colebrooke, where I hadnohealth, and are about to domiciliate for good at Enfield, where I have experiencedgood.
"Lord, what good hours do we keep!How quietly we sleep!" [1]
See the rest in the "Compleat Angler."
We have got our books into our new house. I am a dray-horse if I was not ashamed of the indigested, dirty lumber, as I toppled 'em out of the cart, and blessed Becky that came with 'em for her having an unstuffed brain with such rubbish. We shall get in by Michael's Mass. 'T was with some pain we were evulsed from Colebrooke.
You may find some of our flesh sticking to the doorposts. To change habitations is to die to them; and in my time I have died seven deaths. But I don't know whether every such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence. 'T is an enterprise, and shoves back the sense of death's approximating, which, though not terrible to me, is at all times particularly distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical, recurring after seven years; but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrooke! The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn. Even minnows dwindle.A parvis fiunt minimi!
I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she should envy it, and hate us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come and try it. I heard she and you were made uncomfortable by some unworthy-to-be-cared-for attacks, and have tried to set up a feeble counteraction through the "Table Book" of last Saturday. Has it not reached you, that you are silent about it? Our new domicile is no manor-house, but new, and externally not inviting, but furnished within with every convenience,— capital new locks to every door, capital grates in every room, with nothing to pay for incoming, and the rent £10 less than the Islington one.
It was built, a few years since, at £1,100 expense, they tell me, and I perfectly believe it. And I get it for £35, exclusive of moderate taxes. We think ourselves most lucky.
It is not our intention to abandon Regent Street and West End perambulations (monastic and terrible thought!), but occasionally to breathe the fresher air of the metropolis. We shall put up a bedroom or two (all we want) for occasional ex-rustication, where we shall visit,—not be visited. Plays, too, we'll see,—perhaps our own; Urbani Sylvani and Sylvan Urbanuses in turns; courtiers for a sport, then philosophers; old, homely tell-truths and learn-truths in the virtuous shades of Enfield, liars again and mocking gibers in the coffee-houses and resorts of London. What can a mortal desire more for his bi-parted nature?
Oh, the curds-and-cream you shall eat with us here!
Oh, the turtle-soup and lobster-salads we shall devour with you there!
Oh, the old books we shall peruse here!
Oh, the new nonsense we shall trifle over there!
Oh, Sir T. Browne, here!
Oh, Mr. Hood and Mr. Jerdan, there!
Thine,
C. (URBANUS) L. (SYLVANUS)—(Elia ambo).
[1] By Charles Cotton.
September, 1827.
Dear P.,—Excuse my anxiety, but how is Dash? I should have asked if Mrs. Patmore kept her rules and was improving; but Dash came uppermost. The order of our thoughts should be the order of our writing. Goes he muzzled, oraperto ore? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little inhisconversation. You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him! All the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but I protest they seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people, to those who are not used to them. Try him with hot water; if he won't lick it up, it's a sign he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally or perpendicularly? That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield. Is his general deportment cheerful? I mean when he is pleased, for otherwise there is no judging. You can't be too careful. Has he bit any of the children yet? If he has, have them shot, and keephimfor curiosity, to see if it was the hydrophobia. They say all our army in India had it at one time; but that was inHyder-Ally's time. Do you get paunch for him? Take care the sheep was sane. You might pull his teeth out (if he would let you), and then you need not mind if he were as mad as a Bedlamite.
It would be rather fun to see his odd ways. It might amuse Mrs. P. and the children. They'd have more sense than he. He'd be like a fool kept in a family, to keep the household in good humor with their own understanding. You might teach him the mad dance, set to the mad howl.Madge Owletwould be nothing to him. "My, how he capers!" (In the margin is written "One of the children speaks this.") … What I scratch out is a German quotation, from Lessing, on the bite of rabid animals; but I remember you don't read German. But Mrs. P. may, so I wish I had let it stand. The meaning in English is: "Avoid to approach an animal suspected of madness, as you would avoid fire or a precipice,"—which I think is a sensible observation. The Germans are certainly profounder than we. If the slightest suspicion arises in your breast that all is not right with him, muzzle him and lead him in a string (common packthread will do; he don't care for twist) to Mr. Hood's, his quondam master, and he'll take him in at any time. You may mention your suspicion, or not, as you like, or as you think it may wound, or not, Mr. H.'s feelings. Hood, I know, will wink at a few follies in Dash, in consideration of his former sense. Besides, Hood is deaf, and if you hinted anything, ten to one he would not hear you. Besides, you will have discharged your conscience, and laid the child at the right door, as they say.
We are dawdling our time away very idly and pleasantly at a Mrs. Leishman's, Chase, Enfield, where, if you come a-hunting, we can give you cold meat and a tankard. Her husband is a tailor; but that, you know, does not make her one. I know a jailor (which rhymes), but his wife was a fine lady.
Let us hear from you respecting Mrs. P.'s regimen. I send my love in a— to Dash.
October11, 1828.
A splendid edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim! [1] Why, the thought is enough to turn one's moral stomach. His cockle-hat and staff transformed to a smart cocked beaver and a jemmy cane; his amice gray to the last Regent Street cut; and his painful palmer's pace to the modern swagger! Stop thy friend's sacrilegious hand. Nothing can be done for B. but to reprint the old cuts in as homely but good a style as possible,—the Vanity Fair and the Pilgrims there; the silly-soothness in his setting-out countenance; the Christian idiocy (in a good sense) of his admiration of the shepherds on the Delectable mountains; the lions so truly allegorical, and remote from any similitude to Pidcock's; the great head (the author's), capacious of dreams and similitudes, dreaming in the dungeon. Perhaps you don't know my edition, what I had when a child.
If you do, can you bear new designs from Martin, enamelled into copper or silver plate by Heath, accompanied with verses from Mrs. Hemans's pen? Oh, how unlike his own!
"Wouldst thou divert thyself from melancholy?Wouldst thou be pleasant, yet be far from folly?Wouldst thou read riddles and their explanation?Or else be drowned in thy contemplation?Dost thou love picking meat? or wouldst thou seeA man i' the clouds, and hear him speak to thee?Wouldst thou be in a dream, and yet not sleep?Or wouldst thou in a moment laugh and weep?Or wouldst thou lose thyself, and catch no harm,And find thyself again without a charm?Wouldst readthyself, and read thou knowest not what,And yet know whether thou art blest or notBy reading the same lines? Oh, then come hither,And lay my book, thy head, and heart together."
Show me any such poetry in any one of the fifteen forthcoming combinations of show and emptiness 'yclept "Annuals." So there's verses for thy verses; and now let me tell you that the sight of your hand gladdened me. I have been daily trying to write to you, but [have been] paralyzed. You have spurred me on this tiny effort, and at intervals I hope to hear from and talk to you. But my spirits have been in an oppressed way for a long time, and they are things which must be to you of faith, for who can explain depression? Yes, I am hooked into the "Gem," but only for some lines written on a dead infant of the editor's [2] which being, as it were, his property, I could not refuse their appearing; but I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates, the names of contributors poked up into your eyes in first page, and whisked through all the covers of magazines, the barefaced sort of emulation, the immodest candidateship. Brought into so little space,—in those old "Londons," a signature was lost in the wood of matter, the paper coarse (till latterly, which spoiled them),—in short, I detest to appear in an Annual. What a fertile genius (and a quiet good soul withal) is Hood! He has fifty things in hand,—farces to supply the Adelphi for the season; a comedy for one of the great theatres, just ready; a whole entertainment by himself for Mathews and Yates to figure in; a meditated Comic Annual for next year, to be nearly done by himself. You'd like him very much.
Wordsworth, I see, has a good many pieces announced in one of 'em, not our "Gem." W. Scott has distributed himself like a bribe haunch among 'em. Of all the poets, Cary [3] has had the good sense to keep quite clear of 'em, with clergy-gentlemanly right notions. Don't think I set up for being proud on this point; I like a bit of flattery, tickling my vanity, as well as any one. But these pompous masquerades without masks (naked names or faces) I hate. So there's a bit of my mind. Besides, they infallibly cheat you,—I mean the booksellers. If I get but a copy, I only expect it from Hood's being my friend. Coleridge has lately been here. He too is deep among the prophets, the year-servers,—the mob of gentleman annuals. But they'll cheat him, I know. And now, dear B. B., the sun shining out merrily, and the dirty clouds we had yesterday having washed their own faces clean with their own rain, tempts me to wander up Winchmore Hill, or into some of the delightful vicinages of Enfield, which I hope to show you at some time when you can get a few days up to the great town. Believe me, it would give both of us great pleasure to show you our pleasant farms and villages.
We both join in kindest loves to you and yours.
C. LAMBredivivus.
[1] Anédition de luxe, illustrated by John Martin, and with an Introduction by Southey. See Macaulay's review of it.
[2] Hood's.
[3] The translator of Dante.
January22, 1829.
Don't trouble yourself about the verses. Take 'em coolly as they come. Any day between this and midsummer will do. Ten lines the extreme. There is no mystery in my incognita. She has often seen you, though you may not have observed a silent brown girl, who for the last twelve years has rambled about our house in her Christmas holidays. She is Italian by name and extraction. [1] Ten lines about the blue sky of her country will do, as it's her foible to be proud of it. Item, I have made her a tolerable Latinist. She is called Emma Isola. I shall, I think, be in town in a few weeks, when I will assuredly see you. I will put in here loves to Mrs. Procter and the Anti-Capulets [Montagus], because Mary tells me I omitted them in my last. I like to see my friends here. I have put my lawsuit into the hands of an Enfield practitioner,—a plain man, who seems perfectly to understand it, and gives me hopes of a favorable result.
Rumor tells us that Miss Holcroft is married. Who is Baddams? Have I seen him at Montacute's? I hear he is a great chemist. I am sometimes chemical myself. A thought strikes me with horror. Pray Heaven he may not have done it for the sake of trying chemical experiments upon her,—young female subjects are so scarce! An't you glad about Burke's case? We may set off the Scotch murders against the Scotch novels,—Hare the Great Unhanged. [2]
Martin Burney is richly worth your knowing. He is on the top scale of my friendship ladder, on which an angel or two is still climbing, and some, alas! descending. I am out of the literary world at present. Pray, is there anything new from the admired pen of the author of "The Pleasures of Hope"? Has Mrs. He-mans (double masculine) done anything pretty lately? Why sleeps the lyre of Hervey and of Alaric Watts? Is the muse of L. E. L. silent? Did you see a sonnet of mine in Blackwood's last? [3] Curious construction!Elaborata facilitas!And now I 'll tell. 'Twas written for "The Gem;" but the—editors declined it, on the plea that it wouldshock all mothers; so they published "The Widow" instead. I am born out of time, I have no conjecture about what the present world calls delicacy. I thought "Rosamund Gray" was a pretty modest thing. Hessey assures me that the world would not bear it. I have lived to grow into an indecent character. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, "Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!"
Erratumin sonnet. Last line but something, for "tender" read "tend," The Scotch do not know our law terms, but I find some remains of honest, plain old writing lurking there still. They were not so mealy mouthed as to refuse my verses. Maybe, 't is their oatmeal,
Blackwood sent me £20 for the drama. Somebody cheated me out of it next day; and my new pair of breeches, just sent home, cracking at first putting on, I exclaimed, in my wrath, "All tailors are cheats, and all men are tailors." Then I was better.
[1] Emma Isola, Lamb's ward, daughter of one of the Esquire Bedells of Cambridge University, and granddaughter of an Italian refugee. The Lambs had met her during one of their Cambridge visits, and finally adopted her.
[2] Burke and Hare, the Edinburgh resurrection-men.
[3] The Gypsy's Malison.
Saturday, 25th of July, A.D. 1829, 11 A.M.
There! a fuller, plumper, juicier date never dropped from Idumean palm. Am I in the _date_ive case now? If not, a fig for dates,—which is more than a date is worth. I never stood much affected to these limitary specialities,—least of all, since the date of my superannuation.
"What have I with time to do?Slaves of desks, 't was meant for you."
Dear B. B.,—Your handwriting has conveyed much pleasure to me in respect of Lucy's restoration. Would I could send you as good news ofmypoor Lucy! [1] But some wearisome weeks I must remain lonely yet. I have had the loneliest time, near ten weeks, broken by a short apparition of Emma for her holidays, whose departure only deepened the returning solitude, and by ten days I have passed in town. But town, with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was. The streets, the shops, are left, but all old friends are gone. And in London I was frightfully convinced of this as I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I cared for are in graves, or dispersed. My old clubs, that lived so long and flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. When I took leave of our adopted young friend at Charing Cross,'t was heavy unfeeling rain, and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none, and not a sympathizing house to turn to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of a friend's house; but it was large and straggling,—one of the individuals of my old long knot of friends, card-players, pleasant companions, that have tumbled to pieces, into dust and other things; and I got home on Thursday, convinced that I was better to get home to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner. Less than a month, I hope, will bring home Mary. She is at Fulham, looking better in her health than ever, but sadly rambling, and scarce showing any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when I should come again. But the old feelings will come back again, and we shall drown old sorrows over a game of piquet again. But it is a tedious cut out of a life of fifty-four, to lose twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two. And to make me more alone, our ill-tempered maid is gone, who, with all her airs, was yet a home-piece of furniture, a record of better days; the young thing that has succeeded her is good and attentive, but she is nothing. And I have no one here to talk over old matters with. Scolding and quarrelling have something of familiarity and a community of interest; they imply acquaintance; they are of resentment, which is of the family of dearness.
* * * * *
I bragged formerly that I could not have too much time; I have now a surfeit. With few years to come, the days are wearisome. But weariness is not eternal. Something will shine out to take the load off that flags me, which is at present intolerable. I have killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl. I am a sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him inch-meal just now. But the snake is vital. Well, I shall write merrier anon. 'T is the present copy of my countenance I send, and to complain is a little to alleviate. May you enjoy yourself as far as the wicked world will let you, and think that you are not quite alone, as I am! Health to Lucia and to Anna, and kind remembrances.
Your forlorn C. L.
[1] Mary Lamb.
November30, 1829.
Dear G.,—The excursionists reached home and the good town of Enfield a little after four, without slip or dislocation. Little has transpired concerning the events of the back-journey, save that on passing the house of 'Squire Mellish, situate a stone bow's cast from the hamlet, Father Westwood [1], with a good-natured wonderment, exclaimed, "I cannot think what is gone of Mr. Mellish's rooks. I fancy they have taken flight somewhere; but I have missed them two or three years past." All this while, according to his fellow-traveller's report, the rookery was darkening the air above with undiminished population, and deafening all ears but his with their cawings. But nature has been gently withdrawing such phenomena from the notice of Thomas Westwood's senses, from the time he began to miss the rooks. T. Westwood has passed a retired life in this hamlet of thirty or forty years, living upon the minimum which is consistent with gentility, yet a star among the minor gentry, receiving the bows of the tradespeople and courtesies of the alms-women daily. Children venerate him not less for his external show of gentry than they wonder at him for a gentle rising endorsation of the person, not amounting to a hump, or if a hump, innocuous as the hump of the buffalo, and coronative of as mild qualities. 'T is a throne on which patience seems to sit,—the proud perch of a self-respecting humility, stooping with condescension. Thereupon the cares of life have sat, and rid him easily. For he has thrid theangustiæ domuswith dexterity. Life opened upon him with comparative brilliancy. He set out as a rider or traveller for a wholesale house, in which capacity he tells of many hair-breadth escapes that befell him,—one especially, how he rode a mad horse into the town of Devizes; how horse and rider arrived in a foam, to the utter consternation of the expostulating hostlers, inn-keepers, etc. It seems it was sultry weather, piping-hot; the steed tormented into frenzy with gad-flies, long past being roadworthy: but safety and the interest of the house he rode for were incompatible things; a fall in serge cloth was expected; and a mad entrance they made of it. Whether the exploit was purely voluntary, or partially; or whether a certain personal defiguration in the man part of this extraordinary centaur (non-assistive to partition of natures) might not enforce the conjunction, I stand not to inquire. I look not with 'skew eyes into the deeds of heroes. The hosier that was burned with his shop in Field Lane, on Tuesday night, shall have passed to heaven for me like a Marian Martyr, provided always that he consecrated the fortuitous incremation with a short ejaculation in the exit, as much as if he had taken his state degrees of martyrdomin formâin the market vicinage. There is adoptive as well as acquisitive sacrifice. Be the animus what it might, the fact is indisputable, that this composition was seen flying all abroad, and mine host of Daintry may yet remember its passing through his town, if his scores are not more faithful than his memory.
* * * * *
To come from his heroic character, all the amiable qualities of domestic life concentre in this tamed Bellerophon. He is excellent over a glass of grog; just as pleasant without it; laughs when he hears a joke, and when (which is much oftener) he hears it not; sings glorious old sea-songs on festival nights; and but upon a slight acquaintance of two years, Coleridge, is as dear a deaf old man to us as old Norris, rest his soul! was after fifty. To him and his scanty literature (what there is of it,sound) have we flown from the metropolis and its cursed annualists, reviewers, authors, and the whole muddy ink press of that stagnant pool.
[1] Lamb's landlord. He had driven Mary Lamb over to see Coleridge at Highgate. The Lambs had been compelled, by the frequent illnesses of Mary Lamb, to give up their housekeeping at Enfield and to take lodgings with the Westwoods.
January22, 1830.
And is it a year since we parted from you at the steps of Edmonton stage? There are not now the years that there used to be. The tale of the dwindled age of men, reported of successional mankind, is true of the same man only. We do not live a year in a year now. 'T is apunctum stans. The seasons pass us with indifference. Spring cheers not, nor winter heightens our gloom: autumn hath foregone its moralities,—they are "heypass repass," as in a show-box. Yet, as far as last year, occurs back—for they scarce show a reflex now, they make no memory as heretofore—'t was sufficiently gloomy. Let the sullen nothing pass. Suffice it that after sad spirits, prolonged through many of its months, as it called them, we have cast our skins, have taken a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle called housekeeping, and are settled down into poor boarders and lodgers at next door with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield. Here we have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them, with the garden but to see it grow, with the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock, with the maid but to hear her scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us, save as spectators of the pageant. We are fed we know not how,—quietists, confiding ravens. We have theotium pro dignitate, a respectable insignificance. Yet in the self condemned obliviousness, in the stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life not quite killed rise, prompting me that there was a London, and that I was of that old Jerusalem. In dreams I am in Fleet Market; but I wake and cry to sleep again. I die hard, a stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete. What have I gained by health? Intolerable dulness. What by early hours and moderate meals? A total blank. Oh, never let the lying poets be believed who 'tice men from the cheerful haunts of streets, or think they mean it not of a country village. In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers; but to have a little teasing image of a town about one, country folks that do not look like country folks, shops two yards square, half-a-dozen apples and two penn'orth of over-looked gingerbread for the lofty fruiterers of Oxford Street, and for the immortal book and print stalls a circulating library that stands still, where the show-picture is a last year's Valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels has not yet travelled (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the "Redgauntlet"), to have a new plastered flat church, and to be wishing that it was but a cathedral! The very blackguards here are degenerate, the topping gentry stockbrokers; the passengers too many to insure your quiet, or let you go about whistling or gaping,—too few to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet Street. Confining, room-keeping, thickest winter is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months. Among one's books at one's fire by candle, one is soothed into an oblivion that one is not in the country; but with the light the green fields return, till I gaze, and in a calenture can plunge myself into St. Giles's. Oh, let no native Londoner imagine that health and rest and innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable. A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness luckily sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London; haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, playhouses, satires, epigrams, puns,—these all came in on the town part and the thither side of innocence. Man found out inventions. From my den I return you condolence for your decaying sight,—not for anything there is to see in the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a London newspaper. The poets are as well to listen to; anything high may—nay, must be read out; you read it to yourself with an imaginary auditor: but the light paragraphs must be glid over by the proper eye; mouthing mumbles their gossamery substance. 'Tis these trifles I should mourn in fading sight. A newspaper is the single gleam of comfort I receive here; it comes from rich Cathay with tidings of mankind. Yet I could not attend to it, read out by the most beloved voice. But your eyes do not get worse, I gather. Oh, for the collyrium of Tobias enclosed in a whiting's liver, to send you, with no apocryphal good wishes! The last long time I heard from you, you had knocked your head against something. Do not do so; for your head (I do not flatter) is not a knob, or the top of a brass nail, or the end of a ninepin,—unless a Vulcanian hammer could fairly batter a "Recluse" out of it; then would I bid the smirched god knock, and knock lustily, the two-handed skinker! Mary must squeeze out a linepropriá manu; but indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly nervous to letter-writing for a long interval. 'T will please you all to hear that, though I fret like a lion in a net, her present health and spirits are better than they have been for some time past; she is absolutely three years and a half younger, as I tell her, since we have adopted this boarding plan.
Our providers are an honest pair, Dame Westwood and her husband,—he, when the light of prosperity shined on them, a moderately thriving haberdasher within Bow bells, retired since with something under a competence; writes himself parcel-gentleman; hath borne parish offices; sings fine old sea-songs at threescore and ten; sighs only now and then when he thinks that he has a son on his hands about fifteen, whom he finds a difficulty in getting out into the world, and then checks a sigh with muttering, as I once heard him prettily, not meaning to be heard, "I have married my daughter, however;" takes the weather as it comes; outsides it to town in severest season; and o' winter nights tells old stories not tending to literature (how comfortable to author-rid folks!), and hasone ancedote, upon which and about forty pounds a year he seems to have retired in green old age. It was how he was a rider in his youth, travelling for shops, and once (not to balk his employer's bargain) on a sweltering day in August, rode foaming into Dunstable [1] upon a mad horse, to the dismay and expostulatory wonderment of inn-keepers, ostlers, etc., who declared they would not have bestrid the beast to win the Derby. Understand the creature galled to death and desperation by gad-flies, cormorant-winged, worse than beset Inachus's daughter. This he tells, this he brindles and burnishes, on a winter's eve; 't is his star of set glory, his rejuvenescence to descant upon, Far from me be it (dá avertant!) to look a gift-story in the mouth, or cruelly to surmise (as those who doubt the plunge of Curtius) that the inseparate conjuncture of man and beast, the centaur-phenomenon that staggered all Dunstable, might have been the effect of unromantic necessity; that the horse-part carried the reasoning willy-nilly; that needs must when such a devil drove; that certain spiral configurations in the frame of Thomas Westwood, unfriendly to alighting, made the alliance more forcible than voluntary. Let him enjoy his fame for me, nor let me hint a whisper that shall dismount Bellerophon. But in case he was an involuntary martyr, yet if in the fiery conflict he buckled the soul of a constant haberdasher to him, and adopted his flames, let accident and him share the glory. You would all like Thomas Westwood. [2]
How weak is painting to describe a man! Say that he stands four feet and a nail high by his own yard-measure, which, like the sceptre of Agamemnon, shall never sprout again, still, you have no adequate idea; nor when I tell you that his dear hump, which I have favored in the picture, seems to me of the buffalo,—indicative and repository of mild qualities, a budget of kindnesses,—still, you have not the man. Knew you old Norris of the Temple, sixty years ours and our father's friend? He was not more natural to us than this old Westwood, the acquaintance of scarce more weeks. Under his roof now ought I to take my rest, but that back-looking ambition tells me I might yet be a Londoner! Well, if we ever do move, we have encumbrances the less to impede us; all our furniture has faded under the auctioneer's hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless. Henry Crabb is at Rome; advices to that effect have reached Bury. But by solemn legacy he bequeathed at parting (whether he should live or die) a turkey of Suffolk to be sent every succeeding Christmas to us and divers other friends. What a genuine old bachelor's action! I fear he will find the air of Italy too classic. His station is in the Hartz forest; his soul is be-Goethed. Miss Kelly we never see,—Talfourd not this half year; the latter flourishes, but the exact number of his children, God forgive me, I have utterly forgotten: we single people are often out in our count there. Shall I say two? We see scarce anybody. Can I cram loves enough to you all in this little O? Excuse particularizing.
[1] See preceding letter.
[2] Here was inserted a sketch answering to the description.
May24, 1830.
Mary's love? Yes. Mary Lamb quite well.
Dear Sarah,—I found my way to Northaw on Thursday and a very good woman behind a counter, who says also that you are a very good lady, but that the woman who was with you was naught. We travelled with one of those troublesome fellow-passengers in a stage-coach that is called a well-informed man. For twenty miles we discoursed about the properties of steam, probabilities of carriages by ditto, till all my science, and more than all, was exhausted, and I was thinking of escaping my torment by getting up on the outside, when, getting into Bishops Stortford, my gentleman, spying some farming land, put an unlucky question to me,—What sort of a crop of turnips I thought we should have this year? Emma's eyes turned to me to know what in the world I could have to say; and she burst into a violent fit of laughter, maugre her pale, serious cheeks, when, with the greatest gravity, I replied that it depended, I believed, upon boiled legs of mutton. This clenched our conversation; and my gentleman, with a face half wise, half in scorn, troubled us with no more conversation, scientific or philosophical, for the remainder of the journey.
Ayrton was here yesterday, and aslearnedto the full as my fellow-traveller. What a pity that he will spoil a wit and a devilish pleasant fellow (as he is) by wisdom! He talked on Music; and by having read Hawkins and Burney recently I was enabled to talk of names, and show more knowledge than he had suspected I possessed; and in the end he begged me to shape my thoughts upon paper, which I did after he was gone, and sent him "Free Thoughts on Some Eminent Composers."
"Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart,Just as the whim bites. For my part,I do not care a farthing candleFor either of them, or for Handel," etc.
Martin Burney [1] is as odd as ever. We had a dispute about the word "heir," which I contended was pronounced like "air." He said that might be in common parlance, or that we might so use it speaking of the "Heir-at-Law," a comedy; but that in the law-courts it was necessary to give it a full aspiration, and to sayHayer; he thought it might even vitiate a cause if a counsel pronounced it otherwise. In conclusion, he "would consult Serjeant Wilde," who gave it against him. Sometimes he falleth into the water, sometimes into the fire. He came down here, and insisted on reading Virgil's "Æneid" all through with me (which he did), because a counsel must know Latin. Another time he read out all the Gospel of St. John, because Biblical quotations are very emphatic in a court of justice. A third time he would carve a fowl, which he did very ill favoredly, because we did not know how indispensable it was for a barrister to do all those sort of things well. Those little things were of more consequence than we supposed. So he goes on, harassing about the way to prosperity, and losing it. With a long head, but somewhat a wrong one,—harum-scarum. Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one,—maybe he has tired him out.
I am tired with this long scrawl; but I thought in your exile you might like a letter. Commend me to all the wonders in Derbyshire, and tell the devil I humbly kiss my hand to him.
Yours ever,
[1] Martin Burney, originally a solicitor, had lately been called to the Bar.