Selected Prose

by Charles Lamb

  London

  C LAMB

  Twenty Sixth April 1816

  35. To William Wordsworth

  from Leadin Hall

  Septembr something [23 September] 1816

  My dear Wordsworth,

  It seems an age since we have corresponded, but indeed the interim has been stuffd out with more variety than usually checquers my same-seeming existence –. Mercy on me, what a traveller have I been since I wrote you last! what foreign wonders have been explored! I have seen Bath, King Bladuds ancient well, fair Bristol seed-plot of suicidal Chatterton, Marlbro, Chippenham, Calne, famous for nothing in particular that I know of – but such a vertigo of locomotion has not seized us for years –. We spent a month with the Morgans at the last named Borough, – August – and such a change has the change wrought in us that we could not stomach wholesome Temple air, but are absolutely rusticating (o the gentility of it) at Dalston, about one mischievous boy’s stone’s throw off Kingsland Turnpike, one mile from Shoreditch church, thence we emanate in various directions to Hackney, Clapton, Totnam, and such like romantic country. That my lungs should ever prove so dainty as to fancy they perceive differences of air! but so it is, tho’ I am almost ashamed of it, like Milton’s devil (turn’d truant to his old Brimstone) I am purging off the foul air of my once darling tobacco in this Eden, absolutely snuffing up pure gales, like old worn out Sin playing at being innocent which never comes again, for in spite of good books & good thoughts there is something in a Pipe that virtue cannot give tho’ she give her unendowed person for a dowry. Have you read the review of Coleridges character, person, physiognomy &c. in the Examiner,1 – his features even to his nose – O horrible license beyond the old Comedy –. He is himself gone to the sea side with his favorite Apothecary, having left for publication as I hear a prodigious mass of composition for a Sermon to the middling ranks of people to persuade them they are not so distressed as is commonly supposed. Methinks he should recite it to a congregation of Bilston Colliers, – the fate of Cinna the Poet2 would instantaneously be his. God bless him, but certain that rogue-Examiner has beset him in most unmannerly strains. Yet there is a kind of respect shines thro’ the disrespect that to those who know the rare compound (that is the subject of it) almost balances the reproof, but then those who know him but partially or at a distance are so extremely apt to drop the qualifying part thro’ their fingers. The ‘after all, Mr Wordsworth is a man of great talents, if he did not abuse them’3 comes so dim upon the eyes of an Edinbro’ review reader, that have been gloating-open chuckle-wide upon the preceding detail of abuses, it scarce strikes the pupil with any consciousness of the letters being there, like letters writ in lemon –. There was a cut at me a few months back by the same hand, but my agnomen or agni-nomen4 not being calculated to strike the popular ear, it dropt anonymous, but it was a pretty compendium of observation which the author has collected in my disparagement, from some hundreds of social evenings which we had spent together, – however in spite of all, there is something tough in my attachment to H—5 which these violent strainings cannot quite dislocate or sever asunder. I get no conversation in London that is absolutely worth attending to but his. There is monstrous little sense in the world, or I am monstrous clever, or squeamish or something, but there is nobody to talk to – to talk with I should say – and to go talking to ones self all day long is too much of a good thing, besides subjecting one to the imputation of being out of ones senses, which does no good to ones temporal interest at all. By the way, I have seen Colerge. but once this 3 or 4 months, he is an odd person, when he first comes to town he is quite hot upon visiting, and then he turns off & absolutely never comes at all, but seems to forget there are anysuch people in the world. I made one attempt to visit him (a morning call) at Highgate, but there was something in him or his Apothecary which I found so unattractively-repulsing-from any temptation to call again, that I stay away as naturally as a Lover visits. The rogue gives you Love Powders, and then a strong horse drench to bring ’em off your stomach that they may’nt hurt you. I was very sorry the printing of your Letter was not quite to your mind, but I surely did not think but you had arranged the manner of breaking the paragraphs from some principle known to your own mind, and for some of the Errors, I am confident that Note of Admiration, in the middle of two words did not stand so when I had it, it must have dropt out & been replaced wrong, so odious a blotch could not have escaped me. Gifford (whom God curse) has persuaded squinting Murray (whom may God not bless) not to accede to an offer Field made for me to print 2 vols. of Essays, to include the one on Hogrth. & 1 or 2 more, but most of the matter to be new, but I dare say I should never have found time to make them; M would have had ’em, but shewed specimens from the Reflector to G— as he acknowledged to Field, & Crispin did for me.6 ‘Not on his soal but on his soul damn’d Jew’ may the malediction of my eternal antipathy light –. We desire much to hear from you, and of you all, including Miss Hutchinson for not writing to whom Mary feels a weekly (and did for a long time, feel a daily) Pang. How is Southey? – I hope his pen will continue to move many years smoothly & continuously for all the rubs of the rogue Examiner. A pertinacious foul mouthed villain it is! –

  This is written for a rarity at the seat of business, it is but little time I can generally command from secular calligraphy, the pen seems to know as much and makes letters like figures – an obstinate clerkish thing. It shall make a couplet in spite of its nib before I have done with it,

  ‘and so I end

  Commending me to your love my dearest friend.’

  C LAMB

  36. To Charles Chambers

  [1 September 1817]

  with regard to a John Dory, which you desire to be particularly informed about – I honour the fish, but it is rather on account of Quin1 who patronized it, and whose taste (of a dead man) I had as lieve go by as any body’s, (Apicius and Heliogabulus excepted2 – this latter started nightingales brains and peacock’s tongues as a garnish –)

  Else, in itself, and trusting to my own poor single judgment, it hath not that moist mellow oleaginous gliding smooth descent from the tongue to the palate, thence to the stomach &c. as your Brighton Turbot hath, which I take to be the most friendly and familiar flavor of any that swims – most genial & at home to the palate –

  nor has it on the other hand that fine falling off flakiness, that obsequious peeling off (as it were like a sea onion) which endears your cods head & shoulders to some appitites, that manly firmness combined with a sort of womanish coming-in-pieces which the same cods head & shoulders hath – where the whole is easily separable, pliant to a knife or a spoon, but each individual flake presents a pleasing resistance to the opposed tooth – you understand me – these delicate subjects are necessarily obscure –

  but it has a third flavor of its own, totally distinct from Cod or Turbot, which it must be owned may to some not injudicious palates render it acceptable – but to my unpractised tooth it presented rather a crude river-fish-flavour, like your Pike or Carp, and perhaps like them should have been tamed & corrected by some laborious & well chosen sauce. Still, I always suspect a fish which requires so much of artificial settings off. Your choicest relishes (like native loveliness) need not the foreign aid of ornament, but are when unadorned (that is, with nothing but a little plain anchovy & a squeeze of lemon) are then adorned the most. However, I shall go to Brighton again, next Summer, and shall have an opportunity of correcting my judgment, if it is not sufficiently informed. I can only say that when Nature was pleased to make the John Dory so notoriously deficient in outward graces (as to be sure he is the very Rhinoceros of fishes, the ugliest dog that swims, except perhaps the Sea Satyr which I never saw, but which they say is terrible) when she formed him with so few external advantages, she might have bestowed a more elaborate finish on his parts internal, & have given him a relish, a sapor, to recommend him; as she made Pope a Poet to make up for making him crooked.

  I am sorry to find that you have go
t a knack of saying things which are not true, to shew your wit. If I had no wit, but what I must shew at the expence of my virtue or my modesty, I had as lieve be as stupid as *** at the Tea Warehouse. Depend upon it, [m]y dea[r] Chambers, that an ounce of integrity at our death bed will stand us in more avail than all the Wit of Congreve or ****. For instance you tell me a fine story about Truss,3 and his playing at Leamington, which I know to be false, because I have advice from Derby that he was whipt through the Town on that very day you say he appeared in some character or other, for robbing an old woman at church of a seal ring. And Dr Parr has been two months dead.4 So it wont do to scatter these random stories about among people that know any thing. Besides, your forte is not invention. It is judgment, particularly shewn in your choice of dishes. We seem in that instance born under one star. I like you for liking hare. I esteem you for disrelishing minced veal. Liking is too cold a word, I love you for your noble attachment to the fat unctuous juices of deers flesh & the green unspeakable of turtle. I honor you for your endeavors to esteem and approve of my favorite which I ventured to recommend to you, as substitute for hare, bullock’s heart; and I am not offended that you cannot taste it with my palate. A true son of Epicurus should reserve one taste peculiar to himself. For a long time I kept the secret about the exceeding deliciousness of the marrow of boiled knuckle of veal, till my tongue weakly run out in its praises, and now it is prostitute & common. – But I have made one discovery, which I will not impart till my dying scene is over, perhaps it will be my last mouthful in this world, delicious thought, enough to sweeten (or rather make savoury) the hour of death. It is a little square bit about this size in or near the huckle bone of a fried joint of ******* fat I cant call it, nor lean neither altogether, it is that beautiful compound which Nature must have made in Paradise Park venison, before she separated the two substances, the dry & the oleaginous, to punish sinful mankind; Adam ate them entire & inseparate, and this little taste of Eden in the huckle bone of a fried * seems the only relique of a Paradisaical state. When I die, an exact description of its topography shall be left in a cupboard with a key, ins[c]ribed on which these words, ‘C. Lamb – dying imparts this to C. Chambers as the only worthy depositary of such a secret.’ You’ll drop a tear – – – – – –

  37. To Mrs William Wordsworth

  18 feb. 1818. East India House.

  (Mary shall send you all the news, which I find I have left out.) My dear Mrs Wordsworth,

  I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in the midst of Commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of Goods, Cassia, Cardemoms, Aloes, Ginger, Tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections.

  The reason why I cannot write letters at home is, that I am never alone. Plato’s (I write to W. W. now) Plato’s double animal parted never longed [? more] to be reciprocally reunited in the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for a moment single and separate. Except my morning’s walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so. I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers his damn’d unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great Books, or compare sum with sum, and write PAID against this and UNP’D against t’other, and yet reserve in some ‘corner of my mind’ some darling thoughts all my own – faint memory of some passage in a Book – or the tone of an absent friend’s Voice – a snatch of Miss Burrell’s1 singing – a gleam of Fanny Kelly’s2 divine plain face – The two operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun’s two motions (earth’s I mean), or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front – or as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney – but there are a set of amateurs of the Belle Lettres – the gay science – who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rooks3 &c., what Coleridge said at the Lecture last night – who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible use Reading can be to them but to talk of, might as well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptn. hieroglyph as long as the Pyramids will last before they should find it. These pests worrit me at business and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures which had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanys me home lest I should be solitary for a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door, up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication, knock at the door, in comes Mrs Hazlitt, or M. Burney, or Morgan, or Demogorgon, or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone, a Process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O the pleasure of eating alone! – eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange – for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not wine – wine can mollify stones. Then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters (God bless ’em! I love some of ’em dearly), and with the hatred a still greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choaking and death-doing, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on if they go before bed time. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner, but if you come, never go. The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often, but every time it comes by surprise that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening Company I should always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth) and voices all the golden morning, and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to myself. I am never C. L. but always C. L. and Co.

  He, who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself. I forget bed time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be abed, just close to my bedroom window, is the club room of a public house, where a set of singers, I take them to be chorus-singers of the two theatres (it must be both of them), begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the play houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop or some cheap composer arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in chorus. At least I never can catch any of the text of the plain song, nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on’t. ‘That fury being quenchd’ – the howl I mean – a curseder burden succeeds, of shouts and clapping and knocking of the table. At length over tasked nature drops under it and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet silent creatures of Dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christobel’s father used (bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink) to say every morning by way of variety when he awoke – ‘Every knell, the Baron saith, Wakes us up to a world of death,’ or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale is that by my central situation I am a little over companied. Not that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to drive away the Harpy solitude from me. I like ’em, and cards, and a chearful glass, but I mean merely to give you an idea between office confinement and after office society, how little time I can call my own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an inference. I would not that
I know of have it otherwise. I only wish sometimes I could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome and carried away leaving regret, but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude at being so often favored with that kind northern visitation. My London faces and noises don’t hear me – I mean no disrespect – or I should explain myself that instead of their return 220 times a year and the return of W. W. &c. 7 times in 104 weeks, some more equal distribution might be found. I have scarce room to put in Mary’s kind love and my poor name.

  CH. LAMB.

  This to be read last.

  W. H. goes on lecturing against W. W. and making copious use of quotations from said W. W. to give a zest to said lectures. S. T. C. is lecturing with success. I have not heard either him or H. but I dined with S. T. C. at Gilman’s a Sunday or two since and he was well and in good spirits. I mean to hear some of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and you can’t think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works which you could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always in pain lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honour of me at the London Tavern. ‘Gentlemen,’ said I, and there I stoppt, – the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs Wordsworth will go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the lakes once more which never can be realized. Between us there is a great gulf – not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I hope (as there seemed to be between me and that Gentleman concern’d in the Stamp office that I so strangely coiled up from at Haydons).4 I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all such people – Accountants, Deputy Accountants. The dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather Poetical; but as SHE makes herself manifest by the persons of such Beasts, I loathe and detest her as the Scarlet what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red letter days, they had done their worst, but I was deceived in the length to which Heads of offices, those true Liberty haters, can go. They are the tyrants, not Ferdinand, nor Nero – by a decree past this week, they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one o’clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Blast them. I speak it soberly. Dear W. W., be thankful for your Liberty.