by Charles Lamb
Let me hear that you have clamber’d up to Lover’s Seat; it is as fine in that neighbourhood 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 so grand as when it is left to itself. One cock-boat spoils it. A sea-mew or two improves it. And go to the little church,2 which is a very protestant Loretto, and seems dropt 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 hath it all the appertenances of a church of the first magnitude, its pulpit, its pews, its baptismal font; a cathedral in a nutshell. Seven people would crowd it like a Caledonian Chapel. 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. Tythes out of it could be no more split than a hair. Its First fruits must be its Last, for ’twould 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 any where. A sounding board is merely there for ceremony. It is secure from earthquakes, not more from sanctity than size, for ’twould feel a mountain thrown upon it no more than a taper-worm would. Go and see, but not without your spectacles. By the way, there’s a capital farm house two thirds of the way to the Lover’s Seat, with incomparable plum cake, ginger beer, etc.
Mary bids me warn you not to read the Anatomy of Melancholy in your present low way. You’ll fancy yourself a pipkin, or a headless bear, as Burton speaks of. You’ll be lost in a maze of remedies for a labyrinth of diseasements, a plethora of cures. Read Fletcher; above all the Spanish Curate, the Thief or Little Nightwalker, the Wit Without Money, and the Lover’s Pilgrimage. Laugh and come home fat. Neither do we think Sir T. Browne quite the thing for you just at present. Fletcher is as light as Soda water. Browne and Burton are too strong potions for an Invalid. And don’t thumb or dirt the books. Take care of the bindings. Lay a leaf of silver paper under ’em, as you read them. And don’t smoke tobacco over ’em, the leaves will fall in and burn or dirty their namesakes. If you find any dusty atoms of the Indian Weed crumbled up in the Beaumt and Fletcher, they are mine. But then, you know, so is the Folio also. A pipe and a comedy of Fletcher’s the last thing of a night is the best recipe for light dreams and to scatter away Nightmares. Probatum est.3 But do as you like about the former. Only cut the Baker’s. You will come home else all crust; Rankings must chip you before you can appear in his counting house. And my dear Peter Fin Junr.,4 do contrive to see the sea at least once before you return. You’ll be ask’d about it in the Old Jewry. It will appear singular not to have seen it. And rub up your Muse, the family Muse, and send us a rhyme or so. Don’t waste your wit upon that damn’d Dry Salter. I never knew but one Dry Salter, who could relish those mellow effusions, and he broke. You knew Tommy Hill,5 the wettest of dry salters. Dry Salters, what a word for this thirsty weather! I must drink after it. Here’s to thee, my dear Dibdin, and to our having you again snug and well at Colebrooke. But our nearest hopes are to hear again from you shortly. An epistle only a quarter as agreeable as your last, would be a treat.
Yours most truly
C. LAMB.
Timothy B. Dibdin, Esq., No. 9, Blucher Row, Priory, Hastings.
56. To Peter George Patmore
Mrs Leishman’s, Chace, Enfield,
[No date: June 1827]
Dear Patmore,1
Excuse my anxiety – but how is Dash?2 (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, or aperto ore?3 Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his conversation? 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 is 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 keep him for curiosity, to see if it was the hydrophobia. They say all our army in India had it at one time – but that was in Hyder-Ally’s time. Do you get paunch for him? Take care the sheep was sane. You might pull out his teeth (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 Patmore and the children. They’d have more sense than he! He’d be like a Fool kept in the family, to keep the household in good humour with their own understanding. You might teach him the mad dance set to the mad howl. Madge Owl-et would be nothing to him. ‘My, how he capers!’ [In the margin is written:] One of the children speaks this.
[Three lines here are erased.] 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 Patmore 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 (Dash), muzzle him, and lead him in a string (common pack-thread will do; he don’t care for twist) to 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, Chace, 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 knew a jailor (which rhymes), but his wife was a fine lady.
Let us hear from you respecting Mrs Patmore’s regimen. I send my love in a — to Dash.
C. LAMB.
[On the outside of the letter was written:]
Seriously, I wish you would call upon Hood when you are that way. He’s a capital fellow. I sent him a couple of poems – one ordered by his wife, and written to order; and ’tis a week since, and I’ve not heard from him. I fear something is the matter.
Omitted within
Our kindest remembrance to Mrs P.
57. To Mrs Basil Montagu
[No date: Summer 1827]
Dear Madam,1
I return your List with my name. I should be sorry that any respect should be going on towards [Clarkson,]2 and I be left out of the conspiracy. Otherwise I frankly own that to pillarize a man’s good feelings in his lifetime is not to my taste. Monuments, to goodness, even after death, are equivocal. I turn away from Howard’s,3 I scarce know why. Goodness blows no trumpet, nor desires to have it blown. We should be modest for a modest man – as he is for himself. The vanities of Life – Art, Poetry, Skill military, are subjects for trophies; not the silent thoughts arising in a good man’s mind in lonely places. Was I C[larkson,] I should never be able to walk or ride near [Wade Mill]4 again. Instead of bread, we are giving him a stone. Instead of the locality recalling the noblest moment of his existence, it is a place at which his friends (that is, himself) blow to the world, ‘What a good man is he!’ I sat down upon a hillock at Forty Hill ye
sternight – a fine contemplative evening, – with a thousand good speculations about mankind. How I yearned with cheap benevolence! I shall go and inquire of the stone-cutter, that cuts the tombstones here, what a stone with a short inscription will cost; just to say – ‘Here C. Lamb loved his brethren of mankind.’ Everybody will come there to love. As I can’t well put my own name, I shall put about a subscription:
I scribble in haste from here, where we shall be some time. Pray request Mr M[ontagu] to advance the guinea for me, which shall faithfully be forthcoming; and pardon me that I don’t see the proposal in quite the light that he may. The kindness of his motives, and his power of appreciating the noble passage, I thoroughly agree in.
With most kind regards to him, I conclude,
Dear Madam,
Yours truly,
C. LAMB.
From Mrs Leishman’s, Chase, Enfield.
58. To Barron Field
Oct. 4th, 1827.
I am not in humour to return a fit reply to your pleasant letter. We are fairly housed at Enfield, and an angel shall not persuade me to wicked London again. We have now six sabbath days in a week for – none! The change has worked on my sister’s mind, to make her ill; and I must wait a tedious time before we can hope to enjoy this place in unison. Enjoy it, when she recovers, I know we shall. I see no shadow, but in her illness, for repenting the step! For Mathews – I know my own utter unfitness for such a task.1 I am no hand at describing costumes, a great requisite in an account of mannered pictures. I have not the slightest acquaintance with pictorial language even. An imitator of me, or rather pretender to be me, in his Rejected Articles, has made me minutely describe the dresses of the poissardes at Calais!2 – I could as soon resolve Euclid. I have no eye for forms and fashions. I substitute analysis, and get rid of the phenomenon by slurring in for it its impression. I am sure you must have observed this defect, or peculiarity, in my writings; else the delight would be incalculable in doing such a thing for Mathews, whom I greatly like – and Mrs Mathews, whom I almost greatlier like. What a feast ’twould be to be sitting at the pictures painting ’em into words; but I could almost as soon make words into pictures. I speak this deliberately, and not out of modesty. I pretty well know what I can’t do.
My sister’s verses are homely, but just what they should be; I send them, not for the poetry, but the good sense and good-will of them. I was beginning to transcribe; but Emma3 is sadly jealous of its getting into more hands, and I won’t spoil it in her eyes by divulging it. Come to Enfield, and read it. As my poor cousin, the bookbinder, now with God, told me, most sentimentally, that having purchased a picture of fish at a dead man’s sale, his heart ached to see how the widow grieved to part with it, being her dear husband’s favourite; and he almost apologised for his generosity by saying he could not help telling the widow she was ‘welcome to come and look at it’ – e.g. at his house – ‘as often as she pleased.’ There was the germ of generosity in an uneducated mind. He had just reading enough from the backs of books for the ‘nec sinit esse feros’4 – had he read inside, the same impulse would have led him to give back the two-guinea thing – with a request to see it, now and then, at her house. We are parroted into delicacy. – Thus you have a tale for a Sonnet.
Adieu! with (imagine both) our loves.
C. LAMB.
59. To Bernard Barton
[P.M. 11 October 1828]
A splendid edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim1 – why, the thought is enough to turn one’s moral stomach. His cockle hat and staff transformed to a smart cockd 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 sacriligious 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.2 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, enameld into copper or silver plate by Heath, accompanied with verses from Mrs Heman’s pen – O 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 see
A man i’ th’ 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 read thyself, and read thou knowst not what,
And yet know whether thou art blest or not
By reading the same lines? O then come hither,
And lay my book, thy head and heart together.
JOHN BUNYAN
Shew me such poetry in any of the 15 forthcoming combinations of show and emptiness, yclept Annuals. Let me whisper in your ear that wholesome sacramental bread is not more nutritious than papistical wafer stuff, than these (to head and heart) exceed the visual frippery of Mitford’s Salamander God,3 baking himself up to the work of creation in a solar oven, not yet by the terms of the context itself existing. Blake’s ravings made genteel. So there’s verses for thy verses; and now let me tell you that the sight of your hand gladdend me.
I have been daily trying to write to you, but paralysed. You have spurd me on this tiny effort, and at intervals I hope to hear from and talk to you. But my spirits have been in a deprest way for a long 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,4 but only for some lines written on a dead infant of the Editor’s, 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 on 1st page, and whistled thro’ all the covers of magazines, the barefaced sort of emulation, the unmodest candidateship, brot into so little space – in those old Londons a signature was lost in the wood of matter – the paper coarse (till latterly, which spoil’d them) – in short I detest to appear in an Annual.
What a fertile genius (an[d] a d quiet good soul withal) is Hood. He has 50 things in hand, fares 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 Yates5 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 haunch6 among ’em. Of all the poets, Cary has had the good sense to keep quite clear of ’em, with Clergy-gentle-manly right notions. Don’t think I set up for being proud in 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 washd 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 all three (we can lodge you) our pleasant farms and villages. –
We both join in kindest loves to you and yours. �
�
Saturday.
CH. LAMB REDIVIVUS.
60. To Bryan Waller Procter
[? 29 January 1829]
When Miss Ouldcroft (who is now Mrs Beddome, and Bed— dom’d to her!) was at Enfield, which she was in summertime, and owed her health to its sun and genial influences, she wisited (with young lady-like impertinence) a poor man’s cottage that had a pretty baby (O the yearnling!), and gave it fine caps and sweetmeats. On a day, broke into the parlour our two maids uproarious. ‘O ma’am, who do you think Miss Ouldcroft (they pronounce it Holcroft) has been working a cap for?’ ‘A child,’ answered Mary, in true Shandean female simplicity. ‘It’s the man’s child as was taken up for sheep-stealing.’ Miss Ouldcroft was staggered, and would have cut the connection; but by main force I made her go and take her leave of her protégée (which I only spell with a g because I can’t make a pretty j). I thought, if she went no more, the Abactor1 or Abactor’s wife (vide Ainsworth)2 would suppose she had heard something; and I have delicacy for a sheep-stealer. The overseers actually overhauled a mutton-pie at the baker’s (his first, last, and only hope of mutton-pie), which he never came to eat, and thence inferred his guilt. Per occasionem cujus3 I framed the sonnet; observe its elaborate construction. I was four days about it.