The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume II Part 30

His last contribution to that magazine was dated September, 1826. In 1827 he was chiefly occupied in selecting Garrick play extracts for Hone's _Table Book_, at the British Museum, and for a while after that he seems to have been more interested in writing acrostics and alb.u.m verses than prose. In 1831, however, Moxon's _Englishman's Magazine_ offered harbourage for anything Lamb cared to give it, and a brief revival of Elia (under the name of Peter) resulted. With its death in October, 1831, Lamb's writing career practically ceased.

Page 1. THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE.

_London Magazine_, August, 1820.

Although the "Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People," "Valentine's Day," and "On the Acting of Munden," were all written before this essay, it is none the less the first of the essays of Elia. I have remarked, in the notes to a small edition of _Elia_, that it is probably unique in literature for an author to find himself, as Lamb did, in his forty-fourth year, by recording impressions gathered in his seventeenth; but I think now that Lamb probably visited his brother at the South-Sea House from time to time in later years, and gathered other impressions then. I am led to this conclusion partly by the fact that Thomas Tame was not appointed Deputy-Accountant until four or five years after Lamb had left.

We do not know exactly what Lamb's duties were at the South-Sea House or how long he was there: probably only for the twenty-three weeks--from September, 1791--mentioned in the receipt below, discovered by Mr. J.A. Rutter in a little exhibition of doc.u.ments ill.u.s.trative of the South Sea Bubble in the Albert Museum at Exeter:--

Rec'd 8th feby 1792 of the Honble South Sea Company by the hands of their Secretary Twelve pounds 1s. 6d. for 23 weeks attendance in the Examiners Office.

12 1 6. CHAS. LAMB.

This shows that Lamb's salary was half a guinea weekly, paid half-yearly. His brother John was already in the service of the Company, where he remained till his death, rising to Accountant. It has been conjectured that it was through his influence that Charles was admitted, with the view of picking up book-keeping; but the real patron and introducer was Joseph Pake, one of the directors, whom we meet on page 92. Whether Lamb had ideas of remaining, or whether he merely filled a temporary gap in the Examiners' Office, we cannot tell. He pa.s.sed to the East India House in the spring of 1792.

The South Sea Company was incorporated in 1710. The year of the Bubble was 1720. The South-Sea House, remodelled, is now a congeries of offices.

Page 2, line 11. _Forty years ago_. To be accurate, twenty-eight to thirty.

Page 3, line 1. _Accounts ... puzzle me_. Here Elia begins his "matter-of-lie" career. Lamb was at this time in the Accountants'

Office of the India House, living among figures all day.

Page 3, line 7 from foot. _Evans_. William Evans. The Directories of those days printed lists of the chief officials in some of the public offices, and it is possible to trace the careers of the clerks whom Lamb names. All are genuine. Evans, whose name is given one year as Evan Evans, was appointed cas.h.i.+er (or deputy-cas.h.i.+er) in 1792.

Page 4, line 4. _Ready to imagine himself one_. Lamb was fond of this conceit. See his little essay "The Last Peach" (Vol. I.), and the mischievous letter to Bernard Barton, after Fauntleroy's trial, warning him against peculation.

Page 4, line 7. _Anderton's_. Either the coffee-shop in Fleet Street, now Anderton's Hotel, or a city offshoot of it. The portrait, if it ever was in existence, is no longer known there.

Page 5, line 17. _John Tipp_. John Lamb succeeded Tipp as Accountant somewhen about 1806.

Page 5, line 27. _I know not, etc._ This parenthesis was not in the _London Magazine_, but the following footnote was appended to the sentence:--

"I have since been informed, that the present tenant of them is a Mr. Lamb, a gentleman who is happy in the possession of some choice pictures, and among them a rare portrait of Milton, which I mean to do myself the pleasure of going to see, and at the same time to refresh my memory with the sight of old scenes. Mr.

Lamb has the character of a right courteous and communicative collector."

Mr. Lamb was, of course, John Lamb, or James Elia (see the essay "My Relations"), then (in 1820) Accountant of the South-Sea House. He left the Milton to his brother. It is now in America.

Page 6, line 5 from foot. _Henry Man_. This was Henry Man (1747-1790), deputy-secretary of the South-Sea House from 1776, and an author of light trifles in the papers, and of one or two books. The _Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose of the late Henry Man_ was published in 1802, among the subscribers being three of the officials named in this essay--John Evans, R. Plumer, and Mr. Tipp, and also Thomas Maynard, who, though a.s.signed to the Stock Exchange, is probably the "childlike, pastoral M----" of a later paragraph. Small politics are for the most part kept out of Man's volumes, which are high-spirited rather than witty, but this punning epigram (of which Lamb was an admirer) on Lord Spencer and Lord Sandwich may be quoted:--

Two Lords whose names if I should quote, Some folks might call me sinner: The one invented _half a coat_, The other _half a dinner_.

Such lords as these are useful men, Heaven sends them to console one; Because there's now not one in ten, That can procure a _whole one_.

Page 7, line 13. _Plumer_. Richard Plumer (spelled Plomer in the directories), deputy-secretary after Man. Lamb was peculiarly interested in the Plumers from the fact that his grandmother, Mrs.

Field, had been housekeeper of their mansion at Blakesware, near Ware (see notes to "Dream-Children" and "Blakesmoor in H----s.h.i.+re"). The fine old Whig was William Plumer, who had been her employer, and was now living at Gilston. He died in 1821.

The following pa.s.sage from the memoir of Edward Cave (1691-1754), which Dr. Johnson wrote for the _Gentleman's Magazine_ (which Cave established) in 1754, shows that Lamb was mistaken about Plumer:--

He [Cave] was afterwards raised to the office of clerk of the franks, in which he acted with great spirit and firmness; and often stopped franks which were given by members of parliament to their friends; because he thought such extension of a peculiar right illegal. This raised many complaints, and having stopped, among others, a frank given to the old dutchess of _Marlborough_ by Mr. _Walter Plummer_, he was cited before the house, as for breach of privilege, and accused, I suppose very unjustly, of opening letters to detect them. He was treated with great harshness and severity, but declining their questions by pleading his oath of secrecy, was at last dismissed. And it must be recorded to his honour, that when he was ejected from his office, he did not think himself discharged from his trust, but continued to refuse to his nearest friends any information about the management of the office.

I borrow from Canon Ainger an interesting note on Walter Plumer, written in the eighteen-eighties, showing that Lamb was mistaken on other matters too:--

The present Mr. Plumer, of Allerton, Totness, a grandson of Richard Plumer of the South-Sea House, by no means acquiesces in the tradition here recorded as to his grandfather's origin. He believes that though the links are missing, Richard Plumer was descended in regular line from the Baronet, Sir Walter Plumer, who died at the end of the seventeenth century. Lamb's memory has failed him here in one respect. The "Bachelor Uncle," Walter Plumer, uncle of William Plumer of Blakesware, was most certainly not a bachelor (see the pedigree of the family in Cussans'

_Hertfords.h.i.+re_).

Page 7, line 10 from foot. M----. According to the Key to the initials and blanks in some of the essays, which Lamb filled in for a curious correspondent, M---- stood for one Maynard. "Maynard, hang'd himself"

is Lamb's entry. He was chief clerk in the Old Annuities and Three Per Cents, 1788-1793.

Page 8. OXFORD IN THE VACATION.

_London Magazine_, October, 1820, where it is dated at the end, "August 5, 1820. From my rooms facing the Bodleian." My own belief is that Lamb wrote the essay at Cambridge, under the influence of Cambridge, where he spent a few weeks in the summers of 1819 and 1820, and transferred the scene to Oxford by way of mystification. He knew Oxford, of course, but he had not been there for some years, and it was at Cambridge that he met Dyer and saw the Milton MSS.

Concerning a visit to Oxford (in 1810), Hazlitt had written, in his _Table Talk_ essay "On the Conversation of Authors," in the preceding (the September) number of the _London Magazine_:--

L---- [that is, Lamb] once came down into the country to see us.

He was "like the most capricious poet Ovid among the Goths." The country people thought him an oddity, and did not understand his jokes. It would be strange if they had; for he did not make any while he staid. But when we crossed the country to Oxford, then he spoke a little. He and the old colleges were hail-fellow well-met; and in the quadrangles, he "walked gowned."

The quotation is a reference to Lamb's sonnet, "I was not Trained in Academic Bowers," written at Cambridge in 1819:--

Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers, Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap; My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap, And I walk _gowned_.

Page 8, line 6 from foot. _Agnize_. Lamb was fond of this word. I have seen it stated ingeniously that it was of his own coinage--from _agnus_, a lamb--but the derivation is _ad gnoscere_, to acknowledge, to recognise, and the word is to be found in other places--in "Oth.e.l.lo," for example (Act I., Scene 3, line 232):--

I do agnise A natural and prompt alacrity.

Page 9, middle. _Red-letter days_. See note on page 351. The holidays at the India House, which are given in the London directories of Lamb's early time there, make a considerable list. But in 1820 the Accountants' Office, where Lamb was, kept only five days in the year.

Page 10, line 11. _I can here ... enact the student._ Lamb had distilled the matter of this paragraph into his sonnet, "I was not Trained in Academic Bowers," written at Cambridge in August of the preceding year (see above and Vol. IV.).

Page 11, line 12 from foot. _Unsettle my faith._ At this point, in the _London Magazine_, Lamb appended the footnote:--

"There is something to me repugnant, at any time, in written hand.

The text never seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty--as springing up with all its parts absolute--till, in evil hour, I was shown the original written copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the Library of Trinity, kept like some treasure to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure! as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good! as if inspirations were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive, indifferent! I will never go into the work-shop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea."

In the Appendix to Vol. I., page 428, I have printed a pa.s.sage from the original MS. of _Comus_, which there is reason to believe was contributed to the _London Magazine_ by Lamb.

Page 11, line 9 from foot. _G.D._ George Dyer (1755-1841), Lamb's friend for many years. This is the first mention of him in the essays; but we shall meet him again, particularly in "Amicus Redivivus."

George Dyer was educated at Christ's Hospital long before Lamb's time there, and, becoming a Grecian, had entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He became at first an usher in Ess.e.x, then a private tutor to the children of Robert Robinson, the Unitarian, whose life he afterwards excellently wrote, then an usher again, at Northampton, one of his colleagues being John Clarke, father of Lamb's friend, Charles Cowden Clarke. In 1792 he settled in Clifford's Inn as a hack; wrote poems, made indexes, examined libraries for a great bibliographical work (never published), and contributed "all that was original" to Valpy's cla.s.sics in 141 volumes. Under this work his sight gave way; and he once showed Hazlitt two fingers the use of which he had lost in copying out MSS. of Procrus and Plotinus in a fine Greek hand.

Fortunately a good woman took him under her wing; they were married in 1825; and Dyer's last days were happy. His best books were his _Life of Robert Robinson_ and his _History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge_. Lamb and his friends laughed at him and loved him. In addition to the stories told by Lamb in his letters and essays, there are amusing characteristics of Dyer in Crabb Robinson's diary, in Leigh Hunt, in Hazlitt, in Talfourd, and in other places. All bear upon his gentleness, his untidiness and his want of humour. One of the most famous stories tells of Dyer's criticism of Williams, the terrible Ratcliffe Highway murderer. Dyer, who would never say an ill word of any one, was asked his opinion of this cold-blooded a.s.sa.s.sin of two families. "He must," he replied after due thought, "be rather an eccentric character."

Page 12, line 10. _Injustice to him._ In the _London Magazine_ the following footnote came here, almost certainly by Lamb:--

"Violence or injustice certainly none, Mr. Elia. But you will acknowledge that the charming unsuspectingness of our friend has sometimes laid him open to attacks, which, though savouring (we hope) more of waggery than malice--such is our unfeigned respect for G.D.--might, we think, much better have been omitted. Such was that silly joke of L[amb], who, at the time the question of the Scotch Novels was first agitated, gravely a.s.sured our friend--who as gravely went about repeating it in all companies--that Lord Castlereagh had acknowledged himself to be the author of Waverly!

_Note--not by Elia."_