The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume V Part 91

CHARLES LAMB TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH (_Same letter._)

Dear Miss Wordsworth, Here we are, transplanted from our native soil. I thought we never could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an ugly wrench, but like a tooth, now 'tis out and I am easy. We never can strike root so deep in any other ground. This, where we are, is a light bit of gardener's mold, and if they take us up from it, it will cost no blood and groans like mandrakes pull'd up. We are in the individual spot I like best in all this great city. The theatres with all [_a few words cut away: Talfourd has "their noises. Convent Garden"_] dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and 'sparagus. Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four and twenty hours before she saw a Thief. She sits at the window working, and casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a constable to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life. It is a delicate subject, but is Mr. * * * really married? and has he found a gargle to his mind? O how funny he did talk to me about her, in terms of such mild quiet whispering speculative profligacy. But did the animalcule and she crawl over the rubric together, or did they not? Mary has brought her part of this letter to an orthodox and loving conclusion, which is very well, for I have no room for pansies and remembrances. What a nice holyday I got on Wednesday by favor of a princess dying. [_A line and signature cut away_.]

[The Lambs' house in Russell Street is now (1912) a fruiterer's: it has been rebuilt. Russell Street, Covent Garden, in those days was divided into Great Russell Street (from the Market to Brydges Street, now Catherine Street) and Little Russell Street, (from Brydges Street to Drury Lane). The brazier, or ironmonger, was Mr. Owen, Nos. 20 and 21.

The Wordsworths had moved to Rydal Mount in 1813.

"I am very sorry for Mr. De Quincey." Probably a reference to one of the opium-eater's illnesses.

It was at Littlehampton that Coleridge met Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante, afterwards one of Lamb's friends.

"Spot I like best in all this great city." See Vol. I. of this edition, for a little essay by Lamb on places of residence in London.

"Mr. * * *." One can but conjecture as to these asterisks. De Quincey, who was very small, married at the close of 1816.

"A princess dying"--Princess Charlotte of Saxe-Coburg. She was buried, amid national lamentation, on November 19, 1817.

Here should come a letter from Lamb to Ayrton dated November 25, 1817, which Lamb holds is peculiarly neatly worded.]

LETTER 240

CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN PAYNE COLLIER The Garden of England, December 10, 1817.

Dear J. P. C.,--I know how zealously you feel for our friend S. T.

Coleridge; and I know that you and your family attended his lectures four or five years ago. He is in bad health and worse mind: and unless something is done to lighten his mind he will soon be reduced to his extremities; and even these are not in the best condition. I am sure that you will do for him what you can; but at present he seems in a mood to do for himself. He projects a new course, not of physic, nor of metaphysic, nor a new course of life, but a new course of lectures on Shakspear and Poetry. There is no man better qualified (always excepting number one); but I am pre-engaged for a series of dissertations on India and India-pendence, to be completed at the expense of the Company, in I know not (yet) how many volumes foolscap folio. I am busy getting up my Hindoo mythology; and for the purpose I am once more enduring Southey's Curse. To be serious, Coleridge's state and affairs make me so; and there are particular reasons just now, and have been any time for the last twenty years, why he should succeed. He will do so with a little encouragement. I have not seen him lately; and he does not know that I am writing.

Yours (for Coleridge's sake) in haste, C. LAMB.

[The "Garden of England" of the address stands, of course, for Covent Garden.

This is the first letter to Collier that has been preserved. John Payne Collier (1789-1883), known as a Shakespearian critic and editor of old plays and poems, was then a reporter on _The Times_. He had recently married. Wordsworth also wrote to Collier on this subject, Coleridge's lectures were delivered in 1818, beginning on January 27, in Flower-de-Luce Court. Their preservation we owe to Collier's shorthand notes.

"My Hindoo mythology ... Southey's Curse"--_The Curse of Kehama_.]

LETTER 241

CHARLES LAMB TO BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON December [26], 1817.

My dear Haydon,--I will come with pleasure to 22, Lisson Grove North, at Rossi's, half-way up, right-hand side--if I can find it.

Yours, C. LAMB.

20, Russell Court, Covent Garden East, half-way up, next the corner, left hand side.

[The first letter that has been preserved to Haydon, the painter.

Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846) was then princ.i.p.ally known by his "Judgment of Solomon": he was at this time at work upon his most famous picture, "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem." Lamb's note is in acceptance of the invitation to the famous dinner which Haydon gave on December 28,1817, to Wordsworth, Keats, Monkhouse and others, with the Comptroller of Stamps thrown in. Haydon's _Diary_ describes the evening with much humour. See Appendix.]

LETTER 242

CHARLES LAMB 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, Ca.s.sia, 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 d.a.m.n'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 pa.s.sage in a Book--or the tone of an absent friend's Voice--a s.n.a.t.c.h of Miss Burrell's singing--a gleam of f.a.n.n.y Kelly's 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 Inst.i.tutions, Lalla Rooks &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 Egypt'n.

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 (G.o.d 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 a.s.sure 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 c.o.c.kcrow. 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 gla.s.s, 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 grat.i.tude, 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 2 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 honor 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 seemd to be between me and that Gentleman concern'd in the Stamp office that I so strangely coiled up from at Haydons). 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 Sat.u.r.day, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Blast them. I speak it soberly. Dear W. W., be thankful for your Liberty.

We have spent two very pleasant Evenings lately with Mr. Monkhouse.

[Mary Lamb's letter of news either was not written or has not been preserved.

Lamb returned to the subject of this essay for his Popular Fallacy "That Home is Home" in 1826 (see Vol. II. of this edition). A little previously to that essay he had written an article in the _New Times_ on unwelcome callers (see Vol. I.).

"Miss Burrell"--f.a.n.n.y Burrell, afterwards Mrs. Gould. Lamb wrote in praise of her performance in "Don Giovanni in London" (see Vol. I. of this edition).

"f.a.n.n.y Kelly's divine plain face." Only seventeen months later Lamb proposed to Miss Kelly.

"What Coleridge said." Coleridge was still lecturing on Shakespeare and poetry in Flower-de-Luce Court.

"The two theatres"--Drury Lane and Covent Garden.

"Bishop"--Sir Henry Rowley Bishop (1786-1855), composer of "Home, Sweet Home."