The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume VI Part 39

He lost three pall-bearers their livelyhood, Only with simp'ring at his lively mood: Provided that they fresh and neat came, All jests were fish that to his net came.

He'd banter Apostolic castings, As you jeer fishermen at Hastings.

When the fly bit, _like me_, he leapt-o'er-all, And stood not much on what was scriptural.

P.S.

I had forgot, at Small Bohemia (Enquire the way of your maid Euphemia) Are sojourning, of all good fellows The prince and princess,--the _Novellos_-- Pray seek 'em out, and give my love to 'em; You'll find you'll soon be hand and glove to 'em.

In prose, Little Bohemia, about a mile from Hastings in the Hollington road, when you can get so far. Dear Dib, I find relief in a word or two of prose. In truth my rhymes come slow. You have "routh of 'em." It gives us pleasure to find you keep your good spirits. Your Letter did us good. Pray heaven you are got out at last. Write quickly.

This letter will introduce you, if 'tis agreeable. Take a donkey. 'Tis Novello the Composer and his Wife, our very good friends.

C.L.

[Dibdin must have sent the verses which Lamb asked for in the previous letter, and this is Lamb's reply. Pride of ancestry seems to have been the note of Dibdin's effort. Probably there is a certain amount of truth in Lamb's account of the resolute merriment of his father. It is not inconsistent with his description of Lovel in the _Elia_ essay "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple."

"I have stol'n a quip." The manner rather than the precise matter, I think.

Here should come a letter from Lamb to the Rev. Edward Coleridge, Coleridge's nephew, dated July 19, 1826. It thanks the recipient for his kindness to the child of a friend of Lamb's, Samuel Anthony Bloxam, Coleridge having a.s.sisted in getting Frederick Bloxam into Eton (where he was a master) on the foundation. Samuel Bloxam and Lamb were at Christ's Hospital together.]

LETTER 399

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

[P.M. September 6, 1826.]

My dear Wordsworth, The Bearer of this is my young friend Moxon, a young lad with a Yorks.h.i.+re head, and a heart that would do honour to a more Southern county: no offence to Westmoreland. He is one of Longman's best hands, and can give you the best account of The Trade as 'tis now going; or stopping. For my part, the failure of a Bookseller is not the most unpalatable accident of mortality:

sad but not saddest The desolation of a hostile city.

When Constable fell from heaven, and we all hoped Baldwin was next, I tuned a slight stave to the words in Macbeth (D'avenant's) to be sung by a Chorus of Authors,

What should we do when Booksellers break?

We should rejoyce.

Moxon is but a tradesman in the bud yet, and retains his virgin Honesty; Esto perpetua, for he is a friendly serviceable fellow, and thinks nothing of lugging up a Cargo of the Newest Novels once or twice a week from the Row to Colebrooke to gratify my Sister's pa.s.sion for the newest things. He is her Bodley. He is author besides of a poem which for a first attempt is promising. It is made up of common images, and yet contrives to read originally. You see the writer felt all he pours forth, and has not palmed upon you expressions which he did not believe at the time to be more his own than adoptive. Rogers has paid him some proper compliments, with sound advice intermixed, upon a slight introduction of him by me; for which I feel obliged. Moxon has pet.i.tion'd me by letter (for he had not the confidence to ask it in London) to introduce him to you during his holydays; pray pat him on the head, ask him a civil question or two about his verses, and favor him with your genuine autograph. He shall not be further troublesome. I think I have not sent any one upon a gaping mission to you a good while.

We are all well, and I have at last broke the bonds of business a second time, never to put 'em on again. I pitch Colburn and his magazine to the divil. I find I can live without the necessity of writing, tho' last year I fretted myself to a fever with the hauntings of being starved.

Those vapours are flown. All the difference I find is that I have no pocket money: that is, I must not pry upon an old book stall, and cull its contents as heretofore, but shoulders of mutton, Whitbread's entire, and Booth's best, abound as formerly.

I don't know whom or how many to send our love to, your household is so frequently divided, but a general health to all that may be fixed or wandering; stars, wherever. We read with pleasure some success (I forget quite what) of one of you at Oxford. Mrs. Monkhouse (... was one of you) sent us a kind letter some [months back], and we had the pleasure to [see] her in tolerable spirits, looking well and kind as in by-gone days.

Do take pen, or put it into goodnatured hands Dorothean or Wordsworthian-female, or Hutchinsonian, to inform us of your present state, or possible proceedings. I am ashamed that this breaking of the long ice should be a letter of business.

There is none circ.u.m praecordia nostra I swear by the honesty of pedantry, that wil I nil I pushes me upon sc.r.a.ps of Latin.

We are yours cordially: CHAS. & MARY LAMB.

September. 1826.

[In this letter, the first to Wordsworth for many months, we have the first mention of Edward Moxon, who was to be so closely a.s.sociated with Lamb in the years to come. Moxon, a young Yorks.h.i.+reman, educated at the Green Coat School, was then nearly twenty-five, and was already author of _The Prospect and other Poems_, dedicated to Rogers, who was destined to be a valuable patron. Moxon subsequently became Wordsworth's publisher.

"Constable ... Baldwin." Archibald Constable & Co., Scott's publishers, failed in 1826. Baldwin was the first publisher of the _London Magazine_.

"I pitch Colburn and his magazine." Lamb wrote nothing in the _New Monthly Magazine_ after September, 1826.

I append portions of what seems to be Lamb's first letter to Edward Moxon, obviously written before this date, but not out of place here.

The letter seems to have accompanied the proof of an article on Lamb which he had corrected and was returning to Moxon.]

LETTER 400

CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON

(_Fragment_)

Were my own feelings consulted I should print it verbatim, but I won't hoax you, else I love a Lye. My biography, parentage, place of birth, is a strange mistake, part founded on some nonsense I wrote about Elia, and was true of him, the real Elia, whose name I took.... C.L. was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple in 1775. Admitted into Christs Hospital, 1782, where he was contemporary with T.F.M. [Thomas Fanshawe Middleton], afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, and with S.T.C. with the last of these two eminent scholars he has enjoyed an intimacy through life. On quitting this foundation he became a junior clerk in the South Sea House under his Elder Brother who died accountant there some years since.... I am not the author of the Opium Eater, &c.

[I have not succeeded in finding the article in question.]

LETTER 401

CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN BATES DIBDIN

[P.M. September 9, 1826.]

An answer is requested.

Sat.u.r.day.

Dear D.--I have observed that a Letter is never more acceptable than when received upon a rainy day, especially a rainy Sunday; which moves me to send you somewhat, however short. This will find you sitting after Breakfast, which you will have prolonged as far as you can with consistency to the poor handmaid that has the reversion of the Tea Leaves; making two nibbles of your last morsel of _stale_ roll (you cannot have hot new ones on the Sabbath), and reluctantly coming to an end, because when that is done, what can you do till dinner? You cannot go to the Beach, for the rain is drowning the sea, turning rank Thetis fresh, taking the brine out of Neptune's pickles, while mermaids sit upon rocks with umbrellas, their ivory combs sheathed for spoiling in the wet of waters foreign to them. You cannot go to the library, for it's shut. You are not religious enough to go to church. O it is worth while to cultivate piety to the G.o.ds, to have something to fill the heart up on a wet Sunday! You cannot cast accounts, for your ledger is being eaten up with moths in the Ancient Jewry. You cannot play at draughts, for there is none to play with you, and besides there is not a draught board in the house. You cannot go to market, for it closed last night. You cannot look in to the shops, their backs are shut upon you.

You cannot read the Bible, for it is not good reading for the sick and the hypochondriacal. You cannot while away an hour with a friend, for you have no friend round that Wrekin. You cannot divert yourself with a stray acquaintance, for you have picked none up. You cannot bear the chiming of Bells, for they invite you to a banquet, where you are no visitant. You cannot cheer yourself with the prospect of a tomorrow's letter, for none come on Mondays. You cannot count those endless vials on the mantlepiece with any hope of making a variation in their numbers.

You have counted your spiders: your Bastile is exhausted. You sit and deliberately curse your hard exile from all familiar sights and sounds.

Old Ranking poking in his head unexpectedly would just now be as good to you as Grimaldi. Any thing to deliver you from this intolerable weight of Ennui. You are too ill to shake it off: not ill enough to submit to it, and to lie down as a lamb under it. The Tyranny of Sickness is nothing to the Cruelty of Convalescence: 'tis to have Thirty Tyrants for one. That pattering rain drops on your brain. You'll be worse after dinner, for you must dine at one to-day, that Betty may go to afternoon service. She insists upon having her chopped hay. And then when she goes out, who _was_ something to you, something to speak to--what an interminable afternoon you'll have to go thro'. You can't break yourself from your locality: you cannot say "Tomorrow morning I set off for Banstead, by G.o.d": for you are book'd for Wednesday. Foreseeing this, I thought a _cheerful letter_ would come in opportunely. If any of the little topics for mirth I have thought upon should serve you in this utter extinguishment of suns.h.i.+ne, to make you a little merry, I shall have had my ends. I love to make things comfortable. [_Here is an erasure._] This, which is scratch'd out was the most material thing I had to say, but on maturer thoughts I defer it.

P.S.--We are just sitting down to dinner with a pleasant party, Coleridge, Reynolds the dramatist, and Sam Bloxam: to-morrow (that is, to_day_), Liston, and Wyat of the Wells, dine with us. May this find you as jolly and freakish as we mean to be.

C. LAMB.

[Addressed to "T. Dibdin Esq're. No. 4 Meadow Cottages, Hastings, Suss.e.x."

"You have counted your spiders." Referring, I suppose, to Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, the academician, and a famous prisoner in the Bastille, who trained a spider to eat flies from his hand.

"Grimaldi"--Joseph Grimaldi, the clown. Ranking was one of Dibdin's employers.