The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume VI Part 77

And Rogers, if he shares the town's regard, Was first a banker ere he rose a bard.

In the second edition Dyer altered this to--

And Darwin, if he share the town's regard, Was first a doctor ere he rose a bard.

Lamb notes the alteration in his copy of the second edition, now in the British Museum. In 1828-1829 appeared _Parriana_, by Edmund Henry Barker, which quoted the couplet in its original form, to Dyer's distress.

_Tales of the Castle_. By the Countess de Genlis. Translated by Thomas Holcroft]

LETTER 530

CHARLES LAMB TO GEORGE DYER

Feb. 22nd, 1831.

Dear Dyer,--Mr. Rogers, and Mr. Rogers's friends, are perfectly a.s.sured, that you never intended any harm by an innocent couplet, and that in the revivification of it by blundering Barker you had no hand whatever. To imagine that, at this time of day, Rogers broods over a fantastic expression of more than thirty years' standing, would be to suppose him indulging his "Pleasures of Memory" with a vengeance. You never penned a line which for its own sake you need (dying) wish to blot. You mistake your heart if you think you _can_ write a lampoon. Your whips are rods of roses. Your spleen has ever had for its objects vices, not the vicious-abstract offences, not the concrete sinner. But you are sensitive, and wince as much at the consciousness of having committed a compliment, as another man would at the perpetration of an affront. But do not lug me into the same soreness of conscience with yourself. I maintain, and will to the last hour, that I never writ of you but _con amore_. That if any allusion was made to your near-sightedness, it was not for the purpose of mocking an infirmity, but of connecting it with scholar-like habits: for is it not erudite and scholarly to be somewhat near of sight, before age naturally brings on the malady? You could not then plead the _obrepens senectus_. Did I not moreover make it an apology for a certain _absence_, which some of your friends may have experienced, when you have not on a sudden made recognition of them in a casual street-meeting, and did I not strengthen your excuse for this slowness of recognition, by further accounting morally for the present engagement of your mind in worthy objects? Did I not, in your person, make the handsomest apology for absent-of-mind people that was ever made? If these things be not so, I never knew what I wrote or meant by my writing, and have been penning libels all my life without being aware of it. Does it follow that I should have exprest myself exactly in the same way of those dear old eyes of yours _now_--now that Father Time has conspired with a hard task-master to put a last extinguisher upon them?

I should as soon have insulted the Answerer of Salmasius, when he awoke up from his ended task, and saw no more with mortal vision. But you are many films removed yet from Milton's calamity. You write perfectly intelligibly. Marry, the letters are not all of the same size or tallness; but that only shows your proficiency in the _hands_--text, german-hand, court-hand, sometimes law-hand, and affords variety. You pen better than you did a twelvemonth ago; and if you continue to improve, you bid fair to win the golden pen which is the prize at your young gentlemen's academy. But you must beware of Valpy, and his printing-house, that hazy cave of Trophonius, out of which it was a mercy that you escaped with a glimmer. Beware of MSS. and Variae Lectiones. Settle the text for once in your mind, and stick to it. You have some years' good sight in you yet, if you do not tamper with it. It is not for you (for _us_ I should say) to go poring into Greek contractions, and star-gazing upon slim Hebrew points. We have yet the sight

Of sun, and moon, and star, throughout the year, And man and woman.

You have vision enough to discern Mrs. Dyer from the other comely gentlewoman who lives up at staircase No. 5; or, if you should make a blunder in the twilight, Mrs. Dyer has too much good sense to be jealous for a mere effect of imperfect optics. But don't try to write the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments, in the compa.s.s of a halfpenny; nor run after a midge or a mote to catch it; and leave off hunting for needles in bushels of hay, for all these things strain the eyes. The snow is six feet deep in some parts here. I must put on jack-boots to get at the post-office with this. It is not good for weak eyes to pore upon snow too much. It lies in drifts. I wonder what its drift is; only that it makes good pancakes, remind Mrs. Dyer. It turns a pretty green world into a white one. It glares too much for an innocent colour, methinks. I wonder why you think I dislike gilt edges. They set off a letter marvellously. Yours, for instance, looks for all the world like a tablet of curious _hieroglyphics_ in a gold frame. But don't go and lay this to your eyes. You always wrote hieroglyphically, yet not to come up to the mystical notations and conjuring characters of Dr. Parr. You never wrote what I call a schoolmaster's hand, like Clarke; nor a woman's hand, like Southey; nor a missal hand, like Porson; nor an all-of-the-wrong-side-sloping hand, like Miss Hayes; nor a dogmatic, Mede-and-Persian, peremptory hand, like Rickman; but you ever wrote what I call a Grecian's hand; what the Grecians write (or used) at Christ's Hospital; such as Whalley would have admired, and Boyer have applauded, but Smith or Atwood (writing-masters) would have horsed you for. Your boy-of-genius hand and your mercantile hand are various. By your flourishes, I should think you never learned to make eagles or corkscrews, or flourish the governors' names in the writing-school; and by the tenor and cut of your letters I suspect you were never in it at all. By the length of this scrawl you will think I have a design upon your optics; but I have writ as large as I could out of respect to them--too large, indeed, for beauty. Mine is a sort of deputy Grecian's hand; a little better, and more of a worldly hand, than a Grecian's, but still remote from the mercantile. I don't know how it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since school-days. I can never forget I was a deputy Grecian! And writing to you, or to Coleridge, besides affection, I feel a reverential deference as to Grecians still. I keep my soaring way above the Great Erasmians, yet far beneath the other. Alas! what am I now? what is a Leadenhall clerk or India pensioner to a deputy Grecian?

How art thou fallen, O Lucifer! Just room for our loves to Mrs. D., &c.

C. LAMB.

["I never writ of you but _con amore_." Lamb refers particularly to the _Elia_ essay "Oxford in the Vacation" in the _London Magazine_, where G.D.'s absence of mind and simplicity of character were dwelt upon more intimately than Dyer liked (see Vol. II.).

Dyer was gradually going blind.

"The Answerer of Salmasius"--Milton.

"Comely" Mrs. Dyer. But in the letter to Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, Mrs. D. had been "plain"!

Dyer had been a Grecian before Lamb was born. Clarke would be Charles Cowden Clarke, with whose father Dyer had been an usher. Miss Hayes we have met. The Rev. Peter Whalley was Upper Grammar Master in Dyer's day; Boyer, Lamb and Coleridge's master, succeeded him in 1776. Smith was Writing Master at the end of the seventeenth century.

Lamb had never become a Grecian, having an impediment in his speech which made it impossible that he should take orders, the natural fate of Grecians, with profit. Great Erasmus and Little Erasmus are still the names of cla.s.ses in the Blue-Coat School. Grecians were the Little Erasmians.

Here should come a letter from Lamb to P.G. Patmore, dated April 10, 1831, in which Lamb says of the publisher of the _New Monthly Magazine_: "Nature never wrote Knave upon a face more legible than upon that fellow's--'Coal-burn him in Beelzebub's deepest pit.' I can promise little help if you mean literary, when I reflect that for 5 years I have been feeling the necessity of scribbling but have never found the power.... _Moxon_ is my go between, call on _him_, 63 New Bond St., he is a very good fellow and the bookseller is not yet burn'd into him."

Patmore was seeking a publisher for, I imagine, his _Chatsworth_.

Here should come a letter from Lamb, dated April 13, 1831, which Canon Ainger considers was written to Gary and Mr. Hazlitt to Coleridge. It states that Lamb is daily expecting Wordsworth.]

LETTER 531

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

April 30, 1831.

Vir Bone!--Recepi literas tuas amicissimas, et in mentem venit responsuro mihi, vel raro, vel nunquam, inter nos intercedisse Latinam linguam, organum rescribendi, loquendive. Epistolae tuae, Plinianis elegantiis (supra quod TREMULO deceat) refertae, tam a verbis Plinianis adeo abhorrent, ut ne vocem quamquam (Romanam scilicet) habere videaris, quam "ad canem," ut aiunt, "rejectare possis." Forsan desuetudo Latinissandi ad vernaculam linguam usitandam, plusquam opus sit, coegit.

Per adagia quaedam nota, et in ore omnium pervulgata, ad Latinitatis perditae recuperationem revocare te inst.i.tui.

Felis in abaco est, et aegre videt. Omne quod splendet nequaquam aurum putes. Imponas equo mendic.u.m, equitabit idem ad diabolum. Fur commode a fure prenditur. O MARIA, MARIA, valde CONTRARIA, quomodo crescit hortulus tuus? Nunc majora canamus. Thomas, Thomas, de Islington, uxorem duxit die nupera Dominica. Reduxit domum postera. Succedenti baculum emit. Postridie ferit illam. Aegrescit ilia subsequenti. Proxima (nempe Veneris) est Mortua. Plurimum gestiit Thomas, qud appropinquanti Sabbato efferenda sit.

Horner quidam Johannulus in angulo sedebat, artocreas quasdam deglutiens. Inseruit pollices, pruna nana evellens, et magna voce exclamavit "Dii boni, quam bonus puer fio!"

Diddle-diddle-dumkins! meus unicus filius Johannes cubitum ivit, integris braccis, caliga una tantum, indutus. Diddle-diddle, etc. DA CAPO.

Hie adsum saltans Joannula. c.u.m nemo adsit mihi, semper resto sola.

Aenigma mihi hoc solvas, et Oedipus fies.

Qua ratione a.s.simulandus sit equus TREMULO?

Quippe cui tota communicatio sit per HAY et NEIGH, juxta consilium illud Dominic.u.m, "Fiat omnis communicatio vestra YEA et NAY."

In his nugis caram diem consume, dum invigilo valetudini carioris nostras Emmae, quae apud nos jamdudum aegrotat. Salvere vos jubet mec.u.m Maria mea, ipsa integra valetudine.

ELIA.

Ab agro Enfeldiense datum, Aprilis nescio quibus Calendis-- Davus sum, non Calendarius.

P.S.--Perdita in toto est Billa Reformatura.

[Mr. Stephen Gwynn gives me the following translation:--

Good Sir, I have received your most kind letter, and it has entered my mind as I began to reply, that the Latin tongue has seldom or never been used between us as the instrument of converse or correspondence. Your letters, filled with Plinian elegancies (more than becomes a Quaker), are so alien to Pliny's language, that you seem not to have a word (that is, a Roman word) to throw, as the saying is, at a dog. Perchance the disuse of Latinising had constrained you more than is right to the use of the vernacular. I have determined to recall you to the recovery of your lost Latinity by certain well-known adages common in all mouths.

The cat's in the cupboard and she can't see.

All that glitters is not gold.

Set a beggar on horseback and he'll ride to the Devil.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

Now let us sing of weightier matters.

Tom, Tom, of Islington, wed a wife on Sunday. He brought her home on Monday. Bought a stick on Tuesday. Beat her well on Wednesday. She was sick on Thursday. Dead on Friday. Tom was glad on Sat.u.r.day night to bury his wife on Sunday.

Little Jack Homer sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie. He put in his thumb and drew out a plum, and cried "Good Heavens, what a good boy am I!"

Diddle, diddle, dumkins! my son John Went to bed with his breeches on; One shoe off and the other shoe on, Diddle, diddle, etc. (Da Capo.)

Here am I, jumping Joan. When no one's by, I'm all alone.

Solve me this enigma, you shall be an Oedipus.