The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Part 16

_Martyrdom._--"Heart of oak hath sometime warped a little in the scorching heat of persecution. Their want of true courage herein cannot be excused. Yet many censure them for surrendering up their forts after a long siege, who would have yielded up their own at the first summons.

Oh! there is more required to make one valiant, than to call Cranmer or Jewel coward; as if the fire in Smithfield had been no hotter than what is painted in the Book of Martyrs."

_Text of St. Paul._--"St. Paul saith, let not the sun go down on your wrath, to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's meaning rather than his words, with all possible speed to depose our pa.s.sion; not understanding him so literally, that we may take leave to be angry till sunset: then might our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in Greenland, where the day lasts above a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope for revenge."[19]

[19] This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one would have thought of deducing,--setting up an absurdum on purpose to hunt it down,--placing guards as it were at the very outposts of possibility,--gravely giving out laws to insanity and prescribing moral fences to distempered intellects, could never have entered into a head less entertainingly constructed than that of Fuller, or Sir Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of this pa.s.sage most aptly imitates.

_Bishop Brownrig._--"He carried learning enough _in numerato_ about him in his pockets for any discourse, and had much more at home in his chests for any serious dispute."

_Modest Want._--"Those that with diligence fight against poverty, though neither conquer till death makes it a drawn battle; expect not but prevent their craving of thee: for G.o.d forbid the heavens should never rain, till the earth first opens her mouth; seeing _some grounds will sooner burn than chap_."

_Death-bed Temptations._--"The devil is most busy on the last day of his term; and a tenant to be outed cares not what mischief he doth."

_Conversation._--"Seeing we are civilized Englishmen, let us not be naked savages in our talk."

_Wounded Soldier._--"Halting is the stateliest march of a soldier; and 'tis a brave sight to see the flesh of an ancient as torn as his colours."

_Wat Tyler._--"A _misogrammatist_; if a good Greek word may be given to so barbarous a rebel."

_Heralds._--"Heralds new mould men's names,--taking from them, adding to them, melting out all the liquid letters, torturing mutes to make them speak, and making vowels dumb,--to bring it to a fallacious _h.o.m.onomy_ at the last, that their names may be the same with those n.o.ble houses they pretend to."

_Antiquarian Diligence._--"It is most worthy observation, with what diligence he [Camden] enquired after ancient places, making hue and cry after many a city which was run away, and by certain marks and tokens pursuing to find it; as by the situation on the Roman highways, by just distance from other ancient cities, by some affinity of name, by tradition of the inhabitants, by Roman coins digged up, and by some appearance of ruins. A broken urn is a whole evidence; or an old gate still surviving, out of which the city is run out. Besides, commonly some new spruce town not far off is grown out of the ashes thereof, which yet hath so much natural affection as dutifully to own those reverend ruins for her mother."

_Henry de Ess.e.x._--"He is too well known in our English Chronicles, being Baron of Raleigh, in Ess.e.x, and Hereditary Standard Bearer of England. It happened in the reign of this king [Henry II.] there was a fierce battle fought in Flints.h.i.+re, at Coleshall, between the English and Welsh, wherein this Henry de Ess.e.x _animum et signum simul abjecit_, betwixt traitor and coward, cast away both his courage and banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of English. But he that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny the doing of so foul a fact; until he was challenged in combat by Robert de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was confiscated to the king, and he himself, _partly thrust, partly going into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, under which, betwixt shame and sanct.i.ty, he blushed out the remainder of his life_."[20]--_Worthies. Article, Bedfords.h.i.+re._

[20] The fine imagination of Fuller has done what might have been p.r.o.nounced impossible: it has given an interest, and a holy character, to coward infamy. Nothing can be more beautiful than the concluding account of the last days, and expiatory retirement, of poor Henry de Ess.e.x. The address with which the whole of this little story is told is most consummate: the charm of it seems to consist in a perpetual balance of ant.i.theses not too violently opposed, and the consequent activity of mind in which the reader is kept:--"Betwixt traitor and coward"--"baseness to do, boldness to deny"--"partly thrust, partly going, into a convent"--"betwixt shame and sanct.i.ty." The reader by this artifice is taken into a kind of partners.h.i.+p with the writer,--his judgment is exercised in settling the preponderance,--he feels as if he were consulted as to the issue. But the modern historian flings at once the dead weight of his own judgment into the scale, and settles the matter.

_Sir Edward Harwood, Knt._--"I have read of a bird, which hath a face like, and yet will prey upon, a man; who coming to the water to drink, and finding there by reflection, that he had killed one like himself, pineth away by degrees, and never afterwards enjoyeth itself.[21] Such is in some sort the condition of Sir Edward. This accident, that he had killed one in a private quarrel, put a period to his carnal mirth, and was a covering to his eyes all the days of his life. No possible provocations could afterwards tempt him to a duel; and no wonder that one's conscience loathed that whereof he had surfeited. He refused all challenges with more honour than others accepted them; it being well known, that he would set his foot as far in the face of his enemy as any man alive."--_Worthies. Art. Lincolns.h.i.+re._

[21] I do not know where Fuller read of this bird; but a more awful and affecting story, and moralizing of a story, in Natural History, or rather in that Fabulous Natural History, where poets and mythologists found the Phnix and the Unicorn, and "other strange fowl," is no where extant. It is a fable which Sir Thomas Browne, if he had heard of it, would have exploded among his Vulgar Errors; but the delight which he would have taken in the discussing of its probabilities, would have shewn that the _truth of the fact_, though the avowed object of his search, was not so much the motive which put him upon the investigation, as those hidden affinities and poetical a.n.a.logies,--those _essential verities_ in the application of strange fable, which made him linger with such reluctant delay among the last fading lights of popular tradition; and not seldom to conjure up a superst.i.tion, that had been long extinct, from its dusty grave, to inter it himself with greater ceremonies and solemnities of burial.

_Decayed Gentry._--"It happened in the reign of King James, when Henry Earl of Huntingdon was Lieutenant of Leicesters.h.i.+re, that a labourer's son in that county was pressed into the wars; as I take it, to go over with Count Mansfield. The old man at Leicester requested his son might be discharged, as being the only staff of his age, who by his industry maintained him and his mother. The Earl demanded his name, which the man for a long time was loth to tell (as suspecting it a fault for so poor a man to confess the truth), at last he told his name was Hastings.

'Cousin Hastings,' said the Earl, 'we cannot all be top branches of the tree, though we all spring from the same root; your son, my kinsman, shall not be pressed.' So good was the meeting of modesty in a poor, with courtesy in an honourable person, and gentry I believe in both. And I have reason to believe, that some who justly own the surnames and blood of Bohuns, Mortimers, and Plantagenets (though ignorant of their own extractions), are hid in the heap of common people, where they find that under a thatched cottage, which some of their ancestors could not enjoy in a leaded castle,--contentment, with quiet and security."--_Worthies. Art. Of s.h.i.+re-Reeves or s.h.i.+riffes._

_Tenderness of Conscience in a Tradesman._--"Thomas Curson, born in Allhallows, Lombard-street, armourer, dwelt without Bishopsgate. It happened that a stage-player borrowed a rusty musket, which had lain long leger in his shop: now though his part were comical, he therewith acted an unexpected tragedy, killing one of the standers by, the gun casually going off on the stage, which he suspected not to be charged. O the difference of divers men in the tenderness of their consciences; some are scarce touched with a wound, whilst others are wounded with a touch therein. This poor armourer was highly afflicted therewith, though done against his will, yea without his knowledge, in his absence, by another, out of mere chance. Hereupon he resolved to give all his estate to pious uses: no sooner had he gotten a round sum, but presently he posted with it in his ap.r.o.n to the Court of Aldermen, and was in pain till by their direction he had settled it for the relief of poor in his own and other parishes, and disposed of some hundreds of pounds accordingly, as I am credibly informed by the then churchwardens of the said parish. Thus as he conceived himself casually (though at a great distance) to have occasioned the death of one, he was the immediate and direct cause of giving a comfortable living to many."

_Burning of Wickliffe's Body by Order of the Council of Constance._--"Hitherto [A.D. 1428] the corpse of John Wickliffe had quietly slept in his grave about forty-one years after his death, till his body was reduced to bones, and his bones almost to dust. For though the earth in the chancel of Lutterworth, in Leicesters.h.i.+re, where he was interred, hath not so quick a digestion with the earth of Aceldama, to consume flesh in twenty-four hours, yet such the appet.i.te thereof, and all other English graves, to leave small reversions of a body after so many years. But now such the spleen of the Council of Constance, as they not only cursed his memory as dying an obstinate heretic, but ordered that his bones (with this charitable caution,--if it may be discerned from the bodies of other faithful people) to be taken out of the ground, and thrown far off from any Christian burial. In obedience hereunto, Rich. Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln, Diocesan of Lutterworth, sent his officers (vultures with a quick sight, scent, at a dead carcase) to ungrave him. Accordingly to Lutterworth they come, Sumner, Commissary, Official, Chancellor, Proctors, Doctors, and their servants (so that the remnant of the body would not hold out a bone amongst so many hands), take what was left out of the grave, and burnt them to ashes, and cast them into Swift, a neighbouring brook, running hard by.

_Thus this brook has conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over._"[22]--Church History.

[22] The concluding period of this most lively narrative I will not call a conceit: it is one of the grandest conceptions I ever met with. One feels the ashes of Wickliffe gliding away out of the reach of the Sumners, Commissaries, Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and all the puddering rout of executioners of the impotent rage of the baffled Council: from Swift into Avon, from Avon into Severn, from Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, "dispersed all the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Caesar to the clay that stops a beer-barrel, is a no less curious pursuit of "ruined mortality;" but it is in an inverse ratio to this: it degrades and saddens us, for one part of our nature at least; but this expands the whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort of ubiquity,--a diffusion, as far as the actions of its partner can have reach or influence.

I have seen this pa.s.sage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit of old Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who read it in a temper different from that in which the writer composed it? The most pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as divinity was to the Greeks foolishness. When Richard II., meditating on his own utter annihilation as to royalty, cries out,

"O that I were a mockery king of snow, To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke,"

if we have been going on pace for pace with the pa.s.sion before, this sudden conversion of a strong-felt metaphor into something to be actually realized in nature, like that of Jeremiah, "Oh! that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly and strikingly natural; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a conceit; and so is a "head" turned into "waters."

EDAX ON APPEt.i.tE

(1811. TEXT OF 1818)

_To the Editor of the Reflector_

Mr. Reflector,--I am going to lay before you a case of the most iniquitous persecution that ever poor devil suffered.

You must know, then, that I have been visited with a calamity ever since my birth. How shall I mention it without offending delicacy? Yet out it must. My sufferings then have all arisen from a most inordinate appet.i.te----

Not for wealth, not for vast possessions,--then might I have hoped to find a cure in some of those precepts of philosophers or poets,--those verba et voces which Horace speaks of:

"quibus hunc lenire dolorem Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem;"

not for glory, not for fame, not for applause,--for against this disease, too, he tells us there are certain piacula, or, as Pope has chosen to render it,

"rhymes, which fresh and fresh applied, Will cure the arrant'st puppy of his pride;"

nor yet for pleasure, properly so called: the strict and virtuous lessons which I received in early life from the best of parents,--a pious clergyman of the Church of England, now no more,--I trust have rendered me sufficiently secure on that side:----

No, Sir, for none of these things; but an appet.i.te, in its coa.r.s.est and least metaphorical sense,--an appet.i.te for _food_.

The exorbitances of my arrow-root and pap-dish days I cannot go back far enough to remember, only I have been told, that my mother's const.i.tution not admitting of my being nursed at home, the woman who had the care of me for that purpose used to make most extravagant demands for my pretended excesses in that kind; which my parents, rather than believe any thing unpleasant of me, chose to impute to the known covetousness and mercenary disposition of that sort of people. This blindness continued on their part after I was sent for home, up to the period when it was thought proper, on account of my advanced age, that I should mix with other boys more unreservedly than I had hitherto done. I was accordingly sent to boarding-school.

Here the melancholy truth became too apparent to be disguised. The prying republic of which a great school consists, soon found me out: there was no s.h.i.+fting the blame any longer upon other people's shoulders,--no good-natured maid to take upon herself the enormities of which I stood accused in the article of bread and b.u.t.ter, besides the crying sin of stolen ends of puddings, and cold pies strangely missing.

The truth was but too manifest in my looks,--in the evident signs of inanition which I exhibited after the fullest meals, in spite of the double allowance which my master was privately instructed by my kind parents to give me. The sense of the ridiculous, which is but too much alive in grown persons, is tenfold more active and alert in boys. Once detected, I was the constant b.u.t.t of their arrows,--the mark against which every puny leveller directed his little shaft of scorn. The very Graduses and Thesauruses were raked for phrases to pelt me with by the tiny pedants. Ventri natus,--Ventri deditus,--Vesana gula,--Escarum gurges,--Dapibus indulgens,--Non dans frna gulae,--Sectans lautae fercula mensae, resounded wheresoever I past. I lead a weary life, suffering the penalties of guilt for that which was no crime, but only following the blameless dictates of nature. The remembrance of those childish reproaches haunts me yet oftentimes in my dreams. My school-days come again, and the horror I used to feel, when in some silent corner retired from the notice of my unfeeling playfellows, I have sat to mumble the solitary slice of gingerbread allotted me by the bounty of considerate friends, and have ached at heart because I could not spare a portion of it, as I saw other boys do, to some favourite boy;--for if I know my own heart, I was never selfish,--never possessed a luxury which I did not hasten to communicate to others; but my food, alas! was none; it was an indispensable necessary; I could as soon have spared the blood in my veins, as have parted that with my companions.

Well, no one stage of suffering lasts for ever: we should grow reconciled to it at length, I suppose, if it did. The miseries of my school-days had their end; I was once more restored to the paternal dwelling. The affectionate solicitude of my parents was directed to the good-natured purpose of concealing even from myself the infirmity which haunted me. I was continually told that I was growing, and the appet.i.te I displayed was humanely represented as being nothing more than a symptom and an effect of that. I used even to be complimented upon it.

But this temporary fiction could not endure above a year or two. I ceased to grow, but alas! I did not cease my demands for alimentary sustenance.

Those times are long since past, and with them have ceased to exist the fond concealment,--the indulgent blindness,--the delicate over-looking,--the compa.s.sionate fiction. I and my infirmity are left exposed and bare to the broad, unwinking eye of the world, which nothing can elude. My meals are scanned, my mouthfuls weighed in a balance: that which appet.i.te demands, is set down to the account of gluttony,--a sin which my whole soul abhors, nay, which Nature herself has put it out of my power to commit. I am const.i.tutionally disenabled from that vice; for how can he be guilty of excess, who never can get enough? Let them cease, then, to watch my plate; and leave off their ungracious comparisons of it to the seven baskets of fragments, and the supernaturally-replenished cup of old Baucis; and be thankful that their more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, have saved them from the like reproaches. I do not see that any of them desist from eating till the holy rage of hunger, as some one calls it, is supplied. Alas! I am doomed to stop short of that continence.

What am I to do? I am by disposition inclined to conviviality, and the social meal. I am no gourmand: I require no dainties: I should despise the board of Heliogabalus, except for its long sitting. Those vivacious, long-continued meals of the latter Romans, indeed I justly envy; but the kind of fare which the Curii and Dentati put up with, I could be content with. Dentatus I have been called, among other unsavory jests.

Double-meal is another name which my acquaintance have palmed upon me, for an innocent piece of policy which I put in practice for some time without being found out; which was,--going the round of my friends, beginning with the most primitive feeders among them, who take their dinner about one o'clock, and so successively dropping in upon the next and the next, till by the time I got among my more fas.h.i.+onable intimates, whose hour was six or seven, I have nearly made up the body of a just and complete meal (as I reckon it), without taking more than one dinner (as they account of dinners) at one person's house. Since I have been found out, I endeavour to make up by a damper, as I call it, at home, before I go out. But alas! with me, increase of appet.i.te truly grows by what it feeds on. What is peculiarly offensive to me at those dinner-parties is, the senseless custom of cheese, and the dessert afterwards. I have a rational antipathy to the former; and for fruit, and those other vain vegetable subst.i.tutes for meat (meat, the only legitimate aliment for human creatures since the flood, as I take it to be deduced from that permission, or ordinance rather, given to Noah and his descendants), I hold them in perfect contempt. Hay for horses. I remember a pretty apologue, which Mandeville tells very much to this purpose in his Fable of the Bees:--He brings in a Lion arguing with a Merchant, who had ventured to expostulate with this king of beasts upon his violent methods of feeding. The Lion thus retorts:--"Savage I am, but no Creature can be called Cruel but what either by Malice or Insensibility extinguishes his natural Pity: The Lion was born without Compa.s.sion; we follow the instinct of our Nature; the G.o.ds have appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other Animals, and as long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt after the Living. 'Tis only Man, mischievous Man, that can make Death a sport. Nature taught your stomach to crave nothing but Vegetables."--(Under favour of the Lion, if he meant to a.s.sert this universally of mankind, it is not true.

However, what he says presently is very sensible.)--"Your violent fondness to change, and greater eagerness after Novelties, have prompted you to the destruction of Animals without Justice or Necessity.... The Lion has a ferment within him, that consumes the toughest Skin and hardest Bones, as well as the Flesh of all Animals without exception: Your squeamish Stomach, in which the Digestive Heat is weak and inconsiderable, won't so much as admit of the most tender Parts of them, unless above half the Concoction has been performed by artificial Fire beforehand; and yet what Animal have you spared, to satisfy the Caprices of a languid Appet.i.te? Languid I say; for what is Man's Hunger if compared to the Lion's? Yours, when it is at the worst, makes you Faint; mine makes me Mad: Oft have I tried with Roots and Herbs to allay the violence of it, but in vain; nothing but large quant.i.ties of Flesh can any ways appease it."--Allowing for the Lion not having a prophetic instinct to take in every lusus naturae that was possible of the human appet.i.te, he was, generally speaking, in the right; and the Merchant was so impressed with his argument that, we are told, he replied not, but fainted away. O, Mr. Reflector, that I were not obliged to add, that the creature who thus argues was but a type of me! Miserable man! _I am that Lion._ "Oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay that violence, but in vain; nothing but----."

Those tales which are renewed as often as the editors of papers want to fill up a s.p.a.ce in their unfeeling columns, of great eaters,--people that devour whole geese and legs of mutton _for wagers_, are sometimes attempted to be drawn to a parallel with my case. This wilful confounding of motives and circ.u.mstances, which make all the difference of moral or immoral in actions, just suits the sort of talent which some of my acquaintance pride themselves upon. _Wagers!_--I thank heaven, I was never mercenary, nor could consent to prost.i.tute a gift (though but a left-handed one) of nature, to the enlarging of my worldly substance; prudent as the necessities, which that fatal gift have involved me in, might have made such a prost.i.tution to appear in the eyes of an indelicate world.

Rather let me say, that to the satisfaction of that talent which was given me, I have been content to sacrifice no common expectations; for such I had from an old lady, a near relation of our family, in whose good graces I had the fortune to stand, till one fatal evening----. You have seen, Mr. Reflector, if you have ever pa.s.sed your time much in country towns, the kind of suppers which elderly ladies in those places have lying in petto in an adjoining parlour, next to that where they are entertaining their periodically-invited coevals with cards and m.u.f.fins.

The cloth is usually spread some half-hour before the final rubber is decided, whence they adjourn to sup upon what may emphatically be called _nothing_. A sliver of ham, purposely contrived to be transparent to shew the china-dish through it, neighbouring a slip of invisible brawn, which abuts upon something they call a tartlet, as that is bravely supported by an atom of marmalade, flanked in its turn by a grain of potted beef, with a power of such dishlings, _minims of hospitality_, spread in defiance of human nature, or rather with an utter ignorance of what it demands. Being engaged at one of these card-parties, I was obliged to go a little before _supper-time_ (as they facetiously call the point of time in which they are taking these shadowy refections), and the old lady, with a sort of fear s.h.i.+ning through the smile of courteous hospitality that beamed in her countenance, begged me to step into the next room and take something before I went out in the cold,--a proposal which lay not in my nature to deny. Indignant at the airy prospect I saw before me, I set to, and in a trice dispatched the whole meal intended for eleven persons,--fish, flesh, fowl, pastry,--to the sprigs of garnis.h.i.+ng parsley, and the last fearful custard that quaked upon the board. I need not describe the consternation, when in due time the dowagers adjourned from their cards. Where was the supper?--and the servants' answer, Mr. ---- had eat it all.--That freak, however, jested me out of a good three hundred pounds a year, which I afterwards was informed for a certainty the old lady meant to leave me. I mention it not in ill.u.s.tration of the unhappy faculty which I am possessed of; for any unlucky wag of a school-boy, with a tolerable appet.i.te, could have done as much without feeling any hurt after it,--only that you may judge whether I am a man likely to set my talent to sale, or to require the pitiful stimulus of a wager.

I have read in Pliny, or in some author of that stamp, of a reptile in Africa, whose venom is of that hot, destructive quality, that wheresoever it fastens its tooth, the whole substance of the animal that has been bitten in a few seconds is reduced to dust, crumbles away, and absolutely disappears: it is called from this quality, the Annihilator.

Why am I forced to seek, in all the most prodigious and portentous facts of Natural History, for creatures typical of myself? _I am that Snake, that Annihilator_: "wherever I fasten, in a few seconds----."

O happy sick men, that are groaning under the want of that very thing, the excess of which is my torment! O fortunate, too fortunate, if you knew your happiness, invalids! What would I not give to exchange this fierce concoctive and digestive heat,--this rabid fury which vexes me, which tears and torments me,--for your quiet, mortified, hermit-like, subdued, and sanctified stomachs,--your cool, chastened inclinations, and coy desires for food!

To what unhappy figuration of the parts intestine I owe this unnatural craving, I must leave to the anatomists and the physicians to determine: they, like the rest of the world, have doubtless their eye upon me; and as I have been cut up alive by the sarcasms of my friends, so I shudder when I contemplate the probability that this animal frame, when its restless appet.i.tes shall have ceased their importunity, may be cut up also (horrible suggestion!) to determine in what system of solids or fluids this original sin of my const.i.tution lay lurking. What work will they make with their acids and alkalines, their serums and coagulums, effervescences, viscous matter, bile, chyle, and acrimonious juices, to explain that cause which Nature, who willed the effect to punish me for my sins, may no less have determined to keep in the dark from them, to punish them for their presumption.