The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume II Part 2

[Footnote 1: Recollections of Christ's Hospital.]

[Footnote 2: One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, accordingly, at length convinced the governors of the impolicy of this part of the sentence, and the midnight torture to the spirits was dispensed with.--This fancy of dungeons for children was a sprout of Howard's brain; for which (saving the reverence due to Holy Paul) methinks, I could willingly spit upon his statue.]

[Footnote 3: Cowley.]

[Footnote 4: In this and every thing B. was the antipodes of his co-adjutor. While the former was digging his brains for crude anthems, worth a pig-nut, F. would be recreating his gentlemanly fancy in the more flowery walks of the Muses. A little dramatic effusion of his, under the name of Vertumnus and Pomona, is not yet forgotten by the chroniclers of that sort of literature. It was accepted by Garrick, but the town did not give it their sanction.--B. used to say of it, in a way of half-compliment, half-irony, that it was _too cla.s.sical for representation_.]

THE TWO RACES OF MEN

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, _the men who borrow_, and _the men who lend_. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those impertinent cla.s.sifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, "Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites," flock hither, and do naturally fall in with one or other of these primary distinctions. The infinite superiority of the former, which I choose to designate as the _great race_, is discernible in their figure, port, and a certain instinctive sovereignty. The latter are born degraded. "He shall serve his brethren." There is something in the air of one of this cast, lean and suspicious; contrasting with the open, trusting, generous manners of the other.

Observe who have been the greatest borrowers of all ages--Alcibiades--Falstaff--Sir Richard Steele--our late incomparable Brinsley--what a family likeness in all four!

What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower! what rosy gills!

what a beautiful reliance on Providence doth he manifest,--taking no more thought than lilies! What contempt for money,--accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross! What a liberal confounding of those pedantic distinctions of _meum_ and _tuum_!

or rather what a n.o.ble simplification of language (beyond Tooke), resolving these supposed opposites into one clear, intelligible p.r.o.noun adjective!--What near approaches doth he make to the primitive _community_,--to the extent of one half of the principle at least!--

He is the true taxer who "calleth all the world up to be taxed:" and the distance is as vast between him and _one of us_, as subsisted betwixt the Augustan Majesty and the poorest obolary Jew that paid it tribute-pittance at Jerusalem!--His exactions, too, have such a cheerful, voluntary air! So far removed from your sour parochial or state-gatherers,--those ink-horn varlets, who carry their want of welcome in their faces! He cometh to you with a smile, and troubleth you with no receipt; confining himself to no set season. Every day is his Candlemas, or his Feast of Holy Michael. He applieth the _lene tormentum_ of a pleasant look to your purse,--which to that gentle warmth expands her silken leaves, as naturally as the cloak of the traveller, for which sun and wind contended! He is the true Propontic which never ebbeth! The sea which taketh handsomely at each man's hand. In vain the victim, whom he delighteth to honour, struggles with destiny; he is in the net. Lend therefore cheerfully, O man ordained to lend--that thou lose not in the end, with thy worldly penny, the reversion promised. Combine not preposterously in thine own person the penalties of Lazarus and of Dives!--but, when thou seest the proper authority coming, meet it smilingly, as it were half-way. Come, a handsome sacrifice! See how light _he_ makes of it! Strain not courtesies with a n.o.ble enemy.

Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind by the death of my old friend, Ralph BiG.o.d, Esq., who departed this life on Wednesday evening; dying, as he had lived, without much trouble. He boasted himself a descendant from mighty ancestors of that name, who heretofore held ducal dignities in this realm. In his actions and sentiments he belied not the stock to which he pretended. Early in life he found himself invested with ample revenues; which, with that n.o.ble disinterestedness which I have noticed as inherent in men of the _great race_, he took almost immediate measures entirely to dissipate and bring to nothing: for there is something revolting in the idea of a king holding a private purse; and the thoughts of BiG.o.d were all regal. Thus furnished, by the very act of disfurnishment; getting rid of the c.u.mbersome luggage of riches, more apt (as one sings)

To slacken virtue, and abate her edge, Than prompt her to do aught may merit praise,

he set forth, like some Alexander, upon his great enterprise, "borrowing and to borrow!"

In his periegesis, or triumphant progress throughout this island, it has been calculated that he laid a tythe part of the inhabitants under contribution. I reject this estimate as greatly exaggerated:--but having had the honour of accompanying my friend, divers times, in his perambulations about this vast city, I own I was greatly struck at first with the prodigious number of faces we met, who claimed a sort of respectful acquaintance with us. He was one day so obliging as to explain the phenomenon. It seems, these were his tributaries; feeders of his exchequer; gentlemen, his good friends (as he was pleased to express himself), to whom he had occasionally been beholden for a loan. Their mult.i.tudes did no way disconcert him. He rather took a pride in numbering them; and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be "stocked with so fair a herd."

With such sources, it was a wonder how he contrived to keep his treasury always empty. He did it by force of an aphorism, which he had often in his mouth, that "money kept longer than three days stinks."

So he made use of it while it was fresh. A good part he drank away (for he was an excellent toss-pot), some he gave away, the rest he threw away, literally tossing and hurling it violently from him--as boys do burrs, or as if it had been infectious,--into ponds, or ditches, or deep holes,--inscrutable cavities of the earth;--or he would bury it (where he would never seek it again) by a river's side under some bank, which (he would facetiously observe) paid no interest--but out away from him it must go peremptorily, as Hagar's offspring into the wilderness, while it was sweet. He never missed it. The streams were perennial which fed his fisc. When new supplies became necessary, the first stranger, was sure to contribute to the deficiency. For BiG.o.d had an _undeniable_ way with him. He had a cheerful, open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead, just touched with grey (_cana fides_). He antic.i.p.ated no excuse, and found none. And, waiving for a while my theory as to the _great race_, I would put it to the most untheorising reader, who may at times have disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is not more repugnant to the kindliness of his nature to refuse such a one as I am describing, than to say _no_ to a poor pet.i.tionary rogue (your b.a.s.t.a.r.d borrower), who, by his mumping visnomy, tells you, that he expects nothing better; and, therefore, whose preconceived notions and expectations you do in reality so much less shock in the refusal.

When I think of this man; his fiery glow of heart; his swell of feeling; how magnificent, how _ideal_ he was; how great at the midnight hour; and when I compare with him the companions with whom I have a.s.sociated since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into the society of _lenders_, and _little men_.

To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a cla.s.s of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your _borrowers of books_--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations!

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth knocked out--(you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader!)--with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed posture, guardant of nothing) once held the tallest of my folios, _Opera Bonaventurae_, choice and ma.s.sy divinity, to which its two supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre,--Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs,--itself an Ascapart!--_that_ Comberbatch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that "the t.i.tle to property in a book (my Bonaventure, for instance), is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the same." Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe?

The slight vacuum in the left-hand case--two shelves from the ceiling--scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser--was whilom the commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties--but so have I known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than himself.--Just below, Dodsley's dramas want their fourth volume, where Vittoria Corombona is! The remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's refuse sons, when the Fates _borrowed_ Hector.

Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state.--There loitered the Complete Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side.--In yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, with "eyes closed," I mourns his ravished mate.

One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small under-collection of this nature (my friend's gathering's in his various calls), picked up, he has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory as mine. I take in these orphans, the twice-deserted. These proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. There they stand in conjunction; natives, and naturalised. The latter seem as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am.--I charge no warehouse-room for these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses.

To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. You are sure that he will make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can give no account of the platter after it. But what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K., to be so importunate to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice n.o.ble Margaret Newcastle?--knowing at the time, and knowing that I knew also, thou most a.s.suredly wouldst never turn over one leaf of the ill.u.s.trious folio:--what but the mere spirit of contradiction, and childish love of getting the better of thy friend?--Then, worst cut of all! to transport it with thee to the Gallican land--

Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness, A virtue in which all enn.o.bling thoughts dwelt, Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, her s.e.x's wonder!

--hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of jests and fancies, about thee, to keep thee merry, even as thou keepest all companies with thy quips and mirthful tales?--Child of the Green-room, it was unkindly done of thee. Thy wife, too, that part-French, better-part Englishwoman!--that _she_ could fix upon no other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of remembering us, than the works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brook--of which no Frenchman, nor woman of France, Italy, or England, was ever by nature const.i.tuted to comprehend a t.i.ttle! _Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude?_

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C.--he will return them (generally antic.i.p.ating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his--(in _matter_ oftentimes, and almost in _quant.i.ty_ not unfrequently, vying with the originals)--in no very clerkly hand--legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas!

wandering in Pagan lands.--I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S.T.C.

NEW YEAR'S EVE

Every man hath two birth-days: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth _his_. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birth-day hath nearly pa.s.sed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand any thing in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.

It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Of all sounds of all bells--(bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven)--most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected--in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal colour; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary, when he exclaimed

I saw the skirts of the departing Year.

It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year, than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who--

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years,--from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I am armour-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again _for love_, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks, it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair, and fairer eyes, of Alice W----n, than that so pa.s.sionate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy, which old Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds _in banco_, and be without the idea of that specious old rogue.

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love _himself_, without the imputation of self-love?

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective--and mine is painfully so--can have a less respect for his present ident.i.ty, than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome; a notorious ***; addicted to ****: averse from counsel, neither taking it, nor offering it;--*** besides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more, than thou canst be willing to lay at his door--but for the child Elia--that "other me," there, in the back-ground--I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master--with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient small-pox at five, and rougher medicaments I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood.--G.o.d help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated.--I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was--how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself--and not some dissembling guardian presenting a false ident.i.ty, to give the rule to my unpractised steps, and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my heir and favourite? If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader--(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularly-conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia.

The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old inst.i.tution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circ.u.mstances of peculiar ceremony.--In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now, shall I confess a truth?--I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser's farthings.

In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pa.s.s away "like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends: to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.--Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household-G.o.ds plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian sh.o.r.es. A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful gla.s.s, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony itself_--do these things go out with life?

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?

Shall I enjoy friends.h.i.+ps there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here,--the recognisable face--the "sweet a.s.surance of a look"--?

In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying--to give it its mildest name--does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic.

At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality.

Then we expand and burgeon. Then are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances,--that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles:--I am none of her minions--I hold with the Persian.

Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial evils, like humours, run into that capital plague-sore.--I have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death--but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy _Privation_, or more frightful and confounding _Positive!_'

Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man, that he shall "lie down with kings and emperors in death," who in his life-time never greatly coveted the society of such bed-fellows?--or, forsooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear?"--why, to comfort me, must Alice W----n be a goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee.

Know thy betters! Thy New Years' Days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821. Another cup of wine--and while that turn-coat bell, that just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed, with changed notes l.u.s.tily rings in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr.

Cotton.--

THE NEW YEAR