Page 29, line 12. Comberbatch. Coleridge, who had enlisted as a young man in the 15th Light Dragoons as Silas Titus Comberback.
Page 29, line 16. Bloomsbury. Lamb was then in rooms at 20 Great
Russell Street (now Russell Street), Covent Garden, which is not in
Bloomsbury.
Page 29, line 27. Should he go on acting. The Letters contain references to this habit of Coleridge's. Writing to him in 1809 Lamb says, referring among other loans to the volume of Dodsley with Vittoria Corombona ("The White Devil," by John Webster) in it:—"While I think on it, Coleridge, I fetch'd away my books which you had at the Courier Office, and found all but a third volume of the old plays, containing the 'White Devil, 'Green's 'Tu Quoque,' and the 'Honest Whore,' perhaps the most valuable volume of them all—that I could not find. Pray, if you can, remember what you did with it, or where you took it out with you a walking perhaps; send me word, for, to use the old plea, it spoils a set. I found two other volumes (you had three), the Arcadia and Daniel, enriched with manuscript notes. I wish every book I have were so noted. They have thoroughly converted me to relish Daniel, or to say I relish him, for after all, I believe I did relish him."
And several years later (probably in 1820) we find him addressing Coleridge with reference to Luther's Table Talk:—"Why will you make your visits, which should give pleasure, matter of regret to your friends? You never come but you take away some folio, that is part of my existence. With a great deal of difficulty I was made to comprehend the extent of my loss. My maid, Becky, brought me a dirty bit of paper, which contained her description of some book which Mr. Coleridge had taken away. It was Luster's Tables, which, for some time, I could not make out. 'What! has he carried away any of the tables, Becky?' 'No, it wasn't any tables, but it was a book that he called Luster's Tables.' I was obliged to search personally among my shelves, and a huge fissure suddenly disclosed to me the true nature of the damage I had sustained."
Allsop tells us that Lamb once said of Coleridge: "He sets his mark upon whatever he reads; it is henceforth sacred. His spirit seems to have breathed upon it; and, if not for its author, yet for his sake, we admire it."
Page 30, line 1. John Buncle. Most of Lamb's books are in America; Lamb's copy of John Buncle, with an introductory note written in by Coleridge, was sold, with other books from his library, in New York in 1848. The Life of John Buncle, Esq., a book highly praised by Hazlitt, was by Thomas Amory (1691?-1788), published, Part I. in 1756 and Part II. in 1766. A condensed reprint was issued in 1823 entitled The Spirit of Buncle, in which, Mr. W.C. Hazlitt suggests, Lamb may have had a hand with William Hazlitt.
Page 30, line 19. Spiteful K. James Kenney (1780-1849), the dramatist, then resident at Versailles, where Lamb and his sister visited him in 1822. He married Louisa Mercier, daughter of Louis Sebastian Mercier, the French critic, and widow of Lamb's earlier friend, Thomas Holcroft. One of their two sons was named Charles Lamb Kenney (1821-1881). Lamb recovered Margaret of Newcastle's Letters (folio, 1664), which is among the books in America, as is also the Fulke Greville (small folio, 1633).
Page 31, line 4. S.T.C…. annotations. Lamb's copy of Daniel's Poetical Works, two volumes, 1718, and of Browne's Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, folio, 1658, both with marginalia by himself and Coleridge, are in existence, but I cannot say where: probably in America. Lamb's copy of Beaumont and Fletcher, with Coleridge's notes (see "Old China"), is, however, safe in the British Museum. His Fulke Greville, as I have said, is in America, but I fancy it has nothing of Coleridge in it, nor has his Burton—quarto, 1621—which still exists.
Coleridge's notes in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio are not numerous, but usually ample and seriously critical. At the foot of a page of the "Siege of Corinth," on which he had written two notes (one, "O flat! flat! flat! Sole! Flounder! Place! all stinking! stinkingly flat!"), he added:—
N.B.—I shall not be long here, Charles!—I gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.
Octr. 1811.
Underneath the initials S.T.C. are the initials W.W. which suggest that Wordsworth was present.
The Museum also has Lamb's Milton, with annotations by himself and
Coleridge.
In the Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb, privately issued by the New York Dibdin Club in 1897, is a list of five of Lamb's books now in America containing valuable and unpublished marginalia by Coleridge: The Life of John Buncle, Donne's Poems ("I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be vexed that I have scribbled your book. S.T.C., 2d May, 1811"), Reynolds' God's Revenge against … Murder, 1651 ("O what a beautiful concordia discordantium is an unthinking good man's soul!"), The History of Philip de Commines in English, and Petwin's Letters Concerning the Mind.
* * * * *
Page 31. NEW YEAR'S EVE.
London Magazine, January, 1821.
The melancholy pessimism of this essay led to some remonstrance from robuster readers of the London Magazine. In addition to the letter from "A Father" referred to below, the essay produced, seven months later, in the August number of the London Magazine, a long poetical "Epistle to Elia," signed "Olen," in which very simply and touchingly Lamb was reminded that the grave is not the end, was asked to consider the promises of the Christian faith, and finally was offered a glimpse of some of the friends he would meet in heaven—among them Ulysses, Shakespeare and Alice W——n. Taylor, the publisher and editor of the magazine, sent Lamb a copy. He replied, acknowledging the kindness of the author, and adding:—"Poor Elia … does not pretend to so very clear revelations of a future state of being as 'Olen' seems gifted with. He stumbles about dark mountains at best; but he knows at least how to be thankful for this life, and is too thankful, indeed, for certain relationships lent him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift. He is too apt to express himself lightly, and cannot be sorry for the present occasion, as it has called forth a reproof so Christian-like."
Lamb thought the poet to be James Montgomery, but it was in reality Charles Abraham Elton. The poem was reprinted in a volume entitled Boyhood and other Poems, in 1835.
It is conceivable that Lamb was reasoned with privately upon the sentiments expressed in this essay; and perhaps we may take the following sonnet which he contributed over his own name to, the London Magazine for April, 1821, as a kind of defiant postscript thereto, a further challenge to those who reproached him for his remarks concerning death, and who suggested that he did not really mean them:—
They talk of time, and of time's galling yoke,
That like a millstone on man's mind doth press,
Which only works and business can redress:
Of divine Leisure such foul lies are spoke,
Wounding her fair gifts with calumnious stroke.
But might I, fed with silent meditation,
Assoiled live from that fiend Occupation—
Improbus labor, which my spirits hath broke—
I'd drink of time's rich cup, and never surfeit—
Fling in more days than went to make the gem
That crowned the white top of Methusalem—
Yea on my weak neck take, and never forfeit,
Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky,
The heaven-sweet burthen of eternity.
It was also probably the present essay which led to Lamb's difference with Southey and the famous letter of remonstrance. Southey accused Elia of wanting "a sounder religious feeling," and Lamb suggests in his reply that "New Year's Eve" was the chief offender. See Vol. I. for Lamb's amplification of one of its passages.
It may be interesting here to quote Coleridge's description of Lamb as "one hovering between heaven and earth, neither hoping much nor fearing anything."
Page 31, line 10 from foot. Bells. The music of bells seems always to have exerted fascination over Lamb. See the reference in the story of the "First Going to Church," in Mrs. Leicester's School, Vol. III.; in his poem "Sabbath Bells," Vol. IV.; and his "John Woodvil," Vol. IV.
Page 31, foot. "I saw the skirts of the departing Year." From Coleridge's "Ode to the Departing Year," as printed in 1796 and 1797. Lamb was greatly taken by this line. He wrote to Coleridge on January 2, 1797, in a letter of which only a small portion has been printed:—"The opening [of the Ode] is in the spirit of the sublimest allegory. The idea of the 'skirts of the departing year, seen far onwards, waving in the wind,' is one of those noble Hints at which the Reader's imagination is apt to kindle into grand conceptions." Afterwards Coleridge altered "skirts" to "train."
Page 32, line 21. Seven…. years. See note to "Dream-Children."
Alice W—n is identified with Ann Simmons, who lived near Blakesware
when Lamb was a youth, and of whom he wrote his love sonnets.
According to the Key the name is "feigned."
Page 32, line 25. Old Dorrell. See the poem "Going or Gone," Vol. IV. There seems really to have been such an enemy of the Lamb fortunes. He was one of the witnesses to the will of John Lamb, the father—William Dorrell.
Page 33, line 5. Small-pox at five. There is no other evidence than this casual mention that Lamb ever suffered from this complaint. Possibly he did not. He went to Christ's Hospital at the age of seven.
Page 33, line 13. From what have I not fallen. Lamb had had this idea many years before. In 1796 he wrote this sonnet (text of 1818):—
We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,
The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween,
And Innocence her name. The time has been
We two did love each other's company;
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart:
But when by show of seeming good beguil'd,
I left the garb and manners of a child,
And my first love for man's society,
Defiling with the world my virgin heart—
My loved companion dropp'd a tear, and fled,
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.
Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art—
In what delicious Eden to be found—
That I may seek thee the wide world around?
Page 33, line 27. Phantom cloud of Elia. The speculations in the paragraph that ends with these words were fantastical at any rate to one reader, who, under the signature "A Father," contributed to the March number of the London Magazine a eulogy of paternity, in which Elia was reasoned with and rebuked. "Ah! Elia! hadst thou possessed 'offspring of thine own to dally with,' thou wouldst never have made the melancholy avowal that thou hast 'almost ceased to hope!'" Lamb did not reply.
Page 33, line 7 from foot. Not childhood alone … The passage between these words and "freezing days of December" was taken by Charles Lloyd, Lamb's early friend, as the motto of a poem, in his Poems, 1823, entitled "Stanzas on the Difficulty with which, in Youth, we Bring Home to our Habitual Consciousness the Idea of Death."
Page 34, line 15 from foot. Midnight darlings. Leigh Hunt records, in his essay "My Books," that he once saw Lamb kiss an old folio—Chapman's Homer.
Page 34, line 8 from foot. "Sweet assurance of a look." A favourite quotation of Lamb's (here adapted) from Matthew Roydon's elegy on Sir Philip Sidney:—
A sweet attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks.
A portion of the poem is quoted in the Elia essay on "Some Sonnets of
Sir Philip Sidney."
* * * * *
Page 37. MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST.
London Magazine, February, 1821.
Mrs. Battle was probably, in real life, to a large extent Sarah Burney, the wife of Rear-Admiral James Burney, Lamb's friend, and the centre of the whist-playing set to which he belonged. The theory that Lamb's grandmother, Mrs. Field, was the original Mrs. Battle, does not, I think, commend itself, although that lady may have lent a trait or two. It has possibly arisen from the relation of the passage in the essay on Blakesware, where Mrs. Battle is said to have died in the haunted room, to that in "Dream-Children," where Lamb says that Mrs. Field occupied this room.
The fact that Mrs. Battle and Mrs. Burney were both Sarahs is a small piece of evidence towards their fusion, but there is something more conclusive in the correspondence. Writing in March, 1830, concerning the old whist days, to William Ayrton, one of the old whist-playing company, and the neighbour of the Burneys in Little James Street, Pimlico, Lamb makes use of an elision which, I think, may be taken as more than support of the theory that Mrs. Battle and Mrs. Burney were largely the same—practically proof. "Your letter, which was only not so pleasant as your appearance would have been, has revived some old images; Phillips (not the Colonel), with his few hairs bristling up at the charge of a revoke, which he declares impossible; the old Captain's significant nod over the right shoulder (was it not?); Mrs. B——'s determined questioning of the score, after the game was absolutely gone to the d——l." Lamb, I think, would have written out Mrs. Burney in full had he not wished to suggest Mrs. Battle too.
This conjecture is borne out by the testimony of the late Mrs. Lefroy, in her youth a friend of the Burneys and the Lambs, who told Canon Ainger that though Mrs. Battle had many differing points she was undoubtedly Mrs. Burney. But of course there are the usual cross-trails—the reference to the pictures at Sandham; to Walter Plumer; to the legacy to Lamb; and so forth. Perhaps among the Blakesware portraits was one which Lamb chose as Mrs. Battle's presentment; perhaps Mrs. Field had told him of an ancient dame who had certain of Mrs. Battle's characteristics, and he superimposed Mrs. Burney upon this foundation.
For further particulars concerning the Burney whist parties see the notes to the "Letter to Southey," Vol. I.
Admiral Burney (1750-1821), a son of Dr. Burney, the historian of music, and friend of Johnson and Reynolds, was the brother of Fanny Burney, afterwards Madame d'Arblay. See also "The Wedding," page 275 of this volume, for another glimpse of Lamb's old friend. Admiral Burney wrote An Essay on the Game of Whist, which was published in 1821. As he lived until November, 1821, he probably read the present essay. Writing to Wordsworth, March 20, 1822, Lamb says: "There's Capt. Burney gone!—what fun has whist now; what matters it what you lead, if you can no longer fancy him looking over you?"
Page 37, line 1 of essay. "A clean hearth." To this, in the London
Magazine, Lamb put the footnote:—
"This was before the introduction of rugs, reader. You must remember the intolerable crash of the unswept cinder, betwixt your foot and the marble."
Page 37, line 8 of essay. Win one game, and lose another. To this, in the London Magazine, Lamb put the note:—
"As if a sportsman should tell you he liked to kill a fox one day,
and lose him the next."
Page 38, line 26. Mr. Bowles. The Rev. William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), whose sonnets had so influenced Coleridge's early poetical career. His edition of Pope was published in 1806. I have tried in vain to discover if Mr. Bowles' MS. and notes for this edition are still in existence. If so, they might contain Lamb's contribution. But it is rather more likely, I fear, that Lamb invented the story. The game of ombre is in Canto III. of The Rape of the Lock.
The only writing on cards which we know Lamb to have done, apart from this essay, is the elementary rules of whist which he made out for Mrs. Badams quite late in his life as a kind of introduction to the reading of Admiral Burney's treatise. This letter is in America and has never been printed except privately; nor, if its owner can help it, will it.
Page 40, line 26. Old Walter Plumer. See the essay on "The South-Sea
House."
Page 42, line 18 from foot. Bad passions. Here came in the London Magazine, in parenthesis, "(dropping for a while the speaking mask of old Sarah Battle)."
Page 43, line 2. Bridget Elia. This is Lamb's first reference in the essays to Mary Lamb under this name. See "Mackery End" and "Old China."
A little essay on card playing in the Every-Day Book, the authorship of which is unknown, but which may be Hone's, ends with the following pleasant passage:—
Cousin Bridget and the gentle Elia seem beings of that age wherein lived Pamela, whom, with "old Sarah Battle," we may imagine entering their room, and sitting down with them to a square game. Yet Bridget and Elia live in our own times: she, full of kindness to all, and of soothings to Elia especially;—he, no less kind and consoling to Bridget, in all simplicity holding converse with the world, and, ever and anon, giving us scenes that Metzu and De Foe would admire, and portraits that Deuner and Hogarth would rise from their graves to paint.
* * * * *
Page 43. A CHAPTER ON EARS.
London Magazine, March, 1821.
Lamb was not so utterly without ear as he states. Crabb Robinson in his diary records more than once that Lamb hummed tunes, and Barron Field, in the memoir of Lamb contributed by him to the Annual Biography and Obituary for 1836, mentions his love for certain beautiful airs, among them Kent's "O that I had wings like a dove" (mentioned in this essay), and Handel's "From mighty kings." Lamb says that it was Braham who awakened a love of music in him. Compare Lamb's lines to Clara Novello, Vol. IV., page 101, and also Mary Lamb's postscript to his "Free Thoughts on Eminent Composers," same volume.
Page 43, foot. I was never … in the pillory. This sentence led to an amusing article in the London Magazine for the next month, April, 1821, entitled "The Confessions of H.F.V.H. Delamore, Esq.," unmistakably, I think, by Lamb, which will be found in Vol. I. of this edition, wherein Lamb confesses to a brief sojourn in the stocks at Barnet for brawling on Sunday, an incident for the broad truth of which we have the testimony of his friend Brook Pulham.
Page 44, lines 6 and 7. "Water parted from the sea," "In Infancy."
Songs by Arne in "Artaxerxes," Lamb's "First Play" (see page 113).
Page 44, line 11. Mrs. S——. The Key gives "Mrs. Spinkes." We meet a Will Weatherall in "Distant Correspondents," page 120; but I have not been able to discover more concerning either.
Page 44, line 17. Alice W——n. See note to "Dream Children."
Page 44, line 26. My friend A. Probably William Ayrton (1777-1818), the musical critic, one of the Burneys' whist-playing set, and a friend and correspondent of Lamb's. See the musical rhyming letter to him from Lamb, May 17, 1817.
Page 47, line 5. My friend, Nov——. Vincent Novello (1781-1861), the organist, the father of Mrs. Cowden Clarke, and a great friend of Lamb.
Page 47, footnote. Another friend of Vincent Novello's uses the same couplet (from Watt's Divine Songs for Children, Song XXVIII., "For the Lord's Day, Evening") in the description of glees by the old cricketers at the Bat and Ball on Broad Halfpenny Down, near Hambledon—I refer to John Nyren, author of The Young Cricketer's Tutor, 1833. There is no evidence that Lamb and Nyren ever met, but one feels that they ought to have done so, in Novello's hospitable rooms.
Page 48, line 3. Lutheran beer. Edmund Ollier, the son of Charles Ollier, the publisher of Lamb's Works, 1818, in his reminiscences of Lamb, prefixed to one edition of Elia, tells this story: "Once at a musical party at Leigh Hunt's, being oppressed with what to him was nothing but a prolonged noise … he said—'If one only had a pot of porter, one might get through this.' It was procured for him and he weathered the Mozartian storm."
In the London Magazine this essay had the following postscript:—
"P.S.—A writer, whose real name, it seems, is Boldero, but who has been entertaining the town for the last twelve months, with some very pleasant lucubrations, under the assumed signature of Leigh Hunt[1], in his Indicator, of the 31st January last, has thought fit to insinuate, that I Elia do not write the little sketches which bear my signature, in this Magazine; but that the true author of them is a Mr. L——b. Observe the critical period at which he has chosen to impute the calumny!—on the very eve of the publication of our last number—affording no scope for explanation for a full month—during which time, I must needs lie writhing and tossing, under the cruel imputation of nonentity.—Good heavens! that a plain man must not be allowed to be—
"They call this an age of personality: but surely this spirit of
anti-personality (if I may so express it) is something worse.
"Take away my moral reputation: I may live to discredit that
calumny.
"Injure my literary fame,—I may write that up again—
"But when a gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he?
"Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle at the best. But here is an assassin who aims at our very essence; who not only forbids us to be any longer, but to have been at all. Let our ancestors look to it—
"Is the parish register nothing? Is the house in Princes-street, Cavendish-square, where we saw the light six-and-forty years ago, nothing? Were our progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Boldero[2] was known to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name, transplanted into England, in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing? Are the archives of the steel yard, in succeeding reigns (if haply they survive the fury of our envious enemies) showing that we flourished in prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the commonwealth, nothing?
"Why then the world, and all that's in't is nothing—
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia is nothing.—
"I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move
me so."
Leigh Hunt, in The Indicator, January 31 and February 7, 1821, had reprinted from The Examiner a review of Lamb's Works, with a few prefatory remarks in which it was stated: "We believe we are taking no greater liberty with him [Charles Lamb] than our motives will warrant, when we add that he sometimes writes in the London Magazine under the signature of Elia."
In The Indicator of March 7, 1821, Leigh Hunt replied to Elia. Leigh Hunt was no match for Lamb in this kind of raillery, and the first portion of the reply is rather cumbersome. At the end, however, he says: "There was, by the bye, a family of the name of Elia who came from Italy,—Jews; which may account for this boast about Genoa. See also in his last article in the London Magazine [the essay on "Ears"] some remarkable fancies of conscience in reference to the Papal religion. They further corroborate what we have heard; viz. that the family were obliged to fly from Genoa for saying that the Pope was the author of Rabelais; and that Elia is not an anagram, as some have thought it, but the Judaico-Christian name of the writer before us, whose surname, we find, is not Lamb, but Lomb;—Elia Lomb! What a name! He told a friend of ours so in company, and would have palmed himself upon him for a Scotchman, but that his countenance betrayed him."
It is amusing to note that Maginn, writing the text to accompany the Maclise portrait of Lamb in Fraser's Magazine in 1835, gravely states that Lamb's name was really Lomb, and that he was of Jewish extraction.
The subject of Lamb's birth reopened a little while later. In the "Lion's Head," which was the title of the pages given to correspondence in the London Magazine, in the number for November, 1821, was the following short article from Lamb's pen:—
"ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS.—A Correspondent, who writes himself Peter Ball, or Bell,—for his hand-writing is as ragged as his manners—admonishes me of the old saying, that some people (under a courteous periphrasis I slur his less ceremonious epithet) had need have good memories. In my 'Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,' I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born. Bell clamours upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good identity in question, (see P.S. to my 'Chapter on Ears,') I profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my remoter origin from Italy. But who does not see, except this tinkling cymbal, that in that idle fiction of Genoese ancestry I was answering a fool according to his folly—that Elia there expresseth himself ironically, as to an approved slanderer, who hath no right to the truth, and can be no fit recipient of it? Such a one it is usual to leave to his delusions; or, leading him from error still to contradictory error, to plunge him (as we say) deeper in the mire, and give him line till he suspend himself. No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such obvious rhodomontade to suspect me for an alien, or believe me other than English.—To a second Correspondent, who signs himself 'a Wiltshire man,' and claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in my 'Christ's Hospital,' a more mannerly reply is due. Passing over the Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon. Referring to the passage (in page 484 of our second volume[3]), I must confess, that the term 'native town,' applied to Calne, primâ facie seems to bear out the construction which my friendly Correspondent is willing to put upon it. The context too, I am afraid, a little favours it. But where the words of an author, taken literally, compared with some other passage in his writings, admitted to be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the custom of the ingenuous commentator to smooth the difficulty by the supposition, that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly intended. So by the word 'native,' I may be supposed to mean a town where I might have been born; or where it might be desirable that I should have been born, as being situate in wholesome air, upon a dry chalky soil, in which I delight; or a town, with the inhabitants of which I passed some weeks, a summer or two ago, so agreeably, that they and it became in a manner native to me. Without some such latitude of interpretation in the present case, I see not how we can avoid falling into a gross error in physics, as to conceive that a gentleman may be born in two places, from which all modern and ancient testimony is alike abhorrent. Bacchus cometh the nearest to it, whom I remember Ovid to have honoured with the epithet 'Twice born.'[4] But not to mention that he is so called (we conceive) in reference to the places whence rather than the places where he was delivered,—for by either birth he may probably be challenged for a Theban—in a strict way of speaking, he was a filius femoris by no means in the same sense as he had been before a filius alvi, for that latter was but a secondary and tralatitious way of being born, and he but a denizen of the second house of his geniture. Thus much by way of explanation was thought due to the courteous 'Wiltshire man.'—To 'Indagator,' 'Investigator,' 'Incertus,' and the rest of the pack, that are so importunate about the true localities of his birth—as if, forsooth, Elia were presently about to be passed to his parish—to all such churchwarden critics he answereth, that, any explanation here given notwithstanding, he hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again, in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him.
"Modò me Thebis—modò Athenis.
[Footnote 1: "Clearly a fictitious appellation; for if we admit the latter of these names to be in a manner English, what is Leigh? Christian nomenclature knows no such."]
[Footnote 2: "It is clearly of transatlantic origin."]
[Footnote 3: See page 15 of this volume.]
[Footnote 4:
"Imperfectus adhuc infans genetricis ab alvo
Eripitur, patrioque tener (si credere dignum est)
Insuitur femori—
Tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi.
"Metamorph. lib. iii., 310."]
* * * * *
Page 48. ALL FOOLS' DAY.
London Magazine, April, 1821.
Page 49, line 1. Empedocles. Lamb appended this footnote in the London Magazine:—
He who, to be deem'd
A god, leap'd fondly into Etna's flames.
Paradise Lost, III., lines 470-471 [should be 469-470].
Page 49, line 5. Cleombrotus. Lamb's London Magazine footnote:—
He who, to enjoy
Plato's Elysium, leap'd into the sea.
Paradise Lost, III., lines 471-472.
Page 49, line 8. Plasterers at Babel. Lamb's London Magazine note:—
The builders next of Babel on the plain
Of Sennaar.
Paradise Lost, III., lines 466-467.
Page 49, line 10. My right hand. Lamb, it is probably unnecessary to remind the reader, stammered too.
Page 49, line 13 from foot. Duns, Duns Scotus (1265?-1308?), metaphysician, author of De modis significandi sive Grammatica Speculativa and other philosophic works. Known as Doctor Subtilis. There was nothing of Duns in the London Magazine; the sentence ran: "Mr. Hazlitt, I cannot indulge you in your definitions." This was at a time when Lamb and Hazlitt were not on good terms.
Page 49, last line. Honest R——. Lamb's Key gives "Ramsay, London Library, Ludgate Street; now extinct." I have tried in vain to find out more about Ramsay. The London Library was established at 5 Ludgate Street in 1785. Later, the books were lodged at Charles Taylor's house in Hatton Garden, and were finally removed to the present London Institute in Finsbury Circus.
Page 50, line 6. Good Granville S——. Lamb's Key gives Granville Sharp. This was the eccentric Granville Sharp, the Quaker abolitionist (1735-1813).
* * * * *
Page 51. A QUAKER'S MEETING.
London Magazine, April, 1821.
Lamb's connection with Quakers was somewhat intimate throughout his life. In early days he was friendly with the Birmingham Lloyds—Charles, Robert and Priscilla, of the younger generation, and their father, Charles Lloyd, the banker and translator of Horace and Homer (see Charles Lamb and the Lloyds, 1898); and later with Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet of Woodbridge. Also he had loved from afar Hester Savory, the subject of his poem "Hester" (see Vol. IV.). A passage from a letter written in February, 1797, to Coleridge, bears upon this essay:—"Tell Lloyd I have had thoughts of turning Quaker, and have been reading, or am rather just beginning to read, a most capital book, good thoughts in good language, William Penn's 'No Cross, No Crown,' I like it immensely. Unluckily I went to one of his meetings, tell him, in St. John Street [Clerkenwell] yesterday, and saw a man under all the agitations and workings of a fanatic, who believed himself under the influence of some 'inevitable presence.' This cured me of Quakerism; I love it in the books of Penn and Woolman, but I detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks by the Spirit…."
Both Forster and Hood tell us that Lamb in outward appearance resembled a Quaker.
Page 52, line 13. The uncommunicating muteness of fishes. Lamb had in mind this thought on the silence of fishes when he was at work on John Woodvil. Simon remarks, in the exquisite passage (Vol. IV.) in reply to the question, "What is it you love?"
The fish in th' other element
That knows no touch of eloquence.
Page 53, second quotation. "How reverend …" An adaptation of
Congreve's description of York Minster in "The Mourning Bride" (Mary
Lamb's "first play"), Act I., Scene 1:—
How reverend is the face of this tall pile …
Looking tranquillity!
Page 53, middle. Fox and Dewesbury. George Fox (1624-1691) founded the Society of Friends. William Dewesbury was one of Fox's first colleagues, and a famous preacher. William Penn (1644-1718), the founder of Pennsylvania, was the most illustrious of the early converts to Quakerism. Lamb refers to him again, before his judges, in the essay on "Imperfect Sympathies," page 73. George Fox's Journal was lent to Lamb by a friend of Bernard Barton's in 1823. On returning it, Lamb remarked (February 17, 1823):—"I have quoted G.F. in my 'Quaker's Meeting' as having said he was 'lifted up in spirit' (which I felt at the time to be not a Quaker phrase),' and the Judge and Jury were as dead men under his feet.' I find no such words in his Journal, and I did not get them from Sewell, and the latter sentence I am sure I did not mean to invent. I must have put some other Quaker's words into his mouth."
Sewel was a Dutchman—William Sewel (1654-1720). His title runs: History of the Rise, Increase and Progress of the Christian People called Quakers, written originally in Low Dutch by W. Sewel, and by himself translated into English, 1722. James Naylor (1617-1660) was one of the early Quaker martyrs—"my favourite" Lamb calls him in a letter. John Woolman (1720-1772) was an American Friend. His principal writings are to be found in A Journal of the Life, Gospel Labours, and Christian Experiences of that faithful minister of Jesus Christ, John Woolman, late of Mount Holly in the Province of Jersey, North America, 1795. Modern editions are obtainable.
* * * * *
Page 56. THE OLD AND THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER.
London Magazine, May, 1821.
Page 56, line 9. Ortelius … Arrowsmith. Abraham Ortellius (1527-1598), the Dutch geographer and the author of Theatrum Orbis Terræ, 1570. Aaron Arrowsmith (1750-1823) was a well-known cartographer at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Lamb would perhaps have known something of his Atlas of Southern India, a very useful work at the East India House.
Page 56, line 13. A very dear friend. Barren Field (see the essay on
"Distant Correspondents").
Page 56, line 10 from foot. My friend M. Thomas Manning (1772-1840), the mathematician and traveller, and Lamb's correspondent.
Page 56, last line. "On Devon's leafy shores." From Wordsworth's Excursion, III.
Page 57, line 16. Daily jaunts. Though Lamb was then (1821) living at 20 Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, he rented rooms at 14 Kingsland Row, Dalston, in which to take holidays and do his literary work undisturbed. At that time Dalston, which adjoins Shackleton, was the country and Kingsland Green an open space opposite Lamb's lodging.
Page 58, line 23. The North Pole Expedition. This would probably be Sir John Franklin's expedition which set out in 1819 and ended in disaster, the subject of Franklin's book, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the years 1819, 20, 21, 22 (1823). Sir John Ross made an expedition in 1818, and Sir William Edward Parry in 1819, and again in 1821-1823 with Lyon. The panorama was possibly at Burford's Panorama in the Strand, afterwards moved to Leicester Square.
Page 60, line 17. Tractate on Education. Milton's Tractate on Education, addressed to his friend, Samuel Hartlib, was published in 1644. The quotation above is from that work. This paragraph of Lamb's essay was afterwards humorously expanded in his "Letter to an Old Gentleman whose Education has been Neglected" (see Vol. I.).
Page 60, last line. Mr. Bartley's Orrery. George Bartley (1782?-1858), the comedian, lectured on astronomy and poetry at the Lyceum during Lent at this time. An orrery is a working model of the solar system. The Panopticon was, I assume, a forerunner of the famous Panopticon in Leicester Square.
Page 61, line 8. "Plaything for an hour." A quotation, from Charles and Mary Lamb's Poetry for Children—"Parental Recollections":—
A child's a plaything for an hour.
Page 63, end of essay. "Can I reproach her for it." After these words, in the London Magazine, came:—
"These kind of complaints are not often drawn from me. I am aware that I am a fortunate, I mean a prosperous man. My feelings prevent me from transcribing any further."
* * * * *
Page 63. VALENTINE'S DAY.
This essay first appeared in The Examiner, February 14 and 15, 1819, and again in The Indicator, February 14, 1821. Signed ***
Page 64, line 18. Twopenny postman. Hone computed, in his Every-Day Book, Vol. I., 1825, that "two hundred thousand letters beyond the usual daily average annually pass through the two-penny post-office in London on Valentine's Day." The Bishop's vogue is now (1911) almost over.
Page 65, line 15 from foot. E.B. Lamb's Key gives "Edward Burney, half brother of Miss Burney." This was Edward Francis Burney (1760-1848), who illustrated many old authors, among them Richardson.
* * * * *
Page 66. IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES.
London Magazine, August, 1821, where the title ran: "Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen, and other Imperfect Sympathies."
Page 69, line 18 from foot. A print … after Leonardo. The Virgin of the Rocks. See Vol. IV. for Lamb's and his sister's verses on this picture. Crabb Robinson's MS. diary tells us that the Scotchman was one Smith, a friend of Godwin. His exact reply to Lamb's remark about "my beauty" was: "Why, sir, from all I have heard of you, as well as from what I have myself seen, I certainly entertain a very high opinion of your abilities, but I confess that I have not formed any opinion concerning your personal pretensions."
Page 70, line 10. The poetry of Burns. "Burns was the god of my idolatry," Lamb wrote to Coleridge in 1796. Coleridge's lines on Burns, "To a Friend who had declared his intention of writing no more poetry," were addressed to Lamb. Barry Cornwall records seeing Lamb kiss his copy of the poet.
Page 70, line 17. You can admire him. In the London Magazine Lamb added:—
"I have a great mind to give up Burns. There is certainly a bragging spirit of generosity, a swaggering assertion of independence, and all that, in his writings."
Page 70, line 18. Smollett. Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771), the novelist, came of a Dumbartonshire family. Rory was Roderick Random's schoolboy name. His companion was Strap. See Roderick Random, Chapter XIII., for the passage in question. Smollett continued the History of England of David Hume (1711-1776), also a Scotchman, and one of the authors whom Lamb could not read (see "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," page 196).
Lamb's criticism of Scotchmen did not pass without comment. The pleasantest remark made upon it was that of Christopher North (John Wilson) some dozen years later (after he had met Lamb), in a Blackwood paper entitled "Twaddle on Tweedside" (May, 1833), wherein he wrote:—
Charles Lamb ought really not to abuse Scotland in the pleasant way he so often does in the sylvan shades of Enfield; for Scotland loves Charles Lamb; but he is wayward and wilful in his wisdom, and conceits that many a Cockney is a better man even than Christopher North. But what will not Christopher forgive to Genius and Goodness? Even Lamb bleating libels on his native land. Nay, he learns lessons of humanity, even from the mild malice of Elia, and breathes a blessing on him and his household in their Bower of Rest.
Coleridge was much pleased by this little reference to his friend. He described it as "very sweet indeed" (see his Table Talk, May 14, 1833).
Page 70, line 14 from foot. Hugh of Lincoln. Hugh was a small
Lincoln boy who, tradition states, was tortured to death by the Jews.
His dead body being touched by a blind woman, she received sight.
Many years earlier Lamb had spoken of the Jew in English society with equal frankness (see his note to the "Jew of Malta" in the Dramatic Specimens).
Page 71, line 18. B——. John Braham, née Abraham (1774?-1856), the great tenor. Writing to Manning in 1808, Lamb says:—"Do you like Braham's singing? The little Jew has bewitched me. I follow him like as the boys followed Tom the Piper. He cures me of melancholy as David cured Saul…. I was insensible to music till he gave me a new sense…. Braham's singing, when it is impassioned, is finer than Mrs. Siddons's or Mr. Kemble's acting! and when it is not impassioned it is as good as hearing a person of fine sense talking. The brave little Jew!"
Two years later Lamb tells Manning of Braham's absence from London, adding: "He was a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel; yet all these elements mixed up so kindly in him that you could not tell which preponderated." In this essay Lamb refers to Braham's singing in Handel's oratorio "Israel in Egypt." Concerning Braham's abandonment of the Jewish faith see Lamb's sarcastic essay "The Religion of Actors," Vol. I., page 338.
Page 73, line 17 from foot. I was travelling. Lamb did not really take part in this story. It was told him by Sir Anthony Carlisle (1768-1840), the surgeon, as he confessed to his Quaker friend, Bernard Barton (March 11, 1823), who seemed to miss its point. Lamb described Carlisle as "the best story-teller I ever heard."
* * * * *
Page 74. WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS.
London Magazine, October, 1821.
Compare with this essay Maria Howe's story of "The Witch Aunt," in Mrs. Leicester's School (see Vol. III.), which Lamb had written thirteen years earlier.
Page 75, line 12 from foot. History of the Bible, by Stackhouse. Thomas Stackhouse (1677-1752) was rector of Boldon, in Durham; his New History of the Holy Bible from the Beginning of the World to the Establishment of Christianity—the work in question—was published in 1737.
Page 75, line 6 from foot. The Witch raising up Samuel. This paragraph was the third place in which Lamb recorded his terror of this picture of the Witch of Endor in Stackhouse's Bible, but the first occasion in which he took it to himself. In one draft of John Woodvil (see Vol. IV.), the hero says:—
I can remember when a child the maids
Would place me on their lap, as they undrest me,
As silly women use, and tell me stories
Of Witches—make me read "Glanvil on Witchcraft,"
And in conclusion show me in the Bible,
The old Family Bible, with the pictures in it,
The 'graving of the Witch raising up Samuel,
Which so possest my fancy, being a child,
That nightly in my dreams an old Hag came
And sat upon my pillow.
Then again, in Mrs. Leicester's School, in the story of Maria Howe, called "The Witch Aunt," one of the three stories in that book which Lamb wrote, Stackhouse's Bible is found once more. In my large edition I give a reproduction of the terrible picture. Page 77, foot. Dear little T.H. This was the unlucky passage which gave Southey his chief text in his criticism of Elia as a book wanting "a sounder religious feeling," and which led to Lamb's expostulatory "Letter" (see Vol. I.). Southey commented thus:—
This poor child, instead of being trained up in the way in which he should go, had been bred in the ways of modern philosophy; he had systematically been prevented from knowing anything of that Saviour who said, "Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven;" care had been taken that he should not pray to God, nor lie down at night in reliance upon His good Providence!
T.H. was Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt's eldest son and Lamb's "favourite child" (see verses to him in Vol. IV.).
Page 79, line 18 from foot. Barry Cornwall. Bryan Waller Procter
(1787-1874), Lamb's friend. The reference is to "A Dream," a poem in
Barry Cornwall's Dramatic Scenes, 1819, which Lamb greatly admired.
See his sonnet to the poet in Vol. IV., where it is mentioned again.
Page 80, last paragraph of essay. In the original MS. of this essay (now in the Dyce and Forster collection at South Kensington) the last paragraph ran thus:—
"When I awoke I came to a determination to write prose all the rest of my life; and with submission to some of our young writers, who are yet diffident of their powers, and balancing perhaps between verse and prose, they might not do unwisely to decide the preference by the texture of their natural dreams. If these are prosaic, they may depend upon it they have not much to expect in a creative way from their artificial ones. What dreams must not Spenser have had!"
* * * * *
Page 80. MY RELATIONS.
London Magazine, June, 1821.
Page 80, beginning. At that point of life. Lamb was forty-six on
February 10, 1821.
Page 80, line 12 of essay. I had an aunt. Aunt Hetty, who died in 1797 (see the essay on "Christ's Hospital").
Page 81, line 6. The chapel in Essex-street. The headquarters of "that heresy," Unitarianism. Lamb was at first a Unitarian, but afterwards dropped away from all sects.
Page 81, line 23. Brother, or sister, I never had any—to know them. Lamb is writing strictly as the imagined Elia, Elia being Lamb in mind rather than Lamb in fact. It amused him to present his brother John and his sister Mary as his cousins James and Bridget Elia. We have here an excellent example of his whimsical blending of truth and invention: brothers and sisters he denies, yet admits one sister, Elizabeth, who died in both their infancies. Lamb had in reality two sisters named Elizabeth, the former of whom he never knew. She was born in 1762. The second Elizabeth, his parents' fifth child, was born in 1768, seven years before Charles. Altogether the Lambs had seven children, of whom only John (born 1763), Mary Anne (born 1764) and Charles (born 1775) grew up. Again Lamb confesses to several cousins in Hertfordshire, and to two others. The two others were fictitious, but it was true that he had Hertfordshire relations (see the essay "Mackery End, in Hertfordshire").
John Lamb's character is perhaps sufficiently described in this essay and in "Dream-Children." He was a well-to-do official in the South-Sea House, succeeding John Tipp as accountant. Crabb Robinson found him too bluff and noisy to be bearable; and he once knocked Hazlitt down in a dispute about painting. He died on October 26, 1821, to his brother's great grief, leaving Charles everything. He married late in life a Mrs. Dowden. Probably she had her own money and needed none of her second husband's. Hence the peculiarity of the will. Mrs. John Lamb died in 1826.
John Lamb's sympathy with animals led him to write in 1810 a pamphlet entitled A Letter to the Right Hon. William Windham, on his opposition to Lord Erskine's Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—Mr. Windham having expressed it as his opinion that the subject was not one for legislation. Lamb sent the pamphlet to Crabb Robinson on February 7, 1810, saying:—"My Brother whom you have met at my rooms (a plump good looking man of seven and forty!) has written a book about humanity, which I transmit to you herewith. Wilson the Publisher has put it in his head that you can get it Reviewed for him. I dare say it is not in the scope of your Review—but if you could put it into any likely train, he would rejoyce. For alas! our boasted Humanity partakes of Vanity. As it is, he teazes me to death with chusing to suppose that I could get it into all the Reviews at a moment's notice.—I!! who have been set up as a mark for them to throw at and would willingly consign them all to Hell flames and Megæra's snaky locks.
"But here's the Book—and don't shew it Mrs. Collier, for I remember she makes excellent Eel soup, and the leading points of the Book are directed against that very process."
This is the passage—one red-hot sentence—concerning eels:—
"If an eel had the wisdom of Solomon, he could not help himself in the ill-usage that befalls him; but if he had, and were told, that it was necessary for our subsistence that he should be eaten, that he must be skinned first, and then broiled; if ignorant of man's usual practice, he would conclude that the cook would so far use her reason as to cut off his head first, which is not fit for food, as then he might be skinned and broiled without harm; for however the other parts of his body might be convulsed during the culinary operations, there could be no feeling of consciousness therein, the communication with the brain being cut off; but if the woman were immediately to stick a fork into his eye, skin him alive, coil him up in a skewer, head and all, so that in the extremest agony he could not move, and forthwith broil him to death: then were the same Almighty Power that formed man from the dust, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, to call the eel into a new existence, with a knowledge of the treatment he had undergone, and he found that the instinctive disposition which man has in common with other carnivorous animals, which inclines him to cruelty, was not the sole cause of his torments; but that men did not attend to consider whether the sufferings of such insignificant creatures could be lessened: that eels were not the only sufferers; that lobsters and other shell fish were put into cold water and boiled to death by slow degrees in many parts of the sea coast; that these, and many other such wanton atrocities, were the consequence of carelessness occasioned by the pride of mankind despising their low estate, and of the general opinion that there is no punishable sin in the ill-treatment of animals designed for our use; that, therefore, the woman did not bestow so much thought on him as to cut his head off first, and that she would have laughed at any considerate person who should have desired such a thing; with what fearful indignation might he inveigh against the unfeeling metaphysician that, like a cruel spirit alarmed at the appearance of a dawning of mercy upon animals, could not rest satisfied with opposing the Cruelty Prevention Bill by the plea of possible inconvenience to mankind, highly magnified and emblazoned, but had set forth to the vulgar and unthinking of all ranks, in the jargon of proud learning, that man's obligations of morality towards the creatures subjected to his use are imperfect obligations!"
The poem "The Beggar-Man," in Poetry for Children, 1809 (see Vol.
III.), was also from John Lamb's pen.
Page 85, asterisks. Society for the Relief of—Distrest Sailors, says Lamb's Key.
Page 86, last line of essay. "Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire." This line occurs in a sonnet of Lamb's written many years before the essay (see Vol. IV.). Probably, however, Lamb did not invent it, for (the late W.J. Craig pointed out) in Leland's Itinerary, which Lamb must have known, if only on account of the antiquary's remarks on Hertfordshire, is quoted a poem by William Vallans (fl. 1578-1590), "The Tale of the Two Swans," containing the line—
The fruitful fields of pleasant Hertfordshire—
which one can easily understand would have lingered in Lamb's mind very graciously.
In the London Magazine the essay ended with the words, "Till then,
Farewell."
* * * * *
Page 86. MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE.
London Magazine, July, 1821. Reprinted in Elia, 1823, as written, save for the omission of italics from many passages.
Bridget Elia, who is met also in "Mrs. Battle," in "My Relations," and in "Old China," was, of course, Mary Lamb.
Page 86, line 11 from foot. She must have a story. Thomas Westwood, in his reminiscences of the Lambs in later years, printed in Notes and Queries, speaks of Mary Lamb's passion for novel-reading in the Enfield days, when he was a boy.
Page 87, line 6. Margaret Newcastle. Lamb's devotion to this lady is expressed again in the essay on "The Two Races of Men," in the essay on Beggars, and in "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading."
Page 87, line 8. Free-thinkers … William Godwin, perhaps alone among Lamb's friends, quite answers to the description of leader of novel philosophies and systems; but there had been also Thomas Holcroft and John Thelwall among the Lambs' acquaintance. And Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt would come within this description.
Page 87, foot. Good old English reading. The reference is to Samuel
Salt's library in the Temple (see note to "The Old Benchers of the
Inner Temple").
Page 88, line 14. Mackery End. The farmhouse still stands, although new front rooms have been added. At the end of the present hall, one passes through what was in Lamb's time the front door, and thereafter the house is exactly as it used to be save that its south windows have been filled in. By kind invitation of Mr. Dolphin Smith, the farmer, who had been there over forty years, I spent in 1902 some time in the same parlour in which the Lambs had been entertained. Harpenden, on the north-west, has grown immensely since Lamb's day, and the houses at the Folly, between Wheathampstead and the Cherry Trees, are new; but Mackery End, or Mackrye End as the farmer's waggons have it, remains unencroached upon. Near by is the fine old mansion which is Mackery End house proper; Lamb's Mackery End was the farm.
Lamb's first visit there must have been when he was a very little
boy—somewhere about 1780. Probably we may see recollections of it in
Mary Lamb's story "The Farmhouse" in Mrs. Leicester's School (see
Vol. III. of this edition).
Page 88, line 18. A great-aunt. Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother, was Mary Bruton, whose sister married, as he says, a Gladman, and was the great-aunt mentioned. The present occupier of the farm is neither Gladman nor Bruton; but both names are still to be found in the county. A Miss Sarah Bruton, a direct descendant of Lamb's great-aunt, was living at Wheathampstead in 1902. She had on her walls two charming oval portraits of ancestresses, possibly—for she was uncertain as to their identity—two of the handsome sisters whom Lamb extols.
Writing to Manning, May 28, 1819, Lamb says:—"How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathampstead, and farmer Bruton? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman.
"Hail, Mackery End!
"This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but got no further."
Page 89, verse. "But thou, that didst appear so fair …" From Wordsworth's "Yarrow Visited," Stanza 6. Writing to Wordsworth in 1815, Lamb said of this stanza that he thought "no lovelier" could be found in "the wide world of poetry." From a letter to Taylor, of the London Magazine, belonging to the summer of 1821, we gather that the proof-reader had altered the last word of the third line to "air" to make it rhyme to "fair." Lamb says: "Day is the right reading, and I implore you to restore it."
Page 90, line 4. B.F. Barron Field (see note to "Distant Correspondents"), then living in Sydney, where he composed, and had printed for private circulation in 1819, a volume of poems reviewed by Lamb (see Vol. I.), in 1819, one of which was entitled "The Kangaroo." It was the first book printed in Australia. Field edited Heywood for the old Shakespeare Society. Although a Field, he was no kinsman of Lamb's.
* * * * *
Page 90. MODERN GALLANTRY.
London Magazine, November, 1822.
De Quincey writes in "London Reminiscences" concerning the present essay:—
Among the prominent characteristics of Lamb, I know not how it is that I have omitted to notice the peculiar emphasis and depth of his courtesy. This quality was in him a really chivalrous feeling, springing from his heart, and cherished with the sanctity of a duty. He says somewhere in speaking of himself[?] under the mask of a third person, whose character he is describing, that, in passing a servant girl, even at a street-crossing, he used to take off his hat. Now, the spirit of Lamb's gallantry would have prompted some such expression of homage, though the customs of the country would not allow it to be literally fulfilled, for the very reason that would prompt it—viz., in order to pay respect—since the girl would, in such a case, suppose a man laughing at her. But the instinct of his heart was to think highly of female nature, and to pay a real homage (not the hollow demonstration of outward honour which a Frenchman calls his "homage," and which is really a mask for contempt) to the sacred idea of pure and virtuous womanhood.
Barry Cornwall has the following story in his Memoir of Lamb:—
Lamb, one day, encountered a small urchin loaded with a too heavy package of grocery. It caused him to tremble and stop. Charles inquired where he was going, took (although weak) the load upon his own shoulder, and managed to carry it to Islington, the place of destination. Finding that the purchaser of the grocery was a female, he went with the urchin before her, and expressed a hope that she would intercede with the poor boy's master, in order to prevent his being over-weighted in future. "Sir," said the dame, after the manner of Tisiphone, frowning upon him, "I buy my sugar and have nothing to do with the man's manner of sending it." Lamb at once perceived the character of the purchaser, and taking off his hat, said, humbly, "Then I hope, ma'am, you'll give me a drink of small beer." This was of course refused. He afterwards called upon the grocer, on the boy's behalf. With what effect I do not know.
Page 90, line 2 of essay. Upon the point of gallantry. Here, in the London Magazine, came the words:—
"as upon a thing altogether unknown to the old classic ages. This has been defined to consist in a certain obsequiousness, or deferential respect, paid to females, as females."
Page 92, line 3. Joseph Paice. Joseph Paice was, as Lamb pointed out to Barton in a letter in January, 1830, a real person, and all that Lamb records. According to Miss Anne Manning's Family Pictures, 1860, Joseph Paice, who was a friend of Thomas Coventry, took Lamb into his office at 27 Bread Street Hill somewhere in 1789 or 1790 to learn book-keeping and business habits. He passed thence to the South-Sea House and thence to the East India House. Miss Manning (who was the author of Flemish Interiors) helps to fill out Lamb's sketch into a full-length portrait. She tells us that Mr. Paice's life was one long series of gentle altruisms and the truest Christianities.
Charles Lamb speaks of his holding an umbrella over a market-woman's fruit-basket, lest her store should be spoilt by a sudden shower; and his uncovering his head to a servant-girl who was requesting him to direct her on her way. These traits are quite in keeping with many that can still be authenticated:—his carrying presents of game himself, for instance, to humble friends, who might ill have spared a shilling to a servant; and his offering a seat in his hackney-coach to some poor, forlorn, draggled beings, who were picking their way along on a rainy day. Sometimes these chance guests have proved such uncongenial companions, that the kind old man has himself faced the bad weather rather than prolong the acquaintance, paying the hackney-coachman for setting down the stranger at the end of his fare. At lottery times, he used to be troubled with begging visits from certain improvident hangers-on, who had risked their all in buying shares of an unlucky number. About the time the numbers were being drawn, there would be a ring at the gate-bell, perhaps at dinner time. His spectacles would be elevated, an anxious expression would steal over his face, as he half raised himself from his seat, to obtain a glance at the intruder—"Ah, I thought so, I expected as much," he would gently say. "I expected I should soon have a visit from poor Mrs. —— or Mrs. ——. Will you excuse me, my dear madam," (to my grandmother) "for a moment, while I just tell her it is quite out of my power to help her?" counting silver into his hand all the time. Then, a parley would ensue at the hall-door—complainant telling her tale in a doleful voice: "My good woman, I really cannot," etc.; and at last the hall-door would be shut. "Well, sir," my grandmother used to say, as Mr. Paice returned to his seat, "I do not think you have sent Mrs. —— away quite penniless." "Merely enough for a joint of meat, my good madam—just a trifle to buy her a joint of meat."
Family Pictures should be consulted by any one who would know more of this gentleman and of Susan Winstanly.
Page 92, line 5. Edwards. Thomas Edwards (1699-1757), author of Canons of Criticism, 1748. The sonnet in question, which was modelled on that addressed by Milton to Cyriack Skinner, was addressed to Paice, as the author's nephew, bidding him carry on the family line. Paice, however, as Lamb tells us, did not marry.
* * * * *
Page 94. THE OLD BENCHERS OF THE INNER TEMPLE.
London Magazine, September, 1821.
Lamb's connection with the Temple was fairly continuous until 1817, when he was thirty-eight. He was born at No. 2 Crown Office Row in 1775, and he did not leave it, except for visits to Hertfordshire, until 1782, when he entered Christ's Hospital. There he remained, save for holidays, until 1789, returning then to Crown Office Row for the brief period between leaving school and the death of Samuel Salt, under whose roof the Lambs dwelt, in February, 1792. The 7 Little Queen Street, the 45 and 36 Chapel Street, Pentonville, and the first 34 Southampton Buildings (with Gutch) periods, followed; but in 1801 Lamb and his sister were back in the Temple again, at 16 Mitre Court Buildings, since rebuilt. They moved from there, after a brief return to 34 Southampton Buildings, to 4 Inner Temple Lane (since rebuilt and now called Johnson's Buildings) in 1809, where they remained until the move to 20 Great Russell Street in 1817. With each change after that (except for another and briefer sojourn in Southampton Buildings in 1830), Lamb's home became less urban. His last link with the Temple may be said to have snapped with the death of Randal Morris, sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple, in 1827 (see "A Death-Bed"), although now and then he slept at Crabb Robinson's chambers.
The Worshipful Masters of the Bench of the Hon. Society of the Inner Temple—to give the Benchers their full title—have the government of the Inner Temple in their hands.
Page 97, line 12 from foot, J——ll. Joseph Jekyll, great-nephew of Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, well known as a wit and diner-out. He became a Bencher in 1795, and was made a Master in Chancery in 1815, through the influence of the Prince Regent. Under his direction the hall of the Inner Temple and the Temple Church were restored, and he compiled a little book entitled Facts and Observations relating to the Temple Church and the Monuments contained in it, 1811. He became a K.C. in 1805, and died in 1837, aged eighty-five. Jekyll was a friend of George Dyer, and was interested in Lamb's other friends, the Norrises. & letter from him, thanking Lamb for a copy of the Last Essays of Elia, is printed in Mr. W.C. Hazlitt's The Lambs. He had another link of a kind with Lamb in being M.P. for "sweet Calne in Wiltshire." Jekyll's chambers were at 6 King's Bench Walk. On the same staircase lived for a while George Colman the Younger.
Page 97, line 9 from foot. Thomas Coventry. Thomas Coventry became a Bencher in 1766. He was the nephew of William, fifth Earl of Coventry, and resided at North Cray Place, near Bexley, in Kent, and in Serjeant's Inn, where he died in 1797, in his eighty-fifth year. He is buried in the Temple Church. Coventry was a sub-governor of the South-Sea House, and it was he who presented Lamb's friend, James White, to Christ's Hospital. He was M.P. for Bridport from 1754 to 1780. As an illustration of Coventry's larger benefactions it may be remarked that he presented £10,000 worth of South Sea stock to Christ's Hospital in 1782.
Page 98, line 9. Samuel Salt. Samuel Salt was the son of the Rev. John Salt, of Audley, in Staffordshire; and he married a daughter of Lord Coventry, thus being connected with Thomas Coventry by marriage. He was M.P. for Liskeard for some years, and a governor of the South-Sea House. Samuel Salt, who became a Bencher in 1782, rented at No. 2 Crown Office Row two sets of chambers, in one of which the Lamb family dwelt. John Lamb, Lamb's father, who is described as a scrivener in Charles's Christ's Hospital application form, was Salt's right-hand man, not only in business, but privately, while Mrs. Lamb acted as housekeeper and possibly as cook. Samuel Salt played the part of tutelary genius to John Lamb's two sons. It was he who arranged for Charles to be nominated for Christ's Hospital (by Timothy Yeats); probably he was instrumental also in getting him into the East India House; and in all likelihood it was he who paved the way for the younger John Lamb's position in the South-Sea House. It was also Samuel Salt who gave to Charles and Mary the freedom of his library (see the reference in the essay on "Mackery End"): a privilege which, to ourselves, is the most important of all. Salt died in February, 1792, and is buried in the vault of the Temple Church. He left to John Lamb £500 in South Sea stock and a small annual sum, and to Elizabeth Lamb £200 in money; but with his death the prosperity of the family ceased.