§mm\l Utttemtg Jilratg 
 
 > ' THE GIFT OF 
 
 HEBER GUSHING PETERS 
 
 CLASS OF 1892 » 
 
 5226 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 4860.A2 1876 
 
 Works: poetical and dramatic tales, 
 
 3 1924 013 494 582 
 
The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013494582 
 
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THE WORKS 
 
 OF 
 
 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 POETICAL AND DRAMATIC TALES 
 ESSAYS AND CRITICISMS 
 
 EDITED WITH BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BV 
 
 CHARLES KENT 
 
 OF THE MIDDLE TEMPLE, BARRISTEK-AT-LAW 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Limited 
 
 Broadway, Ludgate Hill 
 
 GLASGOW, MANCHESTER, AND NEW YORK 
 
^,365" -^54 
 
 A casket of gems of small size, but of the first water : a. 
 book to be read, re-read, and loved. We can point to no 
 book so purely charming. Lamb is the first of all our hu- 
 morists. Taken as a whole he is incomparable. 
 
 T^ British Quarterly. 
 
CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 A PREFATORY MEMOIR. 
 
 The Westminster Review, as recently as in the October of 1874, while insist- 
 ing upon the urgent need of an entirely new edition of the Works of Charles 
 Lamb, deprecated in the strongest terms the notion of preceding them with 
 any rearrangement of the well-known facts of his life, or with any iresh esti- 
 mate of his genius and character. This rather startling remark was thrown 
 out in the course of a luminous, and for the most part sagacious, survey of all 
 the editions of Lamb hitherto published. Looking forward eagerly to some 
 more carefully prepared issue of these works, the reviewer observed, with 
 emphasis, "As to anything in the shape of disquisition or biography, a strong 
 word may be said for their entire exclusion." I take note of this objection 
 upon the very threshold, because I am desirous of not seeming to run counter 
 to it out of sheer perversity. A disquisition upon the genius of this delightful 
 humorist I admit at once to be absolutely superfluous. His writings require 
 the pointing of no index finger to ensure their just recognition. They carry 
 his meaning in a vase so transparent that its light shines through resplendently. 
 A, Prefatory Memoir, however, of some sort has appeared to me absolutely 
 requisite by way of introduction. And it has done so for the simple reason that 
 the facts of Charles Lamb's hfe, though doubtless many of them by this time per- 
 fectly familiar to the public by repetition, have again and again been set forth 
 with a curious inaccuracy. The earliest and the latest of the essayist's biogra- 
 phers, for example, are alike at fault in regard to the very date of his birth. 
 Barry Cornwall, when penning, in 1866, his charming Memoir of his old friend, 
 asserts deliberately that he was born on the i8th of February. John Forster, 
 when writing more than thirty years previously his beautiful In Memoriam 
 of Elia in the New Monthly for February, 1835, though much nearer the mark 
 — though, as the children would say, burning— in his conjecture as to theactual 
 birthday, was still out, even though he put it a week earlier. His reliance for 
 the moment was upon a mistaken, or, possibly, a blurred, memorandum in 
 Charles Lamb's handwriting. " ''Tis my poor birthday,' says a letter of his 
 we have lying before us dated the nth of February." Again, according to 
 Mr. Procter, as, indeed, according to all the biographers of Lamb without 
 exception, John and Mary and Charles ' ' were the only children of their 
 parents " — the fact being, as will now immediately be made plain for the first 
 time in this Prefatory Memoir, that the family consisted of more than double 
 that number of children. If beyond the flagrant errors thus distinguishable 
 at a glance upon the very first page of Lamb's biography, yet further justifica- 
 tion were required for the recapitulation, a little more accurately, of the .salient 
 facts of his life, that further justification might, surely, be found in the per- 
 verse deductions which of late years have been drawn by some from the either 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 confused or distorted records of his personal history- ceductions casting a 
 sinister shadow at the last over his bright intellect, and the slur of an imputed 
 subjection to a degrading vice upon as sweet, and pure, and noble a nature , 
 as ever reflected honour upon English literature. 
 
 Charles Lamb, the youngest of the seven children of John Lamb, scrivener, 
 and Elizabeth his wife, nie Field, was born on Friday, the loth of February, 
 177s, in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple. Other men of genius have lived 
 there, but this is the one man of genius who was born within the precincts of 
 the Temple. The substantial row of chambers in one of which, a hundred 
 years ago, this bright-eyed Elia first drew breath, hes parallel with the Thames 
 and Fleet Street, between the Temple Church and the Temple Gardens. If 
 the parents of Charles Lamb Iiad dreamt for a moment of talcing the new-born 
 infant thence, to be baptized at Saint Dunstan's, as the nearest church in the 
 neighbourhood, in order to get to Saint Dunstan's they would have had to 
 pass by the very porch of that yet older church in the Temple. There, obviously, 
 in the Temple Church itself, a child born in the Temple would, in all proba- 
 bility, be baptized. Satisfied in my own mind that this must prove to be 
 the case, I consult the Master of the Temple ; and through his most kind 
 courtesy ray hopes are at once realized. Accompanying Dr. Vaughan into his 
 library, I see him talce down from one of the book-shelves a by no means 
 cumbrous, indeed a rather thinnish quarto volume in beautiful preservation. 
 It is the Baptismal Register for considerably more than a hundred and fifty 
 years past of the Temple Church — a record hitherto overlooked by all Charles 
 Lamb's biographers. As we turn the leaves, the very first name that arrests 
 our attention is that of Lamb- one of the offspring of John Lamb, and 
 Elizabeth his wife. There are seven entries in all to that effect, an interval of 
 thirteen years having elapsed between the birth of the eldest of these 
 children and the birth of tlie youngest :— 
 
 (i.) Elizabeth, bom gth January, baptized 30th Januarj', 1762. 
 
 Y\ JJ""- •'o™ S'h June, baptized 26th June, by the Rev. Mr. Dobey, 1763. 
 
 (3.) MarvAnne, born 3rd December, baptized 30th December, by the Rev. Mr. 
 
 Humphreys, 1764. 
 (4.) Samuel (the date of whose birth is unrecorded), baptized 13th December, 1765. 
 (5.) Elizabeth (the first-bom Elizabeth being obviously dead), bom 30th August, 
 
 baptized 3rd September, 1768. 
 (6.) Edward, bom 3rd September, baptized ^ist September, 1770. 
 
 The Seventh entry on the Register I give here verbatim from the certified 
 copy made for me by the 'Very Rev. the Master of the Temple, a copy now 
 lying at my elbow in his handwriting :— 
 
 r Charles, the son of John Lamb and Elizabeth his wift-. 
 Lamb ■< "^ '^^^ Crown Office Row, in the Inner Temple, was born 
 • ] 10th February, 1775, and baptized loth March fgllowin? 
 I by the Rev. Mr. Jeffs. 
 
 The above is a true :opy of the entry in the Register of Baptisms in the 
 Temple Church. 
 
 (Signed) C. J. 'Vaughan, D.D., 
 
 Master of the Temple. 
 
 Crown Office Row, as these seven entries in tlie Baptismal Register show 
 was the birthplace not merely of the youngest, but of all these children, 
 three of whom alone survived to their maturity. Until Chartes Lamb was 
 sixteen, the family continued to reside under those same roof-beams. Neariy 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 thirty years, consequently, must have run out during John Lamb's occupancy of 
 a set of chambers to which — could only the house be identified !— an excep- 
 tional interest must naturally attach, as having been the birthplace and home 
 of Elia imtil he was a stripling. It is especially tantalizing, therefore, to iind 
 that in the Temple itself no memory whatever has been preserved of the 
 number of the house in which the Lambs had their abode during almost the 
 life-time of a generation. Any one endeavouring to find it, now-a-days, saunters 
 as bewildered down Crown Office Row, as the Captain of the Forty Robbers 
 when he sought to discover the dwelling of .Ali Baba. Time has done the 
 work of Morgiana. All trace of any distinctive mark has long ago been 
 obliterated. The family seems to have come originally from Lincolnshire. 
 The "Annual Register" for 1835, indeed, (p. 212) speaks of Charles Lamb 
 himself, meaning obviously his father John, as a native of Lincolnshire. 
 Quitting his native county for London in search of employment, John J>amb 
 appears to have settled down contentedly as the confidential attendant, or, as 
 Elia exhaustively terms him, "clerk, servant, dresser, friend, flapper, guide, 
 stop-watch, auditor, treasurer ' of a well-to-do widower, one' Mr. Samuel 
 Salt, barrister and bencher of the Inner Temple. 
 
 By an odd coincidence, Charles Lamb's father is said to have greatly 
 resembled David Garrick in appearance, while his mother is stated to have 
 had so matronly and commanding an aspect that she might readily have been 
 mistaken for a sister of Mrs. Siddons. A chirruping blithe little fellow in his 
 younger days, must have been Mr. Salt's Figaro-Factotum : a clerkly domestic 
 — a sort of valet man of letters— a Dodsley in all but wearing the livery ! His 
 solitary claim to the dignity of authorship, it must be added, however, was 
 one thin quarto, entitled "Poetical Pieces on Several Occasions." It com- 
 prised among its contents an old-world picture of the life of a lady's footman 
 in the last century, a History of the Patriarch Joseph, in heroic couplets, 
 and — its writer's favourite effusion, his principal solace later on, when he 
 was sinking into dotage— a childish, prattling Httle fable, after the manner of 
 John Gay, called "The Sparrow's 'Wedding." 
 
 According to Mr. Procter's painfully accurate expression, Charles Lamb was 
 born " almost in penury." He was nevertheless mercifully spared the treat- 
 ment to which the children of the very poor are subjected, as he himself has 
 touchingly described them, where he says that they are not so much brought 
 up as they are dragged up. Until his seventh year was completed he passed 
 his time habitually in that most sequestered and picturesque quarter of the 
 old city, the antique and verdant south-west corner of London lying imme- 
 diately between Temple Bar and the Thames. His playground was over- 
 shadowed at one part by the Roimd Tower of the Knights Templars, at another 
 by the mulberry tree under the gnarled branches of which Henry VIII. tradi- 
 tionally courted Anne Boleyn. He loitered as an urchin across flagstones, 
 and gravel walks, and grass-plots, that had been trodden but yesterday by 
 Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. His earliest delight out of doors 
 every autumn was to see the blaze of chrysanthemums still at that season 
 the glory of the Temple Gardens, or to watch the spray of the slender 
 fountain yet tinkling there under the plane trees. 
 
 His earliest studies were over slate and horn-book at a little day-school, the 
 masters of which were named Bird and Cook. It was situated, this homeliest 
 of seminaries, in an out-of-the-way corner, up an alley, close by Holborn, 
 leading from Fetter Lane to Bartlett's Buildings. Then it was, probably, 
 when he was trotting about London hand-in-hand with his motherly little 
 sister Maty {ten years his senior), that, child as he was; he flashed out the first 
 gleam of the latent humorist. Sauntering with her through one of the 
 city graveyards, where he listened to her reading one eulogistic inscription 
 after another from the tombstones, he put to her, in his hesitating, childish 
 
Charles 'Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 voice, very much after the manner, as one might imagine, of little Paul 
 Dombey, the startling enquiry as to Where all the naughty people were buried ? 
 Charles Lamb, on the 9th of October, 1782, being then well on into his 
 eighth year, was presented to Christ's Hospital by Timothy Yeates, Esq., the 
 Governor. Thenceforth, during eight winters and seven summers he was 
 numbered among the thousand boys on that noble foundation. There he 
 made his first friendships, notably the dearest of them all, that kindled in his 
 breast byone he himself lias spolten of as the "inspired charity boy," Samuel 
 Taylor Coleridge, already, even then, poet, schoUast, dialectician, philosopher. 
 Another schoolmate, Charles Valentine Le Grice, years afterwards, admirably 
 depicted the gentle brilliant Elia of the hereafter, as he was at fourteen. By 
 the help of those charming Recollections of Valentine Le Grice, as through 
 a lens, we are enabled to recognize upon the instant that exceptional blue- 
 coat boy ! Undistinguishable by his garb, clad as he was like the rest of them 
 in the long blueish gaberdine opening from the waist downwards, in the bright 
 yellow stockings and yellow tunic, girdled about the loins by the thin red 
 leather belt, he is seen at a glance to possess the characteristics jotted down 
 by a pen more graphic than many a pencil— the crisply curling black hair, 
 the clear ruddy-brown complexion, the aquiline Jewish contour, the mild 
 countenance, the gUttering eyes, strangely dissimilar in colour, one being 
 hazel, the other having specks of grey in the iris, as you see red spots, in the 
 blood-stone. An amiable winning little creature, singularly sensible, keenly ob- 
 servant. ■ Already people even in childhood, remarked in his gait, what became 
 more distinctly noticeable in after years, namely, that his movements were 
 pecuhar and deliberate, his step being plantigrade. Added to this, as he 
 himself has expressed it; he "stammered abominably." Partly, it may be, 
 because of this infirmity, but chiefly, no doubt, by reason of his alluring and, 
 ingratiating nature, he was petted and indulged alike by preceptors and school- 
 fellows. Insomuch was he treated with habitual ' tenderness by all around 
 ,him that, as C. V. >L. tells us, in spite of there being no one else at 
 the school called Lamb, he never heard his name mentioned without the 
 prefix of Charles. 
 
 Throughout his seven years' routine at Christ's Hospital, Charles Lamb a>! a 
 rule, passed his two half-holidays every week in the midst of his old famiUar 
 haunts m the Temple. His espeaal favourites among the blue-coat boys were 
 the Le Grices from ■ tornwall, Samuel and Valentine, and a certain mad 
 ^¥ ^^S-- Shakspenan enthusiast, James, or, familiarly, Tem White who 
 delighted m masqueradmg as Falstaff, and who wrote what fie set forth as the 
 Fat Kmghts original correspotidence, but whose chief hold upon remembrance 
 now ,s, that his^name and his benevolence have been both embalmed by 
 Elia in his delightful Essay in Praise of Chimney Sweepers Beyond all his 
 school-fellows however, m Charles Lamb's estimation, <L the one he looked 
 up to, thenceforward, as Steele looked up throughout life to Addiso.^ whom 
 he had first known as head boy at the Charterhouse. Coleridge it 1^^ 
 was no more han two years the senior of Lamb, but two years It schoo are 
 as a decade in after life. When the latter quit ed Christ'VHosnital at las7 
 in his sixteenth year, on the 23rd November 1780 the former h^l5 ' 
 
 «ith the brightest prospects \o the uSve^kty' o'f CambX F^ "S 
 chance of gaining an exhibition, Charles Lamb wai! Xwtn 1, 
 by his infirmity of speech. When he threw asidfth.*?,n' ''°*«™'^ 
 the blue suixjoat, he was in the low^ divisfon nf ?h. = S'T '^? ^'^^ 
 Greek form, but 'not Deputy G?eci'^T hav^nr^ead Wgi SaU^ "'^ 
 
 Lucian, and Xenophon. He had acquired both ^n T,r' P''^"'=e, 
 considerable skill fn the nuanT oTt^'^^t h"e Sief^of S 
 composition. Hs love of literature hid'h(.i.n oiJ,Vi niceties of Latin 
 afterwards kept alive, by ColeTd^ meX''t%^e^trup1n"'.oTn 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 7 
 
 II 
 
 from College, the two friends contrived to meet for the discussion of 
 poetry and metaphysics. Their favourite rendezvous was at 17, Newgate 
 Street, in a wainscoted back parlour, at the sign of the Salutation and Cat. 
 There nightly, whenever they could come together, they talked on into the 
 small hours, quaffing egg flip, devouring Welsh rabbits, and smoking pipes of 
 Orinooko. Charles Lamb, however, had to buckle to betimes at the more 
 serious business of Ufe, instead of dreamily dawdling after the Muses, hke one 
 born to at least a competence. His elder brother by a dozen years, whom Mary 
 in her juvenile poem of the "Broken Doll" apostrophized so significantly, even 
 as a child, as " dear little craving, selfish John," was already enrolled as a clerk 
 at the old South-Sea Hoifse. Thither, ' ' where Threadneedle Street abuts upon 
 Bishopsgate," went fora while, in the first bloom of his youth, the "gentle- 
 hearted Charles," embryo poet, essayist, critic, dramatist, humorist. There 
 he famiHarized himself with the mysteries of tare and tret, and brought into prac- 
 tical use whatever knowledge he had already acquired of ciphering. Prior to 
 this, immediately after his leaving Christ's Hospital, Charles had been allowed 
 access to the library of his father's employer, the old bencher. There, among 
 a curiously miscellaneous store of works, he had,' to use his own expression, 
 "browsed," literally in every sense of the phrase, at pleasure. His engage- 
 ment at the South-Sea House was of comparatively brief duration, for on the 
 
 th of April, I7g2, he obtained, through the influence of Mr. Samuel Salt, 
 lis appointmenT" To a clerkship in the Accountant's Office of the East India 
 Company, at the old pro-consular palace, in Leadenhall Street, the site of 
 which is now occupied by what is called East India Avenue. There he con- 
 tinued for three-and-thirty-years in regular employment. His stipend at the 
 outset was barely seventy pounds a year, but it very gradually increased 
 until it reached a maximum of £^600 per annum, a sum placing him, not 
 mertelyin easy, but, for one of his simple tastes, in almost affluent circumstances. 
 Throughout the lengthened period during which he discharged his clerkly 
 duties in the East India House, he was a very model of punctuality. Yet — 
 doubtless, fbr the sake of the Lambesque humour underlying it— the whim- 
 sical story is told of his reply to a Director's complaint about his coming so 
 late; ''Oh,'y-yes, Sir, but then you see I g-go away so early!" To those 
 undongeniil labours of his, three-and-thirty years, the choicest of his life, were 
 sedulously devoted, from the age, that is, of seventeen to the age of fifty. 
 There, he was wont "dolefully to insist— in the ponderous folios ranged upon 
 tjiose familiar bookshelves-^his true Works were discoverable. \X'riting to 
 Coleridge from a desk, the wood of which sometimes entered his soul more 
 piercingly than iron, he said, in allusion to his unsympathetic surroundings, 
 ' ' Not a sOul loves Bowles here ; scarce one has heard of Bums ;. few but laugh 
 at me for reading my Testament : they talk a language I understand not ; I 
 conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to them. 1 can only conversewith 
 you by letter, and with the dead in ' their books. '" Yet, in the intervals of toil, 
 even there, in Leadenhall Street, he had his golden fancies. As a Sonneteer, 
 as a Story-teller, as a Critic, having an exquisite relish for nearly everything 
 that is best in literature, but above all as an Essayist whose subtle combination 
 of the humorous with the pathetic has ever since been recognized as simply 
 incomparable, he contrived, not only to make a sunshine in that shady place, 
 but to sweeten existence for himself even under the weight of a calamity as 
 dreadful as any imagined by Dante in the darkest circle- of his Purgatorio. — ■ 
 
 That calamity descended upon him in the autumn of 1796. It sprang 
 directly from the taint of madness lurking in the blood of the family. Nine 
 months previously, he himself for six weeks together, at the turn of the year 
 1795-96, had succumbed to its terrible influeni,e. Placed under restraint in a 
 lunatic asylum at Hoxton, he had been released at the end of that interval 
 with the balance of his mind completely restored. He returned to his desk- 
 
work at the India House, and to his home, which was no longer in the 
 Temple, but in humble lodgings near Holborn. During the preceding 
 twelvemonth, his father, who was already lapsing into dotage and decrepi- 
 tude, had retired, upon a very small pension, from the service of Mr. Salt, 
 the Inner Temple bencher. To add to the domestic misery, Charles Iamb's 
 mother was to all appearance, permanently bedridden. His well-to-do brother 
 John, of the South Sea House, as usual consulting his own interests exclu- 
 sively, lived elsewhere in great comfort, having nothing whatever to do with 
 the little household, except as an occasional visitor. An old maiden aunt 
 (Hetty) who lived with flie Lambs, added her atom of an annuity to their 
 narrow resources, in their then dwelling place. No. 7, Little Queen Street, 
 Holborn. Charles, the youngest of the group, not merely poured the whole of 
 his small salary into the common stock but, when away from the East India 
 House, devoted himself entirely to his afflicted parents and their surround- 
 ings. The mainstay of them all, the prop and pillar of the house, was Mary 
 Lamb. She passed sleepless nights in attending upon her invalid mother and 
 her imbecile father, and "hved laborious days" in seeing to the comfort of 
 the household. In between whiles she toiled incessantly at her own needlework, 
 besides superintending that of a httle girl who acted as her assistant or appren- 
 tice. Wrought up to an unusual pitch of nervous excitement by a long con- 
 tinuance of these weary days and nights, Mary I .amb betrayed such evidence of 
 having been injuriously affected, that, upon the morning of what was to prove 
 for them all the fatal day, her young brother called upon Dr. Pitcaim, the 
 physician, for the purpose of consulting him in her regard. The latter, as it 
 happened, was away from home, going his rounds, so that the timely aid of 
 his advice was unhappily at the moment inaccessible. The afternoon dinner- 
 hour arrived for the little household, upon that deplorable Thursday, the 22nd 
 September, 1796. What occurred may be found recorded, under the next 
 day's date, in, that year's "Annual Register." The particulars there given are 
 the epitome of the evidence submitted on the morrow (Friday) to the Coroner's 
 Jury, who brought in, without a moment's hesitation, as their verdict — 
 Lunacy. The facts maybe as quickly !old as they were accomplished. While, 
 with the cloth laid, the family were waiting dinner, Mary I^amb, seized with a 
 sudden access of frenzy, snatched up a table-knife, and with it brandished in 
 her hand pursued her apprentice round the apartment. Her bedridden 
 mother, screaming to her to desist, she abruptly abandoned her first inten- 
 tion, and turning upon the helpless invalid with loud shrieks plunged the 
 knife into her heart. Charles Lamb himself was the one — not, as the "Annual 
 Register" states, in error, the landlord of the house— who wrested the blood- 
 stained weapon from the grasp of the unconscious matricide. Swiftly though 
 he did so, more havoc had been effected by the homicidal maniac before she 
 was disarmed. She had hurled the dinner forks frantically about the room, 
 with one of which the poor half-witted father was wounded in the forehead, 
 while the old maiden-aunt lay stretched upon the floor insensible and ap- 
 parently dying. 
 
 Charles Lamb used to say that his life might be comprised in an epigram. 
 If so, it must certainly be an epigram having at the heart of it a tragedy. 
 His witnessing so soon after his own confinement in a madhouse, a catas- 
 trophe thus appalling, one might have thought, must have unseated his 
 reason anew if not permanently. Instead of which it actually seems, 
 for once and for all, to have given it a perfect equipoise, and in doing so, to 
 have elevated, ennobled, subliihated, the whole nature of that young day- 
 dreamer of two-and-twenty. 
 
 At the first shock of this stupendous calamity, his gentle heart seemed com- 
 pletely overwhelmed. " Mention nothing of poetry," he cried out in an agony 
 to Coleridge, adding that he had destroyed every vestige of past vanities of 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 that description. A •' fair-haired maid," the Alice W— n of Elia, had just 
 before captivated his imagination. He tore all thought of the tender passion 
 from his breast, as though it had been a profanation. " I am wedded," he 
 said, with pathetic significance, " to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old 
 father." Upon the evening of that dreadful day, while preserving, as he 
 expressed it, "a tranquilhty not of despair," some neighbours coming in and 
 persuading him to take some food, he suddenly sprang to his feet, from the 
 poor meal he had just begun, with a feeUng of self-abhorrence. " In an agony of 
 emotion," he wrote to his bosom friend, " I found my way mechanically into 
 the adjoining room, and fell on my knees " — observe, he mentions no name ! — 
 "by the side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven, and sometimes of 
 her, for forgetting her so soon I " This incident, though so harrowing by con- 
 trast, is as tenderly affecting as that of Steele's first experience of death when 
 his father died, he himself being at the time a little creature under five years 
 of age. "I remember," he writes in the Tailer, "I went into the room 
 where his body lay, and my mother sate weeping alone by it. I had my 
 battledore in my hand, and fell a beating the coffin, and calling papa ; for, I 
 know not how, I had some idea that he was locked up there." And there- 
 upon, as he relates, his mother caught him in her arms, and, transported 
 beyond all patience of the silent grief she was in before, almost smothered 
 him in her embraces. However dissimilar in themselves, these are distinctly 
 companion pictures— Steele as a child, with the battledore in his hand, pausing 
 bewildered by the side of his father's coffin ; Lamb, in an innocent torment 
 of self-reproach, kneeling by &e side of his mother's coffin, imploring God's 
 forgiveness and hers for a momentary forgetfulness. 
 
 The unhappy matricide herself, immediately upon the close of the coroner's 
 inquest, was placed under rigorous restraint in the Hoxton Asylum, where, 
 but a few months previously, for the' first and only time in his life, her younger 
 brother had been immured. There, under rational treatment, her reason was 
 soon restored. Although, upon realizing what had happened, Mary I-arab 
 appears to have been at the first completely appalled, she speedily, and thence- 
 forth permanently, found solace in the conviction that, for an act done thus in 
 a state of mental aberration, she could be held in no way morally responsible. 
 Her selfish elder brother, John, upon the plea of her being liable to these sud- 
 den outbursts of homicidal mania, was for having her, during the rest of her 
 existence, kept rigidly in confinement. Charles, however, revolted from this 
 proposition. Holding his sister to be quite guiltless, and yearning to her only 
 the more tenderly because of her affliction, he entered into a solemn compact 
 that he would take charge of her from that time forward, on the simple vmder- 
 standing that she was confided freely to his protection. For thirty-four years 
 he held unfalteringly by that agreement. Until his own death came he was 
 her devoted protector. His self-sacrifice in this involved his giving up all 
 thought of love and marriage. Such was her chronic condition, that within 
 two years from the date of her first fatal paroxysm he wrote these terrible 
 words: "I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness." Her in- 
 sanity, in point of fact, was simply Intermittent. It was of deplorably, and at 
 the last of alarmingly, frequent recurrence. Towards her support, from begin- 
 ning to end, her elder brother never moved a finger, never contributed one six- 
 pence. Upon Charles Lamb devolved the whole cost and the sole responsi- 
 bility. His first step, on her release from the Hoxton Asylum, was to take 
 lodgings for her at Hackney. Thence he brought her back home, his income 
 at the time being barely a hundred a year. His father, who had sunk in the 
 meanwhile into a state of hopeless imbecility, passed away soon after becoming 
 a widower. The old maiden aunt, Hetty, died a month later on. Brother 
 and sister were then left entirely to themselves, their only pecuniary resources 
 being, from that time forward, derived from Charles's clerkship. Narrow though 
 
 B * 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 their means continued to be for several years— the increase of income at the 
 India House being at the outset hardly perceptible— they sufficed. Their 
 happiness in a companionship that was niutually delightful would have been 
 complete but for its many disastrous interruptions. The premonitory symptoms 
 with Mary Lamb were unmistalsable. They were restlessness, Ibw fever, and 
 insomnia. When these became apparent beyond the reach of further doubt, 
 he wfluld get leave of absence from the office as if for a day's pleasure. And 
 uponthesj occasions, the two afflicted ones might be met walking across the 
 fields together to Hoxton, Charles carrying the strait waistcoat in his pocket 
 in case of emergency, brother and sister weeping bitterly. Once, and but 
 once only during this hfe of noble endurance a cry of anguish seems to have 
 been wrung from him by the crushing weight of his responsibilities. Another, 
 death in the home circle had to be recorded. A faithful but tyrannous i 
 old servant (Becky) was lying dead upstairs. - Mary, as usual, was away 
 at the lunatic asylum. Charles was pouring ■ out his heart lo Coleridge,,, 
 "My heart is quite sick," he wrote, '-'and I don't know where to look foo, 
 relief. My head is very bad. I almost wish Mary were dead." That thought 
 of faltering, however, was only for an instant. The awful load he had . 
 undertaken to bear was never once laid aside. Down to the very end the 
 formidable ordeal of his life was passed with calm determination. Along a 
 pathway that ended only with his grave, he trod the burning ploughshares. 
 
 , tharles Lamb's career in authorship liad its beginning in the very year which 
 saw his home laid waste as by the fall of a thunderbolt. Then, in 1796, he came 
 into his first battle in literature, as he himself expressed it, under .that greater ^ 
 Ajax, Coleridge. Four Sonnets, included by the latter in a clumsily printed' 
 \ volume entitled "Poems on Various Subjects," published at Bristol, marked 
 J the first appearance in print of the small poet who was to grow into the great 
 essayist. Another and more important volume of poems, published in the 
 same way, provincially, for Coleridge, within the following year, 1797, com- 
 prised among its contents, in addition to a few lyrics from the haniWof Charles 
 Lloyd, a cluster of Miscellaneous Poems, which were announced in the 
 preface as by ' Charles Lamb, of the India House. During the following 
 twelvemonth, 1798, Lloyd and Lamb, gaining courage, issued from the press, 
 together, in London, an unpretending little book of their own entitled Blank 
 Verse. Small in quantity and unambitious in design, their productions 
 passed not unnoticed. In the opening number of the now famous Anti- 
 Jacobin, Gilray's pencil caricatured Coleridge and Southey with asses' heads, 
 and Lloyd and Lamb as toad and frog respectively. There, too, in the July 
 number, under the cynical heading of "The New Morality," appeared, among 
 other audacious rhymes, the following apostrophe : — 
 
 Couriers and Stars, sedition's evening host, 
 Thou Morning Chronicle and Momitig Post, 
 Whether ye make the rights of man your tlieme. 
 Your countrjr libel, or your God blaspheme. 
 Or dirt on private worth and virtue throw, 
 Still blasphemous or blackguard praise Lepaux. 
 And ye five wandering bards that move 
 In sweet accord of harmony and love, 
 Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb and Co., 
 Turie all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux : 
 
 the probability being, as has been remarked, that Charles Lamb for one, up to 
 that moment, had never even heard of the Republican charlatan. Another 
 allusion was made to them in a precisely similar strain through a parody on 
 Collins' " Ode to the Passions," called "The Anarchists," \n\\i& Anti-Jacoliii 
 for September : — ' 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 See, faithful to their mighty dam, 
 Coleridge, Southey, Ooyd and Lamb, 
 In splayfoot madrigals of love, 
 Soft moving like the widowed dove : 
 
 the first-mentioned of the four being yet further infamously denounced, else- 
 where in the letter-press, as beginning a Citizen of the World, by leaving his poor 
 children fatherless and his wife destitute : the scurrile satirist adding, ' ' Ex 
 uno disce his friends Lamb and Southey." Such at that time were the ameni- 
 ties of literature. 
 
 Before 1798 had run out, Charles Lamb had given to the world as his first 
 prose work, his charming novelette, or miniature romance, ' ' Rosamund Gray 
 and Old Blind Margaret. " The name of his heroine he appears to have bor- 
 rowed from a small volume of poems by Charles Lloyd, published three years 
 previously (in 1795) at Carlisle. Spealdng of this exquisite little story, Shelley, 
 twenty years after its first ' publication, exclaimed in a letter to Leigh Hunt, 
 dated 8th September, 1819 : " What a lovely thing is ' Rosamund Gray ! ' How 
 much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest parts of our nature is in it!" 
 The child-heroine's reputed dwelling-place, it maybe interesting to add, is still 
 shown at Blenheim, as one of a couple of cottages near Healin Green, soma 
 two miles from Blakesweir. 
 
 From an exceedingly early period in his literary life, Charles Lamb's atten- 1/ 
 tion had been directed stagewards. His love of the drama, as his Elian Essay, 
 ■ ' My First Play, " dearly shows, dated from his very childhood. As a stripling (I 
 he had penned what was probably his first work, the MS. libretto of a Comit 
 Opera, still treasured up in the British Museum, and now published for the 
 first time {infra, pp. 172-195) in this Popular Centenary Edition, together 
 with facsimiles proving it to be unmistakably in Charles Lamb's hand- 
 writing. His love for the old dramatists, pre-eminently for Shakspere 
 and his immediate contemporaries, as he afterwards, in truth, made plain 
 enough to the world's comprehension, amounted to little less than a passion. 
 He himself, as the eighteenth century drew, towards its close, was labouring assi- 
 duously at a tragedy. In 1799 the writing of this five-act drama in blank verse 
 was completed. As it was not published, however, until three years afterwards, 
 more particular allusion to it for the moment may be judiciously postponed. 
 Lamb at this period, it is worthy of note, moreover, was contributing in 
 common with Coleridge and Southey to the Annual Anthology. 
 
 Early in 1800 the Lambs moved from 7, Little Queen Street, Holborn, with, 
 all its terrible associations— the site of 6, 7, 8, by the way, is now occupied by 
 Trinity Church— to 45, Chapel Street, Fentonville. It was during his residence 
 there that a tender Platonic fancy was inspired in his breast by the sight of Hester 
 Savory, a pretty young Quakeress, whose memory upon the occasion of her pre- 
 mature death, three years afterwards, he embalmed in a lovely elegy. Tarrying 
 but a few months in Pentonville, the Lambs, still in 1800, moved townwards, 
 to 34, Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane, within three minutes' walk from 
 their birthplace. As if this near neighbourhood to it were not enough, how- 
 ever, before the new century had dawned, they had passed once more, after an 
 absence of barely five years from it, within the famiUar precincts of the Temple, 
 taking up their abode, as it proved, for nine years together, at 16, Mitre Court 
 Buildings. It was at an earlier date than this that Lamb is reported to have 
 written pohtical squibs for sixpence in the opposition newspapers. At the 
 beginning of 1800, however, Coleridge, on coming up to London, widened his 
 field of operations in that way, by introducing him to the then editor of the 
 Morning Post, Daniel Stuart. Lamb's frolic fun as an epigrammatist was 
 always of the free-and-easy, or harum-scarum character. It was thus, for 
 example, when he wrote in the Examiner on the Disappointment of the Whig 
 Associates of the Prince Regent :— 
 
T 
 
 .Charles Lamb: A Prefatoij Memoir. 
 
 Ye politicians, tell me, pray. 
 
 Why thus with woe and care rent? 
 
 This is the worst that you can say. 
 
 Some wind has blown the wig away. 
 
 And left the Heir Apparent. 
 Similarly, though here with savage scorn, ^ther than with good-humoured 
 derision; he wrote, about this very time (1800), in the Albion his apostrophe to 
 Sir James Mackintosh : — 
 
 Though thou'rt like Judas, an apostate black. 
 In the resemblance one thing thou dost lack ; 
 When he had gotten his ill-purchased pelf. 
 He went away and wisely hanged himself : 
 This thou mayst do at last, yet much I doubt 
 If thou hast any Bowels to gush out. 
 The Tragedy, just now referred to as having been completed by Ch^s 
 Lamb in 1799, was not pubhshed until early in 1802. Originally entitled 
 ■' Pride's Cure," it was in the end called, more simply, after the hero of it, John 
 WOODVIL. Having been placed in the hands pf John Kemble, with an eye to 
 its production on the boards of Drury Lane, it was retained so long that the 
 author at length applied for the manager's decision. He was thereupon quietly 
 informed that the manuscript had been somehow lost— a cool suggestion being 
 added that another copy should be sent in for consideration. Fortunately the 
 rough draft of the play was still in existence. This having been fairly written 
 out, the MS. was again submitted to Kemble, only, however, to be handed 
 back a little later on, when the manager, according to his wont, bowed out the 
 disappointed author, poUtely bidding him beware, as he did so, of that well- 
 worn door-step, at the lessee's private entrance in Great Russell Street, which 
 so many another aspiring dramatist, before and- since, has found facile 
 descensus rather than a j^rarfaj ad Parnassum. When the rejected tragedy 
 was at length published, it was reviewed in a tone of the gravest banter in 
 the third number of the Edinburgh Review, Jeffi-ey writing of it as evidently 
 the work of a man of the age of Thespis ! The reviewer, seno-comically, 
 descanted, besides, upon the antiquity of Lamb's muse and language and 
 versification, describing his rhetorical figures as having about them all the 
 careless indelicacy of ancient manners. 
 
 Until the early part of 1809 the Lambs continued to reside at 16, Mitre 
 Court Buildings, in the Temple. There it was they wrote together MRS. 
 Leicester's School, to which Charles contributed three, and his sister 
 seven, stories, purporting to be the history of several young ladies related 
 by themselves. There afterwards they wrote in collaboration their well- 
 known Tales from Shakspere, fourteen being from the pen of Mary 
 Lamb, and six from the hand of her brother. During the last year of their 
 sojourn in Mitre Court Buildings, Charles produced, less as a paraphrase than 
 as a prose epitome of Chapman's Odyssey, his admirable version of The Ad- 
 ventures OF Ulysses, a work designed by him, and not unworthily, as a 
 companion volume to Bishop F^ndlon's Telemachus. Another work pro- 
 duced by Charles Lamb in 1808 — one that was published for him by the 
 Messrs. T,ongman — was his twofold masterpiece, in the way, that is, of selec- 
 tion and annotation, known as Specimens of the English Dramatic 
 Poets who lived about the time of Shakspere. 
 
 Upon quitting Mitre Court Buildings, the Lambs settled down, hard by, for 
 another interval of nine years, from 1809 to 1817, in the top story at 4, Inner 
 Temple Lane ; and it was during the earlier period of their sojourn there that 
 they brought out together their Poetry for Children. There Charles, who 
 was greatly enamoured with the locality, meant to have'lived and died, though 
 the abode, when dispassionately regarded, had, it is true, but small attrac- 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 13 
 
 tions. The apartments, as their occupant himself described them with 
 an odd sort of gusto, looked out upon a gloomy court like a churchyard, 
 adorned with three trees and a pump. The period of the Lambs' occupancy 
 of these chambers, however, is considered by Talfourd to have been about the 
 happiest in all Charles's Ufe. There his Wednesday nights acquired their 
 greatest lustre, and, it might even be added, a certain amount of celebrity. 
 There he gathered about him his troops of friends — people worthy of that 
 name, as being his intimate and congenial companions. The mere reckoning 
 up of their names is like counting the stars in a constellation. The chief 
 among them, however, need alone here be enumerated : — 
 
 Pre-eminent in Lamb's eyes, on the score at once of affection and of admira- 
 tion, was Coleridge, whose naif inquiry upon one occasion, ' ' Charles, did you 
 ever hear me preach?" drew from the irrepressible humorist the answer, "I 
 n-never heard you do anything else 1 " He it was, also, that most dearly loved 
 of all his friends, whom, at another time, he likened so irresistibly to a 
 ' ' damaged archangel ! " Conspicuous among these friends, besides, was Martin 
 Barney, to whom, as everybody knows. Lamb observed, in the middle of a 
 rubber, "If dirt were trumps, Martin, w- what hands you would hold ! " 
 . There, too, was Wordsworth, whose genius he so reverenced, yet whom he 
 is actually said, once, in his freakish humour, to have shaken, not by the hand 
 but by the nose, with a " How d'ye do, old Lakey poet?" Writing to him 
 another while, in spite of Wordsworth's constitutional solemnity, "Some 
 d— d people have come in, and I must finish abruptly," but adding quietly 
 in a preposterous postscript, ' ' by d — d I only ■ mean deuced." Barry 
 Cornwall; it was, another of these intimates, who drew from him the 
 remark, in reference to some observation, evidencing a certain degree of 
 smartness, "Very well, my dear boy, very well; B-Ben Jonson has said 
 worse things, and b-b-better 1 " Crabb Robinson's announcement of his 
 maiden brief, elicited from Lamb, in the same spirit of mockery, the 
 profane ejaculation, "Thou first great cause, least understood!" Southey's ■ 
 indifterent lyric about a rose incited the wicked wit in a kindred mood 
 to remark, "Your rose is insipid, it has neither thorns nor sweetness." 
 John Rickman, Clerk of the House of Commons, another of these trea- 
 sured friends, was referred to by Lamb, after a very different fashion, as "a 
 fine rattling fellow, who has gone through life laughing at solemn apes; • 
 hugely literate; talking Greek with Porson, nonsense with me; fullest of 
 matter with least verbosity." While of another intimate, Thomas Manning, 
 Charles declared enthusiastically, "He discloses not, save to select wor- 
 shippers ; and will leave the world without any one hardly but me knowing 
 how stupendous a creature he is." 
 
 The cherished companions of Charles Lamb were for the most part book- 
 worms, critics, authors, and social oddities. Many were celebrities. A few 
 were hardly presentable. His surroundings were of the homeliest, his habits 
 completely unfashionable. Yet his Wednesday evenings (when he and his sister 
 had their At Homes) were the delight of his own chosen circle, especially in 
 the winter time, when the card-table was drawn out, and the fire crackhng, 
 and the long-sixes lit, the snuff-box ready for any one's handling, the kettle 
 singing on the hob, glasses and bottle and cold viands within reach of those 
 who cared for them. The familiar guests did what they liked, there, read or 
 chatted, came and went as they pleased, books and needlework lying about — 
 veritable At Homes, with a sense of slippered, almost of slip-shod, ease, and 
 an utter forgetfulness of anything in the shape of ceremony. Every one took 
 his part in the conversation. But among them all, as WiUiam HazUtt tells us, 
 " no one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half- 
 a-dozen half sentences as Elia himself." At these times, according to John 
 Forster's testimony also, " no one said such startling things as Lamb." Then 
 
14 Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 'his quipgand oranfcs.were at their.blithest, and his puns, squandered -aboiit.^ii 
 libitum, liunning ^lL times into the most fantastic extravagances,. Many of his 
 •more brilliant mots, however, had about them the punster's doom of evan- 
 fiscetice, as 'Talfourd wittily eja,culates, in their, regard " a moment i5?-;^/;/, theji 
 
 Towards the qlose of 1817 thei.I^mbs again removed, and this time finally, 
 ifromthe Temple. Quitting the top story of 4, Innei:, Temple Lane, they took 
 up their, .abode for the next, six years at 20, Russell' Street, Covent Garden. 
 Their apartments, which, were there, oh the first floor, -were situated over what 
 was then a brazier's, what afterwards became a boolcseller's, and what is now- 
 a-days, as it has been for many years past, a ham and beef shop. It is the 
 corner house.ithe side of which looks out upon Bow Street; the site bein^ 
 :that upon which stood,,, in Dryden's time, what was' long famous as Willg 
 Coffee House. A twelvemonth .after this change of residence, there was 
 published, in 1S18, ,iii two. small volumes, the first edition of the 'Workg 
 of Charles I^mb, comprising, among !thein, not only his moderately-sized 
 collection, of poems, . his ttagddy of John 'Woodvil, and his .story, of 
 Rosam'upd . Gf ay, biit with them those niasterly criticisms on Hogarth au,d 
 ShakspBre,whioh,^,issued frpni. the press anonymously (in^irSii) in -the .pages 
 of the Rcfiector, until thus repriiited, with acknowledgment as his, had re- 
 mained for seven years altogether iunnoticed. 
 
 At the beginning of 1S26, when Charles Lamb was completing his /orty-fifth 
 yearj. and "when his intellectual powers were at their best and .brightest, there 
 came for him what he soon made plain to himself and to everybody else was 
 his priceless opportunity. In the January of' that year there . was started 
 by the Messrs, Baldwin, Craddock and Joy, in half-crowii jnonthly numbers, 
 'Tlie ,LiOndon. Alagazinc. ■ Its. editor at -the outset was Mr. John Scott, 
 who had previously conducted, until -its -demise, the- Cliampion news- 
 paper. Under his supervision, and guidance there was collected together 
 a brilliant band of contributors. Hazlitt was the dramatic and art critic 
 of the. new pubUcation. He there sketched the wonders of FonthiU 
 Abbey, expatiated on the matchless beauties of the Elgin Marbles, and 
 poured forth in a series of a dozen papers his radiant Table Talk. 
 De Quincey there confided to the ear of the public his Confessions of 
 an Opium Eater, and reahzed for the first time to many the inner marvels of 
 the genius of Jean Paul Richter. Carlyle there produced his maiden work 
 illustrative of the Life and Writings of Schiller. The translator of Dante, 
 the Rev. Henry Francis Gary, there appended to Dr. Johnson's." Lives of 
 the Poets "'Other later memoirs byway of continuation. Among the Ij^ists 
 on the London were John Keats and James Montgomery. There, too, 1'homas 
 Hood wrote his first poem of any pretension. There Allan Cunningham 
 recounted the traditional tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry. There 
 troUedhissimpleditties, John Clare, the Northamptonshire Poet. Thereflaunted 
 for a while among the best of them, under the guise of an ex-officer of 
 Dragoons, one seemingly of the curled darlings of Mayfair, who descanted 
 vivaciously upon art, letters, and society, under the ripm de plume of Janus 
 ■Weathercock. ' This was no other than the atrocious miscreant Thomas 
 Griffiths Wainewright, the murderer, among others, with the deadhest delibera- 
 tion (afteri effecting insurances upon her life, to the amount of .£18,000 sterUng) 
 of his 'beautifur young sister-in-law, Helen' Abercrombie, whose assassination 
 the scoundrel afterwards justified, with a curl of his moustache, and a lisping 
 sneer, upon. the plea that "she had such d- — d thick ankles!" Lord 
 Lytton has transfixed the reptile with his pen— hke another scorpion added 
 to a cabinet of horrors— as the Gabriel Varney of "Lucretia.'' So decep- 
 tive, however, was .this dastardly assassin, even in the eyes of the most dis- 
 cerning of his brother contributors, that Charles Lamb could write of him to 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 15 
 
 Southej^ as "the light and warm as hght-hearted Janus." Pre-eminent among 
 this motley array of contributors, the pride and boast of the London Maga- 
 zine, as he very soon came to be, was Charles Lamb himself, in his newly- 
 assumed capacity as Elia the Essayist. Even here, nevertheless, in this greatest 
 of all his literary successes, he can hardly be said, in a pecuniary sense, to 
 havs struck upon a golden vein. The largest amount of remuneration he 
 ever received as Elia from the London Magazine was at the r^te of ;^i7o a year 
 for two years together. Jocularly, he used to speak of himself as the Pub- 
 lishers' ruin, exclaiming once in a letter to Procter, "Damn the age! I'll 
 write for antiquity !■" Between the August of 1820 and the November of 
 1S22 he had contributed as many as twenty-seven Elian Essays to the London 
 Magazine. These, with another reprinted from the Indicator, were, in 1823, 
 collected together, and issued from the press as a substantive publication. The 
 magazine had long before this passed into the hands of the Messrs. Taylor 
 and Hessey, as its publishers and proprietors. At uncertain intervals Charles 
 Lamb continued to write in its pages under his favourite signature ; notably 
 after the commencement of a new and enlarged series of the London at the 
 beginning of 1825. It was in the April number of that year, for example, 
 
 that he gave to the world his bewitching little sketch of "Barbara S '-." 
 
 Confronting page 500 of this Popular Centenary Edition, will be found the.- 
 facsimile of a note in the Essayist's handwriting, in which he states dis-' 
 
 tinctly in so many words, "Barbara S shadows under that name Miss . 
 
 Kelly's early life," adding, "and I had the anecdote beautifully from her." 
 As it happens— to my very great pleasure be it said— I can repeat in Charles 
 Lamb's own words a sentence of his occurring in this very essay. ' ' I have 
 had the honour (I must ever call it) once to have been admitted to the tea- 
 table of Miss Kelly." It can scarcely be matter of surprise, therefore, that 
 while engaged upon this very labour of love for mo, the editing of the writings 
 of the Master Essayist, I should have challenged Miss Kelly to throw some light . 
 upon her old friend's bewildering announcement. In answer to that challenge _ 
 Miss Kelly, with a distinctness and precision of memory befitting eighteen 
 rather than eighty-five, has now given, through the following communication, 
 penned fifty years after the famous Elian Essay was first printed, her own 
 charming version of the incident : — 
 
 The True Story of Barbara S . 
 
 r 
 
 Bayswater, Sepiemier 28, 1875. 
 My Dear Sir, 
 I perfectly remember relating an incident of my childhood to Charles 
 Lamb and his dear sister, and I have not the least doubt that the intense 
 interest he seemed to take in the recital, induced him to adopt it as the 
 
 principal feature in his beautiful story of " Barbara S ." Much, however, 
 
 as I venerate the wonderful powers of Charles Lamb as a writer — grateful as I 
 ever must feel to have enjoyed for so many years the friendship of himself and 
 his dear sister, and proudly honoured as I am by the two exquisite sonnets he has 
 given to the world as tributary to my humble talent, I have never been able 
 thoroughly to appreciate the extraordinary skill with which he has, in the con- 
 struction of his story, desired and contrived so to mystify and characterize the 
 events, as to keep me out of sight, and render it utterly impossible for any one 
 to guess at me as the original heroine. Such, I know, was his intention, 
 otherwise, so to have avoided and altered the facts in every point as he has done, 
 would have surprised and disheartened me. As it is, I persuade myself, that I 
 only second his delicate motives, when I object to appear in the garb in which 
 he has so skilfully presented the young lady. So that if I am to be, as it seems. 
 
1 6 Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 considered and announced as the bon&fide heroine of the tale, I frankly declare, 
 that I infinitely prefer the position and feelings of ' ' little Fanny Kelly " to 
 those of Miss Barbara. The question is, how truly, and to what extent, it even 
 "shadows" the early life of Frances Maria Kelly ? I was not a little playhouse 
 " Super," snatched from respectable poverty, to be plunged (alas ! as such too 
 often are) without instruction, or protection, into a life of risk to health and 
 morals. I was a well-born, cared for child, of a devoted mother, whose position 
 and education as a gentlewoman, taught her that self-esteem which, with 
 mental courage, patient endurance, and unceasing sacrifices, enabled her with 
 her five children to " take arms against a siege of troubles." 
 
 In the year 1799, Miss Jackson, one of my mother's daughters, by her first 
 husband, was placed under the special care of dear old Tate Wilkinson, pro- 
 prietor of the York Theatre, there to practice, as in due progression, what she 
 had learned of Dramatic Art, while a Chorus Singer at the Theatre Royal, Drury 
 Lane, coming back, as she did after a few years, as the wife of the late 
 celebrated, inimitable Charles Mathews, to the Haymarket Theatre. In 1799, 
 through the influence of my uncle, Michael Kelly, the celebrated singer 
 and composer of that day, I was allowed to become a miniature chorister 
 in her place ; causing, I assure you, considerable animadversion among the 
 supernumerary class, as to the shameful impropriety of giving " that little thing " 
 one pound a week, as regular salary. Be it known, however, that though only 
 nine years of age, I could read and sing at sight, any piece of music put into 
 my hands ; and when through John Kemble (as I have already told in public, 
 and am even now recording in my reminiscences) I had the Duke of York, in 
 Richard III. given me to study, I came on the following day to rehearsal quite 
 perfect in the words, and when told by what action to express the sneer at 
 Gloucester's deformity, I said (as poor Barbara could not have said), "Thank 
 you, ma'am, my mother told me how that should be done." Whilst I write, I 
 feel myself something too intrusive, but Miss Barbara must give me my rights, 
 and stand content upon her own merits. 
 
 About this time, my father had been four years from home, which he left self- 
 banished, to avoid the then consequences of incurring debts he could not pay, 
 and which he never would have incurred but in absurd imitation of the princely 
 life his brother Michael was led into with almost equal rashness. And I must 
 needs hint, that as under Michael Kelly's very peculiar domestic circumstances, 
 an influence existed to which my mother could not make her pride succumb 
 the " brother and uncle" fell very short of his supposed responsibiUty and 
 our struggle was indeed a very sad one. 
 
 I am now coming briefly to the "Dniry Lane Treasury," on which (with now 
 and then a half-guinea, ill spared— under the wax seal of a letter from York 
 was our only dependance. Any one may know the state of England at that 
 time. All our men gone to the war. Dancers learning to make their own 
 shoes Bread-ashiUingandapennyper quartern. Sugar- one shilling per 
 pound. Salt— sixpence. Tea (fit to drink)- ten shillings. Green ditto— twelve 
 shillings. &c. &c. 
 
 One Saturday, during the limited season of nine months in the year Mr 
 Peake (dear, good old gentleman !) looking, as I remember he always did— 
 anxiously perplexed-doubtless as to how he could best dole out the too 
 frequently insufiicient amount provided for the ill-paid company, silently looked 
 me m the face, while he carefully folded a very dirty, ragged bank note--DUt U 
 into my hand, patted my cheek, and with a shght preffure on my shoulder 
 hinting there was no time for our usual gossip-as good as said • ■ go mv dear '• 
 and I hurried down the long gallery, lined down each side with performers of 
 all degrees, more than one of whom whispered as I passed-" Is it full rv.1, 
 dear?" I nodded " Yes," and proceeded 'to my seat'^on the w ndow of'^th'^ 
 landing-place. ^ 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 17 
 
 It was a great comfort in those days, to have a bank-note to look at ; but not 
 always easy to open one. Mine had been cut and repaired with a line of gum 
 paper, about twenty times as thick as the note itself, threatening the total 
 destruction of the thin part. 
 
 . Now observe in what small matters Fanny and Barbara, were in a marked 
 degree different characters. Barbara, at 1 1 years of age, was some time before 
 she felt the different size of a guinea to a half guinea, held tight in her hand. 
 I, at 9 years old, was not so untaught, or innocent. I was a woman of the 
 world. I took nothing for granted. I had a deep respect for Mr. Peake, but 
 the join might have disfigured the note — destroyed its currency ; and it was 
 my business to see all safe. So, I carefully opened it. A two pound- note in- 
 stead of one ! The blood rushed into my face, the tears into my eyes, and 
 for a moment, something like an ecstacy of joy passed through my mind. 
 "Oh ! what a blessing to my dear mother!" — "Towhom?" — in an instant 
 said my violently beating heart, — " My mother ?" Why she would spurn me 
 for the wish. How shall I ever own to her my guilty thought ? I trembled 
 violently — I staggered back on my way to the Treasury, but no one would let 
 me pass, until I said, " But Mr. Peake has given me too much." "Too 
 much, has he?" said one, and was followed by a coarse, cold, derisive, general 
 laugh. Oh ! how it went to my heart ; but on I went. 
 
 ' ' If you please, Mr. Peake, you have given me a two . 
 
 "A what 1" 
 
 "A two. Sir!" 
 
 " A two ! — God bless my soul !— tuf-tut-tut-tut— dear, dear, dear !— God bless 
 my soul ! There, dear," and without another 'word, he, in exchange, laid a 
 one pound note on the desk ; anew one, quite clean, — a bright, honest looking 
 note,— mine, the one 1 had a right to,— my own,— within the Hmit of my poor 
 deservings. 
 
 Thus, my dear sir, I give (as you say you wish to have ths facts as accurately 
 stated as possible) the simple, absolute truth, and when I have the pleasure to 
 see you, I will point out, in each particular, the extraordinary mystification with 
 which it has been sought to ignore, as it were, my existence, with any reference 
 
 to " Barbara S ." At all events, I trust, my dear Sir, that you will believe 
 
 me to be, 
 
 Yours, very sincerely and faithfully, 
 
 Frances Maria Kelly. 
 
 Charles Kent, Esq. 
 
 P.S. — You see how I shake hands. This "very important document" may, 
 I think, be considered much in the same light as the MS. poems lately left in 
 a cab by a gentleman, who advertised for them as — "Of no value to any one 
 but the owner. " 
 
 Barbara S , it will be seen, therefore, was but another illustration of Charles 
 
 Lamb's dehght in sending a truth masquerading. Nothing he enjoyed more 
 than tricking one out almost beyond the reach of recognition. He prided him- 
 self on being — in contradistinction to a matter-of-fact man — what he called 
 "a matter of lie man." He had a roguish satisfaction in imposing, upon his 
 reader's good faith, by means of circumstantial details bom entirely of his 
 own imagination, and these he would set forth in his narratives with the 
 gravest particularity, as though they were historical and incontrovertible. 
 Some of his literary hoaxes in this way were masterpieces of ingenuity. His 
 mock life of Liston, the comedian, for example, ran for a while the round of 
 the newspapers, to his intense amusement, as a perfectly authentic record, 
 genealogical and otherwise. He played with truths as dexterously, for the 
 
1 8 Chfirles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 mere fun of the thing, in an essay, in a parenthesis even, nay, as in this in- 
 stance, in the merest footnote, as a juggler with gilt balls on his little strip 
 of carpet. Occasionally at these moments, even in the lyii^st of his gravest 
 disclaimers, you may catch a glint of the twinl<ling eyes and dimpUhg i^iDUth 
 of the humorist. But. as a rule, when really bent upoii' taking you in, as in 
 Barbara S— ^, his gravity is imperturbable. "Insoluble compounds of 
 jest and earnest," they^ave been well called, these wonderful,, these simply 
 inimitable Essays of Elia. Enthroned there, he had no need according to 
 his varying theme, 
 
 to choose Cervantes' serious air. 
 
 Or shake and laugh in Rabelais' easy chair. 
 
 But, in an easier chair of his own, he discoursed exactly, as the htimbur of the 
 moment prompted him, upon whatever came uppermost; and this too in his own 
 natural voice, in words that by no possibility could have fallen from any other 
 lips. To no author who ever breathed is Buffon's immortal axiom " Le style 
 c'est I'homme ! " more directly applicable. His style is indeed himself. Not a 
 shadowing forth of something within him, but his very innermost self, his 
 eidolon, his distinctive individuality. It is recognizable at once, this Elian air, 
 as a something suL generis, a thing unique, a lusus hterarum. And the mere 
 manner of it, what a charm it has ! The very diction, what a flavour, what an 
 aroma there is about it ! It is antiquity talking to us afresh, re-bom, rejuve- 
 nescent : and yet for all that, still to the very last, ingrained, ineradicable anti- 
 quity ! Not "ba.ld antiquity" either, but, as onemight say, flowing, hirsute — 
 with a bloom upon it, though still venerable. Employed by any o&er writer 
 than Charles Lamb, the archaic words, the obsolete phrases, the fantastic turns 
 of expression, the discarded or forgotten idioms, must almost by necfessity have 
 degenerated into a mass of affectation. But as they are here employed by 
 Elia, there is about them not a particle of affectation. As a writer, he may 
 be said to have been "to tlie manner born." Could he by any rare chance 
 have dropped this distinctive style— in which he spoke and wrote and thought 
 habitually— then, but not otherwise, there would have been hazard of his 
 degenerating into affectation. And this because the manner thus peculiar to 
 him was not assumed, so to speak, as a raiment with which he clothed his ideas 
 It was no mere husk, or shell, or superficies— it was, as already said, ingrained ' 
 It was as the very substance of him ; it was part and parcel of himselfra som&- 
 thmg mherenf,- mtegral, ineradicable. It is no more reasonably to be taken 
 exception to m his instance than it would be reasonable to charge any one with 
 responsibility because of the natural colour of his hair, the contour of his 
 features, or tlie shade of his complexion. In order to recognize how literally 
 true all this_ is, as to there being no tendency even to affectation in Charles 
 Lamb s mode.of put ing his thoughts into written language, it is onlv neces- 
 sary to examine anything Jotted down by him at his most careless moments 
 the merest scrap of a note dashed off, upon the spur of the moment, in helter- 
 skelter scribbling to afnend Turning to his"^ delightful Correspondence 
 that IS to say, examining not the Essays but his familiaHetters to his int"mate! 
 Knsfetlndy Eha" '^ =""' '= ''''''''^ '^™^ '^""S'-ut, he is still tothe 
 
 butnfiTfi.rp?aten^?hV^'^;\'i^r^^^^ 
 
 Browne with Sir Richard Steele, and with Joseph ST Ind whaTcS ' 
 papers there are among these half hundred Eh^ masterpieces ITlTclo^stera! 
 f^'""!??^"! 'k' ^°"'h-Sea House," which we traverse'^on crossjnl the vefv 
 threshold, how he re-peoples them with life-like glimpses of his bro"her cle^^ 
 Z TT '^^'T'?^ ^""^ expanding over his muffin -PlumerratZgraWe: 
 headed, and obstreperous-Harry iVIan terse, fresh, epigrammatb-john Tpp 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 19 
 
 the accounlant, so formal in his life that his actions seem ruled with a ruler — 
 Thomas Tame, condescending in the aristocratic bend of his figure, by reason 
 of his constant remembrance of his high lineage, A remembnince sweetening , . 
 and ennobling his poverty, in spite of his being endowed with an intellect ' 
 of the shallowest order, his mind being, as Lamb puts it in his' bookish way, 
 ' ' in its original state of white paper ! " 
 
 The diversity of themes descanted upon by Elia is in itself marvellous. 
 Cheek by jowl with that ' ' band of shining ones, " for example, the Quakers and 
 Quakeresses, whose very raiment as he describes it, seems incapable of re- 
 ceiving a soil, " cleanliness with them being something more than the absence 
 of its contrary," he dehneates just as lovingly, the Chimney Sweepers; not 
 grown sweepers, that is, but those tender novices blooming through their first 
 nigritude, whose early cry he likens to the peep peep of the young sparrow, 
 ' ' youthful Africans of our own growth, almost clergy imps, dim specs, irmoceiit 
 blacknesses.'.' He expatiates, again, as none but your well-habituated playgoer 
 could do upon the merits of eertain rare Old Actors. He.renders. what nearly 
 amounts to the absence of a sense almost delightful, vide his Chapter oii Ears. He 
 has his tender Reverie of Dream Children, his serio-comic Complaint as, to the 
 Decay of Beggars, his sprightly vindication of the sweet folly of Valentines, 
 his fraternization with the drolls of history and fiction d propos to All Fools'? 
 Day. The rosy gilled Borrower, as a member of what he gravely terms the 
 great or sovereign race, finds in him at least an appreciator and a celebrant. 
 His delicately outlined sketches start from the page, living and breathing. 
 Mrs. Battle, "Old Sarah Battle, (now with God) who next fo her devotions 
 loved a game of whist," thanks to him, has her wish immortally realized-4 
 basking for ever in front of a clean-swept hearth, a clear fire crackling behind 
 the bars, the curtains close drawn, the rigour of ihe game predominant ! 
 Nothing he touches, as Johnson said of Goldsmith, in the famous epitaph, but 
 he adorns. His Grace before Meat, not only blesses the repast, but gives one 
 an appetite. If he discourses of a viand, his very words are savorous, his 
 very style is succulent. Reading, his "Dissertation upon Roast Pig," we 
 emulate Hoti the Chinese swineherd, and Bobo his lubberly boy, we too seem 
 to have burnt our fingers with the cracklmg, we too have our mouths set 
 a-watering. If he celebrates the acting of Munden, he not only enables you 
 to realize that matchless player's inexhaustible battery of looks, his 
 unaccountable warfare with your gravity, his ynexpected sprouting out of 
 new sets of features like Hydra, his being not so much one as legion, not 
 so much a comedian as a company, but leaves you at last marvelling over 
 Munden's capacity to invest with preternatural interest the most matter of fact 
 objects of every day life, a joint stool gazed at by him being lifted into con- 
 stellatory importance, a tub of butter contemplated by his eyes amounting to a 
 Platonic idea, he himself at last standing wonder-stricken amidst the common- 
 place materials of existence, like primeval man with the sun and stars about 
 him ! 
 
 In 1823, the very year within which the Elian Essays were first collectively — 
 published, the Lambs left their home over the brazier's shop in Covent Garden. 
 Thereupon they took up their abode, for three years together, close to the 
 New River, in a detached whitish house, called Colebrook Cottage, in a Row 
 of that name at Islington. 
 
 And memorably for him it was during their residence in that surburban 
 retreat, that Charles Lamb, on Tuesday, the 2gth March, 1825, closed his 
 thirty-three years clerkship at the India House. As his retiring pension he 
 had awarded to him about two-thirds of his income, namely, .,^450 per annum: 
 provision being made by the Directors for Mary Lamb, in the contingency of 
 her surviving him, upon a scale as ample as if she had been his wife rather 
 than his sister ; she having indeed been to him, as the Westminster Review 
 
■ Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 truly said, irore than his wife, and he to her more than a husband. The 
 Essayist's sensations at the time of his retirement, he graphically portrayed 
 in his Ehan paper of the "Superannuated Man." 
 
 A little more than nine years of repose lay still before him, repose strenuously 
 earned, but alas, only indifferently enjoyed. 
 
 ( From Islington the Lambs moved, in i8z6, to Enfield, taking up their abode 
 there at a distance of a dozen miles from London, in Mr. Westwood's Cottage, 
 at Chase-side. There they remained until 1829, when they removed next door, 
 into the house of a Mrs. Leishman. 
 
 For a while in that year of transition from one house to another, in that 
 I sequestered corner of Enfield, they went back for a few months to their constant 
 I resting place or pied A tetre, whenever they came up to town upon a flying visit, 
 I meaning Miss Buffam's, at 34, Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. 
 ! As the event proved, Mrs. Leishman's, at Chase-side, was the last home but 
 one of Charles Lamb and his sister. There they lived for four years together, 
 from 1829 to 1833, shut out almost entirely because of their remoteness from 
 London, from what, by reason of his gregarious nature, was so essential as a 
 source of happiness to Lamb, constant intercourse with his more cherished 
 friends and acquaintance. The deprivation to him must at the outset have 
 
 jlj been excessive, and at intervals, doubtless, became hardly endurable. Town 
 
 IS life was the breath of his nostrils. His love for books, no doubt, was intense. 
 But he loved, still more, chat and companionship. Beyond this, he was a 
 thorough Londoner. He could have said word for word with Dr. Johnson, 
 " When you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields. Sir, I 
 like to look upon mankind ; let us take a walk down Fleet Street." In this 
 spirit he wrote sententiously to Southey, '■ I am a Christian, Englishman, 
 Londoner, Templar." Early in life, his view of Christianity was as little 
 orthodox as that of his bosom friend Coleridge. They were resolute Socinians. 
 More than that, as believers in necessity, they were intense admirers of Dr. 
 Priestley, writing of whom Lamb said in 1796, " I love and honour him almost 
 profanely :" speaking of him in 1797, again, as one "whom I sin in almost 
 adoring." About that period, indeed, Lamb for some time attended the 
 Unitarian Chapel at Hackney. His Socinianism died out in the end, however, 
 utterly. Hazlitt (himself an Unitarian, and the son of an Unitarian minister) 
 describes Charles Lamb, upon one occasion, reverently referring to Our Saviour 
 as "He who once put on a. semblance of mortality," and exclaiming, at 
 another moment, in a sudden effusion of love and awe, " If He were to come 
 into this room we should fall down and kiss the hem of His garment ! " 
 
 /' During the period of Lamb's secluded life at Enfield, he brought out, in 
 1830, his Album Verses, and a year afterwards, in 1831, his rhymed jeu 
 d'isprit, entitled, Satan in Search of a Wife. It was after his removal in 
 1833^ to Mrs. Walden's in Church Street, Edmonton, that he collected together 
 from the periodicals, The Last Essays of Elia. There, in that poor little 
 melancholy tenement, known as Bay Cottage— towards the lowjy porch of 
 which you descend from the high-road througji a lugubrious garden along a 
 trail of sunken flagstones— the sweet, wise, blithe, delightful humorist found 
 
 . - the home in whicli he breathed his last on Saturday, the 27th December, 1834. 
 The final six months of his life were saddened almost beyond endurance by the 
 death of his dearest friend, the one whom for fifty years without intermission 
 he had loved and revered. During this darkened interval of half a year, he 
 was occasionally heard exclaiming to himself in a tone of anguish and with an 
 air of bewildered abstraction, " Coleridge is dead! Coleridge is dead ! " just 
 five weeks before he himself expired, he wrote in a few sentences expressive of 
 the tenderest appreciation, his "Last Words on Coleridge." The cause of 
 his own demise was a trivial accident. Walking one afternoon on the 
 London Road near the Bell at Edmonton, his foot slipped on a pebble, the 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 sprain and bruise caused by his fall bringing on, a day or two afterwards, an 
 attack of erysipelas. Upon Saturday, the 3rd January, 1835, exactly a week 
 after his death, he was laid in his grave in the picturesque little churchyard at 
 Edmonton, and as John Forster, who stood by it while it closed over him, said 
 with loving emphasis within less than a month afterwards, "never closed it over a 
 better or a wiser spirit." Upwards of twelve years elapsed before Mary Lamb — 
 who died on the 20th May, 1847 — was laid in the same grave by the side of 
 that incomparable brother, who, for thirty-four years had been her faithful and . 
 devoted protector. Not until then was the secret of their tragical history 
 publicly disclosed. So long as the unhappy sister survived, it was veiled from 
 general observation. Even Charles Lamb's adopted daughter Emma Isola, . 
 afterwards the wife, now the widow, of Edward Moxon, was entirely ignorant 
 of the "strange calamity" during the whole period of her residence under the 
 Essayist's roof-beams. Insomuch that, when she was seated with the Lambs one 
 night at the supper-table, the conversation at the moment having turned upon 
 theirfather, on her innocently enquiring how it happened she never heard men- 
 tion of their mother, though Mary gave a sharp piercing cry fqr which Charles 
 playfully and laughingly rebuked her, not a word then or afterwards was 
 uttered by either of them in explanation. It was in the British Quarterly for 
 May, 1848 — Mary Lamb being then a whole year dead — that the terrible truth 
 was first revealed. -- 
 
 Immediately after Charles Lamb himself had passed away, the most genial 
 and tenderly reticent tributes were offered to his memory, (i) Barry Cornwall, 
 whose name was on the humorist's lips upon his deathbed, contributed his Recol- 
 lections, signed B. W. P., to the Athenaum of the 24th January, and of the 7th 
 February, 1835. {2) John Forster wrote his commemorative paper in the May 
 number that year of the New Monthly. (3) Barron Field produced his short 
 Memoir in the Annual Biography and Obituary of 1836. (4) Edward Mo.xon 
 did the like in Leigh Hunt's London Journal, and (5) P. G. Patmore in the Court 
 Magazine. (6) Talfourd, as Lamb's literary executor, in the June of 1837 (Mary 
 being still alive) gave no clue whatever as to the truth through that slight 
 thread of narrative which constituted his First Sketch of the Life of Lamb, and 
 upon which were strung togetlier the contents of his two carefully edited 
 volumes of the Essayist's Letters. (7) Twelve years afterwards, in the July of 
 1848— silence having just before been broken in the British Quarterly— TMourd 
 at last spoke out plainly in his "Final Memorials." (8) Percy Fitzgerald in 
 1866, published his entertaining little anecdotal volume entitled, ' ' Charles Lamb, 
 his Friends, his Haunts, and his Books." (9) Later on in that same twelvemonth, 
 Barry Cornwall, in his seventy-seventh year, issued from the press his admirable 
 Memoir of the Humorist. (10) Thomas Craddock, in the December of 1867, 
 completed in his turn another version of the same biography. (11) G. A. 
 Sala in 1868 prefixed to the first of the four volumes of an entirely new edition 
 of the works of Lamb, an essay on his life and genius, which was subse- 
 quently withdrawn from publication. (12) Thomas Purnell a few months 
 afterwards replaced that cancelled essay with another, in which were incor- 
 porated Mrs. Moxon 's personal recollections of the Essayist. (13) Carew 
 Hazlitt, himself for a while one of tiie numerous editors of the four-volumed 
 edition just mentioned, gave to the pubhc in 1S74, as an integral part of his . 
 miscellaneous book about Charles and Mary Lamb, his New Illustrations of 
 the former's Life and Character. 
 
 Sidelights have been thrown upon the Essayist's history, moreover, from a 
 number of other scattered directions. (14) Mary Novello (Mrs. Cowden 
 Clarke), gave her remiiliscences of the Lambs in two papers contributed to the 
 National Magazine. (15) Edmund Olher jotted down his, by way of introduc- 
 tion to a cheap reprint of the Essays. (16) Mr. Upcott, in r83S, sketched Lamb's 
 memoamthe Gentleman' s Magazine. (17) Lord Lytton, in the Januaiyof 1867, 
 
22 Charles Lamb: A Prefatory -Memoir. 
 
 devoted an article in the Quarterly to the Humorist and his Companions. 
 (i8) Alexander Ireland gave a tolerably accurate chronological list of Charles 
 Lamb's writings. (19) J. E. Babson, of Chelsea, U.S., a diligent student of 
 Lamb, collected together from the periodicals under the title of " Eliana " 
 some thirty essays and sketches, most of which had been previously over- 
 looked. 
 
 The most recent of all the commentators upon Lamb, Mr. Carew Hazlitt, in 
 his miscellaneous volume, published in 1874, has taken occasion not only to' 
 denounce with some show of reason the occasional literary falsifica,tions of Tal- 
 fourd, both in the Sketch of the Life and in the Final Memorials; but, in a wholly 
 uncalled-for manner and with the most unjustifiable acrimony, to denounce 
 also what he does not shrink from designating Mr. Procter's moral falsifications : 
 meaning, as he goes on to explain immediately, a wilful distortion of bio- 
 graphical facts. Forty years after the grave had closed over Lamb, Mr. 
 Hazlitt insisted, in fact, to put his statement quite plainly, first, that Elia 
 was a drunkard,- and secondly, that in the latter portion of his life he 
 was deranged. The first assertion, to express it mildly, is a monstrous 
 exaggeration. The second is proved by a mass of incontrovertible evidence 
 to be utteirly untrue. Charles Lamb's frame was feeble, and, as Talfourd 
 said in 1837, a small portion of wine affected it. He was constitutionally 
 afflicted besides with an impediment in his speech, and it can therefore be 
 small mattei- for' wonder when we find Prodter writing that a trivial quantity of 
 strong liquid yet further disturbed it. Lamb himself playfully boasted that he 
 kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. His readiness to indulge in the 
 luxury of excessive self-depreciation was shown indeed repeatedly, as when he 
 wrote to Bernard Bartbn', "I am accounted by some people a good man! 
 How cheap that character is acquired ! Pay your debts ; don't borrow 
 money, nor twist your kitten's neck off, nor disturb the congregation, &c., and 
 the business is done. I know things (for thoughts are things) of myself which 
 would ynake every friend 1 have fly me as a plague patient. I once set a dog 
 upon a crab's leg that was shoved out under a mass of seaweeds— a pretty 
 little feeler ! Oh, pah, how sick I am of that. And a lie, a mean one, I once 
 told; I stink in the midst of respect." His surviving friends aver in his regard 
 to this day, as his other friends, now dead and gone"; wrote of him years ago, 
 quite distinctly and absolutely, that he was not given to intemperance. As for 
 «is sanity, down to the very last his dead and living intimates were and are 
 equally positive. Those who have recently asserted otherwise either knew him 
 ■personally not at all, or were mere chance acquaintances. Besides which in 
 their very manner of declaring him to have been at the last demented they 
 Tiave contrived to throw the most serious doubts upon their own general 
 accuracy. Mr. Carew Hazlitt, for e.vample, who is so very positive as to the 
 humorist having been deranged towards the close of his career, speaks of him 
 tp. 139) as an inmate of Hoxton Asylum inthe winter of i796-97,meanino-i7qt;-q6 
 being thus distinctly out in his reckoning by a whole twelvemonth Mr S c' 
 Hall, again, who is so very decidedly of opinion that Lamb was " maddish " 
 towards the end of his existence, talks of him in the same breath as having 
 been under the care of one Mrs. Redford, a woman accustomed to take char4 
 of insane persons, at Bay Cottage, Enfield-Bay Cottage being, in point of fact, 
 he tenement in which Charles Lamb died, in the full possession of his facull 
 V^J^tJ: T"h ^^' ^H' ,fo"'- .miles away from Enfield, in Church Street, 
 Edmonton. The Essayist s samty, however, down to the very last, is capable 
 SL w V^'l-'"'"';'' i demonstrated. Documentary evidence, in fact, is ad- 
 ducable that his mmd preserved its serenity, even during those last four months 
 of lheHf?h'°/r'rM'™Ul'^'^T^ for him by the afflicting c?c"ms?ancl 
 of thedeathof Colendge That his intellect preserved its equipoise under 
 that severe shock is visible in every line of his beautiful letter to the Rev 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 23 
 
 James Gillman, of Highgate, on Lamb's first hearing of their common Bereave- 
 ment ; a letter written on the sth August, 1834, from Mr. Walden's, at 
 Edmonton. It is legible again that complete sanity of Elia (which only within 
 these last few years has been so cruelly questioned) in the perfectly coherent 
 and graceful 'verses, vide injra, p. 93, penned by him on the Sth of the 
 
 following October, and addressed to Margaret W (so daintily comparing 
 
 her to her pretty namesake of the greensward, that other, lowlier Marguerite), 
 lines written, as will be seen, only eleven weeks before his death, and pub- 
 lished, less than three months after his interment, in the columns of the 
 Athenaum. Nay, as if to put the fact of his unquestionable sanity down to 
 the very latest, beyond the reach of contradiction, there is the charming 
 pleasantry running all through Ella's playful epistle to Mr. Childs, of Bungay, 
 a letter penned by the humorist only a day or two before he met with his slight 
 but fatal accident. That accident came to him out of his exceeding, love for 
 pedestrianism. Fourteen miles a day he would easily accomplish, gliding over 
 the ground with (as Talfourd desoribed it) "a shadowy step," on limbs so 
 slender that Thomas Hood spoke of them as his "immaterial legs." His 
 walking excursions at one time were^ rendered almost ludicrously erratic and 
 exhaustive, by reason of the vagaries of his then constant attendant. Dash, 
 a huge and handsome dog, the gift of Hood, but a gift that Mary Lamb 
 eventually-entreated Patmore to accept, "if only out of charity," for other- 
 wise, as she wrote serio-comically, " he 11 bethe death of Charles." Incidentally, 
 in one of the humorist's letters to Patmore, while enquiring after his old 
 favourite Dash (then no longer his, but his correspondent's) Charles Lamb 
 might almost be said to haye prophetically poked his fun at those who 
 were years afterwards posthumously to throw doubts upon his own sanity ! 
 "Are his [Dash's] intellects sound?" he asks. " Doej he wander a httle 
 in his conversation?" The italics are Lamb's. "You cannot be too 
 careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical 
 snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him. All the dogs here are going 
 mad, if you believe the overseers ; but • I protest they seem to me very 
 rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people to those who 
 are not used to them. Try him with hot water : if he won't lick it up, it is a 
 sion— he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally or perpendicularly? 
 That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield. Has he bit any of the 
 children yet ? If he has, have them shot, and keep him for curiosity, to see if 
 it was the hydrophobia." Excellent fooling, this; and in his instance — 
 reading it, now, forty years afterwards — fooling that has about it so pathetic 
 an apphcation ! 
 
 The abounding frolic fun of his letters equals, at moments almost sur- 
 passes, the otherwise matchless humour of Elia. Hear him in one of tliese 
 dehghlful epistles run a droll idea nearly to death with a Shaksperian abafi- 
 donne, "lam flatter," he writes to Bernard Barton, "I am flatter than a 
 
 denial or a pancake ; emptier than Judge 's wig when the head is in it ; 
 
 a cypher— an O. My wick hath a thief in it, and T can't muster courage to snuff 
 it. My day is gone into twihght, and I don't think it worth the expense of 
 candles. I have not volition enough left to dot my i's, much less to comb my 
 eyebrows. My hand writes, not I, just as chickens run about a little when 
 their heads are off. O for a vigorous fit of gout, of chohc, of toothache !— an 
 earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organ ; pain is life — the sharper the 
 more evidence of life. I sleep in a damp bedroom, but it does me no good ; 
 I come home late o' nights, but do not find any visible amendment." A misfor- 
 tune—at these moments of supreme internal enjoyment arising out of his exquisite 
 sense of the ridiculous— he records with a sort of rehsh. Writing of Mr. H.'s 
 damnation', he says almost with a smack of the lips, " Hang 'em ! how they 
 hissed. It was not a hiss neither ; it was a sort of frantic yell, like a congrega- 
 
24 Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 tion of mad geese, with roarings something like bears, mows and mops like 
 apes, sometimes snakes that hissed me into madness. 'Twas like St. Anthony's 
 temptations." Everybody knows Sydney Smith's commiserative allusions 
 (when talking with the missionary bound for New Zealand) to the cold clergyman 
 on the sideboard, and the dry little boy in the toast-rack, his remarks ending 
 with a hope that if his friend were eaten by the cannibals, he might at the least 
 disagree with them ! Yet in all this Sydney had been unwittingly anticipated. 
 For Charles Lamb, in a precisely similar strain, had already written 
 dissuasively to Manning, then bound for China, "Some say they are canni- 
 bals, and then conceive a Tartar fellow eatjng my friend, and adding the cold 
 mahgnity of mustard and vinegar ! 'Tjs terrible to be weighed out at fivepence 
 the pound." Never wrote wit or humorist more exhilarating nonsense when 
 interchanging merry greetings with a kindred spirit. Instance the close of his 
 sportive letter challenging Hood to rival junkettings — "O the curds-and-cream 
 you shall eat with us here ! O the turtle-soup and lobster-salads we shall 
 devour with you there ! O the old books we shall peruse here ! O the new 
 nonsense we shall trifle over there ! O Sir T. Browne here ! O Mr. Hood 
 and Mr. jerdan there ! Thine C. (Urbanus), L. (Sylvanus)— (Elia Ambo)." 
 Among all his letters, however, as delectable, as simply inimitable as any that 
 could be named is one dated 19th July, 1827, and addressed to P. G. Patmore, 
 then in Paris, beginning: — "Dear P. — I am so poorly! I have been to a 
 funeral where I made a pun to the consternation of the rest of the mourners." 
 All through it " Oh, I am so poorly !" runs like a r&fraitt. "Mary is gone 
 out for some soles," he writes, adding immediately, " I suppose it's no use to 
 ask you to come dnd partake of 'em ; else 'here's a steam vessel." The letter 
 jerks from one theme to another. "We hope," he observes one while, "the 
 French wines do not disagree with Mrs. Patmore. By the way, I like her." 
 Another while, ■" Christ, how sick I am ! — not of theworld, but of the widow's 
 shrub. She's sworn under 6000/., but I think she perjured herself. She howls 
 in E la, and I comfort her in b flat. You understand music? " And so on from 
 one freakish extravagance of thought.and phrase to another. " ■ No shrimps !' 
 (That is in answer to Mary's question about how the soles are to be done.)" 
 Another while, " We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons. 
 She was howling— part howling and part giving directions lo the proctor —when, 
 crash ! down went my sister through a crazy chair, and made the clerte grin, 
 and I grinned, and the widow tittered— and then I knew that she was not 
 inconsolable. " And thereupon he trails off— with an eye to the astonishing of his 
 correspondent— a conglomeration of grave-faced imaginary news about their 
 intimates. "Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which 
 his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it a rather agreeable excrescence 
 —like his poetry— redundant. Hone has. hanged himself for debt. Godwin 
 was taken up for picking pockets. Becky takes to bad courses. Her father 
 was blown up m a steam machine. The coroner found it Insanity. I should 
 not like him to sit on my letter." His familiar correspondence, hke his famihar 
 conversation, was mostly remarkable for its startling surprises, for those abrupt 
 mcongniities of idea or of expression, which were wit-flashes as sudden as rifle 
 shots from an ambuscade. His oddest thoughts at these times must evidently 
 out, whatever the consequence. Asked by an old lady, for example how he hked 
 babies? Quoth he instantly, to her consternation, "B-boiled, ma'am I" Listen- 
 ing to the extravagant praises lavished upon some one by a good-natured matron 
 who was holding forth at great length about her paragon to Ella's secret dis<'ust 
 the humorist on hearmg her wind up her eulogium at last with "I know him' 
 bless him ! blurted out to the wonderment of all present, ' ' Well I don't- but 
 d-d-damn him at a hazard!" THose were still swearing times,' it ought for 
 Lamb s^ credit s sake to be remembered. Indeed, when Acres observed in ■ ■ The 
 Rivals, " damns have had their day," he was certainly made by Sheridan to 
 
Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Meynoir. 25 
 
 speak by anticipation ; that expletive— always, for some odd reason a strange 
 favourite with Lamb — long surviving the Regency. It is altogether a mistake, 
 however, seriously to charge Elia, as some have done, with profanity. His 
 words, under the incentive of his wit, were occasionally extravagant; but his 
 heart, in its innermost recesses, was essentially' reverent. If out of the very 
 depth of his scorn for the Frenchman who was one day in his hearing pro- 
 fanely contrasting "Voltaire's" character with that of Our Lord, Charles. 
 Lamb shrank not from stammering out his assent that ' ' Voltaire was a very 
 good Jesus Christ — for the F- French!" he could upon fitting occasion 
 rebuke any one who talked slightingly about religion, as where, turning to a 
 young man who had been speaking flippantly of holy things in the presence 
 of Irving and Coleridge, he asked with poignant irony, as the party- broke 
 up, " Pray, did you come here in a hat, sir, or a t-turban? " 
 
 Turning to a consideration of Lamb himself, however, after a cursory 
 glance' thus at his sayings and writings, it is easy enough to realize the aspect 
 of the man from the portraits and descriptions which have happily come down 
 to us from the last generation. Surmounting a curiously fragile-looking frame 
 — which was clothed completely and almost clerically in black, including black 
 small-clothes and black silk stockings, overlapped when out of doors with black 
 clo^h gaiters — was a head pronounced by Leigh Hunt ' ' worthy of Aristotle, "and 
 spokenof byHazUtt as " a fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence. " Theeyes 
 were softly brown, yet glittering. The face was oval in its lower portion. The 
 forehead was expanded. The nose was slightly curved and delicately carved at 
 the nostrils. N. P. "Willis, in his " Pencillings, " alludes with especial emphasis 
 to the Essayist's ' ' beautiful deep-set eyes, aquiUne nose, and very indescribable 
 mouth." His enchanting smile, by the way, is the first characteristic named in 
 the epitaph inscribed upon his tombstone. It is, besides this, the crowning 
 peculiarity mentioned by Talfourd in the latter's wistful ejaculation, "Alas! 
 how many even of his own most delicate fancies, rich as they are in feehng and 
 in wisdom, will be lost to those who have not present to them the sweet broken 
 accents and the half-playful, half-melancholy smile of the writer." Several 
 portraits of Charles Lamb are preserved, of more or less excellence. Robert 
 Handcock's chalk drawing pencilled about the year 1797, depicts him in profile, 
 as he was with the comely bloom upon him of one or two-and-twenty. A 
 grotesque caricature of him, scratched upon copper in 1825 by "his friend 
 Brook Pulham " — as Sir Fretful Plagiary would have called him, one of his 
 
 d d good-natured friends— must have been ludicrously like, exaggerating 
 
 his aquiline nose into a hooked conch, and dwindling his slim figure to the 
 uttermost extremity of attenuation. Another etching, published in Fraser's 
 Magazine, represents him among his darling books, a candle before him, a 
 tumbler of grog at his elbow — a home sketch, unUke the last (which, as has been 
 said, was merely grotesque), being, in a word, simply delightful. As, indeed, 
 should be any truthful limning of one of whom Forster declared (within a few 
 weeks after Lamb's interment) that he was ' ' the most entirely delightful person " 
 he had then (in i33S) ever known. Long afterwards, in his " Life of Landor," 
 the same keen and generous observer spoke- of Elia with precisely the same 
 enthusiasm, as " that most lovable of men, who had not an infirmity that 
 his sweetness of nature did not make one think must be akin to a virtue." 
 Hazlitt, pencil in hand, depicted Lamb with a noble, beautiful head, frilled round f 
 the neck, almost as though in masquerade. As familiar to the public at large 
 as any vera effigies of the humorist that could be named is 'T". Wageman's | 
 full-front portraiture —wrinkled, bright-eyed, curly-headed — a likeness prefixed i 
 to Moxon's 1840 edition of the works, in double-columned imperial octavo, j 
 F. S. Cary's portrait is hardly so satisfactory, or, in other words, so 1 readily i 
 recognizable. In many respects, the one approaching about the nearest I 
 to a resemblance — to what Hamlet terms so felicitously a counterfeit present- [ 
 
ji 26 Charles Lamb: A Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 ment — was that painted somewhere about the early part of 1S27 by Henry 
 Meyer, from sittings given to him in the artist's then studio at 3, Red Lion 
 Square, near Holbom. The original picture, which was of Ute-size, was 
 afterwards copied by Henry Meyer in a sort of miniature kit-kat replica, now 
 in the possession of Sir Charles Dilke, into whose hands it has come by inheri- 
 tance from his grandfather. It is from this charming picture, in the baclcground 
 of which may be recognized the portico of the old East India House in 
 Leadenhall Street, now no longer in existence, that the engraving has been 
 made that forms the frontispiece to this Popular Centenary Edition. For the 
 loan of the painting for this purpose I have to make my heartiest acknowledg- 
 ments to Sir Charles Dilke, who also most generously placed at my command 
 (to do whatever I liked with for the purposes of this Edition) all the choice 
 manuscripts and proofs of Lamb which have in the same manner passed into 
 his possession. ' From these rare fragments of the Essayist's correspondence, it 
 will be seen that I have availed myself of the privilege of having more than one 
 delightful passage carefully fac-similed. Through what I cannot but regard as a 
 happy accident, the skilled master of the burin to whose hands Meyer's portrait 
 of Charles Lamb was entrusted, for the purpose of having it engraved here as the 
 frontispiece, recognized the picture upon the instant as one he perfectly remem- 
 bers seeing painted cight-and-thirty years ago, when he himself, as a strip- 
 ling, was beginning his career as one of Henry Meyer's pupils. 'While he phed 
 his graver upon this steel plate, he could recall to mind perfectly well, so he 
 assures me, the sittings given to his old master by the Essayist while the picture 
 was being painted. In that vivid remembrance, it may be seen from the en- 
 graving itself, that Mr. Joseph Brown handled the burin as Izaak Walton 
 recommended his brother anglers to handle the bait, as if he loved it. There, 
 in the frontispiece, is visible at a glance the bUthe, benignant face of the Master 
 Humorist., Here, in the carefully ordered mass of his varied writings, the 
 rare, wise, brilliant, and, in many ways, incomparable genius of the author is yet 
 more vividly recognizable. In Ella especially Charles Lamb's voice is audible. 
 Though dead, he there speaketh! He whom Procter justly pronounced 
 "one of the rarest and most delicate of the humorists of England 1" Of 
 whom Leigh Hunt said so well that "he was of the genuine line of Yorick !'" 
 And whose mastery of the subtle science of criticism was such that Algernon 
 Swinburne, surely no mean authority upon either head, has, in his " Essav on 
 ■William Blake," declared Lamb emphatically to be "the most supremely 
 competent judge and exquisite critic of lyrical and dramatic art that we have 
 ever had !" Lamb's judgment, nevertheless, needless to add, was not infallible 
 ■While he doated upon Beaumont and, Fletcher, Byron and Shelley had -for 
 him, strange to say, no attraction whatever. 'While he delighted in the novels 
 of Smollett and Fielding and Richardson, he cared not one snap of the fineers 
 |> for Walter Scott's Waverley romances. The books he took most to he dubbed 
 lovmgly his mjdnight dariings. His own works, to those who revel in his 
 humour, come distinctly under that category. As an essayist, he is not siranlv 
 admired-^he is beloved and idoUzed. ''' 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Charles Lamb : A Prefatory Memoir . 
 Dedication to Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
 
 PAGE 
 • 3 
 
 3x 
 
 POETICAL WORKS. 
 
 PACE 
 
 Earl-iest and Later Sonnets. 
 I. Was it some sweet -device of 
 
 Faery 33 
 
 li. Methinks how dainty sweet 
 
 it were, reclined . ■ • 33 
 
 III. As when a child on some 
 
 long winter's night .... 34 
 
 IV. O, I could laugh to hear the 
 
 midnight wind ..... 34 
 V, When last I .roved, these wind- 
 ing wood-walks green ... 34 
 VI. A timid grace sits trembling in 
 
 her eye 35 
 
 VII. If from my lips some angry 
 
 accents fell 35 
 
 VIII. We were two pretty babes, 
 
 the youngest she - ■ ■ - 33 
 IX. By Enfield lanes, and Winch- 
 
 more's verdant hill .... 36 
 X. Forgive me, Burney, if to thee 
 
 these late . . . . . , _ . 36 
 XI. I was not train 'd in Academic 
 
 bowers - 36 
 
 XII. You are not,^ Kelly, of the 
 
 common strain . . _ . . . 37 
 
 XIII. Rare artist ! who with half 
 
 thy tools, or none .... 37 
 
 XIV. Let hate, or grosser heats, 
 
 their foulness mask ... 38 
 XV. Who first invented work, and 
 
 bourid the free . . . _ . . 38 
 XVI. Theytalkof time, and of time's 
 
 galling yoke 38 
 
 xviL Rogers, of all the men that I 
 
 have known 39 
 
 xviii. Suck, baby, suck, mother's 
 
 love grows by giving ... 39 
 XIX. Queen-bird, that sittest on thy - 
 
 . shining, nest ..... 39 
 XX. What reason ,„first imposed 
 
 thee, gentle name . . . _ . 40 
 XXI. John, you were figuring in 
 
 the gay career 40 
 
 XXII. O lift with reverent hand that 
 
 tarnish'd flower ..... 40 
 XXiii. A passing glance was all I 
 
 caught of thee . ... 41 
 
 PAGE 
 
 XXIV. An album is a banquet : from 
 
 the store 41 
 
 XXV. Lady unknown, who cravest 
 
 from me unknown .... 42 
 XXVI. In Christian world Mary the 
 
 garland wears . 42 
 
 Miscellaneous Poems — 
 
 Preliminary Motto 43 
 
 Dedication .... ... 43 
 
 Childhood . . . .... 43 
 
 The Grandame .... . . 44 
 
 The Sabbath Bells 44 
 
 Fancy Employed on Divine sub- 
 jects 45 
 
 The Tomb of Douglas 45 
 
 To Charles Lloyd : an Unexpected 
 
 Visitor ..'.'..■... 45 
 
 Blank Verse — 
 
 To Charles Lloyd 47 
 
 Written on the Day of my Aunt's 
 
 Funeral 47 
 
 Written a Year after the Events . . 48 
 \ Written soon after the preceding 
 
 Poem 49 
 
 -Written on Christmas Day, 1797 . 50 
 
 The Old Familiar Faces .... 50 
 
 Composed at Midnight 51 
 
 Living without God in the World 52 
 
 Thekla's Song 53 
 
 Poetry for Children — 
 
 Hester .... .... 54 
 
 The Three Friends 54 
 
 To a River in which a Child was 
 
 drowned .... . . 56 
 
 Queen Oriana's Dream ... 57 
 
 Minor Poems— 
 A Ballad— Rich and Poor . 
 Lines on a Celebrated Picture 
 A Vision of Repentance , . 
 A Farewell to Tobacco . . ' . 
 To T. L. -H.— A Child . : . 
 The Triumph of the Whale . 
 
28 
 
 Contents, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Album Verses— 
 
 Dedication to the Publisher . . 63 
 In the Album of a Clergyman's 
 
 Lady ... 63 
 
 In the Autograph Book of Mrs. 
 
 Serjeant W .... .64 
 
 In the Album of Lucy Barton . 64 
 
 In the Album of Miss ... 64 
 
 In the Album of a Very Young 
 
 Lady ■ . . 64 
 
 In the Album of a French Teacher 65 
 
 In the Album of Miss Daubeny . 65 
 
 In my own Album . . . . 65 
 
 Angel Help . . . . . . SS 
 
 The Christening tt 
 
 On an Infant Dying as soon as Born . 67 
 To Bernard Barton . ... -67 
 
 The Young Catechist . . 68 
 
 She is Going .... 68 
 
 To a Young Friend . 68 
 
 To the Same . 69 
 
 To James Sheridan Knowles ... 69 
 To the Editor of the ''Every-Day 
 
 Book" -70 
 
 To Caroline Maria Applebee ... 70 
 
 To Cecilia Catherine Lawton ... 70 
 To a Lady who Desired me to write 
 
 her Epitaph 71 
 
 To her Youngest Daughter ... 71 
 
 Translations from the Latin of 
 
 Vincent Bourne — 
 On a Sepulchral statue of an Infant 
 
 Sleeping ... . . . 72 
 
 The Rival Bells ... 72 
 
 Epitaph on a Dog . . 72 
 
 The Ballad Singers .... .73 
 
 To David Cook, Watchman ... 74 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Translations from the Latin op 
 Vincent Bourne — continued: 
 
 On a Deaf and Dumb Artist ... 75 
 
 Newton's Principia 75 
 
 The Housekeeper 75 
 
 The Female Orators 76 
 
 Pindaric Ode to the Treadmill . . . 
 
 Going or Gone 
 
 On R. B. Haydon's "Jerusalem", . 
 
 Translation 
 
 To my Friend the Indicator . 
 
 Satan in Search of a Wn^E — 
 Dedication . . . . , 
 
 Part the First 
 
 Part the Second ^ . 
 
 The Three Graves . . 
 
 To Charles Aders, Esq. . - . . 
 
 The Change "... 
 
 Existence, considered in itself, no 
 
 blessing . „ 
 
 The Parting Speech of the Celestial 
 
 Messenger .... 
 
 Hercules Paciiicatus 
 
 Lines suggested -by a Sight of Wal- 
 
 tham Cross 
 
 The Self-Enchanted .... 
 To a Friend on his Marriage 
 To Thomas. Stothard, R.A. 
 To Clara N[ovello] . . 
 
 Hypochondriacus 
 
 Free Thoughts on Several Eminent 
 
 Composers 
 
 What is an Album ? . . . , 
 
 To Margaret W .... 
 
 Prologue to Coleridge's " Remorse 
 Epilogue to '* The Wife" 
 
 76 
 77 
 
 79 
 79 
 
 80 
 80 
 83 
 
 85 
 86 
 87 
 
 87 
 
 DRAMATIC WORKS. 
 
 John Woodvil : A Tragedy . . 
 The Witch : A Dramatic Sketch 
 Mr. H : A Farce . . . 
 
 96 The Wife's Trial : A Dramatic Poem 139 
 122 The Pawnbroker's Daughter : A Farce 157 
 124 i Comic Opera : (Unnamed) . . . 171 
 
 TALES. 
 
 Rosamund Gray . , 
 
 Mrs. Leicester's School— 
 Maria Howe .... 
 
 Susan Yates 
 
 Arabella Hardy . . . 
 
 Tales from Shakspere— 
 ■'/King Lear . .... 
 
 Macbeth 
 
 Timon of Athens .... 
 
 196 
 
 217 
 221 
 224 
 
 228 
 236 
 242 
 
 Tales from ^nhK.?,V£.^^— continued: 
 \ Romeo and Juliet . . . 
 
 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark . 
 
 Othello 
 
 Thr Adventures of Ulysses 
 Minor Tales— 
 
 248 
 
 257 
 
 266 
 
 Juke Judkins 
 The'^ - 
 
 Defeat of Time! -!!!.' ^23 
 
Contents. 
 
 29 
 
 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Essays of Elia.— First Series. 
 
 Note to the Publisher 
 Dedication to the Reader 
 Obituary of Elia .... 
 
 327 
 
 • 327 
 327 
 
 32Si 
 
 /^^ie South-Sea House . Tr*^ 
 i^' Qsford in the Vacation . vvw<^ 
 l^yhristV Hospital Jj'iv e^and- thirty 
 
 Years Ago .... ^'^y i . . 337 
 I^THg Two Races of Men . Srv-^ . 345. 
 
 l^^tt Year's Eve .- 348 
 
 L-MfsTBattle's Opinions on Whist . 352 
 1,-ySIehtine's Day . . . . v. . . 356 
 
 ^i^ehapter on Ears 358 
 
 pAlTFools' Day _ ■ . 362 
 
 /A-Quakers' Meeting. ...... 365 
 
 pThet)Id and the New Schoolmaster 368 
 
 \,,-.My Relations _ 373 
 
 I^JkJtTckery End in Hertfordshire ^^''T'^'jfy 
 
 Llm^rfeqt Sympathies 379 
 
 xJS!^ Old Benchers of the Inner 
 
 Temple 384 
 
 LJVitehes and other Night-Fears . . 391 
 ^„.Gface Before Meat . ... 395 
 
 iJtfy First Play . , . 399 
 
 Dream Children : A Reverie ^*'**- "i 401 
 On Some of the Old Actors 
 Distant Correspondents .... 412 
 /_jOn the Artificial Comedy of the 
 
 Last Century ^16 „> 
 
 "^ n Praise pf^|"|iimnpy -SwS^niiRi,.,, Y"" ' 
 
 ;omj)lamt of the Decay of Beg- 
 rs m the Metropolis ..... 427 
 issertation upon R^astPia: V*-r'43i 
 ^euaiitaiimt : ' ' ' TliOUglife on 
 Presents of Game, &c." . . . 436 
 ^.<ft"Bachelor's Complaint ..... 437 
 On the Acting of Munden . . . 4^ 
 
 Munden's Farewell 443 
 
 . The Death of Munden .... 444 
 . LJ^odem Gallantry 445 
 
 A Character of the Late Elia. 
 
 By a Friend 448 
 
 The Essays of Elia. — Second Series. 
 Detached Thoughts on Books and 
 
 Reading . . 451 
 
 Confessions of a Drunkard . . .455 
 Rejoicings on the New Year's Com- 
 
 
 Essays of Elia.— Second Series- 
 
 continuedi • 
 ^-¥he Tombs in the Abbey . . . 
 Amicus Redivivus . . . . 
 
 Blakesmoor in H shire . . . 
 
 iptain Jackson . .... 
 
 Barbara S 
 
 Superannuated Man . . . 
 
 The Convalescent 
 
 ge Illusion ...... 
 
 e Genteel Style in Writing . 
 
 480 
 488 
 491 
 494 
 496 
 500 
 S04 
 507 
 509 
 
 532 
 
 ine of Ace . ... . . 461 flotr-That we must not look a Gift 
 
 "thina . . . M<V-^. . .46ff*-^^ ^ 
 
 „ jor keiatioire 468 
 
 The Child Angel : A Dream . . 471- 
 
 The Old Margate Hoy 473 
 
 Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney 478 
 
 To the Shade of EUiston .... 5iy 
 
 ElUstoniana. 515 
 
 Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago . 518 
 T'TBarrenness of the Imaginative 
 /U^Paculty in the Productions of 
 
 'Modern Art . ^ 522 
 
 ■^he Wedding 52*5"" 
 
 " lular Fallacies . .HrV-*:«-*- ^, 532 
 ^ That a Bully is always a 
 ^.^^ Coward .... . . 
 
 ^^That lU-gotten Gain Never 
 ^^^^ Prospers ....... 533 
 
 fijh That a Man must Not Laugh 
 ^^ at his own Jest ... . 533 
 
 ^S That Such a One Shows his 
 ^■^ Breeding— That it is Easy to 
 
 perceive he is no Gentleman 533 
 \J^ That the Poor copy the vices 
 
 Jr^ of the Rich 534 
 
 tfry That Enough is as good as a 
 
 ^^ Feast ' . . ■ 535 
 
 C^ii) Of Two Disputants the 
 Warmest is Generally in the 
 
 ^^ Wrong S3S 
 
 \fiti«!) That Verbal Illusions are not 
 
 Wit, because they will not 
 
 ■,_,^^ bear Translation .... 
 
 /Sc^NThat the Worst Puns are the 
 
 ^-^ Best 
 
 ^^.■^rg^-^fliL-y nii must Love me and 
 
 Love my Dog 
 
 L-«jr^hat we should Rise with the 
 
 Lark 540 
 
 |__;3e>iTr"That we should lie down with 
 
 the Lamb 541 
 
 LJtiii. That Handsome is that Hand- 
 some does. >;d2 
 
 i[XW^' That Home is Home though 
 it is never so Homely 
 
 536 
 
 '536 
 
 538 
 
 543 
 546 
 
 Horse in the Mouth . 
 XVI. That a Deformed Person is a 
 
 — Lord ,- ■ 547 
 
 L^svli. That a Sulky Temper is a 
 
 Misfortune 548 
 
30 
 
 Contents. 
 
 CRITICISMS &c. 
 
 PAGE PAGE 
 
 Fragments from Burton . . _. .,,^551 ; The Reynolds Gallery ._ 650 
 
 Recollections of Christ's Hospital )IUiwS5£i 
 On the Tragedies of Shakspere . , . 561 
 On the Elizabethan Dramatists . . . 572 
 
 On the Garrick Plays 588 
 
 On the Genius and Character of 
 
 Hogarth .... - 593 
 
 On the Poetical Works of George 
 
 Wither 604 
 
 Notes on Specimens from Fuller . . 606 
 On the Inconveniences Resulting from 
 
 being Hanged 608 
 
 On the Danger of Confounding 
 Moral with Personal Deformity . . 614 
 
 Guy Faux 617 
 
 On the Ambiguities arising from 
 
 ■ Proper.Names 622 
 
 ( On the .Custom of Hissing at the 
 
 Theatres ^623 
 
 On Burial Societies; and the Cha- 
 racter of an Undertaker ' . . . 677 
 
 Edax on Appetite 630 
 
 Hospita on the Immoderate Indul- 
 gence of the Palate ...... 634 
 
 The Good Clerk, A Character- . . .636 
 On the Melancholy of Tailors . . . 640 
 
 The Londoner 643 
 
 Wordsworth's "Excursion". . . . 644 
 
 . . . .-^551 I The Reynolds C 
 Hospital 111 j _ ftiili \\\\ Brome' 
 
 's "Jovial Crew " 
 Isaac BickerstafTs Hypocrite'* 
 New Pieces at the Lyceum . . 
 First Fruits of Australian Poetry 
 Elia to his Correspondents 
 The Gentle Giantess .... 
 On a Passage in " The Tempest " 
 Original Letter of James Thomson 
 
 . 651 
 . 652 
 . 653 
 . 65s 
 . 656 
 . 658 
 ■ 659 
 661 
 
 Letter to an Old Gentleman whose 
 Education has been Neglected . . 664 
 
 A Vision of Horns 667 
 
 Biographical Memoir of Mr. Listen . 671 
 Autobiography of Mr. Munden . . t^s^ 
 Reflections in the Pillory , . , , , 677 
 
 The Last Peach 679 
 
 The Illustrious Defunct 680 
 
 The Religion of Actors ... . 684— 
 
 The Months 686 
 
 Reminiscences of Sir JefFory Dun- 
 
 Stan 683 
 
 Captain Starkey ■ . 689 
 
 The Ass. ,....;.,... 691 
 
 In re Squirrels .... .... 693 
 
 Estimate of Defoe's Secondly Novels 694 
 Recollections of a Late ' Roy^l 
 AcademiciaTJi . . . . . - .j.:.. . . 606 
 
 Table Talk, by the Late Elia ... . 700 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Portrait of Charles Lamb by Henry Meyer 
 Facsimiles — i. Sonnet xxv. 
 
 " In Christian world Mary the garland wears " 
 
 2. " I'll cock my hat and draw my sword" . 
 
 3. " No wonder girls in country towns " 
 
 4. On Roast Hare . . . . 
 
 5. On Munden's Acting .... 
 
 6. The True Barbara S . . 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 (Opposite page) 42 
 
 178 
 igo 
 436 
 445 
 496 
 
^ttimixan 
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 [The following dedicatory epistle was prefixed to the first cpUecteji edition of Charles 
 Lamb's Wbrks, published mtwo volumes octavo by Charles and J. Oilier, in t'8i8 — not 
 a word of Elia being then written. The asterisks refer to the sign of "The Salutation 
 and Cat," at No. 17, Newgate Street, an old-Cashioned tavern, in the wainscoted parlour 
 of which ^ Coleridge and Lamb used often to meet of nights during the former s occa- 
 sional visits to London while he was yet a student at Cambridge.] 
 
 My dear Coleridge, — 
 
 You will smile to see the slender labours of your friend designated by the title 
 of iVorks: but such was the wish of the gentlemen who have kindly under- 
 taken the trouble of collecting them, and from their judgment could be no 
 appeal. 
 
 It would be a kind of disloyalty to offer to any one but yourself a volume 
 containing the early pieces, which were first published among your poems, and 
 were fairly derivatives from you and them. My friend Lloyd and myself 
 came into our first battle (authorship is a sort of warfare) under cover of 
 the greater Ajax. How this association, which shall always be a dear and 
 proud recollection to me, came to be broken,— who snapped the threefold cord, 
 — whether yourself (but I know that was not the case) grew ashamed of your 
 former companions, — or whether (which is by much the more probable) some 
 ungracious bookseller was author of the separation, — I cannot tell;— but want- 
 ing the support of your friendly elm (I speak for myself), my vine has, since 
 that time, put forth few or no fruits ; the sap (if ever it had any) has become, 
 in a manner, dried up and e.xtinct : and you will find your old associate, in his 
 second volume, dwindled into prose and criticism. 
 
 Am I right in assuming this as the cause ? or is it that, as years come upon 
 us (except with some more healthy-happy spirits), life itself loses much of its 
 poetry for us? we transcribe but what we read in the great volume of Nature ; 
 and, as the characters grow dim, we turn off, and look another way. You your- 
 self write no Christabels, nor Ancient Mariners, now. 
 
 Some of the Sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the general 
 reader, may happily awaken in you remembrances, which I should be sorry 
 should be ever totally extinct — the memory 
 
 Of summer days and of delightful years — 
 
32 Dedication to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 
 
 even so far back as to those old suppers at our old ••»*•••*• Inn,— when life 
 was fresh, and topics exhaustless,— and you first liindled in me, if not the 
 power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness— 
 
 What words have I heard 
 Spoke at Che Mermaid ! 
 
 The world has given you many a shrewd nip and gird Since that time, but 
 either my eyes are grown dimmer, or my old friend is the same, who stood 
 before me three-and-twenty years ago— his hair a little confessing the hand of 
 time, but still shrouding the same capacious brain,— his heart not altered, 
 scarcely where it " alteration finds." 
 
 One piece, Coleridge, I have ventured to publish in its original form, though 
 I have heard you complain of a certain over-imitation of the antique in the 
 style. If I could see any way of getting rid of the objection, without re-writing 
 it entirely, I would make some sacrifices. But when I wrote John Woodvil, I 
 never proposed to myself any distinct deviation from common English. I had 
 been newly initiated in the writings of our elder dramatists ; Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, and Massinger, were then a first love ; and from what I was so 
 freshly conversant in, what wonder if my language imperceptibly took a tinge ? 
 The very time, which I had chosen for my story, that which immediately fol- 
 lowed the Restoration, seemed to require, in an English play, that the English 
 should be of rather an older cast, than that of the precise year in which it 
 happened to be written. I wish it had not some faults, which I can less vindi- 
 cate than the language. 
 
 I remain, my dear Coleridge, 
 
 Yours, with unabated esteem, 
 
 CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 Four Editions of the Works of Charles Lamb have already appeared, to 
 the compilers and annotators of which the Editor of the Popular Centenary 
 Edition has been largely and increasingly indebted. 
 
 First, that of 1818, in two small volumes, published by C. and J. Oilier, 
 a collection of comparatively slight importance, seeing that it was issued from 
 the press before a single word of Elia was written. 
 
 Secondly, that of 1840, published by E. Mo.wn in five parts, afterwards 
 bound up together in one imperial octavo volume. 
 
 Thirdly, the expanded edition in four volumes, also published by E. Moxon, 
 the first in 186S, the last in 1870, and which was edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. 
 
 Fourthly, that of 1874, published in one volume by Chatto and Windiis 
 under the laborious and painstaking editorship of Richard Heme Shepherd 
 
 To each of these, but more particularly to Mr. Carew Hazlitt and Mr. Heme 
 Shepherd, the present Editor, in recognition of their labours upon ground 
 every inch of which he has himself retraversed while pursuing his own more ' 
 minute and extended researches, would here offer his cordial acknowledgments 
 
THE 
 
 I WORKS OF CHARLES LAMB. 
 
 \attusl Morks. 
 
 EARLIEST AND LATER SONNETS. 
 
 [The four sonnets immediately subjoined were the first poems, the first writings, 
 in fact, Charles Lamb ever published. They originally appeared in 1736, as printed 
 by the Robinsons of London, and published by Joseph Cottle of Bristol, in an insignifi- 
 cant-looking volume entitled " Poems on Various Subjects," by his friend and schoolfellow 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge. The latter touched up 
 many of them unjustifiably in spite of their author's remonstrance " I charge you, 
 Coleridge, spare my ewe lambs I" The last six lines of the second, as first printed, 
 were entirely Coleridge's own. They are all now given, these first four sonnets of 
 Charles Lamb, exactly as he wrote them, and with a scrupulous regard to his own 
 reiterated emendations,] 
 
 I. 
 
 Was it some sweet device of Faery 
 That moclc'd my steps with many a lonely glade, 
 And fancied wanderimgs with a fair-hair'd maid? 
 Have these things been?, or what rare witchery, 
 Impregning with delights the charmed air, 
 Enlightened up the semblance of a smile 
 In those fine eyes ? methought they spake the while 
 Soft soothing things, which might enforce despair 
 To drop the murdering knife, and let go by 
 His foul resolve. And does the lonely glade 
 Still court the footsteps of the fair-hair'd maid? 
 Still in her locks the gales of summer sigh ? 
 While I forlorn do wander, reckless where, 
 And 'mid my wanderings meet no Anna there. 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 i Methinks how dainty sweet it were, reclined 
 
 ] Beneath the vast cut-stretching branches high 
 
 I " Of some old wood, in careless sort to lie, 
 
 ', Nor of the busier scenes we left behind 
 
34 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Aught envying. And, O Anna ! mild-eyed maid ! 
 
 Beloved ! I were well content to play 
 
 With thy free tresses all a summers day. 
 
 Losing the time beneath the greenwood shade. 
 
 Or we might sit and tell some tender tale 
 
 Of faithful vows repaid by cruel scorn, 
 
 A tale of true love, or of friend forgot ; 
 
 And I would leach thee, lady, how to rail 
 
 In gentle sort, on those who practise not 
 
 Or love or pity, though of woman born. 
 
 III. 
 
 As when a child on some long winter's night j 
 
 Affrighted clinging to its grandam's knees i 
 
 With eager wondering and perturb'd delight 
 Listens strange tales of fearful dark decrees 
 Mutter'd to wretch by necromantic spell ; 
 Or of those hags, who at the witching time 
 Of murky midnight ride the air sublime, 
 And mingle foul embrace with fiends of hell : 
 Cold Horror drinks its blood ! Anon the tear 
 More gentle starts, to hear the beldame tell 
 Of pretty babes, that loved each other dear, 
 Murder'd by cruel Uncle's mandate fell : 
 Even such the shivering joys thy tones impart, 
 Even so thou, SiDDONS ! meltest my sad heart ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 WRITTEN AT MIDNIGHT, BY THE SEA-SIDE AFTER A VOYAGE. 
 
 O, I could laugh to hear the midnight wind. 
 That, rushing on its way with careless sweep 
 Scatters the ocean waves. And I could weep 
 Like to a child. For now to my raised mind 
 On wings of winds comes wild-eyed Phantasy, 
 And her rude visions give severe delight. 
 O winged bark ! how swift along the night 
 Pass'd thy proud keel ; nor shall I let go by 
 Lightly of that drear hour the memory. 
 When wet and chilly on thy deck I stood, 
 Unbonneted, and gazed upon the flood. 
 Even till it seem'd a pleasant thing to die, — 
 To be resolved into th' elemental wave. 
 Or take my portion with the winds that rave. 
 
 [Charles Lamb having begun his career in authorship as a sonneteer, and havino- 
 written to Coleridge with effusion, "I love my sonnets!" the first four are in this 
 Centenary Edition of his Writings followed immediately by those he afterwards pro- 
 duced at various times. They are all arranged as nearly as possible in chronological 
 order, being succeeded by the miscellaneous poems, which are also arranged chrono- 
 logically.] 
 
 V. 
 When last I roved these winding wood-walks green, 
 Green winding walks, and shady pathways sweet, 
 Ofttimes would Anna seek the silent scene, 
 Shrouding her beauties in the lone retreat. 
 
Earliest and Later Sonnets. 35 
 
 No more I hear her footsteps in the shade : 
 Her image only in these pleasant ways 
 Meets mc self-wandering, where in happier days 
 I held free converse with the fair-hair'd maid. 
 I pass'd the little cottage which she loved, 
 The cottage which did once my all contain ; 
 It spake of days which ne'er must come again, 
 Spake to my heart, and much my heart was moved. 
 " Now fair befall thee, gentle maid ! " said I, 
 And from the cottage turn'd me with a sigh. ' 
 
 VI. 
 
 A TIMID grace sits trembling in her eye. 
 
 As loth to meet the rudeness of men's sight, 
 
 Yet shedding a delicious lunar light. 
 
 That steeps in kind oblivious ecstasy 
 
 The care-crazed mind, hke some still melody : 
 
 Speaking most plain the thoughts which do possess 
 
 Her gentle sprite : peace, and meek quietness. 
 
 And innocent loves, and maiden purity : 
 
 A look whereof might heal the cruel smart 
 
 Of changed friends, or fortune's wrongs unkind ; 
 
 Might to sweet deeds of mercy move the heart 
 
 Of him who hates his brethren of mankind. 
 
 Turn'd are those Mghts from me, who fondly yet 
 
 Past joys, vain loves, and buried hopes regret. 
 
 VII. 
 
 IF from my lips some angry accents fell, 
 
 Peevish complaint, or harsh reproof unkind, 
 
 'Twas but the error of a sickly, mind 
 
 And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well, 
 
 And waters clear of Reason ; and for me 
 
 Let this my verse the poor atonement be — 
 
 My verse, which though to praise wert ever inclined 
 
 Too highly, and with a partial eye to see 
 
 No blemish. Thou to me didst ever show 
 
 Kindest affection ; and would ofttimes lend 
 
 An ear to the desponding love-sick lay. 
 
 Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay 
 
 But ill the mighty debt of love I owe, 
 
 Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 ■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 beguiled, 
 I left the garb and manners of a child. 
 And my first love for man's society, 
 Defiling with the world my virgin heart— 
 
36 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 My loved companion dropped 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 ? 
 
 IX. 
 
 HARMONY IN UNLIKENESS. 
 
 By Enfield lanes, and Winchmore's verdant hill, 
 Two lovely damsels cheer my lonely walk : 
 The fair Maria, as a vestal, still; 
 And Emma brown, exuberant in talk. 
 With soft and lady speech the first applies 
 The mild correctives that to grace belong 
 To her redundant friend, who her defies 
 With jest, and mad discourse, and bursts of song. 
 O differing pair, yet sweetly thus agreeing. 
 What music from your happy discord rises. 
 While your companion hearing each, and seeing, 
 Nor this, nor that, but both together, prizes ; 
 This lesson teaching, which our souls may strike. 
 That harmonies may be in things unlike 1 
 
 TO MAKTIK CHARLES BURNEY. 
 
 [A dedicatory sonnet originally published at the beginning of the second volume of the 
 1818 edition of Charles Lamb's Works, as a prefix to his earliest essays and criticisms.] 
 
 Forgive me, Burney, if to thee these late 
 And hasty products of a critic pen. 
 Thyself no common judge of books and men. 
 In feeling of thy worth I dedicate. 
 My verse was offer' d to an older friend ; 
 The humbler /rtfji^ has fallen to thy share : 
 Nor could I miss the occasion to declare. 
 What spoken in thy presence must offend- 
 That, set aside some few caprices wild. 
 Those humorous clouds, that flit o'er brightest days. 
 In all my threadings of this worldly maze, 
 (And I have watch'd thee almost-from a child,) 
 Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, 
 I have not found a whiter soul than thine. 
 
 XI. 
 
 ■WRITTEN AT CAMBRIDGE ON THE 15TH AUGUST, 1819. 
 
 I -WAS not train'd in Academic bowers. 
 And to those learned streams I nothing owe 
 "Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow ; 
 Mine have been anything but studious hours. 
 Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers. 
 Myself a nurshng, Granta, of thy lap ; 
 My brow seems tightening with the Doctor's cap. 
 And I -w&Ws. gowned ; feel untisual powers. 
 
Earliest and Later Sonnets. 37 
 
 Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech, 
 
 Old Ramus' ghost is busy at my brain ; 
 
 And my skull teems with notions infinite. 
 
 Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach 
 
 Truths, whicn transcend thu searching Schoolmen's vein, 
 
 And half had sta:;3er'd that stout Stagirite ! 
 
 XII. 
 
 iO MISS KELLY. 
 
 You are not, Kelly, of the common strain, 
 That stoop their pride and female honour down 
 To please that many-headed beast the town. 
 And vend their lavish smiles and tricks for gain ; 
 By fortune thrown amid the aclors' train. 
 You keep your native dignity of thought ; 
 The plaudits that attend you come unsought, 
 As tributes due unto your natural vein. 
 Your tears have passion in them, and a grace 
 Of genuine freshness, which our hearts avow ; 
 Your smiles are winds whose ways we cannot trace, 
 That vanish and return we know not how — 
 And please the better from a pensive face. 
 And thoughtful eye, and a reflecting brow. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 TO A CELEBRATED FEMALE PERFORMER IN " THE BLIND BOY." 
 
 [Published originally in the Monihig Chronicle, the following sonnet, like the preced- 
 ing one, addressed to Miss Kelly, was reproduced some years afterwards, without 
 authority, in Hone's Every-Day Book. Whereupon Charles Lamb addressed to the 
 editor of that ingenious publication ths following whimsical and wonderfully charac- 
 teristic letter, half in denial, as will be seen, half in indignation, but at the last wholly in 
 acknowledgment of the sonnet as his : " Dear Sir," he wrote, — " Somebody has fairly 
 played a hoax on you (I suspect that pleasant rogue M-x-n) in sending the sonnet in my 
 name, inserted in your last number. True it is that I must own to the verses being 
 mine, but not written on the occasion there pretended ; for I have not yet had the pleasure 
 of seeing the lady in the part of Emmeline, and I have understood that the force of her 
 acting in it is in rather the expression of new-born sight than of the previous want of it. 
 The lines were really written upon her performance in the Blind Boy, and appeared in 
 the Morning Chronicle &ora& years back. I suppose our facetious friend thought that they 
 would serve again, like an old coat new turned. — Yours (and his nevertheless), C. Lamb."] 
 
 Rare artist ! who with half thy tools, or none. 
 Canst execute with ease thy curious art. 
 And press thy powerftil'st meanings on the heart, 
 Unaided by the eye, expression's throne ! 
 ■\yhile each blind sense, intelligential grown 
 Beyond Its sphere, performs the effect of sight ■, 
 Those orbs alone, wanting their proper might. 
 All motionless and silent seem to moan 
 The unseemly negligence of nature's hand, 
 That left them so forlorn. What praise is thine, 
 O mistress of the passions ; artist fine ! 
 Who dost our souls against our sense command, 
 Plucking the horror from a sightless face. 
 Lending to blank deformity a grace. 
 
i 38 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 I 1 ^ 
 
 XIV. 
 
 TO THE AUTHOR OF POEMS, PUBLISHED UNDER THE NAME OF BARRY 
 
 COKNWALL. 
 
 (London Magazine, September, 1820.) 
 Let hate, or grosser heats, their foulness mask 
 Under the vizor of a borrow'd name ; 
 Let things eschew the light deserving blame : 
 No cause hast thou to blush for thy sweet task. 
 " Marcian Colonna " is a dainty book -, 
 And thy *' Sicilian Tale " may boldly pass ; 
 Thy " Dream " 'bove all, in which, as in a glass, 
 On the great world's antique glories -we may look. 
 No longer then, as "lowly substitute. 
 Factor, or Proctok, for another's gains," 
 Suffer the admiring world to be deceived ; 
 Lest thou thyself, by self of fame berea,ved, 
 Lament too late the lost prize of thy pains, 
 And heavenly tunes piped through an alien flute. 
 
 XV. 
 
 WORK. 
 Who first invented work, and bound the free 
 > And holyday-rejoicing spirit down 
 
 To the ever-haunting importunity 
 Of business in the green fields, and the town — 
 To plough, loom, anvil, spade— and oh ! most sad, 
 To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood? 
 Who but the being unblest, alien from good, 
 Sabbathless Satan 1 he who his unglad 
 Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings. 
 That round and round incalculably reel — 
 For wrath divine hath made him hke a wheel- 
 In that red realm from which are no returnin"s ; ' 
 Where toiling, and turmoiling ever and aye ° 
 He, and his thoughts, keep pensive working-day. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 LEISURE. 
 
 {London Magazine, April, 1821.) 
 They talk of time, and of time's galling yoke, 
 That like a mill-stone 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— 
 Id drink of time's rich cup, and never surfeit ■ 
 ;bling in more days than went to make the gem, 
 That crown d 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. 
 
 DEUS NOBIS H^C OTlA FECIT. 
 
Earliest atrd Later Sonnets. 39 
 
 XVII. 
 
 TO SAMUEL KOGEKS, ESQ. 
 
 Rogers, of all the men that I have known 
 But slightly, who have died, .your Brother's loss 
 Touch'd me most sensibly. There came across 
 My mind an image of the cordial tone 
 Of your fraternal meetings, where a guest 
 I more than once have sat; and grieve to think, 
 That of that threefold cord one precious link 
 By Death's rude hand is sever'd from the rest. 
 Of our old Gentry he appear'd a stem — 
 A Magistrate who, while the evil-doer 
 He kept in terror, could respect the Poor, 
 And not for every trifle harass them. 
 As some, divine and laic, too oft do. 
 This man's a private loss, and public too. 
 
 XVIII. 
 THE gipsy's malison. 
 (Blackwood s Magazine, January, 1829.) 
 " Suck, baby, suck, mother's love grows by giving. 
 Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting ; 
 Black manhood comes, when riotous guilty living 
 Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting. 
 Kiss, baby, kiss, mother's lips shine by kisses. 
 Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings ; 
 Black manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses 
 Tend thee the kiss that poisons 'mid caressings. 
 Hang, baby, hang, mother's love loves such forces. 
 Strain the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging ; 
 Black manhood comes, when violent lawless courses 
 Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging," 
 So sang a wither'd Beldam energetical. 
 And bann'd the ungiving door with lips prophetical. 
 
 XIX. 
 ON THE SIGHT OP SWANS IN KENSINGTON GARDENS. 
 
 Queen-bird that sittest on thy shining nest. 
 And thy young cygnets without sorrow hatchest, 
 And thou, thou other royal bird, that watchest 
 Lest the white mother wandering feet molest : 
 Shrined are your offspring in a crystal cradle. 
 Brighter than Helen's ere she yet had burst 
 Her shelly prison. They shal) be born at first 
 Strong, active, graceful, perfect, swan-like, able 
 To tread the land or waters with severity. ' 
 UnUke poor human births, conceived in sin. 
 In grief brought forth, both outwardly and in 
 Confessing weakness, error, and impurity. 
 Did heavenly creatures own succession's line, 
 The births of heaven like to yours would shine. 
 
40 The Worlts of Charles Lamb. 
 
 XX. 
 
 THE FAMILY NAME. 
 
 WHAT.reason first imposed thee, gentle name, 
 Name that my father bore, and his sire's sire, 
 Without reproach ? we trace our stream no higher ; 
 And I, a childless man, may end the same. 
 Perchance some shepherd on Lincolnian plains, 
 In manners guileless as his own sweet flocks. 
 Received thee first amid the merry mocks 
 And arch allusions of his fellow swains. 
 Perchance from Salem's holier fields retum'd, 
 ■With glory gotten on the heads abhorr'd 
 Of faithless Saracens, some martial lord 
 Took HIS meek title, in whose zeal he bum'd, 
 ■Whate'er the fount whence thy beginnings came, 
 No deed of mine shall shame thee, gentle name. 
 
 XXI. 
 
 TO JOHN LAMB, ESQ., OF THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. 
 
 John, you were figuring in the gay career 
 
 Of blooming manhood with a young man's joy. 
 
 When I was yet a little peevish boy — 
 
 Though time has made the difference disappear 
 
 Betwixt our ages, which then seem'd so great — 
 
 And still by rightful custom you retain, 
 
 Much of the old authoritative strain. 
 
 And keep the elder brother up in state. 
 
 O ! you do well in this. 'Tis man's worst deed 
 
 To let the "things that have been " run to waste, 
 
 And in the unmeaning present sink the past : 
 
 In whose dim glass even now I faintly read 
 
 Old buried forms, and facps long ago, 
 
 Which you, and I, and one more, only know. 
 
 XXII. 
 
 [Prefixed to this sonnet in Moxon's edition of 1840 of Charles Lamb's Poems, there was 
 given, upon p. 40, the following e.\planatory note from the author's own hand : — " In a 
 leaf of a quarto edition of the ' Lives of the Saints, written in Spanish by the learned 
 and reverend father Alfonso Villegas, Divine of the Order of St. Dominick, set forth in 
 English by John Heigham, Anno 1630,' bought at a Catholic bookshop_ in Duke Street, 
 Lincoln's Inn Fields, I found, carefully inserted, a painted flower, seemingly coeval witll 
 the book itself ; and did not for some time discover that it opened in the middle, and was 
 the cover to a very humble draught of a Saint Anne, with the Virgin and Child ; doubtless 
 the performance of some poor but pious Catholic, whose meditations it assisted."] 
 
 O LIFT with reverent hand that tarnish'd flower, 
 That shrines beneath her modest canopy 
 Memorials dear to Romish piety ; 
 Dim specks, rude shapes of saints . in fervent hour 
 
Earliest and Later Sonnets. 41 
 
 The work perchance of some meek devotee, 
 
 Who, poor in worldly treasures to set forth 
 
 The sanctities she worshipp'd to their worth, 
 
 In this imperfect tracery might see 
 
 Hints, that all Heaven did to her sense reveal. 
 
 Cheap gifts best fit poor givers. We are told 
 
 Of the love mite, the cup of water cold. 
 
 That in their way approved the offerer's zeal. 
 
 True love shows costliest, where the means are scant ; 
 
 And, in their reckoning, they abound, who want. 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 [The four following sonnets are, for the better completion of the series, transferred to 
 this place by anticipation from the Album Verses, to which they more properly belong. 
 His sonnets, however, being Charles Lamb's especial darlings, it has been thought 
 advisable, as already intimated, that, as the poems begin with sonnets, the sonnets should 
 be given here at once as a complete collection.] 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF ROTHA Q[UILLINAN]. ' 
 
 A PASSING glance was all I caught of thee. 
 
 In my own Enfield haunts at random roving. 
 
 Old friends of ours were with thee, faces loving ; 
 
 Time short : and salutations cursory. 
 
 Though deep and hearty. The familiar name 
 
 Of you, yet unfamiliar, raised in me 
 
 Thoughts — what the daughter of that man should be 
 
 Who call'd our Wordsworth friend. My thoughts did frame 
 
 A growing Maiden, who, from day to day 
 
 Advancing still in stature, and in grace. 
 
 Would all her lonely father's griefs efface, 
 
 And his paternal cares with usury pay. 
 
 I still retain the phantom, as I can ; 
 
 And call the gentle image — Quillinan. 
 
 XXIV. 
 
 TO DORA ^'[ORDSWORTH], ON BEING ASKED BY HER FATHER 
 TO WRITE IN HER ALBUM. ■ 
 
 An album is a banquet : from the store, 
 
 In his intelligential orchard growing, 
 
 Your sire might heap your board to overflowing ; 
 
 One shaking of the tree— 'twould ask no more 
 
 To set a salad forth, more rich than that 
 
 Which Evelyn in his princely cookery fancied : 
 
 Or that more rare, by Eve's neat hands enhanced. 
 
 Where a pleased guest, the angelic virtue sat. 
 
 But like the all-grasping founder of the feast, 
 
 Whom Nathan to the sinning king did tax. 
 
 From his less wealthy neighbours he exacts ; 
 
 Spares his own flocks, and takes the poor man's beast. 
 
 Obedient to his bidding, lo, I am, 
 
 A zealous, meekj' contributory Lamb. 
 
 c * 
 
42 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 XXV. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF MRS. JANE TOWERS. 
 
 Ladv unknown, who cravest from me unknown 
 The trifle of a verse these leaves to grace, 
 How shall I find fit matter? with what face 
 Address a face that ne'er to me was shown ? 
 Thy looks, tones, gesture, manners, and what not, 
 Conjecturing, I wander in the dark. 
 I know thee only sister to Charles Clarke ! 
 But at that name my cold Muse waxes hot, 
 And swears that thou art such a one as he. 
 Warm, laughter-loving, with a touch of madness, 
 ' Wild, glee-provpking, pouring oil of gladness 
 
 From frank heart without guile. And, if thou be 
 The pure reverse of this, and I mistake — 
 Demure one, I will like thee for his sake. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH S[0UTHEY]. 
 
 (The Athenaum, 9th March, 1833.) 
 
 [Upon the opposite page is given a facsimile of this sonnet in Charles Lamb'j own 
 handwriting.] 
 
 In Christian world Mary the garland wears ! 
 
 Rebecca sweetens on a Hebrew's ear ; 
 
 Quakers for pure Priscilla are more clear; 
 
 And the light Gaul by amorous NiNON swears. 
 
 Among the lesser lights how I.UCY shines ! 
 
 What air of fragrance Rosamond throws around ! 
 
 How like a hymn doth sweet Cecilia sound ! 
 
 Of Marthas,- and of Abigails, few lines 
 
 Have bragg'd in verse. Of coarsest household stuff 
 
 Should homely JoAN be fashioned. But can 
 
 You Barbara resist, Qr Marian ? 
 
 And is not Clake for love excuse enough ? 
 
 "ifet, by my faith in numbers, I profess. 
 
 These all, than Saxon Edith, please me less. 
 

 
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42 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 XXV. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF MRS. JANE TOWERS. 
 
 Lady unknown, who cravest from me unknown 
 The trifle of a verse these leaves to grace, 
 How shall I find fit matter? with what face 
 Address a face that ne'er to me was shown ? 
 Thy looks, tones, gesture, manners, and what not, 
 Conjecturing, I wander in the dark. 
 I know thee only sister to Charles Clarke ! 
 But at that name my cold Muse waxes hot, 
 And swears that thou art such a one as he. 
 Warm, laughter-loving, with a touch of madness, 
 ' Wild, glee-provoking, pouring oil of gladness 
 
 From frank heart without guile. And, if thou he 
 The pure reverse of this, and I mistake — 
 Demure one, I will like thee for his sake. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF EDITH S[0UTHEY]. 
 
 (The AthencBum^ 9th March, 1833.) 
 
 [Upon the opposite page is given a facsimile of this sonnet in Charles Lamb'i own 
 handwriting.] 
 
 In Christian world Mary the garland wears ! 
 
 Rebecca sweetens on a Hebrew's ear ; 
 
 Quakers for pure Priscilla are more clear; 
 
 And the Ught Gaul by amorous Ninon swears. 
 
 Among the lesser hghts how I.UCY shines ! 
 
 What air of fragrance Rosamond throws around ! 
 
 How Uke a hymn doth sweet Cecilia sound ! 
 
 Of Marthas,- and of Abigails, few Unes 
 
 Have bragg'd in verse. Of coarsest household stuff 
 
 Should homely Joan be fashioned. But can 
 
 You Barbara resist, pr Marian ? 
 
 And is not Clare for love excuse enough ? 
 
 Yet, by my faith in numbers, I profess. 
 
 These all, than Saxon Edith, please me less. 
 
I 
 ^u^t'^^^ ^^yiw^E^ (/^U^£^^^C a.^2^^ ^n^rzA<:^i^t^/ 
 
 
 
tSaIklT^01TS WMlXtB. 
 
 [The initials C. L. were alone subscribed to the four earliest sonnets in 1796. Coleridge, 
 however, at once identified the writer in his Preface as "Mr. Charles Lamb of ths 
 India House." During the following year, 1797, Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd 
 brought oiit at Bristol together with Coleridge, and afterwards apart from Coleridge, 
 another collection of poems to which they contributed about equally. The issuing thus, 
 almost timorously, in partnership with others, of one or two unpretending booklets, 
 be^an for Charles Lamb — as by the first tender sproutings of a half-planted acorn^the 
 growth of what has since struck the deepest roots in the affections of the Knglish people, 
 and has become a gnarled and enduring reputation.] 
 
 PRELIMINARY MOTTO. 
 
 *'This beauty in the blossom of my youth, 
 When my first fire knew no adulterate incense. 
 Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness 
 In the best language my true tongue could tell me. 
 And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, 
 I sued and served. Long did I love this lady." 
 
 Massinger. 
 
 DEDICATION. 
 
 THE FEW FOLLOWING POEMS, 
 CREATURES OF THE FANCY AND THE FEELING, 
 
 IN life's more l^ACA A' T hours; 
 
 PRODUCED, FOR THE MOST PART, BY 
 
 LOVE IN IDLENESS ; 
 
 ARE, 
 
 WITH ALL A brother's FONDNESS, 
 
 INSCRIBED TO 
 
 MARY ANN LAMB, 
 
 THE 
 
 CHILDHOOD. 
 
 To sit in fancy on the turf-clad slope, 
 
 Down which the child would roll; to 
 
 In my poor mind it is most sweet to 
 
 pluck gay flowers. 
 
 muse 
 
 Make posies in the sun, which the 
 
 Upon the days gone by; to act in 
 
 child's hand. 
 
 thought 
 
 (Childhood offended, soon reconciled,) 
 
 Past seasons o'er, and bd again a 
 
 Would throw away, and straight take 
 
 child ; 
 
 up agam, 
 
44 
 
 77/1? Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 '~\ 
 
 Then fling them to the winds, and 
 
 o'er tlie lawn 
 Bound with so playful and so light a 
 
 foot, 
 That the press'd daisy scarce declined 
 
 her head. 
 
 THE GRANDAME. 
 
 On the green hill top. 
 
 Hard by the house of prayer, a mo- 
 dest roof, 
 
 And not distinguish'd from its neigh- 
 bour barn. 
 
 Save by a slender-tapering length of 
 spire. 
 
 The Grandame sleeps. A plain stone 
 barely tells 
 
 The name and date to the chance 
 passenger. 
 
 For lowly born was she, and long had 
 eat, • 
 
 Well-earn' d, the bread of service : — 
 hers was else 
 
 A mounting spirit, one that entertain'd 
 
 Scorn of base- actioni deed dishonour- 
 able, 
 
 Or aught unseemly. I remember well 
 
 Her reverend image : I remember, too, 
 
 'With what a zeal she served her mas- 
 ter's house ; 
 
 And how the prattling tongue of gar- 
 rulous age 
 
 Delighted to recount the oft-told tale 
 
 Or anecdote domestic. Wise she was, 
 
 And wondrous skill'd in genealogies. 
 
 And could in apt and voluble terms 
 discourse 
 
 Of births, of titles, and alliances ; 
 
 Of marriages, and intermarriages ; 
 
 Relationship remote, or near of kin ; 
 
 Of friends offended, family disgraced. 
 
 Maiden high-born, but wayward, dis- 
 obeying 
 
 Parental strict injunctions, and re- 
 gardless 
 
 Of unmix'd blood, and ancestry re- 
 mote, 
 
 Stooping to wed with one of low 
 degree. 
 
 But these are not thy praises ; and I 
 wrong 
 
 Thy honour'd memory, recording 
 chiefly 
 
 Things light or trivial. Better twere ! 
 
 to tell, ! 
 
 How with a nobler zeal, and warmer ( 
 
 love, I 
 
 She served her heavenly Master. I , 
 
 have seen ■ 
 
 That reverend form bent down with [ 
 
 age and pain, 1 
 
 And ranlding malady : yet not for this 
 
 Ceased she to praise her Maker, or [ 
 
 ' withdraw j 
 
 Her trust from liim, her faith, and j 
 
 humble hope; 
 So meekly had she leam'd to bear her 
 
 cross — 
 For she had studied patience in the 
 
 school 
 Of Christ; much comfort she had 
 
 thence derived, 
 And was a.foUcmier of the N azaeene. 
 
 THE SABBATH BELLS. 
 
 aHE cheerful sabbath bells, wherever 
 
 heard. 
 Strike pleasant on the sense, most 
 
 like the voice 
 Of one, who from the far-off hills 
 
 proclaims 
 Tidings of good to Zion : chiefly 
 
 when 
 Their piercing tones f^U sudden on 
 
 the ear 
 Of the contemplant, solitary man. 
 Whom thoughts abstruse or high 
 
 have chanced to lure 
 Forth from the walks of men, re- 
 volving oft, 
 And oft again, hard matter, which 
 
 eludes 
 And baffles his pursuit, thought-sick 
 
 and tired 
 Of controversy, where no end ap- 
 pears. 
 No clue to his research, the lonely 
 
 man 
 Half wishes for society again. 
 Him, thus engaged, the Sabbath bells 
 
 salute 
 Sudden I his heart awal?es : his ears 
 
 drink in 
 The cheering music; his relenting 
 
 soul 
 
Miscellaneous Poems. 
 
 45 
 
 Yearns after all the joys of social life, 
 And softens with the love of human 
 kind. 
 
 \ FANCY EMPLOYED ON DIVINE 
 SUBJECTS. 
 
 S The truant Fancy was a wanderer 
 i ever, 
 
 ' A lone enthusiast maid. She loves to 
 i walk 
 
 I n the bright visions of empyreal light, 
 By the green pastures, and the fra- 
 grant meads, 
 Where the perpetual flowers of Eden 
 
 blow: 
 By crystal streams, and by the living 
 
 waters, 
 Along whose margin grows the won- 
 drous tree 
 Whose leaves shall heal the nations ; 
 
 underneath 
 Whose holy shade a refuge shall be 
 
 found 
 From pain and want, and all the ills 
 that wait 
 1 On mortal life, from sin ana death for 
 ever. 
 
 THE TOMB OF DOUGLAS. 
 (see the tragedy of that 
 
 NAME.) 
 
 When her son, her Douglas, died. 
 To the steep rock's fearful side 
 Fast the frantic mother hied — 
 
 O'er her blooming warrior dead 
 Many a tear did Scotland shed, 
 And shrieks of long and loud lament 
 From her Grampian hills she sent. 
 
 Like one awakening from a trance 
 She met the shock of Lochlin's * 
 
 lance ; 
 On her rude invader foe 
 Return' d an hundredfold the blow, 
 Drove the taunting spoiler home; 
 
 Mournful thence she took her way 
 To do observance at the tomb 
 
 Where the son of Douglas lay. 
 
 * Denmark. 
 
 Round about the tomb did go 
 In solemn state and order slow. 
 Silent pace, and black attire. 
 Earl or Knight, or good Esquire ; 
 Whoe'er by deeds of, valour done 
 In battle had high honours won; 
 Whoe'er in their pure veins could 
 
 trace 
 The blood of Douglas' noble race. 
 
 With them the flower of minstrels 
 came. 
 And to their cunning harps did frame 
 In doleful numbers piercing rhymes. 
 Such strains as in the older times 
 Had soothed the spirit of Fingal, 
 Echoing thro' his father's hall. 
 
 " Scottish maidens, drop a tear 
 O'er the beauteous Hero's bier ! 
 Brave youth, and comely 'boVe com- 
 pare. 
 All golden shone his burnish'd hair ; 
 Valour and smiling courtesy 
 Play'd in the sunbeams of his eye. 
 Closed are those eyes that shone so 
 
 fair. 
 And stain'd with blood his yellow 
 
 hair. 
 Scottish maidens, drop a tear 
 O'er the beauteous Hero's bier ! 
 
 ' ' Not a tear, I charge you, shed 
 For the false Glenalvon dead ; 
 Unpitied let Glenalvon lie. 
 Foul stain to arms and chivalry ! 
 
 " Behind his back the traitor came. 
 And Douglas died without his fame. 
 Young hght of Scotland early spent. 
 Thy country thee shall long lament. 
 And oft to after-times shall tell. 
 In Hope's sweet prime my Hero fell." 
 
 TO CHARLES LLOYD. 
 
 (AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR.) 
 
 [This early friend and sometime collabor- 
 ateur of Charles Lamb survived the" latter 
 nearly five years, dying in 1839, at Ver- 
 sailles. Strange to say kis wit, too, was 
 with madness near allied. Poor Charles 
 Lloyd had frequent paroxysms of insanity, 
 expiring at last in a hopeless state of de- 
 rangement. ] 
 
46 
 
 The Works of C/iarles Lamb. 
 
 Alone, obscure, without a friend, 
 
 A cheerless, solitary thing, * 
 Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger 
 out? 
 What offering can the stranger 
 bring 
 
 Of social scenes, home-bred delights. 
 That him in aught compensate may 
 
 For Stowey's pleasant winter nights, 
 For loves and friendships far away? 
 
 In brief oblivion to forego 
 
 Friends such as thine, so justly 
 dear. 
 And be awhile with me content 
 
 To stay, a kindly loiterer, here. 
 
 For this a gleam of random joy 
 Hath flush'd my unaccustom'd 
 cheek : 
 And, with an o'ercharged bursting 
 heart, 
 I feel the thanks I cannot speak. 
 
 O ! sweet are all the Muses' lays, 
 And sweet the charm of matin 
 bird— 
 'Twas long since these estranged ears 
 The sweeter voice of friend had 
 heard. 
 
 The voice hath spoke: the pleasant 
 sounds 
 In memory's ear in after-time 
 Shall live, to sometimes rouse a tear, 
 And sometimes prompt an honest 
 rhyme. . 
 
 For when the transient charm is fled. 
 And when the little week is o'er. 
 
 To cheerless, friendless solitude 
 When I return, as heretofore. 
 
 Long, long, within my aching heart. 
 The grateful sense shall cherish'd 
 be; 
 I'll think less meanly of myself, 
 That LlSyd will sometimes think 
 on me. 
 
47 
 
 \lmh, WtXBL 
 
 [Written one half of it by Charles Lloyd, and the other half by Charles Lamb, " Blank 
 Verse " appeared in i7g8,_as a small half-crown octavo of less than loo pages, printed by 
 T. Bensley, for the publishers, John and Arthur Arch, of No. 23, Gracetfhurch Street, 
 in the city of London. Charles Lamb's was the later portion of the volume, his con- 
 tributions, seven in number, extending from p. 71 to p. 95,] 
 
 TO CHARLES LLOYD. 
 (August, 1797.) 
 
 A STRANGER, and alone, I past those 
 
 scenes 
 We past so late together; and my 
 
 heart 
 Felt something like desertion, when I 
 
 look'd 
 Around me, and the well-known voice 
 
 of friend 
 Was absent, and the cordial look was 
 
 there 
 No more to smile on me. I thought 
 
 on Lloyd; 
 All he had been to me. And now I 
 
 go 
 
 Again to mingle with a world impure, 
 With men who make a mock of holy 
 
 things 
 Mistaken, and of man's best hope 
 
 think scorn. 
 The world does much to warp the 
 
 heart of man, 
 A'nd I may sometimes join its idiot 
 
 laugh. 
 Of this I now complain not. Deal 
 
 with me, 
 Omniscient Father! as thou judgest 
 
 best. 
 And in thy season tender thou my 
 
 heart. 
 I pray not for myself ; I pray for him, 
 Whose soul is sore perplex'd: shine. 
 
 thou on him. 
 Father of Lights ! and in the difficult 
 
 paths 
 
 Make plain his way before him. His 
 
 own thoughts 
 May he not Ihink, his own ends not 
 
 pursue ; 
 So shall he best perform thy will on 
 
 eartli. 
 Greatest and Best, thy will be ever 
 
 ours ! 
 
 WRITTEN ON THE DAY OF 
 MY AUNT'S FUNERAL. 
 
 (FEBRUARY, 1797.) 
 
 [Immediately before her death, Charles 
 Lamb wrote in one of his letters : " My 
 poor old aunt, who was the kindest creature 
 tome when I fras at school, and used to 
 bring me good things : when I, schoolboy- 
 like, used to be ashamed to see her come, 
 and open her apron, and bring out her 
 basin with some nice thing which she had 
 saved for me— the good old creature is nOAv 
 dying. She says, poor thing, she is glad 
 she has come home to die with me. I was 
 always her favourite."] ■ 
 
 Thou too art dead, [Aunt Hetty] ! 
 very kind 
 
 Hast thou been to me in my childish 
 days. 
 
 Thou best good creature. I have 
 not forgot 
 
 How thou didst love thy Charles, 
 when he was yet 
 
 A prating schoolboy ; I have not for- 
 got 
 
 The busy joy on that important day. 
 
48 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 When, childlike, the poor wanderer 
 
 was content 
 To leave the bosom of parental love, 
 His childhood's play-^lace, and his 
 
 early home. 
 For the rude fosterings of a stranger's 
 
 hand. 
 Hard uncouth tasks, and schoolboy's 
 
 scanty fare. 
 How did thine eye peruse him. round 
 
 and round, 
 And hardly know him in his yellow 
 
 coats, * 
 Red leathern belt, and gown of russet 
 
 blue! 
 Farewell, good aunt ! 
 Go thou and occupy the same grave- 
 bed 
 ■Where the dead mother lies. 
 Oh my dear' mother, oh thou dear 
 
 dead saint ! 
 Where's now that placid face, where 
 
 oft hath sat 
 A mother's smile, to think her son 
 
 should thrive 
 In this bad world, when she was dead 
 
 and gone ; 
 And where a tear hath sat (take shame, 
 
 O son !) 
 ■When that same child has proved 
 
 himself unkind. 
 One parent yet is left— a wretched 
 
 thing, 
 A sad survivor of his buried wife, 
 A palsy-smitten, childish, old, old 
 man, 
 ' A semblance most forlojn of what he 
 I was, 
 
 [ A merry cheerful man. A merrier 
 I man, 
 
 A man. more apt to frame matter for 
 
 mirth. 
 Mad jokes, and antics for a Christ- 
 mas eve ; 
 Making life social, and the laggard 
 
 time 
 To move on nimbly, never yet did 
 
 cheer 
 The little circle of domestic friends. 
 
 * The dress of Christ's Hospital 
 
 WRITTEN A YEAR AFTER 
 THE EVENTS. 
 
 (SEPTEMBER I797.) 
 
 [Another glimmering forth of the hidden » 
 
 anguish of a life that for nearly forty years j 
 
 together— from the autumn of 1796 to the I 
 
 Christmas of i834~was one of sustained I 
 
 and sublime self-sacrifice.] j 
 
 Alas ! how am I changed ! Where i 
 
 be the tears, I 
 
 The sobs, and forced suspensions of 
 
 the breath. 
 And all the dull desertions of the 
 
 heart, 
 ' With which .1 hung o'er my dead 
 
 mother's corse ? 
 Where be the blest subsidings of the 
 
 storm 
 Within, the sweet resignedness of 
 
 hope 
 Drawn heavenward, and strength of 
 
 filial love. 
 In which 1 bow'd me to my Father's 
 
 will? 
 My God, and my Redeemer ! keep 
 
 not thou 
 My soul in brute and sensual thank- 
 
 lessness 
 SeaI'd up ; obUvious ever of that dear 
 
 grace 
 And health restored to my long-loved 
 
 friend. 
 Long-loved, and worthyknown. Thou 
 
 didst not leave 
 Her soul in death ! O leave not now, 
 
 my Lord, 
 Tliy servants in far worse, in spiritual 
 
 death! _ , • 
 
 And darkness blacker than those 
 
 fear&d shadows • 
 
 Of the valley all must tread. Lend 
 
 us thy balms. 
 Thou dear Physician of the sin-sick 
 
 soul. 
 And heal our cleansed bosoms of the 
 
 wounds 
 With which the world has pierced us i 
 
 thro' and thro'. 
 Give us new flesh, new birth. Elect 
 
 of heaven I 
 
 May we become; in thine election ( 
 
 sure ' 
 
Blank Verse. 
 
 49 
 
 Contain'd, and to one purpose stead- 
 fast drawn, 
 Our soul's salvation ! 
 
 Thou, and I, dear friend, 
 With filial recognition sweet, shall 
 
 know 
 One day the face of our dear mother 
 
 in heaven ; 
 And her remember'd looks of love 
 
 shall greet 
 With looks of answering love ; her 
 
 placid smiles 
 Meet with a smile as placid, and her 
 
 hand 
 With drops of fondness wet, nor fear 
 
 repulse. 
 Be witness for me. Lord, I do not 
 
 ask 
 Those days of vanity to. return again 
 (Xor fitting me to ask, nor thee to 
 
 _ give). 
 Vain loves and wanderings with a fair- 
 
 hair'd maid, 
 Child of the dust as I am, who so 
 
 long 
 My captive heart steep'd in idolatry 
 And creatijre-loves. Forgive . me, O 
 
 my Maker ! 
 If in a mood of grief I sin almost 
 In sometimes brooding on the days 
 
 long past. 
 And from the grave of time wishing 
 
 them back, 
 Days of a mother's fondness to her 
 
 child, 
 Her little one. 
 
 O where be now those sports. 
 Ana infant play-games? where the 
 
 joyous troops 
 Of children, and the haunts I did so 
 
 love? 
 
 my companions, O ye lovSd names 
 Of friend or playmate dear ; gone are 
 
 ye now : 
 Gone diverse ways ; to honour and 
 
 credit some. 
 And some, I fear, to ignominy and 
 
 shame ! 
 
 1 only am left, with unavailing grief. 
 To mourn one parent dead, and see 
 
 one live 
 Of all life's joys bereft and desolate : 
 Am left with a few friends, and one, 
 
 above 
 The rest, found faithful in a length of 
 
 years, 
 
 Contented as I may, to bear me on 
 To the not unpeaceful evening of 
 
 day 
 Made black by morning storms ! 
 
 WRITTEN SOON AFTER THE 
 PRECEDING POEM. 
 
 (OCTOBER, 1797.) 
 
 [The subjoined verses were afterwards 
 eliminated by Cbarles Lamb from his col- 
 lected poems, doubtless because of their 
 having such frightfully direct reference to 
 the circumstances of his mother's death — 
 to that secret cupboard by his hearth, in 
 which was hidden away something worse 
 than a blood-stained skeleton ; the mystery 
 of his sister's madness and of her un- 
 witting matricide.] 
 
 Thou should'st have longer lived, 
 
 and to the grave 
 Have peacefully gone down in full old 
 
 age! 
 Thy children would have tended thy 
 
 gray hairs. 
 We might have sat, as we have often 
 
 done. 
 By our fireside, and talk'd whole 
 
 nights away. 
 Old times, old friends, and old events 
 
 recalling ; 
 With many a circumstance, of trivial 
 
 note. 
 To memory dear, and of importaiice 
 
 grown. 
 How shall we tell them in a stranger's 
 
 ear? 
 A wayward son oftlimes was I to thee ; 
 And yet, in all our little bickerings, 
 Domestic jars, there was, I know not 
 
 what. 
 Of tender feeling, that were ill exr 
 
 changed 
 For this world's chilling friendships,, 
 
 and their smiles 
 Familiar, whom the heart calls stranr 
 
 gers still. ' 
 A heavy lot hath he, most wretched 
 
 man ! 
 Who lives the last of all his family ; , 
 He looks around him, and his eye 
 
 discerns 
 The face of the stranger, and his heart 
 
 is sick. ' 
 
 .1 
 
5° 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Man of the world, what canst thou do 
 
 for him ? 
 Wealth is a burden, which he could 
 
 not bear ; 
 Mirth a strange crime, the which he 
 
 dares not act ; 
 And wine no cordial, but a bitter cup. 
 For wounds lilte his Christ is the only 
 
 cure, 
 And gospel promises are his by right. 
 For these were given to the poor in 
 
 heart. 
 Go, preach thou to him of a world to 
 
 come, 
 Where friends sliall meet, and know- 
 each other's face. 
 Say less tlian this, and say it to the 
 
 winds. 
 
 WRITTEN ON CHRISTMAS 
 DAY, 1797. 
 
 [Eight years after\vards, in 1805, when 
 Mary Lamb, to whom this poem is ad- 
 dressed, was again under confinement in a 
 lunatic asylum, suffering from another of 
 herfrequent paroxysms of insanity, Charles 
 wrote of her ;" I am a fool bereft of her 
 co-operation. I am used to look up to her 
 m the least and biggest perplexities. To 
 say all that 1 find her would be more than, 
 I think, anybody could possiblyunderstand. 
 She IS older, wiser, and better than I am • 
 and all my wretched imperfections I cover 
 to myself by thinking on her goodness. "] 
 
 I AM a widow'd thing, now thou art 
 
 gone ! 
 Now thou art gone, m'y own famihar 
 
 friend, 
 Companion, sister, helpmate, coun- 
 sellor ! 
 Alas ! that honour'd mind, whose 
 
 sweet reproof 
 And meekest wisdom in times past 
 
 have smooth'd 
 The unfilial harshness of my foolish 
 
 speech. 
 And made me loving to my pareats 
 
 old, 
 (Why is this so, ah, God ! why is this 
 
 so?) 
 That honour'd mind become a fearful 
 
 blank. 
 Her senses lock'd up, and herself kept 
 
 out '^ 
 
 From human sight or converse, while 
 
 so many 
 Of the foohsh sort are left to roam at 
 
 large, 
 Doing all acts of folly, and sin, and 
 
 shame? 
 Thy paths are mystery ! 
 
 Yet 'I will not think, 
 Sweet friend, but we siiall one day 
 
 meet, and live 
 In quietness, and die so, fearing God. 
 Or if not, and these false suggestions 
 
 be 
 A fit of the weak nature, loth to part 
 With what it loved so long, and held 
 
 so dear ; 
 If thou art to be taken, and I left 
 (More sinning, yet unpunish'd, save 
 
 in thee), 
 It is the will of God, and we are clay 
 In the potter's hands; and, at the 
 
 worst, are made 
 From absolute nothing, vessels of dis- 
 grace. 
 Till, his most righteous purpose 
 
 wrought in us. 
 Our purified spirits find their perfect 
 
 rest. 
 
 THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES. 
 
 (JANUARY, 1798.) 
 
 [This loveliest of Charles Lamb's poems 
 began, in the original issue of it, with an 
 inquiry, m a single line, and with a first 
 stanza, afterwards omitted by the author as 
 of too dreadful import. It bore allusion to 
 that appalling tragedy, the reverent veiling 
 and gentle endurance of which, during the 
 rest of his existence, lifted the homely Hfe 
 of this poor city clerk and London man of 
 If JJ^""^. '° '•'^ height of antique heroism. 
 What is said here of the friend he had left 
 abruptly bore reference to a momentary 
 estrangement from Coleridge. The interro- 
 gation, in answer to which the whole of 
 this exquisite lament was chaunted, and 
 
 ■■ 5"' 'ernble stanza, afterwards can- 
 celled, are here restored as curiosities ; but 
 they are carefully barred off from what 
 Charles Lamb, evidently, alone wished 
 preserved, of a poem that, without them, 
 IS certainly "one entire and perfect chryso- 
 
 [Where are they gone, the old familiar 
 faces ? 
 
Blank Verse. 
 
 SI 
 
 I had a mother, but she died, and left 
 
 me, 
 Died prematurely in a day of hor- 
 rors- 
 Mi, all are . gone, the old f.imiliar 
 faces.] 
 
 I have had playmates, I have had 
 companions. 
 
 In my days of childhood, in my joy- 
 ful school-days — 
 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar 
 faces. 
 
 I have been laughing, I have been 
 
 cirousing, 
 Drinliing late, sitting late, with my 
 
 bosom cronies — 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar 
 
 faces. 
 
 I loved a love once, fairest among 
 
 women. 
 Closed are her doors on me, I must 
 
 not see her — 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar 
 
 faces. 
 
 I have a friend, a kinder friend has 
 
 no man. 
 Like an ingrate, I left my friend 
 
 abruptly ; 
 Left him, to muse on the old familiar 
 
 faces. 
 
 Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts 
 
 of my childhood. 
 Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to 
 
 traverse, 
 Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 
 
 Friend of my bosom, thou more than 
 
 a brother ! 
 Why wert not thou born in my 
 
 father's dwelling ? 
 So might we talk of the old familiar 
 
 faces. 
 
 For some they have died, and some 
 
 they have left me. 
 And some are taken from me ; all are 
 
 departed ; , , .,- 
 
 AH, all are gone, the old familiar 
 
 faces 
 
 COMPOSED AT MIDNIGHT. 
 
 From broken visions of perturbM rest 
 I wake, and start, and fear to sleep 
 
 again. 
 How total a privation of all sounds, 
 Siglits, and familiar objects, man, 
 
 bird, beast. 
 Herb, tree, or flower, and prodigal 
 
 light of heaven ! 
 'Twere some relief to catch the drowsy 
 
 cry 
 Of the mechanic watchman, or the 
 
 noise 
 Of revel, reeling home from midnight 
 
 cups. 
 Those are the meanings of the dying 
 
 man, 
 Who lies in the upper chamber ; rest- 
 less moans, 
 And interrupted only by a cough 
 Consumptive, torturing the wasted 
 
 lungs. 
 So in the bitterness of death he lies, 
 And waits in anguish for the morning's 
 
 light. 
 What can that do for him, or what 
 
 restore ? 
 Short taste, faint sense, affecting no- 
 tices. 
 And httle images of pleasures, past. 
 Of health, and active life — (health 
 
 not yet slain, 
 Nor the other grace of life, a good 
 
 name, sold 
 For sin's black wages).' On his 
 
 tedious bed 
 He writhes, and turns him from th' 
 
 accusing light, 
 And finds no comfort in the sun, but 
 
 says 
 "When night comes I shall get a 
 
 little rest." 
 Some few groans more, death comes, 
 
 and there an end. 
 'Tis darkness and conjecture all be- 
 yond ; 
 Weak nature fears, though charity 
 
 must hope, 
 And fancy, most licentious on such 
 
 themes. 
 Where decent reverence well had 
 
 kept her mute, 
 Hath o'er-stock'd hell with devils, 
 
 and brought down 
 
52 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 By her enormous fablings, and mad 
 lies, 
 
 Discredit on the gospel's serious truths 
 
 And salutary fears. The man of parts, 
 
 Poet, or prose declaimSr, on his couch 
 
 LoUing, like one indifferent, fabricates 
 
 A heaven of gold, where he, and such 
 as he. 
 
 Their heads encompassed with crowns, 
 their heels ' 
 
 With fine, wings garlanded, shall 
 I tread the stars 
 
 Beneath their feet, heaven's pave- 
 ment, far removed 
 
 From damned spirits, and the tortur- 
 ing cries 
 
 Of men, his brethren, fashion'd of 
 the earth. 
 
 As he was, nourish' d with the self- 
 same breath, 
 
 Belike his kindred or companions 
 once, 
 
 Through everlasting ages now di- 
 vorced. 
 
 In chains and savage torments, to 
 repent 
 
 Short years of folly on earth. Their 
 groans unheard 
 
 In heaven, the saint nor pityfeels, nor 
 care. 
 
 For those thus sentenced — pity might 
 disturb. 
 
 The deUcate sense and most divine 
 repose 
 
 Of spirits angelical. Blessed be God, 
 
 The measures of his judgments are 
 not fix'd 
 
 By man's erroneous standard. He 
 discerns 
 
 No such inordinate difference and vast 
 
 Betwi.\t the sinner and the saint, to 
 doom 
 
 So disproportion'd fates. Compared 
 with him. 
 
 No man on earth is holy call'd : they 
 best 
 
 Stand in his sight approved, who at 
 his feet 
 
 Their little crowns of virtue cast, and 
 yield 
 
 To him of his own works the praise, 
 his due. 
 
 LIVING WITHOUT GOD IN 
 THE WORLD. 
 
 [Originally published in I7gg,'at Bristol, 
 in vol. i. pp. 90-92, of Joseph Cottle's 
 Annual Anthology, edited by Robert 
 Southey.] 
 
 Mystery of God ! thou brave and 
 
 beauteous world. 
 Made fair with light and shade and 
 
 stars and flowers. 
 Made fearful and august with woods 
 
 and rocks ; 
 Jagg'd precipice, black "mountain, sea 
 
 in storms. 
 Sun, over all, that no co-rival owns, 
 But thro' Heaven's pavement rides as 
 
 in despite 
 Or mockery of the littleness of man ! 
 I see a mighty arm, by man unseen. 
 Resistless, not to be controU'd, that 
 
 guides. 
 In solitude of unshared energies, 
 All these thy ceaseless miracles, O 
 
 world ! 
 Arm of the world, I view thee, and I 
 
 muse 
 On Man, who, trusting in his mortal 
 
 strength, 
 Leans on a shadowy staff, a staff of 
 
 dreams. 
 We consecrate our total hopes and 
 
 fears 
 To idols, flesh and blood, om- love 
 
 (heaven's due), 
 Our praise and admiration ; praise 
 
 bestow'd 
 By man on man, and acts of worship 
 
 done 
 To a kindred nature, certes do reflect 
 Some portion of the glory and rays 
 
 oblique 
 Upon the pohtic worshipper, — so man 
 Extracts a pride from his humility. 
 Some braver spirits of the modern ' 
 
 stamp 
 Affect a Godhead nearer : these talk 
 
 loud 
 Of mind, and independent intellect. 
 Of energies omnipotent in man ; 
 And man of his own fate artificer ; . 
 Yea, of his own life lord, and of the 
 
 days 
 Of his abode on earth, when time 
 
 shall be, 
 
Blank Verse. 
 
 53 
 
 That life immortal shall become an 
 
 art, 
 Or Death, by chymic practices de- 
 ceived, 
 Forego the scetit, which for six 
 
 thousand years 
 Like ?. good hound he has follow'd, 
 
 or at length 
 More mannei"s learning, and a decent 
 
 sense 
 And reverence of a philosophic world. 
 Relent, and leave to prey on carcasses. 
 But these are fancies of a few : the 
 
 rest. 
 Atheists, or Deists only in the name, 
 By word or deed deny a God, They 
 
 eat 
 Their daily bread, and draw the breath 
 
 of heaven 
 Without or thought or thanks ; 
 
 heaven's roof to them 
 Is biit a painted ceihng hung with 
 
 lamps. 
 No more, that lights them to their 
 
 purposes. 
 They wander "loose about," they 
 
 nothing see. 
 Themselves except, and creatures like 
 
 themselves. 
 Short-lived, short-sighted, impotent 
 
 to save. 
 So on their dissolute spirits, soon or 
 
 late. 
 Destruction cometh "like an armed 
 
 man," 
 Or like a dream of murder in the night, 
 Withering their mortal faculties, and 
 
 breaking 
 The bones of all their pride. 
 
 THEKLA'S SONG. 
 
 BALLAD FROM THE GERMAN. 
 
 [Originally published in iScjo, m Cole- 
 ridge's translation from the German of 
 Schiller's Piccolomini, or the first part of 
 Wallenstein. As a prefix to it there, in a 
 footnote, on p., 89, Coleridge wrote the'se 
 words : " I cannot but add here an imita- 
 tion of this song with which the author of 
 ' The Tale of Rosamund Gray and Blind 
 Margaret ' has favoured me, and which 
 appears to me to have caught the happiest 
 manner of our old ballads." Coleridge, 
 according to his wont, considerably modi- 
 fied these stanzas as they were originally 
 published by him in the footnote to his 
 translation of Piccolomini. Charles Lamb, 
 however, restored them two years after- 
 wards to what he regarded as their in- 
 tegrity when, in 1802, he appended them to 
 his first imprint of John Woodvil._ They 
 are here given according to his own 
 corrected version.] 
 
 THE clouds are blackening, the storms 
 threatening, 
 And ever the forest maketh a moan ; 
 Billows are breaking, the damsel's 
 heart aching, 
 Thus by herself she singeth alone, 
 Weeping right plenteously. 
 
 The world is empty, the heart is dead 
 surely, 
 In this world plainly all seemeth 
 amiss ; 
 To thy breast. Holy One, take now 
 thy little one, 
 I have had earnest of all earth's 
 bhss. 
 Living right lovingly. 
 
54 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb, 
 
 j0£trg kx (^'^xhxm. 
 
 [Originally published in 1809, in two duodecimo volumes, price three shillings. 
 Poetry for Children was issued from the press as a portion of Godwin's Juvenile Library. 
 Written conjointly by Charles and Mary Lamb, it was announced on its_ title-page as 
 " by the author of Mrs. Leicester's School." No copy of this little work is now known 
 to be anywhere in exi-Stence, but a reprint of its scattered contents, so far as they could 
 be brought together proximately, was issued from the press in 1872 in the form of a thin 
 octavo, edited by Richard Heme Shepherd. The pieces thus rearranged under the old 
 title had, luckily, proved to be so far reclaimable from the fact of their having been 
 incorporated, with acknowledgment, in 1810, in The First Book of Poetry for the Use of 
 Schools, by W. F. Mylius. The poems here subjoined are, of course, restricted to those 
 contributed by Charles Lamb to the collection.] 
 
 HESTER. 
 
 When maidens such as Hester die. 
 
 Their place ye may not well supply. 
 
 Though ye among a thousand try. 
 
 With vain endeavour. 
 
 A month or more hath she been dead. 
 Yet cannot I by force be led 
 To think upon the wormy bed. 
 And her together. 
 
 A springy motion in her gait, 
 A rising, step, did indicate 
 Of pride and joy no common rate. 
 That flush'd her spirit. 
 
 I know not by what name beside 
 I shall it call : — if 'twas not pride. 
 It was a joy to that allied. 
 She did inherit. 
 
 Her parents held the Quaker rule, 
 Which doth the human feeling cool, 
 But she was train'd in Nature's school, 
 Nature had blest her. 
 
 A waking eye, a prying mind, 
 A heart that stirs, is hard to bind, 
 A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind, 
 
 Ye could not Hester. 
 My sprightly neighbour, gone before 
 To that unknown and silent shore. 
 Shall we not meet, as heretofore, 
 
 Some summer morning. 
 When from thy cheerful eyes a ray 
 Hath struck a bliss upon the day, 
 A bliss that would not go away, 
 
 A sweet forewarning ? 
 
 THE THREE FRIENDS. 
 
 Three young maids in friendship 
 
 met ; 
 Mary, Martha, Margaret. 
 Margaret was tall and fair, 
 Martha shorter by a hair ; 
 If the first excell'd in feature, 
 Th' other's grace and ease were 
 
 greater ; 
 Mary, though to rival loth, 
 In their best gifts equall'd both. 
 They a due proportion kept ; 
 Martha mourn'd if Margaret wept ; 
 Margaret joy'd when any good 
 She of Martha understood ; 
 And in sympathy for either 
 Mary was outdone by neither. 
 Thus far, for a happy space. 
 All three ran an even race, 
 A most constant friendship proving. 
 Equally beloved and loving ; 
 All their wishes, joys, the same ; 
 Sisters only not in name. 
 
 Fortune upon each one smiled. 
 As upon a favourite child ; 
 Well to do and well to see 
 ■Were the parents of all three ; 
 Till on Martha's father crosses 
 Brought a flood of worldly losses, 
 And his fortunes rich and great 
 Changed at once to low estate ; 
 Under which o'erwhelming blow 
 Martha's mother was laid low ; 
 She a hapless orphan left, 
 Of maternal care bereft. 
 
Poetry for Children. 
 
 55 
 
 Trouble following trouble fast, 
 Lay in a sick bed at last. 
 
 In the depth of her affliction 
 Martha now received conviction, 
 That a true and faithful friend 
 Can the surest comfort lend. 
 IJight and day, with friendship tried, 
 Ever constant by her side 
 Was her gentle Mary found, 
 Witli a love that knew no bound ; 
 And the solace she imparted 
 Saved her dying broken-hearted. 
 
 In this scene of earthly things 
 Not one good unmi.xed springs. 
 That which had to Martha proved 
 A sweet consolation, moved 
 Different feelings of regret 
 In the mind of Margaret. 
 She, whose love was not less dear. 
 Nor affection less sincere 
 To her friend, was, by occasion 
 Of more distant habitation. 
 Fewer visits forced to pay her. 
 When no other cause did stay her ; 
 And her Mary living nearer, 
 Margaret began to fear her, 
 Lest her visits day by day 
 Martha's heart should steal away. 
 That whole heart she ill could spare 
 
 her. 
 Where till now she'd been a sharer. 
 From this cause with grief she pined, 
 Till at length her health decUned. 
 All her cheerful spirits flew. 
 Fast as Martha gather'd new; 
 And her sickness waxM sore. 
 Just when Martha felt no more. 
 
 Mary, who had quick suspicion 
 Of her alter'd friend's condition. 
 Seeing Martha's convalescence 
 Less demanded now her presence. 
 With a goodness, built on reason. 
 Changed her measures with the 
 
 season ; 
 Tum'd her steps from Martha s door, 
 Went where she was wanted more ; 
 All her care and thoughts were set 
 Now to tend on Margaret. 
 Mary, living 'twixt the two, 
 From her home could oftener go. 
 Either of her friends to see. 
 Than they could together be. 
 
 Truth explain'd is to suspicion 
 Evermore the best physician. 
 Soon her visits had the effect ; 
 All that Margaret did suspect. 
 From her fancy vanish'd clean ; 
 She was soon what she had been, 
 And the colour she did lack 
 To her faded cheek came back. 
 Wounds which love had made her 
 
 feel, 
 Love alone had power to heal. 
 
 Martha, who the frequent visit 
 Now had lost, and sore did miss it. 
 With impatience waxed cross, 
 Counted Margaret's gain her loss; 
 All that Mary did confer 
 On her friend, thought due to her. 
 In her girlish bosom rise 
 Little foolish jealousies. 
 Which into such rancour wrought, 
 She one day for Margaret sought ; 
 Finding her by chance alone. 
 She began, with reasons shown. 
 To insinuate a fear 
 Whether Mary was sincere ; 
 Wish'd that Margaret would take heed 
 Whence her actions did proceed. 
 For herself, she'd long been minded 
 Not with outsides to be blinded ; 
 All that pity and compassion. 
 She believed was affectation ; 
 In her heart she doubted whether 
 Mary cared a pin for either. 
 She could keep whole weeks at dis- 
 tance, 
 A.nd not know of their existence. 
 While all things remain'd the same ; 
 But when some misfortune came. 
 Then she made a great parade 
 Of her sympathy and aid, — 
 Not that she did really grieve, 
 It was only make-believe, 
 And she cared for nothing, so 
 She might her fine feelings show, 
 And get credit, on her part, 
 For a soft and tender heart. 
 
 With such speeches, smoothly 
 made, - 
 She found methods to persuade 
 Margaret (who, being sore 
 From the doubts she'd felt before, 
 Was prepared for mistrust) 
 . To believe her reasons just ; 
 
S6 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Quite destroy'd that comfort glad, 
 Which in Mary late she had; 
 Made her, in experience' spite, 
 Think her friend a hypocrite. 
 And resolve, with cruel scoff. 
 To renounce and cast her off. 
 
 See how good turns are rewarded ! 
 She of both is now discarded. 
 Who to both had been so late 
 Their support in low estate, 
 All their comfort and their stay — 
 Now of both is cast away. 
 But the league her presence cherish'd. 
 Losing its best prop, soon perishd; 
 She, that was a link to either. 
 To keep them and it together. 
 Being gone, the two (no wonder) 
 That were left, soon fell asunder ; — 
 Some civiUties were kept, 
 But the heart of friendship slept ; 
 Love with hollow forms was fed, 
 But the life of love lay dead : — 
 A cold, intercourse they held 
 After Mary was expell'd. 
 
 Two long years did intervene 
 Since they'd either of them seen, 
 Or, by letter, any word 
 Of their old companion heard, — 
 When, upon a day, once walking, 
 Of indifferent matters talking, 
 They a female figure met ; — 
 Martha said to Margaret, 
 ' ' That young maid in face does carry 
 A resemblance strong of Mary." 
 Margaret, at nearer sight, 
 Own'd her observation right : 
 But they did not far proceed 
 Ere they knew 'twas she indeed. 
 She— but, ah ! how changed they 
 
 view her 
 From that person which they knew 
 
 her; 
 Her fine face disease had scarr'd. 
 And its matchless beauty marr'd :— 
 But enough was left to trace 
 Mary's sweetness — Mary's grace. 
 When her eye did first behold them. 
 How they blush'd ! — but, when she 
 
 told them, * 
 How on a sick-bed she lay 
 Months, while they had kept away. 
 And had no inquiries made 
 If she were alive or dead ; — 
 
 How, foj: want of a true friend. 
 She was brought near to her end, 
 And was like so to have died, 
 With no friend at her bed-side;^ 
 Hew the constant irritation. 
 Caused by fruitless expectation 
 Of their coming, had extended 
 The illness, when she might have 
 
 mended, — 
 Then, O then, how did reflection 
 Come on them with recollection ! 
 All that she had done for them, 
 How it did their fault condemn ! 
 
 But sweet Mary, still the same. 
 Kindly eased them of their shame; 
 Spoke to them with accents bland. 
 Took them friendly by the hand ; 
 Bound them both with promise fast. 
 Not to speak of troubles past ; 
 Made them on the spot declare 
 A new league of friendship there ; 
 Which, without a word of strife. 
 Lasted thenceforth long as life. 
 Martha now and Margaret 
 Strove who most should pay the debt 
 Which they owed her, nor did vary 
 Ever after from their Mary 
 
 TO A RIVER IN WHICH A 
 CHILD WAS DROWNED. 
 
 Smiling river, smiling river. 
 On thy bosom sunbeams play ; 
 
 Though they're fleeting, and retreat- 
 ing, 
 Thou hast more deceit than they. 
 
 In thy channel, in thy channel. 
 Choked with ooze and gravelly 
 stones. 
 Deep immersM, and unhearsfed, 
 Lies young Edward's corse : his 
 bones 
 
 Ever whitening, ever whitening. 
 As thy waves against them dash : 
 
 What thy torrent, in the current, 
 Swallow'd, now it helps to wash. 
 
 As if senseless, as if senseless 
 Things had feeling in this case ; 
 
 What so blindly and unkindly 
 It destroy'd, it now does grace. 
 
Poetry for Children. 
 
 57 
 
 QUEEN ORIANA'S DREAM, 
 
 " On a bank with roses shaded, 
 Whose sweet scent the violets aided, 
 Violets whose breath alone 
 Yields but feeble smell or none, 
 (Sweeter bed Jove ne'er reposed on 
 When his eyes Olympus closed on,) 
 While o'erhead six slaves did hold 
 Canopy of cloth o' gold, 
 And two more did music keep. 
 Which might Juno lull to sleep, 
 Oriana who was queen 
 To the mighty Tamerlane, 
 That was lord of all the land 
 Between Thrace and Samarcand, 
 While the noon tide fervour beam'd. 
 Mused herself to sleep and dream d." 
 
 Thus far, in magnific strain, 
 A young poet soothed his vein, 
 But he had nor prose nor numbers 
 To express a princess' slumbers. — 
 Youthful Richard had strange fancies, 
 Was deep versed in old romances. 
 And could talk whole hours upon 
 The great Cham and Prester John, — 
 Tell the field in which the Sophy 
 From the Tartar won a trophy — 
 What he read with such delight of. 
 Thought he could as easily write of— 
 But his over-young invention 
 Kept not pace with brave intention. 
 Twenty suns did rise and set. 
 And he could no further get ; 
 But. unable to pi-oceed, 
 Made a virtue out of need. 
 And, his labours wiseher deem'd of, 
 Did omit what the queen dream d of. 
 
 imor iBoems. 
 
 A BALLAD 
 
 NOTING THE DIFFERENCE OF RICH 
 AND POOR. 
 
 IN THE WAYS OF a RICH MAn's PALACE 
 AND A POOR man's WORKHOUSE. 
 
 To the tune of the " Old and Young 
 Courtier." 
 
 In a costly palace Youth goes clad in 
 
 gold ; 
 In a wretched workhouse Age's limbs 
 
 are cold : 
 There they sit. the old men by a 
 
 shivering fire. 
 Still close and closer cowering, warmth 
 
 is their desire. 
 
 In a costly palace, when the biave 
 
 gallants dine. 
 They have store of good venison, with 
 
 old canary wine, 
 With singing and music to heighten 
 
 the cheer; 
 Coarse bits with grudging, are the 
 
 pauper's best fare. 
 
 In a costlypalace. Youth is still carest ' 
 By a train of attendants which laugh 
 
 at my young Lord's jest ; 
 In a wretched workhouse the contrary 
 
 prevails : 
 Does age begin to prattle? — no man 
 
 hearkeneth to his tales. 
 
 In a costly palace, if the child with a 
 
 pin 
 Do but chance to prick a finger, 
 
 straight the doctor is called in ; 
 In a wretched workhouse, men are 
 
 left to perish 
 For want of proper cordials which 
 
 their old age might cherish. 
 
 In a costly palace. Youth enjoys his 
 lust ; [corners thrust, 
 
 In a wretched workhouse Age, in 
 
 Thinks upon the former days, when 
 he was well to do. 
 
 Had children to stand by him, both 
 friends and kinsmen too. 
 
 In a costly palace, Youth his temples 
 
 hides 
 With a new devised peruke that 
 
 reaches to his sides ; 
 
S8 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 In a wretched workhouse Age's crown 
 
 is bare, [out the cold air. 
 
 With a few thin locks, just to fence 
 
 In peace, as in war, 'tis our young gal- 
 lants' pride 
 
 To walk, each one in the streets, with 
 a rapier by his side, 
 
 That none to do them injurj' may have 
 pretence ; [offence. 
 
 Wretched Age, in poverty, must brook 
 
 LINES ON THE CELEBRATED 
 PICTURE 
 
 BY LEONARDO DA VINCI ; CALLED 
 THE VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS. 
 
 While young John runs to greet 
 
 The greater Infant's feet. 
 
 The mother standing by, with trem- 
 bling passion 
 
 Of devout admiration. 
 
 Beholds the engaging mystic play, 
 and pretty adoration ; 
 
 Nor knows as yet the full event 
 
 Of those so low beginnings. 
 
 From whence we date our winnings. 
 
 But wonders at the intent 
 
 Of those new rites, and what that 
 strange child-worship meant. 
 
 But at her side 
 An angel doth abide, , 
 
 With such a perfect joy 
 As no dim doubts alloy. 
 An intuition, 
 A glory, an amenity. 
 Passing the dark condition 
 Of blind humanity, 
 As if he surely knew 
 All the blest wonders should ensue. 
 Or he had lately left the upper sphere. 
 And had read all the sovran schemes 
 and divine riddles there. 
 
 A VISION OF REPENTANCE. 
 
 I SAW a famous fountain in my 
 
 dream, [led ; 
 
 Where shady pathways to a valley 
 
 A weeping willow lay upon that 
 
 stream, [were spread 
 
 And all around the fountain brink 
 
 Wide branching trees, with dark green 
 
 leaf rich clad, . 
 Forming a doubtful twilight desolate 
 
 and sad. 
 
 The place was such, that whoso 
 
 enter'd in, [thought. 
 
 Disrobed was of every earthly 
 
 And straight became as one that 
 
 knew not sin. 
 Or to the world's first innocence 
 
 was brought ; [ground, 
 
 Enseem'd it now, he stood on holy 
 In sweet ^nd tender melancholy 
 
 wrapt around. 
 
 A' most strange calm stole o'er my 
 
 soothed sprite : [I staid, 
 
 Long time I stood, and longer had 
 
 When lo ! I saw, saw by the sweet 
 
 moonlight, [silent shade. 
 
 Which came in silence o'er that 
 
 Where near the fountain SOMETHING 
 like DESPAIR 
 
 Made of that weeping willow gar- 
 lands for her hair. 
 
 And eke with painful fingers she in- 
 wove [thorn — 
 Many an uncouth stem of savage 
 The willow garland, that was for ' 
 
 her love, [would adorn. ' ' 
 
 A^d these her bleeding temples 
 
 ■With sighs her heart nigh burst, salt 
 
 tears fast fell. 
 As mournfully she bended o'er that 
 sacred well. 
 
 To whom when I address'd myself to 
 
 speak, [said ; 
 
 She lifted up her eyes, and nothing 
 
 The delicate red came mantling o'er 
 
 her cheek, [she fied 
 
 And, gathering up her loose attire. 
 
 To the dark covert of that woody 
 
 shade, [gentle maid. 
 
 And in her goings seem'd a timid 
 
 Revolving in my mind what this 
 
 should mean, [so ; 
 
 And why that lovely lady plained 
 
 Perple.t'd in thought at that mysteri- 
 ous scene, [or go, 
 And doubting if 'twere best to stay 
 
 I cast mine eyes in wistful gaze 
 around, 
 
 When from the shades came slow a 
 small and plaintive sound : 
 
Minor Poems. 
 
 59 
 
 " Pysche* am I, who love to dwell 
 In these brown shades, this woody 
 
 dell, 
 Where never busy mortal came, 
 Till nbw, to pry upon my shame. 
 
 ' ' At thy feet what thou dost see 
 The waters of repentance be, . 
 Which, night and day, I must aug- 
 ment 
 With tears, like a true penitent, 
 
 ' ' If haply so my day of grace 
 Be not yet past ; and this lone place, 
 O'er-shadowy, dark, excludeth hence 
 All thoughts but grief and penitence." 
 
 " Why dost thou weep, thou gentle 
 
 maid / 
 And wherefore in this barren shade 
 Thy hidden thoughts with sorrow 
 
 feed f 
 Can thing so fair repentanjie need f" 
 
 " O ! I have done a deed of shame. 
 
 And tainted is my virgin fame. 
 
 And stain'd the beauteous maiden 
 
 white, 
 In which my bridal robes were dight." 
 
 '* And who the promised spouse de- 
 
 j dare: 
 And what those bridal garinents 
 were?" 
 
 ' ' Severe and saintjy righteousness 
 
 Composed the clear white bridal 
 dress ; 
 
 Jesus, the son of Heaven's high 
 King, 
 
 Bought with his blood the marriage- 
 ring. 
 
 *' A wretched sinful creature, I 
 Deem'd lightlyof that sacred tie, 
 Gave to a treacherous WORLD my 
 
 heart, 
 And play'd the foolish wanton's part. 
 
 ' ' Soon to these murky shades I came. 
 To hide from the sun's light my 
 
 shame: 
 And still I haunt this woody dell. 
 And bathe me in that healing well. 
 Whose waters clear have influence 
 From sin's foul stains th6 soul to 
 
 cleanse ; 
 
 * "The soul. 
 
 And night and day I them augment 
 With tears, like a true penitent. 
 Until, due expiatioil made. 
 And fit atonement fully paid. 
 The Lord and Bridegroom me pre- 
 sent. 
 Where in sweet strains of high con- 
 sent, 
 God's throne before, the Seraphim 
 Shall chaunt the ecstatic marriage 
 hymn." 
 
 '^ Now Christ restore thee soon" — I 
 
 said. 
 And thenceforth all my dream was 
 
 fled. 
 
 A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO. 
 {The Reflector, NO. IV. 1811.) 
 
 [Meditated during two years before it was 
 committed to paper in 1805, but not pub- 
 lished until six years afterwards. Re- 
 printed in 1818 in the first collected edition 
 of Charles Lamb's Works, these delightful 
 lines were not only quoted entire, but 
 introduced, with words expressive of the 
 highest admiration, as long ago as in the 
 25th number, April, 1819, of Blackwood's 
 Magazine, in a paper called Horai Nico- 
 tiarue.] 
 
 May the Babylonish curse 
 
 Straight confound my stammering 
 
 verse. 
 If I can a passage see 
 In this word-perplexity, 
 Or a fit expression find. 
 Or a language to my mind, 
 (Still the phrase is wide or scant) 
 To take leave of thee, GREAT PLANT ! 
 Or in any terms relate 
 Half my love, or half my hate : 
 For I hate, yet love thee so. 
 That whichever thing I show, 
 The plain truth will seem to be 
 A constraiad hyperbole. 
 And the passion to proceed 
 More from a' mistress than a weed. 
 
 Sooty retainer to the vine, 
 Bacchus' black servant, negro fine; 
 Sorcerer, that makest us dote upon 
 Thy begrimed complexion. 
 And, for thy pernicious sake. 
 More and greater oaths to break 
 
6o 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Than reclaimed lovers take 
 
 'Gainst women : thou thy siege oost 
 
 lay 
 Much too in the female way, 
 While thou suck'st the labouring 
 
 bieath 
 Faster than kisses or than death. 
 
 Thou in such a cloud dost bind us, 
 That our worst foes cannot find us, 
 And ill fortune, that would thwart us, 
 Shoots at rovers, shooting at us ; 
 While each man, thro' thy heighten- 
 in,^ steam, 
 Does like a smoking Etna seem, 
 And all about us does express 
 (Fancy and wit in richest dress) 
 A Sicilian fruitfulness. 
 
 Thou through such a mist do3; 
 show us, 
 That our best friends do not know us. 
 And, for those allowed features. 
 Due to reasonable creatures, 
 Liken'st us to fell Chimeras, 
 Monsters that, who see us, fear us ; 
 Worse than Cerberus or Geryon, 
 Or, who first loved a cloud, Ixion. 
 
 Bacchus we know, and we allow 
 His tipsy rites. But what art thou, 
 That but by reflex canst show 
 What his deity can do. 
 As the false Egyptian spell 
 Aped the true Hebrew miracle? 
 Some few vapours thou may'st raise, 
 The weak brain may serve to amaze. 
 But to the reins and nobler heirt 
 Canst nor life nor heat impart. 
 
 Brother of Bacchus, later born. 
 The old world was sure forlorn, 
 Wanting thee, that aidest more 
 The god's victories than before 
 All his panthers, and the brawls 
 Of his piping Bacchanals. 
 These, as stale, we disallow. 
 Or judge of thee meant : only thou 
 His true Indian conquest art ; 
 And, for ivy round his dart. 
 The reformed 'god now weaves 
 A finer thyrsus of thy leaves. 
 
 Scent to match thy rich perfume 
 Chemic art did ne'er presume 
 Through her quaint alembic strain. 
 None so sovereign to the brain. 
 
 Nature that did in thee excel. 
 Framed again no second smell. 
 Roses, violets, but toys 
 For the smaller sort of boys. 
 Or for greener damsels meant ; 
 Thou art the only manly scent. 
 
 Stinking'st of the stinking kind. 
 Filth of the mouth and fog of the 
 
 mind, 
 Africa, that brags her foyson. 
 Breeds no such prodigious poison. 
 Henbane, nightshade, both together, 
 Hemlock, aconite 
 
 Nay, rather, 
 Plant divine, of rarest virtue ; 
 Blisters on the tongue would hurt you, 
 'Tw^ but in a sort I blamed thee ; 
 None e'er prosper'd who defamed 
 
 thee ; 
 Irony all, and feign'd abuse, 
 Such as perplex'd lovers use, 
 At a need, when, in despair 
 To paint forth their fairest fair, 
 Or in part but to express 
 That exceeding comeliness 
 Which their fancies doth so strike 
 They borrow language of dislike ; 
 And, instead of Dearest Miss, 
 Jewel, Honey, Sweetheart, Bliss, 
 And those forms of old admiring, 
 Call her Cockatrice and Siren, 
 Basilisk, and all that's evil. 
 Witch, Hyena, Mermaid, Devil, 
 Ethiop, Wench, and Blackamoor, 
 Monkey, Ape, and twenty more; 
 Friendly Tr.iitress,, loving Foe,— 
 ■ Not that slie is truly so. 
 But no other way they know 
 A contentment to ex-press. 
 Borders so upon excess, ' 
 
 "That they do not rightly wot 
 Whether it be pain or not. 
 
 Or, as men, constrain'd to part 
 With what's nearest to their heart. 
 While their sorrow's at the height. 
 Lose discrimination quite, 
 And their hasty wrath let fall. 
 To appease their frantic gall, 
 On the darling thing whatever, 
 Whence they feel it death to sever, 
 Though it be, as thev, perforce, 
 Guiltless of the sad divorce. 
 
Minor Poems. 
 
 6i 
 
 For I must (nor let it grieve thee, 
 Friendliest of plants, that I must) 
 
 leave thee. 
 For thy sake, TOBACCO, I 
 Would do anything but die. 
 And but seek to extend my days 
 Long enough to sing thy praise. 
 But, as she, who once hath been 
 A king's consort, is a queen 
 Ever after, nor will bate 
 Any title of her state, 
 Though a widow, or divorced, 
 So I, from thy converse forced, 
 The old name and style retain, 
 A right Katherine of Spain ; 
 And a seat, too, 'mongst the jo5's 
 Of the blest Tobacco Boys ; 
 Where, though I, by sour physician. 
 Am debarr'd the full fruition 
 Of thy favours, I may catch 
 Some collateral sweets, and snatch 
 Sidelong odours, that give life 
 Like glances from a neighbour's wife ; 
 And still live in the by-places 
 And the suburbs of thy graces : 
 And in thy borders take deligh -. 
 An unconquer'd Canaanite. 
 
 TO T. L. H.-A CHILD. 
 
 [Leigh Hunt's eldest son, Thornton Hunt, 
 who was born loth September 1810, and 
 died 25th June, 1873.] 
 
 Model of thy parent dear, 
 Serious infant worth a fear : 
 In thy unfaltering visage well ■ 
 Picturing forth the son of TELL, 
 When on his forehead, firm and good, 
 Motionless mark, the apple stood ; 
 Guileless traitor, rebel mild. 
 Convict unconscious, culprit-child ! 
 Gates that close with iron roar 
 Have been to thee thy nursery door ; 
 Chains that chink in cheerless cells 
 Have been thy rattles and thy bells ; 
 Walls contrived for giant sin 
 Have hemmd thy faultless weakness 
 
 in ; 
 Near thy ^inless bed black Guilt 
 Her discordant house hath built, 
 And fiU'd it with her monstrous 
 
 brood — 
 Sights, by thee not understood- 
 
 Sights of fear, and of distress. 
 That pass a harmless infant's guess ! 
 
 But the clouds, that overcast 
 Thy young morning, may not last. 
 Soon shall arrive the rescuing hour. 
 That yields thee up to Nature's power. 
 Nature, that so late doth greet thee, 
 Shall in o'er-flowing measure meet 
 
 thee. 
 She shall recompense with cost 
 For every lesson thou hast lost. 
 Then wandering up thy sire's loved 
 
 hill,* 
 Thou shalt take thy airy fill 
 Of health and pastime. Birds shall 
 
 sing 
 For tliy delight each May morning. 
 'Mid new-yean'd lambkins thou shalt 
 
 play, 
 Hardly less a lamb than they. 
 Then thy prison's lengthen'd bound 
 Shall be the horizon skirting round. 
 And, while thou fill'st thy lap with 
 
 flowers, 
 To make amends for wintry hours. 
 The breeze, the sunshine, and the 
 
 place. 
 Shall from thy tender brow efface 
 Each vestige of untimely care. 
 That sour restraint had graven there ; 
 And on thy every look impress 
 A more excelling childishness. 
 
 So shall be thy days beguiled, 
 THORNra.i Hunt, my favourite 
 . child. 
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF THE 
 
 WHALE. 
 
 (The Eyiaminer, 13 March, 1S12.) 
 
 [Written by Charles Lamb as a lampoon 
 on the Piiice of Wales. " I'll 1-lamb-pun 
 him. Sir ! " he once stammered out in a 
 contest cf wits, one of whom for the mo- 
 ment had threatened to eclipse him as a 
 punster. Mr. John Forster has referred to 
 these verses in his charming In Memorzam 
 paper on Lamb, in the New Monthly 
 Magazine of February, 1835, as "a sort of 
 poetical, political libel."] 
 
 lo ! Psean ! lo ! sing 
 
 To the finny people's king. 
 
 * Hampstead. 
 
62 
 
 The Works of Charles Latnb. 
 
 Not a mightier whale than this 
 In the vast Atlantic is ; 
 Not a fatter fish than he 
 Flounders round the Polar Sea. 
 See his blubber — at his gills 
 What a world of drink lie swills, 
 From his trunk as from a spout, 
 Which next moment he pours out. 
 Such his person ; next declare; 
 Muse, who his companions are. 
 Every fish of generous kind 
 Scuds aside or slinks behind ; 
 But about his presence keep 
 All the monsters of the deep ; 
 Mermaids with their tails and singing 
 His delighted fancy stinging ; 
 Crooked dolphins they surround him ; 
 Dog-like seals they fawn around him. 
 Following hard the progress mark 
 Of the intolerant salt sea shark; 
 For his Solace and relief 
 Flat-fish are his courtiers chief; 
 Last and lowest in his train 
 Ink-fish (libellers of the main) 
 Their black liquor shed in spite 
 (Such on earth the things that write). 
 
 In his stomach some do say 
 
 No good thing can ever stay ; 
 
 Had it been the fortune of it 
 
 To have swallowed that old prophet, 
 
 Three days there he'd not have 
 
 dwell'd. 
 But in one have been expell'd. 
 Hapless mariners are they. 
 Who beguiled (as seamen say) 
 Deeming him some rock or island. 
 Footing sure, safe spot, and dry land, 
 Anchor in his scaly rind ; 
 Soon the difference they find ; 
 Sudden plumb he sinks beneath them; 
 Does to ruthless waves bequeath 
 
 them. 
 Name or title, what has he ? 
 Is he Regent of the sea ? 
 From this difficulty free us, 
 Buffon, Banks, or sage Linnseus. 
 With his wondrous attributes 
 Say what appellation suits ? 
 By his bulk and by his size. 
 By his oily qualities. 
 This (or else my eyesight fails) 
 This should be the Prince of Whales. 
 
63 
 
 WITH A FEW OTHERS. 
 
 [These drawing-room effusions were originally published as a collection, in the form of 
 a beautiful little duodecimo, of 150 pages, printed by Bradbury and Evans. Upon the 
 title-page of the volume, as a dainty vignette, was the effigy of a Cupid writing. The work 
 was issued from the press as a miniature edition de luxe, by Edward Moxon, that " book- 
 seller of the poets, and poet among booksellers," as Leigh Hunt once called him in kindly 
 antithesis. To himj indeed, in his double capacity as friend and publisher, the author 
 inscribed these fugitive pieces in the subjoined dedicatory epistle, which is chiefly interest- 
 ing from its explanation as to how it was this diminutive tome came at all into existence.] 
 
 DEDICATION TO THE PUBLISHER. 
 
 Dear Moxon, — I do not know to whom a Dedication of these Trifles is 
 more properly due than to yourself. You suggested the printing of them. 
 You were desirous of exhibiting a specimen of the manner in which Pubhca- 
 tions, entrusted to your future care, would appear. With more propriety, 
 perhaps, the " Christmas," or some of her of your own simple, unpretending 
 Compositions, might have served this purpose. But I forget— you have bid a 
 long adieu to the Muses. I had on my hands sundry Copies of Verses written 
 for Albums — 
 
 Those books kept by modern young ladies for show. 
 Of which their plain grandmothers nothing did know — 
 
 or otherwise floating about in periodicals ; which you have chosen in this 
 manner to embody. I feel little interest in their publication. They are simply 
 Advertisement Verses. 
 
 It is not for me, nor you, to allude in public to the kindness of our honoured 
 friend, under whose auspices you are become a Bookseller. May that fine- 
 minded Veteran in Verse enjoy life long enough to see his patronage justified ! 
 I venture to predict that your habits of industry, and your cheerful spirit, will 
 carry you through the world. I am. Dear Moxon, 
 
 Your Friend and sincere Well-wisher, 
 
 Enfield, \st June, 1830. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF A CLERGY- 
 MAN'S LADY. 
 
 An Album is a Garden, not for show 
 Planted, but use ; where wholesome 
 
 herbs should grow. 
 A Cabinet of curious porcelain, where 
 No fancy enters, but what's rich or 
 
 rare. 
 A Chapel, where mere ornamental 
 
 things 
 Are pure as crowns of saintii, or 
 
 angels' wings. 
 
 Charles Lamb. 
 
 A List of living friends: a holier 
 
 Room 
 For names of some since mouldering 
 
 in the tomb, 
 Whose blooming memories life's cold 
 
 laws survive ; 
 And, dead elsewhere, they here yet 
 
 speak, and live. 
 Such, and so tender, should an Album 
 
 be; 
 And, Lady, such I wish this book to 
 
 thee. 
 
64 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 IN THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK 
 
 OF MRS. SERJEANT W . 
 
 Had I a power, Lady, to my will. 
 You should not want Hand Writings. 
 
 I would fill 
 Your leaves with Autographs — resplen- 
 dent names 
 Of Knights and Squires of old, and 
 
 courtly Dames, 
 Kings, Emperors, Popes. Next under 
 
 these should stand 
 The hands of famous lawyers— a grave 
 
 band — 
 Who in their Courts of Law or Equity 
 Have best upheld Freedom and Pro- 
 perty. 
 These should moot cases in your book, 
 
 and vie. 
 To show their reading and their Ser- 
 
 jeantry. 
 But I have none of these ; nor can I 
 
 send 
 The notes by BuUen to her Tyrant 
 
 penn'd 
 In her authentic hand; nor in soft 
 
 hours 
 Lines writ by Rosamund in Clifford's 
 
 bowers. 
 The lack of curious Signatures I 
 
 moan. 
 And want the courage to subscribe 
 
 my own. 
 
 — M 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF LUCY 
 BARTON. 
 Little Book, surnamed of whCc, 
 Clean as yet, and fair to sight. 
 Keep thy attribution right. 
 Never disproportion'd scrawl ; 
 Ugly blot, that's worse than all ; 
 On thy maiden clearness fall ! 
 In each letter, here design'd, 
 Let the reader emblem.'d find 
 Neatness of the owner's mind. 
 Gilded margins count a sin. 
 Let thy leaves attraction win 
 By the golden rules within ; 
 Sayings fetch'd from sages old ; 
 Laws which Holy Writ unfold, 
 Worthy to be graved in gold : 
 tighter fancies not excluding ; 
 Blameless wit, with nothing rude in 
 Sometimes mildly interluding 
 
 Amid strains of graver measure : 
 Virtue's self hath oft her pleasure 
 In sweet Muses' groves of leisure. 
 Riddles dark, perplexing sense ; 
 Darker meanings of offence ; 
 What but shades — be banish'd hence. 
 Whitest thoughts in whitest dress. 
 Candid me 'nings, best express 
 Mind of quiet Quakeress. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF MISS . 
 
 (Blackwood's Magazine, May, 1829.) 
 
 I. 
 Such goodness in yourface doth shine. 
 With modest look, without design. 
 That I despair, poor pen of mine 
 
 Can e'er express it, 
 To give it words I feebly try ; 
 My spirits fail me to supply 
 Befitting language for 't, and I 
 
 Can only bless it ! 
 
 II. i 
 
 But stop, rash verse ! and don't abuse 
 A bashful Maiden's ear with news 
 Of her own virtues. She'll refuse 
 
 Praise sung so loudly. 
 Of that same goodness, you admire, 
 The best part is, she don't aspire 
 To praise— nor of herself desire 
 
 To think too proudly. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF A VERY 
 
 YOUNG LADY. 
 Joy to unknown Josepha who, I hear. 
 Of all good gifts, to Music most is 
 
 given ; 
 Science divine, which through the 
 
 enraptured ear 
 Enchants the soul, and lifts it nearer 
 
 Heaven. 
 Parental smiles approvingly attend 
 Her pliant conduct of the trembling 
 
 keys. 
 And listening strangers their glad 
 
 suffrage lend. 
 Most musical is Nature. Birds— and 
 
 bees 
 At their sweet labour— sing. The 
 
 moaning winds 
 Rehearse a lesson to attentive minds. 
 In louder tones " Deep unto deep 
 
 doth call; " 
 And there is music in the waterfall. 
 
Album Verses. 
 
 65 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF A FRENCH 
 TEACHER. 
 
 Implored for yerse, I send you what 
 I can; 
 
 But you are so exact a Frenchwoman, 
 
 As I am told, Jemima, that I fear 
 
 To wound with English your Parisian 
 ear, 
 
 And think I do your choice collection 
 wrong 
 
 With lines not written in the French- 
 man's tongue. 
 
 Had I a knowledge equal to my will. 
 
 With airy Chansons I your leaves 
 would fill ; 
 
 With Fabliaux that should emulate 
 the vein 
 
 Of sprightly Gresset, or of La Fon- 
 taine; 
 
 Or Scenes Comiques, that should 
 approach the air 
 
 Of your own favourite — renown'd 
 Moli&re. 
 
 But at my suit the Muse of France 
 looks sour, 
 
 And strik'es me dumb ! Yet, what is 
 in my power 
 
 To testify respect for you, I pray, 
 
 Take in plain English — our rough 
 Enfield way. 
 
 IN THE ALBUM OF MISS 
 DAUBENY. 
 I. 
 Some poets by poetic law 
 Have beauties praised they never saw ; 
 And sung of Kittys and of Nancys, 
 Whose charms but lived in their own 
 
 fancies. 
 So I, to keep my Muse a-going. 
 That willingly would still be doing, 
 A Canzonet or two must try 
 In praise oi— pretty Daubeny. 
 
 ir. 
 But whether she indeed be comely, 
 Or only very good and homely. 
 Of my own eyes I cannot say ; 
 I trust to Emma Isola, 
 But sure I think her voice is tuneful. 
 As smoothest birds that sing in June 
 
 full ; 
 For eke would strangely disagree 
 Theflowiitg name of — Daubeny. 
 
 I hear that she a Book hath got — 
 As what young damsel now hath not. 
 In which they scribble favourite fan- 
 cies, 
 Copied from poems or romances? 
 And prettiest draughts, of her design. 
 About the curious Album shine ; 
 And therefore she shall have for me 
 The style of — tasteful Daubeny. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Thus far I have taken on believing: 
 But well I know without deceiving. 
 That in her heart she keeps alive still 
 Old school-day likings, which survive 
 
 still 
 In spite of absence— worldly cold- 
 ness — 
 And thereon can my Muse take bold- 
 ness 
 To crown her other praises three 
 With praise oi— friendly Daubeny. 
 
 IN MY OWN ALBUM. 
 
 Fresh clad from heaven in robes of 
 
 white, 
 A young probationer of light. 
 Thou wart my soul, an Album bright, 
 
 A spotless leaf; but thought, and care. 
 And friend and foe, in foul or fair. 
 Have "written strange defeatures" 
 there ; 
 
 And Time with heaviest hand of all, 
 Like that fierce writing on the wall. 
 Hath stamp'd sad dates — he can't 
 recall ; 
 
 And error gilding worst designs — 
 Like speckled snake that strays and 
 
 shines — 
 Betrays his path by crooked lines ; 
 
 And vice hath left his ugly blot : 
 And good resolves, a moment hot. 
 Fairly began — but finish'd not ; 
 
 And fruitless, late remorse doth 
 
 trace — 
 Like Hebrew lore a backward pace — 
 Her irrecoverable race. 
 
 D 
 
66 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Disjointed numbers ; sense unknit ; 
 Huge reams of folly, shreds of wit ; 
 ) Compose the mingled mass of it. 
 
 I My scalded eyts no longer brook 
 
 I Upon this ink-blurr'd thing to look— 
 
 I Go, shut the leaves, and clasp the 
 I book. 
 
 ANGEL HELP. 
 
 ( The New Monthly Magazine, June, 
 1827.) 
 [Quoted in Blackwood's Magazine with- 
 in little more than two years after their 
 first appearance, that is, in August, 1830, 
 these lineswere introduced thus: " Charles! 
 we love the following strain," the critic 
 adding with effusion, at their close, " Oh ! 
 rare Charles Lamb ! " An explanatory 
 note appended to the poem by the lyrist 
 himself tells the reader how they were 
 " Suggested by a drawing in the posses- 
 sion of Charles Aders, Esq., in which is 
 represented the legend of a poor female 
 samt who, having spun past midnight, to 
 maintain a bedridden mother, has fallen 
 asleep from fatigue, and angels are finish- 
 ing her work. In another part of the 
 chamber," he adds, ** an angel is tending 
 a lily, the emblem of purity. '] 
 
 This rare tablet doth include 
 
 Poverty with Sanctitude. 
 
 Past midnight this poor Maid hath 
 
 spun, 
 And yet the work is not half done, 
 Which must supply from earnings 
 
 scant 
 A feeble bed-rid parentswant. 
 Her sleep-charged eyes exemption ask. 
 And holy hands take up the task ; 
 Unseen the rock and spindle ply. 
 And do her earthly drudgery. 
 Sleep, saintly poor one, sleep, sleep 
 
 on; 
 And, waking, find thy labours done. 
 Perchance she knows it by her dreams ; 
 Her eye hath caught the golden 
 
 gleams, 
 AngeUc presence testifying, 
 That round her every where are flying ; 
 Ostents from which she may presume. 
 That much of Heaven is in the room. 
 Skirting her own bright hair they run, 
 And to the sunny add more sun : 
 Now on that aged face they fix. 
 Streaming from the Crucifix ; 
 
 The flesh-clogg'd spirit disabusing, 
 Death-disarming sleeps infusing. 
 Prelibations, foretastes high. 
 And equal thoughts to five or die. 
 Gardener bright from Eden's bower. 
 Tend with care that lily flower ; 
 To its leaves and root infuse 
 Heaven's sunshine. Heaven's dews. 
 'Tis a type, and 'tis a pledge. 
 Of a crowning privilege. 
 Careful as that hly flower, 
 ■This Maid must keep her precious 
 
 dower ; 
 Live a sainted Maid, or die 
 Martyr to virginity. 
 
 "Virtuous poor ones, sleep, sleep on, 
 And waking find your labours done. 
 
 THE CHRISTENING. 
 [Blackwood s Magazine, May, 1829.) 
 
 [These verses were written in celebration 
 of the christening of the Infant son of 
 Charles and Mary Gisburne May, on the 
 25th March, 1829, at Enfield, Charles and 
 Mary Lamb standing, on the occasion, as 
 sponsors.] 
 
 Array'd — a half-angelic sight — 
 In vests of pure Baptismal white. 
 The Mother to the Font doth bring 
 The little helpless nameless thing. 
 With hushes soft and mild caressing. 
 At once to get— a name and blessiug. 
 Close by the Babe the Priest doth 
 
 stand, 
 The Cleansing Water at his hand. 
 Which must assoil the soul within 
 From every stain of Adam's sin. 
 The Infant eyes the mystic scenes. 
 Nor knows what all this wonder 
 
 means ; 
 And now he smiles, as if to say 
 " I am a Christian made this day ; " 
 Now frighted clings to Nurse's hold. 
 Shrinking from the water cold, 
 Whose virtues, rightly understood, 
 Are, as Bethesda's waters, good. 
 Strange words— the World, the Flesh, 
 
 the Devil — 
 Poor Babe, what can it know of Evil ? 
 But we must silently adore 
 Mysterious truths, and not explore. 
 
Album Verses. 
 
 67 
 
 Enough for him, in after-times, 
 When he shall read these artless 
 
 rhymes. 
 If, looking back upon this day 
 With quiet conscience, he can say 
 " I have in part redeem'd the pledge 
 Of my Baptismal privilege ; 
 And more and more will strive to flee 
 All which my Sponsors kind did then 
 
 renounce forme." 
 
 ON AN INFANT DYING AS 
 SOON AS BORN. 
 
 I SAW where in the shroud did lurk 
 A curious frame of Nature's work. 
 A floweret crushed in the bud, 
 A nameless piece of Babyhood, 
 Was in a cradle-coffin lying ; 
 Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying ; 
 So soon to exchange the imprisoning 
 
 womb 
 For darker closets of the tomb ! 
 She did but ope an eye, and put 
 A clear beam forth, then straight up 
 
 shut 
 For the long dark : ne'er more to see- 
 Through glasses of mortality. 
 Riddle of destiny, who can show 
 What thy short visit meant, or know 
 What thy errand here below ? 
 Shall we say, that Nature blind 
 Check'd her hand, and changed her 
 
 mind. 
 Just when she had exactly wrought 
 A finish'd pattern without fault? 
 Could she flag, or could she tire. 
 Or lack'd she the Promethean fire 
 (With her nine moons' long workings 
 
 sicken d) 
 That should thy little limbs have 
 
 quicken'd? 
 Limbs so firm, they seem'd to assure 
 Life of health, and days mature : 
 Woman's self in miniature ! 
 Limbs so fair^ they might supply 
 (Themselves now but cold imagery) 
 The sculptor to make Beauty by. 
 Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry. 
 That babe, or mother, one must die ; ' 
 So in mercy left the stock. 
 And cut the branch ; to save the shock 
 Of youngyearswidow'd ; and thepain. 
 When Single State comes back again 
 
 To the lone man who, 'reft of wife, 
 Thenceforward drags a maimed life? 
 The economy of Heaven is dark ; 
 And wisest clerlis have miss'd the 
 
 mark. 
 Why Human Buds, like this, should 
 
 fall. 
 More brief than fly ephemeral. 
 That has his day; while shrivell'd 
 
 crones 
 Stiffen with age to stocks and stones ; 
 And crabbed use the conscience sears 
 In sinners of an hundred years. 
 Mother's prattle, mother's kiss, 
 Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss. 
 Rites, which custom does impose, 
 Silver bells and baby clothes ; 
 Coral redder than those lips. 
 Which pale death did late eclipse ; 
 Music framed for infants' glee. 
 Whistle never tuned for thee ; 
 Though thou want'st not, thou shalt 
 
 have them. 
 Loving hearts were they which gave 
 
 them. 
 Let not one be missing ; nurse. 
 See Ihem laid upon the hearse 
 Of infant slain by (loom perverse. 
 Why should kings and nobles have 
 Pictured trophies to their grave ; 
 And we, churls, to thee deny 
 Thy pretty toys with tliee to lie, 
 A more harmless vanity ? 
 
 TO BERNARD BARTON. 
 
 [These lines, addressed to the Quaker 
 Poet, were transmitted to him "With a 
 Coloured Print," as a note of the author's 
 intimates, " from the venerable and ancient 
 Manufactory of Carrington Bowles. Some 
 of my readers," added Lamb, in 1830, 
 "may recognize it." Few, if any of them, 
 will be likely to do so now.] 
 
 When last you left your Woodbridge 
 pretty. 
 
 To stare at sights, and see the City, 
 
 If I your meaning understood. 
 
 You wish'd a Picture, cheap, but 
 good; 
 
 The colouring? decent; clear, not 
 muddy ; 
 
 To suit a Poet's quiet study, 
 
 Where Books and Prints for delecta- 
 tion 
 
 Hang, rather than vain ostentation. 
 
68 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 -~\ 
 
 The subject ? what I • pleased, if 
 
 comely ; 
 But something scriptural and homely : 
 A sober Piece, not gay or wanton, 
 For winter fire-sides to descant on, 
 The theme so scrupulously handled, 
 A Quaker might look on unscandal'd ; 
 Such as might satisfy Ann Knight, 
 And Classic Mitford just not fright. 
 Just such a one I've found and send it ; 
 If liked, I give— if not, but lend it. 
 The moral? nothing can be sounder. 
 The fable ? 'tis its own expounder— 
 A Mother teaching to her Chit 
 Some good book, and explaining it. 
 He, silly urchin, tired of lesson, 
 His learning lays no mighty stress on. 
 But seems to hear not what he hears ; 
 Thrusting his fingers in his ears, 
 Like Obstinate, that perverse funny 
 
 one. 
 In honest parable of Bunyan. 
 His working Sister, more sedate, 
 Listens ; but in a kind of state, 
 The painter meant for steadiness, 
 But has a tinge of suUenness ; 
 And, at first sight, she seems to brook 
 As ill her needle, as he his book. 
 This is the Picture. For the Frame — 
 'Tis not ill-suited to the same ; 
 Oak-carved, not gilt, for fear of falling; 
 Oldfashion'd; plain, yet not appalling; 
 And sober, as the Owner's Calling. 
 
 THE YOUNG CATECHIST. 
 
 [Lines suggested, as the author's foot- 
 note intimates, by "a picture by Henry 
 Meyer, Esq."] 
 
 While this tawny Ethiop prayeth, 
 Painter, who is she that stayeth 
 By, with skin of whitest lustre, 
 Sunny locks, a shining cluster. 
 Saint-like seeming to direct him 
 To the Power that must protect him ? 
 Is she of the Heaven-bom Three, 
 Meek Hope, strong Faith, sweet 
 
 Charity : 
 Or some Cherub ? — 
 
 They you mention 
 Far transcend ray week invention. 
 'T's a simple Christian child. 
 Missionary youpg and mild. 
 
 From her stock of Scriptural know- 
 ledge, 
 Bible-taught without a college. 
 Which by reading she could gather. 
 Teaches him to say OUR Father 
 To the common Parent, who 
 Colour not respects, nor hue. 
 White and black in him have part. 
 Who looks not to the skin, but heart. 
 
 SHE IS GOING. 
 
 For their elder sister's hair 
 Martha does a wreath prepare 
 Of bridal rose, ornate and gay : 
 To-morrow is the wedding day : 
 She is going. 
 
 Mary, youngest of the three. 
 Laughing idler, full of glee, 
 Arm in arm does fondly chain her. 
 Thinking, poor trifler, to detain her- 
 But she's going. 
 
 Vex not, maidens, nor regret 
 Thus to part with Margaret. 
 Charms like yours can never stay 
 Long within doors ; and one day 
 You'll be going. 
 
 TO A YOUNG FRIEND. 
 
 ON HER TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY. 
 
 [The young friend thus tenderly ad- 
 dressed was Emma Isola faftenvards IMrs. 
 Edward Moxon), one of Charles Lamb's 
 especial child-favourites.] 
 
 Crown me a cheerful goblet, while I 
 
 pray 
 A blessing on thy years, young Isola ; 
 Young, but no more a child. How 
 
 swift have flown 
 To me thy girlish times, a woman 
 
 grown 
 Beneath my heedless eyes ! In vain I 
 
 rack 
 My fancy to believe the almanack. 
 That speaks thee twenty-one. Thou 
 
 should'st have still 
 Remain'd a child, and at thy sovereign 
 
 will ^ 
 
Album Verses. 
 
 69 
 
 Gambol'd about our house, as in times 
 
 past. 
 Ungrateful Emma, to grow up so fast. 
 Hastening to leave thy friends ! — for 
 
 which intent, 
 Fond Runagate, be this thy punish- 
 ment. 
 After some thirty years, spent in such 
 
 bliss 
 As this earth can afford, where still 
 
 we miss 
 Something of joy entire, may'st thou 
 
 grow old 
 As we whom thou hast left ! That 
 
 wish was cold. 
 O far more aged and wrinkled, till 
 
 folks say, 
 Looking upon thee reverend in decay, 
 ' ' This dame for length of days, and 
 
 virtues rare. 
 With her respected grandsire may 
 
 compare." — 
 Grandchild of that respected Isola, 
 Thou should' St have had about thee 
 
 on this day 
 Kind looks of parents, to congratulate 
 Their pride grown up to woman's 
 
 grave estate. 
 But they have died, and left thee, to 
 
 advance 
 Thy fortunes how thou may'st, and 
 
 owe to chance 
 The friends which Nature grudged. 
 
 And thou wilt find, 
 Or make such, Emma, if I am not blind 
 To thee and thy deservings. 'That last 
 
 strain 
 Had too much sorrow in it. Fill again 
 Another cheerful goblet, while I say 
 " Health, and twice health, to our lost 
 Isola." 
 
 TO THE SAME. 
 
 External gifts of fortune or of face. 
 Maiden, in truth, thou hast not much 
 
 to show; 
 Much fairer damsels have I known, 
 
 and know. 
 And richer may be found in every 
 
 place. 
 In thy mind seek thy beauty and thy 
 
 wealth. 
 Sineereness lodgeth. there, the soul's 
 
 best health. 
 
 O guard that treasure above gold or 
 
 pearl. 
 Laid up secure from moths and worldly 
 
 stealth— 
 And take my benison, plain-hearted 
 
 girl. 
 
 TO JAMES SHERIDAN 
 KNOWLES, 
 
 ON HIS TRAGEDY OF VIRGINIUS. 
 
 (London Magazine, September, 1S20.) 
 
 [As originally published in the London 
 Magazine, these complimentary verses had 
 prefixed to them the odd misprint of R. S. 
 Knowles, which, still more strangely, was 
 repeated ten years afterwards, when they 
 were reissued towards the end of the little 
 volume containing the Album Verses.] 
 
 Twelve years ago I knew thee, 
 
 Knowles, and then 
 Esteemed you a perfect specimen 
 Of those fine spirits warm-soul'd 
 
 Ireland sends, 
 To teach us colder- English how a 
 
 friend's 
 Quick pulse should beat. I knew you 
 
 brave, and plain, 
 Strong-sensed, rough-witted, above 
 
 fear or gain ; 
 But nothing further had the gift to 
 
 espy. 
 Sudden you re-appear. With won- 
 der I 
 Hear my old friend (tum'd Shak- 
 
 speare) read a scene 
 Only to his inferior in the clean 
 Passes of pathos: with such fence- 
 like art — 
 Ere we can see the steel, 'tis in our 
 
 heart. 
 Almost without the aid language 
 
 affords. 
 Your piece seems wrought. That 
 
 huffing medium, words, 
 (Which in the modern Tamburlaines 
 
 quite sway 
 Our shamed souls from their bias) in 
 
 your play 
 We scarce attend to. Hastier passion 
 
 draws 
 Our tears on credit : and we find the ( 
 
 cause 
 
7° 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Some two hours after, spelling o'er 
 
 again 
 Those strange few words at ease, 
 
 that wrought the pain. 
 Proceed, old friend; and, as the year 
 
 returns, 
 Still snatch some new old story from 
 
 the urns 
 Of long-dead virtue. We, that knew 
 
 before 
 Your worth, may admire, we cannot 
 
 love you more. 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF THE 
 " EVERY-DAY BOOK." 
 
 {^London Magazine, May, 1825.) 
 
 I LIKE you, and your book, ingeni- 
 ous Hone ! 
 In whose capacious all-embracing 
 leaves 
 The very marrow of tradition's shown ; 
 And all that history— much tha^ 
 fiction — weaves. 
 
 By every sort of taste your work is 
 graced. 
 Vast stores of modern anecdote we 
 find, 
 ■With good old story quaintly inter- 
 laced — ^ 
 The theme as various as the reader's 
 mind. 
 
 Rome's life-fraught legends you so 
 trulv paint — 
 Yet kindly,— that the half-turn'd 
 Catholic 
 Scarcely forbears to smile at his own 
 saint. 
 And cannot curse the candid heretic. 
 
 Rags, relics, witches, ghosts, fiends, 
 crowd your page ; 
 Our fathers mummeries we well- 
 pleased behold. 
 
 And, proudly conscious of a purer 
 age, 
 Forgive some fopperies in the times 
 of old. , 
 
 ■Verse-honouring Phoebus, Father of 
 bright Days, 
 
 Must needs bestow on you both 
 good and many, 
 ■Who, building trophies of his Chil- 
 dren's praise. 
 Run their rich Zodiac through, not 
 missing any. 
 Dan Phoebus loves your book — trust 
 me, friend Hone — 
 The title only errs, he bids me say : 
 For while such art, wit, reading, there 
 are shown, 
 He swears, 'tis not a work of every 
 day. 
 
 TO CAROLINE MARIA 
 APPLEBEE. 
 AN ACROSTIC. 
 
 Caroline glides smooth in verse, 
 And is easy to rehearse ; 
 Runs just like some crystal river 
 O'er its pebbly bed for ever. 
 Lines as harsh and quaint as mine 
 In their close at least will shine. 
 Nor from sweetness can decline. 
 Ending but wiih Caroline. 
 
 Maria asks a statelier pace — • 
 "Ave Maria, full of grace 1" 
 Romish rites before me rise, 
 Image-worship, sacrifice. 
 And well-meant but mistaken pieties. 
 
 Apple with Bee doth rougher ran. 
 Paradise was lost by one; 
 Peace of mind would we regain, 
 Let us, like the other, strain 
 Every harmless faculty, 
 Bee-iike at work in our degree. 
 Ever some sweet tiisk designing. 
 Extracting still, and still refining. 
 
 TO CECILIA CATHERINE 
 
 LAWTON. 
 
 an acrostic. 
 
 Choral service, solemn chanting, 
 Echoing round cathedrals holy — 
 Can aught else on earth be wanting 
 In heaven's bliss to plunge us wholly ? 
 Let us great Cecilia honour 
 In the praise we give unto them. 
 And the merit be upon her. 
 
Album Verses. 
 
 71 
 
 Cold the heart that would undo them, 
 And the solemn organ banish 
 That this sainted Maid invented. 
 Holy thoughts too quickly vanish, 
 Ere the expression can be vented. 
 Raise the song to Catherine, 
 In her torments most divine ! 
 Ne'er by Christians be forgot — 
 Envied be— this Martyr's lot. 
 
 Lawton, who these names combinest. 
 Aim to emulate their praises ; 
 Women were they, yet divinest 
 Truths they taught ; and story raises 
 O'er their mouldering bones a Tomb, 
 Not to die till Day of Doom. 
 
 TO A LADY WHO DESIRED 
 ME TO WRITE HER EPI- 
 TAPH. 
 
 AN ACROSTIC. 
 
 Grace Joanna here doth lie : 
 Reader, wonder not that I 
 Ante-date hi-r hour of rest. 
 Can I thwart her wish exprest, 
 Even unseemly though the laugh 
 
 Jesting with an Epitaph ? 
 On her bones the turf lie lightly, 
 And her rise again be brightly ! 
 No dark stain be found upon her — 
 No, there will not, on mine honour — 
 Answer that at least I can. 
 
 Would that I, thrice happy man, 
 In as spotless garb might rise, 
 Light as she will climb the skies, 
 Leaving the dull earth behind, 
 In a car more swift than wind. 
 All her errors, all her failings, 
 (Many they were not) and ailings. 
 Sleep secure from Envy's railings. 
 
 TO HER YOUNGEST 
 DAUGHTER. 
 
 ANOTHER ACROSTIC. 
 
 Least Daughter, but not least be- 
 loved, of Grace / 
 
 frown not on a stranger, who from 
 
 place 
 Unknown and distant these few lines 
 hath penn'd. 
 
 1 but report what thy instructress 
 
 Friend 
 So oft hath told us of thy gentle 
 
 heart. 
 A pupil most affectionate thou art, 
 
 Careful to learn what elder years im- 
 part. 
 
 Louisa — Clare — by which name shall 
 I call thee ? 
 
 A prettier pair of names sure ne'er 
 was found. 
 
 Resembling thy own sweetness in 
 sweet sound. 
 
 Ever calm peace and innocence befall 
 thee! 
 
72 
 
 
 [The English Latin poet, Vincent Bourne, who flourished between 1700 and 1747, pub- 
 lished in 1734, the " Poemata," which secured him his reputation. One-and-twenty of 
 Bourne's poems, it may be remembered, Cowper had already honoured by translating.] 
 
 I. 
 
 ON A SEPULCHRAL STATUE OF AN 
 INFANT SLEEPING. 
 
 Beautiful Infant, who dost keep 
 Thy posture here, and sleep's! a 
 
 marble sleep, 
 May the repose unbroken be, 
 Which the fine Artist's hand hath lent 
 
 to thee. 
 While thou enjoy' st along with it 
 That which no art, or craft, could 
 
 ever hit. 
 Or counterfeit to mortal sense. 
 The heaven-infused sleep of Inno- 
 cence ! 
 
 II. 
 THE RIVAL BELLS. 
 
 A TUNEFUL challenge rings from 
 
 either side 
 Of Thames' fair banks. Thy twice 
 
 six Bells, Saint Bride, 
 Peal swift and shrill ; to which more 
 
 slow reply 
 The deep-toned eight of Mary Overy. 
 Such harmony from the contention 
 
 flows, 
 That the divided ear no preference 
 
 knows ; 
 Betwixt them both disparting Music's 
 
 State, 
 While one exceeds in number, one in 
 
 weight. 
 
 III. 
 
 EPITAPH ON A DOG. 
 
 P«OR Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie, 
 That wont to tend my old blinti 
 
 master's steps. 
 His guide and guard ; nor, while my 
 
 service lasted. 
 Had he occasion for that staff, with 
 
 which [fear 
 
 He now goes picking out his path in 
 Over the highways and crossings, but 
 
 would plant 
 Safe in the conduct of my friendly 
 
 string, 
 A firm foot forward still, till he had 
 
 reach'd 
 His poor seat on some stone, nigh 
 
 where the tide 
 Of passers-by in thickest confluence 
 
 flow'd : 
 To whom with loud and passionate 
 
 laments 
 From mom to eve his dark estate he 
 
 wail'd. 
 Nor wail'd to all in vain : some here 
 
 and there, 
 The well-disposed and good, their 
 
 pennies gave. 
 I meantime at his feet obsequious 
 
 slept ; 
 Not all-asleep in sleep, but heart and 
 
 ear 
 Prick'd up at his least motion, to re- 
 ceive 
 
Translations from the Latin of Vincent Bournt. 73 [ 
 
 At his kind hand my customary 
 crumbs, 
 
 And common portion in his feast of 
 scraps ; 
 
 Or when night wam'd us homeward, 
 tired and spent 
 
 With our long day, and tedious beg- 
 gary. 
 
 These were my manners, this my way 
 of life. 
 
 Till age and slow disease me overtook. 
 
 And sever'd from my sightless master's 
 side. 
 
 But lest the grace of so good deeds 
 should die. 
 
 Through tract of years in mute ob- 
 livion lost. 
 
 This slender tomb of turf hath Irus 
 rear'd, 
 
 Cheap monument of no ungrudging 
 hand, 
 
 And with short verse inscribed it, to 
 attest, 
 
 In long and lasting union to attest, 
 
 The virtues of the Beggar and his 
 Dog. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE BALLAD SINGERS. 
 
 [The allusion in the first line of this 
 poem is to " Seven Dials," the column 
 formerly standing in the centre of which 
 has long been removed,] 
 
 Where seven fair Streets to one tall 
 
 Column draw. 
 Two Nymphs have ta'en their stand, 
 
 in hats of straw ; 
 Their yellower necks huge beads of 
 
 amber grace. 
 And by their trade they're of the 
 
 Sirens' race : 
 With cloak loose-pinn'd on each, that 
 
 has been red, 
 But long with dust and dirt discoloured 
 Belies its hue ; in mud behind, before. 
 From heel to middle leg becrusted 
 
 o'er. 
 One a small infant at the breast does 
 
 bear; 
 And one in her right hand her tuneful 
 
 ware, 
 
 Which she would vend. Their station 
 
 scarce is taken, 
 When youths and maids flock round. 
 
 His stall forsaken. 
 Forth comes a Son of Crispin, 
 
 leathern-capt. 
 Prepared to buy a ballad, if one apt 
 To move his fancy offers. Crispin's 
 
 sons 
 Have, from uncounted time, with ale 
 
 and buns 
 Cherish'd the gift of Song, which 
 
 sorrow quells ; 
 And, working single in their low- 
 roof d cells, 
 Oft cheat the tedium of a winter's nigh^ 
 With anthems warbled in the Muses' 
 
 spight. 
 Who now hath caught the alarm ? the 
 
 Servant Maid 
 Hath heard a buzz at distance ; and, 
 
 afraid 
 To miss a note, with elbows red 
 
 comes out. 
 Leaving his forge to cool, Pyracmon 
 
 stout 
 Thrusts in his unwash'd visage. He 
 
 stands by, 
 Who the hard trade of Porterage 
 
 does ply, ^ 
 
 With stooping shoulders. What 
 
 cares he ? he sees 
 The assembled ring, nor heeds his 
 
 tottering knees. 
 But pricks his ears up with the hopes 
 
 of song. 
 So, while the Bard of Rhodope his 
 
 wrong 
 Bewail'd to Proserpine on Thracian 
 
 strings. 
 The tasks of gloomy Orcus lost their 
 
 stings. 
 And stone-vex'd Sysiphus forgets his 
 
 load. 
 Hither and- thither from the sevenfold 
 
 road 
 Some cart or waggon crosses, which 
 
 divides 
 The close-wedged audience ; but, as 
 
 when the tides 
 To ploughing ships give way, the 
 
 ship being past. 
 They re-unite, so these unite as fast. 
 The older Songstress hitherto hath 
 
 spent 
 Her elocution in the argument 
 D * 
 
74 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Of their great Song in frose ; to wit, 
 
 the woes 
 Which Maiden true to faithless Sailor 
 
 owes — ■ 
 Ah! " Wandering He/" — which 
 
 now in loftier vei-se 
 Pathetic they alternately rehearse. 
 All gaping wait the event. This 
 
 Critic opes 
 His right ear to the strain. The other 
 
 hopes 
 To catch it better with his left. Long 
 
 trade 
 It were to tell, how the deluded Maid 
 .A victim fell. And now right greedily 
 ^AU hands are stretching forth the 
 
 songs to buy, 
 That are so tragical ; which she, and 
 
 she, 
 Deals out, and sings the while, nor 
 
 can there be 
 A breast so obdurate here, that will 
 
 hold back 
 His contribution from the gentle rack 
 Of Music's pleasing torture. Irus' 
 
 self 
 The staff-propt Beggar, his thin-gotten 
 
 pelf 
 Brings out from pouch, where squalid 
 
 farthings rest, 
 And boldly claims his ballad with the 
 
 best. 
 An old Dame only lingers. To her 
 
 purse 
 The penny sticks. At length, with 
 
 harmless curse, ^ 
 
 "Give me," she cries. "I'll paste it 
 
 on my wall, 
 While the wall lasts, to show what ills 
 
 befall 
 Fond hearts, seduced from Inno- 
 
 cency's way ; 
 How Maidens fall, and Mariners 
 ' betray." 
 
 V. 
 
 TO DAVID COOK, WATCHMAN OF 
 THE PARISH OF ST. MARGARET'S, 
 WESTMINSTER. 
 
 I For much good-natured verse re- 
 ceived from thee, 
 A loving verse take in return from me. 
 
 " Good morrow to my masters," is 
 
 your cry ; 
 And to our David, " twice as good," 
 
 say I. 
 Not Peter's monitor, shrill chanticleer. 
 Crows the approach of dawn in notes 
 
 more clear, 
 Or tells the hours more faithfully. 
 
 While night 
 Fills half the world with shadows of 
 
 affright. 
 You with your lantern, partner of 
 
 your round. 
 Traverse the paths of Margaret's 
 
 hallow'd bound. 
 The tales of ghosts which old wives' 
 
 ears drink up. 
 The drunkard reeling home from 
 
 tavern cup. 
 Nor prowling robber, your firm soul 
 
 appal ; 
 Arm'd with thy faithful staff thou 
 
 slight'st them all. 
 But if the market gardener chance to 
 
 pass, 
 Bringing to town his fruit, or early 
 
 grass. 
 The gentle salesman you with can- 
 dour greet. 
 And with reiterated "good-mornings " 
 
 meet. 
 Announcing your approach by formal 
 
 bell, [tell; 
 
 Of nightly weather you the changes 
 Whether the Moon shines, or her 
 
 head doth steep 
 In rain-portending clouds. When 
 
 mortals sleep 
 In downy rest, you brave the snows 
 
 and sleet 
 Of winter ; and in alley, or in street, 
 Relieve your midnight progress with 
 
 a verse. 
 What though fastidious Phoebus 
 
 frown averse [Night 
 
 On your didactic strain — indulgent 
 With caution hath seal'd up both ears 
 
 of Spite, 
 And critics sleep while you in staves 
 
 do sound 
 The praise of long-dead Saints, whose 
 
 Days abound 
 In wintry months ; but Crispin chief 
 
 proclaim : 
 Who stirs not at that Prince of 
 
 Cobblers' name ? 
 
Translations from the Latin of Vincent Bourne. 75 ! 
 
 Profuse in loyalty some couplets 
 
 shine, 
 And wish long days to all the Bruns- 
 wick line ! 
 To youths and virgins they chaste 
 
 lesson read ; 
 Teach wives and husbands how their 
 
 lives to lead ; 
 Maids to be cleanly, footmen free 
 
 from vice ; 
 How death at last all ranks doth 
 
 equalize ; 
 And, in conclusion, pray good vears 
 
 befall, 
 With store of wealth, your " worthy 
 
 masters all." 
 For this and other tokens of good-will, 
 On Boxing-day may store of shillings 
 
 fill 
 Your Christmas purse ; no house- 
 holder give less. 
 When at each door your blameless 
 
 suit you press : 
 And what you wish to us (it is but 
 
 reason) 
 Receive in turn — the compliments o' 
 
 th' season ! 
 
 VI. 
 
 ON A DEAF AND-DUMB AKTIST. 
 
 {Benjamin Ferrers, who died 
 A.D. 1732.) 
 
 And hath thy blameless life become 
 A prey to the devouring tomb ? 
 A more mute silence hast thou known, 
 A deafness deeper than thine own. 
 While Time was? and no friendly 
 
 Muse, 
 That mark'd thy life, and knows thy 
 
 dues. 
 Repair with quickening verse the 
 
 breach. 
 And write thee into light and speech ? 
 The Power, that made the Tongue, 
 
 restrain'd 
 Thy lips from lies, and speeches 
 
 feign'd ; 
 Who made the Hearing, without 
 
 wrong 
 Did rescue thine from Siren's song. 
 He let thee see the ways of men. 
 Which thou with pencil, not with pen, 
 
 Careful Beholder, down didst note, 
 And all their motley actions quote, 
 Thyself unstain'd the while. From 
 
 look 
 Or gesture reading, more than book. 
 In letter'd pride thoutook'st no part. 
 Contented with the Silent Art, 
 Thyself as silent. Might I be 
 As speechless, deaf, and good, as He ! 
 
 VII. 
 
 NEWTON S PRINCIPIA. 
 
 Great Newton's self, to whom the 
 
 world's in debt. 
 Owed to school mistress sage his 
 
 Alphabet ; 
 But quickly wiser than his teacher 
 
 grown, 
 Discover'd properties to her unknown ; 
 Oi Kpltts B, or minus, learn'd the use. 
 Known quantities from unknown to 
 
 educe ; 
 And made — no doubt to that old 
 
 dame's surprise — 
 The Christ-cross-row bis ladder to the 
 
 skies. 
 Yet, whatsoe'er geometricians say, 
 Her lessons were his true Pkincipia 1 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE HOUSEKEEPER. 
 
 The frugal snail, with forecast of 
 
 repose, 
 Carries his house with him, where'er 
 
 he goes ; 
 Peeps out — and if there comes a 
 
 shower of rain. 
 Retreats to his small domicile amain. 
 Touch but a tip of him, a horn — 'tis 
 
 well— " 
 He curls up in this sanctuary shell. 
 He's his own landlord, his own 
 
 tenant ; stay 
 Long as he will, he dreads no 
 
 Quarter-day. 
 Himself he boards and lodges; both 
 
 invites, 
 And feasts, himself; sleeps with him- 
 self o' nights. 
 
76 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 He spares the upholsterer trouble to 
 
 procure 
 Chattels ; himself is his own furniture, 
 And his sole riches. Wheresoe'er he 
 
 roam — 
 Knock when you will — he's sure,to be 
 
 at home. 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE FEMALE ORATORS. 
 
 [The two words italicised at the end of 
 the fourth line had in the original edition 
 as an elucidatory foot-note '\BUlijigts " in 
 the Latin.] 
 
 Nigh London's famous bridge, a Gate 
 
 more famed 
 Stands, or once stood, from old 
 
 Belinus named, 
 So judged antiquity; and therein 
 
 Vrongs 
 A name, allusive strictly to two tonnes. 
 Her school hard by the Goddess 
 
 Rhetoric opes. 
 And gratis deals to oyster-wives her 
 
 tropes. 
 With Nereid green, green Nereid 
 
 disputes. 
 Replies, rejoins, confutes, and still 
 
 confutes. 
 One her coarse sense by metaphors 
 
 expounds. 
 And one in literalities abounds ; 
 In mood and figure these keep up the 
 
 din: 
 Words multiply, and every word tells 
 
 in. 
 Her hundred throats here bawling 
 
 Slander strains ; 
 And unclothed Venus to her tongue 
 
 gives reins 
 In terms, which Demosthenic force 
 
 outgo. 
 And baldest jests of foul-mouth'd 
 
 Cicero. 
 Right in the midst great Ate keeps 
 
 her stand. 
 And from her sovereign station taints 
 
 the land. 
 Hence Pulpits rail ; grave Senates 
 
 learn to jar ; 
 I Quacks scold; and Billingsgate in- 
 fects the Bar. 
 
 PINDARIC ODE TO THE 
 TREAD-MILL. 
 
 I. 
 Inspire my spirit. Spirit of De Foe, 
 That sang the Pillory, 
 In loftier strains to show 
 A more sublime Machine 
 Than that, where thou wert seen. 
 With neck out-stretch'd and shoulders 
 
 ill awry, 
 Courting coarse plaudits from vile 
 
 crowds below — 
 A most unseemly show ! 
 
 II. 
 
 In such a place 
 
 Who could expose thy face, 
 
 Historiographer of deathless Crusoe ! 
 
 That paint' St the strife 
 
 And all the naked ills of savage life, 
 
 Far above Rousseau ? > 
 
 Rather myself had stood 
 
 In that ignoble wood. 
 
 Bare to the mob, on holyday or high- 
 day. 
 
 If nought else could atone 
 
 For waggish libel, 
 
 I swear on bible, 
 
 I would have spared him for thy sake 
 alone, 
 
 Man Friday ! 
 
 III. 
 Our ancestors' were sour days, 
 Great Master of Romance ! 
 A milder doom had fallen to thy 
 
 chance 
 In our days : 
 Thy sole assignment 
 Some solitary confinement, 
 (Not worth thy care a carrot,) 
 Where in world-hidden cell 
 Thou thy own Crusoe might have 
 
 acted well. 
 Only without the parrot ; 
 By sure experience taught to know. 
 Whether the qualms thou makest him 
 
 feel were truly such or no. 
 
 IV. 
 
 But stay I methinks in statelier mea- 
 sure — 
 A more companionable pleasure — 
 
Pindaric Ode to the Treadmill. 
 
 77 
 
 I see thy steps the mighty Tread Mill 
 
 trace, 
 (The subject of my song, 
 Delay'd however long,) 
 And some of thine own race. 
 To keep thee company, thou bring'st 
 
 with thee along. 
 There with thee go, 
 Link'd in like sentence. 
 With regulated pace and footing slow, 
 Each old acquaintance. 
 Rogue — harlot — thief — that live to 
 
 future ages ; 
 Through many a labour'd tome, 
 Rankly embalm' d in thy too natural 
 
 pages. 
 Faith, friend Defoe, thou art quite at 
 
 home ! 
 Not one of thy great offspring thou 
 
 dost lack. 
 From pirate Singleton to pilfering 
 
 Jack, 
 Here Flandrian Moll her brazen incest 
 
 brags; 
 Vice-stript Roxana, penitent in rags. 
 There points to Amy, treading equal 
 
 chimes, 
 The faithful handmaid to her faithless 
 
 crimes. 
 
 Incompetent my song to raise 
 
 To its just height thy praise. 
 
 Great Mill ! 
 
 Tliat by thy motion proper 
 
 (No thanks to wind, or sail, or work- 
 ing rill) 
 
 Grinding that stubborn corn, the 
 human will. 
 
 Turn' St out men's consciences, 
 
 That were begrimed before, as clean 
 and sweet 
 
 As flour from purest wheat, 
 
 Into thy hopper. 
 
 All reformation short of thee but non- 
 sense is. 
 
 Or human, or divine. 
 
 Compared with thee. 
 
 What are the labours of that Jumping 
 
 Sect, 
 Which feeble laws connive at rather 
 
 than respect ? 
 Thou dost not bump, 
 Or jump, 
 
 But walk men into virtue; betwixt 
 
 crime 
 And slow repentance giving breathing 
 
 time. 
 And leisure to be good ; 
 Instructing with discretion demi-reps 
 How to direct their steps. 
 
 Thou best Philosopher made out of 
 wood ! 
 
 Not that which framed the tub. 
 
 Where sate the Cynic cub, 
 
 With nothing in his bosom sympa- 
 thetic ; 
 
 But from those groves derived, I deem. 
 
 Where Plato nursed his dream 
 
 Of immortality; 
 
 Seeing that clearly 
 
 Thy system all is merely 
 
 Peripatetic. 
 
 Thou to thy pupils dost such lessons 
 give 
 
 Of how to live 
 
 With temperance, sobriety, morality, 
 
 (A new art,) 
 
 That from thy school, by force of 
 virtuous deeds, 
 
 Each Tyro now proceeds 
 
 A ' ' Walking Stewart ! " 
 
 GOING OR GONE. 
 
 I. 
 
 Fine merry franions. 
 Wanton companions. 
 My days are even banyans 
 
 With thinking upon ye ; 
 How death that last stinger. 
 Finis-writer, end-bringer. 
 Has laid his chill finger, 
 
 Or is laying on ye. 
 
 There's rich Kitty Wheatley, 
 With footing it featly 
 That took me completely. 
 
 She sleeps in the Kirk House ; 
 And poor Polly Perkin, 
 Whose dad was still firking 
 The jolly ale firkin. 
 
 She's gone to the Work-house : 
 
78 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Fine gardener, Ben Carter 
 (In ten counties no smarter) 
 Has ta'en his departure 
 
 For Proserpine's orchards ; 
 And Lily, postilion, 
 With cheeks of vermilion, 
 Is one of a million 
 
 That fill up the church-yards ; 
 
 And, lusty as Dido 
 Fat Clemitson's widow 
 Flits now a small shadow 
 
 By Stygian hid ford ; 
 And good master Clapton 
 Has thirty years nap't on, 
 The ground he last hap't on, 
 
 Intomb'd by fair Widford ; 
 
 And gallant Tom Dockwra, 
 Of Nature's finest crockery. 
 Now but thin air and mockery. 
 
 Lurks by Avernus, 
 Whose honest grasp of hand 
 Still, while his life did stand. 
 At friend's or foe's command. 
 
 Almost did burn us. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Roger de Coverley 
 
 Not more good man than he 
 
 Yet has he equally 
 
 Push'd for Cocytus, 
 With drivelling Worral, 
 And wicked old Don"ell, 
 'Gainst whom 1 ve a quarrel. 
 
 Whose end might affright us !- 
 
 Kindly hearts have I known ; 
 Kindly hearts, they are flown ; 
 Here and there if but one 
 
 Linger yet uneffaced, 
 Imbecile tottering elves, 
 Soon to be wreck'd on shelves. 
 These scarce are half themselves, 
 
 With age and care crazed. 
 
 vm. 
 But this day Fanny Hutton 
 Her last dress has put on ; 
 Her fine lessons forgotten. 
 
 She died, as the dunce died ; 
 
 And prim Betsy Chambers, 
 Decay'd in her members, 
 No longer remembers 
 
 Things as she once did ; 
 
 And prudent Miss Wither 
 Not in jest now doth wither 
 And soon must go — whither 
 
 Nor I well, nor you know; 
 And flaunting Miss Waller, 
 That soon must befall her, 
 Whence none can recall her, 
 
 Though proud once as Juno ! 
 
 ON R. B. HAYDON'S 
 "JERUSALEM." 
 
 ^In the "Poetical Recreations of the 
 Champion and his Literary Correspon- 
 dents," published in London, in 1822, there 
 appeared on opposite pages 188 and 189, 
 the following dozen lines, here in Latin, 
 here in English: the former facetiously 
 signed in one word Carlagnulus*; the latter 
 simply subscribed with the writer's initials, 
 C. L. _ "The title prefixed to this tribute in 
 the original is subjoined.] 
 
 IN TABULAM EXIMII PICTORIS B. 
 XIAYDONI, IN QUA SOLYM^I, AD- 
 VENIENTE DOMINO, PALMAS IN 
 VIA PKOSTERNENTES MIRA ARTE 
 DEPINGUNTUR. 
 
 Quid vult iste equitans? et quid velit 
 
 iste virorum 
 Palmifera ingens turba, et vo.t treme- 
 
 bunda Hosanna, 
 Hosanna Christo semper semperque 
 
 canamus. 
 
 Palraa fuit Senior pictor celeberrimus 
 
 olim ; 
 Sed palmam cedat, mod6 si foret i!le 
 
 superstes, 
 Palma, Haydone, tibi : tu palmas 
 
 omnibus aufers. 
 
 Palma negata macnim, donataque 
 
 redd't opimum. 
 Si simul incipiat cum famS, increscere 
 
 corpus, 
 Tu cito pingueEces, fies et, amicule, 
 
 obesus. 
 
On R. B. Haydoiis "Jerusalem:' 
 
 Affectant lauros pictores atque poeta2, 
 Sin laaram invideant (sed quis tibi ?) 
 
 laurigerentes, 
 Pro lauro palma. viridanti tempora 
 
 cingas. 
 
 TRANSLATION. 
 
 What rider's that? and who those 
 
 myriads bringing 
 Him on his way with palms, Hosannas 
 
 singing? 
 Hosanna to the Christ, Heaven — 
 
 Eartli — should still be ringing. 
 
 In days of old, old Palma won re- 
 nown: 
 
 But Palma's self must yield the 
 painter's crown, 
 
 Haydon, to thee. Thy palms put 
 every other down. 
 
 If Flaccus' sentence with the truth 
 
 agree. 
 That "palms awarded make men 
 
 plump to be," 
 Friend Horace, Haydon soon in bulk 
 
 shall match with tliee. 
 
 Painters with poets for the laurel vie : 
 But should the laureat band thy 
 
 claims deny, 
 Wear thou thy own green palm, 
 
 Haydon, triumphantly. 
 
 79 i 
 
 TO MY FRIEND THE 
 INDICATOR. 
 
 (The Indicator, 27th September, 
 1820.) 
 
 YdUR easy Essays indicate a flow. 
 Dear friend, of brain which we may 
 
 elsewhere seek ; 
 And to their pages I and hundreds 
 
 owe, 
 That Wednesday is the sweetest of 
 
 the week. 
 Such observation, wit, and sense, are 
 
 shown. 
 We think the days of Bickerstaff re- 
 turn' d; 
 And that a portion of that oil you 
 
 own. 
 In his undying midnight lamp which 
 
 burn'd. 
 I would not lightly bruise old Pris- 
 
 cian's head 
 Or wrong the rules of grammar 
 
 usiderstood ; 
 But, with the leave of Priscian be it 
 
 said, 
 The Indicative is your Potential 
 
 Mood, 
 Wit, poet, prose-man, party-man, 
 
 translator — 
 H[unt], your best title yet is Indicator. 
 
8o 
 
 kiKw m 3mxt^ ai k Wixit 
 
 [Published originally in 1831, by Edward Moxon, at 64, New Bond Street, in the form 
 of a curious little duodecimo, fantastically illustrated with woodcuts, and entitled — at full 
 length—" Satan in Search of a Wife ; with the whole Process of his Courtship and Mar- 
 riage, and who Danced at the Wedding. By an Eye Witness." The whole is a sort of 
 diaboHcal skit upon " The Loves of the Angels," by Thomas Moore, to whose readers, in 
 fact, as will be seen, this whimsical y«* d' Esprit is with covert irony inscribed.] 
 
 DEDICATION. 
 
 To delicate bosoms, that have sighed over the Loves of the Angels, this poem 
 is with tenderest regard consecrated. It can be no offence to you, dear ladies, 
 that the author has endeavoured to extend the dominion of your darling 
 passion ; to show love triumphant in places, to which his advent has been 
 never yet suspected. If one Cecilia drew an Angel down, another may have 
 leave to attract a spirit upwards; which, I am siu'e, was the most desperate 
 adventure of the two. Wonder not at the inferior condition of the agent ; for, 
 if King Cophetua wooed a beggar-maid, a greater king need not scorn to 
 confess the attractions of a fair tailors daughter. The more disproportionate 
 the rank, the more signal is the glory of your sex. Like that of Hecate, a 
 triple empire is now confessed your own. Nor Heaven, nor Earth, nor deepest 
 tracts of Erebus, as Milton hath it, have power to resist your sway. I con- 
 gratulate your last victory. You have fairly made an honest man of the Old 
 One ; and, if your conquest is late, the success must be salutary. The new 
 Benedict has employment enough on his hands to desist from dabbling with the 
 affairs of poor mortals ; he may fairly leave human nature to herself; and we 
 may sleep for one while at least secure from the attacks of this hitherto restless 
 Old Bachelor. It remains to be seen, whether the world will be much benefited 
 by the change in his condition. 
 
 PART THE FIRST. 
 
 The Devil was sick and queasy of late, 
 And his sleep and his appetite fail'd 
 him ; 
 His ears they hung down, and his tail 
 
 it was clapp'd 
 Between his poor hoofs, like a dog 
 that's been rapp'd— 
 None knew what the devil ail'd him. 
 
 He tumbled and toss'd on his mattress 
 o' nights. 
 That was fit for a fiend's disportal ; 
 
 For 'twas made of the finest of thistles 
 
 and thorn, 
 ■Which Alecto herself had gather'd in 
 scorn 
 Of the best down beds that are 
 mortal. 
 
 iir. 
 
 His giantly chest in earthquakes 
 
 heaved, 
 
 With groanings corresponding ; 
 
 And mincing and few weie the words 
 
 he spoke. 
 While a sigh, like some delicate whirl- 
 wind, broke 
 From a heart that seem'd despond- 
 
Satan in Search of a Wife. 
 
 iv. 
 
 Now the Devil an old wife had for his 
 dam. 
 I think none e'er was older : 
 Her years— old Parr's were nothins to 
 
 them ; ' 
 And a chicken to her was Methusalem, 
 You'd say, could you behold her. 
 
 V. 
 She remember'd Chaos a little child, 
 
 Strumming upon hand organs ; 
 At the birth of Old Night a gossip she 
 
 sat, 
 The ancientest there, and was god- 
 mother at 
 The christening of the Gorgons. 
 
 Her bones peep'd through a rhino- 
 ceros' skin, 
 Like a mummy's through its cere- 
 ment; 
 But she had a mother's heart, and 
 
 guess'd 
 ■What pinch'd her son; whom she 
 thus address'd 
 In terms that bespoke endearment. 
 
 vti. 
 "What ails my Nicky, my darling 
 Imp, 
 My Lucifer bright, my Beelze ? 
 My Pig, my Pug-with-a-curly-tail, 
 You are not weu Can a mother fail 
 To see //mi which all Hell see?" 
 
 viir. 
 ' ' O mother dear, I am dying, I fear ; 
 
 Prepare the yew, and the willow. 
 And the cypress black : for I get no 
 
 ease 
 By day or by night for the cursed fleas 
 That skip about my pillow." 
 
 "Your pillow is clean, and your pil- 
 low-beer. 
 For I wash'd 'em in Styx last night, 
 son. 
 And your blankets both, and dried 
 
 them upon 
 The brimstony banks of Acheron- 
 It is not the /leas that bite, son." 
 
 " O I perish of cold these bitter sharp 
 nights, 
 The damp like an ague ferrets ; 
 The ice and the frost hath shot into 
 
 the bone ; 
 And I care not greatly to sleep alone 
 O' nights— for the fear of spirits." 
 
 "The weather is warm, my own 
 sweet boy, 
 And the nights are close and stifl- 
 ing; 
 And for fearing of spirits, you cow- 
 ardly elf- 
 Have you quite forgot you're a spirit 
 yourself? 
 Come, come, I see you are trifling. 
 
 XII. 
 " I wish my Nicky is not is love — " 
 " O mother, you have nick'd it — " 
 And he tufn'd his head aside with a 
 
 blush — 
 Not red ho: pokers or crimson plush, 
 Could half so deep have prick'd it. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 ' ' These twenty thousand good years 
 or more," 
 Quoth he, "on this burning shingle 
 I have led a lonesome bachelor's life. 
 Nor known the comfort of babe or 
 wife — 
 'Tis a long time to live single." 
 
 XIV. 
 Quoth she, " If a wife is all you want, 
 I shall quickly dance at your wed- 
 ding. 
 I am dry nurse, you know, to the 
 
 female ghosts—" 
 And she call'd up her charge, and 
 they came in hosts 
 To do the old beldam's bidding : 
 
 XV. 
 All who in their Uves had been ser- 
 vants of sin — 
 Adulteress, wench, virago — 
 And murd'resses old that had pointed 
 
 the knife 
 Against a husband's or father's life, 
 Each one a she lago. 
 
The Woi-ks of Charles Lamb. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 First Jezebel came— no need of paint 
 Or dressing, to malce her charming ; 
 For the blood of the old prophetical 
 
 race 
 Had heighten'd the natural flush of 
 her face 
 To a pitch 'bove rouge or carmine. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 Semiramis there low tender'd herself, 
 
 With all Babel for a dowry : 
 With Helen, the flower and the bane 
 
 of Greece — 
 And bloody Medea next offer' d her 
 fleece. 
 That was of Hell the houri. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Clytemnestra, with Joan of Naples, 
 put in ; 
 Cleopatra, by Antony qnicken'd ; 
 Jocasta, that married where she should 
 
 not. 
 Came hand in hand with the daugh- 
 ters of Lot, 
 'Till the Devil wi-i fairly sicken'd. 
 
 For the Devil himself, a devil as he is, 
 Disapproves unequal matches. 
 
 "O mother," he cried, "despatch 
 them hence 
 
 No spirit— I speak it without offence- 
 Shall have me in her hatches." 
 
 XX. 
 
 With a wave of her wand they all 
 were gone ! 
 And now came out the slaughter : 
 " 'Tis none of these that can serve my 
 
 turn; 
 For a wife of flesh and blood I burn— 
 I'm in love with a tailor's daughter. 
 
 '"Tis she must heal the wounds that 
 she made, 
 'Tis she must be my physician. 
 O parent mild, stand not my foe—" 
 For his mother had whisper'd some- 
 thing low 
 About " matching beneath his cot*- 
 dition." 
 
 XXII. 
 
 " And then we must get paternal con- 
 sent, 
 Or an unblest match may vex ye.'' 
 " Her father is dead; I fetch'd him 
 
 away, 
 In the midst of his goose last Michael- 
 mas day — 
 He died of an apoplexy. 
 
 xxin. 
 
 " His daughter is fair, and an only 
 heir — 
 ■With her I long to tether- 
 He has left her his hell, and all that 
 
 he had ; ! 
 
 The estates are contiguous and, I shall 
 be mad 
 'Till we lay our two hells to- 
 gether." 
 
 XXIV. 
 ' ' But how do you know the fair maid's 
 mind?" 
 Quoth he, ' ' Her loss was but re- 
 cent ; 
 And I could not speak my mind, you 
 
 know, 
 Just when I Was fetching her father 
 below — 
 It would have been hardly decent. 
 
 ' ' But a leer from her eye,* where 
 Cupids lie. 
 Of love gave proof apparent ; 
 And, from something she dropp'd, I 
 
 shrewdly ween'd. 
 In her heart she judged that a living 
 Fiend 
 Was better than a dead Parent. 
 
 xxvi. 
 ' ' But the time is short ; and suitors 
 may come 
 While I stand here reporting , 
 Then make your son a bit of a beau, 
 And give me your blessing before I go ' 
 To the other world a-courting." 
 
 XXVII. 
 "But what will you do with your 
 horns, my son ? 
 And that tail — fair maids will mock 
 it—" 
 
Satan in Search of a Wife. 
 
 83 
 
 " My tail I will dock— and as for the 
 
 horn, 
 Like husbands above, I think no scorn 
 To carry it in my pocket." 
 
 XXVIII. 
 
 "But what will you do with your feet, 
 my son?" 
 " Here are stockings fairly woven : 
 My hoofs I will hide in silken hose ; 
 And cinnamon-svveet are my petti- 
 toes — 
 Because, you know, they are cloven." 
 XXIX, 
 
 "Then take a blessing, my darling 
 son," 
 Quoth she, and kissed him civil — 
 Then his neckcloth she tied; and 
 
 when he was drest 
 From top to toe in his Sunday's best. 
 He appear'd a comely devil. 
 
 XXX. 
 
 So his leave he took : but how he fared 
 
 In his courtship— barring failures — 
 
 In a Second Part you shall read it soon. 
 
 In a brand-new song, to be sung to 
 
 the tune 
 
 Of the " Devil among the Tailors." 
 
 THE SECOND PART, 
 
 CONTAINING THE COURTSHIP AND 
 
 THE WEDDING. 
 
 Who is she that by night from her 
 balcony looks 
 On a garden where cabbage ia 
 springing ? 
 'Tis the tailor's fair lass, that we told 
 
 of above ; 
 She muses by moonlight on her true 
 love ; 
 So sharp is Cupid's stinging. 
 
 II. 
 
 Slie has caught a glimpse of the Prince 
 of the Air 
 In his Luciferian splendour. 
 And away with coyness and maiden 
 
 reserve ! 
 For none but the Devil her turn will 
 serve, 
 Her sorrows else will end her. 
 
 She saw when he fetch'd her father 
 away. 
 And the sight no whit did shake her; 
 For the Devil may sure with his own 
 
 make free — 
 And "it saves besides, " quoth merrily 
 she, 
 " The expense of an undertaker. 
 
 ' ' Then come, my Satan, my darling 
 Sin, 
 Return to my arms, my Hell beau ; 
 My Prince of Darkness, my crow- 
 black dove — " 
 And she scarce had spoke, when her 
 own true love 
 Was kneeling at her elbow ! 
 
 But slie wist not at first that this was ) 
 he, j 
 
 That had raised such a boiling pas- 1 
 sion ; 
 For his old costume he had laid aside. 
 And was come to court a mortal bride 
 In a coat-and-waistcoat fashion. 
 
 VI. 
 
 She miss'd his large horns, and she 
 
 miss'd his fair tail. 
 
 That had hung so retrospective ; 
 
 And his raven plumes, and some other 
 
 marks 
 Regarding his feet, that had left their 
 sparks 
 In a mind but too susceptive : 
 
 And she held it scorn that a mortal 
 born 
 Should the Prince of Spirits rival, 
 To clamber at midnight her garden 
 
 fence — 
 For she knew not else by what pre- 
 tence 
 To account for his arrival. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 "What thief art thou," quoth she, 
 "in the dark 
 That stumblest here presumptuous ? 
 
84 
 
 The Works of Charles Latnb. 
 
 Some Irish adventurer I take you to 
 
 be— 
 A foreigner, from your garb I see, 
 Which besides is not over sumptu- 
 
 Then Satan, awhile dissembling his 
 ranlc, 
 A piece of amorous fun tries : 
 Quoth he, " I'm a Netherlander born ; 
 Fair virgin, receive not my suit with 
 scorn ; 
 I'm a Prince in the Low Countries — 
 
 X. 
 
 " Though I travel incog. From the 
 Land of Fog 
 And Mist I am come to proffer 
 My crown and my sceptre to lay at 
 
 your feet ', 
 It is not every day in the week you 
 may meet. 
 Fair maid, with a Prince's offer." 
 
 XI. 
 " Your crown and your sceptre I like 
 full well. 
 They tempt a poor maiden's pride, 
 sir; 
 But your lands and possessions— ex- 
 cuse if I'm rude — 
 Are too far in a northerly latitude 
 For me to become your bride, sir. 
 
 XII. 
 
 "In that aguish clime I should catch 
 my death, 
 Being but a raw new-comer — " 
 Quoth he, ' ' We have plenty of fuel 
 
 stout ; 
 And the fires, which I kindle, never 
 go out 
 By winter, nor yet by summer. 
 
 " I am Prince of Hell, and Lord 
 Paramount 
 Over monarchs there abiding. 
 My groom of the stables is Nimrod 
 
 old; 
 And Nebuchadnazor my stirrups must 
 hold, 
 When I go out a-riding. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 ' ' To spare your blushes, and maiden 
 fears, 
 I resorted to these inventions — 
 But, imposture, begone; and avaunt, 
 
 disguise ! " 
 And the Devil began to swell and rise 
 To his own diabolic dimensions. 
 
 Twin horns from his forehead shot up 
 to the moon, 
 Like a branching stag in Arden ; 
 Dusk wings through his shoulders 
 
 with eagle's strength 
 Push'd out ; and his train lay floun- 
 dering in lengt|> 
 An acre beyond the garden. — 
 
 To tender hearts I have framed my 
 lay- 
 Judge ye, all love-sick maidens. 
 When the virgin saw in the soft moon- 
 
 . light, 
 In his proper proportions, her own 
 
 true knight. 
 If she needed long persuadings. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 Yet a maidenly modesty kept her back, 
 
 As her sex's art had taught her : 
 For "the biggest fortunes," quoth 
 
 she, "in the land 
 Are not worthy," then blush'd, "of 
 yoiu' Highness's hand, 
 Much less a poor tailor's daughter, 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 " There's the two Miss Crockfords are 
 singlfe still, 
 For whom great suitors hunger ; 
 And their father's hell is much larger 
 
 than mine." 
 Quoth the Devil, " I've no such am- 
 bitious design. 
 For their dad is an old fishmonger; 
 
 XIX 
 
 "And I cannot endure the smell of 
 fish— 
 I have taken an anti-bias 
 To their livers, especially since the day 
 That the Angel smoked my cousin 
 away 
 From the chaste spouse of Tobias. 
 
Satan in Search of a Wife. 
 
 85 
 
 "Had my amorous kinsman much 
 longer stay'd, 
 The perfume would have seal'd his 
 obit; 
 For he had a nicer nose than the 
 
 wench, ■ 
 Who cared not a pin for the smother 
 and stench, 
 In the arms of the son of Tobit." 
 
 XXI. 
 'I have read it," quoth she, "in 
 Apocryphal Writ — " 
 And the Devil stoop'd down and 
 kiss'd her ; 
 Not Jove himself, when he courted in 
 
 flame. 
 On Semele's lips, the love-scorch'd 
 dame, 
 Impress' d such a burning blister. 
 
 The fire through her bones and her 
 vitals shot — 
 "O, I yield, my winsome marrow — 
 I am thine for life" — and black thun- 
 ders roU'd — 
 And she sank in his arms through the 
 garden mould. 
 With the speed of a red-hot arrow. 
 
 Merrily, merrily, ring the bells 
 ! From each Pandemonian steeple; 
 I For the Devil hath gotten his beauti- 
 j ful bride, 
 
 ' And a wedding dinner he will provide, 
 ! To feast all kinds of people. 
 
 XXIV. 
 Fat bulls of Basan are roasted whole, 
 
 Of the breed that ran at David ; 
 With the flesh of go-its, on the sinister 
 
 side, 
 Tha* shall stand apart, when the 
 world is tried ; 
 Fit meat for souls unsaved ! 
 
 The fowl from the spit were the 
 Harpies' brood, 
 Which the bard sang near Cre- 
 mona, 
 With a garnish of bats in their leathern 
 
 wings imp'd ; 
 And the fish was— two delicate slices 
 crimp' d. 
 Of the whale that swallow'd Jonah. 
 
 XXVI. 
 
 Then the goblets were crown' d, and a 
 health went round 
 To the bride, in a wine like scarlet; 
 No earthly vintage so deeply paints. 
 For 'twas dash'd with a tinge from 
 the blood of the saints 
 By the Babylonian Harlot. 
 
 No Hebe fair stood cup-bearer there, 
 The guests were their own skinkers ; 
 But Bishop Judas first blest the can, 
 Who is of all Hell Metropolitan, 
 And kiss'd it to all the drinkers. 
 
 XXVIII. 
 The feast being ended, to dancing 
 they went, 
 To music that did produce a 
 Most dissonant sound, while a hellish 
 
 glee 
 Was sung in parts by the Furies 
 Three ; 
 And the Devil took out Medusa. 
 
 XXIX. 
 But the best of the sport was to hear 
 his old dam. 
 Set up her shrill forlorn pipe — 
 How the wither'd Beldam hobbled 
 
 about, 
 And put the rest of the company out — 
 For she needs must try a hornpipe. 
 
 XXX. 
 
 But the heat, and the press, and the 
 noise, and the din, 
 Were so great, that, howe'er un- 
 willing. 
 Our reporter no longer was able to 
 
 stay, 
 But came in his own defence away, 
 And left the bride quadrilling. 
 
The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 THE THREE GRAVES. 
 
 [Originally published among the " Poeti- 
 cal Recreations of the Champion, pp. 
 IO0-2O0, these lines, as a note indicated, 
 were " written during the time, now hap- 
 pily almost forgotten, of the Spy System. J 
 
 Close by the ever-burning brimstone 
 
 beds. 
 Where Bedloe, Gates, and Judas 
 
 hide their heads. 
 I saw great Satan like a sexton stand. 
 With his intolerable spade in hand, 
 Digging three graves. Of coffin shape 
 
 they were, 
 For those who, coffinless, must enter 
 
 there 
 With unblest rites. The shrouds were 
 
 of that cloth 
 Which Clothe weaveth in her blackest 
 
 wrath : 
 The dismal tinct oppress'd the ejre, 
 
 that dwelt 
 Upon it long, like darkness to be felt. 
 The pillows to these baleful beds were 
 
 toads, 
 Large, living, livid, melancholy loads, 
 Whose softness shock'd. Worms of 
 
 all monstrous size >• 
 Crawl'd round; and one, upcoil'd, 
 
 which never dies. 
 A doleful bell, inculcating despair. 
 Was always ringing in the heavy air. ' 
 And all about the detestable pit 
 Strange headless ghosts, andquarter'd 
 
 forms, did flit ; 
 Rivers of blood, from dripping traitors 
 
 spilt, 
 By treachery stung from poverty to 
 
 guilt. 
 I ask'd the Fiend for whom these rites 
 
 were meant? 
 "These graves," quoth he, "when 
 
 life's brief oil is spent, 
 When the dark night comes, and 
 
 they're sinking bedwards, 
 I mean for Castles, Oliver, and 
 Edwards." 
 
 TO CHARLES ADERS, ESQ. 
 
 ON HIS COLLECTION OF PAINTINGS 
 
 BY THE OLD GERMAN MASTERS. 
 
 (Hone's Year Book, 1831.) 
 
 Friendliest of men, Aders, I never 
 
 come 
 Within the precincts of this sacred 
 
 Room, 
 But I am striick with a religious fear. 
 Which says, ' ' Let no profane eye enter 
 
 here." 
 With imagery from Heaven the walls 
 
 ate clothed, 
 Making the things of Time seem vile 
 
 and loaShed. 
 Spare Saints, whose bodies seem sus- 
 
 tain'd by Love, 
 With Martyrs old in meek procession 
 
 move. 
 Here kneels a weeping Magdalen, less 
 
 bright 
 To human sense for her blurr' d cheeks ; 
 
 in sight 
 Of eyes, new touch'd by Heaven, 
 
 more winning fair 
 Than when her beauty was her only 
 
 care. 
 A Hermit here strange mysteries doth 
 
 unlock 
 In desert sole, his knees worn by the 
 
 rock. 
 There Angel harps are sounding, 
 
 while below 
 Palm-bearing Virgins in white order 
 
 go. 
 Madonnas, varied with so chaste 
 
 design, 
 While all are different, each seems 
 
 genuine, 
 And hers the only Jesus : hard out- 
 line 
 And rigid form, by Durer's hand sub- 
 dued 
 To matchless grace and sacro-san^ti- 
 
 tude; 
 Diirer, who makes thy slighted Ger- 
 many 
 Vie with the praise of paint-proud 
 
 Italy. 
 Whoever enter' st here, no more pre- 
 sume 
 To name a Parlour or a Drawing- 
 room ; 
 
Existence, considered in itself, no Blessing. 
 
 87 
 
 But, bending lowly to each holy story, 
 Make this tliy Chapel and thine Ora- 
 tory. 
 
 THE CHANGE. 
 (Hone's Year Book, 1831.) 
 
 [Charles Lamb inscribed these freakish 
 
 verses "To Louisa M- ," adding, 
 
 '* Whom I used to call Monkey."] 
 
 Louisa serious grown and inild, 
 I knew you once a romping child, 
 Obstreperous much, and very wild. 
 
 Then you would clamber up my knees. 
 And strive with every art to tease. 
 When every art of yours could please. 
 
 Those things would scarce be proper 
 
 now, — 
 But they are gone, I know not how. 
 And woman's written on your brow. 
 
 Time draws his finger o'er the scene ; 
 
 But I caAnot forget between 
 
 The thing to me you once have been : 
 
 Each sportive sally — wild escape, — 
 The scoff, the banter, and the jape, — 
 And antics of my gamesome Ape. 
 
 EXISTENCE, CONSIDERED IN 
 ITSELF, NO BLESSING. 
 
 PROM THE LATIN OF PALINGENIUS. 
 
 {The A i/ienaum, 7th July, 1832.) 
 [As originally published in the Atke- 
 m2Uiit, this translation from the Latin of 
 the Italian poet of the sixteenth century, 
 Marcellus Palingenius, vide ZodiacusVitce, 
 lib. 6, ap7ld JiiieJiij had prefixed to it this 
 e:fplanatory note : ' * The poet, after a seem- 
 ing approval of suicide, from a considera- 
 tion of the cares and crimes of life, tinally 
 rejecting it, discusses the negative import- 
 ance of existence, contemplated in itself, 
 without reference to good or evil."] 
 
 Of these sad truths consideration 
 
 had— 
 Thou shall not fear to quit this world 
 
 so mad. 
 
 So wicked ; but the tenets rather hold 
 
 Of wise Calanus, and his followers 
 old. 
 
 Who with their own wills their own 
 freedom wrought. 
 
 And by self-slaughter their dismissal 
 sought 
 
 From this dark den of crime — this 
 horrid lair 
 
 Of men, that savager than monsters 
 are; 
 
 And, scorning longer in this tangled 
 mesh 
 
 Of ills, to wait on perishable flesh. 
 
 Did with their desperate hands antici- 
 pate 
 
 The too, too slow relief of lingering 
 fate. 
 
 And if religion did not stay thine 
 hand. 
 
 And God, and Plato's wise behests, 
 withstand, 
 
 I would in like case counsel thee to 
 throw 
 
 This senseless burden off, of cares 
 below. 
 
 Not wine, as wine, men choose, but 
 as it came 
 
 From such or such a vintage : 'tis the 
 same 
 
 With life, which simply must be 
 understood 
 
 A blank negation, if it be not good. 
 
 But if 'tis wretched all, — as men de- 
 cline 
 
 And loathe the sour lees of corrupted 
 wine — 
 
 'Tis so to be contemn'd. Merely to 
 BE 
 
 Is not a boon to seek, nor ill to flee ; 
 
 Seeing that every vilest little thing 
 
 Has it in common, — from a gnat's 
 small wing, 
 
 A creeping worm, down to the move- 
 less stone, 
 
 And crumbling bark from trees. Un- 
 less to be. 
 
 And TO BE BLEST, be one, I do not 1 
 see I 
 
 In bare existence, as existence, aught ) 
 
 That's worthy to be loved or to be \ 
 sought. S 
 
88 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 THE PARTING SPEECH OF 
 THE CELESTIAL MESSEN- 
 GER TO THE POET. 
 
 FROM THE LATIN OF PALINGENIUS. 
 
 (The AthencBum., 25th February, 
 1832.) 
 
 [Another passage from the same old 
 Italian author's masterpiece,] 
 
 But now time warns (my mission at 
 
 an end) 
 That to love's starry court I reascend ; 
 From wnose high battlements I take 
 
 delight 
 To scan your earth, diminish'd to the 
 
 sight, 
 Pendent and round, and as an apple 
 
 small, 
 Self-propt, self-balanced, and secure 
 
 from fall 
 By her own weight; and how with 
 
 , liquid robe 
 Blue Ocean girdles round her tiny 
 
 globe. 
 While lesser Nereus, gUding like a 
 
 snake, 
 Betwixt her lands his flexile course 
 
 doth take. 
 Shrunk to a rivulet ; and how the Po, 
 The mighty Ganges, Tanais, Ister, 
 
 show 
 No bigger than a. ditch which rains 
 
 have swell' d. 
 Old Nilus' seven proud mouths I late 
 
 beheld. 
 And mock'd the watery puddles. 
 
 Hosts steel-clad 
 Ofttimes I thence behold; and how 
 
 the sad 
 Peoples are punish'd by the fault of 
 
 kings, 
 Which from the purple fiend Ambi- 
 tion springs. 
 Forgetful of mortality, they live 
 In hot strife for possessions fugitive. 
 At which the angels grieve. Some- 
 times I trace 
 Of fountains, rivers, seas, the change 
 
 of place ; 
 By ever-shifting course, and Time's 
 
 unrest. 
 The vale exalted, and the mount de- 
 
 prest 
 
 To an inglorious valley ; ploughshares 
 
 going 
 Where tall trees rear'd their tops, and 
 
 fresh trees growing 
 In antique pastures. Cities lose their 
 
 site; 
 Old things wax new. O what a rare 
 
 delight 
 To him, who from this vantage can 
 
 survey 
 At once stem Afric and soft Asia, 
 With Europe's cultured plains, and in 
 
 their turns 
 Their scatter'd tribes : those whom 
 
 the hot Crab burns, 
 The tawny Ethiops ; Orient Indians ; 
 GetuUans ; ever-wandering Scythians ; 
 Swift Tartar hordes ; Cilicians rapa^ 
 
 clous. 
 And Parthians with back-bended bow 
 
 pugnacious ; 
 Sabeans incense-bringing; men of 
 
 Thrace ; 
 Italian, Spaniard, Gaul; and that 
 
 rough race 
 Of Britons, rigid as their native colds ; 
 With all the rest the circUng sun be- 
 holds ! 
 But clouds, and elemental mists, deny 
 These visions blest to any fleshly eye. 
 
 HERCULES PACIFICATUS 
 
 A TALE FROM SUIDAS, 
 
 (The Englishman's Magazine, 1831.) 
 
 In days of yore, ere early Greece 
 Had dream'd of patrols or police, 
 A crew of rake-hells in ierrorem 
 Spread wide, and carried all before 
 
 'em; 
 Rifled the poultry and the women, 
 And held that all things were in com- 
 mon; 
 Till Jove's great son the nuisance saw. 
 And did abate it by club law. 
 Yet not so clean he made his work, 
 But here and there a rogue would lurk 
 In caves and rocky fastnesses. 
 And shunn'd the strength of Hercules. 
 
 Of these, more desperate than others, 
 A pair of ragamuffin brothers 
 
Hercules Pacificatus. 
 
 89 
 
 In secret ambuscade join'd forces, 
 To carry on unlawful courses. 
 These robbers' names — enough to 
 
 shake us — 
 Were Strymon one, the other Cacus. 
 And, more the neighbourhood to 
 
 bother, 
 A wicked dam they had for mother, 
 Who knew their craft, but not forbid 
 
 it; [it; 
 
 And whatsoe'er they nimm'd, she hid 
 Received tliem with deUght and 
 
 wonder 
 When they brought home some 
 
 special plunder ; 
 Call'd them her darlings, and her 
 
 white boys, 
 Her ducks, her dildings —all was right, 
 
 boys — 
 "Only," she said, "my lads, have 
 
 care 
 Ye fall not into Black Back's snare ; 
 For, if he catch, he'll maul your 
 
 corpus. 
 And clapper-claw you to some pur- 
 pose." 
 She was, in truth, a kind of witch ; 
 Had grown by fortune-telling rich ; 
 To spells and conjurings did tackle 
 
 her. 
 And read folks' dooms by light ora- 
 cular, 
 In which she saw as clear as daylight 
 What mischief on her bairns would 
 
 alight ; 
 Therefore she had a special loathing 
 For all that own'd that sable clothing. 
 
 Who can 'scape fate, when we're 
 
 decreed to 't ? 
 The graceless brethren paid small 
 
 heed to 't. 
 A brace they were of sturdy fellows. 
 As we may say, that fear'd no colours ; 
 And sneer'd with modern infidelity 
 At the old gipsy's fond credulity. 
 It proved all true, though, as she'd 
 
 mumbled — 
 For on a day the varlets stumbled 
 On a green spot — sit Ungues fides — 
 ('Tis Suidas tells it), where Abides, 
 Secure, as fearing no ill neighbour. 
 Lay fast asleep after a " Labour." 
 His trusty oaken plant was near— 
 The prowling rogues look round and 
 
 leer. 
 
 And each his wicked wits 'gan rub. 
 How to bear off the famous Club; 
 Thinking that they sans price or hire 
 
 would 
 Carry 't straight home, and chop for 
 
 fire-wood : 
 'Twould serve their old dame half a 
 
 winter. 
 You stare ; but, 'faith, it was no 
 
 splinter : 
 I would not, for much money, spy 
 Such beam in any neighbour's eye. 
 The villains, these exploits not dull 
 
 in. 
 Incontinently fell a-pulling. 
 They found it heavy, no slight matter. 
 But tugg'd and tugg'd it till the clatter 
 Woke Hercules, who in a trice 
 Whipp'd up the knaves, and, with a 
 
 splice 
 He kept on purpose, which before 
 Had served for giants many a score — 
 To end of Club tied each rogue's head 
 
 fast; 
 Strapping feet too, to keep them 
 
 steadfast ; • 
 And pickaback them carries town- 
 wards. 
 Behind his brawny back, head-down- 
 wards ; 
 (So foohsh calf — for rhyme, I bless 
 
 X- I 
 
 Comes nolens volens out of Essex ;) I 
 Thinking to brain them with his ^ 
 
 dextra, \ 
 
 Or string them up upon the next 
 
 tree. 
 That Club — so equal fates condemn — 
 They thought to catch, has now 
 
 catch'd them. 
 
 Now, Hercules, we may suppose. 
 
 Was no great dandy in his clothes ; 
 
 Was seldom, save on Sundays, seen 
 
 In calimanco or nankeen ; 
 
 Qn anniversaries, would try on 
 
 A jerkin spick-span new from lion ; 
 
 Went bare for the most part, to be 
 
 cool. 
 And save the time of his Groom of 
 
 the Stole. 
 Besides, the smoke he had been in 
 In Stygian gulf had dyed his skin 
 To a natural sable — a right hell-fit. 
 That seem'd to careless eyes black 
 
 velvet. 
 
9° 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 The brethren from their station scurvy, 
 Where they hung dangling topsy- 
 turvy. 
 With horror view the black costume ; 
 And each presumes his hour is come ; 
 Then softly to themselves 'gan mutter 
 The warning words their dame did 
 
 utter : 
 Yet not so softly, but with ease 
 Were overheard by Hercules. 
 Quoth Cacus, "This is he she spoke 
 
 of, 
 Which we so often made a joke of." 
 " I see," said th' other ; " thank our 
 
 sin for 't, 
 'Tis Black Back, sure enough: 
 we're in for 't." 
 
 His godship, who, for all his brag 
 Of roughness, was at heart a wag. 
 At his new name was tickled finely, 
 And fell a-laughing most divinely ; 
 Quoth he, "I'll tell this jest in heaven ; 
 I'he musty rogues shall be forgiven ; " 
 So, in a twinkling, did uncase them. 
 On mother earth once more to place 
 
 them. 
 The varlets, glad to be unhamper'd. 
 Made each a leg, then fairly scamper'd. 
 
 LINES SUGGESTED BY A 
 SIGHT OF WALTHAM CROSS. 
 
 (The Englishman s Magazine, Sep- 
 tember, 1S31.) 
 
 TiME-mouldering CROSSES, gemm'd 
 with imagery 
 
 Of costliest work, and Gothic tracery. 
 
 Point still the spots, to hallow'd wed- 
 lock dear. 
 
 Where rested on its solemn way the 
 bier, 
 
 That bore the bones of Edward's 
 Elinor 
 
 To mix with Royal dust at West- 
 minster. — 
 
 Far different rites did thee to dust 
 consign, 
 
 Duke Brunswick's daughter, princely 
 Caroline. 
 
 A hurrying funeral, and a banish'd 
 grave, 
 
 High-minded wife 1 were all that thou 
 couldst have. 
 
 Grieve not, great ghost, nor count in 
 
 death thy losses ; 
 Thou in thy lifetime had'st thy share 
 
 of crosses. 
 
 THE SELF-ENCHANTED. 
 (The Athenaum, 7th January, 1832.) 
 
 I HAD sense in dreams of a beauty 
 
 rare, 
 Whom Fate had spell-bound, and 
 
 rooted there, 
 Stooping, like some enchanted theme. 
 Over the marge of that crystal stream, 
 Where the blooming Greek, to Echo 
 
 bUnd, 
 With self-love fond, had to waters 
 
 pined. 
 Ages had waked, and ages slept. 
 And that bendingposturestill she kept : 
 For her eyes she may not turn away. 
 Till a fairer object shall pass that 
 
 way — 
 Till an image more beauteous this 
 
 world can show. 
 Than her own which she sees in the 
 
 mirror below. 
 
 Pore on, fair creature ! for ever pore. 
 Nor dream to be disenchanted more ; 
 For vain is expectance, and wish is 
 
 vain, 
 Till a new Narcissus can come again. 
 
 TO A FRIEND, ON HIS 
 MARRIAGE. 
 
 (The Athenaum, 7th December, 
 1833.) 
 
 What makes a happy wedlock? 
 
 What has fate 
 Not given to thee in thy well-chosen 
 
 mate? 
 Good sense — good humour ;— these 
 
 are trivial things. 
 Dear M— , that each trite encomiast 
 
 ' sings. 
 But she hath these, and more. A mind 
 
 exempt 
 From every low-bred passion, where 
 
 contempt. 
 
To Thojnas Stothard, R.A. 
 
 91 
 
 Nor envy, nor detraction, ever found 
 A harbour yet; an understanding 
 
 sound ; 
 Just views of riglit and wrong ; per- 
 ception full 
 Of the deform'd, and of the beautiful, 
 In life and manners; wit above her 
 
 sex, 
 Which, as a gem, her sprightly con- 
 verse decks ; 
 Exuberant fancies, prodigal of mirth. 
 To gladden woodland walk, or winter 
 
 hearth ; 
 A noble nature, conqueror in the strife 
 Of conflict with a hard discouraging 
 
 hfe, 
 Strengthening the veins of virtue, past 
 
 the power 
 Of those whose days have been one 
 
 silken hour, 
 Spoil'd fortune's pamper'd offspring ; 
 
 a keen sense 
 Alike of benefit, and of offence. 
 With reconcilement quick, that instant 
 
 springs 
 From the charged heart with nimble 
 
 angel wings ; 
 While grateful feehngs, like a signet 
 
 sign'd 
 By a strong hand, seem burnt into 
 
 her mind. 
 If these, dear friend, a dowry can 
 
 confer 
 Richer than land, thou hast them all 
 
 in her ; 
 And beauty, which some hold the 
 
 chiefest boon. 
 Is in thy bargain for a make-weight 
 
 thrown. 
 
 TO THOJMAS STOTHARD, R.A., 
 
 ON HIS ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE 
 POEMS OP MK. ROGERS. 
 
 (The AthencBum, 21st December, 
 
 1833-) 
 
 Consummate Artist, whose undying 
 
 name 
 With classic Rogers' shall go down to 
 
 fame. 
 Be this thy crowning work ! In my 
 
 young days 
 How often have I with a child s fond 
 
 gaze 
 
 Pored on the pictured wonders thou 
 
 hadst done : 
 Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandi- 
 
 son ! 
 All Fielding's, Smollett's heroes, rose 
 
 to view ; 
 I saw, and I believed the phantoms 
 
 true. 
 But, above all, thatmost romantic tale 
 Did o'er my raw credulity prevail. 
 Where Glums and Gawries wear 
 
 mysterious things. 
 That serve at once for jackets and for 
 
 wings. 
 Age, that enfeebles other men's de- 
 signs. 
 But heightens thine, and thy free 
 
 draught refines. 
 In several ways distinct you make us 
 
 feel— 
 Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau 
 
 genteel. 
 Your lights and shades, as Titianesque, 
 
 we praise ; 
 And warmly wish you Titian's length 
 
 of days. 
 
 TO CLARA N[OVELLO]. 
 
 [The AlAe>taum, 26th July, 1834.) 
 
 The Gods have made me most un- 
 musical. 
 With feelings that respond not to the 
 
 call 
 Of stringed harp or voice— obtuse and 
 
 mute 
 To hautboy, sackbut, dulcimer, and 
 
 flute; 
 King David's lyre, that made the 
 
 madness flee 
 From Saul, had been but a jew's-harp 
 
 to me : 
 Theorbos, violins, French horns, 
 
 guitars, 
 Leave in my wounded ears inflicted 
 
 scars ; 
 I hate those trills, and shakes, and 
 
 sounds that float 
 Upon the captive air ; I know no note, 
 'Nor ever shall, whatever folks may say. 
 Of the strange mysteries of Sol and 
 
 Fa; 
 I sit at oratorios like a fish. 
 Incapable of sound, and only wish 
 
92 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 The thing was over. Yet do I admire, 
 O tuneful daughter of a tuneful sire, 
 Thy painful labours in a science, which 
 To your deserts I pray may make you 
 
 rich 
 As much as you are loved, and add a 
 
 grace 
 To the most musical Novello race. 
 Women- lead men by the nose, some 
 
 cynics say ; 
 You draw them by the ear — a delicater 
 
 way. 
 
 HYPOCHONDRIACUS. 
 
 [Originally published in 1802 (among 
 the Miscellaneous Pieces appended to 
 Charles Lamb's Five Act Tragedy of 
 John WoodviC) as part and parcel of what 
 purported to be " Curious Fragments 
 from a Common-place Book which be- 
 longed to Robert Burton, author of The 
 Anatomy of Melancholy."] 
 
 By myself walliing, 
 
 To myself talking. 
 
 When a5 I ruminate 
 
 On my untoward fate. 
 
 Scarce seem I 
 
 Alone sufficiently. 
 
 Black thoughts continually 
 
 Crowding my privacy : 
 
 They come unbidden,* 
 
 Like foes at a wedding. 
 
 Thrusting their faces 
 
 In better guests' places. 
 
 Peevish and malecontent. 
 
 Clownish, impertinent. 
 
 Dashing the merriment : 
 
 So in like fashions 
 
 Dim cogitations 
 
 Follow and haunt me. 
 
 Striving to daunt me, 
 
 In my heart festering. 
 
 In my ears whispering, 
 
 "Thy friends are treacherous, 
 
 Thy foes are dangerous. 
 
 Thy dreams ominous." 
 
 Fierce Anthropophagi, 
 Spectra, Diaboli, 
 What scared St. Anthony, 
 Hobgoblins, Lemures, 
 Dreams of Antipodes, 
 Night-riding Incubi 
 Troubling the fantasy, 
 All dire illusions 
 Causing confusions ; 
 
 Figments heretical, 
 Scruples fantastical, 
 Doubts diabolical ; 
 Abaddon vexeth me, 
 Mahu perplexeth me, 
 Lucifer teaseth me — 
 yesu / Maria / liberate nos ab his 
 diris tentationibus Inimici. 
 
 FREE THOUGHTS ON SEVE- 
 RAL EMINENT COMPOSERS. 
 
 Some cry up Haydn, some Mozart, 
 Just as the whim bites ; for my part, 
 I do not care a farthing candle 
 For either of them, or for Handel. — 
 Cannot a man live free and easy, 
 Without admiring Pergoles^ ? 
 Or through the world with comfort go 
 That never heard of Doctor Blow ? 
 So help me Heaven, I hardly have ; 
 And yet I eat, and drink, and shave, 
 Like other people, if you watch it. 
 And know no more of stave or 
 
 crotchet 
 Than did the primitive Peruvians ; 
 Or those old ante-queer-diluvians 
 That lived in the unwash'd world with 
 
 Jubal, 
 Before that dirty blacksmith Tubal, 
 By stroke on anvil, or by summat, 
 Found out, to his great surprise, the 
 
 gamut. 
 I care no more for Cimarosa 
 Than he did for Salvator Rosa, 
 Being no painter ; and bad luck 
 Be mine, if I can bear that Gluck ! 
 Old Tycho Brahe, and modem Her- 
 
 schel. 
 Had something in them ; but who's 
 
 Purcel? 
 The devil with his foot so cloven. 
 For aught I care, may take Beet- 
 hoven ; 
 And, if the bargain does not suit, 
 I'll throw him Weber in to boot ! 
 There's not the splitting of a splinter 
 To choose 'twixt him last named, and 
 
 Winter. 
 Of Doctor Pepusch old Queen Dido 
 Knew just as much, God knows, as I 
 
 do. 
 I would not go four miles to visit 
 Sebastian Bach, (or Batch, which is 
 
 it?) 
 
Prologue to the " Tragedy of Remorse." 
 
 93 
 
 No more I would for Bononcini. 
 As for Novello, or Rossini, 
 I shall not say a word to grieve 'em, 
 Because they're living ; so I leave 'em. 
 
 WHAT IS AN ALBUM? 
 
 [A correspondent of Notes and Queries 
 brought to light the following verses, which 
 he discovered by accident, written on the 
 fly-leaf of a copy of " John Woodvil," lying 
 for sale in a bookseller's window-stall, the 
 lines being dated the 7th September, 1S30, 
 penned _ unmistakably in Charles Lamb's 
 handwriting, and further authenticated 
 with his simple straggling autograph.] 
 
 'Tis a book kept by modem young 
 
 ladies for show. 
 Of which their plain grandmothers 
 
 nothing did know ; 
 A medley of scraps, half verse and 
 
 half prose, 
 And some things not very like either, 
 
 God knows. 
 The first soft effusions of beaux and 
 
 of belles, 
 Of future Lord Byrons and sweet 
 
 L. E. L.'s; 
 Where wise folk and simple both 
 
 equally join. 
 And you write your nonsense that I 
 
 may write mine. 
 Stick in a fine landscape to make a 
 
 display — 
 A flower-piece, a foreground ! all 
 
 tinted so gay. 
 As Nature herself, could she see them, 
 
 would strike 
 With envy, to think that she ne'er did 
 
 the like ; 
 And since some Lavaters, with head- 
 pieces comical, 
 Have agreed to pronounce people's 
 
 hands physiognomical, 
 Be sure that you stuff it with auto- 
 graphs plenty. 
 All penn'd in a fashion so stiff and so 
 
 dainty. 
 They no more resemble folks' ordinary 
 
 writing 
 Than lines penn'd with pains do ex- 
 tempore writing. 
 Or our every-day countenance (pardon 
 
 the stricture) 
 The faces we make when we sit for our 
 
 picture : 
 
 Then have you, iVIadeUna, an album 
 
 complete. 
 Which may you live to finish, and I 
 
 live to see 't ! 
 
 TO MARGARET W . 
 
 (The Athenceum, 14th March, 1835). 
 [Written at Edmonton, on the 8th Octo- 
 ber, 1834, only eleven weeks before Charles 
 Lamb's death,^ and first published in the 
 A i/tetueum, within less than three months 
 after he was laid in his grave.] 
 
 Margaret, in happy hour 
 Christen'd from that humble flower 
 
 Which we a daisy call ! 
 May thy pretty namesake be 
 In all things a type of thee. 
 
 And image thee in all. 
 Like it you show a modest face, 
 An unpretending native grace ; — 
 
 The tulip, and the pink. 
 The china and the damask rose, 
 And every flaunting flower that blows, 
 
 In the comparing shrink. 
 Of lowly fields you think no scorn ; 
 Yet gayest gardens would adorn. 
 
 And grace, wherever set. 
 Home-seated in your lonely bower, 
 Or wedded— a transplanted flower — 
 
 I bless you, Margaret ! 
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 TO COLERIDGE'S TRAGEDY OF 
 " REMORSE." 
 
 [Spoken by Mr. Carr, on Saturday, the 
 23rd January, 1813, when the play was 
 first produced on the boards of Drury 
 Lane 'Theatre. In the original issue of 
 the drama, in its printed form, this pro- 
 logue was duly published.] 
 
 There are, I am told, who sharply 
 
 criticize 
 Our modern theatres' unwieldy size. 
 We players shall scarce plead guilty 
 
 to that charge, 
 Who think a house can never be too 
 
 large : 
 Grieved when a rant, that's worth a 
 
 nation's ear. 
 Shakes some prescribed Lyceum's 
 
 petty sphere ; 
 
94 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 And pleased to mark the grin from 
 
 space to space 
 Spread epidemic o'er a town's broad 
 
 face. 
 O might old Betterton or Booth re- 
 turn 
 To view our structures from their 
 
 silent urn, 
 Could Quin come stalking from 
 
 Elysian glades, 
 Or Garrick get a day-rule from the 
 
 shades. 
 Where now, perhaps, in mirth which 
 
 spirits approve. 
 He imitates the ways of men above, 
 And apes the actions of our upper 
 
 coast. 
 As in his days of flesh he play'd the 
 
 ghost : 
 How might they bless our ampler 
 
 scope to please, 
 And hate their own old shrunk-up 
 
 audiences. 
 Their houses yet were palaces to those 
 Which Ben and Fletcher for their 
 
 triumphs chose. 
 Shakespeare, who wish'd a kingdom 
 
 for a stage. 
 Like giant pent in disproportion'd 
 
 cage, 
 Mourn'd his contracted strengths and 
 
 crippled rage. 
 He who could tame his vast ambition 
 
 down 
 To please some scatter'd gleanings of 
 
 a town. 
 And if some hund.-ed auditors sup- 
 plied 
 Their meagre meed of claps, was 
 
 satisfied, 
 How had lie felt, whea that dread 
 
 curse of Lear's 
 Had burst tremendous on a thousand 
 
 ears. 
 While deep struck wonder from ap- 
 plauding Ijnnds 
 Return'd ihe tribute of as many 
 
 liands ! 
 Rude \i ere his guests ; he never made 
 
 hi5 Ijow 
 To sucli an audience as salutes us 
 
 now. 
 He kiclcd the balm of labour, female 
 
 praise. 
 Few ladies in his time frequented 
 
 plays. 
 
 Or came to see a youth with awkward 
 art 
 
 Apd shrill sharp pipe burlesque the 
 
 ^ woman's part. 
 
 The very use, since so essential grown. 
 
 Of painted scenes, was to his stage 
 unknown. 
 
 The air-blest castle, round whose 
 wholesome crest. 
 
 The martlet, guest of summer, chose 
 her nest— 
 
 The forest walks of Arden's fair 
 domain. 
 
 Where Jaques fed his solitary vein, — 
 
 No pencils aid as yet had dared 
 supply. 
 
 Seen only by the intellectual eye. 
 
 Those scenic helps, denied to Shake- 
 speare's page. 
 
 Our Author owes to a more liberal 
 » age. 
 
 Nor pomp nor circumstance are want- 
 ing here ; 
 
 'Tis for himself alone that he must 
 fear. 
 
 Yet shall remembrance cherish the 
 just pride, 
 
 That (be the laurel granted or denied) 
 
 He first essay'd in this distinguish'd 
 fane 
 
 Severer muses and a tragic strain. 
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 TO "THE Vi-IFE; A TALE OF MAN- 
 TUA," BY JAMES SHERIDAN 
 KNOWLES. 
 
 [Spoken by Miss Ellen-Tree, afterwards 
 Mrs. Charles Kean, on the night of the 
 drama's first representation. In the printed 
 copy of the play published immediately 
 afterwards, the dramatist, in his Preface, 
 dated 24th April, 1833, took occasion to 
 say : " To my early, my trusty and honoured 
 friend, Charles Lamb, I owe my thanks for 
 a delightful Epilogue, composed almost 
 as soon as it was requested."] 
 
 When first our bard his simple will 
 
 express'd 
 That I should in his heroine's robes 
 
 be dress'd. 
 My fears were with my vanity at strife, 
 How I could act that untried part— 
 
 "a wife." 
 
Epilogue to " The Wife: a Tale of Mantua." 
 
 95 
 
 But Fancy to the Grison hills me 
 
 drew 
 Where Mariana like a wild-flower 
 
 grew, 
 Nursing l^r garden-kindred : so far I 
 L-iked her condition, willing to com- 
 ply 
 With that sweet single life : when, 
 
 with a cranch, 
 Down came that thundering, crashing 
 
 avalanche. 
 Starting my mountain-project! " Talce 
 
 this spade," 
 i iid Fancy then, " dig low, adventu- 
 rous maid. 
 For hidden wealth.'' I did ; and 
 
 ladies, lo ! 
 Was e'er romantic female's fortune 
 
 so, 
 To dig a life-warm lover from the 
 
 snow ? 
 A wife and princess see me next, 
 
 beset 
 With subtle toils, in an Italian net, 
 While knavish courtiers, stung with 
 
 rage or fear, 
 Distill'd lip-poison in a husband's 
 
 ear. 
 
 I ponder'd on the boiling southern 
 
 vein; 
 Racks, cords, stilettoes, rush'd upon 
 
 my brain ! 
 By poor, good, weak Antonio, too, dis- 
 owned — 
 I dream'd each night I should be 
 
 Desdemona'd, 
 And, being in Mantua, thought upon 
 
 the shop 
 Whence fair Verona's youth his breath 
 
 did stop : 
 And what if Leonardo, in foul scorn. 
 Some lean apothecary should suborn 
 To take my hated life ? A " tortoise ' ' 
 
 hung 
 Before my eyes, and in my ears scaled 
 
 "aUigators rung." 
 But my Othello, to his vows more 
 
 zealous — • 
 
 Twenty lagos could not make him 
 
 jealous ! 
 New raised to reputation, and to 
 
 life— 
 At your commands behold me, with- 
 out strife. 
 Well-pleased, and ready to repeat — 
 
 the " Wife. ' 
 
g6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 gramalk Mnrks, 
 
 |0^n M00bfaH : 
 
 A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS. 
 
 [Originally published in 1802, as a volume of 12S pages duodecimo, by G. and I. 
 Robinson, of Paternoster Row, Joh}i Woodvil occupied the first 104 pages, the remain- 
 ing 24 pages comprising several curious fragments. There, for example, was given 
 Thekla's " Balad" (sic with one 1), translated from the German. The original title of the 
 volume sufficiently explained the nature of its contents, however, as follows: " ^oAn 
 Woodvzl, a Tragedy by C. Lamb ; to which are added fragments of Burton, the author 
 of The Anatomy of Melanqholy." These Fragments, as a matter of course, were about 
 as truly Burton's as Walter Savage Lander's Imaginary Conversations were the actual 
 utterances of the interlocutors. Imbedded among them, like a vein of pure gold in a 
 lump of sparkling quartz, was his quaint and eminently characteristic poem of " Hjrpo- 
 chondriacus."] 
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 
 Sir Walter Woodvil. 
 John, ) ,. 
 
 ilMON, p"^""^- 
 
 Gray' \ P"^^"^^'^ fi''^''^^ "f 7''^'^' 
 Sandfoed, Sir Walter's old Steward. 
 Margaret, Orphan Ward of Sir Walter. 
 Four Gentlemen, John's riotous companions. 
 Servants. 
 
 Scene. — For the most part at Sir Walter's mansion in Devonshire ; at other 
 
 times in the forest of Sherwood. 
 Time. — Soon after the Restoration. 
 
 ACT THE FIRST. 
 
 Scene.— ^ Servants' Apartment in Woodvil Hall. 
 
 Servants drinking. — Time, the Morning. 
 
 A Song by DANIEL. 
 " When the King enjoys his own again.*' 
 
 Peter. A delicate song. Where didst learn it, fellow ? 
 
 Daniel. Even there, where thou learnest thy oaths and thy politics— at our 
 master's table. Where else should a serving-man pick up his poor accomplish- 
 ments ? 
 
yohn Woodvil. 97 
 
 Martiv. Well spoken, Duniel. O rare Daniel ! — his oaths and his politics ! 
 excellent ! 
 
 Francis. And where didst pick up thy knavery, Daniel? 
 
 Pet. That came to him by inheritance. His family liave supplied the shire 
 of Devon, time out of mind, witli good thieves, and bad serving-men. All of 
 his race have come into the world without their conscience. 
 
 Mar. Good thieves, and bad serving-men? Better and better. I marvel 
 what Daniel hath got to say in reply. 
 
 Dan. I marvel more when thou wilt say anything to the purpose, thou 
 shallow serving-man, whose swiftest conceit carries thee no higher than to 
 apprehend with difficulty the stale jests of us thy compeers. When wast ever 
 known to club thy own particular jest among us? 
 
 Mar. Most unkind Daniel, to speak such biting things of me ! 
 
 Fran. See — if he hath not brought tears into the poor fellow's eyes with the 
 saltness of his rebuke. 
 
 Dan. No offence, brother IVIartin — I meant none. 'Tis true. Heaven gives 
 gifts, and withholds them. It has been pleased to bestow upon me a nimble 
 invention to the manufacture of a jest ; and upon thee, Martin, an indifferent 
 bad capacity to understand my meaning. 
 
 Mar. Is that all ? I am content. Here's my hand. 
 
 Fran. Well, I Uke a little innocent mirth myself, but never could endure 
 bawdry. 
 
 Dan. Quot homines tot senicntics. 
 
 Mar. And what is that ? 
 
 Dan. 'Tis Greek, and argues difference of opinion. , 
 
 Mar. I hope there is none between us. 
 
 Dan. Here's to thee, brother Martin [drinks). 
 
 Mar. And to thee, Daniel {drinks). 
 
 Fran. And to thee, Peter (drinks). 
 
 Pet. Thank you, Francis. And here's to thee {drinks). 
 
 Mar. I shall be fuddled anon. 
 
 Dan. And drunkenness I hold to be a very despicable vice. 
 
 All. O ! a shocking vice. \They drink round. 
 
 Pet. Inasmuch as it taketh away the understanding. 
 
 Dan. And makes the eyes red. 
 
 Pet. And the tongue to stammer. 
 
 Dan. And to blab out secrets. 
 
 {During this conversation they continue drinking.) 
 
 Pet. Some men don't know an enemy from a friend, when they are drunk. 
 
 Dan. Certainly sobriety is the health of the soul. 
 
 Mar. Now I know I am going to be drunk. 
 
 Dan. How canst tell, dry-bones ? 
 
 Mar. Because I begin to be melancholy. That's always a sign. 
 
 Fran. Take care of Martin, he 11 topple off his seat else. 
 
 [Martin drops asleep. 
 
 Pet. Times are greatly altered since young master took upon himself the 
 government of this household. 
 
 All. Greatly altered. , . ,. . . ^, 
 
 If ran. I think everything be altered for the better smce his Majesty s blessed 
 
 restoration. ^ • » j i. 
 
 Pet. In Sir Walters days there was no encouragement given to good house- 
 keeping. 
 
 Dan. For instance, no possibility of getting drunk before two in the after- 
 Pet. Every man his allowance of ale at breakfast— his quart ! 
 
98 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 All. A quart ! ! {In derision). 
 
 Dan. Nothing left to our own sweet discretions. 
 
 Pet. Whereby it may appear, we were treated more like beasts, than what 
 we were— discreet and reasonable serving-men. 
 
 All. Lilce beasts. 
 
 Mar. [opening kis eye^. Like beasts ! 
 
 Dan. To sleep, wag-tail 1 
 
 Fran. I marvel all this while, where the old gentleman has found means 
 to secrete himself. It seems, no man has heard of him since the day of the 
 King's return. Can any tell, why our young master, being favoured by the 
 court, should not have interest to procure his father's pardon ? 
 
 Dan. Marry, I think 'tis the obstinacy of the old Knight, that will not be 
 beholden to the court for his safety. 
 
 Mar. Now that is wilful. 1 
 
 Fran. But can any tell me the place of his concealment ? 
 
 Pet. That cannot I ; but I have my conjectures. 
 
 Dan. Two hundred pounds, as I hear, to the man that shall apprehend him. 
 
 Fran. Well, I have my suspicions. 
 
 Pet. And so have I. 
 
 Mar. And I can keep a secret. , 
 
 Fran, [to Peter). Warwickshire you mean {aside). 
 
 Pet. Perhaps not. 
 
 Fran. Nearer perhaps. 
 
 Pet. I say nothing. 
 
 Dan. I hope there is none in this company would be mean enough to betray 
 him. 
 
 All. Lord, surely not. [TVicy (fWx/E (■(> Sir Walter's ja/c/y. 
 
 Fran. I have often wondered, how our master came to be excepted by name 
 m the late Act of Oblivion. 
 
 Dan. Shall I tell the reason ? 
 
 All. Ay, do. 
 
 Dan. "Tis thought, he is no great friend to the present happy esfablish- 
 ,ent. 
 
 All. O ! monstrous ! 
 
 Pet. Fellow-servants, a thought strikes me. Do we, or do we not, come 
 under the penalties of the treason act, by reason of our being privy to this 
 man's concealment ! 
 
 All. Truly, a sad consideration. 
 
 To them enters Sandford suddenly. j 
 
 Sandford. 'Vou well-fed and unprofitable grooms, ! 
 
 Maintain'd for state, not us? ; \ 
 
 You lazy feasters at another's cost. 
 
 That eat like maggots into an estate, I 
 
 And do as little work, J 
 
 Being indeed but foul excrescences. 
 And no just parts in a well-order'd family ; 
 You base and rascal imitators, 
 Who act up to the height your master's vices. 
 But cannot read his virtues in your bond : 
 Which of you, as I enter'd, spalce of betraying? 
 Was it you, or you, or, thin-face, was it you? 
 
 Mar. Whom does he call thin-face ? 
 
 Sand. No prating, loon, but tell me who he was, 
 That I may brain the villain with my staff, 
 That seeks Sir Walter's life ! 
 
— ^ J 
 
 yohn Woodvil. 99 
 
 You miserable men, 
 
 With minds more slavish than your slave's estate, 
 
 Have you that noble bounty so forgot, 
 
 Which took you from the looms, and from the ploughs, 
 
 Which better had ye foUow'd, fed ye, clothed ye, 
 
 And entertain'd ye in a worthy service, 
 
 Where your best wages was tlie world's repute, 
 
 That thus ye seek his life, by whom ye Uve ? 
 
 Have you forgot too. 
 
 How often in old times 
 
 Your drunken mirths have stunn'd day's sober ears. 
 
 Carousing full cups to Sir Walters health? 
 
 Whom now ye would betray, but that he lies 
 
 Out of the reach of your poor treacheries. 
 
 This learn from me. 
 
 Our master's secret sleeps with trustier tongues, 
 
 Than will unlock themselves to carles like you. 
 
 Go, get you gone, you knaves. Who stirs ? this staff 
 
 Shall teach you manners else. 
 
 All. Well, we are going. 
 
 Sand. And quickly too, ye had better, for I see 
 Young mistress Margaret coming this way. 
 
 [Exeunt all hit SandfORD. 
 
 Enter MARGARET; as in afi-ight, pursued by a Gentleman, who, seeing 
 SANDFORD, retires muttering a curse. 
 
 SANDFORD. MARGARET. 
 
 Sand. Good-morrow to my fair mistress. "Twas a chance 
 I saw you, lady, so intent was I 
 On chiding hence these graceless serving-men, 
 Who cannot break their fast at morning meals 
 Without debauch and mis-timed riotings. 
 This house hath been a scene of nothing else. 
 But atheist riot and profane excess, 
 Since my old master quitted all his rights here. 
 
 Marg. Each day I endure fresh insult from the scorn 
 Of Woodvil's friends, the uncivil jests 
 And free discourses of the dissolute men. 
 That haunt this mansion, making me their mirth. 
 
 Sand. Does my young master know of these affronts ? 
 
 Marg. I cannot tell. Perhaps he has not been told. 
 Perhaps he might have seen them if he would. 
 I have known him more quick-sighted. Let that pass. 
 AH things seem changed, I think. I had a friend, 
 (I can't but weep to think him alter'd too) 
 These things are best forgotten : but I knew 
 A man, a young man, young, and full of honour, 
 That would have pick'd a quarrel for a straw. 
 And fought it out to the extremity, 
 E'en with the dearest friend he had alive. 
 On but a bare surmise, a possibility. 
 That Margaret had suffer'd an affront. 
 Some are too tame that were too splenetic once. 
 
 Sand. 'Twere best he should be told of these affronts. 
 
The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Marg. I am the daughter of his father's friend, 
 Sir Walter's orphan ward. . 
 I am not his servant-maid, that I should wait 
 The opportunity of a gracious hearing, 
 Inquire the times and seasons when to put 
 My peevish prayer up at young 'Woodvirs feet, 
 And sue to him fo'r slow redress, who was 
 Himself a suitor late to Margaret. 
 I am somewhat proud : and Woodvil taught me pride. 
 I was his favourite once, his playfellow in infancy, 
 And joyful mistress of his youth. 
 None once so pleasant in his eyes as Margiret. 
 His conscience, his religion, Margaret was. 
 His dear hearts confessor, a heart ■within that hea-rt. 
 And all dear things summ'd up in her alone. 
 As Margaret smiled or frown'd John lived or died : 
 His dress, speech, gesture, studies, friendships, all 
 Being fashion' d to her liking. 
 His flatteries taught me first this self-esteem, 
 His flatteries and caresses, while he loved. 
 The world esteem'd her happy, who had won 
 His heart, who won all hearts ; 
 And ladies envied me the love of 'Woodvil. 
 
 Sand. He doth affect the courtier's life too much, 
 ■Whose art is to forget. 
 
 And that has wrought this seeming change in him, 
 That was by nature noble. 
 
 'Us these court plagues, that swarm about our house, 
 Have done the mischief, making his fancy giddy 
 ■With images of state preferment, place. 
 Tainting his generous spirits with ambition. 
 
 Marg. I know not how it is ; 
 A cold protector is John grown to me. 
 The mistress and presumptive wife of Woodvil 
 Can never stoop so low to supplicate 
 A man, her equal, to redress those wrongs, 
 ■Which he was bound first to prevent : 
 But which his own neglects have sanction'd rather. 
 Both sanction'd and provoked ; a mark'd neglect. 
 And strangeness fastening bitter on his love, 
 His love which long has been upon the wane. 
 For me, I am determined what to do : 
 To leave this house this night, and lukewarm John. 
 
 Sdnd. O lady, have a care 
 Of these indefinite and spleen-bred resolves. 
 'You know not half the dangers that attend 
 Upon a life of wandering, which your thoughts now 
 Feehng the sweUings of a lofty anger. 
 To your abusM fancy, as 'tis likely. 
 Portray without its terrors, paindng lies 
 And representments of fallacious liberty — 
 You know not what it is to leave the roof that shelters you. 
 
 Marg. I have thought on every possible event, 
 "I'he dangers and discouragements you speak of. 
 Even till my woman's heart hath ceased to fear them. 
 And cowardice grows enamour'd of rare accidents, 
 
yohn IVoodvil. loi 
 
 Nor am I so unfurnish'd as you think, 
 Of practicable schemes. 
 
 Sand. Now God forbid ; think twice of this, dear lady. 
 
 Marg. I pray you spare me, Mr. Sandford, 
 And once for all believe, nothing can shake my purpose. 
 
 Sand. But What course have you thought on ? 
 
 Marg. To seek Sir Walter in the forest of Sherwood. 
 I have letters from young Simon, 
 Acquainting me with all the circumstances 
 Of their concealment, place, and manner of life. 
 And the merry hours they spend in the green haunts 
 Of Sherwood, nigh which place they have ta'en a house 
 In the town of Nottingham, and pass for foreigners. 
 Wearing the dress of Frenchmen. — 
 All which I have perused with so attent 
 And child-like longings, that to my doling ears 
 Two sounds now seem like one. 
 One meaning in two words, Sherwood and Liberty. — ■ 
 And, gentle Mr. Sandford, — 
 Tis you that must provide now 
 The means of my departure, which for safety 
 Must be in boy's apparel. 
 
 Sand. Since you will have it so 
 (My careful age trembles at all may happen) 
 I will engage to furnish you. 
 I have the keys of the wardrobe, and can fit you 
 With garments to your size. 
 I know a suit 
 
 Of lively Lincoln Green, that shall much grace you 
 In the wear, being glossy fresh, and worn but seldom. 
 Ypung Stephen Woodvil wore them while he lived. 
 I have the keys of all this house and passages, 
 And ere day break will rise and let you forth. 
 What things soe'er you have need of 1 can furnish you ; 
 And will provide a horse and trusty guide 
 To bear you on your way to Nottingham. — 
 
 Marg. That once this day and night were fairly past ! 
 For then I'll bid this house and love farewell; 
 Farewell, sweet Devon : farewell, lukewarm John : 
 For with the morning's light will Margaret be gone. 
 Thanks, courteous IMr. Sandford. — [Exeunt divers ways. 
 
 ACT THE SECOND. 
 
 Scene. — An Apartment in Woodvil Hall. 
 
 John Woodvil— «&««. 
 {Reading parts of a Letter.') 
 
 The Letter. 
 "When Love- grows cold, and indifference has usurped upon old esteem, it 
 is no marvel if the world begin to account that dependence, which hitherto has 
 been esteemed honourable shelter. The course I have taken (in leaving this 
 
house, not easily wrought thereunto) seemed to me best for the once-for-all 
 releasing of yourself (who in times past have deserved well of me) from the 
 now daily and not to be endured tribute of forced love, and ill-dissembled re- 
 luctance of affection. 
 
 (Signed) " Makgaeet." 
 
 Gone ! gone ! my girl ? so hasty, Margaret ! 
 
 j^nd never a kiss at parting ? shallow loves, 
 
 And likings of a ten days' growth, use courtesies, 
 
 And show red eyes at parting. Who bids " farewell " 
 
 In the same tone he cries ' ' God speed you, sir ? " 
 
 Or tells of joyful victories at sea, 
 
 Where he hath ventures ? does not rather muffle 
 
 His organs to emit a leaden sound. 
 
 To suit the melancholy dull "farewell," 
 
 Which They in Heaven not use ? — 
 
 So peevish, Margaret ? 
 
 But 'tis the common error of your sex. 
 
 When our idolatry slackens, or grows less, 
 
 (As who of woman born can keep his faculty. 
 
 Of Admiration, being a decaying faculty. 
 
 For ever strain'd to the pitch? or can at pleasure 
 
 Make it renewable, as some appetites are. 
 
 As namely. Hungry, Thirst ?) - this being the case, 
 
 They tax us with neglect, and love grown cold, 
 
 Coin plainings of the perfidy of men. 
 
 Which into maxims pass, and apothegms 
 
 To be retail'd in ballads. — 
 
 I know them all. 
 They are jealous, when our larger hearts receive 
 More guests than one. (Love in a woman's heart 
 Being all in one). For me, I am sure I have room here 
 For more disturbers of my sleep than one. 
 Love shall have part, but Love shall not have all. 
 Ambition, Pleasure, Vanity, all by turns, 
 Shall lie in my bed, and keep me fresh and waking ; 
 Yet Love not be excluded. Foolish wench, 
 I could have loved her twenty years to come, 
 And still have kept my liking. But since 'tis so, 
 Why, fare thee well, old play-fellow ! I'll try 
 To squeeze a tear for old acquaintance' sake. 
 I shall not grudge so much. 
 
 To him enter LovEL. 
 
 Lov. Bless us, Woodvil! what is the matter? I protest, man, I thought 
 you had been weeping. 
 
 Wood. Nothing is the matter, only the wench has forced some water into 
 my eyes, which will quickly disband. 
 
 Lov. .1 cannot conceive you. 
 
 Wood. Margaret is flown. 
 
 [.ov. Upon what pretence ? 
 
 Wood. Neglect on my part : which it seems she has had the wit to discover, 
 maugre all my pains to conceal it. 
 
 Lov. Then you confess the charge ? 
 
 Wood. To say the truth, my love for her has of late stopped short on this 
 side idolatry. 
 
yohn Woodvil. 103 
 
 Lov. As all good Christians should, I think. 
 
 Wood. I am sure, I could have loved her still within the limits of warrantable 
 love. 
 
 Lm. A kind of brotherly affection, I take it. 
 Wood. We should have made excellent man and wife in time. 
 
 Lov. A good old couple, when the snows fell, to crowd about a sea-coal 
 fire, and talk over old matters. 
 
 Wood. While each should feel, what neither cared to acknowledge, that 
 stories oft repeated may at last come to lose some of their grace by the repe- 
 tition. 
 
 Lov. Which both of you may yet live long enough to discover. For, take 
 ray word for it, Margaret is a bird, that will come back to you without a lure. 
 
 Wood. Never, never, Lovel. Spite of my levity, with tears I confess it, she 
 was a lady of most confirmed honour, of an unmatchable spirit, and determi- 
 nate in all virtuous resolutions ; not hasty to anticipate an affront, nor slow to 
 feel, where just provocation was given. 
 
 Lav. What made you neglect her then ? 
 
 Wood. Mere levity and youthfulness of blood, a malady incident to young 
 men, physicians call it caprice. Nothing else. He that slighted her, knew 
 her value : and 'tis odds, but for thy sake, Margaret, John will yet go to his 
 grave a bachelor. \A noise heard as of one drunk and singing. 
 
 Lou. Here comes one, that will quickly dissipate these humours. 
 
 Enter one drunk. 
 
 Drunken Man. Good-morrow to you, gentlemen. Mr. Lovel, I am your 
 humble servant. Honest Jack Woodvil, I will get drunk with you to-morrow. 
 Wood. And why to-morrow, honest Mr. Freeman ? 
 
 Drunk. M. I scent , a traitor in that question. A beastly question. Is it not 
 his Majesty's birth-day? the day of all days in the year, on which King 
 Charles the Second was graciously pleased to be born. [Sings) ' ' Great pity 
 'tis such days as those should come but once a year." 
 
 Lov. Drunk in a morning ! foh ! how he stinks. 
 
 Drunk. M. And why not drunk in a morning? canst tell, bully? 
 
 Wood. Because being the sweet and tender infancy of the day, methinks it 
 should ill-endure such early blightings. 
 
 Drunk. M. I grant you, 'tis in pome sort the youth and tender nonage of 
 the day. Youth is bashful, and I give it a cup to encourage it. [Sings] "Ale 
 that will make Grimalkin prate." — At noon I drink for thirst, at night for 
 fellowship, but above all I love to usher in the bashful morning under the 
 auspices of a freshening stoup of liquor. [Sings) "Ale in a Saxon rumkin 
 then Makes valour burgeon in tall men." — But I crave pardon. I fear I keep 
 that gentleman from serious thoughts. There be those that wait for me in the 
 cellar. 
 
 Wood. Who are they? 
 
 Drunk. M. Gentlemen, my good friends, Cleveland, Delaval, and Truby. 
 I know by this time they are all clamorous for me. * \^Exit singing. 
 
 Wood. This keepnig of open house acquaints a man with strange com- 
 panions. 
 
 Enter, at another door, Three calling for Hakey Freeman. 
 
 Harry Freeman, Harry Freeman. 
 He is not here. Let us go look for him. 
 Where is Freeman ? 
 
 Where is Harry? {^Exeunt the Three, calling for Fkeeman. 
 
 Wood. Did you ever see such geTilry? [laughing). These are they, that 
 
104 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 fatten on ale and tobacco in a morning, drink burnt brandy at noon to pro- 
 mote digestion, and piously conclude wuh quart bumpers after supper to prove 
 their loyalty. . 
 Lov. Come, shall we adjourn to the Tennis Court ? 
 
 Wood. No, you shall go with me into the gallery, where I will show you the ; 
 Vandyke I have purchased : " The late king taking leave of his children." |. 
 
 Lov. I will but adjust my tress, and attend you. [Exit LoVEL. I 
 
 Wood, (alone), f^ow universal England getteth drunk 
 
 For joy that Charles, her monarch, is restored : 
 
 And she, that sometime wore a saintly mask. 
 
 The stale-grown vizor from her face doth pluck, 
 
 And weareth now a suit of morris bells. 
 
 With which she jingling goes through all her towns and villages. 
 
 The baffled factions in their houses skulk : 
 
 The commonwealthsman, and state machinist. 
 
 The cropp'd fanatic, and fifth-monarchy-man, 
 
 Who heareth of these visionaries now ? 
 
 They and their dreams have ended. Fools do sing. 
 
 Where good men yield God thanks ; but politic spirits, 
 
 Who live by observation, note these changes 
 
 Of the popular mind, and thereby serve their ends. 
 
 Then why not I? What's Charles to me, or Oliver, 
 
 But as my own advancement hangs on one of them? 
 
 I to my myself am chief. 1 know. 
 
 Some shallow mouths cry out, that I am smit 
 
 With the gauds and show of state, the point of place, 
 
 And trick of precedence, the ducks, and nods, 
 
 Which weak minds pay to ra,nk. "Tis not to sit 
 
 In place of worship at the royal masques. 
 
 Their pastimes, plays, and Whitehall banquetings, • 
 
 For none of these, 
 
 Nor yet to be seen whispering with some great one, 
 
 Do I affect the favours of the court. 
 
 I would be great, for greatness hath great power. 
 
 And that's the fruit I reach at. — 
 
 Great spirits ask great play-room. Who could sit. 
 
 With these prophetic swellings in my breast. 
 
 That prick and goad me on, and never cease. 
 
 To the fortunes something tells me t was born to ? 
 
 Who, with such monitors within to stir him. 
 
 Would sit him down with lazy arms across. 
 
 An unit, a thing without a name in the state, 
 
 A something to be govern'd, not to govern, 
 
 A fishing, hawking, hunting, country gentleman? [Exit. 
 
 Scene. — Sherwood Forest. 
 
 SIR WALTER WOODVIL, SIMON WOODVIL (disguised as Frenchmen). 
 
 Sir Wal. How fares my boy, Simon, my youngest born, 
 My hope, my pride, young Woodvil, speak to me? 
 Some grief untold weighs heavy at thy heart ; 
 I know it by thy alter'd cheer of late. 
 Thinkest thy brother plays thy father false ? 
 It is a mad and thriftless prodigal. 
 Grown proud upon the favours of the court ; 
 
j^oJin Woodvil. 105 
 
 Court manners, and court fashions, he affects, 
 
 And in the heat and uncheck'd blood of youth, 
 
 Harbours a company of riotous men, 
 
 All hot, and young, court-seekers like himself, 
 
 Most skilful to devour a patrimony ; 
 
 And these have eat into my old estates, 
 
 And these have drain' d thy father's cellars dry; 
 
 But these so common faults of youth not named, 
 
 (Things which themselves outgrow, left to themselves) 
 
 I know no quality that stains his honour. 
 
 My life upon his faith and noble mind, 
 
 bon John could never play thy father false. 
 
 Sim.. I never thought but nobly of my brother, 
 Touching his honour and fidelity. 
 Still I could wish him charier of his person. 
 And of his time more frugal, than to spend 
 In riotous living, graceless society. 
 And mirth unpalatable, hours better employ'd 
 (With those persuasive graces nature lent him) 
 In fervent pleadings for a father s life. 
 
 Sir Wal. I would not owe my life to a jealous court, 
 Whose shallow policy I know it is. 
 On some reluctant acts of prudent mercy, 
 (Not voluntary, but extorted by the times. 
 In the first trembliijgs of new-fixed power, 
 And recollection smarting from old wounds,) 
 On these to build a spurious popularity. 
 Unknowing what free grace or mercy mean. 
 They fear to punish, therefore do they pardon. 
 For this cause have I oft forbid my son, 
 By letters, overtures, open solicilings. 
 Or closet-lamperings, by gold or fee. 
 To beg or bargain with the court for my life. 
 
 Sim. And John has ta'en you, father, at your word. 
 True to the letter of his paternal charge. 
 
 Sir Wal. Well, my good cause, and my good conscience, boy, 
 Shall be for sons to me, if John prove false. 
 Men die but once, and tlie opportunity 
 Of a noble death is not an every-day fortune : 
 It is a gift which noble spirits pray for. 
 
 Sim. I would not wrong my brother by surmise ; 
 I know him generous, full of gentle qualities, 
 Incapable of base compliances. 
 No prodigal in his nature, but affecting 
 The show of bravery for ambitious ends. 
 He drinks, for 'tis the humour of the court. 
 And drink may one day wrest the secret from him. 
 And pluck vou from your hiding place in the sequel. 
 
 Sir Wal. Fair death shall be my doom, and fottl life is. 
 Till when, we'll live as free in this green forest. 
 As yonder deer, who roam unfearing treason ; 
 Who seem the Aborigines of this place, 
 Of Sherwood theirs by tenure. — 
 
 Sim. 'Tis said, that Robert Earl of Huntingdon, 
 Men call'd him Robin Hood, an outlaw bold. 
 With a merry crew of hunters here did haunt, ^ 
 
Not sparing the king's vension. May one believe 
 The antique tale ? 
 
 Sir Wal. There is much likeliliood, 
 Such bandits did in England erst abound, 
 When polity was young. 1 have read of the pranks 
 Of that mad archer, and of the tax he levied 
 On travellers, whatever their degree, 
 Baron, or Knight, whoever pass'd tliese woods, 
 Layman, or Priest, not spanng the Bishop's mitre 
 For spiritual regards ; nay once, 'tis said, 
 He robb'd the King himself. 
 
 Sim, A perilous man [smiling). 
 
 Sir M^al. How quietly we live here. 
 Unread in the world's business, 
 And take no note of all its slippery changes. 
 'Twere best we make a world among oureelves, 
 A little world, 
 
 Without the ills and falsehoods of the greater ; 
 We two being all the inhabitants of ours. 
 And kings and subjects both in one. — 
 
 Sim. Only the dangerous errors, fond conceits. 
 Which make the business of that greater world, 
 Must have no place in ours : 
 
 As namely, riches, honours, birth, place, courtesy, 
 Good fame and bad, rumours and popular noises. 
 Books, creeds, opinions, prejudices national, 
 Humours particular, 
 
 Soul-killiin^ lies, and trutlis that work small good, 
 Feuds, factions, enmities, relations?iips. 
 Loves, hatreds, sympathies, antipathies, 
 And all the intricate stuff quarrels are made of. 
 
 Margaret eniers in boy's apparel. 
 
 Sir Wal. What pretty boy have we here? 
 
 Marg. Bon jour, messieurs. Ye have handsome English faces, 
 I should have ta'en you else for other two, 
 I came to seek in the forest. 
 
 Sir Wal. Who are they ? 
 
 Marg. A gallant brace of Frenchmen, curl'd monsieurs, 
 That, men say, haunt these woods, affecting privacy, 
 More than the manner of their countrymen. 
 
 Sim. We have here a wonder. 
 The face is Margaret's face. 
 
 Sir Wal. The face is Margaret's, but the dress the same 
 My Stephen sometime wore. 
 
 (To Makg.) Suppose us them ; whom do men say we are? 
 Or know you what you seek ? 
 
 Marg. A worthy pair of exiles. 
 Two whom the politics of state revenge, 
 In final issue qf long civil broil?, 
 Have houseless driven fromyour native Fiatie" 
 To wander idle in these English .woods. 
 Where now ye live ; most part 
 Thinking on home, and all the joys of lErance, 
 Where grows tlie'put;pjc'vine. 
 
 Sir Wal. These woods, young-stranger. 
 
'jFohn Woodvil. 107 
 
 And grassy pastures, ■v\liich the slim deer loves, 
 Are they less beauteous than the land of France, 
 Where grows tlie purple vine? 
 
 Marg. I cannot tell. 
 To an indifferent eye both show alik 
 'Tis not the scene. 
 But all familiar objects in the scene. 
 Which now ye miss, that constitute a difference. 
 Ye had a country, exiles, ye have none now ; 
 Friends had ye, and much wealth, ye now have nothing ; 
 Our manners, laws, our customs all are foreign to you, 
 I know ye loathe them, cannot learn them readily : 
 And there is reason, exiles, ye should love 
 Our English earth less than your land of France, 
 Where grows the purple vine ; where all delights grow 
 Old custom has made pleasant. 
 
 Sir Wal. You, that are read 
 So deeply in our story, what are you ? 
 
 Marg. A bare adventurer ; in brief a woman. 
 That put strange garments on, and came thus far 
 To seek an ancient friend : 
 And having spent her stock of idle words, 
 And feeling some tears coming. 
 Hastes now to clasp Sir Walter Woodvil's knees. 
 And beg a boon fot; Margaret, his poor ward i^kiieeliiii>). 
 
 Sir iVal. Not at my feet, Margaret, not at my feet. 
 
 Marg. Yes, till her suit is answer'd. 
 
 Sir Wal. Name it. 
 
 Marg. A little boon, and yet so great a grace, 
 She fears to ask it. 
 
 Sir Wal. Some riddle, Margaret? 
 
 Marg. No riddle, but a plain request. — 
 
 Sir Wal. Name it. 
 
 Marg. Free liberty of Sherwood, 
 And leave to take her lot with you in the forest. 
 
 Sir Wal. A scant petition, Margaret, but take it, 
 Seal'd with an old man's tears. — ■ 
 Rise, daughter of Sir Rowland. 
 (Addresses t/ietn both) O you most worthy,' 
 You constant followers of a man proscribed. 
 Following poor misery in the throat of danger; 
 Fast servitors to crazed and penniless poverty, 
 Serving poor poverty without hope of gain ; 
 Kind children of a sire unfortunate ; 
 Green clinging tendrils"Tound a trunk decay'd, 
 Which needs must bringidn you timeless decay ; 
 Fair living forms to a dead carcase joind ; — 
 What shall I say? 
 
 Better the dead were gather'd to the dead. 
 Than death and life in disproportion meet. — 
 Go, seek your fortunes, children. — 
 
 Sim. Why, whither should we go ? 
 
 Sir Wal. You to the court, where now your brother John 
 Commit-s a rape on Fortune : — 
 
 Sim. Luck to John ! 
 A light-heel'd strumpet, -when thesport is done. 
 
io8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 • 
 
 Sir Wal. You to the sweet society of your equals, 
 Where the world's fashion smiles on youth and beauty : 
 
 Marg. Where young men's flatteries cozen young maids' beauty, 
 There pride oft gets the 'vantage hand of duty, 
 There sweet humility withers. 
 
 Sim. Mistress Margaret, 
 How fared rny brother John, when you left Devon ? 
 
 Marg. John was well, sir. 
 
 Sim. "Tis now nine months almost. 
 Since I saw home. What new friends has John made ? 
 Or keeps he his first love?— I did suspect 
 Some foul disloyalty. Now do I know, 
 John has proved false to her, for Margaret weeps. 
 It is a scurvy brother. 
 
 Sir Wal. Fie upon it ! 
 All men are false, I think. The date of love 
 Is out, expired, its stories all grown stale, 
 Oerpast, forgotten, like an antique tale 
 Of Hero and Leander. 
 
 Sim. I have known some men that are too general-contemplative for the 
 narrow passion. I am in some sort a general lover. 
 / Marg. In the name of the boy-god, who plays at hoodman-blind with the 
 Muses, and cares not whom he catches : what is it you love ? 
 
 Sim. Simply, all things that live. 
 From the crook'd worm to man's imperial form, 
 And God-resembling likeness. The poor fly. 
 That makes short holyday in the sunbeam. 
 And dies by some child's hand. The feeble bird 
 With little wings, yet greatly venturous 
 In the upper sky. The fish in th' other element, 
 That knows no touch of eloquence. What else? 
 Yon tall and elegant stag. 
 Who paints a dancing shadow of his horns 
 In the water, where he drinks. 
 
 Marg. I myself love all these things, yet so as with a difference: — for 
 example, some animals better than others, some men rather than other men ; 
 the nightingale before the cuckooi the swift and graceful palfrey before the 
 slow and asinine mule. Your humour goes to confound all qualities. 
 What sports do you use in the forest ? 
 
 Sim. Not many ; some few, as thus ; — 
 To see the sun to bed, and to arise. 
 Like some hot amourist _with glowing eyes. 
 Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him, 
 With all his fires and travelling glories round him : 
 Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest, 
 Like beauty nestling in a young man's breast, 
 And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep 
 Admiring silence, wliile those lovers sleep : 
 .Sometimes outstretch'd, in very idleness, 
 Nought doing, saying little, thinking less. 
 To view the leaves, tliin dancers upon air, 
 Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare, 
 When motlier Autumn fills their beaks with corn, 
 Filch'd from tlie careless Amalthea's horn ; 
 And how the woods berries and worms provide 
 Without their pains, when earth has nought beside 
 
yohii Woodvll. 109 
 
 To answer their small wants : 
 To view the graceful deer come tripping- 
 Then stop, and gaze, then turn, they know not why, 
 Lil;e bashful younkers in societv : 
 To mark the structure of a plant or tree ; 
 And all fair things of earth, how fair they be. 
 
 Marg. {smUiii^^. And afterwards them paint in simile — 
 
 Sir Wal. Mistress Margaret will have need of some refreshment 
 flease you, we have some poor viands within — 
 
 Marg. Indeed I stand in need of them. 
 
 Sir Wal. Under the .shade of a thick-spreading tree 
 Upon the grass, no better carpeting, 
 We'll eat our noon-tide meal ; and, dinner done. 
 One of us shall repair to Nottingham, 
 To seek some safe night-lodging in the town, 
 Where you may sleep, while here with us you dwell, 
 By day, in the forest, e.\pecting better times 
 And gentler habitations, noble Margaret. — 
 
 Sim. Allans, young Frenchman — 
 
 Marg. Altons, Sir Englishman. The time has been, 
 I've studied love-lays in the EngUsh tongue. 
 And been enamour'd of rare poesy : 
 Which now 1 must unlearn. Henceforth, 
 Sweet mother-tongue, old English speech, adieu; 
 For Margaret has got new name and language new. {Exeunt. 
 
 ACT THE THIRD. 
 
 Scene. — An Apartment of State in Woodvil Hall. — Cavaliers drinking. 
 JOHN WOODVIL, I.OVEL, GRAY, and four more. 
 
 John. More mirth, I beseech you, gentlemen — 
 Mr. Gray, you are not merry. — 
 
 Gray. More wine, say I, and mirth shall ensue in course. What ! we have 
 not yet above three half-pints a man to answer for. Brevity is the soul of 
 drinking, as of wit. Despatch, I say. More wine. [Fills.) 
 
 1st Gent. I entreat you, let there be some order, some method, in our drink- 
 ings. I love to lose my reason with my eyes open. To commit the deed of 
 drunkenness with forethought and deliberation. I love to feel the iumes of the 
 liquor gathering here, like clouds. 
 
 2nd Gent. And I am for plunging into madness at once. Damn order, and 
 method, and steps, and degrees, that he speaks of. Let confusion have her 
 legitimate work. 
 
 Lov. I marvel why the poets, who of all men, methinks, should possess the 
 hottest livers, and most empyreal fancies, should affect to see such virtues in 
 cold water. 
 
 Gray. 'Virtue in cold water ! ha ! ha ! ha ! — 
 
 John. Becatise your -poet born hath an internal wine, richer than Lippara 
 or Canaries, yet uncrushed from any grapes of earth, unpressed in mortal 
 wine-pres.ses. 
 
 yd Gent. What may be the name of this wine? 
 
 John. It hath as many names as cjualities. It is denominated indifferently, 
 wit, conceit invention, inspiration ; but its most royal and comprehensive name 
 j is Fancy. 
 
i no 
 
 The Works of Charles La77ib. 
 
 • srd Gent. And where keeps he this sovereign liquor? 
 
 1 John. Its cellars are in the brain, whence your true poet deriveth intoxica- 
 tion at will ; while his animal spirits, catching a pride from the quality and 
 neighbourhood of their noble relative, the brain, refuse to be sustained by 
 wines and stimuli of earth. 
 I yd Gent. But is your poet born always tipsy with this liquor ? 
 1 John. He hath his stoopings and reposes ; but his proper element is the sky, ' 
 and in the suburbs of the empyrean. 
 
 yd Gent. Is your wine intellectual so exquisite ? henceforth I, a man of 
 I plain conceit, will in all humility content my mind with canaries. 
 ' i,th Gent. I am for a song or a catch. When will the catches come on, the 
 sweet wicked catches? 
 
 John. They cannot be introduced with propriety before midnight. Every 
 man must commit his twenty bumpers first. We are not yet well roused. 
 Frank Lovel, the toast stands with you. 
 
 Lav. Gentlemen, the Duke. [FiUs.) 
 
 ^//. The Duke. (They drink.) 
 
 Gray. Can any tell, why his Grace, being a Papist — 
 
 John. Pshaw ! we will have no questions of state now. Is not this his 
 Majesty's birth-day ? 
 
 Gray. What follows ? 
 
 John. That every man should sing, and be joyful, and ask no questions. 
 
 2.nd Gent. Damn politics, they spoil drinking. 
 
 yd Gent. For certain, 'tis a blessed monarchy. 
 
 2ffrf Gent. The cursed fanatic days we have seen ! The times have been when 
 swearing was out of fashion. 
 
 yd Gent. And drinking. 
 
 T.st Gent. And wenching. 
 
 Gray. The cursed Yeas and Forsooths, w hich we have heard uttered, when 
 a man could not rap out an innocent oath, but straight the air was thouglit to 
 be infected. 
 
 Lov. 'Twas a pleasant trick of the saint, which that trim puritan, Swear- 
 not-at-all Smooth-speech used, when his spouse cliid him with an oath for 
 committing with his servant-maid, to cause his house to be fumigated with 
 burnt brandy, and ends of scripture, to disperse the devil's breath, as he 
 termed it. 
 
 All. Ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 
 Gray. But 'twas pleasanter, when the other saint, Resist-the-devil-and he- 
 will-Jlee-from-thee Pureman was overtaken in the act, to plead an illusio vlsiis, 
 and maintain his sanctity upon a supposed power in the advereary to counterfeit 
 tlie shapes of things. 
 
 All. Ha! ha! ha! 
 
 John. Another round, and then let every man devise what trick he can in 
 his fancy, for the better manifesting our loyalty this day. 
 
 Gray. Shall we hang a puritan ? 
 
 John. No, that has been done already in Coleman Street. 
 
 2nd Gent. Or fire a conventicle ? 
 
 John. That is stale too. 
 
 yd Gent. Or burn the Assembly's Catechism ? 
 
 4^2 Gent. Or toast the king's health, everv man standing upon his head 
 I naked? 
 
 John, [to LOVEI.). We have here some pleasant madness 
 
 yd Gent, (dashing his glass down). Pshaw, damn these acorn cups, they 
 would not drench a fairy. Who shall pledge me in a pint bumper, while we 
 drink the king's health upon our knees? 
 I Lov. Why on our knees, cavalier ? 
 
yohn Woodvil. 
 
 Ill 
 
 John, (smiling) For more devotion, to be sure. (To a servant) Sirrah 
 fetch the gilt goblets. ' '^""-"■ 
 
 {The goblets are brought. They drink the kings Iiealth kneeling. A s/iout of 
 general approbation following tlie first appearance of the goblets.) 
 
 John. We have here the unchecked virtues of the grape. How the vapours 
 curl upwards ! It were a life of gods to dwell in such an element : to see, and 
 hear, and talk brave things. Now fie upon these casual potations. I'hat a 
 man's most exalted reason should depend upon the ignoble fermentation of a 
 fruit, which sparrows pluck at us well as we ! 
 
 Gray [aside to Lovel). Observe how he is ravished. 
 
 Lcrv. Vanity and gay thoughts of wine do meet in him, and engender 
 madness. 
 
 ( While the rest are engaged in a wild kind of talk, John advances to the front 
 of the stage, and soliloquize^.) 
 
 John. My spirits turn to fire, they mount so fast. 
 My joys are turbulent, my hopes show like fruition. 
 These high and gusty reUshes of life, sure, 
 Have no allayings of mortality in them. 
 I am too hot now and o'ercapable, 
 For the tedious processes, and creeping wisdom, 
 Of human acts, and enterprises of a man. 
 I want some seasonings of adversity. 
 Some strokes of the old mortifier, calamity. 
 To take these swellings down, divines call vanity. 
 
 -ist Gent. Mr. Woodvil, Mr. Woodvil. 
 
 znd Gent. Where is Woodvil? 
 
 Gray. Let him alone. I have seen him in these lunes before. His abstrac- 
 tions must not taint the good mirth, 
 
 John (continuing to soliloquize). O for some friend new. 
 To conceal nothing from, to have no secrets. 
 How fine and noble a thing is confidence 
 How reasonable too, and almost godlike ! 
 Fast cement of fast friends, band of society. 
 Old natural go-between in the world's business. 
 Where civil life and order, wanting this cement, 
 Wculd presently rush back 
 Into the pristine state of singularity. 
 And each man stand alone. 
 
 A Servant enters. 
 
 Sei~j. Gentlemen, the fireworks are ready. 
 
 -1st Gent. What be they ? 
 
 Lov. The work of London artists, which our host has provided in honour of 
 this day. 
 
 2nd Gent. 'Sdeath, who would part with his wine for a rocket? 
 
 Lov. Why truly, gentlemen, as our kind host has been at the pains to pro- 
 vide this spectacle, we can do no less than be present at it. It will not take ujj 
 much time. Every man may return fresh and thirsting to his liquor. 
 
 ^rd ent. There is reason in what he says. 
 
 2.nd Gent. Charge on then, bottle in hand. There's husbandry in that. 
 
 [They go out, singing. Only LovEL remains, who observes WOODVIL. 
 
 John (still talking to himself). This Lovel here's of a tough honesty. 
 Would put the rack to the proof. He is not of that sort. 
 Which haunt my house, snorting the liquors. 
 And when their wisdoms are afloat with wine. 
 
The Works of Charles La7?ib. 
 
 Spend vows as fast as vapours, which go off, 
 
 Even with the fumes, their fathers. He is one, 
 
 Whose sober morning actions 
 
 Shame not his o'emight's promises; 
 
 Talks little, flatters less, and makes no promises ; 
 
 Why this' is he, whom the dark-wisdom'd fate 
 
 Might trust her counsels of predestination with. 
 
 And the world be no loser. 
 
 Why should I fear this man ? 
 
 {Seeing LovEL.) Where is the company gone? 
 
 Lov. To see the fireworks, where you will be expected to follow. 
 But 1 perceive you are better engaged. 
 
 "Johji. -I have been meditating this half-hour 
 On all the properties of a brave friendship, 
 The mysteries that are m it, the noble uses, 
 Its limits withal, and its nice boundaries. 
 Exeinpii gratia, how far a man 
 May lawfully forswear himself for his friend ; 
 What quantity of lies, some of them brave ones, 
 He may lawfully incur in a friend's behalf; 
 What oaths, blood-crimes, hereditary quarrels, 
 Night-brawls, fierce words, and duels in the morning, 
 He need not stick at, to maintain his friend's honour, or his cause. 
 
 Lov. I think many men would die for their friends. 
 
 John. Death ! why 'tis nothing. We go to it for sport, 
 To gain a name, or purse, or please a sullen humour, 
 When one has worn his fortune's livery threadbare, 
 Or his spleen'd mistress frowns. Husbands will venture on it. 
 To cure the hot fits and cold shakings of jealousy. 
 A friend, sir, must do more. 
 
 Lov. Can he do more than die? 
 
 John. To serve a friend this he may do. Pray mark me. 
 Having a law within {great spirits feel one) 
 He cannot, ought not to be bound by any 
 Positive laws or ordinances. extern, 
 But may reject all these : by the law of friendship 
 He may do so much, be they, indifferently, 
 Penn'd statutes, or the land's unwritten usages. 
 As public fame, civil compliances, 
 Misnamed honour, trust in matter of secrets, 
 All vo\\s and promises, the feeble mind's religion, 
 {Binding our morning knowledge to approve • 
 What last night's ignorance spake) ; 
 The ties of blood withal, and prejudice of kin. 
 Sir, these weak terrors 
 
 Must never shake me. I know what belongs 
 To a worthy friendship. Come, you shall have my confidence. 
 
 L(ro. I hope you think me worthy. 
 
 yohn. You will smile to hear now — 
 Sir Walter never has been out of the island. 
 
 Lov. You amaze me. 
 
 Jokn, That same report of his escape to France 
 Was a fine tale, forged by myself — 
 Ha ! ha ! 
 I knew it would stagger him. — 
 
 Lov, Pray, gjve me leave. 
 
ToJin Woodvil. ly; 
 
 Where has he dwelt, how lived, how lain conceal'd ? 
 Sure I may ask so much. 
 i fohn. From place to place, dwelling in no place long, 
 My brother Simon sliU hath borne him company, 
 ('Tis a brave youtli, I envy him all his virtues.) 
 Disguised in foreign garb, they pass for Frenchmen, ) 
 
 Two Protestant e.'dles from the Limosin 
 Newly arrived. Their dwellings now at Nottingham, 
 Where no soul knows them. 
 
 Lov. Can you assign any reason a gentleman of Sir Walter's known prudence 
 should expose his person so lightly? 
 
 John. I believe, a certam fondness, 
 A child-like cleaving to the land th.it gave him birth 
 Chains him like fate. 
 
 Lov. I have known some exiles thus 
 To linger out the term of the law's indulgence. 
 To the hazard of being known.- - 
 
 John. You may suppose sometime^, 
 They use the neighbouring Sherwood for their sport, 
 Their exercise and freer recreation. — ■ 
 I see you smile. Pray now, be careful 
 
 Lov. [ am no babbler, sir ; you need not fear me. 
 
 John. But some men have been known to talk in their sleep, 
 And tell fine tales that way. — 
 
 Lov. I have heard so much. But, to say truth, I mostly sleep alone. 
 
 Johu.-OT drink, sir ? do you never drink too freely? 
 Some men will drink, and tell you all their secrets. 
 
 Lov. Why do you question me, who know my habits ? 
 
 John. I think you are no sot, 
 No tavern-troubler, worshipper of the grape ; 
 But all men drink sometimes, 
 And veriest sainjs at festivals relax. 
 The marriage of a friend, or a wife's birthday. 
 
 Lov. How much, sir, may a man with safety drink? {smiling). 
 
 John. Sir, three half-pints a day is reasonable ; 
 I care not if you never exceed that quantity. 
 
 Lov. I shall observe it ; 
 On holidays two quarts. — 
 
 John. Or stay ; you keep no wench ? 1 
 
 Lov. Ha ! 
 
 John. No painted mistress for your private hours ? 1 
 
 You keep no whore, sir? ( 
 
 Lov. What does he mean? 
 
 John. Wlio for a close embrace, a toy of sin. 
 And amorous praising of your worship's breath, i 
 
 In rosy junction of four melting Ups, j 
 
 Can kiss out secrets from you? ( 
 
 Lov. How strange this passionate behaviour shows in you ! | 
 
 Sure you think me some weak one. [ 
 
 John. Pray pardon me some fears. 
 You have now the pledge of a dear father's life. ! 
 
 I am a son— would fain be thought a loving one ; | 
 
 You may allow me some fears : do not despise me, j 
 
 If, in a posture foreign to my spirit, ^ 
 
 And by our well knit friendship I conjure you. 
 Touch not Sir Walter's life.— Ui'ncds.) 
 
11^ The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 You see these tears. My father's an old man. 
 Pray let him live. 
 
 Lov. I must be bold to tell you, these new freedoms 
 Show most unhandsome in you. 
 
 John [rising). Ha ! do you say so? 
 Sure, you are not grown proud upon my secret ! 
 Ah ! now I see it plain. He would be babbhng. 
 No doubt a garrulous and hard-faced traitor.^ 
 But I'll not give you leave. (Draws.) 
 
 Lov. What does this madman mean ? 
 
 John. Come, sir; here is no subterfuge. 
 You must kill me, or I kill you. 
 
 Lov. (drawing). Then self-defence plead my e.xcuse. 
 Have at you, sir (Ihey fight.) 
 
 John. Stay, sir. 
 I hope you have made your wi!.' 
 If not, 'tis no great matter. 
 A broken Cavalier has seldom mucli 
 He can bequeath : an old worn peruke, 
 A snuff-box with a picture of Prince Rupert, 
 A rusty sword he'll swear was used at Naseby, 
 Though it ne'er came within ten miles of the place; 
 And, if he's very rich, 
 A cheap edition of the Icon Basilike, 
 Is mostly all the wealth he dies possesb'd of. 
 Yon say few prayers, I fancy ; — 
 So to it again. 
 
 (They fight again. LOVEL is disarmed. 
 
 Lov. You had best now take niy life. I guess you mean it. 
 
 John (musing). No:— men will say I fear'd him, if I kill'd him. 
 Live still, and be a traitor in thy wish. 
 But never act thy thought, being a coward. 
 That vengeance, which thy soul shall nightly thirst for, 
 And this disgrace I've done you cry aloud for, 
 Still have the will without tlie power to execute. 
 As unfear'd Eunuchs meditate a rape. 
 So now I leave you. 
 Feeling a sweet security. No doubt 
 My secret shall remain'a virgin for you ! — (Goes out, smiling in scorn.] 
 
 Lov. (rising). For once you are mistaken in your man. 
 The deed you wot of shall forthwith be done. 
 A bird let loose, a secret out of hand, 
 Returns not back. Why, then 'tis baby policy 
 To menace him who hath it in his keeping. 
 I will go look for Gray ; 
 
 Then iSIorthward ho ! such tricks as we shall play 
 Have not been seen, I think, in merry Sherwood, 
 Since the days of Robin Hood, that archer good. 
 
 ACT THE FOURTH. 
 
 Scene. — An Apartment in Woodvil Hall. 
 
 John Woodvil (alone). A weight of wine lies heavy on my head, 
 The imconcocted follies of last night. 
 
yoJui WoodviL 115 
 
 Now all those jovial fancies, and bright hopes, 
 
 Children of wine, go off like dreams. 
 
 This sick vertigo here 
 
 Preacheth of temperance, no sermon better. 
 
 These black thoughts, and dull melancholy, 
 
 That stick like burrs to the brain, will they ne'er leave me? 
 
 Some men are full of choler, when they are drunk; 
 
 Some brawl of matter foreign to themselves; 
 
 And some, the most resolvud fools of all, 
 
 Have told their dearest secrets in their cups. 
 
 Scene. — The Forest. 
 Sir Walter. Simon. Lovel. Gray. 
 
 Lew. Sir, we are sorry we cannot return' your French salutation. 
 
 Gray. Nor otherwise consider this garb you trust to, than as a poor dis- 
 guise. 
 
 Lov. Nor use much ceremony with a traitor. 
 
 Gray. Therefore, without much induction of superfluous words, I attach 
 you Sir Walter Woodvil, of high treason in the king's name. 
 
 Lov. And of taking part in the great Rebellion against our late lawful 
 sovereign, Charles the First. 
 
 Sim. John has betraved us, father 
 
 lov Come, sir, you 'had best surrender fairly. We know you, sir. 
 
 Sim Hano- ve, villains, ye are two better known than trusted. I have seen 
 those faces before. Are ye not two l)eggarly retainers, trencher-parasites, to 
 Tohn? I think ye rank above his footmen. A sort of bed and board-worms— 
 locusts that infest our house; a leprosy that long has hung upon its walls and 
 princely apartments, reaching to fill all the corners of my brothers once noble 
 heart. 
 
 Gray. We are his friends. , , c-i. n t 1 ■ 
 
 Sim Fie sir, do not weep. How these rogues will triumph 1 Shall I whip 
 off their heads, father? ^. ,. (^™™f 
 
 Loi: Come, sir. though this show handsome m you, being his son, yet the 
 law must have its course. 
 
 Sim And if 1 tell you, the law shall not have its course, cannot ye be con- 
 tent' "Courara, father; shall such things as these apprehend a man? Which 
 of ye will venture upon me?-Will you, Mr. Constable self-elect? or you, sir 
 with a pimple on your nose, got at Oxford by hard drinking, your only badge 
 of loyalty? ., ^ , . 
 
 Gray. 'Tis a brave youth-I cannot strike at hini. 
 
 Sim Father why do you cover vour face with your hands? Why do you 
 fetfh your brfath so hard? See, villains, his heart is burst I O, villains he 
 ■Inno^ speak. One of you run for some water: <l-ckly, y^^^ knave. ,^wm ^^e 
 
 H^rirSyou" Sir Walter? Look up, sir; the villains ire gone He 
 heJs me not and this deep disgrace of treachery in his son hath touched him 
 even t"fhe death. O most dismned and distempered world where sons talk 
 f u " „.^ ftthers into their graves I Garrulous and diseased world, and still 
 LmPty°rott?n and hollow LS^^ world, where good men decay, states turn 
 ?oTnd'in an endless mutability,*and still for the worse, nothmg is at a stay, 
 noXng abides, but vanity, chaotic vanity. -Brother, adieu ! 
 There lies the parent stock which gave us life, 
 Which I will see consignd with tears to earth. 
 
 T p-ivp thou the solemn funeral rites to me, ■ ., i j 
 
 Leave tnou uic =u ^,^„„ „i,ir1p with thee \Bear5 in the tody. 
 
 Grief and a true remorse aoiae wiin uicc. l -- 
 
r • 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ^IXS^.— Another part of the Forest. 
 Marg. {alone). It was an error merely, and no crime, 
 An unsuspecting openness in youtii, 
 Tiiat from liis lips the fatal secret drew, 
 Wliicli should have slept like one of nature s mysteries, 
 Unveil'd by any man. — 
 Well, he is dead ! 
 
 And what should Margaret do in the forest? 
 O ill-starr'd John ! 
 
 O Woodvil, man enfeoffed to despair ! 
 Take thy farewell of peace. 
 - O never look again to see good days, 
 Or close thy lids in comfortable nights. 
 Or ever think a happy thought again. 
 If what I have heard be true. — 
 Forsaken of the world must Woodvil live. 
 If he did tell these men. 
 
 No tongue must speak to him, no tongue of man 
 Salute him, when he wakes up in a morning ; 
 Or bid ' ' good-night " to John. Who seeks to live 
 In amity with thee, must for thy sake 
 Abide the world's reproach. What then ? 
 Shall Margaret join the clamours of the world 
 Against her friend ? O undiscerning world, 
 That cannot from misfortune separate guilt, 
 No, not in thought ! O never, never, John, 
 Prepared to share the fortunes of her friend 
 For better or for worse thy Margaret comes. 
 To pour into thy wounds a healing love. 
 And wake the memory of an ancient friendship. 
 And pardon me, thou spirit of Sir Walter, 
 Who, in compassion to the wretched living. 
 Have but few tears to waste upon the dead. 
 
 Scene. — Woodvil Hall. 
 Sandford and Margaret {as from a journey). 
 
 Sand. The violence of the sudden mischance has so wrought in him, who by 
 nature is allied to nothing less than a self-debasing humour of dejection, that 
 I have never seen anything more changed and spirit-broken. He hath, with a 
 peremptory resolution, dismissed the partners of his riots and late hours, denied 
 his house and person to their most earnest sohcitings, and will be seen by none. 
 He keeps ever alone, and his grief (which is solitary) does not so njuch seem 
 to possess and govern in him, as it is by him, with a wilfulness of most manifest 
 affection, entertained and cherished. 
 
 Marg. How bears he up against the common rumour? 
 
 Sand. With a strange indiiTerence, which whosoever dives not into the nice- 
 ness of his sorrow, might mistake for obdurate and insensate. Yet are the 
 wings of his pride for ever dipt ; and yet a virtuous predominance of filial 
 grief is sb ever' uppermost, that you may discover his thoughts, less troubled 
 vvith conjecturing what living opinions will say and judge of his deeds, than 
 absorbed and buried with the dead, whom his indiscretion made so. 
 
 Marg. I knew a gre.itness ever to be resident in him, to which the admiring 
 
yohn Woodvil. ny 
 
 eyes of men should look up even in the decjining and bankrupt state of his 
 pride. Fain would I see him, fain talk with liim ; but that a sense of respect, 
 which is violated, when without deliberation we press into the society of the 
 unhappy, checks and holds me back. How, think you, he would bear my 
 presence ? 
 
 Sand. As of an assured friend, whom in the forgetfulness of his fortunes he 
 passed by. bee him you must ; but nut to-night. I'he newness of the sight 
 shall move the bitterest compunction and the truest remorse ; but afterwards, 
 trust me, dear lady, tlie happiest etiects of a returning peace, and a gracious 
 comfort, to him, to you, and all of us. 
 
 Marg. 1 think he would not deny me. He hath ere this received farewell 
 letters from his brother, who hath taken a resolution to estrange himself, for a 
 time, from country, friends, and kindred, and to seek occupation for his sad 
 , thoughts in travelling in foreign places, where sights remote and extern to him- 
 self may draw from him kindly and not painful ruminations. 
 
 Sand. I was present at the receipt of the letter. The contents seemed to 
 affect him, for a moment, with a more lively passion of gi^ief than he has at 
 any time outwardly shown. He wept with many tears (which I had not before 
 noted in him) and appeared to be touched with a sense as of some unkindness ; 
 but the cause of their sad separation and divorce quickly recurring, he presently 
 returned to his former inwardness of suffering. 
 
 Marg. The reproach of his brothers presence at this hour should have been 
 a weight more than could be sustained by bis already oppressed and sinking 
 spirit. Meditating upon these intricate and wide-spread sorrows, hath brought 
 a heaviness upon me, as of sleep. How goes the night ? 
 
 Sand. An hour past sunset. You shall' first refresh your limbs (tired with 
 travel) with meats and some cordial wine, and then betake your no less wearied 
 mind to repose. 
 
 Marg. A good rest to us alL 
 
 Sand. Thanks, lady. 
 
 ACT THE FIFTH. 
 
 JOHN WOODVIL [dressing). 
 
 John. How beautiful [handling his mournin£) 
 And comely do these mourning garments show 1 
 Sure Grief hath set his sacred impress here, 
 To claim the world's respect ! they note so feelingly 
 By outward types the serious man within. 
 Alas ! what part or portion can I claim 
 In all the decencies of virtuous sorrow. 
 Which other mourners use ? 
 This black attire, abstraction from society, 
 Good thoughts, and frequent sighs, and seldom smiles, 
 A cleaving sadness native to the brow. 
 All sweet condolements of like-grieved friends, 
 (7"hat steal away llie sense of loss almost) 
 Men's pity and good offices 
 'Which enemies themselves do for us then. 
 Putting their hostile disposition oft', 
 As we put o.f our high thoughts and proud looks. 
 
 [Pauses and observes the pictures. 
 These pictures must be taken down : 
 
ii8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Tlie portraitures of our most ancient family 
 For nigh three hundred years ! How have I listen'd. 
 To hear Sir Walter, with an old man's pride, 
 Holding me in his arms a prating boy, 
 And pointing to the pictures where they hung, 
 Repeat by course their worthy histories, 
 (As Hugh de Widville, Walter, first of the name. 
 And Anne the handsome, Stephen, and famous John: 
 ' Telling me, I must be his famous John) 
 But that was in old times, 
 Now, no more 
 
 Must I grow proud upon our house's pride. 
 I rather, I, by most unheard-of crimes. 
 Have backward tainted all their noble blood, 
 Rased out the memory of an ancient family, 
 And quite reversed the honours of our house — 
 Who now shall sit and tell us anecdotes ? 
 The secret history of his own times. 
 And fashions of the world when he was young : 
 How England slept out three and twenty years, 
 While Carr and Villiers ruled the baby King: 
 The costly fancies of the pedant's reign, 
 Balls, feastings, huntings, shows in allegory. 
 And Beauties of the court of James the First. 
 
 Margaeet enters. 
 
 yohn. Comes Margaret here to witness my disgrace ? 
 
 lady, I have suffer'd loss, 
 
 And diminution of my honour's brightness. 
 You bring some images of old times, Margaret, 
 That should be now forgotten. - 
 Marg. Old times should never be forgotten, John. 
 
 1 came to talk about them with my friend. 
 yohn. I did refuse you, Margaret, in my pride. 
 Alarg. If John rejected Margaret in his pride, 
 
 (As who does not, being splenetic, refuse 
 Sometimes old play-fellows) the spleen being gone. 
 The offence no longer lives. 
 
 Woodvil, those were happy days. 
 
 When we two first began to love. Wjien first. 
 Under pretence of visiting my father, " 
 (Being then a stripling nigh upon my age) 
 ■you came a-wooing to his daughter, John. 
 Do you remember. 
 
 With what a coy reserv'e and seldom speech, 
 (Young maidens must be chary of their speech) 
 
 1 kept the honours of my thaiden pride ? 
 I was your favourite then. 
 
 John. O Margaret, Margaret ! 
 These your submissions to my low estate, 
 And cleavings to ihe.fat^s of sunken Woodvil, 
 'Write bitter things 'gainst my umvorthiness : 
 Thou perfect pattern of thy slainderd sex, 
 ^yhom miseries of mine could never alienate, 
 Nor change of fortune shake ; whom injuries, 
 
jFohn Woodvil. 119 
 
 And slights (the worst of injuries) which moved 
 Thy nature to return scorn with Ulie scorn, 
 Then when you left in virtuous pride this house, 
 Could not so separate, but now in this 
 My day of shame, when all the world forsalte me, 
 You only visit me, love, and forgive me. 
 
 Marg. Dost yet remember the green arbour, John, 
 In the south gardens of my father's house, 
 Where we have seen the summer sun go down, 
 Exchanging true love's vows without restraint? 
 And that old wood, you call'd your wilderness. 
 And vow'd in sport to build a chapel in it, 
 There dwell 
 
 " Like hermit poor 
 In pensive place obscure," 
 
 And tell your Ave Maries by the curls 
 
 (Dropping lilce golden beads) of Margaret's hair ; 
 
 And mal<e confession seven times a day 
 
 Of every thought that stray'd from love and Margaret, 
 
 And I your saint the penance should appoint — 
 
 Believe me, sir, I will not now be laid 
 
 Aside, like an old fashion. 
 
 John. O lady, poor and abject are my thoughts, 
 My pride is cured, my hopes are under clouds, 
 I have no part in any good man's love. 
 In all earth's pleasures portion have 1 none, 
 I fade and wither in my own esteem, 
 This earth holds not alive so poor a thing as I am. 
 I was not always thus. ( Weeps^ 
 
 Marg. Thou noble nature, 
 "Which lion-like didst awe the inferior creatures. 
 Now trampled on by beasts of basest quality. 
 My dear heart's lord, life's pride, soul-honour'd John ; 
 Upon her knees (regard her poor request) 
 ■your favourite, once-beloved Margaret, kneels. 
 
 John. What wouldst thou, lady, ever-honour'd Margaret ? 
 
 Marg. That John would think more nobly of himself, 
 More worthily of high heaven; 
 And not for one misfortune, child of chance, 
 No crime, but unforeseen, and sent to punish 
 The less offence with image of the greater. 
 Thereby to work the soul's humility, 
 (Which end hath happily not been frustrate quite) 
 O not for one offence mistrust heaven's mercy. 
 Nor quit thy hope of happy days to come — 
 John yet has many happy days to hye ; 
 To live and make atonement. 
 
 John. Excellent lady, 
 Whose suit hath drawn this softness from-myroyas, 
 Not the world's scorn, nor falling off of friends 
 Could ever do. Will you go with mcMargatSt? 
 
 Marg. (rising). Go whither, John ? 
 
 John. Go in with, me. 
 And piay for the.peace of -oar .ttnquiet. minds? 
 
 Marg. That I will, John.- :[£fuunf. 
 
The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Scene. — An inner Apartment. 
 John is discovered kneeli7i^. — MARGARET standing over Mm. 
 
 John [rises). I cannot bear 
 To see you waste that youth and excellent beauty 
 ('Tis now the golden time of the day with you) 
 In tending such a broken wretch as I am. 
 
 Marg. John will brealc Margaret's heart, if he spealc so. 
 
 sir, sir, sir, you are too melancholy, 
 
 And I must call it caprice. I am some\\'hat boM 
 Perhaps in this. But you are now my paiient, 
 (You know you gave me leave to call you so) 
 And I must chide these pestilent liuinours lioivi you. 
 
 John. They are gone. — 
 Mark, love, how cheerfully I speak ! 
 
 1 can smile too, and I almost begin 
 
 To imderstand what kind of creature hope is. 
 
 Marg. Now this is better, this mirth becomes you, John. 
 
 John. Yet tell me, if 1 overact my mirth, 
 (Being but a novice, 1 may f?ll into that error) 
 That were a sad indecency, you know. — 
 
 Marg. Nay, never fear. 
 I will be mistress of your humours. 
 And you shall frown or smile by the book. 
 And herein I shall be most peremptory. 
 Cry " this shows well, but that inclines to levity, 
 This frown has too much of the M^oodvil in it, 
 But that fine sunshine has redeem'd it quite." 
 
 John. How sweetly Margaret robs me of myself ! 
 
 Marg. To give you in your stead a better self ; 
 Such as you were, when these e^es first beheld 
 You mounted on your sprightly steed White Margery, 
 Sir Rowland, my father's gift. 
 And all my maidens gave my heart for lost. 
 I was a young thing then, being newly come 
 Home from my convent education, where 
 Seven years I wasted in the bosom of France : 
 Returning home true Protestant, you call'd me 
 Your little heretic nun. How timid-bashful 
 Did John salute his love, being newly seen. 
 Sir Rowland term'd it a rare modesty, 
 And praised it in a youth. 
 
 John. Now Margaret weeps herself. 
 
 [A noise of tells heard.") 
 
 Marg. Hark the bells, John. 
 
 John. Those are the church bells of St. Mary Ottery. 
 
 Marg. I know it. 
 
 John. Saint Mary Ottery, my native village 
 In the sweet shire of Devon. 
 Those are the bells. 
 
 Marg. 'Wilt go church, John 
 
 John. I have been there already. 
 Marg. How canst say thou hast been there already? 'Tis not yet ten o'cloclc- 
 The bells are only now ringing for morning service, and hast thou been at 
 church already ? 
 
John Woodvil. 
 
 John. I left my bed betimes, I could not sleep, 
 And when I rose, I look'd (as my custom is) 
 From my chamber window, where I can see the sun rise; 
 And the first object I discern'd 
 Was the glistering spire of St. IVIary Ottery. 
 
 Marg. Well, John. — , 
 
 John. Then 1 remember'd, 'twas the sabbath day, 
 Immediately a wish arose in my mind, 
 To go to church and pray with Christian people, 
 And then I check' d myself, and said to myself, 
 " Thou hast been a heathen, John, tliese two years past," 
 (Not having been at church in all that time) 
 "And is it fit, that now for the first time 
 Thou should'st offend the eyes of Christian people 
 With a murderer's presence in the house of prayer ? 
 Thou would'st but discompose their pious thoughts. 
 And do thyself no good : for how could'st thou pray, 
 With unwash'd hands, and lips unused to the ofRces?" 
 And then I at my own presumption smiled ; 
 And then I wept that I should smile at all, 
 Having such cause of grief! I wept outright; , 
 
 Tears, like a river, flooded all my face. 
 And I began to pray, and found I could pray ; 
 And still [ yeam'd to say my prayers in the church. 
 " Doubtless (said I) one might find comfort in it." 
 So stealing down the stall's, like one that fear'd detection. 
 Or was about to act unlawful business 
 At that dead time of dawn, 
 
 I flew to the church, and found the doors wide open 
 (Whether by negligence I knew not, 
 Or some peculiar grace to me vouchsafed. 
 For all things felt like mystery). 
 
 Marg. Yes. 
 
 John. So entering in, not without fear, 
 I pass'd into the family pew. 
 And covering up my eyes for shame, 
 And deep perception of unworthiness,, 
 Upon the little hassock knelt me down, 
 Where I so oft had kneel'd, 
 A docile infant by Sir Walter's side ; 
 And, thinking so, I wept a second flood 
 More poignant than the first ; — 
 But afterwards was greatly comforted. 
 It seem'd, the guilt of blood was passing from me 
 Even in the act and agony of tears. 
 And all my sins forgiven. 
 
The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Uit mxk\ : 
 
 A, DRAMATIC SKETCH OF THE SEVENTEENTH 
 CENTURY. 
 
 [This " solemnly fantastic poem," as Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd calls it, first ap- 
 peared in the i8j8 edition of Charles Lamb's Collected Works. It is demonstrated 
 by Mr. Carew Hazlitt in his volume of 1874, entitled " Charles and Mary Lamb : Poems, 
 Letters, and Remains, now first collected, with Reminiscences and Notes," to have been 
 originally an integral portion of the tragedy of j^okn Woodvil^ from which it was pro- 
 bably eliminated when that drama was for a second time submitted to Kemble's con- 
 sideration. ] 
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 
 Old Servant in the Family of %\^ Francis Fairfoed. Stranger. 
 
 Servant. One summer night Sir Francis, as it chanced. 
 Was pacing to and fro in the avenue 
 That westward fronts our house, 
 Among those agM oaks, said to have been planted 
 Three hundred years ago 
 By a neighbouring prior of the Fairford name. 
 Being o'ertask'd in thought, he heeded not 
 The importunate suit of one who stood by the gate, 
 And begg'd an alms. 
 
 Some say he shoved her rudely from the gate 
 With angry chiding ; but I can never think 
 (Our master's nature hath a sweetness in it) 
 That he could use a woman, an old woman. 
 With such discourtesy : but he refused her— 
 And b'itter had he met a lion in his path 
 Than that old woman that night ; 
 For she was one who practised the black arts, 
 And served the devil, being since burnt for witchcraft. 
 She look'd on him as one that meant to blast him, 
 And with a frightful noise 
 ('Twas partly like a woman's voice, 
 And partly by the hissing of a* snake). 
 She nothing said but this : — 
 (Sir Francis told the words) 
 
 A mischief, mischief, mischief, 
 
 And a nine-times-killing curse. 
 By day and by night, tu the caitiff wight. 
 Who shakes the poor like snakes from Ids door. 
 
 And shuts up tlie womb of his purse. 
 
TJie Witch. 123 
 
 And still she cried — 
 
 A mischief, 
 And a ?iine-fold-with&i'iiig curse: 
 For that shall come to thee that will undo thee. 
 Both all that tlioufearest and worse. 
 
 So saying she departed, 
 Leaving Sir Francis hke a man, beneath 
 Whose feel a scaffolding was suddenly falling; 
 So he described it. 
 
 Str. A terrible curse ! What foUow'd ? 
 
 Seru. Nothing immediate, but some two months after 
 Young Philip Fairford suddenly fell sick. 
 And none could tell what ail'd him ; for he lay, 
 And pined, and pined, till ail his hair fell off. 
 And he, that was fuU-flesh'd, became as thin 
 As a two-months' babe that had been starved in the nursing. 
 And sure I think 
 
 He bore his death-wound like a little child ; 
 With such rare sweetness of dumb melancholy 
 He strove to clothe his agony in smiles, 
 Which he would force up in his poor pale cheeks, 
 Like ill-timed guests that had no proper dwelling there ; 
 And, when they ask'd him his complaint, he laid 
 His hand upon his heart to show the place, 
 Where Susan came to him a-nights, he said, 
 And prick'd him w ith a pin. — ^ 
 And thereupon Sir Francis call'd to mind 
 The beggar-witch that stood by the gateway 
 And begged an alms. 
 
 Str. But did the witch confess? 
 
 Serv. All this and more at her death. 
 
 Str. I do not love to credit tales of magic. 
 Heaven's music, which is Order, seems unstrung, 
 And this brave w orld 
 (The Mystery of God) unbeautified. 
 Disorder' d, marr'd, where such strange things are acted. 
 
124 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 A FARCE IN TWO ACTS. 
 
 As it was performed at Drury Lane Theatre, loth December, 1806. 
 
 [Prefixed to every edition yet published of this whimsical farce, there has been printed, 
 in obedience to the author's directions, the excellent account which will be found given, 
 immediately after this bracketed note, proclaiming to the world, as if by the flourish of 
 
 a tin trumpet, the fact that Mr. H was damned ! One could almost fancy that Charles 
 
 Lamb himself wrote this rejoicing record of his own discomfiture in the Theatrical 
 Examiner. It accords so exactly, in the whole spirit of it, with the ludicrous story^ re- 
 lated in regard to his own conduct on the night of its first performance. Going into " 
 Drury Lane Theatre on the evening of that Wednesday, the loth of December, 1806, to 
 witness,_as he had fondly hoped, his own triumph, Charles Lamb — thus runs the legend — 
 found himself so e;itirely of opinion with tne audience, as the piece went on, that front 
 his place in the middle of the pit, he was conspicuous among the very heartiest in hissing 
 it off the stage. Even that " joyousest of once embodied spirits," Robert William Elliston, 
 v/ho was the hero of the farce, although assisted by Miss Mellon, afterwards the Duchess 
 of St. Albans, by Hartley, and by Wewitzer, failed to carry off the intrinsic absurdity of the 
 
 reticent H whose surname turned out to be after all only Hogsflesh. Doomed to 
 
 damnation though it was in England, Mr, H — , it ought here to be added, has often been 
 performed in the United States, not merely with applause, but with shouts of laughter.] 
 
 '''Mr. ^— , thou wert damned. Bright shone the morning on the play-bills that 
 announced thy appearance, and the streets were filled with the buzz of persons asking 
 
 one another if they would go to see Mr. H , and answering that they would certainly; 
 
 but before night the gaiety, not of the author, Isut of his friends and the town, was 
 eclipsed, for thou wert damned ! Hadst thou been anonymous, thou haply mightst have 
 lived. But thou didst come to an untimely end for thy tricks, and for want of a better 
 name to pass them off ." — Theatrical Examiner. 
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 
 Mr. H Mr. Elliston. 
 
 Belvil Mr. Bartley. 
 
 Landlord Pry .... Mr. Wewitzer. 
 
 Melesinda Miss Mellon. 
 
 Maid to Melestnda .... Mrs. Harlowe, 
 Gentlemen, Ladies, Waiters, Servants, &c. 
 
 Scene. — Batk. 
 
 PROLOGUE. 
 
 \ 
 
 SPOKEN BY MR. ELLISTON, 
 
 If we have sinn'd in paring down a name, 
 All civil well-bred authors do the same, 
 Survey the columns of our daily writers — 
 You'll find that some Initials are great fighters. 
 How fierce the shock, liow fatal is the jar, 
 When Ensign W. meets Lieutenant R. 
 
Mr. IT. 125 
 
 With two stout seconds, just of their own gizzard, 
 Cross Captain X. and rough old General Izzard 1 
 Letter to letter spreads the dire alarms. 
 Till half the Alphabet is up in arms. 
 Nor with less lustre have Initials shone. 
 To grace the gentler annals of crim. con. 
 Where the dispensers of the pubhc lash 
 
 Soft penance give — a letter and a dash 
 
 Where vice reduced in size shrinks to a failing, 
 And loses half her grossness by curtaiUng. 
 Fau.x pas are told in such a modest way, — 
 
 The affair of Colonel B with Mrs. A 
 
 You must forgive them — for what is there, say. 
 
 Which such a pliant Vowel must not grant 
 
 To such a very pressing Consonant ? 
 
 Or who poetic justice dares dispute, 
 
 When, mildly melting at a lover's suit, 
 
 The wife's a Liquia, her good man a Mute? 
 
 Even in the homelier scenes of honest life. 
 
 The coarse-spun intercourse of man and wife, 
 
 Initials I am told have taken place 
 
 Of Deary, Spouse, and that old-fashion'd race ; 
 
 And Cabbage, ask'd by Brother Snip to tea, 
 
 Replies, " I'll come — but it don't rest with me — 
 
 I always leaves tnem things to Mrs. C." 
 
 O should this mincing fashion ever spread 
 
 From names of living heroes to the dead, 
 
 How would Ambition sigh, and liang the head. 
 
 As each loved syllable should melt away — 
 
 Her Alexander turn'd into Great A. — 
 
 A single C. her Caesar to express — 
 
 Her Scipio shrunk into a Roman S. ; — 
 
 And, nick'd and dockd to these new modes of speech. 
 
 Great Hannibal himself a Mr. H. 
 
 ACT I. 
 
 Scene. — A Public Room in an Inn — Landlord, Waiters, Gentlemen, 5fc. 
 Enter M.^. H. 
 
 Mr. H. Landlord, has the man brought homa my boots? 
 
 Land. Yes, sir. 
 
 Air. H. You have paid hira ? 
 
 Land. There is the receipt, sir, only not quite filled up ; no name, only blank 
 — " Blank, Dr. to Zekiel Spanish for one pair of best hessians." Now, sir, he 
 wishes to know what name he shall put in— who he shall say "Dr." 
 
 Mr. H. Why, Mr. H , to be sure. 
 
 Land. So I told him, sir ; but Zekiel has some qualms about it. He Says, 
 he thinks that Mr. H. only would not stand good in law. 
 
 Mr. H. Rot his impertinence ! bid him put in Nebuchadnezzar, and not 
 trouble me with his scruples. 
 
 Land. I shall, sir. \Exit. 
 
 Enter a Waiter. 
 
 Wait. Sir, Squire Level's man is below, with a hare and a brace of pheasants 
 for Mr. H. 
 Mr. H. Give the man half-a-crown, and bid him return my best respects 
 
126 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 to his master. Presents, it seems, will find me out, with any name, or no 
 name. 
 
 Enter ind Waiter. 
 
 znd Wait. Sir, the man that makes up the Directory is at the door. 
 Mr. H. Give him a shilling ; that is what these fellows come for. 
 2nd Wait. He has sent up to know by what name your Honour will please 
 to be inserted. 
 
 Mr. H. Zounds, fellow 1 I give him a shilling for leaving out my name, not 
 for putting it in. This is one of the plaguy comforts of going anonymous. 
 
 {Exitind Waiter. 
 Enter ^rd Waiter. 
 
 yd Wait, Two letters for Mr. H. [Exit. 
 
 Mr. H. From ladies [ppens them). This from Melesinda, to remind me of 
 the morning call I promised ; the pretty creature positively languishes to be 
 made Mrs. H. I believe I must indulge her (affectedly). This from her 
 cousin, to bespeak me to some parly, I suppose {opening it) — Oh, " this 
 evening "—" Tea and cards" — {surveying hiinself witk complacency). Dear 
 H., thou art certainly a pretty fellow. I wonder what makes thee such a 
 favourite among the ladies : I wish it may not be owing to the concealment of 
 
 thy unfortunate pshaw ! 
 
 Enter ejth Waiter. 
 
 6f.h Wait. Sir, one Mr. Printagain is inquiring for you. 
 Mr. H. Oh, I remember, the poet : he is publishing by subscription. Give 
 him a guinea, and tell him he may put me do\vn. 
 i,th Wait. What name shall I tell him, sir? 
 Mr. H. Zounds ! he is a poet ; let him fancy a name. {Exit afh Waiter. 
 
 Enter ^th Waiter. 
 
 $tk Wait. Sir, Bartlemy the lame beggar, that you sent a private donation 
 to last Monday, has by some accident discovered his benefactor, and is at the 
 door waiting to return thanks. 
 
 Mr. H. Oh, poor fellow, who could put it into his head? Now I shall be 
 teased by all his tribe, when once this is kndwn. Well, tell him I am glad I 
 could be of any service to him, and send him away. 
 
 <,tli Wait. I would have done so, sir; but the object of his call now, he 
 says, is onlv to know who he is obliged to. 
 
 Mr. H. Why, me. 
 
 $th Wait. Yes, sir. 
 
 Mr. H. Me, me, me — who else, to be sure? 
 
 $th Wait. Yes, sir ; but he is anxious to know the name of his benetactor. 
 
 Mr. H. Here is a pampered rogue of a beggar, that cannot be obliged to a 
 gentleman in the way of his profession, but he must know the name, birth, 
 parentage, and education of his benefactor. I warrant you, next he will 
 require a certificate of one's good behaviour, and a magistrate's licence in 
 
 one's pocket, lawfully empowering So-and-so to give an alms. Anything 
 
 more? 
 
 $th Wait. Yes, sir : here has been Mr. Patriot, with the county petition to 
 sign ; and Mr. Failtime, that owes so much money, has sent to remind you of 
 your promise to bail him. 
 
 Mr. H. Neither of which I can do while I have no name. Here is more 
 of the plaguy comforts of going anonymous, that one can neither serve one's 
 friend nor one's country. Damn it, a 'man had better be without a nose than 
 without a name ! I will not live long in this mutilated, dismembered state ; I 
 will to Melesinda this instant, and try to forget these vexations. Melesinda ! 
 
Mr. H. 
 
 127 
 
 there is music in the name; but then, hang it ! there is none in mine to answer 
 'o it. \Exit. 
 
 ( While Mr. H. has betn speaking, two gentlemen have been observing 
 him curioitsly.) 
 
 Tst Gent. Who the devil is this extraordinary personage ? 
 
 2)id Gent. Who? why, 'tis Mr. H. 
 
 1st Gent. Has he no more name? 
 
 ziid Gent. None that has yet transpired. No more ! why, that single letter 
 has been enough to inflame the imaginations of all the ladies in Bath. He 
 has been here but a fortnight, and is already received into all the first families. 
 
 xsi Gent. Wonderful ! yet nobody knows who he is, or where he comes 
 from ! 
 
 2nd Gent. He is vastly rich, gives away money as if he had infinity ; dresses 
 well, as you see ; and for address, the mothers are all dying for fear the 
 daughters should get him ; and for the daughters, he may command them as 
 absolutely as . Melesinda, the rich heiress, 'tis thought, will carry him. 
 
 ist Gent. And is it possible that a mere anonymous 
 
 znd Gent. Phoo ! that is the charm. Who is he? and What is he? and 
 
 What is his name? The man with the great nose on his face never excited 
 
 more of the gaping passion of wonderment in the dames of Strasburg than 
 this new-comer with the single letter to his name has lighted up among the 
 wives and maids of Bath ; his simply having lodgings here draws more visi- 
 tors to the house than an election. Come with me to the parade, and I will 
 show you more of him. [Exeunt. 
 
 Scene. — In the Street. 
 Mr. H. walking, BelviL meeting him. 
 
 Bel. My old Jamaica schoolfellow, that I have not seen for so many years ? 
 it must, it can be no other than Jack (goingup to him). My dear Ho 
 
 Mr. H. (stopping his mouth). Ho ! the devil— hush ! 
 
 Bel. Why, sure it is 
 
 Mr. H. It is ; it is your old friend Jack, that shall be nameless. 
 
 Bel. My dear Ho 
 
 Mr. H. (stopping him). Don't name it. 
 
 Bel. Name what ? 
 
 Mr. H. My cursed unfortunate name. I have reasons to conceal it for a 
 time. 
 
 Bel. I understand you— Creditors, Jack ? 
 
 Mr. H. No, I assure you. 
 
 Bel. Snapped up a ward, peradventure, and the whole Chancery at your 
 heels ? 
 
 Air. H. I don't use to travel with such cumbersome luggage. 
 
 Bel. You ha'n't taken a pursr ? 
 
 Mr. H. To relieve you at once from all disgraceful conjectures, you must 
 know 'tis nothing but the sound of my name. 
 
 Bel. Ridiculous ! 'Tis true yours is none of the most romandc, but what can 
 that signify in a man? .,,,,, 
 
 Mr. H. You must understand that I am in some credit with the ladies. 
 
 Bel. With the ladies ! . , , , 
 
 Mr H. And truly I think not without some pretensions. My fortune 
 
 Bel. Sufficiently splendid, if I may judge from your appearance. 
 
 Mr. H. My figure 
 
 Bel. Airv, gay, and imposing. 
 
 Mr. H. My parts 
 
128 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Bel. Bright. 
 
 Mr. H. My conversation 
 
 Bel. Equally remote from flippancy and taciturnity. 
 Mr. H. But then my name — damn my name ! 
 Bel. Childish ! ' 
 
 Mr. H. Not so. Oh ! Belvil, you are blest with one which sighing virgins 
 mayTepeat without a Jjlush, and for it change the paternal. But what virgin 
 of any delicacy (and I require some in a wife) would endure to be called 
 Mrs ? 
 
 Bel. Ha! ha! ha! most absurd ! Did not Clementina. Falconbridge — the 
 romantic Clementina Falconbridge — fancy Tommy Potts? and Rosabella 
 Sweetlips s'acrifice her mellifluous appellative to Jack Deady ? Matilda, her 
 cousin, married a Gubbms, and her sister Amelia a Clutterbuck. 
 
 Mr. H. Potts is tolerable, Deady is sufferable, Gubbins is bearable, and 
 Clutterbuck is endurable, but Ho 
 
 Bel. Hush ! Jack, don't betray yourself. But you are really ashamed of the 
 family name ? 
 
 Mr. H. Ay, and of my father that begot me, and my father's father, and 
 all their forefathers that have borne it since the Conquest. 
 
 Bel. But how do you know tlie women are so squeamish ? 
 
 Mr. //. I have tried them. I tell you there is neither maiden of sixteen 
 nor widow of sixty but would turn up their noses at it. I have been refused 
 by nineteen virgins, twenty-nine reliots, and two old maids. 
 
 Bel. That was hard indeed. Jack I 
 
 Mr. H. Parsons have stuck at publishing the banns, because they averred 
 it was a heathenish name ; parents have Ungered their consent, because they 
 suspected it was a fictitious name ; and rivals have declined ray challenges, 
 because they pretended it was an ungentlemanly name. 
 
 Bel. Ha ! ha ! ha ! but what course do you mean to pursue ? 
 
 Mr. H. To engage the affections of some generous girl, who will be con- 
 tent to take me as Mr. H. 
 
 Bel. Mr. H. ? 
 
 Mr. H. Yes, that is the name I go by here ; you know one likes to be as 
 near the truth as possible. 
 
 Bel. Certainly. But what then? — to get her to consent 
 
 Mr. H. To accompany me to the altar without a name : in short, to 
 
 suspend her curiosity (that is all) till the moment the priest shall pronounce 
 the irrevocable charm which makes two names one. 
 
 Bel. And that name and then she must be pleased, ha ! Jack ? 
 
 Mr. H. Exactly such a girl it has been my fortune to meet with, Heark'ee 
 [whispers) [musing] yet, hang it ! 'tis cruel to betray her confidence. 
 
 Bel. But the family name, Jack ? 
 
 Mr. H. As you say, the family name must be perpetuated. 
 
 Bel. Though it be but a homely one. 
 
 Mr. H. True ; but, come, I will show you the house where dwells this 
 credulous melting fair. 
 
 Bel. Ha, ha ! my old friend dwindled down to one letter. Exeunt. 
 
 An. Apartment in Melesinda's House. 
 Melesinda sola, as if musing. 
 Mel. H., H., H. ? Sure it must be something precious by its being concealed, 
 it can t be Homer, that is a heathen's name ; nor Horatio, that is no surname : 
 ^ u V !' ^S. "^."'•«=''' the Lord Hamlet -pretty, and I his poor distracted 
 Uphelia! No, tis none of these; 'tis Harcourt or Hargrave, or some such 
 soundmg name, or Howard-high-bom Howard— that would do. Maybe i' is 
 
Mr. H. 129 
 
 Harley ; methinks my H. resembles Harley— the feeling Harley. But I hear 
 him, and from his own lips I will once for ever be resolved. 
 
 Enter Mr. H. 
 Mr. H. My dear Melesinda ! 
 
 Mel. My dear H., that is all you give me power to swear allegiance to, — to 
 be enamoured of inarticulate sounds, and call with sighs upon an empty letter 
 But I will know. 
 
 Mr. H. My dear Melesinda, press me no more for the disclosure of that 
 which in the face of day so soon must be revealed. Call it whim, humour, 
 caprice in me. Suppose I have sworn an oath never, till the ceremony of our 
 marriage is over, to disclose my true name. 
 
 Mel. Oh ! H. , H. , H. , I cherish here a fire of restless curiosity which con- 
 sumes me. 'Tis appetite, passion ; call it whim, caprice in me. Suppose I 
 have sworn I must and will know it this very night. 
 
 Mr. H. Ungenerous Melesinda ! I implore you to give me this one proof of 
 your confidence. The holy vow once past, your H. shall not have a secret to 
 withhold. 
 
 Mel. My H. has overcome : his Melesinda shall pine away and die before 
 she dares express a saucy inclinadon ; but what shall I call you till we are 
 married ? 
 
 Mr. H. Call me? call me anything. Call me Love, Love ! Ay, Love, Love 
 will do very well. 
 
 Mel. How many syllables is it. Love ? 
 
 Mr. H. How many? ud, that is coming to the question with a vengeance. 
 One, two, three, four, — what does it signify how many syllables? 
 
 Mel. How many syllables. Love ? 
 
 Mr. H. My Melesinda's mind, I had hoped, was superior to this childish 
 curiosity. 
 
 Mel, How many letters are there in it ? 
 
 {Exit Mr. H., followed by Melesinda repeating the question. 
 
 Scene. — A Room in the Inn, Two Waiters disputing, 
 
 1st Wait. Sir Harbottle Hammond, you may depend upon it ! 
 znd Wait. Sir Harry Hardcastle, I tell you ! 
 sst Wait. The Hammonds of Himtingdonshire. 
 ziid Wait. T-he Hardcastles of Hertfordshire. 
 T.st Wait. The Hammonds. 
 
 ■2.nd Wait. Don't tell me ! does not Hardcastle begin with an H? 
 sst Wait. So does Hammond, for that matter. 
 
 ■iiid Wait. Faith, so it does, if you go to spell it. I did not think of that. 
 I begin to be of your opinion ; he is certainly a Hammond, 
 li/ Wait. Here comes Susan Chambermaid, maybe she can tell. 
 
 Enter SuSAN. 
 
 Both. Well, Susan, have you heard anything who this strange gentleman is? 
 
 Sns. Haven't you heard? it's all come out; Mrs. Guesswell, the parson's 
 widow, has been here about it. I overheard her talking in confidence to Mrs. 
 Setter and Mrs. Pointer, and she says they were holding a sort of a cummitty 
 about it. 
 
 Both. What? What? 
 
 Sus. There can't be a doubt of it, she says, what from his figger and the 
 appearance he cuts, and his sumpshous way of living, and above all from the 
 remarkable circumstance that his surname should begin with an H. , that he 
 nijjst be » 
 
130 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Both. Well? Well? 
 
 Sus. Neither more nor less than the Prince 
 
 Both. Prince ! 
 
 Sus. The Prince of Hessy-Cassel in disguise. 
 Both, Very likely. Very likely. 
 
 Sus. Oh, there can't be a doubt on it. Mrs. Guesswell says she knows it. 
 1st Wait. Now, if we could be sure that the Prince of Hessy What-do-you- 
 eall-him was in England on his travels. 
 2nd Wait. Get a newspaper. Look in the newspapers. 
 Sus. Fiddle of the newspapers ! who else can it be ? 
 Both. That is very true (gravely). 
 
 Enter LANDLORD. 
 
 Land. Here — Susan ! James ! Philip ! where are you all? The London coach 
 is come in, and there is Mr. Fillaside, the fat passenger, has been bawhng for 
 somebody to help him off with his boots. {The Clia7nbermaid and Haiters 
 slip out.) 
 
 (Solus.) The house is turned upside down since the strange gentleman came 
 into it. Nothing but guessing and speculating, and speculating and guessing ; 
 waiters and chambermaids getting into corners and speculating, Oitlers and 
 stable-boys speculating in the yard. I believe the very horses in the stable are 
 speculating too, for there they stand in a musing posture, nothing for them to 
 eat, and not seeming to care whether they have anything or no ; and, after all, 
 what does it signify ? I hate such curious— — odso, I must take this box up 
 into his bedroom — he charged me to see to it myself — I hate such inquisi- 
 tive I wonder what is m it ? — it feels heavy. [Reads) ' ' Leases, title-deeds, 
 
 wills." Here, now, a man might satisfy his curiosity at once. Deeds must have 
 names to them, so must leases and wills. But I wouldn't — no I wouldn't-. — 
 it is a pretty box too — prettily dovetailed. I admire the fashion of it much. 
 
 But I'd cut my fingers off before I'd do such a dirty — what have I to do. curse 
 
 the keys, how they rattle !— rattle in one's pockets — the keys and the halfpence 
 {tahei out a buncli and plays with them). I wonder if any of these would fit ? 
 One might just try them ; but I wouldn't hft up the lid if they did. Oh no, 
 what should I be the richer for knowing? [All this time he tries the keys one 
 by one.) What's his name to me?— a thousand names begin with an H. I hate 
 people that are always prying, poking and prying into things, — thrusting their 
 finger into one place— a mighty Uttle hole this — and their keys into another. 
 O Lord ! httle rusty fits-it ! but what is that to me ? I wouldn't go to — no, no 
 
 — but it is odd little rusty should just happen ( While he is turning up 
 
 the lid of the box, Mr. H. etiiers behind him nnperceived.) 
 
 Mr. H. What are you about, you dog ? 
 
 Land. O Lord, sir ! pardon ; no thief, as I hope to be saved. Little Pry 
 was always honest. 
 
 Mr. H. What else could move you to open that box ? 
 
 Land. Sir, don't kill me, and I will confess the whole truth. This box 
 happened to be lying — that is, I happened to be carrying this box, and I 
 happened to have my keys out, and so — little rusty happened to fit 
 
 Mr. H. So little rusty happened to fit !— and would not a rope fit that 
 rogue's neck? I see the papers have not been moved — all is safe ; but it was 
 as well to frighten him a little (aside). ' Come, Landlord, as I think you honest, 
 and suspected you only intended to gratify a little foolish curiosity 
 
 Land. That was all, sir, upon my veracity. 
 
 Mr, H. For this time I will pass it over. Your name is Pry, I think? 
 
 Land. Yes, sir, Jeremiah Pry, at your service. 
 
 Mr. H. An apt name ; you have a prying temper ; —I mean, some little 
 curiosity— a sort of inquisitiveness about you. 
 
Mr. H. 131 
 
 Land. A natural thirst after knowledge you may caH it, sir. When a boy, 
 I vias never easy but when I was thrusting up the lids of some of my school- 
 fellows' boxes, — not to steal asylhing, upon my honour, sir, — only to see what 
 was in them; have had pens stuclc in my eyes for peeping through key-holes 
 after knowledge ; could never see a cold pie with the legs dangling out at 
 top but my fingers were for lifting up the crust, — ^just to try if it were pigeon 
 or partridge, — for no other reason in the world. Surely, I think, my passion for 
 nuts was owing to the pleasure of cracking the shell to get at something con- 
 cealed, more than to any dehght I took in eating the kernel. In short, sir, 
 this appetite has grown witli my growth. 
 
 Mr. H. You will certainly be hanged some day for peeping into some bureau 
 or other, just to see what is in it. 
 
 Land. That is my fear, sir. The thumps and kicks I have had for peering 
 into parcels, and turning of letters inside out, —just for curiosity ! The blankets 
 I have been made td dance in for searching parish registers for old ladies' 
 ages,— just for curiosity ! Once I was dragged through a horse-pond, only for 
 peeping into a closet that had glass doors to it, while my Lady Bluegarters was 
 undressing, — just for curiosity ! 
 
 Mr. H. A very harmless piece of curiosity, truly ! And now, Mr. Pry, first 
 have the goodness to leave that box with me, and then do me the favour to 
 carry your curiosity so far as to inquire if my servants are within. 
 
 Land. I shall, sir. Here ! David ! Jonathan ! — I think I hear them coming, 
 — shall make bold to leave you, sir. \_Exit. 
 
 Mr. H. Another tolerable specimen of the comforts of going anonymous ! 
 
 Enter two Footmen. 
 
 1st Foot. You speak first. 
 
 2,nd Foot. No, you had better speak. 
 
 T.st Foot. You promised to begin. 
 
 Mr. H. They have something to say to me. The rascals want their wages 
 raised, I suppose ; there is always a favour to be asked when they come smiling. 
 Well, poor rogues, service is but a hard bargain at the best. I think I must 
 not be close with them. Well, David — well, Jonathan. 
 
 \si Foot. We have served your Honour faithfully 
 
 2nd Foot. Hope your Honour won't take offence 
 
 Mr. H. The old story, I suppose— wages ? 
 
 rst Foot. That's not it, your Honour. 
 
 2«rf Foot. You speak. 
 
 T.st Foot. But if your Honour would just be pleased to ; 
 
 •znd Foot. Only be pleased to 
 
 Mr. H. Be quick with what you have to say, for I am in haste. 
 
 \st Foot. Just to 
 
 2nd Foot. Let us know who it is 
 
 \st Foot. Who it is we have the honour to serve. 
 
 Mr. H. Why, me, me, me ! you serve me I 
 
 2.nd Foot. Yes, sir ; but we do not know who you are. 
 
 Mr. H. Childish curiosity ! do not you serve a rich master, a gay master, an 
 indulgent master? 
 
 ■Lst Foot. Ah, sir ! the figure you make is to us, your poor servants, the 
 principal mortification. 
 
 ■2nd Foot. When we get over a pot at the public-house, or in a gentleman's 
 kitchen, or elsewhere— as poor servants must have their pleasures— when the 
 question goes round, who is your master ? and who do you serve ? and one 
 says, I serve Lord So-and-so, and another, I am Squire Such-a-one's foot- 
 man 
 
 1st Foot. We have nothing to say for it, but that we serve Mr. H. 
 
The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 znd Foot. Or Squire H. 
 
 Mr. H. Really you are a couple of pretty modest, reasonable personages ; 
 but 1 hope you will take it as no offence, gentlemen, if, upon a dispassionate 
 review of all that you have said, I think tit not to tell you any more of my 
 name than I have chosen, for especial purposes, to communicate to the rest of 
 the world. 
 
 ij/ Foot. Why then, sir, you may suit yourself. 
 
 2.vd Foot. We tell you plainly, we cannot stay. 
 
 ■Lst Foot. We don't choose to serve Mr. H. 
 
 2nd Foot. Nor any Mr. or Squire in the alphabet 
 
 ■Lst Foot. That lives in Chris-cross Row. 
 
 Mr. H. Go, for a couple of ungrateful, inquisitive, senseless rascals ! Go 
 hang, starve, or drown ! Rogues, to speak thus irreverently of the alphabet ! 
 I shall live to see you glad to serve old Q — to curl the wig of great S— adjust 
 the dot of little i— stand behind the chair of X, Y, Z — wear the livery of Et-castera 
 —and ride behind the sulky of And-by-it-self-and ! \Jixit in a rage. 
 
 I ACT II. 
 
 Scene. — A handsome Apartment well lighted. Tea, Cards, ^c. — A large 
 Party of Ladies and Gentlemen, among them Melesinda. 
 
 ■Lst Lady. I wonder when the charming man will be here ! 
 
 2nd Lady. He is a delightful creature ! Such a polish 
 
 yd Lady. Such an air in all that he does or says 
 
 j,th Lady. Yet gifted with a strong understanding 
 
 ^th Lady. But has your ladyship the remotest idea of what his true name is ? 
 
 Tst Lady. They say his very servants do not know it. His French valet, 
 that has lived with him these two years 
 
 znd Lady. There, madam, I must beg leave to set you right : my coach- 
 man 
 
 Tst Lady. I have it from the very best authority, my footman 
 
 2nd Lady. Then, madam, you have set your servants on 
 
 \st Lady. No, madam, I would scorn any such little mean ways of coming 
 at a secret. For my part, I don't think any secret of that consequence. 
 
 2.nd Lady. That's just like me ; I make a rule of troubling my head with 
 nobody's business but my own. 
 
 Mel. But then she takes care to make everybody's business her own, and so 
 to justify herself that way [aside). 
 
 -Lst Lady. My dear Melesinda, you look thoughtful. 
 
 Mel. Nothing. 
 
 2nd Lady. Give it a name. 
 
 Mel. Perhaps it is nameless. 
 
 ist Lady. As the object Come, never blush nor deny it, child. Bless 
 
 me ! what great ugly thing is that, that dangles at your bosom ? 
 
 Mel. This ? it is a cross : how do you like it ? 
 
 2nd Lady. A cross ! Well, to me it looks for all the world like a great 
 starmg H. ! {ffere a general laugh.) 
 
 Mel. Malicious creatures ! Believe me, it is a cross, and nothing but a cross. 
 
 Vi ,y- ^ "°^^' ' believe, you would willingly hang at. 
 
 Mel. Intolerable spite ! [Mr. H. is announced. 
 
 Enter Mr. H. 
 
 1st Lady. Oh, Mr. H., we are so glad 
 
 2ttd Lady. We have been so dull , 
 
^^- H. 133 
 
 ^rd Lady. So perfectly lifeless ! You owe it to us to be more than com- 
 monly entertaming. 
 
 Mr. H. Ladies, this is so obliging 
 
 <\.th Lady. Oh, Mr. H., those ranimculas you said were dying, pretty things 1 
 they have got up ^ = r j a ■ 
 
 ^tli Lady. I have worked that sprig you commended. I want you to 
 come ^ 
 
 Mr. H. Ladies 
 
 bth. Lady. I have sent for that piece of music from London. 
 
 Mr. H. The Mozart— (i«e/»^MELESlNDA)—Melesinda! 
 
 Several Ladies at once. Nay,, positively, Melesinda, you shan't engross him ' 
 all to yourself. 
 
 [ Wkile the Ladies are pressing about Mk. H. the Gentlemen show 
 " signs of displea ^ure. 
 
 -Lst Gent. We shan't be able to edge in a word, now this coxcomb is come. 
 2nd Gent. Damn him ! I will affront him. 
 
 ■Lst Gent. Sir, with your leave, I have a word to say to one of these ladies. 
 znd Gent. If we could be heard 
 
 (The Ladies pay no attention but to Mr. H.) 
 
 Mr. H. You see, gentlemen, how the matter stands. (Hums an air.] I 
 ajn not my own master : positively, I exist and breathe but to be agreeable to 
 these Did you speak ? 
 
 \st Gent. And affects absence of mind, puppy ! 
 
 Mr. H. Who spoke of absence of mind?— did you, madam? How do you 
 do. Lady Wearwell — how do ? I did not see your ladyship before. What was 
 I about to say ? — oh 1— absence of mind. I am the most unhappy dog in that 
 way— sometimes spurt out the strangest things -the most mal-a-propos— with- 
 out meaning to give the least offence, upon my honour — sheer absence of mind 
 — things I would have given the world not to have said. 
 
 ist Gent. Do you hear the coxcomb 
 
 zst Lady. Great wits, they say • - 
 
 znd Lady. Your fine geniuses are most given 
 
 tjrd Lady. Men of bright parts are commonly too vivacious 
 
 Afr. H. But you shall hear. I was to dine the other day at a great Nabob's, 
 that must be nameless, who, between ourselves, is strongly suspected of— being 
 very rich, that's all. John, my valet, who knows my foible, cautioned me, 
 while he was dressing me — as he usually does where he thinks there's a danger 
 of my committing a lapS2is — to take care in my conversation how I made any 
 allusion, direct or indirect, to presents— you understand me? I set out double- 
 charged with my fellow's consideration and my own, and, to do myself justice, 
 behaved with tolerable circumspection for the first half-hour or so — till at last 
 a gentleman in company, who was indulging a free vein of raillery at the 
 expense of the ladies, stumbled upon that expression of the poet which calls 
 them " fair defects." 
 
 Tst Lady. It is Pope, I believe, who says it. 
 
 Mr. H. No, madam, Milton. Where was I ? Oh, "fair defects." This 
 gave occasion to a critic in company to deliver his opinion on the phrase — 
 that led to an enumeration of all the various words which might have been 
 used instead of " defect," as want, absence, poverty, deficiency, lack. This 
 moment I, who had not been attending to the progress of the argument (as the 
 denoument will show), starting suddenly up out of one of my reveries, by some 
 unfortunate connection of ideas, which the last fatal word had excited, the devil 
 put it into my head to turn round to the Nabob, who was sitting next me, and 
 in a very marked manner (as it seemed to the company) to put the question to 
 
134 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 him, " Pray, sir, what may be the exact value of a lac of rupees ? " You may 
 guess the confusion which followed. 
 
 xst Lady. What a distressing circumstance ! 
 
 2nd Lady. To a delicate mind 
 
 yd Lady. How embarrassing 
 
 4/A Lady. I declare I quite pity you. 
 
 xst Gent. Puppy ! 
 
 Jifr. H. A Baronet at the table, seeing my dilemma, jogged my elbow; and 
 a good-natured Duchess, who does everything with a grace peculiar to herself, 
 trod on my toes at that instant : this brought me to myself, and— covered with 
 blushes, and pitied by all the ladies— I withdrew. 
 
 1st Lady. How charmingly he teKs a story ! 
 
 '^nd Lady. But how distressing ! 
 
 Mr. H. Lord Squandercounsel, who is my particular friend, was pleased to 
 rally me' in his inimitable way upon it next day. I shall never forget a 
 sensible thing he said on the occasion — speaking of absence of mind, my foible 
 —says he, my dear Hogs 
 
 Several Ladles. Hogs — what ? — ha ! 
 
 Mr. H. My dear Hogsflesh— my name— (Ae>-« an universal scream) — Oh, my 
 cursed unfortunate tongue !— H., I mean — Where was 1 ? 
 
 xst Lady, Filthy !— abominable ! 
 
 2nd Lady. Unutterable ! 
 
 yd Lady. Hogs foh ! 
 
 i,th Lady, Disgusting ! 
 
 Stk Lady. Vile ! 
 
 6th Lady. Shocking ! 
 
 1st Lady. Odious ! 
 
 znd Lady. Hogs pah ! 
 
 yd Lady. A smelling bottle— look to Miss Melesinda. Poor thing ! it is 
 no wonder. You had better keep off from her, Mr. Hogsflesh, and not be 
 pressing about her in her circumstances. 
 
 xst Gent. Good time of day to you, Mr. Hogsflesh ! 
 
 znd Gent. The compliments of the season to you, Mr. Hogsflesh ! 
 
 Mr. H. This is too much— flesh and blood cannot endure Tt. 
 
 xst Gent. What flesh ?— hog's-flesh ? 
 
 2Hd Gent. How he sets up his bristles ! 
 
 Mr. H. Bristles ! 
 
 xst. Gent. He looks as fierce as a hog in armour. 
 
 Mr. H. A hog ! Madam ! {here he severally accosif the Ladles, who by 
 
 turns repel him). 
 
 xst Lady. Extremely obliged to you for your attentions ; but don't want a 
 partner. I 
 
 znd Lady. Greatly flattered by your preference ; but believe I shall remain | 
 smgle. 
 
 3rd Lady. Shall always acknowledge your politeness ; but have no thou-^hts , 
 of .altenng my condition. 1 
 
 t,th Lady. Always be happy to respect you as a friend : but you must not ' 
 look for anything further. , 
 
 SihLady. No doubt of your ability to make any woman happy ; but have no 
 tliouglits of changing my name. j 
 
 6lh Lady. Must tell you, sir, that if, by vour insinuations, you think to prevail 
 witli me, you have got the wrong sow by the ear. Does he think any lady 
 would go to pig with him ? . ■> ■' I 
 
 Old Lady Must beg you tobe less particular in your addresses to me. Does 
 he take me for a Jew, to long after forbidden meats ? 
 
 Mr. H. I shall go mad !— to be refused by old Mother Damnable-she 
 
M^-H. X3S 
 
 that's so old, nobody knows whether she was ever married or no but passes 
 for a maid by courtesy ; her juvenile exploits being beyond the farthest stretch 
 of tradition !— old Mother Damnable ! 
 
 [Exeunt all, cither pitying or seeming to avoid him. 
 
 Scene.— rA« street. Belvil and another Gentleman. 
 
 Bel. Poor Jack! I am really sorry for him. The account which you give me 
 of his mortifying change of reception at the assembly would be highly divert- 
 ing if it gave me less pain to hear it. With all his amusing absurdities, and 
 amongst them— not the least— a predominant desire to be thought well of by 
 the fair sex, he has an abundant share of good-nature, and is a man of honour 
 Notwithstanding all that has happened, Melesinda may do worse than take 
 him yet. But did the women resent it so deeply as you say ? 
 
 Gent. Oh, intolerably ! They iled him as fearfully, when 'twas once blown, as 
 a man would be avoided who was suddenly discovered to have marks of the 
 plague, and as fast, — when before they had been ready to devour the foolishest 
 tiling he, could say. 
 
 Bel. Ha 1 ha ! so frail is the tenure by which these women's favourites 
 commonly hold their envied pre-eminence ! 'Well, I must go find him out and 
 comfort him. I suppose I sliall find him at the inn. 
 
 Gent. Either there or at Melesinda' s. Adieu ! [Exeunt. 
 
 Scene.— ^Mr. H '3 Apartment. 
 
 Jilr. H. (solus). 'Was ever anything so mortifying? to be refused by old 
 Mother Damnable ! — with such parts and address, and the little squeamish 
 devils to dislike me for a name — a sound ! — Oh, my cursed name ! that it was 
 something I could be revenged on ! if it v/ere alive, that I might tread upon it, 
 or crush it, or pummel it, or kick it, or spit it out— for it sticks in my throat 
 and will choak me. 
 
 My plaguy ancestors ! if they had, left me but a 'Van or a Mac, or an Irish 
 O', it had bee'h something to qualify it. — Mynheer Van Hogsflesh, — or Sawney 
 
 MacHogsflesh,— or Sir Phelim O'Hogsflesh,— but downright blunt . If 
 
 it had been any other name in the world, I could have borne it. If it had 
 been the name of a beast, as Bull, Fo,\-, Kid, Lamb, Wolf, Lion ; or of a 
 bird, as Sparrow, Hawk, Buzzard, Daw, Finch, Nightingale ; or of a fish, as 
 Sprat, Herring, Salmon ; or the name of a thing, as Ginger, Hay, Wood ; or 
 of a colour, as Black, Gray, White, Green ; or of a sound, as Bray; or the 
 name of a month, as March, May; or of a place, as Barnet, Baldock, Hitchin ; 
 or the name of a coin, as Farthing, Penny, Twopenny; or of a profession, as 
 Butcher, Baker, Carpenter, Piper, Fisher, Fletcher, Fowler, Glover; or a 
 Jew's nami, as Solomons, Isaacs, Jacobs ; or a personal name, as Foot. Leg, 
 Crookshanks, Heaviside, Sidebottom, Longbottom, Ramsbottom, Winter- I 
 bottom ; or a long name, as Blanchenhagen, or Blanchenhausen ; or a short ( 
 name, as Crib, Crisp, Crips, Tag, Trot, Tub, Phips, Padge, Papps, or Prig, | 
 
 or Wig, or Pip, or 'Trip ; Trip had been somethiiig, but Ho . 
 
 ( Walks about ill great agitation, — recovering his calmness a little, sits down.) 
 Farewell the most distant thoughts of marriage — the finger-circling ring, 
 the purity-figuring glove, the envy-pining bridesmaids, the wishing parson, and 
 the simpering clerk ! Farewell the ambiguous blush-raising joke, the titter- 
 provoking pun, the morning-stirring drum ! — No son of mine shall e.xist to 
 i bear my ill-fated name I No nurse come chuckling to tell me it is a boy ! No 
 j midwife, leering at me from under the lids of professional gravity 1 I dreamed 
 1 of caudle (sings in a melancholy tone) — Lullaby, Lullaby, — hush-a-by-baby ! — 
 ! how like its papa it is \— (makes jnotions as if he was nursing). And then, 
 I when grown up, "Is this your son, sir?" "Yes, sir, a poor copy of me, — a 
 
136 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 sad young dog !— just what his father was at his age. I have four more at 
 home." Oh ! oh ! oh ! 
 
 Enter Landlord. 
 
 Mr. H. Landlord, I must paclc up to-night ; you will see all my things got 
 ready. 
 
 Land. Hope your Honour does not intend to quit the " Blue Boar," — sorry 
 anything has happened. 
 
 Mr. H. He has heard it all. 
 
 Land. Your Honour has had some mortification, to be sure, as a man may 
 say : you have brought your pigs to a fine market. 
 
 Mr. H. Pigs ! 
 
 Land. What then? take old Pry's advice, and never mind it. Don't scorch 
 your crackUng for 'em, sir. 
 
 Mr. H. Scorch my crackling !— a queer phrase; but I suppose he don't 
 mean to affront me. 
 
 Land. What is done can't be undone ; you can't make a silken purse out of 
 a sow's ear. 
 
 Mr. H. As you say, landlord, thinking of a thing does uut augment it. 
 
 l^and. Does but hogment it, indeed, sir. 
 
 Mr. H. Hogment it !— damn it ! I said augment it. 
 
 Land. .Lord, sir, 'tis not everybody has such gift of fine phrases as your 
 Honour, that can lard his discourse. 
 
 Mr. H. Lard ! 
 
 Land. Suppose they do smoke you , 
 
 Mr. H. Smoke me ? 
 
 Land. One of my phrases ; never mind my words, sir, my meaning is good. 
 We all mean the same thing, only you express yourself one way, and I 
 another, that's all. The meaning's the same ; it is all pork. 
 
 Mr. H. That's another of your phrases, I presume. (Bell rings, and the 
 landlord called for.) 
 
 Land. Anon, anon. 
 
 Mr, H. Oh, I wish I were anonymous ! {Exeunt several ways. 
 
 Scene. — Melesinda's Apartment. 
 Melesinda and Maid. 
 
 Maid. Lord, madam ! before I'd take on a? you do about a foolish — what 
 signifies a name ? Hogs — Hogs — what is it ?— is just as good as any other, for 
 what 1 see. 
 
 Mel. Ignorant creature ! yet she is perhaps blest in the absence of those 
 ideas which, while they add a zest to the few pleasures which fall to the lot of 
 superior natures to enjoy, doubly edge the 
 
 Maid. Superior natures ! — a fig ! If he's hog by name, he's not hog by 
 nature — that don't follow; his name don't make him anything, does it? He 
 don't grunt the more for it, nor squeak, that ever I hear; he likes his victuals 
 out of a plate, as other* Christians do ; you never see him go to the trough 
 
 Mel. Unfeeling wretch ! yet possibly her intentions 
 
 Maid. For instance, madam, my name is Finch — Betty Finch. I don't 
 whistle the more for that, nor long after canary-seed while I can get good 
 wholesome mutton— no, nor you can't catch me by throwing salt on my tail. 
 If you come to that, hadn't I a young man used to come after me — they said 
 courted me^his name was Lion — Francis I>ion, a tailor ; but though he was 
 fond enough of me, for all that he never offered to eat me. 
 
 Mel. How fortunate that the discovery has been made before it was too 
 
Mr. H. 137 
 
 ' late ! Had I listened to his deceits, and, as the perfidious man had almost 
 
 persuaded me, precipitated myself into an inextricable engagement before 
 
 Maid. No great harm if you had. You'd only have bought a pig in a poke 
 — and what then ? Oh, here he comes creeping 
 
 Enter Mr. H., abject. 
 
 Go to her, Mr. Hogs — Hogs^Hogsbristles— what's your name? Don't be 
 afraid, man— don't give it up — she's not crying— only summat has made her 
 eyes red — she has got a sty in her eye, I believe — (going). 
 
 Mel. You are not going, Betty? 
 
 Maid. Oh, madam, never mind me — I shall be back in the twinkling of a 
 pig's whisker, as they say. \_Bxit. 
 
 Mr. H. Melesinda, you behold before you a wretch who would have betrayed 
 your confidence, but it was love that prompted him ; who would have tricked 
 you by an unworthy concealment into a participation of that disgrace which a 
 superficial world has agreed to attach to a name— but with it you would have 
 shared a fortune not contemptible, and a heart— but 'tis over now. That 
 name he is content to bear alone — to go where the persecuted syllables shall be 
 no more heard, or excite no meaning— some spot where his native tongue has 
 never penetrated, nor any of his countrymen have landed, to plant their 
 unfeeling satire, their brutal wit, and national ill manners— where no English- 
 man (Here Melesinda, wIw has been pouting during this speech, fetches 
 
 a deep sigh.) Some yet undiscovered Otaheite, where witless, unapprehensive 
 savages shall innocently pronounce the ill-fated sounds, and think them not 
 inharmonious. 
 
 Mel. Oh! 
 
 Mr. H. Who knows but among the female natives might be found 
 
 Mel. .Sir ! (raising her head). 
 
 Mr. H. One who would be more kind than— some Oberea— Queen Oberea. 
 
 Mel. Oh ! 
 
 Mr. H. Or what if I were to seek for proofs of reciprocal esteem among 
 unprejudiced African maids in Monorootopa? 
 
 Enter Servant. 
 Serv. Mr. Belvil \_Exit. 
 
 Enter Belvil. . 
 
 Mr. H. In Monomotopa (musing). 
 
 Bel. Heyday, Jack ! what means this mortified face? nothing has happened, 
 I hope, between this lady and you ? I beg pardon, madam, but understanding 
 my friend was with you, I' took the liberty of seeking him here. Some httle 
 difference possibly which a third person can adjust— not a word-will you, 
 madam, as this gentleman's friend, suffer me to be the arbitrator— strange !— 
 hark'ee. Jack, nothing has come out, has there?— you understand me. Oh, I 
 guess how it is— somebody has got at your secret. You haven't blabbed it 
 yourself, have you ?— ha ! ha ! ha ! I could find in my heart— Jack, what would 
 you give me if I should reheve you 
 
 Mr. H. No power of man can relieve me (sighs), but it must he at the root- 
 gnawing at the root— here it will lie. . 
 
 Bel. No power of man?— not a common man, I grant you; for mstance, a 
 subject— it's out of the power of any subject. 
 
 Mr. H. Gnawing at the root— there it will lie. 
 
 Bel. Such a thing has been known as a name to be changed ; but not by a 
 subject — {shows a Gazette). ^ 
 
 Mr. H. Gnawing at the root (suddenly snatches the paper out of a^Vf 11. s 
 hand); ha ! pish ! nonsense ! give it me— what ! (reads) promotions, bankrupts 
 
138 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 —a great many bankrupts this week— there it will lie [lays it down, takes it up^ 
 again, and reads)— " The King has been graciously pleased"— gnawing at the 
 root — " graciously pleased to grant unto John hogsflesh " — tlie devil — "Hogs- 
 flesh, Esq., of Sty Hall, in the county of Hants, his royal license and autho- 
 rity" — O Lord ! O Lorcl ! — " that he and his issue" — me and my issue— "may 
 tnke and use the surname and arms of Bacon" — Bacon, the surname and arms 
 of Bacon ! - " in pursuance of an injunction contained in the last will and testa- 
 ment of Nicholas Bacon, Esq. , his late uncle, as well as out of grateful respect 
 
 to his memory ; " — grateful respect, poor old soul ! here's more—" and that 
 
 such arms may be first duly exemplified "—they shall, I will take care of that 
 — "according to the laws of arms, and recorded in the Heralds' Office." 
 
 Bel. Come, madam, give me leave to put my own interpretation upon your 
 silence, and to plead for my friend, that now that only obstacle which seemed 
 to stand in the way of your union is removed, you will sufl'er me to complete 
 tiie happiness which my news seems to have brought him, by introducing him 
 with a new claim to >our favour, by the name of Mr. Bacon. [Takes their 
 liiinds and joins tlicm, whic/i Melesinda seems to give consent to with a 
 smile.') 
 
 Mr. H. Generous Melesinda ! — mydearfriend — "he and his issue, "—me and 
 my issue— O Lord ! 
 
 Bel. I wish you joy, Jack, with all my heart ! 
 
 Mr. H. Bacon, Bacon, Bacon - how odd it sounds ! I could never be tired 
 of hearing it. There was Lord Chancellor Bacon. Methinks I have some of 
 the Verulam blood in me already— methinks I could look through Nature- 
 there was Friar Bacon, a conjurer — I feel as if I could conjure too 
 
 • 
 
 Enter a Servant. 
 
 Serv. Tv.-o young ladies and an old lady are at the door, inquiring if you 
 see company, madam. 
 
 Mr. H. ' ' Surname and arms " 
 
 A/el. Show them up. — My dear Mr. Bacon, moderate your joy 1 
 
 £nter three Ladies, being fart of those who were at the assembly. 
 
 1st Lady. My dear Melesinda, how do you do ? 
 
 2nd Lady. How do you do ? We have been so concerned for you 
 
 Old Lady. We have been so concerned — [seeing him)— Mt. Hogsflesh 
 
 Mr. H. There's no such person -nor there never was— nor 'tis not fit there 
 should be -" surname and arms " — 
 
 Bel. It is true what my friend would express; we have been all in a mistake, 
 ladies, Very true, the name of this gentleman was what you call it, but it is 
 so no longer. The succession to the long-contested Bacon estate is at length 
 decided, and with it my friend succeeds to the name of his deceased relative. 
 
 Mr. H. " His Majesty has been graciously pleased " 
 
 1st Lady. I am sure we all join in hearty congratulation— (.tz'j-Aj). 
 
 2Hd Lady. And wish you joy with all our hearts— (/4«;^/i/io./). 
 
 Old Lady. And hope you will enjoy the name and estate many years— 
 [cries). 
 
 Bel. Ha ! ha ! ha ! mortify them a little, Jack. 
 
 ist Lady. Hope you intend to stay 
 
 ■2.nd Lady. With us some time 
 
 Old L'ldy. In these parts. 
 
 Mr H. Ladies, for your congratulations I thank you ; for the favours you 
 
 have lavished on me, and in particular for this lady's [turning to the old Lady) 
 
 good opinion, I rest your debtor. As to anv future favours- (atraj^j thim 
 
 I severally in the order in which he was 1 caused by them at the assembly)— 
 
 I 
 
Mr. H. 139 
 
 ) Madam, shall always acknowledge your politeness; but at present, you see, I 
 j am engaged with a partner. Always be happy to respect you as a friend, but 
 ^ you must not look for anything further. Must beg of you to be less particular 
 I in your addresses to me. Ladies all, with this piece of advice, of Bath and 
 .) you,— 
 
 Your ever grateful servaiU takes his leave. 
 
 Lay your plans surer when you plot to grieve; 
 
 See, while you kindly mean to mortify 
 
 Another, the wild arrow do not fly, 
 ; And gall yourself. For once you've been mistaken ; 
 
 Your shafts have miss'd their aim— Hogsflesh has saved his Bacon ! 
 
 OR, THE INTRUDING WIDOW. 
 A Dramatic Poem, founded on George Cralies Tale of " The Confidant.' 
 
 {Blackwood's Magazine, December, 1828.) ( 
 
 [A couple of years after its appearance in Maga, "The Wife's Trial" was reissued 
 among the "Few other Poems" appended to the Author's "Album Verses."] 
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 
 Mr. Selby, u Wiltshire Gentleman, 
 Katherine, Wife to Selby. 
 Lucy, Sister to Selby. 
 Mrs. Frampton, a Widow. 
 Servants. 
 
 Scene. — At Mr. Selby's House, or in the Grounds adjacent. 
 
 Scene.— ^ Library. Mr. Selby, Katherine. 
 
 Selby. Do not too far mistake me, gentlest wife ; 
 1 meant to chide your virtues, not yourself. 
 And those too with allowance. I have not 
 Been blest by thy fair side with five white years 
 Of smooth and even wedlock, now to touch 
 ■With any strain of harshness on a string 
 Hath yielded me such music. 'Twas the quality 
 Of a too grateful nature in my Katherine, 
 That to the lame performance of some vows. 
 And common courtesies of man to wife. 
 Attributing too much, hath sometimes seem'd 
 To esteem as favours, what in that blest union 
 Are but reciprocal and trivial dues. 
 As fairly yours as mine : 'twas this I thought 
 Gently to reprehend. 
 
Kath. In friendship's barter 
 The riches we exchange should hold some level, 
 And corresponding worth. Jewels for toys 
 Demand some thanks thrown in. You took me, sir. 
 To that blest haven of my peace, your bosom, 
 An orphan founder'd in the world's black storm 
 Poor, you have made me rich ; from lonely maiden. 
 Your cherish'd and your full-accompanied wife. 
 
 Selby. But to divert the subject : Kate, too fond 
 I would not wrest your meanings ; else that word 
 Accompanied, and full-accompanied too, 
 Might raise a doubt in some men, that their wives 
 Haply did think their company too long ; 
 And over-company, we know by proof. 
 Is worse than no attendance. 
 
 Katk. I must guess. 
 You speak this of the Widow 
 
 Selhy. 'Twas a bolt 
 At random shot ; but if it hit, believe me, 
 I am most sorry to have wounded you 
 Through a friend's side. I know not how we have swerved 
 From our first talk. I was to caution you , 
 
 Against this fault of a too grateful nature : 
 ■Which, for some girlish obligations past. 
 In that relenting season of the heart. 
 When slightest favours pass for benefits 
 Of endless binding, would entail upon you 
 An iron slavery of obsequious duty 
 To the proud will of an imperious woman. 
 
 Kath. The favours are not slight to her I owe. 
 
 Selby. Slight or not slight, the tribute she exacts 
 
 Cancels all dues (A voice ■within.^ 
 
 Even now I hear her call you 
 In such a tone as lordliest mistresses 
 Expect a slave's attendance. Prithee, Kate, 
 Let her expect a brace of minutes or so. 
 Say, you are busy. Use her by degrees 
 To some less hard exactions. 
 
 Katk. I conjure you. 
 Detain me not. I will return 
 
 Selby. Sweet wife. 
 Use thy own pleasure— \Exil KATHERINE. 
 
 but it troubles me. 
 A visit of three days, as was pretended. 
 Spun to ten tedious weeks, and no hint given 
 When ihe will go ! I would this buxom Widow 
 Were a thought handsomer ! I'd fairly try 
 My Katherine's constancy ; make desperate love 
 In seeming earnest ; and raise up such broils, 
 T\at she, not I, should be the first to warn 
 The insidious guest depart. 
 
 Re-enter Katherine. 
 
 So soon return'd ! 
 What was our Widow's will ? 
 Kath. A trifie, sir. 
 
Selby. Some toilet service— to adjust her head. 
 Or help to stick a pin in the right place 
 
 Kath. Indeed 'twas none of these. 
 
 Selby. Or new vamp up 
 The tarnish'd cloak she came in. I have seen her 
 Demand such service from thee, as her maid, 
 Twice told to do it, would blush angry-red. 
 And pack her few clothes up. Poor fool ! fond slave ! 
 And yet my dearest Kate ! — This day at least 
 (It is our wedding day), we spend in freedom, 
 And will forget our Widow. — Philip, our coach — 
 Why weeps my wife ? You know, I promised you 
 An airing o'er the pleasant Hampshire downs 
 To the blest cottage on the green hill-side 
 Where first I told my love. I wonder much 
 If the crimson parlour hath exchanged its hue 
 For colours not so welcome. Faded though 
 It be, 
 
 It will not show less lovely than the tinge 
 Of this faint red, contending with the pale. 
 Where once the full-flush d health gave to this cheek 
 An apt resemblance to the fruit's warm side 
 That bears my Katherine's name. — 
 
 Our carriage, Philip. 
 
 Enter a Servant. 
 
 Now, Robin, what make you here ? 
 
 Seru. May it please you, 
 The coachman has driven out with Mistress Frampton. 
 
 Selby. He had no orders 
 
 Serv. None, sir, that I know of. 
 But from the lady, who expects some letters 
 At the next post town. 
 
 Selby. Go, Robin. [Exit Servant. 
 
 How is this ? 
 
 Kath. I came to tell you so, but fear'd your anger 
 
 Selbv. It was ill done, though, of this Mistress Frampton- - 
 This forward Widow. But a ride's poor loss 
 Imports not much. In to your chamber, Ipve, 
 Where you with music may beguile the hour. 
 While I am tossing over dusty tomes. 
 Till our most reasonable friend returns. 
 
 Kath. I am all obedience. {.Exit Katherine. 
 
 Selby. Too obedient, Kate, 
 And to too many masters. I can hardly, 
 Dn such a day as this, refrain to speak 
 My sense of this injurious friend— this pest — 
 This household evil — this close-clinging fiend — 
 In rough terms to my wife. 'Death, my own servants 
 ControU'd above me ! orders countermanded ! 
 What next' , „ r... 
 
 [Serz'a?it enters and announces the Sister, 
 
 Enter Lucy. 
 Sister ! I know you are come to welcome 
 This day's return. 'Twas well done. 
 
142 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Lvcy. You seem ruffled. 
 In years gone by this day was used to be 
 The smoothfet of the year. Your honey turn'd 
 So soon to gall ? 
 
 Selby. Gall'd am I, and with cause, 
 And rid to death, yet cannqt get a riddance. 
 Nay, scarce a ride, by this proud Widow's leave. 
 
 Lucy. Something you wrote me of a Mistress Frampton. 
 
 Selby. She came at first a meek admitted guest, 
 Pretending a short stay ; her whole deportment 
 Seem'd as of one obliged. A slender trunk. 
 The wardrobe of her scant and ancient clothing, 
 Bespoke no more. ' But in few days her dress. 
 Her looks, were proudly changed. And now she flaunts it 
 In jewels stolen or borrow'd from my wife ; 
 Who owes her some strange service, of what nature 
 I must be kept in ignorance. Katherine s meek 
 And gentle spirit cowers beneath her eye. 
 As spell-bound by some witch. 
 
 Lucy. Some mystery hangs on it. 
 How bears she in her carriage towards yourself? 
 
 Selby As one who fears, and yet not greatly cares 
 For my displeasure. Sometimes I have thought 
 A secret glance would tell me she could love, 
 If I but gave encouragement. Before me 
 She keeps some moderation ; but is never 
 Closeted with my wife, but in the end 
 I find my Katherine in briny tears. 
 From the small chamber where she first was lodged. 
 The gradual fiend, by specious wriggling arts. 
 Has now ensconced herself in the best part 
 Of this large mansion ; calls the left wing her own ; 
 Commands my servants, equipage. — I hear 
 Her hated tread. What makes she back so soon? 
 
 Etiler Mrs. Frampton. 
 
 Mrs. F. O, I am jolter'd, bruised, and shook to death 
 With your vile Wiltshire roads. The villain l^hilip 
 Chose, on my conscience, the perversest tracks 
 And stoniest hard lanes in all the county. 
 Till I was fain get out, and so walk back. 
 My errand unperform'd at Andover. 
 
 Lucy. And I shall love the knave for't ever after \a.sidi)^ 
 
 Airs. F. A friend with you ! 
 
 Selby. My eldest sister Lucy, 
 Come to congratulate this returning mom. — 
 Sister, my wife's friend, Mistress Frampton. 
 
 Mrs. F. Pray, 
 Be seated. For your brother's sake, you are welcome. 
 1 had thought this day to have spent in homely fashion 
 With the good couple, to whose hospitality 
 I stand so far indebted. But your coming 
 Makes it a feast. 
 
 Lucy. She does the honours naturally ) , . , , 
 
 Selby. As if she were the mistress of the house — J I"-''"'')- 
 
 Mrs. F. I love to be at home with loving friends. 
 
The Wife's Trial. 143 
 
 To stand on ceremony with obligations, 
 
 Is to restrain the obliger. '1 hat oid coach, though. 
 
 Of yours jumbles one strangely. 
 
 Selby. -I shall order 
 An equipage soon, more easy to you, madam 
 
 Lucy. To drive her and her pride to Lucifer, 
 I hope he means (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. I must go trim myself; this humbled garb 
 Would shame a wedding feast. I have your leave 
 For a shorty absence ? — and your Katherine 
 
 Selby. You'll find her in her closet 
 
 Mrs. F. Fare you well, then. \ExU. 
 
 Selby. How like you her assiurance ? 
 
 Lucy. Even so well. 
 That if this Widow were my guest, not yours. 
 She should have coach enough, and scope to ride. 
 My merry groom should in a trice convey her 
 To Sarum Plain, and set her down at Stonehenge, 
 To pick her path through those antiques at leisjre- 
 She should take sample of our Wiltshire flints. 
 O, be not lightly jealous ! nor surmise 
 That to a wanton bold-faced thing like this 
 Your modest shrinking Katherine could impart 
 Secrets of any worth, especially 
 Secrets that touch'd your peace. If there be aught, 
 My life upon't, 'tis but some girlish story 
 Of a first love ; which even the boldest wife 
 Might modestly deny to a husband's ear, 
 Much more your timid and too sensitive Katherine. 
 
 Selby. I think it is no more ; and will dismiss 
 My further fears, if ever I have had such. 
 
 Lucy. Shall we go walk ? I'd see your gardens, brother ; 
 And how the new trees thrive I recommended. 
 Your Katherine is engaged now 
 
 Selby. I'll attend you. [Exeunt. 
 
 Scene. — Servants' Hall. 
 Housekeeper, Philip, and others, laughing. 
 
 Housek. Our lady's guest, since her short ride, seems ruffled, 
 And somew hat in disorder. Philip, Philip, 
 I do suspect some roguery. Your mad tricks 
 Will some day cost you a good place, I warrant. 
 
 Phil. Good Mistress Jane, our serious housekeeper, 
 And sage duenna to the maids and scullions, 
 We must have leave to laugh ; our brains are younger, 
 And undisturb'd with care of keys and pantries. 
 We are wild things. 
 
 Butler. Good Philip, tell us all. 
 
 All. Ay, as you live, tell, tell 
 
 Fhil. Mad fellows, you shall have it. 
 The Widow's bell rang lustily and loud 
 
 /iutl. I think that no one can mistake her ringing. 
 
 Waiting-maid. Our lady's ring is soft sweet music to it. 
 More of entreaty hath it than command. 
 
 Fliil. I lose my story, if you interrupt thus. 
 
144 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 The bell, I say, rang fiercely ; and a voice 
 
 More shrill than bell call'd out for " Coachman Philip." 
 
 I straight obey'd, as 'tis my name and office. 
 
 "Drive me," quoth she, " to the next market town, 
 
 Where I have hope of letters." I made haste, 
 
 Put to the horses, saw her fairly coach'd, 
 
 And drove her 
 
 Waiting-maid. By the straight high road to Andover, 
 
 I guess 
 
 Phil. Pray, warrant things within your knowledge. 
 Good Mistress Abigail; look to your dressings. 
 And leave the skill in horses to the coachman. 
 
 Butl. Hell h.ive his humour ; best not interrupt him. 
 
 Phil, "ris market-day, thought I ; and the poor beasts, 
 Meeting such droves of cattle and of people. 
 May take a fright ; so down the lane 1 trundled, 
 Where Goodman Dobson's crazy mare was founder'd. 
 And where the flints were biggest, and ruts widest. 
 By ups and downs, and such bone-cracking motions, 
 We''flounder'd on a furlong, till my madam. 
 In policy to save the few joints left her. 
 Betook her to her feet, and there we parted. 
 
 All. Ha ! ha ! ha ! 
 
 Butl. Hang her ! 'tis pity such as she should ride. 
 
 Waiting-maid. I think she is a witch ; I have tired myself out 
 With sticking pins in her pillow; still she 'scapes them. 
 
 Butl. And I with helping her to mum for claret, 
 But never yet could cheat her dainty palate. 
 
 Housek.'WeVi, well, she is the guest of our good mistress, 
 And so should be respected. Though, I think, \ 
 
 Our master cares not for her company, 
 He would ill brook we should express so much 
 By rude discourtesies and short attendance. 
 
 Being but servants. [A bell rings furiously.) 'Tis her bell speaks now ; 
 Good, good, bestir yourselves : who knows who's wanted? 
 
 Butl. But 'twas a merry trick of Philip Coachman. [Exeunt. 
 
 Scene. — Mrs. Seliy's Chamber. 
 Mrs. Frampton, ICatherine, working. 
 
 Mrs. F. I am thinking, child, how contrary our fates 
 Have traced our lots through life. Another needle. 
 This works unlowardly. An heiress born 
 To splendid prospects, at our common school 
 I was as one above you all, not of you ; 
 Had my distinct prerogatives, my freedoms. 
 Denied to you. Pray, listen 
 
 fCath. I must hear 
 What you are pleased to speak !— How my heart sinks here ! (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. My chamber to myself, my separate maid. 
 My coach, and so forth. — Not that needle, simple one, 
 With the great staring eye fit for a Cyclops ! 
 Mine own are not so blinded with their griefs. 
 But I could make a shift to thread a smaller. 
 A cable or a camel might go through this. 
 And never strain for the passage. 
 
The Wife's Trial. 145 
 
 Kath. I will fit you. — 
 Intolerable tyranny ! [aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. Quick ! quick ! 
 You were not once so slack. — As I was saying, 
 Not a young thing among ye but observed me 
 Above the mistress. Who but I was sought to 
 In all your dangers, all your little difficulties, 
 Your girlish scnipes ? I was the scape-goat still, 
 To fetch you ort' ; kept all your secrets ; some, 
 Perhaps, since then 
 
 Kath. No more of that, for mercy, 
 If you'd not have me, sinking at your feet. 
 Cleave the cold earth for comfort {kneels). 
 
 Mrs. F. This to me? 
 This posture to your friend had better suited 
 The orphan Katherine in her humble school-days. 
 To the tlien rich heiress, than the wife of Selby — 
 Of wealthy Mr. Selby — 
 To the poor Widow Frampton, sunk as she is. 
 Come, come, 
 
 'Twas something, or 'twas nothing, that I said ; 
 I did not mean to fright you, sweetest bed-fellow '. 
 You once were so, but Selby now engrosses you. 
 I'll make him give you up a night or so — 
 In faith I will — that we may lie and talk 
 Old tricks of school-days over. 
 
 Kath. Hear me, madam 
 
 Mrs. F. Not by that name. Your friend—^ 
 
 Kath. My truest friend. 
 And saviour of my honour ! 
 
 Mrs. F. This sounds better ; 
 You still shall find me such. 
 
 Kath. That you have graced 
 Our poor house with your presence hitherto, 
 Has been my greatest comfort, the sole solace 
 Of my forlorn and hardly guess'd estate. 
 You have been pleased 
 To accept some trivial hospitalities. 
 In part of payment of a long arrear 
 I owe to you, no less than for my life, 
 
 Mrs. F. You speak my services loo large. 
 
 Katk. Nay, less; 
 For what an abject thing were life to me 
 Without your silence on my dreadful secret ! 
 And I would wish the league we have renew'd 
 Might be perpetual 
 
 Mrs. F. Have a care, fine madam ! (aside). 
 
 Kath. That one house still might hold us. But my husband 
 Has shown himself of late 
 
 Mrs. F. How, Mistress Selby? 
 
 Kath. Not— not impatient. You misconstrue him. 
 He honours, and he loves — nay, he must love — 
 The friend of his wife's youth. But there are moods 
 In which 
 
 Mrs. F. I understand you ;— m which husbands, 
 And wives that love, may wish to be alone, 
 
14^ The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 To nurse the tender fits of new-born dalliance. 
 After a five years' wedlock. 
 
 Kat/i. Was that well 
 Or charitably put ? do these pale cheeks 
 Proclaim a wanton blood ? this wasting form 
 Seem a fit theatre for levity 
 To play his love-tricks on ; and act such follies. 
 As even in affection's first bland moon 
 Have less of grace than pardon in best wedlocks? 
 I was about to say that there are times 
 When the most frank and sociable man 
 May surfeit on most loved society, 
 Preferring loneness rather 
 
 Mrs. F. To my company 
 
 Kath. Ay, yours, or mine, or any one's. Nay, take 
 Nat this unto yourself. Even in the newness 
 Of our first married loves 'twas sometimes so. 
 For solitude, I have heard my Selby say, 
 Is to the mind as rest to the corporal functions ; 
 And he would call it oft, the dny's soft sleep. 
 
 Mrs. F. What is your drift ? and whereto tends this speech. 
 Rhetorically labour'd ? 
 
 Kiilh. That you would 
 Abstain b\il from our house a month, a week : 
 I make request but for a single day. 
 
 Mrs. F. A month, a week, a day ! A single hour 
 Is every week, and month, and the long year, 
 And all the years to come ! My footing here, 
 Slipt once, recovers never. From the state 
 Of gilded roofs, attendance, luxuries, 
 Parks, gardens, sauntering walks, or wholesome rides, 
 To the bare cottage on the withering moor, 
 Where I myself am servant to myself. 
 Or only waited on by blackest thoughts, 
 I sink; if this be so. No : here I sit. 
 
 Kath. Then I am lost for ever ! \_Sinks at her feet— curtain drops. 
 
 Scene. — An Apartment contiguous to the last. 
 Selby, as if listening. 
 SeUy. The sounds have died away. ' What am I changed to? 
 What do I here, listening like to an abject 
 Or heartless wittol, that must henr no good, 
 If he hear aught? " This shall to the ear of your husband." 
 It was the Widow's word. I guess'd some mystery. 
 And the solution with a vengeance comes. 
 What can my wife have left untold to me 
 That must be told by proxy? I begin 
 To call in doubt the course of her life past 
 Under my very eyes. She hath not been good. 
 Not virtuous, not discreet ; she hath not outrun 
 My wishes still with prompt and meeli observance. 
 Perhaps she is not fair, sweet-voiced ; her eyes 
 Not like the dove's ; all this as well mav be 
 As that she should entreasure up a secret 
 In the peculiar closet of her breast. 
 
The Wife's Trial. I47 
 
 And gradge it to my ear. It is my right 
 To claim tlie halves in any truth she owns, 
 tis much as in the babe I have by her : 
 Upon whose face hericeforth L fear to loolc, 
 Lest I should fancy in its innocent brow 
 Some strange shame written. 
 
 Enter Lucy. 
 Sister, an anxious word with you. 
 From out that chamber, where my wife but now 
 Held talk with her encroaching friend, I heard 
 (Not of set purpose hearliening, but by chance) 
 A voice of chiding, answer' d by a tone 
 Of replication sucli as the meek dove 
 Makes when the kite has clutch'd her. The high Widow- 
 Was loud and stormy. I distinctly heard 
 One threat pronounced — " Your husband shall know alL" 
 I am no listener, sister; and 1 ho'd 
 A seci'et got by such unmanly shift. 
 The pitiful'st of thefts ; but what mine ear, 
 I not intending it, receives perforce, 
 I count my lawful prize, borne subtle meaning 
 Lurks in this fiend's behaviour ; which, by force 
 Or fraud, I must make mine. 
 
 Lucy. The gentlest means 
 Are still the wisest. What if you should press 
 Your wife to a disclosure ? 
 
 Selby. I have tried 
 All gentler means ; thrown out low hints, which, though 
 Merely suggestions still, have never fail'd 
 To blanch her cheek with fears. Roughlier to insist 
 Would be to kill, where I but meant to heal. 
 
 Lucy. Your own description gave that Widow out 
 As one not much precise, nor over coy 
 And nice to listen to a suit of love. 
 What if you feign'd a courtship, putting on 
 (To work the secret from her easy faith), 
 For honest ends, a most dishonest seeming? 
 
 Selby. I see your drift, and partly meet your counsel. 
 But must it not in me appear prodigious — 
 To say the least, unnatural and suspicious — 
 To move hot love where 1 have shown cool scorn, 
 And undissembled looks of blank aversion ? 
 
 Lucy. Vain woman is the dupe of her own charms, 
 And easily credits the resistless power 
 That in besieging beauty lies, to cast down 
 The slight-built fortress of a casual hate. 
 
 Selby. I am resolved 
 
 Lucy. Success attend your wooing ! re,. 
 
 Selby. And I'll about it roundly, my wise sister. \Lxcn-nt. 
 
 Scene. — The Library. 
 Mr. Selbv. Mrs. Frampton. 
 Selby. A fortunate encounter. Mistress Frampton. 
 My purpose was, if you can spare so much 
 From your sweet leisure, a few words in private. 
 
148 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Mrs. F. What mean his alter'd tones ? These looks to me, 
 Whose glances yet he has repell'd with coolness ? 
 Is the wind changed? I'll veer about with it, 
 And meet him in all fashions (aside). 
 
 All my leisure. 
 Feebly bestow'd upon my kind friends here, 
 Would not express a tithe of the obligements 
 I every hour incur. 
 
 Seiiy. No more of that. — 
 I know not why my wife hath lost of late 
 Much of her cheerful Spirits. 
 
 Mrs. F. It was my topic 
 To-day ; and every day, and all day long, 
 I still am chiding with her. " Child," I said, 
 And said it pretty roundly — it may be 
 I was too peremptory— we elder school-fellows. 
 Presuming on the advantage of a year 
 Or two, which, in that tender time, seem'd much, 
 In after years, much like to elder sisters. 
 Are prone to keep the authoritative style, 
 When time has made the difference most ridiculous. 
 
 Sdby. The observation 's shrewd. 
 
 Mrs. F. " Child, " I was saying, 
 '* If some wives had obtain'd a lot like yours,'' 
 And then perhaps I sigh'd, " they would not sit 
 In corners moping, like to sullen n oppets, 
 That want their will, but dry their eyes, and look 
 Their cheerful husbands in the face," — perhaps 
 I said, their Selbys, — " with proportion'd looks 
 Of honest joy." 
 
 Selby. You do suspect no jealousy ? 
 
 Mrs. F. What is his import ? Whereto tends his speech? (aside). 
 Of whom, or what, should she be jealous, sir? 
 
 Selby, I do not know ; but women have their fancies ; 
 And underneath a cold indifference. 
 Or show of some distaste, husbands have mask'd 
 A growing fondness for a female friend, 
 Which the wife's eye was sharp enough to see 
 Before the friend had wit to find it out. 
 ■You do not quit us soonP 
 
 Mrs. F. "Tis as I find 
 Your Katherine profits by my lesson, sir. — 
 Means this man honest ? Is there no deceit? (aside). 
 
 Selby. She cannot choose.— Well, well, I have been thinking. 
 And if the matter were to do again 
 
 Mrs. F. What matter, sir? 
 
 Selby. This idle bond of wedlock ; 
 These sour-sweet briars, fetters of harsh silk ; 
 I might have made, I do not say a better, 
 But a more fit choice in a wife. 
 
 Mrs. F. The parch'd ground, 
 In hottest Julys, drinks not in the showers 
 More greedily than I his words ! (aside). 
 
 Selby. My humour 
 Is to be frank and jovial ; and that man 
 
The Wife's Trial. j^^ 
 
 Affects me best, who most reflects me in 
 My most free temper. 
 
 Afrs. F. Were you free to choose, 
 As jestingly I'll put the supposition. 
 Without a thought reflecting on your Katherine, 
 What sort of woman would you make vour choice ? 
 
 Seliy. I like your humour, and will meet your jest. 
 She should be one about my Katherine's age ; 
 But not so old, by some ten years, in gravity. 
 One that would meet my mirth, sometimes outrun it ; 
 No puHng, pining moppet, as you said. 
 Nor moping maid, that I must still be teaching 
 The freedoms of a wife all iier life after; 
 But one that, having worn the chain before 
 (And worn it lightly, as report gave out;, 
 Enfranchised from it by her poor fool's death, 
 Took it not so to heart that I need dread 
 To die myself, for fear a second time 
 To wet a widow's eye. 
 
 Mrs. F. Some widows, sir, 
 Hearing you talk so wildly, would be apt 
 To put strange misconstruction on your" words, 
 As aiming at a Turkish liberty. 
 Where the free husband hath his several mates; 
 His Penseroso, his Allegro wife. 
 To suit his sober, or his frolic fit. 
 
 Selby. How judge you of that latitude? 
 
 Mrs. F. As one, 
 
 In European customs bred, must judge. Had I 
 Been bom a native of the liberal East, 
 I might have thought as they do. Yet I knew 
 A married man that took a second wife. 
 And (the man's circumstances duly weigh'd, 
 With all their bearings) the considerate world 
 Nor much approved, nor much condemn'd the deed. 
 
 Selby. You move my wonder strangely. Pray, proceed. 
 
 Mrs. F. An eye of wanton liking he had placed 
 Upon a widow, who liked him again. 
 But stood on terms of honourable love. 
 And scrupled wronging his most virtuous wife; 
 When to their ears a lucky rumour ran. 
 That this demure and saintly-seeming wife 
 Had a first husband living ; with the which 
 Being quesfiond, she but faintly could deny. 
 "A priest indeed there was ; some words had past. 
 But scarce amounting to a marriage rite. 
 Her friend was absent ; she supposed him dead ; 
 And, seven years parted, both were free to choose." 
 
 Selby. .What did the indignant husband? Did he not 
 With violent handlings stigmatize the cheek 
 Of the deceiving wife, who had entail'd 
 Shame on their innocent babe? 
 
 Mrs. F. He neither tore 
 His wife's locks nor his own ; but wisely weighing 
 His own offende with hers in equal poise. 
 And woman's weakness 'gainst the strength of man. 
 
jro The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Came to a calm and witty compromise. , 
 
 He coolly took his gay-faced widow home, 
 
 Made her his second wife ; and still the first 
 
 Lost few or none of her prerogatives. 
 
 The servants call'd her mistress still; she kept 
 
 The keys, and had the total ordering 
 
 Of the house aifairs ; and, some slight toys excepted. 
 
 Was all a moderate wife would wish to be. 
 
 SeUy. A tale full of dramatic incident !— 
 And, if a man should put it in a plky. 
 How should he name the parties ? 
 
 Mrs. F. The man's name 
 Through time I have forgot— the widow's too;— 
 But his first wife's first name, her maiden one, 
 ■Was— not unlike to ihat your Katherine bore. 
 Before she tgok the honour'd style of Selby. 
 
 Selby. A dangerous meaning in your riddle lurks ; 
 One knot is yet unsolved ; that told, this strange 
 And most mysterious drama ends. The name 
 Of that first husbands — 
 
 Enler Lucy. 
 
 Mrs. F. Sir, your pardon. 
 The allegory fits your private ear. 
 Some half-hour hence, in the garden's secret walk, 
 •We shall have leisure. \Exii. 
 
 Selby. Sister, whence come you? 
 
 Lucy. From your poor Katherine's chamber, where she droops 
 In sad presageful thoughts, and sighs, and weeps, 
 And seems to pray by turns. At times she looks 
 As she would pour her secret in my bosom — 
 Then starts, as I have seen her, at the mention 
 Of some immodest act. At her request, 
 I left her on her knees. 
 
 Selby. The fittest posture ; 
 For great has been her fault to Heaven and me. 
 She married me with a first husband living. 
 Or not known not to be so, which, in the judgment 
 Of any but indifferent honesty. 
 Must be esteem'd the same. The shallow Widow, 
 Caught by my art, under a riddling veil 
 Too thin to hide her meaning, hath confess'd all. 
 ■Your coming in broke off the conference, 
 When she was ripe to tell the fatal name 
 That seals my wedded doom. 
 
 Lucy. Was she so forward 
 To pour her hateful meanings in your ear 
 At the first hint ? 
 
 Selby. Her newly-fl?\ttered hopes 
 Array'd themselves at first in forms of doubt ; 
 And with a female caution she stood off 
 Awhile, to read the meaning of my suit, 
 Which with such honest seeming I enforced. 
 That her cold scruples soon gave way ; and now 
 She rests prepared, as mistress, or as wife. 
 
The Wife's Trial. 151 
 
 To seize the place of her betrayM friend - 
 
 My much offending, but more suffering Kniherine. 
 
 I.ncy. Into what labyrinth of fearful shapes 
 My simple project has conducted you ! 
 Were but my wit as skilful to invent 
 A clue to lead you forth ! — I call to mind 
 A letter, which your wife received from the Cape, 
 Soon after you were married, with some circumstances 
 Of mystery too. 
 
 Selby. I well remember it. 
 That letter did confirm the truth (she said) 
 Of a friend's death, which she had long fear'd true, 
 But knew not for a fact. A youth of promise 
 She gave him out — a hot adventurous spirit — 
 That had set sail in quest of golden dreams, 
 And cities in the heart of Central Afric ; 
 But named no names, nor did I care to press 
 My question further, in the passionate grief 
 She show'd at the receipt. iVlight this be he ? 
 
 Lucy. Tears were not all. When that first shower was past, 
 With claspM hands she raised her eyes to Heaven, 
 As if in thankfulness for some escape, 
 Or strange deliverance, in the news implied, 
 Which sweeten'd that sad news. 
 
 Selby. Something of that 
 I noted also 
 
 Lucy. In her closet once, 
 Seeking some other trifle, I espied 
 A ring, in mournful characters deciphering 
 The death of " Robert Halford, aged two 
 And twenty." Brother, I am not given 
 To the confident use of wagers, which I hold 
 Unseemly in a woman's argument; 
 But I am strangely tempted now to risk 
 A thousand pounds out of my patrimony 
 (And let my future husband look to it, 
 If it be lost), that this immodest Widow 
 Shall name the name that tallies with that ring. 
 
 Seliy. That wager lost, I should be rich indeed — 
 Rich in my rescued Kate — rich in m^ honour, 
 Which now was bankrupt. Sister, I accept 
 Your merry wager, with an aching heart 
 For very fear of winning. 'Tis the hour 
 That I should meet my Widow in the walk. 
 The south side of the garden. On some pretence 
 Lure forth my wife that way, that she may witness 
 Our seeming courtship. Keep us still in sight, 
 Yourselves unseen ; and by some sign I'll give 
 (A finger held up, or a kerchief waved). 
 You'll know your wager won— then break upon us. 
 As if by chance. 
 
 Lucy. I apprehend your meaning 
 
 Selby. And may you prove a true Cassandra here, 
 Though my poor acres smart fort, wagering sister. \Extur.t. 
 
152 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Scene. — Mrs. Selby's Chamber. 
 Mrs. Frampton. Katherine. 
 
 Mrs. P. Did I express myself in terms so strong ? 
 
 Kath. As nothing could have more affrighted me. 
 
 Mrs. F. Thinlc it a hurl friend's jest, in retribution 
 Of a suspected cooling hospitality. 
 And, for my staying here, or going hence 
 (Now I remember soinething of our argument), 
 Selby and I can settle that between us. 
 You look amazed. What if your husband, child. 
 Himself has courted me to stay? 
 
 Katk. You move 
 My wonder and. my pleasure equally. 
 
 Mrs. F. Yes, courted me to stay, vi^aived all objections. 
 Made it a fayour to yourselves ; not me,. 
 His troublesome guest, as you surmised. Child, child. 
 
 When I recall his flattering welcome, I 
 Begin to think the burden of my presence 
 Was 
 
 Kath. What, for Heaven 
 
 Mrs. F. A little, httle spice 
 Of jealousy — that's all — an honest pretext. 
 No wife need blush for. Say that you should see, 
 (As oftentimes we widows take such freedoms. 
 Yet still on this side virtue,) fn a jest 
 Your husband pat me on tlie cheek, or steal 
 A kiss, while you were by, — not else, for virtue's sake. 
 
 Kath. I could endure all this, thinking my husband 
 Meant it in sporl ' 
 
 Mrs. F. But if in downright earnest 
 (Putting myself out of the question here) 
 Your Selby, as I partly do suspect, 
 Own'd a divided heart 
 
 Kaih. My own would break 
 
 Mrs. F. Why, what a blind and witless fool it is. 
 That will not see its gains, its infinite gains 
 
 Kath. Gain in a loss ! 
 Or mirth in utter desolation ! 
 
 Mrs. F. He doting on a face— suppose it mine, 
 Or any other's tolerably fair — 
 What need you care about a senseless secret? 
 
 Kath. Perplex'd and fearful woman ! I in part 
 Fathom your dangerous meaning. You have broke 
 The worse than iron band, fretting the soul, 
 By which you held me captive. Whether my husband 
 Is what you give him out, or your fool'd fancy 
 But dreams he is so, either way I am free. 
 
 Mrs. F. It talks it bravely, blazons out its shame ; 
 A very heroine while on its knees ; 
 Rowe's Penitent, an absolute Calista ! 
 , Kath. Not to thy wretched self these tears are falling; 
 But to my husband, and offended Heaven, 
 Some drops are due — and then I sleep in peace, 
 Relieved from frightful dreams, my dreams though sad. [Exit. 
 
The Wife's Trial. 153 
 
 Mrs. F. I have gone too far. Who knows but in this mood 
 She may forestall my story, win on Selby 
 By a frank confession ?— and the time draws on 
 For our appointed meeting. The game's desperate 
 For which I play. A moment's difference 
 May make it hers or mine. I fly to meet him. [Exit. 
 
 Scene.— ^ Garden. 
 Mr. Selby. Mus. Frampton. 
 
 Seliy. I am not so ill a guesser, Mistress Frampton, 
 Not to conjecture that some passages 
 In your unfinish'd story, rightly interpreted, 
 Glanced at my bosom's peace ; 
 
 You knew my wife ? 
 
 Mrs. F. Even from her enrliest school-days. —What of that ? 
 Or how is she concern'd in my fine riddles. 
 Framed for the hour's amusement ? 
 
 Selby. By my hopes 
 Of my new interest conceived in you, 
 And by the honest passion of my heart, 
 Which not obliquely I to you did hint; 
 Come from the clouds of misty allegory. 
 And in plain language let me hear the worst. 
 Stand I disgraced, or no ? 
 
 Mrs. F. Then, by my hopes 
 Of my new interest conceived in you, 
 And by the kindling passion in my breast. 
 Which through my riddles you had almost read, 
 Adjured so strongly, I will tell you all. 
 In her school years, then bordering on fifteen. 
 Or haply not much past, she loved a youth 
 
 Selby. My most ingenuous Widow 
 
 Mrs. F. Met him oft 
 By stealth, where I still of the party was 
 
 Selby. Prime confidante to all the school, I warrant. 
 And general go-between (aside). 
 
 Airs. F. One morn he came 
 In breathless haste : — "The ship was under sail, 
 Or in few hours would be, that must convey 
 Him and his destinies to barbarous shores, 
 Where, should he perish by inglorious hands, 
 It would be consolation in his death 
 To have call'd his Katherine his." 
 
 Selby. Thus far the story 
 Tallies with what I hoped (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. Wavering between 
 The doubt of doing wrong, and losing him ; 
 And my dissuasions not o'er hotly urged. 
 Whom he had flatter'd with the bridemaid's part; — 
 
 Selby. I owe my subtle widow, then, for this (aside). 
 
 Mrs. F. Briefly, we went to church. The ceremony 
 Scarcely was huddled over, and the ring 
 Yet cold upon her finger, when they parted — 
 He to his ship ; and we to school got back. 
 Scarce miss'd, before the dinner-bell could ring. 
 
154 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Selhy. And frqm that hour 
 
 Mrs. F. Nor sight, nor news of him, 
 For aught that I could hear, she e er obtain'd. 
 
 Selby. Like to a man that hovers in suspense 
 Over a letter just received, on v\ hich 
 The black seal hath impress'd its omipous token, 
 Whether to open it or no, so I 
 Suspended stand, whether to press my fate 
 Further, or check ill curiosity. 
 That tempts me to more loss. — The name, the name 
 Of this fine youth ? 
 
 Mrs. F. What boots it, if 'twere told? 
 
 Selby. Now, by our loves. 
 And by my hopes of happier wedlocks, some day 
 To be accomplish 'd, give to me his name ! 
 
 Mrs. F. 'lis no such serious matter. It was — Huntingdon. 
 
 Selby. How have three little syllables pluck'd from me 
 A world of countless hopes ! — (aside). Evasive Widow ! 
 
 Mrs. F. How, sir ! 1 like not this {aside). 
 
 Selby. No, no, I meant 
 Nothing but good to thee. That other woman^ 
 How shall 1 call her but evasive, iialse. 
 And treachefons?— by the trust I place in thee. 
 Tell -me, and tell me truly, was the name 
 As you pronounced it ? 
 
 Mrs. F. Huntingdon — the name 
 Which his paternal grandfather assumed. 
 Together with the estates, of a remote 
 Kinsman : but our high-spirited youth 
 
 Selby. Yes 
 
 Mrs. F. Disdaining , 
 
 For sordid pelf to tmck the family honours. 
 At risk of the lost estates resumed the old style, 
 And answer'd only to the name of 
 
 Selby. What? 
 
 Mrs. F. Of Halford. 
 
 Selby. A Huntingdon to Halford changed so soon 
 Why, then, I see a witch halh her good spells 
 As well as bad, and can by a backward charm 
 UnrufBe the foul storm she has just been raising. 
 
 [Aside. He makes the signal. 
 
 My frank, fair-spoken Widow ! let this kiss, 
 I Which yet aspires no higher, speak my thanks, 
 
 I Till I can think on greater. 
 
 ; 
 
 Enter LucY and Katheeine. 
 
 Mrs. F. Interrupted ! 
 
 Selby. My sister here ! and see, where with her comes 
 My serpent gliding in an angel's form. 
 To taint the new-born Eden of our joys. 
 Why should we fear them ? We'll not stir a foot, 
 Nor coy it for their pleasures. [He courts the Widow. 
 
 Lucy (to Katheeine). This, your free 
 And sweet ingenuous confession binds me 
 For ever to you ; and it shall go hard 
 
The Wife's Trial. 155 
 
 But U shall fetch you back your husband's heart. 
 That now seems bUndly straying ; or, at worst, 
 In me you have still a sister. — Some wives, brother. 
 Would think it strange to catch their husbands thus 
 Alone with a trim widow ; but your Katherine 
 Is arm'd, I think, with patience. 
 
 Kath. I am fortified 
 With knowledge of self -faults to endure worse wrongs — 
 If they be wrongs, than he can lay upon me; 
 Even to look on —and see him sue in earnest. 
 As now I think he does it but in seenaing, 
 To that ill woman. 
 
 Selby. Good words, gentle Kate, 
 And not a thought irreverent of our Widow. 
 Why, 'twere unmannerly at any time, 
 But most uncourteous on our wedding-day, 
 
 When we should show most hospitable. — Some wine. \Wine is brought. 
 I am for sports. And now I do remember, 
 The old Egyptians at their banquets placed 
 A charnel sight of dead men's skulls before them, 
 With images of cold mortality, 
 
 To temper their fierce joys when they grew rampant. 
 I like the custom well : and ere we crown 
 With freer mirth the day, 1 shall propose, 
 In calmest recollection of our spirits, 
 We drink the solemn " Memory of the Dead." 
 
 Mrs. F. Or tlie supposed dead \nsidt to h'mi). 
 
 Selby. Pledge me, good wife — (she fillip. 
 
 Nay, higher yet, till the brimm'd cup swell o'er. 
 
 Kaih. I catch the awful import of your words; 
 And, though I could accuse you of unkindness, 
 "Vet as your lawful and obedient wife, 
 While that name lasts (as I perceive it fading, 
 Nor I much longer may have leave to use it), 
 I calmly take the office you impose: 
 And on my knees, imploring their forgiveness, 
 Whom I in heaven or e-irih may have offended. 
 Exempt from startinij tears, and woman's weakness, 
 I pledge you, sir —The Memory of the Dead ! \She drinks kneeling. 
 
 Selby. 'Tis gently and discreetly said, and like 
 My former loving Kate. 
 
 Mrs. F. Does he relent? [aside). 
 
 Selby. That ceremony past, we give the day 
 To unabated sport. And, in requital 
 Of certain stories, and quaint allegories, 
 Which my rare VVidow hath been telling to me. 
 To raise my morning mirth, if she will lend 
 Her patient hearing, I will here recite 
 A Parable ; and, the more to suit her taste. 
 The scene is laid in the East. 
 
 Mrs. F. I long to hear it. — 
 Some tale, to fit his wife [aside). 
 
 Kath. Now comes my Tkial. 
 
 Lucy. The hour of your deliverance is at hand, 
 If I presage right. Bear up, gentlest sister. 
 
 Selby. " The Sultan Haroun "— Stay— O now I have it — 
 
I 156 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 "The Caliph Haroun in his orchards had 
 A fruit-tree, bearing such delicious fruits, 
 That he reserved them for his proper gust ; 
 And through the palace it was death proclaim'd 
 To any one that should purloin the same." 
 
 Mrs. F. A heavy penance for so light a fault 
 
 Selby. Pray you, be silent, else you put me out. 
 " A crafty page, tliat for advantage watch'd, 
 Detected in the act a brother page, 
 Of his own years, that was his bosom friend ; 
 And thenceforth he became that other's lord, 
 And like a tyrant he demean'd himself, — 
 Laid forced exactions on his fellow's purse ; 
 And when that poor means fail'd, held o'er his head 
 Threats of impending death in hideous forms ; 
 Till the small culprit on his nightly couch 
 Dream'd of strange pains, and felt his body writhe 
 In tortuous pangs around the impaling stake." 
 
 Mrs. P. I like not this beginnmg 
 
 Selby. Pray you attend. 
 ' ' The Secret, like a night-hag, rid his sleeps. 
 And took the youthful pleasures from his days. 
 And chased the youthful smoothness from his brow. 
 That from a rose-cheek' d boy he waned and waned 
 To a pale skeleton of what he was ; 
 And would have died, but for one lucl;y chance." 
 
 Katk. Oh! 
 
 Mrs. F. Your wife— she faints — some cordial —smell to this. 
 
 Selby. Stand off. My sister best will do that office. 
 
 Mrs. F. Are all his tempting speeches come to this? (aside). 
 
 Selby. What ail'd my wife? 
 
 Kafh. A warning faintness, sir, 
 Seized on my spirits when you came to where 
 You said " a lucky chance." I am better now. 
 Please you go on. 
 
 Selby. The sequel shall be brief. 
 
 Katli. But, brief or long, I feel my fate hangs on it (aside). 
 
 Selby. " One morn the Caliph, in a covert hid, 
 Close by an arbour where the two boys talk'd 
 (As oft we read that Eastern sovereigns 
 'Would play the eaves-dropper, to learn the truth 
 Imperfectly received from mouths of slaves), 
 O'erheard their dialogue: and heard enough 
 To judge aright the cause, and know his cue. 
 The following day a Cadi was despatch'd 
 To summon both before the judgment-seat ; 
 The lickerish culprit, almost dead with fear, 
 And the informing friend, who readily. 
 Fired with fair promises of large reward, 
 And Caliph's love, the hateful truth disclosed." 
 
 Mrs. F. What did the Caliph to the offending boy, 
 That had so grossly err'd ? 
 
 Selby. His sceptred hand 
 He forth in token of forgiveness stretch'd 
 And clapp'd his cheeks, and courted him with gifts. 
 And he became once more his favourite page. 
 
The Wife's Trial. 1^7 
 
 Mrs. F. But for that other 
 
 Sclby. He dismiss'd him straight, 
 From dreams of grandeur and of Caliph's love, 
 To the bare cottage on the withering moor, 
 Where friends, tum'd fiends, and hollow confidants, 
 And widows, hide, who in a husband's ear 
 Pour baneful truths, but tell not all the truth ; 
 And told him not that Robin Halford died 
 Some moons before his marriage-bells were mug. 
 Too near dishonour hast thou trod, dear wife. 
 And on a dangerous cast our fates were set ; 
 But Heaven, that will'd our wedlock to be blest. 
 Hath interposed to save it gracious too. 
 Your penance is — to dress your cheek in smiles. 
 And to be once again ;ny merry Kate. — 
 Sister, your hand ; 
 
 Your wager won, makes me a happy man ; 
 Though poorer, Heaven knows, by a thousand pounds. 
 The sky clears up after a dubious day. — 
 Widow, your hand. I read a penitence 
 In this dejected brow ; and in this shame 
 Your fault is buried. You shall in with us, 
 And, if it please you, taste our nuptial fare ; 
 For, till this moment, I can joyful say, 
 Was never truly Selby's Wedding Day. 
 
 A FARCE. 
 
 {Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1830.) 
 
 [A foretaste of this ^avely humorous conceit will be found in one of Charles Lamb's 
 earliest and most whimsical essays, '*0n the Inconveniences of being Hanged," a 
 paper contributed by him, in iSii, to the second number of Leigh Hunt's Rejlecior, 
 xn the form of a letter, signed "Pensilis." The similarity of the humour running through 
 farce and essay is clearly discernible upon a comparison of the whole of the latter with 
 the closing words of Pendulous.] 
 
 CHARACTERS. 
 
 Flint, a Pawnbroker. BEN, Cutlets Boy. 
 
 Davenport, in. love with Marian. 
 
 Pendulous, a Reprieved Gentleman. Miss Flyn. 
 
 Cutlet, a Sentimental Butcher. Betty, her Maid. 
 
 GOLDiNG, a Magistrate. MARIAN, Daughter to Flint. 
 
 William, Apprentice to Flint. Lucy, her Maid. 
 
158 The Works of Charles L 
 
 ACT I. 
 Scene I. — An Apartment at Flint's heuse. 
 Flint. William. 
 
 Flint. Carry those umbrellas, cottons, and wearing apparel, upstairs. You 
 may send that chest of tools to Robins's. 
 
 Wil. That which you lent six pounds upon to the journeyman carpenter 
 that had the sick wife? 
 
 Flint. The same. 
 
 Wil. The man says if you can give him till Thursday 
 
 Flint. Not a minute longer. His time was out yesterday. These improvi- 
 dent fools ! 
 
 Wil. The finical gentleman has been here about the seal that was his grand- 
 father's. 
 
 Flint. He cannot have it. Truly, our trade would be brought to a fine pass 
 if we were bound to humour the fancies of our customers. This man would 
 be taking a liking to a snuff-box thai he had inherited ; and that gentlewoman 
 might conceit a favourite chemise that had descended to her. 
 
 Wil. The lady in the carriage has been here crying about those jewels. 
 )' She says if you cannot let her have them at the advance she offers, her husband 
 will come to know that she has pledged them. 
 
 Flint. I have uses for thoie jewels. Send Marian to me. (Exit WILLIAM.) 
 I know no other trade that is expected to depart from its fair advantages but 
 ours. I do not see the baker, the butcher, the shoemaker, or, to go higher, 
 the lawyer, the physician, the divine, give up any of their legitimate gains, 
 even when the pretences of their art had failed ; yet we are to be branded with 
 an odious name, stigmatized, discountenanced even by the administrators of 
 those laws which acknowledge us ; scowled at by the lower sort of people, 
 whose needs w e serve I 
 
 Enter Marian. 
 
 Come hither, Marian. Come, kiss your father. The report runs that he Is 
 full of spotted crime. What is your belief, child ? 
 
 Mar. That never good report went with our calling, father. I have heard 
 you say, the poor look only to the advantages which we derive from them, and 
 overlook the accommodations which they receive from us. But the poor are the 
 poor, father, and have little leisure to make distinction.s. I wish we could give 
 up this business. 
 
 Flint. You have not seen that idle fellow, Davenport ? 
 
 Mar. No, indeed, father -since your injunction. 
 
 Flint. I take but my lawful profit. The law is not over favourable to us. 
 
 Mar. Marian is no judge of these things. 
 
 Flint. They call me oppressive, grinding— I know not what 
 
 Mar. Alas ! 
 
 Flint. Usurer, extortioner. Am I these things? 
 
 Mar. You are Marian's kind and careful father. That is enough for a child 
 to know. 
 
 Flint. Here, girl, is a little box of jewels, which the necessities of a foolish 
 woman of quahty have transferred into our true and lawful possession. Go, 
 place them with the trinkets that were your mother's. They are all yoius, 
 Marian, if you do not cross me in your marriage. No gentry shall match into 
 this house, to flout their wife hereafter with her parentage. I will hold this 
 business with convulsive grasp to my dying day. I will plague these foor, whom 
 you speak so tenderly of. 
 
The Pawnbroker's Daughter. 159 
 
 Mar. You frighten me, father. Do not frighten Marian. 
 
 Flint. I have heard them say, There goes Flint — Flint, the cruel pawn- 
 broker ! 
 
 Mar. Stay at home with Marian. You shall hear no ugly words to vex you. 
 
 Flint. You shall ride in a gilded chariot upon the necks of these poor, 
 Marian. Their tears shall drop pearls for my girl. Their sighs shall be good 
 wind for us. They shall blow good for my girl. Put up the jewels, Marian. 
 
 \_ExH. 
 Enter Lucy. 
 
 Lucy. Miss, miss, your father has taken his hat, and is stepped out, and 
 Mr. Davenport is on the stairs ; and I came to tell you 
 
 Mar, Alas ! who let him in ? 
 
 Enter DAVENPORT. 
 
 Dav. My dearest girl 
 
 Mar. My father will kill me if he finds you have been here ! 
 
 Dav. There is no time for explanations. I have positive information that 
 your father means, in less than a week, to dispose of you to that ugly Saunders. 
 The wretch has bragged of it to his acquaintances, and already calls you Aii. 
 
 Mar, O heavens I 
 
 Dav. Your resolution must be summary as the time which calls for it. Mine 
 or his you must be, without delay. There is no safety for you under this roof. 
 
 Mar. My father 
 
 Dav. Is no father, if he would sacrifice you. 
 
 Mar. But he is unhappy. Do not speali hard words of my father. 
 
 Dav. Marian must exert her good sense. 
 
 Lucy {as if watching at the window). O, miss, your father has suddenly 
 returned. I see him with Mr. Saunders, coming down the street. Mr. 
 Saunders, ma'am ! 
 
 Mar. Begone, begone, if you love me, Davenport ! 
 
 Dav. You must go with m'e then, else here I am fixed. 
 
 Lucy. Ay, miss, you must go, as Mr. Davenport says. Here is your cloak, 
 miss, and your hat, and your gloves. Your father, ma'am 
 
 Mar. Oh! where— where? Whither do you hurry me, Davenport? 
 
 Dav. Quickly, quickly, Marian ! At the back door. 
 
 [Exit Marian with Davenport, reluctantly ; in her flight still 
 holding the jewels. 
 
 Lucy. Away— away! What a lucky thought of mine to say her father was 
 coming ! he would never have got her off else. Lord, Lord, I do love to help 
 lovers ! . [Exit, following them. 
 
 Scene IL — A Butcher's Shop.- 
 Cutlet. Ben. 
 Cut. Reach me down that book off the shelf, where the shoulder of veal 
 hangs. 
 
 Ben. Is this it? „ , , ., ■ . ■ j 
 
 Cut. No— this is "Flowers of Sentiment —the other— ay, this is a good 
 book.' "An Argument against the Use of Anim.1l Food. By J. R." That 
 means Joseph Ritson. I will open it anyA'here, and read just as it happens. 
 One cannot dip amiss in such books as these. The motto, I see, is from Pope. 
 I dare say very much to the purpose {reads). ^ 
 
 " The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day. 
 Had he thy reason, would he sport and play? 
 Pleased to the last, he crops his flowery food, 
 And licks the hand " 
 
i6o The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Bless us, is that saddle of mutton gone home to Mrs. Simpson's ? It should 
 have gone an hour ago. 
 
 Ben. I was just going with it. 
 
 Cut. Well, go. Where was I ? Oh ! 
 
 " And licks the hand just raised to shed its blood." 
 
 What an affecting picture ! (ttirns over the leaves, and reads). " It is probable 
 that the long lives which are recorded of the people before the flood were 
 owing to their being confined to a vegetable diet." 
 
 Ben. The young gentleman in Pullgn's Row, Islington, that has got the con- 
 sumption, has sent to know if you can let him have a sweetbread. 
 
 Cut, Take two, — take all that are in the shop. What a disagreeable inter- 
 ruption! (reads again). " Those fierce and angry passions, which impel man 
 to wage destructive war with man, may be traced to the ferment in the blood 
 produced by an animal diet." 
 
 Ben. The two pound of rump-steaks must go home to Mr. Molj'neux's. He 
 is in training to fight Cribb. 
 
 Cut. Well, take them ; go along, and do not trouble me with your disgusting 
 details. [Exit Ben. 
 
 Cut. (throwing down the hook). Why was I bred to this detestable business? 
 Was it not plain that this trembling sensibility, which h.is marked my character 
 
 from earliest infancy, must for ever disqualify me for a profession which 
 
 what do ye want ? what do ye buy ? O, it is only somebody going past. I 
 thought it had been a customer.— Why was not I bred a glover, like my cousin 
 Langston ? To see him poke his two Uttle sticks into a delicate pair of real 
 Woodstock ! " A very little stretching, ma'am, and they will fit exactly." — • 
 Or a haberdasher, Uke my next-door neighbour — " Not a better bit of lace in 
 all town, my lady— Mrs. Breakstock took the last of it last Friday— all but this 
 bit, which I can afford to let your ladyship have a bargain. Reach down that 
 drawer on your left hand, Miss Fisher." 
 
 Enter, in haste, Davenport, Marian, and Lucy. 
 
 Lucy. This is the house I saw a bill up at, ma'am ; and a droll creature the 
 landlord is. 
 
 Dav. We have no time for nicety. 
 
 Cut. What do ye want ? what do ye buy ? O, it is only you, Mrs. Lucy. 
 
 [Lucy whispers Cutlet. 
 
 Cut. I have a set of apartments at the end of my garden. They are quite 
 detached from the shop. A single lady at present occupies the ground floor. 
 
 Mar. Ay, ay, anywhere. 
 
 Dav. In, in. 
 
 Cut. Pretty lamb ! — she seems agitated. 
 
 Davenport and Marian go in with Cutlet. 
 Lucy. I am mistaken if my young lady does not find an agreeable companion 
 in these apartments. Almost a namesake. Only the difference of Flyn and 
 Flint. I have some errands to do, or I would stop and have some fun with this 
 droll butcher 
 
 Cutlet returns. 
 
 Cut. Why, how odd this is I Your young lady knows my young lady. They 
 are as thick as flies. 
 
 Lucy. You may fliank me for your new lodger, Mr. Cutlet.— But, bless me 
 you do not look well ? ' 
 
 Cut. To tell you the truth, I am rather heavy about the eyes. Want of sleep 
 I believe. 
 
The Pawnbroker' s Daughter. i6i 
 
 Lucy. Late hours, perhaps. Raking last night ? 
 
 Cut. No, that is not it, Mrs. Lucy. My repose was disturbed by a very 
 different cause from what you may imagine. It proceeded from too much 
 thinlcing. 
 
 Lucy. The deu^e it did ! and what, if I may be so bold, might be the subject 
 of your Night Thoughts ? 
 
 Cut. The distresses of my fellow-creatures. I never lay my head down on 
 my pillow but I fall a-thinking how many at this very instant are perishing. 
 
 Some with cold 
 
 Lucy. What, in the midst of summer ? 
 
 Cut. Ay. Not here, but in countries abroad, where the climate is different 
 from ours. Our summers are their winters, and vice vcrsu,, you know. Some 
 
 with cold 
 
 Lucy. What a canting rogue it is ! I should Uke to trump up some fine story 
 to plague him (aside). 
 
 Cut. Others with hunger— some a prey to the rage of wild beasts 
 
 Lucy. He has got this by rote, out of some book. 
 
 Cut. Some drowning, crossing crazy bridges in the dark — some by the violence 
 
 of the devouring flame 
 
 Lucy. I have it. — For that matter, you need not send your humanity a-travel- 
 ling, Mr. Cutlet. For instance, last night—— 
 
 Cut. Some by fevers, some by gun-shot wounds 
 
 Lucy. Only two streets off 
 
 Cut. Some in drunken quarrels 
 
 Lucy (aloud). The butcher's shop at the comer. 
 Cut. What were you saying about poor Cleaver? 
 
 Lucy. He has found his ears at last [aside). That he has had his housa 
 burnt down. 
 Cut. Bless me ! 
 
 Lucy. I saw four small children taken in at the greengrocer's. 
 Cut. Do you know if he is insured ? 
 Lucy. Some say. he is, but not to the full amount. 
 
 Cut. Not to the full amount— how shocking ! He killed more meat than 
 any of the trade between here and Carnaby Market — and the poor babes — four 
 of them you say — what a melting sight ! — he served some good customers about 
 Marybone— I always think more of the children in these cases than of the 
 fathers and mothers — Lady Lovebrown liked his veal better than any man's in 
 the market — I wonder whether her ladyship is engaged — I must go and comfort 
 poor Cleaver, however. [Exit. 
 
 Lucy. Now is this pretender to humanity gone to avail himself of a neigh- 
 bour's supposed ruin to inveigle his customers from him. Fine feelings ! — 
 pshaw ! ' [Exit. 
 
 Re-enter Cutlet. 
 
 Cut. What a deceitful young hussey ! there is not a word of truth in her. 
 There has been no fire. How can people play with one's feelings so ! — (singi) 
 — "For tenderness formed" — No, I'll try the air I made upon myself. The 
 words may compose me. (Sings)— 
 
 A weeping Londoner I am, 
 A washerwoman was my dam ; 
 She bred me up in a cock-loft. 
 And fed my mmd with sorrows sofl ; 
 
 For when she wrung with elbows stout 
 From linen wet the water out, — _ 
 The drops so like to tears did drip. 
 They gave my infant nerves the hyp. 
 
1 62 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Scarce three clean muckingers a week 
 Would dry the brine that dew'd my cheek ; 
 So while I gave my sorrows scope, 
 I almost ruin'd her in soap. 
 
 My parish learning I did win 
 In ward of Farringdon- Within ; 
 Where, after school, I did jpursue 
 My sports, as little boys wiU do. 
 
 Cockchafers— none like me was found 
 To set them spinning round and round. 
 
 how my tender heart would melt, 
 To think what those poor varmin felt ! 
 
 1 never tied tin-kettle, clog, 
 Or salt-box to the tail of dog, 
 Without a pang more keen at heart 
 Than he felt at his outward part. 
 
 And when the poor thing clatter'd off. 
 To all the unfeeling mob a scoflf. 
 Thought I, " What that dumb creature feels. 
 With half the parish at his heels ! " 
 
 Arrived, you see, to man's estate, 
 The butcher's calling is my fate ; 
 Yet still I keep my feeling ways, 
 And leave the town on slaughtering days. 
 
 At Kentish Town, or Highgate Hill, 
 I sit, retired, beside some nil ; 
 And tears bedew my glistening eye. 
 To think my playful lambs must die ! 
 
 But when they're dead I sell their meat. 
 On shambles kept both clean and neat ; 
 Sweetbreads also I guard full well. 
 And keep them from the blue-botUe, 
 
 Envy, with breath sharp as my steel. 
 Has ne'er yet blown upon my veal ; 
 And mouths of dames, and daintiest fops. 
 Do water at my nice lamb-chops. 
 
 \Exit, half laughing^ half crying. 
 
 Scene III.— ^ Street. 
 
 Davenport, solus. 
 
 Dav. Thus far have I secured my charming prize, I can appreciate, while 
 I lament, the delicacy which makes her refuse the protection of my sister's 
 roof. But who comes here? 
 
 Enter Pendulous, agitated. 
 It must be he. That fretful animal motion— that face working up and down 
 with uneasy sensibility, like new yeast. Jack— Jack Pendulous ! 
 
 Pen, It is your old friend, and very miserable. 
 
 Dav. Vapours, Jack. I have not known you fifteen years to have to guess 
 at your complaint. Why, they troubled you at school. Do you remember 
 When you had to speak the speech of Buckingham, where he is going to exe- 
 cution ? 
 
 Pen, Execution ! — he has certainly heard it (aside). 
 
The Pawnbroker'' s Daughter. 163 
 
 Da.v. What a pucker you were in overnight ! 
 
 Pen, May be so, may be so, Mi:. Davenport. That was an imaginary scene. 
 I have had real troubles since. 
 
 Dav. Pshaw ! so you call every common accident. 
 
 Pen. Do you call my case so common, then ? 
 
 Dav. What case ? 
 
 Pen. You have not heard, then? 
 
 Dav. Positively not a word. 
 
 Pen. You must know I have been — (whispers) — tried for a felony since then. 
 
 Dav. Nonsense ! 
 
 Pen. No subject for mirth, Mr. Davenport. A confounded short-sighted 
 fellow swore that 1 stopped him and robbed him on the York race-ground at 
 nine on a fine moonlight evening, when I was two hundred miles off in Dorset- 
 shire. These hands have been held up at a common bar. 
 
 Dav. Ridiculous ! it could not have gone so far. 
 
 Pen. A great deal farther, I assure you, Mr. Davenport. I am ashamed to 
 say how far it went. You must know, that in the first shock and surprise of 
 the accusation, shame — you know I was always susceptible— shame put me 
 upon disguising my name, that, at all events, it might bring no disgrace upon 
 my family. I called myself James Thomson. 
 
 Dav. For Heaven's sake, compose yourself. 
 
 Pen. I will. An old family ours, Mr. Davenport— never had a blot upon it 
 till now — a family famous for the jealousy of its honour for many generations — 
 think of that, Mr. Davenport — that felt a stain hke a wound 
 
 Dav. Be calm, my dear friend. 
 
 Pen. This served the purpose of a temporary concealment well enough ; but 
 when it came to the — alibi, I think they call it — excuse these technical terms, 
 they are hardly fit for the mouth of a gentleman — the witnesses — that is another 
 term — that I had sent for up from Melcombe Regis, and relied upon for clearing 
 up my character, by disclosing my real name, John. Pendulous— so discredited 
 the cause which they came to serve, that it had quite a contrary effect to what 
 was intended. In short, the usual forms passed, and you behold me here the 
 miserablest of mankind. 
 
 Dav. (aside). He must be light-headed. 
 
 Pen. Not at all, Mr. Davenport. I hear what you say, though you speak it 
 all on one side, as they do at the playhouse. 
 
 Dav. The sentence could never have been carried into — pshaw ! — you are 
 joking— the truth must have come out at last. 
 
 Pen. So it did, Mr. Davenport — just two minutes and a second too late by 
 the Sheriffs stop-watch. ' Time enough to save my life— my wretched life— but 
 an age too late for my honour. Pray change the subject— the detail must be 
 as offensive to you. 
 
 Dav. With all my heart— to a more pleasing theme. The lovely Maria Flyn 
 —are you friends in that quarter still ? Have the old folks relented ? 
 
 Pen. They are dead, and have left her mistress of her inclinations. But it 
 requires great strength of mind to 
 
 Dav. To what ? 
 
 Pen. To stand up against the sneers of the world. It is not every young 
 lady that feels herself confident against the shafts of ridicule, though aimed by 
 the hand of prejudice. Not but in her heart, I beheve, she prefers me to all 
 mankind. But think what the world would say if, in defiance of the opinions 
 of mankind, she should take to her arms a— reprieved man ! 
 
 Dav. Whims ! You might turn the laugh of the world upon itself in a 
 fortnight. These things are but nine days' wonders. 
 
 Pen. Do you think so, Mr. Davenport? 
 
 Dav. Where does she live? 
 
1 64 TTie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Pen. She has lodgings in the next street, in a sort of garden-house, that 
 belongs to one Cutlet. I have not seen her since the affair. I was going there 
 at her request. 
 
 Dav. Ha, ha, ha ! 
 
 Pen. Why do you laugh ? 
 
 Dav. The oddest fellow ! I will tell you But here he comes. 
 
 Enter Cutlet. 
 
 Cut. (to Davenport). Sir, the young lady at my house is desirous you 
 should return immediately. She has heard something from home. 
 
 Pen. What do I hear? 
 
 Dav. 'Tis her fears, I dare say. My dear Pendulous, you will excuse me ? — 
 I must not tell him our situation at present, though it cost him a fit of jealousy. 
 We shall have fifty opportunities for explanation. [£xit. 
 
 Pen. Does that gentleman visit the lady at your lodgings? 
 
 Cut. He is quite familiar there, I assure you. He is all in all with her, as 
 they say. • . *■ I 
 
 Pen. It is but too plain. Fool that I have been, not to suspect that, while 
 she pretended scruples, some rival was at the root of her infidelity ! 
 
 Cut. You seem distressed, sir? Bless me ! 
 
 Pen. I am, friend, above the reach of comfort. 
 
 Cut. Consolation, then, can be to no purpose ? 
 
 Pen. None. 
 
 Cut. I am so happy to have met with him ! 
 
 Pen. Wretch, wretch, wretch ! 
 
 Cut. There he goes ! How he walks about biting his nails ! I would not 
 exchange this luxury of unavailing pity for worlds. 
 
 Pen. Stigmatized by the world 
 
 Cut. My case exactly. Let us compare notes. 
 
 Pen. Nor an accident which 
 
 Cut. For a profession which 
 
 Pen. In the eye of reason has nothing in It— 
 
 Cut. Absolutely nothing in it 
 
 Pen. Brought up at a public bar 
 
 Cut. Brought up to an odious trade 
 
 Pen. With nerves like mine 
 
 Cut. With nerves like mine 
 
 Pen. Arraigned, condemned 
 
 Cut. By a foolish world' 
 
 Pen. By a judge and jury 
 
 Cut. By an invidious exclusion disqualified for sitting upon a jury at all— 
 
 Pen. Tried, cast, and 
 
 Cut. What? 
 
 Pen. Hanged, sir, hanged by the neck, till I was 
 
 Cut. Bless me ! 
 
 Pea. Why should not I publish it to the whole world, since she, whose pre- 
 judice alone I wished to overcome, deserts me? 
 
 Cut. Lord have mercy upon us ! not so bad as that comes to, I hope? 
 
 Pea. When she joins in the judgment of an illiberal world against me 
 
 Cut. You said HANGED, sir-that is, I mean, perhaps I mistook you. How 
 ghastly he looks ! » r j 
 
 Pen. Fear me not, my friend. I am no ghost-though I heartily wish I 
 
 Cut. Why, then, ten to one you were 
 
 Pen. Cut down. The odious word shall out though it choke ma. 
 
TKe Pawnbroker's Daughter. 165 
 
 Cvt. Your case must have some things in it very curious. I dare say vou 
 kept a journal of your sensations. 
 
 Pen. Sensations ! 
 
 Cut. Ay, while you were being— you know what I mean. They say persons 
 m your situation have hghts dancing before their eyes-bluish. But then the 
 worst of all is coming to one's self again. 
 
 Pen. Plagues, furies, tormentors ! I shall go mad ! {Exit. 
 
 Cut. There, he says he shall go mad. Well, my head has not been very 
 nght of late. It goes with a whirl and a buzz somehow. I behave I must not 
 thmk so deeply. Common people that don't reason know nothing of these 
 aberrations. 
 
 Great wits go mad, and small ones only dull ; 
 Distracting cares vex not the empty skviU : 
 They seize on heads that think, and hearts that feel. 
 As flies attack the— better sort of veal. 
 
 \_Exit. 
 
 ACT II. 
 Scene, at Flint's. 
 Flint. 'William. 
 
 Flint. I have overwalked myself, and am quite exhausted. Tell Marian to 
 come and play to me. 
 
 Wil. I shall, sir. {Exit. 
 
 Flint. I have been troubled with an evil spirit of late— I think an evil spirit. 
 It goes and comes, as my daughter is with or from me. ' It cannot stand before 
 her gentle look, when, to please her father, she takes down her music-book. 
 
 Enter 'William. 
 
 Wil. Miss Marian went out soon after you, and is not returned. 
 Flint. That is a pity — that is a pity. Where can the foolish girl be gad- 
 ding? 
 
 Wil. The shopmen say she went out with Mr, Davenport. 
 Flint. Davenport ? Impossible ! 
 
 Wil. They say they are sure it was he, by the same token that they saw her 
 slip into his hand, when she was past the door, the casket which you gave her. 
 Flint. Gave her, 'Wiliiam? I only entrusted it to her. She has robbed me ! 
 Marian is a thief ! You must go to the Justice, "William, and get out a warrant 
 against her immediately. Do you help them in the description. Put in 
 " Marian Flint," in plain words — no remonstrances, William — " daughter of 
 Reuben Flint,"— no remonstrances, but do it — s- 
 
 Wil. Nay, sir 
 
 Flint. I am rock, absolute rock, to all that you can say — a piece of solid 
 
 rock. What is it that makes my legs to fail, and my whole frame to totter 
 
 thus? It has been my overwalking. I am very faint. Support me in, 
 
 William. [Exeunt. 
 
 SiC^J^-E.— The Apartment of Mks Flyn. ' 
 
 Miss Flyn. Betty. 
 
 Miss F. 'Tis past eleven. Every minute I expect Mr. Pendulous here. 
 What a meeting do I anticipate ! 
 
 Bet. Anticipate, truly ! what other than a joyful meeting can it be between 
 two agreed lovers who have been parted these four months ? 
 
i66 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Miss F. But in that cruel space what accidents have happened ! {Aside) 
 As yet I perceive she is ignorant of this unfortunate affair. 
 
 Bet. Lord, madam, what accidents? He has not had a fall or a tumble, has 
 he ? He is not coming upon crutches ? 
 
 Miss F. Not exactly a fall. {Aside) I wish I had courage to admit her to 
 my confidence. 
 \ Bet. If his neck is whole, his heart is so too, I warrant it. 
 
 Miss F. His neck ! {Aside) She certainly mistrusts something. He writes 
 me word that this must be his last inten'iew. 
 
 Bet. Then 1 guess the whole btisiness. The wretch is unfaithful. Some 
 creature or other has got him into a noose. 
 
 Miss F. A noose ! 
 
 Bet. And I shall never more see him hang 
 
 Miss F. Hang, did you say, Betty ? 
 
 Bet. About that dear, fond neck, I was going to add, madam, but you 
 interrupted me. 
 
 Miis F. I can no longer labour with a secret which oppresses me thus. Can 
 you be trusty ? 
 
 Bet. Who, I, madam? {Aside) Lord, I am so glad! Now I shall know 
 all. 
 
 Miss F. This letter discloses the reason of his unaccountable long absence 
 from me. Peruse it, and say if we have not reason to be unhappy. 
 
 (Betty retires to the window to read the letter, Mr. Pendulous 
 enters.) 
 
 Miss F. My dear Pendulous ! 
 
 Pen. Maria ! — nay, shun the embraces of a disgraced man, who comes but 
 to tell you that you must renounce his society for ever. 
 
 Miss F. Nay, Pendulous, avoid me not. 
 
 Pen. {aside). That was tender ! I may be mistaken. Whilst I stood on 
 honourable terms, Maria might have met my caresses without a blush. 
 
 (Betty, who has not attended to the entrance of PENDULOUS, 
 through her eagerness to read the letter, conies forward.) 
 
 Bet. Ha ! ha ! ha ! What a fimny story, madam. And this is all you make 
 
 such a fuss about ? I should not care if twenty of my lovers had been 
 
 {seeing Pendulous) Lord, sir, I ask pardon ! 
 
 Pen. Are we not alone, then ? 
 
 Miss F, 'Tis only Betty — my old servant. You remember Betty? 
 
 Pen. What letter is that? 
 
 Miss F. Oh ! something from her sweetheart, 1 suppose. 
 
 Bet. Yes, ma'am, that is all. I shall die of laughing. 
 
 Pen. You have not surely been showing her 
 
 Miss F. I must be ingenuous. You must know, then, that I was just giving 
 Betty a hint as you came in. 
 
 Pen. A hint! 
 
 Miss. F. Yes, of our unfortunate embarrassment. 
 
 Pen. Wy letter! 
 
 Miss. /'". I thought it as well that she should know it at first. 
 
 Pen. Tie mighty well, madam ! 'Tis as it should be ! I was ordained to be 
 a wretcheiJ laughing-stock to all the world, and it is fit that our drabs- and our 
 servant wenches should have their share of the amusement ! 
 
 Bet, Marry come up ! Drabs and servant wenches ! and this from a person 
 in his circumstances ! 
 
 [Bktty flings herself out of the room, muttering. 
 
 Miss F. I understand not this language. I was prepared to give my Pen- 
 dulous a tender meeting; to assure him that however, in the eyes of the 
 
The Pawnbroker's Daughter. 167 
 
 superficial and the censorious, he may have incurred a partial degradation, in 
 the esteem of one, at least, he stood as high as ever ; that it was not in the 
 power of a ridiculous accident, involving no guilt, no shadow of imputation, 
 to separate two hearts cemented by holiest vows, as ours have been. This 
 untimely repulse to my affections may awaken scruples in me which hitherto, 
 in tenderness to you, I have suppressed. 
 
 Pen. I very well understand what you call tenderness, madam ; but in some 
 situations, pity — pity — is the greatest insult., 
 
 Miss F. I can endure no longer. When you are in a calmer mood, you 
 will be sorry that you have wrung my heart so. \_Exit. 
 
 Pen. Maria ! She is gone— in tears. Yet it seems she has had her scruples. 
 She said she had tried to smother them. Her maid Betty intimated as much. 
 
 Re-enter BETTY. 
 
 Bet. Never mind Betty, sir ; depend upon it she will never 'peach. 
 
 Pen. 'Peach ! 
 
 Bet. Lord; sir, these scruples will blow over. Go to her again, when she is 
 in a better humour. You Imow we must stand off a little at first, to save 
 appearances. 
 
 Pen. Appearances ! We ! 
 
 Bet. It will be decent to let some time elapse. 
 
 Pen, Time elapse ! 
 
 Lost, wretched Pendulous ! to scorn betray'd. 
 The scoff alike of mistress and of maid ! 
 "What now remains for thee, forsaken man. 
 But to complete thy fate's abortive plan. 
 And finish what the feeble law began ? 
 
 \Bxeunt. 
 
 Re-enter Miss Flyn, with Marian. 
 
 Miss F. Now both our lovers are gone, I hope my friend will have less 
 reserve. You must consider this apartment as yours while you stay here. 'Tis 
 larger and more commodious than your own. 
 
 Mar. You are kind, Maria. My sad story I have troubled you with. I 
 have some jewels here, which I unintentionally brought away. I have only to_ 
 beg that you will take the trouble to restore them to my father ; and, without' 
 disclosing my present situation, to tell him that my ne.xt step — with or without 
 the concurrence of Mr. Davenport— shall be to throw myself at his feet, and 
 beg to be forgiven. I dare not see him till you have explored the way for me. 
 I am convinced I vvas tricked into this elopement. 
 
 Miss F. Your commands shall be obeyed implicitly. 
 
 Mar, You are good {agitated). 
 
 Miss F. Moderate your apprehensions, my sweet friend. I too have known 
 my sorrows — [smiling). — You liave heard of the ridiculous affair. 
 
 Mar. Between Mr. Pendulous and you ? Davenport informed me of it, and 
 we took the liberty of blaming the over-niceness of your scruples. 
 
 Miss F. You mistake. The refinement is entirely on the part of my lover. 
 He thinks me not nice enough. I am obliged to feign a little reluctance, that 
 he may not take quite a distaste to me. Will you beheve it, that he turns my 
 very constancy into a reproach, and declares that a woman must be devoid of 
 all delicacy that, after a thing of that sort, could endure the sight of her 
 husband in 
 
 Mar. In what ? 
 
 Miss F. The sight of a man at all in 
 
 Mar, I comprehend you not. 
 
i68 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Miss F. In— in a—iwAispers)-Ti\ght-cap, my dear ! And now the mischief 
 is out. 
 
 Mar, Is there no way to cure him ? ir ■ t. 
 
 Miss F. None, unless I were to try the experiment, by placing myself m the 
 hands of justice for a little while, how far an equality in misfortune might breed 
 a sympathy in sentiment. Our reputations would be both upon a level then, 
 you know. What thinlt you of a little innocent shop-lifung, m sport? 
 
 Mar. And by that contrivance to betaken before a magistrate? The project 
 sounds oddly. 
 
 Miss F And yet I am more than half persuaded it is feasible. 
 
 Enter BETTY. 
 Bet. Mr. Davenport is below, ma'am, and desires to speak with you. 
 Mar. You will excuse me [going. Turning back) You will remember the 
 casket. ^ \_Exit. 
 
 Miss F. Depend on me. 
 
 Bet. And a strange man desires to see you, ma'am. I do not half like his 
 looks. 
 Miss F. Show him in. 
 
 [Exit Bettv, and returns with a Police Officer. BETTY goes out. 
 
 Off. Your servant, ma'am. Your name is 
 
 Miss F. Flyn, sir. Your business with me ? 
 
 Off. {alternately surveying tlie lady and his paper of instructions). Marian 
 Flint. 
 
 Miss F. Maria Flyn. 
 
 Off. Ay, ay, Flyn or, Flint. 'Tis all one. Some write plain Mary, and some 
 put ann after it. I come about a casket. 
 
 Miss F. I guess the whole business. He takes me for my friend. Some- 
 thing may come out of this. I will humour him (aside). 
 
 Off. (aside). Answers the description to a tittle. " Soft, gray eyes, pale 
 complexion " 
 
 Miss F. Yet I have been told by flatterers that my eyes were blue — (takes out 
 a pocket-glass.) — ! hope I look pretty tolerably to-day. 
 
 Off. Blue ! —they are a sort of bluish-gray, now I look better ; and as for 
 colour, that comes and goes. Blushing is often a sign of a hardened offender. 
 Do you know anything of a casket? 
 
 Miss F. Here is one which a friend has just delivered to my keeping. 
 
 Off. And which I must beg leave to secure, together with your ladyship's 
 person. " Garnets, pearls, diamond-bracelet," — here they are, sure enough. 
 
 Miss F. Indeed, I am innocent. 
 
 Off. Every man is presumed so till he is found otherwise. 
 
 Miss F. Police wit ! Have you a warrant ? 
 
 Off. Tolerably cool that ! Here it is, signed by Justice Golding, at the 
 requisition of Reuben Flint, who deposes that you have robbed him. 
 
 Miss F. How lucky this turns out! (aside). — Can I be indulged with a 
 coach ? 
 
 Off. To Marlborough Street? — certainly, .^n old offender (cj/tfi;). The thing 
 shall be conducted with as much delicacy as is consistent with security. 
 
 Miss F. Police manners ! I will trust myself to your protection then. 
 
 \Exeunt. 
 Scene. — Police Office. 
 Justice, Flint, Officers, &c. 
 
 J-ust. Before we proceed to extremities, Mr. Flint, let me entreat you to 
 consider the consequences. What will the world say to your exposing your 
 own child ? 
 
The Pawnbroker's Daughter. 169 
 
 Flint. The world is not my friend. I belong to a profession which has long 
 brought me acquainted with its injustice. I return scorn for scorn, and desire 
 its censure above its plaudits. 
 
 ynst. But in this case delicacy must make you pause. 
 
 Flint. Delicacy — ha ! ha ! — pawnbroker — how fitly these words suit 1 Deli- 
 cate pawnbroker — delicate devil ! — let the law take its course. 
 
 Just. Consider, the jewels are found. 
 
 Flint. 'Tis not the silly baubles I regard. Are you a man ? are you a 
 father? and think you I could stoop so low, vile as I stand here, as to make 
 money — filthy money — of the stuff which a daughter's touch has desecrated? 
 Deep in some pit first would I bury them. 
 
 yust. Yet pause a little. Consider. An only child ! 
 
 Flint. Only, only, — there, it is that stings me — makes me mad ! She was 
 the only thing I had to love me— to bear me up against the nipping injuries of 
 the world. I prate when I should act. Bring in your prisoner. 
 
 ( 77i« Justice makes signs to an Officer, who goes out, and returns with. 
 Miss Flyn.) 
 
 Flint. What mockery of my sight is here? This is no daughter. 
 
 Off. Daughter, or no daughter, she has confessed to this casket. 
 
 Flint {handling it). The very same. Was it in the power of these pale 
 splendours to dazzle the sight of honesty— to put out the regardful eye of 
 piety and daughter-love? Why, a poor glowworni shows more brightly. 
 Bear witness how I valued them (tramples on them). — Fair lady, know you 
 aught of my child ? 
 
 Miss F. I shall here answer no questions. 
 
 yust. You must explain how you came by the jewels, madam. 
 
 Miss F. (aside). Now confidence assist me ! — A gentleman in the neigh- 
 bourhood will answer for me 
 
 yust. Kis name 
 
 Miss F. Pendulous 
 
 yust. That lives in the next street ? 
 
 Miss F. The same. Now I have him sure (aside). 
 
 yust. Let him be sent for. I believe the gentleman to be respectable, and 
 will accept his security. 
 
 Flint. Why do I waste ray time, where I have no business ? None— I have 
 none any more in the world — none ! 
 
 Enter Pendulous. 
 
 Pen, What is the meaning of this extraordinary summons ? — Maria here ? 
 
 Flitit. Know you anything of my daughter, sir? 
 
 Pen. Sir, I neither know her nor yourself, nor why I am brought hither ; 
 but for this lady, if you have anything against her, I will answer it with my 
 life and fortunes. 
 
 yust. Make out the bail-bond. 
 
 Off. (surveying PENDULOUS). Please, your worship, before you take that 
 gentleman's bond, may I have leave to put in a word ? 
 
 Pen. (agitated). I guess what is coming. 
 
 Off. I have seen that gentleman hold up his hand at a criminal bar 
 
 yust. Ha! 
 
 A'liss F. (aside). Better and better. 
 
 Off. My eyes cannot deceive me. His lips quivered about while he was 
 being tried just as they do now. His name is not Pendulous. 
 
 Miss F. Excellent ! 
 
 Off. He pleaded to the name of Thcr...,-.; it York assizes. , 
 
170 The ii'Oiks of Charles Lamb. 
 
 yust. Can tins be true? 
 Miss F, I could kiss the fellow ! 
 Off. He was had up for a footpad. 
 Miss F, A dainty fellow ! 
 Pen. My iniquitous fate pursues me everywhere. 
 Just. You confess, then ? 
 Pen. I am steeped in infamy. 
 
 Miss F. I am as deep in the mire as yourself. ' 
 
 Pen. My reproach can never be washed out. 
 Miss F. Nor mine. 
 
 Pen. I am doomed to everlasting shame. 
 Miss F. We are both in a predicament. 
 Just. I am in a maze where all this will end. 
 
 Miss F. But here comes one who, if I mistake not, will guide us out of all 
 our difficulties. 
 
 Enter MARIAN and DAVENPORT. 
 
 Mar. (kneeling). My dear father ! 
 
 Flint. Do I dream ? 
 
 Mar. I am your Marian. 
 
 Just. Wonders thicken ! 
 
 Flint. The casket 
 
 Miss Fi Let me clear up the rest. 
 
 Flint. The casket 
 
 Miss F. Was inadvertently in your daughter's hand when, by an artifice of 
 h^maid Lucy, — set on, as she confesses, by this gentleman herQf— 
 
 Dav. I plead guilty. 
 
 Miss F. She was persuaded that you were in a hurry going to marry her to 
 an object of her dislike; nay, that he was actually in the house for the pur- 
 pose. The speed of her flight admitted not of her depositing the jewels; but 
 ■ to me, who have been her inseparable companion since she quitted your roof, 
 she entrusted the return of them ; which the precipitate measures of this 
 gentleman (pointing to the Officer] alone prevented. Mr. Cutlet, whom I see 
 coming, can witness this to be true. 
 
 Enter CUTLET, in haste. 
 
 Cut. Ay, poor lamb I poor lamb ! I can witness. I have run in such a 
 haste, hearing how affairs stood, that I have left my shambles without a pro- 
 tector. If your worship had seen how she cried (pointing to MARIAN), and 
 trembled, and insisted upon being brought to her father ! Mr. Davenport 
 here could not stay her. 
 
 Flint. I can forbear no longer. Marian, will you play once again, to please 
 your old father ? 1 
 
 Mar. I have a good mind to make you buy me a new grand piano for your 
 naughty suspicions of me. 
 
 Dav. What is to become of me ? 
 
 Flint. I will do more than that. The poor lady shall have her jewels 
 again. 
 
 Mar. Shall she? . 
 
 Flint. Upon reasonable terms (smiling). And now, I suppose, the court 
 may adjourn. 
 
 Dav. Marian 1 
 
 Flint. I guess what is passing in your mind, Mr. Davenport ; but you have 
 behaved upon the whole so like a man of honour, that it will give me pleasure 
 if you vrill visit at my house for the future-; but Ismiiing) not clandestinely, 
 Marian. 
 
The Pawnbroker's Daughter. 
 
 171 
 
 Mar. Hush ! father. 
 
 Flint. I own I had prejudices against gentry. But I have met with so much 
 candour and kindness among my betters this day — from this gentleman in par- 
 ticular — {fuming to the Justice) — that I begin to think of leaving off business, 
 and setting up for a gentleman myself 
 
 yust. You have the feelings of one. 
 
 Flint. Marian will not object to it. 
 
 Just. But {turning to Miss Flyn) what motive could induce this lady to 
 take SO much disgrace upon herself, when a word's explanation might have 
 relieved her ? 
 
 Miss F. This gentleman {turning to Pendulous) can explain. 
 
 Pen. The devil ! 
 
 Miss F. This gentleman, I repeat it, whose backwardness in concluding 
 a long and honourable suit from a mistaken deUcacy 
 
 Pen. How? 
 
 Miss F. Drove me upon the e.xpedient of involving myself in the same 
 disagreeable embarrassments with himself, in the hope that a more perfect 
 sympathy might subsist between us for the future. 
 
 Pen. I see it — I see it all. 
 
 Just, [to Pendulous). You were, then, tried at York? 
 
 Pen. I was CAST 
 
 Just. Condemned 
 
 Pen. Executed. 
 
 Just How? 
 
 Pen. Cut down and CAME to life again. False delicacy, adieu ! The 
 true sort, which this lady has manifested— by an expedient which at first sight 
 might seem a little unpromising, has cured me of the other. We are now on 
 even terms. 
 
 Miss F. And may 
 
 Pen. Marry, — I know it was your word. 
 
 Miss F. And make a very quiet 
 
 Pe7i. Exemplary ■ 
 
 Miss F. Agreeing pair of 
 
 Pen. Acquitted Felons. 
 
 Flint. And let the prejudiced against our profession acknowledge that a 
 money-lender may have the heart of a father ; and that in the casket, whose 
 loss grieved him so sorely, he valued nothing so dear as {turning to Marian) 
 one poor domestic jewel. 
 
 ^mxz ©pera, (Eiinaimi)'.) 
 
 [What follows has been in this place deliberately appended to the acknowledged 
 tragedy, farces, and dramatic poems of Charles Lamb, _ because the whole manuscript, 
 in beautiful preservation, is undoubtedly in his handwriting. For nearly eleven years 
 past, it has been treasured up in the British Museum. It is a perfectly legible MS. 
 of fifty-nine quarto pages, numbered amongst Additional Manuscripts 25,924. It was 
 presented to the nation in the November of 1864, by Mr, Coventry Patmore ; and it has 
 prefixed to it the following printed excerpt, from the Appendix to the first volume of 
 
 My Friends and Acquaintances, by P. G. Patmore;" An unpublished drama— un- 
 
172 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 questionably his (Cliarles Lamb's) first substantial production^a complete opera in 
 three acts^ numerous songs and concerted pieces, written expressly to popular melodies 
 of the time, every portion of the manuscript, even to the mmutest alterations, erasures, 
 &c, being in his own haridwTiting." Reference is then made to pages 129 and 130 of 
 the " Final Memorials," by Talfourd, in which an extract may be found from a letter 
 of Mary Lamb's to Mrs. Hazlitt. This extract is certainly remarkable, as Mr. P. G". 
 Patmore insists, with good show of reason (vol. i. p_. 307); for inasmuch as, though.it 
 makes no direct allusion tothis particular drama, it "establishes beyond all doubt a 
 personal as well as a professional connection between Charles, Lamb and the Sheridans." 
 The importance of the little side-light thus thrown, upon Charles Lamb's earlier life by 
 his sister will be readily appreciated when the rumoured origin of this curious manuscript 
 is taken into account. According to the story as it noAV runs, Charles Lamb, Richard 
 Brinsley Sheridan, and the latter's son, Thomas Sheridan, were wont, in the winter of 
 1795-96, to meet evening after evening (Charles being then a youngster of little more 
 than twenty) for the purpose of hobnobbing, smoking, joking, and confabulating, 
 while engaged in the joint composition of just such a dramatic production as the one 
 subjoined. The coincidence is, at the least, remarkable, that here is precisely the kind 
 of comic opera these three are reputed to have thus concocted together, and the whole 
 of it from begmnmg to end is mdisputably in Charles Lamb's handwriting. Another 
 odd comcidence has until now been wholly unnoted— namely, that while Mary Lamb 
 refers in so many words to ' some scenes in a specikinr pantomime," strangely enough 
 the very first utterance m this comic opera is the inquiry addressed to the Drummer by 
 Sergeant Halbert, "What news in the Garrison to-day? Thou'rt a very harlequin 
 messenger, and of as many colours." To which the Drummer boy respond.s, "Yes, our 
 young Alde-de-Camp keeps me wagging— there is not a drum in the army that is rattled 
 about like me. Although it may still be matter of question with some whether after 
 all, this Comic Opera is really Charles Lamb's own composition, it is here deliberately 
 appended to his acknowledged dramatic effusions, for the reason already given, because 
 nobody else claiming it, it is undoubtedly every bit of it in his own handwriting.] 
 
 CHARACTERS OF THE OPERA. 
 
 Lovelace, a man of fortune, refused hy Violeta, enlists for a Soldier and goes 
 to Gibraltar. 
 
 ^A^°A^f lTtZ i%"^tSl) } Officers of tHe Ga,-rison. 
 
 Bloomer, Atde-de-Camp to the Governor, an admirer of Caroline, hut 
 
 a flatterer of Mrs. Lapelle. 
 Captain Lapelle, an Officer who comes -with his Lady to join the Garrison. 
 Governor. 
 Halkert, a Sergeant. 
 Drummer. 
 Judge Advocate. 
 Clerk, Soldiers, &c. 
 
 Ladies. 
 
 Mrs. Lapelle, wife of Captaw Lapelle,— aiAo encourages the addresses of 
 
 Bloomer. 
 Caroline, a Young Lady in love with Bloomer. 
 
 Violeta, in the Character of an Officer, follows LovELACE to Gibraltar. 
 Jesse, her Servant, habited as her Footboy. 
 Trulls, &c. 
 
 Scene.— Gibraltar. 
 ACT THE FIRST. 
 
 Scene the First, a /'rtrarf^.— Sergeant Halbert and a Drummer, 
 meeting as by chance. 
 
 Hal. What news in the Garrison to-day ? Thou'rt a very harlequin mes- 
 senger—and of ai many colours. 
 
Comic Opera. 173 
 
 Drum. Yes, our young Aide-de-Camp keeps one wagging— there is not a 
 drum in the army that is rattled about like me. 
 
 Hal. A drummer's profession in a pilgrimage, and if thou mind'st it, boy, it 
 is a certain road to preferment : it has always succeeded in the army, and will 
 ever raise a man to situation. Thou hast a ten rounds of love cartridges to 
 fire off there. — What, is there anything new arrived ? 
 
 Drum. Only four transports stuff'd with recruits — their wives and vfenches. 
 But among them is a Madam Lapelle — who is married, — a certain reason 
 why all the Garrisoil should be mad after her. — She is the finest piece of red 
 and white flesh tha.; ever England trusted on salt water— she is as straight as 
 a halbert, and as tight as a new braced drum. 
 
 Hal. The husband then is a lucky fellow, for here she'll be besieged like a 
 frontier town ; — and if she don't surrender— she is the first that ever defied the 
 assailants of . Gibraltar. 
 
 Drum. I believe I have ammunition enough about me to insure a capitulation ; 
 — but there is no fear of conquest while our young ensigns keep the cartouche 
 box of Cupid. 
 
 Hal. A platoon of hair powder and washball will bring her down. These 
 strangers make fair work for you. — You finger the pistareens, my little rattler 
 of sheepskin. 
 
 Drum. No ; poor pay when you consider I had twenty times a day from 
 Europa point to the convent, bearing packets of sighs to red lips and bright 
 black eyes. But this madam outstrips everything that appeared before. She 
 has a skin fairer than Spanish milk — a cheek like a Barbary orange— and so 
 delicate, that a puff of rocambole, from the Spanish Lines, would kill her 
 dead as a rifleman. The Governor is ten years younger at the sight of her, 
 and the aides-de-camp were up before the sun to be powdered, to do her 
 honour. I am now on the wings of love, to invite all the world to bid her 
 welcome, by the sound of drum. 
 
 Air — The Rhieillk, to fife and drum. 
 
 t^ovf Beauty's up, the army's gay, 
 And ev'ry heart beats reveille ; 
 A brighter flame can ne'er inspire 
 A soldier's breast with martial fire. 
 
 When sweet Beauty takes the field, 
 Generals and Captains yield ; 
 Rank and file must all give way, 
 And to Beauty yield the day. 
 
 [Exit. 
 
 Hal. This drummer will beat himself into bread, while I shall remain here 
 <ill I am fit for nothing but Chelsea. The god of war be praised, I never yet 
 was enlisted by the parson, nor will I resign the name of Bachelor Halbert, 
 while there is a comrade's wife to take pity on me. — But now to reconnoitre 
 the new comers. May I never make another speech at the drum head, but I 
 will have a wench out of this new draught. What should we do in this stone 
 hen-coop if little England did not send us fresh provision? The life of a 
 bachelor soldier is an honour to the army ; but he that has a wife for a 
 knapsack is his own baggage waggon. 
 
 Air (Sergeant Halbert) — " Bachelor Bluff." 
 
 He that is single is free from all care. 
 
 Csesar and Pompey were homed ; 
 Tho' Sampson was strong, he was shorn of his hair, 
 And, like a weak husband, was scorned. 
 Bachelor Bluff, heigh I for a heart that is tougher than buff. 
 
Soldiers and sailors should never be wed, 
 
 But follow with rapture the wenches ; 
 Let wives and their cuckolds go scolding to bed. 
 They sleep undisturb'd in the trenches. 
 Bachelor Bluft, heigh ! for a heart that is tougher than buff. 
 
 [Exit, 
 
 Scene II. — A Saloon. 
 I Governor Bastion and Aide-de-Camp Bi,oower. 
 
 1 Gov Ay, Bloomer, ay, by all accounts she is a gorgeous paragon of beauty— 
 the very salient angle of the Venus of Medicis. .Zounds ! the husband must 
 y mount guard night and day, or we shall carry her by a coup-de-main. 
 
 Bloom. The Garrison was never besieged before— she would make a saint for 
 the Spanish army— and they would follow her as a guardian angel. When 
 she left the boat and pressed her velvet foot to the earth, Jews, Turks, Chris- 
 tians, and Infidels stood with their mouths expanded in amazement, as if she 
 commanded the opening and the shutting. 
 
 Gov. Ay, Bloomer, ay, this is a pretty description of her powers and our 
 softness ! No, no. Bloomer, before she should undo my soldiers I'd put out their 
 eyes, and make them grope and grapple with the Spaniards in the dark. 
 Zounds ! we'd beat 'em blindfold. 
 
 Bloom. That, indeed, sir, would be making Cupids of them all. 
 
 Air (Bloomer). 
 
 How can the man in love go right 
 
 When folly is his guide ? 
 With Cupid 'tis eternal night, 
 
 And mischiefs all his pride. 
 Who can foretell for what high cause 
 
 This darting of the gods was born ? 
 For he who doth obey his laws 
 
 Is sure of misery and scorn. 
 Ah ! Cupid, did it prove thee wise, 
 When folly put out both thy eyes ? 
 
 Enter Servant. 
 
 Serv. Captain Lothian and Major Aptjones wait on the Governor. 
 
 Gov. Gentlemen, good morning to you ! Have you seen the new recruits 
 from England, with Ensign Etheridge, who is strongly recommended to me as 
 a youth of family and fortune ? ' 
 
 Maj. Yes, hur has been down to the Lant port gate, and they are as pritty 
 fellows as the sun ever shonet upon. I have ordered the Sergeant to march 
 them to the parade. 
 
 Loth. The Major's partial ; the lads are in general from the ragged mountains 
 of Merionethshire. 
 
 Maj. Ay, this is to be a Scotsman ; hur has no ragged mountains, to be sure, 
 in hur fertile country of Argyleshire. The Welsh lads are prave, and so are 
 the Scots lads too : but let hur praise hur men for their toings and not for 
 their pirths ; they are poor enough porn in Wales and in Scotland too. 
 
 Loth. 'Tis the pride of your land is your upsetting. Major. 
 
 Maj. Cot knows, hur countrymen are prout enough, but they make coot 
 soldiers, and a coot soldier is not afraid of a pullet or the pelly-ache. 
 
 Loth. There is no character like a soldier, nor no death like the bed of 
 honour ; but were twa bullets hurl'd through my wame, sir, I must speak my 
 \ mind and praise the bonny lads of North Britain. 
 
 L 
 
Comic Opera. 175 
 
 Gov. A truce to your nationality. I shall soon have occasion to exoend 
 some brave boys of all countries. The Welsh and Scotch are equally partial • 
 the h-nghshman malies a friendship with all mankind ; he never defends the 
 villain of his own country, but bravely stands by the honest man, be he Turk 
 Jew, or Infidel. But now, gentlemen, I shall have the honour of feastin<' vour 
 eyes with a new beauty— the wife of Captain Lapelle. 
 
 Maj. The eyes of peauty was ever, more fatal to the Aptjones than swort 
 or gun. 
 
 Loth. Hoot ! Major, hoot ! what, mon, at these years to be trapped by a blind 
 
 Maj. It is peauty that will vanquish the proudest victor. It was Ccesar of 
 Rome, and Alexander of Macedon, that felt the plow of love, and so did Kino- 
 David and Catwallater of Wales. 
 
 Bloom. True, my gallant Major, the Welsh have ever been susceptible to 
 the power of love; the clime of Scotland is too cold for so pure and li=-ht a 
 flame, and the diet too barren to feed Arcadian sheplierds. 
 
 Loth What, sir, do you redicule the Land o' Cakes? Ar there not the 
 pastorals of Allan Ramsay, and the elegiac tears of Ossian ? 
 
 Air (Lothian)— "Sherry Muir." 
 
 The soldier and tar should be cherish' d by war. 
 And not vanquish'd by sighs, tears, or beauty ; 1 
 
 What are Love and his laws to the national cause, 1 
 
 And the gloiy of doing our duty ? 
 
 Chorus. 
 Let honour and glory, then, lead on before ye. 
 If ye wish to be famous in story. 
 
 What are Cupid and Venus, 
 But fit to bemean us. 
 
 Of life the mere squibs and the rockets ? 
 There are no ambuscades so fatal as jades, 
 
 To our credits as well as our pockets ! 
 
 Chorus. 
 Let honour and glory, then, lead on before ye. 
 If ye wish to be famous in story. 
 
 Gov. Come, gentlemen, this is not a time for disputants, fall into the rear, and 
 make room for Love and Beauty. 
 
 Enter Captain and Mrs. Lapelle, Violeta as an Ensign, her servant 
 Jesse, as her jnan servant. 
 
 Gov. Mrs. Lapelle, I give you joy on your arrival ! Gibraltarwas never made 
 so happy before. Captain Lapelle, Mr. Etheridge, you are welcome {going 
 severally to them and bowing in the manner of reception and congratulation), 
 I hope, madam, your passage was pleasant ? 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Indeed, Governor, there are no thanks due from me to the god 
 of the ocean ; that tui-Bulent Bay of Biscay made me often repent that I liad 
 undertaken so long a voyage. 
 
 Gov. It is the general complaint of all passengers, but the contrast gives a 
 lustre to the Spanish- climate. 
 
 Bloom. Beauty gives brilliancy to every climate, but what most surprises me 
 Is, how the .sea could be so rude when bearing her own Venus. 
 
Mrs. Lap. Upon my word, I do not lament the fatigue of the voyage, since. 
 I have gained the shore of compUments and hospitahty. 
 
 Viol. Compliments, madam, are birds of passage, and their springes catch ] 
 woodcocks in all climes. 
 
 Bloom. Woodcocks, sir ! 
 
 Viol. Yes, sir, woodcocks— and you might be „ Q, were your nose longer. 
 
 Bloom. I don't know what cover you were sprung in, but if you don't mind 
 your flight you'll be a good shot here. 
 
 Viol. I came here for the purpose, sir, nor mean I to return before I have 
 winged a dozen cuckoos. 
 
 Gov. Come, come, young soldier, this snip-snap running fire won't do here. 
 [ have seen many young fellows wear their cockades as high as yours, and 
 repent of their follies. 
 
 Bloom. Stick me on a chevau.t-de-frise if it won't be his case too. 
 
 Viol. Sir! 
 
 Bloom. Sir ! — 'What news have you, Mr. Etheridge, in England ? 
 
 Viol. Nothing very new, sir; they speak English at the play-houses and 
 Italian at the operas, and as a pretty fellow you might get into vogue, for lady- 
 like gentlemen are all the ton. 
 
 Bloom, Indeed ! — I'm surprised, then, how they came to spare you. 
 
 Gov. A truce to these squibs and craciiers. I must find better entertainment 
 for Mrs. Lapelle. 
 
 Viol. I believe you or your aides-de-camp may. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Etheridge ! are you sober? 
 . Viol. Alas ! dear worthy Lapelle, thou wilt have the hottest campaign here 
 that ever soldier went through : won't he, my Lady Lapelle? 
 
 Mrs. Lap. You're an impertinent coxcomb ! 
 
 Viol. You are a very pretty woman. 
 
 Air (Mrs. Lapelle and 'Violeta). 
 
 She. 
 A coxcomb's the plague of one's life, 
 
 He. 
 The plague of each pretty wife. 
 
 Slu. 
 I hate and detest all their airs ; 
 
 He. 
 They'll kill and dispel all your cares. 
 
 She. 
 They are monkeys of men, 
 
 He. 
 
 Which you cannot condemn ; 
 
 She. 
 They are blockheads and fools • 
 
 He. 
 But, they're made in your schools. 
 
 \Exeunt the Lapelles, Go- 
 vernor, and Bloomer, 
 who leads the lady off. 
 
 Lothian, Aptjones a«i?- Jesse, come forward. 
 
 Viol. Well, Will, how do you like the scorching sun, and this tremendous 
 ragged rock ? 
 
 Jesse. I think, your honour, it promises to spoil all fair faces and garden 
 stuff : everything must be burnt to a cinder, but virtue, and that lags so in the 
 shade it can't be scorched. 
 
 Viol. I thank you, Will, for the simile. 
 
 Loth. He is a smart chield ensign that you have brought over. 
 
 T'"., ^'^'' enough, as food for gunpowder goes. He will serve to expend, 
 and will fill up a hole as well as a better man. 
 
Comic Opera. 177 
 
 Maj. Got's piessings upon hur — hur is as smart as a carrot, and pites like a 
 raddisli. 
 
 Viol. My dear Taffy, where is hur peard [mocking him). 
 
 Maj. Hur peard ! wiiat does hur mean ? 
 
 Viol. I never saw a goat on a roclt without one before. 
 
 Maj. Splutter and puddings, does hur mean to offend hur ! [putting his hand 
 to his sword). 
 
 Lotli. Zavvns ! Major, will ye never be cool ? thou'rt as quick as bruised 
 powder. 
 
 Viol. Put up hur cheese-toaster, it will serve to spit larks on half-pay. 
 
 Lotli. I am stunnd to see an auld fellow as sore as a minister. 
 
 Viol. To be sure, the blood in the Caledonian barometer does not mount so 
 quickly. 'Tis as lazy as the case that contains it. 
 
 Loth. You're a parfect snap-dragon, but we'll tame you. 
 
 Maj. Hur is as choleric as a lurkey-cock. 
 
 Viol. Come, come, you are veterans of service, and will forgive the folly of 
 a young man. 
 
 Maj. Oh, when hur confesses hur error, hur is ready to forgive. 
 
 Loth. And noo, sur, what— what have you ganging forward in London ? 
 
 Viol. I left all the Common Council of the City with as good stomachs 
 as "ever you knew them. And the Mansion House ■ 
 
 Maj. Now 
 
 Viol. In the same place. I paid my tailor, too, to make him stare. 
 
 Loth. This is nothing to the purpose — get on. < 
 
 Viol. First, then, I left their majesties in a good state of health, reigning in 
 the hearts of their subjects ; and the lords and commons doing wonders, and 
 by their patriotic zeal, and large supplies, they mean to convince the world that 
 England is a match for the four quarters. 
 
 Loth. Ay ! ay ! this is the auld spirit. 
 
 Maj. It is like Vesuvius, it smothers a while, and then blazes. 
 
 Viol. The park is fill'd with beaux of the Guards, who wear bloody stocks, 
 —to make the world believe they are cut-throats. George's is crammed with 
 honest soldiers, who have every advantage in life but one. 
 
 Maj. What is that? 
 
 Viol. Credit for what they want. 
 
 Maj. Yes, it is an old sore in tile army ; but the war will get over it. 
 
 Viol. Not if they don't get over the war. 
 
 Maj. Now let hur come to particulars. 
 
 Viol. Why, about four months ago, I had a rencontre with a woman of 
 the first fashion, and received a deep wound. 
 
 Maj. In hur heart ? 
 
 Vio^. No ! in hur constitution. 
 
 Loth. That's a worse place - a soldier only wants a heart to scale a parapet. 
 Well, younker, gang your gait. 
 
 Viol. I raked— was not black-ball'd at Kenny's, where I won money with- 
 out false dice. I fought a dozen duels without a wound on any side— fell in 
 love with every woman I saw without marrying — and I am now here to fight, 
 love, and drink with the bravest and the best. I am just going down to the 
 Ragged Staff to see my party landed, where I shall be happy to have your com- 
 pany if you will do me the honour to meet me there. 
 
 Loth. Ay, we'll review your bonny boys, and then introduce you to the 
 regiment. [Exeunt Major and Lothian. 
 
 Viol. Alas ! dear generous Lovelace, what have I suffered for thee ? — tedious 
 journeys, tempestuous seas, and every other distress that even men might 
 shrink at. Majf not this atone for my neglect and usage of thee? Oh ! let me 
 read again the dismal letter, the cause of all my woes : — 
 
178 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 " False, cruel, perjured Violeta, — 
 
 ' ' With suffering constancy I bore your cruelty, your neglect, your cold 
 disdain, but now I've conquer'd, and have torn your image from my heart. I 
 am this moment embarking as a private soldier for Gibraltar, where I hope 
 some kind bullet will possess that heart once designed for you. Farewell 
 eternally ! — Lovelace." 
 
 How I upbraid my cruelty and blame the folly of my mind, flattered with 
 the idle idea of securing- every heart at my pleasure ! O ! Lovelace ! Lovelace ! 
 how unjustly I have treated thee ! 
 
 yesse. Alas I dear gentleman, where is he ? for in vain have I inquired of 
 every creature since we landed. 
 
 Veil. Break, stubborn heart— break ! 
 
 l^esse. Oh, dear madam, remember with how many tears and entreaties I 
 begged you not to leave England — indeed now I blame myself for yielding 
 to your solicitations, for nothing but misery and vuin stare us in the face. 
 
 I^iol. Then had you for ever forfeited my esteem. All my care is now for 
 what you may endure, my dear Jesse. 
 
 yesse. Oh, dearest mistress, fear not for me ! if you can bear up imder the 
 difficulties that threaten us, I will support them with pleasure. 
 
 l-'iol. Come on ! and since Lovelace has so highly resented the fickleness of 
 my sex, I will be revenged on his, and quarrel with every fellow that 1 meet. 
 Now will I shake all female weakness from my heart, assume the airs of a real 
 male maccaroni, and make every coxcomb in the army stand clear of me. 
 
 I'll cock my hat, and draw my sword, 
 
 And be as fierce a blade 
 As ever swore or pawn'd his word. 
 
 Or woo'd a wiUing maid. 
 
 Air (Violeta). 
 
 Ill swear, I'll drink, I'll rake, I'll fight. 
 Talk nonsense by the hour ; 
 
 Sonnets to every beauty write, 
 And riot in amour. [Exeunt. 
 
 [A Scene here follows, upon the Beach, where soldiers are landing from the transport 
 ship, in which Lovelace and Halbert, with the Drummer, are the interlocutors, sur- 
 rounded by trulls and camp followers. It is purposely omitted because of its wholly 
 indifferent character.] 
 
 ACT II. 
 Scene.— /i Grove and Bower. 
 Bloomer and Caroline. 
 Caro. Is it possible I can observe your partial attentions and not be affected ? 
 Do you not watch every motion of her features, and lackey her very frowns and 
 smiles ? Have you, since the hour she arrived, ever paid me the least attention, 
 but been ever studious to observe her inclinations and to obey them ? Is this 
 the love and constancy you have sworn ? Is this the firm and everlasting testi- 
 mony of your affections ? 
 
 Bloom. Upon my word. Miss Caroline, you really are so quick in your 
 jealousies, and so primed and loaded with unjust resentments, that you- go 
 
Comic Opera. 
 
 179 
 
 off smack bang before one has touched the trigger. I— I — I have noticed 
 Mrs. Lapelle with that civiUty so natural to my breeding, and which no well- 
 bred man can avpid to a pretty woman ; but that I have any idea of dishonour 
 about me towards the lady is as false as my affection for you is true as my 
 rifled-barrel pistol's to the touch of my finger. 
 
 Caro. Oh, such preposterous rodomontade is more insulting than your be- 
 haviour ! 
 
 Bloom. Why, what in the name of Mars and Mercury am I to do or say ? 
 Upon my virtue— my sacred virtue, Miss Caroline— I do most sincerely love 
 you, and every officer in the garrison has observed it, and call'd me 
 
 Caro. Called you — Mr. Bloomer, called you what ? 
 
 Bloom. Only — happy dog ! and, indeed, I began to think so, till this new 
 fracas broke out. 
 
 Caro. And do you really think so ? 
 
 Bloom. Upon my honour, I not only think so, but I feel myself so ena- 
 moured and wedded to your — affections 
 
 Caro. If your conduct convinces me. Bloomer, I may endeavour to be- 
 lieve it. 
 
 Blooin. Upon my word, I am very well pleased to find you have recovered 
 your faith. It is a cursed troublesome thing that whenever people £^re in love, 
 they are sure to be eternally quarrelling and pouting, to prove the ardour of 
 their passions. 
 
 Air (Bloomer). 
 
 Thus all his fuel did unite 
 
 To make a fire divine, 
 None ever burned so hot, so bright, 
 
 As mine for Caroline. 
 
 So we alone the happy rest. 
 While all the rest is poor. 
 
 And have within ourselves possess'd 
 All Love's and Nature's store. 
 
 Nature had long a treasure made 
 
 Of all her choicest store, 
 Fearing, when she should be decayed, 
 
 To beg in vain for more 
 
 Love wisely had of long foreseen 
 
 That he must once grow old, 
 And therefore stored a magazine 
 
 To keep him from the cold. 
 
 Caro. And pray, Bloomer, where did you leave Mrs. Lapelle ? 
 
 Bloom. At the Convent, where we are to have a ball, al fresco, and for which 
 purpose I am come to invite my Caroline. I am to have the management of 
 the whole business ; and I flatter myself I shall dispose the variegated lamps 
 with more taste than the Cornellys, and throw her garden into the sere leaf 
 with my perpetual spring. 
 
 Caro. You're an agreeable creature, when you please. 
 
 Bloom. Yes, little Caro, I am that ; and Mrs. Lapelle has found it out too. 
 
 Caro. Oh ! your vanity, Bloomer, is your deformity ; she has too much taste. 
 But who, or what is she. Bloomer, for you're in every family secret. 
 
 Bloom. Who is she, Caro? why, a lady — who has been — a lady. 
 
 Caru. What, what, dear Bloomer, a lady — a lady of what ? 
 
 Bloom. Her husband is, without exception, the most sensible, worthy, gallant 
 fellow that ever drew a sword. 
 
 Caro. But what's that to her ? A fiddlestick for her husband 
 
 Bloom. Surely, my dear inquisitive little girl, it is a great deal for the virtues 
 of a husband, like a mirror, to reflect the virtues of his wife. 
 
 Caro. But do you know who she was ? or where she was bom ? or where she 
 comes from ? or where he got her ? Come, tell me, for I am dying to know. 
 
 Bloom. Yes, I dare say you are. She was long his mistress, and for her exem- 
 plary behaviour he made her his wife ; and a damn'd generous action it was ! 
 
 Caro. His mistress ! good heavens ! 
 
 Bloom. Yes, identically : not that I approve of the metamorphosis, for I never 
 
i8o The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 knew an instance of a good mistress making a good wife — unless for tlie Garrison 
 of Gibraltar. But do now, my sweet little orange-flower, do now prepare for 
 the Ball. 
 
 Air (Caroline)— " Through the Wood, Laddie." 
 
 O, Bloomer, nor seek thy dear Caro to tease, 
 
 For thou'rt all my pleasure. 
 
 My joy and my treasure; 
 And yet, thou delight'st not thy maiden to please. 
 Who, robbed of her lover's, deprived of her ease ! 
 
 Fare thee well, Rover, &c. 
 
 time to reflect and some caution to take. 
 
 Nor thus like a feather. 
 
 The caprice of weather. 
 Be blown to and fro hke a common town rake, 
 But think of the maiden who lives for ihy sake. 
 
 Fare thee well. Rover, &c. {Exit, 
 
 Bloom. Yes, my little Caro,— to be sure, you love me, — and I love you, and 
 ■we have plighted vows, — and if I continue in the same mind, I may marry you. 
 But yet, I confess, this Madame Lapelle hath altered the disposition of my 
 Army. Constancy and Fidelity— those steady sentinels of my heart— are dis- 
 banded. Truth and Sincerity were my body-guards, but they are marched into 
 1 winter quarters. And as for Love and Opportunity, they are out on a recruiting 
 'V party. But there is no reasoning on love; it takes everything by storm. Now 
 for this ^l fresco — I must not sacrifice taste for the want of cash, and therefore 
 the Jews are to supply the Garrison with five hundred moidores immediately. 
 Yes, yes, the Jews must supply the Garrison— there is no being without ammuni- 
 tion, when a serious siege is laid against a man's taste, and a lady like Lapelle 
 is to be won. 
 
 Enter Drummer. 
 
 D}-um. Sir, here's the last young Ensign from England without, who says he 
 will see you whether you'll be seen or not. I told him you were engaged with 
 a lady ; he said that was still a greater reason why he would come in. Egad ! 
 such a fellow, your honour, would be in the court-way before you could make 
 a sally. Here he is. 
 
 Enter 'ViOLETA. 
 Via!. Your servant, sir. 
 Bloom. Your servant, sir. 
 Viol. You had a lady here, sir? 
 Bloom. I had, sir, — what might you want with her? 
 Viol. To make love to her. 
 Bloom. 'Tis very concise, sir. 
 Viol. 'Tis a way I have, sir.' 
 
 Bloom. You seem, sir, to be a spark of the true celestial fire. Did you ever 
 cudgel a scoundrel ? 
 Viol. Twenty. 
 
 Bloom. Without an effort of resistance ? 
 Viol. Peaceable as martyrs. 
 
 Bloom. Then, sir, I have a job at hand shall make your list of flaeellation 
 twenty-two. 
 
 Viol. Come on— blows and rencontres are the joys of my soul. 
 Bloom. You must know I have borrowed five hundred moidores of two 
 scoundrels of usuringjews. 
 
Comic Opera. i8i 
 
 Viol. Not a word more. I am used to the work, I was whitewash'd the 
 last act of grace for four thousand — half-pay and all. 
 
 Bloom. Drummer, bid the Jews, Pottifar and Absalom, come in. 
 
 £«/«?- Jews. 
 Drum, (mocking). Here, gentlemans, this is the Jerusalem Chambers. I 
 wish I had thy wife, 'pothecary, and Absalom was hung on a tree {aside). 
 Pot. Your servants. Captains — here be httle Absaloms and Is, with de moneys 
 
 which I have hads from Cales 
 
 Bloom. It is no matter, if you had it from the Devil, I must have it. 
 Pot. Five per cents, and twenty moidores presents, my good Captain. 
 Bloom. Yes, yes, I don't object^it is a forced march with me. 
 Pot. You wants de silk stockings — Absalom has good ones. 
 Bloom. No : damn me if I want a stocking. 
 
 Pot. Yes, you must take ten pounds in stockings. Gentlemans always wants 
 stockings. 
 
 Viol. But, Jew, how do you know they will fit? Bloomer, I say, you shan t 
 take a stocking. 
 Pot. Yes, he must take the stockings, or 1 takes away de moneys. 
 Bloom. Damn his stockings— I'll take them, fit or not fit. 
 Viol. You shan't draw one of them on. 
 Bloom. I will. Drummer, take the cash. 
 I Drum. Yes, and I'll keep it as safe as the Jews of Venice. 
 
 Bloom. Now, sir, I'll try the length of your sword, whether I shall or 
 shall not wear his stockings. 
 
 Viol. With all my heart — come on. (They draw and push.) 
 
 [PoTTiFARyfeWJ down between them on his knees. 
 Pot. Oh ! for the sake of the great Gods— don't fights till I have insured 
 your lifes. 
 
 Viol. Away, Dives— I'll kill him dead as Nebuchadnezzar ! 
 
 E7itcr Major Aptjones suddenly. 
 
 Mai. Flood and confusion— is hur always a-fighting?— 'tis pity hur was not 
 in America. A few Guards, or Punker's Hill, would cool hur plood for hur. 
 What is the cause of hur drawing her sworts? , , i 
 
 Bloom. These Judasan scoundrels, IVIajor, wanted to pick my pocket ot , 
 twenty pieces. " , , . r u » i 
 
 Mai They arede thieves of the earth : from an old pair of preeches to a , 
 pound. Hur is sure to be a knave. I'll have them drummed out of the Gar- 
 
 " Pot. For the great God's sake. Major, spare little Pottifar and drum out . 
 Absaloms, who wanted to cheats the gentlemans. 
 
 Mai. Get hur to hur synagogue, or I will hur to a gaol. 
 
 Pot. The tribe of Israels pray for the Major and the Governor. {^Exeunt. ,1 
 .^A?/'. Well, what has hur to say for hurself now? ^ , ,. , 
 
 Viol. I have been ill-treated by this feather of a soldier, and unless he makes 
 \ the amende honorable, I can't put up with the affront. 
 
 ' Mai To all quarrels everypoty is in fault, and therefore you must beg one 
 i another's partons. 'Tis the best excuse to hur lives. Shake hants ; kiss and 
 ' be friends, and I will then introduce hur to the mass. 
 
 Viol. On your account, Major, I will look it over. But let every man take 
 care Iiow he affronts Ensign Etheridge. 
 
 Entcr]^%sz. 
 \cssc. I am desired to inform you, gentlemen, the drum hath beat to dinner. 
 J [jS'«/ot/ Bloomer, Violeta, awrf Major. 
 
r82 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Drummer and Jesse come forward. , 
 
 Jesse. These are hard times, comrade. 
 
 Drum. Only with those who choose to make 'era so, my little sraock-faoed 
 valet. 
 
 Jesse. Drummer, can you keep a secret ? ' 
 
 Drum. 'Tis part of my profession — but more difficult to keep than my 
 money. 
 
 Jesse. That I believe ; but you're not entrusted with enough of either to 
 give you any consequence. 
 
 Dinm. There's your mistake, my little cream-coloured plate; for my knap- 
 sack has all the intrigues of the Garrison in it, and my supplies enable me to 
 keep a bevy of beauties. I am the next man in this place to the Governor. 
 
 Jesse. How so ? 
 
 Drum. By being in the cabinet council of all. I am received at all hours; 
 and, like the true god of love, I shut my eyes. 
 
 Jesse. Then you hear all, see nothing, and say less. 
 
 Drum. Muffle's the word. 
 
 Jesse. Do you know my master means to make love to Miss Caroline ? 
 
 Drum. He may. The quarters are dear. 
 
 Jesse. How ? Does not Bloomer kneel there ? 
 
 Drum. No. He's after Madam Lapelle— and Caroline's after him. Love's 
 like hunting, when one flies, t'other pursues. 
 
 Jesse. So I believe, and we have experienced that most infernally in our 
 family. 
 
 Drum. In what manner? 
 
 Jesse. My master left England for love, and I too. 
 
 Drum. 'Tis a cursed disorder, and seems to have sweated you down to the 
 size of a drum-stick. Drink black-strap and get into flesh ; nor snivel away 
 your time hke a whining Italian. 
 
 Jesse. I have lost my brother. 
 
 Drum. Well, if he died hke a soldier in battle, a prince might envy him his 
 fall. 
 
 Jesse. No, he's not dead, he is in this Garrison : could you help me to find 
 him ? 
 
 Drum. That I will, if love has not disguised him as much as you. What's 
 his name ? 
 
 Jesse. Lovelace, and a handsome youth he is. 
 
 Drum. Yes, a family ought to be handsome with so much love in it Well 
 I'll pick him out, and turn that dismal face into smiles. ' ' 
 
 Air (Drummer (zwt? Jesse). 
 Drummer. 
 Ye gods ! what a plague to the soul of a man 
 
 Is that tickUng urchin of love 1 
 If the life of the longest is only a span, 
 How short must a soldier's, then, prove ! 
 
 Jesse. 
 ■What contests hath he with the seas and the wars ! 
 
 A prey to the sword and the gun ; 
 His fame is increased by his number of scars 
 
 By peace he is only undone. 
 
Comic Opera. 183 
 
 Both. 
 Ye heroes of arms, wlietlier soldier or tar, 
 
 Attend, and this maxim approve, 
 The soldier's bright star is the great god of war, 
 
 And he is the true god of war 1 {Exeunt. 
 
 Scene.— ^« Apartment, discovering Captaim and Mrs. Lapelle seated. 
 
 Lap. Dearest lady, I flatter myself that universal tenderness which I have 
 shown you for a series of years has made so happy an impression on your 
 mind that any admonitions or cautions which I may find necessary to give 
 you will meet with that approbation which your good sense entitles it to. I 
 have observed 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Well, what have you observed ? Bless me, Captain Lapelle, you 
 are going to preach, — and you know how much I hate it ! 
 
 Lap. Preach, madam ! Is it preaching to tell a wife of her danger, when she 
 is giving liberties— that may do her great discredit ? 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Liberties ! I shouldn't haVe thought of that— liberties ! 
 
 Lap. Yes, liberties, madam !— and such as neither your reputation nor my 
 honour will permit. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Reputation— honour— I don't understand you, sir ! 
 
 Lap. Then madam, you shall. The freedoms, Mrs. Lapelle, which you 
 have suffered that insignificant coxcomb, Bloomer, to take with you neither 
 become the dignity of a wife to suffer nor of a husband to bear. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. What ! a woman is not to suffer the polite addresses of a pretty 
 fellow, truly, but it Is to throw a husband into a fit of jealous vapours .' . 
 
 Lap. Do you call such addresses warrantable ? 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Warrantable ! — yes, very much so. 
 
 Lap. Is it, madam, consistent with the character of my wife to suffer an 
 impertinent, frothy fop to kiss her at his will ? 
 
 Mts. Lap. Kiss her !— and where's the harm of that ? what can be more inno- 
 cent than a simple kiss ? 
 
 Lap. So, Mrs. Lapelle,' you laugh at it,— you laugh at it, madam 
 
 Mrs. Lap. My dear doting caro sposo, would you have me cry at it ? 
 
 Lap. Madam, you have been here a short time, and your head has been 
 turned with a universal deluge of flattery; and if, madam, you cannot so con- 
 duc;t yourself as to reflect honour upon yourself and upon me, I shall be under 
 the disagreeable necessity of taking a step that may be very distasteful to you. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. You may take such steps as you please, sir ; I have no ill-mean- 
 ing in my behaviour, and I shall be very attentive to those who are polite and 
 attentive to me. 
 
 Air {Mrs. Lapelle). 
 Ye belles and ye flirts, pray who'd be a wife. 
 If each whim of her husband's to torture her life? 
 For surely these days a new fashion approve. 
 And all but her husband a lady may love. 
 
 Wedlock's now a release from mammas and old aunts; 
 A spouse must supply all a fine lady wants ; 
 A hfasband is but the convenience of life — 
 He may be the friend, not the flirt of a wife. 
 
 {Enter Caroline and Bloomer with a fine bouquet. 
 Captain and Mrs. Lapelle, Caroline and Bloomer. 
 Bloom, [walking hastily up to Mrs. Lapelle, presents her with a nosegay). 
 
 : J 
 
1 84 
 
 The Works aj Charles Lamb. 
 
 When maids, we tease our mothers' 
 hearts, 
 
 Perpetually in love ; 
 Or use a thousand little arts 
 
 Their jealousies to move. 
 
 A husband is our only care. 
 And when the man we've got, 
 
 Lil^e game entangled in a snare, 
 We toil to break the knot. 
 
 I have ransacked every garden in Gibraltar to procure this bouquet for your 
 acceptance, and for the high gratification of presenting it on my bended knee. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Dear Mr. Bloomer, you do me infinite honour. 
 
 Can. I suppose the Garrison, sir,'Wovild not afford two nosegays? 
 
 Bloom. No; platoon me to death with puns, Miss CaroUne, if it would. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Poor girl ! 'tis a pity to tease her, for she's in love with the fellow 
 —and yet a Turk may as well part with the favourite of his harem as a pretty f 
 woman with an agreeable flatterer. Miss CaroUne, will you accept the [ 
 bouquet ? I 
 
 Bloom. Now, there's a piece of complaisance ! j 
 
 Caro. O, madam, by no means,— I must beg your pardon I 
 
 Bloom. That's better on her side than I e.tpected. O, dear Lady Lapelle, you j. 
 are the real Flora it belongs to ! Nature produced it for your bosom, and | 
 blushed that it was not better. 
 
 Lap. Upon my word, sir, your compliments are so very flowery and ready, 
 that the hotbed of your imagination must be well supplied. 
 
 Bloom. Supplied, sir— supplied with what, sir? 
 
 Lap. With materials for raising mushrooms. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. I am astonished. Captain Lapelle, at your indelicacy ; such false 
 notions and absurd prejudices make you ridiculous ! 
 
 Lap. I am more astonished, Mrs. Lapelle, at the encouragement that you 
 give to every meteor of a spark that wishes to borrow fire from your eyes. 
 
 Air (Mrs. Lapelle). 
 
 [Mrs. Lapelle hajided off by Bloomer. 
 
 Captain Lapelle and Caroline. 
 
 Lap. I could not have believed it possible that so amiable, so sensible a 
 woman, who for a series of years has been a pattern of domestic virtue, could 
 have been so unguarded. 6 insupportable infatuation ! 
 
 Caro. Alas ! I fear it is but too true. I have with the deepest sorrow marked 
 and bewailed it. O fickle, false, insidious Bloomer ! 
 
 Lap. Ah, fair lady ! and— and— has the attachment been so palpable? 
 
 Caro. Indeed, Captain Lapelle, it would be the height of perfidy in me to 
 alarm your mind with any ungenerous suspicions — but I have seen 
 
 Lap. O, madam, I have seen enough already to make advancing dangerous. 
 I entreat you to proceed. 
 
 Caro. It is too plain that I am miserable. — Bloomer false, — and she untrue! 
 
 Lap. O base degenerate enchantress ! Not content with the ruin of her own 
 reputation, the world's opinion, and my peace — but to rob so fair a lady of her 
 love ! It is adding crime to crime. What is become of conjugal honour, once 
 the radiant star of England? Have vice and folly and a loose intercourse 
 with France perverted all our honourable manners to the most paltry foppery 
 of folly ? England ! England ! while the salt sea confined thy natives at 
 home, thy sons were valiant and thy daughters virtuous. By all the gods, he 
 shall experience the force of my resentment ! 
 
 Caro. I do beseech you, sir, to bear awhile this tide of injury ; some lucky 
 moment may destroy the tie, and snatch her from the brink of ruin she thus 
 braves. O my fond credulity ! what hast thou betrayed me to ? 
 
 Lap. Alas ! fair maid, this injury is double ; she linew too well the love you 
 
Comic Opera. 
 
 185 
 
 bore to Bloomer, and gloified in the captivafion. Ungrateful woman ! Did I 
 not love her, then I miglft be happy ; but she is twined so close about my 
 heart that death alone can shake her off. 
 
 Caro. Be moderate, sir; we both may be deceived. Perhaps it's but a 
 sudden turn of giddiness, which your calm admonitions may adjust, and bring 
 her back to home and calm reflection. More women are influenced by little 
 vanities, and by the hope of conquest over their admirers, than stirred by pas- 
 sions to commit an error. 
 
 Lap. What unequalled tenderness ! Alas ! fair maid, our lots are mutually 
 unfortunate. Might not some stratagem awake her virtue, and his love to you .' 
 Suppose this eve, at the ball, we assume a more lively air than usual : I'll pay 
 a constant attention to some other lady, and do you encourage the addresses 
 of Etheridge; thus, playing off the one against the other, you may recover the 
 inconstant soldier, and I bring back the wandering deer. 
 
 Caro. With all my heart. But yet how difficult a task, to dress a face in 
 smiles and wear a heavy heart ! But to regain the wanton flown there's not 
 a thing in life I would not do,— to constitute your felicity, and prevent her 
 shame. 
 
 Air (Caroline)—" Kate of Aberdeen.'' 
 Should the fond dove a wanton grow If, tired of constancy and truth, 
 
 And sigh to change her grove. The country she explores, 
 
 By sad experience she may know May not her inexperienced youth 
 
 The loss of mutual love. Wreck her on Syren shores ? 
 
 For, while she leaves her brooding 
 mate. 
 
 And tries the varying scene. 
 How hard may be her hapless fate ! 
 
 What woes may intervene ! 
 
 May she not in her varied range 
 
 Each sad disaster prove. 
 And, wounded, grieve the fatal change, 
 
 The loss of mutual love ? 
 
 \Exeunt. 
 
 Scene opens and discovers a Regiment at Mess. MAJOR APTJONES at the 
 head of the table. Lothian and Violeta sitting next the audience, and 
 opposite : with other officers. Chorus, as after a song. 
 
 " When ye come to Gibraltar, 
 
 Your notes will soon alter. 
 
 With plenty of claret and Bumper Squire Jones. " 
 
 Aptjones. Come, here's a pumper to the health of hur Majesties, and may 
 the trade and arms of Great Pritain flourish for ever ! 
 
 Viol. With all my heart. Fill round. {Sings) " With plenty of claret and 
 Bumper Squire Jones. ' ' 
 
 Aptjones. Come, Ensign Etheridge, as hur is a stranger, give hur a toast. 
 
 Viol. May he that flinches at a breast-work fall in the covert-way. 
 
 Loth. 'Tis a guid military sentiment, and gives a smack to the liquor. 
 
 Maj. Let us have a peauty ; 'tis love and wine that makes a soldier's face as 
 good a scarlet as his coat, for a soldier should look fierce as well as be fierce. 
 
 Viol. True, major, courage becomes a soldier, but there is no occasion to 
 hang out the sign of the Red Lion of Brentford. Come, give us a Spanish 
 donna — a duenna, if you will, for fashion has made an old woman all the mode 
 now. Lothian, have you no lass that has danced a reel on her linen by the 
 side of some rapid burn ? 
 
 Loth. Ay, ay, Maister Etheridge, those are the bonny things of the North.. 
 I'll give you the Highland Queen 
 
 Viol, {bursts into laughter). What ! Mary Queen of Scots? 
 
1 86 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Enter Halbert. 
 
 Hal. I have the Governor's orders to inform the gentlemen of the regiment 
 that he will be happy to have their company at the ball. Ensign Etheridge, 
 your party, sir, will be ready to review to-morrow morning. 
 
 Viol. Very well, sergeant, I will be on the ground ; but I must first reconnoitre 
 the recruits at the Convent. 
 
 Maj. Sergeant Halbert is an orderly guid man, and does hur duty like a 
 soldier ; give hur a glass of wine, and the sergeant will give us a new song, 
 made by a prave fellow of the 24th. Come, sergeant, sing to hur regiment. 
 
 Air (Halbert). 
 
 While the vine's balmy juice my troubles destroy, 
 O Bacchus, thy bounty dispense ! 
 « But ne'er, mighty God, let the hquor of joy. 
 
 Like Lethe's, deprive us of sense. 
 
 When love's tender passion my bosom alarms. 
 
 Grant, Venus, some beautiful fair ; 
 But O, never make me a slave to her charms. 
 
 Nor poison my pleasure with care ! 
 
 These cordials of Heaven by fools are abused. 
 
 And turned to the fountains of strife ; 
 'Tis by wise men alone that, when rightly they're used. 
 
 Love and wine are the blessings of life. 
 
 Scene closes in the Company ; hut Violeta and Halbert advance. 
 
 Viol. Well, sergeant, what do you think of my party ? 
 
 Hal. They are fine fresh lads, sir, and will drill into fine smart fellows. 
 
 Viol. I believe, Halbert, I shall want a little practice with you, for my 
 experience has not extended farther than the bows of a page, and drinking 
 at the St. James's Coffee-house. 
 
 Hal. O, sir, what I have seen of you already convinces me that you are 
 infinitely superior to the borough election oflicers we have daily remitted here. 
 
 Viol. Well, I will be punctually at the exercise-ground in the morning, and 
 as good a soldier as mounting guard at the Opera-house can make a pretty 
 fellow. \Exit. 
 
 Drummer passing the stage. 
 
 Hal. Halt ! where so fast, my little striped zebra ? 
 
 Drum. That's making me no better that an ass, sergeant. 
 
 Hal. But thou'lt allow it to be a fine ass— it is an ass of the Court. 
 
 Drum. An ass is an ass, whether of Court or country. I don't think the 
 reflection less whether a man's an ass in i^ags or lace : and therefore, sergeant, 
 send your ass into Spain ; for (he Spanish King is fond of their services {going\. 
 
 Hal. But why in such a hurry ? 
 
 Drum. I have business enough, and more than haste and honesty can 
 fulfil. 
 
 Hal. You've a dance to-night; I shall be therewith the guard; don't you 
 forget to smuggle a bottle, with a little good peck, to close the orifice of the 
 stomach. Great men. Drummer, play into one another's hands. Always imitate 
 your superiors. 
 
Comic Opera. 187 
 
 Air (H ALBERT). 
 
 Who the devil, pray, would be a sergeant. 
 For to drill and attend on these wargent ! 
 
 To turn out their toes. 
 
 Cock their hats, clean their clothes, 
 And with pockets without the true argent ! 
 
 As they exeunt, the Scene unfolds, displaying a Superb Garden, with Varie- 
 gated Lamps, and a great Company of Officers and Ladies. At the upper 
 end of the Stage two Palm-trees are distinguishable, with the Sea extend- 
 ing beyond the Garden, while across the water the Coast of Spain is 
 observable at a considerable distance. Music finishes, as after dancing. 
 
 Caroline and Violeta come forward. 
 
 Caro. Upon my word, sir, you are very free and familiar in your opinion of 
 us and our place. ItTnust be downright -prejudice, Mr. Etheridge; you can 
 have no real knowledge of either our modes or our manners. 
 
 Viol. In a moment, my pretty sprig of Spanish jessamine, I can squint 
 through the manners of a town ; it is my trade. I served as regular an 
 apprenticeship to it as a lump of a country boy to weigh sugar and rice in 
 the city. 
 
 Caro. An apprenticeship— where, sir ? 
 
 Viol. At Court. 
 
 Caro. That is the last place, Mr. Etheridge, to learn any vicious habits in ; it 
 
 is the asylum of innocence and conjugal love. 
 
 J Viol. Madam, you're mistaken ; that circle is a magic ring, where I had the 
 
 I honour of being a page, and where I learnt the language of the looks and 
 
 sighs, or I had not so soon discovered those little cupids dancing in your 
 
 bright eyes. 
 
 Caro. Upon my word ! you are very plain, very flattering, and very in- 
 sincere. 
 ' Viol. Yes, we have dropped all form and stiffness ; ceremony is the worst 
 mark of ill-breeding — Paris has taught us better; we come slapdash to the 
 question at once, and carry oiT a woman before she has time to reflect. 
 
 Caro. Any new fashions, Mr. Etheridge? — you seem to be a fop of the ton. 
 
 Viol. This is the last polonaise frock, after Beau Butterfly ; this is the last 
 smart cock; this is the new genteel walking air ; we bow thus, and ogle thus, 
 and run away with a beauty thus. ( Takes her 3'ound the waist and mixes in the 
 crowd.) 
 
 [Captain LAPELLE is seen to take very particular notice of a lady. 
 Bloomer and Mrs. Lapelle come forward. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Didn't you observe Lapelle's attention to Mrs. Wilmot? 
 
 Bloom. And didn't you observe Etheridge's addresses to Caroline? 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Yes, yes, yes, I see how it is ; but I will never suffer or support it. 
 
 Bloom. Nor I — damn the coxcomb ! I hate a coxcomb. I'll challenge him. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. And I will instantly put an end to their flirtation. 
 
 Bloom. And I'll put an end to him or myself — damn the coxcomb ! 
 
 ( They mix with the crowd.) 
 Gov. Ladies and gentlemen, make room for the new group of elegant Italian 
 dancers— and then for supper. Music, strike up ! 
 
 V [A grand Ballet finislus Second Act. 
 
1 88 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ACT III. 
 Scene.— ZAe Drill Ground. 
 
 Soldiers with their firelocks, carefully dispersed. SERVANT a7id DRUMMER 
 talking to each other. Lovelace comes forward leaning on his firelock. 
 
 j . Love. Despair and gi-ief must end my haled life. Wliat have I left for the 
 false, disdainful Violeta? Fortune, friends, , and everything that made life 
 pleasing and society endearing. Oh ! could my conscience admit a thought 
 of suicide, I would hasten death. But no laws, human or divine, can re- 
 concile self-murder. Ah ! Violeta, thou yet must reign my sharp tormentor. 
 
 Air (Lovelace). 
 
 Though ruined my fortune, my peace, and my fame, 
 I cannot against her unkindly exclaim : 
 And yet wear the willow, the badge of my shame — 
 Oh the green willow, the badge of my shame ! 
 
 Though she scorned my love, her name I adore. 
 And her beauties I'll praise, though I ne'er see them more : 
 ■Yet wear the sad willow, and sigh down the shore — 
 Oh wear the green willow, and sigh down the shore ! 
 
 Ah ! maiden, to rend a poor heart with despair, 
 ■Whose love and sincerity caused all its care. 
 And brought the possessor the willow to wear — 
 Alack, woe-is-me, the willow to wear ! 
 
 Ah ! well may ye blame me thus madly to rove, 
 And for one that's so false still continue to love. 
 
 And for her wear the willow whom plaints cannot move 
 
 The garland of sorrow, which beauty hath wove. 
 
 [Halbert and Drummer coming vp to him. 
 
 Hal. 'What! comrade, still in the dumps? Won't Spanish wine and new 
 beauties enliven thee? Thou'rt a dull mixture for a soldier ! 
 
 Love. I have had misfortunes, and was trepanned to 'list by some merciless 
 monsters who ply about Charing Cross to devour the innocent and unwarv. 
 
 Drum. 'What! you were not fairly beat up— the volunteer to a sheep'skin? 
 It IS a shame, m a free country, that such kidnappers should be suffered, or 
 that the Savoy should receive the bones of an honest fellow. 
 
 Hal. Come, come, my brave boy, we shall soon get rid of these quarters 
 for you, and make you as light and gay as a grenadier's feather. It is well 
 those kidnapping alligators didn't ship you for the East Indies, where you had 
 not been a champ for a crocodile. Here's Drum will show you what life is here, 
 and how a gentleman soldier makes sixpence go farther than a vulvar fellow 
 can half-a-ciown. 
 
 Drum. Showing will not signify anything, unless you can get a little priming 
 into him,— wet powder won't go off. 
 
 Hal. I like the looks of the lad, so I'll teach him his e.\ercise myself, and the 
 joys of the army. 
 
 Air (Halbert). 
 Do poets record 
 A dull tradesman or lord? 
 They're not worth the dip of their pen ; 
 
Comic Opera. 189 
 
 'Tis the soldiers of glory 
 Are famous in story, 
 For they are the heroes of men. 
 
 They're the pride of each wench, 
 
 And the fear of the French — 
 The dread of all Old England's foes t 
 
 They have no cares to vex. 
 
 No bad debts to perplex — 
 The King finds them money and clothes. 
 
 Drum. Now for tossing the brown musket — here comes our officer. 
 Hal. Order there !— fall back !— stand to your arms I ( The f arty form a line. ) 
 Drum. Now for my rub-a-dub (takes and slings his drum). How sounds 
 may be produced ! The skin of the sheep, which makes the music (striking 
 
 the drum), when alive only cried ba ! and though the most harmless 
 
 animal of the creation, yet, when manufactured into parchment, supplies 
 lawyers with deeds and armies with drums — the certain instruments of fraud 
 and murder. 
 
 Enter ViOLETA, attd JESSE with the spontoon. 
 
 Viol. Well, Sergeant, are we all here, and sober? (Takes the spontoon.) 
 
 Hal. Yes, your honour, perfectly sober. 
 
 Viol. Come, Halbert, give me a few hints (aside). 
 
 Hal. Remember, sir, to take long strides, and every now and then look 
 round with an air of contempt, stick your spontoon in the ground, shake your 
 head, and with a loud voice dommand silence. 
 
 Viol. Silence ! I say. 
 
 Hal. Now give your spontoon to your boy, take snuff affectedly, flourish 
 your cane, swear as you please — and these are as many qualities as a gentleman 
 requires to make a tolerable soldier. 
 
 Viol. Is that an attitude for a soldier, sirrah? (To a second) Who cocked 
 your hat, dog ? ( To another) I'll teach you to wear such a stock, villain ! ( To 
 another) How came you into the field, scoundrel! with a dirty shirt? Do 
 you think his Majesty allows you the luxury of sixpence a day to stuff vulgar 
 meat and drink. • (To Lovelace) What a boor of a clown have we here ! 
 carry your firelock thus, — and your head thus, or I'll knock it off your 
 shoulders, monster ! ■ 
 
 Love. Oh, my lucky stars, what a coxcomb's here ! 
 
 Hal. A major of twenty years' standing could not have done better. 
 
 yesse. What a spirit she has ! Were she known in the city, she would puzzle 
 the brokers more about the quality of her sex than the most artful chevalier of 
 the kingdom of France. Now for't ! 
 
 Hal. Now, sir, for the word of command ! 
 
 Viol. What shall I do for the words? (asiik to Halbert). 
 
 Hal. Oh, sir, an officer wants no words— only speak as if your mouth was 
 full of pudding ; they'll know the motion by the drill corporal. 
 
 Viol. Have a care bo— boo ! very well bo— boo ! boo ! all to- 
 gether there ! 
 
 Hal. Mind the drill corporal. 
 
 Viol, (to Lovelace). If you don't mind the word ^ven, I'll knock you 
 down, scoundrel ! 
 
 Hal. Oh ! that passion is very graceful, sir, and the true quality of a 
 martinet. 
 
 Viol. Ready — bo — boo ! scoundrels ! rascals ! mongrel dogs ! (Strikes 
 
 Lovelace.) I'll have thee, villain, tied to the halberds directly I 
 
I go 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Love. My soul's above a blow. Rascal as thou art — have at thy life ! (Attempts 
 to stab ViOLETA -with his bayonet. The SERGEANT knocks the piece out of 
 his hand and seizes him.) 
 
 Hal. This is mutiny ! The court-martial's sitting— drag him to the court 1 
 Thou wilt be shot immediately. 
 
 Love. I don't care how soon, for I am sick of life. , 
 
 Jesse. O ye gods, what an escape was this ! 
 
 ytol. Away with the blobdy-mmded villain ! I'll see him executed. 
 
 Love. Were I at liberty, I would .first execute thee. 
 
 yesse. Pray secure the wretch, that he don't get loose. 
 
 Hal. Corporal, inarch in front, and two in the rear. If he attempts to break 
 from you, kill him dead. 
 
 Drum. Shall I beat the funeral ? 
 
 Hal. March ! [Exeunt all hut Jesse and 'Violeta. 
 
 Jesse. Oh, dearest lady, what risks you do run ! I am all in a tremor. What 
 could inspire you with such intrepidity ?— or what could pcrvoke you to venture 
 such a danger ? 
 
 Viol. Revenge— for the loss of my unhappy Lovelace, and for his injuries ! 
 I'll persecute all the kex — lose my own life— or find the hapless wanderer ! 
 
 Jesse. Oh, for the sake of pity, drop these violent resolutions— throw your- 
 self at the Governor's feet — declare yourself a woman^and solicit his protec- 
 tion ! 
 
 Viol. No— no — I'll have the rank of colonel first, and show the lazy breed 
 of Park soldiers that the softer sex is not so soft as they. I'll have a regiment, 
 and malce thee a captain— thou wilt not discredit thy colours, wench ! 
 
 Jesse. I declare, madam, your spirit gives me courage. 
 
 Air (Jesse) — " Daniel Cooper." 
 
 No wonder girls in country towns 
 With soldiers gay are smitten ; 
 No wonder, too, that country clowns 
 By them so oft are bitten. 
 
 The smart cockade. 
 
 The gay parade, 
 May well allure the farmer ■ 
 
 'Twill lead him on 
 
 To sword and gun. 
 And make him quit his charmer. 
 
 Who can resist the scarlet coat. 
 
 Or turn on sons of glory ? 
 'Twas Paris the fair Helen brought 
 To Troy — as told in story. 
 
 From tliat to this 
 
 Each blooming Miss 
 Hath helped the hero's duty ; 
 
 And sons of arms 
 
 Have owned our charms — 
 The power of Love and Beauty I 
 
 Enter Bloomer. 
 Bloom, (to Etheridge). You have been out with your party. I am weary 
 with the business of last night. It was a cursed bore. 
 
 V/oi. It did not appear so. 
 
 Bloom. A very dull bore indeed ! But one must sacrifice to the whims of 
 a ■fine woman. Ypu danced with Caroline, I think? 
 
 Viol. I had that honour,. sir. 
 Bloom, Yes, she is a pleasing girl. 
 
 Viol. A most accomplished woman. 
 
 Bloom. I am glad our sentiments accord. Do you like Caroline, Etheridge? 
 
 Viol. Yes, she lias that about her that will captivate. 
 Bloom. O yes, she has it about her — the girl's well enpugh. 
 
 Viol. Yes, in general— they make them so now. 
 
 Bloom. Do you think of Ijer further than a flirtation or two ? 
 
 Viol. That depends upon her attentions. 
 
 Bloom. I thought you were sweet upon her— she is pretty. 
 
 Viol. I flattered her a little, and you flattered Lapelle— not a little. 
 
^ 
 
 i 
 
 «^ 
 
 
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 ■J is^ 
 
 |e?^ 
 
 ^ '^^ 
 
 \- 
 
 1-, 
 
 
190 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Love. My soul's above a blow. Rascal as thou art — have at thy life ! (Aitemfts 
 to stab ViOLETA ■with his bayonet. The SERGEANT knocks the fiece out 'of 
 his hand and seizes him.) 
 
 Ha!. This is mutiny ! The court-martial's sitting— drag him to the court ! 
 Thou wilt be shot immediately. 
 
 Love. I don't care how soon, for I am sick of life, , 
 
 'Jesse. O ye gods, what an escape was this.! 
 
 yiol. Away with the bloody-minded villain ! I'll see him executed. 
 
 Love, Were I at liberty, 1 would -first execute thee. 
 
 jfesse. Pray secure the wretch, that he don't get loose. 
 
 Hal. Corporal, march in front, and two in the rear. If he attempts to break 
 from you, kill him dead. 
 
 Drum. Shall I beat the funeral ? 
 
 Hal. March ! [Exeunt all but Jesse and Violeta. 
 
 jfesse. Oh, dearest lady, what risks you do run ! I am all in a tremor. What 
 could inspire you with such intrepidity ? — or what could !T-~oke you to venture 
 such a danger? 
 
 Viol. Revenge— for the loss of my unhappy Lovelace, and for his injuries ! 
 I'll persecute all the kex — lose my own life — or find the hapless wanderer ! 
 
 Jesse. Oh, for the sake of pity, drop these violent resolutions— throw your- 
 self at the Governor's feet — declare yourself a woman — and solicit his protec- 
 tion ! 
 
 Viol. No— no — I'll have the rank of colonel first, and show the lazy breed 
 of Park soldiers that the softer sex is not so soft as they. I'll have a regiment, 
 and make thee a captain— thou wilt not discredit thy colours, wench ! 
 
 Jesse. I declare, madam, your spirit gives me courage. 
 
 Air (Jesse)^" Daniel Cooper." 
 
 No wonder girls in country towns 
 With soldiers gay are smitten ; 
 No wonder, too, that country clowns 
 By tliem so oft are bitten. 
 
 The smart cockade. 
 
 The gay parade. 
 May well allure the farmer • 
 
 'Twill lead him on 
 
 To sword and gun, 
 And make him quit his charmer. 
 
 Who can resist the scarlet coat. 
 
 Or turn on sons of glory ? 
 'Twas Paris the fair Helen brought 
 To Troy — as told in story. 
 
 From that to this 
 
 Each blooming Miss 
 Hath helped the hero's duty ; 
 
 And sons of arms 
 
 Have owned our charms — 
 The power of Love and Beauty ! 
 
 Enter Bloomer. 
 
 Bloom, (to Etheridge). You have been out with your party. I am weary 
 witli the business of last night. It was a cursed bore. 
 
 Viol. It did not appear so. 
 
 Bloom. A very dull bore indeed ! But one must sacrifice to the whims of 
 a •fine woman. You danced with Caroline, I think? 
 
 Viol. I had that honour,. sir. 
 
 Bloom. Yes, slie is a pleasing girl. 
 
 Viol. A most accomplished woman. 
 
 Bloom. 1 am glad our sentiments accord. Do you like Caroline, Etheridge? 
 
 Viol. Yes, she has that about her that will captivate. 
 
 Bloom. O yes, she has it about her— the girl's well enpugh. 
 
 Viol. Yes, in general — they make them so now. 
 
 Bloom. Do you think of Ijer further than a flirtation or two ? 
 
 Viol. That depends upon her attentions. 
 
 Bloom. 1 thought you were sweet upon her — shf; is pretty. 
 
 Viol. I flattered her a little, and you flattered Lapelle— not a little. 
 
^ 
 
 
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 V 
 
 vl 
 
 ^ 
 
 <i> t « d V ^ K:3 a 5 1 
 
 ^. 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ \\ 
 
Comic Opera. 191: 
 
 Bloom. A gentleman's under an obligation of attention to these neglected 
 wives. 
 
 Viol. Neglected wives ! come, come, Mr. Bloomer, I must throw aside the 
 mask and assure you that no lady in the land is so little neglected as Mrs. 
 Lapelle — who possesses a husband, one of the first ornaments of the army and 
 society; nor does your particular attention, sir, to that lady become your 
 situation or her character. Husbands, Mr. Bloomer, are too often so critically 
 situated that they cannot take up these matters properly ; you must desist, sir, 
 in your bows and attentions to her, or I shall inform him who will add your 
 bones to the petrifactions at Europa Point. 
 
 Bloom. What the devil's the matter with you now? You're as full of fire as 
 the electrical eel. 
 
 Viol. I am, sir ! and will touch the torpedo part of your disposition, or any 
 man's disposition, who dares to invade the peace and ffelicity of a worthy family. 
 I am going to attend the court martial — and then, sir, I shall send Captain 
 Lapelle to attend you. 
 
 Air (ViOLETA.) 
 ■Would wives consult their dignity and fame, 
 The price of honour, and a virtuous name, 
 They'd never sacrifice to fools 
 
 And throw tliemselves away ; 
 But follow Virtue's hallow'd rules. 
 
 Nor let such meteors lead astray. 
 
 [^Exlt 'ViOLETA. 
 
 Bloom. Gunpowder ! I must mind the manoeuvres of this youth, or he'll 
 
 rescue the Lapelle and walk off with Caroline. Here, you fellow, your master's 
 
 servant. Where the devil does your master come from ? where was he born ? — 
 
 for he's the hottest spark 
 
 Jesie. Yes, sir, he is of a very hot quality. I very often feel the fever of> his 
 fury. His mother was a very passionate woman, sir, and his father a very 
 tiger. 
 
 Bloom. O, I find then he has it on both sides. I can tell you one thing, boy— 
 and if you regard him you may tell him this also — that if he does not lower his 
 sail a little, he will be whipped through the lungs as sure as he is alive. 
 
 Jesse. That will not be an easy matter, sir — for he is a special swordsman, 
 and is supposed to thrust better than any man in the county of Galway. 
 
 \PhIs herself in a. fencing altitude. 
 Bloom. Galway ! and I suppose a member of Lucas's. Coventry must be his 
 residence, and soliloquies his amusement. 
 
 Air (Bloomer.) 
 There's not a place around the world. 
 Where fate or chance hath soldiers hurl'd 
 At once to cool, to tame and settle 
 The boiling blood in sparks of mettle 
 
 Like a trip to Coventry. 
 Though masters, books, and jnoral rules 
 The lash and lumber of the schools 
 May fail — yet still we oft discover 
 Amendment in the Buck and Lover, 
 
 By a trip to Coventry, 
 
 Scene. — A Room. 
 
 Captain and Mrs. Lapelle. 
 
 Lap. I am determined, Mrs. Lapelle, to remove you from this place; 
 
192 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 the career you are driving with this young fop is a dishonour to your age, 
 your character, and fame. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Age, sir ! 
 
 Lap. Yes, age, madam ! Your native bloom by the hand of time is swept 
 from your pallid cheek, which you have supplied with art. I blush to 
 mention this, madam ; but fashion has established this disgraceful custom. 
 O fie ! fie, to hang out false colours, hke a common Syren. Is this well done ? 
 
 Mrs. Lap. This, sir, is a rudeness I am unused to, and which 1 will not bear. 
 
 Lap. This you shall bear, madam; nay, and ten times more, unless you 
 will alter this eccentric conduct. The honour of my house, madam, is 
 equal to the honour of my character, nor shall either be suUied while I've a 
 hand to defend one and a mind to support the other. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. You have indeed, sir, thrown yourself into a violent rage : and for 
 what— I am at a loss to explain ! ' 
 
 Lap. Madam, I will not be trifled with — I have seen enough to convince 
 me that the looseness of your behaviour has discredited me, and drawn the 
 reflections of the world upon you. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. The world ! I despise the world— the bugbear you always intro- 
 duce to awe us. I have done nothing, sir, that can reflect dishonour ; 1 feel my 
 innocence, and I defy the public calumny. The world ! 
 
 Lap. Without the countenance of that world yoa so contemptuously despise, 
 a situation in society, madam, is narrow and irksome. Remember, madam, 
 the pains I took to raise you in the world's opinion ; and will you, Mrs. Lapelle, 
 in a few days destroy and ruin what I have laboured for years to accomplish ? 
 Is this your gratitude ? 
 
 Mrs. Lap. My gratitude I own. But, as my intentions are innocent in 
 regard to Mr. Bloomer, there is nothing you can do, sir, that shall make me 
 alter my opinion or my behaviour. Platonic friendship 
 
 Lap. Platonic nonsense ! — the idle romantic phrenzy of a false philosopher, 
 who, to prove his ability, has aimed at reconciling the absurdest contradictions 
 of nature. The system, madam, may do in the sere leaf of life, but not with 
 youth and beauty. 'Tis incompatible and unnatural. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. Heavens ! what a man!— to attempt to depreciate the fame of the 
 inimitable Eloisa. Sir, the friend of that school you so condemn is what I 
 have ever wished to find in life. 
 
 Lap. That friend you have in your loving husband, without that school. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. No, sir, these friendships are distinct ; to you I owe in duty, love — 
 but surely I may have a pure and virtuous friendship for another without 
 abating my affection for you. 
 
 Lap. This, madam, is trifling with me. To prove the strength of this 
 friendship, see, see, Mrs. Lapelle, your own letter. 
 
 Airs. Lap. {falls on ficr knees). O, I confess my error. O pardon and for- 
 give me— with the humblest contrition I now beseech it.. 
 
 Lap. Rise, dear lady ; there is not a favour you can ask I can refuse ; 
 be this the future beacon to your conduct, and now avoid the coast you were 
 so nearly wrecked on. 
 
 Mrs. Lap. O, exemplary goodness ! Never from this moment will I sport 
 with the affections of him to whom I owe every blessing and honour. Forgive 
 me, dear Lapelle. 
 
 Lap. I do ; dry those tears which I but now made flow, and which I hope 
 may never stream again. 
 
 Air (Mrs. Lapelle) 
 
 Would ye, ye wives, this lesson prove. 
 You ne'er would sink in shame, 
 
 Mallfi pride the sentinel of love 
 And guardian of your fame. 
 
 The pride of every female breast, 
 
 Should be reproach to shun. 
 She that is pure in mind is blest; 
 I If false, she is undone. [Exeunt. 
 
Scene changes to the Street before the Court-Martial Room. 
 Enter Halbert, aud Drummer, with Lovelace as a prisoner. Guard, b'c. 
 
 Hal. I never felt my heart relax for a comrade before, when he had comr 
 mitted a capital offence ; but there is something about thee that moves the 
 hardness of my disposition, because I fear there is no hope of saving thee. 
 Thine is the supreme crime in the army. 
 
 Love. Your concern for me betrays the humanity of your heart. I thank 
 you for your affection, but death is more welcome to me than life. 
 
 Drum. It would be a long time before I could persuade myself to think so ; 
 but I fear there's no more chance for thee than for the head of my drum against 
 the point of a sharp knife. Mutiny to an officer is a deadly stroke, I remem- 
 ber 1 received 400 lashes once for a sort of speech I made on a march, 
 
 Hal. How so, Drummer ? 
 
 Drum. We were. padding the hoof, all over dirt and sweat, at the Retreat at 
 St. Cas, where a good pair of heels was of vast service to a man : so says a 
 comrade to me, seeing the officers ride " Let's pull them off their horses. 
 Zounds ! shall they ride and we walk? " " Be quiet," replies I ; "if they don't 
 ride horses, they'll ride us." Egad! as soon as we had escaped the bayonet, 
 they tickled my back with the hands of two brother drums— 400— and laid it 
 in as close as wax. 
 
 Lov. Thou'rt a cheerful, happy lad, and may prosper. I am pleased with 
 my condition — nor do I repine at the expected fate. 
 
 ^iV.— (Lovelace.) 
 
 The world hath lost its charms for me ; 
 Beauty like Truth's no more ; 
 
 My mirth is changed for misery- 
 She's false whom I adore. 
 
 Angels are not more fair above. 
 
 In each exterior part ; 
 But angels are more true in love, 
 
 And wear a purer heart. 
 
 Drum. Zounds ! my brave fellow, don't let the idea of a bullet kill thee 
 before thou'rt shot. If this breath of life is so irksome, the sooner it's let 
 out the better. Come ! come, I hate to see a fine fellow chap-fallen. Brace 
 up, my buck ! there's good sound in thee yet. 
 
 Air (Drummer) " There was a Mouse lived in a Mill." 
 [Kettledrums and Flutes ) 
 
 We've bright blue eyes about the town. 
 
 Whose rigdum will decoy ye ■, 
 
 And buxom damsels, fair and brown. 
 
 With a rigdum — bonny blue— decoy me ! 
 
 Decoy me, Mary— decoy me, Jenny— decoy me, Sarah— decoy me ! 
 
 Hum-strum, kettle-drum— rum-dum-beauty decoy me ! [Exeunt. 
 
 Scene opens and discovers a regimental Cotirt-Martial.—JVVGE, ADVOCATE, 
 Clerk, Major Aptjones, Lothian, Bloomer, and other Officers. 
 
 Loth. Come, Mr. Judge, let us proceed to business. 
 
 Clerk. Gentlemen of the court, by virtue of a warrant signed by his Excoi- 
 
194 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 lenoy the Governor, you are to inform yourselves of all complaints and 
 misdemeanors that may be brought before you, and upon evidence and con- 
 fession of the criminal party, you are to proceed in judgment, according to the 
 established Articles of War and the custom of the Army. Being sworn, gen- 
 tlemen, you may open the court. 
 
 Maj. Well, let hur call in the parties. 
 
 Judge. Call in the prisoner, and the witnesses against him. 
 
 [£«/«;- Lovelace,. VioLETA, Jesse, H albert, ffw^f Drummer, 
 
 Jndge {to ViOLETA). Stand where you are, sir. What have you to advance 
 against the prisoner ? 
 
 Viol. I was exercising my party early in the morning, and this recruit being 
 more awkward than the rest, I corrected him for it, when he called me rascal, 
 and endeavoured to stab me with his bayonet, which he certainly had effected, 
 but the sergeant prevented — — 
 
 Hal. It is certainly true as my officer reports. 
 
 Loik. Such a bliudy dog should have been cut to mince-collops on the spot ! 
 
 •Maj. Hur is a clouded knave, nor has the fear of Cot before hur eyes. 
 Hur shall be advanced to a gibbet. 
 
 Bloom. Yes, he should hang in the wind to cool his fiery spirit. 
 
 Drum, (to Lovelace). Ah ! comrade, I thought that you would be no 
 more in" their hands than a drumstick in mine. 
 
 Lov. Gentlemen, I know your power, and submit to my sentence. Life has 
 long been a burden to me. I had rather have paid the debt in the field, but I 
 die contented. A blow is what I never received before, and what my pride 
 will never suffer me to bear. 
 
 Bloom. 'Tis an insolent dog, to resent a stroke from an officer. I always 
 think I do a fellow an honour when I cane him. 
 
 Lov. But, permit me to inform this honourable court, before I die, that I 
 am a gentleman of fortune of the county of York, but, being cruelly treated by 
 the woman I adored, I sought death in battle to relieve my woes, and as a 
 soldier left my country. Now lead me to my fate. Ah, ungrateful Violeta. 
 {Turning as to go off.) 
 
 Viol. Oh, save me, Heaven ! {Fainting in "iikXXEKV' 5 arms. Jesse runj to 
 her.) 
 
 Jesse. Oh, help ! help I Oh, save my mistress ! 
 
 Lov. Mistress ! 
 
 Bloom. What ! does our fighting spark faint at the name of death ? 
 
 Viol, {recovering). Hold— hold— hold ! Ah, injured Lovelace ! wretched 
 Violeta ! 
 
 Lov. Ah, ye protecting powers ! I know that tuneful voice. She lives 1 she 
 lives ! the dear deluding Violeta. 
 
 Bloom. 'Tis a woman, egad ! I must mal<e a pretty figure here to have set 
 my wits to a woman. 
 
 Loth. Zounds ! if women begin to turn soldiers, and only ladylike officers 
 get promotion, 'tis time I was hame in quarters for life. The best act, Maister 
 Bloomer, ye can do is to skep awa' for the Governor, and let him 
 
 [A break occurs here in the manuscript— the last leaf of which gives the following as 
 the rough draft of a conclusion] : — 
 
 Mrs. Lapelle. 
 It should be the study of mistress and wife 
 To smooth by her smiles the rough journey of life , 
 
Comic Opera. 195 
 
 For happiness truly the fair must attend 
 
 Who makes virtue her guide, and her husband her friend. 
 
 Lovelace. 
 
 All heroes of arms, since the day of old Troy, 
 
 Have been scratched more or Cess with the dart of the Boy 
 
 It is Beauty the standard that bears to the field, 
 
 And to Beauty alone 'tis that Englishmen yield. 
 
 Caroline. 
 
 The fop may reform, and the rake may repent ; 
 For vice, when corrected, brings pleasing content ; 
 And every fair maiden's so vain of her charms. 
 That she thinks reformation's restricted to arms. 
 
 ViOLETA. 
 
 The spirit I've shown I hope will inspire 
 Our ladylike soldiers with courage and fire 
 He cannot wear scarlet, or fight with the French, 
 Who'won't surpass me for the love of his wench. 
 
 Halbert and Chorus. 
 
 'Tis Valour's the star which irradiates earth, 
 
 Not titles and s&ings — the mere fungus of birth ; 
 
 By courage our fathers defended this isle, 
 
 And her sons ne'er retreat, while her daughters but smile ! 
 
 Chorus. 
 'Tis Valour's the star which irradiates earth, &c. 
 
iq6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Calts. 
 
 ^losamwnir ^ran. 
 
 [Originally published in 1798, by Lee and Hurst, at 32, Paternoster Row, in a half- 
 crown duodecimo of 134 pages, umder the title of "A Tale of Rosamund Gray, and Old 
 Blind Margaret." The root-idea of this charming narrative is traceable to the antique 
 ballad of "The Old Woman clothed in Gray." The little volume in its original issue 
 was inscribed in friendship to Marmaduke Thompson, of Pembroke Hall> Cambridge.] 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 It was noontide. The sun was very hot. An old gentlewoman sat spinning 
 in a little arbour at the door of her cottage. She was blind ; and her grand- 
 daughter was reading the Bible to her. The old lady had just left her work, 
 to attend to the story of Ruth. 
 
 "Orpah kissed her mother-in-law; but Ruth clave unto her." It was a 
 passage she could not let pass without a comment. The moral she drew from 
 it was not very new, to be sure. The girl had head it a hundred times before 
 — and a hundred times more she could have heard it, without suspecting it to 
 be tedious. Rosamund loved her grandmother. 
 
 The old lady loved Rosamund too ; and she had reason for so doing. Rosa- 
 mund was to her at once a child and a servant. She had only her left in the 
 world. They two lived together. 
 
 They had once known better days. The story of Rosamund's parents, their 
 failure, their folly, and distresses, maybe told, another time. Our tale hath 
 grief enough in it. 
 
 It was now about a year and a half since old Margaret Gray had sold off all 
 her effects, to pay the debts of Rosamund's father —just after the mother had died 
 of a broken heart ; for her husband had fled his country to hide his shame in 
 a foreign land. At that period the old lady retired to a small cottage, in the 
 village of Widford, in Hertfordshire. 
 
 Rosamund, .in her thirteenth year, was left destitute, without fortune or 
 friends ; she went with her grandmother. In all this time she had served her 
 faithfuljy and lovingly. 
 
 Old Margaret Gray, when she first came into these parts, had eyes, and 
 could see. The neighbours said, they had been dimmed by weeping : be that 
 as it may, she was latterly grown quite blind. "God is very good to us, child ; 
 I canyie/you yet." This she would sometimes say; and we need not wonder 
 to hear, that Rosamund clave unto her grandmother. 
 
 Margaret retained a spirit unbroken by calamity. There was a principle 
 within, which it seemed as if no outward circumstances could reach. It was 
 a.re!iffious principle, and she had taught it to Rosamund; for the girl had 
 mostly resided with her grandmother from her earliest years. Indeed she had 
 taught her all that she knew herself; and the old lady's knowledge did not 
 extend a vast way. 
 
Rosamund Gray. 197 
 
 Margaret had drawn her maxims from observation ; and a pretty long ex- 
 perience in life had contributed to make her, at times, a little fositive ; but 
 Rosamund never argued with her grandmother. 
 
 Their library consisted chiefly in a large family Bible, with notes and exposi- 
 tions by various learned expositors from Bishop Jewell downwards. 
 
 This might never be suffered to lie about like other books— but was kept 
 constantly wrapped up in a handsome case of green velvet, with gold tassels 
 —the only relic of departed grandeur they had brought with them to the 
 cottage — everything else of value had been sold off for the purpose above- 
 mentioned. 
 
 This Bible Rosamund, when a child, had never dared to open without per- 
 mission ; and even yet, from habit, continued the custom. Margaret had 
 parted with none of her authority ; indeed it was never exerted with mucli 
 harshness ; and happy was Rosamund, though a girl grown, when she could 
 obtain leave to read her Bible. It was a treasure too valuable for an indis- 
 criminate use ; and Margaret still pointed out to her granddaughter where to 
 read. 
 
 Besides this, they had the " Complete Angler, or Contemplative Man's 
 Recreation," with cuts — "Pilgrim's Progress," the first part — a "Cookery 
 Book," with a few dry sprigs of rosemary and lavender stuck here and there 
 between the leaves (I suppose, to point to some of the old lady's most favourite 
 receipts) and there was " Withers Emblems," an old book, and quaint. The 
 old-fashioned pictures in this last book were among the first exciters of the 
 infant Rosamund's curiosity. Her contemplation had fed upon them in rather 
 older years. 
 
 Rosamund had not read many books besides these ; or if any, they had been 
 only occasional companions : these were to Rosamund as old friends, that she 
 had long known. I know not, whether the peculiar cast of her mind might 
 not be traced, in part, to a tincture she had received, in early life, from Walton, 
 and Wither, from John Bunyan, and her Bible. 
 
 Rosamund's mind was pensive and reflective, rather than what passes usually 
 for clever or acute. From a child she was remarkably shy and thoughtful — 
 this was taken for stupidity and want of feeling; and the child has been some- 
 times whipped for being a stubborn thing, when her little heart was almost 
 bursting with affection. 
 
 Even now her grandmother would often reprove her, when she foimd her 
 too grave or melancholy ; give her sprightly lectures about good humour and 
 rational mirth ; and not unfrequently fall a crying herself, to the great discredit 
 of her lecture. Those tears endeared her the more to Rosamund. 
 
 Margaret would say, " Child, I love you to cry, when I think you are only 
 remembering your poor dear father and mother— I would have you think about 
 them sometimes — it would be strange if you did not — but I fear, Rosamund, 
 I fear, girl, you sometimes think too deeply about your own situation and poor 
 prospects in life. When you do so, you do wrong — remember the naughty 
 rich man in the parable. -He never had any good thoughts about God, and his 
 religion : and that might have been your case." 
 
 Rosamund, at these times, could not reply to her : she was not in the habit 
 of arguing with her grandmother ; so she was quite silent on these occasions 
 — or else the girl knew well enough herself, that she had only been sad to think 
 of the desolate condition of her best friend, to see her, in her old age, so in- 
 firm and blind. But she had never been used to make excuses, when the old 
 lady said she was doing wrong. 
 
 The neighbours were all very kind to them. The veriest rustics never 
 passed them without a bow, or a pulling off of the hat — some show of courtesy, 
 awkward indeed, but affectionate— with a "good morrow, madam," or "young 
 madam," as it might happen. 
 
X(j8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Rndeand savage natures, who seem born with a propensity to express con- 
 tempt for anything that looks like prosperity, yet felt respect for its declining 
 lustre. 
 
 The farmers, and better sort of people (as they are called) all promised to 
 provide for Rosamund, when her grandmother should die. Margaret trusted 
 in God, and believed them. 
 
 She used to say," I have lived many years in the world, and have never 
 linown people, good people, to be left without some friend ; a relation, a bene- 
 factor, a something, pod knows our wants— that it is not good for man or 
 woman to be alone ; and he always sends us an helpmate, a leaning-place, a 
 omewkat." Upon this sure ground of experience, did Margaret build her 
 trust in Providence. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Rosamund had just made an end of her story (as I was about to relate) and 
 was listening to the application of the moral (which said application she was 
 old enough to have made herself, but her grandmother still continued to treat 
 her in many respects as a child, and Rosamund was in no haste to lay claim 
 to the title of womanhood) when a young gentleman made his appearance, 
 and interrupted them. 
 
 ' It was young Allan Clare, who had brought a present of peaches, and some 
 roses, for Rosamund. 
 
 ■ He laid his little basket down on a seat of the arbour ; and in a respectful 
 tone of voice, as though he were addressing a parent, inquired of Margaret, 
 "how she did." 
 
 The old lady seemed pleased with his attentions— answered his inquiries by 
 saying, that " her cough was less troublesome a nights, but she had not yet 
 got rid of it, and probably she never might ; but she did not like to tease 
 young people with an account of her infirmities." 
 
 A few kind words passed on either side, when yotmg Clare, glancing a 
 tender look at the girl, who had all this time been silent, took leave of them 
 with saying, " I shall bring Elinor to see you in the evening." 
 
 When he was gone, the old lady began to prattle. 
 
 " That is a sweet dispositioned youth, and I do love him dearly, I must say 
 it — there is such a modesty in all he says or does — he should not come here so 
 often, to be sure, but I don't know how to help it ; there is so much goodness 
 in him, I can't find in my heart to forbid him. But, Rosamund, girl, I must 
 tell you beforehand ; when you grow older Mr. Clare must be no companion 
 for jyoa— while you were both sa young, it was all very well— but the time is 
 coming, when folks will think harm of it, if a rich young gentleman, like Mr. 
 Glare, comes so often to our poor cottage. JJost'hear, girl? why don't you 
 answer? come, I did not mean to say anything to hurt you— speak to me, 
 Rosamund— nay, I must not have you be sullen— I don't love people that are 
 sullen." : 
 
 And in this manner was this poor soul running on, unheard and unheeded, 
 when it occurred to her, that possibly the girl might not be within hearing. 
 
 And true it was, that Rosamund had slunk away at the first mention of Mr. 
 Clare's good qualities : and when she returned, which was not till a few minutes 
 after Margaret had made an end of her fine harangue, it is certain her cheeks 
 did look very rosy. That might have been from the heat of the day or from 
 exercise, for she had been walking in the garden. 
 
 / Margaret, we know, was blind ; and, in this case, it was lucky for Rosamund 
 that she was so, or the might have made some not unlikely surmises. 
 
Rosamund Gray. . igg . 
 
 I must nothave.my readeranfer. from this, that I i^t all thinkit likely avQune 
 maid of fourteen would fall in love without asking, her grandmothers leave— 
 the thing itself is not to be conceived. , 
 
 To obviate all suspicions, Lam disposed; to communicate a little anecdote of 
 Rosamund. . . 
 
 A month or two back her grandmother'had been giving her the strictest pro 
 hibitions, in her walks, not to go near a certain spot, which was dangerous 
 from the circumstance of a huge overgrown oak-tree spreading its proJgious 
 arms across a deep chalk-pit, which they partly concealed. 
 
 To this fatal place Rosamund came one day— female curiosity, we know is 
 older than the flood— let us not think hardly of the girl, if she partook of the 
 sexual failing. . 
 
 Rosamund ventured farther and farther- climbed along one of the branches 
 —approached the forbidden chasm— her foot slipped— she was not killed- butit 
 was a mercy she escaped— other branches intercepted her fall— and with a 
 palpitating heart she made her way back to the cottage. 
 
 It happened that evening, that her grandmother was in one of her best 
 humours, caressed Rosamund, talked of old times, and what a blessing it was 
 they two found a shelter in their little' cottage, and in conclusion told Rosamund 
 " she was a good girl, and God would one day reward her for her kindness to 
 her old blind grandmother." 
 
 This was more than Rosamund could bear. Her morning's disobedience 
 came fresh in her mind, she felt she did not deserve all this from Margaret, 
 and at last burst into a fit of crying, and made confession of her fault. The 
 old gentlewoman kissed and forgave her. 
 Rosamund never went near that naughty chasm again. 
 Margaret would never have heard of this, if Rosamund had not told of it 
 herself But this young maid had a delicate moral sense, which would not 
 suffer her take advantage of her .grandmother, to deceive her, or conceal any- 
 thing from her, though Margaret was old, and blind, and easy to be imposed 
 upon. 
 
 Another virtuous trait I recollect of Rosamund, and, now I am in the vein, 
 I will tell it. 
 
 Some, I know, will think these things trifles — and they are so^-but if these 
 minulics make my reader better acquainted with Rosamund, I am content to 
 abide the imputation. 
 
 These promises of character, hints, and early indications of a sweet nature, 
 are to me more dear, and choice in the selection, than any of those pretty 
 wild flowers, which this young maid, this virtuous Rosamund, has ever 
 gathered in a fine May morning, to make a posy to place in the bosom of her 
 old blind friend. 
 
 Rosamund had a very just notion of drawing, and would often employ her 
 talent in making sketches of the surrounding scenery. 
 
 Un a landscape, a larger piece than she had ever yet attempted, she had 
 now been working for three or four months. She had taken great pains with 
 it, given much time to it, and it was nearly finished. For whose particular 
 inspection it was designed, I will not venture to conjecture. We know it 
 could not have been for her grandmother's. . 
 
 One day she went out on a shbrt errand, and left her landscape on the table. 
 When she returned, she found it gone. 
 
 Rosamund from the first suspected some mischief, but held her tongue. At 
 length she made the fatal discoveiy. Margaret, in her absence, had laid 
 violent hands on it ; not knowing what it was, but taking it for some waste 
 paper, had torn it in half, and with one half of this elaborate composition had 
 twisted herself up — a thread-paper ! 
 Rosamund .spread out her hands at sight of the disaster, gave her grandj- 
 
200 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 mother a roguish smile, but said not a word. She knew the poor soul would 
 only fret, if she told her of it, — and when once Margaret was set a-fretting for 
 other people's misfortunes, the fit held her pretty long. 
 
 So Rosamund that very afternoon began another piece of the same size and 
 subject ; and Margaret, to her dying day, never dreamed of the mischief she 
 had unconsciously done. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Rosamund Gray was the most beautiful young creature that eyes ever beheld. 
 Her face had the sweetest expression in it— a gentleness — a modesty — a timidity 
 — a certain charm — a grace without a name. 
 
 There was a sort of melancholy mingled in her smile. It was not the 
 thoughtless levity of a girl — it was not the restrained simper of premature 
 womanhood— it was something which the poet Young might have remem- 
 bered, whan he composed that perfect line, 
 
 *' Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair." 
 
 She was a mild-eyed maid, and everybody loved her. Young Allan Clare, 
 when but a boy, sighed for her. 
 Her yellow hair fell in bright and curling clusters, like 
 
 ** those hanging locks 
 Of young Apollo." 
 
 Her voice was trembhng and musical. A graceful diffidence pleaded for 
 her whenever she spake— and, if she said but little, that Uttle found its way to 
 the heart. 
 
 Young, and artless, and innocent, meaning no harm, and thinking none ; 
 affectionate, as a smiling infant— playful, yet unobtrusive, as a weaned lamb 
 —everybody loved her. Young Allan Clare, when but a boy, sighed for her. 
 
 The moon is shining in so brightly at my window, wheie I write, that I feel 
 it is a crime not to suspend my employment awhile to gaze at her. 
 
 See how she glideth, in maiden honour, through the clouds, who divide on 
 either side to do her homage. . 
 
 Beautiful vision !— as I contemplate thee, an internal harmony is communi- 
 cated to my mmd, a moral brightness, a tacit analogy of mental purity ■ a 
 calm like tliat we ascribe in fancy to the favoured inhabitants of thv fairy ' 
 regions, " argent fields. " 
 
 I marvel not, O moon, that heathen people, in the "olden times," did wor- 
 ship thy deity— Cynthia, Diana, Hecate. Christian Europe invokes thee not 
 iDy these names now— her idolatry is of a blacker stain ; Belial is her God- 
 she worships Mammon. 
 
 False things are told concerning thee, fair Planet— For I will ne'er believe, 
 that thou canst take a perverse pleasure in distorting the brains of us poor 
 mortals. Lunatics ! moon-struck ! Calumny invented, and Folly took up 
 Infl^* "^'"'=^- ' w°"W hope better things from thy mild aspect and benign 
 
 Lady of Heaven, thou lendest thy pure lamp to light the way to the Virsrin 
 Mourner, when she goes to seek the tomb where her Warrior Lover lies. 
 
 friend of the distressed, thou speakest on\y peace to the lonelv sufferer, who 
 waiKs lorth in the placid evening, beneath thy gentle light, to chide at fortune; 
 or to complain of changed friends, or unhappy loves. 
 
Rosamund Gray. 
 
 Do I dream, or doth not even now a heavenly calm descend from thee 
 into my bosom, as I meditate on the chaste loves of Rosamund and her 
 Clare? 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Allan Clare was just two years older than Rosamund. He was a boy of 
 fourteen, when he first became acquainted with her— it was soon after she had 
 come to reside with her grandmother at Widford. 
 
 He met her by chance one day, carrying a pitcher in her hand, which she 
 had been filling from a neighbouring well— the pitcher was heavy, and she 
 seemed to be bending with its weight. 
 
 Allan insisted on carrying it for her -for he thought it a sin, that a delicate 
 young* maid, like her, should be so employed, and he stand idle by. 
 
 Allan had a propensity to do little kind offices for everybody— but at sight 
 of Rosamund Gray his first fire was kindled— his young mind seemed to have 
 found an object, and his enthusiasm was from that time forth awakened. His 
 visits, from that day, were pretty frequent at the cottage. 
 
 He was never happier than when he could get Rosamund to walk out with 
 him. He would make her admire the scenes he admired — fancy the wild 
 flowers he fancied — watch the clouds he was watching — and not unfrequently 
 repeat to her poetry, which he loved, and make her love it. 
 
 On their return, the old lady, who considered them yet as but children, would 
 bid Rosamund fetch Mr. Clare a glass of her currant wine, a bowl of new milk, 
 or some cheap dainty, which was more welcome to Allan than the costliest 
 delicacies of a prince's court. 
 
 The boy and girl, for they were no more at that age, grew fond of each other 
 —more fond than either of them suspected. 
 
 " They would sit and sigh. 
 And look upon each other, and conceive 
 Not what they ail'd ; yet something they did ail, 
 And yet were well — and yet they were not well ; 
 And what was their disease, they could not tell." 
 
 And thus, 
 
 '* In this first garden of their simpleness 
 They spent their childhood." 
 
 A circumstance had lately happened, which in some sort altered the nature 
 I of their attachment. 
 
 ' Rosamund was one day reading the tale of "Julia de Roubigne," — a book 
 which young Clare had lent her — 
 
 Allan was standing by, looking over her, with one hand thrown round her 
 neck, and a finger of the other pointing to a passage in Julia's third letter. 
 
 " Maria I in my hours of visionary indulgence, I have sometimes painted to 
 myself a hustand — no matter whom — comforting me amidst the distresses, 
 which fortune had laid upon us. I have smiled upon him through my tears ; 
 tears, not of anguish, but of tenderness ;— our children were playing around 
 us, unconscious of misfortune ; we had taught them to be humble, and to be 
 happy ; our little shed was reserved to us, and their smiles to cheer it. I have 
 imagined the luxury of such a scene, and affliction became a part of my dream 
 of happiness." 
 
 The girl blushed as she read, and trembled— she had a sort of confused 
 sensation, that Allan was noticing her — yet she durst not lift her eyes from the 
 book, but continued reading, scarce knowing what she read. 
 
 H * 
 
Allan guessed the causeof her confusion. Allan trembled too— his colour 
 came and went— his feelings became irapetuous^and, flinging both arms 
 round her neck, he kissed his young favourite. 
 
 Rosamund was vexed, and pleased, soothed and frightened, all in a moment 
 — a ht of tears came to her relief. 
 
 Allan had indulged before in these little freedoms, and Rosamund had 
 thought no harm of them— but from this time the girl grew timid and reserved 
 —distant in her manner, and careful of her behaviour,- in Allan's presence— 
 not seeking his society, as before, but rather shunning it— delighting. more to 
 feed upon his idea in absence, -a 
 
 Allan too, from this day, seemed changed : his manner became, though not 
 less tender, yet more respectful and diffident— his bosom felt a throb, it had till 
 now not known, in the society of Rosamund— and, if he was less familiar with 
 her than in former times, that charm of delicacy had superadded a grace to 
 Rosamund, which, while he feared, he loved. 
 
 There is a mysterious character, heightened indeed by fancy and passipn, 
 but not without foundation in reality and observation, which true lovers have 
 ever imputed to the object of their affections. This .character Rosamund had 
 now acquired with Allan — something angelU, perfect^ exceedifig- nature. 
 
 Young Clare dwelt very near to the cottage. He had lost his parents, who 
 were rather wealthy, early in life ; and was left to the care of a sister, some ten 
 years older than himself. • , , . _ ; 
 
 Elinor Clare was an excellent young lady— discreet, intelligent, ,and 
 affectionate. Allan revered her as a parent, while he loved her as his own 
 familiar friend. He told all the little secrets of his heart to her — but there was 
 one, which he had hitherto unaccountably concealed from her— namely, the 
 extent of his regard for Rosamund. 
 
 Elinor knew of his visits to the cottage, and was no stranger to the persons 
 of Margaret and her granddaughter. She had several times met them, when 
 she has been walking with her brother — a civility usually passed on either 
 side— but Elinor avoided troubling her brother with any unseasonable ques- 
 tions. 
 
 Allan's heart often beat, and he had been going to tell his sister a//— but 
 something like shame (false or true, I shall not stay to int^uire) had hitherto 
 kept him'back— still the secret, unrevealed, hung upon his conscience like a 
 crime — for his temper had a sweet and noble frankness in it, which bespake 
 him yet a virgin from the world. 
 
 There was a fine openness in his countenance — the character of it somewhat 
 resembled Rosamund's— except that more fire and enthusiasm were discernible 
 in Allan's — his eyes were of a darker blue than Rosamund's— his hair was of a 
 chestnut colour — his cheeks ruddy, and tinged with brown. There was 
 a cordial'sweetness in Allan's smile, the hke to which I never saw in any other 
 face. 
 
 Elinor had hitherto connived at her brother's- attachment to Rosamund. 
 Elinor, 1 believe, was something of a physiognomist, and thought she could 
 trace in the countenance and manner of Rosamund qualities, which no brother 
 of hers need be ashamed to love. 
 
 The time was now come, when Elinor was desirous of knowing her 
 brother's favourite more intimately— an opportunity offered of breaking the 
 matter to Allan. 
 
 The morning of the day, in which he carried his present of fruit and flowers 
 to Rosamund, his sister had observed him more than usually busy in the 
 garden, culling fruit with a nicety of choice not common to him. 
 
 She came up to him, unobserved, and, taking him, by the arm, inquired, 
 with a questioning smile — "What are you doing, Allan? and who are those 
 peaches designed for ? " 
 
Rosamund Gray. 203 
 
 " For Rosamund Gray," he replied; and, his heart seenned relieved pf a 
 burthen, which had long oppressed it. 
 
 " I have a mind to become acquaintec^ with your handsome friend — will 
 you introduce me, Allan ? I think 1 should like to go and see her this after- 
 noon." 
 
 " Do go, do go, Ehnor — you don't know what a good creature she is— and 
 old blind Margaret, you will like her very much." 
 
 His sister promised to accompany him after dinner ; and they parted. Allan 
 gathered no more, peaches, but hastily cropping a. few roses to fling into his 
 basket, went away with it half filled, being impatient to announce to Rosamund 
 the coming of her promised visitor. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 When Allan returned home, he found an invitation had been left for him, in 
 his absence, to spend that evening with a young friend, who had just quitted 
 a pubUc school in London, and was come to pass one night in his father's 
 house at Widford, previous to his departure the next morning for Edinburgh 
 University. 
 
 It was Allan's bosom friend — they had not met for some months — and it 
 was probable, a much longer time must intervene, before they should meet 
 again. 
 
 \et Allan could not help looking a little blank, when he first heard of the 
 invitation. This was to have been an important evening. But Elinor soon 
 relieved her brother, by expressing her readiness to go alone to the cottage. 
 
 " I will not lose the pleasure I promised myself, whatever you may determine 
 upon, Allan— I will go by myself, rather than be disappointed." 
 
 " Will you, will you, Ehnor?" 
 
 Elinor promised to go— and I believe, Allan, on a second thought, was not 
 very sorry to be spared the awkwardness of introducing two persons to each 
 other, both so dear to him, but either of whom might happen not much to 
 fancy the other. 
 
 At times, indeed, he was confident, that Elinor must love Rosamund, and 
 Rosamond must love Elinor — but there were also times, in which lie felt mis- 
 givings — it was an event he could scarce hope for very joy 1 
 
 Allan's real presence that evening was more at the cottage than at the house, 
 where his todily semblance was visiting— his friend could not help complaining 
 of a certain absence of mind, a coldness he called it. 
 
 It might have been expected, and in the course of things predicted, that 
 Allan would have asked his friend some questions, of what had happened 
 since their last meeting, what his feelings were on leaving school, the probable 
 time when they should meet again, and a hundred natural questions, which 
 friendship is most lavish of at such times; but nothing of all this ever 
 occurred to Allan— they did not even setde ' the method of their future corre- 
 spondence. 
 
 The consequence was, as might have been expected, Allan's friend 
 thought him much altered, and, after his departure, sat down to compose a 
 doleful sonnet about a " faithless friend." I do not find that he ever finished 
 it— indignation, or a dearth of rhymes, causing him to break off in the 
 middle. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 In my catalogue of the little library at the cottage, I forgot to mention a 
 book of Common Prayer. My reader's fanqy might easily have supplied the 
 
204 The Woi'ks of Charles Lamb. 
 
 omission —old ladies of Margaret's stamp <God bless them) may as well be 
 without their spectacles, or their elbow chair, as their prayer-book — I love 
 them for it. 
 
 Margaret's was a handsome octavo, printed by Baskerville, the binding red, 
 and fortified with silver at the edges. Out of this book it was their custom 
 every afternoon to read the proper psalms appointed for the day. 
 
 The way they managed was this ; they took verse by verse— Rosamund read 
 her Uttle portion, and Margaret repeated hers, in turn, from memory— for 
 Margaret could say all the psalter by heart, and a good part of the Bible 
 besides. She would not unfrequently put the girl right, when she stumbled or 
 skipped. This Margaret imputed to giddiness— a quality, which Rosamund 
 was by no means remarkable for— but old ladies, like Margaret, are not, in all 
 instances, alike discriminative. 
 
 They had been employed in this manner just before Miss Clare arrived at the 
 cottage. The psalm they had been reading, was the hundred and fourth- 
 Margaret was naturally led by it into a discussion of the works of creation. 
 
 There had been thunder in the course of the day — an occasion of instruction 
 which the old lady never let pass — she began^ 
 
 " Thunder has a very awful sound — some say, God Almighty is angrywhen- 
 ever it thunders — that it is the voice of God speaking to us — ^for my part, 1 am 
 not afraid of it ." 
 
 And in this manner the old lady was going on to particularize, as usual, iis 
 beneficial effects, in clearing the air, destroying of vermin, &c., when the 
 entrance of Miss Clare put an end to her discourse, 
 
 Rosamund received her with respectful tenderness — and, taking her grand- 
 mother by the hand, said with great sweetness, ' ' Miss Clare is come to see 
 you, grandmother." 
 
 "I beg pardon, lady— I cannot see you— but you are heartily welcome- 
 is your brother with you. Miss Clare? I don't hear him." 
 
 " He could not come, madam, but he sends his love by me." 
 
 " You have an excellent brother. Miss Clare — but pray do us the honour to 
 take some refreshment— Rosamund " 
 
 And the old lady was going to give directions for a bottle of her currant 
 wine — when Elinor, smiling, said " she was come to drink a dish of tea with 
 her, and expected to find no ceremony." 
 
 "After tea, I promise myself a walk with you, Rosamund, if your grand- 
 mother can spare you " Rosamund looked at her grandmother. 
 
 "O for that matter, I should be sorry to debar the girl from any pleasure 
 — I am sure it's lonesome enough for her to be with me always— and, if 
 Miss Clare will take you out, child, I shall do very well by myself till you 
 return— it will not be the first time, you know, that I have been left here 
 alone— some of the neighbours will be dropping in by-and-by— or if not, I 
 shall take no harm." 
 
 Rosamund had all the simple manners of a child— she kissed her grandmother, 
 and looked happy. 
 
 All tea-time the old lady's discourse was little more than a panegyric on 
 young Clare's good quaUties. Elinor looked at her young friend, and smiled. 
 Rosamund w.is beginning to look grave— but there was a cordial sunshine in 
 the face of Elinor, before which any clouds of reserve that had been gathering 
 on Rosamund's, soon brake away. 
 
 " Does your grandmother ever go out, Rosamund?" 
 
 Margaret prevented the girl's reply by saying,— " My dear young lady, I am 
 an old woman, and very infirm— Rosamund takes me a few paces beyond the 
 door sometimes— but I walk very badly— I love best to sit in our httle arbour, 
 when the sun shines— I yet can feel it warm and cheerful— and, if I lose the 
 beauties of the season, I can still remember them with pleasure, and rejoice that 
 
Rosamund Gray. 205 
 
 younger eyes than mine can see and enjoy them— I shall be very happy if you 
 and Rosamund can take delight in this fine summer evening." 
 
 " I shall want to rob you of Rosamund's company now and then, if we like 
 one another. I had hoped to have seen you, madam, at our house. I don't 
 know, whether we could not make room for you to come and live with us— what 
 say you to it?— Allan would be proud to tend you, I am sure ; and Rosamund 
 and I should be nice company." 
 
 Margaret was all unused to such kindnesses, and wept— Margaret had a 
 great spirit— yet she was not above accepting an obhgation from a worthy 
 person— there was a delicacy in Miss Clare's manner— she could have no 
 interest, but pure goodness, to induce her to make the offer— at length the old 
 lady spake from a full heart. 
 
 "Miss Clare, this little cottage received us in our distress— it gave us shelter 
 when we had no home— via have praised God in it— and, while life remains, I 
 
 think I shall never part from it— Rosamund does everything for me 
 
 "And will do, grandmother, as long as Hive"— and then Rosamund fell 
 a-crying. 
 
 " You are a good girl, Rosamund, and, if you do but find friends when I 
 am dead and gone, I shall want no better accommodation while I live— but God 
 bless you, lady, a thousand times for your kind olfer." 
 
 Elinor was moved to tears, and, affecting a sprightliness, bade Rosamund 
 prepare for her walk. The girl put on her white silk bonnet; and EUnor 
 thought she never beheld so lovely a creature. 
 
 They took leave of Margaret, and walked 'out together— they rambled over 
 .all Rosamund s favounte haunts — through many a sunny field — by secret 
 giade or woodwalk, where the girl had wandered so often with her beloved 
 Clare. 
 
 Who now so happy as Rosamund ? She had ofttimes heard Allan speak 
 with great tenderness of his sister — she was now rambling, arm in arm, with 
 that very sister, the " vaunted sister" of her friend, her beloved Clare. 
 
 Not a tree, not a bush, scarce a wild flower in their path, but revived in 
 Rosamund some tender recollection, a conversation perhaps, or some chaste 
 endearment. Life, and a new scene of things, were now opening before her-^ 
 she was got into a fairy-land of uncertain existence. 
 
 Rosamund was too happy to talk much— but Elinor was delighted with her, 
 when she did talk:— the girl's remarks were suggested, most of them, by 
 the passing scene — and they betrayed, all of them, the liveliness of present 
 impulse : — her conversation did not consist in a comparison of vapid feeling, 
 and interchange of sentiment hp-deep— it had all the freshness of young sensa- 
 tion in it. 
 Sometimes they talked of Allan. 
 
 " .4,llan is very good " 1 said Rosamund, "very good indeed to my grand- 
 nrother — he will sit with her, and hear her stories, and read to her, and try to 
 divert her a hundred ways. 1 wonder sometimes he is not tired. She talks 
 him to death!" 
 
 "Then you confess, Rosamund, that the old lady does tireyou sometimes." 
 " O no, I did not mean /Aai— it's very different — I am used to all her ways, 
 and I can humour her, and please her, and I ought to do it, for she is the only 
 friend I ever had in the world." * 
 
 The new friends did not conclude their walk till it was late, and Rosamund 
 began to be apprehensive about the old lady, who had been all this time 
 alone. 
 
 On their return to the cottage, they found that Margaret had been somewhat 
 impatient— old ladies, good old ladies, will be so at times— age is timorous, and 
 suspicious of danger, where no danger is. 
 Besides, it was Margaret's bedtime, for she kept very good hours— indeed, 
 
ift the distributibil of her meals,' aria sundry othet parficulars, she- resembled 
 thejivers in the antique wdVld, more than might well bes^eto a creature, of this 
 —none but- R osatnund could get her mess of broth ready, or put her nightcaps 
 on— (she wore seveii,; the undermost was of flannrij-i-- .,.; ; ' .. ''.^i. 
 
 " You know, love, I can do nothing to help myself-^here I must staytill yon 
 retiirn." - . ;,- 
 
 So the new friends parted for that night, Elinoff-.laayings* made Margaret pro- 
 mise to give Rosamund leave to come and see her the ne«t &ayj ' . i 
 
 ^•i. .^ - ,. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. . ' " 1 - 
 
 Miss Clare, we maybe sure, made her brother very happy, when she told 
 him of the engagement she had made for the morrow, and how delighted shp 
 had been with his handsome friend. • ' " ■, '' — •'>. 
 
 Allan, I believe, got little sleep that night. I know not, whether joy be not a 
 more troublesome bed-fellow than grief— hope keeps a body very wakeful, I- 
 know. ■ '' ■ ' "' ' ' , . ■ ,,''■. i. . 
 
 Elinor Clare w-as the best good creature — the least selfish human, being I 
 ever knew— always at work for other people's goodt planning other .peqple's 
 happiness — continually forgetful to consult for her own personal gratifigatians, 
 except, indirectly, in the welfare of another, whileher parents livedjuehSBiost. 
 attentive of daughters— since they died, the kindest ot'sistei^!— I never knew 
 but one like her. , ■ . i 
 
 It happens that I have some of this young lady's Uttirs in my possession, \ „ 
 shall present my reader with one of them— it W^s written a short time after the 
 death of her mother, and addressed to a cousin, a dear friend of Ehnor s, who, 
 was then on the point of being married to Mr.. Beaumont of Staffordshire, and 
 had invited Elinor to assist at her nuptials, t will transcribe it with minute 
 fideUty. ' ,, , . . 
 
 Elinur Clare to Maria Leslie. , . 
 
 WiDFORD, yiily the — , 17—. 
 
 Health, innocence, and beauty, shall be thy bridemaidsj ^'ray svi'eet cousin. 
 I have ho heart to 'undertake the office. Alas 1 what b^ve }, to dp ^a ^he house 
 of feasting?. ',j ^ , ^ '. , 
 
 Maria ! I fear, lest my griefs should prove obtrusive. Yet bgayVithme a 
 little — I have recovered already a share of my former spirits. ,, , ' [ 
 
 I fear more for Allan than myself. The loss of two such parents, with so 
 short an interval, bears very heavy on him. The boy ^aafj abfiut me from 
 morning till night. He is perpetually forcing a smile jnto bis poor pale cheeks 
 — you know the sweetness of his smile, Maria. , , , 
 
 To-day, a,fter dinner, when he toc^ his glass of wine in hi^ hand, he burst 
 into tears,. and wQuldnot, or could not then, tell me the reason -afterwards he 
 told me—" he had been used to drink mamma's health after dinner,.wd that 
 canie in 'his head, and made him cry." I feel the claims thebay has upon me 
 — 1 perceive that I. am Uving to some ewrf- and the thought supports me. 
 
 Already I have attained to a state of complacent feelings— my mother's 
 lessons were not thrown away upon hsr Ehnor. , , , 
 
 In the visions of last -night her spirit seemed to stand at my bedside— a light, 
 as of noonday,, shone upon the room— she opened my curtains— she smiled 
 upon me with the same placid smile as in her hfetime. I felt no fear. ; 
 ; "Elinor,"she Said, " for mysaketake care of young Allan, '.'-:-and I i^woke 
 with calm feelings. 
 
 Maria ! shall not the meeting of blessed spirits, think'ydu, be something like 
 this ? I think, I could even noW behold my mother without dread— t would' 
 
Rosamtmd Gray. 207 
 
 ask pardon of her for all my past omissions of duty, for all the little asperities 
 in my temper, which have so often grieved her gentle spirit when living. 
 Maria! T think she would nbt turn away from me. 
 
 Oftentimes a feeling, more vivid than memory, brings her before me— I see 
 her sit in her old elbow chair, her arms folded upon her lap, a tear upon her 
 cheek, that seems to upbraid her unkind daughter for some inattention— I wipe 
 it away— and kiss her honoured lips. 
 
 Maria ! when I have been fancying all this, Allan will come in, with his poor 
 eyes red with weeping, and taking me by the hand, destroy the vision in a 
 moment. 
 
 I am prating to you, my sweet cousin, but it is the prattle of the heart, 
 which Maria loves. Besides, whom have I to talk to of these things, but you 
 — ^you have been my counsellor in times past, my companion, and sweet familiar 
 friend. Bear with me a Uttle— I mourn the " cherishers of my infancy." 
 
 I sometimes count it a blessing, that my father did not prove the survivor. 
 You know something of his story. You know, there was a foul tale current, 
 
 it was the busy malice of that bad man, S , which helped to spread it 
 
 abroad— you will recollect the active good nature of our friend. W and 
 
 T-^ ; what pains they took to undeceive people— with the better Sort their 
 
 kind labours prevailed ; but there wasstill a party, who shut their ears. You 
 know the issue of it. My father's great spirit bore up against it for some time 
 —my father never was a bad man — but that spirit was broken at the last— and 
 the greatly-injured man was forced to leave his old paternal dwelling in Staf- 
 fordshire—for the neighbours had begun to point at him. Maria ! I have seen 
 them point at him, and have been ready to drop. 
 
 In this part of the country, where the slander had not reached he sought 
 a retreat — and he found a still more grateful asylum in the daily solicitudes of 
 the best of wives. 
 
 "An enemy hath done this," I have heard him say — and at such times my 
 mother would speak to him so soothingly of forgiveness, and long-suffering, 
 and the bearing of injuries with patience ; would heal all his wounds with so 
 gentle a touch ; — I have seen the old man weep hke a child. 
 
 The gloom that beset his mind, at times betrayed him into scepticism — he 
 has doubted if there be a Providence ! I have heard him say, " God has built 
 a brave world, but methinks he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they 
 may." 
 
 At such times he could not endure to hear my mother talk in a religious 
 strain. He would say, "Woman, have done— you confound, you perplex me, 
 when you talk of these matters, and for one day at least unfit me for the 
 business of life." 
 
 I have seen her look at hith— O God, Maria ! such a look I it plainly spake, 
 that she was willing to have shared her precious hope with the partner of her 
 earthly cares — but she found a repulse: 
 
 Deprived of such a wife, think you the old man could have long endured his 
 existence ? or what consolation would his wretched daughter have had to offer 
 him, but silent and imbecile tears ? 
 
 • My sweet cousin, you will think me tedious— and I ani so — but it does me 
 good to talk these matters over. And do not you be alarmed for me — my sorrows 
 are subsiding into a deep and sweet resignation. 1 shall soon be suflSciently 
 composed, I know it, to participate in my friend's happiness. 
 
 Let me call her, while yet I may, my own Maria Leslie ! Kfethinks, I shall 
 not like you by any other name. Beaumont ! Maria Beaumont ! it hath a 
 strange sound with it, I shall never be reconciled to this name — but do not you 
 fear — Maria Leslie shall plead with me for Maria Beaumont. 
 And now, my sweet friend, God love you, and your 
 
 Elinor Clare. 
 
2o8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 I find in my collection, several letters, written soon after the date of the pre- 
 ceding, and addressed all of them to Maria Beaumont. I am tempted to make 
 some short extracts from these— my tale will suffer interruption by them— but 
 I was willing to preserve whatever memorials I could of Ehnor Clare. 
 
 Frovi Elinor Clare to Maria Beaumont. 
 
 AN EXTRACT. 
 
 1 have been strolling out for half an hour in the fields ; and my mind 
 
 has been occupied by thoughts, which Maria has a right to participate. I 
 have been bringing my mother to my recollection. My heart ached with the 
 remembrance of infirmities, that made her closing years of life so sore a trial 
 to her. 
 
 I was concerned to think that our family differences have been ene source of 
 disquiet to her. I am sensible, that this last we are apt to exaggerate after a 
 person's death; and surely, in the main, there was considerable harmony 
 among the members of our little family, still I was concerned to think, that 
 we ever gave her gentle spirit disquiet. 
 
 I thought on years back— on all my parents' friends— the H s, the 
 
 F s, on D , S , and on many a merry evening in the fire-side circle, 
 
 in that comfortable back parlour — it is never used now. 
 
 O ye Matravises * of the age, ye know not what ye lose, in despising these 
 petty topics of_ endeared remembrance, associated circumstances of past 
 times ; ye know not the throbbings of the heart, tender yet affectionately 
 famiUar, which accompany the dear and honoured names of father or of 
 mother. 
 
 Maria ! I thought on all these things ; my heart ached at the review of them 
 — it yet aches, while I write this — but I am never so satisfied with my train of 
 thoughts, as when they run upon these subjects ; the tears they draw from us, 
 meliorate and soften the heart, and keep fresh within us that memory of dear 
 friends dead, which alone can fit us for a readmission to their society here- 
 after. 
 
 From another Letter. 
 
 1 had a bad dream this morning, that Allan was dead ; and who, of all 
 
 persons in the world, do you think, put on mourning for him ? Why, Matravis. 
 This alone might cure me of superstitious thoughts, if I were inclined to them ; 
 for why should Matravis mourn for us, or our family? Still it was pleasant 
 to awake, and find it but a dream. Methinks something like an awakening 
 from an ill dream shall the Resurrection from the dead be. Materially differ- 
 ent from our accustomed scenes, and ways of life, the World to come may 
 possibly not be ; still it is represented to us under the notion of a Rest, a Sab- 
 bath, a state of bliss not to be conceived. 
 
 From another Letter. 
 
 Methinks, you and I should have been born under the same roof, sucked 
 
 the same milk, conned the same hornbook, thumbed the same Testament, to- 
 gether :— for we have been more than sisters, Maria ! 
 
 Something will still be whispering to me, that I shall one day be inmate of 
 the same dwelling with my cousin, partaker with her in all the delights, which 
 spring from mutual good offices, kind words, attentions in sickness and in 
 health, — conversation, sometimes innocently trivial, and at others profitably 
 serious ;— books read and commented on, together.; meals eat, and walks 
 taken, together,— and conferences, how we may best do good to this poor per- 
 
 * This name will be explained presently. 
 
Rosamund Gray. 209 
 
 son or that, and wean our spirits from the world's cares, without divesting 
 ourselves of its charities. What a picture I have drawn, Maria !— and none 
 of all these things may ever come to pass. 
 
 From another Letter. 
 
 Continue to write to me, my sweet cousin. Many good thoughts, resolu- 
 tions, and proper views of things, pass through the mind in the course of the 
 day, but are lost for want of committing them to paper. Seize them, Maria, as 
 they pass, these Birds of Paradise, that show themselves and are gone, and 
 make a grateful present of the precious fugitives to your friend. 
 
 To use a homely illustration, just rising in my fancy, — shall the good house- 
 wife take such pains in pickling and preserving her worthless fruits, her wal- 
 nuts, her apricots, and quinces — and is there not much spiritual housewifery 
 in treasuring up our mind's best fruits, — our heart's meditations in its most 
 favoured moments? 
 
 This said simile is much in the fashion of the old moralizers, such as I con- 
 ceive honest Baxter to have been, such as Quarles and 'Wither were, with their 
 curious, serio-comic, quaint emblems. But they sometimes reacli the heart, 
 when a more elegant simile rests in the fancy. 
 
 ^fot low and mean, like these, but beautifully familiarized to our conceptions, 
 and condescending to human tlioughts and notions, are all the discourses of 
 our Lord— conveyed in parable, or similitude, what easy access do they win 
 to the heart, through the medium of the delighted imagination ! speaking of 
 heavenly things in fable, or in simile, drawn from earth, from objects common, 
 accustomed. 
 
 Life's business, with such delicious little interruptions as our correspondence 
 affords, how pleasant it is ! — why can we not paint on the dull paper our whole 
 feelings, exquisite as they rise up ? 
 
 From another Letter. 
 
 1 had meant to have left off at this place ; but, looking back, I am sorry 
 
 to find too gloomy a cast tincturing my last page— a representation of life false 
 and unthankful. Life is ho/ all vanity and disappointment— it hath much of 
 evil in it, no doubt ; but to those who do not misuse it, it affords comfort, 
 temporary comfort, much — much that endears us to it, and dignifies it — many 
 true and good feelings, I trust, of which we need not be ashamed— hours of 
 tranquillity and hope. But the morning was dull and overcast, and my spirits 
 were under a cloud. I feel my error. 
 
 Is it no blessing, that we two love one another so deariy— that Allan is left 
 me— that you are settled in life— that woridly affairs go smooth with us both- 
 above all, that our lot hath fallen to us in a Christian country? Maria ! these 
 things are not litde. I will consider life as a long feast, and not forget to say 
 grace. 
 
 From another Letter. 
 
 Allan has WTJtten to me — you know, he is on a visit at his old tutor's in 
 
 Gloucestershire— he is to return home on Thursday — Allan is a dear boy — 
 he concludes his letter, which is very affectionate throughout, in this manner — 
 
 " Elinor, I charge you to learn the following stanza by heart — 
 
 The monarch may forget his crown. 
 
 That on his head an hour hath been ; 
 The bridegroom may forget his bride 
 
 "Was made his wedded wife yestreen. 
 The mother may forget her child, 
 
 That smiles so sweetly on her knee : 
 But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, 
 
 And all that thou habt done for me. 
 
The lines are in Burns— you know, we read him for the first time together 
 at Margate— and I have been used to refer them to you, and to call you, in my 
 mind, Glencairn—lox you were always very, very good to me. I had a thou- 
 sand failings, but you would love me in spite of them all. 1 am going to drink 
 your health." 
 
 I shali detain my reader no longer from the narrative. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 They had but four roonls in the cottage; ' Margaret slept in the biggest room 
 upstairs, and her granddaughter in a kind of closet adjoining where she could 
 be within hearing, if her grandmother should call her in the night. 
 
 The girl was often disturbed in that manner — two or three times in a night 
 she has been forced to leave her bed, to fetch her grandmother's cordials, or 
 do some little service for her— but she knew, that Margaret s ailings Mttrereal 
 and pressing, and Rosamund never complained— never suspected, that her 
 grandmother's requisitions had anything unreasonable in them. 
 ) The night she parted with Miss Clare, she had helped Margaret to bed, as 
 iikual— and, after saying her prayers, as the custom was, kneeling by the old 
 lady's bed-side, kissed her grandmother, and wished her a good-night — Mar- 
 garet blessed her, and charged her to go to bed directly. ■ It was her customary 
 injunction, and Rosamund had never dreamed of disobeying. 
 
 So she retired to her little room. The night was warm and clear— the moon 
 very bright — her window commanded a view of scenes she had been tracing in 
 the day-time with Miss Clare. 
 
 All the events of the day past, the occurrences of their walk arose in her 
 mind. She fancied she should like to retrace those scenes— but it was now 
 nine o'clock, a late hour in the village. 
 
 Still she fancied it would be very charming ; and then hfer grandmother's 
 injunction came powerfully to her recollection— she sighed and tutted from 
 the window— and walked up and down her little room. 
 
 Ever, when she looked at the window, the wish returned. It was not so 
 very laic. The neighbours were yet about, passing under the window to their 
 homes ; she thought, and thought again, till her sensations became vivid, even 
 to painfulness — her bosom was aching to give them vent. 
 
 'i'he vill^tge clock struck ten ! the neighbours ceased to pass under the win- 
 dow. Rosamund, stealing downstairs, fastened the latch behind her, and left 
 the cottage. 
 
 One, that knew her, met her, and observed her with some surprise. Another 
 recollects having wished her a good-night. Rosamund never returned to the 
 cottage ! ' 
 
 An old man, that lay sick in a small house adjoining to Margaret's, testified 
 the next morning, that he had plainly heard the old creature calling for her 
 granddaughter. All the night long she made her moan, and ceased not to 
 call upon the name of Rosamund. But no Rosamund was there — the voice 
 died away, but not till near daybreak. 
 
 When the neighbours came to search in the morning, Margaret was miss- 
 ing ! She had straggled out of bed, and made her way into Rosamund's 
 room — worn out with fatigue and fright, when she found the girl not there, 
 she had laid herself down to die— and, it is thought, she died praying— ior she 
 was discovered in a kneeling posture, her arms and face extended on the 
 pillow, where Rosamiind had slept the night before — a smile was on her face 
 in death. 
 
Rosamund Gray. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Fain would I draw a veil over the transactions of that night — but I cannot — 
 grjef. and burning shame, forbid me to be silent— black deeds are about to be 
 made public, \vhich reflect a stain upon our common nature. 
 
 Rosamund, enthusiastic, and improvident, wandered unprotected to a dis- 
 tance from her guardian doors ; through lonely glens, and woodwalks, where 
 she had rambled many a day in safety ; till she arrived at a shady copse, out of 
 the hearing of any human habitation. 
 
 Tl/rt/raKw met her. "Flown with insolence and wine," returning home 
 
 late at night, he passed that way 1 
 
 Matravis was a very ugly man. Sallow-complexioned ! and, if hearts can 
 wear that colour, his heart was sallow-complexioned also. 
 . A yoiing man with grey deliberation ! cold' and .systematic in all his plans ; 
 and all his plans were evil. His very lust was systematic. 
 
 He would brood over his bad purposes for such a dreary length of time, 
 that it might have been expected, some solitary check of conscience must 
 have intervened to save him from commission. But that light from heaven 
 was extinct in his dark bosom. 
 
 Nothing that is great, nothhig that is amiable, existed for this unhappy man. 
 He feared, he envied, he suspected ; but he never loved. The subhme and 
 beautiful in nature, the excellent and becoming in morals, were things placed 
 beyond the capacity of his sensations. He loved not poetry — nor ever took a 
 lonely walk to meditate — never beheld virtue, which he did not try to disbe- 
 lieve, or female beauty and innocence, which he did not lust to contaminate. 
 
 A sneer was perpetually upon his face, and malice grinning at his heart. 
 He would say the most ill-natured things, with the least remorse of any man I 
 ever knew. This gained him the reputation of a wit — other traits got him the 
 , reputation of a villain. 
 
 And this man formerly paid his court to Elinor Clare ! with what success I 
 leave my readers to determine. It was not in Elinor's nature to despise any 
 living thing— but in the estimation of this man, to be rejected was to be 
 despised; and Matravis never forgave. 
 
 He had long turned his eyes upon Rosamund Gray. To steal from the 
 bosom of her friends the jewel they prized so much, the little ewe lamb they 
 held so dear, it was a scheme of delicate revenge, and Matravis had a twofold 
 motive for accomplishing this young maid's ruin. , ., ,j j 
 
 Often had he met her in her favourite solitudes, but found her ever cold arid 
 inaccessible. Of late the girl had avoided straying far from her own home, m 
 the fear of meeting him— but she had never told her fears to Allan. 
 
 Matravis had, till now, been content to be a villain within the limits of the 
 law— but on the present occasion, hot fumes of wine, co-operating with his 
 deep desire of revenge, and the insolence of an unhoped meeting, overcame 
 his customary prudence, and Matravis rose, at once, to an audacity of glorious 
 
 mischief. . r ■ a ^ u a 
 
 Late at night he met her, a lonely, unprotected virgin— no friend at hand- 
 no place near of refuge. , , , , t i .1, t * ii .i,» 
 ■ Rosamund Gray, my soul is exceeding sorrowful for thee— I loathe to tell the 
 hateful circumstances of thy wrongs-Night and silence were the only 
 witnesses of this young maids disgrace— Matravis fled. ^ , , ^, . , , 
 Rosamund, polluted and disgraced, wandered, an abandoned thing, about 
 the fields and meadows till day-break. Not caring to return to the cottage 
 she sat herself down before the gate of Miss Clare a house-m a stupor of 
 grief. 
 
The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Elinor was just rising, and had opened the windows of her chamber, when 
 she perceived her desolate young friend. She ran to embrace her — she brought 
 her into the house — she took her to her bosom— she kissed her — she spake to 
 her ; but Rosamund could not speak. 
 
 Tidings came from the cottage. Margaret's death was an event which 
 could not be kept concealed from Rosamund. When the sweet maid heard 
 of it, she languished, and fell sick ; she never held up her head after that 
 time. 
 
 If Rosamund had been a sister, she could not have been kindlier treated, 
 than by her two friends. 
 
 Allan had prospects in Ufe ; might, in time, have married into any of the 
 first families in Hertfordshire ; but Rosamund Gray, humbled though she was, 
 and put to shame, had yet a charm for him ; and he would have been content 
 to share his fortunes with her yet, if Rosamund would have lived to be his 
 companion. 
 
 , But this was not to be, and the girl soon after died. She expired in the 
 arms of Elinor — quiet, gentle, as she lived — thankful, that she died not among 
 strangers — and expressing by signs, rather than words, a gratitude for the most 
 trifling services, the common offices of humanity. She died uncomplaining ; 
 and this young maid, this untaught Rosamund, might have given a lesson to 
 the grave philosopher in death. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 I WAS but a boy, when these events took place. All the village remember the 
 story, and tell of Rosamund Gray and old blmd Margaret. 
 
 I parted from Allan Clare on that disastrous night, and set out for Edinburgh 
 the next morning, before the facts were commonly known; I heard not of 
 them — and it was four months before 1 received a letter from Allan. 
 
 " His heart," he told me, " was gone from him ; for his sister had died of a 
 phrenzy fever ! " not a word of Rosamund in the letter — I was left to collect 
 her story from sources which may one day be explained. 
 
 I soon after quitted Scotland, on the death of my father, and returned to my 
 native village. Allan had left the place, and I could gain no information, 
 whether he were dead or living. 
 
 I passed the collage. I did not dare to look that way, or to inquire who 
 lived there. A little dog, that had been Rosamund's, was yelping in my path. 
 I laughed aloud like one mad, whose mind had suddenly gone from him ; 
 I stared vacantly around me, like one alienated from common perceptions. 
 
 But I was young at that time, and the impression became gradi»illy 
 weakened, as I mingled in the business of life. It- is now ten years since 
 these events took place, and I sometimes think of them as unreal. Allan 
 Clare was a dear friend to me; but there are times, when Allan and his sister, 
 Margaret and her granddaughter, appear like personages of a dream— an idle 
 dream 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Strange things have happened unto me— I seem scarce awake — ^but I will 
 re-collect my thoughts, and try to give an account of what hath befallen me 
 in the few last weeks. 
 
 Since my father's death our family have resided in London. I am in practice 
 as a surgeon there. My mother died two years after we left "Widford. 
 
 A month or two ago I had been busying myself in drawing up the above 
 narrative, intending to make it public. The employment had forced my mind 
 
Rosamund Gray. 213 
 
 to dwell upon facts, which had begun to fade from it ; the memory of old 
 times became vivid, and more vivid— I felt a strong desire to revisit the scenes 
 of my native village— of the -young loves of Rosamund and her Clare. 
 
 A kind of dread had hitherto kept me back ; but I was restless now, till I 
 had accomplished my wish. I set out one morning to walk — I reached 
 Widford about eleven in the forenoon — after a slight breakfast at my Inn— 
 where I was mortified to perceive, the old landlord did not know me again— 
 (old Thomas Billet— he has often made angle rods for me when a child)— I 
 rambled over all my accustomed haunts. 
 
 Our old house was vacant, and to be sold. I entered, unmolested, into the 
 room that had been my bed-chamber. I kneeled down on the spot where my 
 little bed had stood— I felt like a child — I prayed like one— it seemed as though 
 old times were to return again ; I looked round involuntarily, expecting to see 
 some face I knew — but all was naked and mute. The bed was gone. My 
 little pane of painted window, through which I loved to look at the sun, when 
 I awoke in a fine summer's morning, was taken out, and had been replaced by 
 one of common glass. 
 
 I visited, by turns, every chamber — they were all desolate and unfurnished, 
 one excepted, in which the owner had left a harpsichord, probably to be sold — 
 I touched the keys — I played some old Scottish tunes, which had delighted 
 me when a child. Past associations revived with the music — blended with a 
 sense of unreality, which at last became too powerful — I rushed out of the 
 room to give vent to my feehngs. 
 
 I wandered, scarce knowing where, into an old wood, that stands at the 
 back of the house^we called it the wilderness. A well-known form was 
 missing, that used to meet me in this place— it was thine, Ben IMoxam— the 
 kindest, gentlest, politest, of human beings, yet was he nothing higher than a 
 gardener in the family. Honest creature, thou didst never pass me in my 
 childish rambles, without a soft speech, and a smile. I remember thy good- 
 natured face. But there is one thing, for which I can never forgive thee, Ben 
 Moxam ; that thou didst join with an old maiden aunt of mine in a cruel 
 plot, to lop away the hanging branches of the old fir-trees. I remember them 
 sweeping to the ground. 
 
 I have often left my childish sports to ramble in this place— its glooms and 
 its solitude had a mysterious charm for my young mind, nurturing within me 
 that love of quietness and lonely thinking, which have accompanied me to 
 maturer years. 
 
 In this wilderness I found myself after a ten years' absence. Its stately fir- 
 trees were yet standing, with all their luxuriant company of underwood — the 
 squirrel was there, and the melancholy cooings of the wood-pigeon ; all was 
 as I had left it — my heart softened at the sight— it seemed, as tliough my 
 character had been suffering a change, since I forsook these shades. 
 
 My parents were both dead ; I had no counsellor left, no experience of age 
 to direct me, no sweet voice of reproof. The Lord had taken away my friends, 
 and I knew not where he had laid them. I paced round the wilderness, seek- 
 ing a comforter. I prayed, that I might be restored to that stale of innocence, 
 in which I had wandered in those shades. 
 
 Methought, my request was heard ; for it seemed, as though the stains of 
 manhood were passing from me, and I were relapsing into the purity and 
 simphcity of childhood. I was content to have been moulded into a perfect 
 child. I stood still, as in a trance. I dreamed, that I was enjoying a personal 
 intercourse with my heavenly Father ; and, extravagantly, put off the shoes 
 from my feet— for the place where I stood, I thought, was holy ground. 
 
 This state of mind could not last long ; and I returned, with languid feel- 
 ing's, to my Inn. I ordered my dinner— green peas and a sweetbread— it had 
 been a favourite dish with me in my childhood— I was allowed to have it on 
 
214 ^^^ Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 my biHhdays. I was impatient to see it come uport table — ^but, when it cam^ 
 1 could scarce eat a mouthful ; my tears choked me. I called for wine — I 
 drank a pint and a half of red wine— and not till then had I dared to visit 
 the chiirdhyard, where my parents were interred. 
 
 The cottage lay in my way — Margaret had chosen it for that very reason, to 
 be near the church — forthe-old lady was regular in her attendance on public 
 worship — I passed on — and in a moment found myself among the tombs. 
 
 I had been present at my father's burial, and knew the spot again-^my 
 mother's funeral I was prevented by illness from attending. — a plain stone was 
 placed over the grave, with their initials liarved upon it — for they both occupied 
 one grave. 
 
 I prostrated myself before the spot ; I kissed the earth that covered them — 
 I contemplated, with gloomy delight, the time when I should mingle my dust 
 with theirs — and kneeled, with my anns incumbent on the grave-stone, in a 
 kind of mental prayer — for I could not speak. 
 
 Having performed these duties, I arose with quieter feelings, and felt lieisiire 
 to attend to indifferent objects. Still I continued in the churchyard, reading 
 the various inscriptions, and moralizing on them with that kind of levity, 
 which will not unfrequently spring up in the mind, in the midst of deep 
 melancholy. 
 
 I read of nothing but careful parents, loving husbands, and dutiful children. 
 I said jestingly, where be all the bad people buried ? Bad parents, bad husr 
 bands, bad children — what cemeteries are appointed for these? do they not 
 sleep in consecrated ground? or is it but a pious fiction, a generous oversight, 
 in the survivors, which thus tricks out men's epitaphs when dead, who in their 
 life-time discharged the offices of life, perhaps, but lamely? "Their failings, 
 with their reproaches, now sleep with them in the grave. Man wars not with 
 the dead. It is a trait of human nature, for which I love it. 
 
 \ had not observed, till now, a little group assembled at the other end of the 
 churchyard ; it was a company of children, who were gathered round a young 
 man, dressed in black, sitting on a gravestone. 
 
 He seemed to be asking them questions — probably, about their learning — 
 and one little dirty ragged-headed fellow was clambering up his knees to kiss 
 him. The children had been eating black cherries— for some of the stones 
 were scattered about, and their mouths were smeared with them. 
 
 As I drew near them, I thought I, discerned in the stranger a mild benignity 
 of countenance, which I had somewhere seen before — I gazed at him more 
 attentively. 
 
 It was Allan Clare ! sitting on the grave of his sister. 
 
 I threw my arms about his neck. I exclaimed "Allan," — he turned his eyes 
 upon me— he knew me— we both wept aloud — it seehied as though the in- 
 terval, since we parted, had been as nothing — I cried out, "Come, and tell 
 me about these things." 
 
 I drew him away from his little friends— he parted with a show of reluctance 
 from the churchyard — Margaret and her granddaughter lay buried there, as 
 well as his sister— I took him to my Inn— secured a room, where we might be 
 private— ordered fresh wine— scarce knowing what I did, I danced for joy. 
 
 Allan was quite overcome, and taking me by the hand he said, " This repays 
 me for all." 
 
 It was a proud day for me— I had found the friend I thought dead— earth 
 seemed to me no longer valuable, than as it contained him; and existence a 
 blessing no longer than while I should live to be his comforter. 
 
 I began at leisure, to survey him with more attention. Time, and grief, had 
 left few traciss of that fine enthusiasm which once burned in his countenance 
 —his eyes had lost their original fire, but they retained an uncommon sweet- 
 ness, and, whenever they were turned upon me, their smile pierced to my heart. 
 
Rosamund Gray. 215 
 
 " Allan, I fear you have been a sufferer.'' He replied not, and I could not 
 press him further. I could not call the dead to life again. 
 
 So we drank, and told old stories — and repeated old poetry — and sung olfi 
 songs— as if nothing had happened. We sat till very late— I forgot that I had 
 purposed returning to town that evening— to Allan all places were alike— I 
 grew, noisy, he grew cheerful — Allan's old manners, old enthusiasm, were 
 returning upon him— we laughed, we wept, we mingled our tears, and talked 
 extravagantly. . 
 
 Allan was my bedfellow that night — and we lay awake, planning schemes 
 of living together under the same roof,, entering upon similar pursuits ; — and 
 praising God that we had met. 
 
 I was obliged to return to town the next morning, and Allan proposed to 
 accompany me. "Since the death of his sister," he told me, " he had been a 
 wanderer." 
 
 In the course of our walk, he unbosomed himself without reserve — told me 
 many particulars of his way of life for the last nine or ten years, which I do not 
 feel myself at liberty tq divulge. 
 
 Once, on my attempting to cheer him, when I perceived him over thought; 
 ful, he replied to me in these words : 
 
 " Do not regard me as unhappy, when you catch me in these moods. I am 
 never more happy than at times, when by the cast of my countenance men 
 judge me most miserable. 
 
 " JVTy friend, the events, which have left this sadness behind them, are of no 
 recent date. The melancholy, which comes over me with the recollection of 
 them, is not hurtful, but only tends to soften and tranquillize my mind, to 
 detach me from the restlessness of human pursuits. 
 
 . ' ' The stronger I feel this detachment, the more I find myself drawn heaven- 
 ward to Ijie contemplation of spiritual objects. 
 
 ' ' I love to keep old friendships alive and warm within me, because I expect 
 a renewal of them in the World of Spirits. • 
 
 "I am a wandering and unconnected thing on the earth. I have made no 
 new friendships, that can compensate me for the loss of the old — and the more 
 I know mankind, the more does it become necessary for me to supply their loss 
 by little images, recollections, and circumstances, of past pleasures. 
 
 " I am sensible that I am surrounded by a multitude of very worthy people, 
 plain-hearted souls, sincere, and kind. But they have hitherto eluded my 
 pursuit, and will continue to bless the Httle circle of their families and friends, 
 while I must remain a stranger to them. 
 
 ' ' Kept at a distance by mankind, I have not ceased to love them— and 
 could I find the cruel persecutor, the malignant instrument of God's judgments 
 on me and mine, I think I would forgive, and try to love him too. 
 
 " I have been a quiet sufferer. From the beginning of my calamities it was 
 given to me, not to see the hand of man in them. I perceived a mighty arm', 
 which none but myself could see, extended over me. I gave ray heart to the 
 Purifier, and my will to the Sovereign Will of the Universe. The irresistible 
 wheels of destiny passed on in their everlasting rotation, — and I suffered myself 
 to be carriedalong with them, without cofnplaining." 
 
 CHAPTER Xn. 
 
 Allan told me, that for some years past, feeling himself disengaged from every 
 personal tie, but not alienated from human sympathies, it had been his taste, 
 his humour he called it, to spend a great portion of his time in hosfitals and 
 lazar^houses. 
 He had found a wayward pleasure, he refused to name it a virtue, in fending 
 
2i6 The Works of Charles Zamli. 
 
 i 
 
 a description of people, who had long ceased to expect kindness or friendliness \ 
 from mankind, but were content to accept the reluctant services, which the i 
 oftentimes unfeeling instruments and servants of these well-meant institutions 
 deal out to the poor sick people under their care. ' 
 
 It is not medicine, — it is not broths and coarse meats, served up at a stated | 
 hour with all the hard formalities of a prison,— it is not the scanty dole of a ] 
 bed to die on — which dying man requires from his species. 
 
 Looks, attentions, consolations, — in a word, sympathies, are what a man 
 most needs in this awful close of mortal sufferings. A kind look, a smile, a 
 drop of cold water to the parched hp— for these things a man shall bless you 
 in death. 
 
 And these better things than cordials did Allan love to administer — to stay 
 by a bedside the whole day, when something disgusting in a patient's distemper 
 has kept the very nurses at a distance — to sit by, while the poor wretch got a 
 little sleep— and be there to smile upon him when he awoke — to slip a guinea, 
 now and, then, into the hands of a nurse or attendant — these things have been 
 to Allan as frivileges, for which he was content to live, choice marks, and cir- 
 cumstances, of his Maker's goodness to him. 
 
 And I do not know whether occupations of this kind be not a spring of 
 purer and nobler delight; (certainly instances of a more disinterested virtue) 
 than ariseth from what are called friendships of sentiment. 
 
 Between two persons of liberal education, like opinions, and common feel- 
 ings, oftentimes subsists a vanity of sentiment, which disposes each to look 
 upon the other as the only being in the universe worthy of friendship, or 
 capable of understanding it, — themselves they consider as the solitary recep- 
 tacles of all that is delicate in feeUng, or stable in attachment :— when the odds 
 ■are, that under every green hill, and in every crowded street, people of equal 
 worth are to be found, who do more good in their generation, and make less 
 noise in the doing of it. 
 
 It was in consequence of these benevolent propensities I have been describ- 
 ing, that Allan oftentimes discovered considerable inclinations in favour of my 
 way of life, which I have before mentioned as being that of a Surgeon. He 
 would frequently attend me on my visits to patients ; and I began to think, 
 that he had serious intentions of making my profession his study. 
 
 He was present with me at a scene— a death-bed scene — I shudder, when I 
 do but think of it. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 I WAS sent for the other morning to the assistance of a gentleman who had 
 been wounded in a duel,— and his wounds by unskilful treatment had been 
 brought to a dangerous crisis. 
 
 The uncommonness of the name, which was Matravis, suggested to me, 
 that this might possibly be no other than Allan's old enemy. Under this 
 apprehension, I did what I could to dissuade Allan from accompanying me— 
 but he seemed bent upon going, and even pleased himself with the notion, 
 that it might lie within his ability to do the unhappy man some service. So 
 he went with me. 
 
 When we came to the house, which was in Soho Square, we discovered that 
 it was indeed the man— the identical Matravis, who had done all that mischief 
 in times past— but not in a condition to excite any other sensation than pity 
 in a heart more hard than Allan's. 
 
 Intense pain had brought on a delirium— we perceived this on first entering 
 the room— for the wretched man was raving to himself— talking idly in mad, 
 unconnected sentences,— that yet seemed, at times, to have a reference to past 
 facts. -^ 
 
Rosamund Gray, 317 
 
 One while he told us his dream. " He had lost his way on a great heath, 
 to which there seemed no end — it was cold, cold, cold — and dark, very dark — 
 an old woman in leading-strings, blind, was groping about for a guide" — and 
 then he frightened me, — for he seemed disposed to he jocular, and sung a song 
 about an "old woman clothed in grey," and said " he did not believe in a 
 devil." 
 
 Presently he bid us "not tell Allan Clare" — Allan was hanging over him 
 at that very moment, sobbing. I could not resist the impulse, but cried out, 
 " This is Allan Clare — Allan Clare is come to see you, my dear sir." The 
 wretched man did not hear me, I believe, for he turned his head away, and 
 began talking of charnel houses, and dead men, and "whether they knew 
 anything that passed, in their coffins," 
 
 Matravis died that night. 
 
 Irs. ^wast«r's Sx:^00l. 
 
 [Under the title of " Mrs. Leicester's School : or, the History of Several Young Ladies, 
 related by themselves," Mary Lamb brought out, in 1807, a collection of ten little homely 
 narratives, seven of which were her own and the remaming three her brother's. These 
 three, here subjoined, as integral portions of the works of Charles Lamb, follow, in due 
 chronological sequence, the novelette of " Rosamund Gray." " Mrs. Leicester's School " 
 was first published as a four shilling volume at the Juvenile Library, No. 41 Skinner 
 Street. It ran into a second edition in 1808, into a third in 1810, and mto a fourth m 
 1814, attaining the dignity of a tenth in 1828.] 
 
 MARIA HOWE. 
 
 THE EFFECTS OF WITCH STORIES 
 
 I WAS brought up in the country. From my infancy I was always a weak and 
 tender-spirited girl, subject to fears and depressions. My parents, and parti- 
 cularly my mother, were of a very different disposition. They were what is 
 usually called gay. They loved pleasure, and parlies and visiting ; but, as 
 they found the turn of my mind to be quite opposite they gave themselves 
 little trouble about me, but upon such occasions generally left me to my choice, 
 which was much oftener to stay at home, and indulge myself"} my solitude 
 than to join in their rambling visits. I was always fond of being alone, yet 
 always in a manner afraid. There was a book-closet which led in o my 
 mother's dressing-room. Here I was eternally fond of being shut up by 
 myself, to take down whatever volumes I pleased, and pore "P"" .'hem,-"'' 
 matter whether they were fit formy years or no, or whether ^ ""ders^ood them 
 Here, when the weither would not permit my gomg into 'he dark walk {«./ 
 wali as it was called) in the garden, -here when ■^y.P^'^™'^ ^^^^ '','™X^ 
 home, I have stayed for hours together, tilHhe loneliness, which pleased me 
 so at first, has at length become quite frightful, and I have rushed out of the 
 closet inti the inhabited parts of the house, and sought refuge in the lap of 
 
21 8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 some! one'oE the female' servants; onof my aunt, .who -woulid. say, seemg me 
 loolopale^ that Maria-rhad been frightening herself with; some of those nasty 
 books: so she. used to call my favourite volumes, -which I would not have 
 parted with, 'no, not with one of the least of them, if. I had had the choice to 
 be made a fine princess and to govern the world. But my aunt was nojeaderJ 
 She used to excuse herself and say that reading hurt her eyes. I have been 
 naughty enough to think that this was only an excuse ; for;I- found, that my 
 aunt's weak eyes did not prevent her from, poring ten hours a day upon her 
 Prayer-book, or her favourite Thomas h, ■ Keirfpis. But this was always her 
 excuse for not. reading any of the books I recommended. My aunt vvas my 
 father's ■ sister. Shchad never been, married. My father was a gppd, deal 
 older than my mother, and my aunt was ten year? older than, my father. As 
 I was often left at home with her, and as my serious disposition so well agreed 
 with hers, an intimacy grew up between the old lady and me ; and she would 
 often say that she loved only one person in the world, and that was me. Not 
 that she and my parents were on very bad terms ; but the old lady did not 
 feel herself respected enough. The attention and fondness which she showed 
 to me, conscious as I was that I was almost the only being that she felt any- 
 thing hke fondness to, made me love her, as it was natural : indeed I am 
 ashamed to say that I fear I almost loved her better than both my parents put 
 together. But there was an oddness, a silence, about my aunt, which was 
 never interrupted but by her occasional expressions of love to me, that made 
 me stand in fear of her. An odd look from under her sjpectacles would some- 
 times scare me away, when I have been peering up in her face, to make her 
 kiss me. Then she had a way of muttering to herself, which, though it was 
 ggiod words, andreligious words that she was mumbling, somehow I. did not 
 
 'like. My weak spirits, and the fears I was, subject to, -always inade. me afraid, 
 of any personal singularity or oddness in any one. I am ashamed, ladies, to 
 lay open so many parXiculars of our family ; but indeed it is necessary to the 
 
 ' understanding, of what I am going to tell you, of a very great weakness, if not 
 wickedness, which I was guilty of towards my aunt. But I must return to my 
 studies, and tell you w(Jiat books I found in the closet, and what reading I 
 chiefly admired. There was a great Book of Martyrs, in which I used to read, 
 or rather I used to spell out meanings ; for . I was too ignorant to make out 
 many words : but (here it was written all about those good men who chose to 
 be burnt alive rather than forsake their religion, and become ijaughty papists. 
 Some words I could make out, some I could not : but I made out enough to 
 fill my little head with vanity ; and I used to think I was so courageous I could 
 be burnt too ; and I would put my hands upon the flames which were pictured 
 in the pretty pictures which the book had, and feel them. But you know, 
 ladies, there is a great difference between the flames in a picture and real, fire ; 
 and I am now ashamed of the conceit which I had of my own courage, and 
 think how poor a martyr I should have made in those days. Then there was 
 a book not so big, but it had pictures in,' it was called Culpepper s Herbal: it 
 was full of pictures of plants and herbs ; but I did not much care for- that. 
 Ihen there was Salmon s Modern. History, out of which I picked a good deal. 
 It had pictures of Chinese gods, and the great hooded serpent, which ran 
 strangely in my fancy. There were some law books top ; but the old English 
 frighted me from reading them. But, above all, what I relished was Stack- 
 Muse s History of the Bible, where was the picture of the Ark, and all the 
 beasts getting into it. This delighted me, because, it puzzled me : and many 
 an aching head have I got with poring into it, and contriving how it might be 
 bmit, with such arid such, rooms, to Jiold all the worid, if there should be 
 another flood ; and sometimes settling what pretty beasts should "be saved, and 
 What should not; for I would have no ugly or deformed^beast in my pretty ark. 
 But this was only a piece of folly and vanity, that a Ijttle reflection might cure 
 
Mrs. Leicester's School : Maria Howe. 219 
 
 me of. Foolish grrl that I was ! to suppose that any creature is really ugly, 
 that has all its limbs contrived with heavenly wisdom, and was doubtless formed 
 to some beautiful end; though a child cannot comprehend it; Poubtless a frog 
 or a toad is not uglier in itself than a squirrel or a pretty green lizard ; but we 
 want understanding to see it. 
 
 These fancies, ladies, were not so very foolish or naughty perhaps, but that 
 they may»be forgiven in a child of six years old ; but what I am going to tell, 
 I shall be ashamed of, and repent, I hope, as long as I live. It will teach me 
 not to form rash judgments. Besides the picture of the Ark, and many others 
 which I have forgot, Stackhouse contained one picture which made more im- 
 pression upon my childish understanding than all the rest. It was the picture 
 of the raising up of Samuel, which I used to call the Witch of Endor picture. 
 I was always very fond of picking up stories about witches. There was a book 
 called Glanvil on Witches, which used to lie about in this closet c it was 
 thumbed about, and showed it had been much read in former times. This was 
 my treasure. Here I used to pick out the strangest stories. My jiot being able 
 to read them very well, probably made them appear more strange and out of 
 the way to me. But I could collect enough to understand that witches were 
 old women, who gave themselves up to do mischief; how, by the help of 
 spirits as bad as themselves, they lamed cattle, and made the com not grow; 
 and how they made images of wax to stand for people that had done them 
 any injury, or they thought had done them injury ; and how they burnt the 
 images before a slow fire, and stuck pins in them ; and the persons which these 
 waxen images represented, however far distant, felt all the pains and torments 
 in good earnest which were inflicted in show upon these images : and such a 
 horror I had of these wicked witches, that though 1 am now better instructed, 
 and look upon all these stories as mere idle tales, and invented to fill people's 
 heads with nonsense, yet I cannot recall to mind the horrors which I then felt, 
 without shuddering, and feeling something of the old fit return. 
 
 This foolish book of witch stories had no pictures in it ; but I made up for 
 them out of my own fancy, and out of the great picture of the raising up of 
 Samuel, in Stackhouse. I was not old enough to understand the difference 
 there was between these silly, improbable tales, which imputed such powers to 
 poor old women, who are the most helpless things in the creation, and the 
 narrative in the Bible, which does not say that the witch, or pretended witch, 
 raised up the dead body of Samuel by her own power, but, as it clearly appears, 
 he was permitted by the divine will to appear, to confound the presumption of 
 Saul ; and that the witch herself was really as much frightened and confounded 
 at the miracle as Saul himself, not expecting a real appearance, but probably 
 having prepared some juggling, sleight-of-hand tricks, and sham appearance, 
 to deceive the eyes of Saul ; whereas neither she, nor any one living, had ever 
 the power to raise the dead to life, but only He who made them from the first. 
 These reasons I rriigl;t have read in Stackhouse's book itself, if I had been old 
 enough, and have read them in that very book since I was older; but at that 
 time I looked at little beyond the picture. 
 
 These stories of witches so terrified me, that my sleep was often broken ; and 
 in my dreams I always had a fancy of a witch being in the room with me. I 
 know now that it was only nervousness ; but though I can laugh at it now as 
 well as you, ladies, if you knew what I then suffered, you would be thankful 
 that you have had sensible people about you to instruct you, and teach you 
 better. I was let grow up wild, like an ill weed ; and thrived accordingly. 
 One night that I had been terrified in my sleep with my imaginations, I got out 
 of bed and crept softly to the adjoining room. My room was next to where 
 my aunt usually sat when she was alone. Into her room I crept for relief from 
 my fears. Tlie old lady was not yet retired to rest, but was sitting with her 
 eyes half open, half closed, her spectacles tottering upon her nose ; her head 
 
 l^ 
 
The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 nodding over her Prayer-book ; her lips mumbling the words as she read them, 
 or half read them, in her dozing posture; her grotesque appearance, her old- 
 fashioned dress, resembling what 1 had seen in that fatal picture in Stackhouse. 
 All this, with the dead time of night, as it seemed to me (for I had gone through 
 my first sleep), all joined to produce a wicked fancy in me, that the form that I 
 had beheld was not my aunt, but some witch. Her mumbling of her prayers 
 confirmed me in this shocking idea. I had read in Glanvil of those wicked 
 creatures reading their prayers backwards ; and I thought that this was the 
 operation whfch her lips were at this time employed about. Instead of flying 
 to her friendly lap for that protection which I had so often experienced when 1 
 have been weak and timid, I shrunk back, terrified and bewildered, to my bed, 
 where I lay, in broken sleeps and miserable fancies, till the morning, which I 
 had so much reason to wish for, came. My fancies a little wore away with the 
 light ; but an impression was fixed, which could not for a long time be done 
 away. In the daytime, when my father and mother were about the house, 
 when I saw them familiarly speak to my aunt, my fears all vanished j and when 
 the good creature has taken me upon her knees, and shown me any kindness 
 more than ordinary, at such times I have melted into tears, and longed to tell 
 her of what naughty, foolish fancies I had had of her. But when night re- 
 turned, that figure which I had seen recurred,— the posture, the half-closed 
 eyes, the mumbling and muttering which I had heard. A confusion was in my 
 head, wlio it was I had seen that night : it was my aunt, and it was not my 
 aunt ; it was that good creature, who loved me above all the world, engaged at 
 her good task of devotions, — perhaps praying for some good to me. Again it 
 was a witch, a creature hateful to God and man, reading backwards the good 
 prayers ; who would perhaps destroy me. In these conflicts of mind I passed 
 several weeks, till, by a revolution in my fate, I was removed to the house of a 
 female relation of my mother's in a distant part of the county, who had come 
 on a visit to our house, and observing my lonely ways, and apprehensive of the 
 ill eiTect of my mode of living upon my health, begged leave to take me home 
 to her house to reside for a short time. I went, with some reluctance at leaving 
 my closet, my dark walk, and even my aunt, who had been such a source of both 
 love and terror to me. But I went, and soon found the good effects of a change 
 of scene. Instead of melancholy closets and lonely avenues of trees, I saw 
 lightsome rooms and cheerful faces. I had companions of my own age. No 
 books were allowed me but what where rational or sprightly,— that gave me 
 mirth, or gave me instruction. I soon learned to laugh at witch stories ; and 
 when I returned, after three or four months' absence, to our own house, my 
 good aunt appeared to me in the same light in which I had viewed her from 
 my infancy, before that foolish fancy possessed me ; or rather, I should say, 
 more kind, more fond, more loving than before. It is impossible to say how 
 much good that lady (the kind relation of my mother's that I spoke of) did to 
 me by changing the scene. Quite a new turn of ideas was given to me. t 
 became sociable and companionable. My parents soon discovered a change iu 
 me ; and I have found a similar alteration in them. They have been plainly 
 more fond of me since that change, as from that time I learned to conform 
 myself more to their way of living. I have never since had that aversion to ' 
 company, and going out with them, which used to make them regard me with I 
 less fondness than they would have wished to show. I impute almost all that ' 
 I had to complain of in their neglect to my having been a little unsociable, 
 uncompanionable mortal. I lived in this manner for a year or two, passing 
 my time between our house and the lady's who so kindly took me in hand, till, 
 by her advice, I was sent to this school ; where I have told you, ladies, what, 
 for fear of ridicule, 1 never ventured to tell any person besides -the storv of my 
 fooUsh and naughty fancy. 
 
Mrs. Leicester's School: Susan Yates. 
 
 SUSAN YATES. 
 
 FIRST TIME OF GOING TO CHURCH. 
 
 I WAS born and brought up in a house in which my parents had all their lives 
 resided, which stood in the midst of that lonely tract of land called the 
 Lincolnshire fens. Few families besides our own lived near the spot ; both 
 because it was reckoned an unwholesome air, and because its distance from 
 any town or market made it an inconvenient situation. My father was in no 
 very affluent circumstances ; and it was a sad necessity which he was put to, 
 of having to go many miles to fetch anything he wanted from the nearest 
 village, which was full seven miles distant, through a sad miry way, that at all 
 times made it heavy walking, and after rain W2is almost impassable. But he 
 had no horse or carriage of his own. 
 
 The church, which belonged to the parish in which our house was situated, 
 stood in this village ; and its distanee being, as I said before, seven miles from 
 our house, made it quite an impossible thing for my mother or me to think of 
 going to it. Sometimes, indeed, on a fine dry Sunday, my lather would rise 
 early, and take a walk to the village, just to see iviyn goodness thrived, as he used 
 to say ; but he would generally return tired and the worse for his walk. It is 
 scarcely possible to explain to any one who has not lived in the fens what 
 difficult and dangerous walking it is. A mile is as good as four, I have heard 
 my father say, in those parts. My mother, who in the early part of her life 
 had Hved in a more civilized spot, and had been used :o constant church-going, 
 would often lament her situation. It was from her I early imbibed a great 
 curiosity and anxiety to see that thing which I had heard her call a church, and 
 so often lament that she could never go to. I had seen houses of various 
 structures, and had seen in pictures the shapes of ships and boats, and palaces 
 and temples, but never rightly anything that could be called a church, or that 
 could satisfy me about its form. Sometimes I thought it must be like our 
 house ; and sometimes I fancied it must be more Uke the house of our neigh- 
 bour, Mr. Sutton, which was bigger and handsomer than ours. Sometimes I 
 thought it was a great hollow cave, such as I have heard my father say the first 
 inhabitants of the earth 'dwelt in. Then I thought it was like a waggon or a 
 cart, and that it must be something movable. The shape of it ran in my 
 mind strangely ; and one day I ventured to ask my mother, what was that 
 foolish thing that she was always longing to go to, and which she called a , 
 church. Was it anything to eat or drink, or was it only like a great huge 
 plaything, to be seen and stared at? — I was not quite five years of age when I 
 made this inquiry. 
 
 This question, so oddly put, made my mother smile : but, in a little time, 
 she put on a more grave look, and informed me that a church was nothing 
 that I had supposed it ; but it was a great building, far greater than any house 
 which I had seen, where men and women and children came together twice a 
 day, on Sundays, to hear the Bible read, and make good resolutions for the 
 week to come. She told me that the fine music which we sometimes heard in 
 the air, came from the bells of St. Mary's church, and that we never heard it 
 but when the wind was in a particular point. This raised my wonder more 
 than all the rest ; for I had somehow conceived that the noise which I heard 
 
The Works- of Charles Lamb. 
 
 was occasioned by birds up in the air, or that it was made by the angels, whom 
 (so ignorant I was till that time) 1 had always considered to be a sort of birds : 
 for, before this time, I was totally ignorant of anything like religion ; it being 
 a principle of my father, that young heads should not be told too many things 
 at once, for fear they should get confused ideas, and no clear notions of any- 
 thing. We had always indeed so far observed Sundays, that no work was done 
 upon that day ; and upon that day I wore my best muslin frock, and was not 
 allowed to sing or to be noisy; but I never understood why that day should 
 differ from any other. We had no public meetings : indeed the few stragghng 
 houses which were near us would have furnished. but a slender congregation ; 
 and the loneliness of the place we lived in, instead of making ns more sociable, 
 and drawing us closer together, as my mother used to say it ought to have 
 done, seemed to have the eflect of making us more distant and averse to 
 society than other people. . One or two good neighbours indeed we had, but 
 not in numbers to give me an idea of church attendance. 
 
 But now my mother thought it high time to give me some clearer instruc- 
 tion in the main points of religion ; and my father came readily into her plan. 
 I was now permitted to sit up half an hour later on a Sunday evening, that I 
 might hear a portion of Scripture read, which had always been their custom ; 
 though, by reason of my tender age, and my father's opinion on the impro- 
 priety of children being taught too young, I had never till now been an 
 auditor. I was taught my prayers, and those things which you, ladies, I doubt 
 not, had the benefit of being instructed in at a much earlier age. 
 
 The clearer my notions on these points became, they only made me more 
 passionately long for the privilege of joining in that social service from which 
 it seemed that we alone, of all the inhabitants of the land, were debarred : and 
 when the wind was in that point which favoured the sound of the distant bells 
 of St. Mary's to be heard over the great moor which skirted our house, 1 have 
 stood out in the air to catch the sounds, which I almost devoured : and the 
 tears have come in my eyes, when sometimes they seemed to speak to- me, 
 almost in articulate sounds, to come to church, and because of the great moor 
 which was between me and them I could not come ; and the too tender appre- 
 hensions of these things has filled me with a religious melancholy. With 
 thoughts like these, I entered into my seventh year. 
 
 And now the time was come when the great moor was no longer to separate 
 me from the object of my wishes and of my curiosity. My father having some 
 money left him by the will of a deceased relation, we ventured to set up a sort 
 of a carriage : no very superb one, I assure you, ladies ; but in that part of 
 the world it was looked upon with some envy by our poorer neighbours. The 
 first party of pleasure which my father proposed to take in it was to the village 
 where I had so often wished to go ; and my mother and I were to accompany 
 him : for it was very fit, my father observed, that little Susan should go to 
 church, and learn how to behave herself; for we might some time or other 
 have occasion to live in London, and not always be confined to that out-of-the- 
 way spot. 
 
 It was on a Sunday morning that we set out, my little heart beating with 
 almost breathless expectation. The day was fine, and the roads were as good 
 as they ever are in those parts. I was so happy and so proud. I was lost in 
 dreams of- what I was going to see. At length the tall steeple of St. Mary's 
 church came in view. It was pointed out to me by my father as the place 
 from which that music had come which I have heard over the moor, and had 
 fancied to be angels singing. I was wound up to the highest pitch of delight 
 at having visibly presented to me the spot from which had proceeded that 
 unknown friendly music ; and when it began to peal, just as we approached 
 the village, it seemed to speak, " Susan is come," as plainly as it used to invite 
 me to come when I heard . it over the moor. I pass over our alighting at the 
 
Mrs. Leicesia^s School: Susan Yates. 223 
 
 house of a relation, and all that passed till I went with my father and mother 
 to church. 
 
 St. Mary's church is a great church for such a small village as it stands in. , 
 My father said it was a cathedral, and that it had once belonged to a monas- 
 tery; but the monks were all gone. Over the door there was stone-work, 
 representing saints and bishops ; and here and there, along the sides of the 
 church, there were figures of men's heads, made in a strange grotesque way. 
 I have seen the same sort of figures in the round tower of the Temple Church 
 in London. My father said they were very improper ornaments for such a 
 place ; and so I now think them ; but it seems the people who built these 
 great churches in old times, gave themselves more liberties than they do now ; 
 and I remember that when 1 first saw them, and before my father had made 
 this observation, though they were so ugly and out of shape, and some of 
 them seemed to be grilming, and distorting their figures with pain or with 
 laughter, yet, being placed upon a church to which I had come with such 
 serious thoughts, 1 could not help thinking they had some serious meaning ; 
 and I looked at t)iem with wonder, but without any temptation to laiigh." I 
 somehow fancied they were the representation of wicked people, set up as a 
 warning. 
 
 When we got into the church the service was not begun ; and my father 
 kindly took me round to show me the monuments, and everything else remark- 
 able. I remember seeing one of a venerable figure, which ray father said had 
 been a judge. The figure was kneeling up, as if it was alive, before a sort of 
 
 ■ desk, with a book, I suppose the. Bible, lying on it. I somehow fancied the 
 figure had a sort of life in it, it seemed so natural ; or that the dead judge, 
 that it was done for, said his prayers at it still. This was a silly notion : but I 
 was very young, and had passed my little life in a remote place, where I had 
 never seen anything, nor knew anything ; and the awe which I felt at first 
 being in a church took from me all power but that of wondering. I did not 
 reason about anything : I was too young. Now I understand why monuments 
 are put up for the dead, and why the figures which are put upon them are 
 described as doing the actions which they did in their lifetimes, and that they 
 are a sort of pictures set, up for our instruction. But all was new and sur- 
 prising to me on that day, — the long windows with little panes, the pillars, the 
 pews made of oak, the little hassocks for the people to kneel on, the form of 
 the puloit, with the sounding-board over it, gracefully carved in flower-work. 
 To you^ who have lived all your lives in populous places, and have been taken 
 to church from the eariiest time you can remember, my admiration of these 
 things must appear strangely ignorant. But I was a lonely young creature, 
 that had been brought up in remote places, where there was neither church, 
 nor church-going inhabitants. I have since lived in great towns, and seen the 
 ways of churches and of worship ; and I am old enough now to distmguish 
 between what is essential in religion, and what is merely formal or brna- 
 
 Whe'n my father had done pointing out to me the things most worthy of 
 notice about the church, the service was almost ready to begm : the pansh- 
 ioners had most of them entered, and taken their seats ; and we were shown 
 into a pew, where my mother was already seated. Soon after, the clergyman 
 entered, and the organ began to play what is called the voluntary I had 
 never seen so manv people assembled before. At first I thought that all eyes 
 were upon me, and that because I was a stranger. I was terribly ashamed 
 and confused at first : but mother helped me to find out the places m the 
 Prayer-book ■ and being busy about that, toOk off some of my pamful appre- 
 hensions I was no stranger to the order of the service, having often read in a 
 Praver-b'ook at home : but, ray thoughts being confused, it puzzled me a little 
 to find out the responses and other things which I thought I knew so well; but 
 
 l_ 
 
224 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 I went tbrough it tolerably well. One thing which has often troubled me 
 i since is, that I am afraid I was too full of myself, and of thinking how happy 
 I was, and what a privilege it was for one that was so young to join in the 
 service with so many grown people ; so that I did not attend enough to the 
 instruction which I might have received. I remember, I foolishly applied 
 everything that was said to myself, so as it could mean ndbody but myselJF, I 
 was so full of my own thoughts. All that assembly of people seemed to me as 
 if they were come together only to show me the way of a church. Not but I 
 received some very affecting impressions from some things which I heard that 
 day ; but the standing-up- and the sitting-down of the people, the organ, the 
 singing, — the way of all these things took up more of my attention than was 
 proper : or I thought it did. I believed I behaved better, and was more 
 serious, when I went a second time and a third time : for now we went, as a 
 regular thing every Sunday; and continued to do so, till, by a still further 
 change for the better in my father s circumstances, we removed to London. 
 Oh ! it was a happy day for me, my first going to St. Mary's church ; before 
 that day, I used to feel like a Uttle outcast in the wilderness ; like one that did 
 not belong to the world of Christian people. I have never felt like a little 
 outcast since. But I never can hear the sweet noise of bells, that I don't 
 think of the angels singing, and what poor but pretty thoughts I had of angels 
 in my iminstructed solitude. 
 
 ARABELLA HARDY. 
 
 THE SEA VOYAGE. 
 
 I WAS born m the East Indies. I lost my father and mother young. At the 
 age of five my relations thought it proper that I should be sent to England for 
 my education. I was to be entrusted to the care of a young woman who had 
 a character for great humanity and discretion ; but just as I had taken leave 
 of my friends, and we were about to take our passage, the young woman was 
 taken suddenly ill, and could not go on board. In this unpleasant emergency 
 no one knew how to act. The ship was at the very point of sailing, and it was 
 the last ship which was to sail that season. At length the captlin, who was 
 known to my fnends, prevailed upon my relation, who had come with us to 
 see us embark to leave the young woman on shore, and to let me embark 
 separately There was no possibility of getting any other female attendant 
 for me m the short time allotted for our preparation; and the opportunity of 
 going by that ship was thought too valuable to be lost. No other ladies hap- 
 pened to be going ; so I was consigned to the care of the captain and his 
 crew-rough and unaccustomed attendants for a young creature, delicately 
 STfii ^^^' ^ ^^^ ^?" = but indeed, they did their best to malce me not 
 ZX\^^ difference The unpolished sailors were my nurseiy-maids and my 
 r^^lr^^Jf"^"- ^T''' """S was done by the captain and the men to ac- 
 ^nS^ t-^"^' ^"d "ake me easy. I had a Httle room 'made out 'of the 
 cabin, which was to be considered as my room, and nobody might enter into 
 It. The first mate had a great character for bravery and all sailor-like accora- 
 
Mrs. Leicester's School: Arabella Hardy. 225 
 
 plishments ; but with all this he had a gentleness of manners, and a pale 
 feminine cast of face, from ill health and a wealdy constitution, which sub- 
 jected him to soine ridicule from the officers, and caused him to be named 
 Betsy. He did not much like the appellation ; but he submitted to it the 
 better, as he knew that those who gave him a woman's name well knew that 
 he had a man's heart, and that in the face of danger, he would go as far as 
 any man. To this young man, whose real name was Charles Atkinson, by a 
 lucky thought of the captain, the care of me was especially entrusted. Betsy 
 was proud of his charge; and, to do him justice, acquitted himself with great 
 diligence and adroitness through the whole of the voyage. From the begin- 
 ning I had somehow looked upon Betsy as a woman, hearing him so spoken 
 of ; and this reconciled me in some measure to the want of a maid, which I 
 had been used to. But I was a manageable girl at all times, and gave nobody 
 much trouble. 
 
 I have not knowledge enough to give an account of my voyage, or to re- 
 member the names of the seas we passed through, or the lands which we 
 touched upon in our course. The chief thing I can remember (for I do not 
 remember the events of the voyage in any order) was Atkinson taking me 
 up on deck to see the great whales playing about in the sea. There was 
 one great whale came bounding up out of the sea, and then he would dive 
 into it again, and then would come up at a distance where nobody expected 
 him : and another whale was following after him. Atkinson said they were 
 at play, and that the lesser whale loved that bigger whale, and kept it 
 company all through the wide seas ; but I thought it strange play, and a 
 frightful kind of love ; for I every minute expected they would come up to 
 our ship and toss it. But Atkinson said a whale was a gentle creature ; and it 
 was a sort of sea-elephant ; and that the most powerful creatures in nature are 
 always the least hurtful. And he told me how men went out to take these 
 whales, and stuck long pointed darts into them ; and how the sea was dis- 
 coloured with the blood of these poor whales for many mile's distance ; and I 
 admired the courage of the men ; but I was sorry for the inoffensive whale. 
 Many other pretty sights he used to show me, when he was not on watch or 
 doing some duty for the ship. No one was more attentive to his duty than he ; 
 but at such times as he had leisure, he would show me all pretty sea-sights — 
 the dolphins and porpoises that came before a storm ; and all the colours 
 which the sea changed to —how sometimes it was a deep blue, and then a deep 
 green, and sometimes it would seem all on fire. All these various appearances 
 he would show me, and attempt to explain the reason of them to me as well 
 as my young capacity would admit of. There was a lion and a tiger on board, 
 going to England as a present to the king ; and it was a great diversion to 
 Atkinson and me, after I had got rid of my first terrors, to see the ways of 
 these beasts in their dens, and how venturous the sailors were in putting their 
 hands through the grates, and patting their rough coats. Some of the men 
 had monkeys, which ran loose about ; and the sport was for the men to lose 
 them and find them again. The monkeys would run up the shrouds, and pass 
 from rope to rope, with ten times greater alacrity than the most experienced 
 sailor could follow them : and sometimes they would hide themselves in the 
 most unthought-of places ;' and when they were found they would grin, and 
 make mouths as if they had sense. Atkinson described to me the ways of 
 these Httle animals in their native woods ; for he had seen them. Oh, how 
 many ways he thought of to amuse me in that long voyage ! 
 
 Sometimes he would describe to me the odd shapes and varieties of fishes 
 that were in the sea ; and tell me tales of the sea-monsters that lay hid at the 
 bottom, and were seldom seen by men ; and what a glorious sight it would be 
 if our eyes could be sharpened to behold all the inhabitants of the sea at once, 
 swimming in the great deeps, as plain as we see the gold and silver fish in a 
 
 I 
 
226 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 bowl of glass. With such notions he enlarged my infant capacity to take in 
 many things. 
 
 When in foul weather I have been terrified at the motion of the vessel as it 
 roclced bacl<wards and forwards, he would still my fears, and tell me that I 
 used to be rocked so once in a cradle; and that tlie sea was God's bed, and 
 the ship our cradle, and we were as safe in that greater motion as when we 
 felt -that lesser one in our little wooden sleeping-places. When the wind was 
 up, and sang through the sails, and disturbed me with its violent clamours, he 
 would call it music, and bid me hark to the sea-organ ; and with that name he 
 quieted my tender apprehensions. Wlien I have looked around with a mourn- 
 ful face at seeing all men about me, he would enter into my thoughts, and tell 
 me pretty stories of his mother and his sisters, and a female cousin that he 
 loved better than his sisters, whom he called Jenny ; and say that, when we 
 got to England, I should go and see them ; and how fond Jenny would be of 
 his httle daughter, as he called ma. And with these images of women and 
 females which he raised in my fancy, he quieted me for a time. One time, and 
 never but once, he told me that Jenny had promised to be his wife, if ever he 
 came to England ; but that he had his doubts whether he should live to get 
 home, for he was very sickly. This made me cry bitterly. 
 
 That I dwell so long upon the attentions of this Atkinson is only because 
 his death, which happened just before we got to England, affected me so 
 much, that he alone of all the ship's crew has engrossed my mind ever since; 
 though, indeed, the captain and all were singularly kind to me, and strove to 
 make up for my uneasy and unnatural situation. The boatswain would pipe 
 for my diversion, and the sailor-boy would climb the dangerous mast for my 
 sport. The rough foremast-man would never willingly appear before me till 
 he had combed his long blaclc hair smooth and sleek^ not to terrify me. The 
 officers got up a sort of a play for my amusement; and Atkinson, or, as they 
 called him, Betsy, acted the heroine of the piece. All ways that could be con- 
 trived were thought upon to reconcile me to my lot. I was the universal 
 favourite : I do not know how deservedly ; but I suppose it was because I was 
 alone, and there was no female in the ship besides me. Had I come over with 
 female relations or attendants, I should have excited no particular curiosity: 
 I should have required no uncommon attentions. I was one little woman 
 among a crew of men ; and I believe the homage which I have read that men 
 universally pay to women was in this case directed to me, in the absence of all 
 other womankind. I do not know how that might be; but I was a little 
 princess among them, and I was not six years old. 
 
 I remember the first drawback which "happened to my comfort was Atkin- 
 son's not appearing during the whole of one day. The captain tried to recon- 
 cile me to it by saying that Mr. Atkinson was confined to his cabin ; that he 
 was not qiiite well, but a day or two would restore him. I begged to be taken 
 in to see him ; but this was not granted. A day, and then another came, and 
 another, and no Atkinson was visible ; and I saw apparent solicitude in the 
 faces of all the officers, who, nevertheless, strove to put on their best coun- 
 tenances before me, and to be more than usually kind to me. At length, by 
 the desire of Atkinson himself, as I have since learned, I was permitted to go 
 into his cabin, and see him. He was sitting up, apparently in a state of great 
 exhaustion ; but his face lighted up when he saw me ; and he kissed me, and 
 told me that he was going a great voyage, far longer than that which we 
 had passed together, and he should never come back. And, though I was so 
 young, I understood well enough that he meant this of his death ; and I cried 
 sadly : but he comforted me, and told me that I must be his little executrix, 
 and perform his last will, and bear his last words to his mother and his sister, 
 and to his cousin Jenny, whom I should see in a short time ; and he gave me 
 his blessing as a father would bless his child ; and he sent a last kiss by me to 
 
Mrs. Leicester's School: Arabella Hardy. 227 
 
 all his female relations ; and lie made [me promise that I would go and see 
 them when I got to England. And soon after this he died : but I was in 
 another part of the ship when he died ; and I was not told it till we got to 
 shore, whicli was a few days after ; but they kept telling me that he was better 
 and better, and that I should soon see him, but that it disturbed him to talk 
 with any one. Oh, what a grief it was, when I learned that I had lost my old 
 shipmate, that had made an irksome situation so bearable by his kind assidu- 
 ities ; and to think that he was gone, and I could never repay him for his 
 kindness ! 
 
 When I had been a year and a half in England, the captain, who had made 
 another voyage to India and back, thinking that time had alleviated a little 
 the sorrow of Atkinson's relations, prevailed upon my friends who had the 
 care of me in England, to let him introduce me to Atkinson's mother and 
 sister. Jenny was no more. She had died in the interval; and I never saw 
 her. Grief for his death had brought on a consumption, of which she lingered 
 about a twelvemonth, and then expired. But in the mother and the sisters of 
 this excellent young man I have found the most valuable friends which I 
 possess on this side the great ocean. They received me from the captain as 
 the X\\XV: protigh of Atkinson, v and from them I have learned passages of his 
 former hfe; and this in parlicular, — that the illness of which he died was 
 brought on by a wound, of which he never quite recovered, which he got in 
 a desperate attempt, when he was quite a boy, to defend his captain against a 
 superior force of the enemy which had .boarded him, and which, by his pre- 
 mature valour inspiriting the men, they finally succeeded in repulsing. 'I'his 
 was that Atkinson who, from his pale and feminine appearance, was called 
 Betsy. This was he whose womanly care of me got him the name of a 
 woman; who, with more than female attention, condescended to play the 
 handmaid toa little unaccompanied orphan, whom fortune had cast upon the 
 care of a rough sea-captain and his rougher crew. 
 
 Calis frnra ^\3k%'^txt> 
 
 [Another work, written conjointly by Charles and Mary Lamb, appeared in 1807, in 
 two volumes, price eight shillings, entitled the " Tales from Shakspere, designed for the 
 use of young persons." These two volumes, illustrated with copperplates, were issued 
 from the press by Thomas Hodgkins, at the Juvenile Library, Hanway Street, opposite 
 Soho Square, Oxford Street. An earlier piecemeal imprint of the work, in eight sixpenny 
 numbers, had been published immediately before this by M. J. Godwin, the owner of 
 the copyrii^ht. Twenty out of the thirty-six dramas were thus commemorated : those 
 not comprised in the collection being the Historical Plays, "Love's Labour's Lost," 
 and "The Merry Wives of Windsor." Of the score thus condensed into a 'series of 
 prose narratives, fourteen were written by Mary Lamb, and six by her brother. Oddly 
 enough, Mary Lamb, with her tragic surroundings, selected as her theme the Comedies, 
 while Elia, the inimitable humorist, selected as his the Tragedies ! Published originally 
 in 180J, the work ran into a second edition in 1808 ; a third edition being issued from the 
 press m 1S16, with plates, by William Muhready; the fourth edition being embellished 
 bj William Uiake, and the fifth by William Harvey. Numerous other reprints have 
 since appeared, one of the latest of these being adorned with chromolithographs from 
 
 k 
 
228 The Woj'ks of Charles Lamb. 
 
 designs by Sir John Gilbert. In i860, a German translation of the work was produced 
 by Dr. F. Buitz. As a matter of course, the half-dozen tragical " Tales from Shakspere/' 
 as told by Charles Lamb, are alone here given.] 
 
 KING LEAR. 
 
 Leak, King of Britain, had three daughters : Goneril, wife to the Duke of 
 Albany ; Regan, wife to the Duke of CJornwall; and Cordelia, a young maia, 
 for whose love the King of France and Duke of Burgundy were joint suitors, 
 and were at this time making stay for that purpose in the court of Lear. 
 
 The old king, worn out with age and the fatigues of government, he being 
 more than fourscore years old, determined to take no further part in state 
 affairs, but to leave the management to younger strengths, that he might have 
 time to prepare for death, which must at no long period ensue. With this 
 intent he called his three daughters to him, to know from their own lips which 
 of them loved him best, that he might part his kingdom among them in such . 
 proportions as their affection for him should seem to deserve. 
 
 Goneril, the eldest, declared that she loved her father more than words 
 could give out, that he was dearer to her than the light of her own eyes, 
 dearer than life and liberty, with a dea 1 of such professing stuff, which is easy 
 to counterfeit where there is no real love, only a few fine words delivered with 
 confidence being wanted in that case. The king, delighted to hear from her 
 own mouth this assurance of her love, and thinking truly that her heart went 
 with it, in a fit of fatherly fondness bestowed upon her and her husband one- 
 third of his ample kingdom. 
 
 Then calling to him his second daughter, he demanded what she had to say. 
 Regan, who was made of the same hollow metal as her sister, was not a whit 
 behind in her professions, but rather declared that what her sister had spoken 
 came short of the love which she professed to bear for his highness ; insomuch 
 that she found all other joys dead, in comparison with the pleasure which she 
 took in the love of her dear king and father. 
 
 Lear blessed himself in having such loving children, as he thought ; and 
 could do no less, after the handsome assurances which Regan had made, than 
 bestow a third of his kingdom upon her and her husband, equal in size to that 
 which he had already given away to Goneril. 
 
 Then turning to his youngest daughter Cordelia, whom he called his joy, he 
 asked what she had to say ; thinking no doubt that she would glad his ears 
 with the same loving speeches which her sisters had uttered, or rather that her 
 expressions would be so much stronger than theirs, as she had alwavs been his 
 darling, and favoured by him above either of them. But Cordelia', disgusted 
 with the flattery of her sisters, whose hearts she knew were far from their lips, 
 and seeing that all their coaxing speeches were only intended to wheedle the 
 old king out of his dominions, that they and their husbands might reign in his 
 lifetime, made no other reply but this, — that she loved his majesty according 
 to her duty, neither more nor less. 
 
 The king, shocked with this appearance of ingratitude in his favourite child, 
 
 I desired her to consider her words, and to mend her speech, lest it should mar 
 her fortunes. 
 Cordeha then told her father, that he washer father, that he had given her 
 breeding, and loved her ; that she returned those duties back as was most fit, 
 and did obey him, love him, and most honour him. But that she could not 
 frame her mouth to such large speeches as her sisters had done, or promise to 
 love nothing else in the world. Why had her sisters husbands, if (as they said) 
 they had no love for anything but their father ? If she should ever wed, she 
 
Tales from Shakspere: King Lear. 229 
 
 was sure the lord to whom she gave her hand would want half her love, half 
 of her care and duty ; she should never marry like her sisters, to love her 
 father all. 
 
 Cordelia, who in earnest loved her old father even almost as extravagantly 
 as her sisters pretended to do, would have plainly told him so at any other 
 time, in more daughter-like and loving terms, and without these qualifications, 
 which did indeed sound a little ungracious ; but after the crafty flattering 
 speeches of her sisters, which she had seen draw such extravagant rewards ' 
 after them, she thought the handsomest thing she could do was to love and 
 be silent. This put her affection out of suspicion of mercenary ends, and 
 showed that she loved, but not for gain ; and that her professions, the less 
 ostentatious they were, had so much the more of truth and sincerity than her 
 sisters'. 
 
 This plainness of speech, which Lear called pride, so enraged the old 
 monarch — who in his best of times always showed much of spleen and rash- 
 ness, and in whom the dotage incident to old age had so clouded over his 
 reason, that he cotild not discern truth from flattery, nor a gay painted speech 
 from words that came from the heart — that in a fury of resentment he retracted 
 the third part of his kingdom which yet remained, which he had reserved for 
 Cordelia, and gave it away from her, sharing it equally between her two sisters 
 and their husbands, the Dukes of Albany and Cornwall : whom he now called 
 to him, and in presence of all his courtiers, bestowing a coronet between them, 
 invested them jointly with allthe power, revenue, and execution of government, 
 only retaining to himself the name of king ; all the rest of royalty he resigned ; 
 with this reservation, that himself, with a hundred knights for his attendants, 
 was to be maintained by monthly course in each of his daughters' palaces in 
 turn. 
 
 So preposterous a disposal of his kingdom, so little guarded by reason, and 
 so much by passion, tilled all his courtiers with astonishment and sorrow ; but 
 none of them had the courage to interpose between this incensed king and his 
 wrath, except the Earl of Kent, who was beginning to speak a good word for 
 Cordelia, when the passionate Lear, on pain of death, commanded him to 
 desist : but the good Kent was not so to be repelled. He had been ever loyal 
 to Lear, whom he had honoured as a king, loved as a father, followed as a 
 master; and had never esteemed his life further than as a p£.wn to wage 
 against his roval master's enemies, nor feared to lose it when Lear's safety was 
 the motive ; nor now that Lear was most his own enemy, did this faithful 
 servant of the king forget his old principles, but manfully opposed Lear, to do 
 Lear good ; and was unmannerly only because Lear was mad. He had been 
 a most faithful counsellor in times past to the king, and he besought him now. 
 that he would see with his eyes (as he had done in many weighty matters), and 
 go by his advice still ; and in his best consideration recall this hideous rash- 
 ness : for he would answer with his life, his judgment that Lear s youngest 
 daughter did not love him least, nor were those empty-hearted whose low 
 sound gave no token of hollowness. 'When power bowed to flattery, honour 
 was bound to plainness. For Lear's threats, what could he do to him, 
 whose life was already at his service? that should not hinder duty from 
 speaking. , . j , , . , 
 
 Tlie honest freedom of thi? good Earl of Kent only stirred up the king s 
 wrath the more, and like a frantic patient who kills his physician, and loves 
 his mortal disease, he banished this true servant, and allotted him but five days 
 to make his preparations for departure ; but if on the sixth his hated person 
 was found in the realm of Britain, that moment was to be his death. And 
 Kent bade farewell to the king, and said that since he chose to show himself 
 in such fashion it was but banishment to stay there ; and before he went he 
 recommended Cordelia to the protection of the gods, the maid who had so 
 
230 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 rightly thought, and so discreetly spoken ; and only wished that her sisters' 
 large speeches might be answered with deeds of love; and then he went, as he 
 said, to shape his old course to a new country. 
 
 The King of France and Duke of Burgundy were now called in to hear the 
 determination of Lear about his youngest daughter, and to know whether they 
 would persist in their courtship to Cordelia, now that she w&s under her father's 
 displeasure, and had no fortune btit her own person to recommend her : and 
 the Duke of Burgundy declined the match, and would not take her to wife 
 upon such conditions ; but the King of France, understanding what the 
 nature of the fault had been which had lost her the love of her father, that 
 it was only a tardiness of speech, and the not being able to frame her tongue 
 to flattery like her sisters, took this young maid by the hand, and saying that 
 her virtues were a dowry above a kingdom, bade Cordelia to take farewell of 
 her sisters, and of her father, though he had been unkind, and she should go 
 with him, and be queen of him and of fair France, and reign over fairer pos- 
 sessions than her sisters ; and he called the Duke of Burgundy in contempt a 
 waterish duke, because his love for this young maid had in a moment run all 
 away like water. 
 
 Then Cordelia, with weeping eyes, took leave of her sisters, and besought 
 them to love their father well, and make good their professions : and they 
 sullenly told her not to prescribe to them, for they knew their duty; but to 
 strive to content her husband, who had taken her (as they tauntingly 
 expressed it) as Fortune's alms. And Cordelia, with a heavy heart departed, 
 for she knew the cunning of her sisters, and she wished her father in better 
 hands than she was about to leave him in. 
 
 Cordelia was no sooner gone than the devilish dispositions of her sisters 
 began to show themselves in their true colours. Even before the expiration of 
 the first month, which Lear was to spend by agreement with his eldest daugh- 
 ter Goneril, the old king began to find out the difference between promises and 
 performances. This wretch having got from her father all that he had to' 
 bestow, even to the giving-away of the crown from off his head, began to 
 grudge even those small remnants of royally which the old man had reserved 
 to himself, to please his fancy with the idea of being still a king. She could 
 not bear to see him and his hundred knights. Every time she met her father 
 she put on a frowning countenance ; and when, the old man wanted to speak 
 with her, she would feign sickness, or anything to be rid of the sight of him ; 
 for it was plain that she esteemed his old age i useless burden, and his atten- 
 dants an unnecessary expense : not only she herself slackened in her expressions 
 of duty to the king, but by her example, and (it is to be feared) not without 
 her private instructions, her very servants affected to treat him with neglect, 
 and would either refuse to obey his orders, or still more contemptuously pre- 
 tend not to hear them. Lear could not but perceive this alteration in the 
 behaviour of his daughter, but he shut his eyes against it as long as he could, 
 as people commonly are unwilling to believe the unpleasant consequences which 
 their own mistakes and obstinacy have brought upon them. 
 
 True love and fidelity are no more to be estranged by ///, than falsehood and 
 hoUow-heartedness can be concihated hy good usage. This eminently appears 
 in the instance of the good Earl of Kent, who, though banished by Lear, and 
 his life made forfeit if he were found in Britafc, chose to stay and abide all 
 consequences, as long as there was a chance of his being useful to the king his 
 master. See to what mean shifts and disguises poor loyalty is forced to submit 
 sometimes ; yet it counts nothing base or unworthy, so as it can but do service 
 where it owes an obligation ! In the disgtiise of a serving-man, all his great- 
 ness and pomp laid aside, this good earl proffered his services to the king, who 
 not knowing him to be Kent in that disguise, but pleased with a certain plain- 
 ness, or rather bluntness in his answers which the earl put on (so different from 
 
Tales from Shakspere : King Lear. 231 
 
 that smooth oily flattery which he had so much reason to be sick of, having 
 found the effects not answerable in his daughter), a bargain was quickly struck, 
 and Lear took Kent into his service by the name of Caius, as he called himself' 
 never suspecting him to be his once great favourite, the high and mighty Earl 
 of Kent. 
 
 This Caius quickly found means to show his iidelity and love to his royal 
 master ; for Goneril's steward that same day behaving in a disrespectful manner 
 to Lear, and giving him saucy looks and language, as no doubt he was secretly 
 encouraged to do by his mistress, Caius, not enduring to hear so open an 
 affront put upon majesty, made no more ado but presently tripped up his heels, 
 and laid the unmannerly slave in the kennel ; for which friendly service Lear 
 became more and more attached to him. 
 
 Nor was Kent the only friend Lear had. In his degree, and as far as so 
 insignificant a personage could show his love, the poor fool, or jester, that had 
 been of his palace while Lear had a palace, as it was the custom of kings and 
 great personages at that time to keep a fool (as he was called) to make them 
 sport after serious business : this poor fool clung to Lear after he had given 
 away his crown, and by his witty sayings would keep up his good humour, 
 though he could not refrain sometimes from jeering at his master for his im- 
 prudence, in uncrowning himself, and giving all away to. his daughters : at 
 which time, as he rhymingly e.\pressed it, these daughters — 
 
 For sudden joy did weep 
 
 And he for sorrow sung, 
 That such a king .should play bo-peep, 
 ' And go the fooL among. 
 
 And in such wild sayings, and scraps of songs, of which he had plenty, this 
 pleasant honest fool poured out his heart even in the presence of Goneril her- 
 self, in many a bitter taunt and jest which cut to the quick : such as comparing 
 the king to the hedge-sparrow, who feeds the young of the cuckoo till they 
 grow old enough, and then has its head bit off for its pains ; and saying, that 
 an ass may know when the cart draws the horse {meaning that Lear's daugh- 
 ters, that ought to go behind, now ranked before their father ) : and that Lear 
 was no longer Lear, but the shadow of Lear : for which free speeches he was 
 once or twice threatened to be whipped.. 
 
 The coolness and falling off of respect which Lear had begun to perceive, 
 were not all which this foolish-fond father was to suffer from his unworthy 
 daughter : she now plainly told him that his staying in her palace ^vas incon- 
 venient so long as he insisted upon keeping up an establishment of a hundred 
 knights ; that this establishment was useless and expensive, and only served to 
 fill her cpurt with riot and feasting ; and she prayed him that he would lessen 
 their number, and keep none but old men about him, such as himself, fitting 
 his age. 
 
 Lear at first could not believe his eyes or ears, nor that it was his daughter 
 who spoke so unkindly. He could not believe that she who had received a 
 crown from him could seek to cut off his train, and grudge him the respect 
 due to his old age. But she persisting in her undutiful demand, the old man's 
 rage was so excited, that he called her a detested kite, and said that she spoke 
 an untruth ; and so indeed she did, for the hundred knights were all men of 
 choice behaviour and sobriety of manners, skilled in all particulars of duty, 
 and not given to rioting and feasting, as she said. And he bid his horses to-be 
 prepared, for he would go to his other daughter, Regan, he and his hundred 
 knights : and he spoke of ingratitude, and said it was a marble-hearted devil, 
 and showed more hideous in a child than the sea-monster. And he cursed his 
 eldest daughter Goneril so as was terrible to hear ; praying that she might never 
 have a child, or if she had, that it might live to return that scorn and contempt 
 
232 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 upon her which she had shown to him ; that she might feel how sharper than 
 a serpent's tooth it was to have a thankless child. And Goneril's husband, 
 the Duke of Albany, beginning to excuse himself for any shai'e which Lear 
 might suppose he had in the unkindness, Lear would not hear him out, but in 
 a rage ordered his horses to be saddled, and set out with his followers for the 
 abode of Regan, his other daughter. And Lear thought to hims^elf how small 
 the fault of Cordeli-d, {if it was a fault) novy^ appeared, in comparison with her 
 sister's, and he wept ; and then he was ashamed that such a creature as Goneril 
 should have so nuich power over his manhood as to malce him weep, 
 
 Regan and her husband were keeping their court in great pomp and state at 
 their palace; and Lear despatched his servant Caius with l etters to his daughter, 
 that she might be prepared for his reception, while he'=HTrcl his train followed 
 after. But it seems that Goneril had been beforehand witli him, sendin^Jettets-^ 
 also to Regan, accusing her father of waywardness and ill-humours, and 
 iadvising her not to receive so great a train as he was bringing with him. This 
 messenger arrived at the same time with Caius, and Caius and he met : and 
 who should it be but Caius's old enemy the steward, whom he had formerly 
 tripped up by the heels for his saucy behaviour to Lear, Caius, not liking the 
 fellow's look, and suspecting what he" came for, began to revile hirr, and 
 challenged him to fight, which the fellow refusing, Caius, in a fit of honest 
 passion, beat him soundly, as such a niischief-malter and carrier of wicked 
 messages deserved ; which, coming to tlie ears of Regan and her-husband, 
 they ordered Caius to be put in the stocks, though he was a messenger from 
 the king her father, and in that character demanded the highest -^ respect : so 
 that the first thing the king saw when he entered the castle was his faithful 
 servant Caim sitting in that disgraceful situation. 
 
 This was but a bad omen of the reception which he was to expect ; but a 
 worse followed when, upon inquiring for his daughter and her husband, he 
 was told they were weary with travelling all night, and could not see him ; and 
 when, lastly, upon his insisting in a positive and angry manner to see them, 
 they came to greet him, whom should he see in their company but tlie hated 
 Goneril, who had come to tell her own story, and set her sister against the king 
 her father. 
 
 This sight much moved the old man, and still more to see Regan talce her by 
 the hand ; and he asked Goneril if she was not ashamed to look upon his old 
 white beard ? And Regan advised hirn to go home again with Goneril, and 
 live with her peaceably, dismissing half of his attendants, and to ask her for- 
 giveness ; for he was old and wanted discretion, and must be ruled and led by 
 persons that had more discretion than himself. And Lear sliowed how pre- 
 posterous that would sound, if he were to down on his knees, and beg of his 
 own daughter for food and raiment, and he argued r gainst^ such an unnatural 
 dependence, declaring his resolution never to return with her, but to stay where 
 he w ..; with Regan, he and Ins hundred knights ; for he said that she had not 
 forgot the half of the kingdom which he had endowed her with, and that her 
 eyes were not fierce like Goneril's, but mild and kind. And he said that rather 
 than return 10 Goneril, with half his train cut off", he would go over to France, 
 and beg a wretched pension of the king there, who had married his youngest 
 daughter without a portion. 
 
 But he was mistaken in expecting kinder treatment of Regan than he had 
 experienced from her sister Goneril. As if willing to outdo her sister in unfilial 
 behaviour, she declared that she thought fifty knights too many to wait upon 
 him — that five-and-twenty were enough. Then Lear, nigh heart-broken, 
 turned to Goneril, and said that he would go back with her, for her fifty doubled, 
 five-and-twenty, and so her love was twice as much as Regan's. But Goneril 
 excused hersdf, and said, what need of so many as five-and-twenty? or even 
 ten? or five? when he might be waited upon by her servants, or her sister's 
 
 S 
 
Tales ffom Shakspere : King Lear. 233 
 
 servants ? So these two wicked daughters, as if they strove to exceed each 
 other in cruelty to their old father who had been so good to them, by little and 
 little would have abated him of all his train, all respect (little enough for liini 
 that once commanded a kingdom), which was left him to show that he had 
 once been a king ! Not that a splendid train is essential to happiness, but 
 from a king to a beggar is a hard change, from commanding milhons to be 
 without one attendant ; and it was the ingratitude in his daughters' denying it, 
 more than what he would suffer by the want of it, which pierced this poor 
 king to the heart ; insomuch, that with this double ill-usage, and vexation for 
 having so foolishly given away a kingdom, his wits began to be unsettled, and 
 while he said he knew hot what, he vowed revenge against those unnatural 
 hags, and to malce examples of them that should be a terror to the earth ! 
 I While he was thus idly threatening what his weak arm could never execute, 
 night came on, and a loud storm of thunder and lightning with rain ; and his 
 daQghters still persisting in their resolution not to admit his followers, he 
 called for his horses, and chose rather to encounter the utmost fury of the 
 storm abroad than stay under the same roof with these ungrateful daughters ; 
 and they, saying that the injuries which wilful men procure to themselves are 
 their just punishment, suffered him to go in that condition, and shut their 
 doors upon him. 
 
 The winds were high, and the rain and storm increased, when the old man 
 sallied forth to combat with the elements, less sharp than his daughters' un- 
 kindness. For many miles about there was scarce a bush ; and there, upon a 
 heath, exposed to the fury of the storm in a dark night, did king Lear wander 
 out, and defy the winds and the thunder : and he bid the winds to blow the 
 earth into the sea, or swell the waves of the sea till they drowned the earth, 
 that no token might remain of any such ungrateful animal as man. The old 
 king was now left with no other companion than the poor fool, who still abided 
 with him, with his merry conceits striving to outjest misfortune, saying it was 
 but a naughty night to ssvim in, and truly the king had better go in and ask his 
 daughters' blessing : 
 
 But he that has a little tiny wit, 
 "With heigh ho, the wind and the rain ! 
 Must make content with his fortunes fit, 
 Though the rain it raineth every day : 
 
 and swearing it was a brave night to cool a lady's pride. 
 
 Thus poorly accompanied, this once great monarch was found by his ever 
 faithful servant the good Earl of Kent, now transformed to Caius, who ever 
 followed close at his side, though the king did not know him to be the earl ; 
 and he said, ' ' Alas ! sir, are you here ? creatures that love night, love not such 
 nights as these. This dreadful storm has driven the beasts to their hiding- 
 places. Man's nature cannot endure the alHiction or the fear." And Lear 
 rebuked him, and said tjiese lesser evils were not felt, where a greater malady 
 was fixed. When the mind is at ease, the body has leisure to be delicate ; 
 but the tempest in his mind did take all feeling else from his senses, but of 
 that which beat at his heart. And he spoke of filial ingratitude, and said it 
 was all one as if the mouth should tear the hand for lifting food to it ; for 
 parents were hands and food and everything to children. 
 
 But the good Caius. still persisting in his entreaties that the king would not 
 stay out in the open air, at last persuaded him to enter a little wretched hovel 
 which stood upon the heath, where the fool first entering, suddenly ran back 
 terrified, saying that he had seen a spirit. But upon examination this spirit 
 proved to be nothing more than a poor Bedlam beggar, who had crept into 
 this deserted hovel for shelter, and with his talk about devils frighted the fool, — 
 one of those poor lunatics who are either mad, or feign to be so, the better to 
 
 I * 
 
234 The Works of diaries Lamb. 
 
 extort charity from the compassionate country-people, who go about the 
 country calling themselves poor Tom and poor Turlygod, saying, " Who 
 gives anything to poor Tom ? " sticking pins and nails and sprigs of rosemary 
 into their arms to make them bleed ; and with such horrible-actions, partly by 
 prayers and partly witt/ lunatic curses, they move or "terrify the ignorant 
 country-folks into giving them alms. This poor fellow was such a one ; and 
 the king seeing him in so wretched a plight, with nothing but a blanket about 
 his loins to cover his nakedness, could not be persuaded but that the fellow was 
 some father who had given all away to his daughters, and brought himself to 
 that pass : for nothing he thought could bring a man to such wretchedness but 
 the having unkind daughters. 
 
 And from this and many such wild speeches which he uttered, the good 
 Caius plainly perceived that he was not in his perfect mind, but that his 
 daughters' ill-usage had really made him go mad. And now the loyalty of 
 this worthy Earl of Kent showed itself in more essential services than he had 
 hitherto found opportunity to perform. For with the assistance of some of the 
 king's attendants who remained loyal, he had the person of his royal master 
 removed at daybreak to the castle of Dover, where his own friends and in- 
 fluence, as Earl of Kent, chiefly lay; and himself embarking, for France, 
 hastened to the court of Cordelia, and did there in such movmg terms re- 
 present the pitiful condition of her royal father, and set out in such lively 
 colours the inhumanity of her sisters, that this good and loving child with 
 many tears besought the king her husband that he would give her leave to 
 embark for England with a sufficient power to subdue these cruel daughters 
 and their husbands, and restore the old king her father to his throne ; which 
 being granted she set forth, and with a royal army landed at Dover. 
 
 Lear having by some chance escaped from the guardians which the good 
 Earl of Kent had put over him to take care of him in his lunacy, was found 
 by some of Cordelia's train wandering about the fields near Dover, in a 
 pitiable condition, stark mad, and singing aloud to himself, with a crown upon 
 his, head which he had made of straw and nettles, and other wild weeds that 
 he had picked up in the corn-fields. By the advice of the physicians, Cordelia, 
 though earnestly desirous of seeing her father, was prevailed upon to put off 
 the meeting, till by sleep and the operation of herbs which they gave him, he 
 should be restored to greater composure. By the aid of these skilful physicians, 
 to whom Cordelia promised all her gold and jewels for the recovery of the old 
 king, Lear was soon in a condition to see his daughter. 
 
 . A tender sight it was to see the meeting between this father and daughter ; 
 to see the struggles between the joy of this poor old king at beholding again 
 his once darling child, and the shame at receiving such filial kindness from her 
 whom he had cast oS for so small a fault in his displeasure; both these 
 passions struggling with the remains of his malady, which in his half-crazed 
 brain sometimes made him that he scarce remembered where he was, or who it 
 was that so kindly kissed him and spoke to him : and then he would beg the 
 standers-by not to laugh at him, if he were mistaken in, thinking this lady to he 
 his daughter Cordeha ! And then to see him" fall on his knees to beg pardon 
 of his child ; and she, good lady, kneeling all the while to ask a blessing of 
 him, and telling him that it did not become him to kneel, but it was her duty, 
 for she was his child, his true and very child Cordelia ! And she kissed him 
 (as she said) to kiss away all her sisters' unkindness, and said that they might 
 be ashamed of themselves, to turn their old kind father with his white beard 
 out into the cold air, when her enemy's dog, though it had bit her (as she 
 prettily expressed it), should have stayed by her fire such a night as that, and 
 ' warmed himself. And she told her father how she had come from France 
 with purpose to brin« him assistance ; and he said' that she must forget and 
 forgive, for he was old and foohsh, and did not know what he did ; but that to 1 
 
 .. i 
 
Tales from Shakspere: Xi?ig Lear. 235 
 
 be sure she had great cause not to love him, but her sisters had none. And 
 Cordelia said, that she had no cause, no more than they had. 
 
 So we will leave this old king in tlie protection of this dutiful and loving 
 child, where, by tlie help of sleep ^nd medicine, she and her physjcians St. 
 length succeeded in winding up the untuned and jarring senses which the 
 cruelty of his other daughters had so violently shalcen. Let us return to say a 
 word or two about those cruel daughters. 
 
 These monsters of ingratitude, who had been so false to their old father 
 could not be expected to prove more faithful to their own husbands They 
 soon grew tired of paymg^even the appearance of duty and affection and in 
 an open way showed they had fixed their loves upon another. It happened 
 thai the object of their guilty loves was the same. It was Edmund a natural 
 son of the late Earl of Gloucester, who by his treacheries had succeeded in 
 disinheriting his brother Edgar, the lawful heir, from his earldom, and by his 
 wicked practices was now earl himself; a wicked man, and a fit object for the 
 love of such wicked creatures as Goneril and Regan. It falling out about this 
 time that the Duke of Cornwall, Regan's husband, died, Regan immediately 
 declared her intention of wedding this Earl of Gloucester which rousing the 
 jealousy of her sister to whom as well as to Regan this wicked earl had at 
 sundry times professed love, Gonenl found means to make away with her sister 
 by poison ; but being detected in her practices, and imprisoned by her husband 
 the Duke of Albany for this deed, and for her guilty passion for the earl which 
 had come to his ears, she, m a fit of disappointed love and rage shortly put an 
 end to her own life. Thus the justice of Heaven at last overtook these wicked 
 daughters. 
 
 While the eyes of all men were upon this event, admiring the justice dis- 
 played in their deserved deaths, the same eyes were suddenly taken off from 
 this sight to admire at the mysterious ways of the same power in the melancholy 
 fate of the young and virtuous daughter, the lady Cordelia, whose good deeds 
 did seem to deserve a more fortunate conclusion : but it is an awful truth, that 
 innocence and piety are not always successful in this world. The forces which 
 Goneril and Regan had sent out under the command of the bad Earl of Glou- 
 cester were victorious, and Cordelia, by the practices of this wicked earl, who 
 did not like that any should stand between him and the throne, ended her life 
 in prison. Thus Heaven took this innocent lady to itself in her young years, 
 after showing her to the world an illustrious example of filial duty. Lear did 
 not long survive this child. 
 
 Before he died, the good Earl of Kent, who had still attended his old 
 master's steps from the first of his daughters' ill-usage to this sad period of his 
 decay, tried to make him understand that it was he who had followed him 
 under the name of Caius ; but Lear's care-crazed brain at that time could not 
 comprehend how that could be, or how Kent and Caius could be the same 
 person : so Kent thought it needless to trouble him with explanations at such 
 a time ; * and Lear soon after expiring,_Jljji_iaJ*bfijlr-96««nUto-.*e-"Km 
 between age anri crrjtf fnr hjj-iaM— nrggrgFc vciratinnc^ soon foUowed him to the 
 grave. 
 
 How the judgment of Heaven overtook the bad Earl of Gloucester, whose 
 treasons were' discovered, and himself slain in single combat with his brother, 
 the lawful earl ; and how Goneril's husband, the Duke of Albany, who was 
 innocent of the death of Cordelia, and had never encouraged his lady in her 
 wicked proceedings against her father, ascended the throne of Britain after the 
 death of Lear, is needless here to narrate ; Lear and his three daughters being 
 dead, whose adventures alone concern our story. » 
 
 Vide suprd., p. 233. 
 
236 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 MACBETH. 
 
 When Duncan the Meek reigned king of Scotland, there Hved a great thane, 
 "or lord, called Macbeth. This Macbeth was a near kinsman to the king, and 
 in great esteem at court for his valour and conduct in the wars ; an example of 
 which he had lately given, in defeating a rebel army assisted by the troops of 
 Norway in terrible numbers. 
 
 The two Scottish generals, Macbeth and Banquo, returning victorious from 
 this great battle, their way lay over a blasted heath, where they were stopped 
 by the strange appearance of three figures lilce women, except that they had 
 beards, and their withered skins and wild attire made them look not like any 
 earthly creatures. Macbeth first addressed them, when they, seemingly 
 offended, laid each one her choppy finger upon her skinny lips, in token of 
 silence ; and the first of them saluted Macbeth with the title of thane of 
 Glamis. The general was not a Uttle startled to find himself known by such 
 creatures ; but how much more when the second of them followed up that 
 salute by giving him the title of thane of CawdoT, to which honour he had no 
 pretensions ; and again the third bid hiirf " All hail ! king that shalt be here- 
 after ! " Such a prophetic greeting might well amaze him, who knew that 
 while the king's sons lived he could not hope to succeed to the throne. Then 
 turning to Banquo, they pronounced him, in a sort of riddling terms, to be 
 lesser than Macbeth, and greater ! not so happy, but much happier / and pro- 
 phesied that though he should never reign, yet his sons after him should be 
 kings in Scotland. They then turned into air and vanished ; by which the 
 generals knew them to be the weird sisters, or witches. 
 
 While they stood pondering on the strangeness of this adventure, there 
 arrived certain messengers from the king, who were empowered by him to 
 confer upon Macbeth the dignity of thane of Cawdor. An event so miracu- 
 lously corresponding with the prediction of the witches astonished Macbeth, 
 and he stood wrapped in amazement, unable to make reply to the messengers; 
 and in that point of time swelling hopes arose in his mjnd, that the prediction 
 of the third witch might in like manner have its accompUshment. and that he 
 should one day reign king in Scotland. 
 
 Turning to Banquo, he said, "Do you not hope that your children shall be 
 kings, when what the witches promised to me has so wonderfully come to 
 pass? " That hope, ■ answered the general, "might enkindle you to aim at 
 the throne; but oftentimes these ministers of darkness tell us truths in Uttle 
 things, to betray us into deeds of greatest consequence." 
 
 ■^j' i'\^ wicked suggestions of the witches had sunk too deep into the 
 mind of Macbeth to allow him to attend to the warnings of the good Banquo. 
 From that time he bent all his thoughts how to compass the throne of 
 Scotland. 
 
 Macbeth had a wife, to whom he communicated the strange prediction of 
 the weird sisters, and its partial accompUshment. She was a bad ambitious 
 woman, and so as her husband and herself could arrive at greatness, she cared 
 not much by what means. She spurred on the reluctant purpose of Macbeth, 
 who felt compunction at the thoughts of blood, and did not cease to represent 
 the murder of the king as a step absolutely necessary to the fulfilment of the 
 itattering prophecy. < 
 
 It happened at this time that the king, who out of his royal condescension 
 
3 
 
 J Tales from Shakspere : Macbeth. 237 
 
 would oftentimes visit his principal nobility upon gracious terms, came to 
 Macbeth's house, attended by his two sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, and a 
 numerous train of thanes and attendants, the more to honour Macbeth for the 
 triumphal success of his wars. 
 
 The castle of Macbeth was pleasantly situated, and the air about it was 
 sweet and wholesome, which appeared by the nests which the martlet, or 
 swallow, had built under all the jutting friezes and buttresses of the building, 
 wherever it found a place of advantage ; for where those birds most breed and 
 haunt, the air is observed to be delicate. The king entered well pleased with 
 the place, and not less so with the attentions and respect of his honoured 
 hostess, lady Macbeth, who had the art of covering treacherous purposes with 
 smiles ; and could look hke the innocent flower, while she was indeed the 
 serpent under it. 
 
 The king, being tired with his journey, went early to bed, and in his state- 
 room two grooms of his chamber (as was the custom) slept beside him. He 
 had been unusually pleased with his reception, and had made presents before 
 he retired to his principal officers ; and, among the rest, had sent a rich diamond 
 to lady Macbeth, .greeting her by the name of his most kind hostess. 
 
 Now was the middle of night, when over half the world nature seems dead, 
 and wicked dreams abuse men's minds asleep, and none but the wolf and the 
 murderer is abroad. This was the time when lady Macbeth waked to plot the 
 murder of the king. She would not have undertaken a deed so abhorrent to 
 her se.v, but that she feared her husband's nature, that it was too full of the 
 milk of human kindness to do a contrived murder. She knew him to be 
 ambitious, but withal to be scrupulous, and not yet prepared for that height of 
 crime which commonly in the end accompanies inordinate ambition. She had 
 won him to consent to the murder, but she doubted his resoltltion ; and she 
 feared that the natural tenderness of his disposition (more humane than her 
 own) would come between, and defeat the purpose. So with her own hands 
 armed with a dagger, she approached the king's bed ; having taken care to ply 
 the grooms of his chamber so with wine that they slept intoxicated, and care- 
 less of their charge. There lay Duncan, in a sound sleep after the fatigues of 
 his journey, and as she viewed him earnestly, there was something in his face, 
 as he slept, which resembled her own father ; and she had not the courage to 
 proceed. 
 
 She returned to confer with her husband. His resolution had begun to 
 stagger. He considered that there were strong reasons against the deed. In 
 the first place, he was not only a subject, but a near kinsman to the king ; and 
 he had been his host and entertainer that day, whose duty, by the laws of 
 hospitality, it was to shut the door against his murderers, not bear the knife 
 himself Then he considered how just and merciful a king this Duncan had 
 been, how clear of offence to his subjects, how loving to his nobiUty, and in 
 particular to him ; that such kings are the peculiar care of Heaven, and their 
 subjects doubly bound to revenge their deaths. Besides, by the favours of the 
 king, Macbeth stood high in the opinion of all sorts of men, and how would 
 those honours be stained by the reputation of so foul a murder ! 
 
 In these conflicts of the mind lady Macbeth found her husband, inclining to 
 the better part, and resolving to proceed no further. But she being a bad 
 ambitious woman, and not easily shaken from her purpose, Sbegan to pour in at 
 his ears words which infused a portion of her own spirit into his mind, assign- 
 ing reason upon reason why he should not shrink from what he had undertaken ; 
 how easv the deed was ; how soon it would be over ; and how the action of 
 one short night would give to all their nights and days to come sovereign sway 
 and royalty ! Then she threw contempt on his change of purpose, and 
 accused him of fickleness and cowardice ; and declared that she had given 
 suck, and knew how tender it was to love the babe that milked her; but she 
 
238 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 would, while it was smiling in her face, have plucked it from her breast, and 
 dashed its brains out, if she had so sworn to do it, as he had sworn to perform 
 that murder. Then she added, how practicable it was to lay the guilt of the 
 deed upon the drunken sleepy grooms. And with the valour of her tongue 
 she so chastised his sluggish resolutions, that he once more summoned up 
 courage to the bloody business. 
 
 So, taking the dagger in his hand, he softly stole in the dark to the room 
 where Duncan lay ; and as he went, he thought he saw another dagger in the 
 air, with the handle towards him, and on the blade and at the point of it 
 drops of blood ; but when he tried to grasp at it, it was nothing but air, a 
 mere phantasm proceeding from his own hot and oppressed brain and the 
 business he had in hand. 
 
 Getting rid of this fear, he entered the king's room, whom he despatched 
 with one stroke of his dagger. Just as he had done the murder, one of tlie 
 grooms, who slept in the chamber, laughed in his sleep, and the other cried, 
 "Murder!" which woke them both; but they said a short prayer; one of 
 them said, "God bless us ! " and the other answered " Amen ;" and addressed 
 themselves to sleep again. Macbeth, who stood hstening to them, tried to 
 say "Amen," when the fellow said, "God bless us !" but, though he had 
 most need of a blessing, the word stuck in his throat, and he could not pro- 
 nounce it. 
 
 Again he thought he heard a voice which cried, " Sleep no more : Macbeth 
 doth murder sleep, the innocent sleep, that nourishes life." Still it cried, 
 "Sleep no more," to all the house. "Glamis hath murdered sleep, and 
 therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more." 
 
 With such horrible imaginations Macbeth returned to his listening wife, who 
 began to think he had failed of his purpose, and that the deed was somehow 
 frustrated. He came in so distracted a state, that she reproached him with his 
 want of firmness, and sent him to wash his hands of the blood which stained 
 them, while she took his dagger, with purpose to stain the cheeks of the 
 grooms with blood, to make it seem their guilt. 
 
 Morning came, and with it the discovery of the murder, which could not be 
 concealed ; and though Macbeth and his lady made great show of grief, and 
 the proofs against the gi'ooms (the dagger being produced against them and 
 their faces smeared with blood) were sufficiently strong, yet the endre suspicion 
 fell upon Macbeth, whose inducements to such a deed were so much more 
 forcible than such poor silly grooms could be supposed to have ; and Duncan's 
 two sons fled. Malcolm, the eldest, sought for refuge in the English court ; 
 and the youngest, Donalbain, made his escape to Ireland. 
 
 The king's sons, who should have succeeded him, having thus vacated the 
 throne, Macbeth as next heir was crowned king, and thus the prediction of the 
 weird sisters was literally accomplished. 
 
 Though placed so high, Macbeth and his queen could not forget the pro- 
 phecy of the weird sisters, that, though Macbeth should be king, yet not his 
 children, but the children of Banquo, should be kings after him. The thought 
 of this, and that they had defiled their hands with blood, and done so great 
 crimes, only to place the posterity of Banquo upon the throne, so rankled within 
 them, that they determined to put to death both Banquo and his son, to make 
 void the predictions of the weird sisters, which in their ov/n case had been so 
 remarkably brought to pass. 
 
 For this purpose they made a great supper, to which they invited all the 
 chief thanes ; and, among the rest, with marks of particular respect, Banquo - 
 and his son Fleance were invited. The way by which Banquo was to pass 
 to the palace at night was beset, by murderers appointed by Macbeth, who 
 stabbed Banquo; but in the scuffle Fleiince escaped. From that Fleance 
 descended a race of monarchs who afterwards filled the Scottish throne, ending 
 
Tales f7-om Shakspere : Macbeth. ^39 
 
 with James the Sixth of Scotland and the First of England, under whom the 
 two crowns of England and Scotland were united. 
 
 At supper the queen, whose manners were in the highest degree affable and 
 royal, played the hostess with a gracefulness and attention which conciliated 
 every one present, and Macbeth discoursed freely with his thanes and nobles, 
 saying, that all that was honourable in the country was under his roof, if he 
 had but his good friend Banquo present, whom yet he hoped he should rather 
 have to chide for neglect, than to lament for any mischance. Just at these 
 words the ghost of Banquo, whom he had caused to be murdered, entered the 
 room, and placed himself on the chair which jVIacbeth was about to occupy. 
 Though Macbeth was a bold man, and one that could have faced the devil 
 without trembling, at this horrible sight his cheeks turned white with fear, and 
 he stood quite unmanned with his eyes fixed upon the ghost. His queen and 
 all the nobles, who saw nothing, but perceived him gazing (as they thought) 
 upon an empty chair, took it for a fit of distraction ; and she reproached him, 
 whispering that it was but the same fancy which had made him see the dagger 
 in the air, when he was about to kill Duncan. But Macbeth continued to see 
 the ghost, and gave no heed to all they could say, while he addressed it with 
 distracted words, yet so significant, that his queen, fearing the dreadful secret 
 would be disclosed, in great hastf dismissed the guests, excusing the infirmity 
 of Macbeth as a disorder he was often troubled with. 
 
 To such dreadful fancies Macbeth was subject. His queen and he had their 
 sleeps afflicted with terrible dreams, and the blood of Banquo troubled them 
 not more than the escape of Fleance, whom now they looked upon as father 
 to a line of kings, who should keep their posterity out of the throne. With 
 these miserable thoughts they found no peace, and Macbeth determined once 
 more to seek out the weird sisters, and kno,w from them the worst. 
 
 He sought them in a cave upon the heath, where they, who knew by fore- 
 sight of his coming, were engaged in preparing their dreadful charms, by 
 which they conjured up infernal spirits to reveal to them futurity. Their horrid 
 ingredients were toads, bats, and serpents, the eye of a newt, and the tongue 
 of a dog, the leg of a lizard, and the wing of the night-owl, the scale of a 
 dragon, the tooth of a wolf, the maw of the ravenous salt-sea shark, the 
 mummy of a witch, the root of the poisonous hemlock (this to have effect 
 must be digged in the dark), the gall of a goat, and the liver of a Jew, with 
 slips of the yew tree that roots itself in graves, and the finger of a dead child ; 
 all these were set on to boil in a great kettle, or cauldron, which, as fast as it 
 grew too hot, was coo'ed with a baboon's blood : to these they poured in the 
 blood of a sow that had eaten her young, and they threw into the flame the 
 grease that had sweaten from a murderer's gibbet. By these charms they 
 bound the infernal spirits to answer their questions. 
 
 It was demanded of Macbeth, whether he would have his doubts resolved 
 by them, or by their masters, the spirits. He, nothing daunted by the dread- 
 ful ceremonies which he saw, boldly answered, ' ' Where are they ? let me see 
 them." And they called the spirits, which were three. And the first arose in 
 the likeness of an armed head, and he called Macbeth by name, and bid him 
 beware of the thane of Fife ; for which caution Macbeth thanked him ; for 
 Macbeth had entertained a jealousy of Macduff, the thane of Fife. 
 
 And the second spirit arose in the hkeness of a bloody child, and he called 
 Macbeth by nam.e, and bid him have no fear, but laugh to scorn the power of 
 man, for none of worman born should have power to hurt him : and he advised 
 him to be bloody, bold, and resolute. "Then live, Macduff ! " cried the king; 
 " what need I fear of thee? but yet I will make assurance doubly sure. 'Thou 
 Shalt not live ; that I may tell pale-hearted Fear it lies, and sleep in spite of 
 thunder." ■ 
 
 That spirit being dismissed, a third arose m the form of a child crowned. 
 
240 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 with a tree in his hand. He called Macbeth by name, and comforted him 
 against conspiracies, saying that he should never be vanquished until the 
 wood of Bimam to Dunsinane Hill should come against him. "Sweet bode- 
 ments, good ! " cried Macbeth ; " who can unfix the forest, and move it from 
 its earth-bound roots? I see I shall live the usual period of man's life, and 
 not be cut off by violent death. But my heart throbs to know one thing. Tell 
 me, if your art can tell so much, if Banquo's issue shall ever reign in this 
 kingdom?" Here the cauldron sunk into the ground, and a noise of music 
 was heard, and eight shadows, like kings, passed by Macbeth, and Banquo 
 last, who bore a glass which showed the figures of many more, and Banquo 
 all bloody smiled upon Macbeth, and pointed to them ; by which Macbeth 
 knew that these were the posterity of Banquo, who should reign after him in 
 Scotland ; and the witches, with a sound of soft music, and with dancing, 
 making a show of duty and welcome to Macbeth, vanished. And from tjiis 
 time the thoughts of Macbeth were all bloody and dreadful. 
 
 The first thing he heard when he got out of the witches' cave was that 
 Macduff, thane of Fife, had fled to England, to join the army which was 
 forming against him under Malcolm, the eldest son of the late king, with 
 intent to displace Macbeth, and set Malcolm, the right heir, upon the throne. 
 Macbeth, stung with rage; set upon the castle of Macduff and put his wife 
 and children, whom the thane had left behind, to the sword, and extended the 
 slaughter to all who claimed the least relationship to Macduff. 
 
 These and such-like deeds alienated the minds of all his chief nobility from 
 him. Such as could, fled to join with Malcolm and Macduff, who were now 
 approaching with a powerful army which they had raised in England ; and 
 the rest secretly wished success to their arms, though for fear of Macbeth 
 they could take no active part. His recruits went on slowly. Everybody 
 hated the tyrant, nobody loved or honoured him ; but all suspected him, and 
 he began to envy the condition of Duncan, whom he had murdered, who 
 slept soundly in his grave, against whom treason had done its worst ; steel nor 
 poison, domestic malice nor foreign levies, could hurt him any longer. 
 
 While these things were acting, the queen, who had been the sole partner 
 in his wickedness, in whose bosom he could sometimes seek a momentary 
 repose from those terrible dreams which afflicted them both nightly, died, it is 
 supposed by her own hands, unable to bear the remorse of guilt, and public 
 hate ; by which event he was left alone, without a soul to love or care for him, 
 or a friend to whom he could confide his wicked purposes. 
 
 He grew careless of life, and wished for death ; but the near approach of 
 Malcolm's army roused in him what remained of his ancient courage, and he 
 determined to die (as he expressed ft) "with armour on his back." Besides 
 this, the hollow promises, of the witches had filled him with false confidence, 
 and he remembered the sayings of the spirits, that none of women boru was to 
 hurt him, and that he was never to be vanquished till Birnam v/ood should 
 come to Dunsinane, which he thought could never be. So he shut himself up 
 in his castle, whose impregnable strength was such as defied a siege : here he 
 sullenly waited the approach of Malcolm. When, upon a day, there came a 
 messenger to him, pale and shaking with fear, almost unable to report that 
 which he had seen; for he averred, that as he stood upon his watch on the hill, 
 he looked towards Birnam, and to his thinking the wood began to move ! 
 " Liar and slave ! " cried Macbeth ; " if thou speakest false, thou shalt hang 
 alive upon the next tree, till famine end thee. If thy tale be true, I care not 
 if thou dost as much by me ; " for Macbeth now began to faint in resolution, 
 and to doubt the equivocal speeches of the spirits. He was not to fear till 
 Birnam wood should come to Dunsinane ; and now awood did move ! " How- 
 ever," said he, " if this which he avouches.be true, let us arm and out. There 
 is no flying hence, nor staying here. I begin to be weary of the sun, and wish 
 
Tales from Shaksfcre: Macbeth. 241 
 
 my life at an end." With these desperate speeches he sallied forth upon the 
 besiegers, who had now come up to the castle. 
 
 The strange appearance which had given the messenger an idea of a wood 
 moving IS easily solved. When the besieging army marched through the wood 
 of Birnam, iWalcolm, like a skilful general, instructed his soldiers to hew down 
 every one a bough, and bear it before him, by way of concealing the true num- 
 bers ot his host. 1 his marching of the soldiers with boughs had at a distance 
 the appearance which had frightened the messenger. Thus were the words of 
 the spirits brought to pass, in a sense different from that in which Macbeth 
 had understood them, and one great hold of his confidence was gone. 
 
 And now a severe skirmishing took place, in which Macbeth, though feebly 
 supported by those who called themselves his friends, but in reality hated the 
 tyrant and inclined to the party of Malcolm and Macduff", yet fought with the 
 extreme of rage and valour, cutting to pieces all who were opposed to him, 
 till he came to where Macduff was fighting. Seeing MacdufT, and remember- 
 ing the caution of the spirit who had counselled him to avoid Macduff above 
 all men, he would have turned, but Macduff, who had been seeking him 
 through the whole fight, opposed his turning, and a fierce contest ensued ; 
 Macduff giving him many foul reproaches for the murder of his wife and 
 children. Macbeth, whose soul was charged enough with the blood of that 
 family already, would still have declined the combat ; but Macduff still urged 
 him to it, calling him tyrant, murderer, hell-hound, and villain. 
 
 Then Macbeth remembered the words of the spirit, how none of woman 
 boJn should hurt him ; and smiling confidently, he said to Macduff, "Thou 
 losest thy labour, Macduff. As easily thou mayest impress the air with thy 
 sword, as make me vulnerable. I bear a charmed life, which must not yield to 
 one of woman born." 
 
 "Despair thy charm," said Macduff, " and let that lying spirit whom thou 
 hast served, tell thee, that Macduff was never born of woman, never as the 
 ordinary manner of men is to be born,.^but was untimely taken from his 
 mother." 
 
 " Accursed be the tongue which -tells me so," said the trembling Macbeth, 
 who felt his last hold of confidence give way; "and let never man in future 
 believe the lying equivocations of witches and juggling spirits, who deceive 
 us in words which have double senses, and while they keep their promise 
 literally, disappoint our hopes with a different meaning. I will not fight with 
 thee." 
 
 "Then live ! " said the scornful Macduff; "we will have a show of thee, as 
 men show monsters, and a painted board, on which shall be written, ' Here 
 men may see the tyrant ! ' " 
 
 " Never," said Macbeth, whose courage returned with despair; " I will not 
 live to kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet, and to be baited with the 
 curses of the rabble. Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane, and thou 
 opposed to me, who was never Dorn of woman, yet will I try the last." With 
 these frantic words he threw himself upon Macduff, who, after a severe struggle, 
 in the end overcame him, and cutting off his he.id, made a present of it to the 
 young and lawful king, Malcolm ; who took upon him the government which, 
 by the machinations of the usurper, he had so long been deprived of, and 
 ascended the throne of Duncan the Meek, amid the acclamations of the nobles 
 and the people. 
 
242 The Works of Charles Laynb. 
 
 TIMON OF ATHENS. 
 
 TiMON, a lord of Athens, in the enjoyment of a princely fortune, affected a 
 humour of liberality which Imew no limits. His almost infinite wealth could 
 not flow in so fast, but he poured it out faster upon all sorts and degrees of 
 people. Not the poor only tasted of his bounty, but great lords did not dis- 
 dain to rank themselves among his dependants and followers. His table was 
 resorted to by all the luxurious feasters, and his house was open to all comers 
 and goers at Athens. His large wealth combined with his free and prodigal 
 nature to subdue all hearts to his love ; men of all minds and dispositions 
 tendered their services to lord Timon, from the glass-faced flatterer, whose face 
 reflects as in a mirror the present humour of his patron, to the rough and un- 
 bending cynic, who, affecting a contempt of men's persons and an indifference 
 to worldly things, yet could not stand out against the gracious manners and 
 munificent soul of lord Timon, but would come (against his nature) to partake 
 of his royal entertainments, and return most rich in his own estimation if he 
 had received a nod or a salutation from Timon. 
 
 If a poet had composed a work which wanted a recommendatory introduc- 
 tion to the world, he had no more to do but to dedicate it to lord Timon, and 
 the poem was sure of a sale, besides a present purse from the patron, and 
 daily access to his house and table. If a painter had a picture to dispose of, 
 he had only to take it to lord Timon, and pretend to consult his taste as to the 
 merits of it; nothitig more was wanting to persuade the liberal-hearted lord to 
 buy it. If a jeweller had a stone of 'price, or a mercer rich costly stuffs, which 
 for their costliness lay upon his hands, lord Tiraon's house was a ready mart 
 always open, where they might get off their wares or their jewellery at any 
 price, and the good-natured lord would thank them into the bargain, as if they 
 had done him a piece of courtesy in letting him. have the refusal of such 
 precious commodities. So that by this means his house was thronged with 
 superfluous purchases, of no use but to swell uneasy and ostentatious pomp ; 
 and his person was still more inconveniently beset with a crowd of these idle 
 visitors, lying poets, painters, sharking tradesmen, lords, ladies, needy courtiers, 
 and expectants, who continually filled his lobbies, raining their fulsome flatteries - 
 in whispers in his ears, sacrificing to him with adulation as to a god, making 
 sacred the very stirrup by which he mounted his horse, and seeming as though 
 they drank the free air but through his permission and bounty. ' 
 
 Some of these daily dependants were young men of birth, who (their means 
 not answering to their extravagance) had been put in prison by creditors, and 
 redeemed thence by lord Timon ; these young prodigals thenceforward fastened 
 upon his lordship, as if by common sympathy he were necessarily endeared to 
 all such spendthrifts and loose livers, who, not being able to follow him in his 
 wealth, found it easier to copy him in prodigality and copious spending of 
 what was not their own. One of these flesh-flies was Ventidius, for whose 
 debts, unjustly contracted, Timon but lately had paid down the sum of five 
 talents. 
 
 But among this confluence, this great flood of visitors, none were more con- 
 spicuous than the makers of presents and givers of gifts. It was fortunate for 
 these men if Timon took a fancy to a dog or a horse, or any piece of cheap 
 lorniture, which was theirs. The thing so praised, 'whatever it was, was sure 
 
Tales from Skakspere : Timon of Athens. 243 
 
 to be sent the next morning with the cotniDliments of the giver for lordTimon's 
 acceptance, and apologies for the unwortliiness of the gift; and this dog or 
 horse, or whatever it might be, did not fail to produce from Timon's bounty— 
 who would not be outdone in gifts — perhaps twenty dogs or horses ; certainly 
 presents of far richer worth, as these pretended donors knew well enough, and 
 that their fhlse presents were but the puttmg out of so much money at a lar"-e 
 and speedy interest. In this way lord Lucius had lately sent to Timon\ 
 ( present of four milli-white horses, trapped in silver, which this cunning lord 
 had observed Timon upon some occasion to commend ; and another lord 
 LucuUus, had bestowed upon him, in the same pretended way of free gift, a 
 brace of greyhounds, whose make and fieetness Timon had been heard to 
 admire : these presents the easy-hearted lord accepted without suspicion of the 
 dishonest views of the presentere ; and the givers of course were rewarded 
 with sotae rich return — a diamond or some jewel of twenty times the value of 
 their false and mercenary donation. 
 
 Sometimes these creatures would go to work in a more direct way, and with 
 gross and palpable artifice, which yet the credulous Timon was too blind to 
 see, would affect to admire and praise something that Timon possessed, a 
 bargain that he had bought, or some late purchase, which was sure to draw 
 from this yielding and soft-hearted lord a gift of the thing commended, for no 
 service in the world done for it but thq easy expense of a little cheap and 
 obvious flattery. In this w-ay Timon but the other day had given to one of 
 these mean lords the bay courser which he himself rode upon, because his lord- 
 ship had been pleased to say that it was a handsome beast, and went well ; and 
 Timon knew that no man ever justly praised what he did not wish to possess. 
 For lord Timon weighed his friends' affection with his own, and so fond was 
 he of bestowing, that he could have dealt kingdoms to these supposed friends, 
 and never have been weary. 
 
 Not that Timon's wealth all went to enrich these wicked flatterers ; he could 
 do noble and praiseworthy actions : and when a servant of his once loved the 
 daughter of a rich Athenian, but could not hope to obtain her by reason that 
 in wealth and rank the maid was so far above him, lord Timon freely bestowed 
 upon his servant three Athenian ■ talents, to make his fortune equal with the 
 dowry which the father of the young maid demanded of him who should be 
 her husband. But, for the most part, knaves and parasites had the command 
 of his fortune — false friends whom he did not know to be such ; but, because 
 they flocked around his person, he thought they must needs love him ; and, 
 because they smiled and flattered him, he thought surely that his conduct was 
 approved by all the wise and good. And when he was feasting in the midst of 
 all these flatterers and mock friends— when they were eating him up and drain- 
 ing his fortunes dry with large draughts of richest wines drunk to his health 
 and prosperity— he could not perceive the difference of a friend from a flatterer; 
 but to his deluded eyes {made proud with the sight) it seemed a precious com- 
 fort to have so many, like brothers, commanding one another's fortunes (though 
 it was his own fortune which paid all the cost), and with joy they would run 
 over at the spectacle of such, as ^t appeared to him, truly festive and fraternal 
 meeting, » 
 
 But while he thus outwent the very heart of kindness, and poured out his 
 bounty, as if Plutus the god of gold had been but his steward ; while thus he 
 proceeded without care or stop, so senseless of expense that he would neither 
 inquire how he could maintain it, nor cease his wild flow of riot ; his riches, 
 which were not infinite, must needs melt away before a prodigality which knew 
 no limits. But who should tell him so ? his flatterers ? they had an interest in 
 shutting his eyes. In vain did his honest steward Flavins try to represent to 
 him his, condition, laying his accounts before him, begging of him, praying of 
 him, with an importunity that on any other occasion would have been unman- 
 
244 '^/'■^ Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 nerly in a servant, beseeching.him with tears to look into the state of his affairs. 
 Timon would still put him off, and turn the discourse to something else ; for 
 nothing, is so deaf to remonstrance as riches turned to poverty, nothing is so 
 unwilling to believe its situation, nothing so incredulous to its own true state, 
 and hard to give credit to a reverse. Often had this good steward, this honest 
 creature, when all the rooms of Timon's great house have been choked up 
 with riotous feeders at his master's cost, when the floors have wept with 
 drunken spilling of wine, and every apartment had blazed with lights and 
 resounded with music and feasting; often had he retired by himself to some 
 solitary spot, and wept faster than the lyine ran from the wasteful casks within, 
 to see the mad bounty of his lord, and to think, when the means were gone 
 which bought him praises from all sorts of people, how quickly the breath 
 would be gone of which the priise was made ; praises won in feasting would 
 be lost in fasting, and at one cloud of winter-showers these flies would disappear. 
 
 But now the time was come that Timon could shut his ears no longer to the 
 representations of this faithful steward. Money must be had; and when he 
 ordered Flavius to sell some of his land for that purpose. Flavins informed him, 
 what he had in vain endeavoured at several times before to make him listen to, 
 that most of his land was already sold or forfeited; and that all he possessed 
 at present was not enough to pay the one half of what he owed. Struck with 
 wonder at this representation, Timon hastily replied, " IMy lands extended from 
 Athens to Lacedaemon." " O, my.good lord," said Flavius, "the world is but 
 a world, and has bounds ; were it all yours to give it in a breath, how quickly 
 were it gone ! " 
 
 Timon consoled himself that no villanous bounty had yet come from him; 
 that if he had given his wealth away unwisely, it had not been bestowed to 
 feed his vices, but to cherish his friends ; and he bade the kind-hearted steward 
 (who was weeping) to take comfort in the assurance that his master could 
 never lack means while he had so many noble friends : and this infatuated lord 
 persuaded himself that he had nothing to do but to send and borrow, to use 
 every man's fortune (that had ever tasted his bounlw, in this extremity, as 
 freely as his own. Then with a cheerful look, as if confident of the trial, he 
 severally despatched messengers to lord Lucius, to lords Lucullus and Sera- 
 pronius, men upon whom he had lavished his gifts in past times without 
 measure or moderation ; and to Ventidius, whom he had lately released out of 
 prison by paying his debts, ^nd who by the death of his father was now come 
 into the possession of an ample fortune, and well enabled to requite Timon's 
 courtesy ; to request of Ventidius the return of those five talents which he had 
 paid for him, and of each of those noble lords the loan of fifty talents ; 
 nothing doubting that their gratitude would supply his wants (if he needed it) 
 to the amount of five hundred times fifty talents. 
 
 Lucullus was the first applied to. This mean lord had been dreaming over- 
 night of a silver bason and cup, and when Timon's servant was announced, his 
 sordid mind suggested to him that this was surely a making out of his dream, 
 and that Timon had sent him such a present : but when he understood the 
 truth of the matter, and that Timon wanted money, the quality of his faint 
 and walery friendship showed itself; .for, with many protestations, he vowed to 
 the servant that he had long foreseen the ruin of his master's affairs, and 
 many a time had he coffle'^^o dinner to tell him of it, and had come again to 
 supper to try to persuade him to spend less, but he would take no counsel nor 
 warning by his coming ; and true it was that he had been a constant attender 
 (as he said) at Timon's feasts, as he had in greater tilings tasted his bounty ; 
 but that he ever came with that intent, or gave good counsel or reproof to 
 Timon, was a base unworthy lie, which he suitably followed up with meanly 
 offering the servant a bribe to go home to his master and tell him that he had 
 not found Lucullus at home. 
 
 i 
 1 
 
Tales from Shaksperc : Timon of Athens. 245 
 
 As little success had the messenger who was sent to lord Lucius. This lying 
 lord, who was full of Timon's meat, and enriched almost to bursting with 
 Timon's costly presents, when he found the wind changed, and the fountain of 
 so much bounty suddenly stopped, at first could hardly believe it ; but, on its 
 being confirmed, he affected great regret that he should not have it in his 
 power to serve lord Timon, for unfortunately (which was a base falsehood) he 
 had made a great purchase the day before, which had quite disfurnished him 
 of the means at present ; the more beast he, he called himself, to put it out 
 of his power to serve so good a friend ; and he counted it one of his greatest 
 afflictions that his ability should fail him to pleasure such an honourable 
 gentleman. 
 
 Who can call any man friend that dips in the same dish with him ? Just of 
 this metal is every flatterer. In the recollection of everybody Timon had been 
 a father to this Lucius, had kept up his credit with his purse ; Timon's money 
 had gone to pay the wages of his servants, to pay the hire of the labourers who 
 had sweat to build the fine houses which Lucius's pride had made net;essary to 
 him : yet, oh ! the monster which man makes himself when he proves un- 
 grateful ! this Lucius now denied to Timon a sum which, in respect of what 
 Timon had bestowed on him, was less than charitable men afford to beggars. 
 
 Sempronius, and every one of these mercenary lords to whom Tin:ion 
 applied in their turn, returned the same evasive answer or direct denial : even 
 Ventidius, the redeemed and now rich Ventidius, refused to assist him with the 
 loan of those five talents which Timon had not lent, but generously given him 
 in his distress. 
 
 Now was Timon as much avoided in his poverty as he had been courted and 
 resorted to in his riches. Now the same tongues which had been loudest in his 
 praises, extolling him as bountiful, liberal, and open-handed, were not ashamed 
 to censure that very bounty as folly, that liberality as profuseness, thoiigh it 
 had shown itself folly in nothing so truly as in the selection of such unworthy 
 creatures as themselves for its objects. Now was Timon's princely mansion 
 forsaken, and become a shunned and hated place, a place for men to pass by, 
 not a place as formerly where every passenger must stop and taste of his wine 
 and good cheer ; now, instead of being thronged with feasting and tumultuous 
 guests, it was beset with impatient and clamorous creditors, usurers, extor- 
 tioners, fierce and intolerable in their demands, pleading bonds, interest, 
 mortgages, iron-hearted men that woul(J take no denial nor putting off, that 
 Timon's house was now his jail, which he could not pass, nor go in nor out for 
 them ; one demanding his due of fifty talents, another bringing in a bill of five 
 thousand crowns, which if he would tell out his blood by drops, and pay them 
 so, he had not enough in his body to discharge, drop by drop. 
 
 In this desperate and irremediable state (as it seemed) of his affairs, the 
 eyes of all men were suddenly surprised at a new and incredible lustre which 
 this setting sun put forth. Once more lord Timon proclaimp.'l a feast, to 
 which he invited his accustomed guests, lords, ladies, all that was great or 
 fashionable in Athens. Lords Lucius and Lucullus came, Ventidius, Sem- 
 pronius, and the rest. Who more sorry now than these fawning wretches, 
 when they found (as they thought) that lord Timon's poverty was all pretence, 
 and had been only put on to make trial of their loves, to think that they should 
 not have seen through the artifice at the time, and have had the cheap credit 
 of obliging his lordship? yet who more glad to find the fountain of that noble 
 bounty, which they had thought dried up, still fresh and running? They came 
 dissembling, protesting, expressing deepest sorrow and shame, that when his 
 lordship sent to them, they should have been so unfortunate as to want the 
 present means to oblige so honourable a friend. But Timon begged them not 
 to give such trifles a thought, for he had altogether forgotten it. And these 
 base fawning lords, though they had denied him money in his adversity, yet 
 
246 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 could not refuse their presence at this new blaze of his returning prosperity. 
 For the swallow follows not summer more willingly than men of these dispo- 
 sitions follow the good fortunes of the great, nor more willingly leaves winter 
 than these shrink from the first appearance of a reverse ; such summer-birds 
 are men. But now with music and state the banquet of smoking dishes was 
 served up; and when the guests had a little done admiring whence the 
 bankrupt Timon could find means to furnish so costly a feast, some doubting 
 whether the scene which they saw was real, as scarce trusting their own eyes ; 
 at a signal given, the dishes were uncovered, and Timon's drift appeared : 
 instead of those varieties and far-fetched dainties which they expected, that 
 Timon's epicurean table in past times had so liberally presented, now appeared 
 under the' covers of these dishes a preparation more suitable to Timon's 
 poverty, nothing but a little smoke and lukewarm water, fit feast for this knot 
 of mouth-friends, whose professions were indeed smoke, and their hearts luke- 
 warm and slippery as the water with whicli Timon welcomed his astonished 
 guests, bidding them "Uncover, dogs, and lap;" and before they could 
 recover their surprise, sprinkling it in their faces, that they might have enough, 
 and throwing dishes and all after them, who now ran huddling out, lords, 
 ladies, with their caps snatched up in haste, a splendid confusion, Timon 
 pursuing them, still calling them what they were, "smooth smiling parasites, 
 destroyers under the mask of courtesy, affable wolves, meek bears, fools of 
 fortune, feast-friends, time-flieS." They, crowding out to avoid him, left the 
 house more willingly than they had entered it ; some losing their gowns and 
 caps, and some their jewels in the hurry, all glad to escape out of the presence 
 of such a mad lord, and the ridicule of his mock banquet. 
 
 This was the last feast which ever Timon made, and in it he took farewell 
 of Athens and the society of men ; for, after that, he betook himself to the 
 woods, turning his back upon the hated city and upon all mankind, wishing 
 the walls of that detestable city might sink, and the houses fall upon their 
 owners, wishing all plagues which infest humanity, war, outrage, poverty, 
 diseases, might fasten upon its inhabitants, praying the just gods to confound 
 all Athenians, both young and old, high and low ; so wishing, he went to the 
 woods, where he said he should find the unkindest beast much kinder than 
 mankind. He stripped himself naked, that he might retain no fashion of a 
 man, and dug a cave to live in, and lived soUtary in the manner of a beast, 
 eating the wild roots, and drinking water, flying from the face of his kind, and 
 choosing rather to herd with wild beasts, as more harmless and friendly than man. 
 
 What a change from lord Timon the rich, lord Timon the delight of man- 
 kind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater ! Where were his flatterers 
 now ? Where were his attendants and retinue ? Would the bleak air, that 
 boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? 'Would 
 those stiff trees, that had outlived the eagle, turn young and airy pages to him, 
 to skip on his errands when he bade them ? Would the cold brook, when it 
 was iced with winter, administer to him his warm broths and caudles wken 
 sick .of an over-night's surfeit? Or would the creatures that lived in those 
 wild woods come and lick his hand and flatter him ? 
 
 Here on a day, when he was digging for roots, his poor sustenance, his 
 spade struck against something heavy, which proved to be gold, a great heap 
 which some miser had probably buried in a time of alarm, thinking to have 
 come again and taken it from its prison, but died before the opportunity had 
 arrived, without making any man privy to the concealment; so it lay, doing 
 neither good nor harm, in the bowels of the earth, its mother, as if it had 
 never come from thence, till the accidental striking of Timon's spade against 
 it once more brought it to light. 
 
 Here was a mass of treasure, which, if Timon had retained his old mind, , 
 was enough, to have purchased him friends and flatterers again; but Timon 
 
Tales from Shakspere : Timon of Athens. 247 
 
 was sick of the false world, and the sight of gold was poisonous to his eyes • 
 and he would have restored it to the earth, but that, thinking of the infinite 
 calamities which by means of gold happen to mankind, how the lucre of it 
 causes robberies, oppression, injustice, briberies, violence, and murder amon"- 
 men, he had a pleasure in imagining (such a rooted hatred did he bear to his 
 species), that out of this heap, which in digging he had discovered, micht 
 arise some mischief to plague mankind. And some soldiers passing through 
 the woods near to his cave at that instant, which proved to be a part of the 
 troops of the Athenian captain Alcibiades, who upon some disgust taken 
 against the senators of Athens (the Athenians were ever noted to be a thank- 
 less and ungrateful people, giving disgust to their generals and best friends) 
 was marching at the head of the same triumphant array which he had formerly 
 headed in their defence, to war against them : Timon, who liked their business 
 well, bestowed upon their captain the gold to pay his soldiers, requiring no 
 other service from him than that he should with his conquering army 
 lay Athens level with the ground, and burn, slay, kill all her inhabitants; not 
 sparing the old men for their white beards, for (he said) they were usurers, nor 
 the young children for their seeming innocent smiles, for those (he said) would 
 live, if they grew up, to be traitors ; but to steel his eyes and ears against any 
 sights or sounds that might awaken compassion; and not to let the cries of 
 virgins, babes, or mothers hinder him from making one universal massacre of 
 the city, but to confound them all in his conquest ; and when he had con- 
 quered, he prayed that the gods would confound him also, the conqueror : so 
 thoroughly did Timon hate Athens, Athenians, and all mankind. 
 
 While he lived in this forlorn state, leading a life more brutal than human, 
 he was suddenly surprised one day with the appearance of a man standing 111 
 an admiring posture at the door of his cave. It was Flavins, the honest 
 steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him 
 out at his wretched dwelling, and to offer his services ; and the first sight of 
 his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was 
 bom, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad 
 ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant, that he stood 
 speechless, wrapped up in horror, and confounded. And when he found 
 utterance at last to his words, they were so choked with tears, that Timon 
 had much ado to know him again, or to make out who it was that had come 
 (so contrary to the experience he had had of mankind) to offer him service in 
 extremity. And being in the form and shape of a man, he suspected him for 
 a traitor, and his tears for false; but the good servant by so many tokens con- 
 firmed the truth of his fidelity, and made it clear that nothing but love 
 and zealous duty to his once dear master had brought him tliere, that Timon 
 was forced to confess that the world contained one honest man ; yet, being in 
 the shape and form of a man, he could not look upon'his man's face without 
 abhorrence, or hear words uttered from his man's lips without loathing ; and 
 this singly honest man was forced to depart because he was a raan, and be- 
 cause, with a heart more gentle and compassionate than is usual to man, he 
 bore man's detested form and outward feature. 
 
 But greater visitants than a poor steward were about to interrupt the savage 
 quiet of Timon's solitude. For now the day was come when the ungrateful 
 lords of Athens sorely repented the injustice which they had done to the noble 
 Timon. For Alcibiades, like an incensed wild boar, was raging at the walls 
 of their city, and with his hot siege threatened to lay fair Athens in the dust. 
 And now the memory of lord Timon's former prowess and military conduct 
 came fresh into their forgetful minds, for Timon had been their general in past 
 times, and was a valiant and expert soldier, who. alone of all the Athenians 
 ' was deemed able to cope with a besieging army such as then threatened them, 
 i or to drive back the furious approaches of Alcibiades. 
 
248 The Works of Charles Lamb. 1 
 
 , J 
 
 A deputation of the senators \vas chosen in this emergency to wait upon 
 Timon. To him they come in their extremity, to whom, when he was in ex- 
 tremity, they had shown but small regard ; as if they presumed upon his grati- 
 tude whom they had disobliged, and had derived a claini-to his courtesy from 
 their own most discourteous and unpiteous treatment. \ 
 
 Now they earnestly beseech him, implore him with tears, to retitrn and save 
 that city from which their ingratitude had so lately driven him ; now they 
 offer him riches, power, dignities, satisfaction for past injuries, and public 
 honours, and the public love ; their persons, lives, and fortunes to be at his 
 disposal, if he will but come bacji and save them. But Timon the naked, 
 Timon the man-hater, was no longer lord Timon, the lord of bounty, the 
 flower of valour, their defence in war, their ornament in peace. If Alcibiades 
 killed his countrymen, Timon cared not. If he sacked fair Athens, and slew 
 her old men and her infants, Timon would rejoice. So he told them ; and 
 that there was not a knife in the unruly camp which he did not prize above 
 the reverendest throat in Athens. 
 
 This was all the answer he vouchsafed to the weeping, disappointed sena- 
 tors ; only at parting he bade them commend him to his countrymen, and tell 
 them, that to ease them of their griefs and anxieties, and to prevent the con- 
 sequences of fierce Alcibiades' wrath, there was yet a way left, which he 
 would teach them, for he had yet so much affection left for his dear country- 
 men as to be willing to do them a kindness before his death. These words a 
 little revived the senators, who hoped that his kindness for their city was re- 
 turning. Then Timon told them that he had a tree, which grew near his 
 cave, which he should shortly have occasion to cut down, and he invited all 
 his friends in Athens, high or low, of what degree soever, who wished to shun 
 affliction, to come and take a taste of his tree before he cut it down ; meaning, 
 that they might come and hang themselves on it, and escape affliction that 
 way. 
 
 And this was the last courtesy, of all his noble bounties, which Timon 
 showed to mankind, and this the last sight of him which his countrymen 
 had : for not many days after, a poor soldier, passing by the sea-beach, which 
 was at a little distance from the woods which Timon frequented, found a 
 tomb on the verge of the sea, with an inscription upon it, purporting that 
 it was the grave of Timon the man-hater, who '• while he lived, did hate all 
 living men, and dying wished a plague might consume all caitiffs jeft ! " 
 
 Whether he finished his life by violence, or whether mere distaste of life 
 and the loathing he had for mankind brought Timon to his conclusion, was 
 not clear, yet all men admired the fitness of his epitaph, and the consistency 
 of his end ; dying, as he had lived, a hater of mankind : and some there were 
 who fancied a conceit in the very choice which he made of the sea-beach . 
 for his place of burial, where the vast sea might weep for ever upon his grave, 
 as in contempt of the transient and shallow tears of hypocritical and deceit- 
 ful mankind. 
 
 ROMEO AND JULIET. 
 
 •T?^ 'wo chief families in Verona were the rich Capulets and the Montagues. 
 There had been an old quarrel between these famihes, which was grown to such 
 a height, and so deadly was the enmity between them, that it extended to the 
 remotest kmdred, to the followers and retainers of both sides, insomuch that 
 
Tales from SJiakspere : Romeo and yiiliet. 249 
 
 a servant of the house of Montague could not meet a servant of the house of 
 Capulet, nor a Capulet encounter with a Montague by chance, but fierce 
 words and sometimes bloodshed ensued ; and frequent were the brawls from 
 such accidental meetings, which disturbed the happy quiet of Verona's streets. 
 
 Old Lord Capulet made a great supper, to which many fair ladies and ' 
 many noble guests were invited. All the admired beauties of Verona were I 
 present, and all comers were made welcome if they were not of the house of 
 Montague. At this feast of Capulets, Rosaline, beloved of Romeo, son to ' 
 the old lord Montague, was present; and though it was dangerous for a | 
 Montague to be seen in this assembly, yet Benvolio, a friend of Romeo, per- I 
 suaded the young lord to go to this assembly in the disguise of a mask, that 
 he might see his Rosaline, and seeing her, compare her with some choice 
 beauties of Verona, who (he said) would make him think his swan a crow. | 
 Romeo had small .faith in ,Benvolio's words; nevertheless, for the love of 
 Rosaline, he was persuaded to go. For Romeo was a sincere and passionate 
 lover, and one that lost his sleep for love, ^nd fled society to be'alone, thinking 
 on Rosaline, who disdained him, and no'er requited his love with the least 
 show of courtesy or affection ; and Benvolio wished to cure his friend of this 
 love by showing him diversity of ladies and company. To this feast of Capu- 
 lets then young Romeo with Benvolio and their friend Mercutio went masked. 
 Old Capulet bid them welcome, and told them that ladies who had their toes 
 unplagued with corns would dance with tliem. And the old man was light- 
 hearted and merry, and said that he had worn a mask when he was young, 
 and could have told a whispering tale in a fair lady's ear. And they fell to 
 dancing, and Romeo was suddenly struck witli the exceeding beauty of a lady 
 who danced there, who seemed to him to teach the torches to burn bright, and 
 her beauty to show by night like a rich jewel worn by a blackamoor : beauty 
 too rich for use, too dear for earth ! like a snowy dove trooping with crows 
 (he said), so richly did her beauty and perfections shine above the ladies her 
 companions. While he uttered these praises he was overheard by Tybalt, a 
 nephew of lord Capulet, who knew him by his voice to be Romeo. And this 
 Tybalt, being of a fiery and passionate temper, could not endure that a Mon- 
 tague should come, under cover of a mask, to fleer and scorn (as he said) at 
 their solemnities. And he stormed and raged exceedingly, and would have 
 struck young Romeo dead. But his uncle, the old lord Capulet, would not 
 suffer him to do any injury at that time, both out of respect to his guests, 
 and because Romeo had borne himself like a gentleman, and all tongues in 
 Verona bragged of him to be a virtuous and well-governed youth. Tybalt, 
 forced to be patient against his will, restrained himself, but swore that this 
 vile Montague should at another time dearly pay for his intrusion. 
 
 The dancing being done, Romeo watched the place where the lady stood ; 
 'and under favour of his masking habit, which might seem to excuse in part 
 the liberty, he presumed in the gentlest manner to take her by her hand, 
 calling it a shrine, which if he profaned by touching it, he was a blushing 
 pilgrim, and would kiss it for atonement. "Good pilgrim," answered the 
 lady, "your devotion shows by far too mannerly and too courtly : saints have 
 hands, which pilgrims may touch, but kiss not." " Have not saints lips, and 
 pilgrims too?" said Romeo, "Ay," said the lady, " lips which they must use 
 in prayer." "O then, my dear saint," said Romeo, "hear my prayer, and 
 grant it, lest I despair." In such like allusions and loving conceits they were 
 engaged, when tlie lady was called away to her mother. And Romeo in- 
 quiring who her mother was, discovered that the lady whose peerless beauty 
 he was so much struck with," was young Juliet, daughter and heir to the lord 
 Capulet, the great enemy of the Montagues; and that he hid unknowingly 
 engaged his heart to his foe. This troubled him, but it could not dissuade him 
 from loving. As httle rest had Juliet, when she found that the gentleman that 
 
250 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 she had been talking with was Romeo and a Montague, for she had been 
 suddenly smit with the same hasty and inconsiderate passion for Romeo, which 
 he had conceived for her; and a prodigious birth of love it seemed to her, that 
 she must love her enemy, and that her affections should settle there, where 
 family considerations should induce her chiefly to hate. 
 
 It being midnight, Romeo with his companions departed ; but they soon 
 missed him, for, unable to stay away from the house where he had left his 
 heart, he leaped the wall of an orchard which was at the back of Juliet's house. 
 Here he had not been long, ruminating on his new love, when Juliet appeared 
 above at a window, through which her exceeding beauty seemed to brake hke 
 the light of the sun in the east ; and the moon, v/hich shone in the orchard 
 with a faint light, appeared to Romeo as if sick and pale with grief at the 
 superior lustre of this new sun. And she leaning her cheek upon her hand he 
 passionately wished himself a glove upon that hand, that he might touch her 
 cheek. She all this while thinking herself alone, fetched a deep sigh, and 
 exclaimed "Ah me ! " Romeo, enraptured to hear her speak, said softly, and 
 unheard by her, "O speak again, bright angel, for such you appear, being 
 over my head, like a winged messenger from heaven whom mortals fall back to 
 gaze upon." She, unconscious of being overheard, and full of the new passion 
 which that night's adventure had given birth to, called upon her lover by name 
 (whom she supposed absent) : "O Romeo, Romeo !" said she, "wherefore art 
 thou Romeo ? Deny thy father, and refuse ^hy name, for my sake ; or if thou 
 wilt not, be but my sworn love, and I no longer will be a Capulet." Romeo,, 
 having this encouragement, would fain have spoken, but he was desirous of 
 hearing more ; and the lady continued her passionate discourse with herself 
 (as she thought), still chiding Romeo for being Romeo and a Montague, and 
 wishing him some other name, or that he would put away that hated name, 
 and for that name, which was no part of himself he- should take all herself. 
 At this loving word Romeo could no longer refrain, but taking up the dialogue 
 as if her words had been addressed to him personally, and not merely in fancy, 
 he bade her call him I^ove, or by \\'hatever other name she pleased, for he was 
 no longer Romeo, if that name was displeasing to her. Juliet, alarmed to hear 
 a man's voice in the garden, did not at first know who it was, that by favour 
 of the night and darkness had thus stumbled upon the discovery of her secret; 
 but when he spoke again, though her ears had not yet drunk a hundred words 
 of that tongue's uttering, yet so nice is a lover's hearing, that she immediately 
 knew him to be young Romeo, and she expostulated with him on the danger 
 to which he had exposed himself by climbing the orchard walls, for if any of 
 her kinsmen should find him there, it would be death to him , being a Montague. 
 "Alack," said Romeo, "there is more peril in your eye, than in twenty of 
 their swords. Do you but look kind upon me, lady, and I am proof against 
 their enmity. Better my life should be ended by their hate, than that hated 
 life should be prolonged, to live without your love." "How came you into 
 this place," said JuHet, "and by whose direction?" "Love directed me," 
 answered Romeo : "I am no pilot, yet wert thou as far apart from me, as that 
 vast shore which is washed with the farthest sea, 1 should adventure for such 
 merchandise." A crimson blush came over Juliet's face, yet imseen by Romeo 
 by reason of the night, when she reflected upon the discovery which she had 
 made, yet not meaning to make it, of her love to Romeo. She would fain 
 have recalled her words, but that was impossible : fain would she have stood 
 upon form, and have kept her lover at a distance, as the custom, of discreet 
 ladies is, to frown and be perverse and give their suitors harsh denials at first ; 
 to stand off, and affect a coyness or indifference, where they most love, that 
 their lovers may not 'think them too hghtly or too easily won ; for the difficulty 
 of attainment increases the value of the object. But there was no room in her 
 case for denials, or puttings off, or any of the customary arts of delay and pro- 
 
Tales from Shakspere : Romeo and yuliet. 251 
 
 tracted courtship. Romeo had heard from her own tongue, when she did not 
 dream that he was near her, a confession of her love. iSo with an honest 
 frankness, which the novelty of her situation excused, she confirmed the truth 
 of what he had before heard, and addressing him by the name oifaif AtoniagHe 
 (love can sweeten a sour name), she begged him not to impute her easy yielding 
 to levity or an unworthy mind, but that he must lay the fault of it (if it were 
 a fault) upon the accident of the night which had so strangely discovered her 
 thoughts. And she added, that though her behaviour to him might not be 
 sufRciently prudent, measured by the custom of her se.x, yet that she would 
 prove more true than many whose prudence was dissembling, and their 
 modesty artificial cunning. 
 
 Romeo was beginning to call the heavens to witness, that nothing ^\■as 
 farther from his thoughts than to impute a shadow of dishonour to such an 
 honoured lady, when she stopped him, begging him not to swear ; for altliough 
 she joyed in him, yet she had no joy of that night's contract : it was too rash, 
 too unadvised, too sudden. But he being urgent with her to exchange a vow 
 of love with him that night, she said that she already had given him hers 
 before he requested it ; meaning, when he overheard her confession ; but 
 she would retract what she then bestowed, for the pleasure of giving it again, 
 for her bounty was as infinite as the sea, and her love as deep. From this 
 loving conference she was called away by her nurse, who slept with her, and 
 thought it time for her to be in bed, for it was near to daybreak; but hastily 
 returning, she said three or four words more to Romeo, the purport of which 
 was, that if liis love was iftdeed honourable, and his purpose marriage, she would 
 send a messenger to him to-morrow, to appoint a time for their marriage, when 
 she would lay all her fortunes at his feet, and follow him as her lord through 
 the world. While they were settling this point, Juliet was repeatedly called 
 for by her nurse, and went in and returned, and went and returned again, for 
 she seemed as jealous of Romeo going from her, as a young girl of her bird, 
 which she will let hop a little from her hand, and pluck it back with a silken 
 thread ; and Romeo was as loth to part as she ; for the sweetest music to lovers 
 is the sound of each other's tongues at night. But at last they parted, wishing 
 mutually sweet sleep and rest for that night. 
 
 The day was brealcing when they parted, and Romeo, who was too full of 
 thoughts of his mistress and that blessed meeting to allow him to sleep, instead 
 of going home, bent his course to a monastery hard by, to find friar Laurence. 
 The good friar was already up at his devotions, but seeing young Romeo 
 abroad so early, he conjectured rightly that he had not been abed that night, 
 but that some distemper of youthful affection had kept him waking. He was 
 right in imputing the cause of Romeo's wakefulness to love, but he made a 
 wrong guess at the object, for he thought that his love for Rosaline had kept 
 him waking. But when Romeo revealed his new passion for Juliet, and re- 
 quested the assistance of the friar to marry them that day, the holy man lifted 
 up his eyes and hands in a sort of wonder at the sudden change in Romeo's 
 affections, for he had been privy to all Romeo's love for Rosaline, and his many 
 complaints of her disdain ; and he said, that young men's love lay not truly in 
 their hearts, but in tlieir eyes. But I-iomeo replying, that he himself had often 
 chidden him for doting on Rosaline, who could not love him again, whereas 
 Juliet both loved and was beloved by him, the friar assented in some measure 
 to his reasons ; and thinking that a matrimonial alliance between young Juliet 
 and Romeo might happily be a m.eans of making up the long breach between 
 the Capulets and the Montagues, which no one more lamented than this good 
 friar, who was a friend to both the families, and had often interposed his media- 
 tion to make up the quarrel without efl(2ct ; partly moved by policy, and partly 
 by his fondness for young Romeo, to whom he could deny nothing, the old 
 man consented to join their hands in mm'riage. 
 
252 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Now was Romeo blessed indeed, and Juliet, who knew his intent from a 
 messenger which she had despatched according to promise, did not fail to be 
 early at the cell of friar Laurence, where their hands were joined in holy 
 marriage ; the good friar praying the heavens to smile upon that act, and in 
 the union of this young Montague and young Capulet to bury the old strife 
 and long dissensions of their families. 
 
 The ceremony being over, Juliet hastened home, where she stayed impatient 
 for the coming of night, at which time Romeo promised to come and meet her 
 in the orchard, where they had met the night before ; and the time between 
 seemed as tedious to her, as the night before some great festival seems to 
 an impatient child, that has got new finery which it may not put on till the 
 morning. 
 
 That same day, about noon, Romeo's friends, Benvolio and Mercutio, walk- 
 ing through the streets of Verona, were met by a parly of the Oapulets with 
 the impetuous Tybalt at their head. This was the same angry Tybalt who 
 would have fought with Romeo at old lord Capulet's feast. He, seeing Mer- 
 cutio, accused him bluntly of associating with Romeo, a Montague. Mercutio, 
 who had as much fire and youthful blood in him as Tybalt, repliedi. to this 
 accusation with some sharpness ; and in spite of all Benvoho could say to 
 moderate their wrath, a quarrel was beginning, when Romeo himself passing 
 that way, the fierce Tybalt turned from. Mercutio to Romeo, and gave him the 
 disgraceful appellation of villain. Romeo wished to avoid a quarrel with 
 Tybalt above all men, because he was the kinsman of Juhet, and much beloved 
 by her ; besides, this young Montague had never thoroughly entered into the 
 family quarrel, being by nature wise and gentle, and the name of a Capulet, 
 which was his dear lady's name, was now rather a charm to allay resentment, 
 than a watchword to e.xcite fury.' So he tried to reason with Tybalt, whom he 
 saluted mildly by the name of good Capulet, as if he, though a Montagtie, had 
 some secret pleasure in uttering that name : but Tybalt, who hated all Mon- 
 tagues as he hated hell, would hear no reason, but drew his weapon ; and 
 Mercutio, who knew not of Romeo's secret motive for desiring peace with 
 1'ybalt, but looked xipon his present forbearance as a sort of calm dishonour- 
 able submission, with many disdainful words provoked Tybalt to the prosecu- 
 tion of his first quarrel with him ; and Tybalt and Mercutio fought, till 
 Mercutio fell, receiving his death's wound while Romeo and Benevolio were 
 vainly endeavouring to part the combatants. Mercutio being dead, Romeo 
 kept his temper no longer, , but returned the scornful appellation of villain 
 which Tybalt had given him ; and they fought till Tybalt was slain by Romeo. 
 This deadly brawl falling out in the midst of Verona at noonday, the news of 
 it quickly brought a crowd of citizens to the spot, and among them the old lords 
 Capulet and Montague, with their wives ; and soon after arrived the prince 
 himself, who being related to Mercutio, whom Tybalt had slain, and having 
 had the peace of his government often disturbed by these brawls of Montagues 
 and Capulets, came determined to put the law in strictest force against those 
 who should be found to be offenders. Benvolio, who had been eye-witness to 
 the fray, was commanded by the prince to relate the origin of it; which he did, 
 keeping as near to the truth as he could without injury to Romeo, softening 
 and excusing the part which his friend took in it. Lady Capulet, whose ex- 
 treme grief for the loss of her kinsman Tybalt made her keep no bounds in 
 her revenge, exhorted the prince to do strict justice upon his murderer, and to 
 pay no attention to Benvolio's representation, who being Romeo's friend, and 
 a Montague, spoke partially. Thus she pleaded against her new son-in-law, 
 but she knew not yet that he was her son-in-law and Juliet's husband. On the 
 other hand was to be seen lady Montague pleading for her child's life, and 
 arguing with some justice that Romeo had done nothing worthy of punishment 
 in taking the life of Tybalt, which was already forfeited to the law by his 
 
Tales from Shaksperc : Romeo aiid yulief. 253 
 
 having slain Mercutio. The prince, unmoved by the passionate exclaroations 
 of these women, on a careful examination of the facts, pronounced his sentence 
 and by that sentence Romeo was banished from Verona. 
 
 Heavy news to young Juliet, who had been but a few hours a bride and now 
 by this decree seemed everlastingly divorced ! when tne tidings reached her 
 she at first gave way to rage against Romeo, who had slain her dear cousin'- 
 she called him a beautiful tyrant, a fiend angelical, a ravenous dove a lamb 
 with a wolfs nature, a serpent-heart hid with a flowering face and other like 
 contradictory names, which denoted the struggles in her mind between her love 
 and her resentment : but in the end love got the mastery, and the tears which 
 she shed for grief that Romeo had slain her cousin, turned to drops of iov 
 that her husband hved whom Tybalt would have slain. Then came fresh tears 
 and they were altogether of grief for Romeo's banishment. That word was 
 more terrible to her than the death of many Tybalts. 
 
 Romeo, after the fray, had taken refuge in friar Laurence's cell, where he 
 was first made acquainted with the prince's sentence, which seemed to him far 
 more terrible than death. To him it appeared there was no world out of 
 Verona s walls, no iving out of the sight of Juliet. Heaven v as there where 
 Juliet lived, and all beyond was purgatory, torture, hell. The good friar 
 would have applied the consolation of philosophy to his griefs ■ but this frantic 
 yoimg man would hear of none, but like a madman he tore his hair, and threw 
 himself all along upon the ground, as he said, to take the measure of his grave. 
 From this unseemly state he was roused by a message from his dear lady, which 
 a httle revived him ; and then the friar took the advantage to expostulate with 
 him on the unmanly weakness which he had shown. He had slain Tybalt, but 
 would he also slay himself, slay his dear lady who lived but in his life? The 
 noble form of man, he said, was but a shape of wax, when it wanted the 
 courage which should keep it firm. The law had been lenient to him, that 
 instead of death, which he had incurred, had pronounced by the prince's 
 mouth only banishment. He had slain Tybalt, but Tybalt would have slain 
 him : there was a sort of happiness in that. Juhet was alive, and (beyond all 
 hope) had become his dear wife ; therein he was most happy. All these bless- 
 ings, as the friai°made them out to be, did Romeo put from him like a sullen 
 misbehaved wench. And the friar bade him beware, for such as despaired (he 
 said) died miserable. Then when Romeo was a little calmed, he counselled 
 him that he should go that night and secretly take his leave of Juliet, and 
 thence proceed straightways to Mantua, at which place he should sojourn, till 
 the friar found a fit occasion to publish his marriage, which might be a joyful 
 means of reconciling their families ; and then he did not doubt but the prince 
 would be moved to pardon him, and he would return with twenty times more 
 joy than he went forthwith grief. Romeo was convinced by these wise counsels 
 of the friar, and took his leave to go and seek his lady, purposing to stay with 
 her that night, and by daybreak pursue his journey alone to Mantua ; to which 
 place the good friar promised to send him letters from time to time, acquaint- 
 ing him with the state of affairs at home. 
 
 That night Romeo passed with his dear wife, gaining secret admission to her 
 chamber, from the orchard in which he had heard her confession of love the 
 night before. That had been a night of unmixed joy and rapture ; but the 
 pleasures of this night, and the delight which these lovers took in each other's 
 society, were sadly allayed with the prospect of parting, and the fatal adventures 
 of the past day. The unwdlcome daybreak seemed to come too soon, and 
 when Juliet heard the morning-song of the lark, she would fain have persuaded 
 herself that it was the nightingale, which sings by night ; but it was too truly 
 the lark which sung, and a discordant and unpleasing note it seemed to her ; 
 and the streaks of day in the east too certainly pointed out that it was time for 
 these lovers to part. Romeo took his leave of his dear wife with a heavy heart, 
 
254 The Woi-ks of Charles Latnb. 
 
 promising to write to her from Mantua every hour in the day ; and when he 
 had descended from her chamber-window, as he stood below her on the ground, 
 in that sad foreboding state of mind in which she was, he appeared to her eyes 
 as one dead in the bottom of a tomb. Romeo's mind misgave him in lil<e 
 manner ; but now he was forced hastily to depart, for it was death for him to 
 be found within the walls of Verona after daybreak. 
 
 This was but the beginning of the tragedy of this pair of star-crossed lovers. 
 Romeo had not been gone many days before the old lord Capulet proposed a 
 match for Juliet. The husband he had chosen for her, not dreaming that she 
 was married already, was Count Paris, a gallant, young, and noble gentleman, 
 no unworthy suitor to the young Juliet, if she had never seen Romeo. 
 
 The terrified Juliet was in a sad perplexity at her father's offer. She pleaded 
 her youth unsuitable to marriage, the recent death of Tybalt, which had left 
 her spirits too weak to meet a husband with. any face of joy, and how indecorous 
 it would show for the family of the Capulets to be celebrating a nuptial-feast, 
 when his funeral solemnities were hardly over : she pleaded every reason 
 against the match, but the true one, namely, that she was married already. 
 But lord Capulet was deaf to all her excuses, and in a peremptory manner 
 ordered her to get ready, for by the following Thursday she should be married 
 to Paris : and having found her a husband rich, young, and noble, such as the 
 proudest maid in Verona might joyfully accept, he could not bear that out of 
 an affected coyness, as he construed her denial, she should oppose obstacles to 
 her own good fortune. . ' 
 
 In this extremity Juliet applied to the friendly friar, always her counsellor in 
 distress, and he asking her if she had resolution to undertake a desperate 
 remedy, and she answering that she would go into the grave alive rather than 
 marry Paris, her own dear husband living ; he directed her to go home, and 
 appear merry, apd give her consent to marry Paris, according to her father's 
 desire, and on the next night, which was 'the night before the marriage, to 
 drink off the contents of a phial which he then gave her, the effect of which 
 would be, that for two-and-fo'rty hours after drinking it she should appear cold 
 and lifeless; that when the bridegroom came to fetch her in the morning he 
 would find her to appearance dead; that then she would be borne, as the 
 manner in that country was, uncovered, on a bier, to be buried in the family 
 vault ; that if she could put off womanish fear, and consent to this terrible 
 trial, in forty-two hours after swallowing the liquid (such was its certain opera- 
 tion) she would be sure to awake, as from a dream ; and before she should 
 awake he would let her -husband know their drift, and he should come in the 
 night and bear her thence to Mantua. Love, and the dread of marrying Paris, 
 gave young Juliet strength to undertake this horrible adventure ; and she took 
 the phial of the friar, promising to observe his directions. 
 
 Going from the monastei-y, she met the young count Paris, and, modestly 
 dissembling, promised to become his bride. This was joyful news to the lord 
 Capulet and his wife. It seemed to put youth into the old man ; and Juliet, 
 who had displeased him exceedingly by her refusal of the count, was his darhng 
 again, now she promised to be obedient. AH things in the house were in a 
 bustle against the approaching nuptials. No cost was spared to prepare such 
 festival rejoicings as Verona had never before witnessed. 
 
 On the 'Wednesday night Juhet drank off the potion. She had many mis- 
 givings lest the friar, to avoid the blame which might be imputed to him for 
 marrying her to Romeo, had given her poison ; but then he was always known 
 for a holy man : then lest she should awalce before the time that Romeo was 
 to come for her ; whether the terror of the place, a vault full of dead Capulets' 
 bones, and where Tybalt, all bloody, lay festering in his shroud, would not be 
 enough to drive her distracted : again she thought of all the stories she had 
 heard of spirits haunting the places where their bodies are bestowed. But than 
 
Tales from Shakspere: Romeo and jfulieL 255 
 
 her love for Romeo, and her aversion for Paris, returned, and she desperately 
 swallowed the draught, and became insensible. 
 
 When young Paris came early in the morning with music to awaken his 
 bride, instead of a living Juliet, her chamber presented the dreary spectacle of 
 a lifeless corse. What death to his hopes ! What confusion then reigned 
 through the whole house ! I-'oor Paris lamenting his bride, whom most detest- 
 able death had beguiled him of, had divorced from him, even before their hands 
 were joined. But still more piteous it was to hear the mournings of the old 
 lord and lady Capulet, who having but this one, one poor loving child to 
 rejoice and solace in, cruel death had snatched her from their sight, just as 
 these careful parents were on the point of seeing her advanced (as they thought) 
 by a promising and advantageous match. Now all things that were ordained 
 for the festival were turned from their properties to do the office of a black 
 funeral. The wedding cheer served for a sad burial feast, the bridal hymns 
 were changed to sullen dirges, the sprightly instruments to melancholy bells, 
 and the flowers that should have been strewed in the bride's path, now served 
 but to strew her corse. Now, instead of a priest to marry her, a priest was 
 needed to bury her; and she was borne to church indeed, not to augment the 
 cheerful hopes of the living, but to swell the dreary numbers of the dead. 
 ■ Bad news, whichj always travels faster than good, now brought the dismal 
 story of his Juliet's death to Romeo at Mantua, before the messenger could 
 arrive who was sent from friar Laurence to apprise him that these were mock 
 funerals only, and but the shadow and representation of death, and that his 
 dear lady lay in the tomb but for a short while, expecting when Romeo should 
 come to release her from that dreary mansion. Just before, Romeo had been 
 unusually joyful and light-hearted; He had dreamed in the night that he was 
 dead (a strange dream, that gave a dead man leave to think,) and that his lady 
 came and found him dead, and breathed such life with kisses in his lips, that 
 he revived, and was an emperor! And now that a messenger came from 
 "Verona, he thought surely it was to confirm some good news which his dreams 
 had presaged. But when the contrary to this flattering vision appeared, and 
 that it was his lady who was dead in truth, whom he could not revive by any 
 kisses, he ordered horses to be gotready, for he determined that night to visit 
 Verona, and to see his lady in her tomb. And as mischief is swift to enter 
 into the thoughts of desperate men, he called to mind a poor apothecary, whose 
 shop in Mantua he had lately passed, and from the beggarly appearance of the 
 man, who seemed famished, and the wretched show in his shop of empty boxes 
 ranged on dirty shelves, and other tokens of extreme wretchedness, he had 
 said at the time (perhaps having some misgivings that his own disastrous life 
 might haply meet with a conclusion as desperate), " If a man were to need 
 poison, which by the law of Mantua it is death to sell, here lives a poor wretch 
 who would sell it him." These words of his now came into his mind, and he 
 sought out the apothecary, who after some pretended scruples, Romeo offering 
 •Jiim gold which his poverty could not resist, sold him a poison, which, if he 
 swallowed, he told him, if he had the strength of twenty men, would quickly 
 despatch him. 
 
 ■With this poison he set out for Verona, to have a sight of his dear lady in 
 her tomb, meaning, when he had satisfied his sight, to swallow the poison, and 
 be buried by her side. He reached Verona at midnight, and found the church- 
 yard, in the midst of which was situated the ancient tomb, of the Capulets. 
 He had provided a light, and a spade, and wrenching iron, and was proceeding 
 to break open the monument, when he was interrupted by a voice, which, by 
 the namie of vile Montague, bade him desist from his unlawful business. It 
 was the young count Paris, who had come to the tomb of Juliet at that un- 
 seasonable time ot night, to strew flowers, and to weep over the grave of her 
 that should have been his bride. He knew not what an interest Romeo had in 
 
256 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 the dead, but knowing him to be a Montague, and (as he supposed) a sworn 
 foe to all the Capulets, he judged that he was come by night to do some 
 villanous shame to the dead bodies ; therefore in an angry tone he bade him 
 desist ; and as a criminal, condemned by the laws of Verona to die if he were 
 found within the walls of the city, he would have apprehended him. Romeo 
 urged Paris to leave him, and warned him by the fate of Tybalt, who lay buried 
 there, not to provoke his anger, or draw down another sin upon his head, by 
 forcing him to kill him. But the count in scorn refused his warning, and laid 
 hands on him as a felon ; which Romeo resisting, they fought, and Paris fell. 
 When Romeo, by the help of a hght, came to see who it was that he had slain, 
 that it was Paris, who (he learned in his way from Mantua) should have married 
 Juliet, he took the dead youth by the hand, as one whom misfortune had made 
 a companion, and said that he would bury him in a triumphal grave, meaning 
 in JuUet's grave, which he now opened : and there lay his lady, as one whom 
 death had no power upon to change a feature or complexion in. her matchless 
 beauty, or as if death were amorous, and the lean abhorred monster kept her 
 there for his dehght ; for she lay yet fresh and blooming, as she had fallen 
 to sleep when she swallowed that benumbing potion ; and near her lay Tybalt 
 in his bloody shroud, whom Romeo seeing, begged pardon of his Ufeless corse, 
 and for Juliet's sake called him cousin, and said that he was about to do him a 
 favour by putting his enemy to death. Here Romeo took his last leave of his 
 lady's lips, kissing them ; and here he shook the burden of his cross stars from his 
 weary body, swallowing that poison which the apothecary had sold him, whose 
 operation was fatal and real, not like that dissembling potion which JuUet had 
 swallowed, the effect of which was now nearly expiring, and she about to awake 
 to complain that Romeo had not kept his time, or that he had come too soon. 
 
 For now the hour was come at which the friar had promised that she should 
 awake ; and he, having, learned that his letters which he had sent to Mantua, 
 by some unlucky detention of the messenger, had never reached Romeo, came 
 himself, provided with a pickaxe and lantern, to deliver the lady from her 
 confinement; but he was surprised to find a light already burning in the 
 Capulet's monument, and to see swords and blood near it, and Romeo and 
 Paris lying breathless by the monument. 
 
 Before he could entertain a conjecture, to imagine how these fatal accidents 
 had fallen out, Juliet awoke out of her trance, and seeing the friar near her, she 
 remembered the place where she was, and the occasion of her being there, and 
 asked for Romeo : but the friar, hearing a noise, bade her come out of that 
 place of death, and of unnatural sleep, for a greater power than they could 
 contradict had thwarted their intents ; and being frighted by the noise of 
 people coming, he fled : but when Juliet saw the cup closed in her true love's 
 hands, she guessed that poison had been the cause of his end, and she would 
 have swallowed the dregs if any had been left, and she kissed his still warm 
 lips to try if any poison' yet did hang upon them ; then hearing a nearer noise 
 of people coming, she quickly unsheathed a dagger which she wore, and 
 stabbing herself, died by her true Romeo's side. 
 
 The watch by this time had come up to the place. A page belonging to 
 count Paris, who had witnessed the fight between his master and Romeo, had 
 given the alarm, which had spread among the citizens, who went up and down ■ 
 the streets of Verona confusedly, exclaiming, A Paris, a Romeo, a Juliet, as 
 the rumour had imperfectly reached them, till the uproar brought lord 
 Montague and lord Capulet out af their beds with the prince, to inquire into 
 the causes of the disturbance. The friar had been apprehended by some of the 
 watch, coming from the churchyard, trembling, sighing, and weeping, in a 
 suspicious manner. A great multitude being assembled at the Capulets' monu; 
 ment, the friar was demanded by the prince to deliver what he knew of these 
 strange and disastrous accidents. 
 
Tales from Shakspere: Romeo and yuliet. 2.57 
 
 And there, in^the presence of the old lords Montague and Capulet, he 
 ■faithfully related the story of their children's fatal love, the part he took in 
 promoting their marriage, in the hope in that union, to end the long quarrels 
 between their families : how Romeo, there dead, was husband to Juliet : and 
 Juliet, there dead, was Romeo's faithful wife : how, before he could find a fit 
 opportunity to diyulge their marriage, another match was projected for Juliet, 
 who, to avoid the crime of a second marriage, swallowed the sleeping draught 
 (as he advised), and all thought her dead : how meantime he wrote to Romeo, 
 to come and take her thence when the force of the potion should cease, and by 
 what unfortunate miscarriage of the messenger the letters never reached 
 Romeo : further than this the friar could not follow the story, nor knew more 
 than that coming himself to deUver Juliet from that place of death, he found 
 the count Paris and Romeo slain. The remainder of the transactions was 
 supplied by the narration of the page who had seen Paris and Romeo fight, 
 and by the servant who came with Romeo from 'Verona, to whom this faithful 
 lover had given letters to be delivered to his father in the event of his death, 
 which made good the friar's words, confessing his marriage with Juliet, im- 
 ploring the forgiveness of his parents, acknowledging the buying of the poison 
 of the poor apothecary, and his intent in coming to the monument, to die, and 
 lie with Juliet. All these circumstances agreed together to clear the friar from 
 any hand he could be supposed to have in these complicated slaughters, further 
 than as the unintended consequences of his own well-meant, yet too artificial 
 and subtle contrivances. 
 
 And the prince, turning to these old lords, Montague and Capulet, rebuked 
 them for their brutal and irrational enmities, and showed, them what a scourge 
 Heaven had laid upon such offences, that It had found means even through the 
 love of their children to punish their unnatural hate. And these old rivals, no 
 longer enemies, agreed to bury their long strife in their children's graves ; and , 
 lord Capulet requested lord Montague to give him his hand, calling him by the ' 
 name of brother, as if in acknowledgment of the union of their families by 
 the marriage of the young Capulet and Montague ; and saying that lord 
 Montague's hand (in token of reconcilement) was all he demanded for his 
 daughter's jointure : but lord Montague said he would give him more, for he 
 would raise her statue of pure gold, that while Verona kept its name, no figure 
 should be so esteemed for its richness and workmanship as that of the true and 
 faithful Juliet. And lord Capulet in return said, that he would raise another 
 statue to Romeo. So did these poor old lords, when it was too late, strive to 
 outdo each other in mutual courtesies ; while so deadly had been their rage 
 and enmity in past times, that nothing but the fearful overthrow of their 
 children (poor sacrifices to their quarrels and dissensions) could remove the 
 rooted hates and jealousies of these noble families. 
 
 HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK. 
 
 Gertrude, queen of Denmark, becoming a widow by the sudden death of 
 king Hamlet, in less than two months after his death married his brother 
 ■Claudius, which was noted by all people at the time for a strange act of indis- 
 cretion, or unfeelingness, or worse : for this Claudius did no ways resemble 
 her late husband in the quahties of his person or his mind, but was as con- 
 
 K 
 
u 
 
 258 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 temptible in outward- appearance as he was base and un^yorthy in disposition; 
 and suspicions did not fail to arise in the minds of some that he had privately 
 made ..away with his brother, the late king, with the view of marrying his 
 widow, and ascending the throne. of Denmarlc, to the exclusion of young 
 Hamlet; the son of the buried king, and lawful successor to the throne. 
 
 But upon no one did this unadvised action of the queen make such itn- 
 pression as upon this young prince, who loved .and venerated the memory of 
 his dead father almost to idolatry, and being of a nice sense of honour, and a 
 most exquisite practiser of propriety himself, did sorely take to heart this un- 
 worthy conduct of his mother Gertrude; jnsomucti that, between grief for his 
 fathers death and shame for, his mother's marriage, this young prince was, over- 
 clouded with a deep melancholy, and lost all bis inirth and all his good looks ; 
 all his customary pleasure in books forsook him ;, his princely exercises and 
 sports, proper to. his youth, were no longer acceptable ; he grew weary of the 
 world, which seemed to him .an unweeded garden, where . all the wholesome 
 flowers were choked up, and nothing but weeds could thrive. Not that the 
 prospect of exclusion from the throne, his lawful inheritance, weighed so much 
 upon his spirits, though that to a young, and high-minded prince was a, bitter 
 wound and a sore indignity ; but what so galled him, and took away, all his 
 cheerful spirits, was that his mother had shown herself so forgetful to his 
 father's memory : and such a father ! who had been to her so loving and so 
 gentle a husband ! and then she . always appeared as loving and obedient a 
 wife to him, and would hang upon him as if her affection grew to him : and 
 now, within two months, or, as it seemed to young Hamlet, less than two 
 months, she had married agaJn-.-married his uncle, her dead husband's brother, 
 in itself a highly improper and unlawful marriage from the nearness of rela- 
 tionship, but made' much more so by the indecent haste with which it was con- 
 cluded, and the unkingly character of the man whom she had chosen to be the 
 partner of her throne and bed. This it was which, more than the loss of ten 
 kingdoms, dashed the spirits and brought a cloud over the mind of this honour- 
 able young prince. 
 
 In vain was all that his mother Gertrude or the king could do or contrive to 
 divert him ; he still appeared in court in a suit of deep black, as mourning for 
 the king his father's death, which mode of dress he had never laid aside, not 
 even in compliment to his mother upon the day she was married ; nor could 
 he be brought to join in any of the festivities or rejoicings of that (as ap- 
 peared to him) disgraceful day. 
 
 What mostly troubled him was an uncertainty about the manner of his 
 father's death. It was given out by Claudius that a serpent had stung him ; 
 but young Hamlet had shrewd suspicions that Claudius himself was the 
 serpent ; in plain English, that he had murdered him for his crown, and that 
 the serpent who stung his father did now sit on the throne. 
 
 How far he was right in this conjecture, and what he ought to think of his 
 mother, how far she was privy to this murder, and whether by her consent or 
 knowledge, or without, it came to pass, were the doubts which continually 
 harassed and distracted him. 
 
 A rumour had reached the car of young Hamlet, <hat an apparition, exactly 
 resembling the dead king his father, had been seen by the soldiers upon watch, 
 on the platform before the palace, at midnight, for two or three nights succes- 
 sively. The figure came constantly clad in the same suit of armour, from head 
 to foot, which the dead king was known to have worn : and they who saw it 
 (Hamlet's bosom-friend Horatio was one) agreed in their testimony as to the 
 time and manner of its appearance : that it came just as the clock struck 
 twelve ; that it looked pale,, with a face more of sorrow than of anger ; that 
 its beard was grisly, and the colour a sable silvered, as they had seen it in his 
 lifetime : that it'made no answer when they spoke to it, yet once they thought ) 
 
it lifted up its head, and addressed itself to motion, as if it were about to speak ; 
 but in that moment the morning cock crew, and it shrunk in haste away, and 
 vanished out of their sight. 
 
 The young prince, strangely amazed at their relation, which was too con- 
 sistent and agreeing with itself to disbelieve, concluded that it was his father's 
 ghost which they had seen,' and determined to take hie watch with the soldiers 
 that night, that he might have a chance of seeing it : for he reasoned with 
 himself, that such an appearance did not come for nothing, but that the ghost 
 had something to impsu-t, and though it had been silent hitherto, yet it 
 would speak to him. And he waited with impatience for the coming of 
 night. 
 
 When night came he took his stand with Horatio, and Marcellus, one of the 
 guard, upon the platform, where this apparition was accustomed to walk : and, 
 it being a cold night, and the air unusually raw and nipping, Hamlet and 
 Horatio and their companion fell into some talk about the coldness of the 
 night, which was suddenly broken off by Horatio announcing that the ghost 
 was coming. 
 
 At the sight of his father's spirit Hamlet was struck with a sudden surprise 
 and fear. He at first called upon the angels and heavenly ministers to defend 
 them, for he knew not whether it were a good spirit or bad— whether it came 
 for good or for evil : but he gradually assumed more courage ; and his father 
 (as it seemed to him) looked upon him so piteously, and as it were desiring to 
 have conversation with him, and did in all respects appear so like himself as he 
 was when he lived, that Hamlet could not help addressing him : he called him 
 by his name, Hamlet, King, Father ; and conjured him that he would tell the 
 reason why he had left his grave, where they had seen him quietly bestowed, 
 to come again and visit the earth and the moonlight : and besought him that 
 he would let them know if there was anything which they could do to give him 
 peage to his spirit. And the ghost beckoned to Hamlet that he should go with 
 him to some more removed place, where they might be alone ; and Horatio and 
 Marcellus would have dissuaded the young prince from following it, for they 
 feared lest it should be some evil spirit who would tempt him to the neighbour- 
 ing sea, or to the top of some dreadful cliff, and there put on some horrible 
 shape which might deprieve the prince of his reason. But their counsels and 
 entreaties could not alter Hamlet's determination, who cared too little about 
 life to fear the losing of it ; and, as to his soul, he said, what could the spirit 
 do to that, being a thing immortal as itself? And he felt as hardy as a lion, 
 and bursting from them, who did all they could to hold him, he followed 
 whithersoever the spirit led him. 
 
 And when they were alone together, the spirit broke silence, and told hmi 
 that he was the ghost of Hamlet, his father, who had been cruelly murdered, 
 and he told the manner of it ; that it was done by his own brother Claudius, 
 Hamlet's uncle, as Hamlet had already but too much suspected, for the hope 
 of succeeding to his bed and crown. That as he was sleeping in his garden, 
 his custom always in the afternoon, this treasonous brother stole upon him in 
 his sleep and poured the juice of poisonous henbane into his ears, which has 
 such an antipathy to the life of man that swift as quicksilver it courses through 
 all the veins of the body, baking up the blood, and spreading a crust-like 
 leprosy all over the skin : thus sleeping, by a brother's hand he was cut oft at 
 once from his crown, his queen, and his hfe; and he adjured Hamlet, if he 
 did ever his dear father love, that he would revenge his foul murder. And the 
 ghost lamented to his son, that his mother should so fall off from virtue as to 
 prove false to the wedded love of her first husband, and to marry his murderer : 
 but he cautioned Hamlet, howsoever he proceeded in his revenge against his 
 wicked uncle, by no means to act any violence against the person of his mother 
 but to leave her to heaven and to the stings and thorns of conscience. And 
 
i 2G0 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 \- ^- 
 
 }, Hamlet promised lo observe the ghost's direction in all things ; and the ghost 
 \ vanished. 
 
 j And when Hamlet was left alone he took up a solemn resolution that all he 
 f' bad in his memory, all that he had ever learned by books or observation, 
 j, should be instantly forgotten by him, and nothing live in his brain but tlie 
 ' memory of what the ghost had told him, and enjoined him to do. And 
 [■ Hamlet related the particulars of the conversation which had passed to none 
 I but his dear Horatio; and he enjoined both to him and Marcellus the strictest 
 ! secrecy as to what they had seen that night. 
 
 \ The terror which the sight of the ghost had left upon the senses of Hamlet, | 
 I' be being weak and dispirited before, ahnost unhinged his mind, and drove him 
 f. beside his reason. And he, fearing that it would continue to have this effect, 
 I. which might subject him to observation, and set his uncle upon his guard, if 
 \ be suspected that he was meditating anything against him, or that Hamlet 
 really knew more of his father's death than he professed, took up a strange 
 1, resolution from that time to counterfeit as if he were really and truly mad, 
 \ thinking that he would be less an object of suspicion when his uncle should 
 [ believe him incapable of any serious project, and that his real perturbation of 
 i mind would be best covered and pass concealed under a disguise of pretended 
 \ lunacy. 
 
 f From this time Hamlet affected a certain wjldness and strangeness in his 
 
 I, apparel, his speech, and behaviour, and did so excellently couterfeit the mad- 
 
 j: man, that the king and queen were both deceived ; and not thinking his grief 
 
 ' for his father's death a sufficient cause to produce such a distemper — for they 
 
 \ knew not of the appearance of the ghost — they concluded that his malady was 
 
 love, and they thought they had found out the object. 
 
 Before Hamlet fell into the melancholy way which has been related, he had 
 
 \ dearly loved a fair maid called Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius, the king's 
 
 chief counsellor in affairs of state. He had sent her letters and rings, and 
 
 made many tenders of his affection to her, and importuned her with love in 
 
 , honourable fashion ; and she had given belief to his vows and importunities. 
 
 I But the melancholy which he fell into latterly had made him neglect her ; and 
 
 from the time he conceived the project of counterfeiting madness, he affected 
 
 to treat her with unkindness and a sort of rudeness ; but she, good lady, rather 
 
 than reproach him with being false to her, persuaded herself that it was nothing 
 
 but the disease in his mind, and no settled unkindness, which had made him 
 
 less observent of her than formerly; and she compared the faculties of his 
 
 once noble mind and excellent understanding, impaired as they were with the 
 
 deep melancholy that oppressed him, to sweet bells, which in themselves are 
 
 capable of most exquisite music, but when jangled out of tune, or rudely 
 
 handled, produce only a harsh and unpleasing sound. 
 
 Though the rough business which Hamlet had in hand, the revenging of his 
 father's death upon his murderer, did not suit with the playful state of courtship, 
 or admit of the society of so idle a passion as love now seemed to him, yet it 
 could not hinder but that soft thoughts of his Ophelia would come between ; and 
 in one of these moments, when he thought that his treatment of this gentle lady 
 bad been unreasonably harsh, he wrote her a letter full of wild starts of passion, 
 and in extravagant terms, such as agreed with his supposed madness, but 
 mixed with some gentle touches of affection, which could but not show to this 
 honoured lady that a deep love for her yet lay at the bottom of his lieart. 
 He bade her to doubt the stars were fire, and to doubt that the sun did move, 
 to doubt truth to be a liar, but never to doubt that he loved ; with more of 
 such extravagant phrases. This letter Ophelia dutifully showed to her father, 
 and the old man thought himself bound to communicate it to the king and 
 queen, who from that time supposed that the true cause of Hamlet's madness 
 was love. And the- queen wished that the good beauties of Ophelia might be 
 
Tales from Shakspere: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. 261 
 
 the happy cause of his wildness, for so she hoped that her virtues might happily 
 restore him to his accustomed way again, to both their honours. 
 
 But Hamlet's malady lay deeper than she supposed, or than could so be 
 cured. His father's ghost, which he had seen, stiLl haunted his imagination, 
 and the sacred injunction to revenge his murder gave him no rest till it was 
 accomplished. Every hour of delay seemed to him a sin, and a violation of 
 his father's commands. Yet how to compass the death of the king, surrounded 
 as he constantly was with his guards, was no easy matter. Or if it had been 
 the presence of the queen, Hamlet's mother, who was generally with the king, 
 was a restraint upon his purpose, which he could not break through. Besides, 
 the very circumstance that the usurper was his mother's husband, filled him 
 with some remorse, and still blunted the edge of his purpose. 1 he mere act 
 of putting a fellow-creature to death was in itself odious and terrible to a dis- 
 
 I position naturally so gentle as Hamlet's was. His, very melancholy, and the 
 dejection of spirits he had so ''ong been in, produced an irresoluteness and 
 wavering of purpose, which kept him from proceeding to extremities. More- 
 over, he could not help having some scruples upon his mind whether the spirit 
 wliich he had seen was indeed his father, or whether it might not be the devil, 
 who he had heard has power to take any form he pleases, and who might have 
 assumed his father's shape only to take advantage of his weakness and his 
 melancholye to drive him to the doing of so desperate an act as murder. And 
 he determined that he would have more certain grounds to go upon than a 
 vision, or apparition, which might be a delusion. 
 
 ■While he was in this irresolute mind, there came to the court certain players, 
 in whom Hamlet formerly used to take delight, and particularly to hear one of 
 them speak a tragical speech, describing the death of old Priam, king of Troy, 
 with the grief of Hecuba, his queen. Hamlet welcomed his old friends, tlie 1 
 players, and remembering how that speech, had formerly given him pleasdre, 
 requested the player to repeat it, which he.did in so lively a manner, setting 
 forth the cruel murder of the feeble old king; with the destruction of his people 
 and city by fire, and the mad grief of the old queen, running barefoot up and 
 down the palace, with a poor clout upon that head where a crown had been, 
 and with nothing but a blanket upon her loins, snatched up in haste, where 
 she had worn a royal robe : that not only it drew tears from all that stood by, 
 who thought they saw the real scene, so lively was it represented, but even the 
 player himself delivered it with a broken voice and real tears.' This put 
 Hamlet upon thinking, if that player could so work himself up to passion by 
 a mere fictitious speech, to weep for one that he had never seen— for Hecuba, 
 that had been dead so many hundred years, how dull was he, who having a 
 real motive and cue for passion, a real king and a dear father murdered, was 
 yet so little moved, that his revenge all this while had seemed to have slept in 
 dull and muddy forgetfulness ! And while he meditated on actors and acting, 
 and the powerful effects which a good play, represented to the life, has upon 
 the spectator, he remembered the instance of some murderer, who, seeing a 
 mlirder on the stage, was by the mere force of the scene and resemblance of 
 circumstances so affected, that on the spot he confessed the crime which he 
 had committed. And he determined that these players should play something 
 like the murder of his father before his uncle, and he would watch narrowly 
 what effect it might have upon him, and from his looks he would be able to 
 gather with more certainty if he were the murderer or not. To this effect he 
 ordered a play to be prepared, to the representatiori of which he invited the 
 king and queen. 
 
 The story of the play was a murder done in Vienna upon a duke. Ihe 
 duke's name was Gonzago, his wife Baptista. The play showed how one 
 Lucianus, a near relation to the duke, poisoned him in his garden for his 
 
 estate, and how the murderer in a short time after got the love of Gonzago s wife. 
 
i262 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 At the representation of this play, the king, who did not know the trap 
 which was laid for him, was present, with his' ijueen and the whole court: 
 Hamlet sitting attentively near him to observe his looks. The play bfegan 
 'with a conversation between Gonzago and his wife, in' which the lady made 
 many protestations of love,' arid of never marrying a second hoSbiind/if she 
 should outlive ^Gonzago ; wishing she might be accursed if she ever took a 
 second husband, and adding that no woman ever did so but those wicked women 
 who kill their first husbands. Hamlet observed the king, his uncle, change colour 
 at this expressidh, and that it was as bad as wormwood both to him and lo 
 the queen. But when Lucianus, according to the story, came to poison 
 Gonzago sleeping in the garden, the strong resemblance which it bore to his 
 own wicked act upon the late king, his brother, whom he had poisoned in his 
 garden, so struck upon the conscience of this usurper, that he was unable to 
 sit out the rest of the play, but on a sudden calling for lights to his chamber, 
 and affecting or partly feeling a sudden sickness, he abruptly left the theatre. 
 The king being departed, the play was given over. Now Hamlet had seen 
 enough to be satisfied that the words of the ghost were true, and no illusion ; 
 and in a fit of gaiely, like that which comes over a man who suddenly has 
 some great doubt or scruple resolved, he swore to Horatio that he would take 
 the ghost's word for a thousand pounds. But before he could make up his 
 resolution as to what measures of revenge he should take, now he was cer- 
 tainly informed that his uncle was his father's murderer, he was sent for by 
 tlie queen, his mother, to a private conference in her closet. 
 
 It was by desire of the king that the queen sent for Hamlet, that she might 
 signify to her son how much his late behaviour had displeased them both ; and 
 the king, wishing to know all that passed at that conference, and thinking that 
 the too partial report of a mother might let slip some part of Hamlet's words, 
 which it might much import the king to know, Polonius, the old councillor of 
 state, was ordered to plant himself behind the hangings in the queen's closet, 
 where he might unseen hear all that passed. This artifice was particularly 
 adapted to the disposition of Polonius, who was a man grown old in crooked 
 maxims and policies of state, and delighted to get at the knowledge of matters 
 in an indirect and cunning way. 
 
 • Hamlet being come to his mother, she began to tax him in the roundest way 
 with his actions and behaviour, and she told him that he had given great 
 offence to his father, meaning the king, his uncle, whom, because he had 
 married her, she called Hamlet's father. Hamlet, sorely indignant that she 
 should give so dear and honoured a name as father seemed to him, to a wretch 
 who was indeed no better than the murderer of his true father, with some 
 .sharpness repUed, " Mother, you have much offended my father." The queen 
 said that was but an idle answer. " As good as the question deserved," said 
 Hamlet. The queen asked him if he had forgotten who it was he was speak- 
 ing to. "Alas!" replied Hamlet, "I wish I could forget. You are the 
 queen, your husband's brother's wife ; and you are my mother ; I wish you 
 were not what you are." " Nay then," said the queen, " if you show me so 
 little respect, I will set those to you that can speak," and was going to send 
 the king or Polonious to him. But Hamlet would not let her go, now he had 
 her alone, till he had tried if his words could not bring her to some sense of 
 her wicked life ; and, taking her by the wrist, he held hfer fast, and made her 
 sit down. She, affrighted at his earnest manner, and fearful lest in his lunacy 
 he should do her a mischief, cried out ; and a voice was- heard from behind 
 
 I the hangings, " Help, help, the queen! "which Hamlet hearing, and verily 
 thinking that it was the king himself there concealed, he drew his sword, and 
 stabbed at the place where the voice came from, as he would have stabbed a 
 lat that ran there, till the voice ceasing, he concluded the person to be dead. 
 1 But when he dragged forth the body, it was not the king, but Polonious, the 
 
Tales from Shakspere: Hainkt, Prince of Denmark. 263 
 
 old pifioious counsellor, that had planted himself as a spy behind the hangings;. 
 '! O ■ me E" exclaimed' the queen, "what a rash- and. bloody deed have you 
 done! ' '^ A' bloody deed, mother," replied H&mlet, "but not so bad as 
 yours,, who killed a kihg and married hjs brothCT,", Hamlet had gone too far 
 to lefeve off here. He was now in the humour, tospeak plainly to his mother, 
 and he.piirsued'it; And though the fault of pkrents are to be tenderly treated 
 by their children, yet in the case of great crimes the " son may have leave to 
 speak even to his own mother with some harshness, so as that harshness is 
 meant for her good, and turn hei- from her wicked ways, and not done for the 
 purpose of upbraiding. And how, this virtuous prince did in moving terms 
 represent to the queen the heinousness of her offence, in being so forgetful of 
 the dead king, his father, as in so short a space of time to marry with his 
 brother arid reputed murderer : such an act as after the vows which she had 
 sworn to her first husband, was enough to make all vows of women suspected, 
 and all virtue to be accounted hypocrisy, wedding contracts to be less than 
 gamesters' oaths, and religion to be a mockery and a mere form of words. 
 He said she had done such a deed, that the heavens blushed at it, and the 
 earth was sick of her because of it. And he showed her two pictures, the one 
 of the late king, her first husband, and the other of the present king, her 
 second husband, and he bade her mark the difference : what a grace was oh 
 the brow of his father, how like a god he looked ! the curls of Apollo, the 
 forehead of Jupiter, the eye of Mars, and a posture like to Mercury newly 
 alighted on some heaven-kissing hill ! this man, he said, was her husband. 
 And then he showed her whom she had got in his stead : how like a blight or 
 .1 mildew he looked, for so he liad blasted his wholesome brother. And the 
 queen was sore ashamed that he should so turn her eyes inward upon her soul, 
 which she now saw so blatk and deformed. And he asked her how she could 
 continue to live with this man, and be a wife to him, who had murdered her 
 
 first husband, and got the crown by as false means as a thief And just as 
 
 he spoke, the ghost of his father, such as he was in his lifetime, and such as 
 he had lately seen it, entered the room, and Hamlet, in great terror, asked 
 what it would have ; and the ghost said that it came to remind him of the 
 revenge he.hcd promised, which Hamlet seemed to have forget: and the 
 ghost bade him speaik to his mother, for the grief and terror she was in would 
 else kill her. It then vanished, and was seen by none but Hamlet, neither 
 could he, by pointing to where it stood, or by any description, make his mother 
 perceive it ; who was terribly frighted all this while to hear him conversing, 
 as it seemed to her, with nothing : and she imputed it to the disorder of his 
 mind. But Hamlet begged her not to flatter her wicked soul in such a manner 
 as to think that it was his madness, and not her own offences, which had 
 brought his father's spirit again on the earth. And he bade her feel his pulse, 
 how temperately it beat, not like a rnadman's. And he begged of her with 
 tears, to confess herself to heaven for what was past, and for the future to 
 ■avbiil the company of the king, and be no more as a wife to him : and I 
 when she should show herself a mother to him, by respecting his father's 
 memory, he would ask a blessing of her as a son. And she promising to 
 observe his directions, the conference ended. 
 
 And now Hamlet was at leisure to consider who it was that in his unfortu- 
 nate rashness he had. killed : and when he came to see that it was Polonius, 
 the father of the lady Ophelia, whom he so dearly loved, he drew apart the 
 dead body, and his spirits being now a little quieter, hewept.for what he "had 
 done. 
 
 This uiifortunate death of Polonius gave the king a pretence for sending 
 Hamlet out of the kingdoih. He would willingly have put him to death, 
 fearing him as dangerous ; but he dreaded the people, who loved Hamlet ; 
 and the queen, who, with all her faults, rioted upon the prince, her son. So 
 
264 The Works of Charles Lamb, 
 
 this subtle king, under pretence of providing for Hamlet's safety, that he might 
 rot be called to account for Polonius's death, caused him to be conveyed on 
 board a ship bound for England, under the care of two courtiers, by whom he 
 despatched letters to the English court, which at that time was in subjection 
 and paid tribute to Denmark, requiring, for special reasons there pretended, 
 that Hamlet should be put to death as soon as he landed, on English ground. 
 Hamlet, suspecting some treachery, in the night time secretly got at the letters, 
 and skilfully erasing his own name, he in the stead of it put in the names of 
 those two courtiers, who had the charge of him, to be put to death ; then 
 seaUng up the letters, he put them into their place again. Soon after, the ship 
 was attacked by pirates, and a sea-fight commenced ; in the course of which 
 Hamlet, desirous to show his valour, with sword in hand singly boarded the 
 enemy's vessel ; while his own ship in a cowardly manner bore away, and 
 ■leaving him to his fate, the two courtiers made the best of their way to 
 ■England, charged with those letters the sense of which Hamlet had altered 
 to their own deserved destruction. 
 
 The pirates, who had the prince in their power, showed themselves gentle 
 enemies ; and knowing whom they had got prisoner, in the hope that the 
 prince might do them a good turn at court in recompense for any favour they 
 might show him, they set Hamlet on shore at the nearest port in Denmark. 
 From that place Hamlet wrote to the king, acquainting him with the strange 
 chance which had brought him back to his own country, and saying that on 
 the next day he should present himself before his majesty. When he got home, 
 a sad spectacle offered itself the first thing to his eyes. 
 
 This was the funeral of the young and beautiful Ophelia, his once dear 
 mistress. The wits of this young lady had begun to turn ever since her poor 
 father's death. That he should die a violent death, and by the hands of the 
 prince whom she loved, so affected this tender young maid, that in a Httle time 
 she grew perfectly distracted, and would go about giving flowers away to the 
 ladies of the court, and saying that they were for her father's burial, singing 
 songs about love and about death, and sometimes such as had no meaning at 
 all, as if she had no memory of what happened to her. There was a willow 
 which grew slanting over a brook, and reflected its leaves in the stream. To 
 this brook she came one day when she was unwatched, with garlands she had 
 been making, mixed up of daisies and nettles, flowers and weeds together, and 
 clambering up to hang her garland upon the boughs of the willow, a bough 
 broke and precipitated this fair young maid, garland, and all that she had 
 gathered, into the water, where her clothes bore her up for a while, during 
 which she chanted scraps of old tunes, like one insensible to her own distress, 
 or as if she were a creature natural to that element : but long it was not before 
 her garments, heavy with the wet, pulled her in from her melodious singing to 
 a muddy and miserable death. It was the funeral of this fair maid which her 
 brother Laertes was celebrating, the king and queen and whole court being 
 present when Hamlet arrived. He knew not what all this show imported, but 
 stood on one side, not inclining to interrupt the ceremony. He saw the flowers' 
 strewed upon her grave, as the custom was in maiden burials, which the queen 
 herself threw in ; and as she threw them, she said, " Sweets to the sweet ! I 
 thought to have decked thy bride-bed, sweet maid, not to have strewed thy 
 grave. Thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife." And he heard her 
 brother wish that violets might spring from her grave : and he saw him leap 
 into the grave all frantic with grief, and bid the attendants pile mountains of 
 earth upon him, that he might be buried with her. And Hamlet's love for this 
 fair maid came back to him, and he could not bear that a brother should show 
 so much transport of grief, for he thought that he loved Opheha better than 
 foi-ty thousand brothers. Then discovering himself, he leaped into the grave 
 where Laertes was, all as frantic or more frantic than he, and Laertes knowing 
 
Tales from ShaksJ>ere: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. zCk 
 
 him to be Hamlet, who had been the cause of his father's and his sister's 
 death^ grappled him by the throat as an enemy, till the attendants parted them • 
 and Hamlet, after the funeral, excused his hasty act in throwing himself into 
 the grave as if to brave Laertes; but he said he could not bear that any one 
 should seem to outgo him in grief for the death of the fair Ophelia. And for 
 the time these two noble youths seemed reconciled. 
 
 But out of the grief and anger of Laertes for the death of his father and 
 Opheha, the king, Hamlet's wicked uncle, contrived destruction for Hamlet 
 He set on Laertes, under cover of peace and reconciliation, to challenge 
 Hamlet to a fnendly trial of skill at fencing, which Hamlet accepting a day 
 was appointed to try the match. At this match all the court was present, and 
 Laertes, by direction of the king, prepared a poisoned weapon. Upori this 
 match great wagers were laid by the courtiers, as both Hamlet and Laertes 
 were known to excel at this sword-play ; and Hamlet taking up the foils chose 
 one, not at all suspecting the treachery of Laertes, or being careful to examine 
 Laertes' weapon, who, instead of a foil or blunted sword, which the laws of 
 fencing require, made use of one with a point, and poisoned. At first Laertes 
 did but play with Hamlet, and suffered him to gain some advantages, which 
 the dissembling king magnified and extolled beyond measure, drinking to 
 Hamlet's success, and wagering rich bets upon the issue : but after a few 
 passes, Laertes growing warm made a deadly thrust at Hamlet with his 
 poisoned weapon, and gave him a mortal blow. Hamlet, incensed, but not 
 knowing the whole of the treachery, in the scufHe exchanged his own innocent 
 weapon for Laertes' deadly one, and with a thrust of Laertes' own sword repaid 
 Laertes home, who was thus justly caught in his own treachery. In this 
 instant the queen shrieked out that she was poisoned. She had inadvertently 
 drunk out of a bowl which the king had prepared for Hamlet, in case that^ 
 being warm in fencing, he should call for drink : into this the treacherous 
 king had infused a deadly poison, to make sure of Hamlet, if Laertes had 
 failed. He had forgotten to warn the queen of the bowl, which she drank off; 
 and immediately died, exclaiming with her last breath that she was poisoned. 
 Hamlet, suspecting some treachery, ordered the doors to be shut, while he 
 sought it out. Laertes fold him to seek no farther, for he was the traitor; and 
 feeling his life go away with the wound which Hamlet had given him, he made 
 confession of the treachery he had used, and how he had fallen a victim to it : 
 and he told Hamlet of the envenomed point, and said that Hamlet had not 
 half an hour to live, for no medicine could cure him ; and begging forgiveness 
 of Hamlet, he died, with his last words accusing the king of being the con- 
 triver of the mischief. When Hamlet saw his end draw near, there being yet 
 some venom left upon the sword, he suddenly turned upon his false uncle, and 
 thrust the point of it to his heart, fulfilling the promise which he had made to 
 his father's spirit, whose injunction was now accomplished, and his foul murder 
 revenged upon the murderer. Then Hamlet, feeling his breath fail and life 
 departing, turned to his dear friend Horatio, who had been spectator of this 
 fatal tragedy ; and with his dying breath requested him that he would live to 
 tell his story to the world (for Horatio had made a motion as if he would slay 
 himself to accompany the prince in death), and Horatio promised that he would 
 make a true report, as one that was privy to all the circumstances. And, thus 
 satisfied, the noble heart of Hamlet cracked : and Horatio and the by- 
 standers with many tears commended the spirit of their sweet prince to the 
 guardianship of angels. For Hamlet was a loving and a gentle prince, and 
 greatly beloved for his many noble and prince-like qualities ; and if he had 
 lived, wpuld no doubt have proved a most royal and complete king to Den- ■ 
 mark. 
 
266 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 OTHELLO. 
 
 Brabantio, the rich senator of Venice, had a fair daughter, the gentle Des- 
 demona. yShe was sought to by divers suitors, both on account of her many 
 virtuous qualities, and for her rich expectations. But among the suitors of her 
 own clime and complexion, she saw none whom she could affect; for this 
 noble lady, who regarded the mind more than the features of men, with a sin- 
 gularity rather to be admired than imitated, had chose for the object of her 
 affections a Moor, a black, whom her father loved, and often invited to his 
 house. 
 
 Neither is Desdemona to be altogether condemned for the unsuitableness of 
 the person whom she selected for her lover. Bating that Dthello was black, the 
 noble Moor wanted nothing which might recommend him to the affections of 
 the greatest lady. He was a soldier, and a brave one ; and by his conduct in 
 bloody wars against the Turks, had risen to the rank of general in the Venetian 
 service, and was esteemed and trusted by the state. 
 
 He had been a traveller, and Desdemona (as is the manner of ladies) loved to 
 hear him tell the story of his adventures, which he would run through from his 
 earliest recollection ; the battles, sieges, and encounters which he had passed 
 through ; the perils he had been exposed to by land and by water ; his hair- 
 breadth escapes, when he has entered a breach, or marched up to the mouth of 
 a cannon ; and how he had been taken prisoner by the insolent enemy, and 
 sold to slavery : how he demeaned himself in that state, and how he escaped : 
 all these accounts, added to the narration of the strange things he had seen in 
 foreign countries, the vast wildernesses and romantic caverns, the quarries, the 
 rocks and mountains, whose heads are in the clouds ; of the savage nations, the 
 cannibals who are man-eaters, and a race of people in Africa whose heads do 
 grow beneath their shoulders : these travellers' stories would so enchain the at- 
 tention of Desdemona, that if she were called off at any time by household 
 affairs, she would despatch with all haste that business, and return, and with a 
 greedy ear devour Othello's discourse. And once he took advantage of a pliant 
 hour, and drew from her a prayer, that he would tell her the whole story of his 
 life at large, of which she had heard so much, but only by parts ; to which he 
 consented, and beguiled her of many a tear, when he spoke of some distressful 
 stroke which his youjh had suffered. 
 
 His story being done, she gave him for his pains a world of sighs : she swore 
 a pretty oath that it was all passing strange, and pitiful, wondrous pitiful : she 
 wished (she said) she had not heard it, yet she wished that heaven had made 
 her such a man ; and then she thanked him, and told him if he had a friend 
 who loved her, he had only to teach him how to tell his story, and that would 
 woo her. Upon this , hint, delivered not with more frankness than modesty, 
 accompanied With a certain bewitching prettiness, and blushes, which Othello 
 could not but understand, he spoke more openly of his love, and in this golden 
 opportunity gained the consent of the' generous lady Desdemona Urivately to 
 marrj^ him. • ' ' : . 
 
 Neither Othello's colour nor his fortune werfe such, that it could be hoped ' 
 Brabantio would accept him for a son-in-law. He had left his daughter free; 
 but he did expect that, as the manner of noble Venetian ladies was, she would 
 choose ere long a husband of senatorial rank or expectations ; but in this he 
 
Tales from Shaksfere: Othello. 267' 
 
 was deceived; Desdemona loved the Moor, .though he,wasblac]<;, anddevoted 
 her heart, and fortunes to his. valiant, .parts and qualities ! .so was her heart 
 subdued to an implicit ^devotion to th&man she had spleotqd for a. husband, 
 that his very colour, which to. all but this discecniug lady would have proved 
 an insurraoimtable objection, was • by her esteemed rabove all, 1 the white skins 
 and clear complexions of the young Venetian nobility, het .suitors. , 
 
 Their marriage, which, though privately carried oowldinot lsng,be kepta 
 secret, came to the ears of the old man, Brabantio, who. appe.ared in a solemn 
 council of the senate, as an accuser of the Moor OthellR„wh9, by spelfe and 
 witchcraft (he maintained) had seduced the affections of the fciir Desderoona 
 to marry him, without the consent of her father,, and against the obligations of 
 hospitality, , , " 
 
 At this juncture of time it happened that the state of Venice had immediate 
 need of the services of Othello, news having arrived that the Turks with 
 mighty preparation had fitted out a fleet,. which was bending its .course to the 
 island ,of Cyprus, with intent to regain that strong post from the Venetians, 
 who then held it. In this emergency the state turned its eyes upon Othello, 
 who alone was deemed adequate to conduct the defence of Cyprus against 
 the Turks. So that Othello, now summoned before the senate, stood in their 
 presence at once as a canditate for a great state employment, and as a culprit 
 charged with offences which by the laws of Venice were made capital. 
 
 The age and senatorial character of old Brabantio commanded a most patient 
 hearing from that grave assembly; but the incensed father conducted his 
 accusation with so much intemperance, producing likelihoods and allegations 
 for proofs, that, when Othello was called upon for,his defence, he had only to 
 relate a plain tale of the course of his love ; which he did with such an artless 
 eloquence, recounting the whole story of his wooing, as we have related it 
 above, and delivered his speech with so noble a plainness (the evidence of 
 truth), that the duke, who sat as chief judge, could not help confessing, that a 
 tale so told would have won his daughter too ; and the, spells and conjurations, 
 which Othello had used in his courtship, plainly appeared to have been no more 
 than the honest arts of men in love ; and the only witchcraft which he had used, 
 the faculty of telling a soft tale to win a ladji'.s ear. 
 
 This statement of Othello was confirmed by the testimony of the lady 
 Desdemona herself, who appeared in court, and professing a duty to her father 
 for life and education, challenged leave of him to profess a yet higher duty to 
 her lord and husband, even so much as her mother had shown in preferring 
 him (Brabantio) above her father. 
 
 The old senator, unable to maintain his plea, called the Moor to him with 
 many expressions of sorrow, and, as an act of necessity, bestowed upon him 
 his daughter, whom, if he had been free to withhold her (he told him), he 
 would vrith all his heart have kept from him ; adding, that he was glad at soul 
 that he had no other child, for this behaviour of Desdemona would have taught 
 him to be a tyrant, and hang clogs on them, for her desertion. 
 
 This difficulty being got over, Othello, to whom custom had rendered the 
 hardships of a military life as natural as food and rest are to other men, readily 
 undertook the management of the wars in Cyprus ; and Desdemona, preferring 
 the honour of her lord (though with danger) before the indulgence of those 
 idle delights in which new-married people usually waste their time, cheerfully 
 consented to his going. 
 
 No sooner were OtheIIo„and his lady landed in Cyprus, than news arrived, 
 that a desperate tempest had dispersed the; Turkish fleet, and thus the island 
 was secure from any immediate apprehension of an attack. But the war which 
 Othello was to suffer was now beginning ; and the enemies which malice stirred 
 up against 'his innocent lady, proved in their nature more deadly than strangers 
 or infidels. 
 
268 Tlie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Among all the general's friends no one possessed the confidence of Othelto 
 more entirely than Cassio. Michael Cassio was a young soldier, a Florentint, 
 gay, amorous, and of pleasing address— favourite qualities with women ; he 
 was handsome, eloquent, and exactly such a person as might alarm the jealousy 
 of aman advanced in years (as Othello in some measure was), who had married 
 a young and beautiful wife : but Othello was as free from jealousy as he was 
 noble, and as incapable of suspecting as of doing a base action. He had 
 employed this Cassio in his love-affair with Desdemona, and Cassio had b"en 
 a sort of go-between in his suit : for Othello, fearing that himself had not those 
 soft parts of conversation which please ladies, and finding these quahties in liis 
 friend, would often depute Cassio to go (as he phrased it) a-com-ting for him ; 
 such innocent simplicity being rather an honour than a blemish to the character 
 of the vaUant Moor. So that no wonder, if next to Othello himself (but at far 
 distance, as beseems a virtuous wife) the gentle Desdemona loved and trusted 
 Cassio. Nor had the marriage of this couple made any difference in their 
 behaviour to Michael Cassio. He frequented their house, and his free and 
 rattling talk was no unpleasing variety to Othello, who was himself of a more 
 seirious temper : for such tempers are observed often to delight in their con- 
 traries, as a relief from the oppressive excess of their own; and Desdemona 
 and' Cassio would talk and laugh together, as in the days when he went a- 
 courting for his friend. 
 
 Othello had lately promoted Cassio to be his lieutenant, a place of trust, and 
 nearest to the general's person. This promotion gave great offence to lago, an 
 older officer, who thought he had a better claim than Cassio, and would often 
 ridicule Cassio, as a fellow fit only for the company of ladies, and one that 
 knew no more of the art of war, or how to set an army in array for battle, than 
 a girl, lago hated Cassio, and he hated Othello, as well for favouring Cassio, 
 as for an unjust suspicion, which he had lightly taken up against Othello, that 
 the Moor was too fond of lago's wife EmiUa. From these imaginary pro- 
 vocations, the plotting mind of lago conceived a horrid scheme of revenge, 
 which should involve Cassio, the Moor, and Desdemona in one common ruin. 
 
 lago was artful, and had studied human nature deeply, and he knew tliat of 
 all the torments which afflict the mind of man (and far beyond bodily torture), 
 the pains of jealousy were the most intolerable, and had the sorest sting. If 
 he could succeed in making Othello jealous of Cassio, he thought it would be 
 an exquisite plot of revenge, and might end in the death of Cassio or Othello, 
 or both ; he cared not. 
 
 The arrival of the general and his lady in Cyprus, meeting with the news of 
 the dispersion of the enemy's fleet, made a sort of holiday in the ishnd. 
 Everybody gave themselves up Vo feasting and making merry. Wine flowed in 
 abundance, and cups went round to the health of the black Othello, and his 
 lady the fair Desdemona. 
 
 Cassio had the direction of the guard that night, with a charge from Othello 
 to keep the soldiers from excess in drinking, that no brawl might arise, to 
 fright the inhabitants, or disgust them with the new-landed forces. That night 
 lago began his deep-laid plans of mischief; under colour of loyalty and love 
 to the general, he enticed Cassio to make rather too free with the bottle (a 
 great fault in an officer upon guard). Cassio for a time resisted, but he could 
 not long hold out against the honest freedom which lago knew how to put on, 
 but kept swallowing glass after glass (as lago still plied him with drink and 
 encouraging songs), and Cassio's tongue ran over in praise of the lady Desde- 
 mona, whom he again and again toasted, aflSrming that she was a most ex- 
 quisite lady : until at last the enemy which he had put into his mouth stole- ^ 
 away his brains ; and upon some provocation given him by a fellow whom " 
 lago had set on, swords were drawn, and Montano, a worthy officer, who 
 interfered to appease the dispute, was wounded in the scuffle. The riot now 
 
i Tales from Shakspere: Othello. 269 
 
 began to be general, and lago, who had set on foot the mischief, was foremost 
 in spreading the alarm, causing the castle-bell to be rung (as if some dangerous 
 mutiny instead of a slight drunken quarrel had arisen) : the alarm-bell ringing 
 awakened Othello, who, dressing in a hurry, and coming to the scene of action, 
 questioned Cassio of the cause. Cassio was now come to himself, the effect of 
 the wine having a little gone off, but was too much ashamed to reply ; and 
 lago, pretending a great reluctance to accuse Cassio, but as it were forced into 
 it by Othello, who insisted upon knowing the truth, gave an account of the 
 whole matter (leaving out his own share in it, which Cassio was too far gone to 
 remember) in such a manner as, while he seemed to make Cassio's offence less, 
 did indeed make it appear greater than it was. The result was, that Othello, 
 who was a strict observer of discipline, was compelled to take away Cassio's 
 place of lieutenant from him. 
 
 Thus did lago's first artifice succeed completely ; he had now undermined 
 his hated rival, and thrust him out of his place : but a further use was here- 
 after to be made of the adventure of this disastrous night. 
 
 Cassio, whom this misfortune had entirely sobered, now lamented to his 
 ■seeming friend lago that he should have been such a fool as to transform him- 
 self into a beast. He was undone, for how could he ask the general for his 
 place again? he would tell him he was a drunkard. He despised himself, 
 lago, affecting to make light of it, said, that he, or any man living, might be 
 idrunk upon occasion ; it remained now to make the best of a bad bargain ; 
 tliie general's wife was now the general, and could do anything with Othello; 
 that he were best to apply to the lady Desdemona to mediate for him with her 
 lord ; that she was of a frank, obliging disposition, and would readily under- 
 take a good office of this sort, and set Cassio right again in the general's 
 favour ; and then this crack in their love would be made stronger than ever. 
 A good advice of lago, if it had not been given for wicked purposes, which 
 will after appear. 
 
 Cassio did as lago advised him, and made application to the lady Desde- 
 mona, who was easy to be won over in any honest' suit ; and she promised 
 Cassio that she would be his solicitor with her lord, and rather die tlian give 
 up his cause. This she immediately set about in so earnest and pretty a 
 manner, that Othello, who was mortally offended with Cassio, could not put 
 her off. 'When he pleaded delay, and that it was too soon to pardon such an 
 offender, sha would not be beat back, but insisted that it should be the next 
 night, or the morning after, or the next morning to that at farthest. Then she 
 showed how penitent and humbled poor Cassio was, and that his offence did 
 not deserve so sharp a check. And when Othello still hung back, "What! 
 my lord," said, ^she " that I should have so much to do to plead for Cassio, 
 Michael Cassio' that came a-courting for you, and oftentimes, when I have 
 spoken in dispraise of you, has taken your part ! I count this but a little thing 
 to ask of you. 'When I mean to try your love indeed, I shall ask a weighty 
 matter." Othello could deny nothing to such a pleader, and only requesting 
 that Desdemona would leave the time to him, promising to receive Michael 
 Cassio again into favour. 
 
 It happened that Othello and lago had entered into the room where Desde- 
 mona was, just as Cassio, who had been imploring her intercession, was 
 departing at the opposite door ; and lago, who was full of art, said in a low 
 voice, as if to himself, " I hke not that." Othello took no great notice of what 
 he said ; indeed the conference whic?h immediately took place with his lady put 
 it out of his head ; but he remembered it afterwards. For when Desdemona 
 was gone, lago, as if for mere satisfaction of his thought, questioned Othello 
 whether Michael Cassio, when Othello was courting his lady, knew of his love. 
 To this the general answering in the affirmative, aiid adding, that he had gone 
 between them very often during the courtship, lago knitted his brow, as if, he 
 
2 70' Tfie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Had got fresh light of some terrible matter,; and, criedi "Indeed,!," This 
 brought into Othello's mind/'theiwords which -lago- had let, fall upop. entering 
 the room, and seeing Cassio with Desdemona; and he began, to thipk there 
 was some' meaning in all this : for he deemed lago to be a just man, and full 
 of love and 'honesty, and what in a false knave would be JriQks, in him seemed 
 tobethe natural workings of an honest mind, big with something too full for 
 utterance ; and Othello prayed lago to speak what he knew, and to give ,his 
 worst thoughts words, " And what," said Jago, '.' if some thought?, very vile 
 should have intruded into my breast, as where is the palace into which foul 
 things do not enter ? " Then lago went on to say, what a pity it were, if,. any 
 troubles should arise to Othello out of his imperfect-. observatiopSi; that jit 
 would not be for Othello's peace to know his thoughts; that people's good 
 names were not to be taken away for slight suspicions ; andwhen Othello's 
 curiosity was raised almost to distraction with these hints and scattered' words, 
 lago, as if in earnest care for Othello's peace of mind, besought him to beware 
 of jealousy : with such art did this villain raise suspicions in the unguarded 
 Othellb, by the very caution which he pretended to give him against suspicion. 
 *■' I know," said Othello, " that my wife is fair,, loves company and feasting, is 
 free of speech, sings, plays; and dances well ; but where virtue is, these qualities 
 are virtuous. I must have proof before I think her dishonest," Then lago, 
 as if glad that Othello was slow to believe ill of his lady, frankly declared that 
 he had no proof, but begged Othello to observe her, behaviour well, when 
 Cassio was by; not to be jealous nor too secure neither, for that he (lago) i 
 knew the dispositions of the Italian ladies, his countrywomen, better than 
 Othello could do; and that in Venice the wives let heaven see many pranks- 
 they dared not show their husbands. Then he artfully insinuated that Desde- 
 mona deceived her father in marrying with Othello, and carried it so closely 
 that the poor old man thought that witchcraft had been used. Othello was 
 much moved with this argument, which brought the matter home to him ; for 
 if sheTiad deceived her father, why might she not deceive her husband? 
 
 Tago begged pardon for having moved him; but Othello, assuming an_ in- 
 difference, while he was really shaken With inward grief at lago's words, 
 begged him to go on, which lago did with many apologies, as if unwilling to 
 produce anything against Cassio, whom he called his friend: he then came 
 strongly to the point, and reminded Othello how Desdemdna had refused 
 many suitable matches of her own clime and complexion, and had married 
 him, a Moor, which showed unnatural in her, and' proved her to have a head- 
 strong will ; and when her better judgment returned, how probable it was she 
 should fall upon comparing Othello with the fine forms and clear white com- 
 plexions of the young Italians her countrymen. He concluded with advising 
 Othello to put off his reconcilement with Cassio a little longer, and in the 
 meanwhile to note with what earnestness Desdemona -should intercede in his 
 behalf; for that much would be seen in that. So mischievously did this artful 
 Villaiii lay his plots to turn the gentle qualities ' of this innocent lady into her 
 destruction, and make a net for her out of her own goodness to entrap her : 
 first setting Cassio on to entreat her mediation, and then out of that very 
 mediation contriving stratagems for her ruin. 
 
 The conference ended with lago's begging Othello to account his wife inno- 
 cent until he had more decisive proof; and' Othello promised to be patient : 
 but from that moment the deceived Othello never tasted content of mind. 
 Poppy, nor the juice of mandragora, nor all the sleeping potions in the world, 
 could ever again restore to him that sweet sleep which he had enjoyed but 
 yesterday. His occupation sickened opon him. He no longer took delight in 
 arms. His heart, that used to be roused at the sight of troops, and banners, 
 and battle-array, and would stir and leap at the sound of a drum, or a trumpet, 
 or a neighing war-horse, seemed to have lost all that pride and ambition which 
 
Tales from Shakspere: Othello. 271 
 
 are a soldier's virtue ; and liis military ardour and all his old joys forsook him 
 Sometimes he thought his wife honest, and at times he thought her not so '■ 
 sometimes he thought lago just, and at times he thought him not so; then he 
 would wish that he had never known of it ; he was not the worse for her loving 
 Cassio, so long as he knew it not : torn in pieces with these distracting 
 thoughts, he once laid hold of lago's throat, and demanded proof of Desde- 
 mona's guilt, or threatened instant death for his having belied her. lago, feign- 
 ing indignation that his honesty should be taken for a vice, asked Othello if he 
 had not sometimes seen a hankerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife's 
 h3.nd. Othello answered, that he had given her such a one; and that it was 
 his first gift. "That same handkerchief," said lago, "did I see Michael 
 Cassio this day wipe his face with." " If it be as you say," said Othello, "I 
 will not rest till a wide revenge swallow them up : and first, for a token of your 
 fidelity, I expect that Cassio shall be put to death within three days ; and for 
 that fair devil [meaning his lady], I will withdraw and devise some swift means 
 of death for her." 
 
 Trifles, light as air, are to the jealous proofs as strong as holy writ. A 
 handkerchief of his wife's seen in Cassio's hand, was motive enough to the 
 deluded Othello to pass sentence of death upon them , both, without once 
 inquiring how Cassio came by it. Desdemona had never given such a present 
 to Cassio, nor would this constant lady have wronged her lord with doing so 
 naughty a thing as giving his presents to another man ; both Cassio and 
 Desdemona were innocent of any offence against Othello : but the wicked 
 lago, whose spirits never slept in contrivance of villany, had made his 'wife (a 
 good, but a weak woman) steal this handkerchief from Desdemona, under 
 pretence of getting the work copied, but in reality to drop it in Cassio's way, 
 where he might find it, and give a handle to lago's suggestion that it was 
 Desdemona's present. 
 
 Othello, soon after meeting his wife, pretended that he had a headache (as 
 he might indeed with truth), and desired her to lend him her handkerchief to 
 hold to his temples. She did so. " Not this," said Othello, "but that hand- 
 kerchief I gave you." Desdemona had it not about her (for indeed it was 
 stolen as we have related). "How!" said Othello, "this is a fault indeed. 
 That handkerchief an Egyptian woman gave to my mother ; the woman was 
 a witch, and could read people's thoughts : she told my mother, while she kept 
 it, it would make her amiable, and my father should love her ; but if she lost 
 it, or gave it away, my father's fancy would tnm, and he would loathe her as 
 much as he had loved her. She dying gave it me, and bade me, if I ever 
 married, to give it to my wife. 1 did so; take heed of" it. Make it a darling 
 as precious as your eye." " Is it possible?" said the frighted lady. " 'Tis 
 true," continued Othello; "it is a magical handkerchief; a sibyl that had 
 lived in the world two hundred years, in a fit of .prophetic fury worked it ; the 
 silkworms that furnished the silk were hallowed, and it was dyed in mummy 
 of maidens' hearts conserved." Desdemona, hearing the wondrous virtues of 
 the handkerchief, was ready to die with fear, for she plainly perceived she had 
 lost it, and with it, she feared, the affections of her husband. Then Othello 
 started, and looked as if he were going to do some rash thing, and still he 
 demanded the handkerchief, which when she could not produce, she tried to 
 divert her husband from too serious thoughts, and cheerfully told him she saw 
 all his talk about the handkerchief was only to put off from her suit about 
 Michael Cassio, whom she went on to praise (as lago had foretold), till Othello 
 in perfect distraction burst out of the room, and then Desdemona, though un- 
 willingly, began to suspect her lord was jealous. 
 
 What cause she could have ministered to him she knew not, and then she 
 accused herself for accusing the noble Othello, and thought to be sure that / 
 some untoward news from Venice, or some state troubles, had puddled his 
 
372 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 spirits, and made his temper not so sweet as formerly. And she said, "Men 
 are not gods, and we must not look for that observance from them when they 
 are married which they show us on the bridal day." And she beshrewed her- 
 self for so unkindly judging of his unkindness. 
 
 Again Othello and Desdemona met, and he accused her more plainly of 
 being unfaithful, and of loving another man, but he did not name whom : and 
 Othello wept, and Desdemona said, "Alas! the heavy day! why do you 
 weep ? " And Othello told her he could have borne all sorts of evils with forti- 
 tude — poverty, and disease, and disgrace ; but her infidelity had broken his 
 heart : and he called her a weed, that looked so fair, and smelled so sweet, 
 that the sense ached at it ; and wished she had never been bom. And when 
 he had left her, this innocent lady was so stupefied with wonder at her lord's 
 untrue suspicion of her, that a weight like sleep came over her, 'and she only 
 desired her attendant to make her bed, and to lay her wedding sheets upon it, 
 saying, that when people teach their babes, they do it by gentle means and 
 easy tasks, and Othello might have chid her so, for in good faith she was 
 but a child when she was chidden. And this was all the complaint which 
 this gentle lady made. 
 
 Desdemona being retired to bed, expecting her lord would follow her, soon 
 fell into a slumber, the effect of her troubled spirits, when Othello entered the 
 chamber, full of the black purpose which he had meditated of putting his lady 
 to death. But when he saw her asleep, he thought he would not shed her 
 blood, nor scar that white skin of hers, more white than alabaster. But he 
 was resolved she should die, else (as he said) she would live to betray more 
 men, as she had done him. Then he kissed her for the last time (as he said), 
 and that kiss was so sweet he must needs kiss her again : and he wept, but he 
 said they were cruel tears. 
 
 Desdemona was awakened with his kisses, and she looked upon Othello, and 
 she saw him gnaw his under-lip, and roll his eyes, and she knew he was always 
 fatal when he looked so : and he bade her prepare for death, and to say her 
 prayers, for he would not kill her soul. And this innocent wife, as she lay at 
 his mercy, begged for compassion, and to know her fault, and then he named 
 Cassio, and the handkerchief which (he said) she had given him : and as the 
 guiltless lady was proceeding to clear herself, he suddenly would hear no more, 
 but covermg her up in the bed-clothes, stifled her till she died. 
 
 In this instant of time was brought into the house Cassio, wounded and 
 bleeding, whom lago had set one of his creatures on to assassinate ; but the 
 fellpw not succeeding in his attempt to kill Cassio (whom he wounded, but not 
 mortally), and being himself killed by lago to prevent discovery, in his pockets 
 were found certain letters, which made the guilt of lago, and the innocence 
 of Cassio, clear beyond all doubt ; and Cassio now came to beg pardon of 
 Othello, and to ask wherein he had offended him that he had employed Ia?o 
 to murder him. 
 
 This discovery was a thunderstroke to Othello, who now plainly saw that he 
 was no better than a murderer, and that his wife (poor innocent lady) had been 
 ever fajthful to him, the extreme anguish of which discovery making life in- 
 supportable, he fell upon his sword, and throwing himself upon the body of 
 his dear injured lady, expired. 
 
 These rash acts raised much passion of horror and amazement in the 
 bystanders, for Othello had borne a fair reputation, and till he was wrought 
 upon by the arts of a villain, which his own noble nature never gave him leave 
 to suspect, he was a loving and a doting husband. He had loved, not wisely, 
 out too well; and his manly eyes (when he learned his mistake), though not 
 used to weep on every small occasion, dropped tears as fast as the Arabian 
 trees their gum. And when he was dead, all his former merits and his valiant 
 acts were remembered. Nothing now remained for his successor but to put 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 273 
 
 the utmost censure of the law in force against lago, who was executed with 
 strict tortures, and to send word to the state of Venice of the lamentable 
 death of their renowned general. 
 
 CIj« §.ir&£ntuMs jof Elgss^s. 
 
 [As a four shilling duodecimo, of 148 pages, " The Adventures of Ulysses " was 
 originally puhlished in 1808, at the juvenile Library, 41, Skinner Street, having 
 been printed in Shoe Lane, by R. and A. Taylor. A classical vignette, designed by 
 Corbould, and engraved by Charles Heath, adorned the title page. Writing long after- 
 wards in a letter to Bernard Barton, " You like the Odyssey," Charles Lamb asked his 
 correspondent, " Did you ever read my ' Adventures of Ulysses,' founded on Chapman's 
 old translation for children or men ? " adding in the same breath, " Chapman is divine ; 
 and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of his divinity."] 
 
 This work is designed as a supplement to the "Adventures of Telemachus." 
 It treats of the conduct and suiierings of Ulysses, the father of Telemachus. 
 The picture \vhich it exhibits is that of a brave man struggling with adversity; 
 by a wise use of events, and with an inimitable presence of m.ind under diffi- 
 culties, forcing out a way for himself through the severest trials to which human 
 life can be exposed ; with enemies naturaland preternatural surrounding him 
 on all sides. The agents in this tale, besides men and women, are giants, 
 enchanters, sirens : things which denote external force or internal temptations, 
 the twofold danger which a wise fortitude must expect to encounter in its 
 course through this world. The fictions contained in it will be found to com- 
 prehend some of the most admired inventions of Grecian mythology. 
 
 The ground-work of the story is as old as the Odyssey, but the moral and 
 the coloiu-ing: are comparativelv modern. By avoiding the prolixity which 
 maris tne speecnes and tne descriptions in Homer, 1 have gained a rapidity to 
 the narration which I hope will make it more attractive and give it more the 
 air of a romance to young readers, though I am sensible that by the curtail- 
 ment I have sacrificed in many places the manners to the passion, the sub- 
 ordinate characteristics to the essential interest of the story. The attempt is 
 not to be considered as seeking a comparison with any of the direct transla- 
 tions of the Odyssey, either in prose or verse, though if I were to state the 
 obligations which I have had to one obsolete version,* I should have run the 
 hazard of depriving myself of the very slender degree of reputation which I 
 could hope to acquire from a trifle like the present undertaking. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 The Cicons. The Fruit of the Lotos-Tree. Polj-phemus and the Cyclops. The 
 Kingdom of the Winds, and God jEolus's Fatal Present. The Laestrygonian Man- 
 eaters. 
 
 This history tells of the wanderings of Ulysses and his followers in their 
 
 return from Troy, after the destruction of that famous city of Asia by the 
 
 Grecians. He was inflamed with a desire of seeing again, after a ten years' 
 
 * The translation of Homer by Chapman in the reign of James I. 
 
274 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 absence, his wife, anil native country Itllaca, He was king of a barren: spot', 
 and a poor country, in comparison -of the fruitftil plains of Asia yirliicli he was 
 leaving, or, the wealthy kingdoms which he touched, upon in his reiurn; yet 
 wherever he came, he could never see a soil which appeared in his eyes half 
 so sweet or desirable as his country earth. This made him refuse the offers of 
 the goddess Calypso to stay with her, and partake of her immortality, in the 
 delightful island ; and this gave him strength to break from the enchantments 
 of Circe, the daughter of the Sun. 
 
 From Troy ill winds cast Ulysses and his fieet upon the coast of the Cicons, 
 a people hostile to the Grecians. Landing his forcgs. he laid siege to their 
 chief city Ismaruj, which. he took, and- with it much spoil, and slew many 
 people. But success proved fatal to him; for his soldiers' elated with the 
 spoil, and the good store of provisions which they found in that place, fell to ;' 
 eating and drinking, forgetful of their safety, till the Cicons, who inhabited 
 the coast, had time to assemble their friends and allies from the interior, who 
 • mustering in prodigious force, set upon the Grecians, while they neglifeently' 
 revelled and feasted, and slew many of them and recovered the spoil. They,, 
 dispirited and thinned in their numbers; with difficulty . made, their ' retreat 
 good to the ships. 
 
 ■ Thence they set sail, sad at heart, yet something cheered that with such 
 fearful odds against them they had not all been utterly destroyed. A dreadful 
 tempest ensued, which for twp nights and two days tossed them about, but 
 the third day the weather cleared, and they had hopes of a favourable. gale to 
 carry them to Ithaca ; but as they doubled the Cape of Malea, suddenly a 
 north wind arising, drove them back as far as Cythera. After that, for the' 
 space of nine days, contrary winds continued to drive them in an opposite! 
 direction to the point to which they were bound, and the tenth day they put 
 in at a shore where a race of men dwell that are sustained by the fruit of the 
 lotos-tree. Here Ulysses sent some of his men to land for fresh water, who. 
 were iriet by certain of the inhabitants, that gave them some of their countiyi 
 food to eat ; not with any ill intention towards them, though in the event it 
 proved pernicious ; for, having eaten of this fruit, so pleasant it proved to 
 their appetite, that they in a minute quite forgot all thoughts of home, or of 
 their countrymen, or of ever returning back to the ships to give an account of 
 what sort of inhabitants dwelt there, but they would needs stay and live there 
 among them, and eat of that precious food for ever ; and when Ulysses sent 
 other of his men to look for them, and to bring them back by force, they 
 strove, and wept, and would not leave their food for heaven itself, so much 
 the pleasure of that enchanting fruit had bewitched them. But Ulysses caused 
 them to be bound hand and foot, and cast under the hatches ; and set sail 
 with all possible speed from that baneful coast, lest others after them might 
 taste the lotos, which had such strange qualities to make men forget their 
 native country, and the thoughts of home. 
 
 Coasting on all that night by unknown and out of the way shores, they came 
 by day-break to the land where the Cyclops dwell, a sort of gia,nt shepherds 
 that neither sow nor plough, but the earth untilled produces for them rich | 
 wheat and barley and grapes, yet they have neither bread nor wine, nor know i 
 the arts of cultivation, nor care to know them : for they live each man to him- i 
 self, without laws or government, or anything like a state or kingdom, but \ 
 their dwellings are in caves, on the steep heads of mountains, every man's 
 household governed by his own caprice, or not governed at all, their wives and i 
 children as lawless as themselves, none caring for others, but each doing as he i 
 <ft she thinks good. Ships or boats they have none, nor artificers to make them, / 
 no trade or commerce, or wish to visit other shores ; yet they have convenient i 
 places for harbours and for shipping. Here Ulysses with a chosen party of I 
 twelve followers landed, to explore what sort of men dwelt there, whether I 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 275 
 
 hospitable and friendly to strangers, or altogether wild and savage, for as yet 
 no dwellers appeared in sighC. 
 
 The first sign of habitation which they came to was a giant's cave rudely 
 fashioned, but of a size which betokened the vast proportions of its owner, the 
 pillars which supported it being the bodies of huge oaka or pines, in the 
 natural state of the tree, and all about shewed more marks of strength than 
 skill in whoever built it. Ulysses, entering in, admired the savage contrivances 
 and artless structure of the place, and longed to see the tenant of so outlandish 
 EV mansion; but well conjecturing that gifts would have more avail in extract- 
 ing courtesy, than strength could succeed in forcing it, from such a one as he 
 expected to find the inhabitant, he resolved to flatter his hospitality with a 
 present of Greek wine, of which he had store in twelve great vessels; so strong 
 that no one ever drank it without an infusion of twenty parts of water to one 
 of wine, yet the fragrance of it even then so delicious, that it would have vexed 
 a man who smelled it to abstain from tasting it ; but whoever tasted it, it was, 
 able to raise his courage to the height of heroic deeds. Taking with them a 
 goatskin flagon full of this precious liquor,' they ventured into the recesses of 
 the, cave. Here they pleased themselves a whole day with beholding the giant's 
 kitchen, where the flesh of sheep and goats lay strewed, his dairy where goat- 
 milk stood ranged in troughs and pails, his pens where he kept his live animals ; 
 but those he had driven forth to pasture with him when he went out in the 
 morning. While they were feasting their eyes with a siglit of these curiosities, 
 their ears were suddenly deafened with a noise like the faUing of a house. It 
 was the owner of the cave who had been abroad all day feeding his flock, as his 
 custom was, in the mountains, and now drove them home in the evening from 
 pasture. He threw down a pile of fire-wood, which he had been gathering 
 against supper-time, before the mouth of the cave, which occasioned the crash 
 they heard. The Grecians hid themselves in the remote parts of the cave, at 
 sight of the uncouth monster. It was Polyphemus, the largest and savagest of 
 the Cyclops, who boasted himself to be the son of Neptune. He looked more 
 like a mountain crag than a man, and to his brutal body he had a brutish mind 
 answerable. He drove his flock, all that gave milk, to the interior of the cave, 
 but left the rams and the he-goats without. Then taking up a stone so massy , 
 that twenty oxen could not have drawn it, he placed it at the mouth of the 
 cave, to defend the entrance, and sat him down to ^^ilk his ewes and his goats ; 
 which done, he lastly kindled a fire, and throwing his great eye round the cave 
 (for the Cyclops have no more than one eye, and that placed in the midst of 
 their forehead), by the gUmmering hght he discerned some of Ulysses's men. 
 
 " Ho, guests, what are you? merchants or wandering thieves?" he bellowed 
 out in a voice which took from them all power of reply, it was so astoundihg. 
 
 Only Ulysses summoned resolution to answer, that they came neither for 
 plunder nor traffic, but were Grecians who had lost their way, returning from, 
 Troy ; which famous city, under the conduct of Agamemnon, the renowned 
 son of Atreus, they had sacked, and laid level with the ground. Yet now they 
 prostrated themselves humbly before his feet, whom they acknowledged to be 
 mightier than they, and besought him that he would bestow the rites of hospi- 
 tality upon them, for that Jove was the avenger of wrongs done to strangers, 
 and would fiercely resent any injury which they 'might suffer. 
 
 " Fool," said the Cyclop, " to come so far to preach to me the fear of the 
 gods. We Cyclops care not for your Jove, whom you fable to be nursed by a 
 goat, nor any of your blessed ones. We are stronger than tliey, and dare bid 
 open battle to Jove himself, though you and all your fellows of the earth join 
 with him." And he bade them tell, him where their ship was, in which they 
 came, and whether they had any companions. But Ulysses, with a wise 
 caution, made answer, that they had no ship or companions, but were unfor- 
 timate men whom the sea. Splitting their ship in pieces, had dashed, upon his 
 
276 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 coast, and they alone had escaped. He rephed nothing, but gripping two of the 
 nearest of them, as if they had been no more than children, he dashed their 
 brains out against the earth, and (shocking to relate) tore in pieces their limbs, 
 and devoured them, yet warm and trembling, making a lion's meal of them, 
 lapping the blood : for the Cyclops are man-eaters, and esteem human flesh to 
 be a delicacy far above goat's or kid's; though by reason of their abhorred 
 customs few men approach their coast except some stragglers, or now and then 
 a shipwrecked mariner. At a sight so horrid Ulysses and his men were like 
 distracted people. He, when he had made an end of his wicked supper, 
 drained a draught of goat's milk down his prodigious throat, and lay down and 
 slept among his goats. Then Ulysses drew his sword, and half resolved to 
 thrust it with all his might in at the bosom of the sleeping monster ; but wiser 
 thoughts restrained him, else they had there without help all perished, for none 
 but Polyphemus himself could have removed that mass of stone which he had 
 placed to guard the entrance. So they were constrained to abide all that night 
 in fear. 
 
 When day came the Cyclop awoke, and kindhng a fire, made his breakfast 
 of two other of his unfortunate prisoners, then milked his goats as he was ac- 
 customed, and pushing aside the vast stone, and shutting it again when he had 
 done, upon the prisoners, with as much ease as a man opens and shuts a 
 quiver's lid, he let out his flock, and drove them before him with whistlings (as 
 sharp as winds in storms) to the mountains. 
 
 Then Ulysses, of whose strength or cunning the Cyclop seems to have had 
 as little heed as of an infant's, being left alone, with the remnant of his men 
 which the Cyclop had not devoured, gave manifest proof how far manly 
 wisdom excels brutish force. He chose a stake from among the wood which 
 the Cyclop had piled up for firing, in length and thickness hke a mast, which 
 he sharpened and hardened in the fire, and selected four men, and instructed 
 them what they should do with this stake, and made them perfect in their parts. 
 
 ■When the evening was come, the Cyclop drove home his sheep ; and as 
 fortune directed it, either of purpose, or that his memory was overruled by the 
 gods to his hurt (as in the issuq it proved), he drove the males of his flock, 
 contrary to his custom, alohg with the dams into the pens. Then shutting-to 
 the stone of the cave, he fell to his horrible supper. When he had despatched 
 two more of the Grecians, Ulysses waxed bold with the contemplation of his 
 project, and took a bowl of Greek wine, and merrily dared the Cyclop to 
 drink. 
 
 " Cyclop," he said, "takea bowl of wine from the hand of your guest; it 
 may serve to digest the man's flesh that you have eaten, and show what drink 
 our sfiip held before it went down. All I ask in recompense, if you find it 
 good, is to be dismissed in a whole skin. Truly you must look to have few 
 visitors, if you observe this new custom of eating your guests." 
 
 The brute took and drank, and vehemently enjoyed the taste of wine, which 
 was new to him, and swilled again at the flagon, and entreated for more, and 
 prayed Ulysses to tell him his name, that he might bestow a gift upon the man 
 who had given him such brave liquor. The Cyclops (he said) had grapes, but 
 this rich juice (he swore) was simply divine. Again Ulysses plied himwitli the 
 wine, and the fool drank it as fast as he poured out, and again he asked the 
 name of his benefactor, which Ulysses cunningly dissembling, s?id. " My 
 name is Noman : my kindred and friends in my own country call me Noman." 
 "Then," said the Cyclop, "this is the kindness I will show thee Noman: I 
 will eat th«e last of all thy friends." He had scarce expressed his savage kind- ■ 
 ness, when the fumes of the strong wine overcame him, and he reeled down 
 upon the floor and sank into a dead sleep. 
 
 Ulysses watched his time, while the monster lay insensible, and heartening ' 
 up his men, they placed the sharp end of the stake in the fire till it was heated ■ 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 277 
 
 red-hot, and some god gave them a courage beyond that which they were used 
 to have, and the four men with difficulty bored the sharp end of the huge 
 '.stake, which they had heated red-hot, right into the eye of the drunken cannibal, 
 and Ulysses helped to thrust it in with all his might, still farther and farther, 
 with effort, as men bore with an auger, till the scalded blood gushed out, and 
 the eye-bail smoked, and the strings of the eye cracked, as the burning rafter 
 broke in it, and the eye hissed, as hot iron hisses when it is plunged into 
 water. 
 
 He waking, roared with the pain so loud that all the cavern broke into claps 
 like thunder. They tied, and dispersed into corners. He plucked the burning 
 stake from his eye, and hurled the wood madly about the cave. Then he cried 
 out with a mighty voice for his brethren the Cyclops, that dwelt hard by in 
 caverns upon hills ; they hearing the terrible shout came flocking from all 
 parts to inquire what ailed Polyphemus ? and what cause he had for making 
 such horrid clamours in the night-time to break their sleeps ? if his fright pro- 
 ceeded from any mortal ? if strength or craft had given him his death's blow ? 
 He made answer from within that Noman had hurt him, Noman had killed 
 him, Noman was with him in the cave. They replied, " If no man has hurt 
 thee, and no man is with thee, then thou art alone, and the evil that afflicts 
 thee is from the hand of heaven, which none can resist or help." So they left 
 him and went their way, thinking that some disease troubled him. He, blind 
 and ready to split with the anguish of the pain, went groaning up and down 
 in the dark, to find the doorway, which when he found, he removed the stone, 
 and sat in the threshold, feehng if he could lay hold on any man going out 
 with the sheep, which (the day now breaking) were beguming to issue forth to 
 their accustomed pastures. But Ulysses, whose first artifice in giving himself 
 that ambiguous name, had succeeded so well with the Cyclop, was not of a wit 
 so gross to be caught by that palpable device. But casting about in his mind 
 all the ways which he could contrive for escape (no less than all their lives 
 depending on the success), at last he thought of this expedient. He made 
 knots of the osier twigs upon which the Cyclop commonly slept, with which 
 he tied the fattest and fleeciest of the rams together, three in a rank, and 
 under the belly of the middle ram he tied a man, and himself last,- wrapping 
 himself fast with both his hands in the rich wool of one, the fairest of the 
 flock. 
 
 And now the sheep began to issue forth very fast ; the males went first. '"e 
 females unmilked stood by, bleating and requiring the hand of their shepherd 
 in vain to milk them, their full bags sore with being unemptied, but he much 
 sorer with the loss of sight. Still as the males passed, he felt the backs ot 
 those fleecy fools, never dreaming that they carried his enemies under their 
 bellies : so they passed on till the last ram came loaded with h's wool and 
 Ulysses to<'ether. He stopped that ram and felt him, and had his hand once 
 in the hair of Ulysses, yet knew it not, and he chid the ram for being last, and 
 spoke to it as if it understood him, and asked it whether it did not wish that its 
 master had his eye again, which that abominable Noman with his execrable 
 lOut had put out, when they had got him down with wine; and he willed 
 tlie ram to tell him whereabouts in the cave his enemy lurked, that he might 
 dash his brains and strew them about, to ease his heart of that tormenting 
 revenge which rankled in it. After a deal of such foolish talk to the beast he 
 let it ffo 
 
 Wheii Ulysses found himself free, he let go his hold, and assisted in disen- 
 ga<rino- his friends. The rams which had befriended them they earned off with 
 them to the ships, where their companions with tears in their eyes received 
 them, as men escaped from death. They pHed their oars, and set their sails, 
 and when they were got as far off from shore as a voice would reach Ulysses 
 cried out to the Cyclop : " Cyclop, thou should'st not have so much abused thy ^ 
 
278 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 monstrous -stfeBgth, as tb devour 'thy:guesl3j Jove by my.hand sends' (hae 1 
 requital to' paythy savage inhumanity.'' The Cyclop heard, and came forth 
 enraged, and 'in his anger he plucked a fragment of a rock,' and threw it with 
 blind fury- at ths ships ; it narrowly escaped lighting upon the bark in which 
 Ulysses sat, but with the fall it raised so fierce an' ebb, as, bore back the'ship 
 till it'almost touched "the shofe.- "Cyclop," said Ulysses, "if any ask thee 
 ■ who imposed on' thee that unsightly blemish, in thine eye, say it yva^ Ulysses, 
 son of Laertes : the king of Ithaca am I called, the waster of cities." ..Then 
 they crowded sail, and; beat the old sea, and forth : they went with a forward 
 gale; sad for fore-past losses, yet glad to have escaped at any rate; till they 
 came to the isle where .^olus reigned,: who is god of the winds. 
 
 Here Ulysses and his men were courteously received by the monarch, who 
 showed him his twelve children which have rule over the twelve windsi . A 
 month they stayed and feasted with him, and at the . end of the month he 
 dismissed them with many pi'esents, and gave to Ulysses at parting, an. ox's 
 hide, in which were inclosed all the winds : only he left abroad the western 
 wind, to play upon their sails and waft them gently home to Ithaca. Thjs 
 bag bound in a glittering silver band, so close that no breath could escape, 
 Ulysses hung up at the mast. His companions did not know its contents, but 
 guessed that the monarch had given to him some treasures of gold or silver. 
 
 Nine days they sailed smoothly, favoured by the western wind, and by the 
 tenth they approached so nigh as to discern lights kindled on the shores of 
 their country earth ; when by ill fortune, Ulysses, overcome with fatigue of 
 watching the helm, fell asleep. The mariners seized the opportunity, and one 
 of them said to the rest : " A fine time has this leader of ours : wherever he 
 goes he is sure of presents, when we come away empty-handed ; and see, wliat 
 king jEolus has given him, store no doubt of gold and silver. " A word was 
 enough to those covetous wretches, wfco quick as thought untied the bag, and 
 instead of gold, out rushed with mighty noise all the winds. Ulysses with the 
 noise awoke and saw their mistake, but too late, for the ship was driving with 
 all the winds back far from Ithaca, far as to the island of jEolus from which 
 they had parted, in one hour measuring back what in nine days they had 
 scarcely tracked, and in sight of home too ! Up he flew amazed, and raving 
 doubted whether he should not fling himself into the sea for grief of his bitter 
 disappointment. At last he hid himself under the hatches for shame. And 
 scarce could he be prevailed upon, when he was told he was arrived again in 
 the harbour of king ^olus, to go himself or send to that monarch for a 
 second succour ; so much the disgrace of having misused his royal bounty 
 (though it was the crime of his followers and not his own) weighed upon 
 him : and when at last he went, and took a herald with him, and came where 
 the god sat on his throne, feasting with his children, he would not. trust in 
 among them at their meat, but set himself down like one unworthy in the 
 ' threshold. 
 
 Indignation seized .^olus to behold him in that manner returned ; and he 
 said, " Ulysses, what has brought you back? are you so soon tired of your 
 country ? or did not our present please you ? we thought we had given you a 
 kingly passport." Ulysses made answer ; " My men have done this ill mischief 
 to me : they did :t while I slept." " Wretch" said ^olus, " araunt,. andiquit 
 our shores: it fits not us to convoymenwhom the gods hate, and will have perish." 
 
 Forth they sailed, but with far different hopes than when they left the same 
 harbour the first time with all the Winds confined, only the west-wioi suffered 
 to play upon their sails to watt them in gentle murmurs to Ithaca. They 
 were now the ^ort of every gale that blew, and despaired of ever seeing 
 home more. Now those covetous mariners were cured of their surfeit for 
 gold, and would not have touched it if it had lain in untold heaps before 
 them. ■ '^ 
 
TTie Adventures of . Ulysses. 279 
 
 Six days and nights they drove along, and on the seventh day they put in 
 to Lamos, a port of the Laestrygonians. So spacious this harbour was, that it 
 held with ease all their fleet, which rode at anchor, safe from any storms, all 
 but the ship in which Ulysses was embarked. He, as if prophetic of the 
 mischance which followed, kept still without the harbour, making fast his 
 bark to a rock at the land's point, which he climbed with purpose to survey 
 the country. He saw a city with smoke ascending from the roofs, but neither 
 ploughs going, nor oxen yoked, nor any sign of agricultural works. Making 
 choice of two men, he sent them to the city to explore what sort of inhabitants 
 dwelt there. His messengers had not gone far before they met a damsel, of 
 stature surpassing human, who was coming to draw water from a spring. 
 They asked her who dwelt in that land. She made no reply, but led them in 
 silence to her father's palace. He was a monarch and named Antiphas. He 
 and all his people were giants. When they entered the palace, a woman, the 
 mother of the damsel, but far taller than she, rushed- abroad and called for 
 Antiphas. He came, and snatching up one of the two men, made ' as if he 
 would devour him. The other fled. Antiphas raised a mighty shout, and 
 instantly, this way and that, multitudes of gigantic people issued but at the 
 gates, and making for the harbour, tore up huge pieces of the rocks, and flung 
 them at the ships which lay there, all which they utterly overwhelmed and 
 sank ; and the vmfortunate bodies of men which floated, and which the sea did 
 not devour, these cannibals thrust through with harpooas, like fishes, and 
 bore them off to their dire feast. Ulysses with his single bark that had 
 never entered the harbour escaped ; that bark which was now the only vessel 
 left of all the gallant navy that had set sail with him from Troy. He pushed 
 off from the shore, cheering the sad remnant of his men, whom horror at the 
 sight of their countrymen's fate had almost turned to marble. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The house of Circe. Men changed into beasts. The voyage to hell. The banquet o. 
 
 the dead. 
 
 • 
 
 On went the single ship till it came to the island of S.mz, where Circe 
 the dreadful daughter of the Sun dwelt. She was deeply skilled in magic, a 
 haughty beauty, and had hair like the Sun. The Sun was her parent, and 
 begot her and her brother ^Eaetes (such another as herself) upon Perse, 
 daughter to Oceanus. 
 
 Here a dispute arose among Ulysses' men, which of them should go ashore 
 and explore the country ; for there was a necessity that some should go to pro- 
 cure water and provisions, their stock of both being nigh spent : btit their 
 hearts failed them when they called to mind the shocking fate of their fellows 
 whom the Lsestrygonians had eaten, and those which the foul Cyclop Poly- 
 phemus had crushed between his jaws ; which moved them so tenderly in the 
 recollection that they wept. But tears never yet supplied any man's wants 
 this Ulysses- knew full well, aud dividing his men (all that were left) into two 
 companies, at the head of one of which was himself, and at the head of the 
 other Eurylochus, a man of tried courage, he cast lots which of them should 
 go up into the country; and the lot fell upon Eurylochus and his company, two 
 and twenty in number; who took their leave, with tears, of Ulysses and his 
 men that stayed, whose eyes wore the same wet badges of weak humanity, 
 for they surely thought never to see these theiir companions again, but that on 
 every coast where they should come, they should ■fiiid nothing btit savages and 
 
 cannibals. ' ... . j , v ■ 
 
 Eurylochus and his party proceeded up the country, till in a dale they 
 
zSo The Works of Charles Lafitb. 
 
 descried ihe house of Circe, built of bright stone, by the road's side. Before 
 her gate lay many beasts, as wolves, lions, leopards, which, by her art, of wild, 
 she had rendered tame. These arose when they saw strangers, and ramped 
 upon their hinder paws, and, fawned upon Eurylochus and his men, who 
 dreaded the effects of such monstrous kindness ; and staying at the gate they 
 heard the enchantress within, sitting at her loom, singing such strains as sus- 
 pended all mortal faculties, while she wove a web, subtle and glorious, and of 
 texture inimitable on earth, as all the housewiferies of the deities are. Strains 
 so ravishingly sweet, provoked even the sagest and prudentest heads among 
 
 , the party to knock and calf at the gate. The shining gate the enchantress 
 opened, and bade them come in and feast. They unwise followed, all but 
 Eurylochus, who stayed without the gate, suspicious that some train was laid 
 for them. Being entered, she placed them in chairs of state, and set before 
 them meal and honey, and Symma wine ; but mixed with baneful drugs of 
 powerful enchantment. When they had eaten of these, and drunk of her cup, 
 she, touched them with her charming-rod, and straight they were transformed 
 into swine, having the bodies of swine, the bristles, and snout, and grunting 
 noise of that animal ; only they still retained the minds of men, which made 
 them the more to lament their brutish transformation. Having dianged them, 
 she shut them up in her sty with many more whom her wicked sorceries had 
 formerly changed, and gave them swine's food, mast, and acorns, and chestnuts, 
 to eat. 
 
 Eur ylochus, who beheld nothing of these sad changes from where" he wa 
 stationed without the gate, only instead of his companions that entered (who 
 he thought had all vanished by witchcraft) beheld a herd of swine, , hurried 
 back to the ship, to give an account of what he had seen : but so frightened 
 and perplexed, that he could give no distinct report of a,nything, only he re- 
 rnembered a palace, and a woman singing at her work, and gates guarded by 
 lions. But his companions, he said, were all vanished. 
 
 Then Ulysses suspecdng some foul witchcraft, snatched his sword, and his 
 bow, and commanded Eurylochus instantly to lead him to the place. But 
 Eurylochus fell down, and embracing his knees, besought him by the name of 
 a man whom the gods had in their protection, not to expose his safety, and the 
 safety of them all, to certain destruction. • 
 
 ' ' Do thou then stay, Eurylochus ! ' ' answered Ulysses : ' ' eat thou and drink 
 in the ship in safety ; while I go alone upon this adventure : necessity, from 
 whose law is no appeal, compels me." 
 
 So saying he quitted the ship and went on shore, accompanied" by none ; 
 none had the hardihood to offer to partake that perilous adventure with him, 
 so much they dreaded the enchantments of the witch. Singly he pursued his 
 journey till he came to the shining gates which stood before her mansion : but 
 when he essayed to put his foot over her threshold, he was suddenly stopped 
 by the apparition of a young man, bearing a golden rod in his hand, who was 
 the god Mercury. He held Ulysses by the wrist, to stay his entrance; and 
 " Whither wouldest thou go ? " he said; "O, thou most erring of the sons of 
 men ! know^st thou not that this is the house of great Circe, where she keeps 
 thy friends m a loathsome sty, changed from the fair fornis of men into the 
 detestable and ugly shapes of swine ? art thou prepared to share their fate, 
 from which nothing can ransom thee ? " But neither his words, nor his coming 
 from heaven, could stop the daring foot of Ulysses, whom compassion for the 
 misfortune of his friends had rendered careless c/ danger : which when the 
 god perceived, he had pity to see valour so misplacfed, and gave him the flower 
 of the herb moly, which is sovereign against enchantments. The moly is a 
 small unsightly root, its virtues but little known, and in low estimation ; the 
 dull shepherd treads on it every day with his clouted shoes : but it bears a 
 
 ' small white flower, which is medicinal against charms, blights, mildews, and 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 281 
 
 damps. — "Take this in thy hand," said Mercury, "and with it boldly enter 
 her gates : when she shall strike thee with her rod, thinking to change thee, as 
 she has changed thy friends, boldly rush in upon her with thy sword, and 
 extort from her the dreadful oath of the gods, that she will tise no enchant- 
 ments against thee : then force her to restore thy abused companions." 
 He gave Ulysses the little white flower, and instructing him how to use it, 
 vanished. 
 
 When the god was departed, Ulysses with loud knockings beat at the gate 
 of the palace. The shining gates were opened, as before, and great Circe with 
 hospitable cheer invited in her guest. She placed him on a throne with more 
 distinction than. she had used to his fellows, she mingled wine in a costly bowl, 
 and he drank of it, mixed with those poisonous drugs. When he had drunk, 
 she struck him with her charming-rod, and " To your sty," she cried; " out, 
 swine; mingle with your companions." But those powerful words were not 
 proof against the preservative which Mercury had given to Ulysses ; he re- 
 mained unchanged, and as the god had directed him, boldly charged the 
 witch with his sword, as if he meant to lake her life : which when she saw, and 
 perceived that her charms were weak against the antidote which Ulysses bore 
 about him, she cried out and bent her knees beneath his sword, embracing his, 
 and said, "Who or what manner of man art thou? Never drank any man 
 before thee of this cup, but he repented it in some brute's form. Thy shape 
 remains unaltered as thy mind. Thou canst be none other than Ulysses, 
 renowned above all the world for wisdom, whom the fates have long since 
 decreed that I must love. This haughty bosom bends to thee. O Ithacan, a 
 goddess woos thee to her bed." 
 
 " O Circe," he replied, " how canst thou treat of love or marriage with one 
 whose friends thou has turned into beasts? and now offerest him thy hand in 
 wedlock, only that thou mightest have him in thy power, to live the life of a 
 beast with thee, nalced, effeminate, subject to thy will, perhaps to be advanced 
 in time to the honour of a place in thy sty. What pleasure canst thou promise, 
 which may tempt the soul of a reasonable man ? thy meats, spiced with poison ; 
 or thy wines, drugged with death? Thou must swear to me, that thou wilt 
 never attempt against me the treasons which thou hast practised upon my 
 friends." The enchantress, won by the terror of his threats, or by the violence 
 of that new love which she felt kindUng in her veins for him, swore by Styx, 
 the great oath of the gods, that she meditated no injury to him. Then Ulysses 
 made show of gentler treatment, which gave her hopes of inspiring him with 
 a passion equal to that which she felt. She called her handmaids, four that 
 served her in chief, who were daughters to her silver fountains, to her sacred 
 rivers, and to her consecrated woods, to deck her apartments, to spread rich 
 carpets, and set out her silver tables with dishes of the purest gold, and meat 
 as precious as that which the gods eat, to entertain her guest. One brought 
 water to wash his feet, and one brought wine to chase away, with a refreshing 
 sweetness, the sorrows that had come of late so thick upon him and hurt his 
 noble mind. They strewed perfumes on his head, and after he'had bathed in 
 a bath of the choicest aromatics, they brought him rich and costly apparel to 
 put on. Then he was conducted to a throne of massy silver, and a regale, fit 
 for Jove when he banquets, was placed before him. But the feast which 
 Ulysses desired was to see his friends (the partners of his voyage) once more 
 in the shapes of men ; and the food which could give him nourishment must 
 be taken in at his eyes. Because he missed this sight, he sat melancholy and 
 thoughtful, and would taste of none of the rich dehcacies placed before him. 
 Which when Circe noted, she easily divined the cause of his sadness, and 
 leaving the seat in which she sat throned, went to her sty, and led abroad his 
 men, who came in like swine, and filled the ample hall, where Ulysses sat, 
 with gruntings. Hardly had he time to let his sad eye run over their 
 
282 The Works of, Charles Lamb. 
 
 ' altered.' fonns and brutal metambtpthosis; when with,. an ointment whichi she , 
 smeared over theni, suddenly their bristles fell off, and they started up in their 
 own. shapes men a^ before. . They toew their l^der again, and ,clui\g abiout 
 himiwithLJoyof' thcirlate^re^torationi and some shame, for their Interchange ; 
 and wept so lotidi blubbering out their joy in broken accent;, that the palace 
 was filled with a sound of pleasing mourning, and the witch herself, grpat Circe, 
 was not unmoved at the sight. To make her atonement complete, she sent for 
 the remnant of Ulysses' men who stayed behind at the phip, giving up "their 
 great commander for lost ; who when they came, and saw him again aliye^, 
 circled with their fellows, no expression can lell what joy they.felt ; they.ev^ 
 cried out with rapture, and to have- seen , their, frantic expressions of mirth, a ; 
 man might have supposed, that they were just in sight of their country earth, 
 the chiTs of rocky Ithaca. Only Euiylochus would hardly be persuaded to ; 
 enter that palace, of wonders, for he remembered with a kind of horror ho^y 
 his eompanions had vanished from his sight. 
 
 Then great Circe spake, and gave order, that there should be no more sad- 
 ness among them, nor remembering of past sufferings. For as yet .they fared 
 like men that are exiles from their country, and if a gleam of mirth, shot among 
 them, 'it was suddenly quenched with the thought, of, their helpless and 
 homeless condition. Her kind persuasions wrought upon Ulysses and the 
 rest, that they spent twelve months in all manner of deUght with her in her 
 palace. For Circe was a powerful magician, and could command the tnoon 
 from her sphere,, or unroot the solid oak from its place to make it dance for ' 
 their diversion, and by the help of her illusions she could vary the taste of 
 pleasures, and contrive delights, recreations, and jolly pastimes, to "fetch 
 the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful 
 dream." 
 
 At length Ulysses awoke from the trance o( the faculties into which her charms , 
 had thrown him, and the thought of home returned with tenfold vigour to goad , 
 and sting him ; that home where he had left his virtuous wife Penelope, and his 
 young son Telemachus. One day when Circe had been lavish of her caresses, 
 and was in her kindest humour, he moved to her subtilely, and as it were afar 
 off, the question of his home-return ; to which she answered firmly, ' ' O Ulys- 
 ses, it is not in my power to detain one whom the gods have destined to further 
 trials. But leaving me, before you pursue yotir journey home, you must visit 
 the house of Hades, or Death, to consult the shade of Tiresias the Theban 
 prophet i to whom alone, of a.11 the dead, Proserpine, queen of hell, has com- 
 mitted the secret of future events ; it is he that must inform you whether you 
 shall ever see again your wife and country." "O Circe," he cried; "that is 
 impossible: who shall steer my course to Pluto's kingdom? Never ship had 
 strength to make that voyage." "Seek no guide," she replied; "but raise you 
 your mast, and hoist your white sails, and sit in your ship in peace : the north 
 wind shall waft you through the seas, till you shall cross the eicpanse of the 
 ocean, and come to where grow the poplar groves, and willows pale, of Proser- 
 pine : where Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus and Acheron mingle their waves. 
 Cocytus is an arm of Styx, the forgetful river. Here dig a pit, and make it a 
 cubit broad and a cubit long, and pour in milk, and honey, and wine, and the 
 blood of a ram, and the blood of a black ewe, and turn away thy face while 
 thou pourest in, and the dead shall come flocking to taste the milk and the 
 blood : but suffer none to approach thy offering till thou hast inquired of Tire- 
 sias all which thou wishest to know." 
 
 He did as great Circe had appointed. He raised his mast, and hoisted his 
 white sails, and sat in his ship in peace. The north wind wafted him through 
 the seas, till he crossed the ocean, and came to the sacred woods of Proserpine. 
 He stood at the confluence of the three floods, and digged a pit, as she had 
 given directions, and poured in his offering; the blood of a ram, and the blood 
 
. The Adventures of Ulysses. 283 
 
 .of a black ewe, milk, and honey, and wine ; and the dead came to his banquet : 
 aged men, and women, and youths, and children who died in infancy. But 
 none of themiifould he suffer.to approach, and dip their thin lips in'tlie offering, 
 till Tiresias was served,' not though his own mother was among the number, 
 whom now for the first time he knew to be dead, for he had left her hving when 
 he went to Troy, and she had died since his departure, and the tidings never 
 reached him : though it irked his soul to use constraint upon her, yet in com- 
 pliance with the injunction of great Circe, he forced her to retire along vi-ith the 
 other ghosts. Then Tiresias, who bore a golden sceptre, came ind 'lapped of 
 the offering, and immediately he knew UlysseS, and began to prophesy : he 
 denounced woe to Ulysses, woe, woe, and many sufferings, through the anger of 
 Neptune for the putting out of the eye of the sea-goS's son. Yet there was safety 
 after suffering, if they could abstain from slaughtering the oxen of the Sun 
 after they landed in the Triangular island. ' For Ulysses, the gods had destined 
 him from a king to become a beggar, aKd to perish by his own giiests, unless he 
 slew those who knew him not. 
 
 This prophecy, ambiguously delivered, was all that Tiresias was empowered 
 to unfold, or else there was no longer place for him; for now the souls of the 
 other dead fame .flocking in such numbers, ttimultuously demanding the blood, 
 that freezing horror seized the limbs of the living Ulysses, to see so many, and 
 all dead, and he the only one alive in that region; Now his mother came and 
 lapped the blood, without restraint from her son, and now she knew him to be 
 her son, and inquired of him why hehad come alive to their comfortless habita- 
 tions. And she said, that affliction for Ulysses' long absence had preyed upon 
 her spirits, and brought her to the grave. 
 
 Ulysses' soul melted at her moving narration, and forgetting the state of the 
 (Jead, and that the airy texture of disembodied spirits does not admit of the 
 embraces of flesh and blood, he threw his arms about her to clasp her : the 
 poor ghost melted from his embrace, and looking mournfully upon him vanished 
 away. 
 
 ; Then saw he other females. —Tyro, who when she lived was the paramour of 
 Neptune, and by him had Pelias, and Neleus. ■ Antiope, who bore two like 
 sons to Jove, Amphion and Zethus, founders of Thebes. Alcmena, the mother 
 of Hercules, with her fair daughter, afterwards her daughter-in-law, Megara. 
 There also Ulysses saw Jocasta, the unfortunate mother and wife of CEdipus ; 
 who ignorant of kin wedded with her son, and when she had discovered the 
 unnatural alliance, for shame and grief hanged herself. He continued to drag 
 a wretched life above the earth, haunted by the dreadful Furies. — There was 
 Leda, the wife of Tyndarus, the mother of the beautiful Helen, and of the two 
 brave brothers, Castor and Pollux, who obtained this grace from Jove, that 
 being dead, they should enjoy life alternately, living in pleasant places under 
 the earth. For Pollux had prayed that his brother Castor, who was subject to 
 death, as the son of Tyndarus, should partake of his own immortality, which 
 he derived from an immortal sire : this the Fates denied; therefore Pollux was 
 permitted to divide his immortality with his brother Castor, dying and Mving 
 alternately. — There was Iphimedeia, who bore two sons to Neptune that were 
 giants, Otus and Ephialtes : Earth in her prodigality never nourished bodies to 
 such portentous size and beauty as these two children were of, except Orion. 
 At nine years old they had imaginations of climbing to heaven to see what 
 the gods were doing ; they thought to make stairs of mountains, and were 
 for piling Ossa upon Olympus, and setring Pelion upon that, and had per- 
 haps performed it, if they had lived till they were striplitigs ; but they were 
 cut off by death in the infancy of their ambitious project.— Phaedra was 
 there, and Procris, and Ariadne, mournful for Theseus's desertion, and 
 
 , Mffira, and Clymene, and Eryphile, who preferred gold before wedlock 
 
 1 faith. 
 
284 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 But now came a mournful ghpst, that late was Agamemnon, son of Atreus, 
 the mighty leader of all the host of Greece and their confederate kings that 
 warred against Troy. He came with the rest to sip a little sf the blood at 
 that uncomfortable banquet. Ulysses was moved with compassion to see him 
 among them, and asked him what untimely fate had brought him there, if 
 storms had overwhelmed him coming from Troy, or if he had perished in some 
 mutiny by his own soldiers at a division of the prey. 
 
 " By none of these," he replied, " did I come to my death, but slain at a 
 banquet to which I was invited by jEgisthus after my return home. He con- 
 spiring with my adulterous wife, they laid a scheme for my destruction, training 
 me forth to a banquet as an ox goes to the slaughter, and there surrounding 
 me they slew me with all my friends about me. 
 
 " Clytemnestra,' my wicked wife, forgetting the vows which she swore to me 
 in wedlock, would not lend a hand to close my eyes in death. But nothing is 
 so heaped with impieties as such a woman, who would kill her spouse that 
 married her a maid. When I brought her home to my house a bride, I 
 hoped in my heart that she would be loving to me and to my children. Now, 
 her black treacheries have cast a foul aspersion on her whole se.x. ^ Blest 
 husbands will have their loving wives in -suspicion for her bad deeds." 
 
 "Alas !" said Ulysses, "there seems to be a fatality in your royal house 
 of Atreus, and that they are hated of Jove for their wives. For Helen's sake, 
 your brother Menelaus's wife, what multitudes fell in the wars of Troy ! " 
 
 Agamemnon replied, " For this cause be not thou more kind than wise to 
 any woman. Let not thy words express to her at any time all that is in thy 
 mind, keep still some secrets to thyself. But thou by any bloody contrivances 
 of thy wife never need'st fear to fall. Exceeding wise shte is, and to her wis- 
 dom she has a goodness as eminent ; Icarius's daughter, Penelope the chaste : 
 we left her a young bride when we parted from our wives to go to the wars, 
 her first child suckling at her breast, the young Telemachus, whom you shall 
 see grown up to manhood on your return, and he shall greet his father with 
 befitting welcomes. My Orestes, my dear son, I sh.ill never see again. His 
 mother has deprived his father of the sight of him, and perhaps will slay him 
 as she slew his sire. It is now no world to trust a woman in. — But what says 
 fame ? is my son yet alive ? lives he in Orchomen, or in Pylus, or is he resi- 
 dent in Sparta, in his uncle's court ? as yet, I see, divine Orestes is not here 
 with me." 
 
 To this Ulysses replied that he had received no certain tidings where 
 Orestes abode, only some uncertain rumours which he could not report for 
 truth. 
 
 While they held this sad conference, with kind tears striving to render un- 
 kind fortunes more palatable, the soul of great Achilles joined them. " What 
 desperate adventure has brought Ulysses to these regions," said Achilles, "to 
 see the end of dead men and their foolish shades? " 
 
 Ulysses answered him that he had come to consult Tiresias respecting his 
 voyage home. " But thou, O son of Thetis," said he, "why dost thou dis- 
 parage the state of the dead ? seeing that as alive thou didst surpass all men 
 in glory, thou must needs retain thy pre-emine^nce here below : so great 
 Achilles triumphs over death." 
 
 But Achilles made reply that he had much rather be a peasant-slave upon 
 the earth than reign over all the dead. So much did the inactivity and sloth- 
 ful condition of that state displease his unquenchable and restless spirit. Only 
 he inquired of Ulysses if his father Peleus were living, and how his son 
 Neoptolemus conducted himself. 
 
 Of Peleus Ulysses could tell him nothing ; but of Neoptolemus he thus bore 
 witness : " From Scyros I convoyed your son by sea to the Greeks, where I 
 can speak of him, for I knew him. He was chief in council and in' the field. 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 285 
 
 When any question was proposed, so quick was his conceit in the forward I 
 apprehension of any case, that he ever spoke first, and was heard witli more | 
 attention than the older heads. Only myself and aged I\estor could compare 
 with him in giving advice. In battle I cannot speak his praise, unless 1 could 
 count all that fell by his sword. I will only mention one mstance of his man- ! 
 hood. When we sat hid in the belly of the wooden horse, in the ambush / 
 which deceived the Trojans to their destruction, I, who had the management 
 of that stratagem, still shifted my place from side to side to note the behaviour 
 of our men. In some I marked their hearts trembUng, through all the pains 
 which they took to appear valiant, and in others tears, that in spite of manly 
 courage would gush forth. And to say truth, it was an adven(jjre of high 
 enterprise, and as perilous a stake as was ever played in war's game. But in 
 him I could not observe the least sign of weakness, no tears nor tremblings, 
 but his hand still on his good sword, and ever urging me to set open the 
 machine and let us out before the time was come for doing it; and when we 
 sallied out he was still first in that fierce destruction and bloody midnight 
 desolation of King Priam's city." 
 
 This made the soul of Achilles to tread a swifter pace, with high-raised feet, 
 as he vanished away, for the joy which he took in his son being applauded by 
 Ulysses. 
 
 A sad shade stalked by, which Ulysses knew to be the ghost of Ajax, his 
 opponent, when living, in that famous dispute about the right of succeeding to 
 the arms of the deceased Achilles. They being adjudged by the Greeks to 
 Ulysses, as the prize of wisdom above bodily strength, the noble Aja.t in 
 despite went mad, and slew himself. The sight of his rival turned to a shade 
 by his dispute, so subdued the passion of emulation in Ulysses, that for his 
 sake he wished, that judgment in that controversy had been given against him- 
 self, rather than so illustrious a chief should have perished for the desire of 
 those arms, which his prowess (second only to Achilles in fight) so eminently 
 had deserved. " Ajax," he cried, "all the Greeks mourn for thee as much as 
 they lamented for Achilles. Let not thy wrath burn for ever, great son of 
 Telamon. Ulysses seeks peace with thee, and will make any atonement to 
 thee that can appease thy hurt spirit." But the shade stalked on, and would 
 not exchange a word with Ulysses, though he prayed it with many tears and 
 many earnest entreaties. " He might have spoke to me," said Ulysses, "since 
 I spoke to him ; but I see the resentments of the dead are eternal." 
 
 ■Then Ulysses saw a throne, on which was placed a judge distributing 
 sentence. . He that sat on the throne was Minos, and he was dealing out 
 just judgments to the dead. He it Is that assigns them their' place in bliss 
 or woe. 
 
 Then came by a thundering ghost, the large-limbed Orion, the mighty 
 hunter, who was hunting there the ghosts of the beasts which he had slaugh- 
 tered in desert hills upon the earth ; for the dead delight in the occupations 
 which pleased them in the time of their living upon the earth. 
 
 There was Tityus suffering eternal pains because he had sought to violate 
 the honour of Latona as she passed from Pytho into Panopeus. Two vul- 
 tures sat perpetually preying upon his liver with their crooked beaks, which 
 as fast as they devoured is for ever renewed ; nor can he fray them away with 
 his great hands. 
 
 ■There was Tantalus, plagued for his great sins, standing up to the chin in 
 water, which he can never taste, but still as he bows his head, thinking to 
 quench his burning thirst, instead of water he licks up unsavoury dust. All 
 fruits pleasant to the sight, and of dehcious flavour, hang in ripe clusters 
 about his head, seeming as though they offered themselves to be plucked by 
 him ; bulrwhen he reaches out his hand, some wind carries them far out of his 
 sight into the clouds, so he is starved in the midst of plenty by the righteous 
 
286 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 doom of Jove, in memotyof that inhuman banquet at which, the sua turned 
 pale, when the unnatural father served up, the Umbs of his little son in a dish, 
 as meat for his divine guests. 
 
 Therie was Sisyphus, that sees , no end, to his labours. His punishment is, 
 to be for ever rolling up avast stone to the top of a mountain, which wSeu it 
 gets to the top, falls down with a crushing weight, and all his work is to be 
 begun again. He was bathed all over in sweat, that reeked out a smoke 
 which covered his head likeia mist. His crime had been the revealing of state 
 secrets. 1 
 
 ' There Uljrases saw Hercules : not that Hercules who enjoys immortal life in 
 heaven among the gods^ and is married to Hebe or Youth, but his shadow 
 which remains below. ' About him the dead flocked as thick as bats, hovering 
 around, and Cuffing at his head : he stands with his dreadful bow, ever in the 
 aot'to shoot. I . 
 
 Therealso might Ulysses have seen and spoken with the shades of Theseus, 
 and Pirithous, and the old heroes ; but he had conversed enough with horrors, 
 th erefore covering his face with his hands, that he might see no more spectres, 
 he resumed his seat in his ship, and pushed off. The barque moved of itself 
 without the: help of any oar, and soon brought him out of the regions of death 
 into the cheerful quarters of the living, and to the island of .iEasa, whence he 
 had set forth. 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 
 The song of, the Sirens. Scylla and Charybdis, The oxen of the Sun. The judgment. 
 The crew killed by lightning. 
 
 ' ' Unhappy man, who at thy birth wast appointed twice to die ! others shall 
 die once : but thou, besides that death that remains for thee, common to all 
 men, hast in thy hfetime visited the shades of death. Thee Scylla, thee 
 Charybdis, expect. Thee the deathful Sirens lie in wait for, that taint the 
 minds of whoever listen to them with their sweet singing. Whosoever shall 
 but hear the call of any Siren, he will so demise both wife and children 
 through their sorceries, that the stream of his affection never again shall 
 set homewards, nor shall he take joy in wife or children thereafter, or they in 
 him." 
 
 With these prophetic greetings great Circe met Ulysses on his return. He 
 besought her to instruct him in the nature of the Surens, and by what method 
 their baneful allurements were to be resisted. 
 
 "They are sisters three," she replied, "that sit in a mead (by which your 
 ship must needs pass) circled with dead men's bones. These are the bones of 
 men whom they have slain, after with fawning invitements they have enticed 
 them into their fen. Yet such is the celestial harmony of their voice accom- 
 panying the persuasive magic of their words, that knowing this, you shall not 
 be able to withstand their enticements. Therefore when you are to sail by 
 them, you shall stop the ears of your companions vrith wax, that they may 
 hear no note of that dangerous music ; but for yourself, that you may hear, 
 and yet live, give them strict command to bind you hand and foot to the mast, 
 and in no case to set you free, till you are out of the danger of the temp- 
 tation, though you should entreat it, and implore it ever so much, but to bind 
 you rather the more for your requesting to be loosed. So shall you escape that 
 snare." 
 
 Ulysses then prayed her that she would inform him what Scylla and 
 Charybdis were, which she had taught him by name to fear. She replied : 
 ' ' Sailing from jEasa to Trinacria, you must pass at an equal distance between 
 two fatal rocks. Incline never so little either to the one side or the other, and 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 287 
 
 your ship must mi;et with certain destruction.; No vessel -even yet itriedthatl 
 pass without being lost, but the Argo, which owed her safely to the sacred^ 
 freight she bore, the fleece of the golden-baeked ram, which could not perish*' 
 The biggest of these rocks which you shall come to, Scyllahath in charge. 
 There in a deep whirlpool at the foot of the rock the abhorred monster shrouds 
 her face ; ;>[ho if she were to show her full form, no eye of man or god could 
 endure the'sight; thence she stretches out all her six long necks peeritig and 
 diving to siick up fish, dolphins, dog-fish, and whales, whole ships, and their 
 men, whatever conies within her raging gulf.; The other rock is lesser, and of 
 less ominous aspect; but there dreadful Charybdis sits, supping the black 
 : de^ps. Thrice a day she drinks her pits dry, and thrice a day again she belches 
 them all up : but when she is drinking, come not nigh, for being once caught, 
 the force of Neptune cannot redeem you from her swallow. Better trust to • 
 Scylla, for she will but have for her si.M necks, six men : Charybdis in her insa- 
 tiate draught will ask all." 
 Then Ulysses inquired, in case he should escape Charybdis, whether he 
 , might not assail that other monster with his sword : to which she replied that 
 he must. not think that he had an enemy subject to death, or wounds, to 
 contend with : for Scylla could never die. Therefore,' his best safety was in 
 flight, and to invoke none of the gods but Cratis, who is Soylla's mother, and 
 might perhaps forbid her daughter to devour them. For his conduct after he 
 arrived; at Trinacria she referred him to the admonitions which had been given 
 him by Tiresias. 
 
 Ulysses having communicated her instructions, as far as related to the 
 Sirens, to his companions, who had not been present at that interview ; but 
 concealing from them the rest, as he had done the terrible predictions of 
 Tiresias, that they might not be deterred by fear from pursuing their voyage : 
 the time for departure being como, they set their sails, and took a final leave 
 of great Circe ; who by her art calmed the heavens, and gave them smooth 
 seas, and a right fore wind (the seaman's friend) to bear them on their way to 
 Ithaca. 
 
 They had not sailed past a hundred leagues before the breeze which Circe 
 had lent them suddenly stopped. It was stricken dead. All the sea lay in 
 prostrate slumber. Not a gasp of air could be felt. The ship stood still. 
 Ulysses guessed that the island of the Sirens was not far off, and that they had 
 charmed the air so with their devilish singing. Therefore he made him cakes 
 of wax, as Circe had instructed him, and stopped the ears of his men with 
 them : then causing himself to be bound hand and foot, he commanded the 
 rowers to ply their oars and row as fast as speed could carry them past that 
 fatal shore. They soon came within sight of the Sirens, who sang in Ulysses' 
 hearing : 
 
 Come here, thou, worthy of a world of praise, 
 
 That dost so high the Grecian glory raise ; 
 
 Ulysses ! stay thy ship ; and that song hear 
 
 "That none pass'd ever, but it bent his ear, 
 
 But left him ravish'd, and instructed more 
 
 By us, than any, ever heard before. 
 
 For we know all things, whatsoever were 
 
 In wide Troy labour'd : whatsoever there_ 
 
 The Grecians and the "Trojans both sustain'd ; 
 
 By those high issues that the gods ordain'd : 
 
 And whatsoever all the earth can show 
 
 To inform a knowledge of desert, we know. 
 
 These were the words, but the celestial harmony of the voices whidh sang- 
 them no tongue can describe : it took the ear of Ulysses with ravishment. He 
 would have broke his bonds to rush after them ; and threatened, wept, sued, 
 entreated, commanded, crying out with tears and passionate imprecations, con- 
 
288 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 juring his men by all the ties of perils past which they had endured in common, 
 by fellowship and love, and the authority which he retained among them, to 
 let him loose ; but at no rate would they obey him. And still the Sirens sang. 
 Ulysses made signs, motions, gestures, promising mountainsof gold if they 
 would set him free ; but their oars only moved faster. And" still the Sirens 
 sung. And still the more he adjured them to set him free, the faster with cords 
 and ropes they bound him ; till they were quite out of hearing of the Sirens' 
 notes, whose effect great Circe had so truly predicted. And well she might 
 speak of them, for often she had joined her own enchanting voice to theirs, 
 while she has sat in the flowery meads, mingled with the Sirens and the 
 Water Nymphs, gathering their potent herbs and drugs of magic quality : 
 their singing altogether has made the gods stoop, and ' ' heaven drowsy with 
 the harmony. " 
 
 Escaped that peril, they had not sailed yet an hundred leagues farther, when 
 they heard a roar afar off, which Ulysses knew to be the barking of Scyllas 
 dogs, which surround her waist, and bark incessantly. Coming nearer they 
 beheld a smoke ascend, with a horrid murmur, which arose from that other 
 whirlpool, to which they made nigher approaches than to Scylla. Through 
 the furious eddy, which is in that place, the ship stood still as a stone, for there 
 was no man to lend his hand to an oar, the dismal roar of Scylla's dogs at a 
 distance, and the nearer clamours of Charybdis, where everything made an 
 echo, quite taking from them the power of e.xertion. Ulysses went up and 
 down encouraging his men, one by one, giving them good words, telling them 
 that they were in greater perils when they were blocked up in the Cyclops 
 cave, yet, heaven assisting his counsels, he had delivered them out of that 
 extremity. That he could not believe but they remembered it ; and wished 
 them to give the same trust to the same care which he had now for their welfare. 
 That they must exert all the strength and wit which they had, and try if Jove 
 would not grant them an escape even out of this peril. In particular he cheered 
 up the pilot who sat at the helm, and told him that he must show more firmness 
 tlian other men, as he had more trust committed to him, and had the sole 
 management by his skill of the vessel in which all their safeties were embarked. 
 That a rock lay hid within those boiling whirlpools which he saw, on the out- 
 side of which he must steer, if he would avoid his own destruction, and the 
 destruction of them all 
 
 They heard him, and like men took to the oars; but little knew what opposite 
 danger, in shunning that rock, they must be thrown upon. For Ulysses had 
 concealed from them the wounds, never to be healed, which Scylla was to open : 
 their terror would else have robbed them all of all care to steer, or move an 
 oar, and have made them hide under the hatches, for fear of seeing her, where 
 he and they must have died an idle death. But even then he forgot the pre- 
 cautions which Circe had given him to prevent harm to his person; who had 
 willed him not to arm, or show himself once to Scylla : but disdaining not to 
 venture life for his brave companions, he could not contain, but armSi in all 
 points, and taking a lance in either hand, he went up to the fore deck, and 
 looked when Scylla would appear. 
 
 She did not show herself as yet, and still the vessel steered closer by her 
 rock, as it sought to shUn that other more dreaded : for they saw how horribly 
 Charybdis's black throat drew into her all the whirling deep, which she dis- 
 •gorged again, that all about her boiled hke a kettle, and the rock roared with 
 ■troubled waters; which when she supped in again, all the bottom turned up, 
 and disclosed far under shore the swart sands naked, whose whole stern sight 
 frayed the startled blood from their faces, and made Ulysses turn his 'to view 
 the wonder of whirlpools. Which when Scylla saw, from out her black den, 
 she darted out her six long necks, and swoopt up as many of his friends : whose 
 cries Ulysses heard, and saw them too late, with their heeld turned up, and 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 280 
 
 their hands thrown to him for succour, who had been their help in all ex- 
 tremities, but could not deliver them now ; and he heard them shriek out as 
 she tore them, and to the last they continued to throw their hands out to him 
 for sweet life. In all his sufferings he never had beheld a sight so full of 
 miseries. 
 
 Escaped from Scylla and Charybdis, but with a diminished crew, Ulysses 
 and the sad remains of his followers reached the Trinacrian shore. Here 
 landing, he beheld oxen grazing of such surpassing size and beauty, that both 
 from them, and from the shape of the island (having three promontories jutting 
 into the sea) he judged rightly that he was come to the Triangular island, and 
 the oxen of the Sun, of which Tiresias had forewarned him. 
 
 So great was his terror lest through his own fault, or that of his men, any 
 violence or profanation should be offered to the holy oxen, that even then, tired 
 as they were with the perils and fatigues of the day past, and unable to stir an 
 oar, or use any exertion, and though night was fast coming on, he would have 
 them re-embark immediately, and make the best of their way from that 
 dangerous station ; but his men with one voice resolutely opposed it, and even 
 the too cautious Euiylochus himself withstood the proposal ; so much did the 
 temptation of a little ease and refreshment (ease tenfold sweet after such 
 labours) prevail over the sagest counsels, and the apprehension of certain evil 
 outweigh the prospect of contingent danger. They expostulated, that the 
 nerves of Ulysses seemed to be made of steel, and his limbs not liable to 
 lassitude like other mens ; that waking or sleeping seemed indifferent to him ; 
 but that they were men, not gods, and felt the common appetites for food and 
 sleep. That in the night-time all the winds most destructive to ships are 
 generated. That black night still required to be served with meat, and sleep, 
 and quiet havens and ease. That the best sacrifice to the sea was in the morn- 
 ing. With such sailor-like sayings and mutinous arguments, which the 
 majority have always ready to justify disobedience to their betters, they forced 
 Ulysses to comply with their requisition, and against his will to take up his 
 night-quarters on shore. But he first exacted from them an oath that they 
 would neither maim or kill any of the cattle which they saw grazing, but con- 
 tent themselves with such food as Circe had stowed their vessel with when they 
 parted from jEasa. This they man by man severally promised, imprecating 
 the heaviest curses on whoever should break it ; and mooring their bark within 
 a creek, they went to supper, contenting themselves that night with such food 
 as Circe had given them, not without many sad thoughts of their friends 
 whom Scylla had devoured, the grief of which kept them great part of the 
 night waking. 
 
 In the morning Ulysses urged them again to a religious observance of the 
 oath that they had sworn, not in any case to attempt the blood of those fair 
 herds which they saw grazing, but to content themselves with the ship's food ; 
 for the god who owned those cattle sees and hears all. 
 
 They faithfully obeyed, and remained in that good mind for a month, during 
 which they were confined to that station by contrary winds, till all the wine and 
 the bread were gone, which they had brought with them. When thjir victuals 
 were gone, necessity compelled them to stray in quest of whatever fish or fowl 
 they could snare, which that coast did not yield in any great abundance. Then 
 Ulysses prayed to all the gods that dwelt in bountiful heaven, that they would 
 be pleased to yield them some means to stay their hunger without having 
 recourse to profane and forbidden violations : but the ears of heaven seemed 
 to be shut, or some god incensed plotted his ruin ; for at mid-day, when he 
 should chiefly have been vigilant and watchful to prevent mischief, a deep 
 sleep fell upon the eyes of Ulysses, during which he lay totally insensible of 
 all that passed in the world, and what his friends or what his enemies might 
 do, for his welfare or destruction. Then Eurylochus took his advantage. He 
 
ago The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 was the man of most authority with them after Ulysses. He represented to 
 them all the misery of their condition ; how that every death is liateful and 
 grevious to mortality, but that of all deaths famine is attended with the most 
 painful, loathsome, and humiliating circumstances ; that the subsistence which 
 they could hope to draw from fowling or fishing was too precarious to be de- 
 pended upon; that there. did not seem to be any chance of the winds changing 
 to favour their escape, but that they must inevitably stay there and perish, if they 
 let an irrational superstition deter them from the means which nature offered to 
 their Jiahds ; that Ulysses might be deceived, in his belief that these oxen had 
 any sacred qualities above other oxen ; and even admitting that they were the 
 property of the god of the Sun, as he said they were, the Sun did neither 
 eat nor drink, and the gods were best served not by a scrupulous conscience, 
 but by a thankful heart, which took freely what they as freely offered : with 
 thesEi and such-like persuasions he prevailed on his half-famished and half- 
 mutinous companions, to begin the impious violation of their oath by the 
 slaughter of seven of the fairest of these oxen which were grazing. Part they 
 roasted and eat, and part they offered in sacrifice, to the gods, particularly to 
 Apollo, god of the Sun, vowing to build a temple to his godhead, when they 
 should arrive in Ithaca, and deck it with magnificent and numerous gifts : Vain 
 men ! and superstition woise than that which they so lately derided ! to imagine 
 that prospective penitence can excuse a present violation of duty, and that the pure 
 natures of the hea.venly powers will admit of compromise or dispensation for sin. 
 
 But to their feast they fell, dividing the roasted portions of the flesh, savoury 
 and pleasant meat to them, but a sad sight to the eyes, and a savour of death • 
 in the nostrils, of the waking Ulysses ; whb,just woke in time to witness, but 
 not soon enough to prevent, their rash and sacrilegious banquet. He had 
 scarce time to ask what great mischief was this which they had done unto him ; 
 when behold, a prodigy ! the ox-hides which they had stripped, began to creep, 
 as if they had life ; and the roasted flesh bellowed as the ox used to do when 
 he was living. The hair of Ulysses stood up an end with affright at these 
 omenS ; but his companions, like men whom the gods had infatuated to their 
 destruction, persisted in their horrible banquet. 
 
 The Sun from its burning chariot saw how Ulysses' men had slain his oxen, 
 and he cried to his father Jove, "Revenge me upon these impious men who 
 have slain my oxen, which it did me gojd to look upon when I walked my 
 heavenly round. In all my daily course I never saw such bright and beautiful 
 creatures as those my oxen were." The father promised that ample retribution 
 should be taken of those accursed men : which was fulfilled shortly after, when 
 they took their leaves of the fatal island. 
 
 Six days they feasted in spite of the signs of heaven, and on the seventh, the 
 wind changing, they set their sails, and left the island: and their hearts were 
 cheerful with the banquets they had held ; all but the heart of Ulysses, which 
 sank within him, as with wet eyes he beheld his friends, and gave them for lost, 
 as men devoted to divine vengeance. Which soon overtook them : for they 
 had not gone many leagues before a dreadful tempest arose, which burst their 
 cables ; down came their mast, crushing the scull of the pilot in its fall ; off 
 he fell from the stem into the water, and the bark wanting his management 
 drove along at the wind's mercy ; thunders roared, and terrible lightnings of 
 Jove came down; first a bolt struck Eurylochus, then another, and then 
 another, till all the crew were killed, and their bodies swam about hke sea- 
 mews ; and the ship was split in pieces : only Ulysses survived ; and he had 
 no hope of safety but in tying himself to the mast, where he sat riding upon 
 the waves, like one that in no extremity would yield to fortune. Nine days was 
 he floating about with all the motions of the sea, with no other support than the 
 slender mast under him, till the tenth night cast him, all spent and weary with 
 toil upon the friendly shores of the island Ogygia. 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 391 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 The island of Calypso. Immortality refused. 
 
 Henceforth the adventures of the single Ulysses must be pursued. Of all 
 those faithful partakers of his toil, who with him left Asia, laden with the spoils 
 of Troy, now not one remains, but all a prey to the remorseless waves, and 
 food for some^reat fish ; their gallant navy reduced to one ship, and that 
 finally swallowed up and lost. Where now are all their anxious thoughts of 
 home ? that perseverance with which they went through the severest sufferings 
 and the hardest labours to which poor seafarers were ever exposed, that their 
 toils at last might be crowned with the sight of their native shores and wives 
 at Ithaca ! — Ulysses is now in the isleOgygia; called the Delightful Island. 
 The poor shipwrecked chief, the slave of ali the elements, is once again raised 
 by the caprice of fortune into a shadow of prosperity. He that was cast naked 
 upon the shore, bereft of all his companions, has now a goddess to attend 
 upon him, and his companions are the nymphs which never die. — Who has 
 not heard of Calypso ? her grove crowned with alders and poplars ? her grotto, 
 against which the luxuriant vine laid forth his purple grapes ? her ever new 
 delights, crystal fountains, running brooks, meadows flowering with sweet 
 balm-gentle and with violet : blue Sfiqlets which like veins enamelled the 
 smooth breasts of each fragrant mead ! It were useless to describe over again 
 what has been so well told already : or to relate those soft arts of courtship 
 which the goddess used to detain Ulysses ; the same in kind which she after- 
 wards practised upon his less wary son, whom Minerva, in the shape of Mentor, 
 hardly preserved from her snares, when they came to the Delightful Island 
 together in search of the scarce departed Ulysses. 
 
 A memorable example of married love, and a worthy instance how dear to 
 every good man his country is, was exhibited by Ulysses. If Circe loved him 
 .sincerely. Calypso loves him with tenfold more warmth and passion : she can 
 deny him nothing, but his departure; she offers him everything, even to a 
 participation of her immortality : if he will stay and share in her pleasures, he 
 shall never die. But death with glory has greater charms for a mind heroic, 
 than a life that shall never die, with shame ; and when he pledged his vows to 
 his Penelope, he reserved no stipulation that he would forsake her whenever a 
 goddess should think him worthy of her bed, but they had sworn to live and 
 grow old together : and he would not survive her if he could, nor meanly share 
 in immortality itself, from which she was excluded. 
 
 These thoughts kept him pensive and melancholy in the midst of pleasure. 
 His heart was on the seas, making voyages to Ithaca. Twelve months had 
 worn away, when Minerval from heaven saw her favourite, how he sat still 
 pining on the sea shores (his daily custom), wishing for a ship to carry him 
 home. She (who is wisdom herself) was indignant that so wise and brave a 
 man as Ulysses should be held in effeminate bondage by an unworthy goddess : 
 and at her request, her father Jove ordered Mercury to go down to the earth 
 to command Calypso to dismiss her guest. The divine messenger tied fast to 
 his feet his winged shoes, which bear him over land and seas, and took in his 
 hand his golden rod, the ensign of his authority. Then wheeling in many an 
 airy round, he stayed not till he alighted on the firm top of the mountain 
 Pieria : thence he fetched a second circuit over the seas, kissing the waves in 
 his flight with his feet, as light as any sea-mew fishing dips her wings, till he 
 touched the isle Ogygia, and soared up from the blue sea to the grotto of the 
 goddess, to whom his errand was ordained. 
 
292 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 His message struck a horror, checked by love, through all the faculties of 
 Calypso. She replied to it, incensed: "You gods are insatiate, past all that 
 live, in all things "which you affect ; vi-hich makes you so envious and grudging. 
 It afflicts you to the heart, when any goddess seeks the love of a mortal man 
 in marriage, though you yourselves without scruple link yourselves to women 
 of the earth. So it fared with you. When the delicious-fing;ered Morning shared 
 Orion's bed ; you could never satisfy your hate and your jealousy, till you had 
 incensed the chastity-loving dame, Diana, who leads the precise UJe, to come 
 upon him by stealth in Ortygia, and pierce him through with her arrows.. And 
 when rich-haired Ceres gave the reins to her afTections, and took lasion (well 
 worthy) to her arms, the secret was not so cunningly kept but Jove had soon 
 notice of it, and the poor mortal paid for his felicity with deatli, struck through 
 with lightnings. And now you envy me the possession of a wretched man, 
 whom tempests have cast upon my shores, making him lawfully mine ; whose 
 ship Jove rent in pieces with his hot thunderbolts, killing all his friends. Him 
 I have preserved, loved, nourished, made him mine by protection, my creature, 
 by every tie of gratitude mine ; have vowed to make him deathless like myself; 
 him you will tsUce from me. But I know your power, and that it is vain for 
 me to resist. Tell your king that I obey his mandates." 
 
 With an ill grace Calypso promised to fulfil the commands of Jove ; and, 
 Mercury departing, she went to find Ulysses, where he sat outside the grotto, 
 not knowing of the heavenly message, drowned in discontent, not seeing any 
 human probability of his ever returning home. ' 
 
 She said to him : "Unhappy man, no longer afflict yourself with pining 
 after your country, but build you a ship, with which you may return home ; 
 since it is the will of the gods; who doubtless as they are greater in power 
 than I, are greater in skill, and best can tell what is fittest for man. But I call 
 the gods, and my inward conscience, to witness, that I had no thotjght but 
 what stood with tliy safety, nor would haye<3one or counselled anything against 
 thy good. I persuaded thee to nothing which I should not have followed my- 
 self in thy extremity : for my mind is innocent and simple. O, if thou knewest 
 what dreadful sufferings thou must yet endure, before ever thou reachest thy 
 native land, thou wouldest not esteem so hardly of a goddess's ofier to share 
 her immortality with thee; nor, for a few years' enjoyment of a perishing 
 Penelope, refuse an imperishable and never-dying life with Calypso." 
 
 He rephed : " Ever-honoured, great Calypso, let it not displease thee, that 
 I a mortal man desire to see and converse again with a wife that is mortal : 
 human objects are best fitted to human infirmities. I well know how far in 
 wisdom, in feature, in stature, proportion, beauty, in all the gifts of the mind, 
 thou exceedest my Penelope : she a mortal, and subject to decay ; thou im- 
 mortal, ever growing, yet never old : yet in her sight all my desires terminate, 
 all my wishes ; in the sight of her, and of my country earth. If any god, 
 envious of my return, shall lay his dreadful hand upon me as I pass the seas, 
 I submit : for the same powers have given me a mind not to sink under oppres- 
 sion. In wars and waves my sufferings have not been small." 
 
 She heard his pleaded reasons, and of force she must assent ; so to her 
 nymphs she gave in charge from her sacred woods to cut down timber, to make 
 Ulysses a ship. They obeyed, though in a work unsuitable to their soft fingers, 
 yet to obedience no sacrifice is hard : and Ulysses busily bestirred himself, 
 labouring far more hard than they, as was fitting, till twenty tall trees, driest 
 and fittest for timber, were felled. Then like a skilful shipwright, he fell to 
 joining the planks, using the plane, the axe, and the auger, with such expe- 
 dition, that in four days' time a ship was made, complete with all her decks, 
 hatches, sideboards, yards. Calypso added linen for the sails, and tackling ; 
 and when she was finished, she was a goodly vessel for a man to sail in alone, 
 or in company, over the wide seas. By the fifth morning she was launched ; 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 293 
 
 and Ulysses, furnished with store of provisions, rich garments, and gold and 
 silver, given him by Calypso, took a last leave of her, and of her nymphs, and 
 of the isle Ogygia which had so befriended him. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The tempest. The sea-bird's gift. The escape by swimming. The sleep in the woods. 
 
 At the stern of his solitary ship Ulysses sat, and steered right artfully. No I 
 sleep could seize his eyelids. He beheld the Pleiads, the Bear which is by ; 
 some called the Wain, that moves round about Orion, and keeps still above 1 
 the ocean, and the slow-setting sign Bootes, which some name the Waggoner. 
 Seventeen days he held his course, and on the eighteenth the coast of Phaeacia . 
 was in sight. The figure of the land, as seen from the sea, was pretty and ' 
 circular, and looked something like a shield. i 
 
 Neptune returning from visiting his favourite Ethiopians, from the moun- j 
 tains of the Solymi, descried Ulysses ploughing the' waves, his domiin. The 
 sight of the man he so much hated for Polyhemui's sake, his son, whose eye ' 
 Ulysses had put out, set the god's heart on fire, and snatching into his hand 
 his horrid sea-sceptre, the trident of his power, he smote the air and the sea, I 
 and conjured up all his black storms, calling down night from the cope of 
 heaven and taking the earth into the sea, as it seemed, with clouds, through 
 the darkness and indistinctness which prevailed, the billows rolling up before 
 the fury of all the winds that contended together in their mighty sport. 
 
 Then the knees of Ulysses bent with fear, and then all his spirit was spent, 
 and he wished that he had been among the number of his countrymen who fell 
 before Troy, and had their funerals celebrated by all the Greeks, rather than 
 to perish thus, where no man could mourn him or know him. 
 
 As he thought these melancholy thoughts, a huge wave took him and washed 
 him overboard, ship and all upset amidst the billows, he struggling afar off, 
 clinging to her stern broken off which he yet held, her mast cracking in 
 two with the fury of that gust of mixed winds that struck it, sails and sail- 
 yards fell into the deep, and he himself was long drowned under water, nor 
 could get his head above, wave so met with wave, as if they strove which 
 should depress him most, and the gorgeous garments given him by Calypso 
 clung about him, and hindered his swimming ; yet neither for this, nor for the 
 overthrow of his ship, nor his own perilous condition, would he give up his 
 drenched vessel, but, wrestling with Neptune, got at length hold of her again, 
 and then sat in her bulk, insulting over death, which he had escaped, and the 
 salt waves which he gave the sea again to give to other men : his ship, striving 
 to live, floated at random, cuffed from wave to wave, hurled to and fro by all 
 the winds : now Boreas tossed it to Notus, Notus passed it to Eurus, and Eurus 
 to the west wind, who kept up the horrid tennis. 
 
 Them in their mad sport Ino Leucothea beheld ; Ino Leucothea, now a 
 sea-goddess, but once a mortal and the daughter of Cadmus ; she with pity 
 beheld Ulysses the niark of their fierce contention, and rising from the waves 
 alighted on the ship, in shape like to the sea-bird which is called a cormorant, 
 and in her beak she held a wonderful girdle made of sea-weeds which grow 
 at the bottom of the ocean, which she dropped at his feet, and the bird spake 
 to Ulysses, and counselled him not to trust any more to that fatal vessel 
 against which god Neptune had levelled his furious wrath, nor to those ill- 
 befriending garments which Calypso had given him, but to quit both it and 
 them, and trust for his safety to dimming. "And here," said the seeming 
 bird, " take this girdle and tie about your middle, which has virtue to protect 
 
294 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 the wearer at sea^ and you shall safely reach the shore ; but when you have 
 landed,' cast it far from you back into the sea." He did as the sea-bird in- 
 structed him, he stripped himself naked, and fastening the wondrous girdle 
 about his middle, cast himself into the seas to swim. The bird dived past his 
 sight into the fathomless abyss of the ocean. 
 
 Two days and two nights he spent in struggling with the waves, though sore 
 buffetted and almost spent, never giving up himself for lost, such confidence 
 he had in that charm which he wore about his middle, and in the words of that 
 divine bird. But the third morning the winds grew calm, and all the heavens 
 were clear. Then he saw himself nigh land, which he knew to be the coast 
 of the Phseacians, a people good to strangers, and abounding in ships, by 
 whose favour he doubted not that he should soon obtain a passage to his own 
 country. And such joy he conceived in his heart, as good sons have that 
 esteem their father's life dear, when long sickness has held him down to his 
 bed, and wasted his body, and they see at length health return to the old man, 
 with restored strength and spirits, in reward of their many prayers to the gods 
 for his safety : so precious was the prospect of home-return to Ulysses, that 
 he might restore health to his country (his better parent), that had long lan- 
 guished as full of distempeif in his absence. And then for his own safety's 
 sake he had joy to see the shores, the woods, so nigh and within his grasp as 
 they seemed, and he laboured with all the might of hands and feet to reach 
 with swimming that nigh-seeming land. 
 
 But when he approached near, a horrid sound of a huge sea beating against 
 rooks informed him that here was no place for landing, nor any harbour for 
 man's resort, but through the weeds and the foam which the sea belched up 
 against the land he could dimly discover the rugged shore all bristled with 
 flints, and all that part of the coast one impending rock that seemed impos- 
 sible to climb, and the water all about so deep, that not -a sand was there for 
 any tired foot to rest upon, and every moment he feared lest some wave more 
 cruel than the rest should crush him against a cliff, rendering worse than vain 
 all his landing : and should he swim to seek a more commodious haven farther 
 on, he was fearful lest, -weak and spent as he was, the winds would force him 
 back a long way off into the main, where the terrible god Neptune, for wrath 
 that he had so nearly escaped his power, having gotten him again into his 
 domain, would send out some great whale (of which those seas breed a horrid 
 number) to swallow him up alive ; with such malignity he still pursued him. 
 
 While these thoughts distracted him with diversity of dangers, one bigger 
 wave drove against a sharp rock his naked body, which it ^shed and tore, 
 and wanted little of breaking all his bones, so rude was the shock. But in 
 this extremity she prompted him that never failed him at need. Minerva (who 
 is wisdom itself) put it into his thoughts no longer to keep swimming off and 
 on, as one dallying with danger, but boldly to force the shore that threatened 
 him, and to hug the rock that had torn him so rudely ; which with both 
 hands he clasped, wrestling with extremity, till the rage of that billow which 
 had driven him upon it was past ; but then again the rock drove back that 
 wave so furiously, that it reft him of his hold, sucking him with it in his return, 
 and the sharp rock (his cruel friend) to which he dinged for succour, rent 
 the flesh so sore from his hands in parting, that he fell off, and could sustain 
 no longer ; quite under water he fell, and past the help of fate, there had the 
 hapless Ulysses lost all portion that he had in this life, if Minerva had not 
 prompted his wisdom in that peril to essay another course, and to explore 
 some other shelter, ceasing to attempt that landing-place. 
 l,She guided his wearied and nigh-exhausted limbs to the mouth of the fair 
 ■ river river Calliroe,* which not far from thence disbursed its watery tribute to 
 
 * KoAAipooio {beautifuUy-Jlowing). The epiiJiet applied to the river by Homer, is 
 changed into a proper name by Chapman, and by Lamb following him.— Ed. 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 295 
 
 the ocean. Here the shores were easy and accessible, and the rocks, which 
 rather adorned than defended its banks, so smooth, that they seemed polished 
 of purpose to invite the landing of our sea-wanderer, and to atone for the un- 
 courteous treatment which those less hospitable cliffs had afforded him. And 
 the god of the river, as if in pity, stayed his current and smoothed his waters, 
 to make his landing more easy ; for sacred to the ever-living deities of the 
 fresh waters, be they mountain-stream, river, or lake, is the cry of erring mor- 
 tals that seek their aid, by reason that being inland-bred they partake more of 
 the gentle humanities of our nature than those marine deities, whom Neptune 
 trains up in tempests in the unpitying recesses of his salt abyss. 
 
 So by the favour of the river's god Ulysses crept to land half-drowned ; 
 both his knees faltering, his strong hands falling down through weakness from 
 the excessive toils he had endured, his cheek and nostrils flowing with froth 
 of the sea-brine, much of which he had swallowed in that conflict, voice and 
 breath spent, down he sank as in death. Dead weary he was. It seemed 
 that the sea had soaked through his heart, and the pains he felt in all his veins 
 were little less than those which one feels that has endured the torture of the 
 rack. But when his spirits came a little to themselves, and his recolleclion by 
 degrees began to return, he rose up, and unloosing from his waist the girdle 
 or charm which that divine bird had given him, and remembering the charge 
 which he had received with it, hs flung it far from him into the river. Back 
 it swam with the course of the ebbing stream till it reached the sea, where the 
 fair hands of Ino Leucothea received it to keep it as a pledge of safety to any 
 future shipwrecked mariner, that like Ulysses should wander in those perilous 
 waves. 
 
 Then he kissed the humble earth in token of safety, and on he went by the 
 side of that pleasant river till he came where a thicker shade of rushes that 
 grew on its banks seemed to point out the place where he might rest his sea- 
 wearied limbs. And here a fresh perplexity divided his mind, whether he 
 should pass the night, which was coming on, in that place, where, though he 
 feared no other enemies, the damps and frosts of the chill sea-air m that ex- 
 posed situation might be death to him in his weak state; or whether he had 
 better climb the next hill, and pierce the depth of some shady wood, m which 
 he might find a warm and sheltered though insecure repose, subject to the 
 approach of any wild beast that roamed that way. Best did this last course 
 appear to him, though with some danger, as that which was more honourable 
 and savoured more of strife and self-exertion, than to perish without a struggle 
 the passive victim of cold and the elements. ■ . r j 
 
 So he bent his course to the nearest woods, where, entenng in, he found a 
 thicket, mostly of wild olives and such low trees, yet growing so intertwined 
 and knit together, that the moist wind had not leave to play through their 
 branches, nor the sun's scorching beams to pierce their recesses, nor any 
 shower to beat through, they grew so thick and as it were folded each in the 
 other ; here creeping in, he made his bed of the leaves which were beginning 
 to fall, of which was such abundance that two or three men might have spread 
 them ample coverings, such as might shield them from the winters rage, 
 though the air breathed steel and blew as it would burst. Here creeping in, 
 he heaped up store of leaves^U about him, as a man would billets upon a 
 winter fire, and lay down in tfll midst. Rich seed of virtue ly>ng hid m poor ■ 
 leaves ! Here Minerva soon gave him sound sleep ; and here all his long toils 
 past seemed to be concluded and shut up within the little sphere of his 
 refreshed and closed eyelids. 
 
296 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The princess Nausica. The washing. The game with the ball The Court of Fhieacia 
 and king Alcinous. 
 
 Meantime Minerva designing an interview between the king's daughter 
 of that country and Ulysses wlien he should awake, went by night to the 
 palace of king Alcinous, and stood at the bedside of the princess Nausicaa in 
 the shape of one of her favourite attendants, and thus addressed the sleeping 
 princess : 
 
 ' ' Nausicaa, why do you lie sleeping here, and never bestow a thought upon 
 your bridal ornaments, of which you have many and beautiful, laid Up in your 
 wardrobe against the day of your marriage, which cannot be far distant ; when 
 you shall have need of all, not only to deck your own person, but to give away 
 in presents to the virgins that honouring you shall attend you to the temple ? 
 Your reputation stands much upon the timely care of these things; these 
 things are they which lill father and reverend mother with delight. Let us 
 arise betimes to wash your fair vestments of linen and silks in the river ; and 
 request your sire to lend you mules and a coach, for your wardrobe is heavy, 
 and the place where we must wash is distant, and besides it fits not a great 
 princess like you to go so far on foot." 
 
 So saying she went away, and Nausicaa awoke, full of pleasing thoughts 
 of her marriage, which the dream had told her was not far distant : and 
 as soon as it was dawn, she arose and dressed herself and went to find her 
 parents. 
 
 The queen her mother was already up, and seated among her maids, spinning 
 at her wheel, as the fashion was in those primitive times, when great ladies did 
 not disdain housewifery ; and the king her father was preparing to go abroad 
 at that early hour to council with his grave senate. 
 
 "My father," she said, "will you not order mules and a coach to be got 
 ready, that I may go and wash, I and my maids, at the cisterns that stand ' 
 without the city ? " 
 
 " What washing does my daughter speak of?" said Alcinous. 
 
 " Mine and my brothers' garments," she replied, "that have contracted soil 
 by this time with lying by so long in the wardrobe. Five sons have you, that 
 are my brothers ; two of them are married, and three are 'oachelors ; these 
 last it concerns to have their garments neat and unsoiled ; it may advance 
 their fortunes in marriage : and who but I their sister should have a care of 
 these things? You yourself, my father, have need of the whitest apparel, 
 when you go, as now, to the council." 
 
 She used this plea, modestly dissembling her care of her own nuptials to her 
 father ; who was not displeased at this instance of his daughter's discretion : 
 for a seasonable care about marriage may be permitted to a young maiden, 
 provided it to be accompanied with modesty and dutiful submission to her 
 parents in the choice of her future husband : and there was no fear of Nausicaa 
 choosing wrongly or improperiy, for she was as wise as she was beautiful, and 
 the best in all Phseacia were suitors to her for her love. So Alcinous readily 
 gave consent that she should go, ordering mules and a coach to he prepared. 
 And Nausicaa brought from her chamber all her vestments, and laid them up 
 m the coach, and her mother placed bread and wine in the coach, and oil in 
 a golden cruse, to soften the bright skins of Nausicaa and her maids when they 
 came out of the river. 
 
 Nausicaa making her maids get up into the coach with her, lashed the mules, 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 297 
 
 till they brought her to the cisterns which stood a little on the outside of the 
 town, and were supplied with water from the river Calliroe. 
 
 There her attendants unyoked the mules, took out the clothes, and steeped 
 them in the cisterns, washing them in several waters, and afterwards treading 
 them clean with their feet, venturing wagers who should have done soonest 
 and cleanest, and using many pretty pastimes to beguile their labour as young 
 maids use, while the princess looked on. When they had laid their clothe^ to 
 dry, they fell to playing again, and Nausicaa joined them in a game with the 
 ball, which is tised in that country, which is performed by tossing the ball from 
 hand to hand with great expedition, she who begins the pastime singing a song. 
 It chanced that the princess, whose turn it became to toss the ball, sent it so 
 far from its mark, that it fell beyond into one of the cisterns of the river : at> 
 which the whole company, in merry consternation, set up a shriek so loud as 
 waked the sleeping Ulysses, who was taking his rest after his long toils, in 
 the woods not far distant from the place where these young maids had come to 
 wash. 
 
 At the sound of female voices Ulysses crept forth from his retirement, making 
 himself a covering with boughs and leaves as well as he could to shroud his 
 nakedness. The sudden appearance of his weather-beaten and almost naked 
 form, so frighted the maidens that they scudded away into the woods and all 
 about to hide themselves, only Minerva (who had brought about this interview 
 to admirable purposes, by seemingly accidental means) put courage into the 
 breast of Nausicaa, and she stayed where she was, and resolved to know what 
 manner of man he was, and what was the occasion of his strange coming to 
 them. 
 
 He not venturing (for delicacy) to approach and clasp her knees, as sup- 
 pliants should, but standing far off, addressed this speech to the young 
 princess : 
 
 " Before I presume rudely to press my petitions, I should first ask whether 
 I am addressing a mortal woman, or one of the goddesses. If a goddess, 
 you seem to me to be likest to Diana, the chaste huntress, the daughter of 
 Jove. Like hers are your lineaments, your stature, your features, and air 
 divine." 
 
 She making answer that she was no goddess, but a mortal maid, he con- 
 tinued : 
 
 " If awoman, thrice blessed are both the authors of your birth, thrice blessed 
 are your brothers, who even to rapture must have joy in your perfections, to see 
 you grown so Uke a young tree, and so graceful. But most blessed of all that 
 breathe is he that 'has the gift to engage your young neck in the yoke of 
 marriage. I never saw that man that was worthy of you. I never saw man or 
 woman that at all parts equalled you. Lately at Delos (where I touched) I 
 saw a young palm which grew beside Apollo's temple ; it exceeded all the 
 trees which ever I beheld for straightness and beauty : I can compare you only 
 to that. A stupor past admiration strikes me, joined with fear, which keeps 
 me back from approaching you, to embrace your knees. Nor is it strange ; for 
 one of freshest and firmest spirit would falter, approaching near to so bright an 
 object : but I am one whom a cruel habit of calamity has prepared to receive 
 strong impressions. Twenty days the unrelenting seas have tossed me up and 
 down coming from Ogygia, and at length cast me shipwrecked last night 
 upon your coast. I have seen no man or woman since I landed but yourself. 
 All that I crave is clothes, which you may spare me, and to be shown the way 
 to some neighbouring town. The gods who have care of strangers, will requite 
 you for these courtesies." 
 
 She admiring to hear such complimentary words proceed out of the mouth 
 of one whose outside looked so rough and unpromising, made answer : 
 ' ' Stranger, I discern neither sloth nor folly in you, and yet I see that vou are 
 L * 
 
298 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 poor and wretched : from which I gather that neither wisdom nor industry can 
 secure fehcity ; only Jove bestows it upon whomsoever he pleases. He perhaps 
 has reduced you to this plight. However, since your wanderings have brought 
 you so near to our city, it lies in our duty to supply your wants. Clothes and 
 what else a human hand should give to one so suppliant, and so tamed with 
 calamity, you shall not want. We will show you our city and tell you the 
 name of our people. This is the land of the Fhaeacians, of which my father 
 Alcinous is king." 
 
 Then calling her attendants who had dispersed on the first sight of Ulysses, 
 she rebuked them for their fear, and said : "This man is no Cyclop, nor 
 monster of sea or land, that you should fear him ; but he seems manly, staid, 
 and discreet, and though decayed in his outward appearance, yet he has the 
 mind's riches, wit and fortitude, in abimdance. Show him the cisterns where 
 he may wash him from the sea-weeds and foam that hang about him, and let 
 him have garments that fit him out of those which we have brought with us to 
 the cisterns." 
 
 Ulysses retiring a little out of sight, cleansed him in the cisterns from the 
 soil and impurities with which the rocks and waves had covered all his body, 
 and clothing himself with befitting raiment, which the princess's attendants , 
 had given him, he presented himself in more worthy shape to Nausicaa. She 
 admired to see what a comely personage he was, now he was dressed in all 
 parts ; she thought him some king or hero : and secretly wished that the gods 
 would be pleased to give her such a husband. 
 
 Then causing her attendants to yoke her mules, and lay up the vestments, 
 which the sun's heat had sufficiently dried, in the coach, she ascended with her 
 maids, and drove off to the palace ; bidding Ulysses, as she departed, keep an 
 eye upon the coach, and to follow it on foot at some distance : which she did, 
 because if she had suffered him to have rode in the coach with her, it might have 
 subjected her to some misconstructions of the common people, who are always 
 ready to vilify and censure their betters, and to suspect that charity is not 
 always pure charity, but that love or some sinister intention lies hid under its 
 disguise. So discreet and attentive to appearance in all her actions was this 
 admirable princess. 
 
 Ulysses, as he entered the city, wondered to see its magnificence, its markets, 
 buildings, temples ; its walls and rampires ; its trade, and resort of rnen ; its 
 harbours for shipping, which is the strength of the Phseacian state. But when 
 he approached the palace, and beheld its riches, the proportion of its architec- 
 ture, its avenues, gardens, statues, fountains, he stood rapt in admiration, and 
 almost forgot his own condition in surveying the flourishing estate of others : 
 but recollecting himself, he passed on boldly into the inner apartment, where 
 the king and queen were sitting at dinner with their peers ; Nausicaa having 
 prepared them for his approach. 
 
 To them humbly kneeling he made it his request, that since fortune had cast 
 him naked upon their shores, they would take him into their protection, and 
 grant him a conveyance by one of the ships, of which their great Phseacian 
 state had such good store, to carry him to his own country. Having delivered 
 his request, to grace it with more humility, he went and sat himself down upon 
 the hearth among the ashes, as the custom was in those days when any would 
 make a petition to the throne. 
 
 He seemed a petitioner of so great state and of so superior a deportment, 
 that Alcinous himself arose to do him honour, and causing him to leave that 
 abject station which he had assumed, placed him next to his throne, upon a 
 chair of state, and thus he spake to his peers : 
 
 ' ' Lords and counsellors of Phjeacia ye see this man, who he is we know 
 not, that ii. come to us in the guise of a petitioner : he seems no mean one; 
 but whoever he is, it is fit, since the gods have cast him upon our protection, 
 
The Advenhires of Ulysses. 299 
 
 — — ^ 
 
 that we grant him the rites of hospitality, while he stays with us, and at his 
 departure, a ship well manned to convey so worthy a personage as he seems to 
 be, in a manner suitable to his rank, to his own country." 
 
 This counsel the peers with one consent approved ; and wine and meat being 
 set before Ulysses, he ate and drank, and gave the gods thanks who had stirred 
 up the royal bounty of Alcinous to aid him in that extremity. But not as yet 
 did he reveal to the king and queen who he was, or whence he had come ; only 
 in brief terms lie related his being cast upon their shores, his sleep in the 
 woods, and his meeting with the princess Nausicaa : whose generosity, mingled 
 with discretion, filled her parents with delight, as Ulysses in eloquent phrases 
 adorned and commended her virtues. But 'Alcinous, humanely considering 
 that the troubles which his guest had undergone required rest, as well as 
 refreshment by food, dismissed him early in the evening to his chamber ; where 
 in a magnificent apartment Ulysses found a smoother bed, but not a sounder 
 repose, than he had enjoyed the night before, sleeping upon leaves which he 
 had scraped together in his necessity. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The songs of Demodocus. The convoy home. The mariners transformed to stone. 
 The young shepherd. 
 
 When it was day-light, Alcinous caused it to be proclaimed by the heralds about 
 the town that there was come to the palace a stranger, shipwrecked on their 
 coast, that in mien and person resembled a god : and inviting all the chief 
 people of the city to come and do honour to the stranger. 
 
 The palace was quickly filled with guests, old and young, for whose cheer, 
 and to grace Ulysses more, Alciiious made a kingly feast with banqu'etings and 
 music. Then Ulysses being seated at a table next the king and queen, in 
 all men's view ; after they had feasted, Alcinous ordered Demodocus, the 
 court-singer, to be called to sing some song of the deeds of heroes, to charm 
 the ear of his guest. Demodocus came and reached his harp, where it hung 
 between two pillars of silver : and then the blind singer, to whom, in recom- 
 pense of his lost sight, the muses had given an inward discernment, a soul 
 and a voice to excite the hearts of men and gods to delight, began in grave and 
 Solemn strains to sing the glories of men highliest famed. He chose a poem, 
 whose subject was the stern strife stirred up between Ulysses and great Achilles, 
 as at a banquet sacred to the gods in dreadful language they expressed their 
 difference ; while Agamemnon sat rejoiced in soul to hear those Grecians jar : 
 for the oracle in Pytho had told him, that the period of their wars in Troy 
 should then be, when the kings of Greece, anxious to arrive at the wished con- 
 clusion, should fall to strife, and contend which must end the war, force or 
 stratagem. • 
 
 This brave contention he expressed so to the life, in the very words which 
 they both used in the quarrel, as brought tears into the eyes of Ulysses at the 
 remembrance of past passages of his life, and he held his large purple weed 
 before his face to conceal it. Then craving a cup of wine, he poured it out in 
 secret libation to the gods, who had put into the mind of Demodocus unknow- 
 ingly to do him so much honour. But when the moving poet began to tell of 
 other occurrences where Ulysses had been present, the memory of his brave 
 followers who had been with him in all difficulties, now swallowed up and lost 
 in the ocean, and of those kings that had fought with him at Troy, some of 
 whom were dead, some exiles like himself, forced itself so strongly upon his 
 mind, that forgetful where he was, he sobbed outright with passion ; which 
 yet he restrained, but not so cunningly but Alcinous perceived it, and without 
 
300 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 taking notice of it to Ulysses, privately gave signs that Demodocus should 
 cease from his singing. 
 
 Next followed dancing in the Phaeacian fashion, when they would show 
 respect to their guests ; which was succeeded by trials of skill, games of strengih, 
 running, racing, hurHng of the quoit, mock fights, hurUng of the javelin, 
 shooting with the bow : in some of which Ulysses modestly challenging hrs 
 entertainers, performed such feats of strength and prowess as gave the admiring 
 Phseacians fresh reason to imagine that he was either some god, or hero of the 
 race of the gods. ' 
 
 These solemn shows and pageants in honour of his guest, king Alcinous, 
 continued for the space of many days, as if he . could never be weary of show- 
 ing courtesies to so worthy a stranger. In all this time he never asked him his 
 name, nor sought to know more of him than he of his own accord disclosed : 
 till on a day as they were seated feasting, after the feast was ended, Demo- 
 docus being called, as was the custom, to sing some grave matter, sang how 
 Ulysses, on that night when Troy was fired, made dreadful proof of his valour, 
 maintaining singly a combat against the whole household of Deipbobus. to 
 which the divine expresser gave both act and passion, and breathed such a 
 fire into Ulysses' deeds, that it inspired old death with hfe in the lively ex- 
 pressing of slaughters, and rendered life so sweet and passionate in the hearers, 
 that all who heard felt it fleet from them in the narration : which made Ulysses 
 even pity his own slaughterous deeds, and feel touches of remorse, to see how 
 song can revive a dead man from the grave, yet no way can it defend a living 
 man from death : and in imagination he underwent some part of death's 
 horrors, and felt in his living body a taste of those dying pangs which he had 
 dealt to others ; that with the strong conceit, tears (the true interpreters of 
 unutterable emotion) stood in his eyes. 
 
 Which king Alcinous noting, and that this was now the second time that 
 he had perceived him to be moved at the mention of events touching the 
 Trojan wars, he took occasion to ask whether his guest had lost any friend or 
 kinsman at Troy, that Demodocus's singing had brought into his mind. Tlien 
 Ulysses, drying the tears with his cloak, and observing that the eyes of all the 
 company were upon him, desirous to give them satisfaction in what he could, and 
 thinking this a fit time to reveal his true name and destination, spake as follows : 
 
 ' ' The courtesies which ye all have shown me, and in particular yourself and 
 princely daughter, O king Alcinous, demand from me that I should no longer 
 keep you in ignorance of what or who I am ; for to reserve any secret from 
 you, who have with such openness of friendship embraced my love, would 
 argue either a pusillanimous or an ungrateful mind in me. Know then that I 
 am that Ulysses, of whom I perceive ye have heard something ; who heretofore 
 have filled the world with the renown of my policies. I am he by whose 
 counsels, if Fame is to be believed at all, more than by the united valour of 
 all the Grecians, Troy fell. I am that unhappy man whom the heavens and 
 ^"Sfy gods have conspired to keep an exile on the seas, wandering to seek my 
 home which still flies from me. The land which I am in quest of is Ithaca ; 
 in whose ports some ship belonging to your navigation-famed Phosacian state 
 may haply at some time have found a refuge from tempests. If ever you have 
 experienced such kindness, requite it now ; by granting to me, who am the 
 king of that land, a passport to that land. 
 
 Admiration seized all the court of Alcinous, to behold in their presence one 
 of the number of those heroes who fought at Troyj whose divine story had 
 been made known to them by songs and poems, but of the truth they had 
 little known, or rather they had hitherto accounted those heroic exploits as 
 fictions and exaggerations of poets ; but having seen and made proof of the 
 real Ulysses, they began to take those supposed inventions to be real verities, 
 and the tale of "Troy to be as true as it was delightful. 
 
Tlie Adventures of Ulysses. 301 
 
 Then king Alcinaus made answer : ' ' Thrice fortunate ought we to esteem 
 our lot, in having seen and conversed with a man of whom report hath spoken 
 so loudly, but, as it seems, nothing beyond the truth. Though we could desire 
 no felicity greater than to have you always among us, renowned Ulysses, yet 
 your desire having been expressed so often and so deeply to return home, we 
 can deny you nothing, though to our own loss. Our kingdom of Phasacia, as 
 you know, is chiefly rich in shipping. In all parts of the world, where there 
 are navigable seas, or ships can pass, our vessels will be found. You cannot 
 name a coast to which they do not resort. Every rock and deep quick-sand is 
 known to them that lurks in the vast deep. They pass a bird in flight ; 
 and with such unerring certainty they make to their destination, that some 
 have said they have no need of pilot or rudder, but that they move instinc- 
 tively, self-directed, and know the minds of their voyagers. Thus much, that 
 you may not fear to trust yourself in one of our Phasacian ships, To-morrow 
 if you please you shall launch forth. To-day spend with us in feasting : who 
 never can do enough when the gods send such visitors." 
 
 Ulysses acknowledged king Alcinous's bounty ; and while these two royal 
 personages stood interchanging courteous expressions, the heart of the princess 
 Nausicaa was overcome : she had been gazing attentively upon her father's 
 guest, as he delivered his speech ; but when he came to that part where he 
 declared himself to be Ulysses, she blessed herself, and her fortune, that in 
 relieving a poor shipwrecked mariner, as he seemed no better, she had con- 
 ferred a kindness on so divine a hero as he proved : and scarce waiting till 
 her father had done speaking, with a cheerful countenance she addressed 
 Ulysses, bidding him be cheerful, and when he returned home, as by her 
 father's means she trusted he would shortly, sometimes to remember to whom 
 he owed his life, and who met him in the woods by the river Calliroe. 
 
 " Fair flower of Phasacia," he rephed, " so may all the gods bless me with 
 the strife of joys in that desired day, whenever I shall see it, as I shall always 
 acknowledge to be indebted to your fair hand for the gift of life which I enjoy, 
 and all- the blessings which shall follow upon my horae-retum. The gods give 
 thee, Nausicaa, a princely husband ; and from you two spring blessings to this 
 state." So prayed Ulysses, his heart overflowing with admiration and grateful 
 recollections of king Alcinous's daughter. 
 
 Then at the king's request he gave them a brief relation of all the adventures 
 that had befallen him, since he launched forth from Troy : during which the 
 princess Nausicaa took great delight (as ladies are commonly taken with these 
 kind of travellers' stories) to hear of the monster Polyphemus, of the men 
 that devour each other in Lsestrygonia, of the enchantress Circe, of Scylla, 
 and the rest ; to which she Ustened with a breathless attention, letting fall a 
 shower of tears from her fair eyes every now and then, when Ulysses told of 
 some more than usual distressfulpassage in his travels : and all the rest of his 
 auditors, if they had before entertained a high respect for their guest, now felt 
 their veneration increased tenfold, when they learnt from his own mouth what 
 perils, what sufferings, what endurance, of evils beyond man's strength to 
 support, this much-sustaining, almost heavenly man, by the greatness of his 
 mind, and by his invincible courage, had struggled through. 
 
 The night was far spent before Ulysses had ended his narrative, and with 
 wishful glances he cast his eyes towards the eastern parts, which the sun had 
 begun to flecker with his first red : for on the morrow Alcinous had promised 
 that a bark should be in readiness to convoy him to Ithaca. 
 
 In the morning a vessel well manned and appointed was waiting for him ; 
 into which the king and queen heaped presents of gold and silver, massy plate, 
 apparel, armour, and whatsoever things of cost or rarity they judged would be 
 most acceptable to their guest : and the sails being set, Ulysses embarking 
 with expressions of regret took his leave of his royal entertainers, of the fair 
 
302 The Wprks of Charles Lamb. 
 
 princess (who had been his first friend), and of the peers of Phseacia; who 
 crowding down to the beach to have the last sight of their illmtrious visitant, 
 beheld the gallant ship with all her canvas spread, bounding and curveting 
 over the waves, lilce a horse proUd of his rider ; or as if she knew that in her 
 capacious womb's rich freightage she bore Ulysses. 
 
 He whose life past had been a series of disquiets, in seas among rude waves, 
 in battles amongst ruder foes, now slept securely, forgetting all ; his eye-lids 
 bound in such deep sleep, as only yielded to death : and when they reached 
 the nearest Ithacan port by the next morning, he Was stiU asleep. The 
 mariners not willing to awake him, landed him softly, and laid him in a cave 
 at the foot of an olive-tree, which made a shady recess in that narrow harbour, 
 the haunt of almost none but the sea-nymphs, which are called Naiads ; few 
 ships before this Phseacian vessel having put into that haven, by reason of the 
 difficulty and narrowness of the entrance. Here leaving him asleep, and dis- 
 ^posing in safe places near him the presents with which King Alcinous had dis- 
 missed him, they departed for Phasacia; where these wf etched mariners never 
 again set foot ; but just as they arrived, and thought to salute their country 
 earth; in. sight of their city's turrets, and in open view of their friends who 
 from the haclDour with shouts greeted their return ; their vessel and all the 
 mariners which were in her were turned to stone, and stood transformed and 
 fixed in sight of the whole Phseacian city, where it yet stands, by Neptune's 
 vindictive wrath ; who resented thus highly the contempt which those 
 Phaeacians had shown in convoying home a man whom the god had destined 
 to destruction. Whence it comes to pass that the Phasacians at this day will 
 at no price be induced to lend their ships to strangers, or to become the carriers 
 for other nations, so highly do they still dread the displeasure of the sea-god, 
 while they see that terrible monument ever in sight. 
 
 When Ulysses awoke, which was not till some time after the mariners had 
 departed, he did not at first know his country again, either that long absence 
 had made it strange, or that Minerva (which was more likely) had cast a cloud 
 about his eyes, that he should have greater pleasure hereafter in discovering 
 his mistake : but like a man suddenly awaking in some desert isle, to which 
 his sea-mates have transported him in his sleep, he looked around, and dis- 
 cerning no known objects, he cast his hands to heaven for pity, and complained 
 on those ruthless men who had beguiled him with a promise of conveying him 
 home to his country, and perfidiously left him to perish in an unknown land. 
 But then the rich presents of gold and silver given him by Alcinous, which he 
 saw carefully laid up in secure places near him, staggered him : which seemed 
 not like the act of wrongful or unjust men, such as turn pirates for gain, or 
 land helpless passengers in remote coasts to possess themselves of their 
 goods. 
 
 While he remained in this suspense, there came up to him a young shepherd, 
 clad in the finer sort of apparel, such as kings' sons wore in those days when 
 princes did not disdain to tend sheep, who accosting him, was saluted again 
 by Ulysses, who asked him what country that was, on which he had been just 
 landed, and whether it were a part of a continent, or an island. The young 
 shepherd made show of wonder, to hear any one ask the name of that land ; 
 as country people are apt to esteem those for mainly ignorant and barbarous 
 who do not know the names of places which are familiar to them, though 
 perhaps they who ask have had no opportunities of knowing, and may have 
 come from far countries. 
 
 " I had thought," said he, "that all people knew our land. It is rocky and 
 barren, to be sure ; but Well enough : it feeds a goat or an ox well ; it is not 
 wanting neither in wine nor in wheat ; it has good springs of water, some 
 fair rivers ; and wood enough, as you may see : it is called Ithaca." 
 
 Ulysses was joyed enough to find himself in his own country ; but so pru- 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 303 \ 
 
 dently he carried his joy, that dissembling his true name and quality, he 
 pretended to the shepherd that he was only some foreigner who by stress of 
 weather had put mto that port ; and framed on the sudden a story to make it 
 plausible, how he had come from Crete in a ship of Phasacia ; when the 
 young shepherd laughing, and taking Ulysses' hand in both his, said to 
 him : "He must be cunning, I find, who thinks to overreach you. What, 
 cannot you quit your wiles and your subtleties, now that you are in a state of 
 security ? must the first word with which you salute your native earth be an 
 untruth? and think you that you are unknown?" 
 
 Ulysses looked again ; and he saw, not a shepherd, but a beautiful woman, 
 whom he immediately knew to be the goddess Minerva, that in the wars of 
 Troy had frequently vouchsafed her sight to him ; and had been with him since 
 in perils, saving him unseen. 
 
 " Let not my ignorance offend thee, great Minerva," he cried, "or move thy 
 displeasure, that in that shape I knew thee not ; since the skill of discerning the 
 deities is not attainable by wit or study, but hard to be hit by the wisest of 
 mortals. To know thee truly through all thy changes is only given to those 
 whom thou art pleased to grace. To all men thou takest all likenesses. AH 
 men in their wits think that they know thee, and that they have thee. Thou art 
 wisdom itself. But a semblance of thee, which is false wisdom, often is taken 
 for thee : so thy counterfeit view appears to many, but thy true presence to 
 few : those are they which, loving thee above all, are inspired with hght from 
 thee to know thee. But this I surely know, that all thd time the sons of Greece 
 waged war against Troy, I was sundry times graced with thy appearance; but 
 since, I have never been able lo set eyes upon thee till now ; but have wandered 
 at my own discretion, to myself a blind guide, erring up and down the world, 
 wanting thee." 
 
 Then Mingrva cleared his eyes, and he knew the ground on which he stood 
 to be Ithaca, and that cave to be the same which the people of Ithaca had in 
 former times made sacred to the sea-nymphs, and where he himself had done 
 sacrifices to them a thousand times ; and full in his view stood Mount Nerytus 
 with all its woods : so that now he knew for a certainty that he vas arrived in 
 his own country, and with the delight which he felt Ije could not forbear stoop- 
 ing down and kissing the soil. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The change from a king to a beggar. Eumseus and the herdsmen. Telemachus. 
 
 Not long did Minerva suffer him to indulge vain transports, but briefly re- 
 counting to him the events which had taken place in Ithaca during his absence, 
 she showed him that his way to his wife and throne did not lie so open, but 
 that before he was reinstated in the secure possession of them, he must en- 
 counter many diflRculties. His palace, wanting its king, was become a resort 
 of insolent and imperious men, the chief nobihty of Ithaca and of the neigh- 
 bouring isles, who, in the confidence of Ulysses being dead, came as suitors to 
 Penelope. The queen (it was true) continued single, but was little better than 
 a state-prisoner in the power of these men, who under a pretence of waiting 
 her decision, occupied the king's house, rather as owners than guests, lording 
 and domineering at their pleasure, profaning the palace, and wasting the royal 
 substance, with their feasts and mad riots. Moreovert he goddess told him how, 
 fearing the attempts of these lawless men upon the person of his young son 
 Telemachus, she herself had put it into the heart of the prince, to go and seek 
 his father in far countries ; how in the shape of Mentor she had borne him 
 company in his long search ; which, though failing, as she meant it should fail, 
 
304 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 in its first object, had yet had this eifect, that through hardships he had 
 learned endurance, through experience he had gathered wisdom, and wherever 
 his footsteps had been he had left such meniorials of his worth, as the fame of 
 Ulysses' son was already blown throughout the world. That it was nowf not 
 many days since Telemachus had arrived in the island, to the great joy of the 
 queen his mother, who had thought him dead, by reason of his long absence, 
 and had begun to mourn for him with a grief equal to that which she endured 
 for Ulysses ; the goddess herself having so ordered the course of his adventures 
 that the time of his return should correspond with the return of Ulysses, that 
 they might together concert measures how to repress the power and insolence 
 of those wicked suitors. This the goddess told him ; but of the particulars of 
 his son's adventures, of his having been detained in the Delightful Island, which 
 his father had so lately left, of Calypso, and her nymphs, and the many strange 
 occurrences which may be read with profit and delight in the history of the 
 prince's adventures, she forbore to tell him as yet, as judging that he would 
 hear them with greater pleasure from the lips of his son, when he should have 
 him in an hour of stillness and safety, when their work should be done, and 
 none of their enemies left alive to trouble them. 
 
 Then they sat down, the goddess and Ulysses, at the foot of a wild oUve- 
 tree, consulting how they might with safety bring about his restoration. And 
 when Ulysses revolved In his mind how that his enemies were a multitude, and 
 he single, he began to despond, and he said, ' ' I shall die an ill death like 
 Agamemnon ; in the threshold of my own house I shall perish, Mke that unfor- 
 tunate monarch, slain by some one of my wife's suitors." But then again 
 calling to mind his ancient courage, he secretly wished that Minerva would but 
 breath such a spirit into his bosom as she enflamed him with in the day of 
 Troy's destruction, that he might encounter with three hundred of those impu- 
 dent suitors at once, and strew the pavemenis of his beautiful palace with their 
 bloods and brains. 
 
 And Minerva knew his thoughts, and she said, " I will be strongly with thee, 
 if thou fail not to do thy part. And for a sign between us that I will perform 
 my promise, and for a token on thy part of obedience, I must change thee, that 
 thy person may not be known of men." 
 
 Then Ulysses bowed his head to receive the divine impression, and Minerva 
 by her great power changed his person so that it might not be known. She 
 changed him to appearance into a very old man, yet such a one as by his limbs 
 and gait seemed to have been some considerable person in his time, and to 
 retain yet some remains of his once prodigious strength. Also, instead of 
 those rich robes in which King Alcinous had clothed him, she thVew over his 
 limbs such old and tattered rags as wandering beggars usually wear. A staff 
 supported his steps, and a scrip hung to his back, such as travelling mendicants 
 use, to hold the scraps which are given (o them at rich men's doors. So from 
 a king he became a beggar, as wise Tiresias had predicted to him in the 
 shades. 
 
 To complete his humiliation, and to prove his obedience by suffering, she 
 next directed him in this beggarly attire to go and present himself to his old 
 herdsman Eumaeus, who had the care of his swine and his cattle, and had 
 been a faithful steward to him all the time of his absence. Then strictly 
 charging Ulysses that he should reveal himself to no man but to his own 
 son, whom she would send to him when she saw occasion, the goddess went 
 her way. 
 
 The transformed Ulysses bent his course to the cottage of the herdsman, 
 and entering in at the front court, the dogs, of which Eumaeus kept many fierce 
 ones for the protection of the cattle, flew with open mouths upon him, as 
 those ignoble animals have oftentimes an antipathy to the sight of anything 
 like a beggar, and would have rent him in pieces with their teeth, if Ulysses 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 305 
 
 had not had the prudence to let fall his staff, which had chiefly provoked their 
 fury, and sal himself down in a careless fashion upon the ground ; but for all 
 that some serious hurt had certainly been done to him, so raging the dogs were, 
 had not the herdsman, whom the barking of the dogs had fetched out of the 
 house, with shouting and with throwing of stones repressed them. 
 
 He said, when he saw Ulysses, "Old father, how near you were to being 
 torn in pieces by these rude dogs ! I should never have forgiven myself, if 
 through neglect of mine any hurt had happened to you. But heaven has given 
 me so many cares to my pc(rtion, that I might well be excused for not attend - 
 ing to everything : while here I lie grieving and mourning for the absence of 
 that majesty which once ruled here, and am forced to fatten his swine and his 
 cattle for evil men, who hate him, and who wish his death ; when he perhaps 
 strays up and down the world, and has not wherewith to appease hunger, if 
 indeed he yet lives (which is a question) and enjoys the cheerful light of the 
 sun." This he said, little thinking that he of whom he spoke now stood before 
 him, and that in that uncouth'disguise and beggarly obscurity was present the 
 hidden majesty of Ulysses. 
 
 Then he had his guest into the house, and set meat and drink before him ; 
 and Ulysses said, "May Jove and all the other gods requite you for the kind 
 speeches and hospitable usage which you have shown me ! " 
 
 EumEBUs made answer, " My poor guest, if one in much worse plight than 
 yourself had arrived here, it were a shame to such scanty means as I have, if I 
 had let him depart without entertaining him to the best of my ability. Poor 
 men, and such as have no houses of their own, are by Jove himself recom- 
 mended to our care. But the cheer which we that are servants to other men 
 have to bestow, is but sorry at most, yet freely and lovingly I give it you. 
 Indeed there once ruled here a man, whose return the gods have set their faces 
 against, who, if he had been suffered to reign in peace and grow old among us, 
 would have been kind to me and mine. But he is gone ; and for his sake 
 would to God that the whole posterity of Helen might perish with her, since 
 in her quarrel so many worthies have perished. But such as your fare is, eat it, 
 and be welcome; such lean beasts as are food for poor herdsmen. The fattest 
 go to feed the voracious stomachs of the queen's suitors. Shame on theif 
 unwovthiness, there is no day in which two or three of the noblest of the herd 
 are not slain to support their feasts and their surfeits." 
 
 Ulysses gave good ear to his words, and as he ate his meat, he even tore it 
 and rent it with his teeth, for mere ve.xation that his fat cattle should be slain 
 to glut the appetites of those godless suitors. And he said, " What chief or 
 what ruler is this, that thou commendest so highly, and sayest that he perished 
 at Troy? I am but a stranger in these parts. It may be I have heard of some 
 such in my long travels." • > 
 
 Eumaeus answered, " Old father, never one of all the strangers that have 
 come to our coast with news of Ulysses being alive, could gain credit with 
 the queen or her son yet. These travellers, to get raiment or a meal, will 
 not stick to invent any lie. Truth is not the commodity they deal in. Never 
 did the queen get anything of them but lies. She receives all that come 
 graciously, hears their stories, inquires all she can, but all ends in tears and 
 dissatisfaction. But in God's name, old father, if you have got a tale, make 
 the most on't, it may gain you a cloak or a coat from somebody to keep you 
 warm : but for him who is the subject of it, dogs and vultures long since have 
 torn him limb from limb, or some great fish at sea has devoured him, or he 
 lieth with no better monument upon his bones than the sea-sand. But for me 
 psist all the race of men were tears created : for I never shall find so kind a 
 royal master more ; not if my father or my mother could come again and visit me 
 from the tomb, would my eyes be so blessed, as they should be with the sight 
 of him again coming as from the dead. In his last rest my soul shall love 
 
3o6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 him. He is not here, nor do I name him as a flatterer, but because I am 
 thanl;ful for his love and care which he had to me a poor man ; and if I knew 
 surely that he were past all shores that the sun shines upon, I would invclie 
 him iis a deified thing." 
 
 For this saying of Eumseus the waters stood in Ulysses' eyes, and he said, 
 " My friend, to say and to affirm positively that he cannot be alive, is to give 
 too much license to incredulity. For, not to speak at random, but with as 
 much solemnity as an oath comes to, I say to you that Ulysses shall return, 
 and whenever that day shall be, then shall you give to me a cloak and a coat ; 
 but till then, I will not receive so much as a thread of a garment, but rather go 
 nalied ; for no less than the gates of hell do 1 hate that man, whom poverty 
 can force to tell an untruth. Be Jove then witness to my words, that this very 
 year; nay ere this month be fully ended, your eyes shall behold Ulysses, 
 dealing vengeance in his own palace upon the wrongers of his wife and his 
 son." 
 
 To give the better credence to his words, he amused EurajEus with a forged 
 story of his life, feigning of himself that he was a Cretan bom, and one that 
 went with Idomeneus to the wars of Troy. Also he said that he knew Ulysses, 
 and related various passages which he alleged to have happened betwixt 
 Ulysses and himself, which were either true in the main, as having really happened, 
 between Ulysses and some other person, or were so hke to truth, as correspond- 
 ing with the known character and actions of Ulysses that Eumaeus' incredulity 
 was not a little shaken. Among other things he asserted that he had lately 
 been entertained in the court of Thesprotia. where the king's son of the 
 country had told him, that Ulysses had been there but just before him, and 
 was gone upon a voyage to the oracle of Jove in Dodona, whence he should 
 shortly return, and a ship would be ready by the bounty of the Thesprotians 
 to convoy him straight to Ithaca. "And in token that what I tell you is true," 
 said Ulysses, " if your king come not within the period which I have named, 
 yoii shall have leave to give your servants commandment to take my old 
 carcass, and throw it headlong from some steep rock into the sea, that poor 
 men, taking example by me, may fear to lie." But Eumaeus made answer that 
 that should be small satisfaction or pleasure to him. 
 
 So while they sat discoursing in this manner, supper was served in, and the 
 servants of the herdsman, who had been out all day in the fields, came in to 
 supper, and took their seats at the fire, for the night was bitter and frostv. 
 After supper, Ulysses, who had well eaten and drunken, and was refreshed 
 with the herdsman's good cheer, was resolved to try whether his host's hospi- 
 tality would extend to the lending him a good warm mantle or rug to cover him 
 in the night-season ; and framing an artful tale for the purpose, in a merry 
 mood, filling a cup of Greek wine, he thus began : 
 
 " I will you a story of your king Ulysses and myself. If there is ever a 
 time when a man may have leave to tell his own stories, it is when he has 
 drunken a little too much. Strong liquor driveth the fool, and moves even the 
 heart of the wise, moves and impels him to sing and to dance, and break forth 
 in pleasant laughters, and perchance to prefer a speech too which were better 
 kept in. When the heart is open, the tongue will be stirring. But you shall 
 hear. We led our powers to ambush once under the walls of Troy." 
 
 The herdsmen crowded about him eager to hear anything which related to 
 their king Ulysses and the wars of Troy, and thus he went on ': 
 
 " I remember, Ulysses and Menelaus had the direction of that enterprise, 
 and they were pleased to join me with them in the command. I was at that 
 time in some repute among men, though fortune has played me a trick since, as 
 you may perceive. But I was somebody in those times, and could do something. 
 Be that as it may, a bitter freezing night it was, such a night as this, the air 
 cut like steel, and the sleet gathered on our shields like crystal. There was 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 307 
 
 some twenty of us that lay close crouched down among the reeds and bulrushes 
 that grew m the moat that goes round the city. The rest of us made tolerable 
 shift, for every man had been careful to bring with him a good cloak or mantle 
 to wrap over his armour and keep himself warm ; but I, as it chanced had left 
 my cloak behind me, as not expecting that the night would .prove so cool or 
 rather I believe because I had at that time a brave suit of new armour on 
 which being a soldier, and having some of the soldier's vice about me vanity 
 I was not willing should be hidden under a cloak ; but I paid for my indiscre- 
 tion with my sufferings, for the, inclement night, and the wet of the ditch in 
 which we lay, I was well-nigh frozen to death ; and when I could endure no 
 longer, I jogged Ulysses who was next to me, and had a nimble ear, and made 
 known my case to him, assuring him that I must inevitably perish. He 
 answered in a low whisper, '■ Hush, lest any Greek should hear you, and take 
 Jiotice of your softness." Not a word more he said, but showed as if he had 
 nopityforthephght I was in. But he was as considerate as he was brave, 
 and even then, as he lay with his head reposing upon his hand, he was medi- 
 tating how to relieve me, without exposing my weakness to the soldiers. At last 
 raising up his head, he made as if he had been asleep, and said, ' Friends, I 
 have been warned in a dream to send to the fleet to king Agamemnon for a 
 supply, to recruit our numbers, for we are not sufficient for this enterprise ; ' 
 and they believing him, one Thoas was despatched on that errand, who 
 departing, for more speed, as Ulysses had foreseen, left his upper garment 
 behind him, a good warm mantle, to which I succeeded, and by the help of it 
 got through the night with credit. This shift Ulysses made for one in need, 
 and would to heaven that I had now that strength in my limbs, which made 
 me in those days to be accounted fit to be a leader under Ulysses ! I should 
 not then want the loan of a cloak or mantle, to wrap about me and shield my 
 old limbs from the night-air." 
 
 The tale pleased the herdsmen ; and Eumteus, who more than all the rest was 
 gratified to hear tales of Ulysses, true or false, said, that for his story he de- 
 served'a mantle, and a night's lodging, which he should have ; and he spread 
 for him a bed of goat and sheep skins by the fire; and the seeming beggar, 
 who was indeed the true Ulysses, lay down and slept under that poor roof, 
 in that abject disguise to which the will of Minerva had subjected him. 
 
 "When morning was come, Ulysses made offer to depart, as if he were not 
 willing to burthen his host's hospitality any longer, but said, that he would go 
 and try the humanity of the town's folk, if any there would bestow upon him 
 a bit of bread or a cup of drink. Perhaps'the queen's suitors (he said) out of 
 their full feasts would bestow a scrap on him : for he could wait at table, if 
 need were, and play the nimble serving-man, he could fetch wood (he said) or 
 build a fire, prepare roast meat or boiled, mix the wine with water, or do any 
 of those offices which recommended poor men like him to services in great 
 man's houses. 
 
 "Alas ! poor guest," said Eumosus, "you know not what you speak. 'What 
 should so poor and old a man as you do at the suitors' tables ? Their light 
 minds'are not given to such grave servitors. They must have youths, richly 
 tricked out in' flowing vests, with curled hair, like so many of Jove's cup- 
 bearers, to fill out the wine to them as they sit at table, and to shift thair 
 trenchers. Their gorged insolence would but despise and make a mock at t)iy 
 age. Stay here. Perhaps the queen, or Telemachus, hearing of thy arrival, 
 may send to thee of their bounty." 
 
 As he spake these words, the steps of one crossing the front court were 
 heard, and a noise of the dogs fawning and leaping about as for joy ; by 
 which token Eumseus guessed that it was the prince, who hearing of a 
 traveller being arrived at Eumasus's cottage that brought tidings of his father, 
 was come to search the truth, and Eumasus said: "It is the tread of Tele- 
 
3o8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 machus, the son of king Ulysses." Before he could well speak the words, 
 the prince was at the door, whom Ulysses rising to receive, Telemachus would 
 not suffer that so aged a man, as he appeared, should rise to do respect to 
 him, but he courteously and reverently took him by the hand, and inclined 
 his head to him, as if he had surely known that it was his father indeed : but 
 Ulysses covered his eyes with his hands, that he might not show the waters 
 which stood in them. And Telemachus said, " Is this the man who can tell 
 us tidings of the king my father? " 
 
 " He brags himself to be a Cretan born," said Eumaeus, "and that he has 
 been a soldier and a traveller, but whether he speak the truth or not, he alone 
 can tell. But whatsoever he has been, what he is now is apparent. Such as 
 he appears, I give him to you; do what you will with him ; his boast at pre- 
 sent is that he is at the very best a supplicant." 
 
 "Be he what he may," said Telemachus, "I accept him at your hands. 
 But where I should bestow him I know not, seeing that in the palace his age 
 would not exempt him from the scorn and contempt which my mother's 
 suitors in their light minds would be sure to fling upon him. A mercy if he 
 escaped without blows : for they are a company of evil men, whose profession 
 is wrongs and violence." 
 
 Ulysses answered : " Since it is free for any man to speak in presence of 
 your greatness, I must say that my heart puts on a wolfish inclination to tear 
 and to devour, hearing your speech, that these suitors should with such injus- 
 tice rage, where you should have the rule solely. - What should the cause be ? 
 do you wilfully give way to their ill manners? or has your government been 
 such as has procured ill-will towards you from your people ? or do you mis- 
 trust your kinsfolk and friends in such sort, as without trial to decline their 
 aid ? a man's kindred are they that he might trust to when e.'itremities ran 
 high." 
 
 Telemachus replied : ' ' The kindred of Ulysses are few. I have no brothers 
 to assist me in the strife. But the suitors are powerful in kindred and friends. 
 The house of old Arcesius has had this fate from the heavens, that from old 
 it still has been supplied with single heirs. To Arcesius Laertes only was 
 bom, from Laertes descended only Ulysses, from Ulysses I alone have sprung, 
 whom he left so young, that from me never comfort arose to him. But the 
 end of all rests in the hands of the gods." 
 
 Then Euma^us departing to see to some necessary business of his herds, 
 Minerva took a woman's shape, and stood in the entry of the door, and was 
 seen to Ulysses, but by his son she was not seen, for the presences of the gods 
 are invisible save to those to whom they will to reveal themselves. Never- 
 theless the dogs which were about the door saw the goddess, and durst not 
 bark, but went crouching and licking of the dust for fear. And giving signs 
 to Ulysses that the time was now come in which he should make himself 
 known to his son, by her great power she changed back his shape into the 
 same which it was before she transformed him ; and Telemachus, who saw 
 the change, but nothing of the manner by which it was effected, only he saw 
 the appearance of a king in the vigour of his age where but just now he had 
 seen a worn and decrepit beggar, was struck with fear, and said, "Some god 
 has done this house this honour," and he turned away his eyes, and would 
 have worshipped. But his father permitted not, but said, "Look better at 
 me ; I am no deity, why put you upon me the reputation of godhead ? I 
 am no more but thy father : I am even he ; I am that Ulysses, by reason of 
 whose absence thy youth has been exposed to such wrongs from injurious 
 men." Then kissed he his son, nor could any longer refrain those tears which 
 he had held under such mighty restraint before, though they would ever be 
 
 (forcing themselves out in spite of him ; but now, as if their sluices had burst, 
 they came out like rivers, pouring upon the warm cheeks of his son. Nor yet 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 3.09 
 
 by all these violent arguments could Telemachus be persuaded to believe that 
 it was his father, but he said, some deity had taken that shape to mock him ; 
 for he affirmed, that it was not in the power of any man, who is sustained by 
 mortal food, to change his shape so in a moment from age to youth : for "but 
 now," said he, "you were all wrinkles, and were old, and now you look as 
 the gods are pictured." 
 
 His father replied : ' ' Admire, but fear not, and know me to be at all parts 
 substantially thy father, who in the inner powers of his mind, and the unseen 
 workings of a father's love to thee, answers to his outward shape and pre- 
 tence ! There shall no more Ulysseses come here. I am he that after twenty 
 years' absence, and suffering a world of ill, have recovered at last the sight of 
 my country earth. It was the will of Minerva that I should be changed as 
 you saw me. She put me thus together ; she puts together or takes to pieces 
 whom she pleases. It is in the law of her free power to do it : sometimes to 
 show her favourites under a cloud, and poor, and again to restore to them their l 
 ornaments. The gods raise and throw down men with ease." I 
 
 Then Telemachus could hold out no longer, but he gave way now to a full ] 
 belief and persuasion, of that which for joy at first he could not credit, that it 1 
 was indeed his true and very father, that stood before him ; and they embraced, \ 
 and mingled their tears. " 
 
 Then said Ulysses, " Tell me who these suitors are, what are their numbers, I 
 and how stands the queen thy mother affected to them ? " 
 
 " She bears them still in expectation," said Telemachus, " which she never 
 means to fulfil, that she will accept the hand of some one of them in second 
 nuptials. For she fears to displease them by an absolute refusal. So from 
 day to day she lingers them on with hope, which they are content to bear the 
 deferring of, while they have entertainment at free cost in our palace." 
 
 Then said Ulysses, ' ' Reckon up their numbers that we may know their 
 strength and ours, if we having none but ourselves may hope to prevail against 
 them." 
 
 " O father," he replied, " I have oft-times heard of your fame for wisdom, 
 and of the great strength of your arm, but the venturous mind which your 
 speeches now indicate moves me even to amazement : for in no wise can it con- 
 sist with wisdom or a sound mind, that two should try their strengths against 
 a host. Nor five, or ten, or twice ten strong are these suitors, but many more 
 by much : from Dulichium came there fifty and two, they and their servants, 
 twice twelve crossed the seas hither from Samos, from Zacy.nthus twice ten, 
 of our native Ithacans, men of chief note, are twelve who aspire to the bed 
 and crown of Penelope, and all these under one strong roof, a fearful odds 
 against two ! My father, there is need of caution, lest the cup which your 
 great mind so thirsts to taste of vengeance, prove bitter to yourself in the 
 drinking. And therefore it were well that we would bethink us of some one 
 who might assist us in this undertaking." 
 
 " Thinkest thou," said his father, " if we had Minerva and the king of skies 
 to be our friends, would their sufficiencies make strong our part ; or must we 
 look out for some further aid yet ? " 
 
 "They you speak of are above the clouds," said Telemachus, "and are 
 sound aids indeed ; as powers that not only exceed human, but bear the 
 chiefest sway among the gods themselves." 
 
 Then Ulysses gave directions to his son, to go and mingle with the suitors, 
 and in no wise to impart his secret to any, not even to the queen his mother, 
 but to hold himself in readiness, and to have his weapons and his good armour 
 in preparation. And he charged him, that when he himself should come to 
 the palace, as he meant to follow shortly after and present himself in his 
 beggar's likeness to the suitors, that whatever he should see which might grieve 
 his heart, with what foul usage and contumelious language soever the suitors 
 
310 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 should receive his father, coming in that shape, though tHey should strike 
 and drag him by the heels along the floors, that he should not stir nor make 
 offer to oppose them, further than by mild words to expostulate with them, 
 until Minerva- from heaven should give the sign which should be the prelude 
 to their destruction. And Telemachus promising to obey his instructions 
 departed ; and the shape of Ulysses fell to what it had been before, and he 
 became to all outward appearance a beggar, in base and beggarly attire. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 The queen's suitors. The battle of the beggars. The armour taken down. The meet- 
 ing with Penelope. 
 
 From the house of Eumseus the seeming beggar took his way, leaning on his 
 staff, till he reached the palace, entering in at the hall where the suitors , sat 
 at meat. They in the pride of their feasting began to break their jests in 
 mirthful manner, when they saw one looking so poor and so aged approach. He 
 who expected no better entertainment was nothing moved at their behaviour, 
 but, as became the character which he had assumed, in a suppliant posture 
 crept by turns to every suitor, and held out his hands for some charity, with 
 such a natural and beggar-resembUng grace, that he might seem to have prac- 
 tised begging all his life ; yet there was a sort of dignity in his most abject 
 stoopings, that whoever had seen him, would have said. If it had pleased 
 heaven that this poor man -had been born a king, he would gracefully have 
 filled a throne. And some pitied him, and some gave him alms, as their pre- 
 sent humours inclined them, but the greater part reviled him, and bid him 
 begone, as one that spoiled their feast ; for the presence of misery has this 
 power with it, that while it stays, it can dash and overturn the mirth even of 
 those who feel no pity or wish to relieve it ; nature bearing this witness of 
 herself in the hearts of the most obdurate. 
 
 Now Telemachus sat at meat with the suitors, and knew that it was the king 
 his father, who in that shape begged an alms ; and when his father came and 
 presented himself before him in turn, as he had done to the suitors one by one, 
 he gave him of his own meat which he had in his dish, and of his own cup to 
 drink. And the suitors were past measure offended to see a pitiful beggar, as 
 they esteemed him, to be so choicely regarded by the prince. 
 
 Then Antinous, who was a great lord, and of chief note among the suitors, 
 said, ' ' Prince Telemachus does ill to encourage these wandering beggars, who 
 go from place to place, affirming that they have been some considerable peisons 
 in their time, filling the ears of such as hearken to them with lies, and pressing 
 with their bold feet into kings' palaces. This is some saucy vagabond, some 
 travelling Egyptian." 
 
 " I see," said Ulysses, " that a poor man should get but little at your board, 
 scarce should he get salt from your hands if he brought his own meat." 
 
 Lord Antinous, indignant to be answered with such sharpness by a supposed 
 beggar, snatched up a stool, with which he smote Ulysses where the neck and 
 shoulders join. This usage moved not Ulysses : but in his great heart he 
 meditated deep evils to come upon them all, which for a time must be kept 
 close, and he went and sat himself down in the doorway to eat of that which 
 was given him, and he said, "For life or possessions a man will fight, but for 
 his belly this man smites. If a poor man has any god to take his part, my 
 lord Antinous shall not live to be the queen's husband." , 
 
 Then Antinous raged highly, and threatened to drag him by the heels, and' 
 to rend his rags about his ears, if he spoke another word. 
 
 But the other suitors did in no wise approve of the harsh language, nor of 
 
I ■_ 
 
 ) The Adventures of Ulysses. 311 
 
 the blow which Antinous had dealt ; and some of them said, ' ' Who knows 
 but one of the deities goes about, hid under that poor disguise? for in the 
 lilteness of poor pilgrims the gods have many times descended to try the dis- 
 positions of men, whether they be humane or impious. " While these things 
 passed, Telemachus sat and observed all, but held his peace, remembering the 
 instructions of his father. But secretly he waited for the sign which Minerva 
 was to send from heaven. 
 
 That day there followed Ulysses to the court one of the common sort of 
 beggars, Irus by name, one that had received alms before-time of the suitors, 
 and was their ordinary sport, when they were inclined (as that day) to give way 
 to mirth, to see him eat and drink ; for he had the appetite of six men ; and 
 was of huge stature and proportions of body ; yet had in him no spirit nor 
 courage of a man. This man thinking to curry favour with the suitors, and 
 recommend himself especially to such a great lord as Antinous was, began to 
 revile and scorn Ulysses, putting foul language upon him; and fairly challeng- 
 ing him to fight with the fist. But Ulysses, deeming his railings to be nothing 
 more than jealousy and that envious disposition which beggars commonly 
 manifest to brothers in their trade, mildly besought him not to trouble him, 
 but to enjoy that portion which the liberality of their entertainers gave him, as 
 he did quietly ; seeing that, of their bounty, there was sufficient for all. 
 
 But Irus thinking that this forbearance in Ulysses was nothing more than a 
 sign of fear, so much the more highly stormed, and bellowed, and provoked 
 him to fight ; and by this time the quarrel had attracted the notice of the 
 suitors, who with loud laughters and shouting egged on the dispute, and lord 
 Antinous swore by all the gods it should be a battle, and that in that hall the 
 strife should be determined. To this the rest of the suitors with violent 
 clamours acceded, and a circle was made for the combatants, and a fat goat 
 was proposed as the victor's prize, as at the Olympic or the Pythian games. 
 Then Ulysses seeing no remedy, or being not unwiUing that the suitors should 
 behold some proof of that strength which ere long in their own persons they 
 were to taste of, stripped himself, and prepared for the comb.it. But first he 
 demanded that he should have fair play shown him, that none in that assembly 
 should aid his opponent, or take part against him, for being an old man they 
 might easily crush him with their strengths. And Telemachus passed his word 
 that no foul play siiould be shown him, but that each party should be left to 
 their own unassisted strengths, and to this he made Antinous and the rest of 
 the suitors swear. 
 
 But when Ulysses had laid aside his garments, and was bare to the waist, all 
 the beholders admired at the goodly sight of his large shoulders being of such 
 exquisite shape and whiteness, and at his great and brawny bosom, and the 
 youthful strength which seemed to remain in a man thought so old ; and they 
 said. What limbs and what sinews he has ! and coward fear seized on the mind 
 of that great vast beggar, and he dropped his threats and big words, and would 
 have fled, but lord Antinous stayed him, and threatened him that if he declined 
 the combat, he would put him in a ship, and land him on the shores where king 
 Echetus reigned, the roughest tyrant which at that time the world contained, 
 and who had that antipathy to rascal beggars, such as he, that when any 
 landed on his coast, he would crop their ears and noses and give them to the 
 dogs to tear. So Irus, in whom fear of king Echetus prevailed above the fear 
 of Ulysses, addressed himself to fight. But Ulysses, provoked to be engaged 
 in so odious a strife with a fellow of his base conditions, and , loathing longer 
 to be made a spectacle to entertain the eyes of his foes, with one blow which 
 he struck him beneath the ear, so shattered the teeth and jawbone of this soon 
 baffled coward, that he laid him sprawling in the dust, with small stomach or 
 ability to renew the contest. Then raising him on his feet, he led him bleeding 
 and sputtering to the door, and put his staff into his hand, and bid him go use 
 
312 The Works of Charles Lamb. \ 
 
 . his command upon dogs and swine, but not presume himself to be lord of the | 
 guests another time, nor of the beggary ! ' 
 
 The suitors applauded in their vain minds the issue of the contest, and 
 rioted in mirth at the expense of poor Irus, who they vowed should be fonh- 
 with embarked, and sent to king Echetus ; and they bestowed thanks on [ 
 Ulysses for ridding the court of that unsavoury morsel, as they called him ; : 
 but in their inward souls they would not have cared if Irus had been victor, 
 and Ulysses had taken the foil, but it was mirth to them to see the beggars 
 fight. In such pastimes and light entertainments the day wore away. 
 
 When evening was come the suitors betook themselves to music and dancing. 
 And Ulysses leaned his back against a piHar from which certain lamps hung 
 which gave light to the dancers, and he made show of watching the dancers, 
 but very different thoughts were in his head. And as he stood near the lamps, 
 the light fqll upon his head, which was thin of hair and bald, as an old man's. 
 And Euryniachus, a suitor, taking occasion from some words which were 
 spoken before, scoffed and said, " Now I know for a certainty that some god 
 lurks under the poor and beggarly appearance of this man, for as he stands 
 by the lamps, his sleek head throws beams around it, like as it were a glory." 
 And another said, "He passes his time too not much unlike the gods, lazily 
 living exempt from labour, taking offerings of men." " I warrant," said Eury- 
 machus again, ' ' he could not raise a fence or dig a ditch for his livelihood, 
 if a man would hire him to work in a garden." 
 
 " I wish," said Ulysses, " that you who speak this, and myself, were to be 
 tried at any task-work, that I had a good crooked scythe put in my hand, that 
 was sharp and strong, and you such another, where the grass grew longest, to 
 be up by day-break, mowing the meadows till the sun went down, not tasting 
 of food till we had finished, or that we were set to plough four acres in one 
 day of good glebe land, to see whose furrows were evenest and cleanest, or 
 that we might have one wrestling-bout together, or that in our right hands a 
 good steel-headed lance were placed, to try whose blows fell heaviest and 
 thickest upon the adversary's head-piece. I would cause you such work, as 
 you should have small reason to reproach me with being slack at work. But 
 you would do well to spare me this reproach, and to save your strength, till 
 the owner of this house shall return, till the day when Ulysses shall return, 
 when returning he shall enter upon his birthright." 
 
 This was a galling speech to those suitors, to whom Ulysses' return was 
 indeed the thing which they most dreaded ; and a sudden fear fell upon their 
 souls, as if they were sensible of the real presence of that man who did indeed 
 stand amongst them, but not in that form as they might know him ; and Eury- 
 machus, incensed, snatched a massy cup which stood on a table near, and 
 hurled it at the head of the supposed beggar, and but narrowly missed the 
 hitting of him ; and all the suitors rose, as at once, to thrust him out of the 
 hall, which they said his beggarly presence and his rude speeches had profaned. 
 But Telemachus cried to them to forbear, and not to presume to lay hands 
 upon a wretched man to whom he had promised protection. He asked if they 
 were mad. to mix such abhorred uproar with his feasts. He bade them take 
 their food and their wine, to sit up or to go to bed at their free pleasures, so 
 long as he should give licence to that freedom ; but why should they abuse his 
 banquet, or let the words which a poor beggar spake have power to move their 
 spleens so fiercely? 
 
 They bit their lips and frowned for anger, to be checked so by a youth ; 
 nevertheless for that time they had the grace to abstain, either for shame, or 
 that Minerva had infused into them a terror of Ulysses's son. ■ 
 
 So that day's feast was concluded without bloodshed, and the suitoiSi tired 
 with, their sports, departed severally each man to his apartment. Only Ulysses 
 and Telemachus remained. And now Telemachus, by his father's direction went 
 
Tlie Adventures of Ulysses. 313 
 
 and brought down into the hall armour and lances from the armoury : for 
 Ulysses said; "On the morrow we shall have need of them." And moreover 
 he said; "If any one shall ask why you have taken them down, say, it is to 
 clean them and scour them from the rust which they have gathered since the 
 owner of this house went for Troy." And as Telemachus stood by the 
 armour, the lights were all gone out, and it was pitch-dark, and the armour 
 gave out glistening beams as of fire, and he said to his father, " The pillars of 
 the house are on fire.". And his father said, " It is the gods who sit above the 
 stars, and have power to make the night as light as the day." And he took it 
 for a good omen. And Telemachus fell to cleaning and sharpening of the lances. 
 
 Now Ulysses had not seen his wife Penelope in all the time since his return ; 
 for the'qUeen did not care to mingle with the suitors at their banquets, but, as 
 became one that had been Ulysses' wife, kept much in private, spinning and 
 doing her excellent housewiveries among her maids in the remote apartments 
 of the palace. Only upon solemn days she would come down and show her- 
 self to the suitors. And Ulysses was filled with a longing desire to see his 
 wife again, whom fori twenty years he had not beheld, and he softly stole 
 through the known passages of his beautiful house, till he came where the 
 maids were lighting the queen through a stately gallery, that led to the 
 chamber where she slept. And when the maids saw Ulysses,' they said, " It is 
 the beggar who came to the court to-day, about whom all that uproar was 
 stirred up in, the hall: what does he here?" But Penelope gave command- 
 tnent that he should be broiight before her, for she said, " It may be that he 
 has travelled, and has heard something concerning Ulysses." 
 
 Then was Ulysses right glad to hear himself named by his queen, to find 
 himself in nowise forgotten, nor her great love towards him decayed in all that 
 time that he had been away. And he stood before his queen, and she knew 
 him not to be Ulysses, but supposed that he had been some poor traveller. 
 And she asked him of what country he was. 
 
 He told her (as he had before told tq Eumaeus) that he was a Cretan born, 
 and however poor and cast down he now seemed, no less a man than brother 
 to Idomeneus, who was grandson to king Minos, and though he now wanted 
 bread, he had once had it in his power to feast Ulysses. Then he feigned how 
 Ulysses, sailing for Troy, was forced by stress of weather to put his fleet in 
 at a port of Crete, where for twelve days he was his guest, and entertained by 
 him with all befitting guest-rites. And he described the very garments which 
 Ulysses had on, by which Penelope knew that he had seen her lord. 
 
 hi this manner Ulysses told his wife many tales of himself, at most but 
 painting, but painting so near to the life, that the feehng of that which she 
 took at her ears became so strong, that the kindly tears ran down her fair 
 cheeks, while she thought upon her lord, dead she thought him, and heavily 
 mourned the loss of him whom she missed, whom she could not find, though 
 in very deed he stood so near her. 
 
 Ulysses was mcred to see her weep, but he kept his own eyes as dry as 
 iron or horn in their lids, putting a bridle upon his strong passion, that it 
 should not issue to sight. 
 
 Then he told how he had lately been at the court of Thesprotia, and what 
 he had learned concerning Ulysses there, in order as he had delivered to 
 Eumaeus : and Penelope was won to believe that there might be a possibility 
 of Ulysses being alive, and she said, "I dreamed a dream this morning. 
 Methought I had twenty household fowl which did eat wheat steeped in water 
 from my hand, and there came suddenly from the clouds a crook-beaked hawk 
 who soused on them and killed them all, trus.sing their necks, then took his 
 flight back up to the clouds. And in my dream methought that I wept and 
 made great moan for my fowls, and fcr the destruction which the hawk had 
 made ; and my maids came about me to comfort me. And in the height of 
 
314 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 my griefs the hawk came back, and lighting upon the beam of ray chamber, 
 he said to me in a man's voice, which sounded strangely even in my dream, to 
 hear a hawk to speak : ' Be of good cheer,' he said, ' O daughter of Icarius; 
 for this is no dream which thpu hast seen, but that which shall happen to thee 
 indeed. Those household fowl which thou lamentest so without reason, are 
 the suitors who devour thy substance, even as thou sawest the fowl eat from 
 thy hand, and the hawk is tliy husband, who is coming to give death to the 
 suitors.' And I awoke, and went to see to my fowls if they were alive, whom 
 I found eating wheat from their troughs, ^1 well and safe as before my 
 dream." 
 
 Then said Ulysses, "This dream can endure no other interpretation than 
 that which the hawk gave to it, who is your lord, and who is coming quickly 
 to effect all that his words told you." 
 
 "Your words," she said, "my old guest, are so sweet, that would you sit 
 and please me with your speech, my ears would never let my eyes close their 
 spheres for very joy of your discourse ; but none that is merely morts^l can 
 live without the death of sleep, so the gods who are without death themselves 
 have ordained it, to keep the memory of our mortality in our minds, while we 
 experience that as much as we live we die every day : in which consideration I 
 will ascend my bed, which I have nightly watered with my tears since he 
 that was the joy of it departed for that bad city;" she so speaking, because 
 she could not bring her lips to name the name of Troy so much hated. So 
 for that night they parted, Penelope to her bed, and Ulysses to his son, and to 
 the armour and the lances in the hall, where they sat up all night cleaning and 
 watching by the armour. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 The madness from above. The bow of Ulysses. The slaughter. The conclusion. 
 
 When daylight appeared, a tumultuous concourse of suitors again filled the 
 hall ; and some wondered, and some inquired what meant that glittering store 
 of armour and lances which lay on heaps by the entry of the door ; and to all 
 that asked Telemachus made reply, that he had caused them to be taken down to 
 cleanse them of the rust and of the stain which they had contracted by lying 
 so long unused, even ever since his father went for Troy ; and with that 
 answer their minds were easily satisfied. So to their feasting and vain rioting 
 again they fell. Ulysses by Telemachus's order had a seat and a mess assigned 
 him in the door-way, and he had his eye ever on the lances. And it moved 
 gall in some of the great ones there present, to have their feast still dulled with 
 the society of that wretched beggar as they deemed him, and they reviled and 
 spumed at him with their feet. Only there was one Philaetius, who had some- 
 thing a better nature than the rest, that spake kindly to him, and had his age 
 in respect. He coming up to Ulysses, took him by the hand with a kind of 
 fear, as if touched exceedingly with imagination of his great worth, and said 
 thus to him, " Hail ! father stranger ! my brows have sweat to see the injuries 
 which you have received, and my eyes have broke forth in tears, when I have 
 only thought that such being oftentimes the lot of worthiest men, to this plight 
 Ulysses may be reduced, and that he now may wander from place to place as 
 you do ; for such who are compelled by need to range here and there, and have 
 I no firm home to fix their feet upon, God keeps them in this earth, as under 
 I water ; so are they kept down and depressed. And a dark thread is sometimes 
 i spun in the fates of kings." 
 
 I At this bare likening of the beggar to Ulysses, Minerva from heaven made 
 I the suitors for foolish joy to go mad, and roused them to such a laughter as 
 I would never stpp, they laughed without power of ceasing, their eyes stood full 
 
TTie Adventures of Ulysses. 315 
 
 of tears for violent joys ; but fears and horrible misgivings succeeded : and 
 one among them stood up and prophesied : "Ah, wretches ! " he said, " what 
 madness from heaven has seized you, that you can laugh? see you not that 
 your meat drops blood ? a night, like the night of death, wraps you about, 
 yqushriek without knowing it; your eyes thrust forth tears; the fixed walls, 
 and the beam that bears the whole house up, fall blood ; ghosts choke up the 
 entry ; full is the hall with apparitions of murdered men ; undef your feet is 
 hell ; the sun falls from heaven, and it is midnight at noon." But like men 
 whom the gods had infatuated to their destruction, they mocked at his fears, 
 and Eurymachus said, "This man is surely mad, conduct him forth into the 
 market-place, set him in the light, for he dreams that 'tis night within the house." 
 But Theoclymenus (for that was the prophet's name), whom Minerva had 
 graced with a prophetic spirit, that he foreseeing might avoid the destruction 
 which awaited them, answered and said : "Eurymachus, I will not require a 
 guide of thee, for I have eyes and ears, the use of both my feet, and a sane 
 mind within me, and with these I will go forth of the doors, because I 
 know the imminent evils which await all you that stay, by reason of thjs poor 
 guest who is a favourite with all the gods." So saying he turned his back 
 upon those inhospitable men, and went away home, and never returned to the 
 palace. 
 
 These words which he spoke were not unheard by Telemachus, who kept 
 still his eye upon his father, expecting fervently when he would give the" sign, 
 which was to precede the slaughter of the suitors. 
 
 They dreaming of no such thing, fell sweetly to their dinner, as joying in the 
 great store of banquet which was heaped in full tables about them ; but there 
 reigned not a bitterer banquet planet in all heaven, than that which hung over 
 ; them this day by secret destination of Minerva. 
 
 There was a bow which Ulysses left when he went for Troy. It had lain 
 by since that time, out of use and unstrung, for no man had strength to draw 
 that bow, save Ulysses. So it had remained, as a monttment of the great 
 strength of its master. This bow, with the quiver of arrows belonging thereto, 
 Telemachus had brought down from the armoury on the' last night along with 
 the lances ; and now Minerva, intending to do Ulysses an honour, put it into 
 the mind of Telemachus to propose to the suitors to try who was strongest to 
 draw that bow ; and he promised that to the man who should be able to 
 draw that bow, his mother should be given in marriage ; Ulysses' wife, the 
 prize to him who should bend the bow of Ulysses. 
 
 There was great strife and emulation stirred up among the suitors at those 
 words of the prince Telemachus. And to grace her son's words, and to confirm 
 the promise which he had made, Penelope came and showed herself that day 
 to the suitors ; and Minerva made her that she appeared never so comely in 
 their sight as that day, and they were inflamed with the beholding of so much 
 beauty, proposed as the price of so great manhood ; and they cried out, that if 
 all those heroes who sailed to Colchos for the rich purchase of the golden- 
 fleeced ram, had seen earth's richer prize, Penelope, they would not have made 
 their voyage, but would have vowed their valours and their lives to her, for she 
 was at all parts faultless. 
 
 And she said, "The gods have taken my beauty from me, since my lord 
 went for Troy." But Telemachus willed his mother to depart and not be 
 present at that contest, for he said, "It may be, some rougher strife shall 
 chance of this, than may be expedient for a woman to witness." And she 
 retired, she and her maids, and left the hall. 
 
 Then the bow was brought into the midst, and a mark was set up by prince 
 Telemachus : and lord Antinous as the chief among the suitors had the first 
 offer, and he took the bow and fitting an arrow to the string, he strove to bend 
 i, but not with all his might and main could he once draw together the ends 
 
3i6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 • 
 
 of that tough bow : and when he found how vain a thing it was to endeavour 
 to draw. Ulysses' bow, he delisted, blushing for shame and for mere anger. 
 Then Eurymachus adventured, but with no better success ; but as it had torn 
 the hands of Antinous, so did the bow tear and strain his hands, and marred 
 his delicate fingers, ^et could he not once stir the string. Then called he to 
 the attendants to brmg fat and unctuous matter, which melting at the fire, he 
 dipped the bow therein, thinking to supple it and make it more pliable, but 
 not with all the helps of art could he succeed in making It to move. After 
 him Liodes, and Amphinomus, and Polybus, and Eurynomus, and Polycto- 
 rides, assayed their strength, but not any one of them, or of the rest of 
 those aspiring suitors, had any better luck : yet not the meanest of them 
 there but thought himself well worthy of Ulysses' wife, though to shoot with 
 Ulysses' bow the completest champion among them was by proof found too 
 feeble. • 
 
 Then Ulysses prayed them that he might have leave to try ; and immediately 
 a clamour was raised among the suitors, because of his petition, and they 
 scorned and swelled with rage at his presumption, and that a beggar should 
 seek to contend in a game of such noble mastery. But Telemachusordered 
 that the bow should be given him, and that he should have leave to try, since 
 they had failed ; " for," he said, " the bow is mine, to give or to withhold : " 
 and none durst gainsay the prince. 
 
 Then Ulysses gave a sign to his son, and he commanded the doors of the 
 hall to be made fast, and all wondered at his words, but none could divine the 
 cause. And Ulysses took the bow into his hands, and before he essayed to 
 bend it, he surveyed it at all parts, to see whether, by long lying by, it had 
 contracted any stiffness which hindered the drawing ; and as he was busied in 
 the curious surveying of his bow, some of the suitors mocked him and said, 
 " Past doubt this man is a right cunning archer, and knows his craft well. See 
 how he turns it over and over, and looks into it as if he could see through 
 the wood." And others said, " We 'vish some one would tell out gold into our 
 laps but for so long a time as he shall be in drawing of that string." But 
 when he had spent some little time in making proof of the bow, and had 
 found it to be in good plight, like as a harper in tuning of his harp draws out a 
 string, 'with such ease or much more did Ulysses draw to the head the string of 
 his own tough bow, and in letting of it go, it twanged with such a shrill noise 
 as a swallow makes when i' sings through the air ; which so much amazed the 
 suitors, that their colours came and went, and the skies gave out a noise of 
 thunder, which at heart cheered Ulysses, for he knew that now his long labours 
 by the disposal of the fates drew to an end. Then fitted he an arrow to the 
 bow, and drawing it to the head, he sent it right to the mark which the prince 
 had set up. Which done, he said to Telemachus, "You have got no disgrace 
 yet by your guest, for I have struck the mark I shot at, and gave myself no 
 such trouble in teasing the bow with fat and fire, as these men did, but have 
 made proof that my strength is not impaired, nor my age so weak and con- 
 temptible as these were pleased to think it. But come, the day going down 
 calls us to supper, after which succeed poem and harp, and all delights which 
 use to crown princely banquetings." 
 
 So saying, he beckoned to his son, who straight girt his sword to his side, 
 and took one of the lances (of which there lay great store from the armoury) 
 in his hand, and armed at all points, advanced towards his father. 
 
 The upper rags which Ulysses wore fell from his shoulder, and his own 
 kingly likeness returned, when he rushed to the great hall door with bow and 
 quiver full of shafts, which down at his feet he poured, and in bitter words 
 presignified his deadly intent to the suitors. "Thus far," he said, "this 
 contest has been decided harmless : now for us there rests another mark, harder 
 to hit, but which my hands shall essay notwithstanding, if Phoebus, god of 
 
The Adventures of Ulysses. 317 
 
 archers, be pleased to give me mastery." With that he left fly a deadly arrow 
 at Antinous, which pierced him in the throat as he was in the act of lifting a 
 cup of wine to his mouth. Amazement seized the suitors, as their great 
 champion fell dead, and they raged highly against Ulysses, and said that it 
 should prove the dearest shaft which he ever let fly, for he had slain a man, 
 whose like breathed not in any part of the kingdom : and they flew to their 
 arms, and would have seized the lances, but Minerva struck them with dimness 
 of sight that they went erring up and down the hall, not knowing where to find 
 them. Yet so infatuated where they by the displeasure of heaven, that they 
 did not see the imminent peril whiqh impended over them, but every man 
 believed that this accident had happened beside the intention of the doer. 
 Fools ! to think by shutting their eyes to evade destiny, or that ^ny other cup 
 remained for them, but that which their great Antinous had tasted ! 
 
 Then Ulysses revealed himself to all in that presence, and that he was the 
 man whom they held to be dead at Troy, whose palace they had usurped, 
 whose wife in his lifetime they had sought in impious marriage, and that for 
 this reason destruction was come upon them. And he dealt his deadly arrows 
 among them, and there was no avoiding him, nor escaping from his horrid 
 person, and Telemachus by his side phed them thick with those murderous 
 lances from which there was no retreat, till fear itself made them valiant, and 
 danger gave them eyes to understand the peril ; then they which had swords 
 drew them, and some with shields, that could find them, and some with tables 
 and benches snatched up in haste, rose in a mass to overwhelm and crush those 
 two ; yet they singly bestirred themselves like men, and defended themselves 
 against that great host, and through tables, shields and all, right through the 
 arrows of Ulysses clove, and the irresistible lances of Telemachus ; and many 
 lay dead, and all had wounds, and Minerva in the likeness of a bird sate upon 
 the beam which went across the hall, clapping her wings with a fearful noise, 
 and sometimes the great bird would fly among them, cufiing at the swords, 
 and at the lances, and up and down the tiall would go, beating her wings, and 
 troubling everything, that it was frigthful to behold, and it frayed the blood 
 from the cheeks of those heaven-hated suitors : but to Ulysses and his son she 
 appeared in her own divine similitude, with her snake-fringed shield, a goddess 
 armed, fighting their battles. Nor did that dreadful pair desist, till they had 
 laid ail their foes at their feet. At their feet they lay in shoals ; like fishes, 
 when the fishermen break up their nets, so they lay gasping and sprawling at 
 the feet of Ulysses and his son. And Ulysses remembered the prediction of 
 1 iresias, which said that he was to perish by his own guests, unless he slew 
 those who knew him not. , , , t, , 1. 1. j 
 
 Then certain of the queen's household went up and told Penelope what had 
 happened, and how her lord Ulysses had come home, and had slain the suitors. 
 But she gave no heed to their words, but thought that some frenzy possessed 
 them or that they mocked her : for it is the property of such extremes of 
 sorrow as she had felt, not to believe when any great joy cometh. And she 
 •rated and chid them exceedingly for troubling her. But they the more persisted 
 in their asseverations of the truth of what they had affirmed ; and some of 
 them had seen the slaughtered bodies of the suitors dragged forth of the hall. 
 And they said, "That poor guest whom you talked with last night was 
 Ulysses Then she was yet more fully persuaded that they mocked her, and 
 she wept But they said, "This thing is true which we have told. We sat 
 within in an inner room in the palace, and the doors of the hall were shut on 
 us but we heard the cries and the groans of the men that were killed, but saw 
 no'thine till at length your son called to us to come iff, and entering we .saw 
 Ulvsses'standing in the midst of the slaughtered." But she persisting in her 
 unbelief, said, that it was some god which had deceived them to think it was 
 the person of Ulysses. 
 
3i8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 By this time Telemachus and his father had cleansed their hands from the 
 slaughter, and were come to where the queen was talking with those of her 
 household; and when she saw Ulysses, she stood motionless, and had no 
 power to speak, sudden surprise and joy and fear and many passlons.so strove 
 within her. Sometimes she was clear that it was her husband that she saw, and 
 sometimes the alterations which twenty years had made in his person (yet that 
 was not much) perplexed her that she knew not what to think, and for joy she 
 could not believe ; and yet for joy she would not but believe ; and, above all, 
 that sudden change from a beggar to a king troubled her, and wrought uneasy 
 scruples in her mind. But Telemachus seeing her strangeness, blamed her, and 
 called her an ungentle and tyrannous mother ! and said that she showed a too 
 ;gi=eat curiousness of modesty, to abstain from embracing his father, and to 
 have doubts of his person, when to all present it was evident that he was the 
 very real and true Ulysses. 
 
 Then she mistrusted no longer, but ran and fell upon Ulysses' neck, and 
 said, "Let not my husband be angry, that I held off so long with strange 
 delays; it is the gods, who severing us for so long time, have caused this, 
 unseemly distance in me. If Menelaus's wife had used ^half my caution, she 
 would never have. taken so freely to a stranger's bed ; and she might have 
 spared us all these plagues which have come upon us througli her shameless 
 deed." 
 
 These words with which Penelope excused herself, wrought more affection 
 in Ulysses than if upon a first sight she had given up herself impUcitly to his 
 embraces ; and he wept for joy to possess a wife so discreet, so answering to 
 his own staid mind, that had a depth of wit proportioned to his own,' and one 
 that held chaste virtue at so high a ;3rice, and he thought the possession of 
 such a one cheaply purchased with the loss of all Circe's delights, and Calypso's 
 immortality of joys ; and his long labours and his severe sufferings past seemed 
 as nothing, now they were crowned with the enjoyment of his virtuous and true 
 wife Penelope. And as sad men at sea whose ship has gone to pieces nigh 
 shore, swimming for their lives, all drenched in foam and brine, cra.wl up to 
 some poor patch of land, which they take possession of with as great a joy as if 
 they had the world given them in fee, with such delight did this chaste wife 
 cling to her lord restored, till the dark night fast coming on reminded her of 
 that more intimate and happy union when in her long-widow^ bed she should 
 once again clasp a living Ulysses. 
 
 So from that time the land had rest from the suitors. And the happy 
 Ithacans with songs and solemn sacrifices of praise to the .gods celebrated ■ 
 the return of Ulysses ; for he that had been so long absent was returned to 
 wreak the evil upon the heads of the doers ; in the place where they had dons 
 the evil, there wreaked he his vengeance upon them. 
 
Minor Tales: Juke yudkins. 315 
 
 mm Cales. 
 
 (77m New Monthly Magazine, June, 1826.) 
 
 [This whimsical character sketch, as originally published in the New Monthly was 
 entitled more exphcitly, " Reminiscences of Juke Judkins, Esq., of Birmingham. ]' 
 
 I AM the only son of a considerable brazier in Birmingham, who, dj-ing in 
 1803, left me successor to the business, with no other encumbrance than a sort 
 of rent-charge, which I am enjoined to pay out of it, of ninety-three pounds 
 sterling ^er annum, to his widow, my mother : and which the improving state 
 of the concern, I bless God, has hitherto enabled me to discharge with punc- 
 tuality. (I say, I am enjoined to pay the said sum, but not strictly obligated : 
 that is to say, as the will is worded, I believe the law would relieve me from the 
 payment of it; but the wishes of a dying parent should in some sort have the 
 effect of law). So that, though the annual profits of my business, on an 
 average of the last three or four years, would appear to an indifferent observer, 
 who should inspect my shop-books, to amount to the sum of one thousand 
 three hundred and three pounds, odd shillings, the real proceeds in that time 
 have fallen short of that sum to the amount of the aforesaid payment of ninety- 
 three pounds sterling annually. 
 
 I was always my father's favourite. He took a delight, to the very last, in 
 recounting the little sagacious tricks and innocent artifices of my childhood. 
 One manifestation thereof I never heard him repeat without tears of joy trick- 
 Mng down his cheeks. It seems that when I quitted the parental roof (Aug. 
 27, 1788), being then six years and not quite a month old, to proceed to the 
 Free School at Warwick, where my father was a sort of trustee, my mother — as 
 mothers are usually provident on these occasions— had stuffed the pockets of 
 the coach, which was to convey me and six more children of my own growth 
 i that were going to be entered along with, me at the same seminary, with a pro- 
 I digious quantity of gingerbread, which I remember my father said was more 
 I than was needed : and so indeed it was ; for, if I had been to eat it all myself, 
 it would have got stale and mouldy before it had been half spent. The con- 
 sideration whereof set me upon my contrivances how I might secure to myself as 
 much of the gingerbread as would keep good for the next two or three days, yet 
 none of the rest in manner be wasted. I had a little pair of pocket compasses, 
 which I usually carried about me for the purpose of making draughts and 
 measurements, at which I was always very ingenious, of the various engines 
 and mechanical inventions in which such a town as Birmingham abounded. 
 By means of these, and a small penknife which my father had given me, I cut 
 out the one half of the cake, calculating that the remainder would reasonably 
 serve my turn ; and subdividing it into many little slices, which were curious 
 to see for the neatness and niceness of their proportion, I sold it out in so many 
 pennyworths to my young companions as served us all the way to Warwick, 
 
320 The Works- of Charles Lamb. 
 
 which is a distance of some twenty miles from this town : and very merry, I 
 assure you, we made ourselves with it, feasting all the way. By this honest 
 straiagem I put double the prime cost of the gingerbread into my purse, and 
 secured as much as I thought would keep good and moist for my next two or 
 tliree days' eating. When I told this to my parents on their first visit to me at 
 Warwick, my father (good man) patted meon the cheek, and stroked my head, 
 and seemed as if he could never make enough of me ; but my mother un- 
 accountably burst into tears, and said, "it was a very niggardly action," or 
 some such expression, and that "she would rather it would please God to 
 talce me " — meaning (God help me !) that I should die — " than that she should 
 live to see me grow up a m-ean man : " which shows the difference of parent 
 fron parent, and how some mothers are more hSrsh and intolerant to their 
 children than some fathers ; when v^ might expect quite the contrary. My 
 f.itlier, however, loaded me with presents from that time, which made me the 
 envy of my school-fellows. As I felt this growing disposition in them, I 
 n.iturally sought to avert it by all the means in my power : and from that time I 
 used to eat my little packages of fruit, and other nice things, in a comer, so 
 privately that I was never found out. Once, I remember, I had a huge apple 
 sent me, of that sort which they call cats' -heads. I concealed this all day 
 under my pillow ; and at night, but not before I had ascertained that my bed- 
 ft^llow was sound asleep, — which I did by pinching him rather smartly two or 
 tliree times, which he seemed to perceive no more than a dead person, though 
 once or twice he made a motion as if he would turn, which frightened me, — I 
 say, when I had made all sure, I fell to work upon my apple ; and, though it 
 was as big as an ordinary man's two fists, I made shift to get through it before 
 it was time to get up. And a more delicious feast I never made ; thinking all 
 night what a good parent I had (I mean my father) to send me so many nice 
 things, whep the poor lad that lay by me had no parent or friend in the world 
 to send him anything nice ; and thirJcing of his desolate condition, I munched 
 and munched as silently as l-^could, that I might not set him a-longing if he 
 overheard me. And yet, for all this considerateness and attention to other 
 people's feelings, I was never much a favourite with my school-fellows ; which 
 I have often wondered at, seeing that 1 never defrauded any one of them of 
 the value of a halfpenny, or told stories of them to their master, as some little 
 lying boys would do, but was ready to do any of them all the services in my 
 power, that were consistent with my own well-doing. I think nobody can be 
 expected to go farther than that. But I am detaining my reader too long in 
 recording my juvenile days. It is time I should go forward to a season when 
 it became natural that I should have some thoughts of marrying, and, as they 
 say, settUng in the world. Nevertheless, my reflections on what I may call the 
 boyish period of my life may have their use to some readers. It is pleasant to 
 trace the man in the boy ; to observe shoots of generosity in those young years ; 
 and to watch the progress of liberal sentiments, and what I may call a genteel 
 way of thinking, which is discernible in some children at a very early age, and 
 usually lays the foundation of all that is praiseworthy in the manly character 
 afterwards. 
 
 With the warmest incUnations towards that way of life, and a serious convic- 
 tion of its superior advantages over a single one, it has been the strange infelicity 
 of my lot never to have entered into the respectable estate of matrimony. Yet 
 I was once very near it. I courted a young woman in my twenty-seventh year ; 
 for so early I began to feel sjjmptoms of the tender passion ! She was well to 
 do in the world, as they call it ; but yet not such a fortune, as, all things con- 
 sidered, perhaps I might have pretended to. It was not my own choice 
 altogether ; but my mother very strongly pressed me to it. She was always 
 putting it to me, rtat I had "comings-in sufficient,"— that I "need not stand 
 upon a portion ; " thot^h the young woman, to do her justice, had considerable 
 
Minor Tales: Juke Judkins. 321 
 
 expectations, which yet did not quite come up to my mark, as I told you be- 
 fore. My mother had this saying always in her mouth, that I had "money 
 enough ; " that it was time I enlarged my housekeeping, and to show a spirit 
 befitting my circumstances. In short, what with her importunities, and my own 
 desires in part co-operating, — for, as I said, I was not yet quite twenty-seven, 
 —a time when the youthful feelings may be pardoned if they show a little 
 impetuosity,— 1 resolved, I say, upon all these considerations, to set about the 
 business of courting in right earnest. I was a young man then ; and having a 
 spice of romance in my character (as the reader has doubtless observed long 
 ago), such as that sex is apt to be taken with, I had reason in no long time to 
 think my addresses were anything but disagreeable. Certainly the happiest 
 part of a young man's life is the time when he is going a-courting. All the 
 generous impulses are then awake, and he feels a double existence in partici- 
 pating his hopes and wishes with another being. Return yet again for a brief 
 moment, ye visionary views, — transient enchantments ! ye moonlight rambles 
 with Cleora in the Silent Walk at Vauxhall, (N.B.— About a mile from 
 Birmingham, and resembling the gardens of that name near London, only that 
 the price of admission is lower,) when the nightingale has suspended her notes 
 in June to listen to our loving discourses, while the moon was overhead ! (for 
 we generally used to take our tea at Cleora's mother's before we set out, not so 
 much to save expenses as to avoid the publicity of a repast in the gardens, — 
 coming in much about the time of half-price, as they call it,)— ye soft inter- 
 communions of soul, when exchanging mutual vows, we prattled of coming 
 felicities ! The loving disputes we have had under those trees, when this house 
 (planning our future settlement) wai rejected, because, though cheap, it was 
 dull ; and the other house was given up, because, though agreeably situated, it 
 was too high-rented ! — one was too much in the heart of the town, another was 
 too far from business. These minutiae will seem impertinent to the aged and 
 the prudent. I write them only to the young. Young lovers, and passionate 
 as being young (such were Cleora and I then), alone can understand me. After 
 some weeks wasted, as I may now call it, in this sort of amorous colloquy, we 
 at length fi.xed upon the house in the High Street, No. 203, just vacated by the 
 death of Mr. Hutton of this town, for our future residence. I had all the time 
 lived in lodgings (only renting a shop for business), to be near my mother, — 
 near, I say : not in the same house ; for that would have been to introduce 
 confusion into our housekeeping, which it was desirable to keep separate. Oh 
 ithe loving wrangles, the endearing differences, 1 had with Cleora, before we 
 could quite make up our minds to the house that was to receive us !— I pre- 
 tending, for argument's sake, the rent was too high, and she insisting that the 
 taxes were moderate in proportion ; and love at last reconciling us in the same 
 choice. I think at that time, moderately speaking, she might have had any- 
 thing out of me for asking. I do not, nor shall ever, regret that my character 
 at that time was marked with a tinge of prodigality. Age comes fast enough 
 upon us, and, in its good time, will prune away all that is inconvenient in these 
 excesses. Perhaps it is right that it should do so. Matters, as I said, were 
 ripening to a conclusion between us, only the house was yet not absolutely 
 taken, — some necessary arrangements, which the ardour of my youthful impetu- 
 osity could hardly brook at that time (love and youth will be precipijate),— some 
 preliminary arrangements, I say, with the landlord, respecting fixtures, very 
 necessary things to be considered in a young man about to settle in the world, 
 though not very accordant with the impatient state of my then passions, — some 
 obstacles about the valuation of the fixtures, — had hitherto precluded (and I 
 shall always think providentially) my final closes with his offer ; when one of 
 those accidents, which unimportant in themselves, often rise to give a turn to 
 the most serious intentions of our life, intervened, and put an end at once to my 
 projects of wiving and of housekeeping. 
 
 M 
 
/ 
 
 322 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 . I was never much given to theatrical entertainments ; that is, at no time of 
 my Mfe was I ever what they call a regular play-goer : but on some occasion of 
 a benefit-night, which was expected to be very productive, and indeed turned 
 out so, Cleora expressing a desire to be present, I could do no less than offer, 
 as I did very willingly, to squire her and her mother to the pit. At that time it 
 was not customary in our town for tradesfolk, except some of the very topping 
 ones, to sit, as they now do, in the boxes. At the time appointed I waited 
 upon the ladies, who had brought with them a young man, a distant relation, 
 whom it seems they had invited to be of the party. This a little disconcerted 
 me, as I had about me barely silver enough to pay for our three selves at the 
 door, and did not at first know that their relation had proposed paying for 
 himself. However, to do the young man justice, he not only paid for himself, 
 but for the old lady besides; leaving me only to pay for two, as it were. In 
 our passage to the theatre the notice of Cleora was attracted to some orange 
 wenches that stood about the doors vending their commodities. She was 
 . leaning on my arm ; and I could feel her every now and then giving me a 
 nudge, as it is called, which I afterwards discovered were hints that I should 
 buy some oranges. It seems it is a custom in Birmingham, and perhaps in 
 other places, when a gentleman treats ladies to the play,— especially when a full 
 night is expected, and that the house will be inconveniently warm, — to provide 
 them with this kind of fruit, oranges being esteemed for their coohng property. 
 But how could I guess at that, never having treated ladies to a play before, and 
 being, as I said, quite a novice at entertainments of this kind ? At last she 
 spoke plain out, and begged that I would buy some ef " those oranges." 
 pointing to a particular barrow. But, when I came to examine the fruit, I did 
 not think the quality of it was answerablesto the price. In this way I handled 
 several baskets of them ; but something in them all displeased me. Some had 
 thin rinds, and some were plainly over-ripe, which is as great a fault as not 
 being ripe enough ; and I could not (what they call) make a bargain. • While I 
 stood haggling with the woman, secretly determining to put off my purchase 
 till I should get within the theatre, where I expected we should have better 
 choice, the young man, the cousin (who, it seems, had left us without my 
 missing him), came running to us with his pockets stuffed out with oranges, 
 inside and out, as they say. It seems, not liking the look of the barrow-fruit 
 any more than myself, he had slipped away to an eminent fruiterer's, about 
 three doors distant, which I never had the sense to think of, and had laid 
 out a matter of two shillings in some of the best St. Michael's, I think, I 
 ever tasted. What a little hinge, as I said before, the most important affairs in 
 life may turn upon ! The mere inadvertence to the fact -that there was an 
 eminent fruiterer's within three doors of us, though we had just passed it with- 
 out the thought once occurring to me, which he had taken advantage of, lost 
 me the affection of my Cleora. From that time she visibly cooled towards me ; 
 and her partiality was as visibly transferred to this cousin. I was long unable 
 to account for this change in her behaviour ; when one day, accidentally dis- 
 coursing of oranges to my mother, alone, she let drop a sort of reproach to me 
 as if I had offended Cleora by my nearness, as she called it, that evening. 
 Even now, when Cleora has been wedded some years to that same officious 
 relation, as I may call him, I can hardly be persuaded that such a trifle could 
 have been the motive to her inconstancy ; for could she suppose that I would 
 sacrifice my dearest hopes in her to the paltry sum of two shillings, when I was 
 going to treat her to the play, and her mother too (an expense of more than 
 four times that amount), if the young man had not interfered to pay for the 
 latter, as I mentioned ? But the caprices of the sex are past finding out : and 
 I begin to think my mother was in the right ; for doubtless women know women 
 better than we can pretend to know them. 
 
Minor Tales: The Defeat of Time. 323 
 
 OR, A TALE OF THE FAIRIES. 
 ( William Hones Table Book, 1827.) 
 
 TiTANlA and her moonlight elves were assembled under the canopy of a huge 
 oak, that served to shelter them from the moon's radiance, which, being now 
 at her full moon, shot fo^th intolerable rays, — intolerable I mean to the subtile 
 texture of their little shadowy bodies, — but dispensing an agreeable coolness to 
 us grosser mortals. An air of discomfort sate upon the queen and upon her 
 courtiers. Their tiny friskings and gambols were forgot; and even Robin 
 Goodfellow, for the first time in his little airy life, looked grave. For the queen 
 had had melancholy forebodings of late, founded upon an ancient prophecy 
 laid up in the records of Fairyland, that the date of fairy existence should be 
 tken extinct when men should cease to believe in them. And she knew how 
 that, the race of the Nymphs, which were her predecessors, and had been the 
 guardians of the sacred floods, and of the silver fountains, and of the con- 
 secrated hills and woods, had utterly disappeared before the chilling touch of 
 man's incredulity ; and she sighed bitterly at the approaching fate of herself 
 and of her subjects, which was dependent upon so fickle a lease as the capri- 
 cious and ever-mutable faith of man. When, as if to realize her fears, a 
 melancholy shape came gliding in, and that was — Time, who with his intoler- 
 able scythe mows down kings and kingdoms ; at whose dread approach the 
 fays huddled together as a flock of timorous sheep ; and the most courageous 
 among them crept into acorn-cups, not enduring the sight of that ancientest of 
 monarchs. Titania's first impulse was to wish the presence of her false lord, , 
 King Oberon, — who was far away, in the pursuit of a strange beauty, a fay of 
 Indian Land, — that with his good lance and sword, like a faithful knight and 
 husband, he might defend her against Time. But she soon checked that 
 thought as vain ; for what could the prowess of the mighty Oberon himself, 
 albeit the stoutest champion in Fairyland, have availed against so huge a giant, 
 whose bald top touched the skies? So, in the mildest tone, she besought the 
 spectre, that in his mercy he would overlook and pass by her small subjects, as 
 too diminutive and powerless to add any worthy trophy to his renown. And she 
 besought him to employ his resistless strength against the ambitious children 
 of men, and to lay waste their aspiring works-; to tumble down their towers 
 and turrets, and the Babels of their prid2, — fit objects of his devouring scythe, 
 —but to spare her and her harmless race, who had no existence beyond a 
 dream; frail objects of a creed that lived but in the faith of the believer. And 
 with her little arms, as well as she could, she grasped the stern knees of Time; 
 and, waxing speechless with fear, she beckoned to her chief attendants and 
 maids of honour to come forth from ther hiding-places, and to plead the plea 
 of the fairies. And one of those small, delicate creatures came forth at her 
 bidding, clad all in white like a chorister, and in a low melodious tone, not 
 louder than the hum of a pretty bee — when it seems to be demurring whether 
 it shall settle upon this sweet flower or that before it settles, — set forth her 
 humble petition. "We fairies," she said, "are the most inoffensive race that 
 live, and least deserving to perish. It is we that have the care of ail sweet 
 
324 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 melodies that no discords may offend tlie sun, wlio is the great soul of music. 
 We rouse the lark at moin; and the pretty Echoes, which respond to all the 
 twittering choir, are of our making. Wherefore, great King of Years, as ever 
 you have loved the music which is raining from a morning cloud sent from 
 the messenger of day, the lark, as he mounts to heavens gate, beyond the 
 ken of mortals ; or if ever you have listened with a charmed ear to the night- 
 bird, that— 
 
 " ' In the flowery spring. 
 Amidst the leaves set, makes the thickets ring 
 Of our sour sorrows, sweeten'd with her song — ' 
 
 spare our tender tribes, and we will muffle up the sheep-bell for thee, that thy 
 pleasure take no interruption whenever thou shalt listen unto Philomel." 
 
 And Time answered, that "he had heard that song too long; and he was 
 even wearied with that ancient strain that recorded the wrong of Tereus. But, 
 if she would know in what music Time delighted, it was, when sleep and dark- 
 ness lay upon crowded cities, to hark to the midnight chime which is tolling 
 from a hundred clocks, like the last knell over the soul of a dead world ; or to 
 the crush of the fall of some age-worn edifice, which is as the voice of himself 
 when he disparteth kingdoms." 
 
 A second female fay took up the plea, and said, ' ' We be the handmaids of 
 the Spring, and tend upon the birth of all sweet buds : and the pastoral cow- 
 slips are our friends ; and the pansies and the violets, like nuns ; and the 
 quaking harebell is in our wardship ; and the hyacinth, once a fair youth, and 
 dear to Phosbus." 
 
 Then Time made answer, in his wrath striking the harmless ground with 
 his hurtful scythe, that " they must not think that he was one that cared for 
 flowers, except to see them wither, and to take her beauty from the rose." 
 
 And a third fairy took up the plea, and said, ' ' We are kindly things : and it 
 is we that sit at evening, and shake rich odours from sweet bowers upon dis- 
 coursing lovers, that seem to each other to be their own sighs; and we keep 
 off the bat and the owl from their privacy, and the ill-boding whistler ; and we 
 flit in sweet dreams across the brains of infancy, and conjure up a smile upon 
 its soft lips to beguile the careful mother, while its little soul is fled for a brief 
 minute or two tosport with our youngest fairies." 
 
 Then Saturn (which is Time) made answer, that " they should not think that 
 he delighted in tender babes, that had devoured his own, till foolish Rhea 
 cheated him with a stone, which he swallowed, thinking it to be the infant 
 Jupiter." And thereat, in token, he disclosed to view his enormous tooth, in 
 which appeared monstrous dents left by that unnatural meal ; and his great 
 throat, that seemed capable of devouring up the earth and all its inhabitants 
 at one meal. "And for lovers," he continued, " my delight is, with a hurrying 
 hand to snatch them away from their love-meetings by stealth at nights ; and, 
 in absence, to stand like a motionless statue, or their leaden planet of mishap 
 (whence I had my name), till I make their minutes seem ages." 
 
 Next stood up a male fairy, clad all in green, like a forester or one of Robin 
 Hood's mates, and, doffing his tiny cap, said, "We are small foresters, that 
 live in woods, training the young boughs in graceful intricacies, with blue 
 snatches of the sky between : we frame ail shady roofs and arches rude; and 
 sometimes, when we are plying our tender hatchets, men say that the tapping 
 woodpecker is nigh. And it is we that scoop the hollow cell of the squirrel, 
 and carve quaint letters upon the rinds of trees, which in sylvan solitudes 
 sweetly recall to the mind of the heat-oppressed swain, ere he lies down to 
 slumber, the name of his fair one, dainty Aminta, gentle Rosalind, or chastest 
 Laura, as it may happen." 
 
 Saturn, nothing moved with this courteous address, bade him be gone, or, 
 
Minor Tales: The Defeat of Time. 325 
 
 " if he would be a woodman, to go forth and fell oak for the fairies' coffins 
 which would forthwith be wanting. For himself he took no deliglit in 
 haunting the woods, till their golden plumage (the yellow leaves) were be- 
 ginning to fall, and leave the brown-black limbs bare, like Nature in her 
 skeleton dress." 
 
 Then stood up one of those gentle fairies that are good to man, and blushed 
 red as any rose while he told a modest story of one of his own good deeds. 
 " It chanced upoaa time," he said, " that while we were looking cowslips in 
 the meads, while yet the dew was hanging on the buds like beads, we found 
 a babe left in its swathing-clothes, — a little sorrowful, deserted thing, begot of 
 love, but begetting no love in others ; guiltless of shame, but doomed to shame 
 for its parents' offence in bringing it by indirect courses into the world. It was 
 pity to see the abandoned little orphan left to tlie world's care by an unnatural 
 mother. How the cold dew kept wetting its childish coats ! and its little hair, 
 how it was bedabbled, that was like gossamer ! Its pouting mouth, unknow- 
 ing how to speak, lay half opened like a rose-lipped shell ; and its cheek was 
 softer than any peach, upon which the tears, for very roundness, could not 
 long dwell, but fell off, in clearness like pearls, — some on the grass, and some 
 on his little hand ; and some haply wandered to tlie little dimpled well under 
 his mouth, which Love himself seemed to have planned out, but less for tears 
 than for smilings. Pity, it was, too, to see how the burning sun had scorched 
 its helpless limbs ; for it lay without shade or shelter, or mother's breast, for 
 foul weather or fair. So, having compassion on its sad plight, my fellows 
 and I turned ourselves into grasshoppers, and swarmed about the babe, mak- 
 ing such shrill cries as that pretty little chirping creature makes in its mirth, 
 till with our noise we attracted the attention of a passing rustic, a tender- 
 hearted hind, who, wondering at our small but loud concert, strayed aside 
 curiously, and found the babe, where it lay in the remote grass, and taking it 
 up, lapped it in his russet coat, and bore it to his cottage, where his wife kindly 
 nurtured it till it grew up a goodly personage. How tliis babe prospered after- 
 wards, let proud London tell. This was that famous Sir Thomas Cresham, 
 who was the chiefest of her merchants, the richest, the wisest. Witness his 
 many goodly vessels on the Thames, freighted with costly merchandise, jewels 
 from Ind, and pearls for courtly dames, and silks of Samarcand. And witness, 
 more than all, that stately Bourse (or. Exchange) which he caused to be built 
 a mart for merchants from east and west, whose graceful summit still bears' 
 in token of the faries' favours, his chosen crest, the grasshopper. And, like' 
 the grasshopper, may it please you, great king, to suffer us also to live, par- 
 takers of the green earth !" 
 
 The fairy had scarce ended his plea, w hen a shrill cry, not unlike the grass- 
 hopper's, was heard. Poor Puck— or Robin Goodfellow, as he is sometimes 
 called— had recovered a little from his first fright, and, in one of his mad 
 freaks, had perched upon the beard of oM Time, which was flowing, ample, 
 and majestic; and was amusing himself with plucking at a hair, which was 
 indeed so massy, that It seemed to him that he was removing some huge beam 
 of timber, mther than a hair : which Time, by some ill chance perceiving, 
 snatched up the Impish mischief with his great hand, and asked what it was. 
 
 ".A.las !" quoth Puck, "a little random elf am I, born in one of Nature's 
 sports ; a very weed, created for the simple, sweet enjoyment of myself, but 
 for jio other purpose, worth, or need, that ever I could learn, 'Tis I that bob 
 the angler's idle cork, till the patient man is ready to breathe a curse. 1 steal 
 the morsel from the gossip's fork, or stop the sneezing chanter in mid psahn ; 
 and when an infant has been bom with hard or homely features, moihers say 
 I changed the child at nurse: but to fulfil any graver purpose I have not wit 
 enough, and hardly the will. I am a pinch of hvely dust to frisk upon the 
 wind : a tear would make a puddle of me ; and so I tickle myself with the 
 
326 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 lightest straw, and shun all griefs that might make me stagnant. This is my 
 small philosophy." 
 
 Then Time, dropping him on the ground, as a thing too inconsiderable for 
 his vengeance, grasped fast his mighty scythe ; and now, not Puck alone, but 
 the whole state of fairies, had gone to inevitable wreck and destruction, had 
 not a timely apparition interposed, at whose boldness Time was astounded ; for 
 he came not with the habit or the forces of a deity, who alone might cope 
 with Time, but as a simple mortal, clad as you might see a forester that hunts 
 after wild conies by the cold moonshine ; or a stalker of stray deer, stealthy 
 and bold. But by the golden lustre in his eye, and the passionate wanness 
 n his cheek, and by the fair and ample space of his forehead, which seemed 
 a palace framed for the habitation of all glorious thoughts, he knew that this 
 was his great rival, who had power given him to rescue whatsoever victims 
 Time should clutch, and to cause them to live for ever in his immortal verse. 
 And, muttering the name of SHakspere, Time spread his roc-like wings, and 
 fled the controlling presence ; and the liberated court of the fairies, with 
 Titania at their head, flocked around the gentle gliost, giving him thanks, 
 nodding to him, and doing him courtesies, who had crowned them henceforth 
 with a permanent existence, to live in the minds of men, while verse shall have 
 power to charm, or midsummer moons shall brighten. 
 
 What particular endearments passed between the fairies and their poet, 
 passes my pencil to delineate; but, if you are curious to be informed, I must 
 refer you, gentle reader, to the " Plea of the Midsummer Fairies," a most 
 agreeable poem lately put forth by my friend Thomas Hood; of the first 
 half of which the above is nothing but a meagre and harsh prose abstract. 
 Farewell ! 
 
 The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. 
 
Essays. 327 
 
 ^\t ^ssags ni (ilk. 
 
 ' M 
 
 [The inijnitable Essays of Elia — Charles Lamb's masterpiece — came from the press 
 originally in a collected form, as a bright little volume entitled " Elia. Essays which 
 have appeared under that signature in the London Magazine." It was published in 
 1823, at 95, Fleet Street, by Messrs. Taylor and Hessey. Eleven years afterwards, 
 before its author's death, it was already out of print, a stray copy only by rare chance 
 being purchaseable at a book stall. The Note to the Publisher, the Dedication to the 
 Reader, and the Obituary of Elia, all of which are here subjoined, will speak for them- 
 selves.] 
 
 To J. Taylor, Esq: 
 Dear Sir, 
 
 I should like the enclosed Dedication to be printed, unless you dislike it. 
 I like it. It is in the olden style. But if you object to it, put forth the book 
 as it is. 
 
 Only pray don't let the Printer mistake the word curi for curst. 
 
 Dec. 7, 1822. C. L. 
 
 M 
 
 DEDICATION. 
 To THE Friendly and Judicious Reader. 
 
 Who will take these Papers as they were meant ; not understanding every 
 thing perseverely in the absolute and literal sense, but giving fair construction 
 as to an after-dinner conversation ; allowing for the rashness and necessary 
 incompleteness of first thoughts ; and not remembering, for the purpose of an 
 after taunt, words spoken peradventure after the fourth glass. The Author 
 wishes (what he would will for himself) plenty of good friends to stand by him, 
 good books to solace him, prosperous events to all his honest undertakings^ 
 and a candid interpretation to his most hasty words and actions. The other 
 sort (and he hopes many of them will purchase his book too) he greets with the 
 curt invitation of Timon, "Uncover, dogs, and lap;" or he dismisses them 
 with the confident security of the philosopher, ' ' You beat but on the case of 
 Dec. 7, 1S22. "ELIA." 
 
 Poor Elia — The real (for I am but a counterfeit) is dead. The fact is, a 
 person of that name, an Italian, was a fellow clerk of mine at the South Sea 
 House thirty (not forty) years ago, when the characters I described there 
 existed, but had left it like myself many years ; and I having a brother now 
 there, and doubting how he might relish certain descriptions in it, I clapped 
 down the name of Elia to it, which passed off pretty well, for Elia himself 
 added the function of an author to that of a scrivener like myself. I went the 
 other day (not having seen him for a year) to laugh over with him at my usur- 
 pation of his name, and found him, alas Tno more than a name, for he died of 
 consumption eleven months ago, and I knew not of it. 
 
 So the name has fairly devolved to me, I think ; and 'tis all he has left me. 
 
 yune ioth, Ti-2u C. LAMB. 
 
(The London Magazine, August, 1820.) 
 
 [As originally printed, this paper was rather more explicitly entitled, " Recollections 
 of the South-Sea House."] 
 
 Reader, in thy passage from the Bank— where thou hast been receiving thy 
 half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself) — to the 
 Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shackleweli, or some other thy 
 suburban retreat northerly, — didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, 
 handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left -where Threadneedle Street abuts 
 upon Bishopsgate ? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals 
 ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters, and 
 pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out— a desolation something 
 like BalcUitha's.* 
 
 This was once a house of trade,— a centre of busy interests. The throng of 
 merchants was here — the quick pulse of gaiip— and here some forms of business 
 are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen 
 stately porticoes ; imposing staircases ; offices roomy as the state apartments in 
 palaces - deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggUng clerics ; the still more 
 sacred interiors of court and committee-rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, 
 door-keepers — directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead 
 dividend), at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished 
 gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry;— the 
 oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, 
 of Queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty ;— huge 
 charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated ; —dusty maps of Mexico, 
 dim as dreams, — and soundings of the Bay of Panama !— The long passages 
 hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might defy 
 any, short of the last conflagration :— with vast ranges of cellarage under all, 
 where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an "unsunned heap," for Mammon 
 to have solaced his solitary heart withal, — long since dissipated, or scattered 
 into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous Bubble. 
 
 Such is the South-Sea House. At least, such it was forty years ago, when 
 I knew it, — a magnificent relic ! What alterations may have been made in it 
 since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time. I take for granted, has 
 not freshened it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. 
 A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were then 
 battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their 
 depredations, but other light generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork 
 among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a 
 superfoetation of dirt !) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, 
 save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the mode of | 
 book-keeping in Queen Anne's reign ; or, with less hallowed curiosity, seeking , 
 
 * I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate.— Ossian. [ 
 
Elia: The South-Sea House. 329 | 
 
 to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous hoax, whose extent the petty 
 peculators of our day look back upon with the same expression of incredulous 
 admiration, and hopless ambition of rivalry, as would become the puny face of 
 modem conspiracy contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot. 
 
 Peace to the manes of the Bubble I Silence and destitution are upon thy 
 walls, proud house, for a memorial I 
 
 Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living commerce,— amid 
 the fret and fever of speculation— with the Bank, and the 'Change, and the 
 India House about thee, in the hey-day of present prosperity, with their im- 
 portant faces, as it were, insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of business — 
 to the idle and merely contemplative, — to such as me, old house! there is a 
 charm in thy quiet : — a cessation— a coolness from business — an indolence 
 almost cloistral — ^which is delightful ! With what reverence have I paced thy 
 great bare rooms and courts at eventide ! They spoke of the past : — the shade 
 of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as 
 in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. 
 But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present 
 day could lift from their enshrining shelves — with their old fantastic flourishes, 
 and decorative rubric interlacings— their sums in triple columniations, set down 
 with formal superfluity of cyphers— with pious sentences at the beginning, 
 without which our religious ancestors never ventured to open a book of 
 business, or bill of lading— the costly vellum covers of some of them almost 
 persuading us that we are got into some belter library, — are very agreeable and 
 edifying spectacles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with complacency. 
 Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled penknives (our ancestors had everything 
 on a larger scale than we have hearts for) are as good as anything from Hercu- 
 laneum. The pounce-boxes of our days have gone retrograde. [ 
 
 The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House — I speak of forty ^ 
 years back— had an air very different from those in the public offices that I 
 have had to do with since. They partook of the genius of the place ! 
 
 There were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous 
 salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not much to do) persons of a 
 curious and speculative turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reason mentioned 
 before. Humorists, for they were of all descriptions ; and, not having been 
 brought together in early life (which has a tendency to assimilate the members 
 of corporate bodies to each other), but, for the most part, placed in this house 
 in ripe or middle age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits and 
 oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a common stock. Hence they 
 formed a sort of Noah's ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery. Domestic re- 
 tainers in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant fellows, 
 full of chat — and not a few among them had arrived at considerable proficiency 
 on the German flute. 
 
 The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. He had some- 
 thing of the choleric complexion of his countrymen stamped on his visage, 
 but was a worthy sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, pow- 
 dered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in carica- 
 tures of what were termed, in my young days, Maccaronies. He was the last 
 of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gib-cat over his counter all the fore- 
 noon, I think I see him making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous 
 fingers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter ; in his hypochon- 
 dry ready to imagine himself one ; haunted, at least, with the idea of the 
 possibility of his becoming one : his tristful visage clearing up a little over his 
 roast neck of veal at Anderton's at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a 
 little before his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house, which he 
 had frequented for the last five-and-twenty years), but not attaining the meri- 
 dian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The 
 
 U • 
 
330 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the 
 clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in the families which 
 this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte, his 
 glorified hour ! Ho* would he chirp, and expand over a muffin ! How would 
 he dilate into secret history I His countryman Pennant himself, in particular, 
 could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London — the 
 site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay — where Rosamond's pond 
 stood— the Mulberry Gardens— and the Conduit in Cheap— with many a 
 pleasant anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures 
 which Hogarth has immortalized in his picture of Noon, — the worthy descen- 
 dants of those heroic confessors, who, flying to this country, from the wrath of 
 Louis the Fourteenth and his dragoons, kept alive the flame of pure religion 
 in the sheltering obscurities of Hog Lane, and the vicinity of the Seven Dials ! 
 
 Deputy, under Kvans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air and stoop of a 
 nobleman. You would have taken him for one, ha'd you met him in one of the 
 passages leading to Westminster Hall. By stoop I mean that gentle bending 
 of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect 
 of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. 
 While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. 
 The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignifi- 
 cance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the 
 shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its 
 original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed him. What 
 was it then ? Was he rich ? Alas, no ! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both 
 he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all 
 times within. She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had 
 not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced 
 her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly un- 
 derstood, — much less can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of 
 day, — to the illustrious, but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was 
 the secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thought — the sentiment — the^bright 
 sohtarystar of your lives, — ye mild and happy pair, — which cheered you in the 
 night, of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station ! This was to you 
 instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of ghttering attainments : and it was 
 worth them all together. 'You insulted none with it ; but, while you wore it as 
 a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through iL 
 Dccua eisolamE7i. 
 
 Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither 
 pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He 
 ' ' thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the 
 greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle 
 reheved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the 
 Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His 
 fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle Street, which, without anything 
 very substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notions of 
 himself that lived in them — (I know not who is the occupier of them now*) 
 —resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert of " sweet breasts," as our 
 ancestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and orchestras- 
 chorus singers — first and second violoncellos— double basses— and clarionets— 
 who ate his cold mutton, and drank his punch, and praised his ear. He sate 
 like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of 
 
 * [I have since been informed, that the present tenant of them is a Mr. Lamb, a gentle- 
 man who is happy in the possession of some choice pictures, and among them a rare 
 portrait of Milton, which I mean to do myself the pleasure of going to see, and at the 
 same time to refresh my memory with the sight of old scenes. Mr. Lamb has the 
 character of a right courteous and communicative collector.] 
 
Elia: The South- Sea House. 331 
 
 creature. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished. 
 You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. Politics were 
 excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted. The whole 
 duty of man consisted in writing off dividend warrants. The striking of the 
 annual balance in the company's books (which, perhaps, differed from the 
 balance of last year in the sum of jf 25 is. 6d.) occupied his days and nights 
 for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as 
 they call them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of 
 the old stirring days when South-Sea hopes were young — (he was indeed equal 
 to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most iiourishing 
 company in these or those days) :— but to a genuine accountant the difference 
 of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farthing is as dear to his heart as 
 the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his 
 part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity. With Tipp form 
 was everything. His life was formal. His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. 
 His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the 
 world : he was plagued with incessant executorships accordingly, which excited 
 his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp 
 swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like 
 the grasp of the dying hand that commended their interests to his protection. 
 With all this there was about him a sort of timidity — (his few enemies used to 
 give it a worse name) — a something which, in reverence to the dead, we will 
 place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had 
 been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of 
 self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it 
 has nothing base or treacherous in its elements ; it betrays itself, not you : it is 
 mere temperament ; the absence of the romantic and the enterprising ; it sees 
 a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel in a 
 straw," when some supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box 
 of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a-balcony; or walked . 
 upon the ridge of a parapet ; or looked down a precipice ; or let off a gun; 
 or went upon a water-party ; or would willingly let you go if he could have 
 helped it : neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, 
 he ever forsook friend or principle. 
 
 Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common 
 qualities become uncommon? Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, the 
 polished man of letters, the author, of the South-Sea House? who never 
 enteredst thy office in a morning, or quittedst it in mid-day— (what didst thou 
 inanoffice?;— without some quirk that left.a sting! Thy gibes and thyjokes 
 are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good 
 fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee 
 terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a httle gone by in these fasti- 
 dious days— thy topics are staled by the " new-born gauds " of the time ;— but 
 great thou used to be in Public Ledgers, and in Chronicles, upon Chatham 
 and Shelbume, and Rockingham, and Howe, and Burgoyne, and CUnton, and 
 the war which ended in the tearing from Great Britain her rebellious colonies, 
 —and Keppel, and Wilkes, and Sawbridge, and Bull, and Dunnmg, and 
 Pratt, and Richmond,— and such small politics. 
 
 A httle less facetious, and a great deal more obstreperous, was tine rattlmg, 
 rattleheaded Plumer. He was descended, —not in a right line, reader (for his 
 lineal pretensions, like his personal, favoured a little of the smister bend), from 
 the Plumers of Hertfordshire. So tradition gave him out; and certam family 
 features not a little sanctioned the opinion. Certainly old Walter Plumer 
 (his reputed author) had been a rake in his days, and visited much in Italy, 
 and had seen the world. He was uncle, bachelor-uncle, to the fine old Whig 
 still living, who has represented the county in so many successive parliaments, 
 
332 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 and has a fine old mansion near Ware. Walter flourished in George the 
 Second's days, and was the same who was summoned before the House of 
 Commons about a business of franlcs, with the old Duchess of Marlborough. 
 You may read of it in Johnson's Life of Cave. Cave came off cleverly in that 
 business. It is certain our Plumer did nothing to discountenance the rumour. 
 He rather seemed pleased whenever it was, with all gentleness, insinuated. 
 But, besides his family pretensions, Plumer was an engaging fellow, and sang 
 gloriously.—— 
 
 Not so sweetly sang Plumber as thou sangest, mild, child-like, pastoral 
 
 M ; a flute's breathing less divinely whispering than thy Arcadian melodies, 
 
 when in tones worthy of Arden, thou didst chant that song sung by Amiens to 
 the banished Duke, which proclaims the winter wind more lenient than for a 
 
 man to be ungrateful. Thy sire was old surly M , the unapproachable 
 
 churchwarden of Bishopsgate. He knew not what he did, when he begat 
 thee, like spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter : — only unfortunate in 
 thy ending, which should have been mild, conciliatory, swan-like. 
 
 Much remains to sing. Many fantastic shapes rise up, but they must be 
 mine in private :— already I have fooled the reader to the top of his bent; — 
 else could I omit that strange creature WooUett, who existed in trying the 
 question, and bought litigations ?— and still stranger, inimitable, solemn Hep- 
 worth, from whose gravity Newton might have deduced the law of gravitation. 
 How profoundly would he nib a pen— with what deliberation would he wet a 
 wafer ! 
 
 But it is time to close — night's wheels are rattling fast over me— it is proper 
 to have done with this solemn mockery. 
 
 Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while — peradv^nture 
 the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic, insub- 
 stantial — like Henry Pimpernel, and old John Naps of Greece : 
 
 Be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their im- 
 portance is from the past. 
 
 (Tht London Mngaiine, October, 1820.) 
 
 tElia, upon his second appearance, came fairly to the front, his contribution assuming 
 
 Colleges of Cambridee. L ,' referred to in the last bracketed note, meaDt Charles 
 
 Lamb himself, who had actually perpetrated the joke there named at the expense of 
 Dyer's credulity. 1 
 
 Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article, as the wary con- 
 noisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads, seems as though it 
 read not), never fails to consult the guis sculpsit in the comer, before he pro- 
 nounces some rare piece to ',c a Viyares, or a Woollet methinks I hear 
 
 you exclaim, render, Who is Elia f 
 
Elia : Oxford in the Vacation. 333 
 
 Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgotten humours 
 of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since gone to 
 decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the 
 self-same college— a votary of the desk— a notched and cropt scrivener— one 
 that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a 
 quill. 
 
 Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my humour, 
 my fancy— in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your man of letters 
 requires some relaxation— (and none better than such as at first sight seems 
 most abhorrent from his beloved studies)— to while away some good hours of 
 my time in the contemplation of indigoes, cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, 
 
 flowered or otherwise. In the first place and then it sends you 
 
 home with such increased appetite to your books not to say, that 
 
 your otitside sheets, and waste wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, 
 most kindly and naturally, the impression of sonnets, epigrams, essays — so 
 that the very parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of 
 an author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among 
 the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over 
 the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation. It feels its promotion. 
 ...... So that you see, upon the whole, the literary dignity of Elia is 
 
 very little, if at all, compromised in the condescension. 
 
 Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities incidental to the 
 life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain flaws, whicl» a 
 ciinning carper might be able to pick in this Joseph's vest. And here 1 must 
 have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition, and doing-away 
 with altogether, of those consolatory interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, 
 through the four seasons, — the red-letter days, now become, to all intents and 
 purposes, dead-letter days. There was Paul, and Stephen, "and Barnabas- 
 Andrew and John, men famous in old times ; 
 
 — we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as I was at school 
 at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the same token, in the old Basket 
 Prayer-book. There hung Peter in his uneasy posture— holy Bartlemy iri the 
 troublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti. — I 
 honoured them all, and could almost have wept the defalcation of Iscariot— so 
 much did we love to keep holy memories sacred : - only methought I a little 
 grudged at the coalition of the better Jude with Simon — clubbing (as it were) 
 their sanctities together, to make up one poor gaudy-day between them— as an 
 economy unworthy of the dispensation. 
 
 These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life — "far off their 
 coming shone. " — I was as good as an almanac in those days. I could have told 
 you such a saint 's-day falls out next week, or the week after. Peradventnre 
 the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity, would, once in six years, merge 
 in a Sabbath. Now am I little better than one of the profane. Let me not 
 be thought to arraign the wisdom of my civil superiors, who have judged the 
 further observation of these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious. Only in 
 a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses the Bishops had, 
 in decency, been first sounded — but I am wading out of my depths. I am not 
 the man to decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical 'authority — I am plain 
 Elia— no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher — though at present in the thick of 
 their books, here in the heart of learning, under the shadow of the mighty 
 Bodley. 
 
 I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a one as my- 
 self, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of academic 
 institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle weeks at, as one 
 or other of the Universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year, 
 
 , 
 
334 -^^^ Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 falls in so pat with ours. Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy 
 myself of what degree or standing I please. I ^eem admitted ad eundem. 1 
 fetch up past opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it 
 rings for me. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When 
 the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, 
 I proceed Master of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that 
 respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in 
 spectacles, drop a bow or curtsey, as I pass, wisely mistaking me for some- 
 thing of the sort. I go about in black, which favours the notion. Only in 
 Christ Church reverend quadrangle, I can be content to pass for nothing short 
 of a Seraphic Doctor. 
 
 The walks at these times are so much one's own, — the tall trees of Christ's, 
 the groves of Magdalen ! The halls deserted, and with open doors, inviting 
 one to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder, or noble or 
 royal Benefactress (that should have been ours) whose portrait seems to smile . 
 upon their over-looked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, to 
 take a peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique 
 hospitality : the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial re- 
 cesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago ; ahd spits which 
 have cooked for Chaucer ! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but 
 is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Manciple. 
 Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art 
 everything ! When thou wert^ thou wert not antiquity — then thou wert 
 nothing, but hadst a x^xnoXsx antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with 
 blind veneration ; thou thyself being to thyself fiat, jejune, modern ! What 
 mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses * are we, that cannot 
 look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert ! The 
 mighty future is is> nothing, being everything ! the past is everything, being 
 nothing ! 
 
 What were thy dark ages f Surely the sun rose as brightly then as now, and 
 man got him to his work in the morning. Why is it that we can never hear 
 mention of them without an accompanying feeling, as though a palpable 
 obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to 
 and fro groping ! 
 Above all thy rarities, old Oxenford, what do most arride and solace me, are 
 
 thy repositories of mouldering learning, thy shelves 
 
 What a place to be in is an old library ! It seems as though all the souls of 
 all the writers, that' have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were re- 
 posing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, 
 to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade. 
 I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage ; and the odour of their 
 old moth-scented coverings is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential 
 apples which grew amid the happy orchard. 
 Still less have I curiosity to disturb the elder repose of MSS.f Those var/(S 
 
 * Januses of one face.— Sir Thomas Browne, 
 
 t [There is something- to me repugnant at any time in written hand. The text never 
 seems determinate. Print settles it. I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown 
 beauty— as springing up with all its parts absolute— till, in an evil hour, I was shown the 
 original written copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the 
 library of Trinity, kept like some treasure, to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them 
 in the Cam, or sent them after the latter cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How 
 it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore ! interlined, corrected ! as if their words 
 were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure ! as if they might have been otherwise, 
 and just as good ! as if inspiration were made up of parts, and those fluctuating> succes- 
 sive, indifferent ! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again, nor desire 
 a sight of his picture till it is fairly off the easel ; no, not if Raphpel were to be alive 
 agam, and painting another Galatea.] 
 
Elia: Oxford in the Vacation. 335 
 
 liction-es, so tempting to the more eradite palates, do but disturb and unsettle 
 my faith. I am no Herculanean raker. The credit of the three witnesses 
 might have slept unimpeached for me. I leave these curiosities to Porson, and 
 to G. D. — whom, by the way, I found busy as a moth over some rotten 
 archive, rummaged out of some seldom-explored press, in a nook at Oriel. 
 With long poring, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as passive as 
 one by the side of thfe old shelves. I longed to new-coat him in Russia, and 
 assign him his place. He might have mustered for a tall Scapula. 
 
 D. is assiduous in hi^ visits to these seats of learning. No inconsiderable 
 portion of his moderate fortune, I apprehend, is consumed in journeys be- 
 tween them and Clifford's Inn — -where, like a dove on the asp's nest, he has 
 long taken up his unconscious abode, amid an incongruous assembly of 
 attorneys' clerks, apparitors, promoters, vermin of the law, among whom he 
 sits, " in calm and sinless peace." The fangs of the law pierce him not — the 
 winds of litigation blow over his humble chambers — the hard sheriff's officer 
 moves his hat as he passes — legal nor illegal discourtesy touches him— none 
 thinks of offering violence or injustice to him* — you would as soon " strike an 
 abstract idea." » 
 
 D. has been engaged, he tells me, through a course of laborious years, in 
 an investigation into all curious matter connected with the two Universities ; 
 
 and has lately lit upon a MS. collection of charters, relative to C , by 
 
 which he hopes to settle some disputed points — particularly that long contro- 
 versy between them as to priority of foundation. The ardour with which he 
 engages in these liberal pursuits, I am afraid, has not met with all the en- 
 couragement it deserved, either here, or at C . Your caputs, and heads of 
 
 Colleges, care less than anybody else about these questions. — Contented to 
 suck the milky fountains of their Alma Maters, without inquiring into the 
 venerable gentlewomen's years, they rather hold such curiosities to be imper- 
 tinent-runreverend. They have their good glebe lands in mauu, and care 
 not much to rake into the title-deeds. I gather at least so much from other 
 sources, for D. is not a man to complain. 
 
 D. started like an unbroke heifer, when I interrupted hnn. A priori it was 
 not very probable that we should have met in Oriel. But D. would have done 
 the same, had I accosted him on the sudden in his own walks in Clifford's Inn, 
 or in the Temple. In addition to a provoking shortsightedness (the effect of 
 late studies and watchings at the midnight oil) D. is the most absent of men. 
 He made a call the other morning at our friend AT' s in Bedford Square ; and 
 finding nobody at home, was ushered into the hall, where asking for pen and 
 ink, with great exactitude of purpose he enters me his name in the book — which 
 ordinarily lies about in such places, to record the failures of the untimely or 
 unfortunate visitor — and takes his leave with many ceremonies, and professions 
 of regret. Some two or three hours after, his walking destinies returned him 
 into the same neighbourhood again, and again the quiet image of the fire-side 
 circle at A/.'j— Mrs. M. presiding at it like a Queen Lar, with pretty A.S. at 
 her side — striking irresistibly on his fancy, he makes another call (forgetting 
 that they were "certainly not to return from the country before that day 
 week ") and disappointed a second time. Inquires for pen and paper as before : 
 again the book is brought, and in the line just above that in which he is about 
 
 * [Violence or injustice, certainly none, Mr. Elia. Butyou will acknowledge that the 
 charming unsuspectingness of our friend has sometimes laid him open to .attacks, which, 
 though savouring (we hope) more of waggery than of malice — such is our unfeigned 
 respect for G. D.— might, we think, much better-have been omitted. Such was that sillv 
 
 joke of L , who, at the time tne question of the Scotch novels was first agitated, 
 
 gravely a.ssured our friend — who as gravely went about repeating it in all companies — 
 that Lord Castlereagh had acknowledged himself to be the author of Waverley \—Noie, 
 110 1 by Elia,\ 
 
336 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 to print his second name (his re-script) — his first name (scarce dry) looks out 
 upon him another Sosia, or as if a man should suddenly encounter his own dupli- 
 cate ! The effect may be conceived. D. made many a good resolution 
 against any such lapses in future. I hope he will not keep them too 
 rigorously. 
 
 For with G. D. — to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to speak it 
 profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when, personally 
 encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition— or, being stopped, starts 
 like a thing surprised — at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor— or 
 Parnassus— or co-sphered with Plato — or, with Harrington, framing " immortal 
 commonwealths" — devising some plan of amelioration to thy country, or thy 
 species— peradventure meditating some individual kindness of courtesy, to be 
 done to thee thyself, the returning consciousness of which made him to start 
 so guiltily at thy obtruded personal presence. 
 
 [D. commenced life after a course of hard study in the house of "pure 
 
 Emanuel," as usher to a knavish fanatic schoolmaster at , at a salary 
 
 of eight pounds per annum, with boaid and lodging. Of this poor stipend he 
 never received above half in all the laborious years he served this man. He 
 tells a pleasant anecdote, that when poverty, staring out at his ragged knees, 
 has sometimes compelled him, against the modesty of his nature, to hint at 
 
 arrears. Dr. would take no immediate notice, but after supper, when 
 
 the school was called together to even-song, he would never fail to introduce 
 some instructive homily against riches, and the corruption of the heart occa- 
 sioned through the desire of them — ending with " Lord, keep thy servants, 
 above all things, from the heinous sin of avarice. Having food and raiment, 
 let us therewithal be content. Give me Hagar's wish " — and the hke — which, 
 to the little auditory, sounded like a doctrine full of Christian prudence and 
 simplicity, but to poor O. was a receipt in full for that quarter's demand at 
 least. 
 
 And D, has been under-working for himself ever since; — drudging at low 
 rates for unappreciating booksellers, — wasting his fine erudition in silent correc- 
 tions of the classics, and in those unostentatious but solid services to learning 
 which commonly fall to the lot of laborious scholars, who have not the heart 
 to sell themselves to the best advantage. He has published poems, which do 
 not sell, because their character is unobtrusive, like his own, and because he 
 has been too much absorbed in ancient literature to know what the popular 
 mark in poetry is, even if he could have hit it. And, therefore, his verses are 
 properly, what he terms them, crotchets; voluntaries; odes to liberty and 
 spring ; effusions ; little tributes and offerings, left behind him upon tables and 
 window-seats at parting from friends' houses ; and from all the inns of hospi- 
 tality, where he has been courteously (or but tolerably) received in his pilgrim- 
 age. If his muse of kindness halt a little behind the strong lines in fashion in 
 this excitement-loving age, his prose is the best of the .sort in the world, and 
 exhibits a faithful transcript of his own healthy, natural mind, and cheerful, 
 innocent tone of conversation.] 
 
 D. is delightful anywhere, but he is at the best in such places as these. 
 He cares not much for Bnth. He is out of his element at Buxton, at Scar- 
 borough, or Harrogate. The Cam and the Isis are to him "better than all 
 the waters of Damascus." On the Muses' hill he is happy, and good, as one 
 of the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains ; and when he goes about with 
 you to show you the halls and colleges, you think you have with you the Inter- 
 preter at the House Beautiful. 
 
Christ's Pusgital Jfifat-antr-t^irfg ^mxs §igo. 
 
 {Tke London Magazine, November, 1820.) 
 
 ^ [This autobiographical essay, as its opening sentence indicates, was really a continua- 
 tion of Charles Lamb's " Recollections of Christ's Hospital." "Tobin"was a friend 
 of the Essayist's, of whom little more than the name is now known. Writing to 
 Wordsworth exultantly about the acceptance of Mr, H. by the Drury Lane managers. 
 Lamb says : "On the following Sunday, Mr. Tobin comes. The scent of a manager's 
 letter brought him.^ He would have gone farther any day on such a business. I 
 read the letter to him. He deems it authentic and peremptory." Writing nine years 
 afterwards to Southey, Lamb, under date jsth August, 1815, remarks, laconically, 
 "Tobin is dead." Another letter of Lamb's, oddly enough, makes mention of Godwin s 
 tragedy oi Antonio having come out "in a feigned name as one To bin's," it hiTi ig 
 been published justat the turn of the century by G. G. and J. Robinson, of Paternuaier 
 Row — the "Advertisement" to it, under date 22nd December, 1800, simply mentioning 
 
 that it was "the first attempt of a lover of the drama." "Dr. T e ' was the Rev. 
 
 Arthur William Trollope, who retired from Christ's Hospital in 1827, and died imme- 
 diately afterwards. *'Th ," who is mentioned as co-Grecian with S. (meaning of course 
 
 Stevens, who had been named just before), was Edward Thornton, who having been third 
 wrangler at Cambridge in 1789, became afterwards, through Mr. Pitt's interest, the Right 
 Honourable Sir Edward Thornton, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary 
 
 at the Court of Portugal and the Brazils. " C. V. Le G " was Charles Valentine Le 
 
 Grice, later on of Treriefe, near Penzance, who died as recently as in 1859, and whose 
 elder brother, Samuel Le Grice, had expired some years before of yellow fever at 
 Jamaica. It was this latter, who, as Charles Lamb said elsewhere, was " like a brother " 
 
 to him at the dreadful time when the Essayist's mother was destroyed. " Fr " was 
 
 Frederick William Franklin, subsequently Master of Hertford. " Marmaduke T " 
 
 was Marmaduke Thompson, afterwards given up to the life of a missionary. These, at 
 any rate, among Elia's school companions, despite innumerabilis ajtnonan series et 
 fugee iempontm, have been happily identified.] 
 
 In Mr. Lamb's " Works," published a year or two since, I find a magnificent 
 eulogy on my old school,* such as it was, or now appears to him to have been 
 between the years 1782 and 1789. It happens, very oddly, that my own stand- 
 ing at Christ's was nearly corresponding with his ; and, with all gratitude to 
 him for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring 
 together whatever can be said in praise of them, dropping all the other side of 
 the argument most ingeniously, 
 
 I remember L. at school ; and can well recollect that he had some peculiar 
 advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived 
 in town, and were near at hand ; and he had the privilege of going to see them, 
 almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was 
 denied to us. The present worthy sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple can 
 explain how that happened. He had his 'tea and hot rolls in the morning, 
 while we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf —our cra^— moistened 
 with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern 
 jack it was poured from. Our Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless, and 
 the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him with 
 a slice of " extraordinary bread and butter," from the hot-loaf of the Temple. 
 ' The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant— (we had three 
 
 1 * Recollections of Christ's Hospital. 
 
I 
 
 338 The Worlis of Charles Lamb. 
 
 banyan to four meat days in the week)— was endeared to his palate with a lump 
 of double-refined, and a smack of ginger (to make it go down the more glibly) 
 or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our half-pickled Sundays, or quite fresh, 
 boiled beef on Thursdays (strong as can equina), with detestable marigolds 
 floating in the pail to poison the broth— our scanty mutton crags on Fridays— 
 and rather more savoury, but grudging, portions of the same flesh, rotten- 
 roasted or rare, on .the Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appetites, 
 and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion) — he had his hot 
 plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin (exotics unknown to our 
 palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen (a great thing), and brought him daily 
 by his maid or aunt ! I remember the good old relative (in whom love forbade 
 pride) squatting down upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters, dis- 
 closing the viands (of higher regale than those cales which the ravens ministered 
 to the Tishbite) ; and the contending passions of L. at the unfolding. There 
 was love for the bringer ; shame for the thing brought, and the manner of its 
 bringing ; sympathy for those who were too many to share in it ; and, at top , 
 of all, hunger (eldest, strongest of the passions 1) predominant, breaking down the 
 stony fences of shame, and awkwardness, and a troubUng over-conscioujness. 
 
 I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who should care for 
 me, were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could 
 reckon upon being kind to me in the great city, after a Httle forced notice, 
 which they had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew 
 tired of my holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I 
 thought them few enough ; and, one after another, they all failed me, and 1 
 felt myself alone among six hundred playmates. 
 
 O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead ! The 
 yearnings which I used 10 have towards it in those unfledged years ! How, in 
 my dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church, 
 and trees, and faces ! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my 
 heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire ! 
 
 To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the recollection of 
 those friendless hohdays. The long warm days of summer never return but 
 they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those whole-day- 
 leaves, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out, for the live- 
 long day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to, or none. I 
 remember those bathing-excursions to the New-River, which L. recalls with 
 such relish, better, I think, than he can— for he was a home-seeking lad, and 
 did not much care for such water-pastimes : — How merrily we would sally forth 
 into the fields ; and strip under the first warmth of the sun ; and wanton like 
 young'dace in the streams ; getting us appetites for noon, which those of us 
 that wore penniless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not 
 the meatis of allaying — while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes, were at 
 feed about us, and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings— the very beauty of 
 the day, and the exercise of ihe pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a 
 keener edge upon them ! —How faint and languid, finally, we would return, 
 towards night-fall, to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant, that the 
 hours of our uneasy liberty had expired ! 
 
 It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets objectless 
 — shivering at cold windows of print-shops, to extract a little amusement ; or 
 haply, as a iast resort, in the hope of a little novelty, to pay a fifty-times re- 
 peated visit (where our individual faces should be as well known to the warden 
 as those of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower — to whose lev&, by 
 courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission. 
 
 L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the foundation) 
 lived in a manner under his paternal roof. Any complaint which he had' to 
 mate was sure of being attended to. This was understood at Christ's, and 
 
Elia: Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago. 339 
 
 was an effectual screen to him against the severity of masters, or worse tyranny 
 of the monitors. The oppressions of these young brutes are heart-sicl<ening to 
 call to recollection. I have been called out of my bed, and waked for the 
 purpose, in the coldest winter nights— and this not once, but night after night 
 — in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong, with eleven other 
 sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any 
 talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the 
 dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offence 
 they neither dared to commit, nor had the power to hinder. The same execrable 
 tyranny drove the younger part of us from the fires, when our feet were perish- 
 ing with snow ; and, under the cruelest penalties, forbad the indulgence of a 
 drink of water, when we lay in sleepless summer nights, fevered with the 
 season, and the day's sports. 
 
 There was one H , who, I learned, in after-days, was seen expiating 
 
 some maturer offence in the hulks. (Do I flatter myself in fancying that this 
 
 might be the planter of that name, who suffered at Nevis, I think, or St. 
 
 Kits, some few years since? My friend Tobin was the benevolent in- 
 strument of bringing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero actually branded a 
 boy, who had offended him, with a red-hot iron ; and nearly starved forty of 
 us, with exacting contributions, to the one half of our bread, to pamper a 
 young ass, which, incredible as it may seem, with the connivance of the nurse's 
 daughter (a young flame of his) he had contrived to smuggle in, and keep 
 upon the leads of the watd, as they called our dormitories. This game went 
 on for better than a week, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but he 
 must cry roast meat — happier than Caligula's minion, could he have kept his 
 own counsel— but, fooUsher, alas ! than any of his species in the fables — 
 waxing fat, and kicking, in the fulness of bread, one unlucky minute would 
 needs proclaim his goftd fortune to the world below ; and, laying out his simple 
 throat, blew such a ram's horn blast, as (toppling down the walls of his own 
 Jericho) set concealment any longer at defiance. The client was dismissed, 
 with certain attentions, to Smithfield ; but I never understood that the patron 
 underwent any censure on the occasion. This was in the stewardship of L.'s 
 admired Peiry. 
 
 Under the same facile administration, can L. have forgotten the cool im- 
 punity with which the nurses used to carry away openly, in open platters, for 
 their own tables, one .out of two of every hot joint, which the careful matron 
 had been'seeing scrupulously weighed out for our dinners? .These things were 
 daily practised in that magnificent apartment, which L. {grown connoisseur 
 since, we presume) praises so highly for the grand paintings "by 'VeiTio, and 
 others," with which it is " hung round and adorned." But the sight of sleek 
 well-fed blue-coat boys in pictures was, at that time, I believe, little consola- 
 tory to him, or us, the living ones, who saw the better part of our provisions 
 carried away before our faces by harpies ; and ourselves reduced (witli the 
 Trojan in the hall of Dido 
 
 To feed our mind with idle portraiture. 
 
 L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to gags, or the fat of fresh beef 
 boiled ; and sets it down to some stiperstition. But these unctuous morsels are 
 never grateful to young palates (children are universally fat-haters), and in 
 strong, coarse, boiled meats, uiisalted, are detestable. A gag-eater in our 
 
 time was equivalent to a ghoul, and held in equal detestation. suffered 
 
 under the imputation : 
 
 -'Twas said. 
 
 He ate strange flesh. 
 He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather up the remnants left at his 
 
340 TTie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 table (not many, nor very choice fragments, you may credit me) — and, in an 
 especial manner, these disreputable morsels, which he would convey away, 
 and secretly stow in the settle that stood at his bed-side. None saw when he 
 ate them. It was rumoured that he privately devoured them in the night. 
 He was watched, but no traces of such midnight practices were discoverable. 
 Some reported, that, on leave-days, he had been seen to carry out of the 
 bounds a large blue check handkerchief, full of something. This then must be 
 the accursed thing. Conjecture next was at work to imagine how he could 
 dispose of it. Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally pre- 
 vailed. He went about moping. None spake to him. No one would play 
 with him. He was excommunicated ; put out of the pale of the school. He 
 was too powerful a boy to be beaten, but he underwent every mode of that 
 negative punishment, which is more grievous than many stripes. Still he 
 persevered. At length he was observed by two of his school-fellows, who 
 were determined to get at the secret, and had traced him one leave-day for 
 that purpose, to enter a large worn-out building, such as there exist specimens 
 of in Chancery Lane, which are let out to various scales of pauperism with 
 open door, and a common staircase. After him they silently slunk in, and 
 followed by stealth up four flights, and saw him tap at a poor wicket, which 
 was opened by an aged woman, meanly clad. Suspicion was now ripened into 
 certainty. The informers had secured their victim. They had him in their 
 toils. Accusation was formally preferred, and retribution most signal was 
 looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then steward, for %his happened a little after 
 my time, with that patient sagacity which tempered all his conduct, determined 
 to investigate the matter, before he proceeded to sentence. The result was, 
 that the supposed mendicants, the receivers or purchasers of the mysterious 
 
 scraps, turned out to be the parents of , an honest couple come to decay, 
 
 — whom this seasonable supply had, in all probability, saved from mendicancy ; 
 and that this young stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this 
 while been only feeding the old birds ! The governors on this occasion, much 
 
 to their honour, voted a present relief to the family of , and presented him 
 
 with a silver medal. The lesson which the steward read upon rash jitdgment, 
 
 on the occasion of publicly delivering the medal to , I believe, would not 
 
 be lost upon his auditory. I had left school then, but I well remember . 
 
 He was a tall, shambling youth, with a cast in his eye, not at all calculated to 
 conciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him carrying a baker's basket. 
 I think I heard he did not do quite so well by himself, as he had done by the 
 old folks. 
 
 I was a hypochondriac lad ; and a sight of a boy in fetters, upon the day of 
 my first putting on the blue clothes, was not exactly fitted to assuage the 
 natural terrors of initiation. I was of tender years, barely turned of seven ; 
 and had only read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams. 
 I was told he had run away. This was the punishment for the first 
 offence. As a novice I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These 
 were little, square. Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon 
 straw and a blanket— a mattress, I think, was afterwards substituted— with a 
 peep of light, let in askance, from a prison-orifice at top, barely enough to 
 read by. Here the poor boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of 
 any but the porter who brought him his bread and water— who might not speak 
 to him ; or of the beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to receive 
 his periodical chastisement, which was almost welcome, because it separated 
 him for a brief interval from solitude : — and here he was shut up by himself of 
 nights, out of the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak 
 nerves, and superstition incident to his time of life, might subject him to.* 
 
 _ * One or two instances of lunacy, or attempted suicide, accordingly, .it length con- 
 vinced the governors of the impolicy of this part of the sentence, and the midnight torture 
 
This was the penalty for the second offence. Wouldst thou Uke, reader, to 
 see what became of him in the next degree ? 
 
 The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and whose expulsion 
 was at this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as at some solemn 
 auto da fe, arrayed in uncouth and most appalling attire— all trace of his late 
 "watohet weeds" carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jaclcet, resembling 
 those which London lamplighters formerly delighted in, with a cap of the 
 same. The effect of this divestiture was such as the ingenious devisers of it 
 could have anticipated. With his pale and frighted features, it was as if some 
 of those disfigurements in Dante had seized upon him. In this disguisement 
 he was brought into the hall (L's favourite state-room) where awaited him the 
 whole number of his school-fellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was 
 thenceforth to share no more ; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen 
 for the last time ; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the 
 occasion ; and of two faces more, of direr import, because never but in these 
 extremities visible. These were governors ; two of whom, by choice, or 
 charter, were always accustomed to officiate at these Ultima Supplicia ; not 
 to mitigate (so at least we understood it), but to enforce the uttermost stripe. 
 . Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert, J remember, we're colleagues on 
 one occasion, when the beadle turning rather pale, a glass of brandy was 
 ordered to prepare him for the mysteries. The scourging was, after the old 
 Roman fashion, long and stately. The lictor accompanied the criminal quite 
 round the hall. We were generally too f^nt with attending to the previous 
 disgusting circumstances to make accurate report with our eyes of the degree 
 of corporal suffering inflicted. Report, of course, gave out the back knotty 
 and livid. After scourging, he was made over, in his Sait Benito, to his 
 friends, if he had any (but commonly such poor runagates were friendless), 
 or to his parish officer, who, to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station 
 allotted to him on the outside of the hall gate. 
 
 These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as to spoil the general 
 mirth of the community. We had plenty of exercise and recreation after 
 school hours ; and, for myself, I must confess, that I was never happier, than 
 in them. The Upper and the Lower Grammar Schools were held in the same 
 room ; and an imaginary line only divided their bounds. Their character was 
 as different as that of the inhabitants on the two sides of the Pyrenees. The 
 Rev. James Boyer was the Upper Master; but the Rev. Mattliew Field pre- 
 sided over that portion of the apartment of which I had the good fortune to 
 be a member. We lived a life as careless as birds. We talked and did just 
 what we pleased, and nobody molested us. We carried an accidence, or a 
 grammar, for form ; but, for any trouble it gave us, we might take two years 
 in getting through the verbs deponent, and another two in forgetting all that 
 we had learned about them. There was now and then the formaUty of saying 
 a lesson, but if you had not learned it, a brush across the shoulders (just 
 enough to disturb a fly) was the sole remonstrance. Field never used the rod ; 
 and in truth he wielded the cane with no great good-will— holding it "like a 
 dancer." It looked in his hands rather like an emblem, than an instrument of 
 authority ; and an emblem, too, he was ashamed of. He was a good easy 
 man, that did not care to ruffle his own peace, nor perhaps set any great con- 
 sideration upon the value of juvenile time. He came among us, now and 
 then, but often stayed away whole days from us ; and when he came, it made 
 no difference to us— he had his private room to retire to, the short time he 
 stayed, to be out of the sound of our noise. Our mirth and uproar went on. 
 We had classics of our own, without being beholden to " insolent Greece or 
 
 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. 
 
342 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 haughty Rome," that passed current among us — Peter Wilkins— the Adven- 
 tures of the Hon. Capt. Robert Boyle — the Fortunate Blue Coat Boy— and the 
 hke. Or we cultivated a turn for mechanic or scientific operations ; making 
 little sun-dials of paper ; or weaving those ingenious parentheses, called cai- 
 cradlis ; or making dry peas to dance upon the end of a tin pipe; or studying 
 the art miUtary over that laudable game "French and English," and a hun- 
 dred other such devices to pass away the time— mixing the useful with the 
 agreeable— as would have made the souLs of Rousseau and John Locke chuckle 
 to have seen us. 
 
 Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines who affect to mix in 
 equal proportion the gentleman, the scholar, and the Christian : but, I know 
 not how, the first ingredient is generally found to be the predominating dose 
 in the composition. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow 
 at some episcopal levee, when he should have been attending upon us. He 
 had for many years the classical charge of a hundred children, during the four 
 or five first years of their education ; and his very highest form seldom pro- 
 ceeded farther than two or three of the introductory fables of. Phaadrus. How 
 things were suffered to go on thus, I cannot guess. Boyer, who was the proper 
 person to have remedied these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, a delicacy 
 in interfering in a province not strictly his own. I have not been without my 
 suspicions, that he was not altogether displeased at the contrast we presented 
 to his end of the school. We were • a sort of Helots to his young Spartans. 
 He would sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under 
 Master, and then, with sardonic grin, observe to one of his upper boys, "how 
 neat and fresh the twigs looked." While his pale students were battering their 
 brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as that enjoined by the 
 Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our, little Goshen. We saw a 
 little into the secrets of his discipline, and the prospect did but the more recon- 
 cile us to our lot. His thunders rolled innocuous for us ; his storms came 
 near, but never touched us ; contrary to Gideon's miracle, while all around 
 were drenched, our fleece was dry.* His boys turned out the better scholars ; 
 we, I suspect, have the advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak of him 
 without something of terror allaying their gratitude ; the remembrance of 
 Field comes back with all the soothing images of indolence, and summer 
 slumbers, and work like play, and innocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, 
 and life itself a "playing holiday." 
 
 Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near 
 enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system. We occasionally 
 heard sounds of the Ululantcs, and caught glances of Tartarus. B. was a 
 rabid pedant. His English style was cramped to barbarism. His Easter 
 anthems (for his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as 
 scrannel pipes.f He would laugh, ay, and heartily, but then it must be at 
 
 Flaccus's quibble about Rex or at the tristis severitas in villi u, or inspicere 
 
 in patinas, of Terence^thin jests, which at their first broaching could hardly 
 have had vis enough to move a Roman muscle. He had two wigs, both 
 pedantic, but of different omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, 
 betokening a mild day. The other, an old discoloured, unkempt, angry caxon, 
 denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to the school, when he made 
 
 * Cowley. 
 
 + In this and every thing B. was the antipodes of his coadjutor. 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 
 classical for representation. 
 
I Elia: Christ's Hospital Five-and- Thirty Years Jgo. 343 
 
 his morning appearance in his passy, or fassionate wig. No comet expounded 
 surer. J. B. had a heavy hand. I have known him double his Itnotty iist at a 
 poor trembhng child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a ' ' Sirrah, 
 do you presume to set your wits at me ? " Nothing was more common than to 
 see him make a headlong entry into the school-room, from his inner recess, or 
 library, and, with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, " Od's my life, 
 sirrah," (his favourite adjuration.) " I have a great mind to whip you,"— then, 
 with as sudden a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair — and after a cool- 
 ing lapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally for- 
 gotten the context) drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, 
 as if it had been some Devil's Litany, with the explefgry yell-s-" ff«rf / will, 
 too." In his gentler moods, when the raiidus furor, v;a& assuaged, he had 
 resort to an ingenious method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of 
 whipping the boy, and reading the Debates, at the same time ; a paragraph, 
 and a lash between ; which in those times, when parliamentary oratory was 
 most at a height and flourishing in these rea;lms, was not calculated to impress 
 the patient with a veneration for the diifuser graces of rhetoric. ■ 
 
 Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to fall ineffectual from his , 
 
 hand — when droll squinting W , having been caught putting the inside of 
 
 the master's desk to a use for which the architect had clearly not designed it, to 
 j ustify himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not know that the thing 
 had been forewarned. This exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent to 
 the oral or declaratory^ struck so irresistibly upon the fancy of all who heard 
 it (the pedagogue himself not excepted) that remission was unavoidable. 
 
 L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as ■ an instructor. Coleridge, in his- 
 Literary Life, has pronounced amore intelligible and ample encomium on them. 
 The author of the Country Spectator doubts not to compare him with the 
 ablest teachers of antiquity. Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better than with 
 the pious ejaculation of C — ■ when he heard that his old master was on his death- 
 bed—" Poor J. B — may all his faults be forgiven t and may he be wafted to 
 bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no ioitoms to reproach his 
 sublunary infirmities." , . '" 
 
 Under him were many good and sound scholars bred. First Grecian of my 
 time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys and men, since Co-grammar- 
 master (and inseparable companion) with Dr. T e. What an edifying. 
 
 spectacle did this brace of friends present to those who remembered the anti- 
 socialities of their predecessors ! You never met the one by chance in the 
 street without a wonder, which was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate 
 sub-appearance of the other. Generally arm in arm, these kindly coadjutors 
 lightened for each other the toilsome duties of their profession, and when, m 
 advanced age, one found it convenient to retire, the other was not long in dis- 
 covering that it suited him to lay down the fasces also. Oh, it is pleasant, as 
 it is rare, to find the same arm hnked in, yours at forty, which at thirteen helped 
 it to turn over the Ciaro De Amicitia, or spme tale, of Antique Friendship, . 
 which the young heart even then was burning to anticipate ! Co-Grecian with 
 
 S. was Th , who has since executed with ability vanous diplomatic 
 
 functions at the Northern courts, Th was a tall, dark, saturnine youth 
 
 sparing of speech, with raven locks. Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed 
 him (now Bishop o£ Calcutta), a scholar and a gentleman in his teens. He 
 has the reputation of an excellent critic,; and is. author (besides the Country 
 Spectator) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, against Sharpe. M. is said to 
 bear his mitre high in India, where the regni novitas (I dare say) sufhciently 
 justifies the bearing. A humility quite as primitive as that of Jewel or Hooker 
 might not be exactly fitted to impress the minds of those Anglo-Asiatic dioce- 
 sans with a reverence for home institutions, and the church which those fathers 
 watered. The manners of M. at school, though firm, were mild, and un- 
 
344 -2^^ Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 assuming. Next to M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, author of the 
 Aboriginal Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems ; a pale, 
 
 studious Grecian. Then followed poor S , ill-fated M ! of these the 
 
 Muse is silent. 
 
 Finding some of Edward's race 
 Unhappy, pass their annals by. 
 
 Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, 
 with hope like a fiery column before thee — the dark pillar not yet turned — 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Logician, Metaphysician, Bard ! — How have I seen 
 the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration 
 (while he weighed the (Ssproportion between the speech and the garb of the 
 young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the 
 mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not 
 pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar 
 while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired 
 charity-toy I — Many were the "wit-combats" (to dally awhile with the words 
 
 of old Fuller) between him and C. V. Le G , " which two I behold like a 
 
 Spanish great galleon, and an English man-of-war ; Master Coleridge, like the 
 former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. 
 C. V. L., with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but hghter in saiUng, 
 could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds, by the 
 quickness of his wit and invention," 
 
 "Nor Shalt thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, with the cordial 
 smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which thou wert wont to make the old 
 Cloisters shake, in thy cognition of some poignant jest of theirs ; or the 
 anticipation of some more material, and, peradventure, practical one, of thine 
 own. Extinct are those smiles, with that beautiful countenance, with which 
 (for thou wert the Nireus formosus of the school), in the days of thy maturer 
 waggery, thou didst disarm the wrath of infuriated town-damsel, who, incensed 
 by provoking pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly converted by thy 
 
 angel-look, exchanged the h5f-formed terrible " il ," for a gentler greetmg 
 
 — " bless thy handsome face f " 
 
 Next follow two, who ought to be now alive, and the friends of Elia— the 
 
 junior Le G and F ; who impelled, the former by a roving temper, the 
 
 latter by too quick a sense of neglect— ill capable of enduring the slights poor 
 Sizars are sometimes subject to in our seats of learning— exchanged their.Alma 
 Mater for the camp ; perishing one by climate, and one on the plains of 
 
 Salamanca : — Le G , sanguine, volatile, sweet-natured ; F dogged, 
 
 faithful, anticipative of insult, warm-hearted, with something of the old Roman 
 height about him. 
 
 Fine, frank-hearted Fr , the present master of Hertford, with Marmaduke 
 
 T , mildest of Missionaries— and both my good friends still— close the 
 
 catalogue of Grecians in my time. 
 
I ■ 
 
 I £/ia .-The Two Races of Men. 345 
 
 (The London Magazine, December, 1820.) 
 
 (Under the guise of "Ralph Bigod," Elia delineated his old friend John Fenwick 
 sometime editor of The Albion newspaper, to which, while under his management 
 Charles Lanib was a contributor. " Comberbatch " (as also later on in this same essay 
 
 C. and S. T. C. ) bore reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, at eighteen, had 
 enlisted in a regiment of dragoons under the odd name of Silas Thompson Comberbatch. 
 
 K. was James Kenney, the dramatic writer, chiefly remembered now as the creator 
 of Jeremy Diddler in the well-known farce of Raising the Wind.} 
 
 The hurnati 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 classifications 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, poi't, 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 I or rather, what a noble simphfica- 
 tion of language (beyond Tooke), resolving these supposed opposites into one 
 clear, intelligible pronoun adjective ! — What near approaches doth he make to 
 the primitive community, — to the extent of one half of the principle at 
 least !— 
 
 He is he 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 tormen- 
 tum 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 
 
346 The Works of Charles Lamb.. 
 
 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 m^es of it ! Strain not courtesies with 
 a noble enemy. 
 
 Reflections like the foregoing were forced upon my mind by the death of my 
 old friend, Ralph Bigod, h.sq. , who departed this life on Wednesday evening ; 
 . dying, as he had lived, without much trouble. He boasted himself a descen- 
 dant 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 noble 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 Bigod were all regal. Thus fur- 
 nished by the very act of disfurnishment ; getting rid of the cumbersome 
 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 tithe 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 jJerambulations 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 tribu- 
 taries ; 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 multitudes did no way disconcert him. He rather took a pride 
 in mumbering 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 .in 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 supphes became necessary, the first person that had the 
 felicity to fall in with him, friend or stranger, was sure to contribute to the 
 deficiency. For Bigod had an undeniable way with him. He had a cheerful, 
 open exterior, a quick jovial eye, a bald forehead, just touched with grey [caiia 
 fidei). He anticipated no excuse, and found none. And, waiving for a while 
 my theory as to the great race, I would put it to the most untheorizing 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 petitionary rogue (your bastard borrower), who, by 
 
Elia : The Two Races of Men. 347 
 
 1. 
 
 his mumping visnomy, tells you, that he expects nothing better; and therefore, 
 whose preconceived notions and expectations you do in reahty 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 associated since, 
 I grudge tlie 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 class 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 Bonavenlurcs, choice and massy divinity, to which its two sup- 
 porters (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 title 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 tlieory, which of our "shelves is safe ? 
 
 The slight vacuum in the left-hand case— two shelves from the ceilings ' 
 
 scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser was whilom the 
 
 commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn IBurial. 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 
 quaUfied to carry her ofi 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, where the fates borrowed Hector. Here 
 stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state. — There loitered the Com- 
 plete Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side. — In yonder nook, John 
 Bimcle, a widower-volume, with "eyes closed," 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 equiva- 
 lent to match it. I have a small under-coilection of this nature (my friend's 
 gatherings 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. 
 1 here they stand in conjimction ; natives, and naturahzed. The latter seem 
 as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am. — I charge no ware- 
 house-room for these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentle- 
 manly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses. 
 
 To lose a volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. "Vou 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 im- 
 portunate to carry off with thee, in spite of tears and adjurations to thee to for- 
 bear, the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle? 
 — knowing at the time, and knowing that 1 knew also, thou most assuredly 
 wouldst never turn over one leaf of the illustrious 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 Galilean land— 
 
348 , The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness, 
 
 A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt, 
 
 Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, ^gh thoughts, her sex 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 jA« 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 constituted to com- 
 prehend a tittle ! Was there not Zimmerman on Solitude ? 
 
 Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of 
 showin" it ; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books ; but let 
 it be tcTsuch a one as S. T. C— he will return them (generally anticipating 
 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 quantity 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. 1 counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor 
 
 thy library, against S. T. C. 
 
 i:cfcff liar's «bx. 
 
 \The London Magazine, January, 1821.) 
 
 Every man hath two birthdays : 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 birthday 
 hath nearly passed 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 sound 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 ovar 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 con- 
 scious of, in that awful leave-taking. I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with 
 
 _J> 
 
Elia: New Year's Eve. 349 
 
 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 coining, 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 pro- 
 spective. I have alnjost 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. 1 play 
 over againybr 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 1 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 passionate 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 identity, than I have for 
 the man Elia. I know htm to be light, and vain, and humoursome; a 
 
 notorious ; addicted to ; averse from counsel, neither 
 
 taking it, nor offering it; — besides; a stammering buftbon ; 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 background — I must take leave to cherish the remembrance 
 of that young master— with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid change- 
 ling 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 medica- 
 ments. 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. — God help thee, Elia, how art tliou changed ! 
 Tliou 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 identity, 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 retros- 
 pection, 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 lingularly 
 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 institution ; and the ringing out of 
 
35° The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony.— In 
 those days the sound of those midnight i chimes, though it seemed to raise 
 hilarity in all around, me, never failed to bting 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 fragihty 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 pass away " like a 
 weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpala- 
 table 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. lam 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 gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are 
 not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavlnian shores. 
 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 glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, 
 and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself— &q 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 friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which 
 point me to them here,— the recognizable face— the "sweet assurance of a 
 look"—? 
 
 In winter this intolerable disinclination to dving— 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 Phosbus's sickly sister, like that 
 innutritions 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, melan- 
 choly 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 lifetime never 
 greatly coveted the society of such bedfellows ?— 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 mis- 
 becoming 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 nv)urnfully chanted the obsequies of 1820 departed, 
 with changed notes lustily rings in a successor, let us atl,une to its peal the 
 song made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton. 
 
 THE NEW YEAR. 
 
 Hark ! the cock crows, and yon bright star 
 
 Tells us the day himself 's not far; 
 
 And see where, breaking irom the night. 
 
 He gilds the western hills with light. 
 
 "With him old Janus doth appear, 
 
 Peeping into the future year,, 
 
 "With such a look as seems to say, 
 
 The prospect is not good that way. 
 
 Thus do we rise ill sights to see, 
 
 And 'gainst ourselves to prophesy ; 
 
 When the prophetic fear of things 
 
 A more tormenting mischief brings. 
 
 More full of soul-tormenting gall. 
 
 Than direct mischiefs can befall. 
 
 But stay ! but stay ! methinks my sight. 
 
 Better inform'd by clearer light, 
 
 Discerns sereneness \n that brow, 
 
 That all contracted seem'd but now. 
 
 His reversed face may show distaste. 
 
 And frown upon the ills are past ; 
 
 But that which this way looks is clear. 
 
 And smiles upon the New-born Year. 
 
 He looks too from a place so high, 
 
 The Year lies open to his eye ; 
 
 And all the moments open are 
 
 To the exact discoverer. 
 
 Yet more and more he smiles upon 
 
 The happy revolution. 
 
 Why should we then suspect or fear 
 
 The influences of a year, 
 
 So smiles upon us the first mom. 
 
 And speaks us good so soon as bom 
 
 Plague on't ! the last was ill enough. 
 
 This cannot but make better proof; 
 
 Or, at the worst, as we brush 'd througli 
 
 The last, why so we may this too : 
 
 And then the next in reason should 
 
 Be superexcellently good : 
 
352 The Works of Charles Lamb, 
 
 For the worst ills (we daily see) 
 Have no more peipetuity, 
 • Than the best fortunes that do fall ; 
 
 Which also bring us wherewithal 
 Longer their being to support, 
 Than those do of the other sort : 
 And who has one good year in three. 
 And yet repines at destiny, 
 Appears ungrateful in the case, 
 And merits not the good he has. 
 Then let us welcome the New Guest 
 With lusty brimmers of the best ; 
 Mirth always should Good Fortune meet, 
 And render e'en disaster sweet : 
 And though the Princess turn her back. 
 Let us but line ourselves with sack. 
 We better shall by far hold out, 
 Till the next Year she face about. 
 
 How say you, reader — do not these verses smack of the rough magnanimity 
 of the old English vein? Do they not fortify like a cordial; enlarging the 
 heart, and productive of sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the concoction ? 
 Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected? — Passed 
 like a cloud — absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry — clean washed 
 away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for these hj^jochondries— 
 And now another cup of the generous ! and a merry New Year, and many of 
 them, to you all, my masters I 
 
 Jrs. i attic's #pmbits an Ml^ist. 
 
 {The London Magazine^ February, 1821.) 
 
 [While Barry Cornwall regards Sarah Battle as a purely imaginary character, Mr. 
 Percy Fitzgerald with good show of reason thinks otherwiise. He conceives a resem- 
 blance to be readily discernible between Mrs. Battle and Charles Lamb's maternal grand- 
 mother, Mrs. Field. The latter, indeed, is expressly referred to by Elia in his reverie 
 about " Dream Children," where she is spoken of as for many years housekeeper at a 
 great mansion in Norfolk. The locality is afterwards more clearly identified as Gilston 
 
 in Hertfordshire, in Elia's account of *' Blakesmoor, in H shire," in which paper, 
 
 besides, the Essayist points out "the room in which old Mrs. Battle died." "Cousin 
 Bridget Elia," meant in reality the Humorist's sister Mary Lamb. In transferring the 
 subjoined essay, soon after its original publication, to his London Joumai, Leigh 
 Hunt prefixed to it words that ought ever afterwards to stand as its introduction : "Here 
 follpweth, gentle reader, the immortal record of Mrs. Battle and her whist ; a game 
 which the author, as thou wilt see, wished that he could play for ever ; and accordingly, 
 in the deathless pages of his wit, for ever will he play it."] 
 
 " A CLF.AR fire, a clean hearth,* and the rigour of the game.'' This was the 
 celebrated wis/i of old Sarah Battle {now with God), who, nex t her devo- 
 
 * [This was before the introduction of rugs, reader. You must remember the intoler- 
 able crash of the unswept cinder, betwixt your foot and the marble.] 
 
Elia: Mts. Battle's Opinions on Whist 353 
 
 tions, loved a good game at whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, 
 your half and half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want 
 one to make up a rubber ; who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning ; 
 that they like to win one game and lose another ; * that they can while away an 
 hour very agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or 
 no ; and will desire an adversary, who has slipped a wrong card, to take "it up 
 and play another. These insufterable tritlers are the curse of a table. One of 
 these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said, that they do not 
 play at cards, but only play at playing with them. 
 
 Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from her 
 heart and soul ; and would not, save upon a striking emergency, willingly seat 
 herself at the same table with them. She loved a thorough-paced partner, a 
 determined enemy. The took, and gave no concessions. She hated favours. 
 She never made a revoke, nor ever passed it over in her adversary without 
 exacting the utmost forfeiture. She fought a good fight ; cut and thrust. She 
 held not her good sword (her cards) "like a dancer." She sat bolt upright ; 
 and neither showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours. All people have 
 their blind side— their superstitions ; and I have heard her declare, under the 
 rose, that Hearts was her favourite suit. 
 
 I never in my life — and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of it — 
 saw her take out her snufl-box when it was her turn to play ; or snuff a candle 
 in the middle of a game ; or ring for a servant, till it was fairly over. She 
 never introduced, or connived at, miscellaneous conversation during its process. 
 As she emphatically observed, cards were cards ; and if I ever saw unmingled 
 distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it was at the airs of a young 
 gentleman of a literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a 
 hand ; and who, in his excess of candour, declared, that he thought there was 
 no harm in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in recrea- 
 tions of that kind ! She could not bear to have her noble occupation, to which 
 she wound up her faculties, considered in that light, It was her business, her 
 duty, the thing she came into the world to do, — and she did it. She unbent 
 her mind afterwards— over a book. 
 
 Pope was her favourite author ; his Rape of the Lock her favourite work. 
 She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards) his celebrated 
 game of Ombre in that poem ; and to explain to me how far it agreed with, 
 and in what points it would be found to differ from, tradrille. Her illustra- 
 tions were apposite and poignant; and I had the pleasure of sending the sub- 
 stance of them to Mr. Bowles ; but I suppose they came too late to be inserted 
 among his ingenious notes upon that author. 
 
 Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love ; but whist had engaged 
 her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy and specious, and likely 
 to allure young persons. The uncertainty and quick shifting of partners— a 
 thing which the constancy of whist abhors; — the dazzling supremacy and 
 regal investiture of Spadille — absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure 
 aristocracy of whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power 
 above his brother-nobility of the Aces;— the giddy vanity, so taking to the 
 inexperienced, of playing alone ;— above all, the overpowering instructions of 
 a Sans Prendre Vole, — to the triumph of which there is certainly nothing 
 parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of whist ;— all these, she would 
 say, made quadrille a game of captivation to the young and enthusiastic. But 
 whist was the soldier game: that was her word, It was a long meal; not, 
 hke quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in 
 duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, to 
 cultivate steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and 
 
 * [As if a sportsman should tell you he liked to kill a fox one day, and lose him the 
 next.] 
 
 N 
 
354 The Works of Charles Lamb 
 
 ever fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she 
 would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the little 
 Italian states, depicted by Machiavel ; perpetually changing postures and con- 
 neetions ; bitter foes to-day, sugared darhngs to-morrow ; kissing and scratch- 
 ing in a breath; — but the wars of whist were comparable to the long, 
 steady, deep-rooted, rational antipathies of the great French and EngUsh 
 nations. 
 
 A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game. 
 There was nothing silly in it, like the nob in cribbage — nothing superfluous. 
 tiio flushes — that most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set up : 
 — that any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark 
 and colour, without reference to the playing of the game, or the individual 
 worth or pretensions of the cards themselves ! She held this to be a solecism ; ' 
 as pitiful an ambition at cards as aUiteration is in authorship. She despised / 
 superficiahty, and looked deeper than the colours of things. — Suits were 
 soldiers, she would say, and must have a uniformity of array to distinguish 
 them : but what should we say to a foolish squire, who should claim a merit 
 from dressing up his tenantry in red jackets that never were to be marshalled 
 — never to take the field ? — she even wished that whist were more simple than 
 it is ; and in my mind, would have stripped it of some appendages, which in 
 the state of human frailty, may be venially, and even commendably, allowed 
 of. She saw no reason for the deciding of the trump by the turn of the card. 
 Why not one suit always trumps ? — Why two colours, when the mark of the 
 suits would have sufiiciently distinguished them without it ? — 
 
 "But the eye, my dear madam, is agreeably refreshed with the variety. Man 
 is not a creature of pure reason — he must have his senses delightfully appealed 
 to. We see it in Roman Catholic countries, where the music and the paint- 
 ings draw in many to worship, whom your quaker spirit of unsensuahsing, 
 would have kept out. — You, yourself, have a pretty collection of paintings — 
 but confess to me, whether, walking in your gallery at Sandham, among those, 
 clear Vandykes, or among the Paul Potters in the ante-room, you ever, felt 
 your bosom glow with an elegant delight, at all comparable to that you have 
 it in your power to experience most evenings over a well-arranged assortment 
 of the court cards?— the pretty antic habits, like heralds in a procession— the 
 gay triumph-assuring scarlets— the contrasting deadly-killing sables — the ' hoary 
 majesty of spades' — Pam in all his glory ! — 
 
 "All these might be dispensed with ; and, with their naked names upon the 
 drab pasteboard, the game might go on very well, pictureless. But the beauty 
 of cards would be extinguished for ever. Stripped of all that is imaginative 
 in them, they must degenerate into mere gambling.— Imagine a dull deal-board, 
 or drum head, to spread them on, instead of that nice verdant carpet (next to 
 nature's), fittest arena for those courtly combatants to play their gallant jousts 
 and turneys in ! — Exchange those deUcately-turned ivory markers— (work of 
 Chinese artist, unconscious of their symbol,— or as profanely slighting their 
 true application as the arrantest Ephesian journeyman that turned out those 
 little shrines for the goddess)— exchange them for httle bits of leather (our 
 ancestors' money) or chalk and a slate ! "■ — 
 
 The old lady, with a smile, confessed the soundness of my logic ; and to her 
 approbation of my arguments on her favourite topic that evening, I have always 
 fancied myself indebted for the legacy of a curious cribbage board, made of 
 the finest Sienna marble, which her maternal uncle (old Walter Plumer, whom 
 I have elsewhere celebrated) brought with him from Florence :— this, and a 
 trifle of five hundred pounds, came to me at her death. 
 
 The former bequest (which I do not least value) I have kept with religious 
 ca.re; though she herself, to confess a truth, was never greatly taken with 
 cribbage. It was an essentially vulgar game, I have heard her say,— disputing 
 
EHa: Mrs. Battle's Opinioiu on Whist. 355 
 
 with her uncle, who was very partial to it. She could never heartily brine her 
 mouth to pronounce "so"-o^ ■' thafs a go." She called it an ungrammatical 
 game. The peggmg teased her. I once knew her to forfeit a rubber (a iive 
 dollar stake), because she would not take advantage of the turn-up knave 
 which would have given it her, but which she must have claimed by the dis- 
 graceful tenure of declaring " two for his heels." There is something ex- 
 tremely genteel in this sort of self-denial. Sarah Battle was a gentlewoman 
 born. 
 
 Piquet she held the best game at the cards for two persons, though she 
 would ridicule the pedantry of the terms— such as pique— repique— the capot 
 —they savoured (she thought) of affectation. But games for two, or even 
 three, she never greatly cared for. She loved the quadrate, or square. She 
 would argue thus :— Cards are warfare : the ends are gain, with glory. But 
 cards are war in disguise of a sport : when single adversaries encounter, the 
 ends proposed are too palpable. By themselves, it is too close a fight ; with 
 spectator?, it is not much bettered. No looker-on can be interested, except 
 for a bet, and then it is a mere affair of money ; he cares not for your luck 
 sympathetically, or for your play.— Three are still worse ; a mere naked war 
 of every man against every man, as in cribbage, without league or aUiance ; or 
 a rotation of petty and contradictory interests, a succession of heartless 
 leagues, and not much more hearty infractions of them, as in traydrille.- But 
 in square games {she meant whist) all that is possible to be attained in card- 
 playing is accomplished. There are the incentives of profit with honour, 
 common to every species — though the latter can be but very imperfectly en- 
 joyed in those other games, where the spectator is only feebly a participator. 
 But the parties in whist are spectators and principals too. They are a theatre 
 to themselves, and a Jooker-on is not wanted. He is rather worse than nothing, 
 and an impertinence. Whist abhors neutrality, or interests beyond its sphere. 
 You glory in some surprising stroke of skill or fortune, not because a cold — or 
 even an interested — bystander witnesses it, but because your partner sympa- 
 thizes in the contingency. You win for two. You triumph for two. Two are 
 exalted. Two again are mortified ; which divides their disgrace, as the oen- 
 junction doubles (by taking off the invidiousness) your glory. Two losing to 
 two are better reconciled, than one to one m that close butchery. The hostile 
 feeling is weakened by multiplying the channels. V\ar becomes a civil game. — 
 By such reasonings as these the old lady was accustomed to defend her 
 favourite pastime. 
 
 No inducement could ever prevail upon her to play at any game, where 
 chance entered into the composition, _/&/- nothing. Chance, she would argue — 
 and here again, admire the subtlety of her conclusion ! — chance is nothing, 
 but where something else depends upon it. It is obvious that cannot he glory. 
 What rational cause of exultation could it give to a man to turn up size ace a 
 hundred times together by himself? or before spectators, where no stake was 
 depending; — Make a lottery of a hundred thousand tickets with but one fortu- 
 nate number — and what possible principle of our nature, except stupid 
 wonderment, could it gratify to gain that number as many times successively, 
 without a prize? — Therefore she disliked the mixture of chance in back- 
 gammon, where it was not played for money. She called it foohsh, and those 
 people idiots, who were taken with a lucky hit under such circumstances. 
 Games of pure skill were as little to her fancy. Played for a stake, they were 
 a mere system of over-reaching. Played for glory, they were a mere letting 
 of one man's wit, — his memory, or combination^faculty rather — against 
 another's ; like a mock-engagement at a review, bloodless and profitless. — She 
 could not conceive a game wanting the sprightly infusion of chance, — the 
 handsome excuses of good fortune. Two people playing at chess in a^ corner 
 of a room, whilst whist was stirring in the centre, would inspire her with in- 
 
356 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 sufferable horror and ennui. Those well-cut similitudes of Castles and 
 Knights, the imagery of the board, she would argue (and I think in this case 
 justly), were entirely misplaced and senseless. Those hard head-contests can 
 in no instance ally with the fancy. They reject form and colour. A pencil and 
 dry slate (she used to say) were the proper arena for such combatants. 
 
 To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad passions, she 
 would retort that man is, a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get 
 the better in something or other : — that this passion can scarcely be more safely 
 expended than upon a game at cards ; that cards are a temporary illusion ; in 
 truth, a mere drama; for we do but //ay at being mightily concerned, where a 
 few idle shillings are at stake, yet, during the illusion, we are as mightily con- 
 cerned as those whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. They are a sort of 
 dream-fighting ; much ado ; great battling and little bloodshed ; mighty 
 means for disproportioned ends ; quite as diverting, and a great deal more 
 innoxious, than many of those more serious games of life, which men play, 
 without esteeming them to be such. 
 
 With great deference to the old lady's judgment on these matters, I think I 
 have experienced some moments in my life, when playing at cards/iw nothing 
 has even been agreeable. When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I 
 sometimes call for the cards, and play a game at piquet _/»;■ love with my cousin 
 Bridget — Bridget Elia. 
 
 I grant there is something sneaking in it ; but with a tooth-ache, or a 
 sprained ankle, — when you are subdued and humble,— you are glad to put up 
 with an inferior spring of action. 
 
 There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick ■whist. — 
 
 I grant it is not the highest style of man — I deprecate the manes of Sarah 
 Battle — she lives not, alas ! to whom I should apologize. — 
 
 At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, come in as 
 something admissible. — I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean 
 nothing. I am subdued to an inferior interest. Those shadows of winning 
 amuse me. 
 
 TSiat last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her)— (dare I tell 
 thee, how foohsh I am?)— I wished it might have lasted for ever, though we 
 gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play : I would 
 be content to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever 
 boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was 
 doomed to apply after the game was over : and as I do not much relish appli- 
 ances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing. 
 
 i'alentmi's gag. 
 
 [The Indicator, 14th February, 1821.) 
 
 [This hitherto untraced essay of Elia, the source of which is now for the first time 
 pointed out, appeared originally in No. 71 of Leigh Hunt's /?i</k«<<»- : where u may re 
 found at pp. 150-152 of the second volume, signed, according to Lamb s not mlre"!^^" 
 custom, with four asterisks. " E. B." meant Edward Burney, half brother 01 rai^ 
 Bumey, afterwards Madame D'Arblay. William Hone in his Every Day Book, unoer 
 date 14th of February, transcribed the whole paper with this prefix, Attend we upon 
 Elia. Hark, how triumphantly that noble herald of the College of Kindness proclaims 
 the day ! "] 
 
 Hail to thy returning festival, old Bishop Valentine ! Great is thy name in 
 
Elia: Valenii lie's Bay. gry 
 
 the rubric, thou venerable Arch-flamen of Hymen ! Immortal Go-between I 
 who and what manner of person art thou ? Art thou but a name, typifvine 
 the restless principle which impels poor humans to seek perfection in union ? 
 or wert thou indeed a mortal prelate, with thy tippet and thy rochet, thy acron 
 on, and decent lawn sleeves ? Mysterious personage ! like unto thee, assuredly 
 there is no other mitred father in the calendar; not Jerome, nor Ambrose nor 
 Cyril ; nor the consigner of undipped infants to eternal torments, Austin 
 whom all mothers hate ; nor he who hated all mothers, Origen; nor Bishop 
 Bull, nor Archbishop Parker, nor Whitgift. Thou comest attended with 
 thousands and tens of thousands of little Loves, and the air is 
 
 Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings. 
 
 Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors ; and instead of the 
 crozier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee. 
 
 In other words, this is the day on which those charming little missives, 
 ycleped Valentines, cross and intercross each other at every street and turning. 
 The weary and all forespent twopenny postman sinks beneath a load of deli- 
 cate embarrassments, not his own. It is scarcely credible to what an extent 
 this ephemeral courtship is carried on in this loving town, to the great enrich- 
 ment of porters, and detriment of knockers and bell-wires. In these little 
 visual interpretations, no emblem is so common as the heart,— S^asX little three- 
 cornered exponent of all our hopes and fears,— the bestuck and bleeding 
 heart ; it is twisted and tortured into more allegories and affectations than an 
 opera hat. What authority we have in history or mythology for placing the 
 head-quarters and metropolis of God Cupid in this anatomical seat rather 
 than in any other, is not very clear ; but we have got it, and it will serve as 
 well as any other. Else we might easily imagine, upon some other system 
 which might have prevailed for anything which our pathology knows to the 
 contrary, a lover addressing his mistress, in perfect simplicity of feeling, 
 " Madam, my liver and fortune are entire!/ at your disposal ;" or putting a 
 delicate question, "Amanda, have you a midriff ^o bestow?" But custom 
 has settled these things, and awarded the seat of sentiment to the aforesaid 
 triangle, while its less fortunate neighbours wait at animal and anatomical dis- 
 tance. 
 
 Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed 
 in interest a kiiock at ike door. It "gives a very echo to the throne where 
 hope is seated." But its issues seldom answer to this oracle within. It is so 
 seldom that just the person we want to see comes. But of all the clamorous 
 visitations the welcomest in expectation is the sound that ushers in, or seems to 
 usher in, a Valentine. As the raven himself was hoarse that announced the 
 fatal entrance of Duncan, so the knock of the postman on this day is light, 
 airy, confident, and befitting one that bringeth good tidings. It is less 
 mechanical than on other days; you will say, " that is not the post, I am 
 sure." Visions of Love, of Cupids, of Hymen! — delightful eternal common- 
 places, "having been will always be; " which no school-boy nor school-man 
 can write away ; having your irreversible throne in the fancy and affections — 
 what are your transports, when the happy maiden, opening with careful finger, 
 careful not to break the emblematic seal, bursts upon the sight of some well- 
 designed allegory, some type, some youthful fancy, not without verses — 
 
 Lovers all, 
 A madrigal, 
 
 or some such device, not over-abundant in sense — young Love disclaims it, — 
 and not quite silly — something between wind and water, a chorus where the 
 sheep might almost join the shepherd, as they did, or as I apprehend they did, 
 in Ascadia. 
 
358 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 All Valentines are not foolish ; and I shall not easily forget thine, my kind 
 friend (if I may have leave to call you so) E. B. — E. B. lived opposite a young 
 maiden, whom he had often seen, unseen, from his parlour window in G — e 
 Street, She was all joyousness and innocence, and just of an age to enjoy 
 receiving a Valentine, and just of a temper to bear the disappointment of 
 missing one with good humour. E. B. is an artist of no common powers ; in 
 the fancy parts of designing, perhaps inferior to none ; his name is known at 
 the bottom of many a well-executed vignette in the way of his profession, but 
 no farther ; for E. B. is modest, and the world meets nobody half-way. E. B. 
 meditated how he could repay this young maiden for many a favour which she 
 had done him unknown ; for when a kindly face greets us, though but passing 
 by, and never knows us again, nor we it, we should feel it as an obligation; 
 and E. B. did. This good artist set himself at work to please the damsel. It 
 was just before Valentines day three years since. He wrought, unseen, and 
 unsuspected, a wondrous work. We need not say it was on the finest gilt 
 paper, with borders — full, not of common hearts and heartless allegory, but 
 all tlie prettiest stories of love from Ovid and older poets than Ovid (for 
 E. B. is a scholar). There was Pyramtis and Thisbe, and be sure Dido was 
 not forgot, nor Hero and Leander, and swans more than sang in Cayster, with 
 mottoes and fanciful devices, such as beseemed— a work in short of magic. 
 Iris dipt the woof. This on Valentine's eve he commended to the all-swallow- 
 ing indiscriminate orifice— (O ignoble trust !) — of the common post; but the 
 humble medium did its duty, and from his watchful stand, the next morning, he 
 saw the cheerful messenger knock, and by-and-by the precious charge delivered. 
 He saw, unseen, the happy girl unfold the Valentine, dance about, clap her 
 hands, as one after one the pretty emblems unfolded tliemselves. She danced 
 about, not with light love or foolish expectations, for she had no lover : or, if 
 she had, none she knew that could have created those bright images which ! 
 delighted her. It was more like some fairy present ; a God-send, as our J 
 familiarly pious ancestors termed a benefit received, wlieje the benefactor was 
 unknown. It would do her no harm. It would do her good for ever after, j 
 It is good to love the unknown. I only give this as a specimen of E. B. and 
 his modest way of doing a concealed kindness. 
 
 " Good-morrow to my Valentine," singspoor Ophelia; and no better wish, 
 but with better auspices, we wish to all faithful lovers, who are not too wise to 
 despise old legends, but are content to rank themselves humble diocesans of 
 old Bishop Valentine, and his true church. 
 
 % C^apto on @a:rs. 
 
 (The London Magazine, March, 1S21.) 
 
 [The Essayist's "good Catholic friend Nov ," was no other than Vincent 
 
 Novello, the eminent organist and composer.] 
 
 I HAVE no ear. — 
 
 Mistake me not, reader, — nor imagine that I am by nature destitute of those , 
 exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments and (architecturally speaking) j 
 
Elia: A Chapter ofi Ears. ■iia\ 
 
 handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne 
 me.^I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those con- 
 duits ; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for 
 her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets— those indispensable side- 
 intelligencers. 
 
 Neither have I incurred or done anything to incur, with Defoe, that hideous 
 disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon assurance— to feel " quite 
 unabashed," * and at ease upon that article. I was never, I thank my stars 
 in the pillory ; nor, if I read them aright, is it within the compass of my des- 
 tiny that I ever should be. 
 
 When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me to mean 
 -^rm^j;V.— To say that this heart never melted at the concourse of sweet 
 souttds, would be a foul self-libel. — " Water parted from the sea " never fails 
 to move it strangely. So does " //« infancy." But they were used to be sung 
 at her harpsichord (the old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a 
 gentlewoman— the gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation— the sweetest 
 
 —why should I hesitate to name Mrs. S , once the blooming Fanny 
 
 Weatheral of the Temple— who had power to thrill the soul of Elia, small 
 imp as he was, even in his long coals; and to make him glow, tremble, and 
 blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the day-spring of that absorbing 
 sentiment, which was afterwards destined to overwhelm and subdue his nature 
 quite, for Alice W n. 
 
 I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically 
 I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising " God save the King" all 
 my life ; whistling and humming it over to myself in solitary corners ; and am 
 not yet arrived, they tell me, within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty 
 of Eha never been impeached. - 
 
 I am not without suspicion that I have an undeveloped faculty of music 
 within me. For, thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s piano, the 
 other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining parlour, — on his return 
 he was pleased to say, ' ' he thought it could not be the maid /" On his first 
 surprise at hearing the keys touched in somewhat an airy and masterful way, 
 not dreaming of me, his suspicions had lighted on Jenny. But a grace 
 snatched from a superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being, — 
 technically perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle cSmmon 
 to all the fine arts, — had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all her 
 (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them. I mention 
 this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any view of dispara- 
 ging Jenny. 
 
 Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken some 
 pains) what a note in music is ; or how one note should differ from another. 
 Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. Only sometimes 
 the thorough bass I contrive to guess at, from its being supereminently. harsh 
 and disagreeable. I tremble, however, for my misapplication of the simplest 
 terms of that which I disclaim. While I profe,ss my ignorance, I scarce know 
 what to say I am ignorant of. I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. Sostenuio and 
 adagio stand in the like relation of obscurity to me ; and Sol, Fa, Mi, Re, is as 
 conjuring as Baraliptoti . 
 
 It is hard to stand alone — in an age like this, — (constituted to the quick and 
 critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily believe, beyond all 
 preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the gamut)— to remain as it were 
 singly unimpressible to the magic influences of an art which is said to have 
 such an especial stroke at soothing, elevating, and refining the passions. — Yet 
 rather than break the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you, 
 
 * [Earless on high stood, unabashed, Defoe. — Dttnciad.\ 
 
360 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 that I have received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up 
 faculty. 
 
 I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in a warm 
 summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But those 
 unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. The 
 ear is passive to those single strokes ; wiUingly enduring stripes, while it hath 
 no task to con. To music it cannot be passive. It will strive — mine at least 
 will— spite of its inaptitude, to thrid the maze ; like an imskilled eye painfully 
 poring upon hieroglyphics. I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for 
 sheer pain, and ine.\plicable anguish, 1 have rushed out into the noisiest places 
 of the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not obhged 
 to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren 
 attention ! I take refuge in the unpretending assemblage of honest common- 
 life sounds; — and the purgatory of the Enraged Musician becomes my 
 paradise. 
 
 I have sat at an Oratorio (that profanation of the purposes of the cheerful 
 playhouse) watching the faces of the auditory in the pit (what a contrast to 
 Hogarth's Laughing Audience !) immovable, or affectmg some faint emotion, — 
 till (as some have said, that our occupations in the next world will be but a 
 shadow of what delighted us in this) I have imagined myself in some cold 
 Theatre in Hades, where some of ikis forms of the earthly one should be kept 
 up, with none of the enjoyment ; or like that — 
 
 Party in a parlour, 
 
 All silent, and all damned ! 
 
 Above all those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, 
 do plague and embitter my apprehension. — Words are something; but to be 
 exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds ; to be long a dying, to lie 
 stretched upon a rack of roses ; to keep up langour by unintermitted effort ; to 
 pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious 
 sweetness ; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; 
 to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to 
 read a \iQ^ all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent 
 extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable ram- 
 bling mime — these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series 
 of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music. 
 
 I deny not, that in the opening of a concert, I have experienced something 
 vastly lulling and agreeable : — afterwards followeth the languor, and the oppres- 
 sion. Like that disappointing book in Patmos ; * or, like the comings on of 
 melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating ap- 
 proaches : — " Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk 
 alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and 
 to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall effect him 
 most, amahilis insania, and mentis grntissimus error. A most incomparable 
 delight to build castles in the air, to go smiling to themselves, acting an infinite 
 variety of parts, which they suppose, and strongly imagine, they act, or that 
 they see done. — So delightsome these toys at first, they could spend whole days 
 and nights without sleep, even whole years in such contemplations, and fantas- 
 tical meditations, which are like so many dreams, and will hardly be drawn 
 from them — winding and unwinding themselves as so many clocks, and still 
 pleasing their humours, until at last the scene turns upon a sudden, and 
 they being now habitated to such meditations and solitary places, can endure 
 no company, can think of nothing but harsh and distasteful subject. Fear, 
 sorrow, suspicion, subrusticus pudor, discontent, cares, and weariness of Ufe, 
 
 * [Rev. chap. x. ver. lo-] 
 
EUa: A Chapter on Ears. 361 
 
 surprise them on a sudden, and they can think of nothing else : continually 
 suspectmg, no sooner are their eyes open, but this infernal plague of melan- 
 choly seizeth upon them, and terrifies their souls, representing some dismsl 
 object to their minds ; which now, by no means, no labour, no persuasions 
 they can avoid, they cannot be rid of, they cannot resist." * ' 
 
 Something hke this "scene-turning" I have experienced at the evening 
 
 parties, at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov ; who, by the aid of 
 
 a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his'drawing-room 
 into a chapel, his week days into Sundays, and these latter into minor 
 heavens, t 
 
 When my friend commences upon one of those solemn anthems, which per- 
 
 1 adventure struck upon my heedless ear, rambling in the side aisles of the dim 
 
 A abbey, some five-and-thirty years since, waking a new sense, and putting a soul 
 
 > of old rehgion into my young apprehension— (whether it be that, in which the 
 
 psalmist, weary of the persecutions of bad men, wisheth to himself dove's 
 
 wings, or that other, which, with a like measure of sobriety and pathos, in- 
 
 quireth by what means the young man shall best cleanse his mind)— a holy 
 
 calm pervadeth me.— I am for the time 
 
 -rapt above earth. 
 
 And possess joys not promised at my birth. 
 
 But when this master of the spell, not content to have laid a soul prostrate, 
 goes on, in his power, to inflict more bliss than lies in her capacity to receive, 
 — impatient to overcome her " earthly " with his "heavenly," — still pouring in, 
 for protracted hours, fresh waves and fresh from the sea of sound, or from that 
 inexhausted German, ocean, above which, in triumphant progress, dolphin- 
 seated, ride those Arions Haydn and Mozart, with their attendant tritons Bach, 
 Beethoven, and a countless tribe, whom to attempt to reckon up would but 
 plunge me again in the deeps, — I stagger under the weight of harmony, reeling 
 to and fro at my wit's end ; — clouds, as of frankincense, oppress me— priests, 
 altars, censers, dazzle before me— the genius of his religion hath me in her 
 toils— a shadowy triple tiara invests the brow of my friend, late so naked, so 
 ingenious- -he is Pope, — and by him sits, like as in the aiiomaly of dreams, a 
 she-Pope too, — tri-coroneted like himself! — I am converted, and yet a Protes- 
 tant;— at once malleus heretkornm, and myself grand heresiarch ; or three 
 heresies centre in my person : I am Marcion, Ebion, and Cerinthus — Gog and 
 Magog— what not ?— till the coming in of the friendly supper-tray dissipates 
 the figment, and a draught of true Lutheran beer (in which chiefly my friend 
 shows himself no bigot) at once reconciles me to the rationalities of a purer 
 faith ; and restores to me the genuine unterrifying aspects of my pleasant- 
 countenanced host and hostess. 
 
 [P.S. A writer, whose real name it seems is Boldero, but who has been eiiter- 
 taining the town for the last twelve months with some very pleasant lucubrations 
 under the assumed signature of Leigh Hunt,\ 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 
 lie writhing and tossing under the cruel imputation of nonentity. Good 
 Heavens ! that a plain man must not be allowed to be 
 
 * [Anatomy of Melancholy.] 
 t [I have been there, and still would go ; 
 'Tis like a little heaven \x\ovr.—Dr. JVatis.] 
 t [Clearly a fictitious appellation ; for, if we admit the latter of these names to be in a 
 manner English, what is Zeig-h ? Christian nomenclature knows no such.] 
 
362 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 They call this an age of personality; but surely this spirit of anti-personality 
 (if I may so express it) is something worse. j-. ». , , 
 
 Take awav 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? . a . 
 
 Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle at 
 thP hpsf but here is an assassin who aims at our very essence ; who not only 
 forbids is to he any longer, but to have been at all. Let our ancestors look 
 
 '° 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 
 pro-en tors from stately Genoa, where we flourished four centuries back, before 
 Se barbarous name of Boldero ' was known to a European mouth nothing? 
 Was the goodly scion of our name, transplanted mto Eng and in the reign of 
 the sevenfh Henry, nothing? Are the archives of the steelyard m succeeding 
 reiens (if haply they survive the fury of out envious enemies), showing that we 
 flourished in prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the Common- 
 wealth, nothing? 
 
 . Why, then the world, and all that's in't, is nothing ; 
 The covering sky is nothing ; Bohemia nothing. 
 
 I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move me so.] 
 
 ■%\\ Jf00ls' gag. 
 
 {The London Magazine, April, 1S21.) 
 
 [There was appended to this essay, as it originally appeared, the date " ist April, 1821,** 
 as if in scrupulous authentication. "Honest R." meant the old bookseller Ramsay of 
 the London Library on Ludgate Hill : while " Granville S." was Granville Sharp.] 
 
 The compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of 
 April to us all ! 
 
 Many happy returns of this day to you — and you — xa&you, sir,— nay, never 
 frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one 
 another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that 
 same— yon understand me — a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on 
 such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am 
 none of those sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who 
 knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wise-acre, 
 I can tell him. Stultus sum. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it 
 to yourself for your pains. What, man, we have four quarters of the globe on 
 our side, at the least computation. 
 
 Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry — we will drink no wise, melan- 
 choly, politic port on this day — and let us troll the catch of Amiens— <^M ^"^ 
 »K« — due ad me — how goes it ? 
 
 * [It is clearly of transatlantic origin.] 
 
Elia : All Fools' Day. 
 
 363 
 
 Here shall he see 
 Gross fools as he. 
 
 Now would I give a trifle to know historically and authentically, who was 
 the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him a bumper. Marry, 
 of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the 
 party. 
 
 Remove your cap a little farther if you please ; it hides my bauble. And 
 now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what tune he 
 pleases. I will give you for my part. 
 
 the crazy old church clock, 
 
 And the bewiider'd chimes, 
 
 Good master Empedocles,* you are welcome. It is long since you went a 
 salamander-gathering down JSXns.. Worse than samphire-picking bysome odds. 
 Tis a mercy your worship did not singe your mustachios. 
 
 Ha I Cleombrotus ! f and what salads in faith did you light upon at the 
 bottom of the Mediterranean ? You were founder, I talce it, of the disinte- 
 rested sect of the Calenturists. 
 
 Gebir, my old freemason, and prince of plaisterers at Babel, J bring in your 
 trowel, most Ancient Grand ! You have claim to a seat here at my right hand, 
 as patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if I remember Herodotus 
 correctly, at eight hundred million toises, or thereabout, above the level of the 
 sea. Bless us, what a long bell you must have pulled to call your top workmen 
 to their luncheon on the low grounds of the Sennaar. Or did you send up 
 your garlick and onions by a rocket ? I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to 
 show you our Monument on Fish-Street Hill, after your altitudes. Yet we 
 think it somewhat. 
 
 What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears ? — cry, baby, put its finger in its 
 eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty moppet ! 
 
 Mister Adams 'odso, I honour your coat— pray do us the favour to read to 
 
 us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipslop— the twenty and second 
 in your portmanteau there — on Female Incontinence — the same — it will 
 come in most irrelevantly and impertinently seasonable to the time of the 
 day. 
 
 Good Master Raymund Lully, you look wise. Pray correct that error. 
 
 Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine' you a bumper, or a paradox. We 
 will have nothing said or done .syllogistically this day. Remove those logical 
 forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension 
 stumbling across them. 
 
 Master Stephen, you are late. — Ha ! Cokes, is it you? — Aguecheek, my dear 
 knight, let me pay my devoir to you, — Master Shallow, your worship's poor 
 servant to command. — Master Silence, I will use few words with you.— Slender, 
 it shall go hard if I edge not you in somewhere. — You six will engross all the 
 poor wit of the company to-day. — 1 know it, I know it. 
 
 Ha ! honest R , my fine old Librarian of Ludgate, time out of mind, 
 
 art thou here again ? Bless thy doublet, it is not over-new, threadbare as thy 
 stories : — what dost thou flitting about the world at this rate ? — Thy customers 
 are extinct, defunct, bed-rid, have ceased to read long ago. — Thou goest still 
 among them, seeing if, peradven'ture, thou canst hawk a volume or two. — Good 
 Granville S , thy last patron, is flown. 
 
 * [ He who, to be deem'd 
 
 A god, leap'd fondly into Etna flames — ^ — 
 + [ He who, to enjoy 
 
 Plato's Elysium, leap'd into the sea ] 
 
 t [The builders next of Babel on the plain 
 
 Of Shenaar. — ] 
 
 -] 
 
364 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 King Pandion, he is dead, 
 
 All thy friends are lapt in lead. — 
 
 Nevertheless, Noble R , come in, and take your seat here, between 
 
 Armado and Quisada ; for in true courtesy, in gravity, in fantastic smiling to thy- 
 self, in courteous smiling upon others, in the goodly ornature of well-apparelled 
 speech, and the commendation of wise sentences, thou art nothing inferior to 
 those accomplished Dons of Spain. The spirit of chivalry forsake me for 
 ever, when I forget thy singing the song of Macheath, which declares that he 
 might be happywith either, situated between those two ancient spinsters— when 
 I forget the inimitable formal love which thou didst make, turning now to the 
 one, and now to the other, with that Malvolian smile as if Cervantes, not Gay, 
 had written it for his hero ; and as if thousands of periods must revolve, before 
 the mirror of courtesy could have given his invidious preference between a pair 
 of so goodly-propertied and meritorious-equal damsels. 
 
 To descend from these altitudes, and not to protract our Fool's Banquet 
 beyond its appropriate day, — for I fear the second of April is not many hours 
 distant — in sober verity I will confess a truth to thee, reader. I love a Fool— 
 as naturally, as if I were of kith and kin to him. When a child, with child- 
 like apprehensions, that dived not below the surface of the matter, I read those 
 Parables — not guessing at their involved wisdom — I had more yearnings 
 towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I enter- 
 tained for his more cautious neighbour ; I grudged at the hard censure pro- 
 nounced upon the quiet soul that kept his talent ; and — prizing their simplicity 
 beyond the more provident, and, to my apprehension, somewhat unfeminine 
 wariness, of their competitors — I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a 
 tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins, — I have never made an acquaintance 
 since, that lasted, or a friendship, that answered, with any that had not some 
 tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of 
 understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your 
 company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach 
 you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants ; the security, 
 which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and 
 say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in 
 his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition. It is 
 observed, that *'the foolisher the fowl or fish — woodcocks, — dotterells, — cod's- 
 heads, &c., the finer the flesh thereof," and what are commonly the world's 
 received fools, but such whereof the world is not worthy? and what have been 
 some of the kindliest patterns of our species, but so many darlings of 
 absurdity, minions of the goddess, and her white boys ? — Reader, if you wrest 
 my words beyond their fair construction, it is you, and not I, that are the 
 April Fool. 
 
Elia: A Quakers' Aleeting. 365 
 
 [The London Magaznie, April, iSai.) 
 
 [The verses quoted at the head of this essay, are takrn from Richard Flecknoe's 
 dramatic pastoral of " Love's Dominion," elsewhere cited by Charles Lamb in his 
 " Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets."] 
 
 Still-born Silence I thou that art 
 Flood-gate of the deeper heart ! 
 Offspring of a heavenly kind ! ^ 
 
 Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o" the mind ! 
 Secrecy's confident, and he 
 Who makes religion mystery ! 
 Admiration's speaking'st tongue ! 
 Leave, thy desert shades among. 
 Reverend hermits' hallow'd cells. 
 Where retired devotion dwells ! 
 With thy enthusiasms come. 
 Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb ! 
 
 Reader, would'st thou know what true peace and quiet mean; would'st thou 
 find a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude; would'st thou 
 enjoy at once solitude and society ; would'st thou possess the depth of thy own 
 spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy 
 species ; would'st thou be alone, and yet accompanied ; solitary, yet not deso- 
 late; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in countenance: a unit in 
 aggregate ; a simple in composite : — come with me into a Quakers' Meeting. 
 
 Dost thou love silence as deep as that "before the winds were made ? " go 
 
 not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth ; 
 
 ■l, shut not up thy casements ; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, 
 
 jwith little-faithed self-mistrusting Ulysses, — Retire with me into a Quakers' 
 
 i Meeting. 
 
 .| For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is 
 I, commendable ; but for a multitude, it is great mastery. 
 
 What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this place ? what the un- 
 communicating muteness of fishes ? — here the goddess reigns and revels. — 
 " Boreas, and Cecias, and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-confounding 
 uproars more augment the brawl — nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their 
 clubbed sounds — than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and 
 rendered more intense by numbers and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, 
 that call unto deeps. Negation itself has a positive more and less ; and closed 
 eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. \ 
 
 There are wounds, which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By imperfect I I 
 mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he | 
 can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' - 1 
 
 Meetin<r. Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when j 
 
 they reUred into Egyptian sohtudes, not singly, but in ."shoals, to enjoy one 
 another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by 
 this at^reeing spirit of incommunicativeness. In secular occasions, what so ! 
 pleasant as to be reading a book through a long winter evening, with a friend I 
 
366 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 sitting by— say, a wife— he, or she, too (if that be probable), reading another, 
 without interruption, or oral communication? — can there be no sympathy 
 without the gabble of words ?— away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade- 
 and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me. Master Zimmerman, a sympathetic 
 solitude. 
 
 To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some cathedral, time- 
 stricken ; 
 
 Or under hanging mountains. 
 
 Or by the fall of fountains ; 
 
 is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those enjoy, who come 
 together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This is the 
 loneliness " to be felt." — The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so. 
 solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers! 
 Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions. 
 
 - sands, ignoble things. 
 
 Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings — 
 
 but here is something, which throws Antiquity herself into the foreground — 
 Silence— eldest of things — language of old Night — primitive Discourser— to 
 which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a 
 violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. 
 
 , How reverend is the view of these hush'd heads 
 
 Looking tranquillity ! 
 
 Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod ! convocation 
 without intrigue ! parliament without debate ! what a lesson dost thou read to 
 council, and to consistory !— if my pen treat of you lightly — as haply it will 
 wander— yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when 
 sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather 
 confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the 
 sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. — I have witnessed that, which 
 brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and 
 serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest 
 you — for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the out-cast and off- 
 scouring of church and presbytery, — I have seen the reeling sea-ruflian, who 
 had wandered into your receptacle, with the avowed intention of disturbing 
 your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, 
 and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered 
 Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in 
 spirit, as he tells us, and " the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under 
 his feet." 
 
 Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above 
 all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, 
 and is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the Primitive Friends. It is 
 far more edifying and affecting than anything you will read of Wesley and 
 his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, 
 no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious ^irit. 
 You will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who 
 perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth),— James Naylor: what dreadful 
 sufferings, with what patience, he endured, even to the boring through of his 
 tongue with red-hot irons without a murmur ; and with what strength of mind, 
 when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatized for blasphemy, 
 had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of 
 the bcautifuUest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still ! — 
 
Elia: A Quakers' Meeting. 367 
 
 so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, 
 when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enougli 
 from the society of their former errors, even lo the renunciation of some 
 saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not impUcatcd. 
 
 Get the writings of John Woolman by heart ; and love the early Quakers. 
 
 How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primi- 
 tive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the 
 Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies, 
 upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, 
 when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly 
 detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition 
 to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. — If the 
 spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pre- 
 tences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom 
 indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now 
 and then a trembling female, generally ancient, voice is heard — you cannot 
 guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds — with a low, buzzing, musical 
 sound, laying out a few words which "she thought might suit the condition 
 of some present," with a quaking diffidence which leaves no possibility of 
 supposing that anything of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were 
 so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty. — The men, from what I have 
 observed, speak seldomer. 
 
 Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old 
 Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases 
 it, might have danced "from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His frame 
 was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him shake all over with the 
 spirit— I dare not say, of delusion. The strivings of the outer man were un- 
 utterable—he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw the strong 
 man bowed down, and his knees to fail— his jomts all seemed loosening— it 
 was a figure to set off against Paul preaching; — the words he uttered were few, 
 and sotmd— he was evidently resisting his will— keeping down his own word- 
 wisdom with more mighty effort, than the world's orators strain for theirs. , 
 "He had been a Wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of a sober 
 remorse. And it was not till long after the impression had begun to wear 
 away, that I was enabled, with something like a smile, to recall the striking 
 incongruity of the confession— understanding the term in its worldly accepta- 
 tion with the frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow 
 
 would have scared away the Levites— the Jocos Risus-que— faster than the Loves 
 fled the face of Dis at Enna.— By wit, even in his youth, I will be Sworn he 
 understood something far within the hmits of an allowable liberty. 
 
 More frequently the Meeting is broken up without a word having been 
 spoken But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made 
 w-ith hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius ; or as in 
 some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, 
 that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed 
 with stillness.— O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness of the 
 ian^lings and nonsense-noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, 
 to go and seat yourself, for a quiet half-hour, upon some undisputed corner of 
 a bench, among the gentle Quakers ! ., •, . ■, . . j 
 
 Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd- 
 like— as in the pasture— "forty feeding like one."— ., , 
 
 The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of receiving a soil ; and 
 cleanliness in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary. 
 Everv Quakeress is a lily ; and when they come up in bands to their Whitsun- 
 confereiices, whitening the easterly streets of the metropolis from all parts of 
 the United Kingdom, they show hke troops of the Shining Ones. 
 
368 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 %\t ®Iir aitir ^i Itfto %t\Qa\ctcmiix, 
 
 'The London Magazine, May, 1821.) 
 
 [Where Elia speaks below of " a very dear friend " in New South Wales, allusion is 
 made to Barron Field, the " B. F." to whom is addressed the letter included among these 
 essays under the title of "Distant Correspondents." The Essayist's other "friend M." 
 is understood to have been Thomas Manning, sometime Mathematical Tutor at Cam- 
 bridge.] 
 
 My reading has been lamentably desultory and immethodical. Odd, out of 
 the way, old English plays and treatises, have supphed me with most of my 
 notions and ways of feeling. In everything that relates to science, I am a 
 whole EncyclopEedia behind the rest of the world. I should have scarcely cut 
 a figure among the franklins, or country gentlemen, in King John's days. I 
 know less geography than a schoolboy of si.x weeks' standing. To me a map 
 of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout 
 Africa merges into Asia ; whether Ethiopia lie in one or other of those great 
 divisions ; nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South 
 Wales, or Van Diemen's Land. Yet do I hold a correspondence with a very 
 dear friend in the first-named of these two TerrEe Incognitas. I have no as- 
 tronomy. I do not know where to look for the Bear, or Charles's Wain ; the 
 place of any star ; or the name of any of them at sight. I guess at Venus 
 only by her brightness — and if the sun on some portentous morn were to make 
 his first appearance in the West, I verily believe that, while all the world were 
 gasping in apprehension about me, I alone should stand unterrified, from sheer 
 incuriosity and want of observation. Of history and chronology I possess 
 some vague points, such as one cannot help picking up in the course of miscel- 
 laneous study ; but I never deliberately sat down to a chronicle, even of my 
 own country. I have most dim apprehensions of the four great monarchies ; 
 and sometimes the Assyrian, sometimes the Persian, floats as first in my fancy. 
 I make the widest conjectures concerning FJgypt, and her shepherd kings. My 
 friend M. , with gr^at painstaking, got me to think I understood the first pro- 
 position in Euclid, but gave me over in despair at the second. I am entirely 
 unacquainted with the modern languages ; and, like a better man than myself, 
 have ' ' small Latin and less Greek. " I am a stranger to the shapes and 
 texture of the commonest trees, herbs, flowers — not from the circumstance of 
 my being town-born — for I should have brought the same inobservant spirit 
 into the world with me, had I first seen it "on Devon's leafy shores," — and am 
 no less at a loss among purely town-objects, tools, engines, mechanic processes. 
 — Not that I affect ignorance— but my head has not many mansions, nor 
 spacious ; and I have been obhged to fill it with such cabinet curiosities as it 
 can hold without aching. I sometimes wonder, how I have passed my proba- 
 tion with so little discredit in the world, as I have done, upon so meagre a 
 stock. But the fact is, a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, 
 and scarce be found out, in mixed company ; everybody is so much more 
 ready to produce his own, than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But 
 in a tSie-d-tS/e there is no shuffling. The truth will out. There is nothing 
 which I dread so much, as the being left alone for a quarter of an hour with 
 
Eha : The Old and the New Schoolmaster. 369 
 
 sto™Ttoiv^'?^"^l''-ff '?^-"^^™ Bishopsgate and Shacklewell, the coach 
 stopped to take up a staid-looking gentleman, about the wrong side of thirty, 
 ir^.,T Siying his parting directions (while the steps were adjusting), in a 
 tone of mild authority to a tall youth, who seemed to be neither his cllrk, his 
 son, nor his servant, but something partaking of all three. The youth was 
 dismissed and we drove on. As we were the sole passengers, he naturally 
 enough addressed his conversation to me ; and we discussed the merits of the 
 tare, the civility and punctuality of the driver ; the circumstance of an oppo- 
 sition coach having been lately set up, with the probabilities of its success-to 
 all which I was enabled to return pretty satisfactory answers, having been 
 drilled into this kind of etiquette by some years' daily practice of riding to and 
 Jro in the stage aforesaid— when he suddenly alarmed me by a startling 
 question, whether I had seen the show of prize cattle that morning in Smith- 
 held ? Now as I had not seen it, and do not greatly care for such sort of exhi- 
 bitions, I was obliged to return a cold negative. He seemed a little mortified, 
 as well as astonished, at my declaration, as (it appeared) he was just come fresh 
 from the sight, and doubtless had hoped to compare notes on the subject. 
 However he assured me that I had lost a fine treat, as it far exceeded the show 
 of last year. We were now approaching Norton Folgate, when the sight of 
 some shop-goods ticketed freshened him up into a dissertation upon the cheap- 
 ness of cottons this spring. I was now a little in heart, as the nature of my 
 morning avocations had brought me into some sort of familiarity with' the raw 
 material ; and I was surprised to find how eloquent I was becoming on the 
 state of the India market— when, presently, he dashed my incipient vanity to 
 the earth at once, by inquiring whether I had ever made any calculation as to 
 the value of the rental of all the retail shops in London. Had he asked of 
 me, what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid 
 himself among women, I might, with Sir Thomas Browne, have hazarded a 
 " wide solution." * My companion saw my embarrassment, and, the alms- 
 houses beyond Shoreditch just coming in view, with great good-nature and 
 dexterity shifted his conversation to the subject of public charities; which led 
 to the comparative merits of pro'ision for the poor in past and present times, 
 with observations on <the old monastic institutions, and charitable orders ; — 
 but, finding ir.e rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions from old 
 poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any speculations reducible to 
 calculation on the subject, he gave the matter up ; and, the country beginning 
 to open more and more upon us, as we approached the turnpike at Kingsland 
 (the destined termination of his journey), he put a home thrust upon me, in the 
 most unfortunate position he could have chosen, by advancing some queries 
 relative to the North Pole Expedition. While I was muttering out something 
 about the Panorama of those strange regions (which I had actually seen), by 
 way of parrying the question, the coach stopping relieved me from any further 
 apprehensions. My companion getting out, left me in the comfortable 
 possession of my ignorance ; and I heard him, as he went off, putting questions 
 to an outside passenger, who had alighted with him, regarding an epidemic 
 disorder that had been rife about Dalston, and which, my friend assured him, 
 had gone through five or six schools in that neighbourhood. The truth now 
 flashed upon me, that my companion was a schoolmaster ; and that the youth, 
 whom he had parted from at onr first acquaintance, must have been one of 
 the bigger boys, or the usher. — He was evidently a kind-hearted man, who did 
 not seem so much desirous of provoking discussion by the questions which he 
 put, as of obtaining information at any rate. It did not appear that he took 
 any interest, either, in such kind of inquiries, for their own sake ; but that he 
 • [Urn Burial.) 
 
370 2rie Works of Charles Laiiih, 
 
 — f ■ 
 
 was in some way bound to seek for knowledge. A greenish-coloured coat, 
 which he had on, forbade me to surmise that he was a clergyman. The ad- 
 venture gave birth to some reiiections on the difference between persons of his f 
 profession in past and present times. 
 
 Rest to the souls of those fine old Pedagogues; the breed, long since extinct, 
 of the Lilys, and the Linacres : \vho believing that all learning was contained 
 in the languages which they taught, and despising every other acquirement as 
 superficial and useless, came to iheir task as to a sport ! Passing from infancy 
 ( to age, they dreamed away all their days as in a grammar-school. Revolving 
 ^ in a perpetual cycle of declensions, conjugations, syntaxes, and prosodies; 
 ' renewing constantly the occupations which had charmed their studious child- 
 hood ; rehearsing continually the part of the past ; life must have slipped from 
 them at last like one day. They were always in their first garden, reaping 
 harvests of their golden time, among their Florl and their Spici-legia ; in 
 Arcadia still, but kings ; the ferule of their sway not much harsher, but of like 
 dignity with that mild sceptre attributed to King Basil eus ; the Greek and 
 Latin, their stately Pamela and their Philoclea ; with the occasional duncery 
 of some untoward Tyro, serving for a refreshing interlude of a Mopsa, or a 
 clown Damastas ! 
 
 With what a savour doth the Preface to Colet's, or (as it is sometimes called) 
 Paul's Accidence, set forth ! " To exhort every man to the learning of 
 grammar, that intendeth to attain the understanding of the tongues, wherein 
 is contained a great treasury of wisdom and knowledge, it would seem but vain 
 and lost labour ; for so much as it is known, that nothing can surely be ended, 
 whose beginning is either feeble or faulty ; and no building be perfect, whereas 
 the foundation and ground-work is ready to fall, and unable to uphold the 
 burden of the frame," How well doth this stately preamble (comparable to 
 those which Milton commendeth as " having been the usage to prefix to some 
 solemn law, then first promulgated by Solon, or Lycurgus ") correspond with 
 and illustrate that pious zeal for conformity, expressed in a succeeding clause, 
 which would fence about grammar-rules with the severity of faith-articles ! — 
 "as for the diversity of grammars, it is well profitably taken away by the 
 king's majesties wisdom, who foreseeing the inconvenience, and favourably 
 providing the remedie, caused one kind of grammar by sundry learned men to 
 be diligently drawn, and so to be set out, only everywh^ to be taught for the 
 use of learners, and for the hurt in changing of school maisters." What a 
 gusto in that which follows : " wheran it is profitable that he [the pupil] can 
 orderly decline his noun, and his verb." His noun ! 
 
 The fine dream is fading away fast ; and the least concern of a teacher in 
 the present day is to inculcate grammar-rules. 
 
 The modern schoolmaster is expected to know a little of everything, because 
 his pupil is required not to be entirely ignorant of anything. He must be 
 superficially, if I may so say, omniscient. He is to know something of pneu- 
 matics ; of chemistry ; of whatever is curious, or proper to excite the atten- 
 tion of the ''youthful mind; an insight into mechanics is desirable, with a 
 touch of statistics ; the quality of soils, &c.; botany ; the constitution of his 
 country, c;vz« mtdtis aliis. You may get .a notion of some part of his ex- 
 pected duties by consulting the famous Tractrate on Education addressed to 
 Mr. Hartlib. 
 
 All these things— these, or the desire of them — he is expected to instil, not 
 by^set lessons from professors, which he may charge in the bill, but at school- 
 intervals, as he walks the streets, or saunters through green fields (those natural 
 instructors) with his pupils. The least part of what is expected from him is to 
 be done in school-hours. He must insinuate knowledge at the mollia tempora 
 fandi. He must seize every occasion— the season of the year— the time of the 
 day—a passing cloud— a rainbow — a waggon of hay — a regiment of soldiers 
 
Elia: The Old and the New Schoolmaster. 371 
 
 going by— to inculcate something useful. He can receive no pleasure from a 
 casual glimpse of nature, but must catch at it as an object of instruction. He 
 must interpret beauty into the picturesque. He cannot relish a beggar-man or 
 a gipsy, for thinking of the suitable improvement. Nothing comes to him, 
 not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses. The Universe— that 
 Great Book, as it has been called — is to him indeed, to all intents and purposes, 
 a book, out of which he is doomed to read tedious homilies to distasting 
 schoolboys. — Vacations themselves are none to him, he is onlv rather worse off 
 than before ; for commonly he has some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon 
 him at such times ; some cadet of a great family ; some neglected lump of 
 nobility, or gentry ; that he must drag after him to the play, to the panorama, 
 to Mr. Hartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's 
 house, or his favourite watering-place. Wherever he goes, this uneasy shadow 
 attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in aU his movements. 
 He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy. 
 
 Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates ; but they are 
 unwholesome companions for grown people. The restraint is felt no less on 
 the one side, than on the other.— Even a child, that "plaything for an hour," 
 tires always. The noises of children, playing their own fancies— as I now 
 hearken to them by fits, sporting on the green before my window, while I am 
 engaged in these grave speculations at my neat suburban retreat at Shacklewell 
 — by distance made more sweet — inexpressibly take from the labour of my 
 task. It is like writing to music. They seem to modulate my periods. They 
 ought at least to do so — for in the voice of that tender age there is a kind of 
 poetry, far unlike the harsh prose-accents of man's conversation. — I should but 
 spoil their sport, and diminish my own sympathy for them, by mingling in their 
 pastime. 
 
 I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior capa- 
 city to my own — not, if I know myself at all, from any considerations of 
 jealousy, or self-comparison, for the occasional communion with such minds 
 has constituted the fortune and felicity of my life— but the habit of too con- 
 stant intercourse with spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you down. 
 Too frequent doses of original thinking from others, restrain what lesser portion 
 of that faculty you may possess of your own. You get entangled in another 
 man's mind, even as you lose yourself in another roan's grounds. You are 
 walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude. The con- 
 stant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to 
 imbecility. You may derive thoughts from others ; your way of thinking, the 
 mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own. Intellect may be 
 imparted, but not each man's intellectual frame. 
 
 As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upwards, as little (or 
 rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwards by your associates. The 
 trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by 
 its provoking inaudibility. 
 
 "Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a schoolmaster? — 
 because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours. He is awk- 
 ward, and out of place, in the society of his equals. He comes like Gulliver 
 from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding 
 to yours. He cannot meet you on the square. He wants a point given him, 
 like an indifferent whist-player. He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be 
 teaching you. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little 
 sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that 1 was unable to make 
 them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young 
 gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes, — The jests 
 of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin. They do not tell out of school. He is 
 under the restraint of a formal and didacf ive hypocrisy in company, as a clergy- 
 
372 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 man is under a moral one. He can no more let his intellect loose in society,, 
 than the other can his inclinations. — He is forlorn among his co-evals; his 
 juniors cannot be his friends. 
 
 " I take blame to myself," said a sensible man of this profession, writing to 
 a friend respecting a youth who had quitted his school abruptly, ' ' that your 
 nephew was not more attached to me. But persons in my situation are more 
 to be pitied, than can well be imagined. We are surrounded by young, and, 
 consequently, ardently affectionate hearts, but we can never hope to share an 
 atom of their affections. The relation of master and scholar forbids this. How 
 pleasing this must be to you, how I envy your feelings, my friends will some- 
 times say to me, when they see young men, whom I have educated, return after 
 some years' absence from school, their eyes shining with pleasure, while they 
 shake hands with their old master, bringing a present of game to me, or a toy 
 to my wife, and thanking me in the warmest terms for my care of their educa- 
 tion. A holiday is begged for the boys ; the house is a scene of happiness ; I, 
 only, am sad at fieart. — This fine-spirited and warm-hearted youth, who fancies 
 he repays his master with gratitude for the care of his boyish yearS — this young 
 man — in the eight long years I watched over him with a parent's anxiety, never 
 could repay me with one look of genuine feeling. He was proud, when I 
 praised ; he was submissive, when I reproved him ; but he did never /twg.me — 
 and what he now mistakes for gratitude and kindness for me, is but a pleasant 
 sensation, which all persons feel at revisiting the scene of their boyish hopes 
 and fears; and the seeing on equal terms the man they were accustomed to 
 look up to with reverence. My wife, too." this interesting correspondent goes 
 on to say, "my once darling Anna, is the wife of a schoolmaster. — When I 
 married her — knowing that the wife of a schoolmaster ought to be a busy 
 notable creature, and fearing that my gentle Anna would ill supply the loss of 
 my dear bustling mother, just then dead, who never sat still, was in every part 
 of the house in a moment, and whom I was obliged sometimes to threaten to 
 fasten down in a chair, to save her from fatiguing herself to death — I expressed 
 my fears, that I was bringing her into a way of life unsuitable to her ; and she, 
 who loved me tenderly, promised for my sake to exert herself to perform the 
 duties of her new situation. She promised, and she has kept her word. What 
 . wonders will not a woman's love perform ? — My house is managed with a pro- 
 priety and decorum, unknown in other schools ; my boys are well-fed, look 
 healthy, and have every proper accommodation ; and all this performed with a 
 careful economy, that never descends to meanness. But I have lost my gentle, 
 helpless Anna ! — When we sit down to enjoy an hour of repose after the fatigue 
 of the day, I am compelled to listen to what have been her useful (and they are 
 really useful) employments through the day, and what she proposes for her 
 to-morrow's task. Her heart and her features are changed by the duties of 
 her situation. To the boys, she never appears other than the masters wife, 
 and she looks up to me as the boys' master ; to whom all show of love and 
 affection would be highly improper, and unbecoming the dignity of her situa- 
 tion and mine. Yet this my gratitude forbids me to hint to her. For my sake 
 she submitted to be this altered creature, and can I reproach her for it? f fhese 
 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 trans- 
 cribing any further.]— For the communication of this letter, I am indebted to 
 my cousin Bridget. ' 
 
Elia: My Relatioiu. 373 
 
 (The London Magazine, June, 1821.) 
 
 (As originally printed, this paper closed with a valedictory signature, thus,—" Till 
 when. Farewell. Elia."— Under the name of "James Eiia," the Essayist sketched the 
 character of his elder brother, John Lamb, for many years a clerk in the South-Sea 
 House, to whom also {,yide supra, p. 40) he addressed one of his Sonnets. " Bridget 
 Elia," as already mentioned in the note prefixed to the essay, " Mrs, Battle's Opinion 
 on Whist," meant the author's sister, Mary Lamb.] 
 
 I AM arrived at that point of life, at which a man may account it a blessing, 
 as it is a singularity, if he have either of his parents surviving. I have not 
 that feUcity— and sometimes think feelingly of a passage in ' ' Browne's Christian 
 Morals," where he spealcs of a man that hath lived sixty or seventy years in 
 the world. " In such a compass of time," he says, " a man may have a close 
 apprehension what it is to be forgotten, when he hath lived to find none who 
 could remember his father, or scarcely the friends of his youth, and may 
 sensibly see with what a face in no long time Oblivion will look upon him- 
 self." 
 
 I had an aunt, a dear and good one. She was one whom single blessedness 
 had soured to the world. She often used to say, that I was the only thing in 
 it which she loved ; and, when she thought I was quitting it, she grieved over 
 me with mother's tears. A partiality quite so exclusive my reason cannot alto- 
 gether approve. She was from morning till night poring over good books, 
 and devotional exercises. Her favourite volumes were Thomas a Kenipis, in 
 Stanhope's Translation ; and a Roman Catholic Prayer Book, with the mati?is 
 and complines regularly set down, — terms which I was at that time too young 
 to understand. She persisted in reading them, although admonislied daily 
 concerning their Papistical tendency; and went to church every Sabbath, as a 
 good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied ; though, 
 I think, at one period of her life, she told me she had read with great satis- 
 faction the Adventures of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman. Finding the 
 door of the chapel in Essex Street open one day- it was in the infancy of that 
 heresy— she went in, liked the sermon, and the manner of worship, and fre- 
 quented it at intervals for some time after. She came not for doctrinal points, 
 and never missed them. With some little asperities in her constitution, which 
 I have above hinted at, she was a steadfast friendly being, and a fine old Chris- 
 tian. She was a woman of strong sense, and a shrewd mmd— extraordinary 
 at a repartee; one of the few occasions of her breaking silence— else she did 
 not. much value wit. The only secular employment I remember to have seen 
 her engaged in, was, the splitting of French beans, and dropping them into a 
 China basin of fair water. The odour of those tender vegetables to this day 
 comes back upon my sense, redolent of soothing recollections. Certainly it 
 is the most dehcate of cuhnary operations. 
 
 Male aunts, as somebody calls them, Ihad none— to remember. By the 
 uncle's side I may be said to have been born an orphan. Brother, or sister, I 
 never had any — to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Eliza- 
 beth, died in both our infancies. What a comfort, or what a care, may I not 
 have missed in her !— But I have cousins, sprinkled about in Hertfordshire— 
 
374 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 besides two, with whom I have been all my life in habits of the closest intimacy, 
 and whom I may term cOMsXxiS par excellence. These are James and Bridget 
 Elia. They are older than myself by twelve, and ten, years ; and neither of 
 them seems disposed, in matters of advice and guidance, to waive any of the 
 prerogatives which primogeniture confers. May they continue still in the same 
 mind ; and when they shall be seventy-five, and seventy-three, years old (I 
 cannot spare them sooner), persist in treating me in my grand climacteric pre- 
 cisely as a stripling, or younger brother 1 
 
 James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, which not every 
 critic can penetrate ; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them. The pen of 
 Yorick, and none since his, could have drawn J. E. entire— those fine Shandian 
 lights and shades, which make up his story. I must limp after in my poor 
 antithetical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talent. J. E. then 
 — to the eye of a common observer at least— seemeth made up of contradictory 
 principles. — The genuine child of impulse, the frigid philosopher of prudence 
 — the phlegm of my cousin's doctrine is invariably at war with his tempera- 
 ment, which is high sanguine. With always some fire-new project in his 
 brain, J. E. is the systematic opponent of innovation, and crier-down of every- 
 thing that has not stood the test of age and experiment. With a hundred fine 
 notions chasing one another hourly in his fancy, he is startled at the least ap- 
 proach to the romantic in others; and, determined by his own sense in every- 
 thing, commends you to the guidance of common sense on all occasions. — 
 With a touch of the eccentric in all which be does, or says, he is only anxious 
 that you should not commit yourself by doing anything absurd or singular. 
 On my once letting slip at table, that I was not fond of a certain popular dish, 
 he begged me at any rate not to say so — for the world would think me mad. 
 He disguises a passionate fondness for works of high art {whereof he hath 
 amassed a choice collection), under the pretext of buying only to sell again — 
 that his enthusiasm may give no encouragement to yours. Yet, if it were so, 
 why does that piece of tender pastoral Domenichino hang still by his wall? — 
 is the ball of his sight much more dear to him ? — or what picture-dealer can 
 talk like him ? 
 
 Whereas mankind in general are observed to warp their speculative con- 
 clusions to the bent of their individual humours, his theories are sure to be in 
 diametrical opposition to his constitiition. He is courageous as Charles of 
 Sweden, upon instinct; chary of his person, upon principle, as a travelling 
 Quaker. — He has been preaching up to me, all my life, the doctrine of bowing 
 to the great— the necessity of forms, and manner, to a man's getting on in the 
 world. He himself never aims at either, that I can discover, — and has a 
 spirit, that would stand upright in the presence of the Cham of Tartary. It 
 is pleasant to hear him discourse of patience— extoUing it as the truest wisdont 
 — and to see him during the last seven minutes that his dinner is getting ready. 
 Nature never ran up in her haste a more restless piece of workmanship than 
 when she moulded this impetuous cousin — and Art never turned out a more 
 elaborate orator than he can display himself to be, upon his favourite topic of 
 the advantages of quiet, and contentedness in the state, whatever it be, that 
 we are placed in. He is triumphant on this theme, when he has you safe in 
 one of those short stages that ply for the western road, in a very obstructing 
 manner, at the foot of John Murray's street — where you get in when it is 
 empty, and are expected to wait till the vehicle hath completed her just freight 
 — a trying three-quarters of an hour to some people. He wonders at your 
 fidgetiness — "where could we be better than we are, thus sitting, thus con- 
 sulting?" — "prefers, for his part, a state of rest to locomotion," — with an 
 eye all the while upon the coachman — till at length, waxing out of all patience, 
 at your want of it, he breaks out into a pathetic remonstrance at the fellow 
 for detaining us so long over the time which he had professed, and declares 
 
Elia : My Relations. 375 
 
 peremptorily, that "the gentleman in the coach is determined to get out if 
 he does not drive on that instant." 
 
 Very quiclc at inventing an argument, or detecting a sophistry, he is incapable 
 of attending jYJtt in any chain of arguing. Indeed he makes wild worlt with 
 logic ; and seems to jump at most admirable conclusions by some process, not 
 at all akin to it. Consonantly enough to this, he hath been heard to deny, 
 upon certain occasioils, that there exists such a faculty at all in man as reason '; 
 and wondereth how man came first to have a conceit of it— enforcing his 
 negation with all the might of reasonitighe is master of. He has some specu- 
 lative notions against laughter, and will maintain that laughing is not natural 
 to him—\then peradventure the next moment his lungs shall crow like Chanti- 
 cleer. He says some of the best: things in the world — and declareth that wit 
 is his aversion. It was he who said, upon seeing the Eton boys at play in 
 ttisi-c gtounAs — What a pity to think, that these fine ingenuous lads in a few 
 years will all be changed into frivolous Members of Parliatnent ! 
 
 His youth was fiery, glowing, tempestuous - and in age he discovered no 
 symptom of cooling. This is that which I admire in him. I hate people who 
 meet Time half-way. I am for no compromise with that inevitable spoiler. 
 While he lives, J. E. will take his swing. — It does me good, as I walk towards 
 the street of my daily avocation, on some fine IVIay morning, to meet him 
 marching in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly handsome presence, and 
 shining sanguine face, that indicates some purchase in his eye- a Claude— or a. 
 Hobbima— for much of his enviable leisure is consumed at Christie's, and 
 Phillips's— or where not, to pick up pictures, and such gauds. On these 
 occasions he mostly stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage a 
 person like me possesses above himself, in having his time occupied with busi- 
 ness which he must cfo— assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy on his 
 hands— wishes he had fewer holidays — and goes off^ Westward Ho I— chanting 
 a tune to Pall Mall— perfectly convinced that he has convinced me— while I 
 proceed in my opposite direction tuneless. 
 
 It is pleasant again to see this Professor of Indifference doing the honours 
 of his new purchase, when he has fairly housed it. You must view it in every 
 light, till he has found the best— placing it at this distance, and at that, but 
 always suiting the focus of your sight to his own. You must spy at it through 
 your fingers, to catch the aerial perspective— though you assure him that to 
 you the landscape shows much more agreeable without that artifice. Woe be 
 to the luckless wight, who does not only not respond to his rapture, but who 
 should drop an unseasonable intimation of preferring one of his anterior bar- 
 gains to the present ! — The last is always his best hit— his " Cynthia of the 
 minute."— Alas ! how many a mild Madonna have I known to come in— a. 
 Raphael !— keep its ascendancy for a few brief moons — then, after certain 
 intermedial degradations, from the front drawing-room to the back gallery, 
 thence to the dark parlour, — adopted in turn by each of the Carracci,! under 
 successive lowering ascriptions of filiation, mildly breaking its fall— consigned 
 to the oblivious lumber-room, go out at last a Lucca Giordano, or plain Carlo 
 Maratti !— which things when I beheld— musing upon the chances and muta- 
 bilities of fate below— hath made me to reflect upon the altered condition of 
 threat personages, or that woful queen of Richard the Second — 
 
 set forth in pomp. 
 
 She came adorned hither like sweet May. 
 > Sent back like Hollowmas or shortest day. 
 
 With great love for you, J. E. hath but a limited sympathy with what you 
 feel or do. He lives in a world of his own, and makes slender guesses at what 
 passes iii your mind. He never pierces the marrow of your habits. He will 
 tell an old-established play-goer, that Mr. Such-a-onC; of So-and-so (naming 
 
376 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 one of the theatres), is a very lively comedian— as a piece of news ! He 
 advertized me but the other day of some pleasant green lanes which he had 
 found out for me, knowing me to ie a great walker, in my own immediate 
 vicinity — who have haunted the identical spot any time these twenty years ! — 
 He has not much respect for that class of feelings which goes by the name of 
 sentimental. He applies the definition of real evil to bodily suffering exclu- 
 sively—and rejecteth all others as ihiaginary. He is affected by the sight or 
 the bare supposition of a creature in pain, to a degree which I have never 
 witnessed out of womankind. A constitutional acuteness to this class of 
 sufferings, may in part account for this. The animal tribe in particular he 
 taketh under his especial protection. A broken-winded or spur-galled horse is 
 sure to find an advocate in him. An over-loaded ass is his client for ever. 
 He is the apostle to the brute kind — the never-failing friend of those who have 
 none to care for them. The contemplation of a lobster boiled, or eels skinned 
 alive, will wring him so, that "all for pity he could die." It will take the 
 savour from his palate, and the rest from his pillow, for days and nights. With 
 the intense feeling of Thomas Clarkson, he wanted only the steadiness of 
 pursuit, and unity of purpose, of that " true yoke fellow with Time," to have 
 affected as much for the Animal, as he hath done for the Negro Creation. 
 But my uncontrolUible cousin is but impei;fectly formed for purposes which 
 demand co-operation. He cannot wait. His amelioration-plans must be 
 ripened in a day. For this reason he has cut but an equivocal figure in bene- 
 volent societies, and combinations for the alleviation of human sufferings. His 
 zeal constantly makes him to outrun, and put out, his coadjutors. Rethinks of 
 relieving, — while they think of debating. He was black-balled out of a society 
 for the Relief of * * * because the fervour of his humanity toiled beyond the 
 formal apprehension, and creeping processes, of his associates. I shall always 
 consider this distinction as a patent of nobility of the Elia family ! 
 
 Do I mention these seeming inconsistencies to smile at, orupbraid, my unique 
 cousin? Marry, heaven, and all good manners, and the understanding that 
 should be between kinsfolk, forbid !— With all the strangeness of this strangest 
 of the Rlias— I would not have him in one jot or tittle other than he is ; neither 
 would I barter or exchange my wild kinsman for the most exact, regular, and 
 everyway consistent kinsman breathing. 
 
 In my next, reader, I may perhaps give you some account of my cousin 
 Bridget— if you are not already surfeited with cousins— and lake you by the 
 hand, if jou are willing to go with us, on an' excursion which we made a 
 summer or two since, in search of more cousins — 
 
 Through the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire. 
 
 ( The London Magazine, July, 1821,) 
 
 [The " B. F." alluded to towards the close of this essay was the Barron Field already 
 mentioned in the note prefixed to the sketch of " The Old and the New Schoolmaster. "J 
 
 Bridget Elta has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have 
 obligations to Bridget, extending beyond the period of memory. We house 
 together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness ; with such 
 
Elta: Mackery End in Hertfordshire. ^17 
 
 tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find myself in no sort of 
 disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offsprmg, to 
 bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits — yet so, as 
 " with a difference." We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings 
 — as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood, 
 than expressed ; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind 
 than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered. 
 We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over 
 (for the thousandth time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange 
 contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof 
 our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narra- 
 tive teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have 
 a story, — well, ill, or indifferently told — so there be life stirring in it, and plenty 
 of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction — and almost 
 in real life— have cciised to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the 
 way humours and opinions— heads with some diverting twist in them— the 
 oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of 
 anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her that is 
 quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She "holds 
 Nature more clever." I can pardon her bhndness to the beautiful obliquities 
 of the Religio Medici ; but she must apologize to me for certain disrespectful 
 msinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the 
 intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one — the thrice 
 noble, chaste, and virtuous,— but again somewhat fantastical, and original- 
 brained, generous Margaret Newcastle. 
 
 It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, 
 to have had for her associates and mint, free-thinkers - leaders, and disciples, 
 of novel philosophies and systems ; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, 
 their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when she was a 
 child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays 
 tricks with her understanding. 
 
 We are both of us incUned to be a little too positive ; and I have observed 
 the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this -that in matters of fact, 
 dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was in the right, and my cousin 
 in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points; upon some- 
 thing proper to be done, or let alone ; whatever heat of opposition, or steadi- 
 ness of conviction, I set out with, I am sure always in the long run, to be 
 brought over to her way of thinking. 
 
 I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for 
 Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to 
 say no worse of it) of reading in company : at which times she will answer yes 
 or no to a question, without fully understanding its purport— which is pro- 
 voking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of 
 the said question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials 
 of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the pur- 
 pose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly ; but in 
 matters which are not Stuff of the conscience, she hath been known sometimes 
 to let slip a word less seasonably. 
 
 Her education in youth was not much attended to ; and she happily missed 
 all that train of female garniture, which passeth by the name of accompUsh- 
 ments. She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet 
 of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed 
 at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they 
 should be brought up exactly in this fashion. I know not whether their chance 
 in wedlock might not be diminished by it ; but I can an.swer for it, that it makes 
 (if the worst come to the worst) most incomparable old maids. 
 
378 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 In a season of distress, she is the truest comforter; but in the teasing acci- 
 dents, and minor perplexities, which do not call out the wiU to meet them, she 
 sometimes maketh matters worse by an excess of participation. If she does 
 not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life she is sure 
 always to treble your satisfaction. She is excellent to be at play with, or upon 
 a visit ; but best, when she goes a journey with you. 
 
 We made an excursion together a few summers since, into Hertfordshire, to 
 beat up the quarters of some of our less-known relations in that fine com 
 country. 
 
 The oldest thing I remember is Mackery End; or Mackarel End, as it is 
 . spelt, perhaps more properly, in some old maps of Hertfordshire ; a farm-house, 
 — delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead. I can just 
 remember having been there, on a visit to a great-aunt, when I was a child 
 under the care of Bridget ; who, as I have said, is older than myself by some 
 ten years. I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint 
 e.xistences, that we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible. 
 The house was at that time in the occupation of a substantial yeoman, who 
 had married my grandjnother's sister. His name was Gladman. My grand- 
 mother was a Bruton, married to a Field. The Gladmans and the Brutons are 
 still flourishing in that part of the county, but the Fields are almost extinct. 
 More than forty years had elapsed since the visit I speak of ; and, for the 
 greater portion of that period, we had lost sight of the other two branches 
 also. Who or what sort of persons inherited Mackery End— kindred or 
 strange folk— we were afraid almost to conjecture, but determined some day 
 to explore. 
 
 By somewhat a circuitous route, taking the noble park at Luton in our 
 way from Saint Alban'.s, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about 
 noon. The sight of the old farm-house, though every trace of it was effaced 
 from my recollection, affected me with a pleasure which I had not experienced 
 for many a year. For though / had forgotten it, we had never forgotten 
 being there together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our 
 lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I 
 thought I knew the aspect of a place, which, when present, O how unlike it 
 was to that, which I had conjured up so many times instead of it ! 
 
 Still the air breathed balmily about it ; the season was in the "^eart of 
 June," and I could say with the poet. 
 
 But thou, that didst appear so fail 
 
 To fond imagination. 
 Dost rival in the light of day 
 
 Her delicate creation ! * 
 
 Bridget's was more a waking bliss than mine, for she easily remembered her 
 old acquaintance again — some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. 
 At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy ; but the scene soon re- 
 confirmed itself in her affections — and she traversed every outpost of the 
 old mansion, to the wood house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon-house 
 had stood (house and birds were alike flown) — with a breathless impatience of 
 recognition, which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of 
 fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years. 
 
 The only thing left was to get into the house— and that was a difficulty 
 which to me singly would have been insurmountable ; for I am terribly shy in 
 making myself known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, stronger 
 than scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she soon returned with a 
 creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. It was 
 
 • [Wordsworth, on Yarrcnu Visited.'l 
 
Elia: Mockery End in HeHfordMre. 379 
 
 the youngest of the Gladmans ; who, by marriage with a Bruton, had become 
 mistress of the old mansion. A comely brood a're the Bmtons. Six of them, 
 females, were noted as the handsomest young women in the county. But this 
 adopted Bruton, in my mind, was better than they all — more comely. She 
 was born too late to have remembered me. She just recollected in early life to 
 have had her cousin Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing a stile. But the 
 name of kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. Those slender ties, that 
 prove slight as gossamer in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind 
 faster, as we found it, in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire. In five minutes 
 we were as thoroughly acquainted as if we had been born and bred up 
 together ; were familiar, even to the calling each other by our Christian names. 
 So Christians should call one another. To have seen Bridget, and her— it was 
 like .the meeting of the two . scriptural cousins! There was a grace and 
 dignity, an amplitude of form and stature, answering to her mind, in this 
 farmer's wife, which would have shined in a palace — or so we thought it. We 
 were made welcome by husband and wife equally — we, and our friend that was 
 with us. — I had almost forgotten him— but B. F. will not so soon forget that 
 meeting, if peradventure he shall read this on the far-distant shores where the 
 Kangaroo haunts. The fatted calf was made ready, or rather was already so, 
 35 if in anticipation of our coming ; and, after an appropriate glass of native 
 wine, never let me forget witli what honest pride this hospitable cousin made 
 us proceed to Wheathampstead, to introduce us (as some new-found rarity) to 
 her mother and sister Gladmans, who did indeed know something more of us, 
 at a time when she almost knew nothing.— With what corresponding kindness 
 we were received by them also — how Bridget's memory, exalted by the occasion, 
 warmed into a thousand half-obliterated recollections of things and persons, to 
 my utter astonishment, and her own — and to the astoundment of B. F. who 
 sat by, almost the only thing that was not a cousin ihere,— old effaced images 
 of more than half-forgotten names and circumstances still crowding back upon 
 her, as words written in lemon come out upon exposure to a friendly warmth, — 
 when I forget all this, then may my country cousins forget me ; and Bridget no 
 more remember, that in the days of weakling infancy I was her tender charge 
 — as I have been her care in foolish manhood since— in those pretty pastoral 
 walks, long ago, about Mackery End, in Hertfordshire. 
 
 (The London Magazine, August, 1821.) 
 
 [This paper was originally headed, much les'5 happily because in a roundabout way, 
 
 "Jews, Quakers, Scotchmen and other Imperfect Sympathies." "B " \yas John 
 
 Braham, the famous tenor singer, whom Charles Lamb once humorously described as a 
 combination of the Jew, the Gentleman and the Angel. The anecdote with which this 
 essay closes in regard to the three Quakers in the stagecoach, Charles Lamb had re- 
 lated to him by the eminent surgeon Sir Anthony Carlisle, who was himself an eye- 
 witness and earwitness of the incident.] 
 
 I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathizeth with all things; I 
 have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in anything. Those national repugnances do 
 not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the French, Italian, Spaniard; or Dutch,- - 
 Religw Medici. 
 That the author of the Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts of 
 
380 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences ; in whose 
 categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of the actual ; should 
 have overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as 
 mankind, is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, that 
 in the genus of animals he should have condescended to distinguish that 
 species at all. For myself— earth-bound and fettered to the scene of my 
 activities, — 
 
 Standing on earth, not wrapt above the sky, 
 
 I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or individual, to 
 an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. 
 Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste ; or when once it becomes 
 indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of 
 prejudices — made up of likings and dislikings— the veriest thrall to sympathies, 
 apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope it may be said of me that 
 I am a lover of my species. I can feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel 
 towards all equally. The more purely-English word that expresses sympathy 
 will better explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who 
 upon another account cannot be my mate o^ fellow. I cannot like all people 
 alike.* 
 
 I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist 
 from the experiment in despair. They cannot lilce me — and in truth, I never 
 knew one of that nation who attempted to do it. There is something more 
 plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at 
 I first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under which mine must 
 be content to rank) which in its constitution is essentially anti-Caledonian. 
 The owners of the sort of faculties I allude to, have minds rather suggestive 
 than comprehensive. Thgy have no pretences to much clearness or precision 
 in their ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual 
 wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They are content with 
 fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She presents no full front to them— 
 a feature or side-face at the most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude 
 essays at a system, is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a litde game 
 Beradventure— and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitutions, to 
 ?un it down. The light that lights them is not steady and polar, but mutable 
 and shifting : waxing, and again waning. Their conversation is accordingly. 
 
 * [I would be understood as confining myself to the subject of imperfect sympathies. 
 To nations or classes of men there can be no direct nntipnthy. There may be individuals 
 born and constellated so opposite to another individual nature, .that the same sphere 
 cannot hold them._ I have met with my moral antipotles, and can believe the story of 
 two persons meeting (who never saw one another before in their lives) and instandy 
 fightmg. 
 
 ; We by proof find there should be 
 
 'Twixt man and man such an antipathy, 
 
 That though he can show no just reason why 
 
 For any former wrong or injury, ^ 
 
 Can neither find a blemish in his fame. 
 
 Nor aught in face or feature justly blame. 
 
 Can challenge or accuse him of no evil. 
 
 Yet notwithstanding liates him as a devil. 
 
 The lines are from old Heywood's "Hierarchie of Angels," and he subjoins a curious 
 story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who attempted to assassinate a King Ferdinand of 
 Spam, and being put to the rack could give no other reason for the deed but an inveterate 
 antipathy which he had taken to the first sight of the King. 
 
 The cause to which that act compell'd him | 
 
 Was, he ne er loved him since he first beheld him.] 1 
 J 
 
Imperfect Sympathies. 381 
 
 They will throw out a random word in or out of season, and be content to let 
 It pass for what it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were upon 
 their oarti— but must be understood, speaking or writing, with some abate- 
 naent. They seldom wait to mature a proposition, but e'en bring it to market 
 in the green ear. They delight to impart their defective discoveries, as they 
 arise, without waiting for their full development. They are no systematizers, 
 and would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said before, are 
 suggestive merely. The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is 
 constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born in panoply. 
 You are never admitted to see his ideas in their growth — if, indeed, they do 
 grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. You 
 never catch his mind in an undress. He never hints or suggests anything, 
 but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. He brings 
 his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it. His riches are always 
 about him. He never stoops to catch a glittering something in your presence, 
 to share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. 
 You cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. He does not find, but bring. 
 You never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His understanding is 
 always at its meridian— you never see the first dawn, the early streaks. — He has 
 no falterings of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, 
 semi-consciousness, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo conceptions, 
 have no place in his brain, or vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls 
 upon him. Is he orthodox — he has no doubts. Is he an infidel — he has none 
 either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with 
 him. You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wander in the 
 maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make 
 excursions with him — for he sets you right. His taste never fluctuates. His 
 moraUty never abates. He cannot compromise, or understand middle actions. 
 There can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book. His 
 affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square 
 with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's 
 country. ' ' A healthy book ! " — said one of his countrymen to me, who had 
 ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle, — "did I catch rightly what 
 you said? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state of body, 
 but I do not see how that epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above 
 all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an 
 extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. 
 Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after 
 Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to , IVIr. . After he had ex- 
 amined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked MY BEAUTY (a foolish 
 name it goes by among my friends) — when he very gravely assured me, that 
 " he had considerable respect for my character and talents " (so he was pleased 
 to say), "but had not given himself much thought about the degree of my 
 personal. pretensions." The misconception staggered me, but did not seem 
 much to disconcert him. — Persons of this nation are particularly fond of 
 affirming a truth — which nobody doubts. They do not so properly affirm, as 
 annunciate it. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth (as if, 
 like virtue, it were valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, 
 whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as is 
 impossible to become a subject of disputation. I was present not long since 
 at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected ; and hap- 
 pened to drop a silly expression (in my South British way) , that I wished it 
 were the father instead of the son — when four of them started up at once to 
 inform me, that "that was impossible, because he was dead." An imprac- 
 ticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive. Swift has hit off 
 this part of their character, namely, their love of truth, in his biting way, but 
 
382 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 with an illiberality that necessarily confines the passage to the margin.* The 
 tediousness of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever tire 
 one another 1 — In my early life I had a passionate fondness for the poetry 
 of Burns. I have sometimes foolishly hoped to ingr^itiate myself with- his 
 countrymen by expressing it. But I have always found that a true Scot resents 
 your admiration of his compatriot, even more than he would your contempt of 
 him. . The latter he imputes to your ' ' imperfect acquaintance with many of 
 the words which he uses; " and the same objection m.akes it a presumption in 
 you to suppose that you can admire him, — Thomson they seem to have for- 
 gotten. Smollett they have neither forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation 
 of Rory and his companion, upon their first introduction to our metropolis. — 
 Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hutne's 
 History compared with his Continuation of it. What if the historian had 
 continued Humphrey Chnker? 
 
 I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a piece of stubborn 
 antiquity, compared with which Sionehenge is in its nonage. They date be-; 
 yond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits- of familiar inter- 
 course with any of that nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter 
 their synagogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the 
 story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate, on the 
 one side,— of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate, on the other, between 
 our and their fathers, must, and ought, to affect the blood of the children; I 
 cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet ; or that a few fine words, such 
 as candour, liberality, the light of a nineteenth century, can close up the 
 breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. 
 He is least distasteful on 'Change — for the mercantile spirit levels all distinc- 
 tions, as are all beauties in the dark. I boldly confess I do not relish the 
 approximationof jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The' 
 reciprocal endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural in 
 them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing and cohgteing- 
 in awkward postures of an affected civility. If ihey are converted, why do' 
 they not come over to us altogether ? Why keep up a form of separation, ' 
 when the life of it has tied? If they can sit with us at table, why do they 
 kick at our cookery ? I do not understand these half convertites. Jews 
 christianizing— Christians judaizing — puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A 
 moderate Jew is a- more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. 
 The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative. B — — would have been 
 more in keeping if he had abided by the faith of his forefathers. There is a 
 
 fine scorn in his face, which nature meant to be of Christians. The 
 
 Hebrew spirit is strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot con- 
 quer the Shibboleth. How it breaks out, when he sings, "The Children of 
 Israel passed through the Red Sea ! " The auditors, for the moment, are as 
 Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks in triumph. There is no mis- 
 taking him. B has a strong expression of sense in his countenance, and 
 
 it is confirmed by his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense. 
 He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He would sing 
 the Commandments, and give an appropriate character to each prohibition. 
 His nation, in general, have not over-sensible countenances. How should 
 they? — but you seldom see a silly expression among them. Gain, and the 
 
 * [There are some people who think they sufficiently acquit themselves, and entertain 
 their company, with relating facts of no consequence, not at all out of the road of such 
 common incidents as happen every day ; and this I have observed more frequently among 
 the Scots than any other nation, who are very careful not to omit the minutest circum- 
 stances of time or place ; which kind of discourse, if it were not a little relieved by the 
 uncouth terms and phrases, as well as accent and gesture peculiar to that country, would 
 be hardly tolerable — Hints towards an Essay on Conversation.'] 
 
Elia: Imperfect Sympathies. 383 
 
 pursuit of gain, sliarpen a man's visage. I never heard of an idiot being born 
 among them. — Some admire the Jewish female-pliysiognomy. I admire it — 
 but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscrutable eyes. 
 
 In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. 
 I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces— or rather 
 masks — that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the 
 streets and highways. I love what Tuller beautifully calls— these "images 
 of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to associate with them, to share 
 my meals and my good-nights with them— because they are black. 
 
 I love Quaker ways, and Quaker worship. I venerate the Quaker principles. 
 It does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of their people in my 
 path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight, or quiet 
 voice of a Quaker, acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking 
 off a load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Desdemona 
 would say) "to live with them." lam all over sophisticated— witb humours, 
 fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit- 
 chat, scandal, jokes, ambiguities, and a thousand whim-whams, which their 
 simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My 
 appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed 
 foi: the angel, my gusto too excited 
 
 To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 
 
 The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return to a question 
 put to them may be explained, I think, without the vulgar assumption, that 
 they are more given to evasion and equivocating than other people. They 
 naturally look to their words more carefully, and are more cautious of commit- 
 ting themselves. They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head. 
 They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by law exempted 
 from taking an oath. The custom of resorting to an oath in extreme cases, 
 sanctiiied as it is by all religious antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce 
 into the laxer sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth — the one appli- 
 cable to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common proceedings 
 of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the conscience by an oath can be 
 but truth, so in the common affirmations of the shop and the market-place 
 a latitude is expected and concealed upon questions wanting this solemn 
 covenant. Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a person 
 say, "You do not e-xpect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." Hence a 
 great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency, short of falsehood, creeps into 
 ordinary conversation ; and a kind of secondary or laic-truth is tolerated, where 
 clergy-truth — oath-truth, by the nature of the circumstances, is not required. 
 A Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation being re- 
 ceived, upon the most sacred occasions, without any further test, stamps a 
 value upon the words which he is to use upon the most indifferent topics of life. 
 He looks to them, naturally, with more severity. You can have of him no 
 more than his word. He knows, if he is caught tripping in a casual expression, 
 he forfeits, for himself, at least, his claim to the invidious exemption. He 
 knows that his syllables are weighed— and how far a consciousness of this 
 particular watchfulness, exerted against a person, has a tendency to produce 
 indirect answers, and a diverting of the question by honest means, might be 
 illustrated, and the practice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper 
 to be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind, which 
 is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies, might be traced to this imposed 
 self-watchfulness— if it did not seem rather an humble and secular scion of that 
 old stock of religious constancy, which never bent or faltered, iii the Primitive 
 Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge or 
 
384 ' The Woi-ks of Charles Latnb. 
 
 accuser, under trials and racking examinations. "You will never be the wiser, 
 if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," said one of those upright 
 Justicers to Penn, who had been putting law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. 
 " Thereafter as the answers maybe," retorted the Quaker. The astonishing 
 composure of this people is sometimes ludicrously displayed in lighter in- 
 stances.- — I was travelling in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned 
 up in the straightest non-conformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at 
 Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. 
 My friends confined themselves to the tea-table. I in my way took supper. 
 When the landlady brought in the bill, the eldest of my companions discovered 
 that she had charged for both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was 
 very clamorous and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of 
 the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed by no means 
 a fit recipient. The guard came in with his usual peremptory notice. The 
 Quakers pulled out their money, and formerly tendered it— so much for tea— 1, 
 in humble imitation, tendering mine— for the supper which I had taken. She 
 would not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their silver, 
 as did myself, and marched out of the room, the eldest and gravest going first, 
 with myself closing up the rear, who thought I could not do better than follow 
 the example of such grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The 
 steps went up. The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not very 
 indistinctly or ambiguously pronounced, became after a time inaudible — and 
 now my conscience, which the whimsical scene had for a while suspended, 
 beginning to give some twitches, I waited, in the hope that some justification 
 would be offered by these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their 
 conduct. To my great surprise, not a syllable was dropped-on the subject. 
 They sate as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them broke silence, 
 by inquiring of his next neighbour, "Hast thee heard how indigos go at the 
 India House ? " and the question operated as a soporific on my moral feeling as 
 far as Exeter. 
 
 [The London Magazine, September, 1821.) 
 
 _ [The Old Benchers described in this essay were with one or two exceptions purely 
 imagmary characters. Samuel Salt was conspicuous among these exceptions, being the 
 Bencher in whose employment Charles Lamb's father lived for so many years as clerk 
 and factotum. Under the romantic title of " Lovel," John Lamb, the elder, was very 
 truthfully portrayed. " R. N." referred to one of the most intimate friends of the Lamb 
 family, Randal Norris, for many years sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple.] 
 
 I WAS bom, and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its 
 church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said— for in 
 those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered 
 our pleasant places? these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this 
 day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindher emotion, than those of 
 Spenser, where he speaks of this spot. 
 
Elia: The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple. 385 
 
 There when Ihey came, whereas those bricky towers, 
 Th6 which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride. 
 Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, 
 There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide. 
 Till they decayed through pride. 
 
 Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for 
 a countryman visiting London for the first time— the passing from the crowded 
 Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample 
 squares, its classic green recesses ! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that 
 portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden : that goodly 
 pile 
 
 Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight, 
 
 confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded 
 one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown-office Row (place of my 
 kindly engendure), right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden- 
 foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned 
 from her Twickenham Naiades ! a man would give something to have been born 
 in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Ehzabethan hall, where 
 the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times ! to the 
 astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not beng able to 
 guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous 
 work as magic ! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, 
 with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they 
 measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, 
 holding correspondence with the fountain of light ! How would the dark line 
 steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its 
 movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of 
 sleep 1 
 
 Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand 
 
 Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! 
 
 What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and 
 brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple 
 altar-like structure, and silent heart-language of the old dial ! It stood as the 
 garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? 
 If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, 
 its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate 
 labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of temperance, and good 
 hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam 
 could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for 
 sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver 
 warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd 
 "carved it out quaintly in the sun ;" and, turning philosopher by the very 
 occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones. It was 
 a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of 
 artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers. I must quote his 
 verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a 
 witty delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of foun- 
 tains and sun-dials. He is speaking of sweet garden scenes ; 
 
 What wondrous life is this I lead ! 
 Ripe appjes drop about my head. 
 The luscious clusters of the vine _ 
 Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 
 The nectarine, and curious peach. 
 Into my hands themselves do reach. 
 
386 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 
 
 Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass, 
 
 Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less 
 
 Withdraws into its happiness. 
 
 The mind^ that ocean, where each kind 
 
 Does straight its own resemblance find ; 
 
 Yet it creates, transcending these. 
 
 Far other worlds and other seas ; 
 
 Annihilating all that's made % 
 
 To a green thought in a green shade. 
 
 Here at the fountain's sliding foot. 
 
 Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root. 
 
 Casting the body's vest aside. 
 
 My soul into the boughs does glide : 
 
 There like a bird it sits and sings, 
 
 Then whets and claps its silver wings ; 
 
 And, till prepared for longer flight. 
 
 Waves in its plumes the various light. 
 
 How well the skilful gardener drew. 
 
 Of flowers and herbs, this dial new ! 
 
 Where, from above the milder sun 
 
 Does through a fragrant zodiac run : 
 
 And, as it works, the industrious bee 
 
 Computes its time as well as we. 
 
 How could such sweet and wholesome hours 
 
 Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers ? * 
 
 The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in hke manner, fast vanishing. 
 Most of them are dried up, or bricked over. Yet, where one is left, as in that 
 little green nook behind the South-Sea House, what a freshness it gives to the 
 dreary pile ! Four little winged marble boys used to play their virgin fancies, 
 spouting out ever fresh streams from their innocent wanton Ups, in the square 
 of Lincoln's Inn, when I was no bigger than they were figured. They are 
 gone, and the spring choked up. The fashion, they tell me, is gone by, and 
 these things are esteemed childish. Why not then gratify children, by letting 
 them stand ? Lawyers, I suppose, were children once. They are awakening 
 images to them at least. Why must everything smack of man, and mannish? 
 Is the world all grown up ? Is childhood dead ? Or is there not in the bosoms 
 of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest 
 enchantments ? The figures were grotesque. Are the stiff-wigged living figures, 
 that still flitter and chatter about that area, less gothic in appearance? or is the 
 splutter of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing and innocent as the little 
 cool playful streams those exploded cherubs uttered ? 
 
 They have lately gothicized the entrance to the Inner Temple-hall, and the 
 library front, to assimilate them, I suppose, to the body of the hall, which they 
 do not at all resemble. What is become of the winged horse that stood over 
 the former ? a stately arms ! and who has removed those frescoes of the Virtues, 
 which ItaUanized the end of the Paper-buildings? — my first hint of allegory! 
 They must account to me for these things, which I miss so greatly. 
 
 The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the parade ; but the traces 
 are passed away of the footsteps which made its pavement awful ! It is become 
 common and profane. The old benchers had it almost sacred to themselves, 
 in the forepart of the day at least. They might not be sided or jostled. Their 
 air and dress asserted the parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you, when you 
 passed them. We walk on even terms with their successors. The roguish eye 
 
 of J 11, ever ready to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie 
 
 a repartee with it. But what insolent familar durst have mated Thomas 
 
 C:oventry?- whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his 
 
 face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, indivertible 
 
 * From a copy of verses entitled The G.lrden. 
 
EUa: The Old Benchers of the Inner Thnple. 387 
 
 from his way as a moving column, the scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow- 
 beater of equals and superiors, who made a solitude of children wherever he 
 came, for they fled his insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an 
 Elisha bear. His growl was as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them 
 in mirth or in rebuke, his invitatory notes being, indeed, of all, the most 
 repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, aggravating the natural terrors of his 
 speech, broke from each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it, not 
 by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it under the mighty flaps of his 
 old-fashioned waisticoat pocket ; his waiscoat red and angry, his coat dark 
 rappee, tinctured by dye original, and by adjuncts, with buttons of obsolete 
 gold. And so he paced the terrace. 
 
 By his side a milder form was sometii^s to be seen ; the pensive gentility of 
 Samuel Salt. They were coevals, and had nothing but that and their bencher- 
 ship in common. In politics Salt was a Whig, and Coventry a staunch Torj'. 
 Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out— for Coventry had a rough 
 spinous humour — at the political confederates of his associate, which rebounded 
 from the gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls from wool. You could 
 not ruffle Samuel Salt. 
 
 S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, and of excellent discern- 
 ment in the chamber practice of the law. I suspect his knowledge did not 
 amount to much. When a case of difficult disposition of money, testamentary 
 or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily handed it over with a few instruc- 
 tions to his man Lovel, who was a quick little fellow, and would despatch it 
 out of hand by the light of natural understanding, of which he had an un- 
 common share. It was incredible v/hat repute for talents S. enjoyed by the 
 mere trick of gravity. He was a shy man ; a child might pose him in a minute 
 — indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men would give him 
 credit for vast appUcation in spite of himself. He was not to be trusted with 
 himself with impunity. He never dressed for a dinner-party but he forgot his 
 sword— they wore swords then— or some other necessary part of his equipage. 
 Lovel had his eye upon him on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave him his 
 cue. If there was anything which he could speak unseasonably, he was sure 
 to do it. — He was to dine at a relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on the 
 day of her execution ; and L., who had a wary foresight of his probable 
 hallucinations, before he set out, schooled him with great anxiety not in any 
 possible manner to allude to her story that day. S. promised faithfully to 
 observe the injunction. He had not been seated in the parlour, where the com- 
 pany was expecting the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a pause in the 
 conversation ensuing, he got up, looked out of the window, and pulling down 
 his ruffles — an ordinary motion with him — observed, "it was a gloomy day," 
 and added, " Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." Instances 
 of this sort was perpetual. Yet S. was thought by some of the greatest men 
 of his time a fit person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining to the 
 law, but in the ordinary niceties and embarrassments of conduct— from force of 
 manner entirely. He never laughed. He had the same good fortune among 
 the female world, - was a known toast with the ladies, and one or two are said 
 to have died for love of him — I suppose, because he never trifled or talked 
 gallantry with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly common attentions. He had 
 a fine face and person, but wanted, methought, the spirit that should have 
 shown them off with advantage to the women. His eye lacked lustre. — Not 
 
 so, thought Susan P ; who, at the advanced age of sixty, was seen, in the 
 
 cold evening time, unaccompanied, wetting the pavement of B d Row, with 
 
 tears that fell in drops which might be heard, because her friend had died that 
 day— he, whom she had pursued with a hopeless passion for the last forty 
 years— a passion, which years could not extinguish or abate; nor the long 
 resolved, yet gently enforced, puttings off of unrelenting bachelorhcwd dissuade 
 
388 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 from its cherished purpose. Mild Susan P , thou hast now thy friend in 
 
 heaven ! 
 
 Thomas Coventry vifas a cadet of the noble family of that name. He passed 
 his youth in contracted circumstances, which gave him early those parsimonious 
 habits which in after-life never forsook him ; so that, with one windfall or 
 another, about the time I knew him he was master of four or five hundred 
 thousand pounds ; nor did he look, or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived 
 in a gloomy house opposite the pump in Serjeants' Inn, Fleet Street. J., ihe 
 counsel, is doing self-imposed penance in it, for what reason I divine not, at 
 this day. C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where he seldom spent 
 above a day or two at a time in the summer ; but preferred, during the Lot 
 months, standing at his window in this damp, close, well-hke mansion, to 
 watch, as he said, " the maids drawing water all day long." I suspect he had 
 his within-door reasons for the preference. Hie currus et a^ma fuSre. He 
 might think his treasures more safe. His house had the aspect of a strong 
 bo.x. C. was a close hunks — a hoarder rather than a miser— or, if amiser, none 
 of the mad Elwes breed, who have brought discredit upon a character, which 
 cannot e.\ist without certain admirable points of steadiness and unity of purpose. 
 One may hate a true miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By 
 taking care of the pence, he is often enabled to part with the pounds, upon a 
 scale that leaves us careless generous fellows halting at an immeasurable dis- 
 tance behind. C. gave away thirty thousand pounds at once in his hfetime to 
 a blind charity. His housekeeping was severely looked after, but he kept the 
 table of a gentleman. He would know who came in and who went out of his 
 house, but his kitchen chimney was never suffered to freeze. 
 
 Salt was his opposite in this, as in all — never knew what he was worth in the 
 world : and having but a competency for his rank, which his indolent habits 
 were httle calculated to improve, might have suffered severely if he had not 
 had honest people about him. Lovel took care of everything. He was at 
 once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his "flapper," his 
 guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer. He did nothing without consulting 
 Lovel, or failed in anything without expecting and fearing his admonishing. 
 He put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in 
 the world. He resigned his title almost to respect as a n[iaster, if L. could ever 
 have forgotten for a moment that he was a servant. 
 
 I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. 
 A good fellow withal, and " would strike." In the cause of the oppressed lie 
 never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents. He 
 once wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had draw n 
 upon him ; and pommelled him severely With the hilt of it. The swordsman 
 had offered insult to a female— an occasion upon which no odds against hiiii 
 could have prevented the interference of Lovel. He would stand next cay 
 bare-headed to the same person, modestly to excuse his interference— for I^. 
 never forgot rank, where something better was not concerned. L. was tlie 
 liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick's whom he was 
 said greatly to resemble (I haVe a portrait of him which confirms it), possessed 
 a fine turn for humorous poetry — next to Swift and Prior — moulded heads in 
 clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius'nierely ; 
 turned cribbage boards, and such small cabinet toys, to perfection: took a 
 hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility ; made punch better than any 
 man of his degree in England ; had the merriest quips and conceits, and was 
 altogether as bi;imful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was 
 a brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest com- 
 panion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a-fishing with. I saw 
 him in his old age and the decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad 
 stage of human weakness — " a remnant most forlorn of what he was,."— yet 
 
Elia: The Old Bciuhers of the Inner Temple. 389 
 
 even then his eye would light up upon the mention of his favourite GaiTicI< 
 He was greatest, he would say, in Bayes— "was upon the stage nearly throui^ii- 
 out the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." At intervals, too,"he 
 would speak of his former life, and how he came up a little boy from Lincoln 
 to go to service, and how his mother cried at parting with him, and how he 
 returned, after some few years' absence, in his smart new hvery to see her, and 
 she blessed herself at the change, and could hardly be brought to believe 
 that it was " her own bairn." And then, the excitement subsiding, he would 
 weep„ till I have wished that sad second-childhood might have a mother still 
 to lay its head upon her lap. But the common mother of us all in no long 
 time after received him gently into hers. 
 
 With Coventry, and with Salt, in their walks upon the terrace, most com- 
 monly Peter Pierson would join, to make up a third. They did not walk linked 
 arm in arm in those days — "as now our stout triumvirs sweep the streets," — 
 but generally with both hands folded behind them for state, or with one at 
 least behind, the other carrying a cane. P. was a benevolent, but not a pre- 
 possessing man. He had that in his face which you could not term unhappi- 
 ness; it rather i.nplied an incapacity of being happy. His cheeks were 
 colourless, even to whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but with- 
 out his sourness) that of our great philanthropist. I know that he did good 
 acts, but I could never make out what he was. Contemporary with these, but 
 subordinate, was Daines Harrington— another oddity— he walked burly and 
 square— in imitation, I think, of Coventry— howbeit he attained not to the 
 dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the strength 
 of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother a bishop. When the 
 account of his year's treasurership came to be audited, the following singular 
 charge was unanimously disallowed by the bench : ' ' Item, disbursed Mr. Allen, 
 the gardener, twenty shillings, for stuff to poison the sparrows, by my orders." 
 Next to him was old Barton — a jolly negation, who took upon him the ordering 
 of the bills of fare for the parliament chamber, where the benchers dine — 
 answering to the combination rooms at college — much to the easement of his 
 less epicurean brethren. I know nothing more of him. — Then Read, and 
 Twopenny— Read, good-humoured and personable -Twopenny, good-hu- 
 moured, but thin, and felicitous in jests upon his own figure. If T. was thin, 
 Wharry was attenuated and i^eeting. Many must remember him (for he was 
 rather of later date) and his singular gait, which was performed by three steps 
 and a jump regularly succeeding. The steps were little efforts, like that of a 
 child beginning to walk ; the jump comparatively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. 
 Where he learned this figure, or what occasioned it, I could never discover. 
 It was neither graceful in itself, nor seemed to answer the purpose any better 
 than common walking. The extreme tenuity of his frame, I suspect, set him 
 upon it. It was a trial of poising. Twopenny svould often rally him upon 
 his leanness, and hail him as Brother Lusty ; but W. had no relish of a j.oke. 
 His .features were spiteful. I have heard that he would pinch his cat's ears 
 extremely, when anything had offended him. Jackson — the omniscient Jack- 
 son he was called — was of this period. He had the refutation of possessing 
 more multifarious knowledge than any man of his time. He was the Friar 
 Bacon of the less literate portion of the Temple. I remember a pleasant 
 passage, of the cook applying to him, with much formality of apology, for 
 instructions how to write down cd^^e bone of beef in his bill of commons. He 
 was supposed to know, if any man in the world did. He decided the ortho- 
 graphy to be — as I have given it — fortifying his authority with such anatomical 
 reasons as dismissed the manciple (for the time) learned and happy. Some do 
 spell it yet perversely, aitnh bone, from a fanciful resemblance between its 
 shape, and that of the aspirate so denominated. I had almost forgotten Mingay 
 with the iron hand— but he was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand 
 
39© The Works of Charles Lamb 
 
 by some accident, and supplied it with a grappling hook, which he wielded with 
 a tolerable adroitness. I detected the substitute, before I was old enough to 
 reason whether it were artificial or not. I remember the astonishment it raised 
 in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking person; and I reconciled the 
 phenomenon to my ideas as an emblem of power — somewhat hke the horns in 
 the forehead of Michael Angelo's Moses. Baron Maseres, who walks (or did 
 till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my 
 imperfect recollections of the old benchers of the Inner Temple. 
 
 Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled ? Or, if the like of you exist, why exist 
 they no more for me? Ye inexjjhcable, half-understood appearances, why 
 comes in reason to tear away the preternatural mist, bright or gloomy, that 
 enshrouded you ? Why make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who made 
 up to me— to my childish eyes— the mythology of the Temple ? In those days 
 I saw Gods, as "old men covered with a mantle," walking upon the earth. 
 Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish, — extinct be the fairies and fairy 
 trumpery of legendary fabling,— in the heart of childhood, there will, for ever, 
 spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstition— the seeds of 
 exaggeraiion will be busy there, and vital - from every-day forms educing the 
 unknown and the uncommon. In that little Goshen there will be light, when 
 the grown world Tiounders about in the darkness of sense and materiality. 
 While childhood, and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, 
 imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth. 
 
 P.S. — I have done injustice to the soft shade of Samuel Salt. See what it 
 is to trust to imperfect memory, and the erring notices of childhood ! Yet I 
 protest I always thought that he had been a bachelor ! This gentleman, R. N. 
 informs me, married young, and losing his lady in child-bed, within the first 
 year of their union, fell into a deep melancholy, from the effects of which, 
 probably, he never thoroughly recovered. In what a new light does this place 
 
 his rejection (O call it by a gentler name !) of mild Susan P , unravelling 
 
 into beauty certain peculiarities of this very shy and retiring character !— 
 Henceforth let no one receive the narratives of EHa for true records ! They 
 are, in truth, but shadows of fact — verisimihtudes, not verities— or sitting but 
 upon the remote edges and outskirts of history. He is no such honest chro- 
 nicler as R. N., and would have done better perhaps to have consulted that 
 gentleman, before he sent these incondite reminiscences to press. But the 
 worthy sub-treasurer— who respects his old and his new masters — would but 
 have been puzzled at the indecorous liberties of Elia. The good man wots 
 not, peradventure, of the licence which Magazines have arrived at in this 
 plain-speaking age, or hardly dreams of their existence beyond the Gentleman's 
 —his farthest monthly excursions in this nature having been long confined to 
 the holy ground of honest Urban's obituary. May it be long before his own 
 name shall help to swell those columns of unenvied flattery ! — Meantime, O ye 
 New Benchers of the Inner Temple, cherish him kindly, for he is himself the 
 kindliest of human creatures. Should infirmities overtake him— he is yet in 
 green and vigorous senility— make allowances for them, remembering that "ye 
 yourselves are old." So may the Winged Horse, your ancient badge and 
 cognizance, still flourish ! so may future Hookers and Seldens illustrate your 
 church and chambers ! so may the sparrows, in default of more melodious 
 quiristers, unpoisoned hop about your walks ! so may the fresh-coloured and 
 cleanly nursery-maid, who, by leave, airs her playful charge in your stately 
 gardens, drop her prettiest blushing curtsey as ye pass, reductive of juvenescent 
 emotion ! so may the younkers of this generation eye you, pacing your stately 
 terrace, with the same superstitious veneratkin, with which the child Elia gazed 
 on the Old Worthies that solemnized the parade before ye ! 
 
Elia: Witches and other Night-Fears. 391 
 
 {The London Magazine, October, 1821.) 
 
 [The " dear little T. H." here spoken of was Leigh Hunt's eldest son, " Thornton 
 Hunt, my favourite child," to whom Charles Lamb wrote i^ide sttpra, p. 6i) his charm- 
 ing poem " To T. L. H., a Child. "J 
 
 We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for 
 the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of 
 witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as 
 rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when 
 once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency 
 of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, 
 or proportion— of that which distinguishes the hkely from the palpable absurd 
 —could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular 
 testimony ?— That maidens pined away, wasting inwardly as their waxen images 
 consumed before a fire— that corn was lodged, and cattle lamed— that whirl- 
 winds uptore in diabolic revelry the oaks of the forest - or that spits and kettles , 
 only danced a fearful-innocent vagary about some rustic's kitchen when no 
 wind was stirring — were all equally probable where no law of agency was 
 understood. That the prince of the powers of darkness, passing by the flower 
 and pomp of the earth, should lay preposterous siege to the weak fantasy of 
 indigent eld— has neither likelihood nor unhkehhood d priori to us, who have 
 no measure to guess at his policy, or standard to estimate what rj^te those anile 
 souls may fetch in the devil's market. Xor, when the wicked are expressly 
 symbolized by a goat, was it to be wondered at so much, that he should come 
 sometimes in that body, and assert his metaphor. — That the intercourse was 
 opened at all between both worlds was perhaps the mistake— but that once 
 assumed, I see no reason for disbelie\fing' one attested story of this nature 
 more than another on the score of absurdity. There is no law to judge of 
 the lawless, or canon by which a dream may be criticised. 
 
 I have sometimes thought that I could not have existed in the days of 
 received witchcraft ; that I could not have slept in a village where one of those 
 reputed hags dwelt. Our ancestors were bolder or more obtuse. Amidst the 
 universal belief that these wretches were in league with the author of all evil, 
 holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple Justice of the Peace seems 
 to have scnipled issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant upon them 
 —as if they should subpcena Satan !— Prospero in his boat, with his books and 
 wand about him, suffers himself to be conveyed away at the mercy of his 
 enemies to an unknown island. He might have raised a storm or two, we 
 think, on the passage. His acquiescence is an exact analogy to the non-resist- 
 ance of witches to the constituted powers.— What stops the Fiend in Spenser 
 from tearing Guyon to pieces — or who had made it a condition of his prey, 
 that Guyon must take essay.of the glorious bait— we have no guess. We do 
 not know the laws of that country. 
 
 From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch- 
 stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with good store. 
 But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into 
 this channel. In my father's book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stack- 
 
392 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 house, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds 
 — one of the aric, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineafed 
 with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the 
 spot— attracted my childish attention, There was a picture, too, of the Witch 
 raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen. We shall come to 
 that hereafter. Stackhouse is in two huge tomes — and there was a pleasure 
 in removing folios of that magnitude, which, with infinite straining, was as 
 much as I could manage from the situation which they occupied upon an 
 upper shelf. I have not met with the work from that time to this, but I 
 remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the 
 objection appended to each story, and the solution of the objection regularly 
 tacked to that. The objection was a summary of whatever difficulties had been 
 opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or 
 modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candour. 
 The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were 
 both before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an 
 end for ever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample 
 on. But — like as was rather feared than realized from that slain monster in 
 Spenser— from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, 
 exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. 
 The habit of expecting objections to every passage, set me upon starting more 
 objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my own for them. I became 
 staggered and perplexed, a sceptic in long-coats. The pretty Bible stories 
 which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of 
 ^impression, and were turned into so many historic or chronologic theses to be 
 defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but — the 
 next thing to that— I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had 
 disbelieved them. Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know 
 that there are infidels at all. Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's 
 strength. O, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and 
 a stickling ! — I should have lost myself in these mazes, and have pined away, 
 I thiiik, with such unfit sustenance as these husks afforded, but for a fortunate 
 piece of ill-fortune, which about this time befell me. Turning over the picture 
 of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious 
 fabric— driving my inconsiderate fingers nght through the two larger quad- 
 rupeds—the elephant and the camel— that stare (as well they might) out of the 
 two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. 
 Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. 
 With the book, the objections and solutions gradually cleared out of my head, 
 and have seldom returned since in any force to trouble me.— But there was one 
 impression which I had imbibed from Stackhouse, which no lock or bar could 
 shut out, and which was destined to try my childish nerves rather more- 
 seriously. — That detestable picture ! 
 
 I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the 
 dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the 
 expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to 
 the seventh or eighth year of my fife — so far as memory serves in things so long 
 ago — without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some 
 frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to 
 his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel— (O that old man covered with a 
 mantle !) I owe— not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy— but the 
 shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag 
 that nightly sate upon my pillow— a sure bedfellow, when my aunt or my maid 
 was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed 
 waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) 
 awoke into sleep, and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the daylight. 
 
once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, 
 aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. — Parents do not 
 know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the 
 dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm — the hoping fo» a familiar voice — 
 when they wake screaming— and find none to soothe them - what a terrible 
 shaking it is to their poor nerves ! The keeping them up till midnight, through 
 candle-light and the unwholesome hours, as they are called, — would, I am 
 satisfied, in a medical point of view, prove the better caution. — That detestable 
 picture, as I have said, gave the fashion to my dreams — if dreams they were 
 — for the scene of them was invariably the room in which I lay. Had 1 never 
 met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some sliape or 
 other — 
 
 Headless bear, black man, or ape, 
 
 but, as it was, my imaginations took that form. — It is not book, or picture, or 
 the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can 
 at most but give them a direction. Dear little T.H., who of all children has 
 been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of supersti- 
 tion — who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be 
 told of bad men, or to read or hear of any distressing story — finds all this 
 world of fear, from which he has been so rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own 
 *' thick-coming; fancies ;" and from his little midnight pillow, this nurse-child 
 of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which 
 the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity. 
 
 Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimasras — dire stories of Celseno and the Har- 
 pies — may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition — but they were 
 there before. They are transcripts, types — the archetypes are in us, and eternal. 
 How else should the recital of that, which we know in a waking sense to be 
 false, come to affect us at all?— or 
 
 Names, whose sense we see not. 
 
 Fray us with things that be not ? 
 
 Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such subjects, considered in their 
 capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury ?— O, least of all ! These 
 terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body— or, without the body, 
 they would have been the same. All the cruel, tormenting, defined devils in 
 Dante— tearing, mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons— are they one 
 half so fearful to the spirit of a man, as the simple idea of a spirit unembodied 
 following him — 
 
 Like one that on a lonesome road 
 
 Doth walk in fear and dread, 
 
 And having once turn'd round, walks on. 
 
 And turns no more his head : 
 
 Because he knows afrightful fiend 
 
 Doth close behind him tread.* 
 
 That the kind of fear here treated of is purely spiritual — that it is strong in / 
 proportion as it is objectless upon earth — that it predominates in the period of 
 sinless infancy— are difficulties, the solution of which might afford some pro- 
 bable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the 
 shadow-land of pre-existence. 
 
 My nrght fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional 
 
 night-mare ; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them. Fiendish 
 
 . faces, with the extinguished taper, will come and look at me; but I know them 
 
 for mockeries, even while I cannot elude their presence, and I fight and grapple 
 
 * Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. 
 
394 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 with them. For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say 
 how tame and prosaic my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, sel- 
 dom even rural. They are of architecture and of buildings — cities abroad, 
 which I have never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, 
 for the seeming length of a natural day, Kome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon— 
 their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with 
 an inexpressible sense of deUght — a map-Iike.d)sliti(;tpess of trace— and a day- 
 light vividness of vision', that was all but being'awake. — I have formerly 
 travelled among the Westmoreland fells— my highest Alps, — but they are 
 objects too mighty for the gi^asp of my dreaming recognition ; and I have 
 again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make 
 out a shape, in any way whatever, of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that 
 country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies 
 me. There is Coleridge, at his will can coujure up icy domes, and plea- 
 sure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids-, and songs of Abara, and 
 caverns. 
 
 Where Alph, the sacred river, runs, 
 
 to solace his night solitudes— when I cannot muster a fiddle. Barry Cornwall 
 has his tritons and his nereids gamboling before him in nocturnal visions, and 
 proclaiming sons bom to Neptune— when my stretch of imaginative activity 
 can hardly, in the night season, raise up the ghost of a fish-wife. To set my 
 failures in somewhat a mortifying light — it was after reading the noble Dream 
 of this poet, that my fancy ran strong upon these marine spectra; and the poor 
 plastic power, such as it is, within me set to work, to humour my folly in a' 
 sort of dream that very night. Methought I was upon the ocean billows at 
 some sea nuptials, riding and mounted high, with the customary train sounding 
 their conchs before me (I myself, you may be sure, the leading god), and jol- 
 lily we went careering over the main, till just where Ino Leucothea should 
 have greeted me (I think it was Ino) with a white embrace, the billows grad- 
 ually subsiding, fell from a sea-roughness to a sea-calm, and thence to a river- 
 motion, and that river (as happens in the famiUarization of dreams) was no 
 other than the gentle Thames, which landed me, in the wafture of a placid 
 wave or two, alone, safe and inglorious, somewhere at the foot of Lambeth 
 palace. 
 
 The degree of the soul's creativeness in sleep might furnish no whimsical 
 criterion of the quantum of poetical faculty resident in- the same soul waking. 
 An old gentleman, a friend of mine, and a humourist, used to carry this notion 
 so far, that when he saw any stripling of his acquaintance ambitious of be- 
 coming a poet, his first question would be, — "Young man, what sort of dreams 
 have you ? " I have so much faith in my old friend's theory, that when I feel 
 that idle vein returning upon me, I presently subside into my proper element 
 of prose, remembering 1 those eluding nereids, and that inauspicious inland 
 landing. 
 
(&xna '§t{ox& ^iut. 
 
 (The London Magazine, November, 1821.) 
 
 ["C ; — ,'' whose axiom about apple-dumplings is here so gravely put upon record, 
 
 was Coleridge. '* C. V. L's " (meaning Charles Valentine Le Grice's) graceless witticism 
 about the absence from the dinner table of any clergyman, has been smce fathered' upon 
 so many other humorists that it is little less than a comfort to have it traced here, beyond 
 dispute, to the right paternity.] 
 
 The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the early 
 times of the world, and the hunter-state of man, when dinners were precarious 
 things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing ; when a 
 bellyful was a windfall, and looked Uke a special providence. In the shouts 
 and triumphal songs with which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky 
 booty of deer's or goat's flesh would naturally be ushered home, existed, 
 perhaps, the germ of the modem grace. It is not otherwise easy to be under- 
 stood, why the blessing of food — the act of eating — should have had a parti- 
 cular expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from that implied and 
 silent gratitude with which we are expected to enter upon the enjoyment of the 
 many other various gifts and good things of existence. 
 
 I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the 
 course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a 
 pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved 
 problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts — a grace 
 before Milton — a grace before Shakspeare^a devotional exercise proper to be 
 said before reading the Faery Queene ? — but, the received ritual having pre- 
 scribed these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation, I shall confine 
 my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so 
 called ; commending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand 
 philosophical, poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now compiling 
 by my friend Homo Humanus, for the use of a certain snug congregation of 
 Utopian Rabelsesian Christians, no matter where assembled. 
 
 The form then of the benediction before eating has its beauty at a poor 
 man's table, or at the simple and unprovocative repasts of children. It is 
 here that the grace becomes exceedingly graceful. The indigent man, who 
 hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to 
 his fare with a present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by 
 the rich, into whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could never, 
 but by some extreme theory, have entered. The proper end of food — the 
 animal sustenance — is barely contemplated by them. The poor man's bread 
 is his daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their courses are perennial. 
 
 Again, the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded by the grace. That 
 which is least stimulative to appetite, leaves the mind most free for foreign 
 considerations. A man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of 
 plain mutton with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon the ordinance and 
 institution of eating ; when he shall confess a perturbation of mind, incon- 
 sistent with the purposes of the grace, at the presence of venison or 
 turtle. When I have sate (a rarus hospes) at rich men's tables, with the 
 savoury soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, and moistening the lips 
 of the guests with desire and a distracted choice, I have felt the introduc- 
 tion of that ceremony to be unseasonable. With the ravenous orgsism upon 
 
396 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment. It is a confusion 
 of purpose to mutter out praises from a moutli that waters. The heats of 
 epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion. The incense which rises round 
 is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. The very excess of the 
 provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the 
 end and means. .The giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the in- 
 justice of returning thanks— for what ?— for having too much, while so marfy 
 starve. It is to praise the Gods amiss. 
 
 I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce consciously perhaps, by the 
 good man who says the grace. I have seen it in clergymen and.others— a sort 
 of shame — a sense of the co-presence of circumstances which unhallow the 
 blessing. After a devotional tone put on for a few seconds, how rapidly the 
 speaker will fall into his common voice, helping^himself or his neighbour, 
 as if to get rid of some uneasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that tlie good 
 man was a hypocrite, or was not most conscientious in the discharge of the 
 duty ; but he felt in his inmost mind the incompatibility of the scene and the 
 viands before him with the e.\ercise of a calm and rational gratitude. 
 
 I hear somebody exclaim, — Would you have Christians sit down at table, 
 like hogs to their troughs, without remembering the Giver? — no— I would have 
 them sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs. Or 
 if their appetites must run riot, and they must pamper themselves with deli- 
 cacies for which east and west are ransacked, I would have them postpone 
 their benediction to a fitter season, when appetite is laid ; when the still small 
 voice can be heard, and the reason of the grace returns — with temperate diet 
 and restricted dishes. Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for 
 thanksgiving. When Jeshuran waxed fat, we read that he kicked. Virgil 
 knew the harpy-nature better, when he put into the mouth of Celaeno anything 
 but a blessing. We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousness of some 
 kinds of food beyond others, though that is a meaner and inferior gratitude : 
 but the proper object of the grace is sustenance, not relishes ; daily bread, not 
 delicacies ; the means of life, and not the means of pampering the carcass. 
 With what frame or composure, I wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his 
 benediction at some great Hall feast, when he knows that his last concluding 
 pious word— and that in all probability, thS sacred name which he preaches — 
 is but the signal for so many impatient harpies to commence their foul orgies, 
 with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is temperance) as those Vir- 
 ginian fowl ! It is well if the good n-.an himself does not feel his devotions a 
 little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the 
 pure altar sacrifice. 
 
 The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the banquet which Satan, 
 in the Paradise Regained, provides for a .temptation in the wilderness : 
 
 A table richly .spread in regal mode, 
 With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort 
 And savour ; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, 
 In pastry built, or from the spit, or boil'd 
 Gris-amber-steam'd : all fish from sea or shore, 
 Freshet or purling brook, for which was drain'd 
 Pontus, and Lucrme bay, and Afric coast. 
 
 The tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go down without 
 the recommendatory preface of a benediction. They are hke to be short 
 graces where the devil plays the host.— I am afraid the poet wants his usual 
 decorum in this place. Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury, or of a 
 gaudy day at CanTbridge? This was a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus. 
 The whole banquet is too civic and culinary, and the accompaniments alto- 
 gether a profanation of that deep, abstracted, holy scene. The mighty 
 
Elia: Grace before Meat. 397 
 
 artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to 
 the simple wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that disturbed him in his 
 dreams, from his dreams might have been taught better. To the temperate 
 fantasies of the famished Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves ? 
 — He dreamed indeed. 
 
 - As appetite is wont to dream. 
 
 Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet. 
 
 But what meats ? 
 
 Him thought, he by the brook of Cherith stood. 
 
 And saw the ravens with their horny beaks 
 
 Food to Elijah bringing even and morn : 
 
 Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought ; 
 
 He saw the prophet also how he fled 
 
 Into the desert, and how there he slept 
 
 Under a juniper ; then how awaked 
 
 He found his supper on the coals prepared. 
 
 And by the angel was bid rise and eat. 
 
 And ate the second time after repose, 
 
 The strength whereof sufficed him forty days ; 
 
 Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook. 
 
 Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 
 
 Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate dreams of the 
 divine Hungeret'. To which of these two visionary banquets, think you, 
 would the introduction of what is called the grace have been most fitting and 
 pertinent ? 
 
 Theoretically I am no enemy to graces ; but practically I own that (before 
 meat especially) they seem to involve something awkward and unseasonable. 
 Our appetites, of one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, 
 which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends of preserving and 
 continuing the species. They are fit blessings to be contemplated at a dis- 
 tance with a becoming gratitude ; but the moment of appetite (the judicious 
 reader will apprehend me) is, perhaps, tjie least fit season for that exercise. 
 The Quakers who go about their business, of every description, with more 
 calmness than we, have more title to the use of these benedictory prefaces. I 
 have always admired their silent grace, and the more because I have observed 
 their applications to the meat and drink following to be less passionate and 
 sensual than ours. They are neither gluttons nor wine-bibbers as a people. 
 They eat, as a horse bolts his chopped hay, with indifference, calmness, and 
 cleanly circumstances. They neither grease nor slop themselves. When I 
 see a citizen in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice. 
 
 I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the kmds of 
 it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not made to be received with 
 dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know 
 what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinc- 
 tively from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical 
 
 character in the tastes for food. C holds that a man cannot have a pure 
 
 mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With 
 the decay of my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those 
 innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. 
 Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. I am 
 impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments, as tp come home at 
 the dinner hour, for instance, expecting some savoury mess, and to find one 
 quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill melted- that commonest of kitchen 
 failures- puts me beside my tenour.— The author of the Rambler used to 
 make inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food. Was this the music 
 
398 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 quite proper to be preceded by the grace ? or would the pious man have done 
 better to postpbne his devotions to a season when the blessing might be con- 
 templated with less perturbation ? I quarrel with no man's tastes, nor would 
 set my thin face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity and feast- 
 ing. But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them of grace 
 or gracefulness, a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, 
 that while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing 
 his hand to some great fish — his Dagon — with a special consecration of no ark 
 but the fat tureen before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the 
 banquets of angels and children ; to the roots and severer repasts of the 
 Chartreuse ; to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged, refection of the 
 poor and humble man : but at the heaped-up boards of the pampered and the 
 luxurious they become of dissonant mood, less timed and tuned to the occa- 
 sion, methinks, than the noise of those better befitting organs would be, which 
 children hear tales of at Hog's Norton. We sit too long at our meals, or are 
 too curious in the study of them, or too disordered in our application to them, 
 or engross too great a portion of those good things (which should be common) 
 to our share, to be able with any grace to say grace. To be thankful for what we 
 grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice. A lurking 
 sense of this truth is what makes the performance of this duty so cold and spirit- 
 less a service at most tables. In houses where the grace is as indispensable as 
 the napkin, who has not seen that never settled question arise, as to who shall say 
 it ; while the good man of the house and the visitor clergyman, or some other 
 guest belike of next authbrity from years or gravity, shall be bandying about 
 the office between them as a matter of compliment, each of them not un- 
 willing to shift the awkward burthen of an equivocal duty from his own 
 shoulders? 
 
 I once drank tea in company with two Methodist divines of different per- 
 suasions, whom it was my fortune to introduce to each other for the first time 
 that evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of these reverend 
 gentlemen put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he chose to say 
 anyilitiig. It seems it is the custom with some sectaries to put up a short 
 prayer before this meal also. His "reverend brother did not at first quite 
 apprehend him, but upon an explanation, with little less importance he made 
 answer, that it was not a custom known in his church : in which courteous 
 evasion the other acquiescing for good manners' sake, or in compliance with a 
 weak brother, the supplementary or tea-grace was waived altogether. With 
 what spirit might not Lucian have painted two priests, of his religion, playing 
 into each other's hands the compliment of performing or omitting a sacrifice,— 
 the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils 
 hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going away in the 
 end without his supper. 
 
 A short form upon these occasions is felt to want reverence ; a long one, I 
 am afraid, cannot escape the charge of impertinence. I do not quite approve of 
 the epigrammatic conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my pleasant 
 school-fellow) C. V. L., when importuned for a grace, used to inquire, first 
 slyly leering down the table, "Is there no clergyman here ? "—significantly 
 adding, " (hank G— ." Nor do I think our old form at school quite pertinent, 
 where we were used to preface our bald bread and cheese suppers with a pre- 
 amble connecting with that humble blessing a recognition of benefits the most 
 awful and overwhelming to the imagination which religion has to offer. Non 
 tunc illis erat locus. I remember we were put to it to reconcile the phrase 
 "good creatures," upon which the blessing rested, with the fare set before us, 
 wilfully understanding that expression ina low and animal sense,— till someone 
 recalled a legend, which told how in the golden days of Christ's, the young 
 Hospitallers were wont to have smoking joints of roast meat upon their nightly 
 
Elia: My First Flay. 399 
 
 boards, till some pious benefactor, coramiseratiBg the decencies, rather than 
 
 the palates, of the children, commuted our flesh for garments, and gave us 
 
 horresco ?-c/«rc«j— trousers instead of mutton. 
 
 {The London Magazine, December, 1821.) 
 
 [Russell_ Court was the locality mentioned in the first line of this paper as it originally 
 appeared in the Magazine. It was afterwards altered to Cross Court in 1823, when the 
 Essays were first collected.] 
 
 At the north end of Cross Court there yet stands a portal, of some architec- 
 ■ tural pretensions though reduced to humble use, serving at present for an 
 entrance to a printing-office. This old door-way, if you are yoimg, reader, 
 you may not know was the identical pit entrance to Old Drury— Garricl<'s 
 brury— all of it that is left. I never pass it without shaking some forty years 
 from off my shoulders, recurring to the evening when I passed through it to see' 
 my first play. The afternoon had been wet, and the condition of our going 
 (the elder folks and myself) was, that the rain should cease. With what a 
 beating heart did I watch from the window the puddles, from the stillness of 
 which I was taught to prognosticate the desired cessation ! I seem to remem- 
 ber the last spurt, and the glee with which I ran to announce it. 
 
 We went with orders, which my godfather F. had sent us. He kept the oil 
 shop (now Davies's) at the corner of Featherstone Buildings, in Holborn. F. 
 was a tall grave person, lofty in speech, and had pretensions above his rank. 
 He associated in those days with John Palmer, the comedian, whose gait and 
 bearing he seemed to copy ; if John (which is quite as likely) did not rather 
 borrow somewhat of his manner, from my godfather. He was also known to, 
 and visited by, Sheridan. It was to his house in Holborn that young Brinsley 
 brought his first wife on her elopement with him from a boarding-school at 
 Bath — the beautiful Maria Linley. My parents were present (over a quadrille 
 table) when he arrived in the evening with his harmonious charge. — From 
 either of these connections it may be inferred that my godfather could com- 
 mand an order for the then Drury-lane theatre at pleasure — and, indeed, a 
 pretty liberal issue of those cheap billets, in Brinsley's easy autograph, I have . 
 heard him say was the sole remuneration which he had received for many years' 
 nightly illumination of the orchestra and various avenues of that theatre— and 
 he was content it should be so. The honour of Sheridan's famiharity— or 
 supposed familiarity— was better to my godfather than money. 
 
 F. was the most gentlemanly of oilmen ; grandiloquent, yet courteous. His 
 delivery of the commonest matters of fact was Ciceronian. He had two Latin 
 words almost constantly in his mouth (how odd sounds Latin from an oilman's 
 lips !), which my better knowledge since has enabled me to correct. In strict 
 pronunciation they should have been sounded vice versO. — but in those young 
 years they impressed me with more awe than they would now do, read aright 
 from Seneca or Varro— in his own peculiar pronunciation, monosyllabically 
 elaborated, or Anglicized, into something like verse verse. By an imposing 
 manner, and the help of these distorted syllables, he chmbed (but that was 
 little) to the highest parochial honours which St. Andrew's has to bestow. 
 
 He is dead — and thus much I thought due to his memory, bpth for my first 
 
400 
 
 77/1? Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 orders (little wondrous talismans !— slight keys, and insignificant to outward 
 sight, but opening to me more than Arabian paradises !) and moreover, that by 
 his testamentary beneficence I came into possession of the only landed pro- 
 perty which I could ever call' my own—situate near the road-way village of 
 pleasant Puckeridge, in Hertfordshire. When I journeyed down to take posses- 
 sion, and planted foot on my own ground, the stately habits of the donor 
 descended upon me, and I strode (shall I confess the vanity?) with larger paces 
 over my allotment of three-quarters of an acre, with its commodious mansion 
 in the midst, with the feeling of an English freeholder that all betwixt sky and 
 centre was my own. The estate has passed into more prudent hands, and 
 nothing but an agrarian can restore it. 
 
 In those days were pit orders. Beshrew the uncomfortable manager who 
 abohshed them I — with one of these we went. I remember the waiting at the 
 door — not that which is left — but between that and an inner door in shelter 
 — O when shall I be such an expectant again'! — with the cry of nonpareils, an 
 indispensable play-house accompaniment in those days. As near as I can 
 recollect, the fashionable pronunciation of the theatrical fruiteresses then was, 
 "Chase some oranges, chase some immparels, chase a bill of the play ;" — 
 chase fro choose. But when we got in, and I beheld the green curtain that 
 
 veiled a heaven to my imagination, which was soon to be disclosed the 
 
 breathless anticipations I endured ! I had seen something like it in the plate 
 prefixed to Troilus and Cre'sida, in Rowe's Shakspeare— the tent scene with 
 Diomede — and a sight of that plate can always bring back in a measure the 
 feeling , of that evening — The boxes at that time, full of well-dressed women 
 of quality, projected over the pit ; and the pilasters reaching down were 
 adorned with a glistening substance (I know not what) under glass (as it 
 seemed), resembling— a homely fancy— but I judged it to be sugar-candy — yet, 
 to my raised imagination, divested of its homelier qualities, it appeared a 
 glorified candy ! — 'I'he orchestra lights at length arose, those "fair Auroras ! " 
 Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet once again— and, incapable of 
 the anticipation, I reposed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon the 
 maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain drew up — I was not past 
 six years old — and the play was Artaxerxes ! 
 
 I had dabbled a little in the Universal History— the ancient part of it— and 
 here was the court of Persia. It was being admitted to a sight of the past. 
 I took no proper interest in the action going on, for I understood not its 
 import — but I heard the word Darius, and I was in the midst of Daniel. All 
 feeling was absorbed in vision. Gorgeous vests, gardens, palaces, princesses, 
 passed before me. I knew not players. I was in Persepolis for the time ; 
 and the burning idol of their devotion almost converted me into a worshipper. 
 I was awestruck, and believed those significations to be something more than 
 elemental fires. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has 
 since visited me but in dreams. — Harlequin's Invasion followed; where, I 
 remember, the transformation of the magistrates into reverend beldams seemed 
 to me a piece of grave historic justice, and the .tailor carrying his own head to 
 be as sober a verity as the legend of St. Denys. 
 
 The next play to which I was taken was the Lady of the Manor, of which, 
 with the exception of some scenery, very faint traces are left in my memory. 
 It was followed by a pantomime, called Lun's Ghost a satiric touch, I 
 apprehend, upon Rich, not long since dead - but to my apprehension (too 
 sincere for satire), Lun was as remote a piece of antiquity as Lud - the father 
 of a line of Harlequins— transmitting his dagger of lath (the wooden sceptre) 
 through countless ages. I saw the primeval Motley come from his silent tomb 
 in a ghastly vest of white patch-work, like the apparition of a dead rainbow. 
 So Harlequins (thought I) look when they are dead. 
 
 My third play followed in quick succession. It was the 'Way of the World. 
 
£Ha: My First Flay. 401 
 
 I think I must have sat at it as grave as a judge ; for, I remember, the hysteric 
 affectations of good Lady Wishfort affected me lil<e some solemn tragic 
 passion. Robinson Crusoe followed ; in which Crusoe, man Friday, and the 
 parrot, were as good and authentic as in the story. — The clownery and panta- 
 loonery of these pantomimes have clean passed out of my head. 1 believe, I 
 no more laughed at them, than at the same age I should have been disposed to 
 laugh at the grotesque Gothic heads (seeming to me then replete with devout 
 meaning) that gape, and grin, in stone around the inside of the old Round 
 Church (my church) of the Templars. 
 
 1 saw these plays in the season 1781-2, when I was from six to seven years 
 old. After the intervention of six or seven other years ,for at school all play- 
 going was inhibited) I again entered the doors of a theatre. That old Arta- 
 xerxes evening had never done ringing in my fancy. I expected the same 
 feelings to come again with the same occasion. But we differ from ourselves 
 less at sixty and si.xteen, than the latter does from si.x. In that interval what 
 had I not lost ! At the first period I knew nothing, understood nothing, dis- 
 criminated nothuig. 1 felt all, loved all, wondered all — 
 Was nourished, I could not tell how — 
 
 I had left the temple a devotee, and was returned a rationalist. The sanre things 
 were there materially ; but the emblem, the reference, was gone ! — The green 
 curtain was no longer a veil, drawn between two worlds, the unfolding of 
 which was to bring back past ages, to present "a royal ^host,"— but a certain 
 quantity of green baize, which was to separate the audience for a given time 
 from certain of their fellow-men who were to come forward and pretend those 
 parts. The lights— the orchestra lights— came up a clumsy machinery. The 
 first ring, and the second ring, was now but a trick of the prompter's bell— 
 which had been, like the note of the cuckoo, a phantom of a voice, no hand 
 seen or guessed at which ministered to lis warning. The actors were men and 
 women painted. I thought the fault was in them ; but it was in myself, and 
 the alteration which those many centuries — of six short twelvemonths — had 
 wrought in me. — Perhaps it was fortunate for me that the play of the evening 
 was but an indifferent comedy, as it gave me time to crop some unreasonable 
 expectations, which might have interfered with the genuine emotions with 
 which I was soon after enabled to enter upon the first appearance to me of Mrs. 
 Siddons in Isabella. Comparison and retrospection soon yielded to the present 
 attraction of the scene; and the theatre became to me, upon a new stock, the 
 most delightful of recreations. 
 
 {The London Magazine, January, 1822.) 
 
 [The. ' ' great house " described in this Essay is not really situated, as here stated (pro- 
 bably as a blind), in Norfolk, but as correctly annpunced afterwards — in the essay upon 
 " Blakesmoor " (meaning Gilston)— i n Hertfo rdshire. " T. L — —."- was John Lamb, the 
 
 essayist's brother. "Alice W n" w^i l1lt,L lULlilified by iJr. CarewLJiazlitt in the 
 
 April number of MdijHiUA}i s MSgdzine for 1867, and afterwards, inore distinctly, in 
 his book of "waifs and strays," published in 1874 under the title of "Charles and 
 Mary Lamb," as Alice "Winn. Charles's first love, who eventually married Mr. Bartrum, 
 the wealthy pawfibroker ot Frinces Street, Leicester Square, one of whose daughters 
 became the wife of William Coulson, the eminent surgeon.] 
 
 Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children : 
 to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, or 
 
402 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones 
 crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother JIm pIH, 
 who lived in a great house in -Norfolk (a hundred times Digger ihatt (Harlir 
 which they and papa lived) which had been the scene— so at least it was 
 " - generally believed in that part of the country — ol tne tragic incidents which 
 the^_had lately become familiar with from the Batlad ot tne ctiiiaren in tae 
 
 
 Wood, certain it 15 that the whole story of Ihe childrenltnd their cruel uncle 
 was to Be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great 
 hall, the whole story down to the Robin Redbreasts, till a foolish rich person 
 pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no 
 story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender 
 to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, how religious and how good 
 their great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by everybody, 
 though she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but had only 
 the charge of it (and yet in some respects she might be, said to be the mistress 
 of it too) committed to her by its owner, who preferred living in a newer and 
 more fashionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the adjoining 
 county ; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept 
 up the dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived, which afterwards 
 came to decay, and was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped 
 and carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and 
 looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away the old tombs they had 
 seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing- 
 room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, " that would be foolish, indeed." 
 And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by a con- 
 course of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neighbourhood for many 
 miles round, -to show their respect foi* her memory, because she had been such a 
 good and religious woman ; so good indeed that she knew all the ■E'iiltpry-by 
 litai t, ayri^iiLl il yi ' bbll l^{l [' L ^of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread 
 her hands. Then I told what a tall,_UBr ight, graceful per son their great-grand- 
 mother Field once was : and how in ner youth yhe was esteemed t he best 
 dancer — here Alice's little right foot played an involuntary movement, till upon 
 my looking grave, it desisted— the best dancer, I was saying, in tlie county, 
 till a cruel disease, cal led a cancer, came, and bowed her down with pain ; but 
 It could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still 
 UBri^ht, because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she wa s used 
 f^/mj^ sfeep by herself in alone chamber of the great lone house; and how she 
 1 -Be lie\<efl t hat AB &]!) tiarition of two infants was to be seeti ff miVli^ ipht Fiiriinp-. 
 up ttUtPdown th'S'V'rp at ^ . t aJCfiStfe near where she slept, but she said ' ' those 
 
 flinocentS'WStilcI ao ner no harm ; " and how frightened I used to be, though in 
 those days I had my maid to, sleep with me, because I was never half so good 
 or religious as she— and yet I never saw the infapts. Here John expanded all 
 his eye-brows and tried to look courageous. Then I told how good^she was Jo 
 all her grandchil dren, having us to the great house in the holidays, where'I 
 in particular used to Spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts 
 of the twelve C^sars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old marble 
 heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them ; how 
 T could never be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast 
 empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved 
 oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out— sometimes in the spacious 
 old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless when now and 
 then a solitary gardening man would cross me— and how the nectarines and 
 peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to pluck them, because 
 they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then,— and because I had more 
 pleasure in stroUing about among the old melancholy-looking yew-trees, or tlie 
 firs, and picking up the red berries, and the iir apples, which were good for 
 
Elia: Dream-Children: a Reverie. 
 
 403 
 
 nothing but to look at— or in lying about upon the fresh grass, with all the fine 
 garden smells around me -or basking in the orangery, till I could almost 
 fancy myself ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grate- 
 ful warmth— or in watching th e dace tha t darted to and fro in the fish-pond at 
 the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging niid- 
 way down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent 
 friskings,— I had more pleasure in these busv-idle diversions than in all the 
 sweet flavours of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such like common baits 
 of children. Jj^r cjohn olyiy -deBaMted baek-upoa-the plate {i Etincirof granp.; • 
 w hich, not tinobserved by AUce, he had meditated dividing with KSrTand both ^ 
 teeiiied willing to relinquislT'them for the present as irrelevant. Then in 
 somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though their great-grandmother 
 Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in an especial manner she might be said 
 to love their uncle, Jo hn L — — , becaus ehe was s p handsome ;ir d spirited a 
 youth, and a king tirrtlFrest of us ; andMfisteadof moping about in soliTary 
 corners, like some of us, he would. mnim t-t4w n i u ' , i n i M i l i i ii >w a-hf)]- ,<i f he coul d 
 getj.when but an imp no Cigger than themselves, and make it carry him 
 naif over the county in a morning, and join^jljfiJmxitfiCijKhfin there were 
 any out— and vet heio md the old gieaf h(3t!se"and gardens too, but had too 
 much spirit to be always pent up within their boundaries— and how their uncle 
 grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration of 
 everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field most especially ; and how he 
 used to carry me upon his back whe n I was a lam p-f^ntf^ hny— fnr he was a 
 good bit older than me — many a mile Wl'lSh 1 could not walk for pain ; — and 
 how in after-life, he became lame-footed too, and 1 did not always (I fear) make 
 allowance enouginGi'lii'm-wlJUirll^'was impatient, and in pain, nor remember 
 sufficiently how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed ; and 
 how when he diejl, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he 
 had' died ^fcgffi2Ii^ile ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death ; and 
 how I bore his death as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards it haunted 
 and haunted me ; and though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and 
 as I think he would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and 
 knew not till then how much I had loved him, I missed his kindness, and I 
 missed hi % crossnes s, and wished him to be alive again, to be quarrelling \yith 
 him (for vve quarrefted sometimes), rather than not have him again, and was 
 as uneasy without him, as he, their poor uncle, must have been when the 
 doctor took off his limb. Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if their 
 little mourning which they had on was not for uncle John, and they looked up, 
 and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some stories 
 about their pretty dead mother. Then I told how for seven long years, in 
 hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair 
 Ali ce W n. : and, as much as children could understand, I explained to 
 ""them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial meant in maidens — when 
 suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first AHce looked out at her 
 eyes with such a reality of representment, that I became in doubt which of 
 them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I 
 stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, 
 and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in 
 the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me 
 the effects of speech ; " Wp nrg not of Alice. n OT of thee, nor are we children 
 jtt all. The childr enjif ' Alicq call Bar trum fa fKeir~'We ar e nofE'ingT' less"" 
 TRanTothing, and "Sreams. We arejDnly.^vKat raig-ht -havirtetii, .tiiil iiiui>t. 
 "x^jni: upon thy I HdIUUb y!tn;^rf?S pfT^efh e millions of ages, before we have 
 
 -existShee, ihd'a'namej^ and immediateTyawaTiing, 1 found' myself qincfly 
 
 seated-imtfy bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful 
 Bridget unchanged by my side— but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever. 
 
404 The Works of Chaises Lamb. 
 
 (The London Magazine, February, 1822.) 
 
 [Under the simple but comprehensive title of "The Old Actors," three papers, or 
 instalments of one paper, were originally published by Elia in the Londott. These were 
 afterwards differently portioned out and considerably modified under three distinct head- 
 ings, when the Elian Essays were first collected. Besides the one given below, there 
 was another "On the Artificial Comedy of the last Century," and another yet, "' On the ; 
 Acting of Munden." This last-mentioned essay was merely the concluding portion of ' 
 the third paper as originally published in the Magazine. A fragment of it, in 1823, was 
 incorporated by Charles Lamb, with the essay here subjoined. Other fragmentary 
 portions then omitted are now interpolated, being distinguished from the context, like 
 the rest of the restored passages, by being bracketed.] I 
 
 The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day- 1 
 know not by what chance it was preserved so long — tempts me to call to mind 
 a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast 
 of parts in the Twelfth Night at the old Drury Lane Theatre two-and-thirty 
 years ago. There is something very touching in these old remembrances. 
 They make us think how we once used to read a Play Bill — not, as now per- 
 adventure, singling out a favourite performer, and casting a negligent eye over 
 the rest ; but spellmg out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of 
 the scene : — when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether Whitfield, 
 or Packer, took the part of Fabian ; when Benson and Burton and Phillimore 
 — ^names of small account — had an importance beyond what we can be content 
 to attribute now to the time's best actors. — " Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore," — 
 What a full Shakspearean sound it carries ! how fresh to memory arise the 
 image, and the manner, of the gentle actor ! 
 
 Those who have only seen Mrs, Jordan within the last ten or fifteen years, 
 can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as Ophelia ; 
 Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well ; and Viola in this play. Her voice had 
 latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough with her Nells and 
 Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady melting eye, into the heart. 
 Her joyous parts— in which her memory now chiefly lives— in her youth were 
 outdone by her plaintive ones. There is no giving an account how she delivered 
 the disguised story of her love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had 
 foreseen, so as to weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following 
 line, to make up the music — yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather read, not 
 without its grace and beauty— but, when she had declaretl her sister's history 
 to be a " blank," and that she " never told her love," there was a pause, as if 
 the story had ended - and then the image of the "worm in the bud" came up 
 as a new suggestion— and the heightened image of " Patience" still followed 
 after that, as by some growing (and not mechanical) process, thought springing 
 up after thought, I would almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in 
 those fine lines — 
 
 Write loyal cantos of contemned love — 
 Hollow your name to the reverberate hills — 
 
 there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which was to 
 follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion ; or it was nature's own rhetoric, 
 most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without rule or law.^ 
 
Elia: On some of the Old Actors. 405 
 
 • Mrs. Powe) (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, made an 
 admirable Olivia. She was particularly e.\cellent in her unbending scenes in 
 conversation with the Clown. I have seen some Ohvias— and those very 
 sensible actresses too— who in these interlocutions have seemed to set their wits 
 at the jester, and to vie conceits with him in downright emulation. But she 
 used him for her sport, like what he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, 
 and then to be dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She touched the 
 imperious fantastic humour of the character with nicety. Her fine spacious 
 person filled the scene. 
 
 The part of Malvolio has in my judgment been so often misunderstood, 
 and \}a& general merits of the actor, who then played it, so unduly appreciated, 
 that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix upon these points. • 
 
 Of all the actors who flourished in my time— a melancholy phrase if taken 
 aright, reader — Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the 
 delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentiment 
 of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm — the rarest 
 faculty among players. None that I remember possessed even a portion of 
 that fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, or 
 the transports of the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city.* 
 His voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect of the trumpet. 
 » His gait was uncouth and stiff, but no way embarrassed by affectation ; and the 
 thorough-bred gentleman was uppermost in every movement. He seized the 
 moment of passion with the greatest truth ; like a faithful cloqk, never striking 
 before the time; never anticipating, or leading you to anticipate. He was 
 totally destitute of trick and artifice. He ^emed come.upon-the-stage to do 
 the poet's message simply, and he did it with as genuine fidehty as the nuncios 
 in Homer deliver the errands of the gods. He let the passion or the sentiment 
 do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to 
 mountebank it; and betrayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of 
 serious acting. For this reason, his lago was the only endurable one which I 
 remember to have seen. No spectator from his action could divine more of 
 his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy 
 alone put you in possession of the mystery. There were no by-intimations to 
 make the audience fancy their own discernment so much greater than that of 
 the Moor — who commonly stands like a great helpless mark set up for mine 
 Ancient, and a quantity of barren spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The lago 
 of Bensley did not go to work so grossly. "There was a triumphant tone about 
 the character, natural to a general consciousness of power ; but none of that 
 petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little successful 
 stroke of its knavery— as is common with your small villains, and green pro- 
 bationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It wa.^? not a 
 a man setting his wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children 
 who are mightily pleased at being let into the secret ; but a consummate villain 
 entrapping a noble nature into toils, against which no discernment was avail- 
 able, where the manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and 
 without motive. The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed 
 by Bensley, with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some recent 
 castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn out from the stage. 
 No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving it to Mr. Baddeley, 
 or Mr. Parsons ; when Bensley was occasionally absent from the theatre, John 
 Kemble thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio is not 
 essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. He is cold, 
 
 * [How lovely the Adriatic whore 
 
 Dress'd in her flames will shine—devouring flames — 
 
 Such as will burn her to her wat'ry bottom, 
 
 And hiss in her foundation. — Pierre, in Venice Presen/ed.'\ 
 
4o6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 austere, repelling ; but dignified, consistent, and, for what appears, rather of 
 an over-stretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan ; and he 
 might have worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old round-head 
 families, in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and 
 his manners are misplaced in lUyria. He is opposed to the proper levities of 
 the piece, and falls in the unequal contest. Still his pride, or his gravity (call 
 it which you will), is inherent, and native to the man, not mock or affected, 
 which latter only are the fit objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the 
 best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His bearing is lofty, a 
 little above his station, but probably not much above his deserts. We see no 
 reason why he should not have been brave, honourable, accomplished. -His 
 careless committal of the ring to the ground (which he was commissioned to 
 restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth and feeling.* His dialect on 
 all occasions is that of a gentleman and a man of education. We must not 
 confound him with the eternal old, low steward of comedy. He is master of 
 the household to a great Princess ; a dignity probably conferred upon him for 
 other respects than age or length of service.f Olivia, at the first indication of 
 his supposed madness, declares that she "would not have him miscarry for 
 half of her dowry." Does this look as if the character was meant to appear 
 little or insignificant? Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face — of what?— 
 of being "sick of self-love," — but with a gentleness and considetateness which 
 could not have been, if she had not thought that this particular infirmity 
 shaded some virtues, His rebuke to the knight, and his sottish revellers, is 
 sensible and spirited ; and when we take into consideration the unprotected 
 condition of his mistress, and the strict regard with which her state of real or 
 dissembled mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-affairs, 
 Malvolio might feel the honour of the family in some sort in his keeping ; as it 
 appears not that Olivia had any more brothers, or kinsmen, to look to it— for 
 Sir Toby had dropped all such nice respects at the buttery hatch. That 
 Malvolio was meant to be represented as possessing estimable qualities, the 
 expression of the Duke in his anxiety to have him reconciled, almost infers : 
 "Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace." Even in his abused state of 
 chains and darkness, a sort of greatness seems never to desert him. He argues 
 highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas,J and philosophizes gallantly upon 
 his straw. There must have been some shadow of worth about the man ; he 
 must have been something more than a mere vapour — a thing of straw, or 
 Jack in office — before Fabian and Maria could have ventured sending him upon 
 a courting-errand to Olivia. There was some consonancy (as he would say) in 
 the undertaking, or the jest would have been too bold even for that house of 
 misrule. [There was "example for it," said Malvolio; "the lady of the 
 Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe." Possibly, too, he might re- 
 member — for it must have happened about this time — an instance of a Duchess 
 
 * [ Viola, She took the ring from me, I'll none of it. 
 Mai, Come, Sir, you peevishly threw it to her ; and her will ib, it should be so re- 
 turned. If it be worth stopping for, there it lies in your eye ; if not, be it his that finds 
 it.] 
 
 + [Mrs. Inchbald seems to have fallen into thff common mistake of the character m 
 some otherwise sensible observations on this comedy. " It might be asked," she says, 
 " whether this credulous steward was much deceived in imputing a deeraded. taste, in the 
 sentiments of love, to his fair lady Olivia, as she actually did fall m love with a do- ' 
 mestic,_ and one who, from his extreme youth, was perhaps a greater reproach to her 
 discretion than had she cast a tender regard upon her old and faithful servant." But 
 where does she gather the fact Qf his age? Neither Maria nor Fabian ever cast that 
 reproach upon him.] 
 X Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl ? 
 Mai, That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. 
 Cloivn, What thinkest thou of his opinion? 
 Mai, I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion. 
 
Elta : On some of the Old Actors. 407 
 
 of Malfy (a countrywoman of Olivia's, and lier equal at least) descending from 
 her state to court a steward : 
 
 The misery of them that are born great ! 
 
 They are forced to woo because none dare woo them." 
 
 To be sure, the lady was not very tenderly handled for it by her brothers in the 
 sequel, but their vengeance appears to have been whetted rather by her pre- 
 sumption in re-marrying at all (when they had meditated the keeping of her 
 fortune in their family), than by her choice of an inferior, of Antonio's noble 
 merits especially, for her husband; and, besides, Olivia's brother was just dead. 
 Malvolio was a man of reading, and possibly reflected upon these lines, or 
 something like them, ill his own country poetry : — 
 
 *' Ceremony has made many fools. 
 It is as easy way unto a duchess 
 As to a hatted dame, if her love answer : 
 But that by timorous honours, pale respects. 
 Idle degrees of fear, men make their ways 
 Hard of themselves." 
 
 ' ' 'Tis but fortune ; all is fortune. Maria once told me she did affect me ; and 
 I have heard herself come thus near, that, should she fancy, it shduld be one 
 of my completion-" If here was no encouragement, the devil is in it. I wish 
 we could get at the private history of all Ah/fi Between the countess herself, 
 serious or dissembUng— for one hardly kuov/s how to apprehend this fantastical 
 great lady— and the practices of I hat delicious little piece of mischief, Maria, 
 the man might well be rapt into a fool's paradise.] 
 
 Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness. He 
 looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, spruce, 
 opinionated ; but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of 
 worth. There was something in it beyond the co.-ccomb. It was big and 
 swelling, but ^ou could not be sure that it was hollow. You might wish to see 
 it taken down, but you felt that it was upon an elevation. He was magnifi- 
 cent from the outset ; but when the decent sobrieties of the character began to 
 give way, and the poison of self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's affection, 
 gradually to work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in 
 person stood before you. How he went smiling to himself 1 with what ineffable 
 carelessness would he twirl his gold chain ! what a dream it was ! you were 
 infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should be removed ! you had 
 no room for laughter ! if an unseasonable reflection of morality obtruded itself, 
 it was a deep sense of the pitiable infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him 
 open to such frenzies — but in truth you rather admired than pitied the' lunacy 
 while it lasted— you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with 
 the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit of 
 such a lady's love as Olivia ? Why, the Duke would have given his principality 
 but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to have been so deluded. 
 The man seemed to tread on air, to taste manna, to walk with his head in the 
 clouds, to mate Hyperion. O ! shake not the casfies of his pride— endure yet 
 for a season, bright moments of confidence— " stand still, ye watches of the 
 element," that Malvolio may be still in fancy for Olivia's lord — but fate and 
 retribution say no— I hear the mischievous titter of Maria- the witty taunts of 
 Sir Toby—the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight- the 
 counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked— and "thus the whirligig of time," as the 
 true clown hath it, " brings in his revenges." I confess that I never saw the 
 qatastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it, without a kind of tragic 
 interest. There was good foolery too. Few now remember Dodd. What an 
 
4o8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Aguecheek the stage lost in him ! Lovegrove, who came nearest to the old 
 actors, revived the character some few seasons ago, and made it sufficiently 
 grotesque ; but Doddwas it, as it came out of nature's hands. It might be 
 said to remain in fur is naturalibus. In expressing slowness of apprehension 
 this actor surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea steahng 
 slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with a painful 
 process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a twilight conception— its 
 highest meridian. He seemed to keep back his intellect, as some have had the 
 power to retard their pulsation. The balloon takes less time in filling, than it 
 took to cover the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with 
 expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a Corner of his eye, 
 and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would catch a little 
 intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to the remainder. 
 
 1 am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five-and-twenty years ago, 
 that walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn— they were then far finer than they 
 are now— the accursed Verulam Buildings had not encroached upon all the 
 east side of them, cutting out delicate green crankles, and shouldering away 
 one or two of the stately alcoves of the terrace — the survivor stands gaping 
 and relationless as if it remembered its brother — they are still the best gardens 
 of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple not forgotten— have the 
 gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and law-breathing— 
 Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their gravel walks — taking my 
 afternoon solace on a summer day upon the aforesaid terrace, a comely sad 
 personage came towards me, whom, from his grave air and deportment, I 
 judged to be one of the Benchers of the Inn. He had a serious thoughtful 
 forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of mortaUty. As I have an instinc- 
 tive awe of old Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of subindicative 
 token of respect which one is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger, 
 and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any positive motion 
 of the body to that effect - a species of humility and will-worship which I 
 observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles than pleases the person it is 
 offered to— when the face turning full upon me strangely identified itself with 
 that of Dodd. Upon close inspection I was not mistaken. But could this sad 
 thoughtful countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had hailed so 
 often under circumstances of gaiety ; which I had never seen without a smile, | 
 or recognized but as the usher of mirth ; that looked out so formally flat in 1 
 Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently busy in Backbite ; so i 
 blankly divested of all meaning, or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in i 
 Fribble, and a thousand agreeable impertinences? "Was this the face— full of t 
 thought and carefulness — that had so often divested itself at will of every trace 
 of either to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or three hours 
 at least of its furrows? Was this the face— manly, sober, inteUigent, — which 
 I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry with ? The remembrance 
 of the freedoms which I had talcen with it came upon me with a reproach of 
 insult. I could have asked it pardon. I thought it looked upon me with a 
 sense of injury. There is something strange as well as sad in seeing actors— 
 your pleasant fellows particularly— subjected to and suffering the common lot— 
 their fortunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene, their 
 actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly connect them 
 with more awful responsibilities. "The death of this fine actor took place shortly 
 after this meeting. He had quitted the stage some months ; and as I learned 
 afterwards, had been in the habit of resorting daily to these gardens almost to 
 the day of his decease. In these serious walks probably he was divesting him- 
 self of many scenic and some real vanities— weaning himself from the frivolities 
 of the lesser and greater theatre— doing gentle penance for a life of no very 
 reprehensible fooleries, — taking off by degrees the buffoon mask which he 
 
Elia : On some of the Old Actors. 409 
 
 might feel he had worn too long — and rehearsing for a more solemn cast of 
 part. Dying, he "put on the weeds of Dominic."* 
 
 [ I do not know a more mortifying thing than to be conscious of a foregone 
 delight, with a total oblivion of the person and manner which conveyed it. In 
 dreams, I often stretch and strain after the countenance of Edwin, whom I i 
 once saw in Peeping Tom. I cannot catch a feature of him. He is no more 
 to me than Kokes or Pinkethman. Parsons, and, still more, Dodd, were near 
 being lost to me till I was refreshed with their portraits (fine treat) the other 
 day at Mr. Matthews's gallery at Highgate ; which, with the exception of the 
 Hogarth pictures, a few years since exhibited in Pall Mall, was the most 
 delightful collection I ever gained admission to. There hang the players, in 
 their single persons and in grouped scenes, from the Restoration,^ — Bettertons, 
 Booths, Garricks,— justifying the prejudices which we entertain for them ; the 
 Bracegirdles, the Mountforts, and the Oldfields, fresh as Gibber has described 
 them ; the WofEngton (a true Hogarth) upon a couch, dallying and dangerous ; 
 the screen scene in -Brinsley's famous comedy ; with Smith and Mrs. Abingdon, 
 whom I have not seen ; and the rest, whom, having seen, I see still there. 
 There is Henderson, unrivalled in Comus, whom I saw at secondhand in the 
 elder Harley ; Harley, the rival of Holman, in Horatio; Holman, with the 
 bright glittering teeth, in Lothario, and the deep pavior's sighs in Romeo, the 
 joUiest person (" our son is fat ") of any Hamlet I have yet seen, with the most 
 laudable attempts (for a personable man) at looking melancholy ; and Pope, 
 the abdicated monarch of tragedy and comedy, in Harry the Eighth and Lord 
 Townley There hang the two Aickins, brethren in mediocrity ; Wroughton, 
 who in kitely seemed to have forgotten that in prouder days he had per- 
 sonated Alexander; the specious form of John Palmer, with the special 
 effrontery of Bobby; Bensley, with the trumpet-tongue; and little Quick (the 
 retired Dioclesian of Islington), with his squeak like a Bartlemew fiddle 
 iThere are fixed cold as in life, the immovable features of Moody, who, afraid 
 /of o'erstepping Nature, sometimes stopped short of her ; and the i-estless 
 /fidgetiness of Lewis, who, with no such fears, not seldom leaped o the other 
 sidl There hang Farren and Whitfield, and Burton and Phillimore names of 
 small account in those times, but which, remembered now or casually recalled 
 by the sight of an old play-bill, with their associated recordations can drown 
 an.eye Snused to flow." There too hangs, not far removed from them m 
 death, the graceful plainness of the first Mrs. Pope, with a voice unstrung by 
 age, but which in her better days must have competed with the silver tones of 
 Barb' himself, so enchanting in decay do I remember it -of all her lady parts 
 exceeding herself in the Lady Quakeress (there earth- touched heaven of 
 O'Keefe when she played it to the "merry cousm of Lewis, and Mrs. 
 Mallocks, the sensiblest of viragoes ; and Miss Pope, « fe"tIewoman ever to 
 the verge of ungentility, with Churchill's compliment still burnishing "Pon her 
 gay Honeycomb lips. There are the two Bannisters and Sedgwick, and 
 Idly and Di"num(Diggy), and the bygone features of Mrs. Ward matchless 
 in LadrLovemle; and the collective majesty of the whole Kemble family; 
 and (Sha3;sper™s woman) Dora Jordan; and, by her. f ^^f ''-^^ .^^o 'n 
 former and in latter days, have chiefly beguiled us of our griefs , w hose 
 pomlits we shallstrive to^■ecall, for the sympathy of those who may not have 
 had the benefit of viewing the matchless Highgate collection. , ,^ ^ ,. , 
 . T^ jj „o„ nf rpaHino- and left at his death a choice collection of old tnglish 
 
 • Dodd was a man ."' «^° "S' ^"Ji^^'i^^'^n „ n,an of wit. I know one instance of an 
 
 :[fhi.';TuluSld":e"sXfa^stra^Jel'':ilh^rco^^ half-rebuking wave of the hand, 
 
 put him off with an "Away, Fool. 
 
4IO The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 for a "slip-shod muse," to celebrate in numbers, loose and shambling as 
 himself, the merits and the person of Mr. Richard Suett, Comedian !] If 
 few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the pleasant 
 creature, who in those days enacted the, part of the Clown to Dodd's Sir 
 Andrew. — Richard, or rather Dicky Suett — for so in his lifetime he delighted 
 to be called, and time hath ratified the appellation— lieth buried on the north 
 side of the cemetery of Holy Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender 
 years were dedicated. There are who ' do yet remember him at that period— 
 his pipe clear and harmonious. He would often spealc of his chorister days, 
 when he was "cherub Dicky," 
 
 What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange the 
 holy for the profane state ; whether he had last his good voice (his best recom- 
 mendation to that office), like Sir John, "with hallooing and singing of 
 anthems : "' or whether he was adjudged to lack something, even in those early 
 years, of the gravity indispensable to an occupation which professeth to 
 " commerce with the skies" — I could never rightly learn : but we find him, 
 after the probation of a twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, 
 and become one of us. 
 
 1 think he was not altogether of that timber out of which cathedral seats and 
 sounding-boards aie hewed. But if a glad heart — kind and therefore glad- 
 be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of Motley, with which he invested 
 himself with so much humility after his deprivation, and which he wore so 
 long with so much blameless satisfaction to himself and to the public, be 
 accepted for a surplice — his white stole, and aloe. 
 
 The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the boards of 
 Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been told, with adopting 
 the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At the period in which most 
 of us knew him, he was no more an imitator than he was in any true sense 
 himself inimitable. 
 
 He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all 
 things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the mattei". 
 He was known, like Puck, by his note—ffa/ Ha ! Ha .'—sometimes deepening 
 to Ho ! Ho I Ho ! with an irresistible accession derived perhaps remotely from 
 his ecclesiastical education, foreign to his prototype of, — O La I Thousands of 
 hearts yet respond to the chuckling O La! of Dicky Suett, brought bacl^ to 
 their remembrance by the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. 
 The "force of nature could no farther go." He drolled upon the stock of 
 these two syllables richer than the cuckoo. 
 
 Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition. Had he 
 had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never have suoported himself 
 upon those two spider's strings, which served him (in the latter "part of his un- 
 mixed existence) as legs. A doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, a 
 sigh have puffed him down ; the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle 
 made him lose his balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts 
 of his, with Robin Good-Fellow, "thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless 
 of a scratched face or a torn doublet. 
 
 Shakspere foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They have 
 all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambhng gait, a slippery tongue, this 
 last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest ; in words, light as air, ' 
 venting truths deep as the centre ; with idlest rhymes tagging conceit whfen 
 busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest, or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch. 
 
 Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal favourites 
 with the town than any actors before or after. The difference, 1 take it, was ' 
 this :— Jack was more beloved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. 
 Dicky was more liked for his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. 
 Your whole conscience stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the 
 
 J 
 
Elia : On some of the Old Actors. 411 
 
 Children in the Wood— but Diclty seemed lilce a things, as Shakspeare says of 
 Love, too young to know what conscience is. He puts us into Vesta's days. 
 Evil fled before him— not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,— but because it 
 could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was delivered 
 from the burthen of that death ; and when Death came hiTself, not in meta- 
 phor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by Robert Palmer, who kindly 
 watched his exit, that he received the last stroke, neither varying his accus- 
 tomed tranquillity, nor tune, with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been 
 recorded in his epitaph— La ! O La I Bobby! 
 
 The elder Palmer (of stage-treadmg celebrity) commonly played Sir Toby in 
 those days ; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of that half-Falstaff which 
 he did not quite fill out. He was as much too showy as Moody (who some- 
 times took the part) was dry and sottish. In sock or buskin there was an air 
 of swaggering gentility about Jack Palmer. He was a gentleman with a slight 
 infusion of the footman. His brother Bob (of recenter memory), who was his . 
 shadow in everything while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow 
 afterwards — was a gentleman with a little stronger infusion of the latter, ingre- 
 dient ; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or less makes a 
 difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the Duke's Servant,* 
 you said, what a pity such a pretty-fellow was only a servant. When you saw 
 Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought you could trace his promotion 
 to some lady of quality who fancied the handsome fellow in his top-knot, and 
 had bought him a commission. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuper- 
 able. 
 
 Jack had two voices, — both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating: but his 
 secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively histrionic than his common 
 one. It was reserved for the spectator; and the dramatis persona were sup- 
 posed to know nothing at all about it. The lies of young Wilding, and the 
 sentiments in Joseph Surface, were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the 
 audience. fThis secret correspondence with the company before the curtain 
 (which is the bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some 
 kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve or of 
 Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so indispensable to 
 scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather interfere to diminisli your 
 pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe in such characters as Surface — the 
 villain of artificial comedy— even while you read or see them. If you did, 
 they would shock and not divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, retui-ns 
 from sea, the following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his 
 father : — 
 
 Sir Sampson. Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, .since I saw thee. 
 
 Ben. Ey, ey, been ! Been far enough, an that be all.— Well, father, and how do all 
 at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val? 
 
 Sir Sampson. Dick ! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. I writ you 
 word when you were at Leghorn. 
 
 Ben. Mess, that's true ; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you say — Well, and 
 how? — I have a many questions to ask you — 
 
 Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be revolting, or 
 rather in real life could not have co-existed with the warm-hearted tempera- 
 ment of the character. But when you read it in the spirit with which such 
 playful selections and specious combinations rather than strict metaphrases of 
 nature should be taken, or when you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor 
 does, wound the moral sense at all. For what is Ben— the pleasant sailor 
 which Bannister gives us— but a piece of satire— a creation of Congreve]s 
 fancy — a dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character — his 
 * High Life Below Stairs. 
 
412 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 contempt of money — his credulity to women — with that necessary estrangement 
 from home w'hich it is just within the verge of credibility to suppose might 
 produce such an hallucination as is here described. We never think the 
 worse of Ben for it, or feel it as a stain upon his character. But when an 
 I actor comes, and instead of the delightful phantom — the creature dear to half- 
 ; belief — which Bannister exhibited — displays before our eyes a downright con- 
 I cretion of a Wapping sailor — a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar — and nothing 
 else— when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of the 
 head, and a veenng undirected goodness of purpose — he gives to it a 
 downright dayhght understanding, and a full consciousness of its actions; 
 thrusting forward the sensibiUties of the character with a pretence as if it 
 stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by them alone — we feel the 
 discord of the thing; the scene is distiurbed; a real man has got in an.ong the 
 dramatis peViOiKS, and puts them out. We want the sailor turned out. We 
 feel that his true place is not behind the curtain but in the first or second gallery. 
 
 IN A LETTER TO B. F. ESQ., AT SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES. 
 {The London Magazine, March, 1822.) 
 
 [" B. F." FAeant Barron Field (already twice named in these notes) who, for some 
 years, held in New South Wales an important judicial appointment, and who eventually 
 
 became the Chief Justice of Gibraltar. Sally W r stood for Sally Winter. " J. W." 
 
 was Elia's old schoolfellow, James White, author of an ingenious little book purporting 
 to be the " Letters of Sir John Falstaff," Knight," a curiosity of literature in the com- 
 position of which, according to Southey's statement, Charles Lamb himself was James 
 White's collaborateur. ] 
 
 My dear F. — When I think how welcome the sight of a letter from the world 
 where you were born must be to you in that strange one to which you have 
 been transplanted, I feel some compunctious visitings at my long sdence. But, 
 indeed, it is no ea,sy effort to set about a correspondence at our distance. The 
 weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It is difficult to 
 conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of 
 presumption to expect that one's thoughts should live so far. It is like writing 
 for posterity; and reminds me of one of Mrs. Rowe's superscriptions, " Alcan- 
 der to Strephon, in the Shades." Cowley's Post-Angel is no more than would 
 be expedient in such an intercourse. One drops a packet at Lombard Street, 
 and in twenty-four hours a friend in Cumberland gets it as fresh as if it came 
 in ice. It is only like whispering through a long trumpet. But suppose a tube 
 let down from the moon, with yourself at one end, and the man at the other ; 
 it would be some balk to the spirit of conversation, if you knew that the dia- 
 logue exchanged with that interesting theosophist would take two or three 
 revolutions of a higher luminary in "its passage. Yet for ought I know, you 
 may be some parasangs nigher that primitive idea — Plato's man — than we in 
 England here have the honour to reckoti ourselves. 
 
 Epistolary matter usually compriseth three topics; news, sentiment, and 
 puns. In the latter, I include all non-serious subjects ; or subjects serious in 
 
Elia: Distant Correspondents. 413 
 
 themselves, but treated after my fashion, non-seriously.— And first, for news. 
 In them the most desirable circumstance, I suppose, is that they shall be true. 
 But what security can I have that what I now send you for truth shall not before 
 you get it unaccountably turn into a lie ? For instance, our mutual friend P. 
 is at this present writing— zkv Now—m good health, and enjoys a fair share of 
 worldly reputation. You are glad to hear it. This is natural and friendly. 
 But at this present reading— jo«^ A'sio-he may possibly be in the Bench, or 
 going to be hanged, which in reason ought to abate something of your trans- 
 port [i.e., at hearing he was well, &c.), or at least considerably to modify it. I 
 am going to the play this evening, to have a laugh with Munden. You have 
 no theatre, I think you told me, in your land of d d realities. You natur- 
 ally lick your lips, and envy me my felicity. Think but a moment, and you 
 will correct the hateful emotion. Why, it is Sunday morning with you, and 
 1823. This confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents, is in a 
 degree common to all postage. But if I sent you word to Bath or the Devizes, 
 that I was expecting the aforesaid treat this evening, though at the moment 
 you received the intelligence my full feast of fun ■ would be over, yet there 
 would be for a day or two after, as you would well know, a smack, a relish left 
 upon my mental palate, which would give rational encouragement for you to 
 foster a portion at least of the disagreeable passion, which it was in part my 
 intention to produce. But ten months hence, your envy or your sympathy 
 would be as useless as a passion spent upon the dead. Not only does truth, in 
 these long intervals, un-essence herself, but {what is harder) one cannot venture 
 a crude fiction for the fear that it may ripen into a truth upon the voyage. 
 
 What a wild improbable banter I put upon you some three years since of 
 
 Will Wetherall having married a servant-maid ! I remember gravely con- 
 sulting you how we were to receive her — for Will's wife was in no case to be 
 rejected ; and your no less serious replication in the matter ; how tenderly you 
 advised an abstemious introduction of literary topics before the lady, with a 
 caution not to be too forward in bringing on the carpet matters more within the 
 sphere of her intelligence ; your deliberate judgment, or rather wise suspension of 
 sentence, how far jacks, and spits, and mops could with propriety be introduced 
 as subjects ; whether the conscious avoiding of all such matters in discourse 
 would not have a worse look than the taking of them casually in our way ; in 
 what manner we should carry ourselves to our maid Becky, Mrs. WiUiam 
 Weatherall being by; whether we should show more delicacy, and a truer 
 sense of respect for Will's wife, by treating Becky with our customary chiding 
 before her, or by an unusual deferential civility paid to Becky as to a person of 
 great worth, but thrown by the caprice of fate into a humble station. There 
 were difficulties, I remember, on both sides, which you did me the favour to 
 state with the precision of a lawyer, united to the tenderness of a friend. I 
 laughed in my sleeve at your solemn pleadings, when lo ! while I was valuing 
 myself upon this flam put upon you in New South Wales, the devil in England, 
 jealous possibly of any lie-children not his own, or working after my copy, 
 has actually instigated our friend {not three days since) to the commission 
 of a matrimony, which I had only conjured up for your diversion. William 
 Weatherall has married Mrs. Cotterel's maid. But to take it in its truest 
 sense, you will see, my dear F. , that news from me must become history to 
 you; which I neither profess to write, nor indeed care much for reading. 
 No person, under a diviner, can with any prospect of veracity, conduct a 
 correspondence at such an arm's length. 'Two prophets, indeed, might thus 
 interchange intelligence with eff'ect ; the epoch of the writer (Habakkuk) fall- 
 ing in with the true present time of the receiver (Daniel) ; but then we are no 
 prophets. 
 
 Then as to sentiment. It fares little better with that. This kind of dish, 
 above all, requires to be served up hot : or sent off in water-plates, that your 
 
414 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 friend may have it almost as warm as yourself. If it have time to cool, it is 
 tlie most tasteless of all cold meats. I have often smiled at a conceit of the 
 late Lord C. It seems thai travelling somewhere about Geneva, he came to 
 some pretty green spot, or nook, where a willow, or something, hung so fan- 
 tastically and invitingly over a stream —was it ? — or a rock ? — no matter— but 
 the stillness and the repose, after a weary journey 'tis likely, in a languid 
 moment of his lordship's hot restless life, so took his fancy, that he could 
 imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death, to lay his bones in. This 
 was all very natural and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his character in 
 a very pleasing light. But when from a passing sentiment it came to be an 
 act ; and when, by a positive testamentary disposal, his remains were actually 
 carried all that way from England ; who was there, some desperate sentimen- 
 talists excepted, that did not ask the question. Why could not his lordship have 
 found a spot as solitary, a nook as romantic, a tree as green and pendant, with 
 a stream as emblematic to his purpose, in Surrey, in Dorset, or in Devon ? Con- 
 ceive the sentiment boarded up, freighted, entered at the Custom House 
 (startling the tide-waiters with the novelty), hoisted into a ship. Conceive it 
 pawed about and handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians— a thing 
 of its delicate texture— the salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as a 
 damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some super- 
 stition about sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh gale to some propiti- 
 atory shark (spirit of St. Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign to the 
 deviser's purpose I) but it has happily evaded a fishy consummation. Trace it 
 then to its lucky landing — at Lyons shall we say?— I have not the map before 
 me — ^jostled upon four mens shoulders — baiting at this town— stopping to re- 
 fresh at t'other village — waiting a passport lies;, a hcence there ; the sanction of 
 ihe magistracy in this district, the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that can- 
 ton ; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk 
 sentiment, into a feature of silly pride or tawdry, senseless affectation. How 
 few sentiments, my dear F., I ara afraid we can set down, in the sailor's phrase, 
 as quite seaworthy. 
 
 Lastly, as to the agreeable levities, which, though contemptible in bulk, are 
 the twinkling corpuscula which should irradiate a right friendly epistle— your 
 puns and small jests are, I apprehend, extremely circumscribed in their sphere 
 of action. They are .so far from a capacity of being packed up and sent beyond 
 sea, they will scarce endure to be transported by hand from this room to the 
 next. Their vigour is as the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for their 
 brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the bystanders : or this last, is 
 the fine slime of Nilus — the welior lutus, — whose maternal recipiency is as 
 necessary as the sol pater to their equivocal generation. A pun hath a hearty 
 kind of present ear-kissing smack with it ; you can no more transmit it in its 
 pristine flavour, than you can send a kiss. — Have you not tried in some instances 
 to palm off a yesterday's pun, upon a gentleman, and has it answered? Not 
 but it was new to his hearing, but it did not seem to come new from you. It 
 did not hitch in. It was like picking up at a village ale-house a two days' old 
 newspaper. You have not seen it before, but you resent the stale thing as an 
 affront. This sort of merchandise above all requires a quick return. A pun, 
 and its recognitory laugh, must be co-instantaneous. The one is the brisk 
 lightning, the other the fierce thunder. A moment's interval, and the Unk is 
 snapped. A pun is reflected from a friend's face as from a mirror. Who would 
 consult his sweet visnomy, if the polished surface were two or three minutes 
 (not to speak of twelve months, my dear F.) in giving back its copy? 
 
 I cannot imagine to myself whereabout you are. When I try to fix it, Peter 
 Wilkins's island comes across me. Sometimes you seem to be in the Hades 
 of Thieves. 1 see Diogenes prying among you with his perpetual fruitless 
 lantern. What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an 
 
Elia: Distant Correspondents. 415 
 
 honest man ! You must almost have forgotten how we look. And tell me, 
 what your Sydneyites do ? are they th**v»ng all day long ? Merciful heaven 1 
 what property can stand against such a depredation ! The kangaroos— your 
 Aborigines — do they keep their primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted, with 
 those little short fore-puds, looking like a lesson framed by nature to the pick- 
 pocket ! Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided i, priori.; 
 but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hiiid- 
 shifters as the expertest loco-motor in the colony. — We hear the most impro- 
 bable tales at this distance. Pray, is it true tliat the young Spartans among 
 you are born with six fingers, which spoils their scanning ? — It must look very 
 odd ; but use reconciles. For their scansion, it is less to be regretted, for if 
 they take it into their heads to be poets, it is odds but they turn out, the greater 
 part of them, vile plagiarists. — Is there much difference to see to between the 
 son of a th**f, and the grandson ? or where does the taint stop ? Do you 
 bleach in three or in four generations ? — I have many questions to put, but ten 
 Delphic voyages can be made in a shorter time than it will take to satisfy my 
 scruples.— Do you grow your own hemp ! — What is your staple trade, exclusive 
 of the national profession, I mean? Your lock-smiths, I take it, are some of 
 your great capitalists. . 
 
 I am insensibly chattering to you as familiarly as when we used to exchange 
 good-morrows out of our old contiguous windows, in pump-famed Hare Court 
 in the Temple. Why did you ever leave that quiet corner ? — Why did I ? — 
 with its complement of four poor elms, from whose smoke-dried barks, the 
 theme of jesting rurahsts, I picked my first lady-birds ! My heart is as diy as 
 that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space 
 that is between us ; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases 
 of our English letters before they can reach you. But while I talk, I think you 
 hear me, — thoughts dallying with vain surmise — 
 
 Ay me ! while thee the seas and sounding shores 
 Hold far away. 
 
 Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly 
 know me. Come, before Bridget walks on crutches. Girls whom you left 
 children have become sage matrons, while you are tarrying there. The bloom- 
 ing Miss W r (you remember Sally W r) called upon us yesterday, an 
 
 aged crone. Folks, whom you knew, die off every year. Formerly, I thought 
 that death was wearing out, — I stood ramparted about with so many healthy 
 friends. The departure of J. W., two springs back, corrected my delusion. 
 Since then the old divorcer has been busy. If you do not make haste to return, 
 there will be little left to greet you, of me, or mine. 
 
 [Something of home matters I could add ; but that, with certain remem- 
 brances never to be omitted, I reserve for the grave postscript to this light 
 epistle ; which postscript, for weighty reasons, justifactory in any court of 
 feeling, I think better omitted in this first edition. London, March ist, 1822. 
 Elia.] 
 
41 6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 (^n i\t |,i:li&ml Com^bg of ^t fast C^nteji. 
 
 {The London Magazine, April, 1822.) 
 
 [As originally published, this essay formed the second instalment of the article on 
 "The Old Actors." "M."is understood to have been Mr. Marshall, an old intimate 
 of William Godwin. '* R s," was probably Reynolds the Dramatist, not Frederick 
 Reynolds, but John Hamilton Reynolds, one of the regular staff of contributors to the 
 London Magazine. ] 
 
 The artificial Comedy, or Comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage. 
 Congreve and Farquhar show their heads once in seven years only, to be ex- 
 ploded and put down instantly. The times cannot bear them. Is it for a few 
 wild speeches, an occasional licence of dialogue? I think not altogether. 
 The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We 
 screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing 
 pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications 
 of profligacy in a son or-ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. 
 We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage 
 libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after-con- 
 sequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon 
 two worlds. We are spectators to a plot or intrigue (not reducible in life to 
 the point of strict morality) and take it all for truth. We substitute a real for 
 a dramatic person, and judge him accordingly. We try him in our courts, from 
 which there is no appeal to the dramatis personcs, his peers. We have been 
 spoiled with— not sentimental comedy— but a tyrant far more pernicious to our 
 pleasures which has succeeded to it, the exclusive and all-devouring drama 
 of common life ; where the moral point is everything ; where, instead of the 
 fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy) 
 we recognize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, aUies, patrons, enemies, 
 — the same as in life, — with an interest in what is going on so hearty and sub- 
 stantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most 
 vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment. What is ikere transact- 
 ing, by no modification is made to affect us in any other manner than the same 
 events or characters would do in our relationships of Ufe. We carry our fire- 
 side concerns to the theatre with us. We do not go thither, like our ancestors, 
 to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of 
 it ; to make assurance double, and take a bond of fate. We must live our 
 toilsome lives twice over, as it was the mournful privilege of Ulysses to descend 
 twice to the shades. All that neutral ground of character, which stood between 
 vice and virtue; or which in fact was indifferent to neither, where neither 
 property was called in question ; that happy breathing-place from the burthen 
 of a perpetual moral questioning— the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted I 
 casuistry— is broken up and disfranchised, as injurious to the interests of society. 1 
 The privileges of the place are taken away by law. We dare not dally with 1 
 images, or names, of wrong. We bark like foolish dogs at shadows. We 
 dread infection from the scenic representation cf disorder ; and fear a painted 
 pustule. In our anxiety thix our morality should not take cold, we wrap it up 
 in a great blanket surtout of precaution against the breeze and sunshine. 
 
Elia: The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century. 417 
 
 I confess for myself that (with no great delinquencies to answer for) I am 
 glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience 
 —not to hve always m the precincts of the law courts,— but now and then for 
 a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions— to' eet 
 into recesses, whither the hunter cannot follow me— 
 
 -Secret shades 
 
 Of woody Ida's inmost grove. 
 
 While yet there was no fear of Jove— 
 
 I come back to my cage and my restraint the fresher and more healthy for 
 It. I wear my shackles more contentedly for having respired the breath of an 
 imaginary freedom. I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better 
 always for the perusal of one of Congreve's— nay, why should 1 not add even 
 of Wycherley's— comedies. I am the gayer at least for it ; and I could never 
 connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn 
 from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as 
 much as fairyland. Take one gf their characters, male or female (with few 
 exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modem play, and my virtuous 
 indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of 
 the pit could desire; because in a modal'n play I am to judge of the right and 
 the wrong. The standard of /i;//« is the measure oi political Justice. The 
 atmosphere will blight it, it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, 
 where it has no business, from which it must needs fall headlong ; as dizzy and 
 incapable of making a stand, as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered 
 unawares into the sphere of one of his Good Men, or Angels. But in its own 
 world do we feel the creature is so very bad ?— The Fainalls and the Mirabels, 
 the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend 
 my moral sense ; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged 
 in their proper element. They break through no laws, or conscientious re- 
 straints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the 
 land— what shall I call it?— of cuckoldry — the Utopia of gallantry, where 
 pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a specula- 
 tive scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is. No 
 good person can be justly offended as a spectator, because no good person 
 suffers on the stage. Judged morally, every character in these plays — the few 
 exceptions only are mistakes— is alike essentially vain and worthless. The 
 great art of Congreve is especially shown in this, that he has entirely excluded 
 from his scenes, — some little generosities in the part of Angelica perhaps ex- 
 cepted, — not only anything like a faultless character, but any pretensions to 
 goodness or good feelings whatsoever. Whether he did this designedly, or 
 instinctively, the effect is as happy, as the design (if design) was bold. I used 
 to wonder at the strange power which his Way of the World in particular 
 possesses of interesting you all along in the pursuits of characters, for whom 
 you absolutely care nothing — for you neither hate nor love his personages — 
 and I think it is owing to this very indifference for any, that you endure the 
 whole. He has spread a privation of moral light, I will, call it, rather than 
 by the ugly name of palpable darkness, over his creations; and his shadows 
 flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good 
 character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual 
 life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the 
 discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none. 
 
 Translated into real life, the characters of his, and his friend Wycherley's 
 dramas, are profligates and strumpets, — the business of their brief existence, 
 the undivided pursuit of lawless gallantry. No other spring of action, or 
 possible motive of conduct, is recognized ; principles which, universally acted 
 upon, must reduce this frame of things to a chaos. But we do them wrong in 
 .^ p 
 
41 8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 so translating them. No such effects are produced in their world. When we 
 are among them, we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them 
 by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings, — 
 for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated,— for no 
 family ties exist amon^ them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained, — for 
 none is supposed to have a being. No deep affections are disquieted, — no 
 holy wedlock bands are snapped asunder,— for affection's depth and wedded 
 faith are not of the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong, — 
 gratitude or its opposite, — claim or duty, —paternity or sonship. Of what con- 
 sequence is it to virtue, or how is she af all concerned about it, whether Sir 
 Simon, or Dapperwit, steal away Miss Martha ; or who is the father of Lord 
 Froth's, or Sir Paul Pliant's children ? 
 
 The whole is a passing pageant, where "we should sit as unconcerned at the 
 issues, for life or death, as at a battle of the frogs and mice. But like Don 
 Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently. We 
 dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical 
 moral sense is for a little transitory ease excluded. We have not the courage 
 to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. 
 We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame. We would indict our 
 very dreams. 
 
 Amidst the mortifying circumstances attendant upon growing old, it is some- 
 thing to have seen the School for Scandal in its glory. This comedy grew out 
 of Congreve and Wycheriey, but gathered some allays of the sentimental 
 comedy which followed theirs. It is impossible that it should be now acted, 
 though it continues, at long intervals, to be annSunced in the bills. Its hero, 
 when Palmer played it at least, was Joseph Surface. When I remember the 
 gay boldness, the graceful solemn plausibility, the measured step, the insinu- 
 ating voice— to express it in a word— the downright acted villany of the part, 
 so different from the pressure of conscious actual wickedness, — the hypocritical 
 assumption of hypocrisy, — which made Jack so deservedly a favourite in that 
 character, I must needs conclude the present generation of playgoers more 
 virtuous than myself, or more dense. I freely confess that he divided the palm 
 with me with his better brother ; that, in fact, I hked him quite as well. Not 
 but there are passages,— like that, for instance, where Joseph is made to refuse 
 a pittance to a poor relation, — incongruities which Sheridan was forced upon 
 by the attempt to join the artificial with the sentimental comedy, either of 
 which must destroy the other— but over these obstructions Jack's manner 
 floated him so lightly, that a refusal from him no more shocked you, than the 
 easy comphance of Charles gave you in reality any pleasure ; you got over the 
 paltry question as quickly as you could, to get back into the regions of pure 
 comedy, where no cold moral reigns. The highly artificial manner of Palmer 
 in this character counteracted every disagreeable impression which you might 
 have received from the contrast, supposing them real, between the two 
 brothers. You did not believe in Joseph with the same faith with which you 
 believed in Charles. The latter was a pleasant reality, the former a no less 
 pleasant poetical foil to it. The comedy, I have said, is incongruous; a 
 mixture of Congreve with sentimental incompatibilities : the gaiety upon the 
 whole is buoyant ; but it required the consummate art of Palmer to reconcile 
 the discordant elements. 
 
 A player with Jack's talents, if we had one now, would not dare to do the 
 part in the same manner. He would instinctively avoid every turn which 
 might tend to unreahze, and so to make the character fascinating. He must 
 take his cue from his spectators, who would expect a bad man and a good man 
 as rigidly opposed to each other as the death-beds of those geniuses are con- 
 trasted in the prints, which I am sorry to say have disappeared from the win- 
 dows of my old friend Carrington Bowles, of St. Paul's Church-yard memoiy 
 
Elia: The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century. 419 
 
 — (an exhibition as venerable as the adjacent cathedral, and almost coeval) of 
 the bad and good man at the hour of death ; where the ghastly apprehensions 
 of the former,— and truly the grim phantom with his reality of a toasting fork 
 is not to be despised, — so finely contrast with the meek complacent kissing of 
 the rod, — taking it in like honey and butter, — with which the latter submits to 
 the scythe of the gentle bleeder, Time, who wields his lancet with the appre- 
 hensive finger of a popular young ladies' surgeon. What flesh, like loving 
 grass, would not covet to meet half-way the stroke of such a delicate mower ? 
 — John Palmer was twice an actor in this exquisite part. He was playing to 
 you all the while that he was playing upon Sir Peter and his lady. You had 
 the first intimation of a sentiment before it was on his lips. His altered voice 
 was meant to you, and you were to suppose that his fictitious co-flutterers on 
 the stage perceived nothing at all of it. What was it to you if that half- 
 reahty, the husband, was over-reached by the puppetry — or the thin thing 
 (Lady Teazle's reputation) was persuaded at was dying of a plethory? The 
 fortunes of Othello and Desdemona were not concerned in it. Poor Jack has 
 passed from the stage in good time, that he did not hve to this our age of 
 seriousness. The pleasant old Teazle I^ing, too, is gone in good time. His 
 manner would scarce have passed current in our day. We must love or hate 
 — atcquit or condemn — censure or pity— exert our detestable coxcombry of 
 moral judgment upon everything. Joseph Surface, to go down now, must be 
 a downright revolting villam — no compromise— his first appearance must shock 
 and give horror— his specious plausibilities, which the pleasurable faculties 
 of our fathers welcomed with such hearty greetings, knowing that no harm 
 (dramatic harm even) could come, or was meant to come of them, must inspire 
 a cold and killing aversion. Charles (the real canting person of the scene — for 
 the hypocrisy of Joseph has its ulterior legitimate ends, but his brother's pro- 
 fessions of a good heart centre in downright self-satisfaction) must be loved, 
 and Joseph hated'. To balance one disagreeable reality with another. Sir Peter 
 Teazle must be no longer the comic idea of a fretful old bachelor bridegroom, 
 whose teasings (while King acted it) were evidently as much played off at you, 
 as they were meant to concern anybody on the stage, — he must be a real 
 person, capable in law of sustaining an injury — a person towards whom duties 
 are to be acknowledged — the genuine crim-con. antagonist of the villanous 
 seducer Joseph. To realize him more, his sufferings under his unfortunate 
 match must have the downright pungency of life — must (or should) make you 
 not mirthful but uncomfortable, just as the same predicament would move you 
 in a neighbour or old friend. The delicious scenes which give the play its 
 name and zest, must affect you in the same serious manner as if you heard the 
 reputation of a dear female friend attacked in your real presence. Crabtree, 
 and Sir Benjamin— those poor snalies that live but in the sunshine of your' 
 mirth— must be ripened by this hot-bed process of realization into asps or 
 amphisbaenas ; and Mrs. Candour— O ! frightful ! become a hooded serpent. 
 Oh who that remembers Parsons and Dodd — the wasp and butterfly of the 
 School for Scandal— in those two characters ; and charming natural Miss Pope, 
 the perfect gentlewoman as distinguished from the fine lady of comedy, in this 
 latter part— would forego the true scenic delight— the escape from life — the 
 oblivion of consequences— the holiday barring out of the pedant Reflection — 
 those Saturnalia of two or three brief hours, well won from the world — to sit 
 instead at one of our modern plays — to have his coward conscience (that for- 
 sooth must not be left for a moment) stimulated with perpetual appeals— dulled 
 rather, and blunted, as a faculty without repose must be — and his moral vanity 
 pampered with images of notional justice, notional beneficence, lives saved 
 without the spectators' risk, and fortunes given away that cost the author 
 nothing? 
 No piece was, perhaps, evef so •completely cast in all its parts as this 
 
42 o The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 manager's comedy. Miss Farren had succeeded to Mrs. Abingdon in Lady 
 Teazle ; and Smith, the original Charles, had retired, when I first saw it. The 
 rest of the characters, with very slight exceptions, remained. I remember it 
 was then the fashion to cry down John Kemble, who took the part of Charles 
 after Smith ; but, I thought, very unjustly. Smith, I fancy, was more airy, 
 and took the eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no 
 sombre recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having 
 pleased beforehand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of 
 Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a passpon to success in 
 one of so opposite a tendency. But, as far as I could judge, the weighty sense 
 of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. 
 His harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good humour. 
 He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed 
 it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It 
 seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkHng 
 sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in succession, 
 and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be altered for the 
 better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue — the dialogue of Congreve or 
 of Wycherley — because none understood it — half so well as John Kemble. 
 His Valentine, in Love for Love, was to my recollection, faultless. He 
 flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over 
 the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. 
 But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty 
 dialogue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since 
 him — the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in 
 Hamlet — the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard 
 — dis'appeared with him, [Tragedy has become a uniform dead weight. They 
 have fastened lead to their buskins. She never pulls them off for the ease of 
 a moment. To invert a commonplace from Niobe, she never forgets herself to 
 liquefaction.] John had his sluggish moods, his torpors — but they were the 
 halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy — politic savings, and fetches of 
 the breath— husbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an 
 economist— rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at 
 worst, less paiuful than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance,— the 
 " lidless dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy. 
 
 [The story of his swallowing opium pills to keep him lively on the first 
 night of a certain tragedy, we may presume to be a piece of retaliatory 
 pleasantry on the part of the suffering author ; but, indeed, John had the art 
 of diffusing a complacent equable dullness, (which you knew not where to 
 quarrel with), over a piece which he did not like, beyond any of his contem- 
 poraries. John Kemble had made up his mind early, that all the good 
 tragedies which could be written, had been written ; and he resented any new 
 attempt. His shelves were full. The old standards were scope enough for his 
 ambition. He ranged in them absolutely— and fair ' ' in Otway, full in Shakes- 
 peare shone." He succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and did not care to 
 adventure bottomry with a Sir Edward Mortimer or any casual speculator that 
 offered. I remember, too actually for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he 
 put upon my friend G. 's " Antonio. " G. , satiate with visions of political justice 
 (possibly not to be reahzed in our time), or wiUing to let the sceptical worldlings 
 see that his anticipations of the future did not preclude a warm sympathy for 
 men as they are and have been — wrote a tragedy. He chose a story, affecting, 
 romantic, Spanish— the plot simple, without being naked— the incidents un- 
 common, without being overstrained. Antonio, who gives the name to the 
 piece, is a sensitive young Castilian, who, in a fit of his country honour, im- 
 molates his jister — 
 
 But I must not anticipate the catastrophe— the play, reader, is extant in 
 
Elia : The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century. 421 
 
 choice English— and you will employ a spare half-crown not injudiciously in 
 the quest of it. 
 
 The conception was bold, and the denoujnent—ihe time and place in which 
 the hero of it existed, considered— not much out of keeping ; yet it must be 
 confessed, that it required a delicacy of handling both from the author and 
 the performer, so as not much to shock the prejudices of a modern English 
 audience. G., in my opinion, had done his part. 
 
 John, who was in familiar habits with the philosopner, had undertaken to 
 play Antonio. Great expectations were formed. A philosopher's first play 
 was a new era. The night arrived. I was favoured with a seat in an advan- 
 tageous box, between the author and his friend M . G. sat cheerful and 
 
 confident. In his friend M.'s looks, who had perused the manuscript, I read 
 some terror. Antonio, in the person of John Philip Kemble, at length ap- 
 peared, starched out in a ruff which no one could dispute, and in most irre- 
 proachable mustachios. John always dressed most provokingly correct on 
 these occasions. The first act swept by, solemn and silent. It went off, as G. 
 assiu-ed M., exactly as the opening act of a piece— the protasis— should do. 
 The cue of the spectators was, to be mute. The characters were but in their 
 introduction. The passions and the incidents would be developed hereafter. 
 Applause hitherto would be impertinent. Silent attention was the effect all- 
 desirable. Poor M. acquiesced — but in his honest, friendly face I could discern 
 a wgrking which told how much more acceptable the plaudit of a single hand 
 (however misplaced) would have been than all this reasoning. The second act 
 (as in duty bound) rose a httle in interest, but still John kept his forces under — 
 in policy, as G. would have it— and the audience were most complacently 
 attentive. The protasis, in fact, was scarcely unfolded. The interest would 
 warm in the next act, against which a special incident was provided. M. 
 wiped his cheek, flushed with a friendly perspiration — 'tis M.'s way of showing 
 his zeal — "from every pore of him a perfume falls' — I honour it above Alex- 
 ander's. He had once or twice during this act joined his palms, in a feeble 
 endeavour to elicit a sound — they emitted a solitary noise, without an echo — 
 there was no deep to ansv/er to his deep. G. repeatedly begged him to be 
 quiet. The third act at length brought him on the scene which was to warm 
 the piece, progressively, to the final flaming forth of the catastrophe.^ A 
 philo?ophic calm settled upon the clear brow of G., as it approached. The 
 lips of M. quivered. A challenge was held forth upon the stage, and there 
 was a promise of a fight. The pit roused themselves on this extraordinary 
 occasion, and, as their manner is, seemed disposed to make a ring,— when 
 suddenly, Antonio, who was the challenged, turning the tables upon the hot 
 challenger, Don Gusman (who, by the way, should have had his sister) baulks 
 his humour, and the pit's reasonable expectation at the same time, with some 
 speeches out of the " New Philosophy against Duelling." The audience were 
 here fairly caught— their courage was up, and on the alert— a few blows, ding- 
 dong, as R— s, the dramatist, afterwards expressed it to me, might have done 
 the business, when their most exquisite moral sense was suddenly called m to 
 assist in the mortifying negation of their own pleasure. They could not 
 applaud for disappointment; they would not condemn for morahty's sake. 
 The interest stood stone still ; and John's manner was not calculated to un- 
 petrify it. It was Christmas time, and the atmosphere furnished some pretext 
 for asthmatic affections. One began to cough— his neighbour sympathized 
 with him— till a cough became epidemical. But when, from being half artifi- 
 cial in the pit, the cough got frightfully naturahzed among the fictitious persons 
 of the drama, and Antonio himself (albeit it was not set down m the stage 
 directions) seemed more intent upon relieving his own lungs than the distresses 
 of the author and his friends, then G. "first knew fear ;" and, mildly turning 
 to M., intimated that he had not been aware that Mr. K. laboured tinder a 
 
42 2 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 cold ; and that the performance might possibly have been postponed with 
 advantage for some nights farther — still keeping the same serene countenance, 
 while M. sweat like a bull. It would be invidious to pursue the fates of this 
 ill-starred evening. In vain did the plot thicken in the scenes that followed ; 
 in vain did the dialogue wax more passionate and stirring, and the progress of 
 the sentiment point more and more clearly to the arduous development which 
 impended. In vain the action was accelerated, while the acting stood still. 
 From the beginning John had taken his stand ; had wound himself up to an 
 even tenor of stately declamation, from which no exigence of dialogue or 
 person could make him swerve for an instant. To dream of his rising with 
 the scene (the common trick of tragedians) was preposterous; for, from the 
 onset, he had planted himself, as upon a terrace, on an eminence vastly above 
 the audience, and he kept that sublime level to the end. He looked from his 
 throne of elevated sentiment upon the under-world of spectators with a most 
 sovereign and becoming contempt. There was excellent pathos dfeliveredoutto 
 them : an they would receive it, so ; an they would not receive it, so ; there was 
 no offence against decorum in all this ; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an 
 irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage 
 stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to predict what would 
 come of it, when towards the winding up of the latter, Antonio, with an 
 irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself— for she had been coolly 
 arguing the point of honour with him — suddenly whips out a poniard, and 
 stabs her sister to the heart. The effect was as if a murder had been com- 
 mitted in cold blood. The whole house rose up in clamorous indignation, de- 
 manding justice. The feeling rose far above hisses. I believe at that instant, 
 if they could have got him, they would have torn the unfortunate author to 
 pieces. Not that the act itself was so exorbitant, or of a complexion different 
 from what they themselves would have applauded upon another occasion, in a 
 Brutus or an Appius, but for want of attending to Antonio's ■words, which 
 palpably led to the expectation of no less dire event, instead of being seduced 
 by his manner, which seemed to promise a sleep of less alarming nature than 
 it was his cue to inflict upon Elvira : they found themselves betrayed into 
 an accompliceship of murder, a perfect misprision of parricide, while they 
 dreamed of nothing less. M., I beheve, was the only person who suffered 
 acutely from the failure ; for G. thenceforward, with a serenity unattainable 
 but by the true philosophy, abandoning a precarious popularity, retired into his 
 fasthold of speculation, — the drama in which the world was to be his tiring- 
 room, and remote posterity his applauding spectators at once and actors.] 
 
 {The London Magazine, May, 1S22). 
 
 [As originally printed, this charming essay had prefixed to it as a suh-tille "A May 
 P^y Effusion." The hero of it, James White, or more familiarly Jem White, was the 
 
 J- "• already referred to by Elia tov/ards the close of his paper on "Distant Corres- 
 pondents. His one literary effusion, the supposititious " Letters of Sir John Falstaff," 
 already named in the note prefixed to that essay, Charles Lamb, for the sake of the 
 quamt old-fashioned humour scattered through its pages, regarxied -with the highest 
 
Elia : The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers. 423 
 
 admiration. James White, here spoken of " as extinct," died in 1821, as nearly as 
 possible a twelvemonth before this celebration of his hospitality to the poor chimney 
 sweepers.] 
 
 I LIKE to meet a sweep — understand me — not a grown sweeper— old chimney- 
 sweepers are by no means attractive— but one of those tendernovices, blooming ( 
 through their first nigritude, the maternal washings not quite effaced from the 
 cheelt— such as come forth with the dawn, or somewhat earlier, with their little 
 professional notes sounding like itiepeef peep of a young sparrow ; or liker to the 
 matin lark should I pronounce them, in their aerial ascents not seldom antici- 
 pating the sun-rise ? 
 
 I have a kindly yearning towards these dim specks — poor blots— innocent 
 blacknesses — 
 
 I reverence these young Africans of our own growth — these almost clergy 
 imps, who sport their cloth without assumption ; and from their little pulpits 
 (the tops of chimneys), in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a 
 lesson of patience to mankind. 
 
 When a child, what a mysterious pleasure it was to witness their operation ! 
 to see a chit no bigger that one's-self enter, one knew not by what process, 
 into what seemed the fauces Averni—Xa pursue him in imagination, as he 
 went sounding on through so many dark stifling caverns, horrid shades 1 — to 
 shudder with the idea that " now, surely, he must be lost for ever ! "^to revive 
 at hearing his feeble shout of discovered daylight— and then (O fulness of 
 delight) running out of doors, to come just in tim,e to see the sable pheno- 
 menon emerge in safety, the brandished weapon of his art victorious like some 
 flag waved over a conquered citadel ! I seem to remember having been told, 
 that a bad sweep was once left in a slack with his brush, to indicate which way 
 the wind blew. It was an awful spectacle certainly ; not much unlike the old 
 stage direction in Macbeth, where the "Apparation of child crowned with a 
 tree in his hand rises." 
 
 Reader, if thou meetest one of these small gentry in thy early rambles, it is 
 good to give him a penny. It is better to give him twopence. If it be starving 
 weather, and to the proper troubles of his hard occupation, a pair of kibed 
 heels (no unusual accompaniment) be superadded, the demand on thy humanity 
 will .surely rise to a tester. 
 
 There is a composition, the groundwork of which I have understood to be 
 the sweet wood yclept sassafras. This wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and 
 tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar, hath to some tastes a delicacy 
 beyond the China luxury. I know not how thy palate may relish it ; for myself, 
 with every deference to the judicious Mr. Read, who hath time out of mind 
 kept open a shop (the only one he avers in I .ondon) for the vending of this 
 "wholesome and pleasant beverage, on the south side of Fleet Street, as thou 
 approachest Bridge Street — the only Salopian house, — I have never yet adven- 
 tured to dip my own particular lip in a basin of his commended ingredients — a 
 cautious premonition to the olfactories constantly whispering to me, that my 
 stomach must infalhbly, with all due courtesy, decline it. Yet I have seen 
 palates, otherwise not uninstructed in dietetical elegances, sup it up with 
 avidity. 
 
 I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it happens, but I 
 have always found that this composition is surprisingly gratifying to the palate 
 of a young chimney-sweeper— whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly 
 oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are some- 
 times found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged 
 practitioners ; or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much of 
 bitter wood in the lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the earth her 
 sassafras for a sweet lenitive— but so it is, that no possible taste or odour to the 
 
424 The Woi-ks of Charles Lamb. 
 
 senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a delicate excitement comparable 
 to this mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang their black heads over the 
 ascending steam, to gratify one sense, if possible, seemingly no less pleased 
 than those domestic animals — cats — when they purr over a new-found sprig of 
 valerian. There is something more in these sympathies than philosophy can 
 inculcate. 
 
 Now albeit Mr. Read boasteth, not without reason, that his is the only Salop- 
 ian house ; yet be it known to thee, reader— if thou art one who keepest what 
 are called good hours, thou art happily ignorant of the fact — he hath a race of 
 industrious imitators, who from stalls, and under open sky, dispense the same 
 savoury mess to humbler customers, at the dead time of the dawn, when (as 
 extremes meet) the rake, reeling home from his midnight cups, and the hard- 
 handed artisan leaving his bed to resume the premature labours of the day, jostle, 
 not unfrequently to the manifest disconcerting of the former, for the honours 
 of the pavement. It is the time when, in summer, between the expired and 
 the not yet relumined kitchen-fires, the kennels of our fair metropolis give 
 forth their least satisfactory odours. The rake who wisheth to dissipate his 
 o'er-night vapours in more grateful coffee, curses the ungenial fume, as he 
 passeth ; but the artisan stops to taste, and blesses the fragrant breakfast. 
 
 This is Saloop — the precocious herb-woman's darling — the dehght of the 
 early gardener, who transports his smoking cabbages I'jy break of day from 
 Hammersmith to Covent Garden's famed piazzas — the delight, and, oh I fear, 
 too often the envy, of the unpennied sweep. Him shouldest thou haply en- 
 counter, with his dim visage pendent over the grateful steam, regale him with 
 a sumptuous basin (it will cost thee but three halfpennies) and a slice of dehcate 
 bread and butter (an added halfpenny)— so may thy culinary fires, eased of the 
 o'ercharged secretions from thy worse-placed hospitalities, curl up a lighter 
 volume to the welkin — so may the descending soot never taint thy costly well- 
 ingredienced soups — nor the odious cry, quick-reaching from street to street, 
 of \\ie fired chimney, invite the rattling engines from ten adjacent parishes, to 
 disturb for a casual scintillation thy peace and pocket ! 
 
 I am by nature extremely susceptible of street affronts ; the jeers and taunts 
 of the populace ; the low-bred triumph they display over the casual trip, or 
 splashed stocking, of a gentleman. Yet can I endure the jocularity of a 
 young sweep with something more than forgiveness. In the last winter but 
 one, pacing along Cheapside with my accustomed precipitation when I walk 
 westward, a treacherous shde brought me upon my back in an instant. I 
 scrambled up with pain and shame enough— yet outwardly trying to face it 
 down, as if nothing had happened— when the roguish grin of one of these 
 young wits encountered me. 'There he stood, pointing me out with his dusky 
 finger to the mob, and to a poor woman (I suppose his mother) in particular, 
 till the tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he thought it) worked them- 
 selves out at the corners of his poor red eyes, red from many a previous weep- 
 ing, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling through all with such a joy, snatched 
 
 out of desolation, that Hogarth- but Hogarth has got him already (how 
 
 could he miss him ?) in the March to Finchley, grinning at the pie-man 
 
 there he stood, as he stands in the picture, irremovable, as if the jest was to 
 last for ever — with such a maximum of glee, and minimum of mischief, in his 
 mirth— for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it — that I 
 could have been content, if the honour of a gentleman might endure it, to have 
 remained his butt and his mockery till midnight. 
 
 I am by theory obdurate to the seductiveness of what are called a fine set of 
 teeth. Every pair of rosy lips (the ladies must pardon me) is a casket presum- 
 ably holding such jewels ; but, methinks, they shoujd take leave to "air" them 
 as frugaliv as possible. "I'he fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their 
 teeth, show nie bones. Yet must I confess, that from the mouth of a true j. 
 
Elia : The Praise of Chimney-Sweepas. 425 
 
 sweep a display (even to ostentation) of those white and shining ossifications, 
 strikes me as an agreeable anomaly in manners, and an allowable piece of 
 foppery. It is, as when 
 
 A sable cloud 
 Turn, forth her silver lining on the night. 
 
 It is like some remnant of gentry not quite extinct ; a badge of better days ; a 
 hint of nobility : — and, doubtless, under the obscuring darkness and double 
 night of their forlorn disguisement, oftentimes lurketh good blood, and gentle 
 conditions, derived from lost ancestry, and a lapsed pedigree. The premature 
 apprenticements of these tender victims give but too much encouragement, I 
 fear, to clandestine, and almost infantile abductions ; the seeds of civility and 
 true courtesy, so often discernible in these young grafts (not otherwise to be 
 accounted for) plainly hint at some forced adoptions ; many noble Rachels 
 mourning for their children, even in our days, countenance the fact ; the tales 
 of fairy-spiriting may shadow a lamentable verity, and the recovery of the 
 young Montagu be but a solitary instance of good fortune, out of many irre- 
 parable and hopeless deftliations. 
 
 In one of the state-beds at Arundel Castle, a few years since — under a ducal 
 canopy — (that seat of the Howards is an object of curiosity to visitors, chiefly 
 for its beds, in which the late duke was especially a connoisseur) — encircled 
 with curtains of delicatest crimson, with starry coronets inwoven — folded 
 between a pair of sheets whiter and softer than the lap where Venus lulled 
 Ascanius — was discovered by chance, after all methods of search had failed, at 
 noon-day, fast asleep, a lost chimney-sweeper. The little creature, having some- 
 how confounded his passage among the intricacies of those lordly chimneys, by 
 some unknown aperture had alighted upon this magnificent chamber ; and, 
 tired with his tedious explorations, was unable to resist the. delicious invitement 
 to repose, which he there saw exhibited ; so, creeping between the sheets very 
 quietly, laid his black head upon the pillow, and slept like a young Howard. 
 
 Such is the account given to the visitors at the Castle. — But I cannot help 
 seeming to perceive a confirmation of what I have just hinted at in this story. 
 A high instinct was at work in the case, or I am mistaken. Is it probable that 
 a poor child of that description, with whatever weariness he might be visited, 
 would have ventured, under such a penalty as he would be taught to expect, to 
 uncover the sheets of a Duke's bed, and deliberately to lay himself down 
 between them, when the rug, or the carpet, presented an obvious couch, still 
 far above his pretensions — is this probable, I would ask, if the great power of 
 nature, which I contend for, had not been manifested within him, prompting 
 to the adventure? Doubtless this young nobleman (for such my mind misgives 
 me that he must be) was allured by some memory, not amounting to full con- 
 sciousness, of his condition in infancy, when he was used to be lapt by his 
 mother, or his nurse, in just such sheets as he there found, into which he was 
 now but creeping back as into his proper incunatula, and resting-place. By 
 no other theory, than by this sentiment of a pre-existent state (as I may call it), 
 can I explain a deed so venturous, and, indeed, upon any other system, so 
 indecorous, in this tender, but unseasonable, sleeper. 
 
 My pleasant friend Jem White was so impressed with a belief of meta- 
 morphoses like this frequently taking place, that in some sort to reverse the 
 wrongs of fortune in these poor changelings, he instituted an annual feast of 
 chimney-sweepers, at which it was his pleasure to ofificiate as host and waiter. 
 It was a solemn supper held in Smithfield, upon the yearly return of the fair of 
 St. Bartholomew. Cards were issued a week before to the master-sweeps in 
 and about the metropohs, confining the invitation to their younger fry. Now 
 and then an elderly stripHng would get in among us, and be good-naturedly 
 winked at ; but our main body were infantry. One unfortunate wight, indeed, 
 
 p * 
 
426 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 who, relying upon his dusky suit, liad intruded himself into our party, but by 
 tokens was providentially discovered in time to be no chimney-sweeper (all is 
 not soot which looks so), was quoited out of the presence with universal in- 
 dignation, as not having on the wedding garment ; but in general the greatest 
 harmony prevailed. The place chosen was a convenient spot among the pens, 
 at the north side of the fair, not so far distant as to be impervious to the agree- 
 able hubbub of that vanity ; but remote enough not to be obvious to the inter- 
 ruption of every gaping spectator in it. The guests assembled about seven. 
 In those little temporary parlours three tables were spread with napery, not so 
 fine as substantial, and at every board a comely hostess presided with her pan 
 of hissing sausages. The nostrils of the young rogues dilated at the savour. 
 James White, as head waiter, had charge of the first table ; and myself, with 
 our trusty companion BiGOD, ordinarily ministered to the other two. There was 
 clamouring and josthng, you may be sure, who should get at the first table— 
 for Rochester in his maddest days could not have done the humours of the 
 scene with more spirit than my friend. After some general expression of 
 thanks for the honour the company had done him, his inaugural ceremony was 
 to clasp the greasy waist of old dame Ursula (the fattest of the three), that 
 stood frying and fretting, half-blessing, half-cursing "the gentleman," and im- 
 print upon her chaste lips a tender salute, whereat the universal host would set 
 up a shout that tore the concave, while hundreds of grinning teeth startled the 
 night with their brightness. O it was a pleasure to see the sable younkeis lick 
 in the unctuous meat, with his more unctuous sayings— how he would fit the tit 
 bits to the puny mouths, reserving the lengthier links for the seniors — how he 
 would intercept a morsel even in the jaws of some young desperado, declaring 
 it " must to the pan again to be browned, for it was not fit for a gentleman's 
 eating " — how he would recommend this sUce of white bread, or that piece of 
 kissing-crust, to a tender juvenile, advising them all to have a care of cracking 
 their teeth, which were their best patrimony, — how genteelly he would deal 
 about the small ale, as if it were wine, naming the brewer, and protesting, if it 
 were not good, he should los? their custom ; with a special recommendation 
 to wipe the lip before drinking. Then we had our toasts — " The King," — the 
 "Cloth," — which, whether they understood or not, was equally diverting and 
 flattering ; —and for a crowning sentiment, which never failed, " May the Brush 
 supersede the Laurel." All these, and fifty other fancies, which were rather 
 felt than compi-ehended by his guests, would he utter, standing upon tables, 
 and prefacing every sentiment with a " Gentlemen, give me leave to propose so 
 and so," which was a prodigious comfort to those young orphans t every now 
 and then stuffing into his mouth (for it did not do to 1^ squeamish on these 
 occasions) indiscriminate pieces of those reeking sausages, which pleased them 
 mightily, and was the savouriest part, you may believe, of the entertainment. 
 
 Golden lads and lasses must. 
 
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust — 
 
 James White is extinct, and with him these suppers have long ceased. 
 He carried away with him half the fun of the world when he died— of my 
 world at least. His old cUents look for him among the pens ; and, missing 
 ' him, reproach the altered feast of St. Bartholomew, and the glory of Smith- 
 field departed for ever. 
 
Elia: On the Decay of Beggars. 427 
 
 (7V2« London Magazine, June, 1822.) 
 
 [The metrical translation by Charles Lamb, of Vincent Bourne's Epitafkium in 
 CaJtem, having been already given {supra, p. 72), as a matter of course, is not here 
 repeated. It first saw the light, however, as an integral portion of this essay in which 
 it followed immediately upon the original.] 
 
 The all-sweeping besom of societarian reformation — your only modem 
 Alcides' club to rid the time of its abuses— is uplift with many-handed sway 
 to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity from the 
 metropolis. Scrips, wallets, bags— staves, dogs, and crutches— the whole 
 mendicant fraternity with all their baggage, are fast posting out of the purlieux 
 of this eleventh persecution. From the crowded crossing, from the corners of 
 streets and turnings of alleys, the parting Genius of Beggary is "with sighing 
 sent. " 
 
 I do not approve of this wholesale going to work, this iijipertinent crusado, 
 or bellum ad exterminationem, proclaimed against a species. Much good 
 might be sucked from these Beggars. 
 
 They were the oldest and the honourablest form of pauperism. Their ap- 
 peals were to our common nature; less revolting to an ingenuous mind than to 
 be a suppliant to the particular humours or caprice of any fellow-creature, or 
 set of fellow-creatures, parochial or societarian. Theirs were the only rates 
 uninvidious in the levy, ungrudged in the assessment. 
 
 There was a dignity springing from the very depth of their desolation ; 
 as to be naked is to be so much nearer to the being a man, than to go in 
 livery. 
 
 The greatest spirits have felt this in their reverses ; and when Dionysius 
 from king turned schoolmaster, do we feel anything towards him but con- 
 tempt? Could Vandyke have made a picture of him, swaying a ferula for a 
 sceptre, which would have affected our minds with the same heroic pity, the 
 same compassionate admiration, with which we regard his Belisarius beg- 
 ging for an obolumf Would the moral have been more graceful, more 
 pathetic? 
 
 The Blind Beggar in the legend — the father of pretty Bessy— whose story 
 doggerel rhymes and ale-house signs cannot so degrade or attenuate, but that 
 some sparks or a lustrous spirit will shine through the disguisements— this 
 noble earl of Cornwall (as indeed he was) and memorable sport of fortune, 
 fleeing from the unjust sentence of his liege lord, stript of dll, and seated on 
 the flowering green at Bethnal, with his more fresh and springing daughter 
 by his side, illumining his rags and his beggary— would the child and parent 
 have cut a better figure, doing the honours of a counter, or expiating their 
 fallen condition upon the three-foot eminence of some sempstering shop- 
 board ? 
 
 In tale or history your Beggar is ever the just antipode to your King. The 
 poets and romancical writers (as dear Margaret Newcastle would call them) 
 
428 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 when they would most sharply and feelingly paint a reverse of fortune, never 
 stop till they have brought down their hero in good earnest to rags and the 
 wallet. The depth of the descent illustrates the height he falls from. There is 
 no medium which can be presented to the imagination without offence. There 
 is no breaking the fall. Lear, thrown from his palace, must divest him of his 
 garments, till he answer " mere natures; " and Cresseid, fallen from a prince's 
 love, must extend her pale alms, pale with other whiteness than of beauty, 
 supplicating lazar arms with bell and clap-dish. 
 
 The Lucian wits knew this very well ; and, with a converse policy, when they 
 would express scorn of greatness without the pity, they show us an Alexander 
 in the shades cobbling shoes, or a Semiramis getting up foul linen. 
 
 How would it sound in song, that a great monarch had declined his affections 
 upon the daughter of a baker ! yet do we feel the imagination at all violated 
 when we read the "true ballad," where King Cophetua woos the beggar- 
 maid? 
 
 Pauperism, pauper, poor man, are expressions of pity, but pity alloyed with 
 contempt. No one properly contemns a beggar. Poverty is a comparative 
 thing, and each degree of it is mocked by its "neighbour grice."* Its poor 
 rents and comings-in are soon summed up and told. Its pretences to property 
 are almost ludicrous. Its pitfful attempts to save excite a smile. Every scorn- 
 ful companion can weigh his trifle-bigger purse against it. Poor man re- 
 proaches poor man in the streets with impolitic mention of his condition, his 
 own being a shade better, while the rich pass by and jeer at both. No rascally 
 comparative insults a Beggar, or thinks of weighing purses with him. He is 
 not in the scale of comparison. He is not under the measure of property. He 
 confessedly hath none, any more than a dog or a sheep. No one twitteth him 
 with ostentation above his means. No one accuses him of pride, or up- 
 braideth him with mock humility. None jostle with him for the wall, or pick 
 quarrels for precedency. No wealthy neighbour seeketh to eject him from his 
 tenement. No man sues him. No man goes to law with him. If I were not 
 the independent gentleman that I am, rather than I would be a retainer to the 
 great, a led captain, or a poor relation, I would choose, out of the delicacy and 
 true greatness of my mind, to be a beggar. 
 
 Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggar's robes, and grace- 
 ful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his fu;: dress, the suit in which he is 
 expected to show himself in public. He is nevt:' out of the fashion, or hmpeth 
 awkwardly behind it. He is not required to put on court mourning. He 
 weareth all colours, fearing none. His costume hath undergone less change 
 than the Qualcer's. He is the only man in the universe who is not obliged to 
 study appearances. The ups and downs of the world concern him no longer. 
 He alone continueth in one stay. The price of stock or land affecleth him not. 
 The fluctuations of agricultural or commercial prosperity touch him not, or at 
 worst but change his customers. He is not expected to become bail or surety 
 for any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his religion or politics. 
 He is the only free man in the universe. 
 
 The Mendicants of this great city were so many of her sights, her lions. I 
 can no more spare them than I could the Cries of London. No comer of a 
 street is complete without them. They are as indispensable as the Ballad Singer; 
 and in their picturesque attire as ornamental as the Signs of Old London. 
 They were the standing morals, emblems, mementoes, dial-mottoes, the spital 
 sermons, the books for children, the salutary- checks and pauses to the high and 
 rushing tide of greasy citizenry— 
 
 ■ Look 
 
 Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there. 
 '^ [Timon of Athens.] 
 
Above all, those old blind Tobits that used to line the wall of Lincoln's Inn 
 Garden, before modern fastidiousness had expelled them, casting up their ruined 
 orbs to catch a ray of pity, and (if possible) of light, with their faithful do-^- 
 guida at their feet,— whither are they fled ? or into what corners, blind as them- 
 selves, have they been driven, out of the wholesome air and sunwarmth? 
 immured between four walls, in what withering poor-house do they endure the 
 penalty of double darkness, where the chink of the dropt halfpenny no more 
 consoles their forlorn bereavement, far from the sound of the cheerful and 
 hope-stirring tread of the passenger? Where hang their useless staves? and 
 
 who will farm their dogs ?— Have the overseers of St. L caused them to be 
 
 shot ? or were they tied up in sacks, and dropt into the Thames, at the sugges- 
 tion of B , the mild Rector of ? 
 
 Well fare the soul of unfastidious Vincent Bourne, most classical, and at 
 the same time, most English, of the Latinists !— who has treated of this 
 human and quadrupedal alliance, this dog and man friendship, in the sweetest 
 of his poems, the Efitaphiiim in Canem, or, Dog's Epitaph. Reader, peruse 
 it ; and say, if customary sights, which could call up such gentle poetry as 
 this, were of a nature to do more harm or good to the moral sence of the 
 passengers through the daily thoroughfares of a vast and busy metropolis. 
 
 Pauperis hie Iri requiesco Lyciscus herilis, 
 
 Dum vixi, tutela vigil columenque senectae, 
 
 Dux cseco fidus : nee, me ducente, solebat, 
 
 Prsetenso hine atqiie hinc baculo, per iniqua loconun 
 
 Ineertam explorare viam ; sed fila seeutus, 
 
 Qua3 dubios regerent passCls, vesligua tuta 
 
 Fixit inoffenso gressu ; gelidunique sedile 
 
 In nudo nactiis saxo, qua prastereuntium 
 
 Unda frequens confluxit, ibi miserisque tenebras 
 
 LamentLs, noctemque oculis ploravit obortam. 
 
 Ploravit nee frustra ; obolum dedit alter et alter, 
 
 Queis eorda et mentem indiderat natura benignam. 
 
 Ad latus interea Jacui sopitus herile, 
 
 Vel mediis vigil m somnis ; ad herilia jussa 
 
 Auresque atque animum arreetus, seu frustula amicS 
 
 Porrexit soeiasque dapes, sue longa diei 
 
 Tsedia perpessus, reditum sub nocte parabat. 
 
 Hi mores, haee vita fnit, dum fata sinebant, 
 
 Dum neque languebam morbis, nee inerte senect^; 
 
 Quae tandem obrepsit, veterique satellite caeeum 
 
 Orbavit dominum : prisci sed gratia facti 
 
 Ne tota intereat, longos delecta per annos, 
 
 Exiguum himc Irus tumulum de eespite fecit, 
 
 Etsi inopis. non ingratae, munuseula dextrae ; 
 
 Carmine signavitque brevi, dominumque canemque 
 
 Quod memoret, iidumque eanem dominumque benignum. 
 
 These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a well-known 
 figure, or part of the figure, of a man, who used to glide his comely upper 
 half over the pavements of London, wheeling along with most ingenious 
 celerity upon a machine of wood ; a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and 
 to children. He was of a robust make, with a florid sailor-like complexion, 
 and his head was bare to the storm and sunshine. He was a natural curiosity, 
 a speculation to the scientific, a prodigy to the simple. The infant would 
 stare at the mighty man brought down to his own level. The common 
 cripple would despise his own pusillanimity, viewing the hale stoutness, and 
 hearty heart, of this half-limbed giant. Few but must have noticed him; 
 for the accident, which brought him low, took place during the riots of 
 1780, and he has been a groundling so long. He seemed earth-born, an 
 Antaeus, and to suck in fre^h vigour from the soil which he neighboured. 
 
43° The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 He was a grand fragment ; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature which 
 should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into 
 his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. I heard a tremendous voice 
 thundering and growling, as before an earthquake, and casting down my eyes, 
 it was this mandrake reviUng a steed that had started at his portentous appear- 
 ance. He seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the offending 
 quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a Centaur, from which 
 the horse-half had been cloven in some dire Lapithan controversy. He 
 moved on as if he could have made shift with yet half of the body-portion 
 which was left him. The os sublime was not wanting ; and he threw out 
 yet a jolly countenance upon the heavens. Forty-and-two years had he 
 driven this out-of-door trade, and now that his hair is grizzled in the 
 service, but his good spirits no way impaired, because he is not -ontent to 
 exchange his free air and exercise for the restraints of a poor-house, he is 
 expiating his contumacy in one of those houses (ironically christened) of Cor- 
 rection. 
 
 Was a daily spectacle like this to be deemed a nuisance, w^-'^^h called for 
 legal interference to remove ? or not rather a salutary and a tou_hing object, tO' 
 the passers-by in a great city ? Among her shows, her museums, and supplies 
 for ever-gaping curiosity (and what else but an accumulation of sights— endless 
 sights— zj a great city ; or for what else is it desirable ?) was there not room for 
 one Lusus (not Natures, indeed, but) Accidc?itium f What if in forty-and-two 
 years' going about, the man had scraped together enough to give a portion to 
 his child (as the rumour ran) of a few hundreds — whom had he injured?— whom 
 had he imposed upon? The contributors had enjoyed their sight for their 
 pennies. What if after being exposed all day to the heats, the rains, and the 
 frosts of heavea — shuffling his ungainly trunk along in an elaborate and pain- 
 ful motion — he was enabled to retire at night to enjoy himself at a club of his 
 fellow-cripples over a dish of hot meat and vegetables, as the charge was 
 gravely brought against him by a clergyman deposing before a House of 
 Commons' Committee — was i/tis, or was his truly paternal consideration, 
 which (if a fact) deserved a statue rather than a whipping-post, and is incon- 
 sistent at least with the exaggeration of nocturnal orgies which he has been 
 slandered with — a reason that he should be deprived of his chosen, harmless, 
 nay edifying, way of hfe, and be committed in hoary age for a sturdy vaga- 
 bond?— 
 
 There was a Yorick once, whom it would not have shamed to have sate 
 down at the cripples' feast, and to have thrown in his benediction, ay, 
 and his mite too, for a companionable symbol. "Age, thou hast lost thy 
 breed ! " — 
 
 JJalf of these stories about the prodigious fortunes made by begging are (I 
 verily believe) rhisers' calumnies. One was much talked of in the public 
 papers some time since, and the usual charitable inferences deduced. A clerk 
 in the Bank was surprised with the announcement of a five hundred pound 
 legacy left him by a person whose name he was a stranger to. It seems that 
 in his daily morning walks from Peckham (or some village thereabouts) where 
 he lived, to his office, it had been his practice for the last twenty years to drop 
 his halfpenny duly into the hat of some blind Bartimeus, that sate begging , 
 alms by the way-side in the Borough. The good old beggar recognized^ his 
 daily benefactor by the voice only ; and, when he died, left all the amassings 
 of his alms (that hai been half a century perhaps in the accumulating) to 
 his old Bank friend. Was this a story to purse up people's hearts, and 
 pennies, against giving an alms to the blind? — or not rather a beautiful 
 moral of well-directed charity on the one part, and noble gratitude upon the 
 other ? 
 
 I sometimes wish I had been that Bank clerk. 
 
Elia : On the Decay of Beggars. 431 
 
 I seem to remember a poor old grateful kind of creature, blinking, and 
 looking up with his no eyes in the sun — 
 
 Is it possible I could have steeled my {)urse against him? 
 
 Perhaps I had no small change. 
 
 Reader, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposition, im.posture— ^zw, 
 and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have unawares 
 (like this Bank clerk) entertained angels. 
 
 Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity 
 sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before 
 thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children," in whose name 
 he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the 
 bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. 
 If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a 
 family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. 
 When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them 
 players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, 
 concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are 
 feigned or no'' 
 
 f " Pray God, your honour, relieve me," said a poor beadswoman to my 
 
 friend L one day: " I have seen better days." "So have I, my good 
 
 woman," retorted he, looking up at the welkin, which was just then threatening 
 a storm— and the jest (he will have) was as good to the beggar as a tester. It 
 was, at all events, kinder than consigning her to the stocks, or the parish 
 beadle. — 
 
 But L. has a way of viewing things in rather a paradoxical light on some 
 occasions. 
 
 P.S.— My friend Hume (not M.P.) has a curious manuscript in his possession, 
 the original draft of the celebrated "Beggar's Petition" (who cannot saj- by 
 heart the "Beggar's Petition?"), as it was written by some school usher (as 
 I remember), with corrections interlined from the pen of Oliver Goldsmith. 
 As a specimen of the Doctor's improvement, I recollect one most judicious 
 alteration— 
 
 '"^ A pamper'd menial drove me from the door.'' 
 
 It stood originally — 
 
 ''A livery servant drove me," &c. 
 
 Here is an instance of poetical or artificial language properly substituted for 
 the phrase of common conversation ; against Wordsworth, I think I must get 
 H. to send it to the London, as a corollary to the foregoing.] 
 
 {The London Magazine, September, 1822.) 
 
 [According to Charles Lamb's own acknowledgment, he was indebted for the root-idea 
 of this delicious morsel of drollery to his old associate, Thomas Manning, who had 
 passed many years of his life as a resident among the Chinese. Mr. Carew Hazlitt has, 
 however, very clearly demonstrated, in what he mpdestly calls his book of " gleanings 
 after the gleaners" (p. 258), that it was not a Chinese manuscript at all that was read and 
 explained to Elia by his friend Manning, but something quite " as good as Chinese " to 
 
432 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Charles Lamb, to wit a printed quarto poem in Italian (of which iie understood little or 
 nothing), written in the terza rima, by Tigrinio Bistonio, and published in T761 at 
 Modena, the theme of the book being " The Praises of the Pig," as its title plainly 
 intimated : " Gli Elogi del Farco Ca^itoli Berneschi^ di Tigrinio Bistonto"\ 
 
 Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging 
 enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their 
 meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abys- 
 sinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Con- 
 fucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a 
 kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cook's holiday. The 
 manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which ! 
 take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following. 
 The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his 
 manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his 
 eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as 
 younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of 
 straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their 
 poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry 
 antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of much 
 more importance, a fine Utter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in 
 number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East 
 from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost conster- 
 nation, as you may think, not so much for tne sake of the tenement, which his 
 father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the 
 labour of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he 
 was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the 
 smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odour assailed his 
 nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What could it 
 proceed from ? — not from the burnt cottage — he had smelt that smell before— 
 indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred 
 through the negUgence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it 
 resemble that of any known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening 
 at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He 
 next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He 
 burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his 
 mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his 
 fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before 
 him no man had known it) he tasted - crackling! Again he felt and fumbled 
 at'the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from 
 a sort of habit. The truth at length broke into his slow understanding, that it 
 was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and, surrender- 
 ing himself up to the new-bom pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls 
 of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his 
 throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, 
 armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain 
 blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail-stones, which Bo-bo 
 heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure, which 
 he experienced in his lower regions, had rendered him quite callous to any 
 inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay 
 on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of 
 it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like the 
 following dialogue ensued ■ 
 
 " You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not 
 enough that you have burnt me down three houses with your dog's tricks, and 
 be hanged to you, but you must be eating fire, and I know not what— what 
 have you got there, I say?" 
 
Elia: A Dissertation upon Roast Pig. 433 
 
 ;• O father the pig the pig, do come and taste how nice the burnt m" eats " 
 
 The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he" cursed 
 himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burnt pi<^ 
 
 Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked 
 out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half bv main 
 foroe into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, "Eat, eat, eat the burnt pie 
 father, only taste, - O Lord, "-with such-like barbarous ejaculations, craml 
 ming all the while as if he would choke. 
 
 Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abominable thing, waverine 
 whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural youno- monster 
 when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applvins 
 the same remedy to them, he in his turn fasted some of its flavour which 
 make what sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved not altogether dis- 
 pleasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious) 
 both father and son fairly sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had 
 despatched all that remained of the litter. 
 
 Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbours 
 would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches who 
 could think of improving upon the good meat which God had sent them 
 Nevertheless, strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cottage 
 was burnt down now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this 
 time forward. Some would break out in broad day, otliers in the night-time. 
 As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze '• 
 and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastisin=- his' 
 son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they°were 
 watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to 
 take their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was 
 given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be 
 pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burnt 
 pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He 
 handled it, and they all handled it, and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his 
 father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same 
 remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge 
 had ever given,— to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, re- 
 porters, and all present — without leaving the box, or any manner of consulta- 
 tion whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty. 
 The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the 
 
 (decision ; and, when the court was dismissed, went privily, and bought up all 
 the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his Lordship's 
 town house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there 
 was nothing to be seen but fires in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enor- 
 mously dear all over the districts. The insurance offices one and all shut up 
 shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the 
 very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus 
 this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manu- 
 script, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh of 
 swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they called 
 it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first 
 began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string, or spit, came in a 
 century or two later, 1 forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, con- 
 cludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the most obvious arts, 
 Imake their way among mankind. 
 "Without placing too implicit faith in the account abcve given, it must be 
 I agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting 
 houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favour of any 
 culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in roast pig. 
 
 L 
 
434 TJi' Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Of all the delicacies in the whole' mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be 
 the most delicate— /r/«^^j obsoniorum. 
 
 I speak not of your grown porkers — things between pig and pork — those 
 hobbydehoys — but a young and tender suckling— under a moon old— guiltless 
 as yet of tjie sty — with no original speck of the amor immunditite, the here- 
 ditary failing of the first parent, yet manifest — his voice as yet not broken, but 
 something between a childish treble, and a grumble — the mild forerunner, or 
 prcsludium, of a grunt. 
 
 He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, 
 or boiled — but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument ! 
 
 There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, - 
 well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called— the very teeth 
 are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, 
 brittle resistance — with the adhesive oleaginous— O call it not fat — but an 
 indefinable . sweetness growing up to it— the tender blossoming of fat — fat 
 cropped in the bud — taken in the shoot— in the first innocence— the cream and 
 
 quintessence of the child-pig's yet pure food the lean, no lean, but a kind 
 
 of animal manna, — or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended and 
 running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or 
 common substance. 
 
 Behold him, while he is doing — it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than 
 a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the 
 string !— Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender 
 age, he hath wept out his pretty eyes — radiant jellies — shooting stars — 
 
 See him in the dish, his second cradle, how m§ek he lieth ! — wouldst thou 
 have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocihty which too often 
 accompany maturer swinehood ? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, 
 a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable animal — wallowing in all manner of filthy 
 conversation — from these sins he is happily snatched away — 
 
 Ere sin could'blight, or sorrow fade. 
 Death came with timely care — 
 
 his memory is odoriferous — no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, 
 the rank bacon — no coalheaver boiteth him in reeking sausages— he hath a fair 
 sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure— and for such a tomb 
 might be content to die. 
 
 He is the best of sapors. Pine-apple is great. She is indeed almost too 
 transcendent— a delight, if not rinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a 
 tender-conscienced person would do well to pause— too ravishing for mortal 
 taste, she woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach her— like lovers' 
 kisses, she biteth — .she is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierceness and 
 insanity of her relish— but she stoppeth at the palate— she meddleth not with 
 the appetite— and the coarsest hunger might barter her consistently for a 
 mutton chop. 
 
 Pig— let me speak his praise-is no less provocative of the appetite, than he 
 is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man 
 may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices. 
 
 Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inex- 
 plicably intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is— good 
 throughout. No part of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as 
 far as his little means extend, all around. He is the least envious of banquets. 
 He is all neighbours' fare. 
 
 I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good 
 
 tilings of this life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. 
 
 I protest I take as great an mterest in my friend's pleasures, his rehshes, and 
 
 I proper satisfactions, as in mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear 
 
Elia: A Dissertation ypoti Roast Pig. 435 
 
 Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door chickens (those 
 tame villatie fowl ), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels of oysters, I dispense as 
 freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the tongue of 
 my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not like Lear 
 " give everything." I make my stand upon pig. Methinksit is an' ingratitude 
 to the Giver of all good flavours, to extra-domiciliate, or send out of the house 
 slightingly (under pretext of friendship, or I know not what), a blessing so par- 
 ticularly adapted, predestined, I may say, to my individual palate— It areues 
 an insensibility. " 
 
 I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at School. My good old 
 aunt, who never parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a 
 sweetmeat, or some nice thing into my ppcket, had dismissed me one evening 
 with a smoking plum-cake, fresh from the oven. In my way to school (it was 
 over London Bridge) a grey-headed old beggar saluted me (I have no doubt at 
 this time of day that he was a counterfeit). 1 had no pence to console him with, 
 and in thevanity of self-denial, and the very co.xcombry of charity, school-boy- 
 like, I made him a present of— the whole cake ! I walked on a little, buoyed up, 
 as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self-satisfaction ; but before 
 I had got to the end of the bridge, my better feehngs returned, and I burst 
 into tears, thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and 
 give her good gift away to a stranger, that 1 had never seen before, and who 
 might be a bad man for aught I knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my 
 aunt would be taking in thinking that I— I myself, and not another— would 
 eat her nice cake— and what should 1 say to her the next time I saw her— how 
 naughty I was to part with her pretty present — and the odour of that spicy cake 
 came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I had taken 
 in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how dis- 
 appointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last — 
 and 1 blamed my impertinent spirit of alms-giving, and out-of-place hypocrisy 
 of goodness, and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insidious, 
 good-for-nothing, old gray impostor. 
 
 Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. 
 We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any. 
 other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be 
 curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process 
 might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild 
 and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we 
 should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the 
 wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto — 
 
 I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was 
 at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both 
 sides, " Whether, supposing that the flavour of a pig who obtained his death 
 by whipping (per flagellationem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the 
 palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in 
 the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting the animal to 
 death?" I forget the decision. 
 
 His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crumbs, clone up 
 with his liver and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But, banish, dear Mrs. 
 Cook, I beseech you, the whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to 
 your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff them out with plantations of the rank 
 and guilty garlic I you cannot poison them, or make them stronger than they 
 are— but consider, he is a weakUng- a flower. 
 
436 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 A RECANTATION. 
 
 UNDER THE TITLE OF " THOUGHTS ON GAME, &c." 
 
 [The Alheni2um, yih November, 1833,) 
 
 [The subjoined paper is interpolated here among the Elian Essays^ as a distinct 
 pendant to the immortal "Dissertation upon Roa^t Pig." As conveying a gravely 
 humorous repudiation by Elia of his earlier pejtchant for the luscious crackling and 
 the animal manna underneath, it may be regarded as not unworthy, by reason of many 
 inimitable touches scattered through it, of being brought into formidable comparison 
 with that succulent masterpiece. The narrow proof-slip of this slight but dainty con- 
 tribution to the AiltencPtim—fiOvjn all down the margin with minute emendations and 
 erasures in Charles Lamb's handwriting— has, with,many other choice original papers of 
 Lamb's, been placed_ at the command of the editor of this Popular Centenary Edition 
 by the kindness of Sir Charles Dilke, into whose hands, with a mass of similar treasure, 
 they have passed through direct inheritance. From among these manuscripts, one of 
 the very choicest of them all is here selected for the purpose of being given upon the 
 opposite page in facsimile. It is'surely the epicure's bit, the tenderest slice, the loveliest 
 morci^an carved from above the spinal cord of this delicately roasted hare — one that 
 its numerous appreciators (for this surely is the Hare with Many Friends), will learn 
 while devouring it, eats so "crips" according to the apt phrase of that delightful 
 Mrs. Minikin,] 
 
 " We love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our table by proxy; 
 to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may be between us) by 
 a turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us his ' plump corpusculum ; ' to taste 
 him in grouse or woodcocli ; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar 
 to the latter; to concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is 
 indeed to have him within ourselves ; to know him intimately ; such partici- 
 pation is methinks unilive, as the old theologians phrase it."— Last Essays 
 OF Elia. 
 
 Elia presents his acknowledgments to his " Correspondent unknown," for 
 a basket of prodigiously fine, game. He takes for granted that so amiable a 
 character must be a reader of" the Atheiiaum. Else he had meditated a notice 
 in the Times. Now if this friend had consulted the Delphic oracle for a pre- 
 sent suited to the palate of Elia, he could not have hit upon a morsel so 
 acceptable. The birds he is barely thankful for ; pheasants are poor fowls 
 disguised in fine feathers. But a hare roasted hard and brown— with gravy 
 and melted butter !— old Mr. Chambers, the sensible clergyman in Warwick- 
 shire, whose son's acquaintance has made many hours happy in the life of Elia, 
 used to allow a pound of Epping to every hare. Perhaps that was overdoing 
 it. But, in spite of the note of Philomel, who, like some fine poets, that think 
 no scorn to adopt plagiarisms from a humble brother, reiterates every spring 
 her cuckoo cry of "Jug, Jug, Jug," Elia pronounces that a hare, to be truly 
 palated, must be roasted. Jugging sophisticates her. In oKr way it eats so 
 "crips," as Mrs. Minikin says. Time was, when Elia was not arrived at his 
 taste, that he preferred to all a roasted Pig. But he disclaims all such green- 
 sickness appetites in future, though he hath to acknowledge the receipt of 
 many a delicacy in that kind from correspondents— good, but mistaken men,— 
 

 *uvA l-^f 
 
 V 
 
 
 C*7/tti' 
 
 ^AU 
 
 rt~ny^' 
 
436 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 A RECANTATION. 
 
 UNDER THE TITLE OF " THOUGHTS ON GAME, &c." 
 
 (The Athenaum, ■^ol/i Novemter, 1833,) 
 
 [The subjoined paper is interpolated here among the Elian Essaysas a distinct 
 pendant to the immortal "Dissertation ti|)on Roast Pig." As conveying a gravely 
 humorous repudiation by Elia of his earlier Jienchant for the luscious crackling and 
 the animal manna underneath, it may be regarded as not unworthy, by reason of many 
 inimitable touches scattered through it, of being brought into formidable comparison 
 with that succulent masterpiece. The narrow proof-slip of this slight but dainty con- 
 tribution to the Atheiue7iin—iowa all down the margin with minute emendations and 
 erasures in Charles Lamb's handwriting— has, with.many other choice original papers of 
 Lamb's, been placed at the command of the editor of this Popular Centenary Edition 
 by the kindness of Sir Charles Dilke, into whose hands, with a mass of similar treasure, 
 they have passed through direct inheritance. From among these manuscripts, one of 
 the very choicest of them all is here selected for the purpose of being given upon the 
 opposite page in facsimile. It is surely the epicure's bit, the tenderest slice, the loveliest 
 morcenu carved from above the spinal cord of this delicately roasted hare— one that 
 its numerous appreciators (for this surely is the Hare with Many Friends), will learn 
 while devouring it, eats so "crips" according to the apt phrase of that delightful 
 Mrs. Minikin.] 
 
 " We love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our table ly proxy; 
 to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may be between 13) by 
 a turltey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us his ' plump corpusculum ; ' to taste 
 him in grouse or woodcocic ; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar 
 to the latter; to concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is 
 indeed to have him within ourselves ; to know him intimately ; such partici- 
 pation is methinks umtive, as the old theologians phrase it."— Last Essays 
 OF Elia. 
 
 Elia presents his acknowledgments to his "Correspondent unknown," for 
 a basket of prodigiously fine, game. He takes for granted that so amiable a 
 character must be a reader o( the Alhenieum. Else he had meditated a notice 
 in the Times. Now if this friend had consulted the Delphic oracle for a pre- 
 sent suited to the palate of Elia, he could not have hit upon a morsel so 
 acceptable. The birds he is barely thankful for ; pheasants are poor fowls 
 disguised in fine feathers. But a hare roasted hard and brown— with gi^vy 
 and melted butter 1— old Mr. Chambers, the sensible clergyman in Warwick- 
 shire, whose son's acquaintance has made many hours happy in the life of Elia, 
 used to allow a pound of Epping to every hare. Perhaps that was overdoing 
 it. But, in spite of the note of Philomel, who, like some fine poets, that think 
 no scorn to adopt plagiarisms from a humble brother, reiterates every spring 
 her cuckoo cry of "Jug, Jug, Jug," Elia pronounces that a hare, to be truly 
 palated, must be roasted. Jugging sophisticates her. In oar way it eats so 
 "crips," as Mrs. Minikin says. Time was, when Elia was not arrived at his 
 taste, that he preferred to all a roasted Pig. But he disclaims all such green- 
 sickness appetites in future, though he hath to acknowledge the receipt of 
 many a delicacy in that kind from correspondents— good, but mistaken men, — 
 

 /l/^ 
 
 jh-Ui^^ffil^^ ^jJc ^^L^S^ryy^, ^^ ^ ^^TrU^ f'^^ 
 
 
 Jy^. ^U^ru. /^*y^ xrXwt ^^ v^ ^r^ ,iru-i^-U 0^ Ls /i^/^^ 
 
Elia: A Recantation. 437 
 
 in consequence of their erroneous supposition, that he had carried up into 
 mature life the prepossessions of childhood. From the worthy Vicar of Enfield 
 he acknowledges a tithe contribution of extraordinary sapor. The ancients 
 must have loved hares. Else why adopt word lepores (obviously from lepus) but 
 for some subtle analogy between the delicate flavour of the latter, and the finer 
 'relishes of wit in what we must poorly translate fleasanlries. The fine mad- 
 nesses of the poet are the very decoction of his diet, Thence is he hare- 
 brained. Harum-scarum is a libellous unfounded phrase of modern usage. 
 'Tis true the hare is the most circumspect of animals, sleeping with her eye 
 open. Her ears, ever erect, keep them in that wholesome exercise, which con- 
 duces them to form the very tit-bit of the admirers of this noble animal. Noble 
 will I call her, in spite of her detractors, who from occasional demonstrations 
 of the principle of self-preservation (common to all animals) infer in her a 
 defect of heroism. Half a hundred horsemen, with thrice the number of dogs, 
 scour the country in pursuit of puss across three counties ; and because the 
 well-flavoured beast, weighing the odds, is wiUing to evade the hue-and-cry, 
 with her delicate ears shrinking perchance from discord — comes the grave 
 Naturalist, Linnaeus perchance or Buffon, and gravely sets down the Hare 
 as a— timid animal. Why, Achilles or Bully Dawson would have declined 
 the preposterous combat. 
 
 In fact, how light of digestion we feel after a hare ! How tender its pro- 
 cesses after swallowing ! What chyle it promotes ! How ethereal ! as if its 
 living celerity were a type of its nimble coursing through the animal juices. 
 The notice might be longer. It is intended less as a Natural History of the 
 Hare, than a cursory thanks to the country "good Unknown." The hare has 
 many friends, but none sincerer than 
 
 Elia. 
 
 OF THE BEHAVIOUR OF MARRIED PEOPLE. 
 (The London. Magazine, September, 1822.) 
 
 rXhis naner eleven years prior to its reissue as one of the Elian essays in the London, 
 appeared (ui 1811) in No. 4 of Leigh Hunt's Reflector Upon the occasion of its 
 republication in the Magazine it was subscribed your humble servant Eha. 1 
 
 As a single man, I have spent a good deal of my time in noting down the in- 
 firmities of Married People, to console myself for those supenor pleasures, 
 which they tell me I have lost by remaining as I am. 
 
 I cannot say that the quarrels of men and their wives ever made any great 
 impression upon me, or had much tendency to strengthen ine int^ose anti- 
 social resolutions, which I took up long ago upon more substantial considera 
 tions What oftenest offends me at the houses of married persons where 1 
 ;°srt!'is arerror of quite a different description; -it is that they are too 
 
 '°™oTtoo loving neither: that does not explain mymeaiiing Besides, why 
 should that offend me ? The very act of separating themselves from the rest of 
 
438 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 the world, to have the fuller enjoyment of each other's society, implies that 
 they prefer one another to all the world. 
 
 But what I complain of is, that they carry this preference so undisguisedly, 
 they perk it up in the faces of us single people so shamelessly, you cannot be 
 in their company a moment without being made to feel, by some indirect hint 
 or open avowal, that you are not the object of this preference. Now there are 
 some things which give no offence, while implied or taken for granted merely ; 
 but expressed, there is much offence in them. If a man were to accost the 
 first homely-featured or plain-dressed young woman of his acquaintance, and 
 tell her bluntly, that she was not handsome or rich enough for him, and he 
 could not marry her, he would deserve to be kicked for his ill manners ; yet 
 no less is implied in the fact, that having access and opportunity of putting 
 the question to her, he has never yet thought fit to do it. The young woman 
 understands this as clearly as if it were put into words ; but no reasonable 
 young woman would think of making this the ground of a quarrel. Just as 
 little right have a married couple to tell me by speeches, and' looks that are 
 scarce less plain than speeches, that I am not the happy man, — the lady's 
 choice. It is enough that I know I am not ; I do not want this perpetual re- 
 minding. 
 
 The display of superior knowledge or richfes may be made suiEciently morti- 
 fying ; but these admit of a palliative. The knowledge which is brought out 
 to insult me, may accidentally improve me ; and in the rich man's houses and 
 pictures, — his parks and gardens, I have a temporary usufruct at least. But 
 the display of married happiness has none of these palliatives ; it is throughout 
 pure, unrecompensed, unqualified insult. 
 
 Marriage by its best title is a monopoly, and not of the least invidious sort. 
 It is the cunning of most possessors of any exclusive privilege to keep their 
 advantage as much out of sight as possible, that their less favoured neighbours, 
 seeing little of the benefit, may the less be disposed to question the right. But 
 these married monopolists thrust the most obnoxious part of their patent into 
 our faces. 
 
 Nothing is to me more distasteful thaii that entire complacency and satisfac- 
 tion which beam in the countenances of a new-married couple,— in that of 
 the lady particularly : it tells you, that her lot is disposed of in this world ; that 
 you can have no hopes of her. It is true, I have none; nor wishes either, per- 
 haps : but this is one of those truths which ought, as I said before, to be taken 
 for granted, not expressed. 
 
 The excessive airs which those people give themselves, founded on the igno- 
 rance of us unmarried people, would be more offensive if they were less irra- 
 tional. 'We will allow them to undereland the mysteries belonging to their own 
 craft better than we who have not had the happiness to be made free of the 
 company : but their arrogance is not content within these limits. If a single 
 person presume to offer his opinion in their presence, though upon the most 
 indifferent subject, he is immediately silenced as an incompetent person. Nay, 
 a young married lady of my acquaintance, who, the best of the jest was, had 
 rot changed her condition above a fortnight before, in a question on which I 
 had the misfortune to differ from her, respecting the properest mode of breed- 
 ing oysters for the London market, had the assurance to ask, with a sijeer, 
 how such an old Bachelor as I could pretend to know any thing about such 
 matters. 
 
 But what I have ipoken of hitherto is nothing to the airs which these crea- 
 tures give themselves when they come, as they generally do, to have children. 
 When I consider how little of a rarity children are,— that every street and blind 
 alley swarms with them, — that the poorest people commonly have them in most 
 i| abundance, — that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one 
 I of these bargains,— how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes 
 
Elia: A Bachelor's Complaint. 435 
 
 can 
 
 ere 
 
 of their parents, taking- to vicious courses, wliich end in poverty disi^nop 
 the gallows, &c.— I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride ther? en ' 
 possibly be in having them. If they were young pho2nixes, indeed that wc'i, 
 bom but one in a year, there might be a pretext. But when they are so com 
 
 mon 
 
 I do not advert to the insolent merit which they assume with their hus 
 bands on these occasions. Let them look to that. But why we who are 
 not their natural-bom subjects, should be expected to bring our spices 
 myrrh, and incense,— our tribute and homage of admiration,— I do not 
 see. 
 
 " Like as the arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young chil- 
 dren : " so says the excellent office in our Prayer-book appointed for the 
 churching of women. ' ' Happj is the man that halh his qiiiver full of them • " 
 so say I ; but then don't let him discharge his quiver upon us that are weapon- 
 less ;— let them be arrows, but not to gall and stick us. I have generally ob- 
 served that these arrows are double-headed : they have two forks, to be sure to 
 hit with one or the other. As for instance, where you come into a house which 
 is full of children, if you happen to take no notice of them (you are thinking 
 of something else, perhaps, and turn a deaf ear to their innocent caresses) you 
 are set down as untractable, morose, a hater of children. On the other hand, 
 if you find them more than usually engaging;— if you are taken with their 
 pretty manners, and set about in earnest to romp and play with them, some 
 pretext or other is sure to be found for sending them out of the room : tliey are 
 
 too noisy or boisterous, or Mr. does not like children. With one or other 
 
 of these forks the arrow is sure to hit you. 
 
 I could forgive their jealousy, and dispense with toying with their brats, if it 
 gives them pain ; but I think it unreasonable to be called upon to love them, 
 where I see no occasion,— to love a whole family, perhaps, eight, nine, or 
 ten, indiscriminately, — to love all the pretty dears, because children are so en- 
 gaging. 
 
 I know there is a proverb, ' ' Love me, love my dog ; ' ' that is not always so 
 very practicable, particularly if the dog be set upon you to tease you or snap at 
 you in sport. But a dog, or a lesser thing,— any inanimate substance, as a 
 keepsake, a watch or a ring, a tree, or the place where we last parted when my 
 friend went away upon a long absence, I can make shift to love, because I love 
 him, and anything that reminds me of him ; provided it be in its nature indif- 
 ferent, and apt to receive whatever hue fancy can give it. But children have a 
 real character and essential being of themselves : they are amiable or unarniable 
 per se; I must love or hate them as I see cause for either in their qualities. A 
 child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere 
 appendage to another being, and to be loved or hated accordingly : they stand 
 with me upon their own stock, as much as men and women do. O ! but you 
 will say, sure it is an attractive age,— there is something in the tender years of 
 infancy that of itself charms us. "That is the very reason why I am more nice 
 about them. I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not 
 even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them ; but the prettier the 
 kind of a thing is, the more desirable it is that it should be pretty of its kind. 
 One daisy differs not much from another in glory ; but a violet should look 
 and smell the daintiest. — I was always rather squeamish in my women and 
 children. 
 
 But this is not the worst : one must be admitted into their familiarity, at 
 least, before they can complain of inattention. It implies visits, and some kind 
 of intercourse. But if the husband be a man with whom you have lived on a 
 friendly footing before marriage, — if you did not come in on the wife's side, — 
 if you did not sneak into the house in her train, but were an old friend in fast 
 habits of intimacy before their courtship was so much as thought on, — look 
 
440 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 about you — your tenure is precarious — before a twelvemonth shall roll over 
 your head, you shall find your old friend gradually grow cool and altered 
 towards you, and at last seek opportunities of breaking with you. I have 
 scarce a married friend of my acquaintance, upon whose firm faith I can rely, 
 whose friendship did not commence after the period of his marriage. With 
 some limitations they can endure that : but that the good man should have 
 dared to enter into a solemn league of friendship in which they were not con- 
 sulted, though it happened before they knew him,— before they that are now 
 man and wife ever met, — this is intolerable to them. Every long friendship, 
 every old authentic intimacy, must be brought into their office to be new 
 stamped with their currency, as a sovereign Prince calls in the good old money 
 that was coined in some reign before he was born or thought of, to be new 
 marked and minted with the stamp of his authority, before he will let it pass 
 current in the world. You may guess what luck genenally befalls such a rusty 
 piece of metal as I am in these new minting^. 
 
 Innumerable are the ways which they take to insult and worm you out of 
 their husband's confidence. Laughing at all you say with a kind of wonder, 
 as if you were a queer kind of fellow that said good things, but an oddity, is 
 one of the ways ; — they have a particular kind of stare for the purpose ;— till 
 at last the husband, who used to defer to your judgment, and would pass over 
 some excrescences of understanding and manner for the sake of a general 
 vein of observation (not quite vulgar) which he perceived in you, begins to 
 suspect whether you are not altogether a humourist, — a fellow well enough to 
 have consorted with in his bachelor days, but not quite so proper to be intro- 
 duced to ladies. This may be called the staring way ; and is that which has 
 oftenest been put in practice against me. 
 
 Then there is the exaggerating way, or tTie way of irony : that is, where they 
 find you an object of especial regard with their husband, who is not so easily to be 
 shaken from the lasting attachment founded on esteem which he has conceived 
 towards you ; by never-qualified exaggerations to cry up all that you say or do, 
 till the good man, who understands well enough that it is all done in compli- 
 ment to him, grows weary of the debt of gratitude which is due. to so much 
 candour, and by relaxing a little on his part, and taking down a peg or two in 
 his enthusiasm, sinks at length to that kindly level of moderate esteem, — 
 that ' ' decent affection and complacent kindness " towards you, where she 
 herself can join in sympathy with him without much stretch and violence to 
 her sincerity. 
 
 Another way (for the ways they have to accomplish so desirable a purpose 
 are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what 
 it was \thich first made their husliiand fond of you. If an esteem for something 
 excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she 
 is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your 
 conversation, she will cry, " I thought, my dear, you described your friend, 
 
 Mr. , as a great wit." If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed 
 
 charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for 
 this to overlook some trifling irregularities in your moral deportment, upon the 
 first notice of any of these she as readily exclaims, ' ' This, my dear, is your 
 
 good Mr. ." One good lady whom 1 took the liberty of expostulating 
 
 with for not showing me quite so much respect as 1 thought due to her hus- 
 band's old friend, had the candour to confess to me that she had often heard 
 
 Mr. speak of me before marriage, and that she had conceived a great 
 
 desire to be acquainted with me, but that the sight of me had very much dis- 
 appointed her expectations ; for from her husband's representations of me, she 
 had formed a notion that she was to see a fine, tall, officer-like looking man (I 
 use her very words) ; the very reverse of which proved to be the truth. This 
 was candid ; and I had the civility not to ask her in return, how she came to 
 
 "1 
 
 K 
 
Elia: A Bachelor's Complaint. 441 
 
 '''i!*kT-^ a standard of personal accomplishments for her husband's friends 
 wh.ch differed so much from his own; for my friends dimensions at neTS 
 possibly approximate to mine; he standing five feet five in his shoes, in which 
 nave the advantage of him by about half an inch; and he no more than my- 
 self exhibiting any indications of a martial character in his air or countenance 
 1 hese are some of the mortifications which 1 have encountered in the absurd 
 attempt to visit at their houses. To enumerate them all would be a vain 
 endeavour : I shall therefore just glance at the very common impropriety of 
 which marned ladies are guilty,— of treating us as if we were their husbands 
 sxiAvice versa. I mean, when they use us with familiarity, and their husbands 
 with ceremony. Testacea, for instance, kept me the other night two or three 
 hours beyond my usual time of supping, while she was fretting because 
 Mr. — — did not come home till the oysters were all spoiled, rather than she 
 would begTiilty of the impoliteness of touching one in his absence. This was 
 reversing the point of good manners : for ceremony is an invention to take off 
 the uneasy feehng which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object 
 of love and esteem with a fellow-creature than some other person is. It 
 endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious 
 preference which it is forced to deny in the greater. Had Testacea kept the 
 oysters back for me, and withstood her husband's importunities to go to supper, 
 she would have acted according to the strict rules of propriety. I know no 
 ceremony that ladies are bound to observe to their husbands, beyond the point 
 of a modest behaviour and decorum : therefore I must protest against the 
 vicarious gluttony of Cerasia, who at her own table sent away a dish of 
 Morellas, which I was applying to with great good will, to her husband at the 
 other end of the table, and recommended a plate of less extraordinary goose- 
 berries to my unwedded palate in their stead. Neither can I excuse the 
 
 wanton affront of . 
 
 But I am weary of stringing up all my married acquaintance by Roman 
 denominations. Let them amend and change their manners, or I promise to 
 record the full-length English of their names to the terror of all such desperate 
 offenders in future. 
 
 {The London Magazine, October, 1822.) 
 
 [This was originally printed as a portion of the concluding instalment of Elia's three 
 contributions to the Lojidoii Ma^aznie, under the general heading of *' The Old Actors." 
 Appended to it in this Popular Centenary Edition is a paper which is unmistakably 
 Charles Lamb's, but which has never, until now, been identified as his, one in which he 
 celebrated, upon the very morrow of Joseph Shepherd Munden's Farewell, the disap- 
 pearance from the stage of that inimitable comedian. This reclaimed theatrical notice 
 from the pen of Elia will be found in every way worthy of being placed thus in direct 
 juxtaposition with what is, beyond all doubt, one of the choicest effusions of the Master 
 Essayist. As completing these tributes to his favourite actor, Charles Lamb's obituary 
 notice of JIunden is immediately afterwards given from the pages of the Athenceum.'\ 
 
 Not many nights ago I had come home from seeing this extraordinary per- 
 former in Cockletop ; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical image 
 still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain I tried to divest 
 myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite associations. I resolved to be 
 
442 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 serious. I raised up the gravest topics of life ; private misery, public calamity. 
 All would not do, 
 
 There the antic sate 
 
 Mocking our state — 
 
 his queer visnomy— his bewildering costume — all the strange things which he 
 had raked together — his serpentine rod, swagging about in his pocket— Cleo- 
 patra's tear, and the rest of his relics — O' Keefe's wild farce, and hn wilder 
 commentary — till the passion of laughter, like grief in excess, relieved itself by 
 its own weight, inviting the sleep which in the first instance it had driven away. 
 
 But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers, than 
 the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape of dreams. 
 Not one Munden, but five hundred, were dancing 'before me, like the faces 
 which, whether you will or no, come when you have been taking opium — all 
 the strange combinations, which this strangest of all strange mortals ever shot 
 his proper countenance into, from the day he came commissioned to dry up the 
 tears of the town for the loss of the now almost forgotten Edwin. O for the 
 power of the pencil to have fixed them when I awoke ! A season or two since 
 there was exhibited a Hogarth gallery. I do not see why there should not be 
 a Munden gallery. In richness and variety the latter would not fall far short 
 of the former. 
 
 There is one face of Farley, one face of Knight, one (but what a one it is !) 
 of Liston ; but Munden has none that you can properly pin down, and call his. 
 When you think he has exhausted his battery of looks, in unaccountable war- 
 fare with your gravity, suddenly he sprouts out an entirely new set of features, 
 like Hydra. He is not one, but legion. Not so much a comedian, as a com- 
 pany. If his name could be multiplied like his countenance, it might fill a 
 play-bill. He, and he alone, literally makes faces : applied to any other 
 person, the phrase is a mere figure, denoting certain modifications of the 
 human countenance. Out of some invisible wardrobe he dips for faces, as his 
 friend Suett used for wigs, and fetches them out as easily. I should not be 
 surprised to see him some day put out the head of a river horse ; or come 
 forth a pewit, or lapwing, some feathered metamorphosis. 
 
 I have seen this gifted actor in Sir Christopher Curry — in Old Doraton— 
 diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded theatre beat 
 like that of one man ; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to 
 the moral heart of a people. I have seen some faint approaches to this sort of 
 excellence in other players. But in the grand grotesque of farce, Munden 
 stands out as single and unaccompanied as Hogarth. Hogarth, strange to tell, 
 had no followers. The school of Munden began, and must end with himself. 
 
 Can any man wonder, like him? can any man see ghosts, like hira? ax fight 
 with his own shadow—'' SESSA "—as he does in that strangely-neglected thing, 
 the Cobbler of Preston— viheve his alterations from the Cobbler to the Magni- 
 fico, and from the Magnifico to the Cobbler, keep the brain of the spectator in 
 as wild a ferment, as if some Arabian Night were being acted before him. 
 Who like him can throw, or ever attempted to throw, a preternatural interest 
 over the commonest daily-life objects ? A table, or a joint stool, in his concep- 
 tion, rises into a dignity equivalent to Cassiopeia's chair. It is invested with 
 constellatory importance. You could not speak of it with more deference, if 
 it were mounted into the firmament. A beggar in the hands of Michael 
 Angelo, says Fuseli, rose the Patriarch of Poverty. So the gusto of Munden 
 antiquates and ennobles what it touches. . His pots and his ladles are as grand 
 and primal as the seething-pots and hooks seen in old prophetic vision. A tub 
 of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands 
 a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the conimon- 
 place materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him. I 
 
Elia: Munden's Farewell. 443 
 
 MUNDEN'S FAREWELL. 
 
 {The London Magaztnc, July, 1S24.) 
 
 [Talfourd mentions, in regard to this farewell performance, that so densely crowded 
 was the house, that Elia and his sister had to be accommodated with seats in the 
 orchestra, adding that, during the course of the evening, his attention was called by- 
 Miss Kelly, from their upper box, to an incident then takinp place, iinoljserved by the 
 rest of the house, in that snug corner of the orchestra ?— Alunden at the little flap 
 door handing in a pot of porter. Lamb quaffing it to the dregs with a relish— the 
 comedian looknig on with inexpressible gusto, while the humorist was draining^ his 
 tankard ! Half a century afterwards, the editor of this Popular Centenary Edition 
 has it from the lips of Miss Kelly (now, in the October of 1875. Just entering the eighty- / 
 sixth year of her age) that she bears the incident still vividly in her remembrance, her / 
 impression being that that extra pot of porter was sent round by herself Upon thiiocca- "" 
 sion Mary Lamb, in the midst of her brother's grief for the loss of an old favourite, con- 
 vulsed him with laughter by her punning exclamation, " Sic transit gloria Muuden .'"J 
 
 The regular playgoers ought to put on mourning, for the king of broad comedy 
 is dead to the drama ! — Alas ! — Munden is no more I— give sorrow vent. He 
 may yet walk the town, pace the pavement in a seeming existence — eat, 
 drink, and nod to his friends in all the affectation of life — but Munden, — ike 
 Munden !— Munden, who with the bunch of countenances, the bouquet of 
 faces, is gone for ever from the lamps, and, as far as comedy is concerned, is 
 as dead as Garrick 1 When an actor retires (we will put the suicide as mildly 
 as possible) how many worthy persons perish with him !— With Munden, — Sir 
 Peter Teazle must experience a shock— Sir Robert Bramble gives up the ghost 
 — Crack ceases to breathe. Without Munden what becomes of Dozey? Where 
 shall we seek Jemmy Jumps ? Nipperkin and a thousand of such admirable 
 fooleries fall to nothing, and the departure therefore of such an actor as 
 Munden is a dramatic calamity. On the night that this inestimable humourist 
 took farewi^Ilof the public, he also took his benefit :— a benefit in which the 
 public assuredly did not participate. The play was Coleman's Poor Genlkman, 
 with Tom Dibdin's farce of Past Ten o'Cloik. Reader, we all know Munden 
 in Sir Robert Bramble, and Old Tobacco coraplexioned Dozey;— weall have 
 seen the old heairty baronet in his light sky-blue coat and genteel cocked hat i 
 and we have all seen the weather-beaten old pensioner, Dear Old Dozey, tacking 
 about the stage in that intense blue sea livery — drunk as heart could wish, and 
 right valorous in memory. On this night Munden seemed like the Gladiator 
 " to rally hfe's whole energies to die," and as we were present at this great dis- 
 play of his powers, and as this will be the last opportunity that will ever be 
 afforded us to speak of this admirable performer, we shall "consecrate," as Old 
 John Buncle says, "a paragraph to him." 
 
 The house was full,— /«//.' — pshaw ! that^s an empty word ! — The house 
 was stuffed, crammed with people — crammed from the swing door of the pit 
 to the back seat in the banished one sInHtng. A quart of audience may be 
 said (vintner-like, may it be said) to have been squeezed mto a pint of theatre. 
 Every hearty play-going Londoner, who remembered Munden years agone, 
 mustered up his courage and his money for this benefit — and middle-aged 
 people were therefore by no means scarce. The comedy chosen for the occa- 
 sion, is one that travels a long way without a guard; — it is not until the third 
 or fourth act, we think, that Sir Robert Bramble appears on the stage. When 
 he entered, his reception was earnest, — noisy, — outrageous, —waving of hats 
 and handkerchiefs, — deafening shouts, — clamorous beating of sticks, — all the 
 various ways in which the heart is accustomed to manifest its joy were had 
 recourse to on this occasion. Mrs. Bamfield worked away with a sixpenny fan 
 till she scudded only under bare poles. Mr. 'VVhittington wore out the ferule 
 
444 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 of a new nine-andsixpenny umbrella. Gratitude did great damage on the 
 joyful occasion. 
 
 The old performer, the veteran, as he appropriately called himself in the 
 farewell speech, was plainly overcome ; he pressed his hands together, he 
 planted one solidly on his bieast, he bowed, he sidled, he cried ! When the 
 noise subsided (which it invariably does at last) the comedy proceeded, and 
 Munden gave an admirable picture of the rich, eccentric, charitable old bachelor 
 baronet, who goes about with Humphrey Dobbin at his heels, and philanthropy 
 in his heart. How crustily and yet how kindly he takes Humphrey's contradic- 
 tions ! How readily he puts himself into an attitude for arguing ! How 
 tenderly he gives a loose to his heart on the apprehension of Frederick's duel. 
 In truth he played Sir Robert in his very ripest manner, and it was impossible 
 not to feel in the very midst of pleasure regret that Munden should then be 
 before us for the last time. 
 
 In the farce he became richer and richer ; Old Dozey is a plant from Green- 
 wich. The bronzed face — and neck lo match— the long curtain of a coat— the 
 straggling white hair — the propensity, the determined attachment to grog,— 
 are all from Greenwich. Munden, as Dozey, seems never to have been out of 
 action, sun, and drink. He looks (alas he looked) fireproof. His face and 
 throat were dried like a raisin, and his legs walked under the rum-and-water 
 with all the indecision which that inestimable beverage usually inspires. It is 
 truly tacking, not walking. He iteer\ at a table, and the tide of grog now and 
 then bears him off the point. On this night, he seemed to us to be doomed to 
 fall in action, and we therefore looked at him, as some of the Victory s crew 
 are said to have gazed upon Nelson, with a consciousness that his ardour and 
 his uniform were worn for the last time. In the scene where Dozey describes a 
 sea fight, the actor never was greater, and he seemed the personification of an 
 old seventy-four ! His coat hung like a flag at his poop ! His phiz was not a 
 whit less highly coloured than one of those lustrous visages which generally 
 superintend the head of a ship ! There was something cumbrous, indecisive, 
 and awful in his veerings ! Once afloat, it appeared impossible for him to come 
 to his moorings ; once at anchor, it did not seem an easy thing to get him 
 under weigh ! 
 
 The time, however, came for thefall of the curtain, and for the fall of Munden ! 
 The farce of the night was finished. The farce of the long forty years' play 
 was over ! He .stepped forward, not as Dozey, but as Munden, and we heard 
 him address us from the stage for the last time. He trusted, unwisely we 
 think, to a written paper. YK^read of "heart-felt recollections," and "inde- 
 lible impressions." He stammered, and he pressed his heart, — and put on his 
 spectacles, — and blundered his written gratitudes,— and wiped his eyes, and 
 bowed— and stood,— and at last staggered away for ever! The plan of his 
 farewell was bad, but the long life of excellence which really made his farewell 
 pathetic, overcame all defects, and the people and Joe Munden parted like i 
 lovers I 'Well ! Farewell to the Rich Old Heart I M^y thy retirement be as ' 
 full of repose, as thy public life was full of excellence ! We must all have our 
 farewell benefits in our turn. 
 
 THE DEATH OF MUNDEN. 
 (7'/4« Alhenceum, nth February, 1832.) 
 
 [A facsimile, from the original manuscript, is given upon the opposite page. 
 Especial note should be taken of the underlining touches of the pen— suggestive of the 
 very inflections of the voice, the twinkling eyes, and the dimpling lines about the 
 mouth of the master humorist] 
 
 ■Your communication to me of the death of Munden made me weep. Now, 
 

 ouM- 1^4^ ""i^ '^r^ 
 
 
 L 
 
 ^apyt^i^ ci,/rtL^4^ 
 
 
 ^t»rA^ L:<f 
 
 ^^4r^i^ Kr^ ' /^ ^^. ^^^ ^^ 
 
 J2f4yi/Lt{ 
 
Elia : The Death of Munden. 445 
 
 sir, I am not of the melting mood ; but, in these serious times, the loss of half 
 the world's fun is no trivial deprivation, it -was my loss (or gam shall I call 
 it?) in the early time of my play-going, to have missed all Munden s acting. 
 There was only he and Lewis at Covent Garden, while Drury Lane was ex- 
 uberant with Parsons, Dodd, &c., such a comic company as, 1 suppose, the stage 
 never showed. Thence, in the evening of my life, 1 had Munden all to myself, 
 more mellowed, richer, perhaps, than ever. I cannot say what his change of 
 faces produced in me. It was not acting. He was not one of my "old 
 actors." It might be better. His power was extravagant. I saw him one 
 evening in three drunken characters. Three farces were played. One part 
 was Dozey— I forget the rest, — but they were so discriminated, that a stranger 
 might have seen them all, and not have dreamed that lie was seeing the same 
 actor. I am jealous for the actors who pleased my youth. He was not a 
 Parsons or a Dodd, but he was more wonderful. He seemed as if he could do 
 anything. He was not an actor, but something belter, if you please. .Shall I 
 instance Old Foresight in Love /or Love, in which, Parsons was at once the old 
 man, the astrologer, &c. Munden dropped the old man, the doater— which 
 makes the character— but he substituted for it a moon-struck character, a 
 perfect abstraction from this earth, that looked as if he had newly come down 
 from the planets. Now, that is not what I call acting. It might be better. 
 He was imaginative ; he could impress upon an audience an idea— the low one 
 perhaps of a leg of mutton and turnips; but such was the grandeur and 
 singleness of his expressions, that that single expression would convey to all 
 his auditory b. notion of all the pleasures they had all received from all the legs 
 of mutton and turmfs they had ever eaten in their lives. Now, this is not 
 acting, nor do I set down Munden amongst my old actors. He was only a 
 wonderful man, exerting his vivid impressions through the agency of the stage. 
 In one only thing did I see him act—XhaX is, support a character; it was in a 
 wretched farce called Johnny Gilpin, for Dowton's benefit, in which he did a 
 cockney; the thing ran but one night ; but when I say that Lubin's Log was 
 nothing to it, I say little ; it was transcendent. And here, let me say of actors 
 —envious actors— that of Munden, Liston was used to speak, almost with the 
 enthusiasm due to the dead, in terms of such allowed superiority to every actor 
 on the stage, and this at a time when Munden was gone by in the world's 
 estimation, that it convinced me that artists (in which term I include poets, 
 painters, &c.) are not so envious as the world think. I have little time, and 
 therefore enclose a criticism on Munden's Old Dozey and his general acting, by 
 a gentleman, who attends less to these things than formerly, but whose criti- 
 cism I think masterly. 
 
 {The London Magazine, November, 1822.) 
 
 [In his Sketch of Lamb's Life, published in 1837, Talfourd asserts that the account 
 in this paper of Joseph Paice's politeness "could be attested to the letter by living 
 witnesses."] 
 
 In comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to compliment 
 ' ourselves upon the point of gallantry ; a certain obsequiousness, or deferential 
 respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as females. 
 
 I shall believe that this principle actuates our conduct, when I can forget, 
 that in the nineteenth century of the era from which we date our civility, we are 
 but just beginning to leave off the very frequent practice of whipping females 
 in public, in common with the coarsest male offenders. 
 

 '^'c 
 
 t^ Ok 
 
 '^ 
 
Elia : The Death of Munden. 445 
 
 sir, I am not of the melting mood ; but, in these serious times, the loss of half 
 the worlds fun is no trivial deprivation. It was my loss (or gain shall I call 
 it?) in the early time of my play-going, to have missed all Munden s acting. 
 There was only he and Lewis at Covent Garden, while Drury Lane was ex- 
 uberant with Parsons, Dodd, &c., such a. comic company as, 1 suppose, the stage 
 never showed. Thence, in the evening of my life, I had Munden all to myself, 
 more mellowed, richer, perhaps, than ever. I cannot say what his change of 
 faces produced in me. It was not acting. He was not one of my "old 
 actors." It might be better. His power was extravagant. I saw him one 
 evening in three drunken characters. Three farces were played. One part 
 was Dozey— I forget the rest,— but they were so discriminated, that a stranger 
 might have seen them all, and not have dreamed that he was seeing the same 
 actor. I am jealous for the actors who pleased my youth. He was not a 
 Parsons or a Dodd, but he was more wonderful. He seemed as if he could do 
 anything. He was not an actor, but something belter, if you please. .Shall I 
 instance Old Foresight in Love for Love, in which, Parsons was at once the old 
 man, the astrologer, &c. Munden dropped the old man, the doater— which 
 makes the character— but he substituted for it a moon-struck character, a 
 perfect abstraction from this earth, that looked as if he had newly come down 
 from the planets. Now, thai is not what I call acting. It might be better. 
 He was imaginative ; he could impress upon an audience an idea — the low one 
 perhaps of a leg of mutton and turnips ; but such was the grandeur and 
 singleness of his expressions, that that single expression would convey to all 
 his auditory a notion of all the pleasures they had all received from all the legs 
 of mutton and turnips they had ever eaten in their lives. Now, this is not 
 acting, nor do I set down Munden amongst my old actors. He was only a 
 wonderful man, exerting his vivid impressions through the agency of the stage. 
 In one only thing did I see him act— thai is, support a character ; it was in a 
 wretched farce called Johnny Gilpin, for Dowton's benefit, in which he did a 
 cockney; the thing ran but one night ; but when I say that Lubin's Log was 
 nothing to it, I say little; it was transcendent. And here, let me say of actors 
 —envious actors — that of Munden, I-iston was used to speak, almost with the 
 enthusiasm due to the dead, in terms of such allowed superiority to every actor 
 on the stage, and this at a time when Munden was gone by in the, world's 
 estimation, that it convinced me that artists (in which term I include poets, 
 painters, &c.) are not so envious as the world think. I have little time, and 
 therefore enclose a criticism on Munden's Old Dozey and his general acting, by 
 a gentleman, who attends less to these things than formerly, but whose criti- 
 cism I think masterly. 
 
 gt0b£nt ^allaixtriT. 
 
 (The London. Magazine, November, 1822.) 
 
 [In his Sketch of Lamb's Life, published in 1837, Talfourd asserts that the account 
 in this paper of Joseph Paice's politeness "could be attested to the letter Jjy living 
 witnesses."] 
 
 In comparing modern with ancient manners, we are pleased to compliment 
 ourselves upon the point of gallantry ; a certain obsequiousness, or deferential 
 respect, which we are supposed to pay to females, as females. 
 
 I shall believe that this principle actuates our conduct, when I can forget, 
 that in the nineteenth century of the era from which we date our civility, we are 
 but just beginning to leave off the very frequent practice of whipping females 
 in public, in common with the coarsest male offenders. 
 
446 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 I shall believe it to be influential, when I can shut my eyes to the fact, that 
 in England women are still occasionally — hanged. 
 
 I shall believe in it, when actresses are no longer subject to be hissed off a 
 stage by gentlemen. 
 
 I shall believe in it, when Dorimant hands a fish-wife across the kennel ; or 
 assists the apple-woman to pick up her wandering fruit, which some unlucky 
 dray has just dissipated. 
 
 I shall believe in it, when the Dorimants in humbler life, who would he 
 thought in their way notable adepts in this refinement, shall act upon it in 
 places where they are not known, or think themselves not observed — when I 
 shall see the traveller for some rich tradesman part with his admired box-coat, 
 to spread it over the defenceless shoulders of the poor woman, who is passing 
 to her parish on the roof of the same stage-coach with him, drenched in the 
 rain— when I shall no longer see a woman standing up in the pit of a London 
 theatre, till she is sick and faint with the e-tertion, with men about her, seated 
 at their ease, and jeering at her distress ; till one, that seems to have more 
 manners or conscience than the rest, significantly declares " she should be 
 welcome to his seat, if she were a Uttle younger and handsomer." Place this 
 dapper warehouseman, or that rider, in a circle of their own female acquaint- 
 ance, and you shall confess you have not seen a politer-bred man in Lothbuiy. 
 
 Lastly, I shall begin to believe that there is some such principle influencing 
 our conduct, when more than one-half of the drudgery and coarse servitude 
 of the world shall cease to be performed by women. 
 
 Until that day comes, I shall never believe this boasted point to be any- 
 thing more than a conventional fiction ; a pageant got up between the sexes, 
 in a certain rank, and at a certain time of life, in which both find their account 
 equally. 
 
 I shall be even disposed to rank it among the salutary fictions of life, when 
 in pohte circles I shall see the same attentions paid to age as to youth, to 
 homely features as to handsome, to coarse complexions as to clear— to the 
 woman, as she is a woman, not as she is a beauty, a fortune, or a title. 
 
 I shall believe it to be something more than a name, when a well-dressed 
 gentleman in a well-dressed company can advert to the topic ai female old age 
 without exciting, and intending to excite, a sneer : — when the phrases "anti- 
 quated virginity," and such a one has " overstood her market," pronounced in 
 good company, shall raise immediate oflence in man, or woman, that shall 
 hear them spoken. 
 
 Joseph Paice, of Bread Street Hill, merchant, and one of the Directors of 
 the South-Sea Company— the same to whom Edwards, the Shakspere com- 
 mentator, has addressed a fine sonnet— was the only pattern of cbnsistent 
 gallantry I have met with. He took me under his shelter at' an early'age, and 
 bestowed some pains upon me. I owe to his precepts and example whatever 
 there is of the man of business (and that is not much) in my composition. It 
 was not his fault that I did not profit more. Though bred a Presbyterian, 
 and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time. He had 
 not one system of attention to females in the drawing-room, and another in 
 the shop, or at the stall. I do not mean that he made no distinction. But 
 he never lost sight of sex, or overlooked it in the casualties of a disadvan- 
 tageous situation. I have seen him stand bare-headed— smile if you please — 
 to a poor servant girl, while she has been inquiring of him the way to some 
 street — in such a posture of unforced civility, as neither to embarrass her in the 
 acceptance, nor himself in the offer, of it. He was no dangler, in the common 
 acceptation of the word, after women : but he reverenced and upheld, in every 
 form in which it came before him, ■womanhood. I have seen him — nay, smile 
 not — tenderly escorting a market-woman, whom he had encountered in a 
 shower, exalting his umbrella over her poor basket of fruit, that it might 
 
Elia: Modern Gallantry. 447 
 
 receive no damage, with as much carefulness as if she had been a countess. 
 To the reverend form of Female Eld he would yield the wall {though it were 
 to an ancient beggar-woman) with more ceremony than we could afford to 
 show our grandams. He was the Preux Chevalier of Age ; the Sir Calidore, 
 or Sir Tristan, to those who have no Calidores or Tristans to defend them. 
 The roses, that had long faded thence, still bloomed for him in those withered 
 and yellow cheeks. 
 
 He was never married, but in his youth he paid his addresses to the beau- 
 tiful Susan Winstanley— old Winstanley's daughter of Clapton— who, dying 
 in the early days of their courtship, confirmed in him the resolution of perpetual 
 bachelorship. It was during their short courtship, he told me, that he had 
 been one day treating his mistress with a profusion of civil speeches— the 
 common gallantries — to which kind of thing she had hitherto manifested no 
 repugnance — but in this instance with no effect. He could not obtain from 
 her a decent acknowledgment in return. She rather seemed to resent his com- 
 pliments. He could not set it down to caprice, for the lady had always shown 
 herself above that littleness. When he ventured on the following day, finding 
 her a little better humoured, to expostulate with her on her coldness of yester- 
 day, she confessed, with her usual frankness, that she had no sort of dislike to 
 his attentions ; that she could even endure some high-flown compliments ; 
 that a young woman placed in her situation had a right to expect all sort of 
 civil things said to her ; that she hoped she could digest a dose of adulation, 
 short of insincerity, with as little injury to her humility as most young women : 
 but that — a little before he had commenced his compliments— she had over- 
 heard him by accident, in rather rough language, rating a young woman, who 
 had not brought home his cravats quite to the appointed time, and she thought 
 to herself, " As I am Miss Susan Winstanley, and a young lady — a reputed 
 beauty, and known to be a fortune, — I can have my choice of the finest 
 speeches from the mouth of this very fine gentleman who is courting me — but 
 if I had been poor Mary Such-a-one [naming the milliner),— axA had failed of 
 bringing home the cravats to the appointed hour — though perhaps I had sat 
 up half the night to forward them— what sort of compliments should I have 
 received then ? — And my woman's pride came to my assistance ; and I thought, 
 that if it were only to do me honour, a female, like myself, might have received 
 handsomer usage ; and I was determined not to accept any fine speeches, to 
 the compromise of that sex, the belonging to which was after all my strongest 
 claim and title to them." 
 
 I think the lady discovered both generosity, and a just way of thinking, in 
 this rebuke which she gave her lover ; and I have sometimes imagined, that 
 the uncommon strain of courtesy, which through life regulated the actions and 
 behaviour of my friend towards all of womankind indiscriminately, owed its 
 happy origin to this seasonable lesson from the lips of his lamented mistress. 
 
 I wish the whole female world would entertain the same notion of these 
 things that Miss Winstanley showed. Then we should see something of the 
 spirit of consistent gallantry ; and no longer witness the anomaly of the same 
 man — a pattern of true politeness to a wife- of cold contempt, or rudeness, to 
 a sister — the idolater of his female mistress— the disparager and despiser of 
 his no less female aunt, or unfortunate— still female— maiden cousin. Just so 
 much respect as a woman derogates from her own sex, in whatever condition 
 placed— her handmaid, or dependent— she deserves to have diminished from 
 herself on that score ; and probably will feel the diminution, when youth, and 
 beauty, and advantages, not inseparable from sex, shall lose of their attraction. 
 What a woman should demand of a man in courtship, or after it, is first- 
 respect for her as she is a woman ; — and next to that — to be respected by him 
 above all other women. But let her stand upon her female character as upon 
 a foundation : and let the attentions, incident to individual preference, be so 
 
448 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 many pretty additaments and ornaments— as many and as fanciful, as you 
 please— to that main structure. Let her first lesson be — with sweet Susan 
 Winstanley — to reverence her sex. 
 
 €\&xuivt 0f '^t hit ^Im. 
 
 BY A FRIEND. 
 (The London Magazine, January, 1823.) 
 
 [When the final series of the Essays of Elia appeared in book form, the following paper 
 (less the closing paragraphs, signed Phil-Elia, which are here restored but duly bracketed) 
 was given at the opening of that volume in 1833, by way of *' Preface by a Iriend of the 
 late Elia." As it was evidently designed by Charles Lamb as a Farewell to the first 
 series, rather than as an Introduction to the last, the paper is given here intermediately] 
 
 This gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath 
 at length paid his final tribute to nature. He just lived long enough (it was 
 what he wished) to see his papers collected into a volume. The pages of the 
 London Magazine will henceforth know him no more. 
 
 Exactly at twelve last night, his queer spirit departed ; and the bells of Saint 
 Bride's rang him out with the old year. The mournful vibrations were caught 
 in the dining-room of his friends Taylor and Hessey, and the company, assembled 
 there to welcome in another first of January, checked their carousals in mid- 
 mirth, and were silent. Janus wept. The gentle Procter, in a whisper, signi- 
 fied his intention of devoting an elegy ; and Allan Cunningham, nobly forget- 
 ful of his countrymen's wrongs, vowed a memoir to his manes full and friendly 
 as a "Tale of Lyddalcross." 
 
 To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humoiu: of the thing, if there 
 was ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted ; and a two years' and a half 
 existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom. 
 
 I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to 
 my late friend's writings was well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you — a 
 sort of unlicked, incondite things — villanously pranked in an affected array of 
 antique moods and phrases. They had not been his, if they had been other than 
 such ; and better it is, that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaint- 
 ness, than to aifect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. 
 Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know, that what 
 he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another ; as in a 
 former Essay (to save many instances) where under the first person (his favourite 
 figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed at a London 
 school, far from his friends and connections — in direct oppposition to his own 
 early history. If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the 
 griefs and affections of another— making himself many, or reducing many 
 unto himself— then is the skilful novehst, who all along brings in his hero, or 
 heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all ; who yet has never, 
 therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how shall the intenser drama- 
 tist escape being faulty, who doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by 
 
Elia : A Character of the Late Elia. 449 
 
 another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, and 
 ■expresses his own story modestly? 
 
 My late friend was in many respects a singular character. Those who did 
 not like him, hated him ; and some, who once liked him, afterwards became 
 his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern what he 
 uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and 
 would e'en out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he 
 would pass for a free-thinker; while the other faction set him down for a bigot, 
 or persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood him ; 
 and 1 am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too 
 much affected that dangerous figure— irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, 
 andreaped plain, unequivocal hatred. — He would interrupt the gravest discus- 
 sion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that 
 could understand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The informal 
 habit of his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of speech, forbade hinl 
 to be an orator ; and he seemed determined that no one else should play that 
 part when he was present. He was petit and ordinary in his person and ap- 
 pearance. I have seen him in what is called good company, but where he 
 has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow ; till some 
 unlucky occasion provoking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not 
 altogether senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his character 
 for the evening. It was hit or miss with hira ; but nine times out of ten, he 
 contrived by this device to send away a whole company his enemies. His 
 conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his happiest impromptus had 
 the appearance of effort. He has been accused of trying to be witty, when in 
 truth he was but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose 
 his companions for some individuality of character which they manifested.— 
 Hence, not many persons of science, and few professed literati, were of his 
 councils. They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune ; and, 
 as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of 
 settled (though moderate) income, he passed with most of them for a great 
 miser. To my knowledge this-was a mistake. His mtimados, to confess a 
 truth, were in the worlds eye a ragged regiment. He found them floating on 
 the surface of society; and the colour, or something else, in the weed pleased 
 him. The burrs stuck to him — but they were good and loving burrs for all that. 
 He never greatly cared for the sociely of what are called good people. If any 
 of these were scandalized (and offences were sure to arise), he could not help 
 it. When he has been remonstrated with for not making more concessions to 
 the feelings of good people, he would retort by asking, what one point did these 
 good people ever concede to him? He was temperate in his meals and diver- 
 sions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use 
 of the Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would 
 say, as a solvent of speech. Marry— as the friendly vapour ascended, how his 
 prattle would curl up sometimes with it ! the ligaments, which tongue-tied him, 
 were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist ! 
 
 I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend has 
 departed. His jests were beginning to grow obsolete, and his stories to be 
 found out. He felt the approaches of age; and while he pretended to cling 
 to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. Discoursing with 
 him latterly on this subject, he expresseU himself with a pettishness, which I 
 thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he 
 called it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school of industry had 
 met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he thought, in an especial manner to him. 
 " They take me for a visiting governor," he muttered earnestly. He had a 
 horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important and 
 parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that stamp daily. He 
 
 Q 
 
45° The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, 
 and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He 
 herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He 
 did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. 
 His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The 
 toga -jirilts never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of mfancy 
 had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were 
 weaknesses ; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his 
 writings. 
 
 [He left little property behind him. Of course, the little that is left (chiefly 
 in India bonds) devolves upon his cousin Bridget. A few critical dissertations 
 were found in his acrilotre, which have been handed over to the editor of this . 
 magazine, in which it is to be hoped they will shortly appear, retaining his 
 accustomed singature. 
 
 He has himself not obscurely hinted that his employment lay in a public 
 office. The gentlemen in the export department of the East India House will i 
 forgive me if I acknowledge the readiness with which they assisted me in the 
 retrieval of his few manuscripts. They pointed out in a most obliging manner 
 the desk at which he had been planted for forty years ; showed me ponderous 
 tomes of figuers in his own remarkably neat hand, which, more properly than 
 his few printed tracts, might be called his "Woirks." They seemed affectionate 
 to his memory, and universally commended his expertness in book-keeping. It 
 seems he was the inventor of some ledger which should combine the precision 
 and certainty of the Italian double entry (I think they called it) with the brevity 
 and facility of some ne\yer German system ; but I am not able to appreciate the 
 worth of the discovery. I have often heard him express a warm regard for his 
 associates in office, and how fortunate he considered himself in having his lot 
 thrown in amongst them. "There is more sense, more discourse, more shrewd- 
 ness, and even talent, among these clerks," he would say, "than in twice the 
 number of authors by profession that I have conversed with." He would 
 brighten up sometimes upon the "old days of the India House," when he 
 consorted with Woodroffe and Wissett, and Peter Corbet (a descendant and 
 worthy representative, bating the point of sanctity, of old facetious Bishop 
 Corbet) ; and Hoole, who translated Tasso ; and Bartlemy Brown, whose father 
 (God assoil him therefore 1) modernized Walton ; and sly, warm-hearted old 
 Jack Cole (King Cole they called him in those days) and Campe and Fombelle, 
 and a world of choice spirits, more than I can remember to name, who asso- 
 ciated in those days with Jack Burrell (thelon-vivajii ol the South Sea House) ; 
 and httle Eyton (said to be a fac-simile of Pope,— he was a miniature of a 
 gentletnan), that was cashier under him; and Dan Voight of the Custom-house, 
 that left the famous library. 
 
 Well, Elia is gone,— for aught I know, to be re-united with them,— and 
 these poor traces of his pen are all we have to show for it. How little 
 survives of the wordiest authors ! Of all they said or did in their life-time a few 
 glittering words only ! His Essays found some favourers, as they appeared 
 separately; they shuffled their way in the crowd well enough singly ; how they 
 will read, now they are brought together, is a question for the publishers, who 
 have thus ventured to draw out into one piece his "weaved-up follies." 
 
 Phil-Elia.] 
 
Elia : Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading. 45 1 
 
 SECOND SERIES. 
 
 [Exactly ten years after the first series of these Essays had heen published in two 
 volumes by the Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, under the laconic heading of " Elia," a second 
 series was issued from the press by Edwird Moxon in 1833, called more explicitly 
 "The Last Ebsays of Elia," These, unlike their predecessors, which had all of them 
 with one exception appeared originally in the London. Magazine, were brought together 
 from various scattered sources, and printed as a collection without any regard to 
 chronological sequence. They ,-ire here given, however, in accordance with the system 
 adopted throughout this Popular Centenary Edition, in the precise ortier in which they 
 were first published as contributions to the periodicals.] 
 
 g^latljiir tl^rag^fs on §o0b m)i ^l^abinig. 
 
 (The London Magazine, July, 1S22.) 
 
 [It has been conjectured that the stanzas with which the subjoined essay is brought 
 to a conclusion, and which are here .spoken of as by "a quaint poetess of our day," 
 formed one of Mary Lamb's contributions to the little work conjointly wiritten by herself 
 
 and her brother Charles, under the title of " Poetry for Children." " Martin ii " was 
 
 Elia's old friend Martin Burney.] 
 
 To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of an- 
 other man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused 
 with the natural sprouts of his own. — Lord Foppington, in the Relapse, 
 
 An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this bright 
 sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great 
 improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this 
 head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to 
 other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love 
 to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading ; 
 I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. 
 
 I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathaii 
 ■Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in 
 that shape which I cannot allow for such. 
 
 In this catalogue of hooks wkich are no hooks— biblia a-hihlia — I reckon 
 Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books (the Literary excepted). Draught 
 Boards bound and lettered at the back. Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, 
 Statutes at Large ; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame 
 Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which "no gentleman's library should 
 be without :" the Histories of Flavitis Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's 
 
452 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost anytliing. I 
 bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding. 
 
 I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in books' clothin" 
 perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into 
 the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well- 
 bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted play-book, then, 
 opening what "seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population 
 Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find — Adam Smith. To view 
 a well-arranged assortment of blockheaded Plncyclopsedias ( Anglicanas or iMetro- 
 politanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good 
 leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios ; would renovate Para- 
 celsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself agam in 
 the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them, to warm my 
 ragged veterans in their spoils. 
 
 To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a volume. Mag- 
 nificence comes after. This, when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished 
 _ upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of Magazines, 
 ' for instance, in full suit. The deshabille, or half-binding (with Russia backs 
 ever) is our costume. K Shakspere, or a Milton (unless the first editions), it 
 were mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession of them confers 
 ■"" distinction. The exterior of them (the things themselves being so common), 
 strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of property in the 
 owner. Thomson's Seasons, again, looks best {I mamtain it) a little torn, and 
 dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves, 
 and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would not 
 forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old " Circulating Library" Tom 
 Jones, or Vicar of "Wakefield ! How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that 
 have turned over their pages with delight !— of the lone sempstress whom they 
 may have cheered (milliner or harder-working mantua maker) after her long 
 day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour, ill 
 spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling out 
 their enchanting contents ! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What 
 better condition could we desire to see them in ? 
 
 In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. 
 Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive 
 volumes— Great Nature's Stereotypes —we see them individually perish with 
 less regret, because we know the copies of them to be " eterne." But where a 
 book is at once both good and rare— where the individual is almost the species, 
 and when that perishes, 
 
 " We know not where is that Promethean torch 
 That can its light relumine '* — 
 
 such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his 
 Duchess— no casket is rich enough, no casing sutficientlv durable, to honour and 
 keep safe such a jewel. 
 
 Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to be 
 reprinted ; but old editions of writers, such as Sir Phihp Sydney, Bishop Taylor, 
 Milton in his prose-works. Fuller— of whom we have reprints, yet the books 
 themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we know, 
 have not endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, 
 so as to become stock books— it is good to possess these in durable and costly 
 covers. I do not care for a First Folio of Shakspere. You cannot make a 
 pet book of an author whom everybody reads. I rather prefer the common 
 editions of Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with plates, which, being so 
 execrably bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text- and 
 
Elia: Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading. 453 
 
 without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are so much better 
 than the bhakspere gallery engravings, which did. I have a community of 
 feehng with my countrymen about his Plays, and I like those eduions of him 
 best, which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled.— On the contrary, 
 I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are 
 painful to look at. 1 have no sympathy with them. If they were as much 
 read as the current editions of the other poet, I should prefer them in that 
 shape to the older one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint 
 of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the 
 bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the 
 newest fashion to modern censure ? what hapless stationer could dream of 
 Burton ever becoming popular?— The wretched Malone could not do worse, 
 when he bribed the se.\ton of Stratford church to let, him white-wash the 
 painted effigy of old Shakspere, which stood there, in rude but lively fashion 
 depicted, to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the eye-brow, hair, the very 
 dress he used to wear— the only authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, 
 of these curious parts and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat 
 
 of white paint. By , if 1 had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, 
 
 I would have clapped both commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a 
 pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets. 
 
 I think I see them at their work— these sapient trouble-tombs. 
 Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of some of our 
 poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear— to mine, at least— than 
 that of Milton or of Shakspere? It maybe, that the latter are more staled 
 and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a 
 perfume in the mention, are. Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthorn- 
 den, and Cowley. 
 
 Aluch depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or 
 six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of 
 taking up the Faerie Queene for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' 
 sermons ? 
 
 Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you 
 enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who hstens, had heed 
 bring docile thoughts, and purged ears. 
 
 Winter evenings— the world shut out— with less of. ceremony the gentle 
 Shakspere enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his ov\n Winters 
 Ta!e— 
 
 These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — to yourself, or (as it 
 chances) to some single person listening. More than one— and it degenerates 
 into an audience. 
 
 Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide 
 0|ver only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the 
 better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness. 
 
 A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices it is the 
 custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the clerks — who is the best 
 scholar — to commence upon the Times, or the Chronicle, and recite its entire 
 contents aloud ;Sto bono publico. With every advantage of lungs and elocution, 
 the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers' shops and public-houses a fellow 
 will get up, and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some dis- 
 covery. Another fellow with his selection. So the entire iournal transpires at 
 length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and, without this 
 expedient, no one in the company would probably ever travel through the 
 contents of a whole paper. 
 
 Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a 
 feeling of disappointment. 
 
 What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, keeps the paper ! 
 
454 The Works of Charles La}nb. 
 
 I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, " The Chronicle is 
 in hand, sir." 
 
 As in these little diurnals I generally skip the Foreign News, the Debates 
 ) and the Politics, I find the Morning Herald by far the most entertaining of 
 them. It is an agreeable miscellany rather than a newspaper. 
 
 Coming in to an inn at night— having ordered your supper — what can be 
 more delightful than to find lymg in the window-seat, left there time out of 
 mind by the carelessness of some former guest— two or three numbers of the 
 old Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing tete-a-lele pictures— " The 
 
 Royal Lover and Lady G ; " " 'ITie Meltmg Platonic and the Old Beau," 
 
 —and such like antiquated scandal ? Would you exchange it— at that time, 
 and in that place— for a better book ? 
 
 Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the 
 weightier kinds of reading— the Paradise Lost, or Comus, he could have read 
 to him— but he missed tlie pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a 
 magazine, or a light pamphlet. 
 
 I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral 
 alone, and reading Caiidide. 
 
 1 do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once de- 
 tected — by a familiar damsel— reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose 
 Hill (her Cythera), reading — Paiitela. There was nothing in the book to make 
 a man seriously ashamed al the exposure ; but as she seated herself down by 
 me, and seemed determined to read in company, I could have wished it had 
 been— any other book. W'e read on very sociably for a few pages; and, not 
 finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and— went away. Gentle 
 casuist, I leave It to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one 
 between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From 
 me you shall never get tlie secret. 
 
 I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits 
 to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow 
 Hill (as yet Skinner's Street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in 
 the morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain 
 of abstraction beyond my reach. 1 used to admire how he sidled along, 
 keeping clear of .secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, 
 or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am 
 master of, and have left me worse than indiherent to the five points. 
 
 ■I was once amused— there is a pleasure in affecting affectation— at the in- 
 dignation of a crowd that was jostling in with me at the pit-door of Covent 
 Garden Theatre, to have a sight of Master Betty— then at once in his dawn 
 and his meridian— in Hamlet. I had been invited, quite unexpectedly, to join 
 a party, whom I met near the door of the play-house, and I happened to have 
 in my hand a large octavo of Johnson and Steevens's Shak^pearc, which, the 
 time not admitting of my carrying it home, of course went with me to the 
 theatre. Just in the very'hent and pressure of the doors opening— tlie rush, 
 as they term it— I dehb'erately held the volume over my head, open at the 
 scene in which the voung Roscius had been most cried up, and quietly read by 
 the lamp-light. The clamour became universal. "The affectation of the 
 follow," cried one. "Look at that gentleman reading, papa," squeaked a 
 young lady, who, in her admiration of the novelty, almost forgot her fears. I 
 read on. " He ought to have his book knocked out of his hand," exclaimed 
 a pursy cit, whose arms were too fast pinioned to his side to suffer him to 
 execute his kind intention. Still I read on— and, till the time came to pay my 
 money, kept as unmoved as Saint Anthony at his holy offices, with the satyrs, 
 apes, and hobgoblins mopping and making mouths at him, in the picture, 
 while the good man sits as undisturbed at the sight as if he were the sole - 
 tenant of the desert. — The individual rabble {I recognized more than one of 
 
Elia: Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading. 455 
 
 their ugly faces) had damned a slight piece of mine a few nights before, arid I 
 was deternuned the culprits should not a second time put me out of counte- 
 nance. 
 
 There is a class of street-readers whom I can never contemplate without 
 affection— the poor gentry, ^vho, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, 
 filch a little learning at the open stalls — the owner, with his hard eye, casting 
 envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. 
 Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall 
 interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they 
 "snatch a fearful joy." Martin B — , in this way, by daily fragments, got 
 through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable 
 ambition, by asking him {it was in his younger days) whether he meant to 
 purchase the work. M. declares, that under no circumstances of his life did 
 he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took inHhose uneasy 
 snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has moralized upon this subject in two 
 very touching but homely stanzas. 
 
 T saw a boy with eager eye 
 * Open a book upon a stall, 
 
 And read as he'd devour it all : 
 
 Whicb when the stall-mair did espy. 
 
 Soon to the boy I heard him call, 
 
 " You, sir, you never buy a book, 
 
 Therefore in one you shall not look." 
 
 The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh 
 
 He wish'd he never had been taught to read, 
 
 Then of the old churl's books he should have had no nead. 
 
 Of sufferings the poor have many, 
 
 Which never can tlie ri(,h annoy . 
 
 I soon perceived another boy. 
 
 Who look'd as if he'd not had any 
 
 Food, for that day at least— enjoy 
 
 The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder*. 
 
 'I'his boy's case, then thought J, is surely harder. 
 
 Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny. 
 
 Beholding choice of dainty-dresb^d meat : 
 
 No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat. 
 
 Confessions of a grnnharb* 
 
 {The Londo7i Magazine, August, 1822.) 
 
 [This paper was originally penned bj' Charles Lamb, in compliance with the request of his 
 friend Basil Montagu, under whose editorship it was published, as one of a collection of 
 tracts in furtherance of the cause of temperance For a reason which caused great pain at 
 the time to its author, it was reprinted in the autumn of 1822, in "The Ljon's Mouth " of 
 the London. Magazine. Its republication then was necessitated by the appearance in the 
 ^Quarterly for April, 1822. of an article upon Dr, John Reid's treatise on Hypocondriasis 
 -and other Nervous Affeciions, in the course of which the Confessions of a Drunkard 
 ■were spoken of as affording "a fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance, 
 .and' which," said the reviewer, "we have reason to know is a true tale." This malig- 
 
45 6 Tlie Worlis of Charles Lamb. 
 
 nant insinuation that there was biographic truth in-what was a purely imaginary descrip- 
 tion, was, many years afterwards, repeated in cold blood, with the cruelest precision, when 
 Charles Lamb's remains had long been lying peacefully in their grave at Edmonton. 
 The Confessions of a Drunkard were then reprinted in another series of temperance 
 tracts, called " Beacon Lights," where they were described as "published anonymously 
 many years ago, but not known to have been indited as a record of hiv own experiences, 
 by the celebrated Charles Lamb, whose sparkhng wit," &c.,— the venomous slander thus 
 trailing off into frothy compliment. Eventually, however, the compiler of "Beacon 
 Lights " had the grace to withdraw that painful mis-statement, and with it this famous 
 Elian Essay, replacing the latter with the lamentable and "ower true" story of Hartley 
 Coleridge's Experiences.] 
 
 Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic 
 of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of 
 applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that 
 is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed. Yet the evil 
 is acknowledged, the remedy is simple. Abstain. ' No force can oblige a man 
 to raise the glass to his head against his will. 'Tis as easy as not to steal, not 
 to tell lies. 
 
 Alas ! the hand to pilfer, and the tongue to bear false witness, have no con- 
 stitutional tendency. These are actions indifiisrent to them. At the iiftt in- 
 stance of the reformed will, they can be brought off without a murmur. The 
 itching finger is but a figure in speech, and the tongue of the liar can with the 
 same natural delight give forth useful truths, with which it lias been accus- 
 tomed to scatter their pernicious contraries, but when a man has commenced 
 sot 
 
 pause, thou sturdy moralist, thou person of stout nerves and a strong 
 heap, whose liver is happily untouched, and ere thy gorge riseth at the name 
 which I had written, first learn what the thing is ; how much of compassion, 
 how much of human allowance, thou mayest virtuously mingle with thy dis- 
 approbation. Trample not on the ruins of a man. Exact not, under so 
 terrible a penalty as infamy, a resuscitation from a state of death almost as real 
 as that from which Lazarus arose not but by a miracle. 
 
 Begin a reformation, and custom will make it easy. But what if the be- 
 ginning be dreadful, the first steps, not like climbing a mountain, but going 
 through fire ? what if the whole system must undergo a change violent as that 
 which we conceive of the mutation of form in some insects ? what if a pro- 
 cess comparable to flaying alive be to be gone through ? is the weakness that 
 sinks under such struggles to be confounded with the pertinacity which chngs 
 to other vices, which have induced no constitutional necessity, no engagement 
 of the whole victim, body and soul? 
 
 1 have known one in that state, when he has tried to abstain but for one 
 evening,— though the poisonous potion had long since ceased to bring back its 
 first enchantments, though he was sure it -would rather deepen his gloom than 
 brighten it, — in the violence of the struggle, and the necessity he had felt of 
 getting rid of the' present sensation at any rate, I have known him to scream 
 out, to cry aloud, for the anguish and pain of the strife within him. 
 
 Why should I hesitate to declare, that the man of whom I speak is myself? 
 I have no puling apology to make to mankind. I see them all in one way or 
 another deyiating from the pure reason. It is to my own nature alone I am 
 accountable for the woe that I have brought upon it. 
 
 I believe that there are constitutions, robust heads and iron insides whom 
 scarce any excesses can hurt ; whom brandy (I have seen them drink it like 
 wine), at all events whom wine, taken in ever so plentiful a measure, can do 
 no worse injury to than just to muddle their faculties, perhaps never very 
 pellucid. ■ On them this discourse is wasted. 1'hey would but laugh at a 
 weak brother, who, trying his strength with them, and coming off foiled from 
 the contest, would fain persuade them that such agonistic exercises are 
 
Elia: Confessions of a Dninkard. 457 
 
 dangerous. It is to a very different description of persons I speak. It is to 
 the weak — the nervous ; to those whofeelthe want of some artificial aid to raise 
 their spirits in society to what is no more than the ordinary pitch of all around 
 them without it. This is the secret of our drinking. Such must fly the con- 
 vivial board in the first instance, if they do not mean to sell themselves for 
 term of life. 
 
 Twelve years ago I had completed my six-and-twentieth year. I had lived 
 from the period of leaving school to that time pretty much in solitude. My 
 companions were chiefly books, or at most one or two living ones of my own 
 book -loving and sober stamp. I rose early, went to bed betimes, and the 
 faculties which God had given me, I have reason to think, did not rust in me 
 unused. 
 
 About that time I fell in with some companions of a different order. They 
 were men of boisterous spirits, sitters up a-nights, disputants, drunken ; yet 
 seemed to have something noble about them. We dealt about the wit, or 
 what passes for it after midnight, jovially. Of the quality called fancy I cer- 
 tainly possessed a larger share than my companions. Encouraged by their 
 applause, I set up for a professed joker ! I, who of all men am least fitted 
 for such an occupation, having, in addition to the greatest difficulty which I 
 experience at all times of finding words to express my meaning, a natural 
 nervous impediment in my speech ! 
 
 Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but 
 that of a wit. When you find a tickling relish upon your tongue disposing 
 you to that sort of conversation, especially if you find a supernatural flow of 
 ideas setting in upon you at the sight of a bottle and fresh glasses, avoid 
 giving way to it as you would fly your greatest destruction. If you cannot 
 crush the power of fancy, or that within you which you mistake for such, divert 
 it, give it some other play. Write an essay, pen a character or description, — 
 but not as I do now, with tears trickling down your cheeks. 
 
 To be an object of compassion to friends, of derision to foes; to be sus- 
 pected by strangers, stared at by fools ; to be esteemed dull when you cannot 
 be witty, to be applauded for witty when you know that you have been dull ; 
 to be called upon for the extemporaneous exercise of that faculty which no 
 premeditation can give ; to be spurred on to efforts which end in contempt ; 
 to be set on to provoke mirth which procures the procurer hatred; to give 
 pleasure and be paid with squinting malice ; to swallow draughts of life- 
 destroying wine which are to be distilled into airy breath to tickle vain 
 auditors ; to mortgage miserable morrows for nights of madness ; to waste 
 whole seas of time upon those who pay it back in little inconsiderable drops of 
 grudging applause, — are the wages of buffoonery and death. 
 
 Time, which has a sure stroke at dissolving all connections which have no 
 solider fastening than this liquid cement, more kind to me than my own taste 
 or penetration, at length opened my eyes to the supposed qualities of my first 
 friends. Xo trace of them is left but in the vices which they introduced, 
 and the habits they infixed. In them my friends survive still, and exercised 
 ample retribution for any supposed infidelity that I may have been guilty of 
 towards them. 
 
 My next more immediate companions were and are persons of such intrinsic 
 and felt worth, that though accidentally their acquaintance has proved perni- 
 cious to me, I do not know that if the thing were to do over again, I should 
 have the courage to eschew the mischief at the price of forfeiting the benefit. 
 I came to them reeking from the steams of my late over-heated notions of 
 companionship ; and the slightest fuel which they unconsciously afforded, was 
 sufficient to feed my own fires into a propensity. 
 
 They were no drinkers ; but one from professional habits, and another from 
 a custom derived from his father, smoked tobacco. The devil could not have 
 
 Q * 
 
45 8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 devised a more subtle trap to re-take a backsliding penitent. The transition, 
 from gulping down draughts of liquid fire to puffing out innocuous blasts of 
 dry smoke, was so like cheating him. But he is too hard for us when we hope 
 to commute. He beats us at barter; and when we think to set off a new 
 failing against an old infirmity, 'tis odds but he puts the trick upon us of two 
 for one. That (comparatively) white devil of tobacco brought with him in the 
 end seven worse tlian himself. 
 
 It were impertinent to carry the reader through all the processes lay which, 
 from smoking at first with malt liquor, I took my degrees through thin wines, 
 through stronger wine and watfr, through small punch, to those juggUng 
 compositions, which, under the name of mixed liquors, slur a great deal of 
 brandy or other poison under less and less water continually, until they come 
 next to none, and so to none at all. But it is hateful to disclose the secrets of 
 my Tartarus. 
 
 I should repel my readers, from a mere incapacity of believing me, were I to 
 tell them what tobacco has been to me, the drudging service which I have 
 paid, the slavery which I have vowed to it. How, when I have resolved to 
 quit it, a feeling as of ingratitude has started up ; how it has put on personal 
 claims and made the demands . of a friend upon me. How the reading of it 
 casually in a book, as where Adam takes his whiff in the chimney-comer of 
 some inn in Joseph Andrews, or Piscator in the Complete Angler breaks his 
 fast upon a morning pipe in that delicate room Piscatoribus Sacrum, has in a 
 moment broken down the resistance of weeks. How a pipe was ever in my 
 midnight path before me, till the vision forced me to realize it, — how then its 
 ascending vapours curled, its fragrance lulled, and the thousand dehcious 
 ministerings conversant about it, employing every faculty, extracted the sense 
 of pain. How from illuminating it came to darken, from a quick solace it 
 turned to a negative relief, thence to a restlessness and dissatisfaction, thence 
 to a positive misery. How, even now, when the whole secret stands confessed 
 in all its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself linked to it beyond the power 
 
 of revocation. Bone of my bone 
 
 Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of their actions, to reckon 
 up the countless nails that rivet the chains of habit, or perhaps being bound 
 by none so obdurate as those I have confessed to, may recoil from this as from an 
 overcharged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, which in spite of 
 protesting friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, chains down many 
 a poor fellow, of no original indisposition to goodness, to his pipe and his pot. 
 I have seen a print after Correggio, in which three female figures are minis- 
 tering to a man who sits fast bound at the root of a tree. Sensuality is 
 soothing him. Evil Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repugnance at the 
 same instant of time is applying »a snake to his side. In his face is feeble 
 delight, the recollection of past rather than perception of present pleasures, 
 languid enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic effeminacy, 
 a submission to bondage, the springs of the will gone down like a broken 
 clock, the sin and the suffering co-instantaneous, or the latter forerunning the 
 former, remorse preceding action— all this represented in one point of time.— 
 When I saw this, I admired the wonderful skill of the painter. But when I 
 went away, I wept, because I thought of my own condition. 
 
 Of that there is no hope that it should ever change. The waters have gone 
 over me. But out of the black depths, could I be heard I would cry out to 
 all those who have but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could the youth, to 
 whom the flavour of his first wine is delicious as the opening scenes of life or 
 the entering upon some newly-discovered paradise, look into my desolation,- 
 and be made to understand what a dreary thing it is when a man shall feel 
 himself going down a precipice with open eyes and a passive will,— to see his 
 destruction and have no power to stop it, and yet to feel it all the way 
 
Elia: Confessions of a Drunkard. 459 
 
 emanating from himself; to perceive all goodness emptied oiU of him, and yet 
 not to be able to forget a time when it was otherwise ; to bear about the piteoiiS' 
 spectacle of his own self-niin : — could he see my fevered eye, feverish with last 
 night's drinking, and feverishly looking for this night's repetition of the folly ; 
 could he feel the body of the death out of which 1 cry hourly with feebler and 
 feebler outcry to be delivered, — it were enough to make him dash the sparkling 
 beverage to the earth in all the pride of its mantling temptation ; to make him 
 clasp his teeth, 
 
 and not undo 'em 
 To suffer wet damnation to run thro' 'em : 
 
 Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be that fine thing 
 you would have us to understand, if the comforts of a cool brain are to be pre- 
 ferred to that state of heated excitement which you describe and deplore, what 
 hinders in your instance that yoa do not return to those habits from which you 
 would induce others never to swerve ? if the blessing be worth preserving, is it 
 not worth recovering? 
 
 Recovering ! — O if a wish could transport me back to those days of youth, 
 when a draught from the next clear spring could slake any heats which summer 
 suns and youthful exercise had power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would 
 I return to thee, pure element, the drink of children and of child-lik& holy 
 hermit ! In my dreams 1 can sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling 
 over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. That which 
 refreshes innocence only makes me sick and faint. 
 
 But is there no middle way betwixt total abstinence and the excess which 
 kills you ? — For your sake, reader, and that you may never attain to my expe- 
 rience, with pain I must utter the dreadful truth, that there is none, none that 
 I can find. In my stage of habit, (I spealc not of habits less confirmed — for 
 some of them I believe the advice to be most prudential,) in the stage which I 
 have reached, to stop short of that measure which is sufficient to draw on 
 torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic sleep of the drunkard, is to have 
 taken none at all. The pain of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I 
 had rather the reader should believe on my credit, than know from his ow^ 
 trial. He will come to know it, whenever he shall arrive at that state in which, 
 paradoxical as it may appear, reason shall only visit him ihrougk intoxication ; 
 for it is a fearful truth that the intellectual faculties by repeated acts of intem- 
 perance may be driven from their orderly sphere of action, their clear daylight 
 ministries, until they shall be brought at last to depend, for the faint manifesta- 
 tion of their departing energies, upon the returning period of the fatal madness 
 to which they owe their devastation. The drinking man is never less himself 
 than during his sober intervals. Evil is so far his good. * 
 
 Behold me then, in the robust period of life, reduced to imbecility and 
 decay. Hear me count my gains, and the profits which I have derived from 
 the midnight cup. 
 
 Twelve years ago, I was possessed of a healthy frame of mind and body. I 
 was never strong, but, I think my constitution (for a weak one,) was as happily 
 exempt from the tendency to any malady as it was possible to be. I scarde knew 
 what it was to ail anything. Now, except when I am losing myself in a sea of 
 drink, I am never free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach, which 
 are so much worse to bear than any definite pains or aches. 
 
 At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the morning summer and 
 
 ^ When poor M painted his last picture, with a pencil in one trembling hand, and 
 
 a glas.s of brandy and water in the other, his fingers owed the comparative steadiness with 
 which they were enabled to go through their task in an imperfect manner, to a temporary- 
 firmness derived from a repetition of practices, the general effect of which had shaken 
 both them and him so terribly. 
 
460 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 winter. I awoke refreshed, and seldom without some merry thoughts in my 
 head, or some piece of a song to welcome the new-born day. Now, the first 
 feeling which besets me, after stretching out the hours of recumbence to their 
 last possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, 
 with a secret wish that I could have Iain on still, or never awaked. 
 
 Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the trouble, and 
 obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the day-time I stumble upon dark 
 mountains. 
 
 Business which, though never very particularly adapted to my nature, yet as 
 something of necessity to be gone through, and therefore best undertaken 
 with cheerfulness, \ used to enter upon with some degree of alacrity, now 
 wearies, affrights, perplexes me. I fancy all sorts of discouragements, and am 
 ready to give up an occupation which gives me bread, from a harassing conceit 
 of incapacity. The slightest commission given me by a friend, or any small 
 duty which I have to perform for myself, as giving orders to a tradesman, &c., 
 haunts me as a labour impossible to be got through. So much the springs of 
 action are broken. 
 
 The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse with mankind. I dare 
 not promise that a friend's honour, or his cause, would be safe in my keeping, 
 if I were put to the expense of any manly resolution in defending it. So much 
 the springs of moral action are deadened within me. ' 
 
 My favourite occupations in times past now cease to entertain. I can do 
 nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time kills me. This poor 
 abstract of my condition was penned at long intervals, with scarcely an attempt 
 at connexion of thought, which is now difficult to me. 
 
 The noble passages which formerly delighted me in history or poetic fiction, 
 now only draw a few tears allied to dotage. My broken and dispirited nature 
 seems to sink before anything great and admirable. 
 
 I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or none. It is inexpressible 
 how much this infirmity adds to a sense of shame, and a general feeUng of 
 deterioration. 
 
 These are some of the instances, concerning which I can say with truth that 
 it was not always so with me. 
 
 Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further? — or is this disclosure 
 sufficient? 
 
 I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to consult by these Con- 
 fessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, or heard seriously. Such 
 as they are, I commend them to the reader's attention, if he find his own case 
 any way touched. I have told him what I am come to. Let him stop in 
 time. 
 
 [Many are the sayings of Elia, painful and frequent his lucubrations, set 
 forth for the most part (such his modesty !) without a name ; scattered about in 
 obscure periodicals and forgotten miscellanies. From the dust of some of these 
 it is our intention occasionally to revive a tract or two that shall seem \yorthy 
 of a better fate, especially at a time like the present, when the pen of our indus- 
 trious contributor, engaged in a laborious digest of his recent Continental 
 tour, may happily want the leisure to expatiate in more miscellaneous specula- 
 tions. 'We have been induced, in the first instance, to reprint a thing which he 
 put forth in a friend's volume some years since, entitled "The Confessions of a 
 Drunkard," seeing that Messieurs the Quarterly Reviewers have chosen to enri- 
 bellish their last dry pages with fruitful quotations therefrom ; adding, from their 
 peculiar brains, the gratuitous affirmation, that they have reason to beheve that 
 the describer (in his delineations of a drunkard, forsooth !) partly sat for his 
 own picture. The truth is, that our friend had been reading among the essays 
 of a contemporary, who has perversely been confounded with him, a paper in 
 which Edax (or the Great Eater) humorously complaineth of an inordinate 
 
Elia: Confessions of a Drunkard. 461 
 
 appetite ; and it struck him that a better paper — of deeper interest and wider 
 usefulness — might be made out of the imagined experiences of a Great Drinker. 
 Accordingly he set to work, and with that mock fervour and counterfeit 
 earnestness with which he is too apt to over-realize his descriptions, has given 
 us— a frightful picture indeed, but no more resembling the man Elia than the 
 fictitious Edax may be supposed to identify himself with Mr. L., its author. 
 It is indeed a compound extracted out of his long observations of the effects of 
 drinking upon all the world about him ; and this accumulated mass of misery 
 he hath centred (as the custom is with judicious essayists) in a single figure. 
 We deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have passed into the 
 picture (as who, that is not a washy fellow, but must at some time have felt the 
 after-operation of a too generous cup ?) ; but then how heightened ! how exag- 
 gerated ! how little within the sense of the Review, where a part, in their 
 slanderous usage, must be understood to stand for the whole ! But it is useless 
 to expostulate with this Quarterly shme, brood of Hilus, watery heads with 
 hearts of jelly, spawned under the sign of Aquarius, incapable of Bacchus, and 
 therefrom cold, washy, spiteful, bloodless. Elia shall string them up one day, 
 and show their colours, — or, rather how colourless and vapid the whole fry, — 
 when he putteth forth his long promised, but unaccountably hitherto delayed, 
 " Confessions of a Water-Drinker. '.' 
 
 (The London Magazine, January, 1823.) 
 
 The Old Year being dead, and the New Year coming of age, which he does, 
 by Calendar I-aw, as soon as the breath is out of the old gentleman s body, 
 nothing would serve the young spark but he must give a dinner upon the 
 occasion, to which all the Days in the year were invited. The Festivals, 
 whom he deputed as his stewards, were mightily taken with the notion. Ihey 
 had been engaged time out of mind, they said, in providing mirth and good 
 cheer for mortals below; and it was time they should have a taste of their 
 own bounty. It was stiffly debated among them, whether the Fasts should be 
 admitted. Some said, the appearance of such lean, starved guests, with their 
 mortified faces, would pervert the ends of the meeting. _ But the objection was 
 over-ruled by Christmas Day, who had a design, upon /<sh Wednesday (as you 
 shall hear), and a mighty desire to see how the old Domine would behave 
 himself ?n his cups. Only the Vigils were requested to come with their 
 lanterns, to hght the gentlefolks home at night. .^ , , .. < , a 
 
 AU the Day! came to their day. Covers were provided for three hundred 
 and sixty-five guests at the principal table ; with an occasional knife and fork 
 at the side-board for the TweniyNtnth of February. ^ . , _, 
 
 I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been issued. The car- 
 riers were the Hours ; twelve little, merry, whirligig foot-pages, as you snonld 
 desire to see that went all round, and found out the persons invited well 
 
462 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 enough, with the exception of Easter Da)i, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such , 
 Movables, who had lately shifted their quarters. I 
 
 Well, they all met at last, foul Days, iine Days, all sorts of Days, and a 
 rare din they made of it. There was nothing but, Hail ! fellow Day, — well 
 met — brother £>«;/— sister Day, —only Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and 
 seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said Twelfth Day cut her out and out, 
 for she came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake, all 
 royal, glittering and Epiphanous. The rest came, some in green, some in 
 white — but old Lent and his family were not yet out of mourning, Rainj 
 Days came in, dripping ; and sun-shiny Days helped them to change their 
 stockings. Wedding Day was there in his marriage finery, a little the worse 
 for wear. Pay Day came late, as he always does ; and Dooms-day sent word-^ 
 he might be expected. 
 
 April Fool (as my young lord's jester) took upon himself to marshal the 
 guests, and wild work he made with it. It would have posed old Erra Paler 
 to have found out any given Day in the year, to erect a scheme upon— good 
 Days, bad Days, were so shuffled together, to the confounding of all sober 
 horoscopy. 
 
 He had stuck the Twenty First of June next to the Twenty Second of 
 December, and the former looked like a Maypole siding a marrow-bone. Ash 
 Wednesday got wedged in (as was concerted) betwixt Christmas and Lord 
 Mayor's Day. Lord ! how he laid about him ! Nothing but barons of beef 
 and turkeys would go down with him — to the great greasing and detriment of 
 his new sackcloth bib and tucker. And still Christmas Day was at his elbow, 
 plying him with the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and hicctfpped, and protested 
 there was no faith in dried ling, but commended it to the devil for a sour, 
 windy, acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit-critical mess, and no dish for 
 a gentleman. Then he dipped his fist into the middle of the great custard 
 that stood before his left-hand neighbour, and daubed his himgry beard all 
 over with it, till you would have taken him for the Last Day in December, it 
 so hung in icicles. 
 
 At another part of the table. Shrove Tuesday was helping the Second of 
 September to some cock broth,— which courtesy the latter returned with the 
 delicate thigh of a hen pheasant — so there was no love lost for that matter. 
 The Last of Lent was spunging upon Shrovetides pancakes; which April 
 Fool perceiving, told him he did well, for pancakes were proper to a good fry- 
 day. 
 
 In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth of January, who it 
 seems, being a sour puritanic character, that thought nobody's meat good or 
 sanctified enough for him, had smuggled into the room a calf s head, which 
 he had had cooked at home .for that purpose, thinking to feast thereon incon- 
 tinently; but as it lay in the dish, March Manyweathers, who is a very fine 
 lady, and subject to the megrims, screamed out there was a "human head in 
 the platter," and raved about Herodias's daughter to that degree, that the ob- 
 noxious viand was obliged to be removed ; nor did she recover her stomach till 
 she had gulped down a Restorative, confected of Oalt Apple, which the merry 
 Twenty Ninth of May always carries about with him for that purpose. 
 
 The King's health * being called for after this, a notable dispute arose between 
 ih^ , Twelfth of August (a zealous old Whig gentlewoman) and the Twenty \ 
 Third of April (a new-fangled lady of the Tory stamp), as to which of them ; 
 should have the honour to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter, 
 affirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to have Iain with her, till her 
 rival had basely supplanted her ; whom she represented as little better than a 
 kept mistress, who went about in/«e clothes, while she (the legitimate Birth- 
 day) had scarcely a rag, &c. 
 
 * The late King. 
 
Elia : New Year's mning of Age. 463 
 
 April Fool, being made mediator, couhrmraT (lie right in the strongest form 
 of words to the appellant, but decided fcii peace' sake that the exercise of it 
 should remam with the present posscsjior. At the same time, he slyly 
 rounded the first lady in the ear, that an uctiou might lie against the Crown 
 iox bi-geny. 
 
 It beginning to grow a little duskish, Cu7iaUma^ lustily bawled out for lights, 
 which was opposed by all the Days, who pn Jtiisted against burning daylight. 
 Then fair water was handed round in silvei ewers, and the same lady was 
 observed to take an unusual time in Washing herself 
 
 May Day, with that sweetness which is peouliai to her, in a neat speech pro- 
 posing the health of the founder, crowned her giiblet (and by her example the 
 rest of the company) with garlands. This being done, the lordly New Year 
 from the upper end of the table, in a cordial 1 lut somewhat lofty tone, returned 
 thanks. He felt proud on an occasion oJ meeting so many of his worthy 
 fathers late tenants, promised to improve their farms, and at the same time 
 to abate (if anything was found unreajonal pie) in their rents. 
 
 At the mention of this, the four Quarto Dayi involuntarily looked at each 
 other and smiled ; y4//-;/ i^oo/ whistled to nn old tune of "New Brooms;" 
 and a surly old rebel at the farther end oi Hit I able (who was discovered to be 
 no other than the Fifth of November) mufleied cut, distinc*' enough to be 
 heard by the whole company, words to this <-.fleit that " when ilie old one is 
 gone, he is a fool that looks for a better." Which rudeness of his, the guests 
 resenting, unanimously voted his expulsion ; and the mal-content was thrust 
 out neck and heels into the cellar, as the properest place for St. jh a boutefeu 
 and firebrand as he had shown himself to be. 
 
 Order bemg restored— the young lord (who to say truth, had been a little 
 ruffled, and put beside his oratorj^) in as few, and yet as obliging words as pos- 
 sible, assured them of entire welcome ; and, with a graceful turn, singling out 
 poor Twenty Ninth of Februaiy , that had sate all this while mum-chance at 
 the side-board, begged to couple his health with that of the good company 
 before him— which he drank accordingly; observing that he had not seen his 
 honest face any time these four years, with a number of endearing expressions 
 besides. At the same time, removing the solitary Day from the forlorn seat 
 which had been assigned him, he stationed him at his own board, somewhere 
 between the Greek Calends and Latter Lammas. 
 
 Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, with his eyes fast stuck 
 in his head, and as well as the Canary he had swallow(ed would give him leave, 
 struck up a Carol, which Chrhtmas Day had taught him for the nonce ; and 
 was followed by the latter who gave " Miserere" in fine style, hitting off the 
 mumping notes and lengthened drawl of Old Mortification with infinite 
 humour. April Fool swore they had exchanged conditions ; but Good 
 Friday was observed to look extremely grave ; and Sunday held her fan 
 before her face, that she might not be seen to smile. 
 
 Shrovetide, Lord Mayors Day, and April Fool, next joined in a glee— 
 
 Which is the properest day to drink ? 
 
 in which all the Days chiming in made a merry burden. 
 
 They next fell to quibbles and conundrums. The question being proposed, 
 who had the greater number of followers— the Quarter Days said there could 
 be no question as to that ; for they had all the creditors in the world dogging 
 their heels. But April Fool gave it in favour of the Forty Days before Easter ; 
 because the debtors in all cases outnumbered the creditors, and they kept lent 
 all the year. , , , . ^ , . 
 
 All this while, Valentines Day kept courtmg pretty May, who sate next him, 
 slipping amorous billets-doux under the table, till the Dog Days (who are 
 
464 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 naturally of a warm constitution) began io be jealous, and to bark and rage ex- 
 ceedingly. April Fool, who likes a bit of sport above measure, and had some 
 pretensions to the lady besides, as being but a cousin once removed, — clapped 
 and hallooed them on ; and as fast as their indignation cooled, those mad 
 wags, the Ember Days, were at it with their bellows, to blow it into a flame ; 
 and all was in a ferment : till old Madame Heptuagedma (who boasts herself the 
 Mother of the Days) wisely diverted the conversation with a tedious tale of the 
 lovers which she could reckon when she was young ; and of one Master Roga- 
 tion Day in particular, who was for ever putting the question to her ; but she 
 kept him at a distance, as the chronicle would tell — by which I apprehend she 
 meant the Almanack. Then she rambled on to the Days that were gone, the 
 good old Days, and so to the Days before the Flood— yih\c\\ plainly showed her 
 old head to be little better than crazed and doited. 
 
 Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks and great-coats, and took 
 their leaves. Lord Mayor s Day went off in a Mist, as usual ; Shortest Day 
 in a deep black Fog. that wrapped the little gentleman all round like a hedge- 
 hog. Two Vi!jtls—so watchmen are called in heaven — saw Christmas Day 
 safe home — they had been used to the business before. Another Vigil— 3. 
 stout, sturdy patrole, called Eiie of St. Christoplier — seeing Ash Wednesday 
 in a condition little better than he should be — e'en whipped him over his 
 shoulders, pick-a-back fashion, and Old Mortification went floating home, 
 singing— 
 
 On the bat's back do I fly, 
 
 and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk and sober, but very few 
 Aves or Penitentiaries (you may believe me) were among them. Longest Day 
 set oif westward in beautiful crimson and gold — the rest, some in one fashion, 
 some in another; but Valentine and pretty May took their departure together 
 in one of the prettiest silvery twilights a Lover's Day could wish to set in. 
 
 {^he London Magazine, March, 1823,) 
 
 I H.WE an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any 
 great house, I inquire for th e china-clnsct anH nfvt fnr tv^- picture-gallery. I 
 cannot defend the order of preference, but by saying, that we have all Bbme 
 taste or other , of too an cient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly in aT" 
 It was an acquired one. i can call to mind the first play and the first exhlbi- 
 tion,"tSal 1 w'as taken to ; but I am not conscious of a time when china jars 
 and saucers were introduced into my imagination. 
 
 I had no repugnance then— why should 1 now have?— to those little law- 
 less, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women, 
 float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that worid before p ers pective— 
 a china tea-cup. ■ ~ 
 
 I like to see my old friends— whom distance cannot diminish— figuring up in 
 the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still— for so we must 
 
Elia: Old Cliina. 465 
 
 in courtesy interpret that speck of deep blue, which the decorous artist, to 
 prevent absurdity, has made to spring up beneath their sandals. 
 
 I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if possible, with still 
 more womanish expressions. 
 
 Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver — 
 two miles oft", b ee how distance -seems to set off respect ! And here the same 
 lady, or another^for likeness is identity on tea-cups — is stepping into a little 
 fairy boat, moored on the other side of this calm garden river, with a dainty 
 mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) 
 must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead — a furlong off on the 
 other side of the same strange stream ! 
 
 Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of their world — see horses, trees, 
 pagodas, dancing the hays. 
 
 Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive — so objects show, seen 
 through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay. 
 
 1 was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson (which we are old- 
 fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon), some of Wi^'i^ spcciosa 
 mirdcuUi upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent purchase) which 
 we were now for the first timeusing ; and could not help remarking, how favour- 
 able circumstances had been to us of late years, that we could afford to please 
 the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort— when a passing sentiment seemed to 
 over-shade the brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting these summer 
 iJs^louds in Bridget. 
 
 " I wish tlie good old times would come again," she said, " when we were 
 not quite so rich. I do not mean, that 1 want to be poor ; but there was a 
 middle state ; " — so she was pleased to ramble on, — " in which [ am sure we 
 were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have 
 money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we 
 coveted a cheap luxury (and, O ! how much ado I had to .get you to consent in 
 those times !) we were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to 
 weigh the for and agaitist, and think what we might spare it out of, and what 
 saving we could hit upon, that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth 
 buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it. 
 
 "Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till 
 all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare— and all because 
 of tha t folio Fteanmnnt and Fletcher , which you dragged home late at night 
 from Barker 's'i n Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks 
 before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a 
 determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set 
 off from Islington, fearing you should be too late— and when the old bookseller 
 with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was 
 setting bedwards) lighted out the*-elic from his dusty treasures— and when you 
 lugged it home, wishing it were twice as-c- m n beraomo— and when you presented 
 it to me— and when we were exploring the perfectness of it jirg//g/<»f you called 
 it)— and while 1 was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your 
 impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak— was there no pleasure in 
 being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes which you wear now, and 
 are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give 
 you half the honest vanity, with which you flaunted it about in tUat^ver-worn 
 suit— your old corbeau— for four or five weeks longer than you should have 
 done, to pacify your'cbnscience for the mighty sum^offifteen— or sixteen 
 chiipngg wR|g-i^ ?— " great aff^''' ^^ thought it then-whidijratl liud laviilieel-e«- 
 the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do 
 not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now. 
 
 " "When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number 
 of shillings upon that print after Leonardo, which we christened the ' Lady 
 
466 The Works of Charles Lamb. 1 
 
 1 
 
 Blanche ; ' when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money— and \ 
 thought of the money, and looked again at the picture— was there no pleasure j 
 , in being a poor man ? Now, you have nothing to do but to walk mto Colnaghis, [ 
 and buy a wilderness of Leonardos. Yet do you? | 
 
 " Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter's Bar, , 
 and_Waltham, when we had ahal!day.:;^llQUitey s^ and all other fun, are go ne, f 
 now!weraEeT3SlI=aii'd'tHe little hand-basket m which 1 used to deposit our days r 
 lare ol savoury cold lamb and salad — and how you would pry about at noon- t 
 tide for some decent house, where we might go in, and produce our store— only [ 
 paying for the ale that you must call for — and speculate upon the looks of the 
 landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a table-cloth— and wish for 
 such another honest hostess, as Izaak Walton has described many a one on the 
 pleas ant banks of the Lea, jyi jfilijje went a-hshing— ana juniLlllfllJi ihcy would 
 "prove obliging enough, and~sometime?'rlli?y"w'OBl4-look grudgingly upon us — 
 but we had cheerful* looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food 
 savourily, scarcely grudging Piscator his Troiit Hall ? Now, when we go out 
 a day's pleasuring, which is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way — and go 
 into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense — 
 which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when 
 we were at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a preca rious welcome. 
 
 "You are too proud to see a play anywhere now Dur'1im!tfe pit. Do you 
 remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw the Battle of H exham, 
 and the Surrender of C^alais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the ChiLiren m 
 Uie_^k;,ooil=^when we squeS~2edDut out- shillings-a-pieee-to-SirTR'ree'of'iour times 
 m a season in the one-shilling gallery — where you felt all the time that you 
 ought not to have brought me— and more strongly I felt obligation to you for 
 having brought me^and the pleasure was the better for a little shame— and, 
 when the curtain drew'up, what cared we for our place in the house, or what 
 mattered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts w'ere with Rosalind in 
 Arden^or with 'Viola-at-th»-6e urt of Illyria? You used to say, that the gallery 
 was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially— that the relish of such 
 exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going— that the com- 
 pany we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend 
 the more, and did attend, to what was going on, on the stage— because a word 
 lost would have been a chasm, which it was impossible for them to fill up. 
 ■With such reflections we consoled our pride then— and I appeal to you, 
 whether, as a woman, I met generally with less attention and accommodation, 
 than I have done since in more expensive situations in the house ? The getting 
 in indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad enough, 
 — but there was still a law of civility to women recognized to quite as great an 
 extent as we ever found in the other passages— and how a httle difficulty over- 
 come heightened the snug seat, and the play, afterwards ! Now we can only 
 pay our money, and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the galleries now. 
 I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then— but sight, and all, I 
 think, is gone with our poverty. 
 
 ' ' 'There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they became quite 
 common— in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear — to have them for 
 a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we were to treat 
 ourselves now — that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it would be 
 selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond 
 what the actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat — when two 
 people Uving together, as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in 
 a cheap luxury, which both hke ; while each apologizes, and is willing to take 
 both halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making 
 much of themselves in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how 
 to make much of others. But now— what I mean by the word— we never do 
 
Elia: Old China. 467 
 
 make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the 
 veriest poo r of all, but persons as we were, just above poverty. 
 
 "I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the end 
 of the year to make all meet — and much ado we used to have every Thirty- 
 first Night of December to account for our exceedings — many a long face did 
 you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to malie it out how 
 we had spent so much — or that we had not spent so much— or that it was im- 
 possible we should spend so much next year — and still we found our slender 
 capital decreasing — but then, betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of 
 one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without that 
 for the future— and the hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which 
 you were never poor till now) , we pocketed up oiir loss, and in conclusion, 
 with ' lusty brimmers ' (as you used to quote it out of hearty cheerful Mr. 
 Cotton^ as you called him), we used to welcome- in the ' coming guest.' Now 
 we have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year — no flattering promises 
 about the new year doing better for us." 
 
 " Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions, that when she gets 
 into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, how- 
 ever, smiling at the phantom of wealth whicli her dear imagination had con- 
 jured up out of a clear income of poor — hundred pounds a year. "It is true 
 we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. 
 I am afraiid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the super- 
 flax into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to 
 struggle with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. 
 It strengthened, and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what 
 we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you 
 now complain of The resisting power — those natural dilations of the youthful 
 it, which circumstances cannot straiten — with us are long since passed 
 away. Competence tQ ^gff niis.., siip.pl'?'^'>ntafFy — youth-; a sorry supplement 
 indeed, but 1 tear the Best that is to be had. We must ride where we formerly 
 walked : live better and lie softer — and shall be wise to do so — than we had 
 means to do in those good old days you speak of Yet could those days 
 return — could you and I once more walk our thirty miles a-day — could 
 Ban nister and Mrs. Bl and again be young, and you and I be young to see 
 THem — could the good "old one-Shilling gallery days return — they are dreams, 
 my cousin, now — but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet 
 argument, by our well carpeted fire-side, sitting on this luxurious sofa — be once 
 more struggling up those inconvenient staircases, pushed about, and squeezed, 
 and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers — could I once 
 more hear those anxious shrieks of yours — and the delicious Thank Cod, we 
 are safe, which alwaj'S followed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the 
 first light of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us— I know not the 
 fathom line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury 
 
 more wealth in than Croesus had, or the great Jew R is supposed to have, 
 
 to purchase it. And now do jiist look at that merry little Chinese waiter 
 holding an umbrella, big enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty 
 insipid half-Madonna-ish chit,of a lady in that very blue summer-house." 
 
 spiri 
 p» '^ awa 
 
468 Tlie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ^00r §lclHfmns. 
 
 f! {The London Magazine^ May, 1823.) 
 
 \ ♦♦■ - 
 
 A POOR relation — is the most irrelevant thing in nature, —a piece of imperti- 
 nent correspondency, — an odious approximation, — a haunting conscience, — a 
 preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity, — an un- 
 welcome remembrancer, — a perpetually recurring mortification, — a drain on 
 your purse, — a more intolerable dun upon your pride, — a drawback upon 
 success, — a rebuke to your rising, — a stain in your blood, — a blot on your 
 'scutcheon, — a rent in your garment, — a death's head at your banquet, — 
 Agathocles' pot, — a Mordecai in your gate, — a Lazarus at your door, — a lion 
 in your path, — a frog in your chamber, — a fly in your ointment, — a mote in 
 your eye,— a triumph to your enemy,— an apology to your friends, — the one 
 thing not needful,— the hail in harvest, — the ounce of sour in a pound of 
 sweet. 
 
 He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you " That is Mr. ." A 
 
 rap, between familiarity and respect ; that demands, and, at the same time, 
 seems to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling, and — embarrassed. 
 He holdeth out his hand to you to shalie, and draweth it back again. He 
 casually looketh in about dinner time— when the table is full. He offereth to 
 go away, seeing you have company — but is induced to stay. He fiUeth a chair, 
 and your visitor's two children are accommodated at a side table. He never 
 Cometh upon open days, when your wife says with some complacency, "My 
 
 dear, perhaps IVIr. will drop in to-day." He remembreth birthdays— and 
 
 professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against 
 fish, the turbot being small— yet sufferetli himself to be importuned into a slice 
 against his first resolution. He sticketh by the port — yet will be prevailed 
 upon to empty the remamder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. 
 He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not 
 civil enough, to him. The guests think " they have seen him before." Every 
 one speculateth upon his condition ; and the most part take him to be— a tide- 
 waiter. He calleth you by your Christian name,' to imply that his other is the 
 same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish hfe had less 
 diffidence. With half the familiarity he might pass for a casual dependent ; 
 with more boldness he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. 
 He is too humble for a friend, yet laketh on him more state than befits a client. 
 He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent 
 —yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, that your guests take him for 
 one. He is asked to make one at the whist table ; refuses on the score of 
 poverty, and— resents being left out. When the company break up, he 
 proffereth to go for a coach — and lets the servant go. He recollects your 
 grandfather ; and will thrust in some mean, and quite unimportant anecdote 
 of— the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as " he is 
 blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to institute what he 
 calleth — favourable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation, he 
 v/ill inquire the price of your furniture ; and insults you with a special com- 
 mendation of your window -curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the 
 more elegant shape, but, after all, there was something more comfortable about 
 
Elia: Poor Relations. 
 
 469 
 
 the old tea-kettle-which you must remember. He dare say you must find a 
 great convenience m havmg a carriage of your own, and appealeth to vour 
 lady ,f It .s not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on ve lura ye"- 
 and d.d not know till lately, that such-and-such had been the crest rf die 
 family. His memory is unseasonable ; his compliments perverse • his talk a 
 trouble; his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his 
 chair mto a corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two 
 nuisances. / »i^* ui lwu 
 
 There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is-a female Poor Relation 
 You may do something with the other; you may pass him off tolerably well- 
 but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. "He is an old humourist," voii 
 may say, and affects to go threadbare. His' circumstances are better than 
 fo&s would take them to be. You are fond of having a Character at your 
 table, and truly he is one. But in the indications of female poverty there can 
 be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth 
 
 must out without shuffling. ■' She is plainly related to the L s ■ or what 
 
 does she at their house ? " She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin Nine 
 times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something between 
 a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently predominates She is 
 most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority He 
 may require to be repressed sometimes— «/;V///ff«rfo sufflaminandai erai—hwt 
 there is no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped 
 
 --after the gentlemen. Mr. requests the honour of taking wine with her ■ 
 
 she hesitates between Port and Madeira, and chooses the former— because he 
 does. She calls the servant Sir; and insists on not troubling him to hold her 
 plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The children's governess takes upon 
 her to correct her, when she has mistaken the piano for a harpsichord. 
 
 Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable instance of the disadvantages, 
 to which this chimerical notion of affinity constUutin^ a claim to acipuiini- 
 ance, may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish blood is all that 
 is betwixt him and a lady with a great estate. His stars are perpetually 
 crossed by the mahgnant maternity of an old woman, who persists in calling 
 him "her son Dick." But she has wherewithal in the end to recompense his 
 indignities, and float him again upon the brilliant surface, under which it had 
 been her seeming business and pleasure all along to sink him. AH men, 
 besides, are not of Dick's temperament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who,' 
 
 wanting Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W was of my own standing 
 
 at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth of promise. If he had a blemish, it was 
 too much pride; but its quality was inoffensive; it was not of that sort which 
 hardens the heart, and serves to keep inferiors at a distance ; it only sought to 
 ward off derogation from itself. It was the principle of self-respect carried as 
 far as it could go, without infringing upon that-respect which he would have 
 every one else equally maintain for himSelf. He would have you to think alike 
 with him on this topic. Many a quarrel have I had with him, when we were 
 rather older boys, and our tallness made us more obnoxious to observation in 
 the blue clothes, because I would not thread the alleys and blind ways of the 
 town with him to elude notice, when we have been out together on "a hohday in 
 
 the streets of this sneering and prying metropolis. W went, sore with 
 
 these notions, to Oi;ford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar's life, 
 meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, wrought in him a passionate 
 devotion to the place, with a profound aversion from the society. The servitor's 
 gown (worse than his school array) clung to him with Nessian venom. He 
 thought himself ridiculous in a garb, under which Latimer must have walked 
 erect ; and in which Hooker, in his young days, possibly flaunted in a vein of 
 no discommendable vanity. In the depth of college shades, or in his lonely 
 chamber, the poor stjident shrunk from observation. He found shelter among 
 
47° The Works of Charles Laml. 
 
 books, which insult "not ; and studies, that ask no questions of a youth's finances. 
 He was lord of his library, and seldom cared for looking out beyond his 
 domains. The heahng influence of studious pursuits was upon him, to soothe 
 and to abstract. He was almost a healthy man; when tjie waywardness of his 
 fate broke out against him with a second and worse malignity. The father of 
 
 W had hitherto exercised the humble profession of house-painter at N , 
 
 near Oxford. A supposed interest with some of the heads of colleges, had 
 now induced him to take up his abode in that city, with the hopes of being 
 employed upon some public works which were talked of. From that moment 
 I read in the countenance of the young man, the determination which at length 
 tore him from academical pursuits for ever. To a person unacquainted with 
 pur Universities, the distance between the gownsmen and the townsmen, as 
 tliey are called— the trading part of the latter especially— is carried to an excess 
 
 that would appear harsh and incredible. The temperament of W 's father 
 
 was diametrically the reverse of his own. Old W was a little, busy, 
 
 cringing tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, would stand bowing and 
 scraping, cap in hand, to anything that wore the semblance of a gown— insen- 
 sible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the young man, to whose 
 chamber-fellow, or equal in standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and 
 
 gratuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not last. W must 
 
 change the air of Oxford or be suffocated. He chose the former; and let the 
 sturdy moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as liigh as they can 
 bear, censure the dereliction ; he cannot estimate the struggle. I stood with 
 
 W , the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of his paternal 
 
 dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading from tlie High Street to the back of 
 
 college, where W kept his rooms. He seemed thoughtful, and 
 
 more reconciled. I ventured to rally him — finding him in a better mood — upon 
 a representation of the Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose affairs 
 were beginning to flourish, had caused to be set up in a splendid sort of frame, 
 over his really handsome shop, either as a token of prosperity, or badge of 
 
 gratitude to his saint. W looked up at the Luke, and, like Satan, "knew 
 
 his mounted sign— and fled." A letter on his father's table the next morning, 
 announced that he had accepted a commission in a regiment about to embark 
 for Portugal. He was among the first who perished before the walls of 
 St. Sebastian. 
 
 I do not know how, upon a subject which I began with treating half seriously, 
 I should have fallen upon a recital so eminently painful ; but this theme of 
 poor relationship is replete with so much matter for tragic, as well as comic 
 associations, that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending. 
 The earliest impressions which I received on this matter, are certainly not 
 attended with anything painful, or very humiliating, in the recalling. At my 
 father's table (no very splendid one) was to be found, every Saturday, the 
 mysterious figure of an aged gentleman clothed in neat black, of a sad yet 
 comely appearance. His deportment was of the essence of gravity ; his wqrds 
 few or none ; and I was not to make a noise in his presence. I had little inclina- 
 tion to have done so— for my cue was to admire in silence. A particular 
 elbow chair'was appropriated to him, which was in no case to be violated. A 
 peculiar sort of sweet pudding, which appeared on no other occasion, distin- 
 guished the days of his cqming. I used to thmk him a prodigiously rich 
 man. All I could make out of him was, that he and my father had been 
 schoolfellows a world ago at Lincoln, and that he came from the Mint. The 
 Mint I knew to be a place where all the money was coined— and I thought he 
 was the owner of all that money. Awful ideas efthe Tower twined them- .' 
 selves about his presence. He seemed above human infirmities and passions. ' 
 A sort of melancholy grandeur invested him. From some inexplicable doom 
 I fancied him obliged to go about in an eternal suit of mourning ; a captive — 
 
Elia: Poor Relations. 471 
 
 a stately being, let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have I wondered 
 at the temerity of my father, who, in spite of an habitual general respect which 
 we all in common manifested towards him, would venture now and then to 
 stand up against liim in some argument, touching their youthful days. The 
 houses of the ancient city of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) 
 between the dwellers on the hill, and in the valley. This marked distinction 
 formed an obvious division between the boys who lived above (however brought 
 together in a common school) and'the boys whose paternal residence was on 
 the plain ; a sufficient cause of hostility in the code of these young Grotiuses. 
 My father had been a leading Mountaineer ; and would still maintain the 
 general superiority, in skill and hardihood, of the Above Boys {his own faction) 
 over the Below Boys (so were they called), of which party his contemporary had 
 been a chieftain. Many and hot were the skirmishes on this topic— the only 
 one upon which the old gentleman was ever brought out— and bad blood 
 bred; even sometimes almost to the recommencement (so i expected) of 
 actual hostilities. But my father, who scorned to insist upon advantages, 
 generally contri\-ed lo turn the conversation upon some adroit by-commenda- 
 tion of the old Minster ; in the general preference of which, before all other 
 cathedrals in the island, the dweller on tlie hill, and the plain-born, could meet 
 on a conciliating level, and lay down their less important differences. Once 
 only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and I remember with anguish the 
 thought that came over me : " Perhaps he will never come here again." He 
 had been pressed to take another plate of the viand, which I have already 
 mentioned as the indispensable concomitant of his visits. He had refused, 
 with a resistance amounting to rigour — when my aunt, an old Lincolnian, but 
 who had something of this, in common with my cousin Bridget, that she woutd 
 sometimes press civility out of season — uttered the following memorable 
 application — " Do take another slice, Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding 
 every day." — The old gentleman said nothing at the time — but he took occasion 
 in the course of the evening, when some argument had intervened between 
 I them, to utter with an emphasis which chilled the company, and which chills 
 I me now as I write it — "Woman you are superannuated." John Billet did not 
 I survive long after the digesting of this affi-ont ; blit he survived long enough to 
 ! assure me that peace was actually restored ! and, if T remember aright, another 
 S pudding was discreetly substituted in the place of that which had occasioned 
 ' the offence. He died at the Mint (.■^nno 1781) where he had long held, what 
 he accounted, a comfortable independence ; and with five pounds, fourteen 
 shiUings, and a penny, which were found in his escrutoire after his decease, 
 left the world, blessing God that he had enough to bury him, and that he had 
 never been obliged to any man for a sixpence. This was— a Poor Relation. 
 
 {The London Magazine, June, 1823.) 
 
 I CHANCED upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a dream the other 
 night, that you shall hear of. I had been reading the "Loves of the Angels," 
 and went to bed with my head full of speculations suggested by that extra- 
 ordinary legend. It had given birth to innumerable conjectures ; and, I 
 
472 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 remember, the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow, 
 was a sort of wonder, "what could come of it." 
 
 I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could scarcely make out— but 
 to some celestial region. It was not the real heavens neither — not the down- 
 right Bible heaven — but a kind of fairyland heaven, about which a poor 
 human fancy may have leave to sport and air itself, 1 will hopes without 
 presumption. 
 
 Methought — what wild things dreams are !— I was present— at what would 
 you imagine ? — at an angel's gossiping. 
 
 Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it come, or whether it came 
 purely of its own head, neither you nor I know— but there lay, sure enough, 
 wrapt in its little cloudy swaddhng bands— a Child Angel. ! 
 
 Sun-threads — filmy beams— ran through the celestial napery of what seemed I 
 its princely cradle. All the winged orders hovered round, watching when the | 
 new-born should open its yet closed eyes ; which, when it did, first one, and i 
 then the other — with a solicitude and apprehension, yet not such as, stained i 
 with fear, dims the expanding eye-lids of mortal infants, but as if lo explore 
 its path in those its unhereditary palaces— what an inexhaustible titter that 
 time spared not celestial visages ! Nor wanted there to my seeming — O the 
 inexplicable simpleness of dreams !— bowls of that cheering nectar, 
 
 — which mortals cajtdie call below — 
 
 Nor were wanting faces of female ministrants, — stricken in years, as it might 
 seem,— so dexterous were those heavenly attendants to counterfeit kindly 
 similitudes of earth, to greet, with terrestrial child-rites the young present, 
 which earth had made to heaven. 
 
 Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full symphony as those by which 
 the spheres are tutored ; but, as loudest instruments on earth speaks often- 
 times, muffled ; so to accommodate their sound the better to the weak ears of 
 the imperfect-born. And, witli the noise of those subdued soundings, the 
 Angelet sprang forth, fluttering Us rudiments of pinions — but forthwith flagged 
 and was recovered into the arms of those full-wmged angels. And a wonder 
 it was to see how, as years went round in heaven — a year in dreams is as a day 
 ^continually its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but, wanting the 
 perfect angehc nutriment, anon was shorn of its aspiring, and fell fluttering- 
 still caught by angel hards— for ever to put forth shoots, and to fall fluttering, 
 because its birth was not of the unmixed vigour of heaven. 
 
 And a name was given to the Babe Angel, and it was to be called Ge- Urania, 
 because its production was of earth and heaven. 
 
 And it could not taste of death, by reason of its adoption into immortal 
 palaces : but it was to know weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human 
 imbecility ; and it went with a lame gait ; but in its goings it exceeded all 
 mortal children in grace and swiftness. Then 'pity first sprang up in angelic 
 bosoms ; and yearnings (like the human) touched them at the sight of the 
 immortal lame one. 
 
 And with pain did then first those Intuitive Essences, with pain and strife to 
 their natures (not grief), put back their bright intelligences, and reduce their 
 ethereal minds, schooUng them to degrees and slower processes, so lo adapt 
 their lessons to the gradual illumination (as must needs be) of the half-earth- 
 born; and what intuitive notices they could not repel (by reason that their 
 nature is, to know all things at once), the half-heavenly novice, by the better 
 part of its nature, aspired to receive into its understanding; so that Humility 
 and Aspiration went on even-paced in the instructions of the glorious Am- 
 phibium. 
 
 But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross to breathe the air of that 
 super-subtile region, its portion was, and is, to be a child for ever. 
 
Elia: The Child Angel. 473 
 
 And because the human part of it might not press into the heart and inwards 
 of the palace of its adoption, those fuU-natured angels tended it by turns in the 
 purlieux of the palace, where were shady groves and rivulets, like this green 
 earth from which it came : so Love, with Voluntary Humility, waited upon the 
 entertainment of the new-adopted. 
 
 And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams Time is nothing), and still it 
 kept, and is to keep, perpetual childhood, and is the Tutelar Genius of Child- 
 hood upon earth, and still goes lame and lovely. 
 
 By the banks of the River Pison is seen, lone-sifting by the grave of the 
 terrestrial Adah, whom the angel Nadir loved, a Child ; but not the same 
 which I saw in heaven. A mournful hue overcasts itshneaments ; nevertheless, 
 a correspondency is between the child by the grave and that celestial orphan, 
 whom I saw above ; and the dimness of the grief upon the heavenly, is as a 
 shadow or emblem of that which stains the beauty of the terrestrial. And this 
 correspondency is not to be understood but by dreams. 
 
 And in the archives of heaven 1 had grace to read, how that once the angel 
 Nadir, being exiled from his place for mortal passion, upspringing on the wings 
 of parental love (such power had parental love for a moment to suspend the 
 else-irrevocable law) appeared for a brief instant in his station ; and, depositing 
 a wondrous Birth, straightway disappeared, and the palaces knew him no more. 
 And this charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and lovely —but Adah 
 sleepeth by the river Pison. 
 
 ^,t ©lir Harcjat^ fog. 
 
 (J'he London Magazine, July, 1823.) 
 
 I AM fond of pasb.ng my vacations (I believe I have said so before) at one or 
 other of the Universities. Next to these my choice would fix me at some woody 
 spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley aflbrds in abundance, upon the 
 banks of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin contrives to 
 wheedle me once in three or four seasons to a watering-place. Old attachments 
 cling to her in spite of experience. We have been dull at Worthing one summer, 
 duller at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourne a third, and are at this moment 
 doing dreary penance at — Hastings ! — and all because we were happy many 
 years ago for a brief week at— Margate. That was our first sea-side experi- 
 ment, and many circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holiday 
 of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea, and we had never been from 
 home so long together in company. 
 
 Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather-beaten, sunburnt 
 captain, and his rough accomirodations— ill exchanged for the foppery and 
 fresh-water niceness of ^e modern steam-packet ? To the winds and waves 
 thou committedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, 
 and spells, and boiling cauldrons. With the gales of heaven thou wentest 
 swimmingly; or, when it was their pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like 
 patience. Thy course was natural, not forced, as in a hotbed ; nor didst thou 
 go poisoning the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke— a great sea-chimera. 
 
474 The Works of Charles Lanib. 
 
 chimneying and furnacing the deep ; or liker to that fire-god parching up 
 Scamander. 
 
 Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy reluctant responses 
 (yet to the suppression of anything like contempt) to the raw questions, which 
 we of the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of 
 this or thatstrange naval implement ? 'Specially can I forget thee, thou happy 
 medium, thou shade of refuge between us and them, conciliating interpreter of 
 their skill to our simplicity, comfortable ambassador between sea and land !— 
 whose sailor-trousers did not more convincingly assure thee to be an adopted 
 denizen of the former, than thy wliite cap, and whiter apron over them, with 
 thy neat-fingered practice in thy culinary vocation, bespokb thee to have been 
 of inland nurture heretofore— a master cook of Eastcheap ? How busily didst 
 thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain ; 
 here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet 
 with kindlier ministrations— not toassist the tempest, but, as if touched with a 
 kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion 
 might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And when the o'er-washing billows 
 . drove us below deck (for it was far gone in October, and we had stiff and blow- 
 ing weather) how did thy officious ministerings, still catering for our comfort, 
 with cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial conversation, alleviate the close- 
 ness and the confinement of thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very 
 inviting, little cabin ! 
 
 With these additamenis to boot, we had on board a fellow-passenger, whose 
 discourse in verity might have beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, 
 and have made mirth and wonder abound as far as the Azores. He was a 
 dark, Spanish complexioned young man, remarkably handsome, with an officer- 
 like assurance, and an insuppressible volubility of assertion. He was, jn fact, 
 the greatest liar I had met with then, or since. 'He was none of your hesi- 
 tating, half story-tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on 
 sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they see you can 
 swallow at a time— the nibbling pickpockets of your patience— but one who 
 committed downright, daylight depredations upon his neighbour's faith. He 
 did not stand shivering upon the brink, but was a hearty thorough-paced liar, 
 and plunged at once into the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he 
 made pretty sure of his company. Not many rich, not many wise, or learned, 
 composed at that time the common stowage of a Margate packet. We were, 
 1 am afraid, a set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse 
 name) as Aldermanbury, or Watling Street, at that time of day could have 
 supplied. There might be an exception or two among us, but I scorn to make 
 any invidious distinctions among such a jolly, companionable ship's company, 
 as those were whom I sailed with. Something too must he conceded to the 
 Genius Loci. Had the confident fellow told us half the legends on land, which 
 he favoured us with on the other element, I flatter myself the good sense of 
 most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything 
 unfamiliar about us,' and the time and place disposed us to the reception of ■ 
 any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obliterated from my memory 
 much of his wild fablings; and the rest would appear but dull, as written, and 
 to be read on shore. He had been Aide-de-camp (among other rare accidents 
 and fortunes) to a Persian prince, and at one blow had stricken off the head of 
 the King of Cariraania on horseback. He, of course, marned the Prince's 
 daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of that court, combining 
 with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his qtlitting Persia ; but with 
 the rapidity of a magician he transported himself along with his hearers, back 
 to England, where we still found him in the confidence of great ladies. There 
 was some story of a Princess— Elizabeth, if I remember — having intrusted to 
 his care an extraordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion — 
 
Elia : The Old Margate Hoy. 475 
 
 but as I am not certain of the name or circumstances at this distance of time, 
 I must leave it to the Royal daughters of England to settle the honour among- 
 themselves in private. I cannot call to mind half his pleasant wonders ; but I 
 perfectly remember, that in the course of his travels he had seen a phoenix ; 
 and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error, that there is but one of 
 that species at a time, assuring us that they were not uncommon in some parts 
 of Upper Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His 
 dreaming fancies had transported us beyond the " ignorant present.' But 
 when (still hardying more and more in his triumphs over our simplicity) he 
 went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs , of the Colossus 
 at Rhodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do 
 justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth, that had 
 hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his recent read- 
 ing, made bold to assure the gentleman, that there must be some mistalce, as 
 "the Colossus in question had been destroyed long since : " to whose opinion, 
 delivered with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to concede thus much, 
 that " the figure was indeed a little damaged." This was the only opposition 
 he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, for he proceeded with 
 his fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow with still more com- 
 placency than ever, — confirmed, as it were, by the extreme candour of that 
 concession. With these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of 
 the Reculvers, which one of our own company (having been the voyage before) 
 immediately recognizing, and pointing out to us, was considered by us as no 
 ordinary seaman. 
 
 All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different character. It 
 was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was 
 ever on the sea, with a smile ; and, if he caught now and then some snatches 
 of these wild legends, it \vas by accident, and they seemed not to concern him. 
 The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being 
 with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring ; 
 and when some of us pulled out our private stores— our cold meat and our 
 salads— he produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit 
 he had laid in ; provision for the one or two riays and nights, to which these 
 vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer 
 acquaintance with him, which he seemed neither to court nor decline, we 
 learned that he was going to Margate, with the hope of being admitted into 
 the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which ap- 
 peared to have eaten all over him. He expressed great hopes of a cure ; and 
 when we asked him, whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied, 
 " he ^rtrf no friends." 
 
 These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with the first sight of the .sea, 
 co-operating with youth, and a sense of holidays, and out-of-door adventure, 
 to me that had been pent up in populous cities for many months before,- have 
 left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing 
 nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon. 
 
 Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwelcome comparisons), 
 if I endeavour to account for the di^iatnfadion which I have heard so many 
 persons confess to have felt (,is I did myself feel in part on this occasion), r?;; the 
 iight of Ihe sea for ihe first time'? I think the reason usually given— refernng 
 to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of them— 
 scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same person see a lion 
 an elephlnt, a mountain, for the first time in his life, and he shall perhaps feel 
 himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that space, which the idea 
 of them seemed to take up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency 
 to his first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar 
 impression : enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon familiarity. But the 
 
47^ Tlie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 sea remains a disappointment. — Is it not, that in the hitler we had expected to 
 behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination unavoid- 
 ably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountaiji compassable 
 by the eye, but all the sea at once, THE comme.nsurate antagonist of the 
 EARTH? I do not say we tell ourselves so much, but the craving of the mind 
 is to be satisfied with nothing less. 1 will suppose the case of a young person 
 of fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. 
 He comes to it for the first time— all lliat he has been reading of it all his life, 
 and ttff/ the most enthusiastic part of life, —ail he has gathered from narra- 
 tives of wandering seamen ; what he has gained from true voyages, and what 
 1 he cherishes as credulously from romance and poetry ; crowdmg their images, 
 \ and exacting strange tributes from expectation.- — He thinks of the great deep, 
 f* and of those who go down unto it ; of its thousand isles, and of the vast con- 
 J tinents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its 
 '•' bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and 
 y the mariner 
 
 I For many a day, and many a dreadful night, 
 
 Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape ; 
 
 of fatal rocks, and the ' ' still-vexed BermoothA ; ' ' of great whirlpools, and 
 the water-spout; of sunken ships, and sumless treasures swallowed up in the 
 unrestoring depths : of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible 
 on earth — 
 
 Be but as bugs to frighten babes withal, 
 Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral ; 
 
 of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez ; of pearls, and shells ; of coral beds, 
 and of enchanted isles; of mermaids' grots — 
 
 I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all these wonders 
 at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty"faculty, which haunts him 
 with confused hints and shadows of all these ; and when the actual object 
 opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather too most likely) from our un- 
 romantic coasts -a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him— what can it 
 prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment ? Or if he 
 has come to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river 
 widening ? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery 
 horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his 
 familiar object, seen daily without dread or amazement .'—Who,' in similar 
 circumstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of 
 Gebir, — 
 
 Is this the mighty ocean ?— is this all ? 
 
 I love town, or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate 
 these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the 
 horrid fissures of dusty innutritions rocks ; whicli the amateur calls "verdure 
 to the edge of the sea. " I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. 
 I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs. 
 I cannot stand all day on the naked beach, w.itching the capricious hues 
 of the seas, shifting like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of 
 looking out at the windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the 
 interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, 
 across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. 
 I should not so feel in Staffordshire. ' There is no home for me here. There is 
 no sense of home at Hastings. It is- a place of fugitive resort, an hetero- 
 geneous assemblage of sea-mews and stockbrokers, Amphitrites of the town, 
 and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive 
 shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair honest fishing-town, and no 
 
Elia: The Old Margate Hoy. 477 
 
 more, it were something— with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered 
 about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it 
 were something. I could abide to dwell with Meschek ; to assort with 
 fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of 
 this latter occupation here. Their faces become the place. I like a 
 
 smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing but the revenue, 
 
 an abstraction I never greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their 
 mackerel boats, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction. 
 I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace 
 along the beach, in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their illicit 
 countrymen— townsfolk or tirethren perchance— whistling to the sheathing and 
 unsheathing of their cutlass (their only solace), who under the mild name of 
 preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplorable absence 
 of a foreign one, to show their detestation of run hoUands, and zeal for old 
 England. But it is the visitants from town that come here to say that they 
 have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond perch, or a dace 
 might be supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in 
 these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as for them. What 
 can they want here ? if they had a true relish of the ocean, why have they 
 brought all this land luggage with them ? or why pitch their civilized tents m 
 the desert ? What mean these scanty book-rooms — marine libraries as they 
 entitle them — if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book ' ' to read 
 strange matter in?" what are their foolish concert- rooms, if they come, as they 
 would fain be thought to do, to listen to the music of the waves. All is false 
 and hollow pretension. They come, because it is the fashion, and to spoil the 
 nature of the place. They are mostly, as I have said, stockbrokers ; but I 
 have watched the better sort of them— now and then, an honest citizen — of the 
 old stamp), in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and 
 daughters, to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. 
 It is easy to see it in their countenance. X day or two they go wandering on 
 the shingles, picking up cockle-shells, and thinking them great things ; but, in 
 a poor week, imagination slackens : they begin to discover that cockles produce 
 no pearls, and then— O then ! — if I could interpret for the pretty creatures (I 
 know they have not the courage to confess it themselves) how gladly would they 
 exchange their sea-side rambles for a Sunday walk on the green-sward of their 
 accustomed Twickenham meadows ! 
 
 I would ask one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they truly love 
 the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings be, if some of the un- 
 sophisticated aborigines of this place, encouraged by their courteous question- 
 ings here, should venture, on the faith of such assured sympathy between them, 
 to return the visit, and come up to see — London. I must imagine them with 
 their fishing-tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a 
 sensation would it cause in Lothbury ! What vehement laughter would it not 
 excite among 
 
 The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard Street! 
 
 I am sure that no town-bred, or inland-born subjects, can feel their true and 
 natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature, where she does not mean us 
 for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam seems to 
 nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured as by the milder waters of 
 my natural river. I would exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a 
 swallow for ever about the banks of Thamesis. 
 
47^ The Works of Charles Lanib^ 
 
 Sunre S0iTJt«ls 6f Sir ^^ilijpf Ss^Jw^g. 
 
 [The London Magazine, September, 1823.) 
 
 r" W. H.," who is spoken of towards the close of this essay, was Elia's old friend, 
 William Hazlitt, the critic] 
 
 \ Sydney's Sonnets — I speak of the best of them— are among the very best of 
 their sort. They fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet 
 modest spirit of self-approval, of Milton in his compositions of a similar 
 structure. They are in truth what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says of' that 
 work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application), " vain and ama- 
 torious" enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be tnie of the 
 romance) may be "full of worth and wit.". They savour of the courtier, it 
 must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman. But Milton was a 
 courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a courtier ■ 
 when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin, he 
 becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time hai ' 
 thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the Revolution, there is no 
 reason why he should not have acted the same .part in that emergency, which 
 has glorified the name of a later Sydney. He did not want plain for plainness 
 or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French match may testify, he could 
 speak his mind freely to Princes. The times did not call him to the sijaffold. . 
 The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mind of Milton were the compositions 
 of his maturest years. Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, were 
 written in the very heyday of his blood. They were struck full' of amorous 
 fancies — far-fetched conceits, befitting his occupation; for True Love thinlcs 
 no labour to send out Thoughts upon the vast, and more than Indian voyages, 
 to bring home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacri- 
 fice in self-depreciating similludes, as shadows of true amiabilities in the 
 Beloved. We must be Lovers— or at least the cooling touch of time, the 
 circifvi pnecordia frigus, must not have so damped our faculties, as to take 
 away our recollection that we were once so— before wfe can duly appreciate the 
 glorious vanities, and graceful hyperboles, of the passion. The images which 
 lie before our feet (though by some accounted the only natural) are least natural 
 for the high Sydnean love to express its fancies by, . They may serve for the 
 loves of Tibullus, or the dear Author of the. Schoolmistress ; for passions that 
 creep and whine in Elegies and Pastoral liailads. I am sure IMilton never loved 
 at this rate. lam afraid some ,of his addresses [ad Leonoram, I mean) have 
 rather erred on the farther side ; and that the poet came not much short of a 
 religious indecorum, when he could thus apostrophize a singing-girl : — 
 
 Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes) 
 
 Obtigit astheriis ales ab ordinibus. 
 Quid minim, Leonora, tibi si gloria major. 
 
 Nam tua praesentem vox sonat ipsa Deum? 
 Aut Deus, aut vacui certfe mens tertia coeli' i 
 
 Per tua secreto ^uttura serpit agens ; | 
 
 Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda -. 
 
 Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. 
 Quod si cuncta quidem Deus est pek cunxtaque fusus. 
 
 In te una loquitur, cetera mutus habet. 
 
 This is loving in a strange fashion ; and it requires some candour of con- 
 
Elia: Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney. 479 
 
 struction (besides the slight darkening of a dead language) to cast a veil over 
 the ugly appearance of something very like blasphemy in the last two verses. 
 J think the Lover would have been staggered, if he had gone about to express 
 the same thought in English. I am sure, Sydney has no flights like this. His 
 extravaganzas do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to adopt the pale 
 Dian into a fellowship with his mortal passions. ' ' With how sad steps, O 
 Moon," &o. — The last line of his poem— " Do they call virtue t\isre— ungrate- 
 fulness f" — is a little obscured by transposition. He means. Do they call 
 ungratefulness there a virtue ? 
 
 [After giving, here, eleven of Sir Philip Sydney's Sonnets, Elia goes on to say.] 
 
 Of the foregoing, the first— " Come, Sleep, O Sleep," &c. — the second— "The 
 curious wits," &c. — and the last sonnet — " Highway, since you," &c. — are 
 my favourites. But the general beauty of them all is, that they are so per- 
 fectly characteristical. The spirit of "learning and of chivalry," — of which 
 union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to have been the "president," — shines 
 through them. I confess I can see nothing of the "jejune" or "frigid" in 
 them ; much less of the "stilT" and "cumbrous"— which I have sometimes 
 heard objected to the Arcadia. The verse runs off swiftly and gallantly. It 
 might have been tuned to the trumpet; or tempered (as himself expresses it) 
 to " trampling horses' feet," They abound in felicitous phrases — "O heavenly 
 Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face'": StA Sonnet. — " Sweet pillows, sweetest 
 bed; a chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light": 2/zrf Sonnet. — "That 
 sweet enemy, — France " : ^th Sonnet. 
 
 But they are not rich in words only, in vague and unlocalized feelings— the 
 failing too much of some poetry of the present day — they are full, material, and 
 circumstantiated. Time and place appropriated every one of them. 1 1 is not a 
 fever of passion wasting itself upon a thin diet of dainty words, but a tran- 
 scendent passion pervading and illuminating action, pursuits, studies, feats of 
 arms, the opinions of contemporaries and his judgment of them. An his- 
 torical thread runs through them, which almost fixes a date to them ; marks 
 the wken and where they were written. 
 
 I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the merit of these poems, be- 
 cause I have been hurt by the wantonness (I wish I could treat it by a gentler 
 name) with which W. H. takes every occasion of insulting the memory of Sir 
 Philip Sydney. But the decisions of the Author of Table Talk, &c. (most 
 profound and subtle where they are, as for the most part, just), are more safely 
 to be relied upon, on subjects and authors he has a partiality for, than on such 
 as he has conceived an accidental prejudice a,gainst. Milton wrote Sonnets, 
 and was a king-hater ; and it was congenial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a 
 patriot. But I was unwilling to lose a fine idea from my mind. The noble 
 images, passions, sentiments, and poetical delicacies of character, scattered all 
 over the Arcadia (spite of some stiffness and encumberment), justify to me the 
 character which his contemporaries have left us of the writer. I cannot think 
 with the critic, that Sir Philip Sydney was that opprobrious thing which a 
 foohsh nobleman in his insolent hostility chose to term him. I call to mind 
 the epitaph made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts of him ; and I repose 
 upon the beautiful lines in the " Friend's Passion for his Astrophel," printed with 
 the Elegies of Spenser and others— ' ' You knew— who knew not Astrophel ? " &o. 
 Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running into rage) in the 
 Poem, — the last in the collection accompanying the above, — from which in- 
 ternal testimony I believe to be Lord Brooke's,— beginning with "Silence 
 augmenteth grief,"— and then seriously ask himself, whether the subject of 
 such absorbing and confounding regrets could have ' been that thing which 
 Lord O.xford termed him. 
 
480 The Works of Charles Lamb, 
 
 (The London Magazine, October, 1823.) 
 
 [When' originally published in the London, this paper appeared as a letter formally ad- 
 dressed "To Robert Squthey, Esq," It was afterwards compacted from an epistle mto 
 an essay, by the striking out of the passages here restored and as usual carefully 
 bracketed. This severe remonstrance wa§ provoked by an article of Southey's in the 
 Quarterly, for the January of 1823, on the "Progress of Infidelity," in the course of 
 which Elia was pamed to find his old friend, alluding by name to his essays, apropos 
 to the one on Witches and other Night Fears, as " a book which only wants a sounder 
 religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original." It was this unexpected onslaught 
 that provoked Charles Lamb to the following pungent retaliation. The result of the 
 contest was a brief estrangement, the two old friends, on Southey's next coming up to 
 London, being readily, however, and, as the sequel proved, lastingly reconciled. Elia's 
 intimates, here referred to under initials, are easily identified. " C." was the Rev. 
 Henry Francis Cary, translator of the Divina Comvtedia ; "Allan C." Allan Cunning- 
 ham ; " P r " Bryan Waller Procter, otherwise Barry Cornwall ; "A p " Thomas 
 
 Allsopp ; " G n Oilman ; " W th " William Wordsworth ; " L. H." Leigh 
 
 Hunt ; "T. H." Leigh Hunt's eldest son Thornton ; " H. C. R." Henry Crabb Robin- 
 son ; " W. A." William Ayrton ; and " W. H." William HazlitL] 
 
 [Sir, — You have done me an unfriendly office, without' perhaps much con- 
 sidering what you were doing. You have given an ill name to my poor lucu- 
 bratiops. In a recent paper on Infidehty, you usher in a conditional commen- 
 dation of them with an exception ; which, preceding the encomium, and taking 
 up nearly the same space with it, must impress your readers with the notion, 
 that the objectionable parts in them are at least equal in quantity to the pardon- 
 able. The censure is in fact the criticism ; the praise — a concession merely. 
 Exceptions usually follow, to qualify praise or blame. But there stands your 
 reproof, in the very front of your notice, in ugly characters, like some bugbear, 
 to frighten all good Christians from purchasing. Through you I become an 
 object of suspicion to preceptors of youth, and fathers of famihes. "A book 
 which wants only a sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is 
 original." With no further explanation, what must your readers conjecture, 
 but that my little volume is some vehicle for heresy or infidehty ? The quota- 
 tion, which you honour me by subjoining, oddly enough, is of a character 
 which bespeaks a temperament in the writer the very reverse of that your 
 reproof goes to insinuate. Had yotl been taxing me with superstition, the 
 passage would have been pertinent to the censure. Was it worth your while 
 to go so far out of your way to affront the feehngs of an old friend, and commit 
 yourself by ^n irrelevant quotation, for the pleasure of reflecting upon a poor 
 child, an exile at Genoa ? 
 
 I am at a loss what particular essay you had in view (if my poor ramblings 
 amount to that appellation) when you were in such a hurry to thrust in your 
 objection, like bad news, foremost. — Perhaps the paper on " Saying Graces" 
 was the obnoxious feature. I have endeavoiured there to rescue a voluntary 
 
Elia : The Tombs in the Abbey. 481 
 
 duty— good in place, but never, as I remember, literally commanded— from the 
 charge of an undecent formaUty. Rightly taken, sir, that paper was not 
 against graces, but want of grace ; not against the ceremony, but the careless- 
 ness and slovenliness so often observed in the performance of it. 
 
 Or was it that on the " New Year"— in which I have described the feelings 
 of the merely natural man, on a consideration of the amazing change, which 
 is supposable to take place on our removal from this fleshly scene ? If men 
 would honestly confess their misgivings (which few men will) there are times 
 when the strongest Christian of us, 1 believe, has reeled under questions of 
 such'Staggering obscurity. I do not accuse you of this weakness. There are 
 some who tremblingly reach out shaking hands to the guidance of Faith- 
 others who stoutly venture into the dark (their Human Confidence their leader, 
 whom they mistake for Faith) ; and, investing themselves beforehand with 
 cherubic wings, as they fancy, find their new robes as familiar, and fitting to 
 their supposed growth and stature in godliness, as the coat they left olT yester- 
 day — some whose hope totters upon crutches — others who stalk into. futurity 
 upon stilts. 
 
 The contemplation of a Spiritual World, — which, without the addition of a 
 misgiving conscience, is enough to shake some naturfes to their foundation — is 
 smoothly got over by others, who shall float over the black billows in their 
 little boat of No-Distrust, as unconcernedly as over a summer sea. The 
 difference is chiefly constitutional. 
 
 One man shall love his friends and his friends' faces ; and, under the un- 
 certainty of conversing with them again, in the same manner and familiar 
 circumstances of sight, speech, &c., as upon earth — in a moment of no 
 irreverent weakness — for a dream-while — no more — would be almost content, 
 for a reward of a hfe of virtue (if he could ascribe such acceptance to his lame 
 performances), to take up his portion with those he loved, and was made to 
 love, in thisgQod world, which he knows — which was created so lovely, beyond 
 his deservings. Another, embracing a more exalted vision— so that he might 
 receive indefinite additaments of power, knowledge, beauty, glory, &c.— is 
 ready to forego the recognition of humbler individualides of earth, and the old 
 familiar faces. The shapings of our heavens are the modifications of our con- 
 stitutions ; and Mr. Feeble Mind, or Mr. Great Heart, is born in every one of us. 
 
 Some (and such have been accounted the safest divines) have shrunk from 
 pronouncing upon the final state of any man ; nor dare they pronounce the 
 case of Judas to be desperate. Others (with stronger optics;, as plainly as with 
 the eye of flesh, shall behold a given king in bliss, and a. given chamberlain in 
 torment; even to the eternizing of a cast of the eye in the latter, his own self- 
 mocked and good-humouredly-borne deformity on earth, but supposed to 
 aggravate the uncouth and hideous expression of his pangs in the other place. 
 That one man can presume so far, and that another would with shuddering 
 disclaim such confidences, is, I believe, an effect of the nerves purely. 
 
 If, in either of these papers, or elsewhere, I have been betrayed into some 
 levities— not affronting the sanctuary, but glancing perhaps at some of the 
 outskirts and extreme edges, the debateable land between the holy and profane 
 regions— (for the admixture of man's inventions, twisting themselves with the 
 name of religion itself has artfully made it difficult to touch even the 
 alloy, without, in some men's estimation, soiling the fine gold) — if I have 
 sported within the purlieux of serious matter — it was, I dare say, a humour — 
 be not startled, sir,— which I have unwittingly derived from yourself. You 
 have all your hfe been making a jest of the devil. Not of the scriptural 
 meaning of that dark essence— personal or allegorical ; for the nature is no- 
 where plainly 'delivered. I acquit you of intentional irreverence. But indeed 
 you have made wonderfully free with, and been mighty pleasant upon, the 
 popular idea and attributes of him. A Noble Lord, your brother Visionary, 
 
 R 
 
1 4^2 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 has scarcely taken greater liberties with the material keys, and merely Catholic 
 ' notion of St. Peter. You have flattered him in prose : you have chanted him 
 in goodly odes. You have been his Jester; volunteer Laureate, and self- 
 j elected Court Poet to Beelzebub. 
 
 You have never ridiculed, I believe, what you thought to be religion, but you 
 are always girding at what some pious, but perhaps mistaken folks, think to be 
 so. For this reason, I am sorry to hear that you are engaged upon a life of 
 George Fox. I know you will fall into the error of intermixing some comic 
 stuff with your seriousness. The Quakers tfemble at the subject in your hands. 
 The Methodists are as shy of you, upon account of their founder. But, above 
 all, our Popish brethren are most in your debt. The errors of that Church have 
 proved a fruitful source to your scoffing vein. Their Legend has been a Golden 
 one to you. And here your friends, sir, have noticed a notable inconsistency, 
 To the imposing rites, the solemn penances, devout austerities of that com- 
 munion ; the affecting though erring piety of their hermits ; the silence and 
 sohtude of the Chartreux— their crossings, their holy waters — their Virgin, 
 and their saints— to these, they say, you have been indebted for the best feelings, 
 and the richest imagery, of your epic poetry. You have drawn copious drafts 
 upon Loretto. We thought at one time you were going post to Rome— but 
 that in the facetious commentaries, which it is your custom to append so plenti- 
 fully, and (some say) injudiciously, to your loftiest performances in this kind, 
 you spurn the uplifted toe, which you but just now seemed to court ; leave his 
 holiness in the lurch ; and show him a fair pair of Protestant heels under your 
 Romish vestment. When we think you already at the wicket, suddenly a violent 
 cross wind blows you transverse — 
 
 " Ten thousand leagues awry 
 
 ■ Then might we see 
 
 Cowls, hoods, and habits, with their wearers, tost 
 And flutter'd into rags ; then reliques, beads. 
 Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls. 
 The sport of winds." 
 
 You pick up pence by showing the hallowed bone^, shrine, and crucifix ; and 
 you take money a second time by exposing the trick of them afterwards. You 
 carry your verse to Castle Angelo for sale in a morning ; and, swifter than a 
 pedlar can transmute his pack, you are at Canterbury with your prose ware 
 before night. 
 
 Sir, is it that I dislike you in this merry vein ? The very reverse. No coun- 
 tenance becomes an intelligent jest better than your own. It is your grave 
 aspect, when you look awful upon your poor friends, which I would deprecate. 
 
 In more than one place, if I mistake not, you have been pleased to compli- 
 ment me at the expense of my companions. I cannot accept your compliment 
 at such a price. The upbraiding a man's poverty naturally makes him look 
 about him to see whether he be so poor indeed as he is presumed to be. You 
 have put me upon counting my riches. Really, sir, I did not know I was so 
 
 wealthy in the article of friendships. There is , and , whom you never 
 
 heard of, but exemplary characters both, and, excellent church-goers ; and 
 Norris, mine and my father's friend for nearly half a century ; and the enthu- 
 siasts for Wordsworth's poetry, , a Uttle tainted with Socinianism it is to be 
 
 feared, but constant in his attachments, and a capital critic ; and. , a sturdy 
 
 old Athanasian, so that sets all to rights again ; andWainwright, the light, and 
 warm-as-light-hearted, Janus of the London ; and the translator of Dante, 
 still a curate, modest and amiable C. ; and Allen C, the large-hearted Scot; 
 
 and P r, candid and affectionate as his own poetry ; and A — ^p, Coleridge's 
 
 friend ; and G n, his more than friend ; and Coleridge himself, the same to 
 
 me still, as in those old evenings, when we used to sit and speculate (do you 
 
remember them, sir?) at our old Salutation tavern, upon Pantisocracy and 
 golden days to come on earth ; and W tli (why, sir, I might drop my rent- 
 roll here, such goodly farms and manors have I recjioned up already. In what 
 possession has not this last name alone estated ine? — but I will go on) — and 
 
 Monkhouse, the noble-minded kinsman, by wedlock, ofW th; andH. C. R., 
 
 unwearied in the offices of a friend ; and Clarkson, almost above the narrow- 
 ness of that relation, yet condescending not seldom heretofore from the labours 
 of his world-embracing charity to bless my humble roof ; and the gall-less and 
 single-minded Dyer; and the high-minded associate of Cook, the veteran 
 Colonel, with his lusty heart still sending cartels of defiance to old Time ; and, 
 not least, W. A. , the last and steadiest left to me of that little knot of whist- 
 players, that used to assemble weekly, for so many years, at the Queen's Gate 
 (you remember them, sir ?) and called Admiral Burney friend. 
 
 I will come to the point at once. I believe you will not malce many excep- 
 tions to my associates so far. But I have purposely omitted some intimacies, 
 which I do not yet repent of having contracted, with two gentlemen diametri- 
 cally opposed to yourself in principles. You will understand me to allude to 
 the authors of " Rimini " and of the " Table Talk." And first of the former. 
 
 It is an error more particularly incident to persons of the correctest prin- 
 ciples and habits, to seclude themselves from the rest of mankind, as from 
 another species, and form into knots and clubs. The best people herding 
 thus exclusively are in danger of contracting a narrowness. Heat and cold, 
 dryness and moisture, in the natural worldi do not fly asunder, to split the 
 globe into sectarian parts and separations ; but mingling, as they best may, 
 correct the malignity of any single predominance. The analogy holds, I 
 suppose, in the moral world. If all the good people were to ship themselves 
 off to Terra Incognita, what, in humanity's name, is to become of the refuse ? 
 If the persons, whom I have chiefly in view, have not pushed matters to this 
 extremity yet, they carry them as far as they can go. Instead of mixing with 
 the infidel and the freethinker— in the room of opening a negotiation, to try 
 at least to find out at which gate the error entered— they huddle close to- 
 gether, in a weak fear of infection, like that pusillanimous underling in 
 Spenser — 
 
 " This is the wandering wood, this Error's den ; 
 A monster vile, whom God and man does hate : 
 Therefore, I rede, beware." fly, quoth then 
 
 The fearful Dwarf. 
 
 And, if thev be writers in orthodox joiimals, addressing themselves only 
 to the irritable passions of the unbeliever— they proceed in a safe system of 
 strengthening the strong hands, and confirming the valiant knees ; of con- 
 verting the already converted, and proselyting their own party. I am the 
 more convinced of this from a passage in the very treatise which occasioned 
 this letter. It is where, having recommended to the doubter the writings of 
 Michaelis and Lardner, you ride triumphantly over the necks of all infidels, 
 sceptics, and dissenters, from this time to the world's end, upon the wheels of 
 two unanswerable deductions. I do not hold it meet to set down, in a miscel- 
 laneous compilation like this, such religious words as you have thought fit to 
 introduce into the pages of a petulant literary journal. I therefore beg leave 
 to substitute numerals, and refer to the Quarterly Review (for January) for 
 fining of them up. " Here," say you, " as in the history of 7, if these books 
 are authentic, the events which they relate must be true ; if they were wntten 
 by 8, 9 is 10 and 11." Your first deduction, if it means honestly, rests upon 
 two identical propositions ; though I suspect an unfairness in one of the terms, 
 which this would not be quite the proper place for explicating. At all events, 
 you have no cause to triumph ; you have not been proving the premises, but 
 
refer for satisfaction therein to very long and laborious works, which may well 
 employ the sceptic a twelvemonth or two to digest, before he can possibly be 
 ripe for your conclusion. When he has satisfied himself about the premises, 
 he will concede to you the inference, I dare say, most readily. — But your latter 
 deduction, viz., that because 8 has written a booli concerning 9, therefore loand 
 II was certainly his meaning, is one of the most extraordinary conclusions per 
 saltum, that I have had the good fortune to meet with. As far as 10 is verbally 
 asserted in the writings, all sects must agree with you ; but you cannot be 
 
 ignorant of the many various ways in which the doctrine of the has 
 
 been understood, from a low figurative expression (with the Unitarians) up to 
 the most mysterious actuahty; in which highest sense alone you and your 
 church take it. And for 11, that there is no other possible conclusion — to 
 hazard this in the face of so many thousands of Arians and Socinians, &c., 
 who have drawn so opposite a one, is such a piece of theological hardihood, 
 as, I think, warrants me in concluding that, when you sit down to pen theo- 
 logy, you do not at all consider your opponents, but have in your eye, merely 
 and exclusively, readers of the same way of thinking with yourself, and there- 
 fore have no occasion to trouble yourself with the quahty of the logic to which 
 you treat them. 
 
 Neither can I think, if you had had the welfare of the poor child— over whose 
 hopeless condition you whine so lamentably (and I must think) unseasonably— 
 seriously at heart, that you could have taken the step of sticking him up by 
 name—T. H. is as good as naming him— to perpetuate an outrage upon the 
 parental feelings, as long as the QuaHerly Review shall last. Was it neces- 
 sary to specify an individual case, and give to Christian compassion the appear- 
 ance of a personal attack ? Is this the way to concihate unbehevers, or not 
 rather to widen the breach irreparably? 
 
 I own I could never think so considerably of myself as to decline the society 
 of an agreeable or worthy man upon difference of opinion only. The impedi- 
 ments and the facilitations to a sound belief are various and inscrutable as the 
 heart of man. Some believe upon weak principles ; others cannot feel the 
 efficacy of the strongest. One of the most candid, most upright, and single- 
 meanirig men I ever knew, was the late Thomas Holcroft. I believe he never 
 said one thing, and meant another, in his life ; and, as near as I can guess, he 
 never acted otherwise than with the most scrupulous attention to conscience. 
 Ought we to wish the character false, for the sake of a hollow compliment to 
 Christianity? 
 
 Accident introduced me to the acquaintance of Mr. L. H. — and the experi- 
 ence of his many friendly quahties confirmed a friendship between us.- You 
 who have been misrepresented yourself, I should hope, have not lent an idle 
 ear to the calumnies which have been spread abroad respecting this gentleman. 
 1 was admitted to his household for some years, and do most solemnly aver that 
 I beheve him to be in his domestic relations as correct as any man. He chose 
 an ill-judged subject for a poem, the peccant humours of which have been 
 visited on him tenfold by the artful use, which his adversaries have made, of 
 an equivocal term. The subject itself was started by Dante, but better because 
 brieflier treated of. But the crime of the lovers, in the Italian and the Enghsh 
 poet, with its aggravated enormity of circumstance, is not of a kind (as the 
 critics ofthe latter well knew) with those conjunctions, forwhich Nature herself 
 has provided no excuse, because no temptation. It lias nothing in common 
 with the black horrors, sung by Ford and Massinger. The familiarizing of it 
 in tale and fable may be for that reason incidentally more contagious. In spite 
 of Rimini, I must look upon its author as a man of taste and a poet He is 
 better than so; he is one of the most cordial-minded men I ever knew, and 
 matchless as a fireside companion. I mean not to affront or wound your feelings 
 when I say that in his more genial moods he has often reminded me of you. 
 
Elia: The Tombs in the Abbey. _ 485 
 
 There is the same air of mild dogmatism— the same condescending to a boyish 
 sportiveness— in both your conversations. His handwriting is so much the 
 same with your own, that I have opened more than one letter of his hoping 
 nay, not doubting, but it was from you, and have been disappointed (he will 
 bear with my saying so) at the discovery of my error. I,. H. is unfortunate in 
 holding some loose and not very definite speculations (for at times I think he 
 hardly knows whither his premises would carry him) on marriage— the tenets I 
 conceive, of the " Political Justice " carried a little farther. For anything I could 
 discover in his practice, they have reference, Uke those, to some future possible con- 
 dition of society, and not to the present times. But neither for these obliquities 
 of thinking (upon which my own conclusions are as distant as the poles asunder) 
 —nor for his political asperities and petulancies, which are -wearing out with 
 the heats and vanities of youth— did I select him for a friend; but for qualities 
 which fitted him for that relation. I do not know whether I flatter myself with 
 being the occasion, but certain it is, that, touched with some misgivings for 
 sundry harsh things which he had written aforetime against our friend C. , before 
 he left this country he sought a reconciliation with that gentleman (himself being 
 his own introducer), and found it. 
 
 L. H. is now in Italy ; on his departure to which land, with much regret I 
 took my leave of him and of his little family— seven of them, sir, with their 
 mother— and as kind a set of little people (T. H. and all), as affectionate children 
 as ever blessed a parent. Had you seen them, sir, I think you could not have 
 looked upon them as so many little Jonases— but rather as pledges of the vessel's 
 safety, that was to bear such a freight of lovi. 
 
 I wish you would read Mr. H.'s lines to that same T. H. "six years old, 
 during a sickness : " — 
 
 *' Sleep breaks at last from out thee, 
 My little patient boy " 
 
 (they are to be found on the 47th page of " Foliage")— and ask yourself how 
 far they are out of the spirit of Christianity. I have a letter from Italy, received 
 but the other day, into which L. H. has put as much heart, and as many friendly 
 yearnings after old associates, and native country, as, I think, paper can well 
 hold. It would do you no hurt to give that the perusal also. 
 
 From the other gentleman I neither expect nor desire (as he is well assured) 
 any such concessions as L. H. made to C. What hath soured him, and made 
 him to suspect his friends of infidelity towards him, when there was no such 
 matter, I know not. I stood well with him for fifteen years (the proudest of my 
 life), and have ever spoken my full mind of him to some, to whom his panegyric 
 must naturally be least tasteful. I never in thought swerved from him, I never 
 betrayed him, I never slackened in my admiration of him ; I was the same to 
 him (neither better nor worse), though he could not see it, as in the days when 
 he thought fit to trust me. At this instant he may be preparing for me some 
 compliment, above my deserts, as he has sprinkled many such among his 
 admirable books, for which I rest his debtor; or, for anything I know, or can 
 guess to the contrary, he may be about to read a lecture on my weaknesses. 
 He is welcome to them (as he was to my humble hearth), if they can divert a 
 spleen, or ventilate a fit of sullenness. I wish he would not quarrel with the 
 world at the rate he does ; but the reconciUation must be effected by himself, 
 and I despair of hving to see that day. But protesting againsfmuch that he 
 has written, and some things which he chooses to do; judging him by his 
 conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by his books, 
 in those places where no clouding passion intervenes — I should belie my own 
 conscience, if I said less, than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and 
 healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being 
 ashamed of that intimacy, which was betwixt us. it is my boast that I was able 
 
486 Tfie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 for so many years to have preserved it entire ; and I think I shall go to my 
 grave without finding or expecting to find, such another companion. But I 
 forget my manners — you will pardon me, sir — I returnao the correspondence. 
 Sir, you were pleased (you know where) to invite me to a compliance with the 
 wholesome forms and doctrines of the Church of England. I take your advice 
 with as much kindness as it was meant. But I must think the invitation rather 
 ' more kind than seasonable. I am a Dissenter. The last sect, with which you 
 can remember me to have made common profession, were the Unitarians. 
 You would think it not very pertinent, if (fearing that all was not well with you), 
 I were gravely to invite you (for a remedy) to attend with me a course of Mr. 
 Belsham's Lectures at Hackney. Perhaps I have scruples to some of your 
 forms and doctrines. But if 1 come, am 1 secure of civil treatment? — The 
 last time I was in any of your places of worship was on Easter Sunday last. I 
 had the satisfaction of listening to a very sensible sermon of an argumentative 
 turn, delivered with great propriety by one of your bishops. The place was 
 Westminster Abbey. As .such rehgion as I have, has always acted on me more 
 by way of sentiment than argumentative process, I was not unwilling, after 
 sermon ended, by no unbecoming transition, to pass over to some serious 
 feelings, impossible to be disconnected from the sight of those old tombs, &c. 
 But, by whose order I know not, I was debarred that privilege even for so short 
 a space as a few minutes ; and turned, like a dog, or some profane person, out 
 into the common street ; with feehngs, which I could not help, but not very 
 congenial to the day or discourse. I do not know that I shall ever venture 
 myself again into one of your churches.] 
 
 [In lieu of the foregoing, which was omitted from the Last Essays of Elia, the opening 
 paragraph of the paper when transformed into an essay ran as follows] : — 
 
 Though in some points of doctrine, and perhaps of discipline, I am diffident 
 of lending a perfect assent to that church which you have so worthily hisiorijled, 
 yet may the ill time never come to me, when with a chilled heart, or a portion 
 of irreverent sentiment, I shall enter her beauriful and time-hallowed edifices. 
 Judge then of my mortification when, after attending the choral anthems of 
 last Wednesday at Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my acquaint- 
 ance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and antiquities there, I found myself 
 excluded: turned out like a dog, or some profane person, into the common 
 street, with feelings not very congenial to the place, or to the solemn service 
 which I had been listening to. It was a jar after that music. 
 
 You had your education at Westminster ; and doubtless among those dim 
 aisles and cloisters, you must have gathered much of that devotional feeling in 
 those young years, on which your purest mind feeds still— and may it feed ! 
 The antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and gracefully blending ever with the 
 religious, may have been sown in you among those wrecks of splendid mor- 
 tality. You owe it to the place of your education ; you owe it to your learned 
 fondness for the architecture of your ancestors ; you owe it to the venerableness 
 of your ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened and called in ques- 
 tion through these practices — to speak aloud your sense of them; never to 
 desist raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away with and 
 abolished ; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against the 
 decent, though low-in-purse enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must commit 
 an injury against his family economy, if he would be indulged with a bare 
 admission within its walls. You owe it to the decencies, which you wish to see 
 maintained in its impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer an object 
 of inspection to the poor at those times only, in which they must rob from their 
 attendance on the worship every minute which they can bestow upon the fabric. 
 In vain the pubhc prints have talien up this subject, in vain such poor nameless 
 writers as myself express their indignation. A word from you, sir — a hint in 
 
Elia: The Tombs in the Abbey. 487 
 
 your Journal-would be sufficient to fling open the doors of the Beautiful 
 Temple again, as we can remember them when we were boys. At that time of 
 life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us, have 
 suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been obstructed by the demand 
 of so much silver !— if we had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission (as 
 we certainly should have done) would the sight of those old tombs have been as 
 impressive to us (while we had been weighing anxiously prudence against senti- 
 ment) as when the gates stood open as those of the adjacent Park ; when we could 
 walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a shorter or longer time, as that 
 lasted ? Is the being shown over a place the same as silently for ourselves 
 detecting the genius of it ? In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person 
 find entrance (out of service time) under the sum of two shillings. The rich 
 and the great will smile at the anticlimax, presumed to lie in these two short 
 words.. But you can tell them, sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for 
 enlarged feeling, how much taste and genms, may coexist, especially in youth, 
 with a purse incompetent to this demand. — A respected friend of ours, during 
 his late visit to the metropolis, presented himself for admission to St. Paul's. 
 At the same time a decently clothed man, with as decent a wife, and child, j 
 were bargaining for the same indulgence. The price was only two-pence each ) 
 person. The poor but decent man hesitated, desirous to go in ; but there were 
 tliree of them, and he turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he wished to have 
 seen the tomb of Nelson. Perliaps the interior of the Cathedral was his 
 object. But in, the state of his finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem 
 too much. Tell the Aristocracy of the country (no man can do it more 
 impressively) ; instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of money, 
 these minims to their sight, may be to their humbler brethren. Shame these 
 Sellers out of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature 
 with the pretext, that an indiscriminate admission would expose the Tombs to 
 violation. Remember your boy-days. Diii you ever see, or hear, of a mob in 
 the Abbey, while it was free to all? Do the rabble come there, or trouble 
 their heads about suoh speculations ? It is all that you can do to drive thqm 
 into your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, 
 alas I no passion for antiquities ; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If 
 they had, they would be no longer the rabble. 
 
 For forty years that I have known the Fabric, -the only well-attested charge 
 of violation adduced, has been — a ridiculous dismemberment committed upon 
 the effigy of that amiable spy Major Andre. And is it for this— the wanton 
 mischief of some schoolboy, iired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic 
 Freedom — or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so 
 easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if the vergers 
 are incompetent to the duty— is it upon such wretched pretences, that the 
 people of England are made to pay a new Peter's Peffce, so long abrogated ; 
 or must content themselves with contemplating the ragged exterior of their 
 Cathedral ? The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar 
 there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic ? [Can you help us 
 in this emergency to find the nose ? or can you give Chantrey a notion (from 
 memory) of its pristine life and vigour? I am willing for peace's sake to 
 subscribe my guinea towards the restoration of the lamented feature. I am, 
 Sir, your humble servant, — Elia.] 
 
488 The Works of Cha7-les Lamb, 
 
 [The London Magazine, December, 1823.) 
 
 t"G. D." whose escape from drowning is here commemorated, was George Dyer, 
 formerly a student of Christ's Hospital, an old bookworm, who in later life eked out his 
 income as a Reader for the press. Barry Cornwall describes him as the simplest and most 
 inoffensive of men. William Haziitt speaks of him as browsing on the^usks and leaves of 
 books and following learning as its shadow. Charles Lamb declared in his regard that 
 the gods by denying him the very faculty of discrimination, had effectually cut off every 
 seed of envy in his bosom. Extremely near-sighted, wonderfully absent, and, in his 
 very gait spasmodic, he was visibly an oddity. Spare and diminutive in stature, thiswas 
 the eccentric, who at broad noonday, as Elia here relates, marched straight into " the 
 New River (by this rather elderlyj " running immediately in front of Elia's then home, 
 Colebrook Cottage.] 
 
 Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep 
 Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas ? 
 
 I DO not know when I have experienced a stranger sensation, than on seeing 
 my old friend G. D., who had been paying me a morning visit a few Sundays 
 back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, instead of fuming down 
 the right-hand path by which he had entered— with staff in hand, and at noon- 
 day, deliberately march right forwards into the midst of the stream that runs 
 by us, and totally disappear.* 
 
 A spectacle like this at dusk would have been appalling enough ; but, in the 
 broad open daylight, to witness such an unreserved motion towards self- 
 destruction in a valued friend, took from me all power of speculation. 
 
 How 1 found my feet, I know not. Consciousness was quite gone. Some 
 spirit, not my own, whirled me to the spot. I remember nothing but the sil- 
 very apparition of a good white head emerging : nigh which a staff (the hand 
 unseen that wielded it) pointed upwards, as feeling for the skies. In a moment 
 (if time was in that time) he was on my shoulders, and I— freighted with a 
 load more precious than he who bore Anchises. 
 
 And here I cannot but do justice to the officious zeal of sundry passers-by, 
 who albeit arriving a little too late to participate in the honours of the rescue, 
 in philanthropic shoals came throngmg to communicate their advice as to the 
 recovery ; prescribing variously the application, or non-application of salt, &c, 
 to the person of the patient. Life meantime was ebbing fast away, amidst the 
 stifle of conflicting judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest by a 
 bright thought, proposed sending for the doctor. Trite as the counsel was, 
 and impossible as one should think, to be missed on, —shall I confess?— in 
 this emergency, it was to me as if an Angel had spoken. Great previous exer- 
 tions—and mine had not been inconsiderable — are commonly followed by a 
 debility of purpose. This was a moment of irresolution. 
 
 MONOCULUs— for so, in default of catching his true name, I choose to desig- 
 nate the medical gentleman who now appeared— is a grave middle-aged person, 
 
 * IThe topography of my cottage and its relation to the river will explain this, as I 
 have been at some cost to have the whole engraved (in time, I hope, for our next number), 
 as well foi- the satisfaction of the reader as to commemorate so signal a deliverance.) 
 
Elia: Amicus Rediviviis. 489 
 
 who, without having studied at the college, or truckled to the pedantry of a 
 diploma, hath employed a great portion of his valuable time in experimental 
 processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow-creatures, in whom the vital 
 spark, to mere vulgar thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for ever. He 
 omitteth no occasion of obtrudmg his services, from a case of common-surfeit- 
 suffocation to the ignobler obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful 
 application of the plant Cannabis outwardly. But though he declineth not 
 altogether these drier extinctions, his occupation tendeth for the most part to 
 water-practice; for the convenience of which, he hath judiciously iixed his 
 quarters near the grand repository of the stream mentioned, where, day and 
 night, from his little watch-tower, at the Middleton's Head, he listeneth to 
 detect the wrecks of drowned mortality— partly, as he saith, to be upon the 
 spot— and partly, because the liquids which he useth to prescribe to himself 
 and his patients, on these distressing occasions, are ordiparily more conveniently 
 to be found at these common hostelries, than in the shops and phials of the 
 apothecaries. His ear hath arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is 
 reported, he can distinguish a plunge at a half furlong distance ; and can tell 
 if it be casual or deliberate. He weareth a medal, suspended over a suit, 
 originally of a sad brown, but which, by time, and frequency of nightly divings 
 has been dinged into a true professional sable. He passeth by the name of 
 Doctor, and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His remedy — after a suffi- 
 cient application of warm blankets, friction, &c., is a simple tumbler or more, 
 of the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as the convalescent can bear it. 
 Where he findeth, as in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he conde- 
 scendeth to be the taster, and showeth, by his own example, the innocuous 
 nature of the prescription. Nothing can be more kind or encouraging than 
 this procedure. It addeth confidence to the patient, to see his medical adviser 
 go hand in hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor swallovveth his 
 own draught, what peevish invalid can refuse to pledge him in the potion ? In 
 fine, Mo.MOCUVus is a humane, sensible man, who, for a slender pittance, 
 scarce enough to sustain life, is content to wear it out in the endeavour to save 
 the lives of others— his pretentions so moderate, that with difficulty I could 
 press a crown upon him, for the price of restoring the existence of such an 
 invaluable creature to society as G. D. 
 
 It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsiding alarm upon the nerves 
 of the dear absentee. Ifseemed to liave given a shake to memory, calling up 
 notice after notice, of all the providential deliverances he had experienced in 
 the course of his long and innocent life. Sitting up in my couch— my couch 
 which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, for the salutary repose which it 
 administered, shall be honoured with costly vallance, at some price, and hence- 
 forth be a state-bed at Colebrook,— he discoursed of marvellous escapes— by 
 carelessness of nurses -by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling element, in 
 infancy— by orchard pranks, and snapping twigs, in schoolboy frolics— by 
 descent of tiles at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke— by 
 studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance, by want, and the fear of 
 want and all the sore throbbings of the learned head. —Anon, he would burst 
 out into little fragments of chaunting— of songs long ago— ends of deliverance 
 hymns, not remembered before since childhood, but coming up now, when his 
 heart was made tender as a child's- for the tremor cordis, in the retrospect of 
 a recent deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, acting upon an inno- 
 cent heart will produce a self-tenderness, which we should (Jp ill to christen 
 cowardice'; and Shakespeare, in the latter crisis, has made his good Sir Hugh 
 to remember the sitting by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers. 
 
 Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton— what aspark you were like to have extin- 
 guished for ever ! Your salubrious streams to this City, for now near two 
 centuries would hardly have atoned for what you were in a moment washing 
 
490 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 away. Mockery of a river— liquid artifice — wretched conduit! hencefortli rank 
 with canals and sluggish aqueducts. Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood 
 with the explorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the vales of Amwell 
 to explore your tributary springs, to trace your salutary waters sparkle through 
 green Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks? — Ye have no swans— no 
 Naiads — no river God — or did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt 
 ye to suck him in, that ye might also have the tutelary genius of your waters? 
 
 Had he been drowned in Cam there would have been some consonancy in it; 
 but what willows had ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulchre ?— or, 
 having no ffa/K^, besides that unmeaning assumption of eternal novity, did ye 
 think to get one by the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the Strea.m 
 Dyekian? 
 
 And could such spacious virtue find a grave 
 Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave ? 
 
 I protest, George, you shall not venture out again— no, not by daylight — 
 without a sufficient pair of spectacles— in your musmg moods especially. Your 
 absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called 
 in question by it. You shall not go wandering into Euripus with .■\ristotle, if 
 we can help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper at your years, after your many tracts 
 in favour of sprinkling only ! 
 
 I have nothing but water in my head o* nights since this frightful accident. 
 Sometimes I am with Clarence in his dream. At others, I behold Christian 
 beginning to sink, and crying out to his good brother Hopeful (that is to me), 
 ' ' I sink in deep waters ; the billows go over my head, all the waves go over 
 tne. Selah." Then I have before me Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. 
 I cry out too late to save. Next follow — a mournful procession — suicidal/aces, 
 saved against their wills from drowning ! dolefully trailing a length of reluctant 
 gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks of watchet hue — constrained 
 Lazari — Pluto's half-subjects— stolen fees from the grave— bilking Charon of 
 his fare. At their head Arion— or is it G. D. ? — in his singing garments 
 marcheth singly, with harp in hand, and votive garland, which Macheon (or 
 Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intending to suspendnt to the stern God of 
 Sea. Then follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half-drenched on 
 earth are constrained to drown downright, by wharves where OpheUa twice acts 
 her muddy death. 
 
 And, doubtless, there is some notice in that invisible world, when ore of us 
 approacheth (as my friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. When 
 a soul knocks once, twice, at death's door, the sensation aroused within the 
 palace must be considerable ; and the grim Feature, by modern science so 
 often dispossessed of his prey, must have learned by this time to pity 
 Tantalus. 
 
 A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the Elysian shades, when the 
 near arrival of G. D. was announced by no equivocal indications. From their 
 seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver ghosts— poet, or historian— 
 of Grecian or of Roman lore— to crown with unfading chaplets the half- 
 finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. Him Markland expected— 
 him Tyrwhitt hoped to encounter— him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, whom 
 
 he had barely seen upon earth,* with newest airs prepared to greet ; and, 
 
 patron of the gentle Christ's boy,— who should have been his patron through 
 life— the mild Askew, with longing aspirations, leaned foremost from his vener- 
 able .ffisculapian chair, to welcome into that happy company the matured virtues 
 of the man, whose fender scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so 
 prophetically fed and watered. 
 
 ' Graium tanium ■atdit. 
 
Elia: Blakcsmoor in H- shire. 491 
 
 {The London Magazine, September, 1824.) 
 
 [Under the title of Blakesmoor, Charles Lamb has here described the old Elizabethan 
 mansion of the Plumers, at Gilston in Hertfordshire. From the Plumers, in Elia's own 
 time, the estate had passed into the possession of a collateral descendant of the race. 
 Robert Plumer Ward, sometime Under Secretary of State, Lord of the Admiralty and 
 Clerk of the Ordnance, but belter known in his day as the didactic novelist who wrote 
 "De Vere" and "Tremaine," At Gilston lived for many years, as housekeeper, the 
 original of Mrs. Sarah Battle, old Mrs. Field, Charles Lamb's maternal grandmother] 
 
 I DO not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the deserted 
 apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur 
 admit of a better passion than envy : and contemplations on the great and 
 good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us 
 illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of 
 foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I Wixz^, attends us 
 between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance 
 but some present human frailty— an act of inattention on the part of some of 
 the auditory— or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory, on that of the 
 preacher — puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and the 
 occasion. But would'st thou know the beauty of holiness?— go alone on some 
 week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool ais;les 
 of some country church : thmk of the piety that has kneeled there— the con- 
 gregations, old and young, that have found consolation there — the meek pastor 
 — the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting 
 comparisons, drink in the tranquillity 6f the place, till thou thyself become as 
 fixed and motionless as the marble elegies that kneel and weep around thee. 
 
 Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going some few miles out of 
 my road to look upon the remains of an old great house with which I had 
 been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner of it 
 had lately pulled it down ; still I had a vague notion that it could not all 
 have perished, that so much solidity with magnificence could not have been 
 crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it. 
 
 The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demoli- 
 tion of a few weeks had reduced it to — an antiquity. • 
 
 I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood the 
 great gates? What bounded the courtyard?' Whereabout did tlie out- 
 houses commence? a few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was 
 so stately and so spacious. 
 
 Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of 
 a man weigh more in their proportion. 
 
 Had ] seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction, at 
 the plucking of every panel I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should 
 have cried out to them to spare a plank at least otit of the cheerful store-room, 
 in whose hot-window seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the gr.iss-plot 
 before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted 
 it about me — it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns; or a panel of 
 the yellow room. 
 
 Why, every plank and panel of that house for me had magic in it. The 
 tapestried bedrooms — tapestry so much better than painting— not adorning 
 merely, but peopling the wainscots— at which childhood ever and anon 
 
492 The Wor-ks of Charles Lamb. 
 
 would steal and look, shifting its coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise 
 its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright 
 visages, staring reciprocally— all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his 
 descriptions. Actsson in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana ; 
 and the still more provoking, and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, 
 eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas. 
 
 Then, that haunted room— in which old Mrs. Battle died— whereinto I have 
 crept, but always in the daytime, with a passion of fear ; and a sneaking 
 curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the past. — How shall 
 they butld it up again f 
 
 It was an old deserted place, yet nof so long deserted but that traces of the 
 splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still 
 standing — even to the tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumbling feathers 
 of shuttlecocks in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. 
 But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew 
 every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere. 
 
 The solitude of childjiood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is 
 the feeder of love, and silence and admiration. So strange a passion for the 
 place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay— I shame to say how ■ 
 few roods distant from the mansion— half hid by trees, what I judged some 
 romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my 
 carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay 
 unexplored for me ; and not till late in hfe, curiosity prevailing over elder 
 devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the 
 Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects— and 
 those at no great distance from the house— I was told of such— what were they 
 tojne, being out of the boundaries of my Eden? — So far from a wish to roam, 
 I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison; 
 and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden 
 walls. I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet — 
 
 Bind me ye woodbines, in your twines ; 
 Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; 
 And oh so close your circles lace. 
 That I may never leave this place ; 
 But, lest your fetters prove too weak, 
 Ere I your silken bondage bieak. 
 Do you, O brambles, chain me too. 
 And, courteous briars, nail me through.* 
 
 1 was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides— the low-built roof- 
 parlours ten feet by ten— frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home— these 
 were the condition of my birth— the wholesome soil which I was planted in. 
 Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have 
 had glances of something beyond; and to have taken, if but a peep, in child- 
 hood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune. 
 
 To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle. 
 The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an 
 importunate race of ancestors ; and the coatless antiquary in his unemblazoned 
 cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those 
 sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit 
 them. The claims of birth are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about 
 to strip me of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? can it be hacked ofL 
 as a spur can ? or torn away like a tarnished garter ? , , j 
 
 What, else, were .the families of the great to us ? what pleasure should we 
 take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments? 
 
 * Marvell on Appleton House, to the Lord Fairfax. 
 
Elia: Blakesmoor in H shire. 
 
 493 
 
 What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not 
 answer within us to a cognate and correspondent elevation. 
 
 Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that hung upon 
 the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, Blakesmoor ! have I in childhood 
 so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters— thy emblematic supporters, 
 with their prophetic ' ' Resurgam " — till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I 
 received into myself Very Gentility? Thou wert first in my morning eyes; 
 and of nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from 
 gazing at thee to dreaming on thee. 
 
 This is the only true gentry by adoption ; the veritable change of blood, and 
 not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion. 
 
 Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I knew not, I 
 inquired not; but its fading rags, and coloui^ cobweb-stained, told that its 
 subject was of two centuries back. 
 
 And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damoetas — feeding flocks, 
 not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln^did I in less earnest vindicate to myself 
 the family trappings of this once proud /Egon ?— repaying by a backward 
 triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped in his lifetime upon my 
 poor pastoral progenitor. 
 
 If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion 
 had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old house of their 
 fathers for a newer trifle ; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images 
 I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to sooth my vanity. 
 
 I was the true descendant of those old W s; and not the present family 
 
 of that name, who had fled the old waste places. 
 
 Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have gone 
 over, giving them in fancy my own family name, one — and then another — 
 would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognize the new 
 relationship ; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their 
 dwelling, and thoughts of fled posterity. 
 
 That Beatity with the cool blue pastoral drapery, and a lamb— that hung 
 
 next the great bay window — with the bright yellow H shire hair, and eye of 
 
 watchet hue — so like my Alice I — I am persuaded she was a true Elia^Mildred 
 Elia, I take it. 
 
 [From her, and from my passion for her — for I first learned love from a 
 picture— Bridget took the hint of those pretty whimsical lines, which thou 
 mayst see, if haply thou hast never seen them. Reader, in the margin.' But 
 my Mildred grew not old, like the imaginary Helen. ] 
 
 Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pave- 
 ments, and its Twelve Caesars- stately busts in marble— ranged round : of 
 whose covmtenanees, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of 
 Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder ; but the mild Galba had my love. 
 There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality. 
 
 Mine too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority, high-backed 
 
 [• HELE^f. 
 
 High-born Helen, rour\d your dwelling 
 These twenty years I've passed in vain. 
 
 Haughty beauty, thy lover s duty 
 Hath been to glory in his pain. 
 
 High -born Helen, proudly telling 
 
 Stories of thy cold disdain : 
 I starve, I die, now you comply. 
 
 And I no longer can complain. 
 
 These twenty years I've lived on tears. 
 Dwelling foreverona frown ; 
 
 On siglis rve fed, your scorn my bread J 
 I per'sh now you kind have grown. 
 
 Can I who loved my beloved 
 But for the scorn " was in her eve," 
 
 Could I be moved for my beloved. 
 When she "returns me sigh for sighT " 
 
 In stately pride, by my bed-side 
 High-born Helen's portrait's hung ; 
 
 Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays 
 Are niglitly to the portrait sung. 
 
 To that I weep, nor ever sleep. 
 Complaining all night long to her— 
 
 Helen, grown old, no longer cold. 
 Said, "You to all men I prefer."] ■ 
 
494 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 and wickered, once the terror of luckless poacher, or self-forgetful maiden— so 
 common since, that bats have roosted in it. 
 
 Mine too — whose else?— the costly fruit-garden, with its sun-baked southern 
 wall ; the ampler pleasure-garden, rising backwards from the house in triple 
 terraces, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a speck here and there, 
 saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and 
 glittering ; the verdant quarters backwarder still ; and, stretching still beyond, 
 in old formaUty, the firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day- 
 long murmuring woodpigeon, with that antique image in the centre, God or 
 Goddess I wist not ; but child of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer 
 worship to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to that fragmental 
 mystery. 
 
 Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol 
 worship, walks and windings of Blakesmoor ! for this, or what sin of mine, 
 has the plough passed over your pleasant places ? I sometimes think that as 
 men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there 
 may be a hope — a germ to be revivified. 
 
 Caplaiit <|atks0ir. 
 
 (The London Magazine, November, 1824.) 
 
 L 
 
 Among the deaths of our obituary for this moiith, I observe with concern ' ' 
 his cpttage on the Bath road. Captain Jackson." The name and attribution 
 are common enough ; but a feeling like reproach persuades me, that this could 
 have been no other in fact than my dear old friend, who some five-and-twenty 
 years ago rented a tenement, which he was pleased to dignify with the appel- 
 lation here used, about a mile from Westboume Green. Alack, how good 
 men, and the good turns they do us, slide out of memory, and are recalled 
 but by the surprise of some such sad momento as that which now lies 
 before us ! 
 
 He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, with a wife and two grown- 
 up daughters, whom he maintained with the port and notions of gentlewomen 
 upon that slender professional allowance. Comely girls they were too. 
 
 And was I in danger of forgetting this man ?— his cheerful suppers— the 
 noble tone of hospitality, when first you set your foot in the cottage— Vas 
 anxious ministerings about you, where little or nothing (God knows) was to 
 be ministered.^ — Althea's horn in a poor platter— the power of self-enchant- 
 ment, by which, in his magnificent wislies to entertain- you, he multiplied liis 
 means to bounties. 
 
 You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed a bare scrag — coM 
 savings from the foregone meal — remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendi- 
 cant from the door contented. But in the copious will— the revelling imagina- 
 tion of your host — the " mind, the mind, Master Shallow," whole beeves were 
 spread before you— hecatombs— no end appeared to the profusion. 
 
 Itwas the widow's cruse— theloaves and fishes ; carving could not lessen nor 
 helping diminish it — the stamina were left— the elemental bone still flourished, 
 divested of its accidents. 
 
 " Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the open-handed creature ex- 
 claim ; "while we have let us not want," "here is plenty left ; " "want for 
 
Elia: Captain jFackson. 45 e 
 
 nothing -with many more such hospitable sayings, the spurs of appetitp 
 and old concomitants of smoking boards, and feast-oppressed chargers Then 
 sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon liis wife's plate or the 
 daughters, he would convey the remnant rind into his own, with 'a merrv 
 quirk of 'the nearer the bone,- &c., and declaring that he universally pre- 
 ferred the outside. For we had our table distinctions, you are to know and some 
 of us in a manner sate above the salt. None but his guest or guest's dreamed 
 of tasting flesh luxuries at night, the fragments were veri hospUibus sacra 
 But of one thing or another there was always enough, and leavings ■ onlv 
 he would sometimes finish the remainder crust, to show that he wished no 
 savings. 
 
 Wine we had none; nor, except on very rare occasions, spirits; but the 
 sensation of wine was there. Some thin kind of ale I remember-" British 
 beverage, he would say! "Push about, my boys;" "Drink to your sweet- 
 hearts, girls. At every meagre draught a toast must ensue, or a^ong. All 
 the forms of good liquor were there, with none of the effects wanting. Shut 
 your eyes, and you would swear a capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the 
 centre, with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to it from each of 
 , the table corners. You got flustered, without knowing whence ; tipsy upon 
 words; and reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bacchanalian 
 encouragements. 
 
 We had our songs-" Why, Soldiers, Why-— and the "British Grena- 
 diers —in which last we were all obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters 
 sang.^ Their proficiency was a nightly theme— the masters had given them - 
 the "no-expense" which he spared to accomplish them in a science "so 
 necessary to young women." But then— they could not sing "without the 
 instrument. - 
 
 Sacred, and by me, never-to-be-violated. Secrets of Poverty ! Should I dis- 
 close your honest aims at grandeur, your makeshift efforts of magnificence? 
 Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the bunch be extant ; thrummed 
 by a thousand ancestral thumbs ! dear cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa ! 
 Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thinner accompanier of her thinner 
 warble ! A veil be spread over the dear delighted face of the well-deluded 
 father, who now haply hstening to cherubic notes, scarce feels sincerer pleasure 
 than when she awakened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twitterings 
 of that slender image of a voice. 
 
 We are not without our literary talk either. It did not extend far, but as far 
 as it went, it was good. It was bottomed well ; had good grounds to go upon. 
 In the cottage was a room, which tradition authenticated to have been the same 
 ill which Glover, in his occasional retirements, had penned the greater part of 
 his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly quoted, though none of the pre- 
 sent inmates, that I could discover, appeared ever to have met with the poem 
 ill question. But that was no matter. Glover had written there, and the anec- 
 dote was pressed into the account of the family importance. It diffused a 
 learned air through the apartment, the little side casement of which (the 
 poet's study window), opened upon a superb view as far as to the pretty 
 spire of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not a rood nor square 
 yard whereof our host could call his own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate 
 ejcpansion of— vanity shall I call it?— in his bosom, as he showed them in a 
 glowing summer evening. It was all his, he took it all in, and communicated 
 rich portions of it to his guests. It was a part of his largess, his hospitality; it 
 was going over his grounds ; he was lord for the time of showing them, and 
 you the implicit lookers-up to his magnificence. 
 
 He was a jugglgr, who threw mists before your eyes — you had no time to 
 detect his fallacies. He would say " hand me the silver sugar tongs ; and, 
 before you could discover it was a single spoon, and that plated, he would dis- 
 
496 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 turb and captivate your imagination by a misnomer of ' ' the urn " for a tea- 
 kettle ; or by calling a homely bench a sofa. Rich men direct you to their 
 furniture, poor ones divert you from it ; he neither did one nor tlie other, but 
 by simply assuming that everything was handsome about him, you were posi- 
 tively at a demur what you did, or did not see, at the cottage. With nothing 
 to live on, he seemed to live on everything. He had a stock of wealth in his 
 mind ; not that which is properly termed Content, for in truth he was not to be 
 contained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the force of a magnificent self- 
 delusion. 
 
 Enthusiasm is catching; and even his wife, a sober native of North Britain, 
 who generally saw things more as they were, was not proof against the 
 continual collision of his credulity. Her daughters were rational and discreet 
 young women ; in the main, perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances. 
 I have seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the prepon- 
 derating opulence of his fancy, that I am persuaded, not for any half-hour 
 together, did they ever look their own prospects fairly in the face. There was 
 no resisting the vorte.>£ of his temperament. His riotous imagination conjured 
 up handsome settlements before their eyes, which kept them in the eye of the 
 world too, and seem at last to have realized themselves ; for they both have 
 married since, I am told, more than respectably. 
 
 It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on some subjects, or I should 
 wish to convey some notion of the manner in which the pleasant creature 
 described the circumstances of his own wedding-day. I faintly remember 
 something of a chaise and four, in which he made his entry into Glasgow on 
 that morning to fetch the bride home, or carry her thither, I forget which. It 
 so completely made out the stanza of the old ballad — 
 
 When we came down through Glasgow town, 
 
 We were a comely ^.ight lo see ; 
 My love was clad in black velvet, 
 
 And I myself in cramasie. 
 
 I suppose it was the only occasion, upon which his own actual splendour at 
 all corresponded with the world's notions on that subject. In homely cart, or 
 travelling caravan, by whatever humble vehicle they chanced to be transported 
 in less prosperous days, the ride through Glasgow came back upon his fancy, 
 not as a humiliating contrast, but as a fair occasion for reverting to that one 
 day's state. It seemed an " equipage etem " from which no power of -fate or 
 fortune, once mounted, had power thereafter to dislodge him. 
 
 There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances. 
 To bully and swagger away the sense of them before strangers, may not be 
 always discommendable. Tibbs, and Bobadil, even when detected, have more 
 of our admiration than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat upon him- 
 self; to play the Bobadil at home ; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to 
 fancy himself all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional 
 philosophy, and a mastery over for'une, which was reserved for my old friend 
 Captain Jackson. 
 
 Barbara 
 
 (The London, Magazine, April, 1825.) 
 
 [Opposite this page is given the facsimile of a note in Charles Lamb's handwriting, 1 
 from which it will be seen as plainly as the simplest words could put it, that Barbara j 
 
 S was in reality Miss Kelly, and not Mrs. Crawford. The footnote at the close of 
 
 the paper was therefore only another of Elia's highly elaborated practices upon the 
 
) 
 
 V 
 
 p 
 
 i^ 
 
 •^ 
 
 \. 
 
 1x 
 
 ^ 
 
 « 
 
 ^. 
 
 ^ 
 
reader's credulity. In the Prefatory Memoir to this Popular Centenary Edition, the 
 Editor has given a letter addressed to himself by Miss Kelly, in the September of 1875, 
 
 giving, more than half a century after the original publication of " Barbara S ,"that 
 
 gifted and venerable lady's own charming version of the incident. In the light cast by 
 that communication uponthis essay the readers of Elia wiU henceforth clearly .see that it 
 was " Fanny Kelly's divine plain face," as Charles Lamb elsewhere calls it, that was 
 turned upon the old theatrical treasurer, when the money was handed back, and not the 1 
 face of Barbara Street, afterwards in succession Mrs. Dancer, Mrs. Barry, and Mrs. 
 Crawford.} 
 
 On the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, I forget which it was, just 
 as the clock had struck one, Barbara S , with her accustomed punctu- 
 ality, ascended the long rambling staircase, with awkward interposed landing- 
 places, which led to the office, or rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat 
 sat the then Treasurer of (what few of our readers may remember) the Old 
 Bath Theatre. All over the island it was the custom, and remains so I believe 
 to this day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend on the Saturday. It 
 was not much that Barbara had to claim. 
 
 This little maid had just entered her eleventh year ; but her important station 
 
 at the theatre, as it seemed to her, with the benefits which she felt to accrue 
 
 >J from her pious application of her small earnings, had given an air of woman- 
 
 jj hood to her steps and to her behaviour. You would have taken her to have 
 
 ^ been at least five years older. 
 
 Till latterly she had merely been employed in choruses, or where children 
 were wanted to fill up the scene. But the manager, observing a diligence and 
 adroitness in her above her age, had for some few months past entrusted to her 
 the performance of whole parts. You may guess the self-consequence of the 
 promoted Barbara. She had already drawn tears in young Arthur ; had rallied 
 Richard with infantine petulance in the Duke of York ; and in her turn had 
 rebuked that petulance when she was Prince of Wales. She would have done 
 the elder child in Morton's pathetic after-piece to the life; but as yet the 
 Children in ihe Wood was not. 
 
 Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, I have seen some of 
 these small parts, each making two or three pages at most, copied out in the 
 rudest hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed a little more care- 
 fully and fairly for the grown-up tragedy ladies of the establishment. But such 
 as they were, blotted and scrawled, as for a child's use, she kept them all ; and 
 , in the zenith of her after-reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them 
 ) bound up in costliest Morocco, each single— each small part making a iooi — 
 with fine clasps, gilt splashed, &'C. She had conscientiously kept them as they 
 had been delivered to her ; not a blot had been eflaced or tampered with. 
 They were precious to her for their affecting remembrancings. They were her 
 principia, her rudiments ; the elementary atoms ; the little steps by which she 
 pressed forward to perfection. "'What,'" she would say, "could india-rubber, 
 or a p imice stone, have done for these darlings ? " 
 
 I am in no hurry to begin my story— indeed I have little or none t(5 tell— so 
 I will just mention an observation of hers connected with that interesting time. 
 
 Not long before she died, I had been discoursing with her on the quantity of 
 real present emotion which a great tragic performer experiences during acting. 
 I ventured to think, that though in the first instance such players must have 
 possessed the feelings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet by 
 frequent repetition those feelings must become deadened in great measure, and 
 the performer trust to the memory of past emotion, rather than express a present 
 one. She indignantly repelled the notion, that with a truly great tragedian the 
 operation, by which such effects were pioduced upon an audience, could ever 
 degrade itself into what was purely mechanical. 'With much delicacy, avoiding 
 to instance in her self experience, she told me, that so long ago as when she 
 itsed to play the part of the Little Son to Mrs. Porters Isabella (I think it was) 
 
 L 
 
49^ The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 when that impressive actress has been bending over her in some heart-rending ! 
 colloquy,, she has felt real hot tears come triclding from' her, which (to use her 
 powerful expression) have perfectly scalded her back. 
 
 I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. Porter ; but it was some great actress of 
 that day. The name is indifferent ; but the fact of the scalding tears 1 most 
 distinctly remember. 
 
 I was always fond of the society of players, and am not sure that an impedi- 
 ment in my speech (which certainly kept me out of the pulpit) even more than 
 certain personal disqualifications, which are often got over in that profession, 
 did not prevent me at one time of Ufe from adopting it. I have had the 
 honour (1 must ever call it) once to have been admitted to the tea-table of Miss 
 Kelly. I have played at serious whist with Mr. Liston. I have chatted with 
 ever good-humoured Mrs. Charles Kemble. I have conversed as friend to 
 ifriend with her accomplished husband. 1 have been indulged with a classical 
 conference with Macready ; and with a sight of the Player-picture gallery, at 
 M r. Matthews's, when the kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of the, old 
 actors (whom he loves so much), went over it with me, supplying to his 
 capital collection, what alone .the artist could not give them— voice; and their 
 living motion. Old tones, half-faded, of Dodd and Parsons and Baddeley, 
 have lived again for me at his bidding. Only Edwin he could not restore to 
 me. I have supped with ; but 1 am growing a co.xcomb. 
 
 As I was about to say— at the desk of the then treasurer of the old Bath 
 theatre— not Diamond's— presented herself the little Barbara S . 
 
 The parents of Barbara had been in reputable circumstances. The father 
 had practised, I believe, as an apothecary in the town. But his practice from 
 causes which I feel my own infirmity too sensibly that way to arraign— or 
 perhaps from that pure infelicity which accompanies some people in their walk 
 through hfe, and which it is impossible to lay at the door of impnidence — was 
 now reduced to nothing. They were in fact in the very teeth of starvation, 
 when the manager, who knew and respected them in better days, took the 
 little Barbara into his company. 
 
 At the period I commenced with, her slender earnings were the sole support 
 of the family, including two younger sisters. I must throw a veil over some 
 mortifying circuinstances. Enough to say, that her Saturday's pittance was the 
 only chance of a Sunday's, (generally their only) meal of meat. 
 
 One thing I will only mention, that in some child's part, wherein her theatri- 
 cal character she was to sup off a roast fowl (Ojoy to Barbara !) some comic 
 actor, who was for the night caterer for this dainty — in the misguided humour 
 of his part, threw over the dish such a quantity of salt (O grief and pain of 
 heart to Barbara !) that when he crammed a portion of it into her mouth, she 
 was obhged sputteringly to reject it; and what with shame of her ill-acted 
 part, and pain of real appetite at missing such a dainty, her little heart sobbed 
 almost to breaking, till a flood of tears, which the well-fed spectators were 
 totally unable to comprehend, mercifully relieved her. 
 
 This was the little starved, meritorious maid, who stood before old Ravens- 
 croft, the treasurer, for her Saturday's payment. 
 
 Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many old theatrical people besides 
 herself say, of all men least calculated for a treasurer. He had no head for 
 accounts, paid away at random, kept scarce any books, and summing up at the 
 week's end, if he found himself a pound or so deficient, blest himself that it 
 was no worse. 
 
 Now Barbara's weekly stipend was a. bare half gtunea. — By mistake he 
 popped into her hand a — whole one. 
 Barbara tripped away. 
 
 She was entirely unconscious at first of the mistake : God knows, Ravens- 
 croft would never have discovered it. 
 
— 1 
 Elia: Barbara S . 499 1 
 
 But when she had got down to the first of those uncouth landing-places, she 
 became sensible of an unusual weight of metal pressing her little hand. 
 
 Now mark the dilemma. 
 
 She was by nature a good child. From her parents and those about her she 
 had imbibed no contrary influence. But then they had taught her nothing. 
 Poor men's smoky cabins are not always porticoes of moral philosophy. This 
 little maid had no instinct to evil, but then she might be said to have no fixed 
 principle. She had heard honesty commended, but never dreamed of its 
 application to herself. She thought of it as something which concerned grown- 
 up people— men and women. She had never known temptation, or thought 
 of preparing resistance against it. 
 
 Her first impulse was to go back to the old treasurer, and explain to him 
 his blunder. He was already so confused with age, besides a natural want of 
 punctuality, that she would have had some difficulty in making him understand 
 it. She saw tkat in an instant. And then it was such a bit of money ! and 
 then the image of a larger allowance of butcher's meat on their table next day 
 came across her, till her little eyes glistened, and her mouth moistened.. But 
 then Mr. Ravenscroft had always been so good-natured, had stood hei: friend 
 behind the scenes, and even recommended her promotion to some of her little 
 parts. But again the old man was reputed to be worth a world of money. He 
 was supposed to have fifty pounds a year clear of the theatre. And then came 
 staring upon her the figures of her little stockingless and shoeless sisters. And 
 when she looked at her own neat white cotton stockings, which her situation at 
 the theatre had made it indispensable for her mother to provide for her, with 
 hard straining and pinching from the family stock, and thought how glad she 
 should be to cover their poor feet with the same - and how then they could 
 accompany her to rehearsals, which they had hitherto been precluded from 
 doing, by reason of their unfashionable attire,— in these thoughts she reached 
 the second landing-place— the second, I mean from the top— for there was still 
 another left to traverse'. 
 
 Now virtue support Barbara ! 
 
 And that never-failing friend did step in— for at that moment a strength not 
 her own I have heard her say, was revealed to her — a reason above reasoning — 
 and without her own agency, as it seemed (for she never felt her feet to move) 
 she found herself transported back to the individual desk she had just quitted, 
 and her hand in the old hand of Ravenscroft, who in silence took back the re- 
 funded treasure, and who had been sitting (good man) insensible to the lapse 
 of minutes, which to her were anxious ages ; and from that moment a deep 
 peace fell upon her heart, and she knew the quality of honesty. 
 
 A year or two's unrepining application to her profession brightened up the 
 feet, and the prospects of her little sisters, set the whole family upon their legs 
 again, and released her from the difficulty of discussing moral dogmas upon a 
 landing-place. 
 
 I have heard her say, that it was a surprise, not much short of mortification 
 to her, to see the coolness with which the old man pocketed the difference, 
 which had caused her such mortal throes. 
 
 This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, from the mouth of the late 
 Mrs. Crawford, * then sixty-seven years of age (she died soon after) ; and to 
 her straggles upon this childish occasion I have sometimes ventured to think 
 her indebted for that power of rending the heart in the representation of con- 
 flicting emotions, for which in after-years she was considered as little inferior 
 (if at all so in the part of Lady Randolph) even to Mrs. Siddons. 
 
 * The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she changed, by successive mar- 
 riages, for those of Dancer, Barry, and Crawford. She was Mrs. Crawford, and a third 
 time a widoWi when I knew her. 
 
500 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 {The London Magazine, May, 1825.) 
 
 Sera tamen respexit 
 Libertas. ViRGIL. 
 
 A Clerk I was in London gay. 
 
 O'Keefe. 
 
 If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden yeais of thy 
 life — thy shining youth— in the irksome coniinement of an office ; to have thy 
 prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs 
 without hope of release or respite ; to have lived to forget that there are such 
 things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood ; 
 then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance. 
 
 It is now six and thirty years since I took my seat at the desk in Mincing Lane. 
 Melancholy was the transition at fourteen from the abundant play-time, and 
 the frequently-intervening vacations of school days, to the eight, nine, and 
 sometimes ten hours'-a-day attendance at a counting-house. But time partially 
 reconciles us to anything. I gradually became content — doggedly contented, 
 as wild animals in cages. 
 
 It is true 1 had my Sundays to rtiyself ; but Sundays, admirable as the insti- 
 tution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very reason the very 
 worst adapted of days for unbending and recreation* In particular, there is a 
 gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the 
 cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad-singers — the buzz and 
 stirring murmur of the streets. Those eternal bells depress me. The closed shops 
 repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of knacks 
 and gewgaws, and ostentatiously displayed >vares of tradesmen, which make a 
 week-day saunter through the less busy parts of the metropolis so delightful — 
 are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle over — no busy faces to recreate 
 the idle man who contemplates them ever passing by — the very face of business 
 a charm by contrast to his temporary relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen 
 but unhappy countenances— or half-happy at best— of emancipated 'prentices 
 and little tradesfolks, with here and there a servant-maid that has got leave to 
 go out, who slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capa- 
 city of enjoying a free hour ; and livelily expressing the hoUowness of a day s 
 pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that day look anything but com- 
 fortable. 
 
 But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a 
 full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertford- 
 shire. This last was a great indulgence ; and the prospect of its recurrence, I 
 believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. 
 
 * Our ancestors, the noble old Puritans of Cromwell's day, could distinguish between p 
 day of religious rest and a day of recreation ; and while they exacted a rigorous absti- 
 nence from all amusements (even to the walking out of nurserymaids with their little 
 charges in the fields) upori the Sabbath ; in the lieu of the superstitious observance of the 
 .saints' days, which they abrogated, they humanely gave to the apprentices and poorer 
 sort of people every alternate Thursday for a day of entire .sport and recreation. A strain 
 of piety and policy to be commended above the profane mockery of the Stuarts and their 
 book of sports. 
 
Elia: The Superanmiattd Man. 501 
 
 But when Ihe week came round, did the glittering phantom of the distance ' 
 keep touch with me ? or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent 
 in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to 
 make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? 
 Before I had a taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting 
 upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must int Trene before such another 
 snatch would come. Still the prospect of its con.'ng threw something of an 
 illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as 1 have said, 
 I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom. 
 
 Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted with 
 a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during my 
 latter years, had increased to such a degree, that it was visible in all the lines 
 of my countenance. My health and my good spirits flagged. I had perpetually 
 a dread of some crisis, to which I should be found unequal. Besides my day- 
 light servitude, I served over again all night in my sleep, and would wake 
 with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like. 
 1 was fifty years of age, and no prospect of emancipation presented itself. I 
 had grown to my desk, as it were ; and the wood had entered into my soul. 
 
 My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon the trouble legible 
 in my countenance ; but I did not know that it had raised the suspicions of any 
 of my employers, when, on the sth of last month, a day ever to be remembered 
 
 by me, L , the junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, directly 
 
 taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly inquired the cause of them. So 
 taxed, I honestly made confession of my infirmity, and added that I was afraid 
 I should eventually be obliged to resign his service. He spoke some words of 
 course to hearten me, and there the matter rested. A whole week I remained 
 labouring under the impression that I had acted imprudently in my disclo- 
 sure ; that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, and had been antici- 
 pating my own dismissal. A week passed in this manner, the most anxious 
 one, I verily believe, in my whole life, when on the evening of the I2lh of 
 April, just as I was about quitting my desk to go home (it might be about 
 eight o'clock) I received an awful summons to attend the presence of the whole 
 assembled firm in the formidable back parlour. I thought. Now my time is 
 surely come, I have done for myself, I am going to be told that they have no 
 longer occasion for me. L — '■ , I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, 
 
 which was a little relief to me,— when to my utter astonishment B , the 
 
 eldest partner, began a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, 
 my very meritorious conduct during the whole of the time (the deuce, thought 
 I, how did he find out that ? I protest I never had the confidence to thmk as 
 much.) He went on to descant on the expediency of retiring at a certam time 
 of life (how my heart panted !) and asking me a few questions as to the amount 
 of my own property, of which I have a httle, ended with a proposal, to which 
 his three partners nodded a grave assent, that I should accept from the house 
 which I had served so well, a pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of 
 my accustomed salary-a magnificent offer ! I do not know what I answered 
 between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted their 
 proposal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. 
 I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home— lor 
 ever. This noble benefit— gratitude forbids me to conceal their names— 1 
 owe to the kindness of the most munificent firm in the world— the house ot 
 Boldero, Merryw^ther, Bosanquet, and Lacy. / 
 
 i For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only appre- 
 hend mv felicity ■ I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, 
 thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was m the condition 
 
50 2 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 of a prisoner in the old Bastiie, suddenly let loose after a forty years' coniine- 
 ment. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of 
 Time into Eternity— for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all 
 to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could 
 ever manage. From a poor man, poor in I'ime, I was suddenly lifted up into 
 a vast revenue ; I could see no end of my vast possessions ; I wanted some 
 steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here 
 let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without 
 weighing their old resources, to forego their customary employment all at once, 
 for there may be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my resources 
 are sufficient ; and now that those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a 
 quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition. I am in no hurry. 
 Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon 
 me, I could wall< it away ; but I do not walk all day long, as I used to do in 
 those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If 
 Time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I do not read in that violent 
 measure, with which, having no Time my own but candle-light Time, I used 
 to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone winters. I walk, read, or 
 scribble '(as now) just when the fit seizes^ me, . I no longer hunt after pleasure ; 
 I let it come to me. I am like the man 
 
 That's born, and has his years come to him 
 
 In some green desert. 
 
 "Years," you will say! " what is this superannuated simpleton calculating 
 upon? He has already told us, he is past fifty." 
 
 I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours 
 which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me 
 still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can pro- 
 perly call his own, that which he has all to himself ; the rest, though in some 
 sense he may be said to live it, is other people's time not his. The remnant of 
 my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied to me, threefold. My ten 
 next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty. "lis a 
 fair rule-of-three sum. 
 
 Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the commencement of ray 'j 
 freedom, and of which all traces are not yet gone, one was, that a vast tract of 
 timehad intervened since I quitted the counting-house. I could not conceive 
 it as an affair of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks, with whom I had 
 for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely 
 associated— being suddenly removed from them— they seemed as dead to me, 
 There is a fine passage, which may serve to illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy 
 by Sir Robert Howard, speaking of a friend's death : 
 
 'Twas but just now he went away ; 
 
 I have not since had time to shed a tear ; 
 And yet the distance does the same appear 
 As if he had been a thousand years from me. 
 Time takes no measure in Eternity. 
 
 To dissipate tliis awkward feeling, I have been fain to go among them once 
 or twice since ; to visit my old desk-fellows — my co-brethren of the quill— that 
 I had left below in the state militant. Not all the kindness with which they 
 received me could quite restore me to that pleasant familiarity, which I had 
 heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked some of our old jokes, but 
 methought they went off but faintly. My old desk ; the peg where I hung my 
 hat, were appropriated to another. I knew it must be, but "l' could not take it 
 
 kindly. D 1 take me, if I did not feel some remorse— beast, if I had not,— 
 
 at quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toil for six-and-thirty 
 
Elia: The Superannuated. Man. 503 
 
 years, that smoothed for me with their joltes and conundrums the ruggedness 
 of my professional road. Had it been so rugged then after all? or was I a 
 coward simply? Well, it is too late to repent; and I also Icnow, that these 
 suggestions are a common fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But my heart 
 smote me. I had violently broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not 
 coiu-teous. I shall be some time before I get quite reconciled to the separation. 
 Farewell, old cronies, yet not for long, for again and again I will come among 
 
 ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell Ch , dry, sarcastic, and friendly ! 
 
 Do , mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly ! PI , officious to do, and 
 
 to volunteer, good services !— and thou, thou dreary pile, fit mansion for a 
 Gresham or a Whittington of old, stately House of Merchants ; with thy 
 labyrinthine passages, and light-excluding, pent-up offices, where candles for 
 one half the year supplied the place of the sun's light ; unhealthy contributor 
 to my weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell ! In thee remain, and not in 
 the obscure collection of some wandering bookseller, my "works!" There 
 let them rest, as I do from my labours, piled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. 
 in folio than ever Aquinas left, and full as useful ! My mantle I bequeath 
 among ye. 
 
 A fortnight has passed since the .date of my first communication. At that 
 period I was approaching to tranquilhty, but had not reached it. I boasted 
 of a calm indeed, but it was comparative only. Something of the first flutter 
 was left ; an unsettlmg sense of novelty ; the dazzle to weak eyes of unaccus- 
 tomed light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary 
 part of my apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline 
 suddenly by some revolution rettirned upon the world. I am now as if I had 
 never been other than my own master. It is natural to me to go where I please, 
 to do what I please. I find myself at eleven o'clock in the day in Bond Street, 
 and it seems to me that I have been sauntering there at that very hour for years 
 past. I digress into Soho, to explore a book-stall. Methinks I have been 
 thirty years a collector. Thfere is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself 
 before a fine picture in the morning. Was it ever otherwise? What is become 
 of Fish Street Hill ? Where is Fenchurch Street ? Stones of old Mincing Lane 
 which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six-and-thirty years, to the foot- 
 steps of what toll-worn elerk are your everlasting flints now vocal? I indent 
 the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is 'Change time, and I am strangely among 
 the Elgin marbles. It was no hyperbole when I ventured to compare the 
 change in my condition to a passing into another world. Time stands still in 
 a manner to me. I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day 
 of the week, or of the month. Each day used to be individually felt by me in its 
 reference to the foreign post days ; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the 
 ne.xt Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations. 
 The genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affecting 
 my appetite, spirits, &c. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to 
 follow, sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations. What charm has 
 washed that Ethiop white? What is gone of Black Monday? All days are 
 the same. Sunday itself— that unfortunate failure of a hohday as it too often 
 • proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest 
 quantity of pleasure out of it — is melted down into a week-day. I can spare to 
 go to church now, without grudging the huge cantle which it used to seem to 
 cut out of the holiday. I have Time for everything. I can visit a sick friend. 
 I can interrupt a man of much occupation when he is busiest. I can insult 
 over him with an invitation to take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor this 
 fine May-morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom 
 I have left behind in the world, carking and caring ; like horses in a mill, 
 drudging on in the same eternal round — and what is it all for ? [I recite those 
 verses of Cowley which so mightily agree with my constitution : — 
 
504 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 " Business ! the frivolous pretence 
 Of human lusts to shake off innocence . 
 Business ! the grave impertinence : 
 Business ! the thing which I, of all things, hate ; 
 Business ! the contradiction of my fate. 
 
 Or I repeat my own lines, written in my clerk state : — 
 
 *' Who first-invented worlc," etc. — \inde supra, p. 38.] 
 
 this divine leisure ! Reader, if thou art furnished with the old series of the 
 " London," turn incontinently to the third volume (page 367), and you will 
 see my present condition there touched in a "Wish "by a daintier pen than 
 
 1 can pretend to. I subscribe to that Sonnet ioto corde.'] A man can never 
 have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would 
 christen him Nothing-to-do ; he should do nothing. Man, I verily beUeve, 
 is out of his element as long as he is operative. 1 am altogether for the life 
 contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come and swallow up those accursed 
 cotton mills ? Take me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down 
 
 As low as to the fiends. 
 I am no longer ******, clerk to the Firm of &c. I am Retired Leisure. 
 I am to be jnet with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my 
 vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor with any 
 settled purpose. I walk about ; not to and from. They tell me, a certain cum 
 dtgnitale air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun 
 to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When I take 
 up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera. Opus operatum est. I 
 have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task-work, and 
 have the rest of the day to myself. 
 
 (The London Magazine, Jv.\y, 1825.) 
 
 A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, under the name of a nervous fever, 
 has made a prisoner of me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, 
 has reduced me to an incapacity of reflecting upon any topic foreign to itself. 
 Expect no healthy conclusions from me this month, reader ; I can offer you 
 only sick men's dreams.- 
 
 And truly the whole state of sickness is such ; for what else is it but a mag- 
 nificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw daylight curtains about him ; 
 and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of all the works which are 
 going on under it? To become insensible to all the operations of life, except 
 the beatings of one feeble pulse? 
 
 If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there ! 
 what caprices he acts without control ! how king-like he sways his pillow — 
 tumbling, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and thumping, and flatting, 
 and moulding it, to the ever-varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. 
 
 He changes sides oftener than a politician. Now he lies full length, then 
 hslf-length, obhquely, transversely, head and feet quite across the bed ; and 
 none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four curtains he is absolute. 
 They are his Mare Clausum. 
 
 How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself ! he is his 
 
Elia: The Convalescent. 505 
 
 own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only 
 duty. 'Tis the Two Tables of the Law to him. He has nothing to thinlc of 
 but how to get well. What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear not 
 the jarring of them, affects him not. 
 
 A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the event of a law-suit, which 
 was to be the making or the marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen 
 trudging about upon this man's errand to fifty quarters of the town at once, 
 jogging this witness, refreshing that solicitor. The cause was to come on yes- 
 terday. He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision, as if it were a question 
 to be tried at Pekin. Peradventure from some whispering, going on about the 
 house, not intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make him under- 
 stand, that things went cross-grained in the Court yesterday, and his friend is 
 ruined. But the word "friend," and the word "ruin," disturb him no more 
 than so much jargon. He is not to think of anything but how to get better. 
 
 What a world of foreign cares are merged in that absorbing consideration ! 
 
 He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is wrapped in the callous 
 hide of suffering ; he keeps his sympathy, like some curious vintage, under 
 trusty lock and key, for his own use only. 
 
 He lies pitying liimself, honing and moaning to himself; he yeameth over 
 himself; his bowels are even melted within him, to think what he suffers ; he is 
 not ashamed to weep over himself. 
 
 He is for ever plotting how to do some good to himself ; studying little strata- 
 gems and artificial alleviations. 
 
 He makes the most of himself ; dividing himself, by an allowable fiction, 
 into as many distinct individuals, as he hath sore and. sorrowing members. 
 Sometimes he meditates — as of a thing apart from him— upon his poor aching 
 head, and that dull pain which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night . 
 like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be removed without opening 
 the very skull, as it seemed, to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, 
 attenuated fingers. He compassionates himself all over ; and his bed is a very 
 discipline of humanity and tender heart. 
 
 He is his own sympathizer ; and instinctively feels that none can so well per- 
 form that office for him. He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only 
 that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that announces his broths, and 
 his cordials. He likes it because it is so unmoved, and because he can pour 
 forth his feverish ejaculations before it as unreservedly as to his bed-post. 
 
 To the world's business he is dead. He understands not what the callings 
 and occupations of mortals are ; only he has a glimmering conceit of some 
 such thing, when the doctor makes his daily call ; and even in the lines of that 
 busy face he reads no multipUcity of patients, but solely conceives of himself 
 as the sick man. To what other uneasy couch the good man is hastening, 
 when he slips out of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so carefully for 
 fear of rustling— is no speculation which he can at present entertain. He 
 thinks only of the regular return of the same phenomenon at the same hour 
 to-morrow. 
 
 Household rumours touch him not. Some faint murmur, indicative of life 
 going on within the house, soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it 
 is. He is not to know anything, not to think of anything. Servants gliding 
 up or down the distant staircase, treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear 
 awake, so long as he troubles not himself further than with some feeble guess 
 at their errands. Exacter knowledge would be a burden to him : he can just 
 endure the pressure of conjecture. He opens his eye faintly at the dull stroke 
 of the mufBed knocker, and closes it again without asking " Who was it? " 
 He is flattered by a general notion that inquiries are making after him, but he 
 cares not to know the name of the inquirer. In the general stillness, and 
 awful hush of the house, he lies in state, and feels his sovereignty. 
 
5o6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. Compare the silent tread, 
 and quiet ministry, almost by the eye, with which he is served-;-with the 
 careless demeanour, the unceremonious - goings in and out {slapping of doors, 
 or leaving them open) of the very same attendants, when he is getting a little 
 better — and you will confess, that from the bed of sickness (throne let me 
 rather call it) to the elbow chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, amount- 
 ing to a deposition. 
 
 How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature ! where is now 
 the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye? The 
 scene of his regalities, his sick room, which was his presence chamber, where 
 he lay and acted his despotic fancies — how is it reduced to a common bedroom ! 
 The trimness of the very bed has something petty and itnmeaning about it. It 
 is Tnade every day. How unlike to that wavy, many-furrowed, oceanic surface 
 which it presented so short a time since, when to make it was a service not to 
 be thought of at oftener than three or four day revolutions, when the patient 
 was with pain and grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to the 
 encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and decencies which his shaken frame 
 deprecated ; then to be lifted into it agam, for another three or four days' 
 respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while every fresh furrow was an his- 
 torical record of some shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking for 
 a little ease ; and the shrunken skin scarce told a truer story than the crumpled 
 coverlid. 
 
 Hushed are those mysterious sighs — those groans — so much more awful, 
 while we knew not from what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. 
 The Lemean pangs are quenched. The riddle of sickness is solved; and 
 Philoctetes is become an ordinary personage. 
 
 Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of greatness survives in the still 
 lingering visitations of the medical attendant. But how is he too changed 
 wilh everything else ! Can this be he — this man of news — of chat— of anecdote— 
 of everything but physic — can this be he who so lately came between the 
 patient and his cruel enemy, as on some solemn embassy from nature, erecting 
 herself into a high mediating party ? — Pshaw ! 'tis some old woman. 
 
 Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous - the spell that hushed , 
 the household — the desert-like stillness, felt through its inmost chambers— the 
 mute attendance— the inquiry by looks — the still softer delicacies of self atten- 
 tion- the sole and single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself — world 
 thoughts excluded— the man a world unto himself— his own theatre — 
 
 What a speck is he dwindled into ! 
 
 In this flat swamp of convalescence, leftby the ebbof sickness, yet far enough 
 from the terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, 
 requesting — an article. In Articulo Mortis thought I ; but it is something 
 hard — and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me. The summons, un- 
 seasonable as it appeared, seemed to link me on again to the petty businesses 
 of life, which I had lost sight of ; a gentle call to activity, however trivial : a 
 wholesome weaning from that preposterous dream of self-absorption— the 
 puffy state of sickness — In which I confess to have lain so long, insensible to 
 the magazines and monarchies, of the world alike ; to its laws, and to its Utera- 
 ture. The hypochondriac flatus is subsiding; the acres, which in imagination 
 I had spread over— for the sick man swells in the sole contemplation of his 
 single sufferings, till he becomes a Tityus to himself are wasting to a span ; 
 and for the giant of self-importanee, which I was so lately, you have me once 
 again in my natural pretensions— the lean and meagre figure of your insigni- 
 ficant Essayist. 
 
Elia : Stage Illusion. 
 
 507 j 
 
 (The London Magazine, August, 1825.) 
 
 A PLAy is said to be well or ill acted in proportion to the scenical illusion pro- 
 daced. Whether such illusion can in any case be perfect, is not the question. 
 The nearest approach to it, we are told, is, when the actor appears wholly 
 unconscious of the presence of spectators. In tragedy- in all which is to affect 
 the feelings— this undivided attention to his stage business, seems indispensable. 
 Yet it is, in fact, dispensed with every day by. our cleverist tragedians ; and 
 while these references to an audience, in the shape of rant or sentiment, are not 
 too frequent or palpable, a sufficient quantity of illusion for the purposes 
 of dramatic interest may be said to be produced in spite of them. But, 
 tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, in certain characters in comedy, 
 especially those which are a little extravagant, or which involve some notion 
 repugnant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in the 
 comedian when, without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a 
 tacit understanding with them; and makes them, unconsciously to themselves, 
 a party in the scene. The utmost nicety is required in the mode of doing this ; 
 but we speak only of the great artists in the profession. 
 
 The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to 
 contemplate in another, is, perhaps, cowardice. To see a coward done to the life 
 upon a stage would produce anything but mirth. Yet we most of us remember 
 Jack Bannister's cowards. Could anything be more agreeable, more pleasant ? 
 We loved the rogues. How was this effected but by the exquisite art of the actor 
 in a perpetual subinsinuation to us, the spectators, even in the extremity of the 
 shaking fit, that he was not half such a coward as we took him for ? We saw 
 all the common symptoms of the malady upon him ; the quivering hp, the 
 cowering knees, the teeth chattering ; and could have sworn "that man was 
 frightened." But we forgot all the while— or kept it almost a secret to our- 
 selves — that he never once lost his self-possession ; that he let out by a thousand 
 droll looks and gestures— meant at us, and not at all supposed to be visible to 
 his fellows in the scene, that his confidence in his own resources had never once 
 deserted him. Was this a genuine picture of a coward ? or not rather a likeness, 
 which the clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of an original ; while 
 we secretly connived at the delusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a 
 more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility, helplessness, and utter self- 
 desertion, which we know to be concomitants of cowardice in real life, could 
 have given us. 
 
 Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so endurable on the stage, but 
 because the skilful actor, by a sort of sub-reference, rather than direct appeal 
 to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its odiousness, by seeming to 
 engage our compassion for the insecure tenure by which he holds his money 
 bags and parchments ? By this subtle vent half of the hatefulness of the 
 character— the self-closeness with which in real life it coils itself up from 
 the sympathies of men evaporates. The miser becomes sympathetic, i.e., is no 
 genuine miser. Here again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very dis- 
 agreeable reality. 
 
 Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old men, which produce only 
 pain to behold in the realities, counterfeited upon a stage, divert not altogether 
 
5c8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 for the comic appendages to them, but in part from an inner conviction that 
 they are being acted before us; that a lilceness only is going on, and not the 
 thing itself. They please by being done under the life, or beside it ; 'not to the 
 life. When Gatty acts an old man, is he angry indeed ? or only a pleasant 
 counterfeit, just enough of a lilceness to recognize, without pressing upon us 
 the uneasy sense of reality ? 
 
 Comedians, paradoxical as it, may seem, maybe too natural. It was the 
 case with a late actor. Nothing could be more earnest or true than the manner 
 of Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his Tyke, and characters of a tragic 
 cast. But when he carried the same rigitl exclusiveness of attention to the 
 stage business, and wilful blindness and oblivion of everything, before the 
 curtain into his comedy, it produced a harsh and dissonant effect. He was out 
 of keeping with the rest of the Personce Dramatis. There was as little link 
 between him and them as betwixt himself and tlie audience. He was a third 
 estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individually considered, his execu- 
 tion was masterly. I3ut comedy is not this unbending thing ; for this reason, 
 that the same degree of credibility is not required of it as to serious scenes. 
 The degrees of credibility demanded to the two things may be illustrated by the 
 different sort of truth which we expect when a man tells us a mournful or a merry 
 story. , If we suspect the former of falsehoods in any one tittle, we reject it 
 altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a suspected imposition. But the teller 
 of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than 
 absolute truth. 'Tis the same with dramatic illusion. We confess we love ia 
 comedy to see an audience naturalized behind the scenes, taken in into the 
 interest of the drama, welcomed as bystanders however. There is something 
 ungracious in a comic actor holding himself aloof from all participation or con- 
 cern with those who are come to be diverted by him. Macbeth must see the 
 dagger, and no ear but his own be told of it ; but an old fool in farce may 
 think he sees something, and by conscious words and looks express it, as plainly 
 as he can speak, to, pit, bo.x, and gallery. When an impertinent in tragedy, an 
 Osric, for instance, breaks in upon the serious passions of the scene, we 
 approve of the contempt with which he is treated. But when the pleasant 
 impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely meant to give delight, and raise 
 mirth out of whimsical perplexities, worries the studious man with taking up 
 his leisure, or making his house his home, the same sort of contempt expressed 
 (however natural) would destroy the balance of delight in the .spectators. To 
 make the intrusion comic, the actor who plays the annoyed man must a little 
 desert nature ; he must, in short, be thinking of the audience, and express only 
 so much dissatisfaction and peevishness as is consistent witli the pleasure of 
 comedy. In other words, his perplexity must seem half put on. If he repel 
 the intruder with the sober-set face of a man in earnest, and more especially 
 if he deliver his expostulations in a tone which in the world must necessarily 
 provoke a duel ; his real-life manner will destroy the whimsical and purely 
 dramatic existence of the other character (which to render it comic demands 
 an antagonist comicality on the part of the character opposed lo it, and 
 convert what was meant for mirth, rather than belief, into a downright piece of 
 impertinence indeed, which would raise no diversion in us, but rather stir pain, 
 to see inflicted in earnest upon any unworthy person. A very judicious actor 
 (in most of his parts) seems to have fallen into an error of this sort in his 
 playing with Mr. Wrench in the Farce of Free and Easy. 
 
 Many instances would be tedious ; these may suffice to show that comic 
 acting at least does not always demand from the performer that strict abstrac- ' 
 tion from all reference to an audience, which is exacted of it ; but that in some 
 cases a sort of compromise may take place, and all the purposes of dramatic 
 \ delight be attained by a judicious understanding, not too openly announced, 
 ' between the ladies and gentlemen— on both sides of the curtain. 
 
 L 
 
Elia: The Genteel Style in Writing. cco 
 
 (The New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826.) 
 
 [When this paper was originally pubhshed in the Nei« Monthly, it appeared as the 
 rourteenth of the Popular Fallacies, under the heading " That my Lord Shaftesbury and 
 Sir William Temple are models of the Genteel Style of Writing."] 
 
 It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William Temple, 
 are models of the genteel style in writing. We should prefer saymg— of the 
 lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be more unlike than the inflated 
 finical rhapsodies of Shaftesbury, and the plain natural chit-chat of Temple. 
 The man of rank is discernible in both writers ; but in the one it is only- 
 insinuated gracefully, in the other it stands out offensively. The peer seems to 
 have written with his coronet on, and the Earl's mantle before him ; the com- 
 moner in his elbow chair and undressed.— What can be more pleasant than 
 the way in which the retired statesman peeps out in the essays, penned by the 
 latter in his delightful retreat atShene ? They scent of Nimeguen, and the Hague. 
 Scarce an authority is quoted under an ambassador. Don Francisco de Melo, 
 a " Portugal Envoy in England," tells him it was frequent in his country for 
 men, spent with age or other decays, so as they could not hope for above a 
 year or two of life, to ship themselves away in a Brazil fleet, a,nd after their 
 arrival there to go on a great length, sometimes for twenty or thirty years, or 
 more, by the force of that vigour they recovered with that remove. " Whether 
 such an effect" (Temple beautifully adds) "might grow from the air, or the 
 fruits of that climate, or by approaching nearer the sun, wliich is the fountain 
 of light and heat, when their natural heat was so far decayed : or whether 
 the piecing out of an old man's life were worth the pains ; I cannot tell : 
 perhaps the play is not worth the candle."— Monsieur Pompone, "French 
 Ambassador in his (Sir William's) time at the Hague," certifies him, that in 
 his life he had never heard of any man in France that arrived at a hundred 
 years of age; a limitation of life which the old gentleman imputes to the 
 excellence of their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper and 
 humour, as disposes them to more pleasures of all kinds than in other 
 countries: and moralizes upon the matter very sensibly. The "late Robert 
 Earl of Leicester" furnishes him with a story of a Countess of Desmond, 
 married out of England in Edward the P'ourth's time, and who lived far in 
 King James's reign. The "same noble person " gives him an account, how 
 such a year, in the same reign, there went about the country a set of morrice- 
 dancers, composed of ten men who danced, a Maid Marian, and a tabor and 
 pipe; and how these twelve, one with another, made up twelve hundred years. 
 "It was not so. much" (says Temple) "that so many in one small county 
 (Herefordshire) should live to that age, .is that they should b^ in vigour and iw 
 humour to travel and to dance." Monsieur Zulichem, one of his "colleagues 
 at the Hague," informs him of a cure for the gout; which is confirmed by 
 another '* Envoy," Monsieur Serinchamps, in that town, who had tried it. — Old 
 Prince Maurice of Nassau recommends to. him the use of hammocks in that 
 complaint ; having been allured to sleep, while suffering under it himself, by 
 the "constant motion or swinging of those airy beds." Count Egmont, and 
 the Rhinegrave who "was killed last summer before Maestricht," impart to 
 him their experiences. 
 
5IO Tlie Works of CJiarles Lamb. 
 
 But the rank of the writer is never more innocently disclosed, than where 
 he takes for granted the compliments paid by foreigners to his fruit-trees. For 
 the taste and perfection of what we esteem the best, he can truly say, that the 
 French, who have eaten his peaches and grapes at Shene in no very ill year, 
 have generally concluded that the last are as good as any they have eaten in 
 France on this side Fontainebleau; and the first as good as any they have eat 
 in Gascony. Italians have agreed his white figs to be as good as any of that 
 sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of white fig there ; for in the later kmd 
 and the blue, we cannot come near the warm climates, no more than in the 
 Frontignac or Muscat grape. His orange trees, too, are as large as any he saw 
 when he was young in France, except those of Fontainebleau, or what he has 
 seen in the Low Countries ; except some very old ones of the Prince of 
 Orange's. Of grapes he had the honour of bringing over four sorts into 
 England, which he enumerates, and supposes that they are all by this time 
 pretty common among some gardeners in his neighbourhood, as well as several 
 persons of quality ; for he ever thought all things of this kind " the commoner 
 they are made the better." The garden pedantry with which he asserts that 
 'tis to little purpose to plant any of the best fruits, as peaches or grapes, hardly, 
 he doubts, beyond Northamptonshire at the farthest northwards ; and pmises 
 the ' ' Bishop of Munster at Cosevelt," for attempting nothing beyond cherries in 
 that cold climate; is equally pleasant and in character. " I mayperhaps" (he 
 thus ends his sweet Garden Essay with a passage worthy of Cowley) "be allowed 
 to know something of this trade, since I have so long allowed myself to be good 
 for nothing else, which few men will do, or enjoy their gardens, without often 
 looking abroad to see how other matters play, what motions in the state, 
 and what invitations they may hope for into other scenes. For my own part, 
 as the country life, and this part of it more particularly, were the inclination of 
 my youth itself, so they are the pleasure of my age ; and I can truly say that, 
 among many great employments that have fallen to my share, I have never 
 asked or sought for any of them, but have often endeavoured to escape from 
 them, into the.ease and freedom of a private scene, where a man may go his 
 own way and his own pace, in the common paths and circles of life. The mea- 
 sure of choosing well is whether a man likes what he has chosen, which I thank 
 God has befallen me ; and though among the follies of my life, building and 
 planting have not been the least, and have cost me m.ore than I have the con- 
 fidence to own ; yet they have been fully recompensed by the sweetness and 
 satisfaction of this retreat, where, since my resolution taken of never entering 
 again into any public employments, I have passed five years without ever once 
 going to town, though I am almost in sight of it, and have a house there always 
 ready to receive me. Nor has this been any sort of affectation, as some have 
 thought it, but a mere want of desire or humour to make so small a remove ; 
 for when I am in this corner, I can truly say with Horace, Me quoties re- 
 ficit, &c. 
 
 " Me when the cold Digentian stream revives, 
 
 What does my friend believe I think or ask ^ 
 
 Let me yet less possess, so I may live, 
 
 Whate'er of life remains, unto myself. 
 
 May I have books enough ; and one year's store. 
 
 Not to depend upon each doubtful hour : 
 
 This is enough of mighty Jove to pray, 
 
 Who, as he pleases, gives and takes away.'' 
 
 The writings of Temple are, in general, after this easy copy. On one occa- 
 sion, indeed, his wit, which was mostly subordinate to nature and tenderness, 
 has seduced him into a string of felicitous antitheses ; which, it is obvious to 
 remark, have been a model to Addison and succeeding essayists. " Who would 
 not be covetous, and with reason," he says, "if health could be purchased 
 
with gold? who not ambitious if it were at the command of power, or restored 
 by honour ? but, alas ! a white staff will not help gouty feet to walk better than 
 a common cane ; nor a blue riband bind up a wound so well as a fillet. The 
 glitter of gold or of diamonds, will but hurt sore eyes instead of curing them ; 
 and an aching head will be no more eased by wearing a crown, than a common 
 night-cap." In a far better style, and more accordance with his own huniour 
 of plainness, are the concluding sentences of his " Discourse upon Poetry." 
 Temple took a part in the controversy about the ancient and the modern learn- 
 ing ; and, with that partiality so natural and so graceful in an old man, whose 
 state engagements had left him httle leisure to look into modern productions, 
 while his retirement gave him occasion to look back upon the classic studies of 
 his youth — decided in favour of the latter. "Certain it is," he says, "that, 
 whether the fierceness of the Gothic humours, or noise of their perpetual wars, 
 frighted it away, or that the unequal mixture of the modern languages would 
 not bear it— the great heights and excellency both of poetry and music fell 
 with the Roman learning and empire, and have never since recovered the 
 admiration and applauses that before attended them. Yet, such as they are 
 amongst us, they must be confessed to be the softest and sweetest, the most 
 general- and most innocent amusements of common time and life. They still 
 find room in the courts of princes, and the cottages of shepherds. They serve 
 to revive and animate the dead calm of poor and idle lives, and to allay or 
 divert the violent passions and perturbations of the greatest and the busiest men. 
 .'ind both these effects are of equal use to human life ; for the mind of man is 
 like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the beholder nor the voyager, in a 
 calm or in a storm, but is so to both when a little agitated by gentle gales ; 
 and so the mind, when moved by soft and easy passions or affections. I know 
 very well that many who pretend to be wise by the forms of being grave, are 
 apt to despise both poetry and music, as toys and trifles too light for the use or 
 entertainment of serious men. But whoever find themselves wholly insensible 
 to their charms, would, I think, do well to keep their own counsel, for fear of 
 reproaching their own temper, and bringing the goodness of their natures, if 
 not of their understandings, into question. While this world lasts, I doubt not 
 but the pleasure and request of these two entertainments will do so too ; and 
 happy those that content themselves with these, or any other so easy and so 
 innocent, and do not trouble the world or other men, because they cannot be 
 quiet themselves, though nobody hurts them." " When all is done" (he con- 
 cludes), "human life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward child, 
 that must be played with, and humoured a little, to keep it quiet, till it falls 
 asleep, and then the care is over." 
 
 (The New Monthly Magazine, May, 1826.) 
 
 [As originally published in the New Monthly, this paper appeared as the seventeenth 
 of the Popular Fallacies, under the heading " That Great Wit is allied to Madness."] 
 
 i Popular Fallacies, under the heading 
 
 So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our 
 modem way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest | 
 
 J' 
 
512 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 wits, on the contrary, will ever be Tound to be the sanest writers. It is impos- 
 sible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspere. The greatness of wit, 
 by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in 
 the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate 
 straining or excess of any one of them. "So strong a wit," says Cowley, 
 speaking of a poetical friend, 
 
 " did Nature to him frame, 
 
 As all things but his judgment .overcame. 
 
 His judgment like the heavenly moon did show 
 
 Tempering that mighty sea below." 
 
 The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher 
 poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own 
 experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute 
 a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being 
 awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it. In the 
 groves of Eden he walks famihar as in his native paths. He ascends the 
 empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without 
 dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos " and old 
 night." Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a "human mind 
 untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate miinkind (a 
 sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, 
 so unchecked, but thut,— never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while 
 most he seems to do so, — he has his better genius 'stilh whispering at his ear, 
 with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest 
 steward Flavins recommending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to 
 recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the 
 scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the 
 law of her consistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, 
 even when he appears most to betray and desert her. His ideal tribes submit 
 to policy ; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood 
 shepherded by Proteus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh 
 and blood till they wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit 
 to European vesture. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own 
 nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the 
 great and the little wits are differenced ; that if the latter wander ever so little 
 from nature or actual existence, they lose themselves and their readers. Their 
 phantoms are lawlSss ; their visions nightmares. They do not create, which 
 implies shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active — for to be 
 active is to call something into act and form— but passive, as men in sick dreams. 
 For the supernatural, or something superadded to what we know of nature, 
 they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, and that these 
 mental hallucinations were discoverable only in the treatment of subjects out of 
 nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if 
 it ran riot, and a little wantonized : but even in the describing of real andevery- 
 day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more de- 
 viate from nature — show more of that inconsequence, which has a natural 
 alliance with frenzy,— than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as Withers 
 somewhere calls them. We appeal to any one who is acquainted with the com- 
 mon run of Lane's novels, — as they existed some twenty or thirty years back — 
 those scanty intellectual viands of the whole female reading pubUc, till a happier 
 genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms,— whether he has 
 not found his brain more "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of 
 when and where more confounded, among the improbable events, the incohe- 
 rent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or no characters, of some third-rate 
 love intrigue— where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and a Miss 
 
EHa: Sanity of True Genius. 513 
 
 Rivers, and the scene only alternate between Bath and Bond Street — a more 
 bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all 
 the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the productions we refer to, nothing but 
 names and places is familiar ; the persons are neither of this world nor of any 
 oth^r conceivable one ; an endless string of activities without purpose, of pur- 
 poses destitute of motive : — we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques 
 only christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction ; and we 
 have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Faerie Queene 
 prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner nature, and the law of 
 their speech and actions, we are at home and upon acquainted ground. The 
 one turns Ufe into a dream ; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties 
 of every-day occurrences. By what subtile art of tracing the mental processes 
 it is effected, we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful 
 episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the 
 lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all 
 the treasures of the world ; and has a daughter. Ambition, before whom all the 
 world kneels for favours — with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, 
 with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertinently, in the same stream 
 — that we should be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, 
 at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, 
 with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgment yet 
 all the time awake, and neither able nor willing to detect the fallacy, — is a 
 proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in his wildest seeming 
 aberrations. 
 
 It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's con- 
 ceptions in sleep ; it is, in some sort — but what a copy ! Let the most romantic 
 of us, that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and 
 magnificent vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by his waking 
 judgment. That which appeared so shifting, and yet so coherent, while that 
 faculty was passivd, when it comes under cool examination, shall appear so 
 reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded ; and 
 to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. But the transitions 
 in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, and 
 yet the waking judgment ratifies them. 
 
 C0 i\t %\^t jof ^Ilisluit. 
 
 (The Englishman's Magazine, August, 1831.) 
 
 JOYOUSEST of once embodied spirits, whither at length hast thou flown? to 
 what genial region are we permitted to conjecture that thou hast flitted? 
 
 Art thou sowing thy wild oats yet (the harvest time was still to come with 
 thee) upon casual sands of Avemus? or art thou enacting Rover (as we would 
 gladlier think) by wandering Elysian streams? . 
 
 This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief antics amongst us, was in 
 truth anything but a prison to thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this body 
 to be no better than a county gaol, forsooth, or some house of durance vile, 
 
 .s 
 
514 The Works of Charles Lainbi 
 
 whereof the: five senses are the fetters. Thoii knowest'better than tobe''in'a 
 huriy to castoff those gwes ; and hadst notice to quit, I fear, before thou wen 
 quiteready to, abandon this- fleshy tenement. It was thy Pleasure House, ttiy 
 . Palace of Dainty Devices ; thyLOuvre, or thy White Hall. 
 
 What new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant how? or when may we 
 expectlhyaSrial house-warming? 
 
 TartarUSTweknow, and we haVe read'of the Blessed' Shades ; now caninat 1| 
 intelligibly fkncy thee in either. '" 
 
 Is' it too much, to hazard 'a conjecture, ^hat- (as the schoolmen adntilted a 
 receptacle apart for Patriarchs and tm-chrisom Babes) there riiay exist— tfo! far 
 perchance from that storehduse Of all vanities, which Milton saw in visions— 
 a Limbo somewhere for PlaVers ? and that- ' . J - 
 
 Up thither like aerbl vapours fly . , , ;i 
 Both all^Stage things, and all that in Stage things 
 Built their ipnd hopes of, glory, or lasting fame .' 
 All the'unaccbraplibh'd works of Authors hands,. 
 Abortive, monstrous, or imkindly mix'd, 
 Damii'd-upon earth, fleet thither— • ■ . , 
 
 Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery'.— 
 
 Therw, by the neighbouring mOOn {by some not improperly supposed thy 
 Regent' Planet upon earth) mayst thoii^not Still be acting thy managerial 
 pranks, great disembodied Lessee ? but Lessee still, and still a Manager. ■ 
 
 In Green Ropras, impervious to mortal eye, the muse beholds thee wielding 
 ' posthumous empire.'. 
 
 Thin ghdsts of FiguranteS^never plump on earth) circle thee in eiidtessly, and 
 still their song is Fye on sinful Phantasy, 
 
 Magrriflcent were thy capriccios oh this globeof earth, Robekt W'LLIAM 
 Elli.ston ! for as yet we know not thy hew name in heaven. , 
 ■ It irks me to think, that, stripped of thy regalities, thou shbuldsf Jerry over, a 
 poor forked shade,' in- 'crazy fetygidn wherry. Methinksl hear the old boatman, 
 paddUngby the weedy wharf,-with raucid voice, bawUng "Sculls, Sculls :" 
 to whiohi with wavi'ngharid, -ana-majestic action, thou deignest no reply, other 
 than in two curt monosyllables, " No : OARS." " 
 
 But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king, and 
 cobbler ; manager, and call-boy; and, if haply your dates of life were con- 
 - terminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble 
 I levelling of Death) with the shade of- some recently departed candle-snuffer. 
 
 But mercy ! what strippings, what tearing off of histrionic robes, and private 
 vanities ! what denudations to the bone, before the surly Ferryman will admit 
 you to set a foot within his battered lighter ! 
 
 Crowns, sceptres ; shield, sword, and truncheon ; thy own coronation robes 
 ■ (for thou hast broughfth«-whol'e property man's wardrobe with thee, enough to 
 sink a navy) ; the judge's ermine ; the coxcomb's wig ; the snuff-box d la 
 Foppington — all must overboard, he positively swears— and that ancient mariner 
 brooks no denial ; for, since the tiresome monodrame of the old Thracian 
 Harper, Charon, it is to be believed, hath shown small taste for theatricals. 
 
 Ay, now 'tis done. You are just boat weight ; pura et pula anima. 
 
 But bless- me, how /;'«/< you look. 
 
 So shall we all look — ^Itings, and kaisers — stripped for the last voyage. 
 
 But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu, pleasant, and thrice pleasant shade ! | 
 with my parting thanks for many a heavy hour of life lightened by thy harmless ^ 
 extravaganzas, public or domestic. ( 
 
 Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, leaving to his two brethn?n \ 
 the heavy calendars— honest Rhadamanth, always partial to players, weighing \ 
 their parti-coloured existence here upon earth, — making account of the few i 
 
 ^.^_„__ -. J 
 
Elia: To the Shade of Ellis ton. 51c 
 
 foibles, that, may have shaded thy i'eal life, as we call it (though, substantially, 
 scarcely less a vapour than thy idlest vagaries upon the boards of Drury), as 
 but of so many-echoes, natural repei-cUssions, and results to be expected from 
 the assumed extravagancies of thy secondary or moc/i life, nightly tipon a- stage 
 i-after a lenient castigation, with rods lighter than of those Medusean ringlets, 
 but just enough to " whip the oiTending Adam out of thee "^hall courteously 
 dismiss thee at the right-hand gate— the, o. p. side of HadeS— that conducts to 
 masques, and mrary-makings, in the Theatre Royal of Proserpine. 
 
 PIvAUDITO, ET VALETO. 
 
 [ Thy friend upon earth. 
 
 Though thou didst connive at his d n. 
 
 Mr. H.] 
 
 ' ^lltstonhma;. 
 
 (The Englishman s Magazine,. August, 1831.) 
 
 ["G. D. was George Dyer, and "Sir A C ,'' Sir Anthony Carlisle,- the 
 
 eminent surgeon, already referred to, (vide supra, p. 379) in the note prefixed to the 
 essay dn'Trnperfect Sympathies.] 
 
 My acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose loss we dll deplore was but 
 slight. 
 
 My first introduction to E., which afterwards ripened into an acquaintance a 
 little on this side of intimacy, was over a counter of the Leamington Spa 
 Library, then newly entered upon by a branch of his family, E., whom nothing 
 misbecame — to auspiciite, I suppose, the filial concern, and set it a-goingwith a 
 lustre— was serving in person two damsels fair, who had come into the shop 
 ostensibly to inquire for some new publication, but in reality to have a sight of 
 the illustrious shopman, hoping some conference. With what an air did he 
 reach down the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion upon the worth of 
 the work in question, and launching out into a dissertation on its comparative 
 merits with those of certain publications of a similar stamp, its rivals ! his 
 enchanted customers fairly hanging on his lips, subdued to their authoritative 
 sentence.. So have I seen a gentleman in comedy acting the shopman. So 
 Lovelace sold his gloves in King Street. I admired the histrionic art, by which 
 he contrived to carry clean away every notion of disgrace, from the occupation 
 he had so generously submitted to ; and from that hour I judged him, with np 
 after repentance, to be a person, with whom it would be a felicity to be more 
 acquainted. 
 
 To descant upon his merits as a Comedian v/ould be superfluous. With his 
 blended private and professional habits alone I have to do ; that harmonious i 
 I fusion of the manners of the player into those of every-day life, which brought 
 ! the stage boards into streets, and dining-parlours, and ]<ept up the play when 
 ! the play was ended. — " I like Wrench," a friend was saying to him one day, 
 I "because he is the same natural, easy creature, on the stage, that he is off." 
 1 " My case exactly," retorted Elliston — with a charming forgetfulness, that the 
 I converse of a proposition does not always lead to the same conclusion — *' I 
 I am the same person off the stage that I am on." The inference, at first sight, 
 ] seems identical ; but examine ii a little, and it confesses only, that the one per- 
 , former was never, and the other always, acting. 
 
5i6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 And in truth this was the charm of Elliston's private deportment. You had 
 a spirited performance always going on before your eyes, with nothing to pay. 
 As wl\ere a monarch takes up his casual abode for a night, the poorest hovel 
 which lie honours by his sleeping in it, becomes ipso facto for that time ."v 
 palace ; so wherever Elliston walked, sate, or stood still, there was the theatre. 
 He carried about with him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his portable 
 playhouse at comers of streets, and in the market-places. Upon flintiest pave- 
 ments he trod the boards still ; and if his theme chanced to be passionate, tlie 
 green baize carpet of tragedy spontaneoivsly rose beneath his feet. Now this 
 was hearty, and showed a love for his art. So Apelles always painted— in 
 thought. So G. D. always poetises. I hate a lukewarm artist. I have known 
 actors— and some of them of Elliston's own stamp — who shall have agreeably 
 been amusing you in the part of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three 
 liours of their dramatic existence; but no sooner does the curtain fall with its 
 leaden clatter, but a spirit of lead seems to seize on all their faculties. They 
 emerge sour, morose persons, intolerable to their families, servants, &c. Another 
 shall have been expanding your heart with generous deeds and sentiments, till 
 it even beats with yearnings of universal sympathy ; you absolutely long to go 
 home, and do some good action. The play seems tedious, till you can get 
 fairly out of the house, and realize your laudable intentions. At length the 
 final bell rings, and this cordial representative or all that is amiable in human 
 breasts steps forth— a miser. Elliston was more of a piece. Did he play 
 Ranger? and did Ranger fill the general bosom of the town with satisfaction? 
 why should he not be Ranger, and diffuse the same cordial satisfaction among 
 his private circles ? with his temperament, his animal spirits, his good-nature, 
 his follies perchance, could he do better than identify himself with his imper- 
 sonation ? Are we to like a pleasant rake, or coxcomb, on the stage, and give 
 ourselves airs of aversion for the identical character presented to us in actual 
 life? or what would the performer have gained by divesting himself of the 
 impersonation ? Could the man Elliston have been essentially different from 
 his part, even if he had avoided to reflect to us studiously, in private circles, 
 the airy briskness, the forwardness, and scapegoat trickeries of his prototype? 
 
 " But there is something not natural in this everlasting acting; we want the 
 real man." 
 
 Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, whom you caiinot, or will 
 not see, under some adventitious trappings, which, nevertheless, sit not at all 
 inconsistently upon him. What if it is the nature of some men to be highly 
 artificial? The fault is least reprehensible in players. Cibberwas his own 
 Foppington, with almost as much wit as Vanbrugh could add to it. 
 
 " My conceit of his person,"— it is Ben Jonson speaking of Lord Bacon,— 
 " was never increased towards him by his plate or honours. But I have, and 
 do reverence him for ifae greatness, that was only proper to himself; in that he 
 seemed to me ever one of the greatest men, that had been in many ages. In 
 his adversity I ever prayed that heaven would give him strength ; for greatness 
 he could not want." 
 
 The quality here commended was scarcely less conspicuous in the subject of 
 these idle reminiscences, than in my Lord Verulam. Those who have imagined 
 that an unexpected elevation to the direction of a great London Theatre, 
 affected the consequence of Elliston, or at all changed his nature, knew not 
 the essential greatness of the man whom they disparage. It was my fortune to 
 encounter him near St. Dunstan's Church (which, with its punctual giants, is 
 now no more than dust and a shadow), bn the morning of his election to that 
 high office. Grasping my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered, — 
 ' ' Have you heard the news ? " — then with another look following up the blow, 
 he subjoined, ' ' I am the future Manager of Drury Lane Theatre.'"— Breathless 
 as he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation or reply, but mutely stalked 
 
Elia :. Ellistoniana. 
 
 517 
 
 away, leaving me to chew upon his new-blown dignities at leisure. In fact, 
 nothing could be said to it. Expressive silence alone could muse his praise. 
 This was in his great style. 
 
 But was he less great (be witness, O ye Powers of Equanimity, that supported 
 in the ruins of Carthage the consular exile, and more recently transmuted for a 
 more illustrious exile, the barren constableship of Elba into an image of Im- 
 perial France), when, in melancholy after-yeats, again, much nearer the same 
 spot, I met him, when that sceptre had been wrested from his hand, and his 
 dominion was curtailed to the petty managership, and part proprietorship, of 
 the small Olympic, his Elba f He still played nightly upon the boards of 
 Drury, but in parts alas ! allotted to him, not magnificently distributed by him. 
 Waiving his great loss as nothing, and magnificently sinking the sense of fallen 
 material grandeur in the more liberal resentment of depreciations done to his 
 more lofty intellectual prei\.&as\ox\5, "Have you heard" (his customary exor- 
 dium) — "have you heard," said he, "how they treat me? they put me in 
 comedy." Thought I — but his finger on his lips forbade any verbal interrup- 
 tion — "Where could they have put you better?" Then, after a pause — 
 " Wliere I formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio," — and so again he 
 stalked away, neither staying, nor caring for, responses. 
 
 O, it was a rich scene,— but Sir A— ^ C— — , the best of story-tellers and 
 surgeons, who mends a lame narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture, alone 
 could do justice to it — that I was witness to, in the tarnished room (that had 
 once been green) of that same little Olympic. Tliere, after his deposition from 
 Imperial Drury, he substituted a throne. That Olympic Hill was his "highest 
 heaven;" himself "Jove in his chair." There he sat in state, while before 
 him, on complaint of prompter, was brought for judgment — how shall I 
 describe her ?— one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the tails of choruses 
 —a probationer for the town, in either of its senses — the prettiest little drab— 
 a dirty fringe and appendage of the lamps' smoke — who, it seems, on some 
 disapprobation expressed by a " highly respectable " audience, had pre- 
 cipitately quitted her station on the boards, and withdrawn her small talents 
 in disgust. 
 
 "And how dare you," said her Manager— assuming a sensorial severity 
 which would have crushed the confidence of a Vestris, and disarmed that 
 beautiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices — I verily believe, he thought 
 ^/-standing before him— "how dare you, madam, withdraw yourself, without 
 a notice from your theatrical duties ? " "Iwashissed, sir." " And you have the 
 presumption to decide upon the taste of the town ? " "I don't know that, sir, 
 but I will never stand to be hissed," was the subjoinder of young Confidence— 
 when gathering up his features into one insignificant mass of wonder, pity, and 
 expostulatory indignation — in a lesson never to have been lost upon a creature 
 less forward than she who stood before him— his words were these; "They 
 have hissed me." 
 
 'Twas the identical argument d fortiori, which the son of Peleus uses to 
 Lycaon trembling under his lance, to persuade him to take his destiny with a 
 good grace. " I too am mortal." And it is to be believed that in both cases 
 the rhetoric missed of its application, for want of a proper understanding with 
 the faculties of the respective recipients. 
 
 " Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was courteously conducting me 
 over the benches of his Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and recess, of his every- 
 day waning grandeur. 
 
 Those who knew Ellistoh, will know the manner in which he pronounced the 
 latter sentence of the few words I am about to record. One proud day to me 
 he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, to which I had superadded a 
 preliminary haddock. After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre oanquet, 
 not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, I made a sort of apology for 
 
SI 8 Tfie Works of -Charles Lamb. \ 
 
 I i I 
 
 the humility of the fare, observing that for my own part I never ateibut of one 
 dish at dinner. " I too never eat but one thing at dinner ". — was his -reply — 
 I then after a pause — " reckoning fish as nothing" The 'manner was all. It 
 was as if by one peremptory sentence he had decreed the annihilation of all 
 the savory esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food-giving Ocean 
 pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom. T\\\'ay^2& greatness ^ 
 tempered with considerate iendenicss to the feelings of his scanty but welcoming 
 entertainer. 
 
 Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William EUiston ! and not lessened in thy 
 death, if report speak truly, which says that thou didst direct that thy mortal 
 remains should repose under no inscription but one of pure Laiiniiy. Classical 
 was thy bringing up ! and beautiful was thy feeling on thy last bed, which, con- 
 necting the man with the boy, took thee back in thy. latest exercise of imagina- 
 tion, to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and Managerships, thou wert 
 a scholar, .and an early ripe one, under the roofs builded by the munificent and 
 pious Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses, weep. . In elegies, that shall silenca 
 this crude prose, they Shall celebrate thy praise. 
 
 'TVi? Englishman s Magazine, October, 1S31.) 
 
 [The exact date referred to in this Essay was 1758. and not 1796, the paper first receiving 
 the title which has ever since been affixed to it in 1833, when it was reprinted among 
 The Last Essays of Elia, and not in 1831, when it originally appeared in the EitgHs/t- 
 jiian's Magazine. The journalism here discussed was of an epoch when the Timet 
 was ten years, old and the Post seventeen ; when the Sun, the Chronicle, and the 
 Herald, since dead, were still flourishing; when the Telegraph, the Standard, the 
 Globe, the Daily Ne7us^ and the Pall Mall Gazette -were all of them as yet undreamt 
 
 of. "SirJ sM — ^h " was Sir James Mackintosh, author of the Vindicise-GalUca;. 
 
 The epigram aUuded fo in this essay has been' given iii the 'Prefatory Memoir.] 
 
 Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember that he ever deliberately 
 walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life. He might occasion- 
 ally have escorted a party of ladies across the way that were going in ; but he 
 never went in of his own head. Yet the office of the Morning Post newspaper 
 stood then just where it does now — we are carrying you back, Reader, some 
 thirty years or more — with its gilt-globe-topped front facing that emporium of 
 our artists' grand Annual Exposure. We sometimes wish that we had ob- 
 served the same abstinence with Daniel. 
 
 A word or two of D. S. He ever appeared to us one of the finest-tempered 
 of Editors. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, was equally pleasant, with a 
 dash, no slight one either, of the courtier. S. was frank, plain, and Englisli 
 all over; We have worked for both these gentlemen. 
 
 It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges ; to trace the first Uttle 
 bubblings of a mighty river; 
 
 With holy reverence to approach the rocks, 
 Whence glide the stream^ renown'd in ancient song. 
 
 Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's exploratory ramblings after 
 
< jEl/a : Naiis^apers ITtirtyi-Fhie Years Ago. 5ic> 
 
 ')■ the qradle of the infant Niliis, we well remember on one fine summer holiday 
 i (li " whole day's leave " we called it at Christ's Hospital) sallying forth at rise 
 of sun, not very well provisioned «ither for such an undertaking, to trace the 
 current of the New River— Middletonian stream !— tto its scaturient source, as 
 ' we had read, m meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly did we commence our 
 . solitary quest— for it was essential to the dignity of a Discovery, that no , eye 
 of schoolboy save our own, should beam on the detection. By flowery spots, 
 and y«rdant lanes,- skirting Homsey, Hope trained us on in many ?. baffling 
 mm; endless, hopeless meanders, as it seemed; or as if the. jealous vyaters- 
 \\zA dodged us, reluctant to have the humble spot of their nativity revealed; 
 till spent, and nigh famished, before set of the same sun, we sat down some- 
 where by Bowes Farm, near Tottenham, with a tithe of our proposed labours 
 only yet accomplished; sorely convinced in spirit, that that Brucian enterprise 
 was as yet too arduous for our young shoulders. ,, 
 
 Not itiore refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the tracing of 
 some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and 
 candid reader to go back to the ine.xperienced essays, the first callow flights in 
 authorship, of some established name in literature; from the Gnat which pre- 
 luded to the^neid, to the Duck which Samuel Johnson trod on. 
 
 in those days every Morning Paper, as an essential retainer to its establish- 
 ment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty 
 paragraphs. Sixpence a joke— and it was thought pretty high too— was Dan 
 Stuart's settled remuneration in these cases. The chat of the day, scandal, but 
 above all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was to 
 exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant. , 
 
 A fashion oi fteih, or rather ;S/«,J-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily, coming 
 up at the juncture, when we were in our probation for the place of Chief Jester 
 to S.'s Paper, established our reputation in that line. We were pronounced a 
 " capital hand." O the conceits which we varied upon red in all its 'prismatic 
 differences ! from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea, to the flaming cos- 
 tume of the lady that has her sitting upon "many waters." Then there was 
 the collateral topic of ancles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like 
 ourself, of touching that nice brink, and never yet tumbling over it, of a seem- 
 ingly ever approximating something "not. quite proper;" while, like a skilful 
 posture-master, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites, he keeps the 
 line, from which a hair's-breadth deviation is destruction ; hovering in the con- 
 fines of light and darkness, or where "both seem either; " a hazy uncertain 
 delicacy ; Autolycus-like in the Play, still putting off, his expectant auditory ■ 
 with "Whoop, do me no harm, good man !" But, above all, that conceit 
 arrided us most at that time, and still tickles our midriff to remember, where, 
 allusivelv to the flight of AsXrssa— ultima. Ctsleitiun terras rdiquit—\ye pro- 
 nounced-in reference to the stockings still-that Mode.sty taking hek 
 FINAL LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BLUSH WAS VISIBLE IN HER ASCENT 
 TO THE HEAVENS BY THE TRACT OF THE GLOWING INSTEP. 'This might be 
 ■called the crowning conceit ; and was esteemed tolerable writing in those days. 
 But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, passes away;- as did the 
 transient mode which had so favoured us. The ancles of our fair friends m a 
 few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand 
 upon Other female whims followed, but none, methought, so pregnant, so 
 invitatorv of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings. ,. , , 
 
 Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns daily consecutively for a 
 fortnight would surfeit the stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many 
 jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a long twelvemonth as vve 
 were constrained to do, was a little harder execution. "Man goeth forth to 
 his work until the evening "-from a reasonable hour in the mornmg, we pre- 
 :sume it was meant. Now as our main occupation took us up from eight till 
 
520 Tfie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 fire every day in the City ; and as our evening hours, at that time of life, had 
 generally to do virith anything rather, than business, it follows, that the only 
 time we could spare for this manufactory of jokes— our supplementary liveli- 
 hood, that supplied us in every want beyond mere bread and cheese — was 
 exactly that part of the day which (as we have heard of No Man's Land) may 
 be fitly denominated No Man's Time ; that is, no time in which a man ought 
 to be up and awake in. To speak more plainly, it is that time, of an hour, or 
 an hour and a half's duration, in which a man, whose occasions call him up so 
 preposterously, has to wait for his breakfast. 
 
 O those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, or half-past five in summer, 
 and not much later in the dark seasons, we were compelled to rise, having been 
 perhaps not above four hours in bed — (for we were no go-to-beds with the 
 lamb, though we anticipated. the lark ofttimes in her rising -we liked a parting 
 cup at midnight, as all young men did before these effeminate times, and to 
 have our friends about us— we were not constellated under Aquarius, that 
 watery sign, and therefore incapable of Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless— we 
 were none of your Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken our degrees at Mount 
 Ague — we were right toping Capulets, jolly companions, we and they) — but to 
 have to get up, as we have said before, curtailed of half our fair sleep, fasting, 
 with only a dim vista of refreshing Bohea in the distance— to be necessitated 
 to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old hag of a domestic, who 
 seemed to take a diabolical pleasure in her announcement that it was " time to 
 rise;" and whose chappy knuckles we have often yearned to amputate, and 
 string them up at our chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseasonable 
 rest-breakers in future 
 
 " Faoil" and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the " descending " of the over- 
 night, balmy the first sinking of the heavy head upon the pillow ; but to get 
 up, as he goes on to say, 
 
 — revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras^ 
 
 and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice prepended — there was the 
 " labour,"— there the " work." 
 
 No Egyptian task-naster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. 
 No fractious operants ever turned out for half the tyranny, which this necessity 
 exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why it 
 seems nothing I We make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter 
 of course, and claim no Sabbatical e.xemptions. But then they come into our 
 head. But when the head has to go out to them — when the mountain must go 
 to Mahomet — 
 
 Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelvemonth. 
 
 It was not every week that a fashion of pink stockings came up ; but mostly, 
 instead of it, some rugged, untractable subject ; some topic impossible to be 
 contorted into the risible ; some feature, upon which no smile could play ; 
 some flint, from which no process of ingenuity could procure a distillation. 
 There they lay ; there your appointed tale of brick-making was set before you, 
 which you must finish, with or without straw, as it happened. The craving 
 dragon— /A« /'aiZ/Vr- like him in Bel's temple— must be fed; it expected its 
 daily rations ; and Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best we could 
 on this side bursting him. 
 
 While we were wringing out coy sprightliness for the Post, and writhing under 
 the toil of what is called " easy writing," Bob Allen, our quondam schoolfellow, 
 was tapping his impracticable brains in a like service for the Oracle. Not 
 that Robert troubled himself much about wit. If his paragraphs had a sprightly 
 air about them, it was suflScient. He carried this nonchalance so far at last, I 
 that a matter of intelligence, and that no very important one, was not seldom | 
 
Elia: Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago. 521 
 
 palmed upon his employers for a good jest; for example is^iiR— "Walking 
 yesterday morning casually down Snow Hill, who should we meet but Mr. 
 Deputy Humphreys I we .rejoice to add, that the worthy Deputy ■ appeared to 
 enjoy a good state of health. We do not remember ever to have seen him^look 
 better." This gentleman, so surprisingly met upon Snow Hill, from some 
 pecularities in gait or gesture, was a constant butt for mirth to the small para- 
 graph-mongers of the day ; and our friend thought that he might have his flino- 
 at him with the rest. We met A. in Holbom shortly after this extraordinary 
 rencounter, which he told with tears of satisfaction in his eyes, and chuckling 
 at the anticipated effects of its announcement next d^y in the paper. We did 
 not quite comprehend where the wit of it lay at the time ; nor was it easy to be 
 detected, when the thing came out, advantaged by type and letter-press. He 
 had better have met anything that morning than a Common Councilman. His 
 services were shortly after dispensed with, on the plea that his paragraphs of 
 late had been deficient in point. The one in question, it must be owned, had 
 an air, in the opening especially, proper to awaken curiosity ; and the sentiment, 
 or moral, wears the aspect of humanity, and good neighbourly feeling. But 
 somehow the conclusion was not judged altogether to answer to the magnificent 
 promise of the premises. We traced our friend's pen afterwards in the True 
 Briton, the Star, the Traveller, — from all of which he was successively 
 dismissed, the Proprietors having ' ' no further occasion for his services. " 
 Nothing was.easierthan to detect him. When wit failed, or topics ran low, 
 there constantly appeared the following— ' '// is not generally known that the three 
 Blue Balls at the Pawnbrokers' shops are the ancient arms of Lombardy. The 
 Lombards were the first money-brokers tn Europe." Bob has done more to set 
 the public right on this important point of blazonry, than the whole College of 
 ' Heralds. 
 
 The appointment of a regular wit has long ceased to be a part of the economy 
 of a Morning Paper. Editors find their own jokes, or do as well without them. 
 Parson Este, and Topham, brought up the set custom of "witty paragraphs " 
 first in the World. Boaden was a reigning paragraphist in his day, and 
 succeeded poor Allen in the Oracle. But, as we said, the fashion of jokes passes 
 away ; and it would be difficult to discover in the Biographer of Mrs. Siddons, 
 any traces of that vivacity and fancy which charmed the whole town at the 
 commencement of the present century. Even the prelusive delicacies of the 
 present writer — the curt " Astraean allusion" — would be thought pedantic, and 
 out of date, in these days. 
 
 From the office of the Morning Post (for we may as well exhaust our News- 
 paper Reminiscences at once) by change of property in the paper, we were trans- 
 ferred, mortifying exchange ! to the office of the Albion Newspaper, late 
 Kackstrow's Museum, in Fleet Street. What a transition — from a handsome 
 apartment, from rose-wood desks, and silver inkstands, to an office — no office, 
 but a den rather, but just redeemed from the occupation of dead monsters, of 
 which it seemed redolent — from the centre of loyalty and fashion, to a focus of 
 vulgarity and sedition ! Here in murky closet, inadequate from its square con- 
 tents to the receipt of the two bodies of Editor, and humble paragraph-maker, 
 together at one time, sat in the discharge of his new Editorial functions (the 
 " Bigod " of Elia) the redoubted John Fenwick. 
 
 F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left not many in the pockets 
 of his friends whom he might command, had purchased (on tick doubtless) the 
 whole and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with all the rights and titles (such as 
 they were worth) of the Albion, from one Lovell ; of whom we know nothing, 
 save that he had stood in the pillory for a libel on the Prince of Wales. With 
 this hopeless concern— for it had been sinking ever since its commencement, and 
 could now reckon upon not more than a hundred subscribers — F. resolutely 
 determined upon pulHng down the Government in the first instance, and making 
 
52 2 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 both our fortJines byway of coroUaiy. . For seven weeks and more did this 
 infatuated Democrat go about borrqwing seven shilling pieces, and lesser coin, 
 to meet the daily demands of the Stamp Office, which allowed no credit to 
 publications of that size in politics. An outcast from politer bread, we attached 
 our small talents to the forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation, now 
 was to write treason. 
 
 Recollections of feelings — which were all that now remained from our first 
 boyish heats kindled by the French Revolution, when if we were misled, we 
 erred in the company of some, who are accounted very good men now— rather 
 than any tendency at this time to Republican doctrines— assisted us m assuming 
 a style of writing, while the paper lasted, consonant in no very imdertone to 
 the right earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to insinuate,, rather than 
 recommend, possible abdications. Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals, were 
 I covered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis— as Mr. Bayes says, never 
 naming the thing directly— that the keen eye of an Attorney-General was 
 insufficient to detect the lurking snake among them. There were times, indeed, 
 when we sighed for our more gentleman-hke occupation under Stuart. But 
 with change of masters it is ever change of service. Already one paragraph, 
 and another, as we learned afterwards from a gentleman at the Treasury, had 
 l5egun to be marked at that office, with a view of its being submitted at least to 
 the attention of the proper Law Officers— when an imlucky, or rather lucky 
 
 epigram from our pen, aimed at Sir J s M — ^h, who was on the eve of 
 
 departing for India to reap the, fruits of his apostasy, as F. pronounced it (it is 
 hardly worth particularizing), happening to offend the nice sense of Lord, or, 
 as he theil delighted to be called. Citizen Stanhope, deprived F. at once of the 
 last hopes of a guinea from the last patron that had stuck by us ; and breaking 
 up our establishment, left us to the safe, but somewhat mortifying, neglect of 
 the Crown Lawyers. — It was about this time, or a little earlier, that Dan Stuart 
 made that curious confession to us, that he had " never deliberately walked into 
 an Exhibition at Somerset House in his life." 
 
 {The j4iAen(Sum, JaxiMary and February, J833.) 
 
 Hogarth excepted, can we prodtiqe any one painter within the last fifty years, 
 or since the humour of exhibitiiig begarir that has treated a stpiy imagitia- 
 tivdy. t By this we mean, upon wHom Jiis subject has so acted,- that it has 
 seemed to direct him — not to be arranged by him ? Any upon whotii its leading 
 or collateral points have impressed themselves so tyranically that he, dare not 
 treat it otherwise, least he should falsify a revelation ? Any that has imparted 
 to his compositions, not merely so much truth ds is enough to convey a story 
 with clearness, but that individualizing property; whiqh should keep the sub- 
 ject so treated distinct in feature from every, other subject, however similar, and 
 to common apprehensions almost identical ; so, as thtlt we might say, tbi; and 
 
Elia : On the Productions of Modern Art. 523 
 
 '.his part could have found an appropriate place in no other picture in .the world 
 but this ? Is there anything in modern art— we will not demand that it should 
 be equal— but in any way analogous to what Titian.has effected, in that 
 wonderful bringing together of two times in the " Ariadne," in tie National 
 Gallery ? Precipiious, with his reeling Satyr rout about him, rerpeopling and 
 re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk, with a new fury beyond the grape, 
 Bacchus, borri in fire, fire-lilie flings himself at the Cretan. . This is the time 
 present. With his telling of the story an artist, and no ordinary one, might 
 remain richly proud. Guido, in his harmonious version of it> saw no farther. 
 But from the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and 
 laid it contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. jWith the 
 desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid with the 
 presence and new offers of a god, — as if unconscious of Bacchus, or biit idly 
 casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning pageant— her soul undistracted 
 from Theseus— Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart- I 
 silence, and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at day- j 
 break to catch the forlorn glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian. - 
 
 Here are two points miraculously co-uniting ; fierce society, with the feeling ! 
 of solitude still absolute ; noonday revelations, with the accidents of the dull ' 
 grey dawn utiquenched and lingering ; the present Bacchus, with the past ' 
 Ariadne ; two stories, with double Time : separate, and harmonizing. Had i 
 the artist made the woman one shade less indifferent to the God; still more, 
 had she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would have been the story of 
 the mighty desolation of the heart previous ? merged in the insipid accident of 
 a flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance. I'he broken heart for Theseus 
 was not lightly to be pieced up by a God. 
 
 We have before us a fine rough print, froih a picture by Raphael in the 
 Vatican. It is the Preseritation of the new-born Eve to Adam by the Almighty. 
 A fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of 
 men since born. But these are matters subordinate to the conception of the 
 situation, displayed in this extraordinary production. A tolerably modem 
 artist would have been satisfied with tempering certain raptures of connubial 
 anticipation, with a suitable acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in 
 the countenance of the first bridegroom ; something like the divided attention I 
 of the child (Adam was here a child man) between the given toy, and fhe 
 mother who had just blessed it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the fn^t- 
 sight view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade, considering the awful 
 presence they were in, would have taken care to subtract something from the 
 expression of the more human passion, and to heighten the more spiritual one. 
 This would be as much as an exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset 
 House to last year's show, has been encouraged to look for. It is obvious to 
 hint at a lower expression, yet in a picture, that for respects of drawing and 
 colouring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible within these art-fostering' 
 walls, in which the raptures should be as ninety-nine, the gratitude as one, or 
 perhaps zero ! By neither the one passion nor the other haS'Raphael expounded 
 the situation of Adam. Singly upon his brow sits the absorbing sense of wonder, 
 at the created miracle. The moment is seized by the intuitive artist^perhaps. 
 not self-conscious of his art, in which neither of the conflicting emotions— a 
 moment how abstracted — have had time to spring up, or to battle for inde- 
 corous mastery. —We have seen a landscape of a justly admired neoteric, in 
 which he aimed at delineating a fiction, one of the most severely beautiful 'in 
 
 ahtiqtiity— the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr. justice, he had 
 
 painted a laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of 
 which a Pdlypheme by Poussin is sonieho* a fac-simile for the situation), 
 lodkino- over into the world shtit out backwards, so that none but a ■''still- 
 climbing Hercules" could hope to get a peep at the admired Ternary of 
 
524 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Recluses. No conventual porter could keep his keys better than this custos 
 with the "lidless eyes." He not only sees that none do intrude into that 
 privacy, but, as clear as daylight, that none but Hercules aut Diaiolus by any 
 manner of means tan. So far all is well. We have absolute solitude here or 
 nowhere. Ab extra the damsels are snug enough. But here the artist's 
 courage seems to have failed him. He began to pity his pretty charge; and, 
 to comfort the irksomeness, has peopled their solitude with a bevy of fair 
 attendants, maids of honour, or ladies of the bed-chamber, according. to the 
 approved etiquette at a court of the nineteenth century ; giving to the whole 
 scene the air of a file champ&tre, if we will but excuse the absence of the 
 gentlemen. This is well, and Watteauish. But what is become of the solitary 
 mystery— the 
 
 Daughters three. 
 That sing around tlie golden tree ? 
 
 This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated this subject. 
 
 The paintings, or rather the stupendous architectural designs, of a modem 
 artist, have been urged as objections to tlie theory of our motto. They are of 
 a character, we confess, to stagger it. His towered structures are of the highest, 
 order of the material sublime. Whether they were dreams, or transcripts of 
 some elder workmanship— Assyrian ruins old — restored by this mighty artist, 
 they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the 
 antique world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled. On that side, the 
 imagination of the artist halts, and appears defective. Let us examine the 
 point of the story in the " Belshazzar's Feast." We will introduce it by an 
 apposite anecdote. 
 
 The court historians of the day record, that at the first dinner given by the 
 late King (then Prince Regent) at the Pavilion, the following characteristic 
 frolic was played off. The guests were select and admiring; the banquet pro- 
 fuse and admirable; the lights lustrous and oriental; the eye Was perfectly 
 dazzled with the display of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar, 
 brought from the regaUa in the Tower for this especial purpose, itself a tower! 
 stood conspicuous for its magnitude. And now the Rev. —^, the then 
 admired Court Chaplain, was proceeding with the grace, when, at a signal 
 given, the lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge transparency was dis- 
 covered, in which glittered in golden letters — 
 
 "Brighton— Earthquake-=-Swallow-up-ai,ive." 
 
 Imagine the confusion of the guests; the Georges and garters, jewels, 
 bracelets, moulted upon the occasion ! The fans dropped, and picked up the 
 next morning by the sly court pages ! Mrs. Fitz-what's-her-name faining, and 
 
 the Countess of holding the smelling-bottle, till the good-humoured 
 
 Prince caused harmony to be restored by caUing in fresh candles, and declaring 
 that the whole was nothing but a pantomime hoax, get up by the ingenious 
 Mr. Farley, of Covent Garden, from hints which his Royal Highness himself 
 had furnished ! Then imagine the infinite applause that followed, the mutual 
 rallyings, the declarations that "they were not much frightened," of the 
 assembled galaxy. ^ 
 
 The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the appearance of the 
 transparency in the anecdote. The huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the escape, 
 the alarm, and the mock alarm ; the prettinesses heightened by consternation ; 
 the courtier's fear which was flattery, and the .lady's which was affectation ; all \ 
 that we may conceive to have, taken place in a mob of Brighton courtiers, j 
 sympathizing with the well-acted surprise of their sovereign ; all this, and no j 
 more, is exhibited by the well-dressed lords and ladies in the Hall of Belus. ! 
 
Elia: On the Productions of Modern Art. 525 
 
 Just this sort of consternation we have seen among a flock of disquieted wild 
 geese at the report only of a gun having gone off! 
 
 But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for the preservation of 
 their persons, — such as we have witnessed at a theatre, when a slight alarm 
 of fire has been given— an adequate exponent of a supernatural terror? the way 
 in which the finger of God, writing judgments, would have been met by the 
 withered conscience? There is a human fear, and a divine fear. The one is 
 disturbed, restless, and bent upon escape. The other is bowed down, effortless, 
 passive. When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz in the visions of the night, 
 and the hair of his flesh stood up, was it in the thoughts of the Temanite to 
 ring the bell of his chamber, or to call up the servants ? But let us see in the 
 text what there is to justify all this huddle of vulgar consternation. 
 
 From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar had made a great feast 
 to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine oefore the thousand. The golden 
 and silver vessels are gorgeously enumerated, with the princes, the kings con- 
 cubines, and his wives. Then follows — 
 
 "In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over 
 against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the kmg's palace ; and 
 the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance 
 was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins 
 were loosened, and his knees smote one against another." 
 
 This is the plain text. By no hint can it be otherwise inferred, but that the 
 appearance was solely confined to the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain 
 was troubled. Not a word is spoken of its being seen by any else there present, 
 not even by the queen herself, who merely tmdertakes for the interpretation of 
 the phenomenon, as related to her, doubtless by her husband. The lords are 
 simply said to be astonished ; i.e. , at the trouble and the change of countenance 
 in their sovereign. Even the prophet does not appear to have seen the scroll, 
 which the king saw. He recalls it only, as Joseph did the Dream to the King 
 of Egypt. "Then was the part of the hand sent from him [the Lord], and 
 this writing was written." He speaks of the phantasm as past. 
 
 Then what becomes of this needless multiplication of the miracle? this mes- 
 sage to a royal conscience, singly expressed— for it was said, " thy kingdom is 
 divided," simultaneously impressed upon the fancies of a thousand courtiers, 
 who were implied in it neither correctly nor grammatically? 
 
 But admitting the artist's own version of the story, and that the sight was seen 
 also by the thousand courtiers— let it have been visible to all Babylon— as the 
 knees of Belshazzar were shaken, and his countenance troubled, even so would 
 the knees of every man in Babylon, and their countenances, as of an indi- 
 vidual man, been troubled ; bowed, bent down, so would they have remained, 
 stupor-fi.ved, with no thought of struggling with that mevitable judgment. 
 
 Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to be shown in every picture. 
 The eye deliWitedly dwells upon the brilliant individualities in a " Marriage at 
 Cana '■ by Veronese, or Titian, to the very texture and colour of the wedding 
 garments the rings glittering upon the bride's fingers, the metal and fashion 
 5f the wine-pots; for at such seasons, there is leisure and luxury to be cunous. 
 But in a "day of judgment," or in a " day of lesser horrors, yet divine as 
 at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the actual eye of an 
 aeent or patient in the immediate scene would see, only m masses and indis- 
 tinction Not only the female attire and jewellery exposed to the cntical eye 
 of the fashion, as minutely as the dresses in aladys magazme, m the criticized 
 Dicture —but perhaps the curiosities of anatomical science, and studied diver- 
 sities of posture in the fallen angels and sinners of Michael Angelo,-have no 
 business in their great subjects. There was no leisure of therri 
 
 By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at their true conclu- 
 sions ■ by not showing the actual appearances, that was, all that was to be seen at 
 
326' The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ■ any given moment by an indifferent eye, but only what the eye might be sup- 
 posed to see in the doing or suffering of some portentous action. Suppose the 
 moment of the swallowingup of Pompeii. There they were to be seen— houses, 
 CQlu;nns, architectural proportions, differences of public and private buildings, 
 men and women, at their standing occupations, the diversified thousand posr 
 tures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion truly, but physically they, were 
 visible. But what eye saw thena at that eclipsing moment, which reduces con- 
 fusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses are upturned from their proprie- 
 ties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only? A thousand years have passed, 
 .and we are at leisure to contemplate the weaver fixed standing at his shutr 
 tie, the baker at his oven, and to turn over with antiquarian coolness the pots 
 and pans of Pompeii. 
 
 ' ' Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeah, and thou Moon, in the valley of Aja- 
 lon." Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, in his conception, sees 
 aught but the heroic son of Nun, with the outstretched arm, and the greater 
 and lesser light obsequies ? Doubtless there were to. be seen hill and dale, and 
 ■chariots and horsemen, on open plain or winding by secret defiles, and all the 
 circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would have been con- 
 scious of this array at the interposition of the sychronic miracle? Yet in the 
 picture of this subject by the artist of the " Belshazizar's Feast" — no ignoble 
 work either— the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the 
 miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day; and the eye rtiay "dart through rank 
 and file traverse " for some minutes, before it shall discover, among his armed 
 followers, which is Joshua ! Not modern art alone, but ancient, where.onlyit 
 is to be found if anywhere, can be detected erring, from defect of this imgina' 
 five faculty. The world has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, 
 transcending the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in the great pic- 
 ture at Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings, k. ghastly horror 
 at itself struggles with newly-apprehended gratitude at second life bestowed. 
 It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body. It 
 has to tell of the world of spirits. — Was it from a feeling, that the crowd of 
 half-impassioned bystanders, and the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at 
 a distance, who have not heard or but faintly have been told of the passing 
 miracle, admirable as they are in design and hue — for it is a glorified work — 
 do not respond adequately to the action— that the single figure of Lazarus has 
 been attributed tb Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly robbed 
 of the fame of the greater half of the interest ? Now that there were not indif- 
 ferent passers-by within actual scope of the eyes of those present at the miracles 
 to whom the sound of it had but fainjly, or not at all, reached, it would be 
 hardihood to deny; but would they see them? or can the mind in the concep- 
 tion of it admit of such unconcerning objects? can it think of them at all? or 
 what associating league to the imagination can there be between the seers, and 
 the seers not, of a presential miracle ? 
 
 Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask 
 whether, in the present low state of expectation, the patron would not, or ought 
 not to be fully satisfied with a beautiful' naked figure recumbent under wide- 
 stretched oaks ? Disseat those woods, and place the same figure among foun- 
 tains, and falls of pellucid water, and you have a— Naiad ! Not so in a rough 
 print we have seen after Julio Romano, we think — for it is long smsx— there, by 
 no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated 
 characters. Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful 
 in convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural tree, co-twisted with its 
 limbs her own, till both seemed either — these, animated branches ; those, dis- 
 animated members— yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently kept distinct 
 —his Dryad lay— an approximation, of two natures, which to conceive, it must be 
 seen : analogous to, not the same with the delicacies of Ovidian transformations.- 
 
Elia: On the Productions of Modern Art. 527 
 
 To the lowest subjects, and to a superficial comprehension, the most barren, 
 the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness. The large eye of genius saiy 
 in the meanness of present objects, their capabilities of treatment from tlieir 
 relations to some grand Past or Future. Hovv has Raphael— we must still hnger 
 about the Vatican— treated the humble craft of the ! ship-builder, in his 
 "Building of the Ark?" It is in that scriptural series, to which we have 
 referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old graphic sketches of them 
 which we possess, seem to be of a higher and more poetic grade than even the 
 Cartoons. The dim of sight are the timid and the shrinking. There is a 
 cowardice in modern art. As the Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge's friend 
 made the prophetic guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of 
 Michael Angelo collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and a 
 Corriuto ; so from this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it would instinc- 
 tively turn away, as from one incapable of investiture with any grandeur. The 
 dockyards at Woolwich would ojpject derogatory associations. The depot at 
 Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye. But not to 
 the nautical preparations in the shipyards of Civita Vecchia did Raphael look 
 for instructions, when he imagined the Building of the Vessel that was to be 
 conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In the inten- 
 sity of the action, he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. 
 There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, and with holy prescience, giving 
 directions. And there are his agents — the solitary but sufficient Three — hewing, 
 sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus ; under some 
 instinctive rather than technical guidance; giant-muscled; everyone a Hercules, 
 or lilter to those Vulcanian Three, that in sounding, caverns under Mongibello 
 wrought in fire— Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmon. So work the 
 workmen that should repair a world ! 
 
 Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with pictorial subjects. In the 
 latter, the e.\terior accidents are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as 
 nothing. Othello's colour— the infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff 
 — do they haunt us perpetually in the reading? or are they obtruded upon our 
 conceptions one- time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiradon at the re- 
 spective moral or intellectual attributes of the charac-ter? But in a picture 
 Othello is always a Blackamoor ; and the other only Plump Jack. Deeply cor- 
 porealized, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality, 
 must be the mind, to which, in its better moments, the image of the high-souled, 
 high-intelligenced Quixote— the errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender 
 by eclipse— has never presented itself, divested from the unhallowed accompani- 
 f ment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Rosinante. That man has 
 read his book by halves ; he has laughed, mistaking his author's purport, which 
 was— tears. Tlie artist that pictures Qui.'iote (and it is in this degrading point 
 that he is every season held up at' our Exhibitions) in the siiallow hope of 
 exciting mirth, would have joined the rabble at the heels of his starved steed. 
 We wish not to see that counterfeited, which we would not have wished to see 
 in the reality. Conscious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on 
 hearing that his withered person was passing, would have stepped over his 
 threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habilaments, and the " strange bedfellows 
 which misery brings a man acquainted with ?" Shade of Cervantes ! who^ in 
 thy Second Part could put into the mouth of thy Quixote those high aspira- ^ 
 tions of a super-chivalrous gallantry, where he replies to one of the shepherd- 
 esses, apprehensive that he would spoil their pretty net-works, and inviting him 
 to be a guest with them, in accents like these: "Truly, fairest lady, Actseon 
 was not more astonished when he saw Diana bathing herself at the fountain, 
 than I have been in beholding your beauty : I commend the manner of your 
 pastime, and thank you for your kind ofiTers; and, if I may serve you, so I may 
 be sure you will be obeyed, you may command me : for my profession is thi^ 
 
To show myself thankful, and a doer of good to all sorts of people, especially 
 of the rank that your person shows you to be ; and if those nets, as they take 
 up but a little piece of ground, should take up the whole world, I would 
 seek out new worlds to pass through, rather than break them : and " (he adds), 
 " that you may give credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that 
 promiseth you this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath 
 come to your hearing." Illustrious Romancer! were the "fine frenzies," 
 which possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this Second 
 Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving men ; to be monstered, 
 and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men ? Was that pitiable infir- 
 mity, which in thy First Part misleads him, always from luitkin, into half- 
 ludicrous, but more than half-compassionable and admirable errors, not 
 infliction enough from heaven, that men by studied artifices must devise and 
 practise upon the humour, to inflame where they should sooth it? Why, 
 Goneril would have blushed to practise upon the abdicated king at this rate, 
 and the she-wolf Regan not have endured to play the pranks upon his fled wits, 
 which thou hast made thy Quixote suffer in Duchesses' halls, and at the hands 
 of that unworthy nobleman.* 
 
 In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most consummate 
 artist in the Book way that the world hath yef seen, to keep up in the mind of the 
 reader the heroic attributes of the character without relaxing ; so as absolutely 
 that they shall suffer no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. If it 
 ever obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh ; or not, rather, to 
 indulge a contrary emotion ? — Cervantes, stung, perchance, by the relish with 
 which his Reading Public had received the fooleries of the man, more to their 
 palates than the generosities of the master, in the sequel let his pen run riot, lost 
 the harmony and the balance, and sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his con- 
 temporaries. We know that in the present day the Knight has fewer admirers 
 than the Squire. Anticipating, what did actually happen to him — as afterwards 
 it did to his scarce inferior follower, the author of " Guzman de Alfarache" — 
 that some less knowing hand would prevent him by a spurious Second Part ; 
 and judging that it would be easier for his competitor, to outbid him in the co- 
 micalities, than in the romance of his work, he abandoned his Knight,- and has 
 fairly set up the Squire for his Hero. For what else has he unsealed the eyes 
 of Sancho : and instead of that twilight state of semi-insanity — the madness at 
 second-hand— the contagion, caught from a stronger mind infected— that war 
 between native cunning, and hereditary deference, with which he has hitherto 
 accompanied his master— two for a pair almost— does he substitute a downright 
 Knave, with open eyes, for his own ends only following a confessed Madman ; 
 and offering at one time to lay, if not actually laying, hands upon him. From the 
 moment that Sancho loses his reverence, Don Quixote is become a — treatable 
 lunatic. Our artists handle him accordingly. 
 
 V%t »bbmff. 
 
 [" Admiral " is thought by some to have meant Admiral Bumey.] 
 
 I DO not know when I have been better pleased than at being invited last week 
 to be present at the wedding of a friend's daughter. I like to make one at 
 
 * Yet from this Second Part, our cried-up pictures are mostly selected ; the waiting- 
 women with beards, &c. 
 
Elia: The Wedding. 525, 
 
 these ceremonies, which to us old people give back our youth in a manner, and 
 restore our gayest season, in the remembrance of our own success, or the 
 regrets, scarcely less tender, of our own youthful disappointments, in this point 
 of a settlement. On these occasions I am sure to be in good-humour for a 
 week or two after, and enjoy a reflected honeymoon. Being without a family, 
 I am flattered with these temporary adoptions in a friend's family ; I feel a sort 
 of cousinhood, or uncleship, for the season ; I am inducted into degrees of 
 affinity ; and, in the participated socialities of the little community, I lay down 
 for a brief while my solitary bachelorship. I carry this humour so far, that 1 
 take it unkindly to be left out, even when a funeral is going on in the house of 
 
 a dear friend. But to my subject. 
 
 The union itself had been long settled, but its celebration had been hitherto 
 deferred, to an almost unreasonable state of suspense in the lovers, by some 
 invincible prejudices which the bride's father had unhappily contracted upon 
 the subject of the too early marriages of females. He has been lecturing any 
 time these five years— for to that length the courtship has been protracted — 
 upon the propriety of putting off the solemnity, till the lady should have com- 
 pleted her five-and-twentieth year. We all began to be afraid that a suit, 
 which as yet had abated of none of its ardours, might at last be lingered on, 
 till passion had time to cool, and love go out in the experiment. But a little 
 wheedling on the part of his wife, who was by no means a party to these over- 
 strained notions, joined to some serious expostulations on that of his friends, 
 who, from the growing infirmities of the old gentleman, could not promise 
 ourselves many years' enjoyment of his company, and were anxious to bring 
 matters to a conclusion during his lifetime, at length prevailed; and on Monday 
 
 last the daughter of my old friend Admiral having attained the womanly 
 
 age of nineteen, was conducted to the church by her pleasant cousin J , 
 
 who told some few years older. 
 
 Before the y outhful part of my female readers express their indignation at 
 the abominable loss of time occasioned to the lovers by the preposterous 
 notions of my old friend, they will do well to consider the reluctance which a 
 fond parent naturally feels at parting with his child. To this unwillingness, I 
 beheve, in most cases may be traced' the difference of opmion on this point 
 between child and parent, whatever pretences of interest or prudence may be 
 held out to cover it. The hardheartedness of fathers is a fine theme for 
 romance writers, a sure and moving topic; but is there not something un- 
 tender, to say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved child is some- 
 times in to tear herself from the parental stock, and commit herself to 
 strange graftings ? The case is heightened where the lady, as in the present 
 instance, happens to be an only child. I do not understand these matters 
 experimentally, but I can make a shrewd guess at the wounded pride of a 
 parent upon these occasions. It is no new observation, I believe, that a lover 
 in most cases has no rival so much to be feared as the father. Certainly there 
 is a jealousy in unparalUl siibjecls, which is little less heart-rending than the 
 passion which we more strictly christen by that name. .Mother's scruples are 
 more easily got over! for this reason, I suppose, that the protection transferred 
 to a husband is less a derogation and a loss to their authority than to the 
 paternal. Mothers, besides, have a trembling foresight, which paints the 
 inconveniences (impossible to be conceived in the same degree by the other 
 parent) of a life of forlorn celibacy, which the refusal of a tolerable match may 
 entail upon their child. Mothers' instinct is a surer guide here, than the cold 
 reasonings of a father on such a topic. To this instinct may be imputed, and 
 by it alone may be excused, the unbeseeming artifices, by which some wives 
 push on the matrimonial projects of their daughters, which the husband, how- 
 ever approving, shall entertain with comparative indiff'erence. A little shame- 
 lessness on this head is pardonable. With this explanation, forwardness 
 
53° ^'^ Works of Charles Lamb. \ 
 
 becomes a grace', and maternal importunity receives the name of a virtue. — But 
 the parson stays, while I preposterously assume his office; 1 am preaching, 
 while the bride is on the threshold. 
 
 JJor let any of my female readers suppose that the sage reflections which 
 have just escaped me have the obliquest tendency of application to the young 
 lady, who it will be seen, lis about to venture upon a change in her condition, 
 at a mature and competent age, and not without the fullest approbation of all 
 parties. I only deprecate very hasty marriages. ' • - \ 
 
 It had been fixed that the ceremony should be gone through at an early hour,: 
 to give time for a little dfjeiiner afterwards, to which a select party of friends! 
 had been invited. We were in church a little before the clock struck eight. 
 
 Nothing could be more judicious or graceful than the dress of the brides-', 
 maids— the three charming Miss Foresters — on this morning. To give the' 
 bride an opportunity of shining singly, they had come "habited all in green. 1, 
 am ilj at describing female apparel ; but, while s/ie stood at the ' ciltar in vest- ; 
 ments white , and candid as her thoughts, a sacrificial whiteness, t/iey assisted i 
 in robes, such as might become Diana's«nymphs— Foresters indeed— as such ', 
 who had not yet come to the resolution of putting off cold virginity. These ; 
 young maids, not being so blessed as to have a mother living, I am fold, keep ( 
 single for their father's sake, and live all together so happy with their remaining 
 parent, that the hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the prospect (so in- 
 auspicious to their hopes) of such uninterrupted and provoking home-comfort. ' 
 Gallant girls ! each a victim worthy of Iphigenia! 
 
 I do not know what business I have to be present in solemn places. 1 
 cannot divest me of an unseasonable disposition to, levity upon the most awful 
 occasions. I was never cut out for a public functionary. Ceremony and I 
 .have long shaken hands ; biit I could not resist the importunities of the young 
 lady's father, whose gout unhappily confined him at home, to^act as parent on 
 this occasion,, and give away tlie bride. Something ludicrous occurred to me 
 at this most serious of all moments — a sense of my unfitness to have the dis- 
 posal, even in imagination, of the sweet young creature beside me. I fear 1 
 was betrayed to some lightness, for, the awful eye of the parson — and llie 
 rector's eye of Saint Mildred's in the Poultrjr is no trifle of a rebuke — was 
 upon me in an instant, souring my incipient jest to the tristful severities of a 
 funeral. 
 
 Tliis was the only misbehaviour which I can plead to upon this solemn 
 occasion, unless what was objected to me after the ceremony by one of the 
 handsome Miss T[urner]s, be accounted a solecism. She was pleased to say that 
 she had never seen a gentleman before me give away a bride iii black. Now 
 black has been my ordinary apparel so long — indeed 1 take it to be the proper 
 costume of an author — the stage sanctions it— that to have appeared in some 
 lighter colour would liave raised more mirth at my expense, than the anomaly 
 liad created censure. But 1 could perceive that the bride's mother, and some 
 elderly ladies present (God bless them !), would have been well content, if I 
 had come in any other colour than that. But I got over the omen by a lucky 
 apologue, which I remembered out of Pilpay, or some Indian author, of all 
 the birds being invited to the linnets' wedding, at which, when all the rest came 
 in their gayest feathers, the raven alone apologized for his f:loak because " he 
 had no Other." This tolerably reconciled the elders. But with the young 
 people all was merriment, and shakings of hands, and congratulations, and 
 kissing away the bride's tears, and kissings from her in return, till a young 
 lady, who assumed some experience in these matters, having, worn the nuptial 
 bands some four or five weeks longer than her friend, rescued her, archly 
 observing, with half an eye upon the bridegroom, that at this rate she 
 would have ."none left." 
 
 My friend -the Admiral was in fine wig and buckle on this occasion— a striking 
 
 ,1 
 
Elia: The Wedding. 531 
 
 contrast to his usual neglect of personal appearance. He did not ortce 
 shove up his borrowed locks (his custom ever at his morning studies) to 
 betray the few grey stragglers of his own beneath them. He wore an ascect 
 of thoughtful satisfaction. I trembled for the hour, which at leneth an- 
 proached, when after a protracted bmtkfaU of three hours-if stores of cold 
 fowls, tongues, hams, botargoes, dried fruits, wines, cordials, &c., can deserve 
 so meagre an appellation— the coacli was announced, which was to come 
 to carry off the bride and bridegroom for a season, as custom has sensibly 
 ordained, into the country; upon which design, wishing them a felicitous 
 journey, let us return to the assembled guests. 
 
 As when a well-graced actor leaves the stage. 
 
 The eyes of men 
 
 Are idly bent on him that enters next, 
 
 so idly did we bend our eyes upon one another, when the chief performers in 
 the morning's pageant had vanished. None told his tale. None sipped her 
 glass. The poor Admiral made an effort— it was not much. I had anticipated 
 so far. Even the infinity of full satisfaction, that had betrayed itself throu<'h 
 the pnm looks and quiet deportment of his lady, began to wane into something 
 like misgiving. No one knew whether to take their leaves or stay. We seemed 
 assembled upon a silly occ^ision. In this crisis, betwixt tarrying and departure 1 
 must do justice to a foolish talent of mine, which had otherwise like to have 
 brought me into disgrace in the fore-part of the day ; I mean a power, in any 
 emergency, of thinking and giving vent to all manner of strange nonsense. In 
 this awkward dilemma I found it sovereign. I rattled off some of my most 
 excellent absurdities. All were willing to be relieved, at any expense of reason 
 from the pressure of the intolerable vacuum which had succeeded to the morn- 
 ing bustle. By this means I was fortunate in keeping together the better part 
 of the company to a late hour : and a rubber of whist (the Admirals favourite 
 game) with some rare strokes of chance as well as skill, which came oppor- 
 tunely on his side— lengthened out till midnight— dismissed the old gentleman 
 at last to his bed with comparati vely easy spirits. 
 
 I have been at my old friend' s various times since. I do not know a visiting 
 place where every guest is so perfectly at his ease ; nowhere, where harmony is 
 so strangely the resulf of confusion. Everybody is at cross purposes, yet the 
 effect is so much better than uniformity. Contradictory orders ; servants puUing 
 oneway; master and mistress driving some other, yet both diverse; visitors 
 huddled up in corners; chairs unsyinmetrized ; c.indles disposed by chance; 
 meals at odd hours, tea and supper at once, or the latter preceding the former; 
 the host and the guest conferring, yet each upon a different topic, each under- 
 standing himself, neither trying to understandor hear the other ; draughts and 
 politics, chess and political economy, cards and conversation on nautical mat- 
 ters, going on at once, without the hope, or indeed the wish, of distinguishing 
 them, make it altogether the most perfect co;/«n//iZ dhcors you shall meet with. 
 Yet som.ehow the old house is not quite what it should be. The Admiral still en- 
 joys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily to fill it for him. The instrument stands 
 where it stood, but she is gonewhose delicate touch could sometimes for a short 
 minute appease the warring elements. He has learnt, as Marvel expresses it, 
 to "make his destiny his choice." He bears bravely up, but he does not come 
 out with his flashes of wild wit so thick as formerly. His seasongs seldom es- 
 cape him. His wife, too, looks as if she wanted sorne young^er body to scold 
 and set to rights. We all miss a junior presence. It is wonderful how one 
 .young maiden freshens up, and keeps green, the paternal roof.. Old and youn^ 
 seem to hdve an interest in her, so long as she is not, absolutely disposed of. 
 The youthfiilness of the house is flown. Emily is manied. 
 
532 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 popular Jfallarws. 
 
 [Under Ihib heading Charles Lamb contributed to the New Monthly Magazine^ in 
 1826, a series of nineteen papers ahogether. Two of these were included by him in 1833, 
 among the Last Essays of Elia— "That Great Wit is Allied to Madness," being then 
 more tersely entitled " Sanity of True Genius," while the other, which had periphrastically 
 announced as its thesis " That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are models 
 of The Genteel Style of Writing," retained in thereprint only the last five words, "The 
 Genteel Style of Writing," as a sufficient designation. Another paper, the one published 
 in the iVcrt; iJ/tjwM/y, for June, 1826, "That a Deformed Person is a Lord," for some 
 unexplained reason was not included by Lamb either among the Elian Essays proper, or 
 among these supplemented minor papers called Popular Fallacies. The two former, 
 under their revised titles, have been allowed to retain their place in the Second Series 
 of Elia, in obedience to the evident desire of the Essayist. The hitherto overlooked 
 paper on the other hand (discarded or forgotten by its wnter, in 1833) is included, 
 but at the same time carefully bracketed, among the Popular Fallacies, which are thus 
 'increased from Sixteen to Seventeen.] 
 
 THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD. 
 
 ij'lie New Monthly Magazine^ January, 1826.) 
 
 This axiom contains a principle of compensation, which disposes us to admit 
 the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to dictionaries and definitions. We 
 should more willingly fall in with this popular language, if we did not find 
 brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour in the same vocabulary; 
 The comic writers, with their poetical justice, have contributed not a little to 
 mislead us on this point. To see a hectoring fellow exposed and beaten upon 
 the stage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some people's share 
 of animal spirits is notoriously low and defective. It has not strength to raise 
 a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. These love to be told 
 that huffing is no part of valour. The truest courage with them is that which 
 is the least noisy and obtruvise. But confront one of the silent heroes with th» 
 swaggerer of real life, and his confidence in the theory quickly vanishes. Pre- 
 tensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest inoffensive 
 deportment does not necessarily imply valour ; neither does the absence of it 
 justify us in denying that quality. Hickman wanted modesty — we do not mean 
 him of Clarissa— but who ever doubted his courage ? Even the poets — upon 
 whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be most binding — have 
 thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. Hara- 
 pha, in the " Agonistes," is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton 
 has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in 
 Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him — and does it. Tom Brown 
 had a shrewder insight into this kind of character than either of his predeces- 
 sors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort of dimi- 
 diate pre-eminence :— " Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the 
 town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true distributive justice. 
 
 ^ 
 
Elia: Popular Fallacies. 533 
 
 11. 
 
 THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS. 
 
 ( The New Monthly Mngazijte, January^ 1826.) 
 
 The weakest part of mankind have this saying commonest in their mouth. It 
 is the trite consolation administered to the easy dupe, whpn he has been tricked 
 out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no good 
 But the rogues of this world— the prudenter part of them, at least— know bet- 
 ter; and, if the observation had been as true as it is old, would not have failed 
 by this time to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distinctions of the 
 fluctuating and the permanent. " Lightly corner lightly go," is a proverb, 
 which they can very well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. 
 They do not always find manors, got by rapine, or chicanery, insensibly to 
 melt away, as the poets will have it ; or that all golij glides, like thawing snow, 
 from the thief's hand that grasps it. Church land, aUenated to lay uses, was 
 formerly denounced to have this slippery quaUty. But some portions of it some- 
 how always stuck so fast, that the denunciators have been fain to postpone the 
 prophecy of refundment to a late posterity. 
 
 III. 
 
 THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST. 
 
 (^The New Monthly Magazine, Januarj', 1826.) 
 
 The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the self-denial of poor human 
 nature ! This is to expect a gentleman to give a treat without partaking of 
 it ; to sit esurient at his own table, and commend the flavour of his venisoi; 
 upon the absurd strength of his never touching it himself. On the contrary, " 
 we love to see a wag taste his own joke to his party ; to watch a quirk, or a 
 merry conceit, flickering upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is deliv- 
 ered of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy— begotten of the occasion ; if he that 
 utters it never thought it before, he is naturally the first to be tickled with it ; 
 and any suppression of such complacence we hold to be churUsh and insulting. 
 What does it seem to imply, but that your company is weak or foolish enough 
 to be moved by an image or a fancy, that shall stir you not at all, or but faintly. 
 This is exactly the humour of the fine gentleman in Mandeville, who, while he 
 dazzles his guests with the display of some costly toy, affects himself to "see 
 nothing considerable in it." 
 
 IV. 
 
 THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING.— THAT IT IS EASY TO 
 PERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMAN. 
 
 {The Ne^u Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.) 
 
 A SPEECH from the poorer sort of people, which always indicates that the 
 party vituperated is a gentleman. The very fact which they deny, is that which 
 galls and exasperates them to use this language. The forbearance with which 
 it is usually received, is a proof what interpretation the bystander sets upon it. 
 Of a kin to this, and still Tess politic, are the phrases with which, in their street 
 rhetoric, they ply one another more grossly : — He is a poor creature. — He has not 
 
534 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 a rag to cover (s°c. , though this last, we confess, is more frequently applied 
 
 by females to females. They do not perceive that the satire glances upon 
 themselves. A poor man, of all things in the world, should not upbraid an 
 antagonist with poverty. Are there no other topics — as, to tell him his father 
 
 was hanged — his sister, &c. , without exposing a secret, which should be 
 
 kept snug between them ; and doing an affront to the order to which they have 
 the honour equally to belong ? All this while they do not see how the wealthier 
 man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both. 
 
 V. 
 
 THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH. 
 
 \T/ie JV^w Monihty Magazitie, January, 1826.) 
 
 .A. SMOOTH text to the latter ; and, preached from the pulpit, is sure of a docile 
 audience from fhe pews lined with satin. It is twice sitting upon velvet to a 
 foolish squire to be .told, that he^ and not perverse ■ nature, as the- homilies 
 would make us imagine, is the true cause of all the irregularities in his parish. 
 This is striking at the root of free- will indeed, and denying the , originahty of 
 sin in any sense. But men are not such imphcit sheep as this comes to. If 
 the abstinence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to derive itself from 
 no higher principle, than the apprehension of setting ill patterns to "the lower, 
 we beg leave to discharge them from all squeamishness on that score : they 
 may even tak.? their fill-, qf pleasures, where they can find them.. The Genius 
 of Poverty, hamper^ and straitened as it is, is not so barren of invention but 
 it can trade upon the staple of its own vice, without drawing upon their capital. 
 The poor are not quite such servile imitators as they take them for. Some of 
 them are very clever artists in their way. Here and there we find an original. 
 Who taught the poor to steal, to pilfer? They did not go to the great for 
 schoolmasters irt these faculties surely. It is well if in some vices they jiUow 
 us to be— no copyists. In no other sense is it true that the poor copy them, 
 than as servants may be said to taie after their masters and mistresses, when 
 they succeed to their reversionary cold meats. If the master, from indisposi- 
 tion or some other cause, neglect his food, the servant dines notwithstanding. 
 
 "O, but (some will say) the force of example is great," We knew a lady 
 who was so scrupulous on this head, that she would put up with the calls of 
 fhe most impertinent visitor rather than :let her servants say she was not at 
 home, for fear of teacljing her maid to tell an untruth ; and this in the very face 
 of the fact, which she knew well enough, and that the wench was one of the 
 greatest liars upon the earth without teaching ; so mucli so, that her mistress 
 possibly never heard two words of consecutive truth from lier in her life. But 
 nature must go for nothing : example must be everything. This liar in grain, 
 who never opened her mouth without a lie, must be guarded against a remote 
 inference, which she (pretty casuist !) might possibly draw from a form of words 
 — literally false, but essentially deceiving no one — that , under some circum- 
 stances a fib might not be so exceedingly sinful— a fiction, too, not at all in her 
 own way, or one that she could be suspected of adopting, for few servant- 
 wenches care to be denied to visitors. 
 
 This word example reminds us of another fine word which is in use upon* 
 these occasions— encouragement. " People in our sphere must not be thought 
 to give encouragement to such proceedings." To such a frantic height is this 
 principle capable of being carried, that we have known individuals who have, 
 thought it within the scope of their influence to sanction despair, and give 
 eclat to— suicide, A domestic in the family pf a county member lately 
 deceased, for love, or some unknown cause,,cut his throat, but not successfully. . 
 
Elia : Popular Fallacies. 535 
 
 The poor fellow was otherwise much loved and respected ; and great interest 
 was used in his behalf upon his recovery, that he might be permitted to retain 
 his place ; his word being first pledged, not without some substantial sponsors 
 to promise for him, that the like should never happen again. His master was 
 inclinable to keep him, but his mistress thought otherwise; and John in the 
 end was dismissed, her ladyship declaring that she "could not think of 
 encouraging any such doings in the county." 
 
 VI. 
 
 THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST. 
 
 (jTIie New Monthly Magctsiite, January, 1826.) 
 
 Not a man, woman, or child in ten miles around Guildhall, who really believes 
 this saying. The inventor of it did not believe it himself. It was made in 
 revenge by somebody, who was disappointed of a regale. It is a vile cold- 
 scrag-of-mutton sophism ; a lie palmed upon the palate, which knows better 
 things. If nothing else could be said for a feast, this is sufficient, that from the 
 superflux there is usually something left for the next day. Morally interpreted, 
 it belongs to a class of proverbs, which have a tendency to make us under- 
 value money. Of this cast are those notable observations, that money is not 
 health.; riches cannot purchase everything : the metaphor which makes gold to 
 be mere muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to the sheep's back, 
 and denounces pearl as the unhandsome excretion of an oyster. Hence, too, the 
 phrase which imputes dirt to acres— a sophistry, so barefaced, that even the 
 literal sense of it is true only in a wet season. This, and abundance of similar 
 sage saws assuming to inculcate content, we verily believe to have been the 
 invention of some c.uiming borrower, who had designs upon the purse of his 
 wealthier neighbour, which lie could only hope to carry by force of these verbal 
 jugglings. Translate any one of these sayings out of the artful metonyme 
 which envelops it, and the trick is apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of 
 mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing 
 foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are 
 not muck — however we may be pleased to scandalize with that appellation the 
 faithful metal that provides them for us. 
 
 VII. 
 
 OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERAIXY IN THE WRONG. 
 
 (The New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.) 
 
 Our experience would lead us to quite an opposite conclusion. Temper, Indeed, 
 is no test of truth ; but warmth and earnestness are a proof at least of a man's 
 own conviction of the rectitude of that which he maintains. Coolness is as 
 often the result of an unprincipled indifference to truth or falsehood, as of a 
 sober confidence in a man's own side in a dispute. Nothing is more insulting 
 sometime? than the appearance of this philosophic temper. There is little I, 
 Titubus, the stammering law-stationer in Lincoln's Inn— wq have seldom known 
 this shrewd little fellow engaged in an argument where we were not convinced 
 he had the best of it, if his tongue would but fairly have seconded him. When 
 he has been spluttering excellent broken sense foranhourtoge'ther,'.5vrithing and 
 labouring to be delivered of the point of dispute— the very gist of the con- 
 troversy knopking at his teeth, whicji like some obstinate iron-grating still ob- 
 structed its. deliy^ranpe— hi? puny frame, convulsed, and face reddening all over 
 
) 
 
 S3 6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 at an unfairness in the logic which he wanted articulation to expose, it has 
 moved our gall to see a smooth portly fellow of an adversary, that cared not a 
 button for the merits of the question, by merely laying his hand upon the head 
 of the stationer, and desiring him to be calm, (your tall disputants have always 
 the advantage), with a provoking sneer carry the argument clean from him in 
 the opinion of all the bystanders, who have gone away clearly convinced that 
 Titubus must have been in the wrong, because he was in a passion ; and that 
 
 Mr. , meaning his opponent, is one of the fairest, and at the same time 
 
 one of the most dispassionate arguers breathing. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THAT VERBAL ILLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, BECAUSE THEY WILL NOT BEAR 
 A TRANSLATION. 
 
 {The New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.) 
 
 The same might be said of the wittiest local allusions. A custom is some- 
 times as difficult to explain to a foreigner as a pun. What would become of a 
 great part of the wit of the last age, if it were tried by this test ! How would 
 certain topics, as aldermanity, cuckoldty, have sounded to a Terentian audi- 
 tory, though Terence himself had been alive to translate them ? Senator 
 iirbanus, with Curruca to boot for a synonyme, would but faintly have done 
 the business. Words, involving notions, ate hard enough to render ; it is too 
 much to expect -us to translate a sound, and give an elegant version to a jingle. 
 The VirgiUan harmony is not translatable, but by substituting harmonious 
 sounds in another language for it. To Latinize a pun, we must seek a pun in 
 Latin, that will answer to it; as, to give an idea of the double endings in 
 Hudibras, we must have recourse to a similar practice in the old monkish 
 doggerel. Dennis, the fiercest oppugner of puns in ancient or modem times, 
 professes himself highly tickled with the " a stick " chiming to "ecclesiastic." 
 Yet what is this but a species of pun, a verbal consonance ? 
 
 IX. 
 
 THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST. 
 
 [jrjie New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.) 
 
 If by worst be only meant the most far-fetched and startling, we agree to it. A 
 pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at thfr 
 ear : not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand 
 upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the 
 less coming for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders. What 
 though it limp a little, or prove defective in one leg ?— all the better. A pun 
 may easily be too curious and artificial. Who has not at one time or other 
 been at a party of professors (himself perhaps an old offender in that line), 
 where, after ringing a round of the most ingenious conceits, every man con- 
 tributing his shot, and some there the most expert shooters of the day ; after 
 making a poor word run the gauntlet till it is ready to drop ; after hunting and 
 winding it through all the possible ambages of similar sounds; after squeezing 
 and hauhng, and tugging at it, till the very milk of it will not yield a drop 
 further, — suddenly some obscure, unthought-of fellow in a corner, who was 
 never 'prentice to the trade, whom the company,' for very pity, passed over 
 as we do by a known poor man when a money subscription is going round, no 
 one calling upon him ifor his quota — has all at once come out with something so 
 
Elia: Popular Fallacies. 537 
 
 whimsical, yet so pertinent ; so brazen in its pretensions, yet so impossible to 
 be denied ; so exquisitely good, and so deplorably bad, at the same time, — that 
 it has proved a Robin Hood's shot ; anything ulterior to that is despaired of ; 
 and the party, brealis up, unanimously voting it to be the very worst (that is, 
 best) pun of the evening. This species of wit is the better for not being perfect 
 in all its parts. What it gains in completeness, it loses in naturalness. The 
 more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less hold it has upon some other faculties. 
 The puns which are most entertaining are those which will least bear an analysis. 
 Of this kind is the following, recorded, with a sort of stigma, in one of Swift's 
 Miscellanies. 
 
 An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the 
 streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question : " Prithee, friend, is that 
 thy own hare, or a wig?" 
 
 There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blur ten sides of 
 paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter- 
 proof. The quibble in itself is not considerable. It is only a new turn given, 
 by a little false pronunciation, to a very common, tliough not very courteous 
 inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have 
 been vapid ; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit 
 than rudeness. We must take in the totality of time, place, and person ; the 
 pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; 
 the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen ; the innocent 
 though rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the 
 utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second ; tlie place— a public street not 
 favourable to frivolous investigations ; the affrontive quality of the primitive 
 inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the new 
 turn given to it) in the implied satire ; namely, tliat few of that tribe are expected 
 to eat of the good things which they carry, they being in most countries con- 
 sidered rather as the temporary trustees than owners of such dainties, -^which- 
 the fellow was beginning to understand ; but then the wig again conies in, ,-ind 
 he can make nothing of it : all put together constitute a picture : Hogarth 
 could have made it intelligible on canvas. 
 
 ■ Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very bad pun because of the 
 defectiveness in the concluding member, which is its very beauty, and constitutes 
 the surprise. The same persons shall cry up for admirable the cold quibble 
 from 'Virgil about the broken Cremona ; • because it is ma^'e out in all its parts, 
 and leaves nothing to the imagination. We venture to call it cold; because of 
 thousands who have admired it, it would be difficult to find one who has heartily 
 chuckled at it. As appealing to the judgment merely (setting the risible faculty 
 aside), we must pronounce it a monument of curious felicity. But as some 
 stories are said to be too good to be true, it may with equal truth be asserted of 
 this bi-verbal allusion, that it is too good to be natural. One cannot help sus- 
 pecting that the incident was invented to fit the line. It would have been better 
 had it been less perfect. Like some 'Virgilian hemistichs, it has suffered by 
 filling up. The uimiiim Vicina was enough in conscience; the Crcmonce 
 afterwards loads it. It is in fact a double pun ; and we have always observed 
 that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is dangerous. When a man has said a 
 good thing, it is seldom politic to follow it up. We do not care to be cheated 
 a second time; or, perhaps, the mind of man (with reverence be it spoken) is 
 not capacious enough to lodge two puns at a time. The impression, to be 
 forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided. 
 
 * Swift. 
 
] 
 
 538 T/ie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 • r ■ 
 X. -.x ■ 
 
 THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MV nOG. 
 
 {The New liionihly Magazine, f^hiMZry, 1^26.)' 
 
 "Good sir, or madam, as it may be— we linost wiHiirgly embrace the offer of 
 your friendsliip. We long have known yoUr excellent qualities: We have 
 wished to have you nearer to us ; to hold you within the very innermost fold 
 of our heart. We can have no reserve towards a person o( youi- open and 
 noble nature.. The frankness of your humour suits us exactly. We have been 
 long looking-for such a iriend. Quick— let us disburthen our troubles into each 
 other's bosom -let us make our single joys shine by reduplication— But j'.z^, 
 yap, .yap .'—v/\i3.\. is this confounded cur? he has fastened his tooth, which is 
 none of the bluntest, just in the fleshy part of my leg." ''■ ' ' 
 
 "It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. Here, T?st— Test — 
 Test!" 
 
 ** But he has bitten nie." 
 
 "Ay, tliat he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with him. I have 
 had him three years. He nevsr bites me." , , 
 
 Yiip, yap, yap / — " He is at it again." ' ' 
 
 " Oh, sir, you must, not kick liim. He does not like to be kicked. I expect 
 my dog to be treated with all the respect due to myself." 
 
 "But do you ahvays take him out with you, when you go a friendship.^ 
 hunting ? " 
 
 " Invariably, "ris the sweetest, prettiest, best conditioned, animal. I call 
 him my to/— the touch-stone by which I try a friend. No one can properly be ■ 
 said to love me, who does not love him." 
 
 ' ' E-TCUse us, dear sir — or madam aforesaid— if upon further consideration 
 we are obliged to decline ,the otherwise invaluable offer of your friendship. We 
 do not like dogs." 
 
 ." Mighty well, sir— you know the conditions— you may have worse offers. 
 Com,e along. Test." 
 
 The above dialogue is not so. imaginary, but that, in the intercourse of life, 
 we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by 
 reason of these canine appendages. They do not always come in the shape of 
 dogs; they sometimes wear the more plaiisible and human character of kinsfolk, 
 near acquaintances, my friend's friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. 
 We could never yet form a friendship — not to speak of more delicate corre- 
 spondences—however much to our t?ste, without the intervention of some third 
 anomaly, some impertinent clog affi.ted to the relation— the understood dog in 
 the proverb. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us 
 with a mixture ; like a schoolboy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of 
 it. What a delightful companion is .... if he did not always bring his tall 
 cousin with him ! He seems to gro^y with him ; like some of those double births, 
 which we remember to have read of with such wonder and delight in the old 
 " Athenian Oracle," where Swift commenced author by writing Pindaric Odes 
 (what a beginning for hini 1) upon Sir William Temple. There is the picture of 
 tile brother, with the little brother peeping out at his shoulder; a species of 
 fraternity, which we have no name of kin close enough to comprehend. When 
 .... comes, poking in his head and shoulders into your room, as if to feel 
 his entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself — what a three 
 hours' chat we shall have !— but, ever in the haunch of him, and before his diffi- 
 dent body is well disclosed in your apartment, appears the haunting shadow of the 
 i cousin, over-peering his modest kinsman, and sure to overlay the expected good 
 I talk with his insufferable procetity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfishnesss 
 
Elia: Popular Fallacies. j^g 
 
 of observation. Misfortunes seldom come alone, '-"fis hard when a blessing 
 comes accompanied. Cannot we like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess 
 with her eternal brother ? or know Sulpicia, without knowing all the round of 
 her card-playing relations ? must my friend's brethren of necessity be mine 
 also? must we be hand and glove with Dick Selby the parson, or Jack Selby 
 the calico printer, because W. S., who is neither, but a ripe wit and a critic, 
 has the misfortune to claim common parentage with them ? Let him lay 
 down ills brothers; and 'tis odds but we will cast him in a pair of ours (we 
 have a superflu-x) to balance the concession. Let F. H. lay down his garrulous 
 uncle ; and Hoaorias dismiss his vapid wife, and superfluous establishment of 
 si.x boys— things between boy and manhood— too ripe for play, too raw for 
 'conversation— that c6mein, impudently staring their -father's old friend out of 
 countenance ; and will neither aid, nor let alone, the conference : that we may 
 once more meet upon equal terms, its we were wont to do in the disengaged 
 state of bachelorhood. 
 
 It is well if your friend, or mistress, be content with thei^e canicular proba- 
 tions; Few young ladies but in this sense keep a dog. But when Rutilia 
 hounds at you her tiger aunt ; or Ruspina expects you to cherish and fondle 
 her viper sister, whom she has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try 
 stinging conclusions upon your constancy; they must not complain if the 
 house be rather thin of suitors. Scylla must have broken off many excellent 
 matches in her time, if she insisted upon all that loved her, loving her dogs 
 also. 
 
 An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, of Della'Crtiscan memory. 
 In tender youth, he loved and courted a modest appanage to the Opera, in 
 truth adfjncer, who had won him by the artless contrast between her manners 
 and situation. She seemed to him a native violet, that had been transplanted 
 by some rude accident into that exotic and artificial hotbed. Nor, in truth, 
 was she less genuine and sincere than she appeared to him. He wooed and 
 won this flower. Only for appearance' sake, and for due honour to the bride's 
 relations, she craved that she might have the attendance of her friends and 
 kindred : t the approaching solemnity. The request was too amiable not to 
 be conceded ; and in this solicitude for conciliating the goodwill of mere rela- 
 tions, he found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, when the golden 
 shaft should have " killed the flock of all affections else." The morning came.; 
 and at the Star and Garter, Richmond— the place appointed for the breakfast- 
 ing— accompanied with one English friend, he irtipatiently waited what rein- 
 forcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she 
 had made. They came in six coaches— the whole corps du ballet — French, 
 Italian, men and women. Monsieur de B., the famous pirouetter of the day, 
 led his fair spouse, but scraggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima 
 Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second Buffa were there ; and 
 
 Signer Sc , and Signora Ch , and Madame V ;, with a countless 
 
 cavalcade besides of choruses, figurantes, at the sight of whom Merry after- 
 wards declared^ that " then for the first time it struck him seriously, that he 
 was about to marry— a dancer." But there was no help for it. Besides, it 
 was her day; these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The assemblage, 
 though whimsical, was all very natural. But when the bride— handing out of 
 the last coach a still more extraordinary figure than the rest— presented to him 
 ; as her fniher—lhe gentleman that was logive her away— no less a person that 
 Signor Delpini himself— with a sort of pride, as much as to say. See what I 
 ' b^ve brought to do us honour ! — the thought of so extraordinary a paternity 
 ) quite overcame him ; and slipping away under some pretence from the bride 
 I and her motley adherents, poor Merry took horse from the back yard to the . 
 I nearest sea-coast, from which, shipping himself to America, he shortly after 
 '■ consoled himself with a more congenial match in the person of Miss Brunton ; 
 
54o The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 relieved from his intended clown father, and a bevy of painted Buifas for 
 bridemaids. 
 
 XI. 
 
 THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK. 
 
 - {Xh£ New Monthly Magazine^ February, 1826.) 
 
 At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear, and pre- 
 pares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalists enough to de- 
 termine. But for a mere human gentleman — that has no orchestra business to 
 call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercises — we take ten, or 
 half after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very 
 earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To 
 think of it, we say ; for to do it in earnest, requires another half-hour's good 
 consideration. Not but that there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and 
 such like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer time especially, some hours 
 before what we have assigned ; which a gentleman may see, as they say, only 
 for getting up. But, having been tempted once or twice in ealirer life, to assist 
 at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are nd longer am- 
 bitious of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold 
 the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; 
 which have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. To say truth, we 
 never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go a 
 journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the 
 long hours after in listlessness and headaches ; Nature herself sufficiently de- 
 claring her sense of our presumption, in aspiring to regulate our frail waking 
 courses ^y the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveller. We deny not 
 that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these 
 break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world; to 
 conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality 
 are in us ; and we pay usually in strange qualms, before night falls, the penalty 
 of the unnatural inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are 
 fast huddling on their clothes, are already up and about their occupations, 
 content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale; we choose to linger a-bed 
 and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images 
 w hich night in a confused mass presented ; to snatch them from forgetfulness, 
 to shape and mould them. Some people have no good of their dreams. Like 
 fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them curiously. We love to 
 chew the cud of a foregone vision ; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter 
 phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal trage- 
 dies; to drag into daylight a struggling and half-vanishing night-mare; to 
 handle and examine the terrors of the airy solaces. We have too much respect 
 for these spiritual communications, to let them go so lightly. We are not so 
 stupid, or so careless, as that Imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should 
 need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as 
 much significance as our waking concerns; or rather to import us more 
 nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world, whither 
 we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the world's business ; we have 
 done with it; we have discharged ourselves of it. Why should we get up? 
 we have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut m 
 upon us at the fourth act. We have nothing here to expect, but in a short 
 time a sick-bed, and a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shad- 
 ows as night affords. We are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were 
 never much in the world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between 
 us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed grey before our hairs. The 
 
Elia: Popular Fallacies. 541 
 
 mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which 
 dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what the mimic 
 images in play-houses present us with. Even those types have waxed fainter. 
 Our clock appears to have struck. We are superannuated. In this dearth 
 of mundane satisfaction, we contract poUtic alliances with shadows. It is good 
 to have friends at court. The abstracted media of dreams seem no ill intro- 
 duction to that spiritual presence upon which, in no long time, we expect to be 
 thrown. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that colony ; to learn 
 the language, and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less 
 awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a phantom our 
 fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore 
 we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world, 
 and think we know already how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, 
 which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. 
 We feel attenuated into their meagre essences, and have given the hand of 
 half-way approach to incorporeal being. We once thought life to be something; 
 but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose 
 to dally with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why 
 should we get up ? 
 
 XII. 
 
 THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB 
 
 (The Netu Monthly Magazine, 'S€brwxy,\%76^ 
 
 We could never quite understand the philosophy of this arrangement, or the 
 wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for instruction to these woolly bed- 
 fellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, 
 and sleep if he can. Man found out long sixes. — Hail candle-light ! without 
 disparagement to sun or moon, the kindUest luminary of the three — if we may 
 not rather style thee their radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon ! — We love 
 to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by candle-light. They are everybody's 
 sun and moon. This is our peculiar and household planet. Wanting it, what 
 savage unsociable nights must our ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and 
 uniUumined fastnesses ! They must have lain about and grumbled at one 
 another in the dark. What repartees could have passed, when you must have 
 felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour's cheek to be sure that he un- 
 derstood it ? This accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a 
 sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlan- 
 terned nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder how they saw to pick 
 up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? what a melange of chance 
 carvmg they must have made of it !— here one had got a leg of a goat, when 
 he wanted a horse's shoulder— there another had dipped his scooped palm in 
 a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. There is 
 neither good eating nor drinking in fresco. Who, even in these civilized times, 
 has never experienced this, when at some economic table he has commenced 
 dining after dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights came ? The senses 
 absolutely give and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the dark ? 
 or distinguish Sherries from pure Malaga? Take away the candle from the 
 smoking man ; by the glimmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still 
 smoking, but he knows it only by an inference ; till the restored light, coming 
 in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then how he 
 redoubles his puffs ! how he burnishes !— There is absolutely no such thing as 
 reading, but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at iioon- 
 day in gardens, and in sultry arbours ; but it was labour thrown away. Those 
 gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many 
 

 5^2 The, Works, of pharles Lamb. 
 
 coquettes; that will have you all to their self, anfl. are jealous.of your abstracr 
 ticris. Bythe.midnight taper, thei.writer digests, his. piedijations. By the same 
 light, we must :app!rQach tp Jheir perusal, if we wpujd catch the illame, the 
 odour. It is a. mockery, all that, is reported of the iijflueritiai Phoebus, I^o 
 true poem ever owed its birth to, the sun's light,, They are abstracted wpijlis— 
 
 "Things, that were born, when none tut' the still night, ^ 
 'Y "' ' ' And hi's dumb candle, saw his pinching throes." 
 
 Marry, daylight — daylight might furnish the images, the crude material ; but 
 for (he fine'sllapings, the true turning and filing, (as mine author hath it), they 
 must be content to hold their inspiration of the candle. The mild internal 
 ■llghl, that reveals them, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sun- 
 shine. Night and silence call out the stalrry fancies. Milton's Morning Hymn 
 on Paradise, we would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight,; and 
 Taylor's richer description of a sunrise. smells decidedly of the taper. Even 
 bui^elf, in these our humbler lucubration^, tune our best measured cadences 
 (Prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watch- 
 man, '! blessing the doors ; ' or thewild sweep, of.winds at midnight. Even 
 now a loftier speculation tlian we have yet attempted, courts our endeavour. 
 We would indite something about the Solar System.— ^ertj*, bring the candles. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES. 
 
 {The New Monthly Magazine^ March, 1826^) 
 
 Those who use this proverb can never haVe seen Mrs. Conrady. 
 
 ITie soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the celestial beauty. As 
 she partakes more or less of this'heavenly light, she informs, with corresponding 
 characters, the fleshly tenenient Which she' chooses, and frames to herself a suit- 
 able mansion. 
 
 All which only proves that the soul of Mrs. Conrady, in her pfe-existent 
 state, was no great judge of architecthre. 
 
 To the same effect, in a HymU in honour of Beauty, divine Spenser, flaton- 
 izing, sings :— 
 
 " Everjr siiirit as it is more pure, 
 
 And hath in' it the more of heavenly light. 
 
 So it the fairer body doth procure - 
 
 To iiabit in. and it more fairly dight 
 
 "With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
 
 For of the soul the body form doth take : 
 
 For soul is form, and doth the body make." 
 
 But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. Conrady. 
 
 These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy.; for here, in his very 
 next stanza but one, is a saving clause, which throws us all out again, and 
 leaves us as much to seek as ever : — I 
 
 " "Vet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind i 
 
 Dwells in deformed tabernacle drown'd. 
 Either by chance against the course of kind, 
 Or through unaptness in the substance found, 
 Whiph it assumed of some stubborn ground, 
 That will not yield unto her form's direction. 
 But is petform'd with some foul impafection." 
 
 From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen somebody like Mrs. 
 Conrady. 
 
Elia; Popiclar Fallacies. 543 
 
 The spirit of this good lady— her previous a«/>Ba— must have stmnbled upon 
 one of these untoward tabernacles, which he ^eaks of. h more rebellious 
 commodity of clay for aground, as the poet calls it, no esntie mind— and sure 
 hers is one of the gentlest— ever had to. deal, with. . , ,, 
 
 , Pondering upon her inexphcable visage— inexplicable, we, mean, but by this 
 tnodificatian of the theory-,- we have come to a conclusion that, if one must be 
 plain,, it-is better to be plain all over, than, amidst a toletable residue of features, 
 to hang out one that shall be exceptionable. No one can say of Mrs. Conrady's 
 countenance, that it wpuld be better if she had but a nose. U is impossible to 
 pull her to pieces in this .manner. We have seen the. most maliciojis bea,uties 
 of her own sex baffled in the attempt at a selection. The tout ensemble defies 
 particularizing; U is too complete— loo consistent, as we may say— to admit 
 of these invidious reservations. It is not .as iif some Apelles had picked out 
 here a Mp— and there a chin— out of the collected ugliness of Greece, to frame 
 a model by; It is a symmetrical whole. We challenge the minutest connois- 
 seunto cavil at any part or parcel of the countenance in question ; to say that 
 this, or that, is improperly placed. We , are convinced that true ugliness, no 
 less than is affirmed of true beauty, is the result of harmony. Like that, too, it 
 reigns without a competitor. No one ever saw Mrs. Conready, without pro- 
 nouncing her to be the plainest woman that he ever met. with in the course of 
 his;life. The first time that you are indulged with a sight of her fa<;e, is an era 
 in your existence ever after. You are glad to have seen it— likeStonehenge. 
 No one can pretend to forget it. No one ever apologized tp. her ,for ;ne?ting, 
 her in the. street on such a day and not knowing her;; the pretext would be too 
 bare. Nobody can mistake her for another, ^'obody can say of her, ' ' I think. 
 1 have seen that face somewhere, but I cannot call to mind where." You must 
 remember that in such a parlour it first struck you— like a bu§t. You wondered 
 where the owner of the house had picked it up. You wondered more wlien it 
 beg-in to move its lips— so mildly too ! No one ever thought of asking her to 
 sit for Ijer picture. Lockets are for remembrance ; and cit. wpuld be clearly 
 superfluous to hang an image at your heart, which, once seen, can never be 
 out of it. . It is not a mean face either ; its entire originality prepludes that. 
 Neither is it of that order of plain faces which improve upon acquaintance. 
 Some very good but ordinary people, by an unwearied perseverance in good 
 office, put a cheat upon our eyes ; juggle our senses out of their natural impres- 
 sions; and set us upon discovering good indications in a countenance, which at 
 first sight promised nothing less. We defect gentleness, which had escaped us, 
 lurking about an under lip. But when Mrs. Conrady has done you a service, 
 her face remains the same ; when she has done you a thousand, and you know 
 that she is ready to double the number, still it is that individual face. Neither ^ 
 can you say of it, that it would be a good face if it was not marked by the • 
 smallpox— a compliment which is always more admissive than excusatory -for > 
 either Mrs'. Conrady never had the smailpox ; or, as we say, took it kindly. 
 No, it stands upon its own merits fairly. There it is. It is her mark, her 
 token; that which she is known by. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY. 
 
 (The New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826.) 
 
 Homes there are, w&aresure, that are no homes : the home of the very poor 
 man, and another which we shall speak of presently. Crowded places to cheap 
 entertainment, and the benches of aJehotEes. if they could sp^, might bear 
 
544 ^'^ JVorh of Charles Lamb. 
 
 mournful testimony to the first. To them the very poor man resorts for an image 
 of the home, which he cannot find at home. For a starved grate, and a scanty 
 firing, that is not enough to keep alive the natural heat in the fingers of so 
 many shivering children with their mother, he finds in the depth of winter 
 always a blazing hearth, and a hob to warm his pittance of beer by. Instead 
 of the clamours of a wife, made gaunt by famishing, he meets with a cheerful 
 attendance beyond the merits of the trifle which he can afford to spend. He 
 has companions which his home denies him, for the very poor man has no 
 visitors. He can look into the goings on of the world, and speak a little to 
 politics. At home there areno politics stirring, but thedomestic. All interests, 
 real or imaginary, all topics that should expand the mind of man, and connect 
 him to a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in the absorbing con- 
 sideration of food to be obtained for the family. 
 
 Beyond the price of bread, news is senseless and impertinent. At home 
 there is no larder. Here there is at least a show of plenty ; and while he 
 cooks his lean scrap of butcher's meat before the common bars, or munches his 
 humbler cold viands, his relishing bread and cheese with an onion, in a corner, 
 where no one reflects upon his poverty, he has sight of the substantial joint 
 providing for the landlord and his family. He takes an interest in the dressing 
 of it ; and while he assists in removing the trivet from the fire, he feels that 
 there is such a thing as beef and cabbage, which he was beginning to forget at 
 home. All this while he deserts his wife and children. But what wife, and what 
 children? Prosperous men, who object to this desertion, imagine to themselves 
 some clean contented family like that which they go home to. But look at the 
 countenance of the poor wives who follow and persecute their good man to the 
 door of the public-house, which he is about to enter, when something like 
 shame would restrain him, if stronger misery did not induce him to pass the 
 threshold. That face, ground by want, in which every cheerful, every con- 
 versable lineament has been long effaced by misery, — is that a face to stay at 
 home with ? is it more a woman or a wild cat ? alas ! it is the face of the wife 
 of his youth, that once smiled upon him. It can smile no longer. What 
 comforts can it share ? what burthens can it lighten ? Oh, 'tis a fine thing to 
 talk of the humble meal shared together ! But what if there be no bread in 
 the cupboard ? The innocent prattle of his children takes out the sting of a 
 man's poverty. But the children of the very poor do not prattle. It is none 
 of the least frightful features in that condition, that there is no childishness in 
 its dwellings. Poor people, said a sensible old nurse to us once, do not bring 
 up their children : they drag them up. The little careless darling of the 
 wealthier nursery, in their hovel is transformed betimes into a premature 
 reflecting person. No one has time to dandle it, no one thinks it worth while 
 to coax it, to soothe it, to toss it up and down, to humour it. There is none to 
 kiss away its tears. If it cries, it can only be beaten. It has been prettily 
 said that " a babe is fed with milk and praise." But the aliment all this 
 poor babe was thin, unnourishing ; the return to its little baby-tricks, and 
 efforts to engage attention, bitter ceaseless objurgation. It never had a toy or 
 knew what a coral meant. It grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it was a 
 stranger to the patient fondle, the hushing caress, the attracting novelty, the 
 costlier plaything, or the cheaper off-hand contrivance to divert the child ; the 
 prattled nonsense (best sense to it), the wise impertinences, the wholesome lies, 
 the apt story interposed, that puts a stop to present sufferings, and awakens 
 the passion of young wonder. It was never sung to — no one ever told to it a 
 tale of the nursery. It was dragged up, to live or to die as it happened. It had 
 no young dreams. It broke at once into the iron realities of life. A child exists 
 not for the very poor as any object of dalliance ; it is only another mouth to be 
 fed, a pair of little hands to be betimes inured to labour. It is the rival, till 
 it can be the co-operator, for food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his 
 
diversion, his solace; it never mal<es him young again, with recalling his young 
 times. The children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very 
 heart to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her 
 little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the 
 squalid beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery 
 books, of summer holidays (fitting that age) ; of the promised sight, or play; 
 of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of 
 the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be 
 the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and 
 melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman before it was a child. It 
 has learned to go to market ; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs ; it is 
 knowing, acute, sharpened ; it never prattles. Had we not reason to say, that 
 the home of the very poor is no home ? 
 
 There is yet another home, which we are constrained to deny to be one. It has a 
 larder, which the home of the poor man wants ; its fireside conveniences, of which 
 the poor dream not. But with all this, it is no home. It is — the house of the 
 man that is infested with many visitors. May we be branded for the veriest 
 churl, if we deny our heart to the many noble-hearted friends that at times 
 exchange their dwelling for our poor roof ! It is not of quests that we com- 
 plain, but of endless, purposeless visitants ; droppers in, as they are called. 
 We sometimes wonder from what sky they fall. It is the very error of the 
 position of our lodging; its horoscopy was ill-calculated, being just situate in 
 a medium — a plaguy suburban mid-space — fitted to catch idlers from town or 
 country. We are older than we were, and age is easily put out of its way. 
 We have fewer sands in our glass to reckon upon, and we cannot brook to see 
 them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences. At our time of life, to be 
 alone sometimes is as needful as sleep. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. 
 The growing infirmities of age manifest themselves in 'nothing more strongly, 
 than in an inveterate dislike of interruption. The thing which we are doing, 
 we wish to be permitted to do. We liave neither much knowledge nor devices ; 
 but there are fewer in the place to which we hasten. We are not willingly put 
 out of our way, even at a game of nine-pins. While youth was, we had vast 
 reversions in time future ; we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to 
 economize in that article. We bleed away our moments now as hardly as our 
 ducats. We cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into 
 by moths. We are willing to barter our good time with a friend, who gives 
 us in exchange his own. Herein is the distinction between the genuine guest 
 and the visitant. This latter takes your good time, and gives you his bad in 
 exchange. The guest is domestic to you as your good cat, or household bird : 
 the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at your window, and out again, leaving 
 nothing but a sense of disturbance and, victuals spoiled. The inferior functions 
 of life begin to move heavily.- We cannot concoct our food with interruptions. 
 Our chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitarj'. With difficulty we can eat 
 before a guest ; and never understood what the relish of public feastmg meant. 
 Meats have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, in a crowd. The unexpected 
 coming in of a visitant stops the machine. There is a punctual generation 
 who time their calls to the precise commencement of your dining-hour— not to 
 eat— but to see you eat. Our knife and fork drop instinctively, and we feel 
 that we have swallowed our latest morsel. Others again show their genius, as 
 we have said, in knocking the moment you have just sat down to a book. They 
 have a pecuUar compassionating sneer, with which they "hope that they 
 do not interrupt your studies." Though they flutter off the next moment, to 
 carry their impertinences to the nearest student that they can call their friend, 
 the tone of the book is spoiled ; we shut the leaves, and, with Dante s lovers, 
 read no more that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion were simply co- 
 extensive with its presence ; but it mars all the good hours afterwards. These 
 
5^6 1'hi Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 scratches'in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. " It is, a prosti- ' 
 tution of the bravery of friendship,',' say? worthy Bishop Taylor, "to spend it ,' 
 upon impertinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their families, but can j' 
 never ease my loads." This is the secret of their gaddings,, their visits, and ■ 
 morning calls. They too have homes, which are— no homes. 
 
 XV. 
 
 THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE MOUTH. 
 
 (The New Montlily Magazine, April, 1826.) , 
 
 Nor a lady's age in the parish register. We hope we have more delicacy than V 
 to do either : but some faces spare us the trouble of these dental inquiries. 
 And what if the beast, which my friend would force upon my acceptance, prove, 
 upon the face of it, a sorry Rozinante, a lean ill-favoured jade, whom no gentle- 
 man could think of setting up in his stables? Must I, rather than not be 
 ©bliged to my friend, make her a companioii to Eclipse or Lightfoot ? A horse- 
 giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a right to palm his spavined article upon 
 us for good ware. An equivalent is expected in either case ; and, with my own 
 good will, I would no more be cheated out of my thanks, than out of my 
 money. Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifls of no real value, 
 to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.' Our 
 friend Mitis carries this humour of never refusing a present, to the very point 
 of absurdity — if it were possible to couple the ridiculous with so much mistaken 
 delicacy, and real good-nature. Not an apartment in his fine house (and he 
 has a true taste in household decorations), but is stuffed up with some prepos- 
 terous print or mirror — the worst adapted to his panels that may be— the 
 presents of his friends that know his weakness ; while his noble Vandykes are 
 displaced, to make room for a set of daubs, the work of same wretched artist 
 of his acquaintance, who, having had them returned upon his hands for bad 
 likenesses, finds his account in bestowing them here gratis. The good creature 
 has not the heart- to mortify the painter at the expense of an honest refusal. It 
 is pleasant (if it did not vex one at the same time) to see him sitting in his 
 dining parlour, surrounded with obscure aunts and cousins to Go^ knows 
 whom, while the true Lady Marys and Lady Bettys of his own honourable 
 family, in favour to these adopted frights, are consigned to the staircase and the 
 lumber-room. In Uke manner his goodly shelves are one by one stripped of 
 his favourite old authors, to give place to a collection of presentation copies — 
 the flower and brain of modern poetiy. A presentation copy, reader — if haply 
 you are yet innocent of such favours — is a copy of a book which does not sell, 
 sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it ; for 
 which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship ; if a brother author, he 
 expects from you a book of yours which does sell, in return. We can speak to 
 experience, having by us a tolerable assortment of these gift-horses. Not to 
 ride a metaphor to death — we are willing to acknowledge, that in some gifts 
 there is sense. A duplicate out of a friend's library (where he has more than 
 one copy of a rare author) is intelligible. There are favours, short of the 
 pecuniary — a thing not fit to be hinted at among gentlemen — which confer as 
 much grace upon the acceptor as the offerer : the kind, we confess, which is 
 most to our palate, is of those little conciliatory missives, which for their vehicle 
 generally choose a hamper — little odd presents of game, fruit, perhaps wine—' 
 though it is essential to the delicacy of the latter that it be home-made. We 
 love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our table by proxy ; to 
 apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may be between us) by a 
 
Elia: Popular Fallacies. 547 
 
 turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us his " plump corpusculum ; " to taste 
 him in grouse or woodcock; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar to 
 the latter; to concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed 
 to have him within ourselves ; to know him intimately : such participation is, 
 methinks, unitive, as the old theologians phrase it. For these considerations 
 we should be sorry if certain restrictive regulations, which are thought to bear 
 hard upon the peasantry of this country, were entirely done away with. A 
 hare, as the law now stands, makes many friends. Caius conciliates Titius 
 (knowing \i\sgoi,t) with a leash of partridges. Titius (suspecting his partiality 
 for them) passes them to Lucius ; who, in his turn, preferring his friend's relish 
 to his own, makes them over to Marcius : till in their ever-widening progress, 
 and round of unconscious circum-migration, they distribute the seed? of har- 
 mony over half a parish. We are well disposed to this kind of sensible remem- 
 brances ; and are the less apt to be taken by those little airy tokens — impalpable 
 to the palate — which, under the names of rings, lockets, keep-sakes, amuse 
 some people's fancy mightily. We could never away with these indigestible 
 trifles. They are the very kickshaws and foppery of friendship. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 THAT A DEFORMED PERSON IS A LORD. 
 
 Ijrhe New Monthly Magazine, June, 1826.) 
 
 After a careful perusal of the most approved works that treat of nobility, and 
 of its origin in these realms in particular, we are left very much in the dark as 
 to the original patent in which this branch of it is recognized. Neither Camden 
 in his " Etymologie and Original of Barons," nor Dugdale in his "Baronage of 
 England," nor Selden (a more exact and laborious inquirer than either) in his 
 "Titles of Honour " afford a glimpse of satisfaction upon the subject. There 
 is an heraldic term, indeed, which seems to imply gentility, and the right to 
 coat armour (but nothing further), in persons thus qualified. But the sinister 
 bend is more probably interpreted by the best writers on this science, of some 
 irregularity of birth than of bodily conformation. Nobility is either hereditary 
 or by creation, commonly called patent. Of the former kind, the title in ques- 
 tion cannot be, seeing that the notion of it is limited to a personal distinction 
 which does not necessarily follow in the blood. Honours of this nature, as 
 Mr. Anstey very well observes, descend, moreover, in a right line. It must 
 be by patent, then, if anything. But who can show it? How comes it to be 
 dormant? Under what king's reign is it patented? Among the grounds of 
 nobility cited by the learned Mr. Ashmole, after " Services in the Field or in 
 the Council Chamber," he judiciously sets down "Honours conferred by the 
 sovereign out of mere benevolence, or as favouring one subject rather than 
 ahother for some likeness or conformity observed (or but supposed) in him to 
 the Toyal nature ; " and instances the graces showered upon Charles Brandon, 
 who, ' ' in his goodly person being thought not a little to favour the port and 
 bearing of the king's own majesty, was by that sovereign, King Henry the 
 Eighth, for some or one of these respects, highly promoted and preferred." 
 Here, if anywhere, we thought we had discovered a clue to our researches. 
 But after a painful investigation of the rolls and records under the reign of 
 Richard the 'Third, or " Richard Crouchback," as he is more usually designated 
 in the chronicles, — from a traditionary stoop or gibbosity in that part, — we do 
 not find that that monarch conferred any such lordships as here pretended, upon 
 any subject or 'subjects, on a simple plea of "conformity" in that respect to 
 the "royal nature." The posture of affairs, in those tumultuous times pre- 
 ceding the battle of Bosworth, possibly left him at no leisure, to attend to such 
 
 -/ 
 
548 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 niceties. Further than his reign, we have not extended our inquiries ; the kings 
 of England who preceded or followed him being generally described by histo- 
 rians to have been of straight and clean limbs, the " natural derivative," says 
 Daniel,* "of high blood if not its primitive recommendation to such ennoble- 
 ment, as denoting strength and martial prowess, — the quaUties set most by in 
 that fighting age. " Another motive, which inclines us to scruple the validity of 
 this claim, is the remarkable fact, that none of the persons in v/hom the right 
 is supposed to be vested do ever insist upon it themselves. There is no instance 
 of any of them " suing his patent," as the law books call it ; much less of his 
 having actually stepped up into his proper seat, as, so qualified, we might 
 expect that some of them would have had the spirit to do, in the House of 
 Lords. On the contrary, it seems to be a distinction thrust upon them. " Their 
 title of ' lord,' " says one of their own body, speaking of the common people, 
 ' ' I never much valued, and now I entirely despise ; and yet they will force it 
 npon me as an honour which they have a right to bestow, and which I have 
 none to refuse." Upon a dispassionate review of the subject, we are disposed 
 to believe that there is no right to the peerage incident to mere bodily configu- 
 ration ; that the title in dispute is merely honorary, and depending upon the 
 breath of the common people, which in these realms is so far from the power 
 of conferring nobility, that the ablest constitutionalists have agreed in nothing 
 more unanimously than in the maxim, that " the king is the sole fountain of 
 honour." 
 
 XVII. 
 
 THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE. 
 
 (TVi^ New Monthly Magazine, September, 1826.) 
 
 We grant that it is, and a very serious one— to a man's friends, and to all that 
 have to do with him; biit whether the condition of the man himself is so much 
 to be deplored, may admit of a question. We can speak a httle to it, being 
 ourself but lately recovered— we whisper it in confidence, reader — out of a long 
 and desperate fit of the sullens. Was the cure a blessing ? The conviction 
 which wrought it, came too clearly to leave a %cruple of the fanciful injuries— 
 for they were mere fancies— which had provoked the humour. But the humour 
 itself was too self-pleasing, while it lasted— we know how bare we lay ourself 
 in the confession — to be abandoned all at once with the grounds of it. We 
 still brood over wrongs, which we know to have been imaginary: and for our 
 
 old acquaintance, N , whom we find to have been a truer friend than we 
 
 took him for, we substitute some phantom — a Caius or a Titius — as like him as 
 we dare to form it, to wreak our yet unsatisfied resentments on. It is mortifying 
 to fall at once from the pinnacle of neglect ; to forego the idea of having been 
 ill-used and contumaciously treated by an old friend. The first thing to aggran- 
 dize a man in his own conceit, is to conceive of himself as neglected. There 
 let him fix if he can. To undeceive him is to deprive him of the most tickling 
 morsel within the range of self-complacency. No flattery can come near it. 
 Happy is he who suspects his friend of an injustice ; but supremely blessed, 
 who thinks all his friends in a conspiracy to depress and undervalue him. 
 There is a pleasure (we sing not to the profane), far beyond the reach of all that 
 the world counts joy — a deep, enduring satisfaction in the depths, where the 
 superficial seek it not, of discontent. Were we to recite one half of this mys- 
 tery, which we were let into by our late dissatisfaction, all the world would be 
 in love with disrespect ; we should wear a sUght for a bracelet, and neglects 
 and contumacies would be the only matter for courtship. Unlike to that mys- 
 
 * History of England, "Temporibus Edwardi Prim iet sequentibus." 
 
Elia: Popidar Fallacies. 549 
 
 terious book in the Apocalypse, the study of this mystery is unpalatable only 
 in the commencement. The first sting of a suspicion is greivous ■ but wait- 
 out of that wound, which to flesh and blood seemed so difficult there is balm 
 and honey to be extracted. Your friend passed you on such or such a day — 
 havmg m his company one that you conceived worse than ambiguously disposed 
 towards you,— passed you in the street without notice. To be sure he is some- 
 thing short-sighted ; and it was in your power to have accosted him. But 
 facts and sane inferences are trifles to a true adept in the science of dissatisfac- 
 tion. He must have seen you ; and S , who was with him, must have been 
 
 the cause of the contempt. It galls you, and well it may. But have patience. 
 Go home, and make the worst of it, and you are a made man from this tinle. 
 Shut yourself up, and— rejecting, as an enemy to your peace, every whispering 
 suggestion that but insinuates there may be a mistake— reflect seriously upon 
 the many lesser instances which you had begun to perceive, in proof of your 
 friend's disaffection towards you. None of them singly was much to the pur- 
 pose, but the aggregate weight is positive; and you have this last affront to 
 clench them. Ihus far the process is anything but agreeable. But now to 
 your reUef comes in the comparative faculty. You conjure up all the kind 
 feelings you have had for your friend ; what you have been to him, and what 
 you would have been to him, if he would have suffered you ; how you defended 
 him in this or that place ; and his good name— his literary reputation and so 
 forth, was always dearer to you than your own ! Your heart, spite of itself, 
 yearns towards him. You could weep tears of blood, but for a restraining 
 pride. How say you? do you not yet begin to apprehend a comfort ? some 
 allay of sweetness in the bitter waters ! Stop not here, nor penuriously cheat 
 yourself of your reversions. You are on vantage ground. Enlarge your specula- 
 tions, and take in the rest of your friends, as a spark kindles more sparks. Was 
 there one among them, who has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery as 
 water? Begin to think that the relation itself is inconsistent with mortality. 
 That the very idea of friendship, with its component parts, as honour, fidelity, 
 steadiness, exists but in your single bosom. Image yourself to yourself, as 
 the only possible friend in a world incapable of that communion. Now the 
 gloom thickens. The little star of self-love twinkles, that is to encourage you 
 through deeper glooms than this. You are not yet at the half-point of your 
 elevation. You are not yet, believe me, half sulky enough. Adverting to the 
 world in general (as these circles in the mind will spread to infinity), reflect 
 with what strange injustice you have been treated in quarters where (setting 
 gratitude and the expectation of friendly returns aside as chimeras), you pre- 
 tended no claim beyond justice, the naked due of all men. Think the very 
 idea of right and fit fled from the earth, or your breast the solitary receptacle 
 of it, till you have swelled yourself into at least one hemisphere; the other 
 being the vast Arabia Stony of your friends and the world aforesaid. To grow 
 bigger every moment in your own conceit, and the \\ orld to lessen : to deify 
 yourself at the expense of yo.ir species ; to judge the world — this is the acme 
 and supreme point of your mystery— these the true -Pleasures of Sulkiness. 
 We profess no more of this grand secret than what ourself experimented on 
 one rainy afternoon in the last week, sulking in our study. We had proceeded 
 to the penultimate point, at which the true adept seldom stops, where the con- 
 sideration of benefit forgot is about to merge in the meditation of general in- 
 justice — when a knock at the door was followed by the entrance of the very 
 friend, whose not seeing of us in the morning (for we will now confess the case 
 our own) an accidental oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable generali- 
 zation ! To mortify us still more, and take down the whole flattering super- 
 structure which pride had piled upon neglect, he had brought in liis hand the 
 
 identical S , in whose favour we had suspected him of the contumacy. 
 
 Asseverations were needless, where the frank manner of them both was convic- 
 
55° The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 live of the injurious nature of the suspicion. We fancied that they perceived 
 our embarrassment ; but were too proud, or something else, to confess to the 
 secret of it. We had been but too lately in the condition of the noble patient 
 in Argos : 
 
 Qui se credebat miros audire tragoedcs, • 
 In vacuo Isetus sessor plausorque theatro — 
 
 and could have exclaimed with ecjual reason against the friendly hands that 
 cured us,— 
 
 ' Pol me occidistis, amici, 
 
 t Non serv^tis, ait ; cui sic extorta voluptas, 
 
 Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error. 
 
Fragments from Burton. egi 
 
 Crxtkisms, t\u 
 
 {Appended to "John Woodvil" 1802.) 
 
 [When this paper was originally pubHshed at the head of the miscellaneous writings 
 
 appended to the_ first imprint of John Woodvil, it was gravely entitled— as though it 
 
 were authentic instead of simply imitative — "Curious Fragments extracted from a 
 
 Commonplace Rook which belonged to Robert Uurton, the famous author of the 
 
 ^Anatomy of Melancholy."] 
 
 EXTRACT 1. 
 
 I Democritus Junior have put my finishing pen to a'tractaieDe Melancholia, 
 this day, December 5, 1620. First, I blesse the Trinity, which hath given me 
 health to prosecute my worthlesse studies thus far, and make supplication with 
 a Lau! Deo, if in any case these my poor labours may be found instrumental 
 to weede out blacli melancholy, carking cares, harte-grief, from the mind of 
 man. Sed hoc magh volo qiiam expecto. 
 
 I turn now to my book, i nunc liber, goe forth, my brave Anatomy, child of 
 my brain-sweat, and yee, candidl lectores, lo ! here 1 give him up to you, even do 
 with him what you please, my masters. Some, I suppose, will applaud, commeiid, 
 cry him up (these are my friends) hee is a.Jlos rams, forsooth, a none-suchi a 
 Phoenix, {concerning whom see Pliniits and Mandeuille, though Ficnus de 
 monstris doubteth at large of such a bird, whom Montalius confuting argueth 
 to have been a man 7nalcs scnipolositatis, ,of a weak and cowardlie faith : 
 Christopherus a Vega is with him in this). Others again will blame, hiss, 
 reprehende in many things, cry down altogether, my collections, for crude, 
 inept, putid, post ccsnam scripta, Coryate could write better ttpon a full meal, 
 verbose, incrudite, and not sufiiciently abounding in authorities dogmata, 
 sentences, of learneder writers which have been before me, when as that first 
 named sort clean otherwise judge of my labours to bee nothing else but a 
 messe of opinions, a vort^.x attracting indiscriminate, gold, pearls, hay, straw, 
 wood, excrement, an exchange, tavern, marte, for foreigners to congregate, 
 Danes, Swedes, Hollanders, Lombards, so many strange faces, dresses, saluta- 
 tions, languages, all which Wolfius behelde with great contente upon the Vene- 
 tian Rialto, as he describes diffusedly in his book the world's Epitome, which 
 Sannazar so bepraiseth, e contra our Polydore can see nothing in it ; they 
 call me singular, a pedant, fantastic, words of reproach in this age, which is 
 all too neoteric and light for my humour. 
 
 One Cometh to me sighing, complaining. He expected universal remedies 
 in my Anatomy ; so many cures as there are distemperatures among men. I 
 have not put his affection in my cases. Hear you his case. My fine Sir is 
 a lover, an inamorato, a Pyramus, a Romeo ; he walks seven years disconsolate, 
 moping, becaiiset he cannot enjoy his miss, insantis amorSs, his melancholy, the 
 man is mad ; delirat, he dotes ; all this while his Glycera is rude, spiteful, not 
 
to be entreated, churlish, spits at him, yet exceeding fair, gentle eyes (which 
 is a beauty), hair lustrous and smiling, the trope is none of mine, jEtieas 
 Sylvius hath crines ridentes — in conclusion she is wedded to his rival, a boore, 
 a Corydon, a rustic, omnino ignarus, he can scarce construe Corderius, yet 
 haughty, fantastic, opiniaire. The lover travels, goes into foreign parts, pere- 
 grinates, amoris ergo, sees manners, customs, not Enghsh, converses with 
 pilgrims, lying travellers, monks, hermits, those cattle, pedlars, travelling 
 gentry, Egyptians, natural wonders, unicorns (though Aldobrandus will have 
 them to be figments), satyrs, semi-viri, apes, monkeys, baboons, curiosities 
 artificial, pyramidts, Virgilius his tombe, relicks, bones, which are nothing but 
 ivory as Melancthon judges, though Corniiius leaneth to think them bones of 
 dogs, cats, (why not men ?) which subtill priests vouch to have been saints, 
 martyrs, lieu Pieiast By that time he has ended his course, Jugil hora, seven 
 other years are expired, gone by, time is, he should return, he taketh ship for 
 Britaine, much desired of his friends, favehani venii, Neptune is curteis, after 
 some weekes at sea he landeth, rides post to town, greets his family, kinsmen, 
 compotores, those jokers his friends that ivere wont to tipple with him at ale- 
 houses ; these wonder now to see the change, quantum mutaius, the man is 
 quite another thing, he is disenthralled, manumitted, he wonders what so 
 bewitched him, he can now both see, hear, smell, handle, converse with his 
 mistress, single by reason of the death of his rival, a widow having children, 
 grown wilhng, prompt, amorous, shewing no such great dislike to second 
 nuptials, hee might have her for asking, no such thing, his mind is changed, he 
 loathes Ijis former meat, had liever eat ratsbane, aconite, his humour is to die 
 a batchelour ; marke the conclusion. In this humour of celibate seven other 
 years are consumed in idleness, sloth, world's pleasures, which fatigate, satiate, 
 induce wearinesse, vapours, tcEdium vitce : When upon a day, behold a wonder, 
 rcdit Amor, the man is as sick as ever, he is comm.enced lover upon the old 
 stock, walks with his hand thrust into his bosom for negligence, moping he 
 leans his head, face yellow, beard flowing and incomposite, eyes sunken, 
 anhelus, breath wheezy and asthmatical by reason of over-much sighing : 
 society he abhors, solitude is but a hell, what shall he doe? all this while his 
 mistresse is forward, coming, amantissima, ready to jump at once into his 
 mouth, her he hateth, feels disgust when she is but mentioned, thinks her ugly, 
 old, a painted Jezabeel, Alectb, Megara, and Tisiphone all at once, a Corinth- 
 ian Lais, a strumpet, only not handsome ; that which he affecteth so much, 
 that which drives him mad, distracted, phrenetic, beside himself, is no beauty 
 which lives, nothing in rerum natur& (so he might entertain a hope of a cure), 
 but something which is not, can never be, a certain fantastic opinion notional 
 image of his mistresse, that which she was, and that which hee thought her to 
 be, in former times, how beautiful ! torments him, frets him, follows him, makes 
 him that he wishes to die. 
 
 This Caprichio, Sir Humourous, hee cometh to me to be cured. I counsel 
 marriage with his Mistresse, according to Hippocrates his method, together 
 with milk diet, herbs, aloes, and wild parsley, good in such cases, though 
 Avicenna preferreth some sort of wild fowl, teals, widgeons, becca ficos, 
 which men in Sussex eat. He flies out in a passion, ho! ho; and falls to 
 calling me names, dizzard, ass, lunatic, moper, Bedlamite, pseudo-Deniocritus. 
 I smile in his face, bidding him be patient, tranquil, to no purpose, he still 
 rages, I think this man must fetch his remedies from Utopia, Fairy Land, 
 Islands in the Moone, &c. 
 
 EXTRACT II. 
 
 ' Much disputacyons of fierce wits amongst themselves, in logomachies, 
 controversies, many dry blows given on either side, contentions of 
 
Fraginents from Burton. 553 
 
 learned men, or such as would be so thought, as Bodlnus de Periodis saith of 
 such an one, arridcnt amici ridet mundus, in English, this man his cronies 
 they cocker him up, they flatter him, he would fayne appear somebody, mean- 
 while the world thinks him no better than a dizzard, a ninny, a sophist • • « 
 
 * * ♦ Philosophy running mad, madness philosophizing, much idle-learned 
 inquiries, what Truth is? and no issue, fruit, of all these noises, only huge 
 books are written, and wlio is the wiser? • * « * Men silting in the Doctor's 
 chairs, we marvel how they got there, being homines intellectus pulverideiiii, 
 as Trincduelliiis notes ; they care not so they may raise a dust to smother the 
 eyes of their oppugners ; homines parvullissimi as Lemnius, whom Alcuin herein 
 taxeth of a crude Latinism ; dwarfs, minims, the least Mttle men, these spend' 
 their time, and 'tis odds but they lose their time and wits too into the bar- 
 gain, chacing of nimble and retiring Truth : Her they prosecute, her still 
 they worship, libant, they make libations, spilling the wine, as those old 
 Romans in their sacrificials, Cerealia, May-games : Truth is the game all these 
 hunt after, to the extreme perturbacyon and drying up of the moistures, humi- 
 dum radicale cxsiccant, as Galen, in his counsels to one of these wear-wits, 
 brain-moppers, spunges, saith. *** and for all this nunqitam metam aitinguni, 
 and how should they ? they bowle awry, shooting beside the marke; whereas 
 it should appear, that Truth absolute on this planet of ours, is scarcely to be 
 found, but in her stede Queene opinion predominates, governs, whose shifting 
 and ever mutable Lampas, me seemeth, is man's destinie to follow, she prae- 
 curseth, she guideth him, before his uncapable eyes she frisketh her tender 
 lights, which entertayne the child-man, untill what time his sight be strong to 
 endure the vision of Very Truth, which is in the heavens, the vision which is 
 beatifical, as Anianus expounds in his argument against certain mad wits 
 which helde God to be corporeous ; these were dizzards, fools, gothamites. *** 
 but and if Very Truth be extant indeede on earth, as some hold she it is which 
 actuates men's deeds, purposes, ye may in vaine look for her in the learned 
 universities, halls, colleges. Truth is no Doctoresse, she taketh no degrees at 
 Paris or Oxford, amongst great clerks, disputants, subtile Aristotles, men nodosi 
 ingenii, able to take Lully by the chin, but oftentimes to such an one as myself 
 an Idiota or common person, no great things, melancholizing in woods where 
 waters are, quiet places by rivers, fountains, whereas the silly man expecting 
 no such matter, thinketh only how best to delectate ahd refresh his mynde 
 continually with Nattira her pleasant scenes, woods, waterfalls, or Art her 
 statelier gardens, parks, terraces, Belvideres, on a sudden the goddesse herself 
 Truth has appeared, with a shyning lyghte and a sparklyng countenance, so 
 as yee may not be able lightly to resist her. « ♦ * * 
 
 EXTRACT IV. 
 
 This morning. May 2, 1602, having first broken my fast upon eggs ana cool- 
 ing salades, mellows, water-cresses, those herbes, according to Villanovus his 
 prescription, who disallows the use of meat in a morning as gross, fat, hebetant, 
 ferall, altogether fitter for wild beasts than men, e contra commendeth this 
 herb-diete for gentle, humane, active, conducing to contemplation in most men, 
 I betook myselfe to the nearest fields. (Being in London I commonly dwell in 
 the suburbes, as airiest, quietest, loci musis propriores, free from noises of caro- 
 ches, waggons, mechanick and base workes, workshoppes, also sights, pa- 
 geants, spectacles of outlandish birds, fishes, crocodiles, Indians, mermaids, 
 adde quarrels, fightings, wranglings of the mobbe, plebs, the rabble, duellos 
 with fists, proper to this island, at which the stiletto'd and secrete Italian 
 laughs :) withdrawing myselfe from these buzzing and illiterate vanities, with a 
 bezo las manos to the citty, I begin to inhale, draw in, snuff up, as horses dila- 
 
554 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 tis naribus snort the fresh aires, with exceeding great dehght, when suddenly 
 there crosses me a procession sad, heavy, dolorous, tristfull, melancholick, able 
 to change mirth into dolour, and overcast a clearer atmosphere than possibly 
 the neighbourhoods of so great a city can afford. An old man, a poore man, 
 deceased, is borne on men's shoulders to .a poore buriall, without solemnities of 
 hearse, mourners, plumes, inutcz personce, those personate actors that will weep 
 if yee shew them a piece of silver ; none of those customed civilities of child- 
 ren, kinsfolk, dependants, following the coffin ; he died a poore man, his friends 
 assessores opum, those cronies of his that^ stuck by him so long as he had a 
 penny, now leave him, forsake him, shun him, desert him : they think it much 
 to follow his putrid atfti stinking carcase to the grave ; his children, if he had 
 any, for commonly the case stands thus, this poore man his son dies before 
 him, he survives poore, indigent, base, dejected, miserable, &c., or if he have 
 any which survive him, sua negotia agunt, they mind their own business, 
 forsooth, cannot, will not, find time, leisure, inclination, extremu-m. munus 
 perficere, to follow to the pit their old indulgent father, which loved them, 
 stroked them, caressed them, cockering them up, quantum potuit, as farre as 
 his means extended, while they were babes, chits, minims, hee may rot in his 
 grave, lie stinking in the sun, for them, have no buriall at all, they care not. 
 O nefas! Chiefly I noted the coffin to have been, without a pall, nothing but a 
 few planks of cheapest wood that could be had, naked, having none of the or- 
 dinary symptomata of a funerall, those locularii which bare the body, having 
 on diversely, coloured coats, and none black; (one of these reported the de- 
 ceased to have been an almsman seven yeares, a pauper, harboured and fed in 
 the workhouse of St. Giles in the fields, to whose proper burying ground he 
 was now going for interment). All which when I behelde, hardly I refrained 
 from weeping, and incontinently I fell to musing : " If this man had been rich, 
 a Crcssus, a Crassus, or as rich as Whittington, what pompe, charge, lavish 
 cost, expenditure of- rich buriall, ceremoniall-obsequies, obsequious ceremonies, 
 had been thought too good for such an one ; what store of panegyricks, 
 elogies, funerall orations, &c., some beggarly poetaster, worthy to be beaten 
 for his ill rimtes, crying him up, hee was rich, generous, bountiful, polite, 
 learned, a Maecenas, while as in very deede he wasnothing lesse : what weeping 
 sighing, sorrowing, honing, complaining, kinsmen, friends, relatives, fourtieth 
 cousins, poor relatives, lamenting for the deceased ; hypocriticall heirs, sobbing 
 striking their breasts, (they care not if he had died a year ago ; so many clients 
 dependants; flatterers, parasites, cunning Gnathoes, tramping on foot after the 
 hearse,' all their care is, who shall stand fairest with the successour ; he mean- 
 time (like enough) spurns them from him, spits at theit), treads them under his 
 foot, will have nought to do with any such cattle. I think him in the right : 
 Hfsc sunt majora gravitate Heracliti. These follies are enough to give crying 
 Heraclitus a fit of the spleene. The fruit, issue, children, of these my morning 
 meditations, have been certain crude, impolite, incomposite, hirsute, (what 
 shall I say ?) verses, noting the difference of rich and poor, in the ways of a 
 rich noble's jJhlace and a poor workhouse. 
 
 Sequuntur. 
 THE ARGUMENT. 
 
 In a costly palace Youth meets respect ; 
 In a wretched workhouse Age finds neglect 
 
Recollections of Christ's Hospital. 555 
 
 To comfort the desponding parent with the thought that, without diminishing 
 the stock which is imperiously demanded to furnish the more pressing and 
 homely wants of our nature, he has disposed of one or more perhaps out of a 
 numerous offspring, under the shelter of a care scarce less tender than the 
 paternal, where not only their bodily cravings shall be suppUed, but that mental 
 ■pabulum is also dispensed, which He hath declared to be no less necessary to 
 our sustenance, who said, that "not by bread alone man can live;" for this 
 Christ's Hospital unfolds her bounty. HeiVe neither, on the one hand, are the 
 youth lifted up above their family, which we must suppose liberal though re- 
 duced ; nor, on the other hand, are they Mable to be depressed l^elow its level 
 by the mean habits and sentiments which a common charity-school generates. 
 It is, in a word, an Institution to keep those who have yet held up their heads 
 in the world from sinking ; to keep alive the spirit of a decent household, when 
 poverty was in danger of crushing it; to assist those who are the most wiUing, 
 but not always the most able, to assist themselves ; to separate a child from his 
 family for a season, in order to render him back hereafter, with feelings and 
 habits more congenial to it, than he could even have attained by remaining at 
 home in the bosom of it. It is a preserving and renovating principle, an anti- 
 dote for the res angusta domi, when it presses, as it always does, most heavily 
 upon the most ingenuous nature. 
 
 This is Christ's Hospital ; and whether its character would be improved by 
 confining its advantages to the very lowest of the people, let those judge who 
 have witnessed the looks, the gestures, the behaviour, the manner of their play 
 with one another, their deportment towards strangers, the whole aspect and phy- 
 siognomy of that vast assemblage of boys on the London foundation, who freshen 
 and make alive again with their sports the else mouldering cloisters of the old 
 Grey Friars^which strangers who have never witnessed, if they pass through 
 Newgate Street, or by Smithfieid, would do well to go a little out of their way 
 to see. ' , , , . . 
 
 For the Christ's Hospital boy feels that he is no charity-boy ; he feels it m 
 the antiquity and regality of the foundation to which he belongs; in the usage 
 which he meets with at school, and the treatment he is accustomed to out of 
 its bounds ; in the respect, and even kindness, which his well-known garb never 
 fails to procure him in the streets of the metropolis ; he feels it m'his education, 
 in that measure of classical attainments, which every individual at that school, 
 though not destined to a learned profession, has it in his power to procure, 
 attainments which it would be worse than folly to put it in. the reach of the 
 labouring classes to acquire : he feels it in the numberless comforts, and even 
 magnificences, which surround him ; in his old and awful cloisters, with their 
 traditions; in his spacious school-rooms, and in the well-ordered, airy, and 
 lofty rooms where he sleeps ; in his stately dining-hall, hung round with 
 pictures byVerrio, Lely, and others, one of them surpassing in size and grandeur 
 almost any other in the kingdom;' above all, in the very extent and magni- 
 tude of the body to which he belongs, and the consequent spmt, the intelli- 
 gence, and public conscience, which is the result of so many various yet 
 wonderfully ' combining members. Compared with this last-named advantage, 
 
 ♦ Bv Verrio, representing James the Second on his throne, surrounded by his courtiers 
 (all curious portraits), receiving the mathematical pupils at their annual presentation, a 
 custom still kept up on New Year's-day at Court. 
 
5S6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 what is the stock of information (I do not here speak of book-leamingi but of 
 that knowledge which boy receives fiom boy), the mass of collected opinions, 
 the intelligence in common, among the few and narrow members of an ordinary 
 boarding-school. 
 
 The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of his 
 own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is 
 from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the pubhc 
 schools. There is pride in it, accum^lated from the circumstances which I 
 have described as differencing him from the former ; and there is a restraining 
 modest/, from a sense of obligation and dependence, which must ever keep his 
 deportment from assimilating to that of the latter. His very garb, as it is antique 
 and venerable, feeds his self-respect ; as it is a badge of dependence, it re- 
 strains the natural petulance of that age from breaking out into overt acts of 
 insolence. This produces silence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that 
 cowardly shyness which boys mewed up at home will feel; he will speak up 
 when spoken to, but the stranger must begin the conversation with him. 
 Within his Hounds he is all fire and play ; but in the streets he steals along 
 with all the self-concentration of a young monk. He is never known to mix 
 with other boys, they are a sort of laity to him. AU this proceeds, 1 have no 
 doubt, from the continual consciousness which he carries about him of the 
 difference of his dress from that of the rest of the world ; with a mode'it 
 jealousy over himself, lest, by over-hastily mi.xing with common and secular 
 playfellows, he should commit the dignity of his cloth. Nor let any one laugh 
 at this ; for, considering the propensity of the multitude, and especially of the 
 small multitude, to ridicule anything unusual in dress— above all, where such 
 peculiarity may be construed by maUce into a mark of disparagement — this 
 reserve will appear to be nothing more than a wise instinct in the Blue-coat 
 boy. That it is neither pride nor rusticity, at least that it has none of the offen- 
 sive qualities of either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself by putting a question 
 to any of these boys : he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of plain 
 civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed. Let him put the same question 
 
 to a parish-boy, or to one of the trencher-caps in the cloisters, and the 
 
 impudent reply of the one shall not fail to exasperate any more than the certain 
 servility, and mercenary eye to reward, which he will meet with in the other, 
 can fail to depress and sadden him. 
 
 The Christ's Hospital boy is a religious character. His school is eminently 
 a religious foundation ; it has its peculiar prayers, its services at set times, its 
 graces, hymns, and anthems, following each other in an almost monastic close- 
 ness of succession! This religious character in him is not always untinged with 
 superstition. That is not wonderful, when we consider the thousand tales and 
 traditions which must circulate with undisturbed credulity, amongst so many 
 boys, that have so few checks to their belief from any intercourse with the 
 world at large ; upon whom their equals in age must work so much, their elders 
 so little. With this leaning towards an over-belief in matters of rehgion, which 
 will soon correct itself when he comes out into society, may be classed a turn 
 for romance above most other boys. This is to be traced in the same manner 
 to their excess of society with each other, and defect of mingUng with the world. 
 Hence the peculiar avidity with such books as the Arabian Nights' Entertain- 
 ments, and others of a still wilder cast, are, or at least were in my time, sought 
 for by the boys. I remember when some half-dozen of them set off from 
 school, without map, card, or compass, on a serious expedition to find out 
 Philip Quart's Island. 
 
 The Christ's Hospital boy's sense of right and wrong is peculiarly tender and , 
 apprehensive. It is even apt to run out into ceremonial observances, and to 
 im pose a yoke upbn itself beyond the strict obligations of the moral law. Those 
 who were contemporaries with me at that School thirty years ago, will remember 
 
Recollections of Christ's Hospital. 557 
 
 with what more than Judaic rigour the eating of the fat of certain boiled meats* 
 was interdicted. A boy would have blushed, as at the exposure of some 
 heinous immorality, to have been detected eating that forbidden portion of his 
 allowance of animal food, the whole of which, while he was in health, was 
 little more than sufficient to allay his hunger, ^he same, or even greater, 
 refinement was shown in the rejection of certain kinds of sweet-cake. What 
 gave rise to these supererogatory penances, these self-denying ordinances, I 
 could never learn ;f .they certainly argue no defect of the conscientious prin- 
 ciple. A little e.tcess in that article is not undesirable in youth, to make allow- 
 ance for the inevitjible waste which comes in maturer years. But in the less 
 ambiguous line of duty, in those directions of the moral feelings wliich cannot 
 be mistaken or depreciated, I will relate what took place in the year 1785, when 
 Mr. Perry, the steward, died. I must be pardoned for taking my instances from 
 my own times. Indeed the vividness of my recollections, while I am upon this 
 subject, almost brings back those times ; they are present to me still. But I 
 believe that in the years which have elapsed since the period which I speak of, 
 the character of the Christ's Hospital boy is very little changed. Their situa- 
 tion in point of many comforts is impro\?ed ; but that which I ventured before 
 to term tlie public conscience of the school, the pervading moral sense, of which 
 every mind partakes, and to which so many individual minds contribute, re- 
 mains, I believe, pretty much the same as when I left it. I have seen within 
 this twelvemonth almost the change which has been produced upon a boy of 
 eight or nine years of age, upon being admitted into that school; how, from a 
 pert young co.\comb, who thought that all knowledge was comprehended within 
 jiis shallow brains, because a smattering of two or three languages and one or 
 two sciences were stuffed into him by injudicious treatment at home, by a 
 imixture with the wholesome society of so many schoolfellows, in less time than 
 I have spoken of, he has sunk to his own level, and is contented to be carried on 
 in the quiet orb of modest self-knowledge in which the common mass of that 
 unpresumptuous assemblage of boys seem to move ; from being a little unfeel- 
 ing mortal, he has got to feel and reflect. Nor would it be a difficult matter to 
 show how, at a school like this, where the boy is neither entirely separated 
 from home, nor yet exclusively under its influence, the best feelings, the filial 
 for instance, are brought to a maturity which they could not have attained under 
 a completely domestic education ; how the relation of parent is rendered less 
 tender by unremitted association, and the very awfulness of age is best appre- 
 hended by some sojourning amidst the comparative levity of youth ; how absence, 
 not drawn out by too great extension into alienation or forgetfulness, puts 'an 
 edge upon the relish of occasional intercourse, and the boy is made the better 
 child by that which keeps the force of that relation from being felt as perpe- 
 tually pressing on him; hov/ the substituted paternity, into the care of which 
 he is adopted, while in everything substantial it makes up for the natural, in the 
 necessary omission of individual fondness and partialities, directs the mind only 
 the more strongly to appreciate that natural and first tie, in which such weak- 
 nesses are the bond of strength, and the appetite which craves after them 
 betrays no perverse palate. But these speculations rather belong to the ques- 
 tion of the comparative advantage of a public over a private education in 
 general. I must get back to my favourite school ; and to that which took place 
 when our old and good steward died. 
 
 * Under the denomination of s^^^gs. - ^ 
 
 t I am told that the late steward, Mr. Hathaway, who evinced on many occasions a 
 most praiseworthy anxiety to promote the comfort of the boys, had occasion for all his 
 address and perseverance to eradicate the first of these unfortunate prejudices, in which 
 he at length happily succeeded, and thereby restored to one-half of the animal nutrition 
 of the school those honours which painful superstition and blind zeal had so long con- 
 spired to withhold from it. 
 
558 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 And I will say, that when I think of the frequent instances which I have met 
 with in children, of a hard-heartedness, a callousness, and insensibility to the 
 loss of relations, even of those who have begot and nourished them, I cannot 
 but consider it as a proof of something in the peculiar conformation of that 
 school, favourable to the expansion of the best feelings of our nature, that, at 
 the period which I am noticing, out of five hundred boys there was not a dry 
 eye to be found among them, nor a heart that did not beat with genuine emo- 
 tion. Every impulse to play, until the funeral day was past, seemed suspended 
 throughout the school ; and the boys, lately so mirthful and sprightly, were seen 
 pacing their cloisters alone, or in sad groups standing abput, few of them 
 without some token, such as their slender means could provide, a black riband 
 or something to denote respect and a sense of their loss. The time itself was 
 a time of anarchy, a time in which all authority (out of school-hours) was 
 abandoned. The ordinary restraints were for those days superseded; and the 
 gates, which at other times kept'us in, were left without watchers. Yet, with 
 the exception of one or two graceless boys at most, who took advantage of that 
 suspension of authorities to skulk out, as it was called, the whole body of that 
 great school kept rigorously within their bounds, by a voluntary self-imprison- 
 ment ; and they who broke bounds, though they escaped punishment from any 
 master, fell into a general disrepute among us, and, for that which at any other 
 time would have been applauded and admired as a mark of spirit, were con- 
 signed to infamy and reprobation : so much natural government have gratitude 
 and the principles of reverence and love, and so much did a respect to their 
 dead friend prevail with these Christ's Hospital boys above any fear which his 
 presence among them when living could ever produce. And if the impressions 
 which were made on my mind so long ago are to be trusted, very richly did their 
 steward deserve this tribute. It is a pleasure to me even now to call to mind his 
 portly form, the regal awe which he always contrived to inspire, in spite of a 
 tenderness and even weakness of nature that would have enfeebled the "reins 
 . of discipline in any other master ; a yearning of tenderness towards those under 
 his protection, which could make five hundred boys at once feel towards him 
 each as to their individual father. He had faults, with which we had nothing to 
 do ; but, with all his faults, indeed, Mr. Perry was a most extraordinary creature. 
 Contemporary with him, and still living, though he has long since resigned his 
 occupation, will it be impertinent to mention the name of our excellent upper 
 grammar-master, the Rev. James Boyer? He was a disciplinarian, indeed, of 
 a dj^fferent stamp from him whom I have just described ; but now the terrors of 
 the rod, and of a temper a little too hasty to leave the more nervous of us quite 
 at our ease to do justice to his merits in those days, are long since over, un- 
 grateful were we if we should refuse our testimony to that unwearied assiduity 
 with which he attended to the particular improvement of each of us. Had we 
 been the offspring of the first gentry in the land, he could not have been insti- 
 gated by the strongest views of recompense and reward to have made himself 
 a greater slave to the most laborious of all occupations than he did for us sons 
 of charity, frorti whom, or from our parents, he could expect nothing. He has 
 had his reward in the satisfaction of having discharged his duty, in the pleasur- 
 able consciousness of having advanced the respectability of that institution to 
 which, both man and boy, he was attached; in the honours to which so many 
 of his pupils have successfully aspired at both our Universities; and in the 
 staff with which the Governors of the Hospital at the close of his hard labours 
 with the highest expressions of the obligations the school lay under to him, 
 unanimously voted to present him. 
 
 I have often considered it among the felicities of the constitution of this 
 school, that the offices of steward and schoolmaster are kept distinct ; the strict 
 business of education alone devolving upon the latter, while the former has the 
 charge of all things out of school, the control of the provisions, the regulation 
 
Recollections of Christ's Hospital. 559 
 
 of meals, of dress, of play, and the ordinary intercourse of the boys. By this 
 divilsion of management, a superior respectability must attach to the teacher 
 whiae his office is unmixed with any of these lower concerns. A still greater 
 adv ntage over the construction of common boarding-schools is to be found in 
 the settled salaries of the masters, rendering them totally free of obhgation to 
 any individual pupil or his parents. This never fails to have its effect at schools 
 where each boy can reckon up to a hair what profit the master derives from 
 him, where he views him every day in the light of a caterer, a provider for the 
 family, who is to get somuchbyhimin each of his meals. Boys will see and con- 
 sider these things ; and how much must the sacred character of preceptor suffer 
 in their minds by these degrading associations 1 The very bill which the pupil 
 carries home with him at Christmas, eked out, perhaps, with elaborate though 
 necessary minuteness, instructs him that his teachers have other ends than the 
 mere love to learning in the lessons which they give him ; and though they put 
 into his hands the fine sayings of Seneca or Epictetus, yet they themselves are 
 none of those disinterested pedagogues to teach philosophy _^?-a/ij. The mas- 
 ter, too, is sensible that he is seen in this light ; and how much this must lessen 
 that affectionate regard to the learners which alone can sweeten the bitter 
 labour of instruction, and convert the whole business into unwelcorrie and un- 
 interesting task-work, many preceptors that I have conversed with on the sub- 
 ject are ready, with a sad heart, to acknowledge. From this inconvenience the 
 settled salaries of the masters of this school in great measure exempt them ; 
 while the happy custom of choosing masters (indeed every officer of the estab- 
 lishment) from those who have received their education there, gives them an 
 interest in advancing the character of the school, and bmds them to observe a 
 tenderness and a respect to the children, in which a stranger, feeling that inde- 
 pendence which I have spoken of might well be expected to fail. 
 
 In affectionate recollection of the place where he was bred up, in hearty 
 recognitions of old schoolfellows met with again after the lapse of years, or in 
 foreign countries, the Christ's Hospital boy yields to none; I might almost say 
 he goes beyond most other boys. The very compass and magnitude of the 
 school, its thousand bearings, the space it takes up in the imagination beyond 
 the ordinary schools, impresses a remembrance, accompanied with an elevation 
 of mind, that attends hun through Ufe. It is too big, too affecting an object, 
 to pass away quickly from his mind. The Christ s Hospital boys' friends at 
 school are commonly his intimates through life. For me, I do npt know 
 whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately to cling 
 to the remembrances of childhood ; in an inverted ratio to the usual sentiments 
 of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since seems of any value or 
 importance, compared to the colours which imagination gave to everything 
 then. I belong to no body corporate %\ish as I then made a part of. — And here 
 before I close, taking leave of the general reader, and addressing myself solely 
 to my old schoolfellows, that were contemporaries with me from the year 1782 
 to 1789, let me have leave to remember some of those circumstances of our 
 school, which they will not be unwilling to have brought back to their minds. 
 
 And first, let us remember, as first in importance in our childish eyes, the 
 young men (as they almost were) who, under the denomination of Grecians, 
 were waiting the expiration of the period when they should be sent, at the 
 charges of the Hospital, to one or other of our Universities, but more fre- 
 quently to Cambridge. These youths, from their superior acquirements, their 
 superior age and stature, and the fewness of their numbers (for seldom above 
 two or three at a time were inaugurated intS that high order), drew the eyes of 
 all, and especially of the younger boys, into a reverent observance and admi- 
 ration. How tall they used to seem to us !— how stately would they pace along 
 
 the cloisters ! while the plav of the lesser boys was absolutely suspended, or 
 
 its boisterousness at least allayed, at their presence ! Not that they ever beat 
 
560 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 or struck the boys — that would have been to have demeaned themselves— the 
 dignity of their persons alone insured them all respect. The task of blows, of 
 corpBral chastisement, they left to the common monitors, or heads of wards, 
 who it must be confessed, in our time had rather too much licence allowed them 
 to oppress and misuse their inferiors ; and the interference of the Grecian, who 
 may be considered as the spiritual power, was not unfrequently called for, to 
 mitigate by its mediation, the heavy unrelentmg arm of this temporal power, 
 or monitor. In fine, the Grecians were the solemn Muftis of the school. jEras 
 were computed from their time ; — it used to be said, such or such a thing was 
 
 done when S or T was Grecian. 
 
 As I ventured to call the Grecians the Muftis of the school, the king's boys,* 
 as their character then was, may well pass for the Janissaries. They were the 
 terror of all the other boys ; bred up under that hardy sailor, as well as excel- 
 lent mathematician, and co-navigator with Captain Cook, Wiiham Wales. All 
 his systems were adapted to fit them for the rough element which they were des- 
 tined to encounter. Frequent and severe punishments, which were expected to 
 be borne with more than Spartan fortitude, came to be considered less as in- 
 flictions of disgrace than as trials of obstinate endurance. To make his boys 
 hardy, and to give them early sailor habits, seemed to be his only aim ; to this 
 everything was subordinate. Moral obliquities, indeed, were sure of receiving 
 their full recompense, for no occasion of laying on the lash was ever let sUp ; 
 but the effects expected to be produced from it were something very different 
 from contrition or mortification. There was in William Wales a perpetual fund 
 9f humour, a constant glee about him, which, heightened by an inveterate 
 provincialism of North-country dialect, absolutely took away the sting from his 
 severities. His punishments were a game at patience, in which the master was 
 not always worst contented when he found himself at times overcome by his 
 pupil. What success this discipline had, or how the effects of it operated upon 
 the after-lives of these king's boys, I cannot say : but I am sure that, for the time, 
 they were absolute nuisances to the rest of the school. Hardy, brutal, and 
 often wicked, they were the most graceless lump in the whole mass ; older and 
 bigger than the other boys (for, by the system of their education they were kept 
 longer at school' by two or three years than any of the rest, except the Gre- 
 cians), they were a constant terror to the younger part of the school; and some 
 who may read this, I doubt not, will remember the consternation into which 
 the juvenile fry of us were thrown, when the cry was raised in the cloisters, that 
 the First Order was coming — for so they termed the first form or class of 
 those boys. Still these sea-boys answered some good purposes in the school. 
 They were the military class among the boys, foremost in athletic exercises, 
 who extended the fame of the prowess of the school far and near : and the 
 apprentices in the vicinage, and sometimes the butchers' boys in the neigh- 
 bouring market, had sad occasion to attest their valour. 
 
 The time would fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate all those circum- 
 stances, some pleasant, some attended with some pain, which seen through the 
 mist of distance, come sweetly softened to the memory. But I must crave leave 
 to remember our transcending superiority in those invigorating sports, leap- 
 frog, and basting the bear ; our delightful excursions in the summer holidays to 
 the New River, near Newington, where, like otters, we would live the long day 
 in the water, never caring for dressing ourselves when we had once stripped; our 
 savoury meals afterwards, when we came home almost famished with staying out 
 all day without our dinners ; our vijits at other times to the Tower, where, by 
 ancient privilege, we had free access to all the curiosities ; our solemn proces- 
 sions through the City at Easter, with the Lord Maypr'S largess of buns, wine, 
 and a shilling, with the festive questions and civic pleasantries of the dispen- 
 sing Aldermen, which were more to us than all the rest of the banquet ; our 
 * The mathematical pupils, bred up to the sea, on the foundation of Charles the Second. 
 
 
Recollections of Christ's Hospital. 561 
 
 stately suppings in puMic, where the well-lighted hall, and the confluence of 
 well-dressed company who came to see us, made the whole look more like a 
 concert or assembly, than a scene of a plain bread and cheese collation ; the 
 annual orations upon St. Matthew's'day, in which the senior scholar, before he 
 had done, seldom failed to reckon up, among those who had done honour to 
 our school by being educated in it, the names of those accomphshed critics and 
 Greek scholars, Joshua Barnes and Jeremiah Markland (t marvel they left out 
 Camden while they were about it). Let me have leave to remember our hymns 
 and anthems, and well-toned organ ; the doleful tune of the burial anthem 
 chatrted in the solemn cloisters, upon the seldom-occurring funeral of some 
 schoolfellow; the festivities at Christmas, when the richest of us would club 
 our stock to have a gaudy day, sitting round the fire, replenished to the height 
 with logs, and the penniless, and he that could contribute nothing, partook in 
 all the mirth, and in some of the substantialities of the feasting: the carol sung 
 by night at that time of the year, which, when a young boy, I have so often 
 lain awake to hear from seven {the hour of going to bed) till ten, when it was 
 sung by the older boys and monitors, and have listened to it, in their rude 
 chanting, till I have been transported in fancy to the fields of Bethlehem, and 
 the song whicli was sung at that season by angels' voices to the shepherds. 
 
 Nor would I willingly forget any of those things which administered to our 
 vanity. The hem-stitched bands, and town-made shirts, which some of the 
 most fashionable among us wore ; the town-girdles, with buckles of silver, or 
 shining stone ; the badges of the sea-boys; the cots, or superior shoe-strings 
 of the monitors ; the medals of the markers (those who were appointed to hear 
 the Bible read in the wards on Sunday morning and evening), which bore on 
 their obverse in silver, as certain parts of our garments carried in meaner 
 metal, the countenance of our Founder, that godly and royal child. King 
 Edward the Sixth, the flower of the Tudor name— the young flower that was 
 untimely cropped as it began to fill our land with its early odours— the boy- 
 patron of boys— the serious and holy child who walked with Cranmer and 
 Ridley— fit associate, in those tender years, for the bishops and future martyrs 
 of our Church, to receive, or (as occasion sometimes proved) to give instruction. 
 
 WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR 
 STAGE REPRESENTATION. 
 
 {The Reflector, No. IV., art. ix., i8ir.) 
 
 CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO THEIR FITNESS FOR 
 STAGE REPRESENTATION. 
 
 [The oridnal title of this masterly paper, on its first publication in Leigh Hunt's Re- 
 fleSor! w^ "?Th"atSlia, No. I., On Garrick and Acting." It was then signed wth the 
 letter " X "—affording the reader no.clue whatever as to the authorship.] 
 
 Taking a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck w-ith the affected atti- 
 tude of kfi sure which I do not remember to have seen before, and which upon 
 exam?nation P oved to be a whole-length of the celebrated Mr. Garnck. 
 ThoT"hi would not go so far with som^e good Catholics abroad as to shut 
 
562 The Works of Charles Lamb. ) 
 
 1 
 
 players altogether out of consecrated ground, yet I -own I was not a little 
 scandalized at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set 
 apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed 
 under this barlequii) figure the following lines : — 
 
 To paint fair Nature, by divine command, 
 Her magic pencil in his glowing hand, 
 A Shakspere rose : then, to expand his fame 
 Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came. 
 Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew. 
 The Actor's genius made them breathe anew ; 
 Though, like' the bard himself, in night they lay. 
 Immortal Garrick call'd them back to-day : 
 And till Eternity with power sublime 
 Sliall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time, 
 Shak.spere and Garrick l^ke twin-stars shall shine, 
 And earth irradiate with a beam divine. 
 
 It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt anything like 
 a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and nonsense. But the reflection 
 it led me into was a kind of wonder, how from the days of the actor here 
 celebrated to our own, it should have been the fashion to compUment every 
 performer in his turn, that has had the luek to please the town in any of the 
 great characters of Shakspere, with a notion of possessing a mind congenial 
 with the poets: how people should come thus unaccountably to confound 
 the. power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty of 
 being able to read or recite the same when put into words ;* or what connection 
 that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man, which a great dramatic 
 poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a 
 player by observing a few general effects, which some common passion, as grief, 
 anger, &c. , usually has upon the gestures and e.xterior, can easily compass. To 
 know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or 
 a Hamlet, for instance, the when and the why and the how far they should be 
 moved ; to what pitch a passion is becoming ; to give the reins and to pull in 
 the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the slacking is most 
 graceful ; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from 
 that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions 
 in the countenance or gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most 
 lively and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all 
 but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief, generally; but of the 
 motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same passion in 
 low and vulgar natures, of tlTese the actor can give no more idea by his face or 
 gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter in- 
 telligible sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions 
 which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow 
 apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not 
 only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but 
 even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actorwith the character 
 which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent play-goer to disembarrass 
 the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of 
 Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this con- 
 fusion incidental alone to unlettered persons, who, not possessing the advantage 
 
 * It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dramatic recitations. We 
 never dream that the gentleman who reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is 
 therefore a great poet and philosopher : nor do we find that Tom Davies, the bookseller, 
 who is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in England in his 
 day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this tradition) was 
 tberefore, by his intimate friends, set upon a level with Milton. 
 
On the Tragedies of Shakspere. 563 
 
 of reading, are necessarily dependent upon the stage-player for all the pleasure 
 which they can receive from the drama, and to whom the very idea of what an 
 author is cannot be made comprehensible without some pain and perplexity of 
 mind : the error is one from which persons otherwise not meanly lettered, find 
 it almost impossible to extricate themselves.' 
 
 Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of satisfaction 
 which I received some years back from seeing for the first time a tragedy of 
 Shakspere performed, in which these two great performers sustained the prin- 
 cipal parts.' It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto 
 assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life afterwards for 
 this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we 
 find to our cost that, instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and 
 brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let 
 go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance. 
 
 How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus 
 cramped and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be 
 judged from that delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn to those 
 plays of Shakspere which have escaped being performed, and to those passages 
 in the acting plays of the same writer which have happily been left out in the 
 performance. How far the very custom of hearing anything spouted, withers 
 and blows upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry the 
 Fifth, &c., which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to 
 be found in Enfield Speakers, and such kind of books. 1 confess myself utterly 
 unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning ' ' To be or 
 not to be," or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so 
 handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly 
 from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to 
 me a perfect dead member. 
 
 It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of 
 Shakspere are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost 
 any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a reason that 
 they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under the 
 province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do. 
 
 The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of passion ; 
 and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the eyes 
 and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For this reason, 
 Scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit of fury, and 
 then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again, have always been 
 the most popular upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spec- 
 tators are here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this 
 war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed round such 
 " intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the direct object of the imitation here. 
 But in the best dramas, and in Shakspere above all, how obvious it is, that the 
 form of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and 
 often a highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into possession 
 of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of mind in a character, 
 which he could otherwise never have arrived at m that form of composition by 
 any gift short of intuition. We do here as we do with novels written in the 
 epistolary form. How many improprieties, perfect solecisims in letter-writing, 
 do we put up with in " Clarissa " and other books, for the sake of the delight 
 which that form upon the whole gives us. 
 
 But the practice of stage representation reduces everything to a controversy 
 of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet 
 to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator. The love-dia- 
 logues of Romeo and Juliet, those silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by 
 night; the more intimate and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an 
 
564 The Works of Charles Lamjb. 
 
 Othello or a Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are 
 so delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful dalliances in 
 Paradise — 
 
 As beseem'd 
 
 Fair couple link'd in happy nuptial league. 
 
 Alone : 
 
 by the inherent fault of stage representation, how are these things sullied and 
 turned from their very nature by being exposed to a large assembly; when such ' 
 speeches as Imogen addresses to her lord, come drawling out of the mouth of | 
 a hired actress, whose Courtship, though nominally addressed to the personated 1 
 Posthumus, is manifestly a:med at the spectators, who are to judge of her I 
 endearments and her returns of love. 
 
 The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of Bet- 
 terton, a succession of popular performers have had the greatest- ambition 
 to distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one of their reasons. 
 But for the character itself, we find it in a play, and therefore we judge it a lit 
 subject of dramatic representation. The play itself abounds in maxims and 
 reflections beyond any other, and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle 
 for conveying moral instruction. But Hamlet himself — what does he suffer 
 meanwhile by being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster, to give lectures to 
 the crowd 1 Why, -nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions 
 between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his solitary 
 musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts 
 of the palace to pour forth ; or rather, they are the silent meditations with 
 which his bosom is bursting, reduced to words for the sake ol the reader, who 
 must else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These profound sorrows, 
 these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares 
 utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticulat- 
 ing actor, who comes and mouths them out before an audience, making four 
 hundred people his confidants at once ? I say not that it is the fault of the 
 actor so to do ; he must pronounce them ore rotundOt he must accompany them 
 with his eye, he must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of eye, 
 tone, or gesture, or he fails. He must be thinking alt the white of his appear- 
 ance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it. And 
 this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet. 
 
 It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of thought 
 and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise would never 
 learn it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual acquisition gained this 
 way may, for aught I know, be inestimable ; but I am not arguing that Hamlet 
 should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being 
 acted. I have heard much of the wonders which Garrick performed in this 
 part ; but as I never-saw him, I must have leave to doubt whether the repre- 
 sentation of such a character came within the province of his art. Those who 
 tell me of him, speak of his eye, of the magic of his eye, and of his com- 
 manding voice : physical properties, vastly desirable in an actor, and without 
 which he can never insinuate meaning into an auditory, — but what have they to 
 do with Hamlet? what have they to do with intellect? In fact, the things 
 aimed at in theatrical representation, are to arrest the spectator's eye upon the 
 form and the gesture, and so to gain a more favourable hearing to what is 
 spoken : it is not what the character is, but how he looks ; not what he says, 
 but how he speaks it. • I see no reason to think that if the play of Hamlet 
 were written over again by some such writer as Banks or Lillo, retaining the 
 process of the story, but totally omitting all the poetry of it, all the divine 
 features of Shakspere, his stupendous intellect: and only taking care to give 
 us enough of passionate dialogue,- which Banks or Lillo were never at a loss to 
 
On the Tragedies of Shakspere. 565 
 
 furnish ; I see not how the effect could be much different upon an audience, 
 nor how the actor has it in his power to represent Shakspere to us differently 
 from his representation of Banks or Lillo. Hamlet would still be a youthful 
 accomplished prince, and must be gracefully personated ; he might be puzzled 
 in his mind, wavering in his conduct, seemingly cruel to Ophelia, he might see 
 a ghost, and start at it, and address it kindly when he found it to be his father ; 
 all this in the poorest and roost homely language of the servilest creeper after- 
 nature that ever consulted the palate of an audience ; without troubhng Shak- 
 spere for the matter : and I see not but there would be room for all the power 
 •which an actor has, to display itself. All the passions and changes of passion 
 might remain ; for those are much less difficult to write or act than is thought ; 
 it is a trick easy to be attained, it is but rising or falling a note or two in the 
 voice, a whisper with a significant foreboding look to announce its approach, 
 and so contagious the counterfeit appearance of any emotion is, that let the 
 words be what they will, the look and tone shall carry it off and make it pass 
 for deep skill in the passions. 
 
 It is common for people to talk of Shakspere's plays being jo natural, that 
 everybody can imderstand him. They are natural indeed, they are grounded 
 deep in nature, so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of 
 us. You shall hear the same persons say that George Barnwell is very natural, 
 and Othello is very natural, that they are both very deep ; and to them they are 
 the same kind of thing. At the one they sit and shed tears, because a good 
 sort of young man is tempted by a naughty woman to commit a trifling pecca- 
 dillo, the murder of an uncle or so,* that is all, and so comes to an untimely 
 end, which is so moving ; and at the other, because a blackamoor in a fit of 
 jealousy kills his innocent white wife : and the odds are that ninety-nine out of 
 a hundred would willingly behold the same catastrophe happen to both the 
 heroes, and have thought the rope more due to Othello than to Barnwell. For 
 of the texture of Othello's mind, the inward construction marvellously laid 
 open with all its strengths and weaknesses, its heroic confidences and its human 
 misgivings, its agonies of hate springing from the depths of love, they see no 
 more than the spectators at a cheaper rate, who pay their pennies apiece to look 
 through the man's telescope in Leicester Fields, see into the inward plot and 
 topography of the moon. Some dim thing or other they see, they see an actor 
 personating a passion, of grief, or anger, for instance, and they recognize it as 
 a copy of the usual external effects of such passions ; or at least as being true 
 to that symbol of the emotion which passes current at the theatre for it, for it is 
 often no more than that : but of the grounds of the passion, its correspondence 
 to a great or heroic nature, which is the only worthy object of tragedy, — that 
 common auditors know anything of this, or can have any such notions dinned 
 into them by the mere strength of an actor's lungs, — that apprehensions foreign 
 to them should be thus infused into them by storm, I can neither believe, nor 
 understand how it can be possible. 
 
 We talk of Shakspere's admirable observation' of life, when we should feel 
 that not from a petty inquisition into those cheap and every-day characters 
 which surrounded him, as" they surround us, but from his own mind, which 
 
 * If this note could hope to meet the eye of any of the Managers, I would entreat and 
 beg of them, in the name of both the galleries, that this insult upon the morality of the 
 common people of London should cease to be eternally repeated in the holiday weeks. 
 Why are the 'Prentices of this famous and well-governed city, instead of an amusement, 
 to be treated over and over again with a nauseous sermon of George Barnwell ? Why at 
 tk£ end of their vistas are we to place the gallows ? Were I anuncle, I .should not 
 much like a nephew of mine to have suchan example placed before his eyes. It is really 
 making uncle-murder too trivial to exhibit it as done upon such slight motives ; — it is 
 attributing too much to such characters as Millwood : it is putting things into the heads 
 of good young men, which they would never otherwise have dreamed of. Uncles that 
 think anything of their lives, should fairly petition the Chamberlain against it. 
 
566 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 was, to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's, the very "sphere of humanity," he 
 fetched those images of virtue and of knowledge, of which every one of us 
 recognizing a part, thinlc we comprehend in our natures the whole ; and often- 
 times mistake the powers which he positively creates in us,, for nothing more 
 than indigenous faculties of our own minds, which only v/aited the application 
 of corresponding virtues in him to return ,a full and clear echo of the same. 
 
 To return to Hamlet. — Among the distinguishing features of that wonderful 
 character, one of the most interesting (yet painful) is that soreness of mind 
 which makes him treat the intrusions of Polonius with harshness, and that 
 asperity which he puts on in his interviews with Ophelia. These tokens of an 
 unhinged mind (if they be not mixed in the latter casewith a profound artifice 
 of love, to alienate Ophelia by affected discourtesies, so to prepare her mind 
 for the breaking off of that loving intercourse, which can no longer find a place 
 amidst business so serious as that which he has to do) are parts of his character, 
 which to reconcile with our admiration of Hamlet, the most patient considera- 
 tion of his situation is no more th,an necessary ; they are what we forgi-ve ajier- 
 wards, and explain by the whole of his character, but at the time they are 
 harsh and unpleasant. Yefsuch is the actor's necessity of giving strong blows 
 to the audience, that I have never seen a player in this character, who did not 
 exaggerate and strain to the utmost these ambiguous features, — these temporary 
 deformities in the character. They make hijn express a vulgar scorn at Polo- 
 nius which utterly degrades his gentility, and which no explanation can render 
 palatable ; they make him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia's 
 father, — contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get 
 applause by it : it is nattiral, people say ; that is, the words are scornful, and 
 the actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge of : but why so much scorn, 
 and of that sort, they never think of asking. 
 
 tio to Ophelia. — All the Hamlets that I have ever seen, rant and rave at her 
 as if she had committed some great crime, and the audience are highly pleased, 
 because the words of the part are satirical, and they are enforced by the 
 strongest expression of satirical indignation of which tlie face and voice are 
 capable. But then, whether Hamlet is likely to have put on such brutal 
 appearances to a lady whom he loved so dearly, is never thought on. The 
 truth is, that in all such deep affections as had subsisted between Hamlet and 
 Ophelia, there is a stock of supererogatory love (if I may venture to use the 
 expression), which in any great grieY of heart, especially where that which 
 preys upon the mind cannot be communicated, confers a kind of indulgence 
 upon the grieved party to express itself, even to its heart's dearest object, in the 
 language of a temporary alienation ; but it is not alienation, it is a distraction 
 purely, and so it always makes itself to be felt by that object ; it is not anger, 
 but grief assuming the appearance of anger, — love awkwardly counterfeiting 
 hate, as sweet countenances when they try to frown ; but such sternness and 
 fierce disgust as Hamlet is made to show, is no counterfeit, but the real face of 
 absolute aversion, -^of irrecgjjGitaBle alienation. It may be said he puts on the 
 madman ; but then he should only so far put on this counterfeit lunacy as his 
 own real distraction will give him leave ; that is, in'completely, imperfectly ; 
 not in that confirmed, practised way, like a master of his art, or as Dame 
 Quickly would say, "like one of those harlotry players." ; 
 
 I mean no disrespect to any actor, but the sort of pleasure which Shak- 
 spere's plays give in the acting seems to me not at all to differ from that which . 
 the audience receive from those of other writers ; and, they being in themselves 
 essentially so different from all others, I must conclude that there is something 
 in the nature of acting which levels all distinctions. And in fact, who does not 
 speak indifferently of the Gamester and ai Macbeth as fine stage performances, 
 . and praise the Mrs. Beverley in the same way as the Lady Macbeth of Mrs. 
 S. ? Belvidera, and Calista, and Isabella, and Euphrasia, are they less liked 
 
On the Tragedies of Shakspere. 567 
 
 than Imogen, or than Juliet, or than Desdemona? Are they not spoken of 
 and remembered in the same way ? Is not the female performer as great (as 
 they call it) m one as in the other? Did not Garrick shine, and was he not 
 ambitious of shining ni every drawling tragedy that his wretched day produced 
 —the productions of the Hills aitd the Murphys and the Browns,— and shall 
 he have that honour to dwell in our minds for ever as an inseparable concomi- 
 tant with Shakspere ? A kindred mind ! O who can read that affecting 
 sonnet of Shakspere which alludes to his profession as a player : — 
 
 Oh for my sake do you with Fortune chide, 
 
 The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 
 Than public means whicll public manners breeds — 
 
 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; 
 
 And almost thence my nature is subdued 
 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand 
 
 Or that other confession ; — 
 
 Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there. 
 
 And made myself a motley to the view, 
 
 Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear — 
 
 Who can read these instances of jealous self-watchfulness in our sweet Shak- 
 spere, and dream of any congeniality between him and one that, by every 
 tradition of him, appears to have been as mere a player as ever existed ; to 
 have had his mind tainted with the lowest player's vices, — envy and jealousy, 
 and miserable cravings after applause; one who in the exercise of his profes- 1 
 sion was jealous even of the women-performers that stood in his way; a I 
 manager full of managerial tricks and stratagems and finesse : that any resem- I 
 blance should be dreamed of between him, and Shakspere, — Shakspere 
 who, in the plenitude and consciousness of his own powers, could with that 
 noble modesty, which we can neither imitate nor appreciate, express himself 
 thus of his own sense of his own defects : — 
 
 Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 
 Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd : 
 Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope. 
 
 I am almbst, disposed to deny to Garrick the merits of being an admirer of 
 Shakspere. A true lover of his excellencies he certainly was not ; for would 
 any true lover of them have admitted into his matchless scenes such ribald 
 trash as Tate and Gibber, and the rest of them, that 1 
 
 With their darkness durst affront his light, 
 
 have foisted into the acting plays of Shakspere ? , I believe it impossible that 
 he could have had a proper reverence for Shakspere, and have condescended 
 to go through that interpolated scene in Richard Uic Third, in which Richard 
 tries to break his wife's heart by telling her he loves another woman, and says, 
 " if she survives this she is immortal." Yet I doubt not he delivered this vulgar 
 stuff with as much anxiety of emphasis as any of the genuine parts : and for 
 acting, it is as well calculated as any. But we have seen the part of Richard 
 lately produce great fame to an actor by liis manner of playing it, and it lets 
 us into the secret of acting, and of popular judgments of Shakspere derived 
 from acting. Not one of the spectators who have witnessed Mr. C.'s exertions 
 in that part, but has come away with a proper conviction that Richard is a very 
 wicked man, and kills little children in their beds, with something like the plea- 
 sure which the giants and ogres in children's books are represented to have 
 
568 ' The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 taken in that practice ; morco/er, that he is very close and shrewd, and devilish 
 cunning, for you could see that by his eye. 
 
 But is in fact this the impression we have in reading the Richard of Shaks- 
 pdre ? Do we feel anything like disgust, as we do at that butcher-like repre- 
 sentation of him that passes for him on the stage ? A horror at his crimes 
 blends with the effect which we feel, but how is it quaUfied, how is it carried off, 
 by the rich intellect which he displays, ^is resources, his wit, his buoyant spirits, 
 his vast knowledge and insight into characters, the poetry of his part— not an 
 atom of all which is made perceivable in Mr. C.'s way of acting it. Nothing but 
 his crimes, his actions, is visible; they are prominent and staring ; the murderer 
 stands out, but where is the lofty genius, the man of vast capacity,— the pro- 
 found, the witty, accomplislied Richard? 
 
 The truth is, the characters of Shakspere are so much the objects of medi- 
 tation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions, that while we are 
 reading any of his great criminal characters, — Macbeth, Richard, even lago, — 
 we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the 
 aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity which prompts them to overleap those 
 moral fences. Barnwell is a wretched murderer ; there is a certain fitness 
 between his neck and the rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows; 
 nobody who thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case 
 to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from the higher 
 tragedy, what else but a mere assassin is Glenalvon ! Do we think of anything 
 but of the crime which he commits, and the rack which he deserves? That is 
 all which we really think about him. Whereas in corresponding characters in 
 Shakspere so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that while the im- 
 pulses, the inner mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is 
 exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when we see 
 these things represented, the acts which they do are comparatively everything, 
 their impulses nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which we are 
 elevated by those images of night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, 
 that solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike 
 which is to call him to murder Duncan, — when we no longer read it in a book, 
 when we have given up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading pos- 
 sesses over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes 
 actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, 
 as I have witnessed it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful anxiety 
 about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, 
 the too close pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness 
 which totally destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where 
 the deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence : it 
 rather seems to belong to history, — to something past and inevitable, if it has ' 
 anything to do with time at all. The subUme images, the poetry alone, is that 
 which is present to our minds in the reading. 
 
 So to see Lear acted,— ;to see an old man tottering about the stage with a 
 walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing 
 in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter 
 and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced 
 in me. But the Lear of Shakspere cannot be acted. The contemptible 
 machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more 
 inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be 
 to represent Lear : they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of 
 Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The great- 
 ness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual : the explosions 
 of his passion are terrible as a volcano : they are storms turning up and dis- 
 closing to the bottom that sea his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind 
 which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be 
 
On the Tragedies of Shakspere. 569 
 
 thought on ; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but 
 corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage ; while we read it, we 
 see not Lear, but we are Lear, — we are in his mind, we are sustained by a 
 grandeur which baffles the mahce of daughters and storms ; in the aberrations 
 of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized 
 from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows 
 where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What 
 have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that 
 of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the 
 injustice of his children, he reminds them that " they themselves are old?" 
 What gestures shall we appropriate to this ? What has the voice or the eye to 
 do with such things ? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with 
 it show : it is too hard and stony ; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. 
 It is not enough that Cordeha is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate 
 has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, 
 the showmen of scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy 
 ending!— as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through,— the flaying 
 of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the 
 only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could 
 sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation, — why 
 torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy ? As if the childish pleasure of 
 getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his 
 misused station, — as if at his years, and with his experience anything was left 
 but to die. 
 
 Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how many 
 dramatic personages are there in Shaljspere, which though more tractable and 
 feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some 
 adjunct to their character, are improper to be shown to our bodily eye. Othello, 
 for instance. Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering to the nobler 
 parts of our natures, than to read of a young Venetian lady of highest extrac- 
 tion, through the force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she 
 loved, laying aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, 
 and wedding with a coal-black Moor — (for such he is represented, in the imper- 
 fect state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those days, compared 
 with our own, or in compliance with popular notions, though the Moors are 
 now well enough known to be by many shades less unworthy of white woman's 
 fancy) — it is the perfect triumph of virtue over accidents, of the imagination 
 over the senses. She sees Othello's colour in his mind. But upon the stage, 
 when the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our poor 
 unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played, whether 
 he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his colour; whether he did 
 not find something extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded caresses oi 
 Othello and Desdemona; and whether the 'actual sight of the thing did not 
 over-weigh all that beautiful compromise which we make in reading;^ — and the 
 reason it should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality pre- 
 sented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not enough 
 of belief in the internal motives, — all that which is unseen, — to overpower and • 
 reconcile the first and obvious prejudices. * What we see upon a iitage is body 
 * The error of supposing that because Othello's colour does not offend us in the reading, 
 it s'hould also not offend us in the seeing, is just such a fallacy as supposing that an 
 Adam and Eve in a picture shall affect us just as they_ do in the poem. But in the poem 
 we for a while have Paradisaical senses given us, which vanish when we see a man and 
 his wife without clothes in the picture. The painters themselves feel this, as is apparent 
 by the awkward shifts they have recourse to, to make them look not quite_ naked ; by a 
 sort of prophetic anachronism antedating the invention of fig-leaves. So in the reading 
 of the play, we see with Desdemona's eyes ; in the seeing of it, we are forced to look with 
 our own. 
 
57° The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 and bodily action ; -what we are conscious of in reading is almost exclusively 
 the mind, and its movements : and this, I think, may sufficiently account for the 
 very different sort of delight with which the same play so often affects us in the 
 reading and the seeing. 
 
 It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in Shakspere 
 which are within the precincts of nature, have yet something in. them which 
 appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to admit of their being.made objects 
 to the senses without suifering a change and a diminution,— that still stronger 
 the objection must lie against representing another line of characters, which 
 Shakspere has introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to 
 his scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to common 
 life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. When we read 
 the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in Macbeth, though some 
 of the ingredients of their hellish composition savour of the grotesque, yet is 
 the effect upon us other than the most serious and appalling that can be 
 imagined ? Do we not feel spell-bound as Macbeth was ? Can any mirth ac- 
 company a sense of their presence ? We might as well laugh under a con- 
 sciousness of the principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with 
 us. But attempt to bring these beings on to a stage, and you turn them in- 
 stantly into so ihany old women, that men and children are Jo laugh at. Con- 
 trary to the old saying,_that "seeing is believing," the sight actually destroys 
 the faith : and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see 
 these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification which we 
 make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when reading made them 
 an object of belief, — when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as child- 
 ren to their nurses and their elders ; and we laugh at our fears, as children who 
 thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a 
 candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural 
 agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusive- 
 ness. It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these 
 terrors : a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no spec- 
 tators, — a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions 
 made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and a well-dressed 
 nudience, shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions : as 
 Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impenetrable 
 armour over it, " Bully Dawson would have fought the de\ilwith such ad- 
 vantages." ^ 
 
 Much has been said, and deservedly, in reprobation of the vile mixture 
 which Dryden has thrown into the Tempest : doubtless without some such 
 vicious alloy, the impure ears of that age would never have sate out to hear so 
 much innocence of love as is contained in the sweet courtship of Ferdinand 
 and Miranda. But is the Tempest of Shakspere at all a subject for stage 
 representation ? It is one thing to read of an enchanter, and to believe the 
 wondrous tale while we are reading it ; but to have a conjuror brought before 
 us in his conjuring-gown, with his spirits about him, which none but himself 
 and some hundred of favoured spectators before the curtain are supposed to 
 see, involves such a quantity of the hateful incredible, that all our reverence 
 for the author cannot hinder us from perceiving such gross attempts upon the 
 senses to be in the highest degree childish and inefficient. Spirits and fairies 
 ^ ca nnot be represented, they cannot even be painted, — they can only be believed. 
 "^ "T3ut the elaborate and anxious provision of scenery, which the luxury of the 
 age demands, in these cases works a quite contrary effect to what is intended. 
 That which in comedy, or plays of familiar life, adds so much to the life of the 
 imitation, in plays which appeal to the higher faculties, positively destroys the 
 illusion which it is introduced to aid. A parlour or a drawing-room,— a library 
 opening into a garden, — a garden with an alcove in it, — a street, or the piazza 
 
On the Tragedies of Shakspere. 571 
 
 of Covent Garden, does well enough in a scene ; we are content to give as 
 much credit to itas it demands; or rather, we think little about it,— it is little 
 more than reading at the top of a page, ' ' Scene, a Garden ; " we do not 
 imagine ourselves there, but we readily admit the imitation of familiar objects. 
 But to think by the help of painted trees and caverns, which we known to be 
 painted, to transport our minds to Prospero, and his island and his lonely cell;* 
 or by the aid of a fiddle dexterously thrown in, in an interval of speaking, to 
 make us believe that we hear those supernatural noises of which the isle was 
 full :— the Orrery Lectiurer at the Haymarket might as well hope, by his mu- 
 sical glasses cleverly stationed out of sight behind his apparatus, to make us 
 believe that we do indeed hear the crystal spheres ring out that chime, which if 
 it were to inwrap our fancy long, Milton thinks, 
 
 Time would run back and fetch the age of gold, 
 
 And speckled vanity 
 
 Would sicken soon and die, 
 
 And leprous Sin would melt from earthly mould ; 
 
 Yea Hell itself would pass away. 
 
 And leave its dolorous mansions to the peering day. 
 
 The Garden' of Eden, with our first parents in it, is not more impossible to be 
 shown on a stage, than the Enchanted Isle, with its no less interesting and in- 
 nocent first settlers. 
 
 The subject of Scenery is closely connected with that of the Dresses, which 
 are so anxiously attended to on our stage. I remember the last time I saw 
 Macbeth ■pX^.-jsA, the discrepancy I felt at the changes of garment which he 
 varied, — ^the shiftings and re-shiftings, like a Romish priest at mass. The 
 luxury of stage-improvements, and the importunity of the public eye, require 
 this. The coronation robe of the Scottish monarch was fairly a counterpart to 
 that which our King wears when he goes to the Parliament-house, — just so full 
 and cumbersome, and set out with ermine and pearls. And if things must be 
 represented, I see not wliat to find fault with in this. But in reading, what" 
 robe are we conscious of? Some dim images of royalty— a crown and sceptre, 
 may float before our eyes, but who shall describe the fashion of it ? Do we see 
 in our mind's eye what Webb or any other robe-maker could pattern ? This is 
 the inevitable consequence of imithting everything, to make all things natural. 
 ■Whereas the reading of a tragedy is a fine abstraction. It presents to the fancy 
 just so much of external appearances as to make us feel that we are among 
 flesh and blood, while by far the greater and better part of our imagination is 
 employed upon the thoughts and internal machinery of the character. But in 
 acting, scenery, dress, the most contemptible things, call upon us to judge of 
 their naturalness. 
 
 Perhaps it would be no bad similitude, to liken the pleasure which we take 
 in seeing one of these fine plays acted, compared with that quiet delight which 
 we find in the reading of it, to the different feelings with which a reviewer, and 
 a man that is not a reviewer, reads a fine poem. 'The accursed critical habit, — 
 the being called upon to jud.ge and pronounce, must make it quite a different 
 thing to the former. In seeing these plays acted, we are affected just as judges. 
 ■When Hamlet compares the two pictures of Gertrude's first and second hus- 
 band, who wants to see the pictures ? But in the acting, a miniature must be 
 lugged out; which we know not to be the picture, but only to show how finely , 
 a miniature maybe represented. This showing of everything, levels all things : 
 it makes tricks, bows, and curtseys, of importance. Mrs, S. never got more 
 
 * It will be said these things are done in pictures. But picture and scenes are very | 
 different things. Painting is a world of itself, but in scene-painting there isthe attempt J 
 to deceive ; and there is the discordancy, never to be got over, between painted scenes j 
 end real people. 
 
 I 
 
572 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ■ fame by anything than by the manner in which she dismisses the guests in the 
 banquet-scene in Macbeth : it is as much remembered as any of her thrilUng 
 tones or impressive loclcs. But does such a trifle as this enter into tlie 
 imaginations of the reader of that wild and wonderful scene ? Does not the 
 mind dismiss the feasters as rapidly as it can ? Does it care about -the grace- 
 fulness of the doing it ? But by acting, and judging of acting, all these non- 
 essentials are raised into an importance, injurious to the main interest of the 
 play. 
 
 I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakspere. It would 
 be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his comedies; and to show 
 why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest are equally incompatible 
 with stage representation. The length to which this Essay has run, will make 
 it, I am afraid, sufficiently distasteful to the Amateurs of the Theatre, without 
 going any deeper into the subject at present. 
 
 [^Notes in *^ Specimens of Dramatic Poets," 1808.) 
 
 [The title of this work, as it originally appeared — when it was published as a half- 
 guinea volume, in Paternoster Row, by the Messrs. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme — 
 ran thus : " Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shaks- 
 pere : with Notes by Charles Lamb."] 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 More than a third part of the following specimens are from plays which are- 
 to be found only in the British Museum, and in some scarce private libraries. 
 The rest are from Dodsley's and Hawkins's collections, and the .works of 
 Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger. 
 
 I have chosen wherever I could to give entire scenes, and in some instances 
 successive scenes, rather than to string together single passages and detached 
 beautie^, whicli I have always found wearisome in the reading in selections of 
 this nature. 
 
 To every extract is prefixed an explanatory head, sufficient to make it intelli- 
 gible with the help of some trifling omissions. Where a line or more was ob- 
 scure, as having reference to something that had gone before, which would 
 have asked more time to explain than its consequence in the scene seemed to 
 deserve, I have had no hesitation in leaving the line or passage out. Some- 
 times where I have met with a superfluous character, which seemed to burthen 
 without throwing any light upon the scene, I have ventured to dismiss it alto- 
 gether. I have expunged without ceremony all that which the writers had 
 better never have written, that forms the objection so often repeated to the pro- 
 miscuous reading of Fletcher, Massinger, and some others. 
 
 The kind of extracts which I have sought after have been, not so much 
 passages of wit and humour, though the old plays are rich in such, as scenes 
 of passion, sometimes of the deepest quahty, interesting situations, jerious 
 descriptions, that which is more nearly allied to poetry than to wit, and to 
 tragic rather than to comic poetry. The plays which I have made choice of 
 
I On the Elizabethan Dramatists. 573 
 
 — — — — — I 
 
 have been, with few exceptions, tliose which treat of human life and manners, 
 rather than masques, and Arcadian pastorals, with their train of abstmctions, 
 unimpassioned deities, passionate mortals, Claius, and Medorus, and Amintas, 
 and Amarillis. My leading design has been, to illustrate what may be called 
 the moral sense of our ancestors : to show in what manner they felt, when they 
 placed themselves by the power of imagination in trying situations, in the con- 
 flicts of duty and passion, or the strife of contending duties ; what sort of loves 
 and enmities theirs were; how their griefs were tempered, and their fuU-swoln 
 joys abated : how much of Shakspere shines in the great men his contempo- 
 raries, and how far in his divine mind and manners he surpassed them and all 
 mankind. 
 
 Another object which I had in making these selections was, to bring together 
 the most admired scenes in Fletcher and Massinger, in the estimation of the 
 world the only dramatic poets of that age who are entitled to be considered 
 after Shakspere, and to exhibit them in the same volume with the more impres- 
 sive scenes of old IVIarlowe, Heywood, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and others, 
 to show what we have slighted, while beyond all proportion we have cried up 
 one or two favourite names. 
 
 The specimens are not accompanied with anything in the shape of biographi- 
 cal notices.* I had nothing of consequence to add to the slight sketches inDods- 
 ley and the " Biographia Dramatica," and I was unwilling to swell the volume 
 with mere transcription. The reader will not fail to observe from the frequent 
 instances of two or more persons joining in the composition of the same play 
 (the noble practice of those times), that of most of the writers contained in 
 these selections it may be strictly said, that they were contemporaries. The 
 whole period, from the middle of Elizabeth's reign to the close of the reign of 
 Charles I., comprises a space of little more than half a century, within which 
 time nearly all that we have of excellence in serious dramatic composition was 
 produced, if we e.xcept the Samson Agonistes of Milton. 
 
 CHRTSTOPHER MARLOWE. 
 
 Lust's Dominion, or the Lascivious Queen.— Kit Marlowe, as old Izaak 
 Walton assures us, made that smootii song which begins ' ' Come live with me 
 and be my love." The same romantic invitations "in folly ripe in reason 
 rotten," are given by the queen in the play, and the lover in the ditty. He 
 talks of " beds of roses, buckles of gold :" 
 
 Thy silver dishes for thy meat, 
 As precious as t/ie Gods do eat. 
 Shall on an ivory table be 
 Prepared each day for thee and me. 
 
 The lines in the extract have a luscious smoothness in them, and they were 
 the most temperate which I could pick out of this Play. The rest is m Kmg 
 Cambyses' vein; rape, and murder, and superlatives; " huffing, braggart, 
 puff lines, such as the play-writers anterior to Shakspere are full of, and 
 Pistol " but coldly imitates." Blood is made as light of m some of these old 
 dramas as money in a modern sentimental comedy ; and as this\s given away 
 until it remind us that it is nothing but counters, so that is spilt till it affects 
 us no more than its representative, the paint of the property-man m the theatre. 
 
 Tamburlaine the Great, or the Scythian Shepherd.— T'rs Junes of Tambur- 
 laine are perfect midsummer madness. Nebuchadnazar's are mere modest pre- 
 tens ons compared with the thundering vaunts of this Scythian Shepherd. He 
 comes in drawn by conquered kings, and reproaches these pampered jades of 
 
 1. 
 
 ' The few notes which are interspersed will be found to be chiefly critical. 
 
574 The Works of Charles Lavtb. 
 
 . Asia that they can draw tut twenty miles a day. Till I saw this passage'with 
 ' my own tyes, I never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant bur- 
 lesque of mine ancient's. But I can assure my readers that it is soberly set 
 down in a play which their ancestors took to be serious. 
 
 Edward the Second. — In a very diiferent style from the mighty Tamburlaine 
 is the tragedy of Edward the Second. Tlie reluctant pangs of abdicating 
 royalty in Edward furnished hints, which Shakspere scarcely improved in his 
 Richard the Second ; and the death-scene of Marlowe's king moves pity and 
 terror beyond any scene ancient or modern with which I am acquainted. 
 
 The Rich Jew of Malta.— MaiXove's Jew does not approach so near to 
 Shakspere's, as his Edward the Second does to Richard the Second. Barabas 
 is a mere monster brought in with a large painted nose to please the rabble. 
 He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, invents infernal machines. He is 
 jtist such an exhibition as a century or two earlier might have been played be- 
 fore the Londoners " by the royal command," when a general pillage and 
 massacre of the Hebrews had been previously resolved on in the cabinet. It 
 is curious to see a superstition wearing out. The idea of a Jew, which our 
 pious ancestors contemplated with so much horror, has nothing in it now re- 
 volting. We have tamed the claws of the beast, and pared its nails, and now 
 we talce it to our arms, fondle it, write plays to ilatter it; it is visited by princes, 
 affects a taste, patronizes the arts, and is the only liberal and gentlemanlike 
 thing in Christendom. 
 
 Doctor Faustus. — The growing horrors of Faustus's last scene are awfully 
 marked by the hours and half hours as they expire, and bring him nearer and 
 nearer to the exactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an agony and a fear- 
 ful coUuctation. Marlowe is said to have been tainted with atheistical positions, 
 to have denied God and the Trinity. To such a genius the history of Faustus ' 
 must have been delectable food : to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden 
 to go, to approach the dark gulf near enough to look in, to be busied in specu- 
 lations which are the rottenest part df the core of the fruit that fell from the 
 tree of knowledge. Barabas the Jew, and Faustus the conjurer, are offsprings 
 of a mind which at least delighted \o dally with interdicted subjects. They 
 both talk a language which a believer would have been tender of putting into 
 the mouth of a character though but in fiction. But the hohest minds have 
 sometimes not thought it reprehensible to counterfeit impiety in the person of 
 another, to bring Vice upon the stage speaking her own dialect ; and them- 
 selves being armed with an unction of self-confident impunity, have not scrupled 
 to handle and touch that familiarly, which would be death to others. Milton 
 in the person of Satan has started speculations hardier than any which the 
 feeble armoury of the atheist ever furnished ; and the precise, strait-laced 
 Richardson has strengthened Vice from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling 
 sophistries and abstruse pleas against her adversary Virtue, which Sedley, 
 Villiers, and Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to have invented. 
 
 THOMAS DEKKER. 
 
 Old Fortunatus. — The humour of a frantic lover, in the scene where Orleans 
 to his friend Galloway defends the passion with which himsslf, being a prisoner 
 in the Enghsh king's court, is enamoured to frenzy of the king's daughter 
 Agripyna, is done to the life. Orleans is as passionate an inamorato as any 
 which Shakspere ever drew. He is just such another adept in Love's reasons. 
 The sober people of the world are with him 
 
 -A swarm of fools 
 
 Crowding together to be counted -wise. 
 He talks ' ' pure Biron and Romeo," he is almost as poetical as they, quite as 
 
On the Elizabethan Dramatists. 
 
 S7S 
 
 philosophical, only a little madder. After all, Love's sectaries are a reason 
 unto themselves. We have gone retrograde to the noble heresy, since the days 
 ' when Sidney proselyted our nation to this mixed health and disease ; the kind- 
 liest symptom, yet the most alarming crisis in the ticklish state of youth ; the 
 nourisher and the destroyer of hopeful wits ; the mother of twin births, wisdom 
 and folly, valour and weakness ; the servitude above freedom ; the gentle 
 mind's religion ; the hberal superstition. 
 
 Satiro-Mastix, or the untrussiitg of the Humorous Poet. — [The king ex- 
 acts an oath from Sir 'Walter Terill to send his bride Caslestina to court on 
 the marriage night. - Her father, to save her honour, gives her a poisonous 
 mixture which she swallows.] 
 
 The beauty and force of this scene are much diminished to the reader of the 
 entire play, when he comes to find that this solemn preparation is but a sliam 
 contrivance of the father's, and the potion which C^lesdna swallows nothing 
 more than a sleeping draught ; from the effects of which she is to awake in due 
 time, to the surprise of her husband, and the great mirth and edification of the 
 king and his courtiers. As Hamlet says, they do but "poison in jest." The 
 sentiments are worthy of a real martyrdom, and an Appian sacrifice in earnest. 
 
 The Honest Whore. — There is in the second part of this play, where Bella- 
 front, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her profession, a 
 simple picture of honour and sharae, contrasted without violence, and expres- 
 sed without immodfesty, which is worth all the strong lines against the harlot's 
 profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively crowded. A 
 satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its 
 acts and minutest circumstances With a sort of relish and retrospective fondness 
 But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out 
 sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same 
 high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served but U inflame 
 his appetites, in his new province of moralist will serve him, a little ti:rned, to 
 expose the enormity of those appetites in other men. When Cervantes with 
 such proficiency of fondness dwells upon the Don's library, who sees not that 
 he has been a great reader of books of knight-errantry— perhaps was at some 
 time of his life in danger of falling into those very extravagancie,, which he 
 ridiculed so happily in his hero ? 
 
 JOHN MAESTON. 
 
 Antonio and Mellida. — The situation of Andrugio and Lucie, in the 
 first part of this tragedy, where Andrugio Dulse of Genoa, r«'T!ished his 
 country, with the loss of a son supposed drowned, is cast upon t."> territory of 
 his mortal enemy the Duke of 'Venice, with no attendants but '' ,ucio an old 
 nobleman, and a page resembles that of Lear and Kent in that king's dis- 
 tresses. Andrugio, like Lear, manifests a king-like impatience, a turbulent 
 greatness, an affected resignation. The enemies which he enters lists to com- 
 bat, "Despair and mighty Grief and sharp Impatience," and the forces which 
 he brings to vanquish them, " cornets of horse,'' &c., are in the boldest style 
 of allegory. They are such a "race of mourners" as the "infection of sorrows 
 loud" in the intellect might beget on some "pregnant cloud" in the imagina^ 
 tion. The prologue to the second part, for its passionate earnestness, and for 
 the tragic note of preparation which it sounds, might have preceded one of 
 those old tales of Thebes or Pelops' hne, which Milton has so highly commend- 
 ded, as free from the common error of the poets in his day, of " intermixing 
 comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, brought in without discretion cor- 
 ruptly to gratify the people." It is as solemn a preparative as the warning 
 voice which he who saw the Apocalypse heard cry. 
 
 What you will. O I shall ne'er forget how he went clothed. Act I. Scene I. 
 
576 Tlte Works of Charles Lamb. , 
 
 — Td judge of the liberality of these notions of dress, we must advert to the 
 days of Gresham, and the consternation which a phenomenon habited like the 
 merchant here described would have excited among the flat round caps and 
 cloth stockings upon 'Change, when those " original arguments or tokens of a 
 citizen's vocation were in fashion, not more for thrift and usefulness than for 
 distinction and grace." The blank uniformity to which all professional distinc- 
 tions in apparel have been long hastening is one instance of the decay of sym- 
 bols among us, which whether it has contributed or not to make us a more 
 intellectual, has certainly made us a less imaginative people. Shakspere knew 
 the force of signs : a "malignant and a turban'd Turk." This "meal-cap 
 miller," says theauthor of Gods Revenge againU Murder, to expresshis indig- 
 
 1 nation at an atrocious outrage committed by the miller Pierot upon tlie person 
 
 I of the fair Marieta. 
 
 AUTHOR UNKNOWN. 
 
 The Merry Devil of Edmonton* — The scene in this delightful comedy, in 
 which Jerningham, "with the true feeling of a zealous friend," touches the 
 griefs of Mounchensey, seems written to make the reader happy. Few of our 
 dramatists or novelists have attended enough to this. They torture and wound 
 us abundantly. They are economists only in delight. Nothing can be finer, 
 more gentlemanlike, and nobler, than the conversation and compliments of 
 these young men. How delicious is Raymond Mounchensey's forgetting, in his 
 fears, that Jerningham has a "Saint in Essex;" and how sweetly his friend 
 reminds him ! I wish it could be ascertained, that Michael Drayton was the 
 author of this piece. It would add a worthy appendage to the renown of that 
 Panegyrist of my native Earth : who has gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, 
 with the fidelity of a herald, and the painful love of a son ; who has not left a 
 rivulet, so narrow that it may be stepped over, without honourable mention ; 
 and has animated hills and streams with life and passion beyond the dreams of 
 old mythology. 
 
 THOMAS HEYWOOD. 
 
 The Fair Maid of the Exchange. — The full title of this play is " The Fair,. 
 Maid of the Exchange, with the Humours of the Cripple of Fenchurch." The 
 above satire against some Dramatic Plagiarists of the time, is put into the 
 mouth of the Cripple, who is an excellent fellow,' and the hero of the Comedy. 
 Of his humour this extract is a sufficient specimen ; but he is described (albeit 
 a tradesman, yet wealthy withal) with heroic qualities of mind and body ; the 
 latter of which he evinces by rescuing his mistress (the Fair Maid) from three 
 robbers by the main force of one crutch lustily applied ; and the former by his 
 foregoing the advantages which this action gained him in her good opinion, 
 and bestowing his wit and finesse in procuring for her a husband, in the person 
 of his friend Golding, more worthy of her beauty, than he could conceive his 
 own maimed and halting limbs to be. It would require some boldness in a 
 dramatist nowadays to exhibit such a character ; and some luck in finding a 
 sufficient actor, who would be wiUing to personate the infirmities, together with 
 the virtues, of the noble Cripple. 
 
 A Woman Killed with Kindness. — Heywood is a sort of prose Shakspere. 
 His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But we ,miss the pet, that 
 which in Shakspere always appears out and above the surface of the nature. 
 Hey wood's characters in this play, for instance, his country gentlemen, &c. , are 
 exactly what we see, but of the best kind of what we see in life. Shakspere 
 makes us beUeve, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are nothing 
 
 * It has been ascribed without much proof to Shakspere and to Michael Drayton. 
 
On the Elizabethan Dramatists. 577 
 
 but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem old ; but lye 
 awake, and sigh for the difference. 
 
 1 am tempted to extract some lines from Heywood's " Hierarchie of Angels, 
 1634;" not strictly as a Dramatic Poem, but because the passage contains 
 a string of names, all but that of Watson, bis contemporary Dramatists. He 
 is complaining in a mood half serious, half comic, of the disrespect which 
 Poets in his own times meet with from the world, compared with the honours 
 paid them by Antiquity. Then, they could afford them three or four sonorous 
 names, and at full length ; as to Ovid, the addition of Publius Naso Sulmensis ; 
 to Seneca, that of Lucius Annaeas Cordubensis ; and the like. Now, says he, 
 
 Our modern Poets to that pass are driven, 
 
 Those names are curtail'd which they first had given ; 
 
 And, as we wish'd to have their memories drown'd, 
 
 We scarcely can afford them half their sound, 
 
 Greene, who had in both Academies ta'en 
 
 Degree of Master, yet could never gain 
 
 To be call'd more than Robin : who, had he 
 
 Professed aught save the Muse_, served, and been free 
 
 After a seven years' 'prenticeship, might have 
 
 (With credit too) gone Robert to his grave. 
 
 Marlowe, renown d for his rare art and wit. 
 
 Could ne'er attain beyond the name of Kit ; 
 
 Although his Hero and Leander did 
 
 Merit addition rather. Famous Kid 
 
 Was call'd but Tom. Tom Watson, though he wrote 
 
 Able to make Apollo's self to dote 
 
 Upon his Muse ; for all that he could strive. 
 
 Yet never could to his full name arrive. 
 
 Tom Nash (in his time of no small esteem) 
 
 Could not a second syllable redeem. 
 
 Sxcellent Beaumont, in the foremost rank 
 
 Of the rarest wits, was never more than Frank. 
 
 Mellifluous Shakspere, whose enchanting quill 
 
 Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will ; 
 
 And Famous Jonson, though his learned pen 
 
 Be dipp'd in Castaly, is still but Ben. 
 
 Fletcher, and Webster, of that learned pack 
 
 None of the meanest, neither was but Jack ; 
 
 Dekker's but Tom ; nor May, nor Middleton ; 
 
 And he's now but Jack Ford, that once was John. 
 
 Possibly our Poet was a little sore, that this contemptuous curtailment of 
 their baptismal names was chiefly exercised upon his poetical brethren of the 
 Drama. We hear nothing about Sam Daniel or Ned Spenser, in his catalogue. 
 The familiarity of common discourse might probably take the greater liberties 
 with the Dramatic Poets, as conceiving of them as more upon a level with the 
 Stage Actors. Or did their greater publicity, and popularity in consequence, 
 fasten these diminutives upon them out of a feeling of love and kindness, as we 
 say Harry the Fifth, rather than Henry, when we would express goodwill?— as 
 himself says, in those reviving words put into his mouth by Shakspere, where 
 he would comfort and confirm his doubting brothers : — 
 
 Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds, 
 But Harry, Harry ! 
 
 And doubtless Heywood had an indistinct conception of this truth, when 
 (coming to his own name), with" that beautiful retracting which is natural 
 to one that, not satirically given, has wandered a little out of his way into 
 something recriminative, he goes on to say : — 
 
578 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Nor speak I this,'that any here exprest 
 Should think themselves less worthy than the rest 
 Whose names have their full syllables and sound ; 
 Or that Frank, Kit, or Jack, are the least wound 
 Unto their fame and merit. I for my part 
 (Think others what they please) except Uiat heart, 
 Which courts my love in most familiar phrase ; 
 And that it take^'not from my pains or praise, 
 If any-otie to me so bluntly come : 
 '• I hold he loves me best that calls me Tom. )-<..; 
 
 The foundations of the English Drama were laid deep in tragedy by Mar- 
 lowe and others— Marlowe especially — while our comedy was yet in its lisping 
 stale. To this tragic preponderance (forgetting'his' own sweet Comedies and 
 Shakspere's), Heywood'sfeeills .fo refer with regret; as in, the " Rosciaii 
 Strain" he evidentlyalludes to Alleyn, who was great in, the "Jew of Malta," 
 as Heywood elsewheic~testifieS( and in the principal tragip parts both of Mar- 
 lowe and Shakspere. .1 • 
 
 The Brazen Age.—\ cannot take leave of this Drama without noticing a 
 touch of the truest pathos, which the writer has put into the.rapulhof Meleager, 
 as he is wasting away by the opefkiion of the fatal brand, administered to him 
 by his wretched Mother. 
 
 My flame increaseth still— Oh Father'CEneus ; 
 And you, Althea, whom I would call Mother ,' 
 But that my genius prompts me thou'rt unkind : ■''■ - 
 And yet /arewelll 
 
 What is the boasted "Forgive me, but -forgave me!" of' the dying wife 
 of Shore in Rowe, compared with these three' little words ? 
 
 The English Traveller. — Heywood's preface to this play is interesting, as it 
 shows the heroic indifference about the opinion qf posterity,, which some of 
 these great writers seem to have felt. There is a magnanimity in authorship 
 as in everything else. His ambition seems to have been confined to the plea- 
 sure of hearing the players speak his lines while he lived. It:does not appear 
 that he ever contemplated the possibility of being Tead by after-ages. What a 
 slender pittance of fame was motive sufficient to the production of such plays 
 as the English Traveller, the Challenge for Beauty, and the Woman Killed 
 with Kindness ! Posterity is bound to take care that a writer loses nothing by 
 such a noble modesty. 
 
 If I were to be consulted as to a Reprint of our Old English Dramatists, I 
 should advise to begin with the collected Plays of Heywood. He was a fellow 
 Actor, and fellow Dramatist, with Shakspere. He possessed not the imagina- 
 tion of the latter ; but in all those quahties which gained for Shalcspere the 
 attribute oi gentle, he was not inferior to him. Generosity, courtesy, temper- 
 ance in the depths of passion ; sweetness, in a word, and gentleness ; Chris- 
 tianism ; and true hearty Anglicism of feelings, shaping that Christianism ; 
 shine throughout his beautiful writings in a manner more conspicuous than in 
 those of Shakspere, but only more conspicuous, inasmuch as in Heywood 
 these qualities are primary, in the other subordinate to poetry. I love them 
 both equally, but Shakspere has most of my wonder. Heywood should be 
 known to his countryman, as he deserves. His plots are almost invariably 
 English. 1 am sometimes jealous, that Shakspere laid so few of his scenes 
 at home. I laud Ben Jonson, for that in one instance having framed the first 
 draught of his Every Man in his Humour in Italy, he changed the scene, and 
 Anglicised his characters. The names of them in the First Edition, may not 
 be unamusing. 
 
Oti the Elizabethan Dramatists. 579 
 
 ^"'- Women. 
 
 Lorenzo, Sen. Guilliana. 
 
 Lorenzo, Jun. Biahcha. 
 
 Prospero. > Hesperida. 
 
 Thorello.- Tib(tHesataeinEngUsh). 
 
 Stephano (Master Stephen). • . ^ ' 
 
 Dr. Clement (Justice Clement). 
 BobadiUa (Bobadil). 
 Musco. 
 
 Cob (the same In English). 
 Peto. 
 Pizo. 
 Matheo (Master Mathew). 
 
 How say you. Reader? do not Master Kitely, Mistress Kitely, Master 
 Knowell, Brainworm, &c., read better than these Cisalpines .' 
 
 THOMAS MIDDLETON AND WILLIAM ROWLEY. 
 
 A Fair Quarrel.— The insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage 
 is tied down, would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are 
 filled with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, 
 is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh 
 and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal 
 causists could discern in the differences, the quarrel^, the animosities of men, a 
 beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the everlastingly inculcated 
 duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is hypocritical meekness. 
 A reconciliation-scene, be the occasion never so absurd, never fails of applause. 
 Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented on tfieir goodness. They 
 compare notes with the amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful 
 sympathy of disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic 
 morahty, out of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble of copying 
 it from originals within his own breast. To know the boundaries of honour, 
 to be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance which shall beget a smoothness 
 in the angry swellings of youth, to esteem life as nothing when the sacred 
 reputation of a parent is to be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious 
 cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and totter- 
 ing, to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword which the 
 imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen an edge upon 
 but lately : to do, or to imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something more 
 of a moral sense, somewhat a greater deUcacy of perception in questions of 
 right and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences 
 about the laws of honour as opposed to the laws of the land, or a common- 
 place against duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer nowadays in far 
 better stead than Captain Agar and his conscientious honour ; and he would 
 be considered as a far better teacher of morality than old Rowley or Middleton, 
 if they were living. 
 
 WILLIAM ROWLEY. 
 
 A New Wonder; A Woman Never Vexed. — The Old play-writers are dis- 
 tinguished by an honest boldness of exhibition, they show everything without 
 being ashamed. If a reverse in fortune is to be exhibited, they fairly bring us 
 to the prison-grate and the alms-basket. A poor man on our stage is always 
 a gentleman, he may be known by a peculiar neatness of apparel, and by 
 wearing black. Our delicacy in fact forbids the dramatizing of distress at all. 
 It is never shown in its essential properties ; it appears but as the adjunct pf 
 
580 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 some virtue, as something which is to be relieved, from the approbation of 
 which relief the spectators are to derive a certain soothing of self-referred satis- 
 faction. We turn away from the real essences of things to hunt after their 
 relative shadows, moral duties; whereas, if the truth of things were fairly 
 represented, the relative duties might be safely trusted to themselves, and mora 1 
 philosophy lose the name of a science. 
 
 THOMAS MIDDLETON. 
 
 Women beware Women : A Tragedy. — [Livia, the Duke's creature, cajoles 
 a poor Widow with the appearance of hospitality and neighbourly attentions, 
 that she may get her daughter-in-law (who is left in the Mother's care in the 
 Son's absence) into her trains, to serve the Duke's pleasure.] 
 
 This is one of those scenes which has the air of being an immediate trans- 
 script from life. Livia the ** good neighbour" is as real a creature as one 
 of Chaucer's characters. She is such another jolly Housewife as the Wife of 
 Bath. 
 
 The Witch. — ^Though some resemblance may be traced between the charms 
 in Macbeth, and the incantations in this play, which is supposed to have pre- 
 ceded it, this coincidence will not detract much from the originality of Shak- 
 spere. His witches are distinguished from the witches of Middleton by essen- 
 tial differences. These are creatures to whom man or woman, plotting some 
 dire mischief, might resort for occasional consultation. • Those originate deeds 
 of blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes 
 first meet with Macbeth's, he is spell-bound. That meeting sways his destiny. 
 He can never break the fascination. These witches can hurt the body, those 
 have power over the soul. Hecate in IVIiddleton has a son, a low buffoon : the 
 hags of Shakspere have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended 
 from any parent. They are foul anomalies, of whom we know not whence 
 they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are 
 without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. They 
 come with -thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we 
 know of them. Except Hecate, they have no names; which heightens their 
 mysteriousness. The names, and some of the properties, which the other 
 author has given to his hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious 
 things. Their presence cannot co-exist with mirth. But, in a lesser degree, 
 the witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their power too is, in some 
 measure, over the mind. They raise jars, jealousies, strifes, ' ' like a thick 
 scurf" over Ufe. 
 
 WILLIAM ROWLEy,— THOMAS DEKKER,— JOHN FORD, &C. 
 
 The Witch of Edmonton. — Mother Sawyer, in this wild play, differs from 
 the hags of both Middleton and Shakspere. She is the plain traditional old 
 woman witch of our ancestors ; poor, deformed, and ignorant ; the terror of 
 villages, herself amenable to a justice. That should be a hardy sheriff with the 
 power of the county at his heels", that would lay hands upon the W^ird Sisters. 
 They are of another jurisdiction. But upon the common and received opinion, 
 the author (or authors) have engrafted strong fancy. There is something fright- 
 fully earnest in her invocations to the Familiar. 
 
 CYRIL TOURNEUR. 
 The Atheist's Tragedy.-^Drowned Soldier. — This way of description, which 
 seems unwiiyng ever to leave off, weaving parenthesis within parenthesis, was 
 brought tp its height by Sir Philip Sidney. He seems to have set the example 
 
On the Elizabethan Dratnatists. 581 
 
 to Shakspere. Many beautiful instances may be found all over the Arcadia 
 These bountiful Wits always give full measure, pressed down and running 
 
 The Revengers Tragedy.— The reality and life of the dialogue, in which 
 Vindici and HippoUto first tempt their mother, and then threaten her with 
 death for consenting to the dishonour of their sister, passes any scenical illusion 
 I ever felt. I never read it but my ears tingle, and I feel a hot blush over- 
 spread my cheeks, as if I were presently about to proclaim such malefactions 
 of myself as the brothers here rebuke in their unnatural parent, in words more 
 keen and dagger-like than those which Hamlet speaks to his mother. Such 
 power has the passion of shame truly personated, not only to strike guilty 
 creatures unto the soul, but to " appal " even those that are " free." 
 
 :OHN WEBSTER. 
 
 Tie Duchess of Malfy. — All the several parts of the dreadful apparatus with 
 which the death of the Duchess is ushered in, the waxen images which counter- 
 feit death, the wild masque of madmen, the tombmaker, the bellman, the 
 hving person's dirge, the mortification by degrees, — are not more remote from 
 the conceptions of ordinary vengeance, than the strange character of suffering 
 which they seem to bring upon their victim is out of the imagination of ordinary 
 poets. As they are not like inflictions of this life, so her language seems not 
 of this world. She has Uved among horrors till she is become " native and 
 endowed unto that element." She speaks the dialect of despair; her tongue 
 has a smatch of Tartarus and the souls in bale. To move a horror skilfully, 
 to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean 
 and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments • 
 to take its last forfeit : this only a Webster can do. Inferior geniuses may 
 "upon horror's head horrors accumulate," but they cannot do this. They 
 mistake quantity for quality; they "terrify babes with painted devils; " but 
 they know not how a soul is to be moved. Their terrors want dignity, their 
 affrightments are without decorum. 
 
 The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona. — This White Devil of Italy sets 
 off a bad cause so speciously, and pleads with such an innocence-resembling 
 boldness, that we seem to see that matchless beauty of her face which inspires 
 such gay confidence into her, and are ready to expect, when she has done her 
 pleadings, that her very judges, her accusers, the grave ambassadors who sit as 
 spectators, and all the court, will rise and make proffer to defend her in spite of 
 the utmost conviction of her guilt ; as the Shepherds in Don Quixote make 
 proffer to follow the beautiful Shepherdess Marcela, "without making any 
 profit of her manifest resolution made there in their hearing." 
 
 So sweet and lovely does she make the shame. 
 Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, 
 Does spot the beauty of her budding name ! 
 
 I never saw anything like the funeral dirge* in this play, for the death of 
 Marcello, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in 
 the Tempest. As that is'of the water, watery ; so this is of the earth, earthy. 
 Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the 
 element which it contemplates. 
 
 In a note on the Spanish Tragedy, I have said that there is nothing in the 
 undoubted plays of Jonson which would authorize us to suppose that he could 
 have supplied the additions to Hieronymo. I suspected the agency of some 
 
 * Webster was parish clerk at St. Andrew's, Holbom. "The anxious recurrence to 
 church matters ; sacniejr^t ; tomb-stones; with the frequent introduction of dirges; in 
 this, and his other tragedies, may be traced to his professional sympathies. 
 
582 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 more potent spirit. I tliouglit tliat Webster miglit have furnished them. They 
 seemed full of that wild, solemn; preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us 
 in the Duchess af Malfy. On second consideration, I think this a hasty criti- 
 cism. They are more like the overflowing griefs and talking distraction of 
 Titus Andronicus. The sorrows of the Duchess set inward ; if she talks, it is 
 little more than soliloquy imitating conversation in a kind of bravery. 
 
 JOHN FORD. 
 
 The Lover' s Melancholy : Contention of a Bird anda Musician. — ^This Story, 
 which' is originally to be met with in Strada's Prolusions, h.is been paraphrased 
 in rhyme by Crashaw, Ambrose Philips, and others : but none of those versions 
 can at all compare for harmony and grace with this blank verse of Ford's. It 
 is as fine as anything in Beaumont and Fletcher ; and almost equals the strife 
 which it celebrates. 
 
 ' Tis Pity she's a Whore ,• a Tragedy. — The good Friar in this play is evidently 
 a copy of Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet. He is the same kind physician to 
 the souls of his young charges ; but he has more desperate patients to deal with. 
 The Broken Heart. — I do not know where to find, in any play, a catastrophe 
 so grand, so solemn, and so surprising as in this. This is, indeed, according 
 lo Milton, to describe high passions and high actions. The fortitude of the 
 Spartan boy,' who let a beast gnaw out his bowels till he died without expressing 
 a groan,' is a faint bodily image of this dilaceration of the spirit,and exenteration 
 of the inmost mind, which Calantha, with a holy violence against her nature, 
 keeps closely covered, till the last duties of a .wife and a queen are fulfilled. 
 Stories of martyrdom are but of chains and the stake ; a little bodily suffering. 
 'These torments 
 
 On the purest spirits prey. 
 
 As on entrails, joints, and limbs. 
 
 With answerable pains, but more intense. 
 
 What a noble thing is the soul in its strength and in its weaknesses ! Who would 
 be less'weak than Calantha ? Who can be so strong ? The expression of this tran- 
 scendent scene almost bears us in imagination to Calvary and the Cross ; and we 
 seem to perceive some analogy between the scenical sufferings which we are here 
 contemplating, and the real agonies of that final completion to which we dare no 
 more than hint a reference. Ford was of the first order of poets. Heoought 
 for- sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but directly where 
 she has het full residence in the heart of man ; in the actions and sufferings 
 of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains, seas, 
 and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of Giovanni and Anna- 
 bella, in the play* which stands at the head of the modern collection of the 
 works of this author, we discern traces of that fiery particle, which, in the 
 irregular starting from out the road of beaten action,' discovers something of a 
 right line even in obliquity, and shows hints of an improvable greatness in the 
 lowest descents and degradations of our nature. 
 
 FULKE GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE. 
 
 Alaham, Musiapha. — The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, printed among his 
 poems, might with more propriety have been termed political treatises than 
 plays. Their author has strangely contrived to make passion, character, and 
 interest of the highest order, subservient to the expression of stale dogmas and 
 mysteries. He is nine parts Mathiavel and Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or 
 Seneca. In this writer's estimate of the powers of the mind, the understanding 
 
 *'Tii Pity Wi a Whfn. 
 
On the Elizabethan Dramatists. 583 
 
 I ^ 
 
 must have held a most tyrannical pre-eminence. Whether we look into his 
 plays, or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made 
 rigid with intellect. The finest movements of the human heart, the utmost 
 grandeur of which the soul is capable, are essentially comprised in the actions 
 and speeches of CaeUca and Caimena. Shakspere, who seems to have had a 
 peculiar delight in contemplating womanly perfection, whom for his many 
 sweet images of female excellence all women are in an especial manner bound 
 to love, has not raised the ideal of the female character higher than Lord Brooke 
 in these two women, has done.. But it requires a study equivalent to the learning 
 of a new language to understand their meaning when they speak. It is indeed 
 hard to hit : 
 
 Much like thy riddle, Samson, in one day. 
 
 Or seven though one should musing sit. 
 
 It is as if a being of pure intellect should take upon him to express the emotions 
 of our sensitive natures. There would be all knowledge, but sympathetic 
 expressions would be wanting. 
 
 BEN JONSON. 
 
 The Case is Altered. — ^The passion for wealth has worn out much of its 
 grossness in tract of time. Our ancestors certainly conceived of money as able 
 to confer a distinct gratification in itself, not considered simply as a symbol of 
 wealth. The old poets, when they introduce a miser, make him address his 
 gold as his mistress ; as something to be seen, felt, and hugged ; as capable of 
 satisfying two of the senses at least. The substitution of a thin, unsatisfying 
 medium in the place of the good old tangible metal, has made avarice quite 
 a Platonic affection in comparison Vvith the seeing, touching, and handling- 
 pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A bank-note can no more satisfy he touch 
 of a true sensualist in this passion, than Creusa could return her husband's 
 embrace in the shades. See the Cave of Mammon in Spenser ; Barabas's 
 contemplation of his wealth in the Rich Jew of Malta ; Luke's raptures in the 
 City Madam ; the idolatry and absolute gold-worship of the miser Jaques in 
 this early eomic production of Ben Jonson's. Above all hear Guzman, in that 
 excellent old translation of the Spanish Rogue, expatiate on the ' ' ruddy cheeks 
 of your golden ruddocks, your Spanish pistolets, your plump and full-faced 
 Portuguese, and your clear-skinned pieces of eight of Castile," which he and 
 his fellows the beggars kept secret to themselves, and did privately enjoy in a 
 plentiful manner. " For to have them, to pay them away, is not to enjoy them ; 
 to enjoy them, is to haye them lying by us ; having no other need of them than 
 to use them for the clearing of the eyesight, and the comforting of our senses. 
 These we did carry about with us, sewing them in some patches of our doublets 
 near unto the heart, and as close to the skin as we could handsomely quilt them 
 in, holding them to be restorative." 
 
 Poetaster. — This Roman play seems written to confute those enemies of Ben 
 in his own days and ours, who' have said that he made a pedantical use of his 
 learning. He has here revived the whole Court of Augustus, by a learned 
 spell. ,We are admitted to the society of the illustrious dead. Virgil, Horace, 
 Ovid, "Tibullus, converse in our own tongue more finely and poetically than they 
 were used to express themselves in their native Latin. Nothing can be imagined 
 more elegant, refined, and court-like, than the scenes between this Louis the 
 Fourteenth of antiquity and his literati. The whole essence and secret of that 
 kind of intercourse is contained therein. The economical liberahty by. which 
 greatness, seeming to waive some part of its prerogative, takes care to lose 
 none of the essentials ; the prudential liberties of an inferior, which flatter by 
 commanded boldness and sopthe with complimentary sincerity. These,, and a 
 thousand beautiful passages from his New Inn, his Cynthia's Revels, and from 
 
584 The Works of_ Charles Lamb. 
 
 those numerous court-masques and entertainments which he was in the daily 
 habit of furnishing, might be adduced to show the poetical fancy and elegance 
 of mind of the supposed rugged old bard. 
 
 Alchemist. — The judgment is perfectly overwhelmed by the torment of images, 
 words, and book-knowledge, with which Epicure Mammon (Act 2, Scene 2) 
 confounds and stuns his incredulous hearer. They come pouring out like the 
 successive falls of the Nilus. They "doubly redouble strokes upon the foe." 
 Description outstrides proof. We are made to believe efiects before we have 
 testimonyfor their causes. If there is no one image which attains the height of 
 the sublime, yet the confluence and assemblage of them all produces a result 
 equal to the grandest poetry. The huge Xerxean army countervails against 
 \ single Achilles. Epicure Mammon is the most determined offspring of its 
 author. It has the whole ' ' matter and copy of the father — eye, nose, lip, the 
 trick of his frown." It is just such a swaggerer as contemporaries have described 
 old Ben to be. Meercraft, Bobadil, the Host of the New Inn, have all his 
 image and superscription. But Mammon is arrogant pretension personified. 
 Sir Samson Legend, in Love for Love, is such another lying, overbearing cha- 
 racter, but he does not come up to Epicure Mammon. What a ' ' towering 
 bravery" there is in his sensuality ! he affects no pleasure under a Sultan. It 
 is as if " Egypt with Assyria strove in lu-iury." 
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 Bussy D' Ambois, Byron's Conspiracy, Byron s Tragedy, b'C, ^c. — Webster 
 has happily characterized the " full and heightened "style" of Chapman, who, 
 of all the English play-writers, perhaps approaches nearest to Shakspere in 
 the descriptive and didactic, in passages which are less purely dramatic. Dra- 
 matic imitation was not his talent. He could not go out of himself, as Shak- 
 speare could shift at pleasure, to inform and animate other existences, but in 
 himself he had an eye to perceive and a soul to embrace all forms and modes 
 of being. He would have made a great epic poet, if indeed he has not abun- 
 dantly shown himself to be one ; for his Homer is not so properly a translation 
 as tlie stories of Achilles and Ulysses re-written. The earnestness and passion 
 which he has put into every part of these poems, would be incredible to a reader 
 of mere modem translations. His almost Greek zeal for the glory of his heroes 
 can only be paralleled by that fierce spirit of Hebrew bigotry, with which Milton, 
 as if personating one of the zealots of the old law, clothed himself when he 
 sat down to paint the acts of Samson against the uncircumcised. The great 
 obstacle to Chapman's translations being read, is their unconquerable quaint- 
 ness. He pours out in the same breath the most just and natural, and the most 
 violent and crude expressions. He seems to grasp at whatever words come first 
 to hand while the enthusiasm is upon him, as if all others must be inadequate 
 to the divine meaning. But passion (the all-in-all in poetry) is everywhere 
 present, raising the low, dignifying the mean, and putting sense into the absurd. 
 He makes his readers glow, weep, tremble, take any aflection which he pleases, 
 be moved by words, or in spite of them, be disgusted and overcome their disgust. 
 
 I have often thought that the vulgar misconception of Shakspere, as of a 
 wild irregular genius ' ' in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties, 
 would be really true, applied to Chapman. But there is no scale by which to 
 balance such disproportionate subjects as the faults and beauties of a great 
 genius. To set off the former with any fairness against the latter, the pain 
 which they give us should be in same proportion to the pleasure which we ' 
 receive from the other. As these transport us to the highest heaven, those 
 should steep us in agonies infernal. 
 
 Bussy DAmlois. — This calling upon Light and Darkness for information, 
 but, above all, the description of the Spirit — " Threw his changed countenance 
 
On the Elizabethan Dramatists. 585 
 
 headlong into clouds" — is tremendous, to the curdling of the blood. I know 
 nothing in Poetry like it. 
 
 FRANCIS BEAUMONT.— JOHN FLETCHER. 
 
 Maids Tragedy. — One characteristic of the excellent old poets is, their being 
 able to bestow grace upon subjects which naturally do not seem susceptible of 
 any. I will mention two instances. Zelmane in the Arcadia of Sidney, and 
 Helena in the All's Well that End's Well of Shakspere. What can be 
 more unpromising at first sight, than the idea of a young man disguising him- 
 self in woman's attire, and passing himself off for a woman among women ; 
 and that for a long space of time ? Yet Sir Philip has preserved so matchless 
 a decorum, that neither does Pyrocles' manhood suffer any stain for the effemi- 
 nacy of Zelmane, nor is the respect due to the princesses at all diminished 
 when the deception comes to be known. In the sweetly constituted mind of Sir 
 Philip Sidney, it seems as if no ugly thought or unhandsome meditation could 
 find a harbour. He turned sS that he touched into images of honour and 
 virtue. Helena in Sh^spere is a young woman seeking a man in marriage. 
 The ordinary rules of courtship are reversed, the habitual feelings are crossed. 
 Yet with such exquisite address this dangerous subject is handled, that Helena's 
 forwardness losgs herno honour; delicacy dispenses with its laws in her favour, 
 and natuie, in her single case, seems content to suffer a sweet violation. 
 Aspatia, in the Maid's Tragedy, is a character equally difficult, with Helena, 
 of being managed with grace. She too is a slighted woman, refused by the 
 man who had once engaged to marry her. Yet it is artfully contrived, that 
 while we pity we respect her, and she descends without degradation. Such 
 wonders true poetry and passion can do, to confer dignity upon subjects which 
 do not seem capable of it. But Aspatia must not be compared at all points 
 with Helena ; she does not so absolutely predominate over her situation but she 
 suffers some diminution, some abatement of the full lustre of her female char- 
 acter, which Helena never does. Her character has many degrees of sweet- 
 ness, some of delicacy ; but it has weakness which, if we do not despise, we 
 are sorry for. After all, Beaumont and Fletcher were but an inferior sort of 
 Shaksperes and Sidneys. 
 
 Philaster. — The character of Bellario must have been extremely popular in 
 its day. For many years after the date of Philaster s first exhibition on the 
 stage, scarce a play can be found without one of these women pages in it, 
 following in the train of some pre-engaged lover, calling on the gods to bless 
 her happy rival (his mistress), whom no doubt she secretly curses in her heart, 
 giving rise to many pretty equivoques by the way on the confusion of sex, and 
 either made happy at last by some surprising turn of fate, or dismissed with 
 the joint pity of the lovers and the audience. Donne has a copy of verses to 
 his mistress, dissuading her from a resolution which she seems to have taken 
 up from some of these scenical representations, of following him abroad as a 
 page. It is so earnest, so weighty, so rich in poetry, in sense, in wit, and 
 pathos, that it deserves to be read as a solemn close in future to all such sickly 
 fancies as he there deprecates. 
 
 JOHN FLETCHEE. 
 Thierry and TheodoreL—The scene where Ordella offers her life a sacrifice, 
 that the King of France may not be childless, I have always considered as the 
 finest in all Fletcher, and Ordella to be the most perfect notion of the female 
 heroic character, next to Calantha in the Broken Heart. She is a piece of sainted 
 nature. Yet noble as the whole passage is, it must be confessed that the manner 
 of it, compared vrith Shakspere's finest scenes, is faint and languid. Its 
 motion is circular, not progressive. Each line revolves on itself in a sort of 
 
 u * 
 
586 the Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 separate orbit. They do not join- into one another like a running-hand. 
 Fletcher's ideas moved slow ; his versification, though sweet, is tedious, it 
 stops at every turn ; he lays line upon line, malting up one after the other, . 
 adding image to image so deliberately, that we see their junctures. Shakspere 
 mingles evetything,jruns ling into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors; 
 before one idea has burst it^; shell, another is. .batchedrand clamours for. dis- 
 closure. ,;Anatl»er-,strikiiig diijerence between nFl^tcher land Shakspere, is the 
 fondness of , the former for unnatural and violent situations. iHe seems to have 
 tliought that nothing great could be produced in an ordinary way. The, chief 
 .incidents in some of his most admired tragedies- show this.:^ Shakspere had 
 nothing of this contortion in his tnindi ijone of that craving afl^ violent situa- 
 tions, and flights of strained and improbable virtue, which I. think always 
 betrays an imperfect moral sensibility. The, wit of Fletcher is excellen);'!; lilce 
 his serious scenes, butthere is something strained ai)d .fapJistpli^ in both.- . Hp 
 ds. too mistrustful <rf, Nature, ihe-alw^ys goes ra little, on one^side, of her. .Shak- 
 spere chos6 her-without a reserye : andi had- riches, power,' underst^inding, ancl 
 length of days, withher, for- a; dowry. - , -i -, , ^ - -^ - 
 
 Love's^ jPi^mKiagei—r-The dialogue between Pbilippo^and Leocadia isonesf ' 
 the most pleasing if not the ,most^,sbining spenes in- Fletcher. All is,sweet, i 
 natural, andunforced.: : It is a copy which we may suppose iMassinger to have 
 .profited iby the studying.-. , -; ■. -r j -. ... 
 
 Tie Tvio.NohU Kinsmen.-r-Tiie ?qene;tii.wfaiph Palamon andArcite repining . 
 at their hard rcpndition,- in being .made!,eaptiyes for lif? i in Athens, derive coii- 
 solation from the enjoyment of each other's company in prison, bears indiibit- 
 able marks of Fletcher : the two which precede it give strong countenance to 
 the tradition that Shakspere had a hand in this play. The same judgnient 
 may be formed, of the death of Arcite and some other passagejS, got here given, ' 
 They have a luxuriance in them which strongly resembles Shakspere's manner 
 in those parts of his plays wheis, the progress of the interest being subordinate, , 
 the poet was at leisure for description. I might fetch instances froni Troilus 
 and Timon. That Fletcher should have copied Shakspere's manner through 
 somanyenture scenes (which is the theory of Mr. Steeyens):,is not very pro- 
 bable ; that he could have done it with such facility is to me not certain. If 
 Fletcher wrote some scenes in imitation, why did he stop ? or shall we say that 
 Shakspere wrote the other scenes in imitation of Fletcher? that he gave 
 Shakspere a ■ curb and a bridle, and that Shakspere gave; him a pair of 
 spurs : as Blackmoor and Lucan are brought in exchanging gifts in the Baitk 
 of the Books ? 
 
 Faithful Shepherdess. — If all the parts of this delighffiil pastoral had been 
 in unison with its many innocent scenes and sweet lyric intermixtures, it had 
 been a poem fit to vie with Comus or the Arcadia, to have, been put into the 
 hands of boys and virgins, to have made matter for young dreams, like the 
 loves of Hermia and Lysander. But a spoti is on the face of this Diana. 
 Nothing short of , infatuation could have driven Fletcher upon mixing with this 
 "blessedness" such aii ugly deformity as Cloe> - th& wanton shepherdess! 
 Coarse words do but wound the ears : but a character of lewdness affronts the 
 mind. Female lewdness at once shocks nature and morality. If Cloe was 
 meant to set off Clorin by contrast, Fletcher should have known that such 
 weeds by juxtaposition do not set off but kill sweet flowers. 
 
 FRANaS BEAUMONT. 
 The Triumfh of Love ~ Being the second bffour pldys, or mordZ reprisenla- 
 tions, in oh«.— 'Violallta, Daugntbr'to a Nobleman of iSlilan, is with child by 
 
 * Wife for a Month, Cupid's Revenge, DotMe Marriage, &c. 
 i tVit without Money, and his comedies generally. 
 
Gerrard, supposed to be of mean descent : an offence which by the laws of 
 Milan is made capital to both parties. 
 
 Violanta's prattle is so very pretty and so natural in her situation, that I 
 could not resist giving it a place-. Juno Lucina was never invoked with more 
 elegance. Pope has been praised for giving dignity to a game of cards. It 
 required at least as much address to engoble. a lying-in. ^. -_ 
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER. — THOMAS DEKKER. 
 
 The Virgin Martyr.— This play has some beauties of so very high an order, 
 that with all my respect for Massinger, I do not think he had poetical enthu- 
 siasm capable of rising up to thefn. His associate Dekker, who wrote Old 
 Fortunatus, had poetry enough for , anything. The very impurities which 
 obtrude themselves among the sweet pieties of this play, like Satan anipng'the 
 Son^ q£ Heaven, have, a strength of contrast, a racin^ss, and a glow in thenl, 
 which are beyond Massinger. They are to the religion of the rest what Caliban 
 is to Miranda; 
 
 ' PHILIP MASSINGER. 
 
 . The City Madam.-r-'This bifterisatire against the city women for aping the 
 fashions of the court ladies inust have been peculiarly gratifying toithe females 
 of the Herbert family and the rest of Massinger's noble, patrons and. patronesses. 
 The Picture. — The good sense, rational fondness, and chastised feeling, of 
 the dialogue in which Matthias, a knight of Bohemia, going to the wars, in 
 parting with his wife, shows her substantial reasons why he should go— make 
 it more valuable than many of those scenes in .which this writer has attempted 
 a deeper passion and more tragical Interest. Massinger, had not the higher 
 requisites of his art in anything like the degree in which they were .pbssesseil 
 by Ford, Webster, Toumeur, Heywood, and others. He never shakes or' dis- 
 turbs the mind with grief. , He is read with composure and placid delight. He 
 wrote with that equability of all the passions, which ma,de fjis English style 
 the purest and most free from violent metaphors and harsh constructions, of 
 any of the dramatists who were his contemporaries. 
 
 PHILIP MASSINGER.^THOMAS MIDDLETON. — WILLIAM ROWLEY. 
 
 Old iazii.-^There is an exquisiteness of moral sensibility, making one's eyes 
 to gjjsh out tears.of delight, and a poetjcal strangeness in the circumstances ol 
 this sweet tragi-comedy, which are unlike anything in the dramas which Mas- 
 singer wrote alone. The pathos is of a subtler edge, ^fiddletpn and Rowley, 
 who assisted in it, had.both of them finer geniuses than.tljeir associate. . , 
 
 JAMES SHIRLEY ' .. 
 
 ,dla^msV^,.placq ajnohgst the worthies of this period, not so much for aiiy 
 transcendent talent in, himself, as that he was the last "of a great race, all of 
 whpm sisoke nearly the same language, and had a set of mpral feelings and 
 ;no'tions in common. A new language, and quite a pbw turn of tragic Snd 
 comic interest, came in with the Restoration. 
 
 The Lady of Pleasure.— The dialogue between Sir Thomas Bofnewell and 
 his lady Aretina is in the very spirit of the recriminating scenes between Lord 
 and Lady Townley in the Provoked Husiand. It is difficult to believe but it 
 must have been Vanburgh's prototype. 
 
588 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 (Hone's Table Book, 1827-28.) 
 
 [The following papers were Designed by Charles Lamb as a second -series Oi, or sequel 
 to, the Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets published by the Messrs. Longman 
 and Company. They were contributed to*' Hone's Table Book in twenty-three instal- 
 ments as Part I., Part II., &c., under the title of Notes to the Garrick Plays, and 
 may be found ranging over that curious repertory of miscellaneous literature be- 
 ginning on column 3 and ending on column 1,827. Among the additional MSS. at 
 the British Museum (Nos. 0,95s and 9,956) are preser\'ed extracts from the Garrick Col- 
 lection of Old Plays in Charles Lamb's handwriting. How thoroughly he enjoyed 
 the luxury of examining that collection in the old reading-room at Montagu House he 
 has made plain to us all in his explanatory letter to the editor of the Table Book with 
 which these critical Notes are introduced.] 
 
 LETTER TO THE EDTTOK. 
 
 \_William Hone.'] 
 
 Dear Sir, — It is not unknown to you, that about nineteen years since I pub- 
 lished "'Specimens of EngHsh Dramatic Poets, who lived about the time of 
 Shakspere." For the scarcer Plays I had recourse to the Collection bequeathed 
 to the British Museum by Mr. Garrick. But my time was but short, and my 
 subsequent leisure has discovered in it a treasure rich and exhaiistless beyond 
 what I then imagined. In it is to be found almost every production in the 
 shape of a Play that has appeared in print, from the time of the old Mysteries 
 and Moralities to the days of Crowne and D'Urfey. Imagine the luxury to one 
 like me, who, above every other form of Poetry, have ever preferred the 
 Dramatic, of sitting in the princely apartments, for such they are, of poor 
 condemned Montagu House, which I predict will not speedily be followed by a 
 handsomer, and culling at will the flower of some thousand Dramas. It is like 
 having the range of a Nobleman's Library, with the Librarian to your friend. 
 Nothing can exceed the courteousness and attentions of the gentleman who has 
 the chief direction of the Reading-rooms here ; and you have scarce to ask for 
 a volume, before it is laid before you. If the occasional extracts which I have 
 been tempted to bring away, may find an appropriate place in your Tatle Book, 
 some of them are weekly at your service. By those who remember the " Speci- 
 mens, " these must be considered as mere after gleanings, supplementary to that 
 work, only comprising a longer period. You must be content with sometimes 
 a scene, sometimes a song ; a speech or passage, or a poetical image, as they 
 happen to strike me. I read without order of time ; I am a poor hand at dates ; 
 and for any biography of the dramatists, I must refer to writers who are more 
 skilful in such matters. My business is with their poetry only. 
 
 Your well-wisher, 
 January 27, 1827. C. Lamb. 
 
 ROBERT DAVENPORT. 
 King John and Matilda: a Tragedy. Acted in 1651. — [John not being 
 
On the Gar rick Plays. 589 
 
 able to bring Matilda, the chaste daughter of the old Baron Fitzwater, to com- 
 pliance with his wishes, causes her to be poisoned in a nunnery. 
 
 And thou, Fitzwater, reflect upon thy name,*' 
 And turn the Sok of Tears.] 
 
 This scene has much passion and poetry in it, if I mistake not. The last 
 words of Fitzwater are an instance of noble temperament ; but to understand 
 him, the character throughout of this mad, merry, feeling, insensible seeming 
 ; lord, should be read. That the venomous John could have even counterfeited 
 ' repentance so well, is out of nature ; but, supposing the possibility, nothing is 
 I truer than the way in which it is managed. These old play-wrights invested 
 I their bad characters with notions of good, which could by no possibility have 
 I co-existed with their actions. Without a soul of goodness in himself, how 
 ( could Shakspere's Richard the Third have lit upon those sweet phrases and 
 ' inducements by which he attempts to win over the dowager queen to let him 
 \ wed her daughter. It is not nature's nature, but imagmation's substituted 
 I nature, which does almost as well in a fiction. 
 
 JOHN DAY. 
 The Parliament of Bees : a Masque. Printed 1607.— Whether this singular 
 production, in which the characters are all Bees, was ever acted, I have no in- 
 formation to determine. It is at least as capable of representation as we can 
 conceive the " Birds " of Aristophanes to have been. 
 
 —The doings. 
 
 The births, the wars, the wooings, 
 
 of these pretty little winged creatures are with continued liveliness por- 
 trayed throughout the whole of this curious old drama, in words which bees 
 would talk with, could they talk ; the very air seems replete with humming and 
 buzzing melodies, while we read them. Surely bees were never so be-rhymed 
 before. 
 
 ABRAHAM COWLEY. 
 The Guardian : a Comedy, 1650. — This was the first draught 01 tnat which 
 he published afterwards under the title of the Cutter of Coleman Street; and 
 contains the character of a foohsh poet, omitted in the latter. The Cutter has 
 always appeared to me the link between the comedy of Fletcher and of Con- 
 greve. In the elegant passion of the love scenes it approaches the former ; and 
 Puny' (the character substituted for the omitted poet) is the prototype of the 
 half-witted wits, the Brisks and Dapperwits, of the latter. 
 
 ROBERT YARRINGTON, 
 
 Who wrote in the reign of Elizabeth. 
 
 Two Tragedies in One.— It is curious that this old play comprises the distinct 
 
 action of two atrocities ; the one a vulgar murder, committed in our own 
 
 Thames Street, with the names and incidents truly and histoncally set down ; 
 
 !* Fitzwater : son of water. A striking instance of the compatjbiUty of the serious 
 iim with the expression of the profoundest sorrows Grief, as well as joy, finds ease m 
 thus olayinff witli a word. Old John of Gaunt in Shakspere thus descants on his »«»«.- 
 " Gaunt and gaunt indeed ; " to a long stnng of conceits, which no one has ever yet felt 
 as ridiculous. The poet Wither thus, in a mournful review of the declmmg estate of his 
 family, says with deepest nature :— 
 
 The very name of Wither shows decay.] 
 
$1)6 Th^'Work's of CMarles IMmi. 
 
 the other a murder in high life, supposed to be acted at the- same tima in Itoly, 
 the scenes alternating bfetween that country- and' Engltod-: 'the' story of the 
 latter is mutatis mutandis no other than that of .our own Babes in the Wood, 
 transferred to Italy, from a'delicaCy no doubt to'some of the family of the rich 
 wicked uncle, who might yet be living. ' The treatment of the two differs as the 
 roihante-like narratives in God's Revenge against Mtirder, in whichthe aetors 
 of the murders (with the trifling exception that they «;«?-« murderers) ax& repre- 
 sented as.most accomplished and every way amiable young gentlefolks of either 
 seSL— as!inuclKias-^/ia< differs from the honest unglossing pages of the homely ■ 
 Newgate Ordinary. i 
 
 GEORGE PEELE. ., , - 
 
 The Love of King David and- Fair Beihsahe, with the Trageay of Absalom. 
 — Bethsabe, with her maid, bathing. She sings : and David sits above 'viewing 
 her; There is more of the same stuff, but I suppose the reader has' a sUrfeitj 
 especially as this Canticle of David has never been suspected to contain any 
 pious sense couched underneath it, whatever his son's may. The kingly bower 
 " seated in hearing of a hundred streams," is the best of it. 
 
 SONG IN GEORGE PEELE'S DRAMATIC PASTORAL " THE ARRAIGNMENT OF 
 , . . PARIS," 1584.. 
 
 To my esteemed friend, and excellent -musician, V\incent'] N\ovello']i Esq. 
 
 Dear Sir, — I conjure you in the name of all the Sylvan deities, and of the 
 Muses, whom you honow,i.and they reciprocally love and honour you, — rescue 
 this old and passionate ditty — the very flower of an olA forgotten pastoral, which 
 had it been in all parts equal',' the. Faithful -Shepherdess of Fletcher had been 
 but a second name in this sort of Writing ■ • rescue it from the profane hands 
 of every common composer : and in one of your tranquillest moods, when you 
 have most leisure from those Sad thoughts, which someri'mes .unworthily beset 
 you ; yet a mood, in itself not unallied to the better sort of melancholy; laying 
 by for once the lofty organ, with which you shake the Temples : attune, as to 
 the pipe of Paris himself, some milder and more love-according instrument, 
 this pretty courtship between Paris and'his (then-not-as-yet-forsScen) (Enone. 
 Obligp me, and all more knowing judges of music and of poesy, by the adapta- 
 tibn of fit musical numbers, which it only wants to be the rarest love dialogue 
 in our language. 
 
 Your iraplorer, 
 
 C. L. 
 
 Tancrcd and Gism'u«d : acted before the Court by the Gentlemen of the 
 Inner Temple, 1591. — Nearly a century after the date of this drama, Dryden 
 produced his admirable version of the same story from Boccaccio, The speech 
 here extracted may be compared with the corresponding passage in the Sigis- 
 monda and Guiscardo, with no disadvantage to the elder performance. It is 
 quite as weighty, as pointed, and as passionate. 
 
 The Battle of Alcasar : a Tragedy, 1594.— Muly M^hainet,' driven from his 
 throne into a desert, robs the lioness to feed his fainting wife Calipolis. 
 
 Miily, Hold thee, Calipolis ; feed and faint no more, &c. 
 
 This address, for its barbaric splendour of 'conception, 'extrav^ant vein 
 of promise, not to menticirt some idiomatid peculiarities, and the very structure 
 of the verse, savours strongly of Mailowe ; but the real authoi, I believe, is 
 unknown. 
 
, On the Garrick Plays. 591 
 
 HENRY PORTER. 
 
 The Two Angry Women of Abingdon: a Comedy, 1599. — This pleasant 
 comedy is contemporary with some of the earliest of Shakspere's, and is no 
 wit inferior to either the Comedy .0/ Errors, or the Taming of the Shrew, for 
 instance. It is full of business, humour, and merry malice. Its night-scenes 
 are peculiarly sprightly and wakeful. The versification unencumbered, and 
 rich with cbinpound epithets. Why do we go on with ever new editions of 
 Ford, and Massinger, and the thrice reprinted Selections of Dodsley ? What 
 we want is as many volumes more, as these latter consist of, filled with plays 
 (such as this), of which we know comparatively nothing. Not a third part of 
 the treasures of old English dramatic literature has been exhausted. Are we 
 afraid that the genius of Shakspere would suffer in our estimate by the dis- 
 closure ? He would indeed be somewhat lessened as a miracle and a prodigy. 
 But he would lose no height by therconfession. When a giant is shown to us, 
 does it detract from the curiosity to be told that he has at home a gigantic 
 brood of brethren, less only than himself? Along with him, not from him, 
 sprang up the race of mighty dramatists, who, compared with the Otways and 
 Rowes that followed, were as Miltons to a Young or an Akenside. That he 
 was their elder brother, not their parent, is evident from the fact of the very 
 few direct imitations of him to be found in their writings. Webster, Dekker, 
 Heywood, and the rest of his great contemporaries went on their own ways, 
 and followed their individual impulses, not blindly prescribing to themselves 
 his tract. Marlowe, the true (though imperfect) father of our tragedy, preceded 
 him. The comedy of Fletcher is essentially unlike to that of his. 'Tis out of 
 no detracting spirit that I speak thus, for the plays of Shakspere have been 
 the strongest and the sweetest food of my mind from infancy; but I resent the 
 comparative obscurity in which some of his most valuable co-operators remain, 
 who were his dear intimates, his stage and his chamber-fellows while he lived, 
 and to whom his gentle spirit doubtlessly then awarded the full portion of their 
 genius, as from them toward himself appears to have been no grudging of his 
 acknowledged excellence. 
 
 SIR RICHARD FANSHAW'S 
 
 Translation of " Querer for Sola Querer"—" To Love for Love's Sake .-" 
 a Xomantic Drama, written in Spanish by Mendoza, i649.---[Felisbravo, 
 Prince of Persia, from a picture sent him of the brave Amazonian Queen of 
 Tartary, Zelidaura, becoming enamoured, sets out for that realm ; in his way 
 thithef disenchants a Queen of Araby ; but first, overcome by fatigue, falls 
 asleep in the enchanted grove, where Zelidaura herself coming by, steals the 
 picture from him. The passion of the romance arises from his remorse at being 
 taken so negligent ; and her disdain that he should sleep, having the company 
 of her picture. She here plays upon him, who does not yet know her, in the 
 disguise of a Rustic] 
 
 To my taste this is fine, elegant, queen-like raillery ; a second part of Love s 
 Labour Lost, to which title this extraordinary play has still better pretensions 
 than even Shakspere's ; for after leading three pair of royal lovers through 
 endless mazes of doubts, difficulties ; oppositions of dead fathers' wills ; a 
 labyrinth of losings and findings ; jealousies ; enchantments ; conflicts with 
 giants, and single-handed against armies ; to the exact state in which all the 
 lovers might with the greatest propriety indulge their reciprocal wishes— when, 
 the deuce is in it, you think, but they must all be married now— suddenly the three 
 ladies turn upon their lovers : and, as an exemplification of the moral of the 
 play, "Loving for Loving's sake," and a hyperplatonic, traly Spanish proof of 
 
592 The Works of Charles Lanib. 
 
 their affections— demand that the lovers shall consent to their mistresses' taking 
 upon them the vow of a single life ! to which the gallants, with becoming re- 
 finement, can do no less than consent. — The fact is that it was a court play, in 
 which the characters — males, giants, and all— were played by females, and 
 those of the highest order of Grandeeship. No nobleman might be permitted 
 amongst them ; and it was against the forms, that a great court lady of Spain 
 should consent to such an unrefined motion, as that of wedlock, though but 
 in a play. 
 
 Appended to the drama, the length of which may be judged from its having 
 taken nine day^ in the representation, and me three hours in the reading of it 
 — hours well wasted— is a poetical account of a fire, which broke out in the 
 theatre on one of the nights of its acting', when the whole of the dramatis fer- 
 sonm were nearly burnt, because the common people out of "base fear," and 
 the nobles out of "pure respect," could not think of laying hands iipon such 
 " Great Uonnas ;" till the young king, breaking the etiquette, by snatching up 
 his queen, and bearing her through the flames upon his back, the grandees 
 (dilatory jEneases),' followed his example, and each saved one (Anchises- 
 fashion), till the whole courtly company of comedians were got off in tolerable 
 safety. — Imagine three or four stout London firemen, on such an occasion, 
 standing off in mere respect. 
 
 THOMAS SACKVILLE, LORD BUCKHURST, AFTERWARDS EARL OF 
 DORSET; AND THOMAS NORTON. 
 
 Gorboduc ; a Tragedy. — The style of this old play is stiff and cumbersome, 
 like the dresses of its times. There may be flesh and blood underneath, but 
 we cannot get at it. Sir Philip Sidney has praised it for its morality. One of 
 its authors might easily furnish that. Norton was an associate to Hopkins, 
 Sternhold, and Robert Wisdom, in the singing psalms. I am willing to beUeve 
 that Lord Buckhurst suppUed the more vital parts. The chief beauty in the 
 extract is of a secret nature. Marcella obscurely intimates that the murdered 
 prince Porrex and she had been lovers. 
 
 THOMAS KYD. 
 
 The Spanish Tragedy; or Hieronimo is viad again: a Tragedy.— Thess 
 scenes [of Hieronimo's madness], which are the very salt of the play (which 
 without them is but a caput mortuum, such another piece of flatness as Lo- 
 crine), Hawkins, in his re-publication of this tragedy, has thrust out of the text 
 into the notes; as omitted in the second Edition, "printed for Ed. Allde, 
 amended of such gross blunders as passed in the first :" and thinks them to 
 have been foisted in by the players. — A late discovery at Dulwich College has 
 ascertained that two sundry payments were made to Ben Jonson by the theatre 
 for famishing additions to Hieronimo. There is nothing in the undoubted 
 plays of Jonson which would authorize us to suppose that he could have sup- 
 plied the scenes in question. I should suspect the agency of some "more 
 potent spirit." Webster might have furnished them. They are full of that 
 wild solemn preternatural cast of grief which bewilders us in the Duchess of 
 Malfy. 
 
On the Genius and Character of Hogarth. 593 
 
 ®xi i\t (genius anir (ITIjarader of f 0garl^. 
 
 (The Reflector, No. III., art. viii. 1811.) 
 
 ••i'" .^^ °''*'?^"..',^^"\ ''''^ masterly criticism bore under its lieading, as a sort of sub- 
 title, the word.s With some remarlcs on a passage in the writings of the late Mr. 
 JJarry. 1 he signature aifixed to the paper was " L."] 
 
 One of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a boy was in the con- 
 templation of those capital prints by Hogarth, the Harlot's and Rakes Pro- 
 gresses. vi\x\c\ along with some others, hung upon the walls of a great hall, in 
 an old-fashioned house in shire, and seemed the solitary tenants (with my- 
 self) of that antiquated and life-deserted apartment. 
 
 Recollection of the manner in which those orints used to affect me, has often 
 made me wonder, when I have heard Hogarth described as a mere comic 
 painter, as one whose chief ambition was to raise a laugh. To deny that there 
 are throughout the prints which I have mentioned circumstances introduced of 
 a laughable tendency, would be to run counter to the common notions of man- 
 kind ; but to suppose that in their ruling character they appeal chiefly to the 
 risible faculty, and not first and foremost to the very heart (K man, its best and 
 most serious feelings, would be to mistake no less grossly their aim and pur- 
 pose. A set of severer Satires (for they are not so much Comedies, which they 
 have been likened to, as they are strong and masculine Satires) less mingled 
 with anything of mere fun, were never written upon paper,<or graven upon 
 copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches in Timon of Alliens. 
 
 I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being asked which book 
 he esteemed most in his library, answered,--" Shakspere :" being asked which 
 he esteemed next best, replied,— " Hogarth." His graphic representations are 
 indeed books : they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. 
 Other pictures we look at,— his prints we read. 
 
 In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes entertained myself with com- 
 paring the Timon of Athens of Shakspere (which I have just mentioned) and 
 Hogarth's Rakes Progress together. The story, the moral, in both is nearly 
 the same. The wild course of riot and e.'itravagance, ending in the one with 
 driving the Prodigal from the society of men into the solitude of the deserts, 
 and in the other with conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissi- 
 pation into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play 
 and in the picture are described with almost equal force and nature. The levee 
 of the Rake, which forms the subject of the second plate in the series, is 
 almost a transcript of Timon's levee in the opening scene of that play. We 
 find a dedicating poet, and other similar characters in both. 
 
 The concluding scene in the Rake's Progress is perhaps superior to the last 
 scenes of Timon. If we seek for something of kindred excellence in poetry, 
 it must be in the scenes of Lear's beginning madness, where the King and the 
 Fool and the Tom-o'-Bedlam conspire to produce such a medley of mirth 
 checked by misery, and misery rebuked by mirth ; where the society of those 
 " strange bed-fellows " which misfortunes have brought Lear acquainted with, 
 so finely sets forth the destitute state of the monarch, while the lunatic bans 
 of the one, and the disjointed sayings and wild but pregnant allusions of the 
 other, so wonderfully sympathize with that confusion, which they seem to assist 
 in the production of, in the senses of that "child-changed father." 
 
594 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rakes Process, we find the 
 same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. Here is desperate madness, 
 the overturning of originally strong thinking faculties, at which we shudder, as 
 we contemplate the duration and pressure of affliction which it must have asked 
 to destroy such a building ; — and here fs the gradual hurtless lapse into idiocy, 
 of faculties which at their best of times never having been strong, we look upon 
 the consummation of their decay with no more of pity than is consistent with a 
 smile. The mad tailor, the poor driveller, that has gone out of his wits (and 
 truly he appears to have had no great journey to go to get past their confines) 
 for the love of Charming Betty ^ C(Z?*£/«jj,—^these' half-laughable, scarce-pitiable 
 objects take off from the horror which the principal figure would of itself raise, 
 at the same time that they assist the feeling of the scene by contributing to the 
 general notion of its subject. 
 
 Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to remark, that in the, poor 
 kneeling weeping female, who accompanies her seducer in his sad .decay, there 
 is something analogous to Kent or Caius, as he deUghts rather to be called, in 
 Lear, — the noblest pattern of virtue which even Shakspere has conceived, — 
 who follows his royal master in banishment that had pronounced his banishment, 
 and forgetful at once of his wrongs and dignities, taking on himself the disguise 
 of a menial, retains his fidelity to the figure, his loyalty to the carcase, the 
 shadow, the shell and empty husk of Lear. 
 
 In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the impression which we 
 receive depends upon the habit of mind which we bringwithus to such perusal. 
 The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall render another 
 very sprious ; or in the same persoh- the first impression may be corrected 
 by af(er-thought. The misemployed incongruous characters of the Harlot's 
 Funeral, on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter ; but when we have 
 sacrificed the first emotion to levity, a very diiTerent frame of mind succeeds, or 
 the painter has los't half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful assemblage 
 of depraved beings, who, without a grain of reverence or pity in their perverted 
 minds, are performing the sacred exteriors of duty to the relics of their departed 
 partner in folly, but I am as much moved to sympathy from the very want of it 
 in them, as I should be by the finest representation of a virtuous death-bed 
 surrounded by real mourners, pious children, weeping friends.^perhaps more 
 by the very contrast. What reflections does it not awake, of the dreadful 
 heartless state in which the creature (a female, too) must Have lived, who in 
 death wants the accompaniment of one genuine tear. That wretch who is 
 removing the lid of the coffin to gaze upon the corpse with a face which indi- 
 cates a perfect negation of all goodness or womanhood — the hypocrite parson 
 and his demure partner — all the fiendish group — to a thoughtful mind pre- 
 sent a moral emblem more affecting than if the poor friendless carcase had 
 been depicted as thrown out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its 
 / obsequies; itself furnishing forth its own funeral banquet. 
 
 It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together in this picture, 
 — incongruous objects being of the very essence of laughter, — but surely the 
 laugh is far different in its kind from that thoughtless species to which we are 
 moved by mere farce and grotesque. We laugh when Ferdinand Count 
 Fathom, at the first sight of the white cliffs of Britaih, feels his heart yearn 
 with filial fondness towards the land of his progenitors, which he is coming to 
 fleece and plunder, — we smile at the exquisite irony of the passage, — but if we 
 are not led on by such passages to some more salutary feeling than laughter, 
 we are very neg:ligent perusers of them in book or picture. > 
 
 It is the fashion with those who cry up the great Historical School in this [ 
 country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to exclude i 
 Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar'cla.Ss. Those [ 
 persons seem to me to confound the painting of subjects in common or ' 
 
 : . J 
 
On the Genius and Charader of Hogarth. ,595 
 
 vulgar life with the being a vulgar artist. The quantity of thought which 
 Hogarth cl-owds into every picture, would;alone uwvulgarize every subject 
 Which he might choose. Let us take the lowest of his subjects, the print 
 called Gin Lane. Here is plenty of poverty and low. stuff to disgust upon a 
 superficial ttewrj'-a'rtd aftodrdinglyi a cold- spectator feels himself immediately 
 disgusted and 'repelled; I'have seen many turn away from it, not being able 
 to bear it. •The'sS.ihfe ipeisona would perhaps have looked with great com- 
 placency upon PbUs^in's celebrated picture of the Elague of Athens.* Disease 
 and Death iftd bewildering Terror, in Athenitm garments, are endurable, and 
 cotiiB.'as the delicate critics express it, within the " hmits of pleasurable sensa- 
 tion." Butthfe Scends of their own St. Giles's, delineated by their own country- 
 man, 'are 't<So shocking to_ think of. . Yet if- we could abstract our minds from 
 the fascinating coloute of the picture, and forget the coarse execution (in some 
 respects) of the print, intended as it was to be a cheap platei accessible to-the 
 poorer sort of- people,' for whose instruction it was done,, I think we could have 
 no'hesitation'-in conferring the palm of superior genius: upon Hogarth, com- 
 paring this work of his with Poussin's picture.- There is more of imagination 
 in it-'^thatpbwer 'Which draws all things to one, — which. makes things animate 
 and inanimates, beings with their attributes, subjects and- their accessaries,, take 
 one colour, afld serve to one effect. Everything in the print, to use a vulgar 
 expression, tells. Every part is full of " strange images of death." It is per- 
 fe5ly amazing and astounding to look- at. . Not only the two prominent figures, 
 the woman and- the half-dead' man^ which are as terrible as anything which 
 Michael Angelo ever drew, but everything else in the print contributes to be- 
 wilder -and' stupefy, -"the very houses, as I heard a friend of mine express it, 
 ftl'Mblihg all about in- various directions, seem drunk — seem absolutely reeling 
 from the effect- of that diabolical spirit of frenzy which goes forth over the 
 whbte composition. — To show the poetical and almost prophetical conception 
 in the drtist,' 6ne little circumstance may serve. Not content with the dying 
 and dead Sgiire^, which he has strewed iUMprofusion over the proper scene of 
 the action; he shows you what (of a , kindred nature) is passing beyond it. 
 Close' by the shell, in which; by direction of the parish beadle,, a man is 
 depositing his wife, is an old- wall, which, partaking of the universal decay 
 aroimd it, is tumbling^ to pieces, 'rhrough a gap in this wall are seen three 
 figures, which appear to make a part in some funeral procession which is 
 passing by the other side of ' the wall, out of the sphere of the composition. 
 This extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject could only 
 halve been conceived by a great igenius. Shakspere, in his description of the 
 painting of the Trojan War, in his Tiirquin and Lucrece, has introduced a 
 similar device, where the painter made a part stand for the whole : — 
 
 For much imaginary work was there, 
 Conceit deceitful, aa compact, so kind. 
 That for Achilles' imaE;e stood his spear. 
 Griped in an armed hand ; himself behind 
 "Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind : 
 A hand, a foot, -a face, a leg, a head. 
 Stood for the -whole to be imajjined. 
 
 This he well calls imaginary work, where the spectator must meet the artist 
 in 'his conceptions half way ; and it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius 
 alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists show everything 
 distinct and full, as they require- an object to be made out to themselves before 
 they can comprehend it. ., . ^ , 
 
 When I think of the power displayed in this (I will not hesitate to say) sub- 
 lime pritit,-it seems to me the extreme narrowness of system alone, and of that 
 * At the late Mr. Hope's, in Cavendish Square. 
 
596 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 rage for classification, by which in matters of taste at least, we are perpetually 
 perplexing instead of arranging our ideas, that would make us concede to the 
 work of Poussin above-mentioned, and deijy to this of Hogarth, the name of 
 a grand serious composition. 
 
 We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call one 
 man a great historical painter, because he has taken for his subjects kings or 
 great men, or transactions over which time has thrown a grandeur. We term 
 another the painter of cominon hfe, and set him down in our minds for an artist 
 of an inferior class, without reflecting whether the quantity of thought shown 
 by the latter may not much more than level the distinction which their mere 
 choice of subjects may seem to place between them ; or whether, in fact, from 
 that very common life a great artist may not extract as deep an interest as 
 another man from that which we are pleased to call history. 
 
 I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of Reynolds, 
 but I do not like that his reputation should overshadow and stifle the merits of 
 such a man as Hogarth, nor that to mere names and classifications we should 
 be content to sacrifice one of the greatest ornaments of England. 
 
 I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, whether in the 
 countenances of his Staring and Grinning Despair, which he has given us 
 for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be anything comparable to 
 the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his broken-down rake 
 in' the last plate but one of the Rake's Progress,* where a letter from the 
 manager is brought to him to say that his play "will not do?" Here all is 
 easy, natural, iindistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is here accumulated ! 
 — the long history of a mis-spent life is compressed into the countenance as 
 plainly as the series of plates before had told it ; here is no attempt at Gor- 
 gonian looks which are to freeze the beholder, no grinning at the antique bed- 
 posts, no face-making, or consciousness of the presence of spectators in or out 
 of the picture, but grief kept to a man's self, a face retiring from notice with 
 the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it, — a final leave taken 
 of hope, — the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction, — a beginning ahenation 
 of mind looking like tranquiUity. -Here is matter for the mind of the beholder 
 to feed on for the hour together, — ^matter to feed and fertiUze the mind. It is 
 too real to admit one thought about the power of the artist who did it. — When 
 we compare the expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and 
 find the superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere con- 
 temptible difference of the scene of it being laid in the one case in our Fleet 
 or King's Bench Prison, and in the other in the State Prison of Pisa, or the 
 bedroom of a cardinal,— or that the subject of the one has never been authenti- 
 cated, and the other is matter of history, — so weigh down the real points of 
 the comparison, as to induce us to rank the artist who has chosen the one scene 
 or subject (though confessedly inferior in that which constitutes the soul of his 
 art) in a class from which we exclude thfe better genius (who has happened to 
 make choice of the other) with something like disgrace ? 
 
 * The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression. That which comes next to 
 it, I think, is the jaded morning countenance of the debauchee in the second plate of the 
 Marriage a-la-iiiode, which lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as anything 
 in Ecclesiastes. 
 
 t Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his lectures, speaks of the jtresumption of 
 Hogarth in attempting the grand style in painting, by which he means his choice of cer- 
 tain Scripture subjects. Hogarth's excursions into Holy Land were not very numerous, 
 but what he has left us in this kind have at least this merit, that they have expression of 
 some sort or other in them, — ^the Child Moses he/ore Pharaoh's Daughter, for in-Stance : 
 which is more than can be said of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Repose in Egypt, painted for 
 Macklin's Bible, where for a Madonna he has substituted a sleepy, insensible, unmotherly 
 girl, one so little worthy to have been selected as the Mother of the Saviour, that she 
 seems to have neither heart nor feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all. But 
 
On the Genius and Character of Hogarth. 597 
 
 The Boys under Demomacal Possession of Raphael and Dominichino, by 
 wnat law ol classification are we bound to as,ign them to belong to the great 
 style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake of Hogarth 
 when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am sure he is far morl im- 
 pressive than either. It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget. 
 1 here IS the stretch of human suffering to tlie utmost endurance, severe bodily 
 pain brought on by strong mental agony, the frightful obstinate laugh of mad- 
 ness,— yet all so unforced and natural, that those who never were witness to 
 madness in real life, think they see nothing but what is familiar to them in this 
 lace. Here are no tricks of distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony. 
 This IS high tragic painting, and we might as well deny to Shakspere the 
 honours of a great tragedian, because he has interwoven scenes of mirth with 
 the serious business of his plays, as refuse to Hogarth the same praise for the' 
 two concluding scenes of the Raie's Progress, because of the Comic Lunatics 
 which he has thrown into the one, or the Alchymist that he has introduced in 
 the other, who is paddling in the coals of his furnace, keeping alive the flames 
 of vain hope within the very walls of the prison to which the vanity has con- 
 ducted him, which liave taught the darker lesson of extinguished hope to the 
 desponding figure who is the principal person of the scene. 
 
 It is the force of these kindly admi.xtures, which assimilates the scenes of 
 Hogarth and of Shakspere to the drama of real life, where no such thing as pure 
 tragedy is to be found ; but merriment and infelicity, ponderous crime and 
 feather-light vanity, like twi-formed births, disagreeing complexions of one in- 
 tertexture, perpetually unite to show forth motley spectacles to the world. 
 Then it is that the poet or painter shows his art, %\ hen in the selection of these 
 comic adjuncts he chooses such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast with or 
 fall into; without forming a violent opposition to, his principal object. Who 
 sees not that the Grave-digger in Hamlet, the Fool in Lear, have a kind of 
 correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt, 
 while.the comic stuff in Venice Preserved, and the doggerel nonsense of the 
 Cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and Fletcher, are 
 pure, irrelevant, impertinent discords, — as bad as the quarrelling dog and cat 
 under the table of the Lord and tlie Disciples at Emmaus of Titian. 
 
 Not to tire the reader with perpetual reference to prints which he may not be 
 fortunate enough to possess, it may be sufficient to remark, that the same tragic 
 cast of expression and incident, blended in some instances with a greater alloy of 
 comedy, characterizes his other great work, the. Marriage a-la-mode, as well as 
 those less elaborate exertions of his genius, the prints called Industry and Idle- 
 ness, the Distressed Poet, &c. , forming, with the Harlot' s and Pake s Progresses, 
 the most considerable if not the largest class of his productions, — enough surely 
 to rescue Hogarth from the imputation of being a mere buffoon, or one whose 
 general aim was only to shake the sides. 
 
 There remains a very numerous class of his performances, the object ofvhich 
 must be confessed to be principally comic. But in all of them will be found 
 something to distinguish them from the droll productions of Bunbury and 
 others. They have this difference, that we do not merely laugh at, we are led 
 into long trains of reflections by them. In this respect they resemble the charac- 
 ters of Chaucer's Pilgrims, which have strokes of humour in them enough to 
 designate them for the most part as comic, but our strongest feelingstill is wonder 
 
 indeed the race of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up, root and Branch, at 
 the Reformation. Our artists are toogood Protestants to give life to that admirable 
 commixture of maternal tenderness, with reverential awe and wonder approaching to 
 worship, with which the.Virgin Mothers of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael (themselves 
 by their divine countenances inviting men to worship) contemplate the union of the two 
 natures in the person of their Heaven-born Infant. 
 
598 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 at the comprehensiveness of genius which could crowd, as poet and.painter 
 have done, into one small canvas so many diverse yet co-operating materials. 
 
 The faces of Hogarth have not a mere momentary interest, as in caricatures, 
 or those grotesque physiognomies which we sometimes catch a glance of in the 
 street, and, struck with their whimsicahty, wish for a pencil and the power to 
 sketch them down ;i,and forget them again as rapidly,— but they are permanent 
 abiding ideas. Not the sports of nature, but her necessary eternal classes. 
 We feel that we cannot part with any of them, lest a link should be broken; . , 
 
 It is worthy of observation, that he has seldom drawn a mean or insignificant 
 countenance*. Hogarth's mind was eminently reflective ; and, as it has been 
 well observed of Shakspere, that he has transfused his own poetical character 
 into the persons of his drama (they are all more or \es&poets), Hogarth has im- 
 pressed a thinking character upon the persons of his canvas. This remark 
 must not be taken universally.! The exquisite idiotism • of the little gentleman 
 in the bag aiid sword beating his drum in the print of the Enraged Musician, 
 would of itself rise lip against so sweeping an assertion. But I think it, wiU be 
 found to be true of the generaUty of his countenances. The knife-grinder and 
 Jew flute-player in the plate, just mentioned may serve as instances instead of a 
 thousand. They have intense thinking faces, though the purpose to which they 
 are subservient by no means required it ; but indeed it seems as if it was pain- 
 ful to Hogarth to contemplate mere vacancy or insignificance. 
 
 This reflection of the artist's own intellect fromlhe faces of his characters, 
 is one reason why the works of Hogarth, so much more than those of any other 
 artist, are objects of meditation.; Our intellectual natures love the mirror which 
 gives them back their own likenesses. The mental eye will not bend long with 
 delight upon vacancy. 
 
 Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth and the common paint- 
 ers of droll or burlesque subjects, with whom he is often confounded, is the sense 
 of beauty, which in the most unprotaiising subjects seems never wholly to have 
 deserted him. " Hogarth himself," says Mr. Coleridge, t from whom I have 
 borrowed this observation, speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg 
 ' ' never drew a more ludicrous distortion, both of attitude and physiognomy, 
 than this effect occasioned : nor was there wanting beside it one of those beau- 
 tiful female faces which the same Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extin- 
 guished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet, so often and. so 
 gladly introduces as the central figure in a crowd of humorous deformities, 
 which figure (such is the, power of true genius) neither acts nor is meant to act 
 as a contrast ; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group, a spirit of 
 reconciliation and human kindness ; and even when the attention is no longer 
 consciously directed toithe cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness with 
 our laughter : and thus prevents the instinctive merriment at the whims of 
 nature, or the foibles or humours of our fellow-men, from degenerating into 
 the heart-poison of contempt or hatred. To the beautiful females in Hogarth, 
 which Mr. C. has pointed out, might be added the frequent introduction of 
 children (which Hogarth seems to have taken a^particular delight in) into his 
 pieces. 'I'hey have a singular effect in giving tranquillity and a portion of their 
 own innocence to the subject. Thebabyriding in itsmother's lapinthe/V/izrM.ft' 
 Finchley lf\s careless innocent fjce placed directly behind the intriguing time- 
 furrowed countenance of the treason-plotting French priest), perfectly sobers 
 
 * If there are any of that description, they are in his StroUiitg Players^y^ print which 
 has been cried up by LordOrford as the richest of his productions, and it may be,-for 
 what I know, in tne mere lumber,^ the properties, and dead furniture of the scene, but in 
 living character and^expression it is (for Hogarth) lamentably poor and wanting ', it -is 
 perhaos the only one of his performfinces at which we have a right to feel disgu^ed.i : 
 
 t The Friendy No. xvi. ' ' ' 
 
On the Genius and Character of Hogarth. 599 
 
 the whole of that tumultuous scene. The boy-mourner winding up his top with 
 so much unpretended insensibility in the plate of the Harlot's Funeral (the 
 only thing in that assembly that is not a hypocrite), quiets and soothes the 
 mind that has been disturbed at the sight of so miich depraved man and woman 
 kind. ' 
 
 I had written thus far, when I met with a passage in the writings of the late 
 Mr Barry, which, as it falls in with the vulgar notion respecting Hogarth, 
 which this Essay has been employed in combating, I shall take the liberty to 
 transcribe, with sucti remarks as may suggest themselves to me in the trans- 
 cription ; referring the reader for a full answer to that which has gone before. 
 
 "Notwithstanding Hogarth's merit does Undbubtedly entitle him to an 
 honourable place among the artists; and that his little compositions, considered 
 as so many dramatic repr'esentations, abounding with humour, character, and 
 e.vtehsive observations on the variouf, incidents of low, faulty, and vicious life, 
 are very ingeniously; brought together, and frficfuently tell their own story with 
 niot;e facility-than 15 often, found in mkny of t;he" elevated and more noble in- 
 ventions of 'kafaeil?, and Other gfe'at men ; yet it must be hotiestly confessed, 
 that, in what j? called knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly observed, 
 that Hogarth is' often so i:aw and unformed, as hardly to deserve the name of 
 an artist, , But this, capital defect is not often ' perceivable, as examples 6f the 
 naked and of elevated nature but rafely occur in his subjects, \yhich are for thp 
 most part filled with characters, that in their nature tend to deformity ; besides, 
 his figures are small, aiid the junctures, and other difficulties of drawing that 
 might occur in their limbs, are artfully concealed with theit clothes, rags, &c. 
 But what would atone for all his defects, even if they were twice told, is his 
 admirable fund of invention, ever inexhaustible in its resources ; and his satire, 
 which is always sharp and pertinent, and often, highly moral, was (exp ept in a 
 few instances, where he weakly and meanly suffered his integrity to give way to 
 his envy) setdom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way. Hogarth 
 has beeti oiften imitated in his satirical vein, sometimes in his humorous, but 
 vei'y few have attempted to rival hin> 'i h'S moral walk. The line of art pur- 
 sued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother academician, Mr. Penny, 
 is quite distinct from that of Hogarth, and is of a much more delicate and 
 superior relish ; he attempts the heart, and reaches it, whilst Hogarth's general 
 aim. is only to shake the sides,; in other respects no comparison can be thought 
 of, as Mr. Penny has all that knowledge of the figure and academical skill, 
 which the other wanted. As to Mr. Bunbury, who had so happily succeeded 
 in the vein of humour and caricature, he has for some time past altogether re- 
 linquished it, for the more amiible pursuit of beautiful nature : this, indeed, is 
 not to be wondered at, when we recollect that he has, in Mrs. Bunbury, so 
 admirable an exemplar of the most finished grace and beauty continiially at liis 
 elbow. .But (to say all that occurs to me on this subject) , perhaps it may be 
 reasonably doubted, whether the being much conversant with Hogarth's method 
 of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, in many of his works, is not irather 
 a dangerous, or, at least, a worthless pursuit; which, if it does not find a false 
 relish and- a love of and search after satire and buffoonery in the spectator, is, 
 at least, not unlikely to give him one. .Life is short : and the little .leisure of it 
 is much-tietter jaid out uppn. that species of art which is employe,d abdut the 
 amiablfe and the admirable, as it is more likely to be attended with better and 
 nobler consequences to ourselves. These two pursuits in art may be compared 
 with two sets of people with whom we might associate; if we give ourselves up 
 to the Footes, the Kenricks, &c.,. we shall be; continually busied andpaddling 
 in whatever is ridiculous,' faulty, and vicious in lif^ ; wheteas there are those 
 to be found with whom we should be in the constant pursuit, and study of. all 
 that gives a value and adignity to human nature." [Account of a series of pic- 
 tures in the Great Room of the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and. Commercs, 
 
6oo The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 at the Adelphi, by James Barry, R.A., Professor of Painting to the Royal 
 Academy ; reprinted in the last quarto edition of his Works.] 
 
 " it must be honestly confessed, that m what is called knowledge of the 
 
 figure foreigners have justly observed," &c. 
 
 It is a secret well-known to the professors of the art and mystery of criticism, 
 to insist upon what they do not find in a man's works, and to pass over in 
 silence what they do. That Hogarth did not draw the naked figure so well as 
 Michael Angelo, might be allowed; especially as "examples of the naked,'' 
 as Mr. Barry acknowledges, "rarely (he might almost have said never) occur 
 in his subjects ; " and that his figures under their draperies do not discover all 
 the fine graces of an Antinous or an Apollo, may be conceded likewise ; perhaps 
 it was more suitable to his purpose to represent the average forms of mankind 
 in the mediocrity (as Mr. Burke expresses it) of the age in which he lived : but 
 that his figures in general, and in his best subjects, are so glaringly incorrect as 
 is here insinuated, I dare trust my own eye so far as positively to deny the 
 fact. And there is one part of the figure in which Hogarth is allowed to have 
 excelled, which these foreigners seem to have overlooked, or perhaps calcu- 
 lating from its proportion to the whole (a seven or an eighth, I forget which) 
 deemed it of trifling importance ; I mean the human face ; a small part, 
 reckoning by geographical inches, in the map of man's body, but here it is 
 that the painter of expression must condense the wonders of his skill, even at 
 the expense of neglecting the "junctures and other difficulties of drawing in 
 the limbs, " which it must be a cold eye that in the interest so strongly demanded 
 by Hogarth's countenances has leisure to survey and censure. 
 
 "The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother 
 academician, Mr. Penny." 
 
 The first impression caused in me by reading this passage, was an eager 
 desire to kno^y who this Mr. Penny was. This great surpasser of Hogarth, 
 in the "delicacy of his relish," and the " line which he pursued," where is he, 
 what are his works, what has he to show? In vain I tried to recollect, till by 
 happily putting the question to a friend who is more conversant in the works 
 of the illustrious obscure than myself, I learnt that he was the painter of a 
 Death of Wolfe which missed the prize the year that the celebrated picture of 
 West on the same subject obtained it ; that he also made a picture of the 
 Marquis of Graniy relieving a Sick Soldier; moreover, that he was the inventor 
 of two pictures of Suspended and Restored Animation, which I now remember 
 to have seen in the Exhibition some years since, and the prints from which are 
 still extant in good men's houses. This then, I suppose, is the line of subjects 
 in which Mr. Penny was so much superior to Hogarth. I confess I am not of 
 that opinion. The relieving of poverty by the purse, and the restoring a young 
 man to his parents by using the methods prescribed by the Humane Society, 
 are doubtless very amiable subjects, pretty things to touch the first rudiments 
 of humanity;^ they amount to about as much instruction as the stories of good 
 boys that give away their custards to poor beggar-boys in children's books. 
 But, good God ! is this milk for babes to be set up in opposition to Hogarth's 
 moral scenes, his strong meat for men f As well might we prefer the fulsome 
 verses upon their own goodness, to which the gentlemen of the Literary Fund 
 annually sit still with .such shameless patience to listen, to the satires of Juvenal 
 and Persius : because the former are full of tender images of Worth relieved 
 by Charity, and Charity stretching out her hand to rescue sinking Genius, and 
 the theme of the latter is men's crimes and follies with their black consequences 
 —forgetful meanwhile of those strains of moral pathos, those sublime heart- 
 touches, which these poets (ia them chiefly showing themselves poets) are per- 
 petually darting across the otherwise appalling gloom of their subject- 
 consolatory remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty mankind have made 
 U3 even to despair for our species, that there is such a thing as virtue and moral 
 
On the Genius and Character of Hogarth. 60 1 
 
 I 
 
 dignity in the world, that her unquenchable spark is not utterly out— refreshing f 
 admonitions, to which we turn for shelter from the too great heat and asperity ' 
 of the general satire. 
 
 And is there nothing analogous to this in Hogarth ? nothing which ' ' attempts 
 and reaches the heart?" — no aim beyond that of "shaking the sides?" — If 
 the kneeUng ministering female in the last scene of the Kakes Progress, the 
 Bedlam scene, of which I have spoken before, and have dared almost to 
 parallel it with the most absolute idea of Virtue which Shakspere has left us, 
 be not enough to disprove the assertion ; if the sad endings of the Harlot and 
 the Rake, the passionate heart-bleeding entreaties for forgiveness which the 
 adulterous wife is pouring forth to her assassinated and dying'lord in the last 
 scene but one of the Marriage d.-la-mode, — if these be not things to touch the 
 heart, and dispose the mind to a meditative tenderness : is there nothing sweetly 
 conciliatory in the mild, patient face and gesture with which the wife seems to 
 allay and ventilate the feverish irritated feelings of her poor poverty-distracted 
 mate (the true copy of Ihe genus irritabile in the print of the Distressed Poet f 
 or if an image of maternal love be required, where shall we find a sublimer 
 view of it than in that aged woman in Industry and Idleness (plate v.) who is 
 cUnging with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished to her brutal vice- 
 hardened child, whom she is accompanying to the ship which is to bear him 
 away from his native soil, of which he has been adjudged uniA'orthy ; in 
 whose shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems obUterated, 
 and a brute beast's to be left instead, shockmg and repulsive to all but herwho 
 watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered, and feels it must 
 belong to her while a pulse by the vindictive laws of his country shall be 
 suffered to continue to beat in it. Compared with such things, what is 
 Mr. Penny's "knowledge of the figure and academical skill which Hogarth 
 wanted ? " 
 
 With respect to what follows concerning another gentleman, with the con- 
 gratulations to him on his escape out of the regions of ' ' humour and carica- 
 ture," in which it apf^rs he was in danger of travelling side by side with 
 Hogarth, I can only congratulate my country, that Mrs. Hogarth knew her 
 province better than by disturbing her husband at his palette to divert him from 
 that universality of subject, which has stamped him perhaps, next to Shakspere, 
 the most inventive genius which this island has produced, into the " amiable 
 pursuit of beautiful nature," i.e., copying ad infinitum the individual charms 
 and graces of Mrs. H . 
 
 " Hogarth's method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, 
 Paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and vicious." 
 
 ' A person unacquainted with the works thus stigmatized, would be apt to 
 imagine, that in Hogarth there was nothing else to be found but subjects of the 
 coarsest and most repulsive nature; that his imagination was naturally unsweet, 
 and that he delighted in raising into every species of moral filth'; that he preyed 
 upon sore places only, and took a pleasure in exposing the unsound and rotten 
 parts of human nature. Whereas, with the exception of some of the plates of 
 the Harlot's Progress, which are harder in their character than any of the rest 
 of his productions (the Stages 0/ Cruelty I omit as mere worthless caricatures, 
 foreign to his general habits, the offspring of his fancy in some wayward 
 humour), there is scarce one of his pieces vvhere vice is most strongly satirized, 
 in which some figure is not introduced upon which the moral eye may rest 
 satisfied ; a face that indicates goodness, or perhaps mere good-humouredness 
 and carelessness of mind (negation of evil) only, yet enough to give a relaxa- 
 tion to the frowning brow of satire, and, keep the general air from tainting. 
 Take the mild supplicating posture of patient poverty in the poor woman that 
 
6o2 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 is persuading the pawnbroker to accept her clothes in pledge, in the plate of 
 Gin Lane, for an instance. A little does it, a little of the good nature over- 
 powers a world of bad. One cordial honest laugh of a Tom Jones absolutely 
 clears thC' atmosphere that \yas reeking with the black putrefying breathings of 
 a hypocrite Blifil. One homely expostulating shrug from Strap, warms the 
 whole air which the suggestions of a gentlemanly ingratitude from his friend 
 Random had begun to freeze. One ", Lord bless us!"of Parson Adams upon 
 the wickedness of the times, exorcises and purges off the mass of iniquity which 
 the world-knowledge of even a Fielding could cull out and rake together. But 
 of the severer class of Hogarth's performances, enough, 1 trust, has been said 
 to show that thtey do not merely shock and repulse ; that there is in them the 
 " scorn of vice " and the " pity" too ; something to touch .the heart, and keep 
 alive the sense of moral beauty; the "lacrymse rerum," and the sorrowing by 
 which the heart is made better. If they be bad things, then is satire and 
 tragedy a bad thing ; let us proclaim at once an age of gold, and sink the 
 existence of vice and misery in our speculations ; let us 
 
 wink, and shut our apprehensions up 
 
 From common sense of what men were and^are : 
 
 let us make believe with the children that everybody is good and happy,' and 
 with Dr. Swift, write panegyrics upon the world. 
 
 But that larger half of Hogarth's works which were painted more forenter- 
 , tainment than instruction (though such was the suggestiveness of his mind, that 
 there is always something to be learnt from them), his humorous scenes,— are 
 they such as merely to disgust and set us against our species? 
 , The, confident assertions of such a man as I consider the late Mr. Barry to 
 have been, have that weight of authority in them which staggers, at first hear- 
 ing, even a long preconceived opinion. When I read his pathetic admonition 
 concerning the shortness of life, and how much better the little leisure of it were 
 laid out -upon "that species of art which is employeAabout the amiable and 
 the admirable;" and Hogarth's " method " proscribed as a ',' dangerous or 
 worthless pursuit," I began to think there was something in it; that I might 
 have been indulging all my life a passion for the works of this artist, to the 
 utter prejudice of my taste and moral sense ; but my first convictions gradually 
 returned, a world of good-natured English faces came up one by one to my 
 reeollection, and a glance at the matchless Election Entertainment, which I 
 have the happiness to have hanging up in my parlour, subverted Mr. Barry's 
 whole theory in an instant. 
 
 In that inimitable print (which in myjudgment as far exceeds the more known 
 and celebrated March to Finchley, as the best comedy exceeds the best farce 
 that ever was written) let a person look till he be saturated, and when he has ' 
 done wondering at the inventiveness of genius which could bring so many 
 characters (more than thirty distinct classes of face) mto a room, and set them 
 down at table together, or otherwise dispose them about in so natural a manner, 
 engage them in so many easy sets and occupations, yet all partaking of the 
 spirit of the occasion which brought them, together, so that we feel that nothing 
 but an election time could have assembled them ; having no central figure or 
 principal group (for the hero of the piece, the Candidate, is properly set aside 
 in the levelling indistinction of the day, one must look for him to find him), 
 nothing to detain the eye from passing' from part to part, where every part is 
 alike instinct with Hfe,— for here are no furniture-faces, no figures brought in to 
 fill up the scene like stage choruses, but all dramatis persqnes: when he shall 
 have done wondering at all these faces so strongly charactered, yet finished with 
 the accuracy of the finest miniature ; when he shall have done admiring the 
 numberless appendages of the scene, those gratuitous doles which rich genius 
 
flings into the heap when it has already done enough, the over-measure which 
 it delights in giving, as if its stores were exhaustless ; the dumb rhetoric of the 
 scenery— for tables, and chairs, and joint-stools in Hogarth, are living and sig- 
 nificant things ; the witticisms that are expressed by words (all artists but 
 Hogarth have failed when they have endeavoured to combine two mediums of 
 expression, and have introduced words into their pictures), and the unwritten 
 numberless little allusive pleasantries that are scattered about ; the work that is 
 going on in the scene and beyond it, as is made visible to the " eye of mind," 
 by the mob which chokes up the doorway, and the sword that has forced an 
 entrance before its master : when he shall have sufficiently admired this wealth 
 of genilis, let him fairly say what is the result left on his mind. Is it an im- 
 pression of the vileness and worthlessness of his species? or is it not the general 
 feeling which remains, after the individual faces have ceased to act sensibly on 
 his mind, a kindly one in favour of his species f was not the general air of the 
 whole scene wliolesome ? did it do the heart hurt to be among it ? Something 
 of a riotous spirit to be sure is there, some worldjy-mindedness in some of the 
 faces, a Doddingtonian smoothness which does not promise any superfluous de- 
 gree of sincerity in the fine gentleman who has been the occasion of calling so 
 much good company together : but is not the general cast of expression in the 
 faces, of the good sort ? do they not seem cut out of the good old rock, sub- 
 stantial English honesty? would one fear treachery among characters of their 
 expression ? or shall we call their honest mirth and seldom-returning relaxation 
 by the hard names of vice and profligacy ? That poor country fellow, that is 
 grasping his staff (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves at home 
 which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since he came 
 into the irdom), and is enjoying with a relish that seems to fit all the capacities 
 of his soul the slender joke, which that facetious wag his neighbour is practis- 
 ing upon the gouty gentleman, whose eyes the effort to suppress pain has made 
 as round as rings— does it shock the "dignity of human nature" to look at 
 that man and to sympathize with him in the seldom-heard joke which has un- 
 bent his care-worn hard-wOrking visage, and drawn iroA smiles from it ? or 
 with that full-hearted cobbler; who is honouring v(ith the grasp of an honest fist 
 the unused palm of that annoyed patrician, whom the licence of the time has 
 seated next him ? 
 
 I can see nothing " dangerous " in the contemplation of such scenes as this, 
 or the Enraged Musician, or: the Southwark Fair, or twenty other pleasant 
 prints which come crowding in upon my recollection, in which the restless ac- 
 tivities, the diversified bents and humours, the blameless peculiarities of men, 
 as they deserve to be called, rather than their "vices and folhes," are held up 
 in a laughable point of view. All laughter is not of a dangerous or soul-hard- 
 ening tendency.. There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and 
 kills Love, and there is the cordial laughter of a man which implies and 
 cherishes it. What heart was ever made the worse by joining in a hearty laugh 
 at the simplicities of Sir Hugh Evans or Parson Adams, where a sense of the 
 ridiculous mutually kindles and is kindled by a perception of the amiable? 
 .That tumultuous harmony of singers that are roaring out the words, Ihe 
 worid shall bow to the Assyrian throne," from the opera of Judit/i, m tne 
 third plate of the series, called the Four Groups of Heads ;v,\vch the quick 
 eve of Hogarth must have struck off in the very infancy of the rage for sacred 
 oratorios in this country, while "Music yet was young;" when we have done 
 sniiling at the deafening distortions, which these fearers of devotion to rags 
 and tatters, these takers of Heaven by storm, in their boisterous mimicry of the 
 occupation of angels; are making, -what Unkindly impression is left behind, 
 . or what more of haish or contemptuous feeling, than w'hen we quietly leave 
 Uncle Toby and iWr. Shandy riding their hobby-horses about the room ? The 
 conceited, long-backed Sign-painter, that with all the self-applause of a 
 
6 04 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Raphael or Correggio (the twist of body which his conceit has thrown him into 
 has something of the Correggiesque in it) is contemplating the picture of a 
 bottle which he is drawing from an actual bottle that hangs beside him, in the 
 print of Beer Street, — while we smile at the enormity of the self-delusion, can 
 we help loving the good-humour and self-complacency of the fellow ? would we 
 willingly wake him from his dream ? 
 
 I say not thafall the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have necessarily some- 
 thing in them to make us like them ; some are indifferent to us, some in their 
 natures repulsive, and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to 
 nature in the painter ; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprink- 
 ling of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the 
 contagion of the bad. They have this in them besides, ,that they bring us 
 acquainted with the every-day human face, — they give us skill to detect those 
 gradations of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer) 
 in the countenances of the world about us ; and prevent that disgust at common 
 life, that ttsdium quotidian-arum formarum, which an unrestricted passion for 
 ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in many other 
 things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett or Fielding. 
 
 (iit i\t f ociixal Marks of (^m^i, W\i\tt> 
 
 The poems of George Wither are distinguished by a hearty homeliness of 
 manner, and a plain moral speaking. He seems to have passed his life in one 
 continued act of an innocent self-pleasing. That which he calls his Motto is 
 a continued self-eulogy of two thousand lines, yet we read it to the end without 
 any feeling of distaste, almost without a ponsciousness that we have been 
 listening all the while to a man praising himself. There are none of the cold 
 particles in it, the hardness and self-ends which render vanity and egotism 
 hateful. He seems to be praising another person under the mask of self ; or 
 rather we feel that it was indifferent to him where he found the virtue which he 
 celebrates ; whether another's bosom or his own, were its chosen receptacle. 
 His poems are full, and this in particular is one downright confession of a 
 generous self-seeking. But by self he sometimes means a great deal, — his 
 friends, his principles, his country, the human race. 
 
 Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this writer any of those 
 peculiarities which pleased him in the satires of Dryden or Pope, will be 
 grievously disappointed. Here are no high-finished characters, no nice traits 
 of individual nature, few or no personalities. The game run down is coarse 
 general vice, or folly as it appears in classes. A liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, 
 is stript and whipt ; no Shaftesbury, no Villiers, or Wharton, is curiously 
 anatomized, and read upon. But to a well-natured mind there is a charm of 
 moral sensibility running through them which amply compensates the want of 
 those luxuries. Wither seems everywhere bursting with a love of goodness, and 
 a hatred of all low and base actions. — At this day it is hard to discover what 
 parts in the poem here parficularly alluded to. Abuses Stript and Whipt, could 
 have occasioned the imprisonment of the author. Was Vice in High Places 
 more suspicious than now ? had she more power ; or more leisure to listen after 
 ill reports ? That a man should be convicted of a libel when he named no 
 
On the Poetical Works of Gtorge Wither. 605 
 
 names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is lilce one of the indict- 
 ments in tlie Pilgrim's Progress, where Faithful is arraigned for having ' ' railed 
 on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of his honourable 
 friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord Luxurious " 
 What unlucliy jealousy could have tempted the great men of those days to 
 appropriate such innocent abstractions to themselves ! 
 
 Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of idolatry his own possible 
 virtue. He is for ever anticipating persecution and martyrdom ; fingering, as 
 it were, the flames, to try how he can bear them. Perhaps his premature 
 defiance sometimes made him obnoxious to qensures, which he would otherwise 
 have slipped by. 
 
 The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to attract in the present 
 day. It is certainly not such as we should expect from apoet " soaring in the 
 high region of his fancies with his garland and his singing robes about him;* " 
 nor is it such as he has shown in his Philarete, and in some parts of his Shep- 
 herds Hunting. He seems to have adopted this dress with voluntary humility, 
 as fittest for a moral teacher, as our divines choose sober grey or black ; but in 
 their humility consists their sweetness. The deepest tone of moral feeling in 
 them, (though all throughout is weighty, earnest, and passionate) is in those 
 pathetic injunctions against sheddmg of blood in quarrels, in the chapter en- 
 titled Revenge. The story of his own forbearance, which follows, is highly 
 interesting. While the Christian sings his own victory over Anger, the Man of 
 Courage cannot help peeping out to let you know that it was some higher 
 principle ihan/ear which counselled his forbearance. 
 
 Whether encaged, or roaming at liberty. Wither never seems to have abated 
 a jot of that free spirit, which sets its mark upon his writings, as much as a 
 predominant feature of independence impressed every page of our late glorious 
 Bums ; but the elder poet wraps his proof-armour closer about him, the other 
 wears his too much outwards ; he is thinking too much of annoying the foe, to 
 be quite easy within ; the spiritual defences of Wither are a perpetual source 
 of inward sunshine ; the magnanimity of the modern is not without its alloy 
 of soreness, and a sense of injustice which seerns perpetually to gall and irritate. 
 Wither was better skilled in the " sweet uses of adversity, " he knew how to 
 extract the "precious jewel" from the head of the "toad," without drawing 
 any of the " ugly venom" along with it.— The prison notes of Wither are finer 
 than the wood notes of most of his poetical brethren. The description in the 
 Fourth Eclogue of his Shepherds Hunting (which was composed during his 
 imprisonment in the Marshalsea) of the power of the Muse to extract pleasure 
 from common objects, has been oftener quoted, and is more known, than any 
 part of his writings. Indeed the whole Eclogue is in a strain so much above 
 not only what himself, but almost what any other poet has written, that he him- 
 self could not help noticing it ; he remarks, that his spirits had been raised 
 higher than they were wont "through the love of poesy." — The praises of 
 Poetry have been often sung in ancient and in modern times ; strange powers 
 have been ascribed to it of influence over animate and inanimate auditors ; its 
 force over fascinated crowds has been acknowledged ; but, before Wither, no 
 one ever celebrated its power at home, the wealth and the strength which this 
 di\'ine gift confers upon its possessor. Fame, and that too after death, was all 
 which hitherto the poets had promised themselves from their art. It seems to 
 have been left to Wither to discover, that poetry Was a present possession, as 
 well as a rich reversion ; and that the Muse had promise of both lives, of this, 
 and of that which is to come. 
 
 The Mistress of Philarete is in substance a panegyric protracted through 
 several thousand lines in the mouth of a single speaker, but diversified, so as 
 to produce an almost dramatic effect, by the artful introduction of some ladies, 
 
 * Milton. 
 
6o6 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 who are rather auditors than interlocutors in the scene ; and of a boy, whose 
 singing furnishes pretence for an occasional change of metre : though the seven- 
 syllable line, in which the main part of it is written, is that in Which Wither 
 has shown himself so great a master, that I do not know that I am always 
 thankful to him for the exchange. 
 
 Wither has chosen to bestow upon the lady whom he commends, the name of 
 Arete, or Virtue ; and assuming to himself the character of Philarete, or Lover of 
 Virtue, there is a sort of pj-opriety in that heaped measure of perfections, 
 which he attributes to this partly real, partly allegorical personage. Drayton 
 before him had shadowed his mistress under the name of Idea, or Perfect Pat- 
 tern, and some of the old Italian love-strains are couched in such religious 
 terms as to make it doubtful whether it be a mistress, or Divine Grace, which 
 the poet is addressing. ■ 
 
 In this poem (full of beauties) there are two passages of pre-eminent merit. 
 The first is where the lover, after a flight of rapturous commendation, expresses 
 his wonder why all men that are about his mistress, even to her servants, do 
 not view her with the same eyes that he does. 
 
 Sometime I do admire, &c. 
 
 The other is, where he has been comparing her beauties to gold, and stars, 
 and the most excellent thirigs in nature ; and, fearing to be accused of hyper- 
 bole, the common charge against poets, vindicates himself by boldly taking 
 upon him, that these comparisons are no hyperboles; but that the best things 
 in nature do, in a lover's eyes, fall short of those excellencieis which he adores 
 in her. 
 
 What pearls, what rubies can, &a 
 
 To the measure in which these lines are written, the wits of Queen Anne's 
 days contemptuor^ly gave the name of Namby Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose 
 Philips, who has used it in some instances, as in the lines on Cuzzoni, to my 
 feeling, at least, very' deliciously ; but Wither, whose darling measure it seems 
 to have been, may show, that in skilful hands it is capable of expressing the 
 subtilest movements of passion. So true it is, which Drayton seems to have 
 felt, that it is the poet who modifies the metre, not the metre the poet ; In his 
 own words, that 
 
 'Tis possible to climb ; 
 To kindle, or to stake : 
 
 Altho' in Skekon's rhyme. 
 
 ^0f£S mt Sp^dimns from JfuIUr. 
 
 (2'Ac Refiector. No. iv., art. xiii,, 1811.) 
 
 [The heading of this paper (of which the notes only are here given) as it first appea«4 
 ran thus :— " Specimens from the Writings of Fuller, the Church Historian.' Appended 
 to it as a signature was thfr letter *' Y."] 
 
 The writings of Fuller are usually designated by the title of qumt, and with 
 sufficient reason ; for such was his natural bias to conceits, that I doubt not 
 
Notes on Specimens from Fuller. 607 
 
 upon most occasions it would have been going out of his way to have expressed 
 himself out of therti. But his wit is not always a lumen siccum, a dry faculty 
 of surprising ; on the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in 
 human feeling and passion. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its eager 
 Uveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the narrator happily 
 blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled. 
 
 As his works are now scarcely perused but by antiquaries, I thought it might 
 not be unacceptable to my readers to present them with some specimens of his 
 manner in single thoughts and phrases ; and in some few passages of greater 
 length, chiefly of a narrative description. I shall arrange them as I casually 
 find them in my book of extracts, without being solicitous to specify the parti- 
 cular work from which they are taken. 
 
 [Upon Fuller's remarking] — "St. Paul saith, Let not the sun go down on 
 your wrath, to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revenge- 
 ful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's meaning father than his words, with 
 all possible speed to depose our passion ; not understanding him so literally, 
 that we may take leave to be angry till sunset : then might pur wrath lengthen 
 with the days ; and men in Greenland, where the clay lasts above a quarter of a 
 year, have plentiful scope for revenge." 
 
 [Lamb has the following characteristic note.]— This whimsical prevention of 
 a consequence which no one would have thought of dedilcing, — 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 passage most aptly imitates. 
 ' [Fuller having observed in reference to] ffenry de Essex. — " His large inheri- 
 tance was confiscated to the king, and he himself, partly thrust, partly going 
 into a convent t hid his head in a cowl, under which, betwixt shame and sanctity, 
 he blushed out the remainder of his life." [Lamb remarks.] — The fine imagina- 
 tion of Fuller has done what might have been pronounced 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 Essex. 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 antitheses 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 sanctity." The reader by this artifice is taken 
 into a kind of partnership with the writer, — his judgment is exercised in settling 
 the preponderance, — he feels as if he were consulted as to the issue. But the 
 modem historian ilings at once the dead weight of his own judgment into the 
 scale, and settles the matter. 
 
 [Fuller's observation, again, in respect ia\ Sir Edward Harwood, Knt.—"\ 
 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," 
 [elicits from Lamb the remark]—! 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 Phoenix and the Unicom, and " other strange foijvl," 
 is no where extant. It is a fable which Sir Thomas Brown, if he had heird of 
 it, would have exploded among his Vulgar Errors ; but the delight which he 
 would have taken in the discussing of its probabiUties, would have shown 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 
 
6o8 ' The Works of Charles Lainli. 
 
 poetical analogies, ^hose essential varities 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 superstition, that had 
 been long extinct, from its dusty grave, to enter it himself with greater cere- 
 monies and solemnities of burial. 
 
 [Where Fuller writes in regard to the] Burning of Wickliffis Body by Order 
 of the Council of Constance. — *' Thus this brook [Swift] 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." 
 
 [Lamb observes]. — 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 Wickhffe gliding away out of the reach of the Sumners, 
 Commissaries; Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and all the puddering rout of exe- 
 cutioners of the impotent rage of the bafHed Council ; from S\/ift 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 Cassar 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 passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit of old 
 I 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 foolish- 
 ness. 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 vrith the passion 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." 
 
 #n: t^£ %xizaxiamnmtt> ^Itswltkg from hiucj 
 
 {,The Reflector, No. ii., art. xii., 1811.) 
 
 [The whimsical conceit set forth in this papar was afterwards elaborated by Lamb {^ide 
 supra pp. 157-171) into his fantastic farce of the Pawnbroker's Daughter.'\ 
 
 I AM one of those unhappy persons whose misfortunes, it seems, do not entitle 
 them to the benefit of pure pity. All that is bestowed upon me of that kindest 
 alleviator of human miseries, comes dashed with a double portion of contempt. 
 
r 
 
 Inconveniences Resultir^ from being Hanged. 609 
 
 My gnefs have nothing m them that is felt as sacred by the bystanders.' Yet 
 IS my afflictionm truth of the deepest grain. The heaviest task that was ever 
 given to mortal patience to sustain. Time, that wears out all other sorrows 
 2"h"a7fat"mark^° '"''^^" "^™ '^^^ ""^^ continue to gnaw, as long 
 Why was I ever born? Why was innocence in my person suffered to be 
 branded with a stain which was appointed only for the blackest guilt ? What 
 had I done, or my parents, that a disgrace of mine should involve a whole 
 postenty in infamy? I am almost tempted to believe, that in some ore- 
 existent states, cnmes to which this sublunary life of mine hath been as much 
 a stranger as the babe that is newly born into it, have drawn down upon me 
 this vengeance, so disproportionate to my actions on this globe. 
 
 My brain sickens, and my bosom labours to be delivered of the weight that 
 presses upon it, yet my conscious pen shrinks from the avowal. But out it 
 
 must 
 
 O, Mr. Reflector ! guess at the wretch's misery, who now writes this to you, 
 when, with tears and burning blushes, he is obliged to confess, that he has 
 
 been hanged 
 
 Methinks I hear an involuntary exclamation burst from you, -as your 
 imagination presents to you fearful images of your correspondent unknown — 
 lianged I 
 
 Fear not, Mr. Editor. No disembodied spirit has the honour of addressing 
 you. I am flesh and blood, an unfortunate system of bones, muscles, sinews, 
 arteries, like yourself. 
 
 Then, I presume, you mean to he pleasant — That expression of yours, Mr. 
 
 Correspondent, must be taken somehow in a metaphorical sense 
 
 In the plainest sense, without trope or figure— Yes, Mr. Editor ! this neck of 
 mine has felt the fatal noose,— these hands have tremblingly held up the 
 corroborative prayer-book,- these lips have sucked the moisture of the last 
 consolatory orange, — this tongue has chanted the doleful cantata which no 
 performer was ever called upon to repeat,— this face has had the veiling night- 
 cap drawn over it 
 
 Rut for no crime of mine. — Far be it for me to arraign the justice of my 
 country, which, though tardy, did at length recognize my innocence. It is not 
 for me to reflect upon judge or jury, now that eleven years have elapsed since 
 the erroneous sentence was pronounced. Men will always be infallible, and 
 
 perhaps circumstances did appear at the time a little strong 
 
 Suffice it to say, that after hanging four minutes (as the spectators were 
 pleased to compute it, — a man that is being strangled, I know from e.\perience, 
 has altogether a different measure of time from his friends who are breathing 
 leisurely about him, — I suppose the minutes lengthen as the time approaches 
 eternity, in the same manner as the miles get longer as you travel northward — ), 
 after hanging four minutes, according to the best calculation of the bystanders, 
 
 a reprieve came, and I was cut down 
 
 Keally I am ashamed of deforming your pages with these technical phrases 
 
 — if I knew how to express my meaning shorter 
 
 But to proceed. — ^My first care after I had been brought to myself by the 
 usual methods (those methods that are so interesting to the operator and his 
 assistants, who are pretty numerous on such occasions, — but which no patient 
 was ever desirous of undergoing a second time for the benefit of science), my 
 first care was to provide myself with an enormous stock or cravat to hide the 
 place — you understand me ; — my next care was to procure a residence as dis- 
 tant as possible from that part of the country where I had suffered. For that 
 reason I chose the metropolis, as the place where wounded honour (I had been 
 told) could lurk with the least danger of exciting inquiry, and stigmatized 
 innocence had the best chance of hiding her disgrace in a crowd. I sought 
 
 X 
 
6io The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 out a new circle of acquaintance, and ray circumstances happily enabling me 
 to pursue my fancy in that respect, I endeavoured, by mingling in all the 
 pleasures which the town affords, to efface the memory of what I had under- 
 gone. 
 
 But, alas 1 such is the portentous and all-pervading chain of connectipn which 
 links together the head and members- of this great /community, ,my scheme of 
 lying' perdu was defeated almost at the outset. A countryman of mine, whom 
 a foolish lawsuit had brought to- town, by chance met me, and the- secret 
 was soon blazoned about. 
 
 In a short time, I found myself deserted by most of those who had been my 
 intimate friends. Not that any guilt was supposed to attach to my character. 
 My officious countryman, to do him justice, had been candid enough to e.Nplain 
 my perfect innocence. But, somehow or other, there is a want of strong 
 virtue in mankind. We have plenty of the softer instincts, but the heroic 
 character is gone. How else can I account for it, that of all my numerous 
 acquaintance, among whoiri I had ' the honour of ranking sundry persons of 
 education, talents, and worth,, scarcely .here and there one or two could be 
 foimd, who had the courage to associate with a man that had been hanged. 
 
 Those few who did not desert me altogether, were persons of .strong but 
 coarse minds; and from the absence jof all delicacy in them I suffered, almost 
 as much as from the superabundanice of a false species of it in others. Those 
 who stuck by me were the jokers, who thought themselves entitled by the 
 fidelity which they had shoWn towards me to use me With what familiarity they 
 pleased. Many and unfeeling are the jests that I have suffered from these rude 
 (because faithful) Achatdses. ' As they passed me in the streets, on^ would nod 
 Significantly to his companion and say, pointing to me, "Smoke his cravat," 
 and ask me if I had got a wen, that 1 was so solicitous to cover my neck. 
 Another would inquire. What nSws from * • * Assizes?^ (which you may 
 guess, Mr. Editor, was the scene of my; shame), and whether the .sessions was 
 like to prove a Inaiden one? A third would offer to ensure me from drowning. 
 A fourth would tease me with inquiries how I felt when I was swinging, whether 
 I had not something like a blue ilame dancing before my eyes? A fifth took 
 a fancy never to call me anything-buf , EazdruS^ And an eminent bookseller 
 and publisher,^— who, in his zealoto prtsent the pubUc with new facts, had he 
 lived in those days, I am sonfideftt, "wduld not haVe .scrupled waiting upon the 
 person himself lasti mentioned, at the most critical period of his existence, to 
 solicit a, few facts relative to resiiscitaiion.^^haS. the modesty to offer me * * 
 guineas per sheet, if I would write, in his Magazine, .a physiological account 
 of my feelings upon coming to myself. i , ' 
 
 But these were evils which a hioderate fortitude might have, enabled me to 
 truggle with. Alas I Mr., ^ditor, the women,— whose good graces I had 
 always most assiduously cultivated, from whose softer minds I had hoped a 
 more' delicate and generous sympathy than I found in the njen,— the women 
 began to shun me — this was the unkindest blow of all. 
 
 But is it to be wondered at ? How couldst thou imagine, wretchedest of 
 beings, that that tender creature Seraphina would fling her pretty arms about 
 that- neck which previous circumstances had rendered infamous? That she 
 would put up with the refuse of the rope, tlie leavings of the cord? Or that 
 any analogy could subsisf between the knot which binds true lovers, and the 
 knot which ties malefactors? 
 
 I can forgive that pert baggage Flirtilla, who, when I complimented her one 
 day on the execution which her eyes had done, rephed, that, to be sure, Mr. * • 
 was a judge of those things. But from thy more exalted mind, Celestina, I 
 expected a more unprejudiced decision. 
 
 The person whose true name 'I conceal tinder this appellation, of all the 
 women that I was ever acquainted with, had the most manly turn of mind. 
 
Inconveniences Resulting from being Hanged. 6ii 
 
 which she had improved by reading and the best conversation. Her under- 
 standing was not more mascuUne than her manners and whole disposition were 
 delicately and truly feminine. She was the daughter of an officer who had 
 fallen in the service of his country, leaving his widow and Celestina, an only 
 child, with a fortune sufficient to set them above want, but not to enable them 
 to live in splendour. I had the mother's permission to pay my addresses to the 
 young lady, and Celestina seemed to approve of my suit. 
 
 Often and often have I poured out my overcharged soul in the presence of 
 Celestina, complaining of the hard and unfeeling prejudices of the world, and the 
 sweet maid has again and again declared, that no irrational prejudice should 
 hinder her from esteeming every man according to his intrinsic worth. Often 
 has she repeated the consolatory assurance, that she could never consider as 
 essentially Ignominious an accident, which was indeed to be deprecated, but 
 ■ which might have happened to the most innocent of mankind. Then would 
 she set forth some illustrious example, which her reading easily furnished, of a 
 Phocion or a Socrates unjustly condemned ; of a Raleigh or a Sir Thomas 
 More, to whom late posterity had done justice ; and by soothing my fancy 
 with some such agreeable parallel, she would make me almost to triumph in 
 my disgrace, and convert my shame into glory. 
 
 In such entertaining and instructive conversations the time passed on, till I 
 importunately urged the mistress of my affections to name a day for our union. 
 To this she obUgingly consented, and I thought myself the happiest of man- 
 kind. But how was I surprised one morning on the receipt of the following 
 billet from my charmer ;— 
 
 Sir, — You must not impute it to levity, or to a worse failing, ingratitude, if, 
 with anguish of heart, I feel myself compelled by irresistible arguments to 
 recall a vow which I fear I made with too little consideration. I never can be 
 yours. The reasons of my decision, which is final, are in my own breast, and 
 you must everlastingly remain a stranger to them. Assure yourself that I can 
 never cease to esteem you as I ought. 
 
 Celestina. 
 
 At the sight of this paper, I ran in frantic haste to Celestina's lodgings, where 
 I learned, to my infinite mortification, that the mother and daughter were set 
 off on a journey to a distant part of the country, to visit a relation, and were 
 not expected to return in less than four months, 
 
 Stunned by this blow, which left me without the courage to solicit an explan- 
 ation by letter, even if I had known where they were (for the particular address 
 was industriously concealed from me), I waited with impatience the termination 
 of the period, in the vain hope that I might be permitted to have a chance of 
 softening the harsh decision by a personal interview with Celestma after her 
 return. But before three months were at an end, I learned from the news- 
 papers, that my beloved had— given her hand to another ! 
 
 Heart-broken as I was, I was totally at a loss to account for the strange step 
 which she had taken ; and it was not till some years after that I learned the 
 true reason from a female relation of hers, to whom it seems Celestina had 
 confessed in confidence, that it was no demerit of mine that had caused her to 
 break off the match so abruptly, for any preference which she might feel for any 
 other person, for she preferred me (she was pleased to say) to all mankind ; but 
 when she came to lay the matter closer to her heart, she found that she never 
 should be able to bear the sight (I give you her very words as they were detailed 
 to me by her relation)— the sight of a man in a nightcap, who had appeared oiv 
 a public platform, it would lead to such a disagreeable association of ideas ! 
 And to this punctilio I was sacrificed. , .-, .,,-„i . „„.i 
 
 To pass over an infinite series of minor mortifications, to which this last and 
 
6i2 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 heaviest might well render me callous, behold me here, Mr. Editor ! in the 
 thirty-seventh year of my existence (the twelfth, reckoning from my re-anima- 
 tion), cut off from all respectable connections, rejected by the fairer half of the 
 community,— who in my case alone seemed to have laid aside the characteristic 
 pity of their sex ; punished because I was once punished unjustly ; suffering 
 for no other reason than because I once had the misfortune to suffer without, 
 any cause at all. In no other country, I think, but this, could a man have been 
 subject to such a life-long persecution, when once his innocence had been 
 clearly established. 
 
 Had I crawled forth a rescued victim from the rack in the horrible dungeons 
 of the Inquisition,— had I heaved myself up from a half bastinado in China, 
 or been torn from the just-entering, ghastly impahng stake in Barbary, — had I 
 dropped alive from the knout in Russia, or come off with a gashed neck from 
 the half-mortal, scarce-iii-time-retracted scimitar of an executioneering slave in 
 Turkey, — I might have borne about the remnant of this frame (the mangled 
 trophy of reprieved innocence) with credit to myself, in any of those bar- 
 barous countries. No scorn, at least, would have mingled with the piry 
 (small as it might be) with which what was left of me would have been 
 surveyed. 
 
 'I'he singularity of my case has often led me to inquire into the reasons of 
 the general levity with which the subject of hanging is treated as a topic in this 
 country. I say as a topic : for let the very persons who speak so liglitly of the 
 thing at a distance be brought to view the real scene, — let the platform be bona 
 fide exhibited, and the trembling culprit brought forth, — the case is changed; 
 but as a topic of conversation, I appeal to the vulgar jokes which pass current 
 in every street. But why mention them, when the politest authors have agreed 
 in making use of this subject as a source of the ridiculous ? Swift, and Pope, 
 and Prior, are fond of recurring to it. Gay has built an entire^drama upon this 
 single foundation. The whole interest of the Beggar's Opera may be said to 
 hang upon it. To such writers as Fielding and Smollett it is a perfect bonne 
 bouche. — Hear the facetious Tom Brown, in his Comical View of London and 
 Westminster, describe the Order of the Show at one of the Tyburn Executions 
 in his time : — " Mr. Ordinary visits his melancholy flock in Newgate by eight. 
 Doleful procession up Holborn Hill about eleven. Men handsome and proper 
 that were never thought so before, which is some comfort however. Arrive at the 
 fatal place by twelve. Burnt brandy, women, and sabbath-breaking, rqpented 
 of. Some few penitential drops fall under the gallows. Sheriff's men, parson, 
 pickpockets, criminaLs all very busy. The last concluding peremptory psalm 
 struck up. Show over by one." — In this sportive strain does this misguided wit 
 think proper to play with a subject so serious, which yet he would hardly have 
 done, if he had not known that there existed a predisposition in the habits of his 
 unaccountable countrymen to consider the subject as a jest. But what shall we 
 say to Shakspere, who (not to mention the solution which the Gravedigger in 
 Hamlet gives of his fellow-workman's problem), in that scene in Measure for 
 Measure, where the Clown calls upon Master Bamardine to get up and be 
 hanged, which he decUnes on the score of being sleepy, has actually gone out 
 of his way to gratify this amiable propensity in his countrymen ; for it is plain, 
 from the use that was to be made of his head, and from Abhorson's asking, 
 ' ' Is the axe upon the block, sirrah ? " that beheading, and not hanging, was 
 the punishment to which Bamardine was destined. But Shakspere knew that 
 the axe and block were pregnant with no ludicrous images, and therefore falsi- 
 fied the historic truth of his own drama (if I may so speak) rather than he would 
 leave out such excellent matter for a jest as the suspending of a fellow-creature 
 in mid air has been ever esteemed to be by Englishmen. 
 
 One reason why the ludicrtms never fails to intrude itself into our contem- 
 plations upon this mode of deam, I suppose to be, the absurd posture into which 
 
Iticonveniences Resulting from being Hanged. 613 
 
 a man is thrown who is condemned to dance, as the ulgar delight to vexpress 
 it, upon nothing. To see him whisking and wavering in the air, 
 
 As the wind you know will wave a man ;* 
 to behold the vacant carcass, from which the life is newly dislodged, shifting 
 between earth and heaven, the sport of every gust ; like a weathercock, serving 
 to show from which point the wind blows ; like a maukin, fit only to scare 
 away birds ; hke a nest left to swing upon a bough when the bird is flown ; 
 these are uses to which we cannot without a mixture of spleen and contempt 
 behold the human' carcass reduced. We string up dogs, fo.xes, bats, moles, 
 weasels. Man surely deserves a steadier death. 
 
 Another reason why the ludicrous associates more forcibly with this than with 
 any other mode of punishment, I cannot help thinking to be the senseless 
 costume with which old prescription has thought fit to clothe the exit of male- 
 factors in this country. Let a man do what he will to abstract from his 
 imagination all idea of the whimsical, something of it will come across him 
 when he contemplates the figure of a fellow-creature in the daytime (in how- 
 ever distressing a situation) in a nightcap. Whethei; it be that this nocturnal 
 addition has something discordant with daylight, or that it is the dress which 
 we are seen in at those times when we are "seen," as the Angel in Milton 
 expresses it, " leastwise ; " this I am afraid will always be the case ; unless 
 indeed, as in my instance, some strong personal feeling overpower the ludicrous 
 altogether. To me, when I reflect upon the train of misfortunes which have 
 pursued me through life, owing to that accursed drapery, the cap presents as 
 purely frightful an object as the sleeveless yellow coat and devil-painted mitre 
 of the San Benitos. — An ancestor of mine, who suffered for his loyalty in 
 the time of the civil wars, was so sensible of the truth of what I am here 
 advancing, that on the morning of execution, no entreaties could prevail upon 
 him to submit to the odious deshabille, as he called it, but he insisted upon 
 wearing, and actually suffered in, the identical flowing periwig which he is 
 painted in, in the gallery belonging to my uncle's seat in shire. 
 
 Suffer me, Mr. Editor, before I quit the subject, to say a word or two 
 respecting the minister of justice in this country ; in plain words, I mean the 
 hangman. It has always appeared to me that, in the mode of inflicting capital 
 punishments with us, there is too much of the ministry of the human hand. 
 The guillotine, as performing its functions more of ttself and sparing human 
 agency, though a cruel and disgusting exhibition, in my mind, has many 
 ways the advantage over our way. In beheading, indeed, as it was formerly 
 practised in England, and in whipping to death, as is sometimes practised 
 now, the hand of man is no doubt sufficiently busy; but there is some- 
 thing less repugnant in these downright blows than in the officious barber- 
 like ministerings of the other. To have a fellow with his hangman's hands 
 fumbling about your collar, adjusting the thing as your valet would regulate 
 your cravat, valuing himself on his menial dexterity 
 
 I never shall forget meeting my rascal, — I mean the fellow who officiated for 
 me, — in London last winter. I think I see him now,— in a waistcoat that had 
 been mine,— smirking along as if he knew me 
 
 In some parts of Germany, that fellow's office is by law declared infamous, 
 and his posterity incapable of being ennobled. They have hereditary hang- 
 men, or had at least, in the same manner as they had hereditary other great 
 officers of state; and the hangmen's families of two adjoining parishes inter- 
 married with each other, to keep the breed entire. I wish something of the 
 same kind were established in England. 
 
 But it is time to quit a subject which teems with disagreeable images 
 
 Permit me to subscribe myself, Mr. Editor, Your unfortunate friend, 
 
 Pensilis. 
 * Hieronimo in the Spanish Tragedy. 
 
6 14 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 WITH A HINT TO THOSE HAVING THE FRAMING OF ADVERTISE, 
 MENTS FOR APPREHENDING OFFENDERS. 
 
 (The Reflector, No. il., art. xv., 1811.) 
 
 [When it originally appeared, this paper was signed " Crito."] 
 
 Mr. Reflector, there is no science in their pretensions to which mankind are 
 more apt to commit grievous mistakes, than in the supposed very obviotis one 
 of physiognomy. I quarrel not with the principles of this science, as they are 
 laid down by learned professors ; much less am I disposed, with some people, 
 to deny its existence altogether as any inlet of knowledge that can be depended 
 upon. I believe that there is, or may be, an art to " read the mind's construc- 
 tion in the face." But) then, in every species of reading, so much depends 
 upon the eyes of the reader ; if they are blear, or apt to dazzle, or inattentive, 
 or strained with too much attention, the optic power will infallibly bring home 
 false reports of what it reads. How often do we say, upon a cursory glance 
 at a stranger, what a fine open countenance he has, who, upon second inspec- 
 tion, proves to have the exact features of a knave. Nay, in much more inti- 
 mate acquaintances, how a delusion of this kind shall continue for months, 
 years, and then break up all at once. 
 
 Ask the married man, who has been so but for a short space of time, if those 
 blue eyes where, during so many years of anxious courtship, truth, sweetness, 
 serenity, seemed to be written in characters which could not be misunderstood 
 — ask him if the characters which they now convey be exactly the same ? — if 
 for truth he does not rend a dull virtue (the mimic of constancy) which' changes] 
 not, only because it wants the judgment to make a preference? — if for sweet- 
 ness he does not read a stupid habit of looking pleased at everything, — if for 
 serenity he does not read unrmaX tranquillity, the dead pool of the heart, which 
 no breeze of passion can stir into health ? Alas I what is this book of the coun- 
 tenance good for, which when we have read so long,' and thought that we 
 understood its contents, there comes a countless list of heart-breaking errata 
 at the end ! 
 
 But these are the pitiable mistakes to which love alone is subject. I have 
 inadvertently wandered from my purpose, which was to expose quite an oppo- 
 site blunder, into which we are no less apt to fall, through hate. How ugly a 
 person looks upon whose reputation some awkward aspersion hangs, and how 
 suddenly his countenance clears up with his character. I remember Ijeing per- 
 suaded of a man whom I had conceived an ill opinion of, that he had a very 
 bad set of teeth : which, since I have had better opportunities of being ac- 
 quainted with his face and facts, I find to have been the very reverse of the truth. 
 TAat crooked old woman, I once said, speaking of an aged gentlewoman, whose 
 actions did not square altogether with my riotions of the rule of right. The 
 unanimous surprise of the company before whom I uttered these words, soon 
 convinced me that I had confounded mental with bodily obliquity, and that 
 there was nothing tortuous about the old lady but her deeds. 
 
 This humour of mankind to deny personal comeliness to those with whose 
 
Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity. 6 1 5 
 
 moral attributes they are dissatisfied, is vety strongly sliown in those adv^c^e 
 ments, which stare us in the face from the walls of every street ^dwkh the 
 empfng bait wh.ch they hang forth, stimulate at once cu^idUyiiTan abstract 
 oveofjust.ee in the breast of every passing peruser; I Lan,X advert se- 
 ments offering rewards for the apprehension of absconded culorits straved 
 apprentices bankrupts who have conveyed away their effects? debto^ihat hive 
 
 [n"d"i.nir^ ■f;:°™v"}f"L ''^"- ^ °'^=^"«' "'^' '° ^^^'^^ proportSn to thi 
 ndignity with which the prosecutor, who is commonly the framer of the adver! 
 tisenient, conceives he has been treated, the personal pretensions of the fugilfve 
 are denied, and his defects exaggerated. iuguive 
 
 A fellow, whose misdeeds have been directed against the public in general 
 and in whose delinquency no individual shall feel himself particularlyintlrested 
 generally meets with fair usage. A coiner or a smuggler shall get off toleiabi; 
 well. His beauty, if he has any, is not underrated, his deformities are not much 
 magnihed. A runaway apprentice, who excites perhaps the next least degree 
 of spleen in his prosecutor, generally escapes with a pair of bandy legs : if he 
 Ta '^''^VJ!^"?'"S with him in his flight, a hitch in his gait is generally super- 
 added. A bankrupt, who has been guilty of withdrawing his effects, if his case 
 be not very atrocious, commonly meets with mild usage. But a debtor who 
 has left his bail in jeopardy, is sure to be described in characters of unmingled 
 deformity. Here the personal feelings of the bail, which may be allowed to be 
 somewhat poignant, are admitted to interfere ; and, as wrath and revenge com- 
 monly strike in the dark, the colours are laid on with a grossness which I am 
 convinced must often defeat its own purpose. The fish that casts an inky cloud 
 about.him that his enemies may not find him, cannot more obscure himseff by 
 that device than the blackening representations of these angry advertisers must 
 inevitably serve to cloak and screen the persons of those who have injured them 
 from detection. I have before me at this moment one of these bills which 
 runs thus : — 
 
 Fifty Pounds Reward. 
 
 " Run away from his bail, John Tomkins, formerly resident in Princes Street, 
 Soho, but lately of Clerkenwell. Whoever shall apprehend, or cause to be 
 apprehended and lodged in one of his Majesty's jails, the said John Tomkins, 
 shall receive the above reward. He is a thickset, sturdy man, about five foot 
 six inches high, halts in his left leg, with a stoop in his gait, with coarse red 
 hair, nose short and cocked up, with little grey eyes; one of them bears the 
 effect of a blow which he has lately received, with a pot belly, speaks with a 
 thick and disagreeable voice, goes shabbily dressed, had on when he went away 
 a greasy shag great coat, with rusty yellow buttons." 
 
 Now, although it is not out of the compass of possibility that John Tomkins 
 aforesaid may comprehend in his agreeable person all the above-mentioned 
 aggregate of charms ; yet, from my observation of the manner in which these 
 advertisements are usually drawn up, though I have not the pleasure of knowing 
 the gentleman, yet would I lay a wager that an advertisement to the following 
 effect would have a much better chance of apprehending and laying by the 
 heels this John Tomkins than the above description, although penned by one 
 who, from the good services which he appears to have done for him, has not 
 improbably been blessed with some ysars of previous intercourse with the said 
 John. Taking, then, the above advertisement to be true, or nearly so, down 
 to the words "left leg" inclusive (though I have some doubt if the blemish 
 there implied amount to a positive lameness, or be perceivable by any but the 
 nearest friends of John) I would proceed thus : — 
 
 — "Leans a little forward in his walk, his hair thick and inclining to auburn, 
 his nose of a middle size, a httle turned up at the end, lively hazel, eyes 
 (the contusion, as its effects are probably gone off by this time, I judge better 
 
6i6 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 omitted), inclines to be corpulent, his voice thick but pleasing, especially when 
 he sings, liad on a decent shag greatcoat with yellow buttons." 
 
 Now, I would stake a considerable wager (though by no means a positive 
 man) that some such mitigated description would lead the beagles of the law 
 into a much surer track for finding this ungracious varlet, than to set them upon 
 a false scent after fictitious ugliness and fictitious shabbiness ; though, to do 
 those gentlemen justice, I have no doubt their experience has taught them in 
 all such cases to abate a great deal of the deformity which they are instructed 
 to expect; and has discovered to them that the Devil's agents upon this earth, 
 like their master, are far less ugly in reality than they are painted. 
 
 I am afraid, Mr. Reflector, that I shall be thought to have gone wide of my 
 subject, which was to detect the practical errors of physiognomy properly so 
 called ; whereas I have introduced physical defects, such as lameness, the effects 
 of accidents upon a man's person, his wearing apparel, &c., as circumstances 
 on which the eye of dislike, looking askance, may report erroneous conclusions 
 to the understanding. But if we are liable, through a kind, or an unkind pas- 
 sion, to mistake so grossly concerning things so exterior and palpable, how 
 much more are we likely to err respecting those nicer and less perceptible hints 
 of character in a face, whose detection constitutes the triumph of the physiog- 
 nomist ? 
 
 To revert to those bestowers of unmerited deformity, the framers of adver- 
 tisements for the apprehension of delinqents, a sincere desire of promoting the 
 ends of public justice induces me to address a word to them on the best means 
 of attaining those ends. I will endeavour to lay down a few practical, or rather 
 negative, rules for their use, for my ambition extends no further than to arm 
 them with cautions against the self-defeating of their own purposes : — 
 
 1. Imprimis, then* Mr, Advertiser ! If the culprit whom you are willing to 
 recover be one to whom in times past you have shown kindness, and been dis- 
 posed to think kindly of him yourself, but he has deceived your trust, and run 
 away, and left you with a load of debt to answer for him. — sit down calmly, 
 and endeavour to behold him through the spectacles of memory rather than of 
 
 ' present conceit. Imagine to yoiurself, before you pen a tittle of his description, 
 the same plausible, good-looking man who took you in ; and try to put away 
 from your mind every intrusion of that deceitful spectre which perpetually ob- 
 trudes itself in the room of your former friend' s known visage. It will do you 
 more credit to have been deceived by such a one ; and depend upon it, the 
 traitor will convey to the eyes of the world in general much more of that first 
 idea which you formed (perhaps in part erroneous) of his physiognomy, than 
 of that frightful substitute which you have suffered to creep in upon your mind 
 and usurp upon it ; a creature which has no archetype except in your own 
 brain. 
 
 2. If you be a master that have to advertise a runaway apprentice, though 
 the young dog's faults are known only to you, and no doubt his conduct has 
 been aggravating enough, do not presently set him down as having crooked 
 ankles. He may have a good pair of legs, an'd run away notwithstanding. 
 Indeed, the latter does rather seem to imply the former. 
 
 3. If the unhappy person against whom your laudable vengeance is directed 
 be a thief, think that a thief may have a good nose, good eyes, good ears. It 
 is indispensable to his profession that he be possessed of sagacity, foresight, vigi- 
 lance ; it is more than probable, then, that he is endued with the bodily types 
 or instruments of these qualities to some tolerable degree of perfectness. 
 
 4. If petty laiceny be his offence, I exhort you, do not confound meanness 
 of crime with diminutiveness of stature. These things have no connection. 
 I have known a tall man stoop to the basest action, a short man aspire to the 
 height of crime, a fair man be guilty of the foulest actions, &c. 
 
 5. Perhaps the offender has been guilty of some atrocious and aggravated 
 
Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity. 617 
 
 murder. Here is the most difficult case of all. It is above all requisite, that 
 such a daring violator of the peace and safety of society should meet with his 
 reward, a violent and ignominious death. But how shall we get at him ? 
 Who is there among us, that has known him before he committed the offence, 
 that shall take upon him to say he can sit down coolly and pen a dispassionate 
 description of a murderer? The tales of our nursery,— the reading of our 
 youth, — the ill-looking man that was hired by the Uncle to despatch the 
 Children in the Wood, — the grim ruflSans who smothered the babes in the 
 Tower, — the black and beetle-browed assassin of Mrs. RadcUffe,— the shag- 
 haired villain of Mr. Monk Lewis, — the Tarquin tread, and mill-stone dropping 
 eyes, of Murder in Shakspere, — the exaggerations of picture and of poetry, — 
 what we have read and what we have dreamed of, — rise up and crowd in upon 
 us such eye-scaring portraits of the man of blood, that our pen is absolutely 
 forestalled ; we commence poets when we should play the part of strictest 
 historians, and the very blackness of horror which the deed calls up, serves as a 
 cloud to screen the doer. The fiction is blameless, it is accordant with those 
 wise prejudices with which nature has guarded our innocence, as with impass- 
 able barriers, against the commission of such appalling crimes ; but, mean- 
 time, the criminal escapes ; or if, — owing to that wise abatement in their 
 expectation of deformity, which, as I hinted at before, the officers of pursuit 
 never fail to make, and no doubt in cases of this sort they make a more than 
 ordinary allowance, — if, owing to this or any accident, the offender is caught 
 and brought to his trial, who that has been led out of curiosity to witness such 
 a scene, has not with astonishment reflected on the difference between a real 
 committer of a murder, and the idea of one which he has been collecting and 
 heightening all his fife out of books, dreams, &c. The fellow, perhaps, is a 
 sleek, smug-looking man, with light hair and eye-brows, — the latter by no 
 means jutting out or like a crag, — and with none of those marks which our 
 fancy had pre-bestowed upon him. 
 
 I find I am getting unawares too serious ; the best way on such occasions 
 is, to leave off, which I shall do by generally recommending to all prosecuting 
 advertisers not to confound crimes with ugliness; or rather, to distinguish 
 between that physiognomical deformity, which I am willing to grant always 
 accompanies crime, and mere physical tigliness, — which signifies nothing, 
 is the exponent of nothing, and may exist in a good or a bad person indif- 
 ferently. 
 
 {The Sefiector, No. 11., art. xvi., i8ii.) 
 
 [As originally printed in the Reflectirr, the following paper, which was thwe signed 
 " Speculator," had affixed to it this roundabout heading. On the Probable i,ffects of 
 the Gunpowder Treason in this Country if the Conspirators had accomplished their 
 Object." The briefer title here given was first attached to it when the paper was reprinted 
 in the London Magazine of November, 1823.3 
 
 A VERY ingenious and subtle writer, whom there is good reason for suspecting 
 to be an ex-Jesuit, not unknown at Douay some five-and-twenty years smce 
 
6i8 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 (he will not obtrade himself at M th again in a hurry), about a twelve- 
 
 raohth back set himself to prove the character of the Powder Plot Conspirators 
 to have been that of heroic self-devotedness and true Christian martyrdom. 
 Under the mask of Protestant candour, he actually gained admission for his 
 treatise into a London weekly paper not particularly distinguished for its zeal 
 towards either religion- But, adtnitting Catholic principles, his' arguments &re 
 shrewd and incontrovertible. He says : — ' ■ ' '■'■ ' _.', 
 
 ' ' Guy Faux was a fanatic ; but he was no hyp'ocrife. He tanks among '^ot? 
 haters. He was cruel, bloody-minded, reckless of all considerations but thps^ 
 of an infuriated and bigoted faith ; but he was a true son of the Catholic 
 Church, a martyr, and a coiifessor, for all that. He whcKJan prevail upon 
 himself to devote his life to a cause, however we may condem'n his opinions or 
 abhor his actions, vouches at least -for the honesty of his principles' arid 'the 
 disinterestedness of his motives. 'He may be' guilty of the worst practices j 
 but he is capable 'of the greatest. He is no longer a slave, but free. The 
 contempt of death is the beginning of virtue. The hero of the Gunpowder 
 Plot was, if you will, a fool, a madman, an assassin ; call him what naines yoi^ 
 please : still he was neither knave nor coward. He did not propose to blowt 
 up the parliament, and come off scot-free himself: he showed that he valued 
 his own life no more than theirs in' such a cause, where theintegnfy of the 
 Catholic faith and the salvation of perhaps millions of souls was at stake. 
 He did not call it a murder, but a sacrifice, which he was about to achieve : 
 he was armed with the Holy Spirit and with fire: he was the Church's chosen 
 servant, and her blessed martyr. He comforted himself as ' the best of cut- 
 throats." How many wretches are there who would have undertaken to do 
 what he intended, for a sum of money, if they could' have got off with im- 
 punity ! How few are there who would have put themselves in Guy Faux's 
 situation to save the universe ! Yet, in the latter case, we affect to be thrown 
 into greater consternation than at the most unredeemed acts of villany ; as if 
 the absoliite disinterestedness of the motive doubled the horror of the deed ! 
 The cowardice and selfishness of mankind are in fact shocked at the conse- 
 quences to themselves (if such exosoples are held up for imitation) ; and they 
 make a fearful outcry against the violation of every principle of morality, lest 
 they, too, should be called on for any such tremendous sacrifices ; lest they in 
 their turn, should have to go on the forlorn hope of extra-ofiicial duty. Charity 
 begins at home is a maxim that prevails as well in the courts of. consciousness 
 as in those of prudence. We would be thought to shudder at the conse- 
 quences of crime to others, while we tremble for them to ourselves. "We talk 
 of the dark and cowardly assassin ; and this is well, when an individual shrinks 
 from the face of an enemy, and purchases his own safety by striking a blow in 
 the dark : but how the charge of cowardly can be applied to the public assassin, 
 who, in the very act of destroying another, lays down his life as the pledge and 
 forfeit of his sincerity and boldness, I am at a loss to devise. There may be 
 barbarous prejudice, rooted hatred, unprincipled treachery in such an act ; but 
 he who resolves to take all the danger and odium upon himself can no more 
 be branded vrith cowardice, than Regulus devoting himself for his country, 
 or Codrus leaping into the fiery gulf. A wily Father Inquisitor, coolly and 
 with plenary authority condemning hundreds of helpless, unoffending victims 
 to the flames, or the horrors of a living tomb, while he himself would. not 
 suffer a hair of his head to be hurt, is, to me, a character without any qualifying 
 trait in it. Again: The Spanish conqueror and hero, the favourite of his 
 monarch, who enticed thirty thousand poor Mexicans into a large open building 
 under promise of strict faith and cordial good-will, and then set fire to it, 
 making sport of the cries and agonies of these deluded creatures, is an instance 
 of uniting the most hardened cruelty with the most heartless selfishness. His 
 plea was, keeping no faith with heretics ; this was Guy Faux's too : but I am 
 
Guy Faux. 619 
 
 sure at least that the latter kept faith with himself ; he was in earnest in his prq- 
 fessions. His was not ^ay, wanton, unfeeling depravity ; he did not murder 
 in sport : It was serious work that he had taken in hand. To see this arch- 
 bigot, this heart-whole traitor, this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulliing 
 in his retreat with his cloak and dM'k lantern, moving cautiously about among 
 hisbairels of gunpowder loaded with death, but not yet ripe for destruction, 
 regardless of the lives of others, and more tlian indifferent to his own, presents 
 a picture of the strange infatuation of the human understanding, but not of 
 the depravity of the human will, without an equal. There were thousands of 
 pious Papists, privy to and ready to applaud the deed when done : there was 
 no one but pur old fifth-of-November friend, who still Gutters in rags and straw 
 on the occasion, that had the courage to attempt it. In him stern duty and 
 unshaken faith prevailed over natural frailty.'' : 
 
 It is impossible, upon Catholic principles, not to admit the force of this 
 reasoning : we can only not help smiling (with the writer) at the simplicity of 
 the gulled editor, swallowing the dregs of Loyola for the very quintessence of 
 subhmated reason in England at the commencement of the nineteenth century. 
 We will just, as a contrast, show what we Protestants (who are a party con., 
 earned) thought upon the same subject at a period rather nearer to the heroic 
 project in question. , 
 
 The Gunpowder Treason was the subject which called forth the earliest 
 specimen which is left us of the pulpit eloquence of Jeremy Taylor. When 
 he preached the sermon on that anniversary, which is printed at the .end of the. 
 folio edition of liis Sermons, he was a young man, just commencing his 
 ministry under the auspices of Archbishop Laud. From the learning and' 
 maturest oratory which it manifests, one should rather have conjectured it to 
 have proceeded from the same person after he was ripened by time into a 
 Bishop and Father of the Church. "And, really, these Romano-harbari 
 could never pretend to any precedent for an act so barbarous as theirs. 
 Adramelech, indeed, killed a king; but he spared the people. Haman 
 would have killed the people, but spared the king; but that both king and 
 people, princes and judges, branch and rush and root, should die at once (as 
 if Caligula's wish were actuated, and all England upon one head), was never 
 known till now, that all the malice of the world met in this as in a centre.. 
 The Sicilian even-song, the matins of St. Bartholomew, known for the pitiless 
 and damned massacres, were but /tairi/ou <r/ti'as owip, the dream of the shadow of 
 smolce, if compared with this great fire. In tarn occupato smculo fabulas 
 vulgares veguitia non invenit. This was a busy age. Herostratus must have 
 invented a more sublimed malice than the burning of one temple, or not have 
 been so much as spoke of since the discovery of the powder treason. But I 
 must make more haste; I shall not else climb the sublimity of this impiefy. 
 Nero was sometimes (hepopulare odium, was popularly hated, and deserved it 
 too : for he slew his master, and his wife, and all his family, once or twice 
 over; opened his mother's womb; fired the city, laughed at it, slandered the , 
 Christians for it : but yet all these were but frincipia malorum, the very first ^ 
 rudiments of evil. Add, then, to these, Herod's masterpiece at Ramah, as it 
 was deciphered by the tears and sad threnes of the matrons in a universal 
 mourning for the loss of their pretty infants ; yet this of Herod will prove but 
 an infant wickedness, and that of Nero the evil but of one city. I would 
 willingly have found out an example, but see I cannot. Should I put mto the 
 scale the extract of the old tyrants famous in antique stories :— 
 
 " Bistonii stabulum regis, Busiridis aras, 
 Antiphatffi mensas, et Taurica regna Tiioantis ;— 
 
 should I take for true story the highest cruelty as it was fancied by the most 
 liieroglyphical Egyptian,— this alone would weigh them down, as if the Alps 
 
620 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 were put in scale against the dust of a balance. For, had this accursed treason 
 prospered, we should have had the whole kingdom mourn for the inestimable 
 loss of its chiefest glory, its life, its present joy, and all its very hopes for the 
 future. For such was their destined malice, that they would not only have in- 
 flicted so cruel a blow, but have made it incurable, by cutting off our suppUes 
 of joy, the whole succession of the Line Royal. Not only the vine itself, but 
 all the gemmula, and the tender olive branches, should either have been bent 
 to their intentions, and made to grow crooked, or else been broken. 
 
 "And now, after such a sublimity of malice, I will not instance in the 
 sacrilegious ruin of the neighbouring temples, which needs must have perished 
 in the flame ; nor in the disturbing the ashes of our entombed kings, devour- 
 ing their dead ruins hke sepulchral dogs : these are but minutes in respect of 
 the ruin prepared for the living temples :— 
 
 " Stragem sed iscam non tulit 
 
 Christus cadentum Principum 
 
 Impune, ne forsan sui 
 
 Paths periret fabrica. 
 
 Ergo quae poterit lingua retexere 
 
 Laudes, Christe, tuas, qui domitutn struis 
 
 Iniidum populum cum Duce perfido 1" 
 
 In such strains of eloquent indignation did Jeremy Taylor's young oratory 
 inveigh against that stupendous attempt which he truly says had no parallel in 
 ancient or modem times. A century and a half of European crimes has elapsed 
 since he made the assertion, and his position remains in its strength. He 
 wrote near the time in which the nefarious project had like to have been com- 
 pleted. Men's minds still were shuddering from the recentness of the escape. 
 It must have been within his memory, or have been sounded in his ears so 
 young by his parents, that he would seem, in his maturer years, to have re- 
 membered it. No wonder, then, that he describes it in words that bum. But 
 to us, to whom the tradition has come slowly down, and has had time to cool, 
 the story of Guido Vaux sounds rather like a tale, a fable, and an invention, 
 than trae history. It supposes such gigantic audacity of daring, com- 
 bined with such more than infantile stupidity in the motive, — such a combina- 
 tion of the fiend and the monkey, — that credulity is almost swallowed up in 
 contemplating the singularity of the attempt. It has accordingly, in some 
 degree, shared the fate of fiction. It is famiharized to us in a kind of serio- 
 ludicrous way, like the story of Guy of Warwick, or Valentine and Orson. The 
 way which we take to perpetuate the memory of this deliverance is well adapted 
 to keep up this fabular notion. Boys go about the streets annually with a 
 beggarly scarecrow dressed up, which is to be burnt indeed, at night, with 
 holy 'zeal ; but, meantime, they beg a penny for poor Guy : this periodical 
 petition, which we have heard from our infancy, combined with the dress and 
 appearance of the effigy, so well calculated to move compassion, has the effect 
 of quite removing from our fancy the horrid circtimstances of the story which 
 is thus commemorated ; and in poor Guy vainly should we try to recognize any 
 of the features of that tremendous madman in iniquity, Guido Vaux, with his 
 horrid crew of accompUces, that sought to emulate earthquakes and bursting 
 volcanoes in their more than mortal mischief 
 
 Indeed, the whole ceremony of burning Guy Faux, or the Pope, as he is 
 indifferently called, is a sort of Treason Travestie, and admirably adapted to 
 lov/er our feehngs upon this memorable subject. The printers of the little 
 duodecimo Prayer Book, printed by T. Baskett,* in 1749, which has the effigy 
 * The same, I presume, upon whom the clergyman in the song of the " Vicar and 
 Moses," not without' judgment, passes this memorable censure : 
 " Here, Moses the king : 
 
 "ris a scandalous thing 
 
 That this Baskett should print for the Crown." 
 
Guy Faux. (s<2.\ 
 
 of his sacred majesty George II. piously prefixed, have illustrated the service 
 (a very fine one in itself), which is appointed for the anniversary of this day, 
 with a print, which it is not very easy to describe ; but the contents appear to 
 be these : The scene is a room, I conjecture in the king's palace. Two persons 
 —one of whom I take to be James himself, from his wearing his hat, while the 
 other stands bareheaded — are intently surveying a sort of speculum, or magic 
 mirror, which stands upon a pedestal in the midst of the room, in which a 
 Uttle figure of Guy Faux with his dark lantern, approaching the door of the 
 Parliament House, is made discernible by the light proceedihg from a great eye 
 which shines in from the topmost comer of the apartment ; by which eye the 
 pious artist no doubt meant to designate Providence. On the other side of 
 the mirror is- a figure doing something, which puzzled me when a child, and 
 continues to puzzle me now. The best I can make of it is, that it is a 
 conspirator busy laying the train; but, then, why is he represented in the 
 king's chamber? Conjecture upon so fantastical a design is vain; and I only 
 notice tlje print as being one of the earliest graphic representations which 
 woke my childhood into wonder, and doubtless combined, with the mummery 
 before mentioned, to take off the edge of that horror which the naked his- 
 torical mention of Guido's conspiracy could not have failed of exciting. 
 
 Now that so many years are past since that abominable machination was 
 happily frustrated, it will not, I hope, be considered a profane sporting with 
 the subject, if we take no very serious survey of the consequences that would 
 have flowed from this plot if it had had a successful issue. The first thing 
 that strikes us, in a selfish point of view, is the material change which it must 
 have produced in the course of the nobility. All the ancient peerage being 
 extinguished, as it was intended, at one blow, the Red Book must have been 
 closed for ever, or a new race of peers must have been created to supply the 
 deficiency. As the first part of this dilemma is a deal too shocking to think 
 of, what a fund of mouth-watering reflections does this give rise to in the breast 
 of us plebeians of a.d. 1823 ! 'Why, you or I, reader, might have been Duke 
 
 of , or Earl of . I particularize no titles, to avoid the least suspicion 
 
 of intention to usurp the dignities of the two noblemen whom I have in my 
 eye ; but a feeling more dignified than envy sometimes excites a sigh, when I 
 think how the posterity of Guido's Legion of Honour (among whom you or I 
 might have been) might have rolled down "dulcified," as Burke expresses it, 
 "by an exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of generations, 
 from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the spring."* What new orders 
 of merit, think you, this English Napoleon would have chosen? Knights of 
 the Barrel, or Lords of the Tub, Grand Almoners of the Cellar, or Ministers 
 of Explosion ? We should have given the train couchant, and the fire ram- 
 pant, in our arms ; we should have quartered the dozen white matches in our 
 coats : the Shallows would have been nothing to us. 
 
 Turning away from these mortifying reflections, let us contemplate its effects 
 upo« the other home; for they were all to have gone together,— king, lords, 
 
 commons. , , j •» ■ »v 
 
 To assist our imagination, let us take leave to suppose (and we do it m the 
 harmless wantonness of fancy) that the tremendous explosion had taken place 
 in our days. We better know what a House of Commons is in our days, and 
 can better estimate our loss. Let us imagine, then, to ourselves, the united 
 members sitting in full conclave above; Faux just ready with his train and 
 matches below,— in his hand a "reed tipt with fire. He applies the fatal 
 
 ™To assist our notions still further, let us suppose some lucky dog of a re- 
 porter, who had escaped by miracle upon some plank of St. btephen s benches, 
 and came plump upon the roof of the adjacent Abbey; from whence descend- 
 * Letter to a Noble Lord. 
 
622 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ing, at some neighbouring coffee-house, first wiping his clothes and calling for 
 a glass of lemonade, he sits down and reports what he had heard and seen 
 {quorum pat's magna fuit), for the Morning Post or the Courier. We can 
 scarcely imagine him describing the event in any other words but some such 
 as these : — 
 
 "A TKotion was put and carried, that this House Ao adjourn ; that the 
 speaker do quit the chair. ' The House HOSE amid clamours for order. "■ 
 ; In some such way the event might most technically have been conveyed to 
 the public. Buta poetical mind, not content with this dry method of narra- 
 tion, cannot jielp pursuing the effects of this tremendous blowing up, this ad- 
 journment in the air, sine die. It seems the benches mount, — the chair first, 
 and then the benches ; and first the treasury bench, hurried up in this- nitrous 
 explosion, — the members,- as it were, pairing off; Whigs and Tories talcing 
 their friendly apotheosis together (as they -did their sandwiches below, in 
 Bellamy's room). Fancy, in her flight, keeps pace with the aspiring legis- 
 lators : she sees the awful seat of order mounting, till it becomes finally fixed, 
 a constellation, next to Cassiopeia's chair, — the wig of him that sat in it 
 taking its place near Berenice's curls. St. Peter, at heaven's wicket, — no, not 
 St. Peter, — St. Stephen, with open arms, receives his own. 
 j While Fancy beholds these celestial appropriations. Reason, no less pleased, 
 cliscerns the mighty benefit which so complete a renovation must produce 
 below. Let the most determined foe to corruption, the most thorough-paced 
 redresser of abuses, try to conceive a more absolute purification of the House, 
 than this was calculated to produce. Why, Pride's purge was nothing to it.' 
 The whole borough-mongering system would have been got rid of, fairly ex- 
 ploded ; with it the senseless distinctions of party must have disappeared, 
 faction must have vanished, corruption have expired in the air. From 
 Hundred,- Tything, and Wapentake, some new Alfred would have convened, 
 in all its purity, the primitive Witenagemote, — fixed upon a basis of property 
 or population permanent as the poles. 
 
 From this dream of universal restitution. Reason and Fancy with difficulty 
 awake to view the real state of things. But, blessed be Heaven ! St. Stephen s 
 walls are standing, all her seats firmly secured ; nay, some have doubted (since 
 tha Septennial Act) whether gunpowder itself, or anything short of a committee 
 above stairs, would be able to shake any one member from his seat. That 
 great and final improvement to the Abbey, which is all that seems wanting, — 
 the removing Westminster Hall and its appendages, and letting in the view of 
 the Thames, — must not be expected in our days. Dismissing,' therefore, all 
 such speculations as mere tales of a tub, it is the duty of every honest English- 
 man to endeavour, by means less wholesale than Guido's, to ameliorate, without 
 extinguishing parliaments ; to hold the lantern to the dark places of corrup-'' 
 tion ; to apply the match to the rotten parts of the system only ; and to wrap 
 himself up, not in the muffling mantle of conspiracy, but in the warm honest 
 cloak of integrity and patriotic intention. 
 
 #n a^t ^mKgttiths arising from ||rflpr ilamfs. 
 
 [The Reflector, No. ii., Art. xxi., 1811.) 
 
 How oddly it happens that the same sound shal\ siiggest to the minds of two 
 Ipersons hearing it ideas the most opposite I I was conversing, a few years 
 
071 the Ambiguities arising from Proper Names. 623 
 
 since, with a young friend upon the subject of poetry, and particularly that 
 species of it which is Icnown by the name, of the epithalamium. I, ventured to 
 assert that the most perfect specimen of it in our language was the " Epitha- 
 lamium" of Spenser upon his Own marriage. 
 
 My young.gentleman, who.has a smattering of taste, and would not 
 willingly be thought ignorant of anything remotely connected with the belles- 
 lettres, expressed a degree of .surprisp, mixed with mortification, that he should 
 never have heard of this poem ; Spenser being an author with whose writings 
 he thought himself peculiarly conversant. ° 
 
 I offeredito show ,him the poem, in the fine folio copy of the poet's works 
 which Iihave at home. He seemed pleased with the offer, though the mention 
 of the ifolio seemed 4gain to puzzle him. But, presently after, assuming a 
 grave look, he compassionately muttered to himself, "Poor Spencer ! " 
 
 There was something in the tone with which he spoke these words that 
 struck me not a little. It was more like the accent with which a man bemoans 
 some recent calamity that has happened to a i friend,- than that; tone of .sober 
 grief with which we lament the sorrows of a person, however excellent and 
 however grievous his afflictions may have been, who has been dead more than- 
 two centuries. I had,th^ curiosity to inquire into the reasons of so uncommon 
 an ejaculation., My young gentleman, with a more solemn tone of pathos 
 than oefore, rfepeated, " Poor Spencer 1 " and added, " He has lost his wife ! " 
 
 My astonishment at this assertion rose to such a height, that I began to 
 think the -brain of my young friend must be cracked, or some, unaccountable 
 reverie had gotten possession of it. But, upon further explanation, it appeared 
 that the word "Spenser"— which to you or me, reader, in a conversation upon 
 poetry too, would naturally have called up the, idea of, an old poet in a ruff, 
 one Edmund Spenser, that- flourished in the days of Queen Elizabeth, and 
 wrote a poem called " The Faery Queene," with "The Shepherd's Calendar,'! 
 and many more verses besides— did, in the mind of my young friend, excite 
 a verydifferent and quite modern idea; namely, that of the Honourable 
 WiUiam Spencer, one of the living ornaments, if I am not misinformed, of 
 this present poetical era, A.D. 1811. 
 
 WITH SOME ACCOUNT QF A CLUB OF DAMNED AUTHORS. 
 {The Reflector, No. m., Art. xi., 1811.) 
 
 Me. Reflector, — I am one of those persons whom the world has thought 
 proper to designate by the title of Damned Authors. In that memorable 
 season of dramatic failures, 1806-7, — in which no fewer, I think, than two 
 tragedies, four comedies, one opera, and three farces suffered at Drury 
 Lane Theatre, — I was found guilty of constructing an afterpiece, and was 
 damned. 
 
 Against the decision of the public, in such instances there can be no appeal. 
 ' The clerk of Chatham might as well have protested against the decision of 
 ; Cade and his followers Who were then the public. Like him, I was condemned 
 because I could write. 
 
624 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Not but it did appear to some of us that the measures of the popular 
 tribunal at that period savoured a Uttle of harshness and of the summum jus. 
 The public mouth was early in the season fleshed upon the " Vindictive Man, " 
 and some pieces of that nature; and it retained, through the remainder of it, I 
 a relish of blood. As Dr. Johnson would have said, ' ' Sir, there was a habit 
 of sibilation in the house." 
 
 Still less am I disposed to inquire into the ¥eason of the comparative lenity, 
 on the other hand, with which some pieces were treated, which, to indifferent 
 judges, seemed at least as much deserving of condemnation as some of those 
 which met with it. I am willing to put a favourable construction upon the 
 votes that were given against us ; I beheve that there was no bribery or de- 
 signed partiality in the case : only " our nonsense did not happen to suit their 
 nonsense ; " that was all. 
 
 But against the manner in which the public, on these occasions, think fit to 
 deliver theur disapprobation, I must and ever will protest. 
 
 Sir, imagine— but you have been present at the damning of a piece (those 
 who never had that felicity, I beg them to imagine)— a vast theatre, hke that 
 which Drury Lane was before it was a heap of dust and ashes (I insult not 
 over its fallen greatness ; let it recover itself when it can for me, let it lift up 
 its towering head once more, and take in poor authors to write for it ; hie 
 ccBstus artemque repond), — a theatre like that, filled with all sorts of disgusting 
 sounds, —shrieks, groans, hisses, but chiefly the last, like the noise of many 
 waters, or that which Don Quixote heard from the fulling-mills, or that 
 wilder combination of devilish sounds which St. Anthony listened to in the 
 wilderness. 
 
 Oh I Mr. Reflector, is it not a pity that the sweet human voice, which was 
 given man to speak with, to sing with, to whisper tones of love in, to express 
 compliance, to convey a favour, or to grant a suit, — that voice, which in a 
 Siddons or a Braham rouses us, in a siren Catalani charms and captivates us, — 
 that the musical', expressive human voice should be converted into a rival of 
 the noises of silly geese, and irrational, venomous snakes ? 
 
 I never shall forget the sounds on my night. I never before that time fully 
 felt the reception which the Author of AH 111, in the " Paradise Lost," meets 
 with from the critics in the fit, at the final close of his "Tragedy upon the 
 Human Race," — though that, alas ! met with too .much success : — 
 
 " From innumeiable tongues 
 A dismal universal hiss, the sound 
 Of public scorn. Dreadful was the din 
 Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now 
 With complicated monsters, head and tail. 
 Scorpion and asp, and Amphisbaena dire. 
 Cerastes hom'd, Hydrus, and Slops drear. 
 And Dipsas." 
 
 For hall substitute theatre, and you have the very image of what takes 
 place at what is called the damnation of a piece, — and properly so called ; 
 for here you see its origin plainly, whence the custom was derived, and what 
 the first piece was that so suffered. After this, none can doubt the propriety 
 of the appellation. 
 
 But, sir, as to the justice of bestowing such appalling, heart-withering de- 
 nunciations of the popular obloquy upon the venial mistake of a poor author, 
 who thought to please us in the act of filling his pockets, — for the sum of his 
 demerits amounts to no more than that, — it does, I own, seem to me a species 
 of retributive justice far too severe for the offence. A culprit in the pillory 
 (bate the eggs) meets with no severer exprobation. 
 
 Indeed, I have often wondered that some modest critic has not proposed 
 that there should be a wooden machine to that eflect erected in some con- 
 
On the Cicstom of Hissing at the Theatres. 625 
 
 venient part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful author should be re- 
 quired to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and oranges of the 
 pit. This amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some 
 authors, who, in their prologues, fairly prostrate their skulls to the audience, 
 and seem to invite a pelting. 
 
 Or why should they not have their pens publicly broke over their heads, as 
 the swords of recreant knights in old times were, and an oath administered to 
 them that they should never write again? 
 
 Seriously, Messieurs the Public, this outrageous way which you have got of 
 expressing your displeasures is too much for the occasion. When I was 
 deafening under the effects of it, I could not help asking what crime of great 
 moral turpitude I had committed ; for every man about me seemed to feel the 
 offence as personal to himself : as something which pubUc interest and private 
 feehngs ahke called upon him in the strongest possible manner, to stigmatize 
 with infamy. 
 
 The Romans, it is well-known to you, Mr. Reflector, took a gentler method 
 of marking their disapprobation of an author's work. They were a humane 
 and equitable nation. They left the/area and ihepatibulum, the axe and the 
 rods, to great offenders : for these minor and (if 1 may so term them) extra- 
 moral offences, the bent thumb was considered as a sufficient sign of disappro- 
 bation, — vertere pollicem ; as the pressed thumb, prcmere poUicem, was a 
 mark of approving. 
 
 And really there seems to have been a sort of fitness in this method, a 
 correspondency of sign in the punishment to the offence. For, as the action 
 of writing is performed by bending the thumb forward, the retroversion or 
 bending back of that joint did not unaptly point to the opposite of that action ; 
 implying that it was the will of the audience that the author should write no 
 more : a much more significant as well as more humane way of expressing 
 that desire than our custom of hissing, which is altogether senseless and inde- 
 fensible. Nor do we find that the Roman audiences deprived themselves, by 
 this lenity, of any tittle of that supremacy which audiences in all ages have 
 thought themselves bound to maintain over such as have been candidates for 
 their applause. On the contrary, by this method they seem to have had the 
 author, as we should express it, completely under finger and thumb. 
 
 The provocations to which a dramatic genius is exposed from the public are 
 so much the more vexatious as they are removed from any possibility of retalia- 
 tion, which sweetens most other injuries ; for the public never writes itself. 
 Not but something very hke it took place at the time of the O.P. differences. 
 The placards which were nightly exhibited were, properly speaking, the com- 
 position of the public. The public wrote them, the public applauded them ; 
 and precious morceaux of wit and eloquence they were,— except some few, of 
 a better quahty, which it is well known were furnished by professed dramatic 
 writers. After this specimen of what the public can do for itself, it should 
 be a little slow in condemning what others do for it. 
 
 As the degrees of malignancy vary in people according as they have more 
 or less of the Old Serpent (the father of hisses) in their composition, I have 
 sometimes amused myself with analyzing this many-headed hydra, which calls 
 itself the public, into" the component parts of which it is "complicated, head 
 and tail," and seeing how many varieties of the snake kind it can afford. 
 
 First, there is the Common Enghsh Snake.— This is that part of the atidi- 
 tory who are always the majority at damnations ; but who, having no critical 
 venom in themselves to sting them on, stay till they bear others hiss, and then 
 join in for company. 
 
 Tlie Blind Worm is a species very neariy alhed to the foregoing. Some 
 naturalists have doubted whether they are not the same. 
 
 The Rattlesnake. — These are your obstreperous talking critics.— the im- 
 
626 The Works of Charles Lamb. \ 
 
 pertinent guides of the pit, — who will not give a plain man leave to enjoy, an \ 
 evening's entertainment ; but with their frothy jargon and incessant finding of | 
 faults, either drown his pleasure quite, or force him, in his own defence, to 
 join in their clamorous censure. The hiss always originates with these. 
 When this creature springs his rattle, you would think, from the noise it 
 makes, there was something in it ; but you have only to examine the instru- 
 ment from which the noise proceeds, and you will find it typical of a critic's 
 tongue, — a shallow membrane, empty, voluble, and seated in the most con- 
 temptible part of the creature's body. 
 
 The Whipsnake.. — This is he that lashes the poor 'author the next day in the 
 newspapers. 
 
 The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnaeus. — Under this head may be 
 classed all that portion of the spectators (for 'audience they properly are not), 
 who, not finding the first act of a piece answer to their preconceived notions of 
 what a first act should be, like Obstinate in John Bunyan, positively thrust 
 their fingers in their ears, that they may not hear a word of what is coming, 
 though perhaps the very next act may be composed in a style as different as 
 possible, and be written quite to their own tastes. These adders refuse to hear 
 the voice of the charmer, because the tuning of his instrument gave them 
 offence. 
 
 I should weary you and myself too, if I were to go through all the classes 
 of the serpent kind. Two qualities are common to them all. They are 
 creatures of remarkably cold digestions, and chiefly haunt pits and low 
 grounds, , 
 
 I proceed with more pleasure to give you an account of a club to which I 
 have the honour to belong. There are fourteen of us, who are all authors that 
 have been once in our lives what is called damned. We meet on the anniver- 
 sary of our respective nights, and make ourselves merry at the expense of the 
 public. The chief tenets.which distinguish our society,, and which every man 
 among us is bound to hold for gospel, are, — 
 
 That the pubUc, or mob, in all ages have been a set of bhnd, deaf, 
 obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius, in his senses, 
 would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful rabble. That 
 the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick their pockets ; and, 
 that failing, we are at fuU liberty to vilify and abuse them as much as ever we 
 think fit. 
 
 That authors, by their affected pretences to humility, which they made use 
 of as a cloak to insinuate their writings into the callous senses of the multitude, 
 obtuse to everything but the grossest flattery, have by degrees made that great 
 beast their master ; as we may act submission to children till we are obliged to 
 practise it in earnest. That authors are and ought to be considered the 
 masters and preceptors of the public, and not vice versa. That it was so in 
 the days of Orpheus, Linus, and Musasus ; and would be so again, if it were 
 not that writers prove traitors to themselves. That, in particular, in the days 
 of the first of those three great authors just mentioned, audiences appear to 
 have been perfect models of what audiences should be ; for though, along 
 with the trees and the rocks and the wild creatures which he drew after him to 
 listen to his strains, some serpents doubtless came to hear his music, it does 
 not appear that any one among them ever lifted up a dissentient voice. Tliey 
 knew what was due to authors in those days. Now every stock and stone 
 turns into a serpent, and has a voice. 
 
 That the terms "courteous reader" and " candid auditors," as having given 
 rise to a false notion in those to whom they were applied, as if they conferred 
 upon them some right, which they cannot have, of exercising their judgments, 
 ought to be utterly banished and exploded. 
 
 U 
 
On the Custom of Hissing at the Theatres. 627 
 
 • ^^1 ^''^ °"i dis'ingU'Shing tenets. To keep up the memory of the cause 
 in which we^uffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed unhealthy 
 animal, to ^culapius, on our - feast-nights we cut up a goose, an animal 
 typical of the popular vazce, to the deifies of Candour and Patient Hearing. 
 A zealous member of the society once proposed that we should revive the 
 obsolete luxury of viper-broth ; but the stomachs of some of the company 
 rising at the proposition, we lost the benefit of that highly salutary and 
 antidotal dish. 
 
 The privileges of admission to our club is strictly limited to such as have 
 been fairly damned. A piece that haS met with ever so little applause, that 
 has but languished its night or two, and then gone out, will never entitle its 
 author to a seat among us. An exception to our usual readiness in conferring 
 this privilege is in the case of a writer, who, having been once condemned, 
 writes again, and becomes candidate for a second martyrdom. Simple damna- 
 tion we hold to beameriti but to be twice damned We adjudge infamous. 
 Such a one we utterly reject, and blackball without a hearing :— 
 
 T/te common damned skun his society." 
 
 Hoping that your publication of our i-egulations may be a means of inviting 
 some more members into our society, I conclude this long letter.— I am, Sir 
 yours, Semel-Damnatus. 
 
 (The Reflector, No. in., Art. xi., 1811.) 
 
 Mr. Reflectoi!, — I was amused the other day with having the following 
 notice thrust into my hand by a man who gives out bills at the corner of Fleet 
 Market. Whether he saw any prognostics about me, that made him judge 
 such a notice seasonable, I cannot say ; I might perhaps carry in a countenance 
 (naturally not very florid) traces of a fever which had not long left me. Those 
 fellows have a good instinctive way of guessing at the sort of people that are 
 likeliest to pay attention to their papers. 
 
 ' ' BURIAL SOCIETY. 
 
 " h. favourable opportunity now offers to any person of either se.\, who 
 would wish to be buried in a genteel manner, by paying one shilling entrance, 
 and twopence per week for the benefit of the stock. Members to be free in 
 six months. The money to be. paid at Mr. Middleton's, at the sign of the 
 First and the Last, Stonecutter's Street, Fleet Market. The deceased to be 
 furnished as follows : — A strong elm coffin, covered with superfine black, and 
 finished with two rows, all round, close drove, best japanned nails, and 
 .adorned with ornamental drops, a handsome plate of inscription. Angel above, 
 and Flower beneath, and four pair of handsome handles, with wrought gripes ; 
 the coffin to be well pitched, lined, and ruffled with fine crape; a handsome 
 crape shroud, cap and pillow. For use, a handsome velvet pall, three gentle- 
 men's cloaks, three crape hatbands, three hoods and scarfs, and six pairs of 
 
628 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 gloves; two porters equipped to attend the funeral, a man to attend the 
 same with band and gloves ; also, the burial fees paid, if not exceeding one 
 guinea." 
 
 " Man," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, 
 and pompous in the grave." Whoever drew up this little advertisement, cer- 
 tainly understood this appetite in the species, and has made abundant provi- 
 sion for it. It really almost induces a tadium vitie upon one to read it. 
 Methinks I could be wiUing to die, in death to be so attended. The two rows 
 all round close-drove best black japanned nails, how feelingly do they invite 
 and irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down ! What aching head 
 can resist the temptation to repose, which the crape shroud, the cap, and the 
 pillow present ? What sting is there in death, which the handles with wrought 
 gripes are not calculated to pluck away? What victory in the grave, which the 
 drops and the velvet pall do not render at least extremely disputable? but 
 above all, the pretty emblematic plate with the Angel above and the Flower 
 beneath, takes me mightily. 
 
 The notice goes on to inform us, that though the society has been established 
 but a few years, upwards of eleven hundred persons have put down their 
 names. It is really an affecting consideration to think of so many poor 
 people, of the industrious and hard-working class (for none but such would be 
 possessed of such a generous forethought) clubbing their twopences to s.ive 
 the reproach of a parish funeral. Many a poor fellow, I dare swear, has that 
 Angel and Flower kept from the Angel and Punchbowl, while, to provide 
 himself a bier, he has curtailed himself of ieer. Many a savoury morsel has 
 the living body been deprived of, that the lifeless one might be served up in a 
 richer state to the worms. And sure, if the body could understand the actions 
 of the soul, and entertain generous notions of things, it would thank its provi- 
 dent partner, that she had been more sohcitous to defend it from dishonours 
 at its dissolution, than careful to pamper it with good things in the time of its 
 union. If Caesar were chiefly anxious at his death how he might die most 
 decently, every Burial Society may be considered as a club of Cassars. 
 
 Nothing tends to keep up, in the imaginations of the poorer sort of people, 
 a generous horror of the workhouse more than the manner in which pauper 
 funerals are conducted in this metropolis. The coffin nothing but a few naked 
 planks, coarsely put together,— the want of a pall (that decent and well- 
 imagined veil, which, hiding the coffin that hides the body, keeps that which 
 would shock us at two removes from us), the coloured coats of the men that 
 are hired, at cheap rates, to carry the body, — altogether give the notion of 
 the deceased having been some person of an ill-life and conversation, some 
 one who may not claim the entire rites of Christian burial, — one by whom 
 some parts of the sacred ceremony would be desecrated if they should be be* 
 stowed upon him. I meet these meagre processions sometimes in the streets. 
 They are sure to make me out of humour and melancholy all the day after. 
 They have a harsh and ominous aspect. 
 
 If there is anything in the prospectus issued from Mr. Middleton's, Stone- 
 cutter's Street, which pleases me less than the rest, it is to find that the six 
 pairs of gloves are to be returned, that they are only lent, or, as the bill ex- 
 presses it, for use, on the occasion. The hoods, scarfs, and hatbands, may 
 properly enough be given up, after the solemnity : the cloaks no gentleman 
 would think of keeping ; but a pair of gloves, once fitted on, ought not in 
 courtesy to be re-demanded. The wearer should certainly have the fee-simple 
 of them. The cost would be but trifling, and they would be a proper 
 memorial of the day. This part of the proposal wants reconsidering. If is 
 not conceived in the same liberal way of thinking as the rest. I am also a 
 httle doubtful whether the limit, within which the burial-fee is made payable, 
 should not be extended to thirty shillings. 
 
Burial Societies, and the Character of an Undertaker. 62.9 
 
 Some provision too ought undoubtedly to be made in favour of those well- 
 intentioned persons and well-wishers to the fund, who, having all along paid 
 their subscriptions regularly, are so unfortunate as to die before the six months, 
 which would entitle them to their freedom, are quite completed. One can 
 hardly imagine a more distressing case than that of a poor fellow lingering on 
 in a consumption till the period of his freedom is almost in sight, and then 
 finding himself going with a velocity which makes it doubtful whether he shall 
 be entitled to his funeral honours : his quota to which he nevertheless squeezes 
 out to the diminution of the comforts which sickness demands. I think, in 
 such cases, some of the contribution-money ought to revert. With some such 
 modifications, which might easily be introduced, I see nothing in these Pro- 
 posals of Mr. Middleton which is not strictly fair and genteel; and heartily 
 recommend them to all persons of moderate incomes, in either sex, who are 
 willing that this perishable part of them should quit the scene of its mortal 
 activities, with as handsome circumstances as possible. 
 
 Before I quit the subject, I must guard my readers against a scandal, which 
 they may be apt to take at the place whence these Proposals purport to be 
 issued. From the sign of the First and the Last, they may conclude that Mr. 
 Middleton is some publican, who, in assembling a club of this description at 
 his house, may have a sinister end of his own, altogether foreign to the solemn 
 purpose for which the club is pretended to be instituted, I must set them 
 right by informing them that the issuer of these Proposals is no publican, 
 though he hangs out a sign, but an honest superintendent of funerals, who, by 
 the device of a Cradle and a Coffin, connecting both ends of human existence 
 together, has most ingeniously contrived to insinuate, that the framers of these 
 first and last receptacles of mankind divide this our life betwixt them, and 
 that all that passes from the midwife to the undertaker may, in strict propriety, 
 go for nothing: an awful and instructive lesson to human vanity. 
 
 Looking over some papers lately that fell into my hands by chance, and 
 appear to have been written about the beginning of the last century, I 
 stumbled, among the rest, upon the following short Essay, which the writer 
 calls " The Character of an Undertaker." It is written with some stiffness 
 and peculiarities of style, but some parts of it, I think, not unaptly characterize 
 the profession to which Mr. Middleton has the honour to belong. The writer 
 doubtless had in his mind the entertaining character of Sable, in Steele's ex- 
 cellent comedy of the Funeral, 
 
 "CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER. 
 
 " He is master of the ceremonies at burials and mourning assemblies, grand 
 marshal at funeral processions, the only true yeoman of the body, over which 
 he exercises a dictatorial authority from the moment that the breath has taken 
 leave to that of its final commitment to the earth. His ministry begins where 
 the physician's, the lawyer's, and the divine's end. Or if some part of the 
 functions of the latter run parallel with his, it is only in ordine ad spiritualia. 
 His temporalities remain unquestioned. He is arbitrator of all questions of 
 honour which may concern the defunct ; and upon slight inspection will pro- 
 nounce how long he may remain in this upper world with credit to himself, 
 and when it will be prudent for his reputation to retire. His determination in 
 these points is peremptory and without appeal. Yet, with a modesty peculiar 
 to his profession, he meddles not out of his own sphere. With the good or " 
 bad actions of the deceased in his lifetime he has nothing to do. He leaves 
 the friends of the dead man to form their own conjectures as to the place to 
 which the departed spirit is gone. His care is only about the exuvias. He 
 concerns not himself even about the body, as it is a structure of parts internal, 
 and a wonderful ■ microcosm. He leaves such curious speculations to the 
 
 I 
 
630 
 
 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 anatomy professor. Or, if anything, he is averse to such wanton inquiries, ai 
 delighting rather that the parts which he has care of shbuld'.be returned to 
 their kindred dust> in as handsome and unmutilated' a condition as- possible ; 
 .that the grave should have its full and unimpaired tribute,— a cotnplete and 
 just carcass, Noris he only careful to provide, for th0 body's entireness, butior 
 •its acoomrhodaltion and ornament. He orders the fashion of its clothes, and 
 ' designs the 'Symmetry of its dwelling. , Its vanity has an innocent survival in 
 him. - He is bed-hi'alier to the dead. The pillows which he . lays never 
 rumple.' The day of intertnent is the theatre in which he displays the mysteries 
 of his art. It is hard to describe what he is, or rather .'to ,tell what he is not, 
 on that day J for, being neither kinsirian, servant; or friend, he is all in turns ; 
 a' transcendBnti' running through all those relations. His oflppe is to supply 
 the place of self-agency in the 'family, who are presumed'ihc&pMble of it through 
 grief. He is eyes, and ears, and hands, to the whole household.' A draught: 
 of wine cannot go round to the mourners, but he must minister it. A chair 
 may hardly be restored to its place' by a less solemn hand than his. He takes 
 upon himself all functions, and is a sort of ephemeral major-domo ! He 
 distributes his attentions among the company assembled according to the 
 dfegree of affliction, which he calculates to the degree, of kin from the deceased;, 
 'and marshals them actordingly in the procession. He himself is of a sad' and 
 tristful countenance; yet such as (if well examined) is not without some show 
 of patience and resignation at bottom : prefiguring, as it were, to the friends of 
 the deceased, what their grief shall be when the hand of Time shall have 
 softened and taken d9wn the .bitterness pf their first anguish; so handsomely 
 can he fore-shape and anticipate the work of Time. Lastly, with his wand, as, 
 with another divinirig rod, he calculates the depth of earth at which the bones 
 ,of the dead man may rest, which lie ordinarily contrives may be at such a 
 distance from- the 'surface of this earth, as -may frustrate the profane attempts 
 of such as would violate his repose, yet' suifBciently on this sidie the centre 
 to give his friends hopes of an easy and practicable resurrection. And here 
 we leave him, casting in dust to diist, which is the last friendly office tl^at he 
 undertakes to do." Begging your pardon for detuning you so long among 
 graves, and worms, and epitaphs, I am. Sir, your humble servant, Mokiturus. 
 
 [The Reflector, No. iv., Art^ xix., 1811,) 
 
 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 dehcacy ? 'Yet, out it must. 
 My sufferings, then, have all arisen from a most inordinate appetite 
 
 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 ct 
 voces Which Horace speaks of : 
 
 "tiuibus hunc lenire doloreni 
 Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem ; " 
 
not for glory, not for fame, not for applause, — for against this disease, too, he 
 tells us tliere are certain piacula, or, as Pqpe 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 piarerits-^a pious clergyman of the 
 Church of England, now no more, — I trust haye rendered me sufficiently 
 secure on that side : — 
 
 Noi sir, for none of these things : but an appetite, in its coarsest and least 
 metaphorical sense, — an appetite 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 constitution not 
 admitting of my being nursed at home, the woman vyho had the care of me for 
 that purpose usedi to make most extravagant demands for my pretended ex^ 
 cesses in that kind, ; which my parents, rather than believe anything unpleasant 
 of me, chose to impute to the known covetousness and mercenary disposition 
 of that sort of people, This blindness continued on t)ieir 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 shifting the blame any longer upon other peopfe's shoulders, — no 
 good-natured maid to take upon herself the enormities of which I stood actused 
 in the article of bread and butter, 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 in- 
 structed by my kind parents to give me. The sense of the ridiculous, which 
 is but too much ahve in grown persons, is tenfold more active and alert in 
 boys. Once detected, I was the constant butt 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, — Vetitrideditus, — Vesana gula, — Escarum gurges,— 
 Dapibus indulgens, — Non dans fmiia gules,— Sectans latttiz fercula mencEs, 
 resounded wheresoever I passed. I led a weary life, suffering the penalties of 
 guilt for that which v/as no crime, but only following the blameless dictates of 
 nature. The remembrance of those childish reproaches haunts me yet often- 
 times in my dreams. My school-days come again, and the horror I used to 
 feel, when in some silent comer retired from the notice of my unfeeling play- 
 fellows, I have sat to mumble the solitary slice of gingerbread allotted rtie 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 dwellmg. The affectionate 
 solicitude of my parents was directed to the good-natured purpose of conceal- 
 ine even from myself the infirmity which haunted me. I was continually told 
 thatj was growing, and the appetite I displayed was humanely represented as 
 beir^ 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 
 
! 632 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 year or two. I ceased to grow, but alas! I did not cease my demands for 
 alimentary sustenance. 
 
 Those times are long since passed, and with them have ceased to exist the 
 fond concealment, — the indulgent blindness,— the delicate overlooking,— the 
 compassionate 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 appetite 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 con- 
 stitutionally 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 o£f their ungracious comparisons of it to the seven baskets of fragments, 
 and the supernaturally replenished cup of ojd Baucis ; and be thankful that 
 their more phlegmatic stomachs, not their virtue, have saved them from the like 
 reproacjies. 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 unsavoury jests. Double-meal 
 is another name which my acquaintance have palmed upon ijie, 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 succes- 
 sively dropping in upon the next and the next) till by the time I got among my 
 more fashionable 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 my damper, as I call it, at 
 home, before I go out. But alas ! with me, increase of appetite truly grows I 
 by what it feeds on. What is peculiarly offensive to nie 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 
 substitutes 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 insensibihty 
 extinguishes his natural pity. The Lion was bom without compassion ; we 
 follow the instinct of our nature ; the gods 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. 
 — (I'nder favour of the Lion, if he meant to assert 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 
 
Edax on Appetite. 633 
 
 much as admit of the most tender parts of them, unless above half the con- 
 coction has been performed by artificial fire beforehand ; and yet what animal 
 have you spared, to satisfy the caprices of a languid appetite ? Languid, I 
 say; for what is mans hunger if compared with 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 
 quantities of flesh can any ways appease it." — Allowing for the Lion not 
 having a prophetic instinct to take in every lusus natura that was possible of 
 the human appetite, he was, generally speaking in the right; and the Mer- 
 chant 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 1 Miserable man ! / 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 space in their unfeeUng 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 
 circumstances, which make all the difference or moral or immoral in actions, 
 just suits the sort of talent which some of my acquaintance pride themselves 
 upon. Wagers! — I thank heaven 1 was never mercenary, nor could consent 
 to prostitute 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 prostitution to appear in the eyes -of 
 an indehcate 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 passed 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 
 muffins. 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 show 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 mar- 
 malade, 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 face- 
 tiously call thepoint of time in which they are taking these shadowy refections), 
 and the old lady, with a sort of fear shining 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 into 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 despatched the whole meal intended for eleven persons, 
 —fish, flesh, fowl, pastry,- to the sprigs of garnishing parsley, and the last 
 fearful custard that quaked upon the board. I need not describe the conster- ^ 
 nation, when in due time the dowagers adjourned from their cards. Where h 
 
 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 V 
 I afterwards was informed for a certainty the old lady meant to leave me. I '! 
 mention it not in illustration of the unhappy faculty which I am possessed of; I 
 for any unlucky wag of a school-boy, with a tolerable appetite, could have f 
 done as much without feeling any hurt after it,— only that you may judge \ 
 
634 TJte Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 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 railed, from 
 this quality, the Annihilator. Why am I forced to seek, in all the most prodi- 
 gious and portentous facts of Natural. History, for creatures typical of myself. 
 I am. ikat Snake, tkat Annihilator : "wherever I fasten, in a few seconds "' 
 
 O happy sick men, that are groaning under the waijt of that very thing, the 
 excess of which is my torment ! O fortunate, too fortunate, if you knew vour 
 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 crav- 
 ing 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 appetites shall have' 
 ceased their importunity, may be cut up also (horrible suggestion !) to detirraine 
 in what systems of solids or fluids this original sin of my constitution lay lurk- 
 ing. 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. 
 
 You may ask, Mr. Reflector, to, what purpose is my appeal to you : what can 
 you do for me? Alas ! I know. too well that my case is out of the reach of 
 advice, — out of the reach of consolation. But it is some relief to the wounded 
 heart to impart its tale of misery ; and some of my acquaintance, who may 
 read my case in your pages, under a borrowed name, may be induced to^give 
 it a more humane consideration than I could ever yet obtain from them under 
 my own. Make them, if possible, to reflect, that an original peculiarity of, 
 constitution is no crime; that not that which goes into the mouth desecrates 
 a man but that which comes out of it, — such as sarcasm, bitter jests, mocks 
 and taunts, and ill-natured observations ; and let them consider, if theie be 
 such things (which we have heard of) as Pious Treachery, Innocent Adultery, 
 &c., whether there may not be also such a thing as Innocent Gluttony. 
 
 Your afflicted Servant, 
 ED.'iX. 
 
 (The Reflector, No. iv., Art. xix., 1811.) 
 
 Mr. Reflector. — My husband and I are fond of company, and being in easy 
 circumstances, we are seldom without a party to dinner twp or three days in 
 a week. The utmost cordiality has hitherto prevailed at our meetings : but 
 
Hospita on the Immoderate Indulgence of the Palate. 635 
 
 there is a young gentleman, a near relation of rtiy husband's, that has lately 
 come among us, whose preposterous behaviour bids fair, if not timely checked, 
 to disturb our tranquillity. He is too great a favourite with my husband, in 
 other respects, for me to remonstrate with him in any other than this distant 
 way. A letter printed in your publication may catch his eye ; for he is a great 
 reader, and makes a point of seetag all the nevy thingsthat come out. Indeed, 
 he is by no means deficient in understanding. My husband says that he has 
 a good deal of wit ; but for my part I cannot Say I am 'any judge of that, having 
 seldom observed him open his mouth except for purposes very foreign to 
 conversation. In short, sir, this young geiitleman's failingis, an immoderate 
 indulgence of his palate. The first time ne dined with us, he thought it 
 necessary to extenuate the length of time he kept the dinner on the table, by 
 declaring that he had taken a very lotig walk in the morning, and'came in fast- 
 ing ; but as that excuse could not serve above once or twice at most, he has 
 latterly dropped the mask altogether, and chosen to appear in his own proper 
 colours without reserve or apology. 
 
 You cannot imagine how unpleasant his conduct has become. His way of 
 staring at the dishes as they are brought in has absolutely something im- 
 modest in it : it is like the stare of an impudent man of fashion at a fine 
 woman, when she first comes into a room. I am positively in pain for the 
 dishes, and cinnot help thinking they have consciousness, and -will be put out' 
 of countenance, he treats them so like what -they are not. 
 
 Then, again, he makes lib scruple of keeping a jonit of meat on the table, 
 after the cheese and fruit are brought in; till he has what he calls done with it. 
 Now how awkward this looks, where there are ladies ; you may judge, Mr. 
 Reflector, how it disturbs the order and comfort of a meal. And yet I always 
 make a point of helping him first, contrary to all good manners,— before any 
 of my female friends are helped,— that he may avoid this very error. I wish 
 he would eat before he comes out. 
 
 What makes his proceedings more particularly offensive at our house is, 
 that my husband, though out of common politeness he is obliged to set dishes 
 of animal food before his visitors, yet himself and his whole family (myself in- 
 cluded) feed entirely on vegetables. We have a theory that ' animal food is 
 neither wholesome nor natural to man ; and even vegetables we refuse to eat 
 until they have undergone the operation of fire, in consideration of those 
 numberless little living creatures which the glass helps us to detect in every 
 fibre of the plant or root before it be dressed. On the same theory we boil our 
 water, which is our only drink, before we suffer it to come to table. Our children 
 are perfect little Pythagoreans : it would do you good to see them in their 
 nursery, stuffing their dried fruits, figs, rasins, and milk, which is the only ap- 
 proach to animal food which is allowed. They have no notion how the substance 
 of a creature that ever had life can become food for another creature. Beef- 
 steak is an absurdity to them ; a mutton-chop, a solecism in terms ; a cutlet, 
 a word absohitely without any meaning; a butcher is nonsense, except so far 
 as it is taken for a man who delights in blond, or a hero. In this happy state 
 of innocence we have kept their minds, not allowing them to go into the 
 kitchen, or to hear of any preparations for the dressing of animal food, or even 
 to know that such things are practised. But as a state of ignorance is incom- 
 patible with a certain age ; and as my eldest girl, who is ten years old next 
 Midsummer, must shortly be introduced into the world and sit at table with us, 
 where she will see some things which will shock all her received notions, I have 
 been endeavourin'' by little and little to break her mmd, and prepare it for the 
 disagreeable impressions which must be forced upon it. The first hint I gave 
 her upon the subject, I could see her recoil from it with the same horror with 
 which we listen to a tale of Anthropophagism ; but she has gradually grown 
 more reconciled to it in some measure, from my telhng her that it was the 
 
636 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 custom of the world, — to which, however senseless, we must submit so far a 
 we could do it with innocence not to give offence ; and she has shown so much 
 strength of mind on other occasions, which I have no doubt is owing to the 
 calmness and serenity superinduced by her diet, that I am in good hopes, when 
 the proper seasoB for her dlbut arrives, she may be brought to endure the sight 
 of a roasted chicken or a dish of sweetbreads, for the first time, without faint- 
 ing. Such being the nature of our little household, you may guess what inroads 
 into the economy of it, — what revolutions and turnings of things upside down, 
 the example of such a feeder as Mr. is calculated to produce. 
 
 I wonder at a time liite the present, when the scarcity of. every kind of food 
 is so painfully acknowledged, that shame has no effect upon him. Can he 
 liave read Mr. Malthus's Thoughts on the Ratio of Food to Population? 
 Can he think it reasonable that one man should consume the sustenance of 
 many ? 
 
 The young gentleman has an agreeable air and person, such as are not un- 
 likely to recommend him on the score of matrimony. But his fortune is not 
 over large ; and what prudent young woman would think of embarking hers 
 with a man who would bring three ior four mouths {or what is equivalent 10 
 them) into a family ? She might as reasonably choose a widower m the same 
 circumstances with three or four children. 
 
 I cannot think who he takes after. His father and mother, by. all accounts, 
 were very moderate eaters ; only I have heard that the latter swallowed her 
 victuals very fast, and the former had a tedious custom of sitting long at his 
 meals. Perhaps he takes after both. 
 
 I wish you would (urn this in your thoughts, Mr. Reflector, and give us 
 your ideas on the subject of excessive eating ; and, particularly, of animal food. 
 
 « HOSPITA. 
 
 WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF " THE COMPLETE ENGLISH 
 TRADESMAN." 
 
 (The Reflector, No. TV., art. xxiii., 1811.) 
 
 [Signed with the first and last letter of the author's surname, " L. B."] 
 
 The Good Clerk.— He writeth afair and swift hand, and is competently versed 
 in the four first rules of arithmetic, in the Rule of Three (which is sometimes 
 called the Golden Rule), and in Practice. We mention these things that we 
 may leave no room for cavillers to say that anything essential hath been 
 omitted in our definition ; else, to speak the truth, these are but ordmary 
 accomplishments, and such as every understrapper at a desk is commonly 
 furnished with. The character we treat of soareth higher. _ 
 
 He is clean and neat in his person, not from a vainglorious desire of setting 
 himself forth to advantage in the eyes of the other sex, with which vanity too 
 many of our young sparks nowadays are infected ; but to do credit, as we sav, 
 to the office. For this reason, he evermore taketh care that his desk or his 
 
The Good Clerk. 637 ■ 
 
 books receive no soil; the which things he is commonly as solicitous to have 
 fair and unblemished, as the owner of a fine horse is to have him appear m 
 good keep. 
 
 He riseth early in the morning; not because early rising conduceth to health 
 (though he doth not altogether despise that consideration), but chiefly to the 
 intent that he may be first at the desk. There is his post,— there he delighteth 
 to be, unless when his meals or necessity calleth him away ; which time he 
 alway esteemeth as loss, and maketh as short as possible. 
 
 He is temperate in eating and drinking, that he may preserve a clear head 
 and steady hand for his master's service. He is also partly induced to this 
 observation to the rules of temperance by his respect for rehgion and the laws 
 of his country; which things, it may once for all be noted, do add special 
 assistances to his actions, but do not and cannot furnish the main-spring or 
 motive thereto. His first ambition, as appeareth all along, is to be a good 
 clerk ; his next, a good Christian, a good patriot, &c. 
 
 Correspondent to this, he keepeth himself honest, not for fear of the laws, 
 but because he hath observed how unseemly an article it maketh in the day- 
 book or ledger when a sum is set down lost or missing ; it being his pride to 
 make these books to agree and to tally, the one side with the other, with a .sort 
 of architectural symmetry and correspondence. 
 
 He marrieth, or marrieth not, as best suiteth with his employer's views. 
 Some merchants do the rather desire to have married men in their counting- 
 houses, because they think the married state a pledge for their servants' in- 
 tegrity, and an incitement to them to be industrious ; and it was an observation 
 of a late Lord Mayor of London, that the sons of clerks do generally prove 
 clerks themselves, and that merchants encouraging persons in their employ to 
 marry, and to have families, was the.best method of securing a breed of sober, 
 industrious young men attached to the mercantile interest. Be this as it may, 
 such a character as we have been describing will wait till the pleasure of his 
 employer is known on this point ; and regulateth his desires by the custom of 
 the house or firm to which he belongeth. 
 
 He avoideth profane oaths and jesting, as so much time lost from his employ. 
 What spare time he hath for conversation, which, in a counting-house such as 
 we have been supposing, can be but small, he spendeth in putting seasonable 
 questions to such of his fellows (and sometimes respectfully to the master him- 
 self) who can give him information respecting the price and quaUty of goods, 
 the state of exchange, or the latest improvements in book-keeping ; thus 
 making the motion of his lips, as well as of his fingers, subservient to his 
 master's interest. Not that he refuseth a brisk saying, or a cheerful sally of 
 wit, when it comes unforced, is free of offence, and hath a convenient brevity. 
 For this reason, he hath commonly some such phrase as this in his mouth :— 
 
 It's a slovenly look 
 To blot your book. 
 Or. 
 
 Red ink for ornament, black for use : 
 The best of things are open to abuse. 
 
 So upon the eve of any great holy-day, of which he keepeth one or two at 
 least every year, he will merrily say, in the hearing of a confidential friend, but 
 to none other, — 
 
 All work and no play 
 Makes Jack a dull boy. 
 Or, 
 
 A bow always bent must crack at last. 
 
 But then this must always be understood to be spoken confidentially, and, as 
 we say, under the rose. 
 
638 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 , Lastly, his dress is plain, without singularity; with no other ornament than 
 the quill, which is the badge of his function, stuck behind the dexter ear, and 
 this rather for Convenience of having it at hand, when he hath been called 
 away from his desk, and expecteth to resume his seat there again shortly, than 
 from any delight wliich he taketh in foppery or ostentation. The colour of his 
 clothes is generally noted to be black rather than brown, brown rather than 
 blue or green.' His whole deportment is staid, modest, and civil. His motto 
 is " Regularity." 
 
 This character was sketched in an interval of business, to divert some of the 
 melancholy hours of a counting-house. It is so little a creature of fancy, that 
 it is scarce anything more than a recollection of some of those frugal and 
 economical maxims which, about the beginning of the last century (England's 
 meanest period), were endeavoured to be inculcated and instilled into the 
 breasts of the London Apprentices* by a class of instructors who might not 
 inaptly be termed "The Masters of Mean Morals." The astonishing narrow- 
 ness and illiberality of the lessons contained in some of those books is incon- 
 ceivable by those whose studies have not led them that way, and would almost 
 induce one to subscribe to the hard censure which Drayton has passed upon 
 the mercantile spirit : — 
 
 The gripple merchant, bom to be the curse 
 Of this brave isle. 
 
 I have now lying before me that curious book by Daniel Defoe, " The Com- 
 plete English Tradesman." The pompous detail, the studied analysis of every 
 little mean art, every sneaking address, every trick and subterfuge,-short of 
 larceny, that is necessary to the tradesman's occupation, with the huiidieds of 
 anecdotes, dialogues (in Defoe's liveliest mapner.) interspersed, all tending to 
 the same amiable purpose,— namely, the sacrificing of every honest emotion of 
 the soul to what he calls the main oliance,; — if you read it in au-ironicai sense, 
 and as a piece of covered satire, make it one of the most amusing books which 
 Defoe ever writ, as much so as any of his best novels. It is difficult to say 
 what his intention was in writing it. It is almost impossible to suppose him in 
 earnest. Yet such is the bent of the book to narrow and to degrade the heart, 
 that if such maxims were as catching and infectious, as those of a licentious 
 cast, which happily is not the case, had I been living at that time, I certainly 
 should have recommended to the Grand Jury of Middlesex, , who presented 
 ' ' The Fable ■of the Bees, " to have presented this book of Defoe's in preference, 
 as of a far more vile and debasing tendency. I will give one specimen of his 
 advice to the young tradesman on the gorvernment of his temper : " The retail 
 tradesman in especial, and even every tradesman in his station, must furnish 
 himself with a competent stock of patience. I mean that sort of patience which 
 is needful to bear with all sorts of impertinence, and the most provoking curiosity 
 that it is possible to imagine the buyers, even the worst of them, are, or can 
 be, guilty of. A tradesman behind his counter mttst have no Jlesh and blood 
 about him, no passions, no resentment ; he must never be angry, — no, not so 
 much as seem to be so, if a customer tumbles him five hundred pounds' worth 
 of goods, and scarce bids money for anything ; nay, though they really come to 
 his shop with no intent to buy, as many do, only to see what is to be sold, 
 and though he knows they cannot be better pleased than they are at some 
 other shop where they intend to buy, 'tis all one; the tradesman must lake it; 
 he must place it to the account of his calling, that 'tis his business to be ill used, 
 and resent nothing; and so must answer as obhgingly to those that give him an 
 
 * This term designated a larger class of young men than that to which it is now con- 
 Rned. It took in the articled clerks of merchants and bankers, the George Barnwells of 
 the day. 
 
The Good Clerk. 639 
 
 hour or two's trouble and buy nothing, as he does to those who, in half the 
 time, lay out ten or twenty pounds. The case is plain ; and if some do give 
 him trouble, and do not buy, others make amends, and do buy ; and as for 
 the trouble, 'tis the business of the shop." 
 
 Kere follows a most admirable story of a mercer, who by his indefatigable 
 meanness, and more than Socratic patience under affronts, overcame and 
 reconciled a lady, who, upon the report of another lady that he had behaved 
 saucily to some third lady, had determined to shun his shop, but, by the over- 
 persuasions of a fourth lady, was induced to go to it ; which she does, declaring 
 beforehand that she will buy nothing, but give him all the trouble she can. Her 
 attack and his defence, her insolence and his persevering patience, are described 
 in coloors worthy of a Mandeville ; but it is too long to recite. "The short 
 inference from this long discourse," says he, " is this, — that here you see, and 
 I could give you many examples hke this, how and in what manner a shop- 
 keeper is to behave himself in the way of his business; what impertinences, 
 what taunts, flouts, and ridiculous things he must bear in his trade ; and must 
 not show the least return, or the least signal of disgust : he must have no 
 passions, no fire in his temper ; he must be all soft and smooth ; nay, if his 
 real temper be naturally fiery and hot, he must bhow none of it in his shop ; he 
 must be a perfect complete h;i>focrite, if he will be a cojnplete tradesman.' It is 
 true, natural tempers are not to be always counterfeited : the man cannot easily 
 be a lamb in his shop, and a lion in himself; but, let it be easy or hard, it must 
 be done, and is done. There are men who have by custom and usage brought 
 , themselves to it, that nothing could be meeker and milder than they when 
 behind the counter, and yet nothing be more furious and raging in- every other 
 part of life : nay, the provocations they have met with in their shops have so 
 'irritated their rage, that they would go upstairs from their shop, and fall into 
 frenzies, and a kind of madness, and beat their heads against the wall, and 
 perhaps mischief themselves, if not prevented, till the violence of it had gotten 
 vent, and the passions abate and cool. I heard once of a shopkeeper that 
 behayed himself thus to such an extreme, that when he was -provoked by the 
 impertinence of the customers beyond what his temper could bear, he would 
 go upstairs and beat his wife, kick his children about like dogs, and be as 
 furious for two or three minutes as a man chained down in Bedlam ; and again, 
 when that heat was over, would sit down, and cry faster than the children he 
 had abused; and, after the fit, he would go down into the shop again, and be 
 as humble, courteous, and as calm as any man whatever; so absolute a 
 government of his passions had he in the shop, and so httle out of it : in the 
 shop, a soulless animal that would resent nothing; and in the family, a mad- 
 man : in the shop, meek like a lamb ; but in the family outrageous, like a 
 Libyan lion. The sum of the matter is, it is necessary for a tradesman to 
 subject himself, by all the ways possible, to his business ; his customers are to 
 be his idols; so far as he may worship idols, by allowance, he ts to bow down to 
 them, and worship them; at least he is not in any way to displease them, or 
 show any disgust or distaste whatsoever they may say or do. The bottom of 
 all is that he is intending to get money by thetn ; and it is not for him that gets 
 money to offer the least inconvenience to them by whom he gets it : he is to 
 consider that," as Solomon says, "the borrower is servant to the lender ; so the 
 seller is servant to the buyer." What he says on the head of "Pleasures and 
 Recreations " is not less amusing : "The tradesman s pleasure should be in his 
 business ; his companions should be in his books " (he means his ledger, waste- 
 book &c ) "and if he has a family he makes his excursion supstairs and no 
 farther, kohe of my cautions aim at restraining a tradesman from diverting 
 
 * As no qualification accompanies this maxim, it must be understood as the gehuine 
 sentiment of the author ! 
 
640 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 himself, as we call it, with his fireside, or keeping company with his wife and 
 children." Literal allowance ! nay, almost licentious and criminal indulgence ! 
 But it is time to dismiss this Philosopher of Meanness. More of this stuffwould 
 illiberalize the pages of the Hejlector. Was the man in earnest, when he could 
 bring such powers of description, and all the charms of natural eloquence, in 
 commendation of -^the meanest, vilest, wretchedest degradations of the human 
 character? or did he not rather laugh in his sleeve at the doctrines which 
 he inculcated ; and, retorting upon the grave citizens of London their own 
 arts, palm upon them a sample of disguised satire under the name of whole- 
 some instruction ? 
 
 ®it tiji ^^lawljulg of Cailors. 
 
 Sedet, setemumque sedebit, 
 Infelix Theseus. Virgil. 
 
 That there is a professional melancholy, if I may so express myself, incident 
 to the occupation of a tailor, is a fact which I think very few will venture to 
 dispute. I may safely appeal to my readers, whether they ever knew one of 
 that faculty that was not of a temperament, to say the least, far removed from 
 mercurial of jovial. 
 
 Observe the suspicious gravity of their gait. The peacock is not more tender, 
 from a consciousness of his peculiar infirmity, than a gentleman of this pro- 
 fession is of being known by the same infallible testimonies of his occupation. 
 
 ".Walk, that I may know thee." 
 
 Do you ever see him go whistling along the foot-path like a carman, or brush 
 through a crowd like a baker, or go smiling to himself like a lover ? Is he for- 
 ward 10 thrusl into mobs, or to make one at the ballad-singer's audiences? 
 Does he not rather slink by assemblies and meetings of the people, as one that 
 wisely declines popular observation ? 
 
 How extremely rare is a noisy tailor ! a mirthful and obstreperous tailor ! 
 
 "At my nativity," says Sir Thomas Browne, " my ascendant was the earthly 
 sign of Scorpius ; I was born in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a 
 piece of that leaden planet in me." One would think that he were anatomizing 
 a tailor 1 save that to the latter's occupation, methinks, a woollen planet would 
 seem more consonant, and tliat he should be bom when the sun was in Aries. — 
 He goes on. ' ' I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliar- 
 dize of company." How true a type of the whole trade ! Eminently economical 
 of his words, you shall seldom hear a jest come from one of them. He some- 
 times furnishes subject for a raparfee, but rarely (I think) contributes one on 
 propria. 
 
 Drink itself does not seem to elevate him, or at least to call out of him any 
 of the external indications of vanity. I cannot say that it never causes his 
 pride to swell, but it never breaks out. I am even fearful that it may swell and 
 rankle to an alarming degree inwardly. For pride is near of kin to melancholy ;. 
 — a hurtful obstruction from the ordinary outlets of vanity being shut. It is 
 this stoppage which engenders proud humours. Therefore a tailor may be proud. 
 I think he is never vain. The display of his gaudy patterns in that book of his 
 
On the Melancholy of Tailors. 641 
 
 which emulates the rainbow, never raises any inflations of that emotion in him, 
 corresponding to what the wig-maker (for instance) evinces, when he expatiates 
 on a curl or a bit of hair. He spreads them forth with a sullen incapacity for 
 pleasure, a re.-d or affected indifference to grandeur. Cloth of gold neither 
 seems to elate, nor cloth of frieze to depress him — according to the beautiful 
 motto which formed the modest impress of the shield worn by Charles Brandon 
 at his marriage with the king's sister. Nay, I doubt whether he would discover 
 any vain-glorious complacence in his colours, though " Iris" herself " dipt the 
 woof." 
 
 In further corroboration of this argument — who ever saw the wedding of a 
 tailor announced in newspapers, or the birth of his eldest son? 
 
 When was a tailor known to give a dance, or to be himself a good dancer, 
 or to perform exquisitely on the tight rope, or to shine in any such light and 
 airy pastimes ? to sing, or play on the violin ? 
 
 Do they much care for public rejoicings, lightings up, ringing of bells, firing 
 of cannons, &c. ? 
 
 Valiant I know they can be ; but I appeal to those who were witnesses to the 
 exploits of Eliot's famous troop, whether in their fiercest charges they betrayed 
 anything of that thoughtless oblivion of death with which a Frenchman jigs 
 into battle, or whether they did not show more of the melancholy valour of 
 the Spaniard, upon whom they charged ; that deliberate courage which con- 
 templation and sedentary habits breathe ? 
 
 Are they often great newsmongers ? I have known some few among them 
 arrive at the dignity of speculative politicians ; but that light and cheerful 
 every-day interest in the affairs and goings-on of the world, which makes the 
 barber* such delightful company, I think is rarely observable in them. 
 
 This characteristic pensiveness in them being so notorious, I wonder none of 
 those writers, who have expressely treated of melancholy, should have mentioned 
 it. Burton, whose book is an excellent abstract of all the authors in that kind 
 who preceded him, and who treats of every species of this malady, from the 
 hypochondriacal or windy to the heroical or love melancholy has strangely 
 omitted it. Shakspere himself has overlooked it. "I have neither the 
 scholar's melancholy (saith Jacques), which is emulation ; nor the courtier's, 
 which is proud ; nor the soldier's, which is politic ; nor the lover's, which is all 
 these; " — and then, when you might expect him to have brought in, " nor the 
 tailor's, which is so and so" — he comes to an end of his enumeration, and falls 
 to a defining of his own melancholy. 
 
 Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair an opportunity of bring- 
 ing it in, in his Penseroso. 
 
 But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing against the existence 
 of any well-attested fact, I shall proceed and endeavour to ascertain the causes 
 why this pensive turn should be be so predominant in people of this profession 
 above all others. 
 
 And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing apparel being derived 
 to us from the Fall, and one of the most mortifying products of that unhappy 
 
 * Having incidentally mentioned the barber, in a comparison of professional tempera- 
 ments, I hope no other trade will take offence, or look upon it as an incivility to them, if 
 I sav, that in courtesy, humanity, and all the conversational and social graces which 
 " rladden life," I esteem no profession comparable to his. Indeed so great is the good- 
 wit; which I bear to this useful and agreeable body of men, that, residing in one of the 
 inns of Court (where the best specimens of them are to be found, except perhaps at the 
 Universities) there are seven of them to whom I am personally known, and who never 
 pass me without the compliment of the hat on either side. My truly polite and urbane 
 
 friend Mr. A m, of Flower-de-luce Court, in Fleet Street, will forgive my mention 
 
 of him in particular. I can truly say, that I never spent a quarter of an hour under his 
 hands without deriving £ome profit from the agreeable discussions which are always 
 going on there. 
 
 Y 
 
642 The Wotks of Charles Lamb. 
 
 event, a certain seriousness (to say no more of it) may in the order of things 
 have been intended to be impressed upon the minds of that race of men to, 
 wliom in all ages the care of contriving the human apparel ■ has been en- 
 trusted,— to keep up the memory of the first institution of clothes, and ser\e as 
 a standing remonstrance against those vanities, which the absurd conversion of 
 a memorial olf our shame into an ornament of our persons was destined to pro- 
 . duce? v-orrespondent in some sort to this, it may be remarked, that the tailor 
 sitting ovc. a cave or hollow place, in the cabalistic language of his order, is 
 said to have certain melancholy regions always open under his feet. But 
 waiving furtl^er inquiry into final causes, where the best of us can only wonder 
 in the dark, let us try to discover t,he efficient causes of this melancholy. 
 
 I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, omitting some surbordinate 
 ones, viz : — 
 The sedentary habits of the tailor. 
 Something pecuhar in his diet. — 
 
 First, his sedentary habits. — In Dr. Norris's famous narrative of the frenzy 
 of Mr. John Dennis, the patient, being questioned as to the occasion of the 
 swelling in his legs, replies that it came "by criticism : " to which tiie learned 
 doctor seeming to dernur, as to a distemper which he had never heard of, Dennis 
 {who appears iiot to have been mad upon all subjects) rejoins with some warmth, 
 tliat it was no distemper, but a noble art I that he had sat fourteen hours a day 
 at it : and that the other was a pretty doctor not to know that there was a com- 
 munication between the brain and the legs. , 
 
 When we consider that this sitting for fourteen hours continuously, which 
 ' the critic probably practised only while he was writing his " remaj-lts," is no 
 more than what the tailor, in the ordinary pursuance of his art, submits to 
 daily (Sundays excepted) th^'pughout the year, shall we wonder to find the brain 
 affected, and in a manner over-clouded, from that indissoluble sympathy between 
 the noble and less noble parts of the body, which Dennis hints at ? The un- 
 -natural and painful manner of his sitting must also greatly aggravate the evil, 
 insomuch that I haye sometimes ventured to liken tailors at their boards to so 
 many envious Junos, sitting cross-legged to hinder the birth of their own /elicity. 
 The legs transyersed, thus >< cross-wise, or decussated, was among the ancients 
 the posture of njaledictioii. The Turks, who practise it at this day, are noted, 
 to be a melancholy people. . 
 
 Secondly, his diet. — To lyhich purpose I find a most remarkable passage in 
 Burton, in his chapter entitled " Bad diet a cause of melancholy." "Amongst 
 herbs to be eaten (he says) I find gourds, cucumbers, melons, disallowed; 
 but especially cabbage. It caus«th troublesome dreams, and sends up black 
 vapours to the brain. Galen, loc. affect, lib. 3, cap. 6, of all herbs condemns 
 CABBAGE. And Isaack, hb. 2, cap. i, animtBgravitatemfacit, it brings heaviness 
 to the soul." I could not omit so flattering a testimony from an author, who, 
 having no theory of his own to serve, has so unconsciously contributed to the 
 confirmation of mine. It is well known that this last-named vegetable has, 
 from the earliest periods which we can discover, constituted almost the sole 
 food of this extraordinary race of people. — Huston, Junior. 
 
The Londoner. 643 
 
 £ i!^oniromr. 
 
 I WAS bom under the shadow of St. Dunstan's steeple, just where the conaux 
 of the eastern and western inhabitants of this twofold city meet and jostle in 
 friendly opposition at Teneple Bar. The same day which gave me to the world 
 saw London happy in the celebration of her great annual feast. This I cannot 
 help looking upon as a lively omen of the future great good-will which I was 
 destined to bear toward the city, resembUng in kind that solicitude which 
 every Chief Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever concerns her interests 
 and well-being. Indeed I consider myself in some sort a speculative Lord 
 Mayor of London ; for though circumstances unhappily preclude me from the 
 hope of ever arriving at the dignity of a gold chain and Spital Sermon, yet 
 thus much will I say of myself in truth, that Whittington with his Cat (just 
 emblem of vigilance and a furred gown) never went beyond me in affection, 
 which I bear to the citizens. 
 
 I was bom, as you have heard, in a crowd. This has begot in me an entire 
 affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion 
 from solitude and rural scenes. This aversion was never interrupted or sus- 
 pended, e.'tcept for a few years in the younger part of my life, during a period 
 in which I had set my affections upon a charming young woman. Eveiy man 
 while the passion is upon him, is for a time at least addicted to groves and 
 meadows and purling streams. During this short period of my existence, I 
 contracted just familiarity enough with rural objects to understand tolerably 
 well ever after the foets, when they declaim in such passionate terms in favour 
 of a country life.. 
 
 For my own part, now the fit is past, I have no hesitation in declaring, that 
 a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury Lane Theatre, 
 just at the hour of six, gives me ten thousand sincerer pleasures, than I could 
 ever receive from all the flocks of silly sheep that ever whitened the plains of 
 Arcadia or Epsom Downs. 
 
 This passion for crowds is nowhere feasted so full as in London. The man 
 must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street. I 
 am naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it vanishes, like all other 
 ills. Often, when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed 
 out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour, till tears have wetted my 
 cheek for inutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which 
 she never fails to present at all hours, like the scenes of a shifting pantomime. 
 
 The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from habit do 
 not displease me. The endless succession of shops where Fancy mis-called 
 Follv is supplied with perpetual gauds and toys, excite in me no puritanical 
 aversion. I gladly behold every appetite supplied with its proper food. The 
 obliging customer, and the obliged tradesman— things which live by bowing, 
 and things which exist but for homage— do not affect me with disgust; from 
 liabit I perceive nothing but urbanity, where other men, more refined, discover 
 meanness : I love the very smoke of London, because it has been the medium 
 most familiar to my vision. I see grand principlos of honour at work in the 
 dirty ring which encompasses two combatants with fists, and principles of no 
 less eternal justice in the detection of a pick-pocket. The salutary astonishment 
 with which an execution is surveyed, convinces me more forcibly than a 
 hundred volumes of abstract pohty, that the universal instinct of man in all 
 ages has leaned to order and good government. 
 
644 ^^^^ IVbrks of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Thus an art of extracting morality from the commonest incidents of a town 
 life, is attained by the same well-natured alchemy, with which the Foresters of 
 Arden, in a beautiful country. 
 
 Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks. 
 Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 
 
 Where has spleen her food but in London ? Humour, Interest, Curiosity, suck 
 at her measureless" breasts without a possibility of being satiated. Nursed 
 amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my 
 hfe, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes ! 
 
 (The Quarterly Review, October, 1S14.) 
 
 [Charles Lamb's intense admiration for the genius of Wordsworth, and his unaffected 
 delight upon reading an early presentation copy of " The Excursion "can alone account 
 for his excessive magnanimity in having ever undertaken to review it in the pages of the 
 Quarterly. The article as itactually appeared, and as it is here reprinted, from vol. xii., 
 pp. loo-iii, the agonized writer himself described as having had "the eyes pulled out and 
 the bleeding sockets left." It was, in truth, so hacked and maimed editorially by William 
 Gifford, as to be scarcely recognizable. The marvel is that Lamb should ever have 
 dreamt of contributing to pages in which only three years previously the editor of 
 the Quarterly, ' in reviewing Weber's edition of the works of Ford, the dramatist, in 
 allusion to Charles Lamb's " Specimens of the Dramatic Poets,'* had said, with frightful 
 coarseness, " He (Weber) has polluted his pages with the blasphemies of a poor maniac, 
 who, it seems, once published^ some detached scenes of the_ Broken Heart Forthis 
 unfortunate creature every feeling mind will find an apology in his calamitous situation ; 
 but for Mr. Weber, we know not where the warmest of his friends will seek either pallia- 
 tion or excuse." On Southey's remonstrating, in a letter addressed to Mr. Murray, 
 couched in terms of burning expostulation upon allusions of such astounding brutality, 
 Gifford, as editor, and as writer of the article, protested, with an exaggerated emphasis, 
 " I call God to witness ^at in the whole course of my life I never heard one syllable of 
 Mr. Lamb and his family, I knew not that he ever had a sister. I declare in the most 
 solemn manner that all I ever knew or ever heard of Mr. Lamb was merely his name. 
 Had I been aware of one of the circumstances which you mention, 1 would have lost my 
 right arm sooner than have written what I have." Accepting these asseverations, the 
 appalling extravagance of the language, applied to one whose name merely had never 
 previously been heard of, and of whose surroundings the critic protests with an oath 
 that he had no knowledge whatever, is, to say the least of it, matter only for the most 
 profound amazement. Charles Lamb, though pained at the time beyond expression by an 
 outrage so wild and wanton, may be said to have condoned it by contributing, three years 
 afterwards, this very paper on Wordsworth's ** Excursion" to the Quarterly, having pro- 
 bably received in good faith the editor'sastonishing explanation. However this may have 
 been, his trust in Gifford only subjected him, as the event proved, to another anguish. 
 On seeing how cruelly his article had been dealt with — decapitated, quartered, and disem- 
 bowelled — he wrote to Wordsworth, " I cannot give you an idea of what he has done to 
 it. The language he has altered throughout. Whatever inadequateness it had to its 
 subject, it was, in point of composition, the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ. That 
 charm, if it had any, is all gone ; more than a third of the substance is cut away, and 
 that not all from one place, \i\xK. passion, so as to make utter nonsense. Every warm ex- 
 pression is changed for a nasty cold one." And so forth. No wonder, putting it in the 
 niildest phrase possible under the circumstances, h? said that he never felt more vexed in 
 his life than on reading it. Yet all his revenge was writing a sarcastic sonnet date^ St. 
 Crispin's Eve, and-headed " St. Crispin to Mr. Gifford," in which, with a final allusion to 
 the stretching-leather of his brain, the ■ great critic was reminded, if not of the ne snior . 
 
Wordsworth's " Exairsion." 645 
 
 belTch'of a'^iho^iker!]'""" "'° '° "'^ ^"'''"^' "''^'"' "'" ""^ e«a'-'^r6', from the humble 
 THE volume before us, as we learn from the Preface, is "a detached portion 
 i.^'j "1 n P"^™' <=on'aming views of man, nature, and society •" to be 
 called the Recluse, as having for its principal subject the "sensations and 
 opinions of a poet living in retirement ;" and to be preceded by a "record in 
 verse of the origin and progress of the author's own powers, with reference to 
 the fitness which they may be supposed to have conferred for the task." To the 
 completion of this plan we look forward with a confidence which the execution 
 of the finished part is well calculated to inspire.— Meanwhile, in what is before 
 us there is an ample matter for entertainment: for the "Excursion" is not 
 a branch (as might have been suspected) prematurely plucked from the parent 
 tree to gratify an overhasty appetite for applause : but is, in itself, a complete 
 and legitimate production. 
 
 It opens with the meeting of the poet with an aged man whom he had known 
 from his schooldays ; in plain words, a Scottish pedlar; a man who, though of 
 low origin, had received good learning and impressions of the strictest piety 
 from his stepfather, a minister and village schoolmaster. Among the hills of 
 Athol, the child is described to have become familiar with the appearances of 
 nature in his occupation as a feeder of sheep ; and from her silent influences 
 to have derived a character, meditative, tender, and poetical. With an ima- 
 gination and feelings thus nourished— his intellect noi unaided by books, but 
 those, few, and chiefly of a religious cast— the necessity of seeking a mainte- 
 nance in riper years, had induced him to make choice of a profession, the 
 appellation for which has been gradually declining into contempt, but which 
 formerly designated a class of men, who, journeying in country places, when 
 roads presented less facilities for travelling, and the intercourse between towns 
 and villages was unfrequent and hazardous, became a sort of hnk of neighbour- 
 hood to distant habitations ; resembling, in some small measure, in the effects 
 of their periodical returns, the caravan which Thomson so feelingly describes 
 as blessing the cheerless Siberian in its annual visitation, with " news of human 
 kind." 
 
 In the solitude incident to this rambling life, power had been given him to 
 keep alive that devotedness to nature which he had imbibed in his childhood, 
 together with the opportunity of gaining such notices of persons and things 
 from his intercourse with society, as qualified him to become a ' ' teacher of 
 moral wisdom. With this man, then, in a hale old age, released from the bur- 
 then of his occupation, yet retaining much of its attive habits, the poet meets, 
 and is by him introduced to a second character — a sceptic — one who had been 
 partially roused from an overwhelming desolation, brought upon him by the 
 loss of wife and children, by the powerful incitement of hope which the 
 French Revolution in its commencement put forth, but who, disgusted with 
 the failure of all its promises, had fallen back into a laxity of faith and conduct 
 which induced at length a tota.1 despondence as to the dignity and final desti- 
 nation of his species. In the language of the poet, he 
 
 broke faith with those whom he had laid 
 
 In earth's dark chambers. 
 
 Yet he describes himself as subject to compunctious visitations from that 
 silent quarter. 
 
 Feebly must they have felt, etc. — p. 133. 
 
 The conversations which this person, in which the Wanderer asserts the 
 consolatory side of the question against the darker views of human life main- 
 tained by his friend, and finally calls to his assistance the experience of a 
 village priest, the third, or rather fourth interlocutor, (for the poet himself is 
 one), form the groundwork of the "Excursion." 
 
646 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 It will be seen by this sketch that the poem is of a didaptic nature, and not 
 a fable or story ; yet it is not wanting in stories of the most interesting kind, — 
 such as the lovers of Cowper and Goldsmith will recognize as something familiar 
 and congenial to them. We might instance the Ruined Cottage, and the 
 Solitary's own story,' in the first half of the work ; and the second half, as 
 being almost a continued cluster of narration. But the prevailing charm of 
 the poem is, perhajis, that conversational as it is in its pfen, the dialogue 
 throughout is carried' OH in the very heart of the most romantic scenery which 
 the poet's native hills could supply ; and which, by the perpetual references 
 made to it either in the way of illustration or for variety and pleasurable de- 
 scription's sake, is brought before us as we read. We breathe in the fresh air, 
 as we do while reading Walton's Complete Angler ; only the country about us 
 is as much bolder than Walton's, as the thoughts and speculations, which form 
 the matter of the poem, exceed the trifling pastime and low-pitched conversa- 
 tion of his humble fishermen. We give the description of the "two huge 
 peaks," which from some other vale peered into that in which. the Solitary is 
 entertaining the poet and his companion. ' ' Those," says their host, 
 
 -if here you dwelt, would be 
 
 "Vour prized companions, etc. — p. 84, 
 
 To a mind constituted like that of Mr. Wordsworth, the stream, the torrent, 
 and the stirring leaf — seem not merely to suggest associations of deity, but to 
 be a kind of speaking communication with it. He walks through common 
 forests, as through some /Dodona or enchanted wood ; and every casual bird 
 that flits upon the boughs, like that miraculous one*" in Tasso, but in language 
 moi*e piercing than any articulate sounds, reveals to him, far higher love-lays. 
 In his poetry nothing in nature is dead. Motion is synonymous with life. 
 " Beside yon spring," says the Wanderer, speaking of a deserted well, from 
 which, in former times, a poor woman, who died heart-broken, had been used 
 to dispense refreshment to the thirsty traveller. 
 
 -beside yon spring I stood, etc. —p. 27. 
 
 To such a mind, we say — call it strength or weakness— if \veakness, assuredly 
 a fortunate one — the visible and audible things of creation present, not dim 
 symbols, or curious emblems, which they have done at all times to those whp 
 have been gifted with tlie poetical faculty ; but revelations and quick insights 
 into the life within us, the pledge of immortality: — , 
 
 ; the whispering air 
 
 Sends inspiration from Her shadowy heights. 
 And blind recesses of the cavern'd rocks; ■ 
 The'little rills, and waters numberless. 
 Inaudible by daylight. 
 
 " I have seen," the poet says, and the illustration is a happyone: 
 
 — r* 1 hav.e seen 
 
 A curious child, applying to his ear 
 
 The convolutions of a smooth-lipp'd shell, etc. — p. 191. 
 
 Sometimes this harmony is' imaged to us by an echo ; and in one instance, 
 
 * With parti-colpured plumes, and purple bill, 
 A wondrous bird among the rest there flew. 
 That in plain speech sung love-layS' loud and shrill ; 
 Her leden was like human language true ,; 
 So much she talk'd, and with such wit and skill, 
 That strange it seemfed how much good she knew. 
 
 Fairfax's Tratislatioiu 
 
Wordsworth's "Excursion." 647 
 
 it is with such transcendent beauty set forth by a shadow and its corresponding 
 substance, that it would be a sin to cheat our readers at once of so happy an 
 illustration of the poet's system, and so fair a proof of his descriptive powers. 
 
 Thus having reach'd a bridge that over-arch'd, etc.— p. 407. 
 
 Combinations, it is .confessed, " like those reflected in that quiet pool," can- 
 not be lasting : it is enough for the purpose of the poet, if they are felt. They 
 are at leasthis system ; and his readers, if they reject them for their creed, 
 may receive them merely as poetry. In him, faith, in friendly alliance and 
 conjunction with the religion of his country, appears to have grown up, fos- 
 tered by meditation and lonely communions with Nature— an internal 
 principle of lofty consciousness, which stamps upon his opinions and senti- 
 raents(we were almost going to say) the character of an expanded and generous 
 Quakerism. 
 
 From such a creed we should expect unusual results ; and, when applied to 
 the purposes of consolation, more touching considerations than from the mouth 
 of common teachers. The finest speculation of this sort perhaps in the poem 
 before us, is the notion of the thoughts which may sustain the spirit, while they 
 crush the frame of the sufferer, who from loss of objects of love by death, is 
 commonly supposed to pine away under a broken heart. 
 
 If there be, whose tender frames have droop' d, etc.— p. 148. 
 
 With the same modifying and incorporating power, he tells us, — 
 
 Within the soul a faculty abides, etc.— p. i88. 
 
 This is high poetry ; though (as we have ventured to lay the basis of the 
 author's sentiments in a sort of liberal Quakerism) from some parts of it, others 
 may, with more plausibility, object to the appearance of a kind of natural 
 Methodism: we could have wished therefore' that the tale of Margaret had been 
 postponed, till the reader had been strengthened by some previous acquaint- 
 ance with the author's theory, and not placed in the front of the poem, with 
 a kind of ominous aspect, beautifully tender as it is. It is a tale of a cottage, 
 and its female tenant, gradually decaying together, while she expected the 
 return of one whom poverty and not unkindness had driven from her arms. 
 We trust ourselves only with the conclusion — 
 
 -nine tedious years 
 
 From their first separation, nine long years, etc. — p. 46. 
 
 The fourth book, entitled "Despondency Corrected," we consider as the 
 most valuable portion of the poem. For moral grandeur; fOTwidescope of 
 thought and along train of lofty imaggfyT*Jof tender personarappeairr^nd a 
 versiyication which we feel we ought to notice, but feel it also so involved in 
 the poetry, that we can hardly mention it as a distinct excellence ; it stands 
 without competition among our didactic and descriptive verse. The general 
 tendency of the argument (which we might almost affirm to be the leading 
 moral of the poem) is to abate the pride of the calculating understanding,, and 
 to reinstate the imagination and the affections in those seats from which 
 modem philosophy has laboured but too successfully to expel them. 
 
 "Life's autumn past," says the grey-haired Wanderer, 
 
 — 1 stand on winter's verge, etc.— p. 168. 
 
 In the same spirit, those illusions of the imaginative faculty to which the 
 
 * r" The reasons for postponing it," wrote Lamb to Wordsworth, '"are as deducible 
 from what goes before as they are from the io4lh Psalm. The passage whence I 
 deduced it has vanished, but clapping a colon before a </tfr-c/&>-« is always reason enough 
 for Mr Baviad GifTord to allow to a reviewer that is not himself. ] 
 
648 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 peasantry in solitary districts are peculiarly subject, are represented as the 
 kindly ministers of conscience : 
 
 -witli whose service charged 
 
 They come and go, appear and disappear ; 
 
 Diverting evil purposes, remorse 
 
 Awakening, chastening an intemperate grief. 
 
 Or pride of heart abatmg. 
 Reverting to the more distant ages of the world, the operation of that same 
 faculty in producing the several fictions of Chaldean, Persian, and Grecian 
 idolatry, is described with such seductive power, that the Solitary, in good 
 earnest, seems alarmed at the tendency of his own argument. Notwithstand- 
 ing his fears, however, there is one thought so uncommonly fine, relative to the 
 spirituality which lay hid beneath the gross material forms of Greek worship, in 
 metal or stone, that we cannot resist the allurement of transcribing it — 
 
 Triumphant o'er this pompous show, etc — p. 174. 
 
 In discourse like this the first day passes away. The second (for this almost 
 dramatic poem takes up the action of two summer days) is varied by the intro- 
 duction of the village priest ; to whom the Wanderer resigns the office of chief 
 speaker, which had been yielded to his age and experience on the first. The 
 conference is begun at the gate of the churchyard ; and after some natural 
 speculations concerning death and immortality— and the custom of funereal and 
 sepulchral observances, as deduced from a feeling of immortality— certain 
 doubts are proposed respecting the quantity of moral worth existing in the 
 world, and in that mountainous district in particular. In the resolution of 
 these doubts, the priest enters upon a most affecting and singular strain of 
 narration, derived from the graves around him. Pointing to hillock after hil- 
 lock, he gives short histories of their tenants, disclosing their humble virtues, 
 and touching with tender hand upon their frailties. 
 
 Nothing can be conceived finer than the manner of introducing these tales. 
 With heaven above his head, and the mouldering turf at his feet- standing 
 betwixt fife and death— he seems to maintain that spiritual relation which he 
 bore to his living flock, in its undiminished strength, even with their ashes ; 
 and to be in his proper cure, or diocese, among the dead. 
 
 We might extract powerful instances of pathos from these tales— the story 
 of Ellen in particular — but their force is in combination, and in the circum- 
 stances under which they are introduced. The traditionary anecdote of the 
 Jacobite and Hanoverian, as less liable to suffer by transplanting, and as 
 affording an instance of that finer species of humour, that thoughtful playful- 
 ness in which the author more nearly perhaps than in any other quality re- 
 sembles Cowper, we shall lay at least a part of it before our readers. It is the 
 story of a whig who, having wasted a large estate in election contests, retired 
 "beneath a borrowed name" to a small town among these northern mountains, 
 where a Caledonian laird, a follower of the house of Stuart, who had fled his 
 country after the overthrow at CuUoden, returning with the return of lenient 
 times, had also fixed his residence. 
 
 -Here, then, they met. 
 
 Two doughty champions ; flaming Jacobite, etc — ^p. 270-73. 
 The causes which have prevented the poetry of Mr. Wordsworth from attain- 
 ing its full share of popularity are to be found in the boldness and originality of 
 his genius. The times are past when a poet could securely follow the direction ' 
 of his own mind into whatever tracts it might lead. A writer, who would be 
 popular, must timidly coast the shore of prescribed sentiment and sympathy. 
 He must have just as much more of the imaginative faculty than his readers, as 
 will serve to keep their apprehensions from stagnating, but not so much as to . 
 alarm their jealousy. He must not think or feel too deeply. j 
 
 . I 
 
Wordsworth's " Excursion." ' 649 
 
 If he tias had the fortune to be bred in the midst of the most magnificent 
 objects of creation, he must not have given away his heart to them ; or if 
 he have, he must conceal his love, or not carry his expressions of it beyond 
 that point of rapture, which the occasional tourist thinks it not overstepping 
 decorum to betray, or the limit which that gentlemanly spy upon Nature, the 
 picturesque traveller, has vouchsafed to countenance. He must do this, or be 
 content to be thought an enthusiast. 
 
 If from living among simple mountaineers, from a daily intercourse with 
 them, not upon the footing of a patron, but in the character of an equal, he 
 has detected, or imagines that he has detected, through the cloudy medium of 
 their unlettered discourse, thoughts and apprehensions not vulgar; traits of 
 patience and constancy, love unwearied, and heroic endurance, not unfit (as he 
 may judge) to be made the subject pf verse, he will be deemed a man of per- 
 verted genius by the philanthropist who, conceiving of the peasantry of his 
 country only as objects of a pecuniary sympathy, starts at finding them elevated 
 to a level of humanity with himself, having their own loves, enmities, cravings, 
 aspirations, &c., as much beyond his faculty to believe, as his beneficence to 
 supply. 
 
 If from a familiar observation of the ways of children, and much more from 
 a retrospect of his own mind when a child, he has gathered more reverential 
 notions of that state than fall to the lot of ordinary observers, and, escaping 
 from the dissonant wranglings of men, has tuned his lyre, though but for occa- 
 sional harmonies, to the milder utterance of that soft age, — his verses shall be 
 censured as infantile by critics who confound poetry ' ' having children for its 
 subject" with poetry that is " childish," and who, having themselves perhaps 
 never been children, never having possessed the tenderness and docility of that 
 age, know not what the soul of a child is— how apprehensive ! how imagina- 
 tive ! how religious ! 
 
 We have touched upon some of the causes which we conceive to have been 
 unfriendly to the author's former poems. We think they do not apply in the 
 same force to the one before us. There is in it more of uniform elevation, 
 a wider scope of subject, less»of manner, and it contains none of those starts 
 and imperfect shapings which in some of this author's smaller pieces offended 
 the weak, and gave scandal to the perverse. It must indeed be approached 
 with seriousness. It has in it much of that quality which ' ' draws the devout, 
 deterring the profane." Those who hate the Paradise Lost will not love this 
 poem. The steps of the great master are discernible in it ; not in direct imita- 
 tion or injurious parody, but' in the following of the spirit, in free homage and 
 generous subjection. 
 
 One objection it is impossible not to foresee. It will be asked, why put such 
 eloquent discourse in the mouth of a pedlar? It might be answered that Mr. 
 Wordsworth's plan required a character in humble life to be the organ of his 
 philosophy. It was in harmony with the system and scenery of his poem. We 
 read Piers Plowman's Creed, and the lowness of the teacher seems to add 
 a simple dignity to the doctrine. Besides, the poet has bestowed an unusual 
 share of education upon him. Is it too much to suppose that the author, at 
 some early period of his life, may himself have known such a person, a man 
 endowed with sentiments above his situation, another Burns ; and that the 
 dignified strains which he has attributed to the Wanderer may be no more than 
 recollections of his conversation, heightened only by the amplification natural 
 to poetry, or the lustre which imagination flings back upon the objects and 
 companions of our youth? After all, if there should be found readers willing 
 to admire the poem^ who yet feel scandalized at a name, we would advise them, 
 wherever it occurs, to substitute silently the word Palmer, or Pilgrim, or any 
 less offensive designation, which shall connect the notion of sobriety in heart 
 and manners with the experience and privileges which a wayfaring life confers. 
 
650 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 ( The Examiner, 6th June, 1813.) 
 
 The Reynolds Gallery has, upon the whole, disappointed me. Some of. the 
 portraits are interesting. They are faces of characters whom we (middle-aged 
 gentlemen) were born a little too late to remember, but about whom, w? have 
 heard our fathers tell stories till we almost fancy to have seen l;hem. There is 
 a charm in the portrait of a Rodney or a Keppel, which even a picture of 
 Nelson must want for me. I should turn away after a slight inspection from 
 the best likeness that could be made of Mrs. Anne, Clarke ; but Kitty fisher is 
 a considerable personage. Then the dresses of some of the women so exactly 
 remind us of modes which we can just recall ; of the forms under which the 
 venerable relationship of aunt pr mother first presented themselves to our 
 young eyes; the aprons, the coifs, the lappets, the hoods. Mercy on us! what 
 a load of head ornaments seem to have conspired to bury a pretty face in the 
 picture of Mrs. Long, yd could not.' Beauty must have some "charmed hfe" 
 to have been able to surmount, the conspiracy of fashion in those days to 
 .destroy iii 
 
 The portraits which least pleased me were those boys as infant Bacchuses, 
 Jupiters, &c. But the artist is not to be blamed for the disguise. No doubt 
 the parents wished to see their children deified in their lifetime. It was but 
 putting. a thunderbqlt (instead of a squib), into young master's hands; and a 
 wheyrSiced chit was transformed into the infant ruler of Olympus, —him who 
 was aftefward to shake heaven and earth with his black brow. Another good 
 boy pleased his grandmamma so well, and the^lameless dotage of the good 
 old woman imagined in him an adequate representative of the awful Prophet 
 Samuel. But the great historical compos i-t ions, where ike artist was at liberty 
 to paint from his own idea, — the Beaufort and the Ugolivo : why then, I must 
 confess, pleading the liberty of table talk for my presumption, that they have 
 not left any very elevating impression on my mind. Pardon a ludicrous com- 
 parison. I know, madam, you admire them both ; but placed opposite to each 
 other as they are at the gallery, as if to set the one work in competition with 
 the other, they did remind me of the famous contention for the prize of de- 
 formity, mentioned in the 173d Number of the Spectator. The one stares, and 
 the other grips; but is there common dignity in their countenances^ Does 
 anything of the history of their hfe gone by peep through the ruins of the 
 mind in the face, like the unconquerable grandeur that surmounts the distor- 
 tions of the Laocoiin ? The figures which stand by the bed of Beaufort are 
 indeed happy rfepreserttations of the plain unmannered old nobiUty of the 
 English historical plays of Shakspere; but, for anything else; — Give me 
 leave to recommend those macaroons. . 
 
 After leaving the Reynolds Gallery (where, upon the whole, I- received a -good 
 deal of pleasure), and feeling that I had quite had my fill of paintings, I, stum- 
 bled upon a picture in Piccadilly (No. 22, I think), which purports to be a por- 
 trait of Francis the First, by Leonardo da Vinci. Heavens, wfet a difference ! 
 It is but a portrait, as most of those I had bepn seeing; but, placed Ijy them, 
 it would kill them, swillow them up &s Moses' rod the other rods. ■ Where did 
 these old painters get their models? I see no figures; not in my dreams, as 
 thi^" Francis, .in the character, or ratheir yith the attributes, of John the Baptist. 
 A more than' martial niajesty in the brow'iind upori'the eyelid; an arm, mxB- 
 
\ The Rey Herds Gallery. 651 
 
 cular, beautifully formed ; the long, graceful, massy fingers compressing yet so 
 as not to hurt, a lamb more lovely, more sweetly shrmking, than we can conceive ' 
 that milk-whue one which followed Una; the picture altogether lookin-- as if 
 It were eternal,— combining the truth of flesh with apromise of permanence 
 hke marble. 
 
 Leonardo, from the one or two specimens we have of him in England) must 
 have been a stupendous genius. I can scarce think he has had his full- fame- 
 he who could paint that wonderful personification of the Logos, or second 
 person of the Trinity, grasping a globe, late in the possessionof Mr. Troward 
 of Pall Mall, where the hand was, by the boldest, licence, twice as big as the 
 truth of drawing warranted ; yet the effect, to every one that saw it, by some 
 magic of genius was confessed to be not monstrous, but miraculous and silenc- 
 ing. It could not be gainsaid. 
 
 Ili^arl^ §rom£'s "fofabl C^rifa." 
 
 {The Examiner, 4th July, 1819.) 
 
 [This and the three subsequent papers were first identified as Lamb's, thaiiks to the 
 industrious researches of Mr.- Herne Shepherd.] > ' , ■, 
 
 The Jovial .Crew,, or ;ili;i^ Merry Beggars, has been revived here [at the 
 English opera] after an interval, as the bills tell us, of seven years. Can it be 
 so long, ,(it seenis but yesterday) since we saw popr Lovegrpve in Justice Clack ? 
 His childish treble still pipes in our ears ; ".Whip "em, whip 'em, whip 'em." 
 Dowton was the representative of the Justice the other night, and shook oiir 
 ribs most incontinently. He was in " excellent foolery," and our lungs crpwed 
 chanticleer. Yet it appears to us that there was a still higher strain of fatuity 
 in his predecessor— that his eyes distilled a richer dotage. Perhaps,' after all, 
 it was an error of the memory. Defunct merit comes out upon us strangely. 
 
 Easy natural Wrench was the Springlove; too comfortable a personage 
 perhaps to personify Springlove, in whom the voice of the bird awakens a 
 restless instinct of roaming that had slept during the winter. ' Miss Stevenson 
 certainly leaves us nothing to regret for the absence of the lady, however, 
 agreeable, who formerly performed the part of Meriel. Miss Stevensoni is a 
 fine open-countenanced lass, with glorious girlish manners. But the Princess 
 of Mumpers, and Lady Paramount of beggarly counterfeit accents, was she 
 that played Rachel. Her gabbling lachrymose petitions ; her tones, such as 
 we have heard by the side of old woods, when an irresistible face has come 
 peeping on one on a sudden ; with her full black locks, and a voice— hoy/ shall 
 we describe it ? — a voice that was by nature meant to convey nothing biit truth 
 and goodness, but warped by circumstance into an assurance that .she is tell- 
 ing us a lie— that catching twitch of the thievish irreprovable finger — those 
 ballad-singers' notes, so vulgar,, yet. so unvulgar— that assurance so like imr 
 pudence and yet so many countless leagues removed from it — her jeers, 
 wJiich^we had rather stand, than be caressed with other, ladies' complimentSj, 
 a summer's day long— her face, with a wild out-of-doors grace upon it 
 
 Altogether, 3 brace of more romantic she-beggars it was never our fortune, 
 to meet in this supplicatory world. The youngest might have sat for "pretty, 
 Bessy," whose father was ^U' Earl, and whose legend stiil adorns the front ot 
 mine hostess's doors at Bethnal-.Green ; and the other could be no less than 
 
652 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 the "Beggar Maid" whom "King Cophetua wooed." "What a lass that 
 were," said a stranger who sate beside us, speaking of Miss Kelly in Rachel, 
 " to go a-gypsying through the world with." We confess we longed to drop 
 a tester in her lap, she begged so masterly. 
 
 fiy-the-way, this is the true Beggar's Opera. The other should have been 
 called the Mirror for Highwaymen. We wonder the Societies for the Sup- 
 pression of Mendicity (and other good things) do not club for the putting down 
 of this infamous protest in favour of air, and clear liberty, and honest licence, 
 and blameless assertion of man's original blest charter of blue skies, and 
 vagrancy, and nothing-to-do. 
 
 (The Examiner, 1st August, 1819.) 
 
 By one of those strange perversions which actuate poor mortals in the place 
 of motives (to persuade us into the notion that we are free agents, we pre- 
 sume), we had never till the other evening seen Dowton [at the English Opera] 
 in Doctor Cantwell. By a pious fraud of Mr. Arnold's, who by a process as 
 simple as some of those by which Mathews metamorphoses his person, has 
 converted the play into an opera,— a conversion, by-the-way, for which we are 
 highly indebted to him, — we have been favoured with this rich novelty at our 
 favourite theatre. It seems a little unreasonable to come lagging in with a 
 posthumous testimony to the merits of a performance of which the town has 
 long rung, but we cannot help remarking in Mr. Dowton's acting, the subtle 
 gradations of the hypocrisy ; the length to which it runs in proportion as the 
 recipient is capable of taking it in ; the gross palpable way in which he ad- 
 ministers the dose in wholesale to old Lady Lambert, that rich fanatic ; the 
 somewhat more guarded manner in which he retails it out, only so much a 
 time as he can bear, to the somewhat less bitten fool her son ; and the almost 
 absence of it before the younger members of the family, when nobody else is 
 by ; how the cloven foot peeps out a little and a little more, till the diabohcal 
 nature is stung out at last into full manifestation of its horrid self. What a 
 grand insolence in the tone which he assumes, when he commands Sir John 
 to quit his house ; and then tlie tortures and agonies when he is finally baffled ! 
 It is in these last perhaps that he is greatest, and we should be doing in- 
 justice not to compare this part of the performance with, and in some respects 
 to give it the preference above, the acting of Mr. Kean, in a situation nearly 
 analogous, at the conclusion of the City Madam. Cantwell reveals his pangs 
 with quite as much force, and without the assistance of those contortions 
 which transform the detected Luke into the similitude of a mad tiger, or a 
 foaming demon. Dowton plays it neither like beast nor demon, but simply 
 as it should be, a bold bad man pushed to extremity. Humanity is never once 
 overstepped. Has it ever been noticed, the exquisite modulation with which 
 he drawls out the word "Charles," when he calls his secretary, so humble, so 
 seraphic, so resigned. The most diabolical of her sex that we ever knew 
 accented all her honey devil words in just such a hymn-like smoothness. 
 The spirit of Whitfield seems hovering in the air, to suck the blessed tones 
 
so much like his own upon earth ; Lady Huntingdon claps her neat white 
 wings, and gives it out again in heaven to the sainted ones, in approbation. 
 
 Miss Kelly is not quite at home in Charlotte ; she is too good for such 
 parts. Her cue is to be natural ; she cannot put on the modes of artificial 
 life, and play the coquette as it is expected to be played. There is a frankness 
 in her tones which defeats her purposes ; we could not help wondering why 
 her lover (Mr. Pearman) looked so rueful ; we forgot that she was acting airs 
 and graces, as she seemed to forget it herself, turning them into a playfulness 
 which could breed no doubt for a moment which way her inchnations ran. 
 She is in truth not framed to tease or torment even in jest, but to utter a 
 hearty Yes or No ; to yield or refuse assent with a noble sincerity. We have not 
 the pleasure of being acquainted with her, but we have been told that she 
 carries the same cordial manners into private life. We have heard, too, of 
 some virtues which she is in the practice of ; but they are of a description 
 which repay themselves, and with them neither we nor the public have any- 
 thing to do. 
 
 One word about Wrench who played the Colonel : — Was this man never 
 unhappy? It seems as if care never came near him, as if the black ox could 
 never tread upon his foot ; we want something calamitous to befall him, to 
 bring him down to us. It is a shame he should be suffered to go about with 
 his well-looking happy face and tones insulting us thin race of irritable and 
 irritable-making critics. 
 
 {The Examiner, 8th August, 1819.) 
 
 j [Prefixed to this criticism by Charles Lamb was the following editorial note from the 
 ' haiid of Leigh Hunt.] 
 
 [We must make the public acquainted with a hard case of ours. Here had 
 we been writing a long, elaborate, critical, and analytical account of the new 
 pieces at the Lyceum, poring over the desk for two hours in the morning after 
 a late night, and melting away what little had been left of our brains and nerves 
 from the usual distillation of the week, when a,n impudent rogue of a friend, 
 whose most daring tricks and pretences carry as good a countenance with them 
 as virtues in any other man, and who has the face above all to be a better 
 critic than ourselves, sends us the following remarks of his own on those two 
 very pieces. What do we do? The self-love of your inferior critic must vent 
 itself somehow ; and so we take this opportunity of showing our virtue at the 
 expense of our talents, and fairly making way for the interioper. 
 
 Dear, nine, closely-written octavo pages ! you were very good, after all, 
 between you and me ; and should have given way to nobody else. If there 
 is room left, a piece of you shall be got in at the end ; for virtue is undoubtedly 
 its own reward, but not quite.] 
 
 A plot has broke out at this theatre. Some quarrel has been breeding between 
 the.raale and female performers, and the women have determined to set up for 
 
6.S'4-' The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 themselvesl' Seven of them, Belles without Beaux they call themselves, have 
 undertaken to get up a piece without any assistance from the men, and in our 
 opinion have established their point most successfully. There is Miss Carew 
 with her silvery tones, and Miss Stevenson with her delicious mixture of the 
 school-girl arid the waiting-maid, and Miss Kelly, sure to be first in any mischief, 
 and Mrs. Chatterly, with some of the best acting we have ever witnessed, and 
 Miss LpVe; worthy of the name, and Mrs. Grove thatirhymes to her, and Mrs. ' 
 RichardsqniWho might in charity have been allowed somewhat a larger portion 
 of the didlogue. The effect was enchanting. We mean for once. We do not 
 want to entourage these Amazonian vanities. Once or twice we longed to have 
 Wrench bustlijig among them. A lady who sate near us was observed to gape 
 for want of variety. To us it was delicate quintessence, an apple-pie made all 
 of quinces. We remember poor Holcroft's last comedy, which positively died 
 from the opposite excess ; it was choked up with men, and perished from a 
 redundancy of male population. It had nine principal men characters in it, 
 and but one woman, and she of no very ambiguous character. Mrs. Harlow, 
 to do the part justice, chose to play it in scarlet. 
 
 We did not know Mrs. Chatterly's merits before ; she plays, with downright 
 sterling gbod acting, a prude who is to be convinced out of her prudery by 
 Miss Kelly's- (we did not catch her stage name) assumption of the dress and ' 
 character of a brother of seventeen, who makes the prettiest unalarming. 
 platonic approaches; and in the shyest mark of moral battery, no onestepbf. 
 which you can detect, or say this is decidedly going too far, vanquishes at last 
 the ice of her scruples, brings her into an infinite scrape, and then with her 
 own infinite good humour sets all to right, and brings her safe out of it again 
 with an explanation. Mrs. Chatterly's embarrassments were masterly. Miss 
 Stevenson her maid's start at surprising a youth in her mistress's closet at mid- 
 night, was quite as good. Miss Kelly we do not care to say anything about, 
 because we have been accused of flattering her. The truth is, this lady puts 
 so much intelligence and good sense into every part which she plays, that there 
 is no expressing an honest sense of her merits, without incurring a suspicion of 
 that sort. But what have we to gain by praising Miss Kelly? 
 
 .Altogether, this little feminine republic, this provoking experiment, went off 
 most smoothly. What a nice world it would be, we sometimes think, all 
 women I but then we are afraid, we slip in a fallacy unawares into the hypo- 
 thesis ; we somehow edge in the idea of ourselves as spectators or something 
 among them. 
 
 We saw Wilkinson after it in Walk for a Wager. What a picture of forlorn 
 hope ! of abject orphan destitution ! he seems to have no friends in the world 
 but his legs, and he plies them accordingly. He goes walking on like a per- 
 petual motion. His continual ambulatory presence performs the part of a 
 Greek chorus. He is the walking gentleman of the piece ; a peripatetic that 
 would 'make a stoic laugh. He made us cry. His Muffincap mAmaieursand 
 Actors is just such another piece of acting. We have seen charity boy§, both 
 of St. Clement's and Farriiigdon Without, looking just as old, ground down 
 out of all semblance of youth, by abject and hopeless neglect — you cannot 
 guess their age between fifteen and fifty. If Mr. Peake is the author of these 
 pieces, he has no reason to be piqued at their reception. 
 
 We must apologize for an oversight in our last week's article. The allusion 
 made to Mr. Kean's acting of Luke in the City Madamyi^s totally inapplicable 
 to the part and to the play. We were thinking of his performance of the con- 
 cluding scenes of The New Way to Pay Old Debts. We confounded one of 
 Massinger's strange heroes with the other. It was Sir Giles Overreach we 
 meant ; nor are we sure that our remark was just, even with this explanation. \ 
 When we oonsider the iiitense tone in which Mr. Kean thinks it proper (and ' 
 • he is quiteas likely to be in the right as his blundering critic) to pitch the tem- I 
 
New Pieces at the Lyceum. 655 
 
 perament of that monstrous character from the beginning, it follows but logically 
 and naturally, that where the wild uncontrollable rn^n comes to be baffled 
 of his purpose, his passion should assume a frenzied manner, which it was alto- 
 gether absurd to expect should be the same with the manner of the cautious 
 and self-restraining Cantwell, even when he breaks loose from all bonds in the 
 agony of his final exposure. We never felt more strongly the gbod sense of 
 the saying — comparisons are odious. They betray us not seldom into bitter 
 errors of judgment ; and sometimes, as in , the present instance, into absolute 
 matter-of-fact blunders. But we have recanted. 
 
 Jfirsl-frttxls jrf Australian '%ai\x^. 
 
 (The Examiner, i6th January, 1820.) 
 
 [The little volume of verse here passed under review, and which was announced at 
 the head of the criticism to have been published in Sydney, New South Wales, and 
 urinted for private distribution, was generally understood among Charles l-amb s Inends, 
 to have been the production of his old intimate, Barron Field, sometime resident at the 
 antipodes as a judge in Australia.] 
 
 I first adventure ; follow me who list : 
 And be the second Austral harmonist. 
 
 Whoever thou art that hast transplanted the British wood-notes to the far-off 
 forests which the Kangaroo haunts— whether thou art some involuntary e.'cile 
 that solaces his sad estrangement with recurrence to his native notes, with 
 more wisdom than those captive Hebrews of old refused to smg their Sion 
 songs in a strange land-or whether, as we rather suspect, thou art that valued 
 Sd of ours, who, in thy young time of Hfe, together with thy faithful bride, 
 thy liewly "wedded flower," didst, in obedience to the stern voice of duty 
 quit thy friends, thy family, thy pleasing avocations, the Muses with which 
 thou wart as deeply smitten as any, we believe, in our ag^ and country, to go 
 and administer tedious justice in inauspicious unliterary Thiefland* we re- 
 ddmtherfor our ow^and gladly transport thee back to thy native 
 
 "fields," and studies congenial to thy habits. ., „ , , -j^ i,:„„if 
 We know a merry captain, and co-navigator with Cook, who prides himself 
 upon having planted the fi^st pun in Otaheite. It was in their own language 
 and the Slanders first looked at him, then stared at one another, and all at 
 once burst out into a genial laugh. It was a stranger, and as a stranger they 
 eaveitwelcoiue MSiy a quibble of their own growth, we doubt not, has 
 Ince sprang from that well-timed exotic. Where puns flourish, there must be 
 nd TncSeSb" advance in civilization. The same good results we are wiU- 
 . Z to au^r from this dawn of refinement at Sydney. They were beginning 
 to hive XeS like a theatrical establishment there, which we are sorry to 
 heaihLbTen suppressed; for we are of opinion with those who think that a 
 » An elegant_ periphrasis for the Bay. Mr. Coleridge led us the way-" Clondland, 
 gorgeous land." 
 
656 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 taste for such kind of entertainments is one remove at least from profligacy, 
 and that Shakspere and Gay may be as safe teachers of morality as the ordi- 
 nary treatises which assume to instil that science. We have seen one of their 
 play-bills (while the thing was permitted to last), and were affected by it in 
 no ordinary degree, particularly in the omission of the titles of honour, which 
 in this country are condescendingly conceded to the players. In their 
 Dramatis Personee, Johson was played by Smith ; Lady Loverule, Jones ; Nell, 
 Wilkinson : gentlemen and lady perfonners alike curtailed of their fair propor- 
 tions. With a little patronage, we prophesy, that in a very few years the 
 histrionic establishment of Sydney would have risen in respectability ; and the 
 humble performers would, by tacit leave or open permission, have been allowed 
 to use the same encouraging affixes to their names, which dignify their prouder 
 brethren and sisters in the mother country. What a moral advancement, what 
 a Uft in the scale, to a Braham or a Stephens of New South Wales, to write 
 themselves Mr. and Miss ! The King here has it not in his power to do so 
 much for a commoner, no, not though he dub him a Duke. 
 
 The " First Fruits " consist of two poems. The first celebrates the plant 
 epacris grandijlora ; but we are no botanists, and perhaps there is too much 
 mitter mixed up in it from the Midsummer Night's Dream to please some 
 readers. The thefts are indeed so open and palpable, that we almost recur to 
 our first surmise, that the author must be some unfortunate wight, sent on his 
 travels for plagiarisms of a more serious complexion. But the old matter and 
 the new blend kindly together, and must, we hope, have proved right acceptable 
 to more than one 
 
 ^-^ Among the fair 
 
 Of that young land of Shakspere's tongue. 
 
 We select for our readers the second poem : and are mistaken if it does not 
 relish of the graceful hyperboles of our elder writers. We can conceive it to 
 have been written by Andrew Marvell, supposing him to have been banished to 
 Botany Bay, as he did, we believe, once meditate a voluntary exile to Bermuda. 
 See his fine poem, " Where the remote Bermudas ride." 
 
 €lia: to \i% Cornspontimts. 
 
 [The London Magazine, November, 1S21.) 
 
 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 periphra.sis, I slur his less ceremonious epithet) 
 had need have good memories. In my ■' Old Benchers of the Inner Terfiple," 
 I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born. Bell clamours upon this, 
 and thinketh that he hath caught W fox. It seems that, in a former paper, 
 retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good identity in question 
 (see Postscript to my "Chapter on Ears "), I profess my.self 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 the idle fiction of Genoese 
 ancestry I was answering a fool according to his folly,— that EUa there ex- 
 
Elt'a to his Correspondents. 657 
 
 
 presseth 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 phmge 
 him, as we say, deeper in the mire, and give him line till he suspend himsetf. 
 No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such obvious rhodomon- 
 tade 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, I must confess that the term "native town," applied to Calne, p7-imC>, 
 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 smoothe the difficulty by the supposition that in the one case an allegorical 
 or tropical sense was chiefly intended. So, by the word "native,"! 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 1 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 inter- 
 pretation 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 modem and ancient testimony is alike abhorrent. Bacchus 
 Cometh the nearest to it, whom I remember Ovid to have honoured with the 
 epithet "twice born." * 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 films femoris by no means in the same sense 
 as he had been before e.filius alvi; for that latter was but a secondary and 
 tralatitious way of being bom, and he but a denizen of the second house of his 
 geniture. Thus much by way of explanation was thought due to the cour- 
 teous ' ' 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 rasty 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 
 
 " Modo me Thebis, modo Athenis." 
 
 * Imperfectus adhuc infans genetricis ab alvo 
 Eripitur, patrioque tener (si credere dignum) 
 
 Insuitur femori 
 
 Tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi. 
 
 Metamorph., lib. lii. 
 
658 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 (The London Magazine, December, 1822. J 
 
 The widow Blacket, of Oxford, is the largest female I ever had the pleasure 
 of beiholding. There may be her parallel upon the earth ; but surely I never 
 saw it. I tSse her to be lineally descended from the maid's aunt of Brainford, 
 who caused Master Ford such uneasiness. She hath Atlantean shoulders ; and, 
 as she stoopeth in her gait, — with as few offences to answer for in her own 
 particular as any one of Eve's daughters, — her back seems broad enough to 
 bear the blame of all the peccadilloes that have been committed since Adam. 
 She girdeth her waist— or what she is pleased to esteem as such — nearly up to 
 her shoulders ; from beneath which that huge dorsal expanse, in mountainous 
 declivity, emergeth. Respect for her alone preventeth the idle boys, who 
 follow her about in shoals, whenever she cometh abroad, from getting up and 
 riding. But her presence infallibly commands a reverence. She is indeed, as 
 the Americans would express it, something awful. Her person is a burthen to 
 herself no less than to the ground which bears her. To her mighty bone, she 
 had a.pinguitude withal, which makes the depth of winter to her the most 
 desirable season. Her distress in the warmer solstice is pitiable. During the 
 months of July and August, she usually renteth a cool cellar, where ices are 
 kept, whereinto she descendeth when Sirius rageth. She dates from a hot 
 Thursday,— some twenty-five years ago. Her apartment in summer is pervious 
 to the four winds. Two doors, in north and south direction, and two win- 
 dows, fronting the rising and the setting sun, never closed,' from every cardinal 
 point catch the contributory breezes. She loves to enjoy what she calls a 
 quadruple draught. That must be a shrewd zephyr that can escape her. I 
 owe a painful face-ache, which oppresses me at this moment, to a cold caught, 
 sitting by her, one day in last July, at this receipt of coolness. Her fan, in 
 ordinary, resembleth a banner spread, which she keepeth continually on the 
 alert to detect the least breeze. She possesseth an active and gadding mind, 
 totally incommensurate with her person. No one delighteth more than herself 
 in country exercises and pastimes. I have passed many an agreeable holiday 
 with her in her favourite park at Woodstock. She performs her part in these 
 delightful ambulatory excursions by the aid of a portable garden-chair. She 
 setteth out with you at a fair foot-gallop, which she keepeth up till you are 
 both well-breathed, and then reposeth she for a few seconds. Then she is up 
 again for a hundred paces or so, and again resteth ; her movements, on these 
 sprightly occasions, being something between walking and flying. Her great 
 weight seemeth to propel her forward, ostrich-fashion. In this kind of relieved 
 marching, I have traversed with her many scores of acres on those well-wooded 
 and well-watered domains. Her delight at Oxford is in the public walks and 
 gardens, where, when the weather is not too. oppressive, she passeth much of 
 her valuable time. There is a bench at Maudlin, or rather situated between 
 
 the frontiers of that and 's College (some litigation, latterly, about repairs, 
 
 hast vested the property of it finally in 's), where, at the hour of noon, she 
 
 is ordinarily to be found sitting, — so she calls it by courtesy, — but, in fact, 
 pressing and breaking of it down with her enormous settlement ; as both those 
 foundations, — who, however, are good-natured enough to winlc at it, — have 
 found, I believe, to their cost. Here she taketh the fresh air, principally at 
 vacation-times, when the walks are freest from interruption of the younger fry 
 
The Gentle Giantess. 659 
 
 of students. Here she passeth her idle hours, not idly, but generally accom- 
 panied with a book, — blessed if she can but intercept some resident Fellow (as 
 usually there are some of that brood left behind at these periods), or stray 
 Master of Arts (to most of them she is better known than their dinner bell), 
 with whom she may confer upon any curious topic of literature. I have seen 
 these shy gownsmen, who truly set but a very slight value upon female con- 
 versation, cast a hawk's eye upon her from the length of Maudlin Grove, and 
 warily glide off into another waik, — true monks as they are; and urgently 
 neglecting the delicacies of her polished converse for their own perverse and 
 uncommunicatirtg solitariness ! Within-doors, her principal diversion is music, 
 vocal and instrumental; in both which she is no mean professor. Her voice is 
 wonderfully fine ; but till I got used to it, I confess it staggered me. It is, for 
 all the world, like that of a piping bullfinch ; while, from her size and stature, 
 you would expect notes to drown the deep organ. The shake, which most 
 fine Singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable ilexibility, 
 or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition ; so that 
 her time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth, — 
 running the primary circuit of the tune, and still revolving upon its own axis. 
 The effect, as I said before, when you are used to it, is as agreeable as it is 
 altogether new and surprising. The spacious apartment of her outward frame 
 lodgeth a soul in all respects disproportionate. Of more than mortal make, 
 she evinceth withal a trembling sensibility, a yielding infirmity of purpose, a 
 quick susceptibility to reproach, and all the train of diffident and blushing 
 virtues, which for their habitation usually seek out a feeble frame, an attenu- 
 ated and meagre constitution. With more than man's bulk, her humours and 
 occupations are eminently feminine. She sighs, — being six foot high. She 
 languisheth,— being two feet wide. She worketh slender sprigs upon the 
 delicate muslin, — her fingers being capable of moulding a Colossus. She sip- 
 peth her wine out of her glass daintily — her capacity being that of a tun of 
 Heidelberg. She goeth mincingly with those feet of hers, whose solidity neefd 
 not fear the black ox's pressure. Softest and largest of thy sex, adieu ! By 
 what pai-ting attribute may I salute thee, last and best of the Titanesses, — 
 Ogress, fed with milk instead of blood ; not least, or least handsome, among 
 Oxford's stately structures, — Oxford, who, in its deadest time of vacation, can " 
 never properly be said to be empty, having thee to fill it. 
 
 [The London Magazine, November, 1823.) 
 
 [" Nugse Critica:, No. il.," was the title of this paper when it originally appeared in 
 the London. It was there published as a companion to the criticism "On the Knocking at 
 the Gate in Macbeth," which had appeared in the preceding number of the magazine for 
 October, though that contribution had been given without any heading of ' Nugse 
 Criticse, No. i."] 
 
 As long as I can remember the play of The Tempest, one passage in it has 
 always set me upon wondering. It has puzzled me beyond measure. In vain 
 I strove to find the meaning of it. I seemed doomed to cherish infinite, 
 hopeless curiosity. 
 
66o The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 It is where Prospero, relating the banishment of Syoorax from Argier, 
 adds : — 
 
 For one thing that she did. 
 They would not take her life. 
 
 How have I pondered over this when a boy ! How have I longed for some 
 authentic memoir of the witch to clear up the obscurity ! Was the story extant 
 in the chronicles of Algiers ? Could I get at it by some fortunate introduction 
 to the Algerine ambassador? Was a voyage thither practicable? The Specta- 
 tor, I knew, went to Grand Cairo only to measure the pyramid. Was not the 
 object of my quest of at least as much importance? The blue-eyed hag! 
 could she have done anything good or meritorious ? might that succubus relent ? 
 then might there be hope for the Devil. I have often admired since that none 
 of the commentators have boggled at this passage ; how they could swallow 
 this camel, — such a tantalizmg piece of obscurity, such an abortion of an 
 anecdote. 
 
 At length I think I have lighted upon a clue which may lead to show what 
 was passing in the mind of Shakspere when he dropped this imperfect rumour. 
 In the " Accurate Description of Africa, by John Ogilby (foho), 1670," page 
 230, I find written as follows. The marginal title to the narrative is, " Charles 
 the Fifth besieges Algier : " — 
 
 " In the last place, we will briefly give an account of the Emperor Charles 
 the Fifth, when he besieged this city : and of the great loss he sufifered 
 therein. 
 
 " This prince, in the year one thousand five hundred forty-one, having em- 
 barqued upon the sea an army of twenty-two thousand men aboard eighteen 
 galleys, and an hundred tall ships, not counting the barques and shallops, and 
 other small boats, in which he had engaged the principal of the Spanish and 
 Italian nobility, with a good number of (Jie Knights of Malta ; he was to land 
 on the coasts of Barbary, at a cape called Matifou. From this place unto the 
 city of Algier, a flat shore or strand extends itself for about four leagues, the 
 which is exceeding favourable to galleys. There he put ashore with his army, 
 and in a few days caused a fortress to be built, which unto this day is called 
 the castle of the Emperor. 
 
 " In the meantime the city of Algier took the alarm, having in it at that time 
 but eight hundred Turks, and six thousand Moors, poor-spirited men, and 
 unexercised in martial aifairs ; besides it was at that time fortified only with 
 walls, and had no outworks : insomuch that by reason of its weakness, and the 
 great forces of the Emperor, it could not in appearance escape taking. In 
 fine, it was attempted with such order, that the army came up to the very 
 gates, where the Chevalier de Savignac, a Frenchman by nation, made him- 
 self remarkable above all the rest by the miracles of his valour. For having 
 repulsed the Turks, who, having made a sally at the gate called Babason, and 
 there desiring to enter along with them, when he saw that they shut the gate 
 upon him, he ran his poniard into the same, and left it sticking deep therein. 
 They next fell to battering the city by the force of cannon ; which the assail- 
 ants so weakened, that in that great extremity the defendants lost their courage, 
 and resolved to surrender. 
 
 ' ' But as they were thus intending, there was a witch of the town, whom the 
 history does not name, which went to seek out Assam Aga, that commanded 
 within, and prayed him to make it good yet nine days longer with assurance, 
 that within that time he should infalhbly see Algier delivered from that siege, 
 and the whole army of the enemy dispersed so that Christians should be as 
 cheap as birds. In a word, the thing did happen in the manner as foretold ; 
 for upon the twenty-first day of October, in the same year, there fell a continual 
 rain upon the land, and so furious a storm at sea, that one might have seen 
 
On a Passage in "The Tempest." 66 1 
 
 ships hoisted into the clouds, and in one instant again precipitated into the 
 bottom of the water : insomuch that that same dreadful tempest was followed 
 with the loss of fifteen galleys, and above an hundred other vessels ; which was 
 the cause why the Emperor, seeing his army wasted by the bad weather, pur- 
 sued by a famine, occasioned by wrack of his ships, in which was the greatest 
 part of his victuals and ammunition, he was constrained to raise the siege, and 
 set sail for Sicily, whither he retreated with the miserable reliques of his fleet. 
 
 " In the meantime that witch being acknowledged the deliverer of Algier, 
 was richly remunerated, and the credit of her charms authorized. So that 
 ever since, witchcraft hath been very freely tolerated ; of which the chief of 
 the town, and even those who are esteemed to be of greatest sanctity among 
 them, such as are the Marabous, a religious order of their sects, do for the 
 most part make profession of it, under a goodly pretext of certain revelations 
 which they say they have had from their prophet, Mahomet. 
 
 " And hereupon those of Algier, to palliate the shame and the reproaches 
 that are thrown upon them for making use of a witch in the danger of this 
 siege, do say that the loss of the forces of Charles V. was caused by a prayer 
 of one of their Marabous, named Cidy Utica, which was at that time in great 
 credit, not under the notion of a magician, but for a person of a holy life. 
 Afterwards in remembrance of their success, they have erected unto him a 
 small mosque without the Babason gate, where he is buried, and in which they 
 keep sundry lamps burning in honour of him : nay, they sometimes repair 
 thither to make their sala, for a testimony of greater veneration." 
 
 Can it be doubted, for a moment, that the dramatist had come fresh from 
 reading some older narrative of this deliverance of Algier by a witch, and 
 transferred the merit of the deed to his SycSrax, exchanging only the "rich 
 remuneration," which did not suit his purpose, to the simple pardon of her life? 
 Ogilby wrote in 1670 ; but the authorities to which he refers for his account of 
 Barbary are Johannes de I ,eo or Africanus, Louis Marraol, Diego de Haedo, 
 Johannes Gramaye, Braeves, Cel. Curio, and Diego de Torres, names totally 
 unknown to me, and to which I beg leave to refer the curious reader for his 
 fuller satisfaction. 
 
 #rijg[in;al ^ette of fames %\Gm%m. 
 
 (T^e London Magazine, November, 1824.) 
 
 [Another of Charles Lamb's ingenious hoaxes.] 
 
 [The following very interesting letter has been recovered from obUvion, or at 
 least from neglect, by our friend Elia, and the public will no doubt thank him 
 for the deed. It is without date or superscription in the manuscript, which (as 
 our contributor declares) was in so " fragmentitious " a state as to perplex his 
 transcribing faculties in the extreme. The poet's love of nature is quite evident 
 from one part of it; and the "poetical posture of his affairs" from another. 
 Whether regarded as elucidating the former or the latter, it is a document not 
 a httle calculated to excite the attention of the curious as well as the critical. 
 We could ourselves write an essay-full of conjectures from the grounds it affords 
 
662 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 both with respect ,to the author's poems and his pride. But we must fake 
 another opportunity, or leave it to his next biographer.] 
 
 Dear Sir, — I yvould chide you for the slackness of your correspondence ; 
 but having .blamed' you' wrong^pusly (sic m MS.) last time, I shall say nothing 
 till I hear from you, which, I hope, will be soon. 
 
 There's a Ijttle business I would compiunicate to you before I come. to the 
 more'erilertainiiig pdrt of our correspondence. 
 
 I'm going (hard task) to complain, and beg your assistance. 'When I came 
 up here I brought very little money with me ; expecting some more upon the 
 selling of Widehope, which was to have been sold that day ray mother was 
 buried, •. Now it is unsold yet, but will be disposed of as soon as c^n be con- 
 veniently done ; though indeed it is perplexed with some difficulties." I was a 
 long time living here at my own charges, and you know how expensive that is ; : 
 this, together with the furnishing of myself with clothes, linen, one thing and 
 another, to tit me for any business of this nature here, necessarily obliged me 
 to contract some debts. Being a stranger, it is a wonder how I got any credit ; 
 but I cannot expect it will be long sustained, unless I immediately, clear it. 
 Even now, I believe it is at a crisis— my friends have no money to send me till 
 the larid-.is sold ; and my creditors will not wait till then. You know what the 
 consequence would be. Now the assistance I would beg of you, and which I 
 know, if in your power, you will not refuse me, is a letter of credit on some 
 merchant, banker, or such like person in London, for the ma,t{er of twelve 
 pounds, till I get money upon the selling of the land, which I am at last certain 
 of, if you, couldeither ..give it me yourself or procure.it; though you owe it not 
 to my merit, yet you owe it to your own nature, which I know ^o.well as to say 
 no more upon the subject; only allow me to add, that when I first, fell upon 
 such a project fthe only thing I have for it in my present circumstances), 
 knowing ,the selfish inhumane temper of the generaUty of the wqrld, you were 
 the first person that offered to my thoughts, as one to whom I had the con- 
 fidence to make such an address. 
 
 Now I imagine you are seized with a fine romantic kind of melancholy on 
 the fading of the year — now I figure you wandering, philosophical and pensive, 
 amidst brown withered groves ; whiles the leaves rustle under your feet, the 
 sun gives a farewell parting gleam, and the birds 
 
 Stir the faint note, and but attempt to sing. 
 Then again, when the heavens wear a gloomy aspect, the winds whistle and the 
 waters spout, I see you in the well-known cleugh, beneath the solemn arch of 
 tall, thick, embowering trees, listening to the amusing lull of the many steep, 
 moss-grown cascades ; while, deep, divine contemplatipn, the genius of the 
 place, prompts each swelling, awful thought. I am sure you would not resign 
 your place in that scene at an easy rate, — none ever enjoyed it to the height you 
 do, and you are worthy of it. There I walk in spirit and disport in its beloved 
 gloom. This country I am in is not very entertaining— no vai-iety but that of 
 woods, and these we have in abundance. But where is the living stream ? the 
 airy mountain ? or the hanging rock ? with twenty other things that elegantly 
 please the lover of nature. Nature delights me in every form. I am just now 
 painting her in her most luxurious dress ; for my own amusement, describing 
 winter as it presents itself. After my first proposal of the subject 
 
 I sing of winter and his gelid reign ; 
 Nor let a rhyming insect of the spring 
 Deem it a barren theme, to me 'tis full 
 Of manly charms ; to me who court the shade, 
 Whom the gay seasons suit not, and who shun ■ 
 The glare of summer. . Welcome, kindred .s;ldoni ! 
 . Drear-awful- wintry -horrors, welcome all-! &c. ---- -' ' 
 
Original Letter of yames Thomson. 663 
 
 After this introduction, I say, which insists for a few lines further, I prosecute 
 the purport of the following ones : — 
 
 Nor can I, O departing Summer ! choose 
 But consecrate one pitying line to you ; 
 Sing your last temjaerd days and sunny balm 
 That cheer the spirits and serene the soul. 
 
 Then terrible floods, and high winds, that usually happen about this time of 
 the year, and have already happened here (I wish you have not felt them too 
 dreadfully) ; the first produced the enclosed lines ; the last are not completed. 
 Mr. Rickleton's poem on Winter, which I still have, first put the design into 
 my head — in it are some masterly strokes that awalcened me— being only a 
 present amusement it is ten to one but I drop it whenever another fancy comes 
 across. I believe it had been much more for your entertainment if in this letter 
 I had cited other people instead of myself— but I must refer that till another 
 time. If you have not seen it already, I have just now in my hands an original 
 of Sir Alexander Brands (the crazed Scots knight of the woful countenance), 
 you would relish. I believe it might make Mis* John catch holii of his kneesi 
 which I take; in him to be a degree of mirth only inferior to fall back again 
 with an elastic spring. It is very [here a word is waggishly obliterated] printed 
 in the Evening Post ; sp perhaps you have seen thfese panegyrics of our declin- 
 ing .bard ; one en the' Princess's birthday ; the other on his Majesty's, in 
 [oblitei-ated] cantos : they are written in the spirit of a complicated craziness. 
 Iwas lately in London a night, and in the old playhousesaw a comedy acted, 
 called Love makes a Alan, or the Fop's Fortune, where I beheld Miller and 
 Gibber shine to my infinite entertainment. In and about London this month of 
 September, near a hundred people have died by accident and suicide. There 
 was one blacksmith tired of the hamrher, who hung himself, and left written 
 behind him this concise epitaph — 
 
 I, Joe Pope, 
 Lived without hope. 
 And died by a rope, 
 
 , or else some epigrammatic Muse has belied him. 
 
 ' Mr. Muir has ample fund for politics in the present posture of afifeirs, as you 
 ' will find by the public news. I should be glad to know that great minister's 
 frame just now. Keep it to yourself— you may whisper it too in Mis John's ear. 
 Far otherwise is his lately mysterious brother, Mr. Tait, employed. Started a 
 superannuated fortune and just now upon the full scent. It is comical enough 
 to see him amongst the rubbish of his controversial divinity and politics, fur- 
 bishing up his ancient rusty gallantry. 
 
 Yours sincerely, J. T 
 
 Remember me to aU friends, Mr. Rickle, Mis John, Br. John, &c. 
 * Mas? 
 
664 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 \m ben It^gUrl^ir. 
 
 (TOc London Magazine, January, 1825.) 
 
 To the Editor of the London Magazine. 
 
 Dear Sir,— I send you a bantering "Epistle to an Old Gentleman whose 
 Education is supposed to have been neglected." Of course, it was suggested by 
 some letters of your admirable Opium-Eater, the discontinuance of whtch has 
 caused so much regret to myself in common with most of your readers. You 
 will do me injustice by supposing that, in the remotest degree, it was my inten- 
 tion to ridicule those papers. The fact is, the most serious things may give 
 rise to an innocent burlesque ; and, the more serious they are, the fitter they 
 become for that purpose. It is not to be supposed that Charles Cotton did not 
 entertain a very high regard for Virgil, notwithstanding he travestied that poet. 
 Yourself can testify the deep respect I have always held for the profound learn- 
 ing and penetrating genius of our friend. Nothing upon earth would give me 
 greater pleasure than to find that he has not lost sight of his entertaining and 
 instructive purpose. 
 
 I am, dear Sir, yours and his sincerely, 
 
 Elia. 
 
 My dear Sir, — The question which you have done me the honour to propose 
 to me, through the medium of our common friend, Mr. Grierson, I shall 
 endeavour to answer with as much exactness as a limited observation and 
 experience can warrant. 
 
 You ask, — or rather Mr. Grierson, in his own interesting language, asks for 
 you, — " Whether a person at the age of sixty-three, with no more proficiency 
 than a tolerable knowledge of most of the characters of the Enghsh alphabet 
 at first sight amounts to, by dint of persevering application and good masters, 
 a docile and ingenuous disposition on the part of the pupil always presupposed, 
 — may hope to arrive, within a presumable number of years, at that degree of 
 attainments which shall entitle the possessor to the character, which you are on 
 so many accounts jtistly desirous of acquiring, of a learned -man.*' 
 
 This is fairly and candidly stated, — only I could wish that on one point you 
 had been a little more explicit. In the meantim":, I will take it for granted, 
 that by a "knowledge of the alphabetic characters " you confine your meaning 
 to the single powers only, as you are silent on the subject of the diphthongs and 
 harder combinations. 
 
 Why, truly, sir, when I consider the vast circle of sciences, — it is not here 
 worth while" to trouble you with the distinction' between learning and science, 
 which a man must be understood to have made the tour of in these days, 
 before the world will be wiUing to concede to him the title which you aspire 
 to, —lam almost disposed to reply to your inquiry by a direct answer in the 
 negative. 
 
 However, where all cannot be compassed, a great deal that is truly valuable 
 may be accomplished. I am unwilling to throw out any remarks that should 
 
Letter to an Old Gentleman. 665 
 
 have a tendency to damp a hopeful genius; but I must not, in fairness, conceal 
 trom you that you have much to do. The consciousness of difficulty is 
 sometimes a spur to exertion. Rome-or rather, my dear sir, to borrow an 
 lUustration from a place as yet more familiar to you, Rumford— Rumford was 
 not built in a day. 
 
 Your mind as yet, give me leave to tell you, is in the state of a sheet of 
 white paper. We must not blot or blur it over too hastily. Or, to use an 
 opposite simile, it is like a piece of parchment all bescrawled and bescribbled 
 over with characters of no sense or import, which we must carefully erase and 
 remove before we can make way for the authentic characters or impresses 
 which are to be substituted in their stead by the corrective hand of science. 
 
 Your mind, my dear sir, again, resembles that same parchment, which we 
 will suppose a little hardened by time and disuse. We may apply the charac- 
 ters ; but are we sure that the ink will sink ? 
 
 You are in the condition of a traveller that has all his journey to begin. 
 And, again, you are worse off than the traveller which 1 have supposed ; for 
 you have already lost your way. 
 
 You have much to learn, which you have never been taught ; and more, I 
 fear, to unlearn, which you have been taught erroneonslv. You have hitherto, 
 I dare say, imagined that the sun moves round the earth. When you shall 
 have mastered the true solar system, you will have quite a different theory upon 
 that point, I assure you. I mention but this instance. Your own experience, 
 as knowledge advances, will furnish you with many parallels. 
 
 I can scarcely approve of the intention, which Mr. Grierson informs me you 
 have contemplated, of entering yourself at a common seminary, and working 
 your way up from the lower to the higher forms with the children. I see more 
 to admire in the modesty than in the expediency of such a resolution. I own 
 I cannot reconcile myself to the spectacle of a gentleman at your time of life, 
 seated, as must be your case at first, below a tyro of four or five; for at that 
 early age the rudiments of education usually commence in this country. 1 
 doubt whether more might not be lost in the point of fitness than would be 
 gained in the advantages which you propose to yourself by this scheme. 
 
 You say you stand in need of emulation ; that this incitement is nowhere to 
 be had but at a public school ; that you should be more sensible of your 
 progress by comparing it with the daily progress of those around you. But 
 have you considered tlie nature of emulation, and how it is sustained at these 
 tender years which you would have to come in competition with ? I am afraid 
 you are dreaming of academic prizes and distinctions. Alas ! in the university 
 for which you are preparing, the highest medal would be a silver penny ; and 
 you must graduate in nuts and oranges. 
 
 I know that Peter, the Great Czar — or Emperor — of Muscovy, submitted 
 himself to the discipline of a dockyard at Deptford, that he might learn, and 
 convey to his countrymen, the noble art of shipbuilding. You are old enough 
 to remember him, or at least the talk about him. I call to mind also other 
 great princes, who, to instruct themselves in the theory and practice of war, 
 and set an example of subordination to their subjects, have condescended 
 to enrol themselves as private soldiers ; and, passing through the successive 
 ranks of corporal, quartermaster, and the rest, have served their way up to the 
 station at which most princes are willing enough to set out,— of general and 
 commander-in-chief over their own forces. But — besides that there is often- 
 times great sham and pretence in their show of mock humility — the competition 
 which they stooped to was with their coevals, however inferior to them in birth. 
 Between ages so very disparate as those which you contemplate, I fear there 
 can no salutary emulation subsist. 
 
 Again : in the other alternative, could you submit to the ordinary reproofs 
 and discipline of a day-school ? Could you bear to be corrected for your 
 
 t 
 
faults? Or how would it look to see you put to stand, as must be the case 
 sometimes, in a corner ? 
 
 I am afraid the idea of a public school in your circumstances must be given 
 up. 
 
 But is it impossible, my dear sir, to find some person of your own age,— if of 
 the other sex, the more agreeable, perhaps, — whose information, like your 
 own, has rather lagged behind his years, who should be willing to set out from 
 the same point with yourself; to undergo the same tasks?— thus at once incit- 
 ing and sweetening each other's labours in a sort of friendly rivalry. Such a 
 one, I think, it would not be difficult to find in some of the western parts of 
 this island, — about Dartmoor- for instance. 
 
 Or what if, from your own estate, — that estate, which, unexpectedly acquired 
 so late in life, has inspired into you this generous thirst after knowledge, — you 
 were to select some elderly peasant, that might best be spared from the land, 
 to come and begin his education with you, that you might till, as it were, your 
 minds together, — one whose heavier progress might invite, without a fear of 
 discouraging, your emulation? We might then see— starting from an equal 
 post— the difference of the clownish and the gentle blood. 
 
 A private education, then, or such a one as I have been describing, being 
 determined on, we must in the next place look out for a preceptor ; for it will 
 be some tinx) before either of you, left to yourselves, will be able to assist the 
 other to any great purpose in his studies. 
 
 And now, my dear sir, if, in describing such a tutor as I have imagined for 
 you, I use a style a little above the familiar one in which I have hitherto chosen 
 to address you, the nature of the subject must be my apology. Difficile est de 
 scieiitiis inscienier loqui ; which is as much as to say, that, " in treating of ' 
 scieiitific matters, it is difficult to avoid the use of scientific terms." But I 
 shall endeavour to be as plain as possible. I am not going to present you 
 with the ideal of a pedagogue as it may exist in my fancy, or has possibly been 
 realized in the persons of Buchanan and Busby. Something less than per- 
 fection will serve our turn. The scheme which I propose in this first or intro- 
 ductory letter has reference to the first four or five years of your education only ; 
 and in enumerating the qualifications of him that should undertake the direc- 
 tion of your studies, I shall rather point out the minimum, or least, that I shall 
 require of him, than trouble you in the search of attainments neither common 
 nor necessary to our immediate purpose. 
 
 He should be a man of deep and extensive kiiowledge. So much at least is 
 indispensable. Something older than yourself, I could wish him, because 
 years add reverence. , 
 
 To his age and great learning, he should be blessed with a temper and a 
 patience willing to accommodate itself to the imperfections of the slowest and 
 meanest capacities. Such a one, in former days, Mr. Hartlib appeals to have 
 tieen ; and such, in our days, I take Mr. Grierson to be : but our friend, you 
 know, unhappily, has other engagements. I do not demand a consummate 
 grammarian ; but he must be a thorough master of vernacular orthography, 
 with an insight into the accentualities and punctualities of modern Saxon, or 
 English. He must be competently instructed (or how shall he instruct you?) 
 ia the tetralogy, or first four rules, upon which not only arithmetic, but geo- 
 metry, and the pure mathematics themselves, are grounded. I do not require 
 that he should have measured the globe with Cook or Ortelius; but It is de- 
 sirable that he should have a general knowledge (I do not mean a very nice or 
 pedantic one) of the great division of the earth into four parts, so as to teach 
 you readily to name the quarters. He must have a genius capable in some 
 degree of soaring to the upper element, to deduce from thence^the not much 
 dissimilar computation of the cardinal points, or hinges, upon which those 
 invisible phenomena, which naturalists agree to term winds, do perpetually 
 
Letter to an Old Gentleman. 667 
 
 shift and turn. He must instruct you, in imitation of the old Orphic fragments 
 (the mention of which has possibly escaped you), in numeric and harmonious 
 responses, to deliver the number of solar revolutions within which each of the 
 twelve periods, into which the Annus Vulgaris, or common year, is divided, 
 doth usually complete and terminate itself. The intercalaries and other subtle 
 problems he will do well to omit, till riper years and course of study shall have 
 rendered you more capable thereof. He must be capable' of embracing all 
 history, so as, from the countless myriads of individual men who have peopled 
 this globe of earth,— /or it is a globe,— by comparison of their respective 
 births, lives, deaths, fortunes, conduct, prowess, &c., to pronounce, and teach 
 you to pronounce, dogrnatically and catechetically, who was the richest, who 
 was the strongest, who was the wisest, ' who was the meekest, man that ever 
 lived ; to the facilitation of which solution, you will readily conceive, a smatter- 
 ing of biography would in no inconsiderable degree conduce. Leaving the 
 dialects of men (in one of which I shall take leave to suppose you by this time 
 at least superficially instituted), you will learn to ascend with him to the con- 
 templation of that unarti'culated language which was before the written tongue ; 
 and, with the aid of the elder Phrygian or ^sopic key, to interpret the sounds 
 by which the animal tribes communicate their minds, evolving moral instruction 
 with delight from the dialogue of cocks, dogs, and foxes. Or, marrying 
 theology with verse, from whose mixture a beautiful and healthy offspring may 
 be expected, in your own native accents (but purified), you will keep time to- 
 gether to the profound harpingi of the more modern or Wattsian hymnics. 
 
 Thus far I have ventured to conduct you to a " hill-side whence you may 
 discern the right path of a virtuous and noble education ; laborious, indeed, at 
 the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospects and 
 melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more 
 charming."* 
 
 With my best respects to Mr. Grierson when you see him, I remain, my dear 
 Sir, your obedient servant, Elia. 
 
 {The London Magazine, January, 1825.) 
 
 My thoughts had been engaged last evening in solving the problem, why in all 
 times and places the horn has been agreed upon as the symbol, or honourable 
 badge, of married men. Moses' horn, the horn of Aramon, of Amalthea, and 
 a cornucopia of legends besides, came to my recollection, but afforded no satis- 
 factory solution, or rather involved the question in deeper obscurity. Tired 
 with the fruitless chase of ine.xplicant analogies, I fell asleep, and dreamed in 
 this fashion : — ■ , . . . . > 
 
 Methought certain scales or films fell from my eyes, which had hitherto 
 hindered these little tokens from being visible. I was somewhere in the Corn- 
 hill (as it might be termed) of some Utopia. Busy citizens jostled each other, 
 
 * Milton's "Tractate on Education," addressed to Mr. Hartlib. 
 
668 , nie Works of Charles Latnb. 
 
 as they may do in our streets, with care (the care of making a penny) written 
 upon tlieir foreheads; and something else, which is rather imagined than dis- 
 tinctly imaged, upon the brows of my own friends and fellow-townsmen. 
 
 In my first surprise, I supposed myself gotten into some forest— Arden, — to 
 be sure, or Sherwood ; but the dresses and deportment, all civic, forbade me to 
 continue in that delusion. Then a scriptural thought crossed me (especially as 
 there were nearly as many Jews as Christians among them), whether it might 
 not be the children of Israel going up to besiege Jericho. I was undeceived of 
 both errors by the sight of many faces which were familiar to me. I found 
 myself strangely (as it will happen in dreams) at one and the same time in an 
 unknown country with known companions. I met old friends, not with new 
 faces, but with their old faces oddly adorned in front, with each man a certain 
 corneous excrescence. Dick Mitis, the little cheesemonger in St. 's Pas- 
 sage,' was the first that saluted me, with his hat off (you know Dick's way to a 
 customer) ; and, I not being aware of him, he thrust a strange beam into my 
 left eye, which pained and grieved me exceedingly ; but, instead of apology, 
 he only grinned and fleered in my face, as much as to say, " It is the custom 
 of (he country," and passed on. 
 
 I had scarce time to send a civil message to his lady, whom I have always 
 admired as a pattern of a wife, and do indeed take Dick and her to be a model 
 of conjugal agreement and harmony, when I felt an ugly smart in my neck, as 
 if something had gored it behind ; and, turning round, it was my old friend 
 and neighbour, Dulcet, the confectioner, who, meaning to be pleasant, had 
 thrust his protuberance right into my nape, and seemed proud of his power of 
 offending. 
 
 Now I was assailed right and left, till in my own defence I was oWiged to 
 walk sideling and wary, and look about me, as you guard your eyes in London 
 streets ; for the horns thickened, and came at me like the ends of umbrellas 
 poking in one's face. 
 
 I soon found that these towns-folk were the clvilest, best-mannered people 
 in the world ; and that, if they had offended at all, it was entirely owing to 
 their blindness. They do not know what dangerous weapons they protrude in 
 front, and will stick their best friends in the eye with provoking complacency. 
 Yet the best of it is, they can see the beams on their neighbours' foreheads, if 
 they are as small as motes ; but their own beams they can in nowise discern. 
 
 There was little Mitis, that I told you I just encountered. He has simply 
 (I speak of him at home in his own shop) the smoothest forehead in his own 
 conceit. He will stand you a quarter of an hour together, contemplating the 
 serenity of it in the glass, before he begins to shave himself in a morning ; yet 
 you saw what a desperate gash he gave me. 
 
 Desiring to be better informed of the ways of this extraordinary people, I 
 applied myself to a fellow -of some assurance, who (it appeared) acted as a sort 
 of interpreter to strangers : he was dressed in a military uniform, and strongly 
 
 resembled Col. , of the Guards. And " Pray, sir," said I, " have all the 
 
 inhabitants of your city these troublesome excrescences? I beg pardon: I see 
 you have none. 'You perhaps are single."— "Truly, sir," he replied with a 
 smile, "for the most part we have, but not all alike. There are some, like 
 Dick, that sport but one tumescence. Their ladies have been tolerably faith- 1 
 ful,— have confined themselves to a single aberration or so : these we call f 
 Unicorns. Dick, you must know, is my Unicom. [He spoke this with an air \ 
 of invincible assurance.] Then we have Bicoms, Tricoms, and so on up to ' 
 Millecorns. [Here methought I crossed and blessed myself in my dream.] ', 
 Some again we have, — there goes one : you see how happy the rogue looks, — 1 
 how he walks smiling, and perking up his face, as if he thought himself the f 
 only man. He is not married yet ; but on Monday next he leads to the altar ' 
 the accomplished widow Dacres, relict of our late sheriff." ; 
 
A Vision of Horns. 669 
 
 " I see, sir, said I, and observe tViat he is happily free from the national 
 goitre (let me call it) which distinguishes most of your countrymen. ' ' 
 
 " Look a little more narrowly," said my conductor. 
 
 I put on my spectacles ; and, observing the man a little more diligently, above 
 his forehead I could mark a thousand little twinkling shadows dancing the 
 hornpipe : little hornlets, and rudiments of horn, of a soft and pappy consis- 
 tence (for I handled some of them), but which, like coral out of water, my 
 guide informed me, would infallibly stiffen and grow rigid within a week or two 
 from the expiration of his bachelorhood. 
 
 Then I saw some horns strangely growing out behind ; and my interpreter 
 explained these to be married men, whose wives had conducted themselves 
 with infinite propriety since the period of their marriage, but were thought 
 to have antedated their good men's titles, by certain liberties they had indulged 
 themselves in, prior to the ceremony. This kind of gentry wore their horns 
 backwards, as has been said, in the fashion of the old pigtails ; and, as there 
 was nothing obtrusive or ostentatious in tliem, nobody took any notice of it. 
 
 Some had pretty little budding antlers, like the first essays of a young fawn. 
 These, he told me, had wives whose affairs were in a hopeful way, but not quite 
 brought to a conclusion. 
 
 Others had nothing to show : only by certain red angry marks and swellings 
 in the foreheads, which itched the more they kept rubbing and chafing them, it 
 was to be hoped that something was brewing. 
 
 I took notice that every one jeered at the rest, only none took notice of the 
 sea-captains; yet these were as well provided with their tokens as the best 
 among them. This kind of people, it seems, taking their wives upon so con- 
 tingent tenures, their lot was considered as nothing but natural : so they wore 
 their marks without impeachment, as they might carry their cockades ; and 
 nobody respected them a whit the less for it. ' 
 
 I observed, that the more sprouts grew out of a man's head, the less weight 
 they seemed to carry with them ; whereas a single token would now and then 
 appear to give the wearer some uneasiness. This shows that use is a great 
 thing. , . . ., 1. 
 
 Some had their adomings gilt, which needs no explanation ; while others 
 like musicians, went sounding theirs before them,— a sort of music which 1 
 thought might very well have been spared. 
 
 It was pleasant to see some of the citizens encounter between themselves; 
 how they smiled in their sleeves at the shock they received from their neigh- 
 bour, and none seemed conscious of the shock which their neighbour ex- 
 perienced in return. ^ j 1.1 j- t^ 
 
 Some had great corneous stumps, seemingly torn off and bleeding. These, 
 the interpreter warned me, were husbands who had retaliated upon their wives, 
 and the badge was in equity divided between them. 
 
 While I stood discerning these things, a shght tweak on my cheek unawares, 
 which brought tears into my eyes, introduced to me my friend Placid, between 
 whose lady and a certain male cousin some idle flirtations I remember to have 
 heard talked of; but that was all. He saw he had =°™t°^,^7| ^ed so 
 asked my pardon with that round, unconscious face of his, and looked so 
 tristful and contrite for his no-offence, that I was ashamed for the man s peni- 
 tence Yet I protest it was but a scratch. It was the least httle horne of a 
 horn hat could be framed. " Shame on the man," I secretly exclaimed, "who 
 could thrust so much as the value of a hair into a brow so unsuspecting and 
 inoffensive ' What then, must they have to answer for, who plant great, 
 monstrous ■timber-like, projecting antlers upon the heads of those whom they 
 SlU the°r friends when r puncture of this atom.cal tenuity made my eyes to 
 water at this rate 1 All the pincers at Surgeons' Hall cannot pull out for 
 Placid that little hair." 
 
670 TJie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 I was curious to knowwhat became of these frontal excrescences when the 
 husbands died ; and my guide informed me that the, chemists in theif countfy 
 made a considerable profit by them,, extracting from them certaiij -subtile 
 essenpes': and then I remembered that nothing was so efficacious in my. own, 
 flgr restoring swooning rpatrons, and wives trout)led with the vapours, as a 
 strong, sniff or two at the composition appropriately called hitshom, far be- 
 ygnd^ sal volatile. 
 
 , } Tt).§ij|5ls,9 I began to understand why a man, who is the jest of the com- 
 pany, is said to be the butt, — as much as to say, such a one butteth witli the 
 horn.' .-. ■ : ' • 
 
 r inquired if by no operation these wens were ever extracted; and was told 
 that there was indeed an of der of d^tists, wliom they call canonists in their 
 languEvge,: who undertook, to restore the forehead to its pristine smoothness ; 
 but that ordinarily it was not done without much cost and trouble ; and when 
 they succeeded in plucking out the offending part, it left a painful void, which 
 coiild pot, be fiiled, up ;r,andnthat many patients who had submitted to.the ex- 
 cisi&n were eager to marryagajn, to supply with a good second antler the bald- 
 ness and deformed gap4eft by the extraction of the former, as men losing'their 
 natural hair substitute for it a less becoming pei-iwig. 
 
 Some horns Isobserved t)?autifully taper, smooth, and (as it were) flowering. 
 Tf^ese..! understand wereithe portions brought by handsome women tojheir 
 spouses ; and I pitied the rough, homely, unsightly deformities on the brows of 
 others, who had been 4eo^ed by plain and ordinary partners. Yet the latter 
 I observed to be by far the most common ; .the solution of wBich I leave to the 
 natural philosopher. ' ,t' ' 
 
 One tribe of married men-Iparticularly admired at, who, ipstead of horns, 
 woie; ingrafted on their forehead a sort, of horn-book. "This," qiipth my 
 guide, " is the greatest'mystery'in our country, i^nd well worth an explan^tion. 
 YbU must' know that all- infidelity is not of the senses. We have as >\:ell 
 intellectual as material wittols. These, whom you see decorated with the 
 order of the book are triflers, who encourage about their wives' , pregepce the 
 soqiety of your men of genius (their good friends, as they call themj, — literary 
 dispiitants; 'who ten to one out-talk the poor husband, ..and commit- upon the 
 understanding of the woman a violence and estrangement in the end, little less 
 painful than the coarser sort of alienation. Whip me these knaves - [my con- 
 duclbr here expressed himself with a becoming warmth], — whip me them, I 
 .say, .who, with. no excuse from the passions, in cold blood seduce the minds, 
 rather-tlian the persons, of. their, friends' wives; who, for the /tickling pleasure 
 of hearing themselves prate, dehonestate the intellects of married women, dis- 
 honotlring the husband in ,W|hat -should be his most sensible part. If I must 
 be— [here he used a plainfword] let it be by some honest sinner like myself, 
 and not by one of these gad-fiiesj these debauchers of the understanding, these 
 flattery-buz^erS."". He was going on in this manner, and I was getting insen- 
 sibly pleased-wfth my friend's manner (I had been, a little shy of him at first), 
 when the dreain suddenly left me, vanishing, as Virgil speaks, .through the 
 gate of Hor0. ^ 
 
Biographical Mempir of Mr. Liston. 671 
 
 {Thi London Magazine, January, 1825.) 
 
 The subject of our Memoir, is lineally descended froni. Johan de' I''Kstonne 
 (see "Domesday Book,'' where he is iSo written), who came in with the Con- 
 queror, and had lands awarded him at Lupton Magna, in Kent. His particu- 
 lar merits or services, Fabian, whose, authority I chiefly follow, has forgotten, 
 or perhaps thought it;. immaterial, to specify. FuUei; thinks that he was 
 ^tandard-bearer to Huog 4e 1 Agmoti^esbam, a powerful . Norman baf on, who 
 was slain by the hand of Harold, himself at the fatal battle .of Hastings. Be 
 this as it may, we find af/amjly of that name flourishing sonie centuries later in 
 that county. . John DelUston,- knight, was High Sheriff for Kent, a>;oording to 
 Fabian, ^viato Henrici Sexti; and we trace the lineal branch flourishing 
 downwards, — the orthography varying, according to the unsettled usage of the 
 times, froin DelleSton to Leston or . Liston, between w.hich it seems to have' 
 alternated,, till, in the latter end of the reign of James I., it finally settled into 
 the determinate and pleasing dissyllabic arrangement which: it stijl retains." 
 Aminadab Liston^ the eldest -male representative of the family. of th.'it day, was 
 of the strictest order of Puritans. Mr.. Fpss, of. .Pall Mall, lias obligingly 
 communicated to me an undoubted- tract of his, \yhichbears the initials only, 
 A. L.,'.arid isentitled, '.'The Grinning Glass, or Actor's Mirrour ; wherein the' 
 vituperative Visnoray of Vicious Players, for the Scene is as virtuously reflected 
 back upon their mimetjc- Monstrosities as it has viciously (hitherto) vitiated 
 with its vile Vanities her Votarists," A strange title, but bearing the impress 
 of those. .absurdities: with which .the,, title-pages of. that pamphlet-spawning ao;e 
 abounded. The work bears date. 1617.. ; It preceded the .VHistriomastix" 'by 
 fifteen years ; and, as. it went before it in time, so it comes not far short of it 
 in virulence. It is amusing to find an ancestor of Lisfon's thus bespattering 
 the players at' the commencement of the seventeenth, century. -.-^ ' 
 
 "Thhiketh He" (the actor), "with his costive countenances, to wry a 
 sorrowing ■ soul out of her anguish, or by defacing the divine denotement of 
 destinate dignityj(daignely described in the face humane and no other) to rein- 
 stamp the ParadicevplottedsimiUtude with a novel and naughty approj^imation 
 (not in the first intention) to those abhorred and ligly God-forbidden correspon- 
 dences, with flouting Apes' jeering gibberings, and Babion babbUng-like to hoot 
 out of countenance all -modest measure, as if our sins were not sufiicing to 
 stoop our backs without He wresting and crooking his members to mistimed 
 mirth (rather malice) in deformed fashion, leering when he should learri, 
 prating for praying, goggling his eyes (better upturned for grace), whereas in 
 "Paradice (if we can go thus high for His professions) that devilish Serpent ap- 
 peareth his undoubted Predecessor, first induing a mask like some roguish 
 roistering Roscius (I spit at them all) to beguile with stage shows the gaping 
 Woman, whose Sex hath still chiefly upheld these Mysteries, and are voiced to 
 be the chief Stage-haunters, where, as I am told, the custom, is cctomdnly to 
 mumble (between acts) a;pples, not ambiguously derived from that pernicious 
 Pippin (worse in effect than the Apples of Discord), whereas sometimes the 
 h'issifig sounds of displeasure, as I hear, do lively reintonate that snake-taking- 
 leave, and diabolical goings off, in Paradice." , ^ ^ 
 The Puritanic effervescence, of the early Presbyterians appears to have abated 
 
672 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 with time, and tlie opinions of the more immediate ancestors of our subject to 
 have subsided at length into a strain of moderate Calvinism. Still a tincture 
 of the old leaven was to be expected among the posterity of A. L. 
 
 Our hero was an only son of Habakkuk Liston, settled as an Anabaptist 
 minister upon the patrimonial soil of his ancestors. A regular certificate ap- 
 pears, thus entered in the Church-book at Lupton Magna : — "Johannes,fiUus 
 Habakkuk et Reteccce Liston, Dissentimtium, naius quinto Decemlri, 1780, 
 bapiisatus sexto FebruaHi sequent is ; Spovsoribus y. et W. Woollasiont unk 
 cum Maria Merryweather." The singularity of an Anabaptist minister con- 
 forming to the child-rites of the Church would have tempted me to doubt the 
 authenticity of this entry, had I not been obliged with the actual sight of it by 
 the favour of Mr. Minns, the intelligent and worthy parish clerk of Lupton. 
 Possibly some expectation in point of worldly advantages from some of the 
 sponsors might have induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have ap- 
 peared, from the practice and principles of that generally rigid sect. The term 
 Dissentieniium was possibly intended by the orthodox clergyman as a slur 
 upon the supposed inconsistency. What, or of what nature, the expectations 
 we have hinted at may have been, we have now no means of ascertaining. Of 
 the WooUastons no trace is now discoverable in the village. The name of 
 Merryweather occurs over the front of a> grocer's shop at the western extremity 
 of Lupton. 
 
 Of the infant Liston we find no events recorded before his fourth year, in 
 which a severe attack of the measles bid fair to have robbed the rising genera- 
 tion of a fund of innocent entertainment. He had it of the confluent kind, as 
 it is called ; and the child's life was for a week or two despaired of. His 
 recovery he always attributes (under Heaven) to the humane interference of 
 one Dr. Wilhelm Richter, a German empiric, who, in this extremity, prescribed 
 a copious diet of saner-kraui, which the child was observed to reach at with 
 avidity, wjien other food repelled him ; and from this change of diet his re- 
 storation was rapid and complete. We have often heard him name the circum- 
 stance with gratitude ; and it is not altogether surprising that a relish for this 
 kind of aliment, so abhorrent and harsh to common EngUsh palates, has 
 accompanied him through life. When any of Mr. Liston's intimates invite 
 him to supper, he never fails of finding, nearest to his knife and fork, a dish of 
 sauer-kraut, 
 \ At the age of nine, we find our subject under the tuition of the Rev. Mr. 
 f Goodenough (his father's health not permitting him probably to instruct him 
 ' himself), by whom he was inducted into a competent portion of Latin and 
 Greek, with some mathematics, till the death of Mr. Goodenough, in his own 
 seventieth, and Master Liston's eleventh year, put a stop for the present to his 
 classical progress. 
 
 We have heard our hero, with emotions which do his heart honour, describe 
 the awful circumstances attending the decease of this worthy old gentleman. 
 It seems they had been walking out together, master and pupil, in a fine 
 sunset to the distance of three-quarters of a mile west of Lupton, when a 
 sudden curiosity took Mr. Goodenough to look down upon a chasm, where a 
 shaft had been lately sunk in a mining speculation (then projecting, but 
 abandoned soon after, as not answering the promised success, by Sir Ralph 
 Shepperton, knight, and member for the county). The old clergyman leaning 
 over, either with incaution or sudden giddiness (probably a mixture of both), 
 suddenly lost his footing, and, to use Mr. Liston's phrase, disappeared, and 
 was doubtless broken into a thousand pieces. The sound of his head, &c., 
 dashing successively upon the projecting masses of the chasm, had such an 
 effect upon the child, that a serious sickness ensued ; and, even for many years 
 after his recovery, he was not once seen so much as to smile. 
 The joint death of both his parents, which happened not many months after 
 
Biographical Memoir of Mr. Liston. 673 
 
 this disastrous accident, and were probably (one or both of them) accelerated 
 by It, threw our youth upon the protection of his maternal great aunt, Mrs. 
 bittmgboum. Of this aunt we have never heard him speak but with expres- 
 sions amountmg almost to reverence. To the influence of her early counsels 
 and manners he has always attributed the firmness with which, in maturer 
 years, thrown upon a way of life commonly not the best adapted to gravity 
 and self-retirement, he has been able to maintain a serious character, untinc- 
 tured with the levities ipcident to his profession. Ann Sittingbourn (we have 
 seen her portrait by Hudson) was stately, stiff, tall, with a cast of features 
 strikingly resembling the subject of this memoir. Her estate in Kent was 
 spacious and well woode^ ; the house one of those venerable old mansions 
 which are so impressive in childhood, and so hardly forgotten in succeeding 
 years. In the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, among thick shades of the 
 oak and beech (this last his favourite tree), the young Liston cultivated those 
 contemplative habits which l\ave never entirely deserted him in after-years. 
 Here he was commonly in the summer months to be met with, with a book in 
 his hand,— not a play-book,— n(ieditating. Boyle's " Reflections " was at one 
 time the darling volume ; which, in its turn, was superseded by Young's ' ' Night 
 Thoughts, " which has continued its hold upon him through life. He carries it 
 always about him ; and it is no uncommon thing for him to be seen, in the re- 
 freshing intervals of his occupation, leaning against a side-scene, in a sort of 
 Herbert-of-Cherbury posture, turning over a pocket-edition of his favourite 
 author. 
 
 But the solitudes of ChamwooiJ were not destined always to obscure the 
 path of our young hero. The premature death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, at the 
 age of seventy, occasioned by incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in her 
 sjeeping-chamber, left him in his nineteenth year nearly without resources. 
 'That the stage at all should have presented itself as an eligible scope for his 
 talents, and, in particular, that he should have chosen a line so foreign to 
 what appears to have been his turn of mind, may require some explanation. 
 
 At Charnwood, then, we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic. From his 
 cradle averse to flesh-meats and strong drink ; abstemious even beyond the 
 genius of the place, and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his great-aunt, 
 who, though strict, was not rigid, — water was his habitual drink, and his food 
 little beyond the mast and beech-nuts of his favourite groves. It is a medical 
 fact, that this kind of diet, however favourable to the contemplative powers of 
 the primitive hermits, &c.,is but ill-adapted to the less robust minds and bodies 
 of a later generation. Hypochondria almost constantly ensues. It was so in 
 the case of the young Liston. He was subject to sights, and had visions. 
 Those arid beech-nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into 
 an occiput already prepared to kindle by long seclusion and the fervour of strict 
 Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood, he was assailed by illusions 
 similar in kind to those which are related of the famous Anthony of Padua. 
 Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude themselves upon his sensorium. 
 Whether he shut his eyes, or kept them open, the same illusions operated. 
 The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more 
 whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, 
 flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appen- 
 dages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace ; and he 
 desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall 
 ) presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his future 
 destiny. 
 
 On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, we find him received into the family of 
 Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin Lane, 
 London. We lose a little while here the chain of his history,— by what in- 
 ducements this gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his house. 
 
 z 
 
674 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Probably he had had some personal kindness for Mrs. Sittingboum formerly ; but, 
 however it was, the young man was here treated more like a son than a clerk, 
 though he was nominally but the latter. Different avocations, the change of 
 scene, with that alternation of business and recreation which in its greatest 
 perfection is to be had only in London appear to have weaned him in a short , 
 time froin the hypochondriacal affections which had beset him at Chamwood. 
 
 In the three years which followed his removal to Birchin Lane, we find him 
 making more than oh6 voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr. Willoughby 
 at the Porte. We could easily fill our biography with the pleasant passages 
 which we have heard him relate as having happened to him at Constantinople , 
 such as his having been taken up on suspicioii df a design of penetratmg llie 
 seraglio, &c. ; but, with the deepest convincement of this ' gentleman's own 
 veracity, we think that some of the stories are of that whimsical, and others '■ 
 of that romantic nature, which, however diverting, would be out of place in a 
 narrative of this kind, which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the 
 very appearance of the contrary. 
 
 , We will now bring him over the seas again, and suppose him in the counling- 
 house in Birchin Lane, his protector satisfied with the ireturns of Ws factorage, 
 and all^bing on so .smoothly, that we may expect to find Mr. Listen at last an 
 o[Julent merchant upon 'Change, as it is called. But see the turns of destiny ! 
 Upon 'a! summer's excursion into Norfolk, in the year 1801, the accidental sight 
 of pretty Sally Parker, as she was called (then in the Norwich company), 
 diverted his inclinations at once from commerce ; and he became, in the lan- 
 giiage of commonplace biography, stage-struck. Happy for the lovers of 
 mirth was it that our hero took this turn ; he might else have been to this hour 
 that unentertaining^charact'er, a plodding London merchant. 
 
 We accordingly find him shortly after making bis dSbut, as it is called, upon 
 the Norwich boards, in the season of that year, beihg then in the twenty- 
 second year of his age. Having a natural bent to trag«ly, he chose the part 
 of Pyrrhus, in the Distressed Mother, to Sally Parker's HermionB. We find 
 him afteirwards as, Barnwell, Altamohf, Chinjont, &c. ; but, as if NaturS had 
 destined }iim to' the sock, an finavqidable, infiimity absolutely discapacitated 
 him for tragedy. His person, at this latter period of which I have been speak- 
 ing, was graceful, and gven comtnanding ; his countenance set to gravity: he 
 had the power of arresting the attention of an audience at first sight almost 
 beyond any other tragic actor. But he cowld not hold it. To understand this 
 obstacle, we must go bapk a few years to those appalling reveries at Charnwood. 
 Those illusions, which had vanished before the dissipation of a less recluse life 
 and more free society, now in his solitary tfagic studies, and amid the intense 
 calls upon feeling incident to tragic acting, came back upon him with tenfold 
 vividness. In the midst of some most pathetic passage (the parting of JafBer 
 with his dying friend, for instance), he would suddenly be surprised witha fit of 
 violent horse-laughter. While the spectators were all sobbing before him with 
 emotion, suddenly one of those grotesque .faces would peep out upon him, and 
 he could not resist the impulse. A timely excuse once or twice served his pur- 
 pose ; but no audiences could be expected %a bear repeatedly this violation of 
 the continuity of feeling. He describes therti (the illusions) as so many demons 
 haunting him, and paralyzing every effect. Even now, I am told, he dannot 
 recite, the famous soliloquy in Hamlet, even in private, without immoderate 
 bursts of laughter. However, what he had not force of reason sufficient to 
 overcome, he had good sense enough to turn into emolument, and determined 
 to make a commodity of his distemper. He prudently exchanged the buskin 
 for the sock, and the illusions instantly ceased ; or, if they occurred for a 
 short season, by their very co-operation added a zest to his comic vein, — some 
 of his most catching faces being (as he expresses it) little more than transcripts 
 and copies of those extraordinary phantasmala. 
 
Siogmphical Memoir of Mr. Liston. 675 
 
 
 ab^ttoTee"ToMhrfir.?,'°".,''"°'' "'^'""^= •° "^^ period when he was 
 pS°arTof hk.^n^iic •'""^;,'''^^y'"P^''''^= °f ^ London .audience. The 
 = niio ^ 01 hs success since have been too much before our eves to render 
 
 wnn,rhhf v^ •^^'="' °f '"''" '^"Pedi^nt- I shall only meS, that Mr 
 AeStfeendfnrh"'"?!' having had time to subside; is at pre ent onf o? 
 M^ic I •,?-'^'"'°''^ "^^^Sade factor; and that Mr. Listens hooes of ' 
 
 Miss Parker vanishmg along with his unsuccessful suit to Me pomene fn the 
 autumn of 1811 he married his present lady, by whom he has been bles ed 
 with one son, Philip, and two daughters, Ann and Augustina 
 
 (The London Magazine, February, 1825.) 
 
 Hare ee, Mr. Editor. A word in your ear. They tell me you are going to 
 put me in print,— in print, sir; to.publish.mylife. What is jny life to you, sir ? 
 What IS It to you whether I ever lived at all ? My life is a very good life, sir. 
 I am insured in the Pelican, sir. I am three-score years and six,— six, mark 
 me, sir; but I can play Polonius, which, I believe, few of your corre— corre- 
 spondents can dp, sir. I suspect tricks, sir : I smell a rat ; I do, I do. You 
 would cog the die upon us ; you would, you would, sir. But I will forestall 
 you,, sir. You would be deriving me from William the Conqueror, with a 
 murrain to you. It is no such thing, sir. The town shall know better, sir. 
 They begin to smoke your flams, sir. Mr. Liston may be bom where he 
 pleases, sir ; but I will not be born at Lup— Lupton Magna for anybody's 
 pleasure, sir. My son and I have looked over the great map of Kent together, 
 and we can find no such place as you would palm upon us, sir ; palm upon us, 
 ! I say. Neither Magna nor Parva, as my son says, and he knows Latin, sir ; 
 ,' Latin. If you write my life true, sir, ycu must set down, that I, Joseph 
 I Munden, comedian, came into tjie world upon AUhallows I?ay, Anno Domini, 
 I ^759 — 1759 ; no sooner nor later, sir ; and I saw the first light — the first light, 
 I remember, sir, at Stoke Pogis — Stoke Pogis, comitatu Bucks, and not at Lup 
 I — Lup Magna, which I believe to be no better than moonshine^moonshine ; 
 I do you mark me, sir? I wonder you can put such flim-flams upon us, sir ; I 
 do, I do. It does not become you, sir; I say it,— I say it. And my father 
 was an honest tradesman, sir : he dealt in malt and hops, sir ; and was a cor- 
 poration-man, sir ; an(i of the Church pf England, sir, and no Presbyterian ; 
 nor Ana — Anabaptist, sir; however you may be disposed to make honest 
 people believe to the contrary, sir. Your bams are found out, sir. The (own 
 will be your stale-puts no longer, sir ; and you must not send us jolly fellows, 
 sir, — we that are comedians, sir, — you must not send us into groves and char — 
 charnwoods a-moping, sir. Neither charns, nor charnel-houses, sir. It is not 
 our constitution, sir: I tell it you— I tell it you. I was a droll dog from my crjdie. 
 I came into the world littering, and the midwife tittered, and the gossips spilt 
 their caudle with tittering; and, when I was brought to the font, the patson 
 could not christen me for littering. So I was never more than half baptized. 
 And, when I was little Joey, I made 'em all titter; there was not a melancholy 
 
676 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 face to be seen in Pogis. Pure nature, sir. 1 was born a comedian. Old 
 Screwup, the undertaker, could tell you, sir, if he were living. Why, I was 
 obliged to be lodged up every time there was to be a funeral at Pogis. I was 
 — I was, sir ? I used to grimace at the mutes, as he called it, and put 'em out 
 with my mops and my mows, till they couldn't stand at a door for me. And 
 when 1 was loclied up, with nothing but a cat in my company, I followed my 
 bent^with trying to malce her laugh ; and sometimes she would, and sometimes 
 she would not. ' And my schoolmaster could malce nothing of me : I had only 
 to thrust my tongue in my cheek — in my cheek, sir, and the rod dropped from 
 his fingers; and so my education was limited, sir. And I grew up a young 
 fellow, and it was thought convenient to enter me upon some course of life 
 that should make me serious ; but it wouldn't do, sir. And I was articled to a 
 drysalter. IVTy father gave forty pounds premium with me, sir. I can show 
 the indent — dent— dentures, sir. But I was born to be a comedian, sir : so I 
 ran away, and listed with the players, sir : and I topt my parts at Amershani 
 and Gerrard's Cross, and played my own father to his face, iri his own town of 
 Pogis, in the part of Gripe, when 1 was not full seventeen years of age ; and 
 he did not know me again, but he knew me afterwards; and then he laughed, 
 and I laughed, and, what is better, the drysalter laughed, and gave me up my 
 articles for the joke's sake : so that I came into court afterwards with clean 
 hands — with clean hands— do you see, sir ? 
 
 [Here the manuscript becomes illegible for two or three sheets onwards, 
 which we presume to be occasioned by the absence of Mr. Munden, jun., who 
 clearly transcribed it for the press thus' far. The rest (with the exception of the 
 concluding paragraph, which is seemingly resumed in the first handwriting) 
 appears to contain a confused account of some lawsuit, in which the elder 
 Munden was engaged; with a circumstantial history of the proceedings of a 
 case of breach of promise of marriage, made to or by (we cannot pick out 
 which) Jemima Munden, spinster ; probably the comedian's cousin, for it does 
 not appear he had any sister ; with a few dates, rather better preserved, of this 
 great actor's engagements,— as " Cheltenham (spelt Cheltnam), 1776; " " Bath, 
 1779; " "London, 1789; " together with stage anecdotes of Messrs. Edwin, 
 Wilson, Lee, Lewis, &c. ; over which we have strained our eyes to no purpose, 
 in the hope of presenting something amusing to the public. Towards the 
 end, the manuscript brightens up a little, as we said, and concludes in the 
 following manner : — ] 
 
 stood before them for six and thirty years [we suspect that Mr. Munden 
 
 is here speaking of his final leave-taking of the stage], and to be dismissed 
 at last. But I was heart-whole to the last, sir. What though a few drops did 
 course themselves down the old veteran's fcheeks : who could help it, sir? 1 
 was a giant that night, sir ; and could have played fifty parts, each as arduous 
 as Dozy. My faculties were never better, sir. Rut I was to be laid upon the 
 shelf It did not suit the public to laugh with their old servant any longer, sir. 
 [Here some moisture has blotted a sentence or two.] But I can play Polonius 
 still, sir ; I can, I can. Your servant, sir, Joseki Munden. 
 
Reflections in the Pillory. 677 
 
 {The London Magazine, March, 1825.) 
 
 About the year 18—, one R d, a respectable London merchant (since 
 
 dead), stood in the pillory for some alleged fraud upon the revenue. Among 
 his papers were found the following "Reflections," which we have obtained 
 by favour of our friend Elia, who knew him well, and had heard him describe 
 the train of his feeUngs, upon that trying occasion, almost in the words of the 
 manuscript. Elia speaks of him as a man (with the exception of the peccadillo 
 aforesaid) of singular integrity in all his private dealings, possessing great 
 suavity of manner, with a certain turn for humour. As our object is to present 
 human nature under every possible circumstance, we do not think that we shall 
 sully our pages by inserting it.— Editor. 
 
 Scene, — Opposite the Royal Exchange. 
 
 Time, — Twelve to One, Noon. 
 
 KeTch, my good fellow, you have a neat hand. Prithee adjust this new collar 
 to my neck gingerly. I am not used to these wooden cravats. There, softly, 
 softly. That seems the exact point between ornament and strangulation. A 
 thought looser on this side. Now it will do. And have a care, in turning me, 
 that I present my aspect due vertically. I now face the orient. In a quarter 
 of an hour I shift southward, — do you mind ?— and so on till I face the east 
 again, travelling with the sun. No half-points, I beseech you, — NN. by W., 
 or any such elaborate niceties. They become the shipman's card, but not 
 this mystery. Now leave me a little to my own reflections. 
 
 Bless us, what a company is assembled in honour of me 1 How grand I 
 stand here ! I never felt so sensibly before the effect of solitude in a crowd. 
 I muse in solemn silence upon that vast miscellaneous rabble in the pit there. 
 From my private box I contemplate, with mingled pity and wonder, the gaping 
 curiosity of those underlings. There are my Whitechapel supporters. Rose- 
 mary Lane has emptied herself of the very flower of her citizens to grace my 
 show. Duke's Place sits desolate. What is there in my face, that strangers 
 should come so far from the east to gaze upon it? \Here an egg narrow^ 
 misses him.] That offering was well meant, but not so cleanly executed. By 
 the tricklings, it should not be either myrrh or frankincense. Spare your 
 presents, my friends : I am noways mercenary. I desire no missive tokens of 
 your approbation. I am past those valentines. Bestow these coffins of un- 
 timely chickens upon mouths that water for them. Comfort your addle spouses 
 with them at home, and stop the mouths of your brawling brats with such 
 OUa Podridas : they have need of them. [A brick is letjly.] Disease not, I 
 pray you, nor dismantle your rent and ragged tenements, to furnish me with 
 architectural decorations, which I can excuse. This fragment might have 
 stopped a flaw against snow comes. [A coal flies.] Cinders are dear, gen- 
 tlemen. This nubbling might have helped the pot boil, when your dirty 
 cuttings from the shambles at three-halfpence a pound shall stand at a cold 
 simmer. Now, south about, Ketch. I would enjoy Australian popularity. 
 
 What, my friends from over the water I Old benchers— files of a day- 
 ephemeral Romans— welcome ! Doth the sight of me draw souls from limbo ? 
 Can it dispeople purgatory ?— Ha ! 
 
678 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 What am I, or what was my father's house, that I should thus be set up a 
 spectacle to gentlemen and others ? Why are all faces, like Persians at the 
 sunrise, bent singly on mine alone ? I was wont to be esteemed an ordinary 
 visnomy, a quotidian merely. Doubtless these assembled myriads discern some 
 traits of nobleness, gentility, breeding, which hitherto have escaped the 
 common observation, — some intimations, as it were, of wisdom, valour, piety, 
 and so forth. My sight dazzles ; and, if am not deceived by the too-familiar 
 pressure of this strange neckcloth that envelopes it, my countenance gives out 
 lambent glories. For some painter now to take me in the lucky point of ex- 
 pression !— the posture so convenient !— the head never shifting, but standing 
 quiescent in a sort of natural frame. But these artisans require a westerly 
 aspect. Ketch, turn me. 
 
 Something bf St. James's air In these my new friends. How my prospects 
 shift and brighten ! Now, if Sir Thomas Lawrence be anywhere in that group, 
 his fortune is made for ever. I think I see some one taking out of a crayon. 
 I will compose my whole face to a smile, which yet shall not so predominate 
 but that gravity and gaiety shall contend, as it were, — you understand me? 
 I will work lip my thoughts to some mild rapture, — a gentle enthusiasm, — 
 which the artist may transfer, in a manner, warm to the canvas. I will inwardly 
 apostrophise my tabernacle. 
 
 Delectable mansion, hail ! House not made of c'.ury wood ! Lodging 
 that pays no rent ; airy and commodious ; which, owing no window-tax, art yet 
 all casement, out of which men have such pleasure in peering and overlooking, 
 that they will sometimes stand an hour together td enjoy thy prospects ! " Cell, 
 recluse from the vulgar ! Quiet retirement from the great Babel, yet affording 
 sufficient glimpses into it ! Pulpit, that instructs without note or sermon-book ; 
 into which the preacher is inducted without tenth or fiist-fruit ! Throne, un- 
 shared and iSingle, that disdainest a Brentford competitor ! Honour without 
 co-rival ! Or hearest thou, rather, magnificent theatre, in which the spectator 
 comes to see and to be, seen? From thy giddy heights I look down upon the 
 common herd, who stand with eyes upturned, as if a winged messenger 
 hovered over them ; and mouths open as if they expected manna. I feel, I 
 feel, the true episcopal yearnings. Behold in me, my flock, your true over- 
 seer ! What though I cannot lay hands, because my own are laid ; yet I can 
 mutter benedictions. True otinm. cum dignitate! Proud Pisgah eminence ! 
 pinnacle subUme J O Pillory ! 'tis thee I sing 1 Thou younger brother to the 
 gallows, without his rough and Esau palms, that with ineffable contempt 
 surveyest beneath thee the grovelling stodts, which claim presumptuously ta be 
 of thy great race ! Let that low wood know that thou art far higher born. Let 
 that domicile for groundling rogues and base earth-kissing varlets envy thy 
 preferment, not seldom fated to be the wanton baiting-house, the temporary 
 retreat, of poet and of patriot. Shades of Bastwick and of Prynne hover over 
 thee, —Defoe is there, and more greatly daring Shebbeare, — from their (Uttle 
 more elevated) stations they look down with recognitions. Ketch, turn me. 
 
 I now veer to the north. Open your widest gates, thou proud Exchaiige of 
 London, that I may look in as proudly ! Gresham's wonder, hail ! I stand 
 upon a level with all your kings. They and I, from equal heights, with equal 
 superciliousness, o'erlook the plodding money-hunting tribe below, who, busied 
 in their sordid speculations, scarce elevate their eyes to notice your ancient, or 
 my recent, grandeur. The second Charles smiles on me from three pedestals !' 
 
 * A statue of Charles II.. by the elder Gibber, adorns the front of the Exchange. He 
 stands also on high, in the train of his crowned ancestors, in his proper order, wWtin 
 that building. But the merchants of London, in a superfetation of loyalty, have, 
 within a few years, caused to be erected another effigy of him on the ground in the 
 centre of the interior. We do not hear that a fourth is in contemplation. 
 
Reflections in the Pillory. 679 
 
 He closed the Exchequer : I cheated the Excise. Equal our darings, equal 
 be our lot. 
 
 Are those the quarters? 'tis their fatal chime. That the ever-winged hours 
 would but stand still ! but I must descend,— descend from this dream of 
 greatness. Stay, stay, a little while, importunate hour-hand ! A moment or 
 two, and I shall walk on foot with the undistinguished many. The clock 
 speaks one. I return to common life. Ketch, let me out. 
 
 ^&« fast f mr&. 
 
 (The London Magazine, April, 1823.) 
 
 I AMthe miserablest man living. Give me counsel, dear Editor. I was bred 
 up in the strictest principles of honesty, and have passed my life in punctual 
 adherence to them. Integrity might be said to be ingrained in oiu: family. 
 Yet I live in constant fear of one day coming to the gallows. 
 
 Till the latter end of last autumn, I never experienced these feelings of self- 
 mistrust, which ever since have embittered my existence. From the apprehen- 
 sion of that unfortunate man,* whose story began to make so great an impres- 
 sion upon the public about that time, I date my horrors. I never can get it 
 out of my head that I shall some time or other commit a forgery, or do some 
 equally vile thing. To make matters worse, I am in a banking-house. I sit 
 surrounded with a cluster of bank-notes. These were formerly no more to me 
 than meat to a butcher's dog. They are now as toads and aspics. 1 feel all 
 day Uke one situated amidst gins and pitfalls. Sovereigns, which I once took 
 such pleasure In counting out ; and scraping up with ray Uttle tin shovel (at 
 which I vras the most expert in the banking-house), now scald my hands. 
 When I go to sign my name, I set down that of another person, or write 
 my own in a counterfeit character. I am beset with temptations without 
 motive. I want no more wealth than I possess. A more contented being than 
 myself, as to money matters, exists not. What should I fear ? 
 
 When a child, I was once let loose, by favour of a nobleman's gardener, 
 into his lordship's magnificent fruit-garden, with full leave to pull the currants 
 and the gooseberries; only I was interdicted from touching the wall-fruit. 
 Indeed, at that season (it was the end of autumn), there was little left. Only 
 on the south wall (can I forget the hot feel of the brick-work ?) lingered the one 
 last peach. Now, peaches are a fruit which I always had, and still have, an 
 almost utter aversion to. There is something to my palate singularly harsh 
 and repulsive in the flavour of them. I know not by what demon of contradic- 
 tion inspired, but I was haunted by an irresistible desire to pluck it. Tear myself 
 as often as I would from the spot, I found myself still recurring to it ; till madden- 
 ing with desire (desire I cannot call it), with wilfulness rather, — without appetite, 
 ^against appetite, I may call it, — in an evil hour, I reached out my hand and 
 plucked it. Some few raindrops just then fell ; the sky (from a bright day) became 
 
 * Fauntleroy. 
 
68o The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 overcast ; and I was a type of our first parents, after the eating of that fatal 
 fruit. I felt myself naked and ashamed, stripped of ray virtue, spiritless. The 
 downy fruit, whose sight rather than savour had tempted me, dropped from 
 my hand never to be tasted. All the commentators in the world cannot 
 persuade me but that the Hebrew word, in the second chapter of Genesis, 
 translated "apple," should be rendered "peach." Only this way can I reconcile 
 that mysterious story. 
 
 Just such a child at thirty am I among the cash and valuables, longing to 
 pluck, without an idea of enjoyment further. I cannot reason myself out of 
 these fears ; I dare not laugh at them. I was tenderly and lovingly brought 
 
 up. What then? Who that in Hfe's entrance had seen the babe F , from 
 
 the lap stretching out his little fond mouth to catch the maternal kiss, could 
 have predicted, or as much as imagined, that life's very different exit? The 
 sight of my own fingers tbrments me; they seem so admirably constructed for 
 — pilfering. Tiien that jugular vein which I have in common ; in an em- 
 phatic sense may I say with David, I am "fearfully made." All my mirth is 
 poisoned by these unhappy suggestions. If, to dissipate reflection, I hum a 
 tune, it changes to the "Lamentations of a Sinner." My very dreams are 
 tainted. I awake with a shocking feeling of my hand in some pocket. 
 
 Advise me, dear Editor, on this painful heart-malady. Tell me, do you feel 
 anything allied to it in yourself? Do you never feel an itching, as it were,— a 
 dactylomania, — or am I alone? You have my honest confession. My next 
 may appear from Bow Street. 
 
 (The New Monthly Magazine, January, 1825.) 
 
 Since writing this article, we have been informed that the object of our 
 funeral oration is not definitively dead, but only moribund. So much the 
 better : we shall have an opportunity of granting the request made to Walter 
 by one of the children in the wood, and " kill him two times." The Abbe de 
 Vertot having a siege to write, and not receiving the materials in time, com- 
 posed the whole from his invention. Shortly after its completion, the expected 
 documents arrived, when he threw them aside, exclaiming, " You are of no use 
 to me now : I have carried the town." 
 
 Nought but a blajik remains, a dead void space, 
 A step of life that promised such a race. — Drvdem. 
 
 Napoleon has now sent us back from the grave sufficient echoes of his 
 hving renown : the twilight of posthumous fame has lingered long enough over 
 the spot where the sun of his glory set ; and his name must at length repose in 
 the silence, if not in the darkness, of night. In this busy and evanescent scene, 
 other spirits of the age are rapidly snatched away, claiming our undivided 
 sympathies and regrets, until in turn they yield to some newer and more 
 absorbing grief. Another name is now added to the Ust of mighty departed, 
 — a name whose influence upon the hopes and fears, the fates and fortunes, of 
 
The Illustrious Defunct. 68 1 
 
 our countrymen, has rivalled, and perhaps eclipsed, that of the defunct " child 
 and champion of Jacobinism," while it is associated with all the sanctions of 
 legitimate government, all the sacred authorities of social order and our most 
 holy rehgion. We speak of one, indeed, under whose warrant heavy and in- 
 cessant contributions were imposed upon our fellow-citizens, but who exacted 
 nothing without the signet and the sign-manual of most devout Chancellors of 
 the Exchequer. Not to dally longer with the sympathies of our readers, we 
 think it right to premonish them that we are composing an epicedium upon no 
 less distinguished a personage than the Lottery, whose last breath, after many 
 penultimate puffs, has been sobbed forth by sorrowing contractors, as if the 
 world itself were about to be converted into a blank. There is a fashion of 
 eulo^, as well as of vituperation ; and, though the Lottery stood for some 
 time in the latter predicament, we hesitate not to assert that multis ille bonis 
 fleUlis occidit. Never have we joined in the senseless clamour which con- 
 demned the only tax whereto we became voluntary contributors,!— the only 
 resource which gave the stimulus without the danger or infatuations of 
 gambling; the only alembic which in these plodding days sublimized our 
 imaginations, and filled them with more delicious dreams than ever flitted 
 athwart the sensorium of Alnaschar. 
 
 Never can the writer forget, when, as a child, he was hoisted upon a servant's 
 shoulder in Guildhall, and looked down upon the installed and solemn pomp 
 of the then drawing Lottery. The two awful cabinets of iron, upon whose 
 massy and mysterious portals the royal initials were gorgeously emblazoned, as 
 if, after having deposited the unfulfilled prophecies within, the king himself had 
 turned the lock, and still retained the key in his pocket ; the blue-coat boy, 
 with his naked arm, first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into 
 the dark recess for a ticket ; the grave and reverend faces of the commissioners 
 eyeing the announced number ; the scribes below calmly committing it to their 
 huge books ; the anxious countenances of the surrounding populace; while 
 the giant figures of Gog and Magog, hke presiding deities, looked down with 
 a grim silence upon the whole proceeding, — constituted altogether a scene, 
 which, combined with the sudden wealth supposed to be lavished from those 
 inscrutable wheels, was well calculated to impress the imagination of a boy with 
 reverence and amazement. Jupiter, seated between the two fatal urns of good 
 and evil, the bUnd goddess with her cornucopia, the Parcas wielding the distaff, 
 the thread of life, and the abhorred shears, seemed but dim and shadowy 
 abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an assemblage exercising, 
 as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all presented to me in palpable and 
 living operatioth Reason and experience, ever at their old spiteful work of 
 catching and destroying the bubbles which youth delighted to follow, have 
 indeed dissipated much of this illusion ; but my mind so far retained the 
 influence of that early impression, that I have ever since continued to deposit 
 my humble offerings at its shrine, whenever the ministers of the Lottery went 
 ■forth with type and trumpet to announce its periodical dispensations; and 
 though nothing has been doled out to me from its undiscerning coffers but 
 blanks, or those more vexatious tantalizers of the spirit denominated small 
 prizes, yet do I hold myself largely indebted to this most generous diffuser of 
 universal happiness. Ingrates that we are ! are we to be thankful for no 
 benefits that are not palpable to sense, to recognize no favours that are not 
 of marketable value, to acknowledge no wealth unless it can be counted 
 with the five fingers? If we admit the mind to be the sole depository of 
 genuine joy, where is the bosom that has not been elevated into a temporary 
 Elysium by the magic of the Lottery? Which of us has not converted his 
 ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one into a nest-egg of Hope, upon which 
 he has sate brooding in the secret roosting-places of his heart, and hatched it 
 into a thousand fantastical apparitions ? 
 
 z * 
 
682 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 What a startling revelation of the passions if all the aspirations engendered 
 by the Lottery could be made manifest! Many an impecuni3ry epicure has 
 gloated over his locked-up warrant for future wealth, as a means of realizing the 
 dream of his namesake in the "Alchemist : " 
 
 ** My meat shall all come in in Indian shells," &c. 
 
 Many a doting lover has kissed the scrap of paper whose promissory shower 
 of gold was to give up to him his otherwise unattainable Danae : Nimrods 
 have transformed the same narrow symbol into a saddle, by which they have 
 been enabled to bestride the backs of peerless hunters; whije nynip^shave 
 metamorphosed its Protean form into^ 
 
 " Rings, gauds, conceits, . 
 Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats," 
 
 and all the braveries of dress, to say nothing of the obsequious husbajid, the 
 two footman'd carriage, and the opera-box. By the simple charm of this 
 numbered and printed rag, gamesters have, for a time at least, recovered their 
 losses : spendthrifts have cleared off mortgages ifrom their estates ; the im- 
 prisoned debtor has leapt over his lofty boundary of circumscription and 
 restraint, and revelled in all the joys of liberty and fortune ; the cottage-walls 
 have swelled out into more goodly prpjportion than those of Baucis and Phile- 
 mon; poverty has tasted the luxuries of competence ; labour has lolled at ease 
 in a perpetual arpichair of idleness; sickness has been trjbed into banish- 
 ment ; life has been invested with new charms; and ^eath deprived of its 
 former terrors. Nor have the affections been less gratified tlian the_ wants, 
 appetites, and ambitions of mankind. By the conjurations of the same potent 
 spell, kindred have lavished anticipated benefits upon one another, and charity 
 upon all. Let it be termed a delusion, — a fool's paradise is better than the 
 wise man's Tartarus ; be it branded as an ignis-fetuus,— it was at least a, bene- 
 volent one, which, instead of beguiling its followers into swamps, caverns, and 
 pitfalls, allured them on with all the blandishments of enchantment to a garden 
 of Eden, — an ever-bloo-ning Elysiiim of dehght. True, the pleasures it be- 
 stowed were evanescent : but which of our joys are permanent ? and who so 
 inexperienced as not to know that anticipation is always of higher relish than 
 reality, which strikes a balance both in our sufferings and enjoyments? " The 
 fear of ill exceeds the ill we fear; " and fruition, in the same proportion, in- 
 variably falls short of hope. ' ' Men are but children of a larger growth," who 
 may amuse themselves for a long time in gazing at the reflection of the moon 
 in the water ; but, if they jump in to grasp it, they may grope for ever, and 
 only get the farther from their object. He is the wisest who keeps feeding upon 
 the future, and refrains as long as possible from undeceiving himself by con- 
 verting his pleasant speculations into disagreeable certainties. 
 
 The true mental epicure always purchased his ticket early, and postponed 
 inquiry into its fate to the last possible moment, during the whole of which 
 intervening period he had an imaginary twenty thousand locked up in his desk : 
 and was not this well worth all the money ? Who would scruple to give twenty 
 pounds interest for even the ideal enjoyment of as many thousands during two 
 or three months? Crede quoi habes, et habcs : and the usufruct of such a 
 capital is surely not dear at such a price. Some years ago, a gentleman in 
 passing along Cheapside saw the figures 1069, of which number he was the 
 sole proprietor, flaming on the window of a lott^-oflioe as a papital, prize. 
 Somewhat flurried by this discovery, not less welcome than unexpected, he 
 resolved to walk round St. Paul's that he might consider in what way iQPom- 
 municate the happy tidings to his wife and family ; but, upoiirerpassing the shop 
 
The Illustriotts Defunct. 683 
 
 he observed that the number was altered to 10,069, and, upon inquiry, had the 
 mortification to learn that his ticket was a blank, and had only been stuck up 
 in the window by a mistake of the clerk. This effectually calmed ,his agitar 
 tion ; but he always speaks of himself as having once possessed twenty thou- 
 sand pounds, and maintains that his ten-minutes' walk round St. Paul's was 
 worth ten times the purchase-money of the ticket. A prize thus obtained has, 
 moreover, this special advantage, —it is beyond the reach of fate; it cannot be 
 squandered ; bankruptcy cannot lay siege to it ; friends cannot pull it down, 
 nor enemies blow it up; it bears a charmed life, and none of woman bom can 
 break its integrity, even by the dissipation of a single fraction. Show me the 
 property in these perilous times, that is equally campact and impregnable. We 
 can no longer become enriched for a quarter of an hour ; we can no longer 
 succeed in such splendid failures ; all our chances of making such a miss have 
 vanished with the last of the Lotteries. 
 
 Life will now become a fiat, prosaic routine of matterrof-fact ; and sleep 
 itself erst so prolific of numerical configurations and mysterious stimulants to 
 lottery adventure, will be disfumished of its figures and figments. People will 
 cease to harp upon the one lucky number suggested in a dream,, and which forms 
 the exception, while they are scrupulously silent upon the ten thousand falsified 
 dreams which constitute the rule. Morpheus will stifle Cocker with a hand- 
 ful of poppies, and our pillows will be no longer haunted by the book of 
 numbers. 
 
 And who, too, shall maintain the art and mystery of puffing, in, all jts 
 pristine glory, when the lottery professors shall have abandoned its cultivation ? 
 They were the first, as they will assuredly be the last, who fully developed the 
 resources of that ingenious art; who cajoled and decoyed the most suspicious 
 and wary reader into a perusal of their advertisements by devices of endless 
 variety and cunning ; who baited their lurking schemes with inidnight murders, 
 ghost-stories, crim-cons, bon-mots, balloons, dreadful catastrophies, and every 
 diversity of joy and sorrow, to catch newspaper-gudgeons. Ought not such 
 talents to be encouraged? Verily the abolitionists have much to answer 
 for! • 
 
 And now, having established the felicity of all those who gained imaginary 
 prizes, let us proceed to show that the equally numerous class who were pre- 
 sented mth real blanks have not less reason to consider themselves happy. 
 Most of us have cause to be thankful for that which is bestowed ! but we have 
 all, probably, reason to be still more grateful for that which is withheld, and 
 more especially for our being denied the sudden possession of riches, In the 
 Ijtany, indeed, we call upon the Lord to deliver us "in all time of our 
 "wealth ; " but how few of us are sincere in deprecating such a ■ calamity ! 
 lilassinger's Luke, and Ben Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon, and Pope's Sir 
 Balaam, and our own daily observation, might convince us that the Devil ' ' now 
 tempts by making rich, not making poor." We may read in the Guardian a 
 circumstantial account of a man who was utteriy rumed by gaining a capital 
 prize ■ we may recollect what Dr. Johnson said to Garrick, when the latter was 
 making a display of his wealth at Hampton Court— "Ah, David, David! 
 these are the things that make a death-bed terrible; " we may recall the Scrip- 
 ture declaration, as to the difficulty a rich man finds in entering the kingdom of 
 Heaven ; and, combining all these denunciations against opulence, let us heartily 
 congratulate one another upon our lucky escape from the calamity of a twenty 
 or thirty thousand pound prize ! The fox in the fable, who accused the uiiat- 
 tainable grapes of sourness, was more of a philosopher than we are generally : 
 willing to allow. He was an adept in that species of- moral alchemy which 
 turns everythin" to gold, and converts disappointment- itself into a ground of 
 resignation and°content. Such we have shown to be the great lesson inqulcated ' 
 by the Lotterv when rightly contemplated ; and, if we might parody M.de 
 
684 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 Chiteaubiiand's jingling expression, — " Le Roi est mort : vive le Roil" — we 
 should be tempted to exckim, " The Lottery is no more : long live the 
 Lottery 1 " 
 
 lleligkn of %Aam. 
 
 [The New Monthly Magazine, April, 1826.) 
 
 [The "present licenser," referred to in the fifteenth line helow, was George Colman 
 the younger.] 
 
 The world has hitherto so little troubled its head upon the points of doctrine 
 held by a community which contributes in other ways so largely to its amuse- 
 ment, that, before the late mischance of a celebrated tragic actor, it scarce con- 
 descended to look into the practice of any individual player, much less to 
 inquire into the hidden and abscondite springs of his actions. Indeed, it is 
 with some violence to the imagination that we conceive of an actor as belong- 
 ing to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our 
 mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage. How oddly does 
 it sound, when we are told that the late Miss Pope, for instance,— that is to 
 say, in our notion of her Mrs. Candour, — ^was a good daughter, an affectionate 
 sister, and exemplary in all the parts of domestic life ! With still greater 
 difficulty can we carry our notions to church, and conceive of Lisbon kneeUng 
 upon a hassock, or Munden uttering a pious ejaculation, — " making mouths at 
 the invisible event." But the times are fast improving; and, if the process of 
 sanctity begun under the happy auspices of the present licencer go on to its 
 completion, it will be as necessary for a comedian to give an account of his faith 
 as of his conduct. Fawcett must study the five points ; and Dicky Suett, if 
 he were alive, would have to rub up his catechism. Already the effects of it 
 begin to appear. A celebrated performer has thought fit to oblige the world 
 with a confession of his faith, — or Br 's Religio Dramatici. This gentle- 
 man, in his laudable attempt to shift from his person the obloquy of Judaism, 
 with a forwardness of a new convert, in trying to prove too much, has, in the 
 opinion of many, proved too Utile. A simple declaration of his Christianity 
 was sufficient ; but, strange to say, his apology has not a word about it. We 
 are left to gather it from some expressions which imply that he is a Protestant ; 
 but we did not wish to inquire into the niceties of his orthodoxy. To his 
 friends of the old persuasion the distinction was impertinent ; for what cares 
 Rabbi Ben Kimchi for the differences which have split our novelty ? To the 
 great body of Christians that holds the Pope's supremacy — that is to say, to the 
 major part of the Christian world— his religion will appear as much to seek as 
 ever. But perhaps he conceived that all Christians are Protestants, as children 
 and the common people call all, that are not animals. Christians. The mis- 
 take was not very considerable in so young a proselyte, or he might think the 
 general (as logiciatis speak) involved in the particular. All Protestants are 
 Christians ; but I am a Protestant ; ergo, &c. ; as if a marmoset, contending 
 to be a man, overleaping that term as too generic and vulgar, should at once 
 
The Religion of Actors. 685 
 
 roundly proclaim himself to be a gentleman. The argument would be, as we 
 say exabundanti. From whichever cause this excesms in terminis proceeded, 
 we can do no less than congratulate the general state of Christendom upon the 
 accession of so extraordinary a convert. Who was the happy instrument of 
 the conversion, we are yet to leani : it comes nearest to the attempt of the late 
 pious Dr. Watts to Christianize the Psalms of the Old Testament. Something 
 of the old Hebrew raciness is lost in the transfusion ; but much of its asperity 
 is softened and pared down in the adaptation. 
 
 The appearance of so singular a treatise at this conjuncture has set us upon 
 an inquiry into the present state of religion upon the stage generally. By the 
 favour of the Churchwardens of St. Martin's in the Fields, and St. Paul's, 
 Covent Garden, who have very readily, and with great kindness, assisted our 
 pursuit, we are enabled to lay before the public the following particulars. 
 Strictly speaking, neither of the two great bodies is collectively a religious 
 institution. We expected to find a chaplain among them, as at St. Stephen's 
 and other Court establishments ; and werethe more surprised at the omission, 
 as the last Mr. Bengough at the one house, and Mr. Powell at the other, from 
 a gravity of speech and demeanour, and the habit of wearing black at their 
 first appearances in the beginning of the fifth or the conclusion of the/oarth 
 act, so eminently pointed out«their qualifications for such office. These corpora- 
 tions, then, being not properly congregational, we must seek the solution of 
 our question in the tastes, attainments, accidental breeding, and education of 
 the individual members of them. As we were prepared to expect, a majority 
 at both houses adhere to the religion of the Church Established,— only that 
 at one of them a strong leaven of Roman Catholicism is suspected ; which, 
 considering the notorious education of the manager at a foreign seminary, is not 
 so much to be wondered at. Some have gone so far as to report that Mr. 
 
 T y, in particular, belongs to an order lately restored on the Continent. We 
 
 can contradict this : that gentleman is a member of the Kirk of Scotland : and 
 his name is to be found, much to his honour, in the list of seoeders from the 
 congregation of Mr. Fletcher. While the generality, as we have said, are 
 content to jog on in the safe trammels of national orthodoxy, symptoms of a 
 sectarian spirit have broken out in quarters where we should least have looked 
 for it. Some of the ladies at both houses are deep in controverted points. 
 
 Miss F e, we are credibly informed, is a Sui- and Madame V a 
 
 5«^ro-Lapsarian. Mr. Pope is the last of the exploded sect of the Ranters. 
 Mr. Sinclair has joined the Shakers. Mr. Grimaldi, sen., after being long a 
 Jumper, has lately fallen into some whimsical theories respecting the fall of 
 man ; which he understands, not of an allegorical, but a real tumble, by which 
 the whole body of humanity became, as it were, lame to the performance of 
 good works. Pride he will have to be nothing but a stiff neck; irresolution, 
 the nerves shaken ; an inclination to sinister paths, crookedness of the joints ; 
 spiritual deadness, a paralysis ; want of charity, a contraction in the fingers ; 
 despising of government, a broken head ; the plaster, a sermon ; the lint to 
 bind it up, the text ; the probers, the preachers ; a pair of crutches, the old 
 and new law ; a bandage, religious obligation : a fanciful mode of illustration, 
 derived from the accidents and habits of his past calling spiritualized, rather 
 than from any accurate acquaintance with the Hebrew text, in which report 
 speaks him but a raw scholar. Mr. Elliston, from all we can learn, has his 
 religion yet to choose ; though some think him a Muggletonjan. 
 
686 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 [flottis Every Day Book, i6th April, 1827.) 
 
 Rummaging over the contents of an old stall at a half hook, half old-iron :hop, 
 in an alley leading from Wardour Street to Soho Square, yesterday, I lit upon a 
 ragged duodecimo which had. been the strange delight of my infancy, and 
 which I had lost sight of for more than forty years,— the "Queen-like Closet, 
 or Rich Cabinet; " written by Hannah Woolly, and printed for R. C. and T, 
 S., 1681; being an abstract of receipts in cookery, confectionery, cosmetics, 
 needlework, morality, and all such branches of what were then considered as 
 temale accomplishments. The price demanded was sixpence, which the owner 
 (a little squab duodecimo character himself) enforced with the assiirance that 
 his "own mother should not have it for a farthing less." On my demurring at 
 this extraordinary assertion, the dirty httle vendor reinforced his assertion with 
 a sort of oath, which seemed more than the occasion demaiided : " And now," 
 said he, " I have put my soul to it." Pressed by so solemn an asseveration, I 
 could no longer resist a demand which seemed to set me, however unworthy, 
 upon a level with its dearest relations ; and depositing a tester, I bore away 
 the tattered prize in triumph. I remember a gorgeous description of the twelve 
 months of the year, which I thought would be a fine substitute for those 
 poetical descriptions of them which your "Every Day Book" had nearly 
 exhausted out of Spenser. "This will be a treat," thought I, "for friend 
 Hone." To memory they seemed no less fantastic and splendid than the 
 other. But what are the mistakes of childhood ! On reviewing them, they 
 turned out to be only a set of commonplace receipts for working the seasons, 
 months, heathen gods and goddesses, &c., in samplers ! Yet, as an instance 
 of the homely occiipation of our great grandmothers, they may be amusing to 
 some readers. " I have seen," says the notable Hannah Woolly, "such ridi- 
 culous things done in work, as it is an abomination to any artist to behold. As 
 for example : You may find, in some pieces, Abraham and Sarah, and many 
 other persons of old time, clothed as they go nowadays, and truly sometimes 
 worse ; for they most resemble the pictures on ballads. Let all ingenious women 
 have regard, that when they work any image, to represent it aright. First, let 
 it be drawn well, and then observe the directions which are given by knowing 
 men. I do assure you, 1 never durst work any Scripture story without inform- 
 ing myself from the^ground of it ; nor any other story, or single person with- 
 out informing myself both of the visage and habit ; as foUoweth : — 
 
 " If your work Jupiter, the imperial feigned God, he must have long, black 
 curled hair, a purple garment trimmed with gold, and sitting upon a golden 
 throne, with bright yellow clouds about him." 
 
 THE TWELVE MONTHS OF THE YEAR. 
 
 March. Is drawn in tawny, with a fierce aspect : a helmet upon his head, 
 and leaning on a spade ; and a basket of garden-seeds in his left hand, and in 
 his right hand the sign of Aries ; and winged. 
 
 April. A young man in green, with a garland of myrtle and hawthorn- 
 buds ; winged ; in one hand primroses and violets, in the other the sign 
 Taurus. 
 
The Months. 687 
 
 May. With a sweet and lovely countenance : clad in a robe of white and 
 green, embroidered with several flowers ; upon his head a garden of all manner 
 of roses ; on the one hand a nightingale, in the other a lute. His sign must be 
 Gemini. 
 
 June. In a mantle of dark grass-green ; upon his head a garland of bents, 
 kings-cups, and maiden-hair; in his left hand an angle, with a box of cantha- 
 rides ; in his right, the sign Cancer ; and upon his arms a basket of seasonable 
 fruits. 
 
 July. In a jacket of light yellow, eating cherries ; with his face and bosom 
 sun-burnt ! upon his head a wreath of centaury and wild thyme ; a scythe on his 
 shoulder, and a bottle at his girdle ; carrying the sign Leo. 
 
 August. A young man of fierce and choleric aspect, in a fiame-cploured 
 garment ; upon his head a garland of wheat and rye ; upon his arm a basket 
 of all manner of ripe fruits ; at his belt a sickle j his sign Virgo. 
 
 September. A merry and cheerful countenance, in a purple robe ; upon his 
 head a wreath of red and white grapes ; in his left hand a handful of oats ; 
 withal carrying a horn of plenty, full of all manner of ripe fruits ; in his right 
 hand the sign Libra. 
 
 October. In a garment of yellow and carnation ; upon his head a garland 
 of oak-leaves with acorns ; in his right hand the sign Scorpio ; in his left hand 
 a basket of medlars, services, and chestnuts, and any other fruits then in 
 season. 
 
 November. In a garment of changeable green and black ; upon his head a 
 garland of olives, with the fruit in his left hand ; bunches of parsnips and 
 turnips in his right : his sign Sagittarius. 
 
 December. A horrid and fearful aspect, clad in Irish rags, or coarse frieze 
 girt unto him; upon his head three or four night-caps, and over them a 
 Turkish turban ; his nose red, his mouth and beard clogged with icicles ; at 
 his back a bundle of holly, ivy, or mistletoe ; holding in ftitred mittens the 
 sign of Capricomus. 
 
 Jar^uary. Clad all in white, as the earth looks with the snow, blowing his 
 nails ; in his left arm a billet ; the sign Aquarius standing by his side. 
 
 February. Clothed in a dark sky-colour, carrying in his right hand the sign 
 Pisces. 
 
 The .following receipt " To dress up a chimney very fine for the summer- 
 time, as I have done many, and they have been liked very well," may not be 
 unprofitable to the housevrives of this century. [After giving the extract, 
 Lamb adds] : 
 
 One phrase in the above should particularly recommend it to such of your 
 female readers as, in the nice language of the day, have done growing some 
 time,— " little toad-stools, &c., and anything that is old and pretty." Was 
 ever antiquity so smoothed over? The culinary receipts have nothing remark- 
 able in them, except the costliness of them. Everything (to the meanest 
 meats) is sopped in claret, steeped in claret, basted with claret, as if claret 
 were as cheap as ditch-water, I remember Bacon recommends opening a turf 
 or two in your garden walks, and pouring into each a bottle of claret, to re- 
 create the sense of smelhng, being no less grateful than beneficial. We hope 
 the Chancellor of the Exchequer will attend to this m his next reduction of 
 French wines, that we may once more water our gardens with right Bourdeaux. 
 The medical recipes are as whimsical as they are cruel. Our ancestors were 
 not at all effeminate on his head. Modern sentimentalists would shrink at a 
 cock plucked and bruised in a mortar alive to make a cuUis, or a live mole 
 baked in an oven (be sure it be alive) to make a powder for consumption. But 
 the whimsicalest of all are the directions to servants (for this little book is a 
 compendium of all duties) : the footman is seriously admonished not to stand 
 loUing against his master's chair while he waits at table; for "to lean on a 
 
688 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 chair when they wait is a particular favour shown to any superior servant, as 
 the chief gentleman, or the waiting-woman when she rises from the table. Also 
 he must not " hold the plates before his mouth to be defiled with his breath, 
 nor touch them on the right [inner] side." Surely Swift must have seen this 
 little treatise. 
 
 '%%mmtiM%% nf Sir ItfEerg- grastan 
 
 {Hone's Every Day Book, 2znd June, 1S27.) 
 
 [A footnote signed " Ed. of Hone's Every Day Book," explained, at the mention of 
 Sir JefFery's appearance upon the stagp somewhere in the character of Doctor Last, that 
 " It was at the Haymarket Theatre."] 
 
 To your account of Sir Jeifery Dunstan, in columns 829-30 (where, by an 
 unfortunate erratum, the effigies of two Sir J^erys appear, when the upper- 
 most figure is clearly meant for Sir Harry Dimsdale), you may add that the 
 writer of this has frequently met him in his latter days, about 1790 or 1791, 
 returning in an evening, after his long day's itineracy, to his domicile,— a 
 wretched shed in the most beggarly purlieu of Bethnal Green, a little on this 
 side the Mile-end Turnpike. The lower figure in that leaf most correctly 
 describes his then appearance, except that no graphic art can convey an idea 
 of the general squalor of it, and of his bag (his constant concomitant) in parti- 
 cular. Whether it contained "old wigs" at that time, I know not; but it 
 seemed a fitter repository for bones snatched out of kennels than for any part 
 of a gentleman's dress, even at second-hand. 
 
 The ex-member for Garrat was a melancholy instance of a great man whose 
 popularity is worn out. He still carried his sack ; but it seemed a part of his 
 identity rather than an implement of his profession ; a badge of past grandeiur : 
 could anything have divested him of that, he would have shown a' "poor 
 forked animal " indeed. My hfe upon it, it contained no curls at the time I 
 speak of The most decayed and spiritless remnants of what was once a 
 penike would have scorned the filthy case; would absolutely have " burst its 
 cerements." No : it was empty, or brought home bones, or a few cinders, 
 possibly. A strong odour of burnt bones, I remember, blended with the scent 
 of horse-flesh seething into dog's meat, and only relieved a Uttle by the breath- 
 ings of a few brick-kilns, made up the atmosphere of the delicaft suburban 
 spot which this great man had chosen for the last scene of his earthly vanities. 
 The cry of " old wigs" had ceased with the possession of any such fripperies; 
 his sack might have contained not unaptly a little mould to scatter upon that 
 grave to which he was now advancing ; but it told of vacancy and desolation. 
 His quips were silent too, and his brain was empty as his sack : he slank 
 along, and seemed to decline popular observation. If a few boys followed 
 him, it seemed rather from habit than any expectation of fun. 
 
 Alas ! how changed from Mm, 
 The life of humour, and the soul of whim, 
 Gallant and gay on Garrat 's hustings proud ! 
 
 But it is thus that the world rewards its favourites in decay. What faults te 
 had, I know not. I have heard something of a peccadillo or so. But some 
 little deviation from the precise line of rectitude might have been winked at in 
 
Reminiscences of Sir jFeffery Dunstan. 689 
 
 so tortuous and stigmatic a frame. Poor Sir Jeffery! it were well if some 
 M. P.'s in earnest had passed their parliamentary existence with no more offences 
 against integrity than could be laid to thy charge ! A fair dismissal was thy 
 due, not so unkind a degradation ; some little snug retreat, with a bit of green 
 before thine eyes, and not a burial alive in the fetid beggaries of Bethnal. 
 ' Thou wouldst have ended thy days in a manner more appropriate to thy pns- 
 tine dignity, installed in munificent mockery (as in mock honours you had 
 lived), — a poor knight of Windsor ! 
 
 Every distinct place of public speaking demands an oratory peculiar to 
 itself. The forensic fails within the walls of St. Stephen. Sir Jeffery was a 
 living instance of this ; for, in the flower of his popularity, an attempt was 
 made to bring him out upon the stage (at which of the winter theatres I forget, 
 but I well remember thd anecdote) in the part of Doctor Last, The announce- 
 ment drew a crowded house ; but, notwithstanding infinite tutoring, —by Foote 
 or Garrick, I forget which, — ^when the curtain drew up, the heart of Sir Jeffery 
 failed, and he faltered on, and made nothing of his part, till the hisses of the 
 house at last, in very kindness, dismissed him from the boards. Great as his 
 parliamentary eloquence had shown itself, brilliantly as his off-hand sallies had 
 sparkled on a hustings, they here totally failed him. Perhaps he had an aver- 
 sion to borrowed wit, and, like my Lord Foppington, disdained to entertain 
 himself (or others) with the forced products of another man's brain. Your man 
 of quality is more diverted with the natural sprouts of his own. 
 
 (Hone's Every Day Book, 21st July, 1826.) 
 
 Dear Sik,- I read your account of this unfortunate being, and his forlorn 
 piece of self-history, with that smile of half-interest which the annals of msig- 
 nificance excite, till 1 came to where he says, " I was bound apprentice to 
 Mr William Bird, an eminent writer, and teacher of languages and mathe- 
 matics " &c. ; when I started as one does in the recognition of an old acquamt- 
 ance in a supposed stranger. This, then, was that Starkey of whom I have 
 heard myjister relate so many pleasing anecdotes ; and whom, never havmg 
 seen, I yet seem almost to remember. For nearly fifty years, she had lost all 
 sight of him ; and, behold ! the gentle usher of her youth, grown into an aged 
 beggar dubbed with an opprobrious title to which he had no pretensions ; an 
 obiect and a May-game ! To what base purposes may we not return ! What 
 may not have been the meek creature's sufferings, what his wandenngs, before 
 he finally settled down in the comparative comfort of an old hospitaller ot the 
 almonry of Newcastle? And is poor Starkey dead ? , v, . o. 1 
 
 I was a scholar of that "eminent writer" that he speaks of; but Starkey 
 had quitted the school about a year before I came to it. &ti 1 the odour of his 
 merits had left a fragrancy upon the recollection of the elder pupils. Ihe 
 schoolroom stands where it did, looking into a discoloured, dingy garden in the 
 Dassao-e leading from Fetter Lane into Bartletfs Buildings. It is still a school, 
 thougli the main prop, alas! has fallen so ingloriously; and bears a Latin 
 inscription over the entrance in the lane, which was unknown m our humbler 
 
690 Tlie Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 tittles. Heaven knows what " languages " were taught in it then ! I am sure 
 that neither my sister nor myself brought any out of it but a little of our native 
 English. By " mathematics," reader, must be understood " ciphering." It 
 was. in fact, a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to 
 us boys in the morning ; and the same slender erudition was communicated to 
 the girls, our sisters, &c., in the evening. Now, Starkey presided, under Bird, 
 over both establishments. In my time, Mr. Cook, now or lately a respectable 
 singer and performer at Drury Lane Theatre, and nephew to Mr. Bird, had 
 succeeded to him. I well remember Bird. He was a squat, corpulent, middle- 
 sized man, with something of the gentleman about him, and that peculiar 
 mild tone — especially while he was inflicting punishment— which is so much 
 more terrible to children than jthe angriest looks and gestures. Whippings 
 were not frequent; but, when they took place, the correction was performed in 
 a private room adjoining, where we could only hear the plaints, but saw 
 nothing. This heightened the decorum and the solemnity. But the ordinary 
 chastisement was the bastinado, a stroke or two on the palm with that almost 
 obsolete weapon now, — the ferule. A ferule was a sort of flat ruler, widened, at 
 the inflicting end, into a shape resembling a pear, — but nothing like so sweet, 
 with a delectable hole in the middle to raise blisters, like a cupping-glass. I 
 have an intense recollection of that disused instrument of torture, and the 
 malignancy, in proportion to the apparent mildness, with which its strokes 
 were applied. The idea of a rod is accompanied with something ludicrous ; 
 but by no process can I look back upon this blister-raiser with anything but 
 unmingled horror. To make him look more formidable, — if a pedagogue had 
 need of these heightenings,— Bird wore one of those flowered Indian gowns 
 formerly in use with schoolmasters, the strange figures upon which we used to 
 interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering. But, boyish fears apart. 
 Bird, I believe, was, in the main, a humane and judicious master. 
 
 Oh, how I remember our legs wedged into those uncomfortable slqping 
 desks, where we sat elbowing each other ; and the injunctions to attain a free 
 hand, unattainable in that position ; the first copy I wrote after, with its moral 
 lesson, ' ' Art improves Nature ; " the still earlier pot-hooks and the hangers, 
 some traces of which I fear may yet be appatent in this manuscript ; the truant 
 looks side-long to the garden, which seemed a mockery of our imprisonment ; 
 the prize for best spelling which had almost turned my head, and which, to 
 this day, I cannot reflect upon without a vanity, which I ought to be ashamed 
 of; our little leaden inkstands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the 
 desks ; the bright, punctually-washed morning fingers, darkening gradually 
 with another and another ink-spot ! What a world of little associated cir- 
 cumstances, pains, and pleasures, mingling their quotas of pleasure, arise at 
 the reading of those few simple words, — "Mr. William Bird, an eminent 
 writer, and teacher of languages and mathematics, in Fetter Lane, ^olbom ! " 
 
 Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in 
 his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predicate any particular 
 age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven 
 nnd thirty. This antique cast always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. 
 Yet it seems he was not always the abject thing he came to. My sister, who 
 well remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an 
 etching so unlike her idea of him when he was a youthful teacher at Mr. 
 Bird's school. Old age and poverty — a life-long poverty, she thinks — could at 
 no time have so effaced the marks of native gentihty which were once so visible 
 in a face otherwise strikingly ugly, thin, and care-worn. From her recollections 
 of him, she thinks that he would have wanted bread before he would have 
 begged or borrowed a halfpenny. " If any of the girls," she says, "who were 
 my school-fellows, should be reading, through their aged spectacles, tidings, 
 from the dead, of their youthful friend Starkey, they will feel a pang, as I do. 
 
Captain Starkey. 691 
 
 at having teased his gentle spirit." They were big girls, it seems— too old to 
 attend his instructions with the silence necessary ; and, however old age and a 
 long state of beggary seems to have reduced'his vnriting faculties to a state of 
 imbecility, in those days his (anguage occasionally rose to the bold and figu- 
 rative ; for, when he was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase 
 was, "Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven 
 pan make you." Once he was missing for a day or two : he had run away. 
 A little, old, unhappy-looking man brought him back,— it was his father,— and 
 he did no business in the school that day, but sat moping in a comer, with his 
 hands before his face ; and the girls, his tormentors, in pity for his case, for tlie 
 rest of that, day forbore to annoy him. " I had been there but a few months," 
 adds she, "when Starkey, who was the chief instructor of us girls, commu- 
 nicated to us a profound secret, —that the tragedy of Cato was shortly to be 
 acted by the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the representation." 
 That Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors, she remembers ; 
 and, but for his unfortunate person, he might have had some distinguished 
 part in the scene to enact. As it was, he had the arduous task of prompter 
 assigned to him, and his feeble voice was heard clear and distinct, repeating 
 the text during the whole perfomiance. She describes her recollection of the 
 cast of characters, even now, with a relish. Martia, by the handsome Edgar 
 Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa, and of whom slie never afterwards 
 heard tidings ; Lucia, by Master Walker, whose sister was her particular 
 friend': Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly declaimer, but a plain boy, and 
 shorten by the head than his two sons in the scene, &c. In conclusion, Starkey 
 appears to have been one of those mild spirits, which, not originally deficient 
 in uriderstanding, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. He 
 might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament, to society, if Fortune 
 had taken him into a very little fostering ; but, wanting that, be became a 
 captain, — a byword, — and Uved and died a broken buhrush. 
 
 (Hone's Every Day Book, sth October, 1S26,) 
 
 [Prefixed to this communication, on column 1,358 of the first volume of " Hone's Every 
 D^ Book," appeared the following editorial paragraph ; — " Tfie cantermg of Tim Tims 
 startles him who told of his youthful days at the school wherein poor ' Starkey ' cyphered 
 part of his little life. C. L., getting well, but weak from painful and severe indisposi- 
 tion, is off and away for a short discursion. Better health to him, and good be to him 
 all his life. Here he is." Whereupon follows incongruously The Ass — as the title of the 
 article.] 
 
 » 
 Mr. Collier, in his "Poetical Decameron" (Third Conversation), notices a 
 tract printed in 1595, with the author's initials only, A. B., entitled "The 
 Noblenesse of the Asse ; a work rare, learned, and excellent." He has selected 
 the following pretty passage from it : "He (the ass) refuseth no burden : he 
 goes whither he is sent, without any contradiction. He lifts not his foote 
 against any one ; he bytes not ; he is no fugitive, nor malicious affected. 
 He doth all things in good sort, and to his liking that hath cause to employ 
 
6g2 The Works of ChSrles Lamb. 
 
 him. If strokes be given him, he cares not for them ; and, as our modern poet 
 
 singeth, — 
 
 " ' TIiou wouldst (perhaps) he should become thy foe. 
 And to that end dost beat him many times : 
 He cares not for himselfe, much less thy blow.'" 
 
 Certainly Nature, foreseeing the cruel usage which this useful servant to 
 man should receive at man's hand, did prudently in furnishing him with a 
 tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or a weak hand 
 can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny 
 foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute insen- 
 sibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a schoolboy with a tough pair 
 of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well fortified ; and therefore the coster- 
 mongers, "between the years 1790 and iSoo, " did more politicly than piously 
 in lifting up a part of his upper garment. I well remember that beastly and 
 bloody custom. I have often longed to see one of those refiners in discipline 
 himself at the cart's tail, with just such a convenient spot laid bare to the 
 tender mercies of the whipster. But, since Nature has resumed her rights, it 
 is to be hoped that this patient creature does not suffer to extremities ; and 
 that, to the savages who still belabour his poor carcass with their blows (con- 
 sidering the sort of anvil they are laid upon), he might in some sort, if he 
 could speak, exclaim with the philosopher, "Lay on: you beat but upon the 
 case of Anaxarchus." 
 
 Contemplating this natural safeguard, this fortified exterior, it is with pain I 
 view the sleek, foppish, combed, and curried person of this animal as he is 
 disnaturalized at watering-places, &c., where they affect to make a palfrey of 
 him. Fie on all such sophistications 1 It will never do, master groom. Some- 
 thing of his honest, shaggy exterior will still peep up in spite of you, — his 
 good, rough, native, pine-apple coating. You cannot ' ' refine a scorpion into a 
 fish, though you rinse it and scour it with ever so cleanly cookery."* 
 
 The modern poet quoted by A.B. proceeds to celebrate a virtue for which no 
 one to this day had been aware that the ass was remarkable :— 
 
 *' One other gift this beast hath as his owne, 
 Wherewith the rest could not be furnishM ; 
 On man himself the same was not bestowne : 
 To wit, on him isne'er engendered 
 The hateful vermine that doth teare the skin. 
 And to the bode [body] doth make his passage in." 
 
 And truly, when one thinks on the suit of Impenetrable armour with which 
 Nature (like Vulcan to another Achilles) has provided him, these subtile 
 enemies to ozer repose would have shown some dexterity in getting into his 
 quarters. As the bogs of Ireland by tradition expel toads and reptiles, he 
 may well defy these small deer in his fastnesses. It seems the latter had iiot 
 arrived at the exquisite policy adopted by the human vermin ' ' between 1790 
 and 1800." 
 
 But the most singular and delightful gifl of the ass, according to the writer 
 of this pamphlet, is his voice, the "goodly, sweet, and condnual brayings" of 
 which, "whereof they forme a melodious and proportionable kinde of musicke," 
 seem to have affected him with no ordinary pleasure. "Nor thinke I," he 
 adds, "that any of our immoderate musicians can deny but that their song is 
 full of exceeding pleasure to be heard ; because therein is to be discerned both 
 concord, discord, singing in the meane, the beginning to sing in large compasse, 
 then following into rise and fall, the halfe-note, whole note, musicke of five 
 
 * Milton from memory. 
 
The Ass. 693 
 
 voices, firme singing by four voices, tiiree together, or one voice and a halfe. 
 Then their variable contrarities amongst them, when one delivers forth a long 
 tenor or a short, the pausing for time, breathing in measure, breaking the 
 minim or very least moment of time. Last of all, to heare the musicke of five 
 or six voices chaunged to so many of asses is amongst them to heare a song of 
 world without end." 
 
 There is no accounting for ears, or for that laudable enthusiasm with which 
 an author is tempted to invest a favourite subject with the most incompatible 
 perfections : I should otherwise, for my own taste, have been inclined rather to 
 have given a place to these extraordinary musicians at that banquet of nothing- 
 less-than-sweet-sounds, imagined by old Jeremy CoUier (Essays, 1698, part ii. on 
 Music), where, after describing the inspiriting effects of martial music in a 
 battle, he hazards an ingenious conjecture, whether a sort of anti-music might 
 not be invented, which should have quite the contrary effect of ,' ' sinking the 
 spirits, shaking the nerves, curdling the blood, and inspiring despair and 
 cowardice and consternation. 'Tis probable," he says, "the roaring of lions, 
 the warbling of cats and screech-owls, together with a mixture of the howling 
 of dogs, judiciously imitated and compounded, might go a great way in this 
 invention." The dose, we confess, is pretty potent, and skilfully enough 
 pr^ared. But what shall we say to the Ass of Silenus, who, if we may trust 
 to classic lore, by his own proper sounds, without thanks to cat or screech-owl, 
 dismayed and put to tout a whole army of giants? Here was anti-music: with 
 a vengeance; a whole Pan-Dis-HarmoHicon in a single lungs of leather ! 
 
 But I keep you trifling too long on this asinine subject. I have already 
 passed the Pons Asinorum, and will desist, remembering the old pedantic 
 pun of Jem Boyer, my schoolmaster, — 
 
 " Ass in frasenii seldom makes a wise man infuturo." 
 
 (Hones Every Day Book, 17th October, i8a6. ) 
 
 Fletcher in the " Faithful Shepherdess." The satyr offers to Clorin— 
 
 " Grapes whose lusty blood 
 Is the learned poet's good, — 
 Sweeter yet did never crown 
 The head of Bacchus ; nuts more brown ^_ 
 Than the squirrels' teeth that crack them. 
 
 What is gone with the cages with the climbing squirrel, and bells to them, 
 which were formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of a tmmans 
 shop, and were, in fact, the only live signs? Otie, we believe, still hangs out 
 on Holborn : but they are fast vanishing with the good old modes of our an- 
 cestors. They seem to have been superseded by that still more ingenious 
 refinement of modem humanity.-the tread-m.U; in ^1"* /»ff ? =1";"^^ 
 still perform a similar round of ceaseless, unprogressive clambering, which 
 
 "^ We'^almost doubtThe fact of the teeth of this creature being so purely orange- 
 
694 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 coloured as Mr. Urban's correspondent gives out. One of our old poets — and 
 they were pretty sharp observers of Nature -describes them as brown. But 
 perhaps the naturalist referred to meant "of the colour of a Maltese orange," 
 which is rather more obfuscated' than your fruit of Seville or St. Michael's, and 
 may help to reconcile the difference. We cannot spealc from observation ; but 
 we remember at school getting our fingers into the orangery of one of these 
 little gentry (not having a due caution of the traps set there), and the result 
 proved sourer than lejnons. The author of the " Task," somewhere, speaks of 
 their anger as. being "insignificantly fierce ; "but we found the demonstration 
 of it on this occasion qiiite as significant as we desired, and have not been dis- 
 posed since to look any of these " gift horses " in the mouth. Maiden aunts 
 keep these " small deer," as they do parrots, to bite people's fingers, on purpose 
 to give them good advice "not to adventure so near the cage another time." 
 As foi: their " si.t quavers divided into three quavers and a dotted crotchet,'' I 
 suppose they may go into Jeremy Bentham's next budget of fallacies, along 
 with the "melodious and propprtionable kinde of musicke " recorded, in your 
 last number, of a highly-gifted animal. 
 
 [Memoirs of Defoe, by Walter Wilson, vol. iii., 1830.) 
 
 [First identified by Mr. Heme Shepherd.] 
 
 In the appearances of truth, in all the incidents and conversations that occur 
 in them, they exceed any works of fiction that I am acquainted with. It is 
 perfect illusion. The author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they 
 ought to be called, or rather auto-biographies), but the narrator chains us down 
 to an implicit belief in everything he says. There is all the minute detail of a 
 log-book in it. Dates ai-e painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are 
 repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot choose but believe 
 them. It is like reading evidence in a court of justice. So anxious the story- 
 teller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has 
 told us a matter of fact, or a motive; in a line or two farther down he repeats 
 it, with his favourite figure of .speech, I say, so and so, though he had made it 
 abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common people's way of 
 speaking, or father of the way in which they are addressed by a master or 
 mistress, who wishes to impress something upon their memories, and has a 
 wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed it is to such principally 
 that he writes. His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain and homely. 
 " Robinson Crusoe" is delightful to all ranks and classes; but it is easy to see, 
 that it is written in a phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower conditions of 
 readers. Hence it is an especial favourite with seafaring itien, poor bo]e, 
 servant-maids, &c. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while they are 
 worthy, from their interest, to find a shelf in the libraries of the wealthiest and 
 the most learned. -His passion for matter-of-fact narrative, sometimes betrayed 
 him into a long relation of common incidents, which might happen to any 
 man, and have no interest beyond the intense appearance of truth in them, to 
 recommend them. The whole latter half, or two-thirds of "Colonel Jack," is 
 of this description. The beginning of " Colonel Jack " is the most affecting 
 
Estimate of Defoe's Secondary Novels. 695 
 
 natural picture of a young thief, that was ever drawn. His losing the stolen 
 money in the hollow tree, and finding it again when in despair; and then being 
 in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and several similar touches 
 in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep linowledge of human nature ; 
 and putting out of question the superior romantic interest of the latter, in my 
 mind very much exceeds Crusoe. "Roxana" (first edition) is the next in interest; 
 though he left out the best part of it in subsequent editions, from a fooUsh 
 hypercriticism of his friend Southeme. But "Moll Flanders," the " Account 
 of the Plague," &c. &c., are all of one family, and have the same stamp of 
 character. 
 
 It has happened not seldom that one work of some author has so transcen- 
 dently surpassed in execvition the rest of his compositions, that the world has 
 agreed to pass a sentence of dismissal upon the latter, and to consign them to 
 total neglect and oblivion. It has done wisely in this not to suffer the contem- 
 plation of excellencies of a lower standard to abate pr stand in the way of tlie 
 pleasure it has agreeil to receive from the masterpiece. 
 
 Again : it has happened, .that from no inferior merit of execution in the rest, 
 but from superior good fortune in the choice of its subject, some singly work 
 shall have beensuiferfed to eclipse and cast into shade the deserts of its less 
 forfuiiate brethren. This has been done -with more or less injustice in the case 
 ' of the popular allegory 6f Bunyan, in which the beautiful and scriptural image 
 of a pilgrim or wayfergr (we are all such upon earth), addressing itself intel-' 
 ligibly and feelingl^.to th^'bosoms of all, has silenced,, and made almost to be 
 forgotten, the more awful and scarcely less tender beauties of the ' ' Holy War 
 made by Shaddai upon Diabolus," of the same author, — a romance le?s happy 
 in its subject, but Surely well worthy of a secondaiyimmdrtality. But in -no 
 instance has this excluding partiality been exerted with more unfairness than 
 againstwhat may be tenned the secondary novels or romances of Defoe. 
 
 While all ages and descriptions of people hang delighted over the " Adven- 
 tures of Robinson Crusoe," and shall continue to do so, we trust while the 
 world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told that there exist other 
 fictitious narratives by the same writer,— four of them at least of no inferior 
 interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation > ' ' Roxana, ' ' 
 "Singleton," "Moll Flanders," "Colonel Jack," are all genuine offspring of 
 the same father. They bear the veritable impress of Defoe. An unpractised 
 midwife that would not swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye of every one 
 of them ! They are, in their way, as full of incident, and some of them every 
 bit as romantic ; only they want the uninhabited island, and the charm that has 
 bewitched the world, of the striking solitary situation. 
 
 But are there no solitudes out of the cave and the desert? or cannot the 
 heart in the midst of crowds feel frightfully alone ? Singleton on the world of 
 waters, prowUng about with pirates less merciful than the creatures of any 
 howling wilderness, — is he not alone, with the faces of men' about him, but 
 without a guide that can conduct him through the mists of educational and 
 habitual ignorance, or a fellow-heart that can interpret to him the new-bom 
 yearnings and aspirations of unpractised penitence ? Or when the boy Colonel 
 Jack, in the loneliness of the heart (the worst solitude), goes to hide his ill- 
 purchased treasure in the hollow tree by night, and miraculously loses, and 
 miraculously finds it again,— whom hath he there to sympathize with him? or 
 of what sort are his associates ? 
 
 The narrative manner of DefSe has a naturalness about it beyond that of 
 any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories. 
 It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them, that a real person is 
 not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what really happened to himself. 
 To this the extreme homeliness of tifeir style mainly contributes. We use the 
 word in its best and heartiest sense, — that which comes' Aootc to the reader. 
 
696 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 • 
 
 The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in 
 it : therefore they tell their own tales (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this 
 remark), as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition, 
 and an overacted exactness, lest the bearer should not have minded, or have 
 forgotten, some thmgs that had been told before. Hence the emphatic sen- 
 tences marked in the good old (but deserted) Italic type ; and hence, too, the 
 frequent interposition of the reminding old colloquial parenthesis, "I say," 
 " Mind," and the like, when the story-teller repeats what, to a practised reader, 
 might appear to have been sufficiently insisted upon before : which made an 
 ingenious critic observe, that his works, in this kind, were excellent reading for 
 the kitchen. And, in truth, the heroes and heroines of Defoe can never again 
 hope to be popular with a much higher class of readers than that of the servant- 
 maid or the sailor. Crusoe keeps its rank only by tough prescription. Single- 
 ton, the pirate ; Colonel Jack, the thief; Moll Flanders, both thief and harlot ; 
 Roxana, harlot and something worse, — would be startling ingredients in the 
 bill of fare of modem Uterary delicacies. But, then, what pirates, what thieves, 
 and what harlots, are the thief, the harlot, and the pirate of Defoe ! We 
 would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the Uves of 
 such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or 
 the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more 
 earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of rehgious visitation upon 
 the rude and uninstructed soul more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in 
 this, come near to the tenderness of Bunyan ; while the livelier pictures and 
 incidents in them, as in Hogarth or in Fielding, tend to diminish the fastidious- 
 ness to the concerns and pursuits of common hfe which an unrestrained passion 
 for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of producing. 
 
 (The Englishman's Magazine, September, 1831.) 
 
 What Apelles was to the Grecian Alexander, the same to the Russian was 
 the late George Dawes. None but Apelles might attempt the lineaments of the 
 world's conqueror ; none but our Academician could have done justice to the 
 lines to the Czar, and his courtiers. There they hang, the labour of ten plod- 
 ding years, in an endless gallery, erected for the nonce, in the heart of Imperial 
 Petersburgh — eternal monuments of barbarian taste submitted to half-civilized 
 cunning — four hundred fierce Half-Lengths, all male, and all military; hke the 
 pit in a French theatre, or the characters in Timon as it was last acted, vrith 
 never a woman among them. Chaste sitters to Vandyke, models of grace and 
 womanhood ; and thou Dame Venetia Digby, fairest among thy fair compeers 
 at Windsor, hide your pure pale cheeks, and cool Enghsh beauties, before this 
 suffocating horde of Scythian riflers, this mal^ chaos ! Yoiu" cold oaken frames 
 shall wane before the gorgeous buildings, 
 
 With Tartar faces throng'd, and horrent uniforms. 
 
 One emperor contended for the monopoly of the ancient; two were com- 
 petitors at once for the pencil of the modern Apelles. The Russian carried it 
 
Recollections of a Late Royal Academician. 697 
 
 against the Haytian by a single length. And if fate, as it was at one time 
 nearly arranged, had wafted D. to the shores of Hayti— with the same com- 
 placency, in his art, with which he persisted in daubing in, day after day, his 
 frozen Muscovites, he would have sate down for life to smutch in upon canvas 
 the faces of blubber-lipped sultanas, or the whole male retinue of the dingy 
 court of Christophe. For in truth a choice of subjects was the least of D.s 
 care. A Goddess from Cnidus, or from the Caffre coast, was equal to him ; Lot 
 or Lot's wife ; the charming widow H., or her late husband. 
 
 My acquaintance with D. was in the outset of his art, when the graving 
 tools, rather than the pencil, administered to his humble wants. Those imple° 
 ments, as is well known, are not the most favourable to the cultivation of that 
 virtue, which is esteemed next to godliness. He might "wash his hands in 
 innocency," and so metaphorically " approach an altar; " but his material puds 
 were anything but fit to be carried to church. By an ingrained economy in 
 soap— if it was not for pictorial effect rather — he would wash (on Sundays) the 
 inner oval, or portrait, as it may be termed, of his countenance, leaving the 
 unwashed temples to form a natural black frame round the picture, in which a 
 dead white "was the predominant colour. This, with the addition of greerj 
 spectacle, made necessary by the impairment, which his graving labours by day 
 and night (for he was ordinarily at them for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four) 
 had brought upon his visual faculties, gave him a singular appearance, when 
 he took the air abroad ; insomuch, that I have seen a crowd of young men and 
 boys following him along Oxford Street with admiration not without shouts ; 
 even as the Youth of Rome, we read in Vasari, followed the steps of Raphael 
 with acclamations for his genius, and for his beauty, when he proceeded from 
 his workshop to chat with Cardinals and Popes at the Vatican. 
 
 The family of D. were not at this time in affluent circumstances. His father, 
 a clever artist, had outlived the style of art in which he excelled most of his 
 contemporaries. He, with the father of the celebrated Morland, worked for 
 the shop of Carrington and Bowles, which exists still for the poorer sort of 
 caricatures, on the north side of St. Paul's Church Yard. They did clever 
 things in colours. At an inn in Reading a screen is still preserved, full of 
 their labours ; but the separate portions of either artist are now undistinguish- 
 able. I remember a mother teaching her child to read (B. Barton has a copy 
 of it) ; a laundress washing ; a young Quaker, a beautiful subject. But the 
 flower of their forgotten productions hangs still at a public-house on the left 
 hand, as thou arrivest, reader, from the now Highgate archway, at the foot of 
 the descent where Crouch End begins, on thy road to green Hornsey. Turn 
 in, and look at it, for the sight is well worth a cup of excusatory cyder. In 
 the parlour to the right you will find it — an antiquated subject — a damsel sitting 
 at her breakfast table in a gown of the flowered chintz of our grandmothers, 
 with a tea-service before her of the same pattern. I'he effect is most delicate. 
 Why have these harmonies — these a^rimens — no place in the works of modern 
 art? 
 
 With such niceties in his calling D. did not much trouble his head, but, after 
 an ineffectual experiment to reconcile his eye-sight with his occupation, boldly 
 quitted it, and dashed into the beaten road of common-place portraiture in oil. 
 ■The Hopners, and the Lawrences, were his Vandykes, and his Velasquezes ; 
 and if he could make anything like them, he insured himself immortality. 
 With such guides he struggled on through laborious nights and days, till he 
 reached the eminence he aimed at — of mediocrity. — Having gained that 
 summit, he sate down contented. If the features were but cognoscible, no 
 matter whether the flesh resembled flesh, or oil-skin. For the thousand tints 
 — the grains — which in life diversify the nose, the chin, the cheek— which a 
 Reynolds can but coarsely counterfeit — he cared nothing at all about them. 
 He left such scrupulosities to opticians and anatomists. If the features 
 
698 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 were but there, the character of course could not be far off. A lucky 
 bit which he made in painting the very dress of a dressy lady— Mrs.W— e— , 
 whose handsome countenance also, and tall elegance of shape, were too palpable 
 entirely to escape under any masque of oil, with which even D. could overlay 
 them— brought to him at once an influx of sitters, which almost rivalled the 
 importunate calls upon Sir Thomas. A portrait he did soon after, of the Prin- 
 cess Charlotte, clenched his fame. He proceeded Academician. At that memo- 
 rable conjuncture of time it pleased the Allied Sovereigns to visit England. 
 
 I called upon D. to congratulate him upon a crisis so doubly eventful. His 
 pleasant housekeeper seemed embarrassed ; owned that her master was alone. . 
 But could he be spoken with ? With some importunity I prevailed upon her to, 
 usher me into his painting-room. It was in Newman Street. At his easel 
 stood p., with an immense spread of canvas before him, and by his side a — 
 live goose. I inquired into this extraordinary combina,tion. ■ Under the rose 
 he informed me, that he had undertaken to paint a transparency for Vauxhall, 
 against an expected visit of the Allied Sovereigns to that place. I smiled at an 
 engagement so derogatory to his new-born honours ; but a contempt ai small 
 gains was never one of D.'s foibles. My eyes beheld crude forms of v/airiors, 
 kings, rising under his brush upon this interminable stretch of cloth. The 
 Wolga, the Don, and the Nieper, were there, or their representative River 
 Gods ; and Father Thames clubbed urns with the Vistula. Glory with her 
 dazzHng eagle were not absent, nor Fame, nor Victory. The shade of Rubens 
 might have evoked the mighty allegories. But what was the Goose? He was 
 saadently sitting for a something. 
 
 T>. at last informed me, that having fixed upon a group of rivers, ,he could 
 not introduce the Royal Thames Tirithout his swans. Tliat he had inquired the 
 price of a live swan, and it being more than he was prepared to give for it, he 
 had bargained with the poulterer for the next thing to it ; adding significantly, 
 that it would do to roast, after it had served its turn to paint swans by. Reader, 
 this is a true story. 
 
 So entirely devoid of imagination, or any feeling for his high art, was this 
 Painter, that for the few historical pictures he attempted, any sitter might sit 
 for any character. He took once for a subject The Infant Herctfles. Did he 
 choose for a model some robust antique? No. He did not even pilfer from 
 Sir Joshua, who was nearer to his own size. But from a shno he hired to sit to 
 him a child in years indeed (though no Infant), but in fact a precocious Man, 
 or human portent, that was disgustingly exhibiting at that period ; a thing to 
 be strangled. From this he formed his Infant Hercules. In a scriptural 
 flight he next attempted a Samson in the lap of Dalilah. A Dalilah of some 
 sort was procurable for love or money, but who should stand for the Jewish 
 Hercules ? He hired a tolerably stout porter, with a thickish head of hair, 
 curling in yellowish locks, but lithe— much like a wig. And these were the 
 robust strengths of Samson. 
 
 I once was a witness to a family scene in his painting closet, which I had 
 entered rather abruptly, and but for his encouragement, should as hastily have 
 retreated. He stood with displeased looks eyeing a female relative— whom I 
 had known under happier auspices — that was kneeling at his feet with a baby 
 in her arms, with her eyes uplifted and suppliant. Though I could have pre- 
 viously sworn to the virtue of Miss , yet casual slips have been known. 
 
 There are such things as families disgraced, where least you would have expected 
 
 it. The child might he ; I had heard of no wedding— I was the last 
 
 person to pry into family secrets — when D. relieved my uneasy cogitations by 
 explaining, that the innocent, good-humoured creature before me (such as she 
 ever was, and is now that she is married) with a baby borrowed from a public- 
 house, was acting Andromache to his Ulysses, for the purpose of transferring 
 upon canvas a tender situation from the Troades of Seneca. 
 
Recollections of a Late Royal Academician. 699 
 
 On a subsequent occasion I knocked at D.'s door. I had chanced to have 
 been in a dreamy humour previously. I am not one that often poetises, but I 
 had been musing— coxcombically enough in the heart of Newman Street, 
 Oxford Road— upon Pindus, and the Aonian Maids. The Lover of Daphne 
 was in my mind — when, answering to my summons, the door opened, and there 
 stood before me, laurel-crowned, the God himself, unshorn Apollo. I was 
 beginning to mutter apologies to the Celestial Presence— when on the thumb 
 of the right hand of the Dehan (his left held the harp) I spied a palette, such 
 as painters carry, which immediately reconciled me to the whimsical transfor- 
 mation of my old acquaintance — with his own face, certainly any other 
 than Grecianesque — ^into a temporary image of the oracle-giver of Delphos. 
 To have impersonated the Ithacan was little : he had been just sitting for a God. 
 — It would be no incurious inquiry to ascertain what the minimum of the faculty 
 of imagination, ever supposed essaitial to painters along with poets, is, that, 
 in these days of complaints of want of patronage towards the fine arts, suflfices 
 to dub a man a R ^1 A n. 
 
 Not only had D. no imagination to guide him in the treatment of such 
 subjects, but he had no relish for high art in the productions of the great 
 masters. He turned away from them as from something foreign and irrelative '' 
 to him, and his calling. He knew he had neither part nor portion in them. 
 Cozen him into the Stafford or the Angerstein Gallery, he involuntarily , turned 
 away from the Baths of Diana — the Four Ages of Guercino-rthe Lazarus of 
 Piombo — to some pretty piece of viodern art that had been inconsistently 
 thrust into the collection through favour. On that he would dwell and pore, 
 blind as the dead to the delicacies that surrounded him. There he might learn 
 something. There he might pilfer a little. There was no grappling with 
 Titian, or Angelo. 
 
 The narrowness of his domestic habits to the very last, was the consequence 
 of his hard bringing up, and unexpected emergence into opulence. While 
 rolling up to the ears in Russian roubles, a penny was still in his eyes the same 
 important thing, which it had with some reason seemed to be, when a few 
 shillings were his daily earnings. When he visited England a short time before 
 his death, he reminded an artist of a commission, which he had executed for 
 him in Russia, the package of which was " still unpaid." At this time he was 
 not unreasonably supposed to have reaUzed a sum little short of half a million 
 sterling. What became of it was never known ; what gulf, or what Arctic 
 vora^o, .sucked it in, his acquaintance in those parts have better means of 
 guessing, than his countrymen. It is certain that few of the latter were any- 
 thing the better for it. 
 
 It was before he expatriated himself, but subsequently to his acquisition of 
 pictorial honours in this country, that he brought home two of his brother 
 Academicians to dine with him. He had given no orders extraordinary to his 
 housekeeper. He trusted, as he always did, to her providing. She was a 
 shrewd lass, and knew, as we say, a bit of her master's mind. 
 
 It had happened that on the day before, D. passing near Clare Market by 
 one of those open shambles, where tripe and cow-lieel are exposed for sale, his 
 eye was arrested by the sight of some tempting flesh rolled up. It is a part 
 of the intestines of some animal, which my olfactory sensibilities never per- 
 mitted me to stay long enough to inquire the name of. D. marked the curious 
 involutions of the unacquainted luxury ; the harmony of its colours— a sable 
 w/-/— pleased his eye; and, warmed with the prospect of a new flavour, for a 
 few farthings he bore it off in triumph to his housekeeper. It so happened 
 that his day's dinner was provided, so the cooking of the novelty was for that 
 time necessarily suspended. ,.,_... 
 
 Next day came. The hour of dinner approached. His visitors, with no 
 very romantic anticipations, expected a plain meal at least ; they were prepared 
 
70O 
 
 Tlie. Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 for no new dainties ; when, to tlie astonislinient of them, and almost of D. 
 himself, the purchase of the preceding day was served up piping hot— the 
 cook declaring, that she did not know well what it was, for "her master 
 always marketed." His guests were not so happy in their ignorance. They 
 kept dogs. 
 
 I will do D. the justice to say, that on such occasions he took what happened 
 in the best humour possible. He had no fiUe modesty— Xhaa.^ I have 
 generally observed, that persons, who are quite deficient in that mauvaise 
 lionte, are seldom over-troubled with the quality itself, of which it is the 
 counterfeit. 
 
 By what arts, with his pretensions, D. contrived to wriggle himself into a 
 seat in the Academy, I am not acquainted enough with the intrigues of that 
 body (more involved than those of an Itahan conclave) to pronounce. It is 
 certain, that neither for love to him, nor out of any respect to his talents, did 
 they elect him. Individually he was obnoxious to them all. I have heard 
 that, in his passion for attaining this object, he went so far as to go down upon 
 his knees to some of the members, whom he thought least favourable, and 
 beg their suffrage with many tears. 
 
 But death, which extends the measure of a man's stature to appearance ; 
 and wealth, which men worship in life and death, which makes giants of 
 punies, and embalms insignificance ; called around the exequies of this pigmy 
 Painter the rank, the riches, the fashion of the world. By Academic hands his 
 pall was borne ; by the carriages of nobles of the land, and of ambassadors 
 from foreign powers, his bier was followed ; and St. Paul's (O worthy 
 casket for the shrine of such a Zeuxis) now holds — ALL THAT WAS MORTAL 
 OF G. D. 
 
 %Mt-%^\\ Irg \\t fat* ^lia. 
 
 {The Athenaum, 4 January, 1834.) 
 
 The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it 
 found out by accident. 
 
 'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him ; and, if you 
 relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket. 
 
 Men marry for fortune, and sometimes to please their fancy; but, much 
 oftener than is suspected, they consider what the world will say of it, — how 
 such a woman in their friends' eyes will look at the head of a table. Hence 
 we see so many insipid beauties made wives of, that could not have struck the 
 particular fancy of any man that had any fancy at all. These I call furniture 
 wives : as men buy furniture pictures, because they suit this or that niche in 
 their dining parlours. 
 
 Your universally cried-up beauties are the very last choice which a man of 
 taste would make. What pleases all, cannot have that individual charm 
 which makes this or that countenance engaging to you, and to you only perhaps, 
 you know not why. What gained the fair Gunnings titled husbands, who, 
 after all, turned out very sorry wives ? Popular repute. 
 
Table-Talk, by the Late Elia. 701 
 
 It is a sore trial when a daughter shall marry against her father's appro- 
 bation. A little hardheartedness, and aversion to a reconcilement, is almost 
 pardonable. After all, Will Dockwray's way is, perhaps, the wisest. His 
 best-loved daughtef made a most imprudent match ; in fact, eloped with the 
 last man in the world that her father would have wished her to marry. All the 
 world said that he would never speak to her again. For months she durst not 
 write to him, much less come near him. But, in a casual rencounter, he met 
 her in the streets of Ware, — Ware, that will long remember the mild virtues of 
 William Dockwray, Esq. What said the parent to his disobedient child, whose 
 knees faltered under her at the sight of him ? " Ha, Sukey ! is it you ? " with 
 that benevolent aspect with which he paced the streets of Ware, venerated as 
 an angel : " come and dine with us on Sunday ; " then turning away, and 
 again turning back, as if he had forgotten something, he added, " and, Sukey, 
 do you hear, bring your husband with you." This was all the reproof she 
 ever heard from him. Need it be added, that the match turned out better for 
 Susan than the world expected ? 
 
 "We read the " Paradise Lost" as a task," says Dr. Johnson. Nay,rather as 
 a celestial recreation, of which the dullard mind is not at all hours alike 
 recipient. "Nobody ever wished it longer," nor the moon rounder, he might 
 have added. Why, 'tis the perfectness and completeness of it which makes us 
 imagine that not a line could be added to it, or diminished from it with ad- 
 vantage. Would we have a cubit added to the stature of the Medicean Venus ? 
 Do we wish her taller ? 
 
 (JThe Athenceum, 31 May, 1834.) 
 
 " Lear. Who are you ? 
 Mine eyes are not o' the best. I'll tell you straight 
 Are you not Kent ? 
 
 Kent, The same ; your servant Kent. 
 Where is your servant Caius ? 
 
 Lear. 'Twas a good fellow, I can tell you that : 
 He'd strike, and quickly too : he is dead and rotten. 
 
 Kent. No, my good lord : I am the very man— 
 
 Lear. I'll see that straight— 
 
 Kent. That from your first of difference and decay 
 Have foUow'd your sad steps.^ 
 
 Lear. You are welcome hither. _ ^ , 
 
 Albany. He knows not what he says ; and vam is it 
 That we present us to him. 
 
 Edgar. Look up, my lord. 
 
 Kent. Vex not his ghost. O let him pass. He hates him. 
 That would upon the rack of this rough world 
 Stretch him out longer." 
 
 So ends King Lear, the most stupendous of the Shaksperlan dramas ; and 
 Kent, the noblest feature of the conceptions of his divine mind. This is the 
 magnanimity of authorship, when a writer, having a topic presented to him, 
 fruitful of beauties for common minds, wait^s his pnvilege, and trusts to the 
 judicious few for understanding the reason of his ab'stinence. What a pudder 
 would a common dramatist have raised here of a reconciliation scene, a perfect 
 recognition, between the assumed Caius and his master !— to the suffusing of 
 many fair eyes, and the moistening of cambric handkerchiefs. The old dymg 
 king partially catching at the truth, and immediately lapsing into obhviousness, 
 with the high-minded carelessness of the other to have his services appre- 
 ciated, — as one that — 
 
 " Served not for gain, 
 Or follow'd out of form,"— 
 
702 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 are among the most judicious, not to say heart-touching strokes in Shaks- 
 pere. 
 
 Allied to this magnanimity it is, where the pitch and point of an argument, 
 the amplification of which might compromise the modeSty of the speaker, is 
 delivered briefly, and as it were, parenthetically ; as in. those few but pregnant 
 words, in which the man in the old "Nut-brown Maid" rather intimates than 
 reveals his unsuspected high birth to the woman : — 
 
 " Now understand, to Westmoreland, 
 Which is my heriioffey ^ 
 I will you bring, and with a ring 
 By way of marriage, 
 I will you take and lady make." 
 
 Turn we to the aversion of it, ten times diluted, of dear Mat Prior,— In his 
 own way unequalled, and a poet now-a-days too much neglected. " In me," 
 quoth Henry, addressing the astounded Emma, — ^with a flourish and an atti- 
 tude, as we may conceive,— 
 
 " In me behold the potent Edgar's heir. 
 Illustrious Earl ! him terrible in war. 
 Let Loire confess." 
 
 And with a deal of skimble-skamble stuff, as Hotspur would term it, more, 
 presents the lady with a full and true enumeration of his papa's rent-roll in the 
 fat soil by Deva. 
 
 But, of all parentheses (not to quit thetopio too suddenly), commend me to 
 that most significant one, at the commencement of the old popular ballad of ' 
 " Fair Rosamund : " — 
 
 *' When good King Henry ruled this land, . 
 The second of that name," 
 Now mark, — 
 
 " (Besides the Queen) he dearly loved 
 A fair and'comely dame." ■ 
 
 There is great virtue in this besides. 
 
 Amidst the complaints of the wide, spread of infidelity among us, it is con- 
 solatory that a sect is sprung up in the heart of the metropolis, and is daily on 
 the increase, of teachers of that healing doctrine which Pope upheld, and 
 against which Voltaire directed his envenomed wit : we mean those practical 
 preachers of optimism, or the belief that whatever is is best; the cads of om- 
 nibuses, who from their Uttle back pulpits, hot once in three or four hours, as 
 those proclaimers of "God and his prophet" in Mussulman countries, but 
 every minute, at the entry or exist of a brief passenger, are heard, in an almost 
 prophetic tone, to exclaim (Wisdom crying out, as it were, in the streets), 
 " All's EIGHT ! " 
 
 {The Athg^ncsum, 7th June, 1834.) 
 
 Advice is not so commonly thrown away as is imagined. We seek it in 
 difficulties. But in common speech we are apt to confound with it admonition ,■ 
 as when a friend reminds one that drink is prejudicial to the health, &c. We 
 do not care to be told of that which we know better than the good man that 
 
 admonishes. M sent to his friend L— , who is no water drinker, a 
 
 twopenny tract "Against the Use of Fermented Liquors." L acknow- 
 ledged the obligation, as far as to twopence, Penotier's advice was the safest, 
 after all : — 
 -r- " I advised him " 
 
Tahle-Talk, by the Late Elia. 703 
 
 But I must tell you. The dear, good-meaning, no-thinking creature had 
 been dumb-founding a company of us with a detail of inextricable difficulties, 
 in which the circumstances of an acquaintance of his were involved. No clue 
 of light offered itself. He grew more and more misty as he proceeded. We 
 pitied his friend, and thought, — 
 
 " God help_the mai^so wrapt in error's endless maze : " 
 
 when, suddenly brightening up his placid countenance like one that had found 
 
 out a riddle, and looked to have the solution admired, — 
 "At last," said he, " I advised him " — 
 , Here he paused, and here we were again interminably thrown back, fiy no 
 
 possible guess could any of us aim at the drift of the meaning he was about to 
 
 be delivered of. 
 
 " I advised him," he repeated, " to have some advice upon the subject." 
 A general approbation followed 5 and it was unanimously agreed, that, under 
 
 all the circumstances of the case, no sounder or more judicious counsel could 
 
 have been given 
 
 A laxity pervades the popular use of words. 
 
 Parson W is not quite so continent as Diana, yet prettily disserhbleth his 
 
 frailty. , Is Parson W- , therefore, a hypocrite f I think not. Where the 
 
 concealment of a vice is less pernicious than the bare-faced publication of it 
 
 would be, no additional delinquency is incurred in the secrecy. , Parson W 
 
 is simply an immoral clergyman. But if Parson W were to be for ever 
 
 haranguing on the opposite virtue ; choosing for his perpetual fe.'it, in pre- 
 ference to all other pulpit-topics, the remarkable Resistance recorded in the 39th 
 
 of Exodus ; dwelling, moreover, and dilating upon it, — then Parson W 
 
 might be reasonably suspected of hypocrisy. But Parson W rarely di- 
 
 verteth into such line of argument, or toucheth it briefly. His ordinary topics 
 are fetched from " obedience to the powers that are," " submission to the civil 
 magistrate, in all commands that are not absolutely unlawful ; " on which he 
 can delight to expatiate with equal fervour and sincerity. 
 
 Again : to despise a person is properly to look down upon him with hone or 
 the least possible emotion. But when Clementina, who has latfely lost her 
 -lover, with bosom heaving, eyes flashing, and her whole frame in agitation, 
 pronounces with a peculiar emphasis that she "(f«/z\rc.f the felldvv," depend 
 upon it that he is not quite so despicable in her eyes as she would have us 
 -imagine. 
 
 ■, One more instance : If we must naturalize that portentous phrase, a truism, 
 it were well that we limited the use of it. Every commonplace or trite: obser- 
 vation is not a truism. For example : A good name helps a Aian on in the 
 world. This is nothing but a simple truth, however hackneyed. It has a dis- 
 tinct subject and predicate. But when the thing predicated is involved in the 
 term of the subject, and so necessarily involved that by no possible conception 
 they can be separated, then it becomes a tniisra ; as to say, " A good name is 
 a proof of a man's estimation in the world." We seem to be saying something 
 
 when we say nothing. I was describing to F some knavish tricks of a 
 
 mutual friend of ours. " If he did so and so," was the reply, " he cannot be 
 ah honest man." Here was a genuine truism, truth upon truth, inference and 
 proposition identical ; or rather a dictionary definition usurping the place of an 
 inference. , 
 
 (The Aihenaum, 19th July, 1834.) 
 
 The vices of some men are magnificent. Compare the amours of Henry 
 the Eighth and Charles the Second. The Stuart had mir,tresses : the Tudor 
 hept wives. 
 
704 The Works of Charles Lamb. 
 
 We are ashamed at sight of a monkey, — somehow as we are shy of poor 
 relations. 
 
 C imagined a Caledonian compartment in Hades, where there should be 
 
 fire without sulphur. ■ 
 
 Absurd images are sometimes irresistible. I will mention two, — an elephant 
 in a coach-office gravely coming to have his trunk booked ; a mermaid over i 
 iish-kettle cooking her own tail. 
 
 It is the praise of Shakspere, with reference to the play-writers, his con- 
 temporaries, that he has so few revolting characters. Yet he has one that is 
 singularly mean and disagreeable, — the king in Hamlet. Neither has he 
 characters' of insignificance, unless the phantom that stalks over the stage, as 
 Julius Caesar, in the play of that name, may be accounted one. Neither has 
 he envioiis characters, excepting the short part of Don John, in Mack Ado 
 about Nothing. Neither has he unentertaining characters, if we except 
 ParoUes, and the httle that there is of the Clown, in All's Well that Ends 
 Well. 
 
 It would settle the dispute as to whether Shakspere intended Othello for a 
 jealous character, to consider how differently we are affected towards him, and 
 Leontes in the Winters Tale. Leontes is that character. Othello-s fault was 
 simply credulity. 
 
 Is it possible that Shakspere should never have read Homer, in Chapman's 
 version at least ? If he had read it, could he mean to travesty it in the parts 
 of those big boobies, Ajax and Achilles ? Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon 
 are true to their parts in the Iliad: they are gentlemen at least. Thersites, 
 though unamusing, is fairly deducible from it. Troilus and Cressida are a fine 
 graft upon it. But those two big bulks— 
 
 It is a desideratum in works that treat de re culinaria, that we have no 
 rationale of sauces or theory of mixed flavours : as to show why cabbage is 
 reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon ; why the haunch of mutton 
 seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it ; why loin of 
 veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctuous, seeketh the adventitious lubricity 
 of melted butter, — and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhor- 
 reth from it ; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer ; why 
 salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead-set at mustard ; why cats pre- 
 fer valerian to heart's-ease, old ladies vice 7/«?jd,— though this is rather travel- 
 ing out of the road of the dietetics, and may be thought a question more 
 curious than relevant ; why salmon (a strong sapor per se) fortifieth its condition 
 with the mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the delicater rehsh 
 of the turbot ; why oysters in death rise up against the contamination of brown 
 sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar ; why the sour mango 
 and the sweet jam by turns court and are accepted by the compilable mutton 
 hash,— she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the 
 empirical stage of cookery. We feed ignorantly, and want to be able to give 
 a reason of the relish that is in us ; so that, if Nature should furnish us with a 
 new meat, or be prodigally pleased to restore the phoenix, upon a given flavour, 
 we might be able to pronounce instantly, on philosophical principles, what the 
 sauce to it should be, — what the curious adjuncts. 
 
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