LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 
 
 Chap, ._, Copyright No. 
 
 She!f„>_^ Pf- 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
LITTLE MASTERPIECES 
 
Little Masterpieces 
 
 Edited by Bliss Perry 
 
 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 SELECTIONS FROM HIS 
 
 ESSAYS, LETTERS AND VERSES 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE CO. 
 
 1899 
 

 41433 
 
 COPYRIGHTED 1 899 
 BY 
 
 DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE CO. 
 
 Acknowledgment is due to A. C. Armstrong 
 
 & Son for permission to use selections 
 
 from the text of their edition of 
 
 Lamb's letters, edited by 
 
 Alfred Ainger. 
 
 / 
 
 S"feV\2> 
 
Editor's Introduction 
 
 The only editorial discomfort in selecting a 
 couple of hundred of Lamb's choicest pages has 
 arisen from a sense of the excellence of those 
 other pages that have not been taken. Even 
 were the choice to be made from the "Essays of 
 Elia" alone, the chooser must needs stand like 
 a boy under an apple-tree, with pockets stuffed 
 already, and yet eyeing and comparing and half 
 tempted to trade his plunderings for some of 
 the fruit still hanging on the tree, — so hazard- 
 ous is this business of making sure that one 
 has the best. To justify in set terms one's in- 
 stinctive preference among the delicate-fla- 
 voured fruitage of Lamb's genius is a still more 
 difficult task, and perhaps not altogether worth 
 doing, even were it possible. 
 
 In casting about for some word or other o£ 
 preface, however, it occurred to the editor to> 
 consult the latest literary handbook and dis- 
 cover how Lamb was faring nowadays at the 
 hands of the professional critics. He found 
 first some five pages ^f Biography, — all about 
 the Temple and Christ's Hospital, the South 
 Sea House, the India House, the home life* 
 
Editor's Introduction 
 
 tragic and gay, the publication of essays and 
 verses, the long holiday at last and the quiet 
 ending; then three closely-printed pages of 
 Bibliography on Lamb's style; and finally, the 
 following ten Particular Characteristics, each 
 vouched for by various competent critics and 
 proved by illustrative examples : I. Quaint- 
 ness — Fondness for the Antique. 2. Tenderness 
 — Sympathy with Humanity. 3. Graceful Ease 
 — Companionability. 4. Amiable Humour. 5. 
 Wit — Epigram — Paronomasia. (This last, O 
 unclassical reader, means that Lamb liked to 
 make puns ; — and they were the worst, that is 
 to say, the best, in the world!) 6. Self-Reflec- 
 tion — Unselfish Egoism. 7. Delicate Fancy. 8. 
 Melancholy. 9. Critical Acumen. 10. Discur- 
 siveness. 
 
 To all who love Particular Characteristics the 
 foregoing list is warmly commended. It has 
 been borrowed without leave and is reproduced 
 here with a kind of awe. For in the two edi- 
 tions of Lamb which the editor knows best 
 there are marginal comments in great plenty, 
 and yet nothing whatever is said about Particu- 
 lar Characteristics. One edition is a tattered 
 paper-bound affair, with boyish pencil marks 
 drawn long and black along the margin of 
 many a delicious paragraph. The other, still 
 more highly prized, is annotated throughout 
 in the minute beautiful handwriting of that 
 lover of Lamb's memory and fit companion for 
 Lamb himself, the late Professor Dodd of 
 vi 
 
Editor's Introduction 
 
 Williams College. But even in those luminous 
 and scholarly footnotes there is nothing about 
 Graceful Ease or Amiable Humour or Critical 
 Acumen. Professor Dodd was somewhat old- 
 fashioned in his tastes, and never had the ad- 
 vantage of Laboratory Courses in literature. 
 
 To confess the truth, this little volume is 
 equally innocent of any disciplinary intention. 
 It is not designed to train the critical faculties 
 of anybody. It is meant to be slipped into the 
 pocket and pulled out when one feels like read- 
 ing Lamb. The nine "Essays of Elia" which it 
 contains are among the most delightful of that 
 rare company and are fairly representative of 
 the range of Lamb's moods and tastes. Some of 
 them, like "Dream-Children" and "The Super- 
 annuated Man," are frankly autobiographical, 
 and all of them, it is needless to say, have a 
 good deal of Lamb in them. To one reading 
 him for the first time they will prove, it is 
 hoped, a happy introduction, and they contain 
 many of those passages which old friends of 
 one of the friendliest of writers find themselves 
 reading over and over with a perpetually re- 
 newed and deepened pleasure. 
 
 A distinctive feature of the book is the in- 
 clusion of a dozen or more of Lamb's letters, 
 which have not hitherto been put within easy 
 reach of the general public. These letters not 
 only, as Mr. Birrell has remarked, "do the 
 reader good by stealth," but explain many facts 
 and motives of Lamb's life that would other- 
 
Editor's Introduction 
 
 wise be misinterpreted. It has been thought 
 best to print here even those two most per- 
 sonal letters to Coleridge concerning the great 
 tragedy of the Lamb household, because with- 
 out a knowledge of Lamb's domestic circum- 
 stances the sweetness and heroism of his nature 
 cannot be fully perceived. The letters to his 
 friends Manning, Wordsworth, Bernard Barton 
 and others, reflect the surroundings of Lamb's 
 later life and make more complete the expres- 
 sion of a lovable personality. 
 
 Lamb's poetry is now little read, but some 
 of it is so graceful and felicitous that a volume 
 of selections from his writings should certainly 
 include a few specimens of his verse. I have 
 chosen the "Farewell to Tobacco" (it was not a 
 very long farewell, by the way!) the daintily 
 lyrical lines entitled "She is Going," and "The 
 Old Familiar Faces," whose simple, haunting 
 pathos has given it a secure immortality among 
 English minor poetry. 
 
 BLISS PERRY. 
 
 Viil 
 

 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 • 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Editor's 
 
 5 Introduction 
 
 . . v 
 
 Essays- 
 
 
 
 The Two Races of Men 
 
 3 
 
 New Year's Eve 
 
 ii 
 
 Imperfect Sympathies 
 
 21 
 
 Dream-Children : A Reveri< 
 
 2 • • 34 
 
 A ] 
 
 Dissertation Upon Roas 
 
 t Pig . 40 
 
 On 
 
 Some of the Old Actor; 
 
 5 • • 52 
 
 Detached Thoughts on Books and 
 
 Reading 
 
 70 
 
 The 
 
 Superannuated Mar 
 
 i . . 8o 
 
 Old China 
 
 91 
 
 Letters 
 
 
 
 To 
 
 Coleridge 
 
 . 103 
 
 To 
 
 Coleridge 
 
 
 . ios 
 
 To 
 
 Manning 
 
 
 112 
 
 To 
 
 Wordsworth . 
 
 
 . 114 
 
 To 
 
 Manning 
 
 
 . 117 
 
 To 
 
 Miss Hutchinson 
 
 
 122 
 
 To 
 
 J. Taylor 
 
 
 . 123 
 
 To 
 
 J. Taylor 
 
 
 . 125 
 
 To 
 
 Bernard Barton 
 
 
 127 
 
 To 
 
 Wordsworth . 
 
 
 129 
 
 To 
 
 Bernard Barton 
 
 
 . 133 
 
 To 
 
 Wordsworth . 
 
 
 . 136 
 
 To 
 
 Wordsworth . 
 
 
 . 143 
 
 Verses- 
 
 
 
 A Farewell to Tobacco 
 
 . 149 
 
 She 
 
 Is Going 
 
 . 154 
 
 The Old Familiar Face 
 
 3 
 
 . • 155 
 
Essays 
 
ESSAYS 
 
 THE TWO RACES OF MEN 
 
 The human species, according to the best 
 theory I can form of it, is composed of two 
 distinct races, the men who borrow, and the 
 men who lend. To these two original diversi- 
 ties 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 Elam- 
 ites," 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 dis- 
 cernible in their figure, port, and a certain in- 
 stinctive sovereignty. The latter are born de- 
 graded. "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 borrow- 
 ers of all ages — Alcibiades — Falstaff — Sir Ricb- 
 
 3 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 ard 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 re- 
 liance on Providence doth he manifest, — taking 
 no more thought than lilies ! What contempt 
 for money, — accounting it (yours and mine es- 
 pecially) no better than dross ! What a liberal 
 confounding of those pedantic distinctions of 
 mcum and tuum! or rather, what a noble sim- 
 plification of language, (beyond Tooke,) re- 
 solving these supposed opposites into one clear, 
 intelligible pronoun adjective ! What near ap- 
 proaches doth he make to the primitive com- 
 munity, — to the extent of one-half of the prin- 
 ciple at least. 
 
 He is the true taxer who "calleth all the 
 world up to be taxed ;" and the distance is as 
 vast between him and one of us, as subsisted 
 between the Augustan Majesty and the poorest 
 obolary Jew that paid his 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 wel- 
 come in their faces ! He cometh to you with a 
 smile, and troubleth you with no receipt; con- 
 fining himself to no set season. Every day is 
 his Candlemas, or his Feast of Holy Michael. 
 He applieth the lene tormentum of a pleasant 
 look to your purse, — which to that gentle 
 warmth expands her silken leaves, as naturally 
 
 4 
 
Essays 
 
 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, strug- 
 gles with destiny ; he is in the net. Lend there- 
 fore 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 penal- 
 ties of Lazarus and of Dives; — but when thou 
 seest the proper authority coming, meet it 
 smilingly, as it were half-way. Come, a hand- 
 some sacrifice ! See how light he makes 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, Esq., who parted this life on 
 Wednesday evening; dying, as he had lived, 
 without much trouble. He boasted himself a 
 descendant from mighty ancestors of that 
 name, who heretofore held ducal dignities in 
 this realm. In his actions and sentiments he 
 belied not the stock to which he pretended. 
 Early in life he found himself invested with 
 ample revenues; which, with that noble disin- 
 terestedness which I have noticed as inherent 
 in men of the great race, he took almost imme- 
 diate 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 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 furnished 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 tythe part of the inhabitants un- 
 der contribution. I reject this estimate as 
 greatly exaggerated; but having had the hon- 
 our of accompanying my friend divers times in 
 his perambulations about this vast city, I own 
 I was greatly struck at first with the prodigious 
 number of faces we met who claimed a sort of 
 respectful acquaintance with us. He was one 
 day so obliging as to explain the phenomenon. 
 It seems these were his tributaries ; feeders of 
 his exchequer; gentlemen, his good friends, (as 
 he was pleased to express himself,) to whom 
 he had occasionally been beholden for a loan. 
 Their multitudes did no way disconcert him. 
 He rather took a pride in numbering them; 
 and, with Comus, seemed pleased to be 
 "stocked with so fair a herd." 
 
 With such sources, it was a wonder he con- 
 trived 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 
 6 
 
Essays 
 
 while it was fresh. A good part he drank 
 away (for he was an excellent tosspot) ; 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, inscruta- 
 ble cavities of the earth; — or he would bury 
 it (where he would never seek it again) by a 
 river's side under some bank, which (he would 
 facetiously observe) paid no interest; but out 
 away from him it must go peremptorily, as 
 Hagar's offspring into the wilderness, while it 
 was sweet. He never missed it. The streams 
 were perennial which fed his fisc. When new 
 supplies became necessary, the first person that 
 had the felicity to fall in with him, friend or 
 stranger, was sure to contribute to the de- 
 ficiency ; 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 (cana fides). 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 untheorising reader, who may at times 
 have disposable coin in his pocket, whether it is 
 not more repugnant to the kindliness of his 
 nature to refuse such a one as I am describing, 
 than to say no to a poor petitionary rogue 
 (your bastard borrower) who, by his mumping 
 visnomy, tells you that he expects nothing bet- 
 ter; and, therefore, whose preconceived notions 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 and expectations you do in reality so much less 
 shock in the refusal. 
 
 When I think of this man, — his fiery glow of 
 heart, his swell of feeling, — how magnificent, 
 how ideal he was; how great at the midnight 
 hour; and when I compare with him the com- 
 panions with whom I have associated since, I 
 grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and 
 think that I am fallen into the society of lend' 
 ers and little men. 
 
 To one like Elia whose treasures are rather 
 cased in leather covers than closed in iron cof- 
 fers, there is a class of alienators more formi- 
 dable than that which I have touched upon ; I 
 mean your borrowers of books — those muti- 
 lators 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 Blooms- 
 bury, reader) — with the huge Switzer-like 
 tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, 
 in their reformed posture, guardant of noth- 
 ing) once held the tallest of my folios, Opera 
 Bonaventnrce, choice and massive divinity, to 
 which its two supporters (school divinity also, 
 but of a lesser calibre, — Bellarmine, and Holy 
 Thomas) showed but as dwarfs, — itself an 
 Ascapart! — that Comberbatch abstracted upon 
 the faith of a theory he holds, which is more 
 easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to re- 
 
Essays 
 
 fute, namely, that "the title to property in a 
 book, (my Bonaventure, for instance,) is in 
 exact ratio to the claimant's powers of under- 
 standing and appreciating the same." Should 
 he go on acting upon this theory, which of our 
 shelves is safe? 
 
 The slight vacuum in the left-hand case — ■ 
 two shelves from the ceiling — scarcely distin- 
 guishable but by the quick eye of a loser — was 
 whilom the commodious resting-place of 
 Brown on Urn Burial. C. will hardly allege 
 that he knows more about that treatise than I 
 do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed 
 the first (of the moderns) to discover its beau- 
 ties ; but so have I known a foolish lover to 
 praise his mistress in the presence of a rival 
 more qualified to carry her off than himself. 
 Just below, Dodsley's dramas want their fourth 
 volume, where Vittoria Corombona is ! The 
 remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam's 
 refuse sons when the Fates borrowed Hector. 
 Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in 
 sober state. There loitered the Complete Ang- 
 ler ; quiet as in life, by some stream side. In 
 yonder nook, John Buncle, 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 treas- 
 ure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as 
 rich an equivalent to match it. I have a small 
 under-collection of this nature, (my friend's 
 gatherings in his various calls,) picked up, he 
 
 9 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited 
 with as little memory at mine. I take in these 
 orphans, the twice-deserted. These proselytes 
 of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews. 
 There they stand in conjunction; natives and 
 naturalized. The latter seem as little disposed 
 to inquire out their true lineage as I am. — I 
 charge no warehouse-room for these deodands, 
 nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly 
 trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay 
 expenses. 
 
 To lose a volume to C. carries some sense 
 and meaning in it. You are sure that he will 
 make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can 
 give no account of the platter after it. But 
 what moved thee, wayward, spiteful K — , to be 
 so importunate to carry off with thee, in spite 
 of tears and adjurations to thee to forbear, the 
 Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble 
 Margaret Newcastle? — knowing at the time, 
 and knowing that I knew also, thou most as- 
 suredly 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 Gallican land — 
 
 Unworthy land to harbour such a sweetness, 
 A virtue in which all ennobling thoughts dwelt, 
 Pure thoughts, kind thoughts, high thoughts, 
 her sex's wonder ! 
 
 hadst thou not thy play-books, and books of 
 
 jests and fancies, about thee, to keep thee 
 
 10 
 
Essays 
 
 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 
 English woman! — that she could fix upon no 
 other treatise to bear away, in kindly token of 
 remembering us, than the works of Fulke 
 Greville, Lord Brook, — of which no French- 
 man, nor woman of France, Italy, or England, 
 was ever by nature constituted to comprehend 
 a title ! — Was there not Zimmerman on Soli- 
 tude ? 
 
 Reader, if haply thou art blest with a moder- 
 ate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy 
 heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books ; 
 but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. : he will 
 return them (generally anticipating the time 
 appointed) with usury, enriched with annota- 
 tions tripling their value. I have had experi- 
 ence. Many are these precious MSS. of his — 
 (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity 
 not unfrequently, vying with the originals) in 
 no very clerklv hand — legible in my Daniel ; in 
 old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those 
 abstruser cogitations of the Greville, — now, 
 alas, wandering in Pagan lands! I counsel 
 thee, shut not thy heart nor thy library against 
 S. T. C. 
 
 NEW YEAR'S EVE 
 
 Every man hath two birthdays : two days, at 
 least, in every year, which set him upon revolv- 
 ii 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 ing the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal 
 duration. The one is that which in an espe- 
 cial 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 
 anything 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 in- 
 difference. 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 over the past 
 twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, per- 
 formed 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 
 everv one of us seems to be conscious of, in 
 that awful leave taking. I am sure I felt it, 
 and all felt it with me, last night ; though some 
 of my companions affected rather to manifest 
 
Essays 
 
 an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year, 
 than any very tender regrets for the decease of 
 its predecessor. But I am none of those who — 
 
 Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest. 
 
 I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties, 
 — new books, new faces, new years, — from 
 some mental twist which makes it difficult in 
 me to face the prospective. I have almost 
 ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in the 
 prospects of other (former) years. I plunge 
 into foregone visions and conclusions. I en- 
 counter pell-mell with past disappointments. I 
 am armour-proof against old discouragements. 
 I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adver- 
 saries. I play over again for love, as the 
 gamesters phrase it, games for which I once 
 paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of 
 those untoward accidents and events of my life 
 reversed. I would no more alter them than 
 the incidents of some well-contrived novel. 
 Methinks it is better that I should have pined 
 away seven of my goldenest years, when I was 
 thrall to the fair hair and fairer eyes of Alice 
 W — n, than that so passionate a love-adven- 
 ture 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. 
 
 13 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 In a degree beneath manhood, it is my in- 
 firmity to look back upon those early days. Do 
 I advance a paradox, when I say, that, skip- 
 ping 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 iden- 
 tity than I have for the man Elia. I know him 
 to be light, and vain, and humoursome; a no- 
 torious* * * ; addicted to* * * * : averse from 
 counsel, neither taking it nor offering it ; — * * * 
 besides ; a stammering buffoon ; what you will ; 
 lay it on, and spare not : I subscribe to it all, 
 and much more than thou canst be willing to 
 lay at his door : but for the child Elia, that 
 "other me," there, in the back-ground, I must 
 take leave to cherish the remembrance of that 
 young master, — with as little reference, I pro- 
 test, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty 
 as if it had been a child of some other house, 
 and not of my parents. I can cry over its 
 patient small-pox at five, and rougher 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 ten- 
 derness 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 thou changed ! — Thou art 
 sophisticated. — I know how honest, how cour- 
 
 14 
 
Essays 
 
 ageous (for a weakling) it was, — how re- 
 ligious, 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 retrospection, may be the 
 symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it 
 owing to another cause : simply, that being 
 without wife or family, I have not learned to 
 project myself enough out of myself; and hav- 
 ing no offspring of my own to dally with, I 
 turn back upon memory, and adopt my own 
 early idea as my heir and favourite? If these 
 speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader, (a 
 busy man perchance,) if I tread out of the way 
 of thy sympathy, and am singularly conceited 
 only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under 
 the phantom cloud of Elia. 
 
 The elders, with whom I was brought up, 
 were of a character not likely to let slip the 
 sacred observance of any old institution ; and 
 the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by 
 them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. 
 In those days the sound of those midnight 
 chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all 
 around me, never failed to bring a train of 
 pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then 
 scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of 
 it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not child* 
 15 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 hood alone, but the young man till thirty, never 
 feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it 
 indeed, and, if need were he could preach a 
 homily on the fragility of life ; but he brings it 
 not home to himself, any more than in a hot 
 June we can appropriate to our imagination the 
 freezing days of December. But now (shall I 
 confess a truth?) I feel these audits but too 
 powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities 
 of my duration, and to grudge at the expendi- 
 ture of moments and shortest periods, like 
 misers' 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 shut- 
 tle." Those metaphors solace me not, nor 
 sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. 
 I care not to be carried with the tide that 
 smoothly bears human life to eternity; and 
 reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am 
 in love with this green earth, — the face of town 
 and country, — the unspeakable rural solitudes, 
 and the sweet security of streets. I would set 
 up my tabernacle here I am content to stand 
 still at the age to which I am arrived, — I and 
 my friends, — to be no younger, no richer, no 
 handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by 
 age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, 
 into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of 
 mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discom- 
 poses me. My household gods plant a terrible 
 16 
 
Essays 
 
 fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. 
 They do not willingly seek Lavinian 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 fireside conversations, and in- 
 nocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself, — 
 do these things go out with life? 
 
 Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, 
 when you are pleasant with him? 
 
 And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios ! 
 must I part with the intense delight of having 
 you (huge armfuls) in my embrace*? 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 recognisable face, — the "sweet as- 
 surance of a look?" 
 
 In Winter this intolerable disinclination to 
 dying — to give it its mildest name — does more 
 especially haunt and beset me. In a genial 
 August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death 
 is almost problematic. At those times do such 
 poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. 
 Then we expand and burgeon. Then we are 
 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. 
 
 17 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 Phcebus's sickly sister, like that in- 
 nutritious one denounced in the Canticles : — I 
 am none of her minions; I hold with the Per- 
 sian. 
 
 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 in- 
 difference 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 thou- 
 sand devils, as in no instance to be excused or 
 tolerated, but shunned as an universal viper, — 
 to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of ! 
 In no way can I be brought to digest thee, 
 thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more 
 frightful and confounding Positive! 
 
 Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear 
 of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting, like 
 thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man, that 
 he shall "lie down with kings and emperors in 
 death," who in his lifetime never greatly cov- 
 eted the society of such bedfellows? — or, for- 
 sooth, that "so shall the fairest face appear?" — 
 18 
 
Essays 
 
 why, to comfort me, must Alice W n be a 
 
 goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust at 
 those impertinent and misbecoming familiari- 
 ties inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. 
 Every deadman 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 bet- 
 ters ! Thy New Years' days are past. I sur- 
 vive, a jolly candidate for 182 1. Another cup 
 of wine ! — and while that turncoat bell, that 
 just now mournfully chanted the obsequies of 
 1820 departed, with changed notes lustily rings 
 in a successor, let us attune to its peal the song 
 made on a like occasion, by hearty, cheerful 
 Mr. Cotton:— 
 
 THE NEW YEAR 
 
 Hark ! the cock crows ! and yon bright star 
 Tells us, the day himself s not far. 
 And see where, breaking from 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 do prophesy; 
 When the prophetic fear of things 
 A more tormenting mischief brings, 
 More full of soul-tormenting gall 
 Than direst mischiefs can befall. 
 
 19 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 But stay ! but stay ! methinks my sight 
 
 Better inform'd by clearer light, 
 
 Discerns sereneness in that brow, 
 
 That all contracted seem'd but now. 
 
 His revers'd 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 morn, 
 
 And speaks us good so soon as born? 
 
 Plague on't ! the last was ill enough, 
 
 This cannot but make better proof; 
 
 Or, at the worst, as we brush' d through 
 
 The last, why so we may this too ; 
 
 And then the next in reason shou'd 
 
 Be superexcellently good : 
 
 For the worst ills (we daily see) 
 
 Have no more perpetuity 
 
 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 renders e'en Disaster sweet : 
 
 And though the Princess turn her back, 
 
 Let us but line ourselves with sack, 
 
 20 
 
Essays 
 
 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 cor- 
 dial ; enlarging the heart, and productive of 
 sweet blood, and generous spirits, in the con- 
 coction? 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 hypochondries. And now another 
 cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, 
 and many of them to you all, my masters ! 
 
 IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES 
 
 I am of a constitution so general, that it con- 
 sorts and sympathizeth with all things. I have 
 no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy in any 
 thing. Those natural repugnancies do not 
 touch me; nor do I behold with prejudice the 
 French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — Religio 
 Medici. 
 
 That the author of the Religio Medici, 
 mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, 
 conversant about notional and conjectural es- 
 sences, in whose categories of Being the pos- 
 sible took the upper hand of the actual, should 
 have overlooked the impertinent individualities 
 
 21 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 of such poor concretions as mankind, is not 
 much to be admired. It is rather to be won- 
 dered at, that in the genus of animals he should 
 have condescended to distinguish that species at 
 all. For myself, — earthbound and fettered to 
 the scene of my activities, — 
 
 Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky, 
 
 I confess that I do feel the differences of man- 
 kind, 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 be- 
 comes indifferent, it begins to be disrelishing. 
 I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices 
 — made up of likings and dislikings — the veri- 
 est 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 
 or fellow. I cannot like all people alike. 1 
 
 *I would be understood as confining myself to 
 the subject of imperfect sympathies. To na- 
 tions or classes of men there can be no direct 
 antipathy. 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 antipodes, and can 
 
Essays 
 
 I have been trying all my life to like Scotch- 
 men, and am obliged to desist from the experi- 
 ment in despair. They cannot like me ; and in 
 truth, I never knew one of that nation who at- 
 tempted to do it. There is something more 
 plain and ingenuous in their mode of proceed- 
 ing. We know one another at 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 
 
 believe the story of two persons meeting (who 
 never saw one another before in their lives) 
 and instantly fighting. 
 
 ■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 hates him as a devil. 
 
 The lines are from old Heywood's "Hie- 
 rarchie of Angels," and he subjoins a curious 
 story in confirmation, of a Spaniard who at- 
 tempted to assassinate a King Ferdinand of 
 Spain, 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 which to that act compell'd 
 
 him 
 Was, he ne'er loved him since he first beheld 
 
 him. 
 
 23 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 have minds rather suggestive than comprehen- 
 sive. They have no pretences to much clear- 
 ness or precision in their ideas, or in their man- 
 ner 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 little game peradventure, 
 and leave it to knottier heads, more robust con- 
 stitutions, to run it down. The light that lights 
 them is not steady and polar, but mutable and 
 shifting: waxing, and again waning. Their 
 conversation is accordingly. 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 
 oath, but must be understood, speaking or writ- 
 ing, with some abatement. They seldom wait 
 to mature a proposition, but e'en bring it to 
 market in the green ear. They delight to im- 
 part 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 con- 
 stituted upon quite a different plan. His 
 Minerva is born in panoply. You are never ad- 
 mitted to see his ideas in their growth — if in- 
 24 
 
Essays 
 
 deed they do grow, and are not rather put to- 
 gether 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 complete- 
 ness. He brings his total wealth into com- 
 pany, 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 appre- 
 hension of a thing. His understanding is al- 
 ways at its meridian : you never see the first 
 dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings 
 of self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgiv- 
 ings, half-intuitions, semi-consciousness, par- 
 tial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo con- 
 ceptions, have no place in his brain or vocabu- 
 lary. 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 morality never abates. 
 He cannot compromise, or understand mid- 
 dle actions. There can be but a right 
 
 25 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 indi- 
 rect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an 
 extinguisher upon your irony if you are un- 
 happily blest with a vein of it. Remember you 
 are upon your oath. I have a print of a grace- 
 ful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I 
 was showing off to Mr. * * *. 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 as- 
 sured 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 pre- 
 tensions." The misconception staggered me, 
 but did not seem much to disconcert him. Per- 
 sons of this nation are particularly fond of af- 
 firming 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 
 26 
 
Essays 
 
 itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable, 
 whether the proposition that contains it be new 
 or old, disputed, or such as is impossible to be- 
 come 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 im- 
 possible, 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 with an illiberality that 
 necessarily confines the passage to the margin. 1 
 The tediousness of these people is certainly 
 provoking. I wonder if they ever tire one an- 
 other ! — In my early life I had a passionate 
 fondness for the poetry of Burns. I have some- 
 times foolishly hoped to ingratiate myself with 
 
 ^here are some people who think they suf- 
 ficiently acquit themselves, and entertain their 
 company, with relating facts of no consequence, 
 not at all out of the road of such common inci- 
 dents as happen every day ; and this I have ob- 
 served more frequently among the Scots than 
 any other nation, who are very careful not to 
 omit the minutest circumstances 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. 
 
 27 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 his countrymen by expressing it. But I have 
 always found that a true Scot resents your ad- 
 miration 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 makes it a presumption in you 
 to suppose that you can admire him. Thom- 
 son they seem to have forgotten. 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 Hume's History com- 
 pared with his Continuation of it. What if the 
 historian had continued Humphrey Clinker? 
 
 I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. 
 They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, com- 
 pared with which Stonehenge is in its nonage. 
 They date beyond the pyramids. But I should 
 not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse 
 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 in- 
 jury, 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, lib- 
 erality, the light of a nineteenth century, can 
 28 
 
Essays 
 
 close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. 
 A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me. He is 
 least distasteful on 'Change, for the mercan- 
 tile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beau- 
 ties in the dark. I boldly confess that I do not 
 relish the approximation of Jew and Chris- 
 tian, which has become so fashionable. The re- 
 ciprocal endearments have, to me, something 
 hypocritical and unnatural in them. I do not 
 like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing 
 and congeeing in awkward postures of an af- 
 fected civility. If they are converted, why do 
 they not come over to us altogether? Why 
 keep up a form of separation, when the life of 
 it is fled? If they can sit with us at table, why 
 do they keck at our cookery? I do not under- 
 stand these half convertities. Jews christian- 
 izing — Christians judaizing — puzzle me. I like 
 fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more con- 
 founding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker. 
 The spirit of the synagogue is essentially sepa- 
 rative. 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 conquer the Shibboleth. 
 How it breaks out, when he sings, "The Chil- 
 dren of Israel passed through the Red Sea !" 
 The auditors, for the moment, are as Egyp- 
 tians to him, and he rides over our necks in 
 
 triumph. There is no mistaking him. B 
 
 29 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 has a strong expression of sense in his counte- 
 nance, 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 pro- 
 hibition. His nation, in general, have not over- 
 sensible countenances. How should they? — but 
 you seldom see a silly expression among them. 
 Gain, and the pursuit of gain, sharpen a man's 
 visage. I never heard of an idiot being born 
 among them. Some admire the Jewish female 
 physiognomy. 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 Fuller 
 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 
 3o 
 
Essays 
 
 Quakers (as Desdemona would say) "to live 
 with them." I am all over sophisticated — with 
 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 for 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 eva- 
 sion and equivocating than other people. They 
 naturally look to their words more carefully, 
 and are more cautious of committing them- 
 selves. 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, sanctified 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 applicable 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 tb'" 
 
 3i 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 market-place a latitude is expected and con- 
 ceded upon questions wanting this solemn cove- 
 nant. Some thing less than truth satisfies. It 
 is common to hear a person say, "You do not 
 expect me to speak as if I were upon my oath." 
 Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inad- 
 vertency, short of falsehood, creeps into ordi- 
 nary 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 trip- 
 ping in a casual expression, he forfeits, for 
 himself, at least, his claim to the invidious ex- 
 emption. He knows that his syllables are 
 weighed ; and how far a consciousness of this 
 particular watchfulness, exerted against a per- 
 son, has a tendency to produce indirect an- 
 swers, and a diverting of the question by hon- 
 est 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 
 32 
 
Essays 
 
 scion of that old stock of religious constancy, 
 which never bent or faltered, in the Primitive 
 Friends, or gave way to the winds of persecu- 
 tion, to the violence of judge or 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 up- 
 right Justicers to Penn, who had been putting 
 law-cases with a puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter 
 as the answers may be," 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 strait- 
 est 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 clam- 
 ourous 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 formally tendered 
 it — so much for tea. I, 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 
 33 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 did myself, and marched out of the room, the 
 eldest and gravest going first, with myself clos- 
 ing 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 of- 
 fered by these serious persons for the seeming 
 injustice of their conduct. To my great sur- 
 prise not a syllable was dropped on the subject. 
 They sat 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 ques- 
 tion operated as a soporific on my moral feeling 
 as far as Exeter. 
 
 DREAM CHILDREN ; A REVERIE 
 
 Children love to listen to stories about their 
 elders, when they were children; to stretch 
 their imagination to the conception of a tradi- 
 tionary great-uncle or 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 Field, who lived 
 in a great house in Norfolk, (a hundred times 
 34 
 
Essays 
 
 bigger than that in which they and papa lived,) 
 which had been the scene (so at least it was 
 generally believed in that part of the country) 
 of the tragic incidents which they had lately 
 become familiar with from the ballad of the 
 Children in the Wood. Certain it is that the 
 whole story of the children and their 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 up- 
 braiding. 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 
 the owner, who preferred living in a newer and 
 more fashionable mansion which he had pur- 
 chased 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 after- 
 wards 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 
 
 35 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 concourse of all the poor, 
 and some of the gentry too, of the neighbour- 
 hood for many miles round, to show their re- 
 spect for her memory, because she had been 
 such a good and religious woman ; so good in- 
 deed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, 
 ay, and a great part of the Testament besides. 
 Here little Alice spread her hands. Then I told 
 what a tall, upright, graceful person their 
 great-grandmother Field once was ; and how in 
 her youth she was esteemed the best dancer, 
 (here Alice's little right foot played an invol- 
 untary movement, till, upon my looking grave, 
 it desisted,) the best dancer, I was saying, in 
 the county, till a cruel disease, called 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 upright, be- 
 cause she was so good and religious. Then I 
 told how she was used to sleep by herself in a 
 lone chamber of the great lone house ; and how 
 she believed that an apparition of two infants 
 was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down 
 the great staircase near where she slept, but 
 she said "those innocents would do her no 
 harm;" and how frightened I used to be, 
 though in those days I had my maid to sleep 
 36 
 
Essays 
 
 with me, because I was never half so good or 
 religious as she; and yet I never saw the in- 
 fants. Here John expanded all his eyebrows 
 and tried to look courageous. Then I told how 
 good she was to all her grandchildren, having 
 us to the great house in the holidays, where I 
 in particular used to spend many hours by my- 
 self, in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve 
 Csesars, 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 
 I never could 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 al- 
 most 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, be- 
 cause they were forbidden fruit, unless now 
 and then ; and because I had more pleasure in 
 strolling about among the old melancholy-look- 
 ing yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the 
 red berries, and the fir-apples, which were good 
 for 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 
 grateful warmth — or in watching the dace that 
 
 37 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 darted to and fro in the fish-pond at the bottom 
 of the garden, with here and there a great sulky- 
 pike hanging midway down the water in 
 silent state, as if it mocked at their 
 impertinent friskings, — I had more pleas- 
 ure in these busy-idle diversions than in 
 all the sweet flavours of peaches, nec- 
 tarines, oranges, and such-like common 
 baits for children. Here John slyly deposited 
 back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, 
 not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated di- 
 viding with her, and both seemed willing to re- 
 linquish 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, 
 
 John L , because he was so handsome and 
 
 spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us; 
 and, instead of moping about in solitary cor- 
 ners, like some of us, he would mount the most 
 mettlesome horse he could get, when but an 
 imp no bigger than themselves, and make it 
 carry him half over the county in a morning, 
 and join the hunters when there were any out; 
 (and yet he loved the old great house and gar- 
 dens 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 every- 
 body, but of their great-grandmother Field 
 most especially; and how he used to carry me 
 38 
 
Essays 
 
 upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy, 
 (for he was a good bit older than I,) many a 
 mile when I could not walk for pain ; and how 
 in after life he became lame-footed too, and 
 I did not always, I fear, make allowances 
 enough for him when he was impatient, and in 
 pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate 
 he had been to me when I was lame-footed ; 
 and how when he died, though he had not been 
 dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a 
 great while ago, such a distance there is be- 
 twixt 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 his crossness, and 
 wished him to be alive again, to be quarrelling 
 with him, (for we quarrelled 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 Alice W n; and, 
 
 39 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 as much as children could understand, I ex- 
 plained to them what coyness, and difficulty, 
 and denial, meant in maidens — when suddenly, 
 turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice 
 looked out at her eyes with such a reality of 
 re-presentment, 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 : "We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor 
 are we children at all. The children of Alice 
 call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less 
 than nothing, and dreams. We are only what 
 might have been, and must wait upon the tedi- 
 ous shores of Lethe millions of ages before we 
 have existence and a name" and immedi- 
 ately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in 
 my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen 
 asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by 
 my side; but John L. (or James Elia) was gone 
 forever. 
 
 A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG 
 
 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 
 
 40 
 
Essays 
 
 biting it from the living animal, just as they 
 do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not 
 obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in 
 the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, 
 where he designates a kind of golden age by 
 the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holi- 
 day. The manuscript goes on to say, that the 
 art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I 
 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 col- 
 lect 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 re- 
 duced to ashes. Together with the cottage, (a 
 sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, 
 you may think it,) what was of much more im- 
 portance, a fine litter 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 consternation, as you 
 may think, not so much for the 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 
 
 41 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 be- 
 fore 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 negligence of this unlucky young 
 fire-brand. Much less did it resemble that of 
 any known herb, weed, or flower. A premoni- 
 tory 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 fash- 
 ion 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 ftis 
 slow understanding, that it was the pig that 
 smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; 
 and surrendering himself up to the new-born 
 pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfulls 
 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 smok- 
 ing rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and 
 42 
 
Essays 
 
 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 pleas- 
 ure which he experienced in his lower regions 
 had rendered him quite callous to any incon- 
 veniences he might feel in those remote quar- 
 ters. 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?" 
 
 "O father, the pig, the pig! do come and 
 taste how nice the burnt pig 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 
 
 pig- 
 
 Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharp- 
 ened since morning, soon raked out another pig, 
 and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser 
 half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still 
 shouting out, "Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, 
 father, only taste — O Lord !" — with such-like 
 barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while 
 as if he would choke. 
 
 43 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 Ho-ti trembled every joint while he grasped 
 the abominable thing, wavering whether he 
 should not put his son to death for an unnat- 
 ural young monster, when the crackling scorch- 
 ing his fingers, as it had done his son's, and ap- 
 plying the same remedy to them, he in his turn 
 tasted some of its flavour, which, make what 
 sour mouths he would for a pretence, proved 
 not altogether displeasing to him. In conclu- 
 sion, (for the manuscript here is a little tedi- 
 ous,) both father and son fairly sat down to 
 the mess, and never left off till they had de- 
 spatched all that remained of the litter. 
 
 Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the se- 
 cret 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. Nev- 
 ertheless, strange stories got about. It was ob- 
 served 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, others 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 chastising his son, seemed to grow 
 more indulgent to him than ever. At length 
 they were watched, the terrible mystery discov- 
 ered, and father and son summoned to take 
 their trial at Pekin, then an inconsiderable as- 
 size town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious 
 
 44 
 
Essays 
 
 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, reporters, and all present — without 
 leaving the box, or any manner of consultation 
 whatever, they brought in a simultaneous ver- 
 dict 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 fire in every direction. Fuel and 
 pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. 
 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 
 manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who 
 made a discovery that the flesh of swine, or in- 
 
 45 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 deed of any other animal, might be cooked 
 (burnt, as they called it,) without the ne- 
 cessity 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, I forget in whose dynasty. By 
 such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, 
 do the most useful and seemingly the most ob- 
 vious, arts make their way among mankind. 
 
 Without placing too implicit faith in the ac- 
 count above given, it must be agreed that if a 
 worthy pretext for so dangerous an experi- 
 ment 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. 
 
 Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edi- 
 bilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate 
 — princeps 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 the sty, with no original 
 speck of the amor immunditicu, the hereditary 
 failing of the first parent, yet manifest — his 
 voice as yet not broken, but something between 
 a childish treble and a grumble — the mild fore- 
 runner or prceludium 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 con- 
 46 
 
Essays 
 
 tend, 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 sweet- 
 ness 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 
 meek he lieth ! — Wouldst thou have had this in- 
 nocent grow up to the grossness and indocility 
 which too often accompany maturer swine- 
 hood? Ten to one he would have proved a 
 glutton, a sloven, an obstinate, disagreeable 
 animal, wallowing in all manner of filthy con- 
 versation. From these sins he is happily 
 snatched away. 
 
 47 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, 
 Death came with timely care. 
 
 His memory is odouriferous. No clown curseth, 
 while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank ba- 
 con ; no coal-heaver bolteth him in reeking sau- 
 sages; 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 de- 
 light, if not sinful, 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 ap- 
 proach her. Like lovers' kisses, she biteth : she 
 is a pleasure bordering on pain from the fierce- 
 ness and insanity of her relish ; but she stoppeth 
 at the palate; she meddleth not with the appe- 
 tite; and the coarsest hunger might barter her 
 consistently for a mutton-chop. 
 
 Pig (let me speak his praise) is no less pro- 
 vocative of the appetite than he is satisfactory 
 to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The 
 strong man may batten on him, and the weak- 
 ling refuseth not his mild juices. 
 
 Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a 
 bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably inter- 
 twisted, 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 
 48 
 
Essays 
 
 is the least envious of banquets. He is all 
 neighbours' fare. 
 
 I am one of those who freely and ungrudg- 
 ingly impart a share of the good things 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 interest in my friend's pleasures, his rel- 
 ishes, and proper satisfactions, as in mine own. 
 "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." 
 Hares, pheasants, partridges, snipes, barn-door 
 chickens, (those "tame villatic 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. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the 
 giver of all good flavours to extra-domiciliate, 
 or send out of the house slightingly (under pre- 
 text of friendship, or I know not what,) a 
 blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I 
 may say, to my individual palate. — It argues 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 pocket, 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 v/as a 
 49 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 counterfeit.) I had no pence to console him 
 with, and in the vanity of self-denial, and the 
 very coxcombry of charity, schoolboy-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-satis- 
 faction ; but before I had got to the end of the 
 bridge my better feelings 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 I 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 I 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 disappointed she would feel that 
 I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last. 
 And I 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 
 grey 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 
 
 SO 
 
Essays 
 
 age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curi- 
 ous to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) 
 what effect this process might have towards in- 
 tegrating 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 pleas- 
 antry on both sides, "Whether, supposing that 
 the flavour of a pig who obtained his death by 
 whipping {per Hagellationem extremam) su- 
 peradded 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, done 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 plan- 
 tations of the rank and guilty garlic ; you can- 
 not poison them, or make them stronger than 
 they are; but consider, he is a weakling, — a 
 flower. 
 
 5i 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS 
 
 The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I 
 picked up the other day — I 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 re- 
 membrances. They make us think how we once 
 used to read a Play Bill — not, as now perad- 
 venture, singling out a favourite performer, 
 and casting a negligent eye over the rest; but 
 spelling 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 be- 
 yond what we can be content to attribute now 
 to the time's best actors. "Orsino, by Mr. Bar- 
 rymore." What a full Shakespearian 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 
 52 
 
Essays 
 
 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 dis- 
 guised 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 nec- 
 essarily 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 declared 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 height- 
 ened 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 — 
 
 Right 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. 
 
 Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the 
 pride of her beauty, made an admirable Olivia. 
 
 53 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 She was particularly excellent in her unbend- 
 ing scenes in conversation with the Clown. I 
 have seen some Olivias — and those very sensi- 
 ble actresses too — who in these interlocutions 
 have seemed to set their wits at the jester, and 
 to vie conceits with him in downright emula- 
 tion. 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 im- 
 perious 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 the general 
 merits of the actor, who then played it, so un- 
 duly 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 presentment 
 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, 
 
 54 
 
Essays 
 
 but no way embarrassed by affectation ; and the 
 thorough-bred gentleman was uppermost in 
 every movement. He seized the moment of 
 passion with greatest truth; like a faithful 
 clock, never striking before the time ; never an- 
 ticipating or leading you to anticipate. He was 
 totally destitute of trick and artifice. He seemed 
 come upon the stage to do the poet's message 
 simply, and he did it with as genuine fidelity 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 be- 
 trayed none of that cleverness which is the bane 
 of serious acting. For this reason, his Iago 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 audi- 
 ence 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 specta- 
 tors, to shoot their bolts at. The Iago of Bens- 
 ley 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 
 
 55 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 villains, and green probationers in mischief. It 
 did not clap or crow before its time. It was 
 not a man setting his wits at a child, and wink- 
 ing 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 available, where the manner was as fath- 
 omless as the purpose seemed dark, and with- 
 out 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 ab- 
 sent 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, austere, repelling; 
 but dignified, consistent, and, for what ap- 
 pears, 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 
 Illyria. 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 
 56 
 
Essays 
 
 mock or affected, which latter only are the fit 
 objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the 
 best unlovely, but neither buffoon nor con- 
 temptible. 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 house- 
 hold to a great princess ; a dignity probably 
 conferred upon him for other respects than age 
 or length of service. Olivia, at the first indica- 
 tion 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 gentle- 
 ness and considerateness 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 considera- 
 tion 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, Mal- 
 
 57 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 volio 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 pos- 
 sessing 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, and philosophises 
 gallantly upon his straw. 1 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 — be- 
 fore 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. 
 
 Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an 
 air of Spanish loftiness. He looked, spake, and 
 moved like an old Castilian. He was starch, 
 
 1 Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras 
 concerning wild fowl ? 
 
 Mai That the soul of our grandam might 
 haply inhabit a bird. 
 
 Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion? 
 Mai I think nobly of the soul, and no way 
 approve his opinion. 
 
 58 
 
Essays 
 
 spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of 
 pride seemed bottomed upon a sense of worth. 
 There was something in it beyond the coxcomb. 
 It was big and swelling, but you 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 magnificent from the out- 
 set; but when the decent sobrieties of the cha- 
 racter began to give way, and the poison of 
 self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's affec- 
 tion, gradually to work, you would have 
 thought that the hero of La Mancha in person 
 stood before you. How he went smiling to 
 himself ! 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 unseason- 
 able 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 upon air, to taste 
 manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to 
 mate Hyperion. O shake not the castles of his 
 
 59 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 pride ; endure yet for a season bright moments 
 of confidence; "stand still, ye watches of the 
 element," that Malvolio may be still in fancy 
 fair 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 in- 
 supportable 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 catastrophe of this character, 
 while Bensley played it, without a kind of 
 tragic interest. There was good foolery too. 
 Few now remember Dodd. What an 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 Dodd was it, as it came out of 
 Nature's hands. It might be said to remain in 
 puris naturalibus. In expressing slowness of 
 apprehension, this actor surpassed all others. 
 You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing 
 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 un- 
 derstanding would appear in a corner of his 
 60 
 
Essays 
 
 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. 
 
 I 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 Veru- 
 lam Buildings had not encroached upon all the 
 east side of them, cutting out delicate green 
 crankles, and shouldering away one of two of 
 the stately alcoves of the terrace — the survivor 
 stands gaping and relationless as if it remem- 
 bered its brother — they are still the best gar- 
 dens of any of the Inns of Court, my beloved 
 Temple not forgotten — have the gravest charac- 
 ter : 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 de- 
 portment, I judged to be one of the old Bench- 
 ers of the Inn. He had a serious, thoughtful 
 forehead, and seemed to be in meditations of 
 mortality. As I have an instinctive awe of old 
 Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of 
 sub-indicative 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 
 61 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 mis- 
 taken. But could this sad thoughtful counte- 
 nance 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 recognised but as the usher of mirth ; that 
 looked out so formally flat in Foppington, so 
 frothily pert in Tattle, so impotently busy in 
 Backbite ; so blankly divested of all meaning, 
 or resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in 
 Fribble, and a thousand agreeable imperti- 
 nences? Was this the face, full of thought and 
 carefulness, that had so often divested itself at 
 will of every trace of either to give me di- 
 version, to clear my cloudy face for two or 
 three hours at least of its furrows? Was this 
 the face — manly, sober, intelligent — which I 
 had so often despised, made mocks at, made 
 merry with? The remembrance of the free- 
 doms which I had taken 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 fel- 
 lows 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. 
 62 
 
Essays 
 
 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 after- 
 wards, had been in the habit of resorting daily 
 to these gardens, almost to the day of his de- 
 cease. In these serious walks, probably, he was 
 divesting himself of many scenic and some real 
 vanities — weaning himself from the frivolities 
 of the lesser and the greater theatre — doing 
 gentle penance for a life of no very reprehensi- 
 ble fooleries — taking off by degrees the buffoon 
 mask, which he might feel he had worn too 
 long — and rehearsing for a more solemn cast 
 of part. Dying, he "put on the weeds of Domi- 
 nic." 1 
 
 If few can remember Dodd, many yet living 
 will not easily forget the pleasant creature 
 who in those days enacted the part of the 
 
 1 Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his 
 death a choice collection of old English litera- 
 ture. I should judge him to have been a man 
 of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu 
 which no length of study could have bettered. 
 My merry friend, Jem White, had seen Dodd 
 one evening in Aguecheek, and recognising him 
 the next day in Fleet Street, was irresistibly 
 impelled to take off his hat and salute him as 
 the identical Knight of the preceding evening 
 with a "Save you, Sir Andrew." Dodd, not at 
 all disconcerted at this unusual address from a 
 stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave 
 of the hand, put him off with an "Away, 
 Fool!" 
 
 63 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 Clown to Dodd's Sir Andrew. Richard, or 
 rather Dicky Suett — for so in his life-time 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 serv- 
 ice his nonage and tender years were dedi- 
 cated. There are who do yet remember him 
 at that period — his pipe clear and harmonious. 
 He would often speak of his chorister days, 
 when he was "cherub Dicky." 
 
 What clipped his wings, or made it expedi- 
 ent that he should exchange the holy for the 
 profane state; whether he had lost his good 
 voice, (his best recommendation 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, re- 
 verting to a secular condition, and become one 
 of us. 
 
 I think he was not altogether of that timber 
 out of which cathedral seats and sounding- 
 boards are 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 
 
 64 
 
Essays 
 
 and to the public, be accepted for a surplice — 
 his white stole, and albe. 
 
 The first-fruits of his secularisation 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 imi- 
 tator than he was in any true sense himself 
 imitable. 
 
 He was the Robin Goodfellow of the stage. 
 He came in to trouble all things with a wel- 
 come perplexity, himself no whit troubled for 
 the matter. He was known, like Puck, by his 
 note — Ha! Ha! Ha! — sometimes deepening 
 to Ho! Ho! Ho! with an irresistible acces- 
 sion, derived, perhaps, remotely from his ec- 
 clesiastical education, foreign to his prototype 
 of — La! Thousands of hearts yet respond 
 to the chuckling La! of Dicky Suett, 
 brought back to their remembrance by the 
 faithful transcript of his friend Mathew's mim- 
 icry. The "force of nature could no further 
 go." He drolled upon the stock of these two 
 syllables richer than the cuckoo. 
 
 Care, that troubles all the world, was for- 
 gotten in his composition. Had he had but 
 two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could 
 never have supported himself upon those two 
 spider's strings, which served him (in the lat- 
 ter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A 
 doubt or a scruple must have made him totter, 
 
 65 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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, "through brake, through briar," reck- 
 less of a scratched face or a torn doublet. 
 
 Shakespeare foresaw him, when he framed his 
 fools and jesters. They have all the true Suett 
 stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery 
 tongue, this last the ready midwife to a with- 
 out-pain-delivered jest; in words, light as air, 
 venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest 
 rhymes tagging conceit when 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 differ- 
 ence, I take it, was this: — Jack was more be- 
 loved for his sweet, good-natured, moral pre- 
 tensions. Dicky was more liked for his sweet, 
 good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your 
 whole conscience stirred with Bannister's per- 
 formance of Walter in the Children in the 
 Wood; but Dicky seemed like a thing, as 
 Shakspeare says of Love, too young to know 
 what conscience is. He put 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 himself, 
 66 
 
Essays 
 
 not in metaphor, 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 accustomed tranquillity, nor tune, 
 with the simple exclamation, worthy to have 
 been recorded in his epitaph — O La! La! 
 Bobby! 
 
 The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celeb- 
 rity) 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 sometimes 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 mem- 
 ory,) 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 ingredient; 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, 1 
 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 topknot, and had bought him a commis- 
 
 1 High Life Below Stairs. 
 67 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 sion. Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was in- 
 superable. 
 
 Jack had two voices, both plausible, hypocrit- 
 ical, and insinuating; but his secondary or sup- 
 plemental voice still more decisively histrionic 
 than his common one. It was reserved for the 
 spectator ; and the dramatis personam were 
 supposed 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. This secret corre- 
 spondence 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 diminish 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, returns 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, and 
 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 
 
 68 
 
Essays 
 
 been dead these two years. I writ you word 
 when you were at Leghorn. 
 
 Ben. Mess, that's true : marry, I had for- 
 got. Dick is 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 temperament 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 contempt of money — his credu- 
 lity to women — with that necessary estrange- 
 ment from home which 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 
 actor comes, and instead of the delightful phan- 
 tom — the creature dear to half-belief, which 
 Bannister exhibited — displays before our eyes 
 a downright concretion 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 veering undi- 
 69 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 rected goodness of purpose, he gives to it a 
 downright daylight understanding, and a full 
 consciousness of its actions ; thrusting forward 
 the sensibilities of the character with a pre- 
 tence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was 
 to be judged by them alone — we feel the dis- 
 cord of the thing ; the scene is disturbed ; a real 
 man has got in among the dramatis personae, 
 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. 
 
 DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS 
 AND READING 
 
 To mind the inside of a book is to entertain 
 one's self with the forced product of another 
 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 Lord- 
 ship, 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 inconsidera- 
 ble 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. 
 
 70 
 
Essays 
 
 I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not 
 too genteel for me, nor Jonathan 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 books which are no 
 books — biblia a-biblia, I reckon Court Calen- 
 dars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught 
 Boards bound and lettered on the back, Scien- 
 tific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large : 
 the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beat- 
 tie, Soame Jenyns, and generally all those vol- 
 umes which "no gentleman's library should be 
 without :" the Histories of Flavius Josephus 
 (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philoso- 
 phy. With these exceptions I can read almost 
 anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catho- 
 lic, so unexcluding. 
 
 I confess that it moves my spleen to see these 
 things in books' clothing perched upon shelves, 
 like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, in- 
 truders 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 wither- 
 ing Population Essay. To expect a Steele or a 
 Farquhar, and find Adam Smith. To view a 
 well-arranged assortment of block-headed En- 
 cyclopaedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) 
 set out in an array of russia or morocco, when 
 a tithe of that good leather would comfortably 
 
 7i 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 re-clothe my shivering folios — would renovate 
 Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund 
 Lully to look like himself again 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. Magnificence comes 
 after. This, when it can be afforded, is not to 
 be lavished upon all kinds of books indiscrimi- 
 nately. For instance, I would not dress a set 
 of Magazines in full suit. The dishabille, or 
 half binding, (with russia backs ever,) is our 
 costume. A Shakspeare or a Milton (unless 
 the first editions) it were mere foppery to trick 
 out in gay apparel. The possession of them 
 confers no 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. Thom- 
 son's Seasons, again, looks best (I maintain 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 for- 
 get 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- work- 
 ing mantuamaker) after her long day's needle- 
 72 
 
Essays 
 
 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, Smol- 
 lett, 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 individ- 
 ual is almost the species, and when that per- 
 ishes, 
 
 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 sufficiently 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 Philip Syd- 
 ney, 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 
 
 73 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 books,) it is good to possess these in durable 
 and costly covers. I do not care for a First 
 Folio of Shakspeare. I rather prefer the com- 
 mon editions of Rowe and Tonson, without 
 notes, and with plates, which, being so execra- 
 bly bad, serve as maps or modest remem- 
 brancers to the text; and without pretending 
 to any supposable emulation with it, are so 
 much better than the Shakespeare engravings, 
 which did. I have a community of feeling with 
 my countryman about his Plays, and I like 
 those editions 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. I 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 "Anat- 
 omy 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 sex- 
 ton of Stratford Church to let him white-wash 
 the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, which 
 stood there, in rude but lively fashion depicted, 
 to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the 
 eyebrow, hair, the very dress he used to wear, 
 
 74 
 
Essays 
 
 — the only authentic testimony we had, how- 
 ever imperfect, of these curious parts and par- 
 cels of him. They covered him over with a 
 
 coat of white paint. By , if I 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 sac- 
 rilegious 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 Shaks- 
 peare? It may be that the latter are more 
 staled and rung upon in common discourse. 
 The sweetest names, and which carry a per- 
 fume in the mention, are Kit Marlowe, Dray- 
 ton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley. 
 
 Much depends upon when and where you 
 read a book. In the five or six impatient min- 
 utes before the dinner is quite ready, who 
 would think of taking up the "Fairy Queen" 
 for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop An- 
 drewes's 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 listens, 
 had need bring docile thoughts and purged 
 ears. 
 
 Winter evenings — the world shut out — with 
 less of ceremony the gentle Shakspeare enters. 
 75 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 At such a season the Tempest, or his own 
 Winter's Tale. 
 
 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 over 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, pro bono publico. With every 
 advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is 
 singularlv vapid. In barbers' shops and public- 
 houses a fellow will get up and spell out a para- 
 graph, which he communicates as some dis- 
 covery. Another follows with his selection. So 
 the entire journal 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 con- 
 tents of a whole paper. 
 
 Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one 
 ever lays one down without a feeling of dis- 
 appointment. 
 
 What an eternal time that gentleman in black, 
 at Nando's, keeps the paper! I am sick of 
 76 
 
Essays 
 
 hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, 
 "The Chronicle is in hand, Sir." 
 
 Coming into an inn at night— having ordered 
 your supper — what can be more delightful than 
 to find lying 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-tete pictures— "The Royal Lover and Lady 
 
 G ;" "The Melting 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 the 
 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 
 Candide. 
 
 I do not remember a more whimsical sur- 
 prise than having been once detected, by a 
 familiar damsel, reclined at my ease upon the 
 grass, on Primrose Hill, (her Cythera,) read- 
 ing Pamela. There was nothing in the book 
 to make a man seriously ashamed at the ex- 
 posure; 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. 
 We read on very sociably for a few pages ; but 
 
 77 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 the secret. 
 
 I am not much a friend to out-of-doors read- 
 ing. 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. I 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 
 nu worse than indifferent to the five points. 
 
 There is a class of street readers whom I can 
 never contemplate without affection, — the poor 
 gentry, who, 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 think- 
 ing when they will have done. Venturing ten- 
 derly, 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 
 
 7S 
 
Essays 
 
 damped his laudable ambition, by asking him 
 (it was in his younger days) whether he meant 
 to purchase the work. M declares, that un- 
 der no circumstance in his life did he ever pe- 
 ruse a book with half the satisfaction which he 
 took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess 
 of our day has moralised upon this subject in 
 two very touching but homely stanzas : — 
 
 "I saw a boy with eager eye 
 Open a book upon a stall, 
 And read, as he'd devour it all ; 
 Which when the stall-man 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 need. 
 
 Of sufferings the poor have many, 
 
 Which never can the rich annoy : 
 
 I soon perceived another boy, 
 
 Who look'd as if he had not any 
 
 Food — for that day at least — enjoy 
 
 The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. 
 
 This boy's case, then thought I, is surely 
 
 harder, 
 Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, 
 Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : 
 No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to 
 
 eat." 
 
 79 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN 
 
 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 years of thy life, thy shin- 
 ing youth, in the irksome confinement 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. Melan- 
 choly was the transition at fourteen from the 
 abundant playtime, and the frequently inter- 
 vening vacations of school days, to the eight, 
 nine, and sometimes ten hours a-day attend- 
 ance at the counting-house. But time partially 
 reconciles us to anything. I gradually became 
 content; doggedly contented, as wild animals 
 in cages. 
 
 It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but 
 Sundays, admirable as the institution of them 
 is for purposes of worship, are for that very 
 reason the very worst adapted for days of un- 
 bending and recreation. In particular, there is 
 80 
 
Essays 
 
 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 re- 
 pel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and 
 endless succession of knacks and gew-gaws, 
 and ostentatiously displayed wares of trades- 
 men, which make a week-day saunter through 
 the less busy parts of the metropolis so de- 
 lightful, are shut out. No book-stalls deli- 
 ciously to idle over; no busy faces to recreate 
 the idle man who contemplates them ever pass- 
 ing 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 'pren- 
 tices and little tradesfolk, 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 capacity of enjoying a free 
 hour, and livelily expressing the hollowness of 
 a day's pleasuring. The very strollers in the 
 fields on that day look anything but comfort- 
 able. 
 
 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 Hertfordshire. 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. But when the 
 81 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 prom- 
 ised 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 in- 
 tervene before such another snatch would come. 
 Still the prospect of its coming threw some- 
 thing of an illumination upon the darker side 
 of my captivity. Without it, as I 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 un- 
 equal. Besides my daylight servitude, I served 
 over again all night in my sleep, and would 
 awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, 
 errors in my accounts, and the like. I 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 coun- 
 tenance ; but I did not know that it had raised 
 82 
 
Essayj 
 
 the suspicions of any of my employers, when, 
 on the fifth of last month, a day ever to be re- 
 membered 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 impru- 
 dently in my disclosure ; that I had foolishly 
 given a handle against myself, and had been 
 anticipating 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 12th of April, just as I was about quit- 
 ting 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 was 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 lit- 
 tle relief to me, — when to my utter astonish- 
 ment 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 con- 
 
 83 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 fidence to think as much). He went on to 
 descant on the expediency of retiring at a cer- 
 tain 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 little, 
 ended with a proposal, to which his three part- 
 ners nodded a grave assent, that I should ac- 
 cept 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 be- 
 tween surprise and gratitude, but it was under- 
 stood 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 — for- 
 ever. This noble benefit (gratitude forbids me 
 to conceal their names) I owe to the kindness 
 of the most munificent firm in the world, — the 
 house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, 
 and Lacy. 
 
 Esto perpetual 
 
 For the first day or two I felt stunned, over- 
 whelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; 
 I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I 
 wandered about, thinking I was happy, and 
 knowing that I was not. I was in the condi- 
 tion of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly 
 let loose after a forty years' confinement. I 
 could scarce trust myself with myself. It was 
 like passing out of Time into Eternity, for it is 
 
Essays 
 
 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 Time, I 
 was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I 
 could see no end of my 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 own re- 
 sources, 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 walk it away; but I do not walk 
 all day long, as I used to do in those 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 candlelight Time, I used to weary out my 
 head and eyesight in by-gone 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. 
 
 85 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 "Years!" you will say; what is that super- 
 annuated 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 prop- 
 erly call his own, that which he has all to him- 
 self ; 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 for me threefold. 
 My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as 
 long as any preceding thirty. 'Tis a fair Rule- 
 of-Three sum. 
 
 Among the strange fantasies which beset me 
 at the commencement of my freedom, and of 
 which all traces are not yet gone, one was, 
 that a vast tract of time that intervened since 
 I quitted the Counting House. I could not 
 conceive of 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 
 86 
 
Essays 
 
 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 this 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 to 
 me that pleasant familiarity which I had 
 hitherto 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 an- 
 other. I knew it must be, but I 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 
 toils for six-and-thirty years, that smoothed 
 for me with their jokes and conundrums the 
 ruggedness of my professional road. Had it 
 been so rugged then, after all? or was I sim- 
 ply a coward? Well, it is too late to repent; and 
 Ialsoknowthat 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 courteous. 
 I shall be some time before I get quite recon- 
 ciled 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! 
 
 87 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 Do , mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly ! 
 
 PI , officious to do and to volunteer good 
 
 services ! — and thou, thou dreary pile, fit man- 
 sion for a Gresham or a Whittington of old, 
 stately house of Merchants; with thy labyrin- 
 thine passages, and light-excluding, pent-up of- 
 fices, where candles for one-half the year sup- 
 plied 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 book- 
 seller, 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 be- 
 queathe among ye. 
 
 A fortnight has passed since the date of my 
 first communication. At that period I was ap- 
 proaching to tranquillity, but had not reached 
 it. I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was com- 
 parative only. Something of the first flutter 
 was left; an unsettling sense of novelty; the 
 dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed 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 dis- 
 cipline suddenly by some revolution returned 
 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 
 88 
 
Essays 
 
 been sauntering there at that very hour for 
 years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a 
 bookstall. Methinks I have been thirty years a 
 collector. There 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 Fen- 
 church Street? Stones of old Mincing Lane, 
 which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage 
 for six-and-thirty years, to the footsteps of 
 what toil-worn clerk 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 refer- 
 ence to the foreign post days ; in its distance 
 from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I 
 had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday 
 nights' sensations. The genius of each day was 
 upon me distinctly during the whole of it, af- 
 fecting my appetite, spirits, &c. The phantom 
 of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, 
 sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recrea- 
 tions. What charm has washed that Ethiop 
 white? What is gone of Black Monday? All 
 days are the same. Sunday itself — that un- 
 fortunate failure of a holiday, as it too often 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 time 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 the 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? 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 believe, is 
 out of his element as long as he is operative. 
 I 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 met 
 with in trim gardens. I am already come to be 
 known by my vacant face and careless gesture, 
 perambulating at no fixed place, nor with any 
 settled purpose. I walk about; not to and 
 90 
 
Essays 
 
 from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate 
 air, that has been buried so long with my other 
 good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my per- 
 son. I perceptibly grow into gentility. 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. 
 
 OLD CHINA 
 
 I have an almost feminine partiality for old 
 china. When I go to see any great house I 
 inquire for the china closet, and next for the 
 picture gallery. I cannot defend the order of 
 preference but by saying that we have all some 
 taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit 
 of our remembering distinctly that it was an 
 acquired one. I can call to mind the first play 
 and the first exhibition that I was taken to ; but 
 I am not conscious of a time when china jars 
 and saucers were introduced into my imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 I had no repugnance then (why should I now 
 have?) to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured 
 grotesques, that under the notion of men and 
 women float about, uncircumscribed by any ele- 
 ment, in that world before perspective — a china 
 tea-cup. 
 
 I like to see my old friends — whom distance 
 cannot diminish — figuring up in the air (so 
 
 9i 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 they appear to our optics), yet on terra Hrrna 
 still, for so we must in courtesy interpret that 
 speck of deeper blue which the decorous ar- 
 tist, to prevent absurdity, had 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, hand- 
 ing tea to a lady from a salver, two miles off. 
 See how distance seems to set off respect ! And 
 here the same lady, or another, (for likeness 
 is identity on teacups,) is stepping into a little 
 fairy boat, moored on the hither 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-ex- 
 tensive ; so objects show, seen through the 
 lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay. 
 
 I 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 these speciosa miracula upon a set of 
 extraordinary old blue china (a recent pur- 
 chase) which we were now for the first time 
 using; and could not help remarking how fa- 
 92 
 
Essays 
 
 vourable circumstances had been to us of late 
 years, that we could afford to please the eye 
 sometimes with trifles of this sort, when a pass- 
 ing sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of 
 my companion. I am quick at detecting these 
 Summer clouds in Bridget. 
 
 "I wish the good old times would come 
 again," she said, "when we were not quite so 
 rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; 
 but there was a middle state," (so she was 
 pleased to ramble on,) "in which I 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 Oh, 
 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 against, 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 
 tnat 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 thread-bare, 
 and all because of that folio Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, which you dragged home late at 
 night from Barker's, in Covent Garden? Do 
 you remember how we eyed it for weeks be- 
 fore we could make up our minds to the pur- 
 chase, and had not come to a determination till 
 93 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 book- 
 seller with some grumbling opened his shop, 
 and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting 
 bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty 
 treasures, — and when you lugged it home, 
 wishing it were twice as cumbersome, — and 
 when you presented it to me, — and when we 
 were exploring the perfectness of it (collating 
 you called it), — and while I was repairing some 
 of the loose leaves with paste, which your im- 
 patience would not suffer to be left till day- 
 break, — 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 that overworn suit — your 
 old corbeau — for four or five weeks longer than 
 you should have done, to pacify your conscience 
 for the mighty sum of fifteen shillings — or six- 
 teen was it? (a great affair we thought it then) 
 which you had lavished on 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 vou came home with twenty apologies 
 for laying out a less number of shillings upon 
 that print after Lionardo, which we christened 
 the 'Lady Blanch ;' when you looked at the pur- 
 chase, and thought of the money — and looked 
 
 94 
 
Essays 
 
 again at the picture, and thought of the money 
 — was there no pleasure in being a poor man? 
 Now you have nothing to do but to walk into 
 Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. 
 Yet do you? 
 
 "Then do you remember our pleasant walks 
 to Enfield, and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, 
 when we had a holyday, (holydays and all 
 other fun are gone now we are rich,) and the 
 little hand-basket in which I used to deposit 
 our day's fare of savoury cold lamb and salad 
 — and how you would pry about at noontide 
 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 pleasant banks 
 of the Lea, when he went a fishing ; and some- 
 times they would prove obliging enough, and 
 sometimes they would look grudgingly upon 
 us ; but we had cheerful looks still for one an- 
 other, and would eat our plain food savourily, 
 scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout 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 
 
 95 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 mercy of uncertain usage and a precarious wel- 
 come. 
 
 "You are too proud to see a play anywhere 
 now but in the pit. Do you remember where 
 it was we used to sit, when we saw the Battle 
 of Hexham, and the Surrender of Calais, and 
 Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in 
 the Wood, — when we squeezed out our shill- 
 ings a-piece to sit three or four times in a sea- 
 son 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 were with Rosalind 
 in Arden, or with Viola at the Court 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 pro- 
 portion to the infrequency of going; that the 
 company 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? Getting in 
 96 
 
Essays 
 
 indeed, and crowding up those inconvenient 
 staircases, was bad enough; but there was still 
 a law of civility to woman recognised to quite 
 as great an extent as we ever found in the 
 other passages; and how a little 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 pease 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 our- 
 selves 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 al- 
 low ourselves beyond what the actual poor can 
 get at, that makes what I call a treat — when 
 two people living together, as we have done, 
 now and then indulge themselves in a cheap 
 luxury, which both like; 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 make much of 
 ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do 
 
 97 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 not mean the veriest poor 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 ac- 
 count for our exceedings ; many a long face did 
 you make over your puzzled accounts, and in 
 contriving to make it out how we had spent so 
 much, or that we had not spent so much, or 
 that it was impossible we should spend so much 
 next year ; and still we found our slender capi- 
 tal decreasing; but then, — betwixt ways, and 
 projects, and compromises of one sort or an- 
 other, 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 pock- 
 eted up our 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, however, smiling at the phantom of 
 wealth which her dear imagination had con- 
 jured up out of a clear income of poor hun- 
 dred pounds a year. "It is true we were hap- 
 98 
 
Essays 
 
 pier when we were poorer, but we were also 
 younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put 
 up with the excess, for if we were to shake the 
 superflux into the sea we should not much 
 mend ourselves. That we had much to strug- 
 gle with, as we grew up together, we have rea- 
 son 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 nat- 
 ural dilations of the youthful spirit which cir- 
 cumstances cannot straiten — with us are long 
 since passed away. Competence to age is sup- 
 plementary youth; a sorry supplement indeed, 
 but I fear 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 Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be 
 young, and you and I be young to see them; 
 could the good old one-shilling gallery days re- 
 turn, (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 stair- 
 cases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed 
 by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scram- 
 blers; could I once more hear those anxious 
 99 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 shrieks of yours, and the delicious Thank God, 
 we are safe, which always 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 Crcesus had, or the great 
 
 Jew R is supposed to have, to purchase it. 
 
 And now do just look at that merry little Chi- 
 nese waiter holding an umbrella, big enough 
 for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty 
 insipid half Madona-ish chit of a lady in that 
 very blue summer-house." 
 
 IOO 
 
Letters 
 
LETTERS 
 
 "****** Letters of dear Charles 
 Lamb, 'Saint Charles,' as Thackeray once 
 called him, while looking at one of his half- 
 mad letters and remembering his Devotion to' 
 that quite mad Sister. I must say I think his 
 Letters infinitely better than his Essays ; and 
 Patmore says his Conversation, when just 
 enough animated by Gin and Water, was better 
 than either : which I believe too. Procter said 
 he was far beyond the Coleridges, Words- 
 worths, Southeys, etc. And I am afraid I be- 
 lieve that also." 
 
 Edward FitzGerald to C. E. Norton, June 10, 
 1876. 
 
 TO COLERIDGE: 
 
 September 27, 1796. 
 
 My dearest Friend — White, or some of my 
 
 friends, or the public papers, by this time may 
 
 liave informed you of the terrible calamities 
 
 that have fallen on our family. I will only 
 
 103 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 give you the outlines : — My poor dear, dearest 
 sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of 
 her own mother. I was at hand only time 
 enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. 
 She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I 
 fear she must be moved to an hospital. God 
 has preserved to me my senses : I eat, and 
 drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I be- 
 lieve, very sound. My poor father was slightly 
 wounded, and I am left to take care of him 
 and my aunt. Mr. Norris, of the Bluecoat 
 School, has been very very kind to us, and we 
 have no other friend; but, thank God, I am 
 very calm and composed, and able to do the 
 best that remains to do. Write as religious a 
 letter as possible, but no mention of what is 
 gone and done with. With me "the former 
 things are passed away," and I have something 
 more to do than to feel. 
 God Almighty have us all in His keeping ! 
 
 C. Lamb. 
 
 Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed 
 every vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do 
 as you please, but if you publish, publish mine 
 (I give free leave) without name or initial, and 
 never send me a book, I charge you. 
 
 Your own judgment will convince you not to 
 take any notice of this yet to your dear wife. 
 You look after your family; I have my reason 
 and strength left to take care of mine. I charge 
 you, don't think of coming to see me. Write. 
 104 
 
Letters 
 
 I will not see you if you come. God Almighty 
 love you and all of us! C. Lamb. 
 
 TO COLERIDGE: 
 
 October 3, 1796. 
 My dearest Friend — Your letter was an in- 
 estimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort 
 to you, I know, to know that our prospects are 
 somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest sis- 
 ter, the unhappy and unconscious instrument 
 of the Almighty's judgments on our house, is 
 restored to her senses, — to a dreadful sense and 
 recollection of what has past, awful to her 
 mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end 
 of life), but tempered with religious resigna- 
 tion and the reasonings of a sound judgment, 
 which, in this early stage, knows how to dis- 
 tinguish between a deed committed in a tran- 
 sient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a 
 mother's murder. I have seen her. I found 
 her this morning, calm and serene ; far, very 
 far from an indecent forgetful serenity : she has 
 a most affectionate and tender concern for what 
 has happened. Indeed, from the beginning — 
 frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed — 
 I had confidence enough in her strength of 
 mind and religious principle, to look forward 
 to a time when even she might recover tranquil- 
 lity. God be praised, Coleridge ! wonderful as 
 it is to tell, I have never once been otherwise 
 than collected and calm; even on the dreadful 
 105 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 day, and in the midst of the teirible scene, I 
 preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may 
 have construed into indifference — a tranquillity 
 not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say 
 that it was a religious principle that most sup- 
 ported me? I allow much to other favourable 
 circumstances. I felt that I had something else 
 to do than to regret. On that first evening my 
 aunt was lying insensible — to all appearance 
 like one dying; my father, with his poor fore- 
 head plaistered over from a wound he had re- 
 ceived from a daughter, dearly loved by him, 
 and who loved him no less dearly; my mother 
 a dead and murdered corpse in the next room; 
 yet was I wonderfully supported. I closed not 
 my eyes in sleep that night, but lay without ter- 
 rors and without despair. I have lost no sleep 
 since. I had been long used not to rest in 
 things of sense, — had endeavoured after a com- 
 prehension of mind, unsatisfied with the "ig- 
 norant present time;" and this kept me up. I 
 had the whole weight of the family thrown on 
 me; for my brother, little disposed (I speak 
 not without tenderness for him) at any time to 
 take care of old age and infirmities, had now, 
 with his bad leg, an exemption from such 
 duties, and I was now left alone. One little 
 incident may serve to make you understand my 
 way of managing my mind : Within a day or 
 two after the fatal one, we dressed for dinner 
 a tongue, which we had had salted for some 
 weeks in the house. As I sat down, a feeling 
 1 06 
 
Letters 
 
 like remorse struck me : this tongue poor Mary 
 got for me; and can I partake of it now, when 
 she is far away? A thought occurred and re- 
 lieved me : — if I give into this way of feeling, 
 tnere is not a chair, a room, an object in our 
 rooms, that will not awaken the keenest griefs. 
 I must rise above such weaknesses. I hope this 
 was not want of true feeling. I did not let this 
 carry me, though, too far. On the very sec- 
 ond day (I date from the day of horrors), as is 
 usual in such cases, there were a matter of 
 twenty people, I do think, supping in our room : 
 they prevailed on me to eat with them (for to 
 eat I never refused). They were all making 
 merry in the room ! Some had come from 
 friendship, some from busy curiosity, and some 
 from interest. I was going to partake with 
 them, when my recollection came that my poor 
 dead mother was lying in the next room — the 
 very next room ; — a mother who, through life, 
 wished nothing but her children's welfare. In- 
 dignation, the rage of grief, something like re- 
 morse, rushed upon my mind. In an agony of 
 emotion I found my way mechanically to the 
 adjoining room, and fell on my knees by the 
 side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven, 
 and sometimes of her, for forgetting her so 
 soon. Tranquillity returned, and it was the 
 only violent emotion that mastered me. I think 
 it did me good. 
 
 I mention these things because I hate con- 
 cealment, and love to give a faithful journal of 
 107 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 what passes within me. Our friends have been 
 very good. Sam Le Grice, who was then in 
 town, was with me the first three or four days, 
 and was as a brother to me ; gave up every 
 hour of his time, to the very hurting of his 
 health and spirits, in constant attendance and 
 humouring my poor father ; talked with him, 
 read to him, played at cribbage with him (for 
 so short is the old man's recollection, that he 
 was playing at cards, as though nothing had 
 happened, while the coroner's inquest was sit- 
 ting over the way!) Samuel wept tenderly 
 when he went away, for his mother wrote him 
 a very severe letter on his loitering so long in 
 town, and he was forced to go. Mr. Norris, 
 of Christ's Hospital, has been as a father to 
 me — Mrs. Norris as a mother ; though we had 
 few claims on them. A gentleman, brother to 
 my godmother, from whom we never had right 
 or reason to expect any such assistance, sent 
 my father twenty pounds ; and to crown all 
 these God's blessings to our family at such a 
 time, an old lady, a cousin of my father and 
 aunt's, a gentlewoman of fortune, is to take my 
 aunt and make her comfortable for the short 
 remainder of her days. My aunt is recovered, 
 and as well as ever, and highly pleased at 
 thoughts of going — and has generously given 
 up the interest of her little money (which was 
 formerly paid my father for her board) wholely 
 and solely to my sister's use. Reckoning this, 
 we have, Daddy and I, for our two selves and 
 108 
 
Letters 
 
 an old maid-servant to look after him, when 
 I am out, which will be necessary, £170 (or 
 £180 rather) a-year, out of which we can spare 
 £50 or £60 at least for Mary while she stays 
 at. Islington, where she must and shall stay 
 during her father's life, for his and her com- 
 fort. I know John will make speeches about it, 
 but she shall not go into an hospital. The good 
 lady of the madhouse, and her daughter, an ele- 
 gant, sweet-behaved young lady, love her, and 
 are taken with her amazingly ; and I know from 
 her own mouth she loves them, and longs to be 
 with them as much. Poor thing, they say she 
 was but the other morning saying she knew she 
 must go to Bethlem for life ; that one of her 
 brothers would have it so, but the other would 
 wish it not, but be obliged to go with the 
 stream ; that she had often as she passed Beth- 
 lem thought it likely, ''here it may be my fate 
 to end my days," conscious of a certain flight- 
 iness in her poor head oftentimes, and mind- 
 ful of more than one severe illness of that 
 nature before. A legacy of £100, which my 
 father will have at Christmas, and this £20 I 
 mentioned before, with what is in the house, 
 will much more than set us clear. If my father, 
 an old servant-maid, and I, can't live, and live 
 comfortably, on £130 or £120 a-year, we ought 
 to burn by slow fires ; and I almost would, that 
 Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me 
 not leave one unfavourable impression on your 
 mind respecting my brother. Since this has 
 109 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 happened, he has been very kind and brotherly ; 
 but I fear for his mind : he has taken his ease 
 in the world, and is not fit himself to struggle 
 with difficulties, nor has much accustomed him- 
 self to throw himself into their way; and I 
 know his language is already, "Charles, you 
 must take care of yourself; you must not 
 abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have 
 been used to," etc., etc., and in that style of 
 talking. But you, a Necessarian, can respect 
 a difference of mind, and love what is amiable 
 in a character not perfect. He has been very 
 good ; but I fear for his mind. Thank God, I 
 can unconnect myself with him, and shall man- 
 age all my father's moneys in future myself, 
 if I take charge of Daddy, which poor John 
 has not even hinted a wish, at any future time 
 even, to share with me. The lady at this mad- 
 house assures me that I may dismiss imme- 
 diately both doctor and apothecary, retaining 
 occasionally a composing draught or so for a 
 while ; and there is a less expensive establish- 
 ment in her house, where she will only not 
 have a room and nurse to herself, for £50 or 
 guineas a-year — the outside would be £60. You 
 know, by economy, how much more even I shall 
 be able to spare for her comforts. She will I 
 fancy, if she stays, make one of the family, 
 rather than of the patients ; and the old and 
 young ladies I like exceedingly, and she loves 
 dearly; and they, as the saying is, take to her 
 very extraordinarily, if it is extraordinary that 
 no 
 
Letters 
 
 people who see my sister should love her. Of 
 all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor 
 sister was most and thoroughly devoid of the 
 least tincture of selfishness. I will enlarge upon 
 her qualities, poor dear, dearest soul, in a 
 future letter, for my own comfort, for I un- 
 derstand her thoroughly ; and, if I mistake not, 
 in the most trying situation that a human be- 
 ing can be found in, she will be found — (I 
 speak not with sufficient humility, I fear), but 
 humanly and foolishly speaking, she will be 
 found, I trust, uniformly great and amiable. 
 God keep her in her present mind ! — to whom 
 be thanks and praise for all His dispensations 
 to mankind. 
 
 C. Lamb. 
 
 These mentioned good fortunes and change 
 of prospects had almost brought my mind over 
 to the extreme, the very opposite to despair. 
 I was in danger of making myself too happy. 
 Your letter brought me back to a view of things 
 which I had entertained from the beginning. 
 I hope (for Mary I can answer) — but I hope 
 that / shall through life never have less recol- 
 lection nor a fainter impression of what has 
 happened than I have now. 'Tis not a light 
 thing, nor meant by the Almighty to be received 
 lightly. I must be serious, circumspect, and 
 deeply religious through life; and by such 
 means may both of us escape madness in 
 future, if it so please the Almighty. 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 Send me word how it fares with Sara. I re- 
 peat it, your letter was, and will be, an ines- 
 timable treasure to me. You have a view of 
 what my situation demands of me, like my own 
 view, and I trust a just one. 
 
 Coleridge, continue to write ; but do not for- 
 ever offend me by talking of sending me cash. 
 Sincerely, and on my soul, we do not want it. 
 God love you both ! 
 
 I will write again very soon. Do you write 
 directly. 
 
 TO MANNING* 
 
 November 28, 1800. 
 Dear Manning — I have received a very kind 
 invitation from Lloyd and Sophia, to go and 
 spend a month with them at the Lakes. Now 
 it fortunately happens (which is so seldom the 
 case) that I have spare cash by me, enough to 
 answer the expenses of so long a journey; and 
 I am determined to get away from the office by 
 some means. The purpose of this letter is to 
 request of you (my dear friend), that you will 
 not take it unkind if I decline my proposed visit 
 to Cambridge for the present. Perhaps I shall 
 be able to take Cambridge in my way, going or 
 coming. I need not describe to you the ex- 
 
 *Thomas Manning (1772-1840), a brilliant 
 mathematician, tutor at Caius College, Cam- 
 bridge, where Lamb first met him, and after- 
 wards for many years an explorer in China. 
 
 112 
 
Letters 
 
 pectations which such an one as myself, pent 
 up all my life in a dirty city, have formed of a 
 tour to the Lakes. Consider Grasmere ! Am- 
 bleside ! Wordsworth ! Coleridge ! I hope 
 you will. Hills, woods, lakes, and mountains, 
 to the devil. I will eat snipes with thee, 
 Thomas Manning. Only confess, confess, a 
 bite. 
 
 P. S. — I think you named the 16th; but was 
 it not modest of Lloyd to send such an invita- 
 tion ! It shows his knowledge of money and 
 time. I should be loth to think he meant 
 
 "Ironic satire sidelong sklented 
 On my poor pursie." — Burns. 
 
 For my part, with reference to my friends 
 northward, I must confess that I am not ro- 
 mance-bit about Nature. The earth, and sea, 
 and sky (when all is said), is but as a house to 
 dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and 
 good liquors flow like the conduits at an old 
 coronation, if they can talk sensibly, and feel 
 properly, I have no need to stand staring upon 
 the gilded looking-glass (that strained my 
 friend's purse-strings in the purchase) nor his 
 five-shilling print, over the mantlepiece of old 
 Nabbs the carrier (which only betrays his false 
 taste). Just as important to me (in a sense) 
 is all the furniture of my world ; eye-pamper- 
 ing, but satisfies no heart. Streets, streets, 
 streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent 
 Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of 
 
 ii3 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies 
 cheapening, gentlemen behind counters, lying, 
 authors in the street with spectacles, George 
 Dyers (you may know them by their gait), 
 lamps lit at night, pastrycooks' and silver- 
 smiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, 
 noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic 
 watchmen at night, with bucks reeling home 
 drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, 
 cries of "Fire !" and "Stop thief !" ; inns of 
 court, with their learned air, and halls, and 
 butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old 
 book-stalls, "Jeremy Taylors," "Burtons on 
 Melancholy," and "Religio Medicis," on every 
 stall. These are thy pleasures, O London ! with 
 thy many sins. O City, abounding in w . . ., 
 for these may Keswick and her giant brood go 
 
 han S ! C. L. 
 
 TO WORDSWORTH 
 
 January 30, 1801. 
 I ought before this to have replied to your 
 very kind invitation into Cumberland. With 
 you and your sister I could gang anywhere ; but 
 I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to af- 
 ford so desperate a journey. Separate from 
 the pleasure of your company, I don't much 
 care if I never see a mountain in my life. I 
 have passed all my clays in London, until I 
 have formed as manv and intense local attach- 
 ments as any of you mountaineers can have 
 114 
 
Letters 
 
 done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of 
 the Strand and Fleet Street ; the innumerable 
 trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, 
 wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wicked- 
 ness round about Covent Garden ; the very- 
 women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken 
 scenes, rattles ; life awake, if you awake, at all 
 hours of the night ; the impossibility of being 
 dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt 
 and mud, the sun shining upon houses and 
 pavements, the print-shops, the old book-stalls, 
 parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, 
 steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes 
 — London itself a pantomime and a masquerade 
 — all these things work themselves into my 
 mind, and feed me, without a power of sati- 
 ating me. The wonder of these sights impels 
 me into night-walks about her crowded streets, 
 and I often shed tears in the motley Strand 
 from fulness of joy at so much life. All these 
 emotions must be strange to you ; so are your 
 rural emotions to me. But consider, what must 
 I have been doing all my life, not to have lent 
 great portions of my heart with usury to such 
 scenes ? 
 
 My attachments are all local, purely local. 
 I have no passion (or have had none since I 
 was in love, and then it was the spurious en- 
 gendering- of poetry and books) for groves and 
 valleys. The rooms where I was born, the fur- 
 niture which has been before my eyes all my 
 life, the book-case which has followed me about 
 
 115 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 like a faithful dog, (only exceeding him in 
 knowledge), wherever I have moved, old 
 chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I 
 have sunned myself, my old school, — these are 
 my mistresses. Have I not enough, without 
 your mountains? I do not envy you. I should 
 pity you, did I not know that the mind will 
 make friends of anything. Your sun, and 
 moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me 
 no more, or scarcely come to me in more 
 vener .ble characters, than as a gilded room 
 with tapestry and tapers, where I might live 
 with handsome visible objects. I consider the 
 clouds above me but as a roof beautifully 
 painted, but unable to satisfy the mind : and at 
 last, like the pictures of the apartment of a 
 connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a 
 pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, 
 have been the beauties of Nature, as they have 
 been confinedly called ; so ever fresh, and 
 preen, and warm are all the inventions of men, 
 and assemblies of men in this great city. I 
 should certainly have laughed with dear 
 Joanna. 
 
 Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. 
 and yourself; and a kiss from me to little Bar- 
 bara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my 
 
 P,3y - C. L. 
 
 116 
 
Letters 
 
 TO THOMAS MANNING 
 
 London, September 24, 1802. 
 My dear Manning — Since the date of my last 
 letter I have been a traveller. A strong desire 
 seized me of visiting remote regions. My first 
 impulse was to go and see Paris. It was a 
 trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that I 
 did not understand a word of the language, 
 since I certainly intend some time in my life 
 to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never 
 to learn the language ; therefore that could be 
 no objection. However, I am very glad I did 
 not go, because you had left Paris (I see) be- 
 fore I could have set out. I believe, Stoddart 
 promising to go with me another year, pre- 
 vented that plan. My next scheme (for to my 
 restless, ambitious mind London was become a 
 bed of thorns) was to visit the far-famed peak 
 in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, 
 without breeches. This my purer mind rejected 
 as indelicate. And my final resolve was, a 
 tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to 
 Keswick, without giving Coleridge any notice, 
 for my time, being precious, did not admit of 
 it. He received us with all the hospitality in 
 the world, and gave up his time to show us all 
 the wonders of the country. He dwells upon a 
 small hill by the side of Keswick, in a com- 
 fortable house, quite enveloped on all sides by 
 a net of mountains : great floundering bears 
 117 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 and monsters they seemed, ali couchant and 
 asleep. We got in in the evening, travelling in 
 a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a 
 gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the 
 mountains into colours, purple, etc. etc. We 
 thought we had got into fairyland. But that 
 went off (as it never came again; while we 
 stayed we had no more fine sunsets), and we 
 entered Coleridge's comfortable study just in 
 the dusk, when the mountains were all dark 
 with clouds upon their heads. Such an impres- 
 sion I never received from objects of sight be- 
 fore, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glori- 
 ous creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, etc. I 
 never shall forget ye, how ye lay about that 
 night, like an intrenchment ; gone to bed, as it 
 seemed for the night, but promising that ye 
 were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had 
 got a blazing fire in his study ; which is a large 
 antique, ill-shaped room, with an old-fash- 
 ioned organ, never played upon, big enough for 
 a church, shelves of scattered folios, an ^olian 
 harp, and an old sofa, half bed, etc. And all 
 looking out upon the last fading view of Skid- 
 daw, and his broad-breasted brethren : what a 
 night ! Here we stayed three full weeks, in 
 which time I visited Wordsworth's cottage, 
 where we stayed a day or two with the Clark- 
 sons (good people, and most hospitable, at 
 whose house we tarried one day and night), 
 and saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone 
 to Calais. They have since been in London, 
 118 
 
Letters 
 
 and past much time with us : he is now gone 
 into Yorkshire to be married. So we have seen 
 Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater 
 (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the 
 other end of Ulswater; I forget the name; to 
 which we travelled on a very sultry day, over 
 the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered 
 up to the top of Skiddaw, and I have waded up 
 the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied my- 
 self that there is such a thing as that which 
 tourists call romantic, which I very much sus- 
 pected before : they make such a spluttering 
 about it, and toss their splendid epithets around 
 them, till they give as dim a light as at four 
 o'clock next morning the lamps do after an il- 
 lumination. Mary was excessively tired when 
 she got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we 
 came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be 
 imagined more cold, running over cold stones), 
 and with the reinforcement of a draught of 
 cold water she surmounted it most manfully. 
 Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop 
 of it, with a prospect of mountains all about 
 and about, making you giddy; and then Scot- 
 land afar off, and the border countries so fa- 
 mous in song and ballad! It was a day that 
 will stand out like a mountain, I am sure, in 
 my life. But I am returned (I have now been 
 come home near three weeks; I was a month 
 out), and you cannot conceive the degradation 
 I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander 
 free as air among mountains, and bathe in 
 119 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 rivers without being controlled by any one, to 
 come home and work. I felt very little. I had 
 been dreaming I was a very great man. But 
 that is going off, and I find I shall conform 
 in time to that state of life to which it has 
 pleased God to call me. Besides, after all, Fleet 
 Street and the Strand are better places to live 
 in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still 
 I turn back to those great places where I wan- 
 dered about, participating in their greatness. 
 After all, I could not live in Skiddaw. I could 
 spend a year, two, three years among them, 
 but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet 
 Street at the end of that time, or I should mope 
 and pine away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a 
 fine creature. My habits are changing, I think, 
 i. e. from drunk to sober. Whether I shall be 
 happier or not remains to be proved. I shall 
 certainly be more happy in a morning; but 
 whether I shall not sacrifice the fat, and the 
 marrow, and the kidneys, i. e. the night, glori- 
 ous care-drowning night, that heals all our 
 wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, 
 changes the scene from indifferent and flat to 
 bright and brilliant! O Manning, if I should 
 have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time 
 you come to England, of not admitting any 
 spirituous liquors into my house, will you be 
 mv guest on such shameworthy terms? Is life, 
 with such limitations, worth trying? The truth 
 is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly 
 harpies about my house, who consume me. This 
 
Letters 
 
 is a pitiful tale to be read at St. Gothard, but it 
 is just now nearest my heart. Fen wick is a 
 ruined man. He is hiding himself from 
 his creditors, and. has sent his wife and 
 children into the country. Fell, my other 
 drunken companion (that has been: nam hie 
 ccestus artemque repono), is turned editor 
 of a Naval Chronicle. Godwin continues a 
 steady friend, though the same facility does 
 not remain of visiting him often. That 
 . . . has detached Marshall from his house ; 
 Marshall, the man who went to sleep 
 when the "Ancient Mariner" was reading; the 
 old, steady, unalterable friend of the Professor. 
 Holcroft is not yet come to town. I expect to 
 see him, and will deliver your message. Things 
 come crowding in to say, and no room for 'em. 
 Some things are too little to be told, — i. e. to 
 have a preference ; some are too big and cir- 
 cumstantial. Thanks for yours, which was 
 most delicious. Would I had been with you, 
 benighted, etc. ! I fear my head is turned with 
 wandering. I shall never be the same acqui- 
 escent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, 
 for I shall not like to hazard a letter, not know- 
 ing where the fates have carried you. Farewell, 
 my dear fellow. 
 
 C. Lamb. 
 
 121 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 To Miss HUTCHINSON* 
 
 Thursday, October 19, 1815. 
 Dear Miss H. — I am forced to be the replier 
 to your letter, for Mary has been ill, and gone 
 from home these five weeks yesterday. She has 
 left me very lonely and very miserable. I stroll 
 about, but there is no rest but at one's own fire- 
 side, and there is no rest for me there now. I 
 look forward to the worse half being past, and 
 keep up as well as I can. She has begun to 
 show some favourable symptoms. The return 
 of her disorder has been frightfully soon this 
 time, with scarce a six months' interval. I am 
 almost afraid my worry of spirits about the E. 
 I. House was partly the cause of her illness, 
 but one always imputes it to the cause next at 
 hand ; more probably it comes from some cause 
 we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts 
 sad great slices out of the time, the little time, 
 we shall have to live together. I don't know but 
 the recurrence of these illnesses might help me 
 to sustain her death better than if we had had 
 no partial separations. But I won't talk of 
 death. I will imagine us immortal, or forget 
 that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a 
 few weeks we may be making our meal to- 
 gether, or sitting in the front row of the Pit at 
 Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past 
 
 *Miss Hutchinson was a sister of Words- 
 worth's wife. 
 
 122 
 
Letters 
 
 the theatres, to look at the outside of them, at 
 least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget 
 we are assailable; we are strong for the time 
 as rocks; — "the wind is tempered to the shorn 
 Lambs." Poor C. Lloyd, and poor Priscilla ! I 
 feel I hardly feel enough for him ; my own 
 calamities press about me, and involve me in a 
 thick integument not to be reached at by other 
 folks' misfortunes. But I feel all I can — all the 
 kindness I can towards you all — God bless you ! 
 I hear nothing from Coleridge. 
 Yours truly, C. Lamb. 
 
 To J. TAYLOR.* 
 
 July 30, 1 82 1. 
 Dear Sir — You will do me injustice if you do 
 not convey to the writer of the beautiful lines, 
 which I now return you, my sense of the ex- 
 treme kindness which dictated them. Poor Elia 
 (call him Ellia) does not pretend to so very 
 clear revelations of a future state of being as 
 Olen seems gifted with. He stumbles about 
 dark mountains at best; but he knows at least 
 how to be thankful for this life, and is too 
 thankful indeed for certain relationships lent 
 him here, not to tremble for a poss^ ble resump- 
 tion of the gift. He is too apt to express him- 
 self lightly, and cannot be sorry for the pres- 
 
 *Lamb's publisher. This letter explains the 
 origin of the nom-de-plume "Elia." 
 
 123 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 ent occasion, as it has called forth a reproof so 
 Christian-like. His animus at least (whatever 
 become of it in the female termination) hath 
 always been cum Christianis. 
 
 Pray make my gratefullest respects to the 
 Poet (do I natter myself when I hope it may 
 
 be M y?) and say how happy I should feel 
 
 myself in an acquaintance with him. I will just 
 mention that in the middle of the second col- 
 umn, where I have affixed a cross, the line 
 
 "One in a skeleton's ribb'd hollow cooped," 
 
 is undoubtedly wrong. Should it not be — 
 
 "A skeleton's rib or ribs?" 
 or, 
 
 "In a skeleton ribb'd, hollow-coop'd?" 
 
 I perfectly remember the plate in Quarles. In 
 the first page esoteric is pronounced esoteric. 
 It should be (if that is the word) esoteric. The 
 false accent may be corrected by omitting the 
 word old. Pray, for certain reasons, give me 
 to the 18th at farthest extremity for my next. 
 
 Poor Elia, the real (for I am but a counter- 
 feit), 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 ex- 
 isted, 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 clapt down the name of Elia to it, which 
 124 
 
Letters 
 
 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 
 usurpation of his name, and found him, alas ! 
 no more than a name, for he died of consump- 
 tion 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. 
 
 Dear sir, yours truly, C. Lamb. 
 
 Messrs. Taylor & Hessey, Fleet Street, 
 for J. Taylor, Esq. 
 
 To J. TAYLOR. 
 
 December 7, 1822. 
 Dear Sir — I should like the enclosed Dedica- 
 tion 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 curt for curst. 
 
 C. L. 
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 TO THE FRIENDLY AND JUDICIOUS READER, 
 
 who will take these Papers, as they were 
 meant; not understanding everything per- 
 versely in its absolute and literal sense, but giv- 
 ing fair construction, as to an after-dinner con- 
 
 125 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 versation ; allowing for the rashness and neces- 
 sary 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 philos- 
 opher, — "you beat but on the case of Elia." On 
 better consideration, pray omit that Dedication. 
 The Essays want no Preface : they are all 
 Preface. A Preface is nothing but a talk with 
 the reader; and they do nothing else. Pray 
 omit it. 
 
 There will be a sort of Preface in the next 
 Magazine, which may act as an advertisement, 
 but not proper for the volume. 
 
 Let Elia come forth bare as he was born. 
 
 C. L. 
 
 Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, 
 
 Booksellers, Fleet Street. 
 
 No Preface. 
 
 126 
 
Letters 
 
 To BERNARD BARTON.* 
 
 January g, 1823. 
 
 "Throw yourself on the world without any- 
 rational plan of support, beyond what the 
 chance employ of booksellers would afford 
 you ! ! !" 
 
 Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the 
 steep Tarpeian rock, slap-dash headlong upon 
 iron spikes. If you had but five consola- 
 tory minutes between the desk and the bed, 
 make much of them, and live a century 
 in them, rather than turn slave to the 
 booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars when 
 they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto 
 you have been at arm's length from them. 
 Come not within their grasp. I have known 
 many authors for bread, some repining, others 
 envying the blessed security of a counting- 
 house, all agreeing they would rather have 
 been tailors, weavers, — what not, rather than 
 the things they were. I have known some 
 starved, some to go mad, one dear friend liter- 
 ally dying in a workhouse. You know not what 
 a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are. 
 Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) 
 has made a fortune by book drudgery, what he 
 
 *The "Quaker poet," a bank clerk in Wood- 
 bridge, Suffolk. His daughter married Edward 
 Fitzgerald, who published in 1849 a volume of 
 selections from Barton's poetry. 
 
 :27 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 has found them. Oh, you know not (may yotl 
 never know!) the miseries of subsisting by au- 
 thorship. Tis a pretty appendage to a situa- 
 tion like yours or mine; but a slavery, worse 
 than all slavery, to be a booKseller's dependent, 
 to drudge your brains for pots of ale and 
 breasts of mutton, to change your free thoughts 
 and voluntary numbers for ungracious task- 
 work. Those fellows hate us. The reason I 
 take to be, that contrary to other trades, in 
 which the master gets all the credit (a jewel- 
 ler or silversmith for instance), and the jour- 
 neyman, who really does the fine work, is in the 
 background, — in our work the world gives all 
 the credit to us, whom they consider as their 
 journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and 
 cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the 
 blood of us out, to put another sixpence in their 
 mechanic pouches ! I contend that a bookseller 
 has a relative honesty towards authors, not like 
 his honesty to the rest of the world. B., who 
 first engaged me as "Elia," has not paid me up 
 yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying 
 appeals), yet how the knave fawned when I 
 was of service to him ! Yet I dare say the fel- 
 low is punctual in settling his milk-score, etc. 
 
 Keep to your bank, and the bank will keep 
 you. Trust not to the public; you may hang, 
 starve, drown yourself, for anything that 
 worthy personage cares. I bless every star that 
 Providence, not seeing good to make me inde- 
 pendent, has seen it next good to settle me upom 
 128 
 
Letters 
 
 the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, 
 good B. B., in the banking-office. What ! is 
 there not from six to eleven p.m. six days in the 
 week, and is there not all Sunday ? Fie, what a 
 superfluity of man's time, if you could think 
 so ! — enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, 
 poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. Oh the 
 corroding, torturing, tormenting thoughts, that 
 disturb the brain of the unlucky wight who 
 must draw upon it for daily sustenance ! 
 Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of 
 mercantile employment ; look upon them as lov- 
 ers' quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Wel- 
 come dead timber of a desk, that makes me 
 live. A little grumbling is a wholesome medi- 
 cine for the spleen ; but in my inner heart do 
 I approve and embrace this our close but un- 
 harassing way of life. I am quite serious. If 
 you can send me Fox, I will not keep it six 
 weeks, and will return it, with warm thanks to 
 yourself and friend, without blot or dog's ear. 
 You will much oblige me by this kindness. 
 Yours truly, C. Lamb. 
 
 TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 Colebrook Cottage, April 6, 1825. 
 Dear Wordsworth — I have been several times 
 meditating a letter to you concerning the good 
 thing which has befallen me, but the thought of 
 poor Monkhouse came across me. He was one 
 that I had exulted in the prospect of congratu- 
 129 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 lating me. He and you were to have been the 
 first participators, for indeed it has been ten 
 weeks since the first motion of it. Here am I 
 then, after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in 
 my own room at eleven o'clock this finest of 
 all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a 
 year for the remainder of my life, live I as long 
 as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and 
 starved at ninety; £441, i. e. £450, with a de- 
 duction of £g for a provision secured to my 
 sister, she being survivor, the pension guaran- 
 teed by Act Georgii Tertii, etc. 
 
 I came home for ever on Tuesday in last 
 week. The incomprehensibleness of my condi- 
 tion overwhelmed me. It was like passing 
 from life into eternity. Every year to be as 
 long as three, i. e. to have three times as much 
 real time (time that is my own) in it ! I 
 wandered about thinking I was happy, but feel- 
 ing I was not. But that tumultuousness is 
 passing off, and I begin to understand the 
 nature of the gift. Holydays, even the annual 
 month, were always uneasy joys; their con- 
 scious fugitiveness ; the craving after making 
 the most of them. Now, when all is holyday, 
 there are no holydays. I can sit at home, in 
 rain or shine, without a restless impulse for 
 walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon 
 find it as natural to me to be my own master, 
 as it has been irksome to have had a master. 
 Mary wakes every morning with an obscure 
 feeling that some good has happened to us. 
 130 
 
Letters 
 
 Leigh Hunt and Montgomery, after their re- 
 leasements, describe the shock of their emanci- 
 pation much as I feel mine. But it hurt their 
 frames. I eat, drink, and sleep as sound as 
 ever. I lay no anxious schemes for going 
 hither and thither, but take things as they oc- 
 cur. Yesterday I excursioned twenty miles; 
 to-day I write a few letters. Pleasuring was 
 for fugitive play-days ; mine are fugitive only 
 in the sense that life is fugitive. Freedom and 
 life co-existent ! 
 
 At the foot of such a call upon you for 
 gratulation, I am ashamed to advert to that 
 melancholy event. Monkhouse was a charac- 
 ter I learned to love slowly, but it grew upon 
 me, yearly, monthly, daily. What a chasm has 
 it made in our pleasant parties ! His noble 
 friendly face was always coming before me, 
 till this hurrying event in my life came, and 
 for the time has absorbed all interest; in fact 
 it has shaken me a little. My old desk com- 
 panions, with whom I have had such merry 
 hours, seem to reproach me for removing my 
 lot from among them. They were pleasant 
 creatures ; but to the anxieties of business, and 
 a weight of possible worse ever impending, I 
 was not equal. Tuthill and Gillman gave me 
 my certificates. I laughed at the friendly lie 
 implied in them; but my sister shook her 'head, 
 and said it was all true. Indeed, this last Win- 
 ter I was jaded out: Winters were always 
 worse than other parts of the year, because the 
 
 131 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 spirits are worse, and I had no daylight. In 
 Summer I had day-light evenings. The relief 
 was hinted to me from a superior Power, when 
 I, poor slave, had not a hope but that I must 
 wait another seven years with Jacob : and lo ! 
 the Rachel which I coveted is brought to me ! 
 
 Have you read the noble dedication of Irv- 
 ing's "Missionary Orations" to S. T. C. ? Who 
 shall call this man a quack hereafter? What 
 the Kirk will think of it neither I nor Irving 
 care. When somebody suggested to him that 
 it would not be likely to do him good, videlicet, 
 among his own people, "That is a reason for 
 doing it," was his noble answer. That Irving 
 thinks he has profited mainly by S. T. C, I 
 have no doubt. The very style of the Dedica- 
 tion shows it. 
 
 Communicate my news to Southey, and beg 
 his pardon for my being so long acknowledging 
 his kind present of the "Church," which cir- 
 cumstances, having no reference to himself, 
 prevented at the time. Assure him of my 
 deep respect and friendliest feelings. 
 
 Divide the same, or rather each take the 
 whole to you — I mean you and all yours. To 
 Miss Hutchinson I must write separate. 
 
 Farewell ! and end at last, long selfish letter. 
 
 C. Lamb. 
 
 132 
 
Letters 
 
 TO BERNARD BARTON 
 
 Enfield Chase Side, Saturday, 
 2$th of July, a. d. 1829, II A. M. 
 There! — a fuller, plumper, juicier date never 
 dropt from Idumean palm. Am I in the date- 
 ive case now? If not, a fig for dates, which 
 is more than a date is worth. I never stood 
 much affected to these limitary specialties ; least 
 of all, since the date of mv superannuation. 
 
 "What have I with time to do? 
 Slaves of desks, 'twas meant for you." 
 
 Dear B. B. — Your handwriting has conveyed 
 much pleasure to me in report of Lucy's res- 
 toration. Would I could send you as good 
 news of my poor Lucy. But some wearisome 
 weeks I must remain lonely yet. I have had 
 the loneliest time, near ten weeks, broken by a 
 short apparition of Emma for her holidays, 
 whose departure only deepened the returning 
 solitude, and by ten days I have past in town. 
 But town, with all my native hankering after 
 it, is not what it was. The streets, the shops 
 are left ; but all old friends are gone ! And in 
 London I was frightfully convinced of this as 
 I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. 
 I have ceased to care almost about anybody. 
 The bodies I cared for are in graves, or dis- 
 persed. My old clubs, that lived so long and 
 flourished so steadily, are crumbled away. 
 133 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 When I took leave of our adopted young friend 
 at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling rain, 
 and I had nowhere to go. Home have I none, 
 and not a sympathising house to turn to in the 
 great city. Never did the waters of heaven 
 pour down on a forlorner head. Yet I tried 
 ten days at a sort of friend's house, but it was 
 large and straggling, — one of the individuals of 
 my old long knot of friends, card-players, 
 pleasant companions, that have tumbled to 
 pieces, into dust and other things; and I got 
 home on Thursday, convinced that I was bet- 
 ter to get home to my hole at Enfield, and 
 hide like a sick cat in my corner. Less than a 
 month I hope will bring home Mary. She is 
 at Fulham, looking better in her health than 
 ever, but sadly rambling, and scarce showing 
 any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when I 
 should come again. But the old feelings will 
 come back again, and we shall drown old sor- 
 rows over a game of picquet again. But 'tis a 
 tedious cut out of a life of sixty-four, to lose 
 twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two. 
 And to make me more alone, our ill-tempered 
 maid is gone, who, with all her airs, was yet a 
 home-piece of furniture, a record of better 
 days. The young thing that has succeeded her 
 is good and attentive, but she is nothing. And 
 I have no one here to talk over old matters 
 with. Scolding and quarrelling have some- 
 thing of familiarity, and a community of in- 
 terest; they imply acquaintance; they are of 
 
 134 
 
Letters 
 
 resentment, which is of the family of clearness. 
 I can neither scold nor quarrel at this in- 
 significant implement of household services: 
 she is less than a cat, and just better than a 
 deal dresser. What I can do, and do over- 
 do, is to walk; but deadly long are the days, 
 these Summer all-day days, with but a half- 
 hour's candle-light, and no fire-light. I do not 
 write, tell your kind inquisitive Eliza, and can 
 hardly read. In the ensuing Blackwood will be 
 an old dejected farce of mine, which may be 
 new to you, if you see that same medley. What 
 things are all the magazines now ! I contrive 
 studiously not to see them. The popular New 
 Monthly is perfect trash. Poor Hessey, I sup- 
 pose you see, has failed ; Hunt and Clarke too. 
 Your "Vulgar Truths" will be a good name; 
 and I think your prose must please — me at 
 least. But 'tis useless to write poetry with no 
 purchasers. 'Tis cold work authorship, with- 
 out something to puff one into fashion. Could 
 you not write something on Quakerism, for 
 Quakers to read, but nominally addressed to 
 Non-Quakers, explaining your dogmas — wait- 
 ing on the Spirit — by the analogy of human 
 calmness and patient waiting on the judgment? 
 I scarcely know what I mean, but to make 
 Non-Quakers reconciled to your doctrines, by 
 showing something like them in mere human 
 operations ; but I hardly understand myself ; so 
 let it pass for nothing. I pity you for over- 
 work ; but I assure you, no work is worse. The 
 135 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome 
 food. I bragged formerly that I could not have 
 too much time. I have a surfeit. With few 
 years to come, the days are wearisome. But 
 weariness is not eternal. Something will shine 
 out to take the load off that flags me, which is 
 at present intolerable. I have killed an hour or 
 two in this poor scrawl. I am a sanguinary 
 murderer of time, and would kill him inch- 
 meal just now. But the snake is vital. Well : 
 I shall write merrier anon. 'Tis the present 
 copy of my countenance I send, and to com- 
 plain is a little to alleviate. May you enjoy 
 yourself as far as the wicked wood will let you, 
 and think that you are not quite alone as I am ! 
 Health to Lucia, and to Anna, and kind re- 
 membrances. Your forlorn, C. L. 
 
 TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 January 22, 1830. 
 And is it a year since we parted from you at 
 the steps of Edmonton stage? There are not 
 now the years that there used to be. The tale 
 of the dwindled age of men, reported of suc- 
 cessional mankind, is true of the same man 
 only. We do not live a year in a year now. 
 'Tis a punctum stans. The seasons pass us 
 with indifference. Spring cheers not, nor Win- 
 ter heightens our gloom ; Autumn hath fore- 
 gone its moralities, — they are fi hey-pass re- 
 136 
 
Letters 
 
 pass," as in a show-box. Yet, as far as last 
 year occurs back, — for they scarce show a re- 
 flex now, they make no memory as heretofore, 
 — 'twas sufficiently gloomy. Let the sullen 
 nothing pass. Suffice it that after sad spirits, 
 prolonged through many of its months, as it 
 called them, we have cast our skins ; have taken 
 a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle, 
 called housekeeping, and are settled down into 
 poor boarders and lodgers at next door with an 
 old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull En- 
 field. Here we have nothing to do with our 
 victuals but to eat them ; with the garden but 
 to see it grow; with the tax-gatherer but to 
 hear him knock ; with the maid but to hear her 
 scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are 
 things unknown to us, save as spectators of the 
 pageant. We are fed we know not how; 
 quietists — confiding ravens. We have otium 
 pro dignitate, a respectable insignificance. Yet 
 in the self-condemned obliviousness, in the 
 stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life, 
 not quite killed, rise, prompting me that there 
 was a London, and that I was of that old 
 Jerusalem. In dreams I am in Fleet Market, 
 but I wake and cry to sleep again. I die hard, 
 a stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete. 
 What have I gained by health? Intolerable 
 dulness. What by early hours and moderate 
 meals? A total blank. O never let the lying 
 poets be believed, who 'tice men from the 
 cheerful haunts of streets, or think they mean 
 
 137 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 it not of a country village. In the ruins of 
 Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or 
 muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers ; but 
 to have a little teazing image of a town about 
 one ; country folks that do not look like coun- 
 try folks ; shops two yards square, half-a-dozen 
 apples, and two penn'orth of overlooked gin- 
 ger-bread for the lofty fruiterers of Oxford 
 Street; and, for the immortal book and print 
 stalls a circulating library that stands still, 
 where the show-picture is a last year's Valen- 
 tine, and whither the fame of the last ten 
 Scotch novels has not yet travelled, — (marry, 
 they just begin to be conscious of the Red- 
 gauntlet:) — to have a new plastered flat 
 church, and to be wishing that it was but a 
 cathedral ! The very blackguards here are de- 
 generate ; the topping gentry stock-brokers ; the 
 passengers too many to insure your quiet, or 
 let you go about whistling or gaping, too few 
 to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet 
 Street. Confiding, room-keeping, thickest Win- 
 ter, is yet more bearable here than the gaudy 
 months. Among one's books at one's fire by 
 candle, one is soothed into an oblivion that one 
 is not in the country ; but with the light the 
 green fields return, till I gaze, and in a calen- 
 ture can plunge myself into St. Giles's. O let 
 no native Londoner imagine that health, and 
 rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of 
 converse sweet, and recreative study, can make 
 the country anything better than altogether 
 138 
 
Letters* 
 
 odious and detestable! A garden was the 
 primitive prison, till man, with Promethean 
 felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out 
 of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, 
 Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, tav- 
 erns, playhouses, satires, epigrams, puns, — 
 these all came in on the town part, and the 
 thither side of innocence. Man found out in- 
 ventions. From my den I return you con- 
 dolence for your decaying sight; not for any- 
 thing there is to see in the country, but for the 
 miss of the pleasure of reading a London news- 
 paper. The poets are as well to listen to; any- 
 thing high may, nay must, be read out; you 
 read it to yourself with an imaginary auditor; 
 but the light paragraphs must be glid over by 
 the proper eye; mouthing mumbles their gos- 
 samery substance. 'Tis these trifles I should 
 mourn in fading sight. A newspaper is the 
 single gleam of comfort I receive here; it 
 comes from rich Cathay with tidings of man- 
 kind. Yet I could not attend to it, read out by 
 the most beloved voice. But your eyes do not 
 get worse, I gather. O for the collyrium of 
 Tobias inclosed in a whiting's liver, to send 
 you with no apocryphal good wishes ! The last 
 long time I heard from you, you had knocked 
 your head against something. Do not do so; 
 for your head (I do not flatter) is not a 
 knob, or the top of a brass nail, or the end of a 
 nine pin, — unless a Vulcanian hammer could 
 fairly batter a "Recluse" out of it; then would 
 139 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 I bid the smirched god knock and knock lustily, 
 the two-handed skinker. Mary must squeeze 
 out a line propria manu, but indeed her fingers 
 have been incorrigibly nervous to letter writing 
 for a long interval. 'Twill please you all to 
 hear, that though I fret like a lion in a net, her 
 present health and spirits are better than they 
 have been for some time past. She is absolutely 
 three years and a half younger, as I tell her, 
 since we have adopted this boarding plan. 
 
 Our providers are an honest pair, Dame 
 W[estwood] and her husband. He, when the 
 light of prosperity shined on them, a moder- 
 ately thriving haberdasher, within Bow bells, 
 retired since with something under a compe- 
 tence; writes himself parcel gentleman; hath 
 borne parish offices ; sings fine old sea songs at 
 threescore and ten ; sighs only now and then 
 when he thinks that he has a son on his hands, 
 about fifteen, whom he finds a difficulty in get- 
 ting out into the world, and then checks a sigh 
 with muttering, as I once heard him prettily, 
 not meaning to be heard, "I have married my 
 daughter, however;" takes the weather as it 
 comes : outsides it to town in severest season ; 
 and o'winter nights tells old stories not tend- 
 ing to literature (how comfortable to author- 
 rid folks!), and has one anecdote, upon which 
 and about forty pounds a year he seems to have 
 retired in green old age. It was how he was a 
 rider in his youth, travelling for shops, and 
 once (not to balk his employer's bargain) on a 
 140 
 
Letters 
 
 sweltering day in August, rode foaming into 
 Dunstable upon a mad horse, to the dismay 
 and expostulatory wonderment of innkeepers, 
 ostlers, etc., who declared they would not have 
 bestrid the beast to win the Derby. Under- 
 stand, the creature galled to death and despera- 
 tion by gad-flies, cormorant-winged, worse 
 than beset Inachus's daughter. This he tells, 
 this he brindles and burnishes on a Winter's 
 eve ; 'tis his star of set glory, his rejuvenes- 
 cence, to descant upon. Far from me be it (dii 
 avertant) to look a gift story in the mouth, or 
 cruelly to surmise (as those who doubt the 
 plunge of Curtius) that the inseparate conjunc- 
 ture of man and beast, the centaur-phenomenon 
 that staggered all Dunstable, might have been 
 the effect of unromantic necessity; that the 
 horse-part carried the reasoning, willy nilly; 
 that needs must when such a devil drove; that 
 certain spiral configurations in the frame of 
 T [nomas] W[estwood] unfriendly to alighting, 
 made the alliance more forcible than voluntary. 
 Let him enjoy his fame for me, nor let me hint 
 a whisper that shall dismount Bellerophon. 
 But in case he was an involuntary martyr, yet 
 if in the fiery conflict he buckled the soul of a 
 constant haberdasher to him, and adopted his 
 flames, let accident and him share the glory. 
 You would all like Thomas Westwood. How 
 weak is painting to describe a man ! Say that 
 he stands four feet and a nail high by his own 
 yard measure, which, like the sceptre of Aga- 
 141 
 
Essays 
 
 memnon, shall never sprout again, still you 
 have no adequate idea; nor when I tell you 
 that his dear hump, which I have favoured in 
 the picture, seems to me of the buffalo — indica- 
 tive and repository of mild qualities, a budget 
 of kindnesses — still you have not the man. 
 Knew you old Norris of the Temple? sixty 
 years ours and our father's friend? He was 
 not more natural to us tha*i this old W., the 
 acquaintance of scarce more weeks. Under his 
 roof now ought I to take my rest, but that 
 back-looking ambition tells me I might yet be 
 a Londoner ! Well, if we ever do move, we 
 have incumbrances the less to impede us; all 
 our furniture has faded under the auctioneer's 
 hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished 
 frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a 
 spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came 
 into Enfield, and naked we must go out of it. 
 I would live in London shirtless, bookless. 
 Henry Crabb is at Rome ; advices to that effect 
 have reached Bury. But by solemn legacy he 
 bequeathed at parting (whether he should live 
 or die) a turkey of Suffolk to be sent every 
 succeeding Christmas to us and divers other 
 friends. What a genuine old bachelor's ac- 
 tion ! I fear he will find the air of Italy too 
 classic. His station is in the Harz forest; his 
 soul is be-Goethed. Miss Kelly we never see; 
 Talfourd not this half-year: the latter flour- 
 ishes, but the exact number of his children 
 (God forgive me!) I have utterly forgotten. 
 142 
 
Letters 
 
 We single people are often out in our count 
 there. Shall I say two? We see scarce any- 
 body. Can I cram loves enough to you all in 
 this little O ? Excuse particularising. 
 
 C. L. 
 
 TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 [End of May nearly] 1833. 
 
 Dear Wordsworth — Your letter, save in what 
 respects your dear sister's health, cheered me 
 in my new solitude. Mary is ill again. Her 
 illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three 
 months, followed by two of depression most 
 dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks 
 with longing : nice little durations of six weeks 
 or so, followed by complete restoration, — 
 shocking as they were to me then. In short, 
 half her life she is dead to me, and the other 
 half is made anxious with fears and lookings 
 forward to the next shock. With such pros- 
 pects, it seemed to me necessary that she should 
 no longer live with me, and be fluttered with 
 continued removals ; so I am come to live with 
 her, at a Mr. Walden's and his wife, who take 
 in patients, and have arranged to lodge and 
 board us only. They have had the care of her 
 before. I see little of her : alas ! I too often 
 hear her. Sunt lachryma? rerum! and you and 
 I must bear it. 
 
 To lay a little more load on it, a circumstance 
 143 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 has happened, cujus pars magna fui, and which, 
 at another crisis, I should have more rejoiced 
 in. I am about to lose my old and only walk- 
 companion, whose mirthful spirits were the 
 "youth of our house," Emma Isola. I have 
 her here now for a little while, but she is too 
 nervous, properly to be under such a roof, so 
 she will make short visits, — be no more an in- 
 mate. With my perfect approval, and more 
 than concurrence, she is to be wedded to 
 Moxon, at the end of August — so "perish the 
 roses and the flowers" — how is it? 
 
 Now to the brighter side. I am emancipated 
 from the Westwoods, and I am with attentive 
 people, and younger. I am three or four miles 
 nearer the great city; coaches half-price less, 
 and going always, of which I will avail my- 
 self. . I have few friends left there, one or two 
 though, most beloved. But London streets and 
 faces cheer me inexpressibly, though not one 
 known of the latter were remaining. 
 
 Thank you for your cordial reception of 
 "Elia." Inter nos, the Ariadne is not a darling 
 with me; several incongruous things are in it, 
 but in the composition it served me as illus- 
 trative. 
 
 I want you in the "Popular Fallacies" to like 
 the "Home that is no home," and "Rising with 
 the lark." 
 
 I am feeble, but cheerful in this my genial 
 hot weather. Walked sixteen miles yesterday. 
 I can't read much in summer time. 
 144 
 
Letters 
 
 With my kindest love to all, and prayers 
 for dear Dorothy, 
 I remain most affectionately yours, 
 
 C. Lamb. 
 
 At Mr. Walden's, Church Street, Edmonton, 
 Middlesex. 
 
 Moxon has introduced Emma to Rogers, and 
 he smiles upon the project. I have given E. 
 my Milton (will you pardon me) in part of 
 a portion. It hangs famously in his Murray- 
 like shop. 
 
 145 
 
Verses 
 
VERSES 
 
 A FAREWELL TO TOBACCO 
 
 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 constrain'd 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 mak'st us dote upon 
 Thy begrimed complexion, 
 149 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 And, for thy pernicious sake, 
 
 More and greater oaths to break 
 
 Than reclaimed lovers take 
 
 'Gainst women : thou thy siege dost lay 
 
 Much too in the female way, 
 
 While thou suck'st the lab'ring breath 
 
 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, through thy height'ning 
 
 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 dost 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, 
 
 150 
 
Verses 
 
 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 heart 
 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 sov'reign 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. 
 
 151 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 Stinking' st of the stinking kind, 
 Filth of the mouth and fog of the mind, 
 Africa, that brags her foison, 
 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. 
 'Twas 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 Trait'ress, loving Foe, — 
 Not that she is truly so, 
 But no other way they know 
 
 152 
 
Verses 
 
 A contentment to express, 
 Borders so uoon 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 they, perforce, 
 Guiltless of the sad divorce, 
 
 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 diie, 
 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 tittle 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 joys 
 Of the blest Tobacco Boys ; 
 153 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 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 delight, 
 An unconquer'd Canaanite. 
 
 SHE IS GOING 
 
 For their eldest 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. 
 
 154 
 
Verses 
 
 THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES 
 
 I have had playmates, I have had companions, 
 In my days of childhood, in my joyful school- 
 days, 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have been laughing, I have been carousing, 
 Drinking 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 dwell- 
 ing? 
 So might we talk of the old familiar faces — 
 
 155 
 
Charles Lamb 
 
 How some they have died, and some they have 
 
 left me, 
 And some are taken from me; all are departed; 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
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SEP 2 1899 
 
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