The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
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Chapter 126 : and "The Surrender of Calais" were by George Colman the Younger; "The C
and "The Surrender of Calais" were by George Colman the Younger; "The Children in the Wood," a favourite play of Lamb's, especially with Miss Kelly in it, was by Thomas Morton. Mrs. Bland was Maria Theresa Bland, _nee_ Romanzini, 1769-1838, who married Mrs. Jordan's brother.
Jack Bannister we have met, in "The Old Actors."
Page 286, line 12. _The Great yew R----_. This would be Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836), the founder of the English branch of the family and the greatest financier of modern times.
Page 286. POPULAR FALLACIES.
This series of little essays was printed in the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1826, beginning in January. The order of publication there was not the same as that in the _Last Essays of Elia_; one of the papers, "That a Deformed Person is a Lord," was not reprinted by Lamb at all (it will be found in Vol. I. of this edition); and two others were converted into separate essays (see "The Sanity of True Genius" and "The Genteel Style in Writing").
After Lamb's death a new series of Popular Fallacies was contributed to the _New Monthly Magazine_ by L.B. (Laman Blanchard) in 1835, preceded by an invocation to the spirit of Charles Lamb.
Page 286. I.--THAT A BULLY is ALWAYS A COWARD.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Page 287, line 1. _Hickman_. This would be Tom Hickman, the pugilist.
In Hazlitt's fine account of "The Fight," Hickman or the Gas-Man, "vapoured and swaggered too much, as if he wanted to grin and bully his adversary out of the fight." And again, "'This is the _grave digger_' (would Tom Hickman exclaim in the moments of intoxication from gin and success, showing his tremendous right hand); 'this will send many of them to their long homes; I haven't done with them yet.'"
But he went under to Neale, of Bristol, on the great day that Hazlitt describes.
Page 287, line 2. _Him of Clarissa_. Mr. Hickman, in Richardson's novel _Clarissa_, the lover of Miss Bayes.
Page 287. II.--THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Page 287. III.--THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Page 288, line 12. _In Mandeville_. In Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, a favourite book of Lamb's. See Vol. I., note to "The Good Clerk."
Page 288. IV.--THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING, ETC.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Page 288. V.--THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Page 290. VI.--THAT ENOUGH is AS GOOD AS A FEAST.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Page 291. VII.--OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN THE WRONG.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Page 291, line 4 from foot. _Little t.i.tubus_. I do not know who this was, if any more than an abstraction; but it should be remembered that Lamb himself stammered.
Page 292. VIII.--THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, ETC.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Page 292. IX.--THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST.
_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1826.
Compare the reflections on puns in the essay on "Distant Correspondents." Compare also the review of Hood's _Odes and Addresses_ (Vol. I.). Cary's account of a punning contest after Lamb's own heart makes the company vie with each in puns on the names of herbs. After anise, mint and other words had been ingeniously perverted Lamb's own turn, the last, was reached, and it seemed impossible that anything was left for him. He hesitated. "Now then, let us have it," cried the others, all expectant. "Patience," he replied; "it's c-c-c.u.min."
Page 293, line 18. _One of Swift's Miscellanies_. This joke, often attributed to Lamb himself, will be found in _Ars Punica, sine flos Linguarum, The Art of Punning; or, The Flower of Languages_, by Dr.
Sheridan and Swift, which will be found in Vol. XIII. of Scott's edition of Swift. Among the directions to the punster is this:--
Rule 3. The Brazen Rule. He must have better a.s.surance, like Brigadier C----, who said, "That, as he was pa.s.sing through a street, he made to a country fellow who had a hare swinging on a stick over his shoulder, and, giving it a shake, asked him whether it was his own _hair_ or a periwig!" Whereas it is a notorious Oxford jest.
Page 294, line 8. _Virgil ... broken Cremona_. Swift (as Lamb explained in the original essay in the _New Monthly Magazine_), seeing a lady's mantua overturning a violin (possibly a Cremona), quoted Virgil's line: "Mantua vae miserae nimium vicina Cremonae!" (_Eclogues_, IX., 28), "Mantua, alas! too near unhappy Cremona."
Page 294. X.--THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES.
_New Monthly Magazine_, March, 1826.
Whether a Mrs. Conrady existed, or was invented or adapted by Lamb to prove his point, I have not been able to discover. But the evidence of Lamb's "reverence for the s.e.x," to use Procter's phrase, is against her existence. _The Athenaeum_ reviewer on February 16, 1833, says, however, quoting the fallacy: "Here is a portrait of Mrs. Conrady. We agree with the writer that 'no one that has looked on her can pretend to forget the lady.'" The point ought to be cleared up.
Page 296. XI.--THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE MOUTH.
_New Monthly Magazine_, April, 1826.
Page 297, line 13. _Our friend Mitis_. I do not identify Mitis among Lamb's many friends.
Page 297, line 11 from foot. _Presentation copies_. The late Mr.
Thomas Westwood, the son of the Westwoods with whom the Lambs lived at Edmonton, writing to Notes and Queries some thirty-five years ago, gave an amusing account of Lamb pitching presentation copies out of the window into the garden--a Barry Cornwall, a Bernard Barton, a Leigh Hunt, and so forth. Page 298, line 6. _Odd presents of game_.
Compare the little essay on "Presents of Game," Vol. I.
Page 298. XII.--THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY.
_New Monthly Magazine_, March, 1826. In that place the first sentence began with the word "Two;" the second ended with "of our a.s.sertions;"
and (fourteenth line of essay) it was said of the very poor man that he "can ask" no visitors. Lamb, in a letter, wished Wordsworth particularly to like this fallacy and that on rising with the lark.
Page 300, line 9. _It has been prettily said_. By Lamb himself, or more probably by his sister, in _Poetry for Children_, 1809. See "The First Tooth," Vol. III., which ends upon the line
A child is fed with milk and praise.
Page 301, line 3. _There is yet another home_. Writing to Mrs.
Wordsworth on February 18, 1818, Lamb gives a painful account, very similar in part to this essay, of the homeless home to which he was reduced by visitors. But by the time he wrote the essay, when all his day was his own, the trouble was not acute. He tells Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, "My tirade against visitors was not meant _particularly_ at you or A.K. I scarce know what I meant, for I do not just now feel the grievance. I wanted to make an _article_." Compare the first of the "Lepus" papers in Vol. I.
Page 301, line 20. _It is the refres.h.i.+ng sleep of the day_. After this sentence, in the magazine, came this pa.s.sage:--
"O the comfort of sitting down heartily to an old folio, and thinking surely that the next hour or two will be your own--and the misery of being defeated by the useless call of somebody, who is come to tell you, that he is just come from hearing Mr. Irving!
What is that to you? Let him go home, and digest what the good man said to him. You are at your chapel, in your oratory."
