The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 108 : Lamb's memory is preserved at Christ's Hospital by a medal which is given fo

Lamb's memory is preserved at Christ's Hospital by a medal which is given for the best English essays. It was first struck in 1875, the centenary of his birth.

Page 26. THE TWO RACES OF MEN.

_London Magazine_, December, 1820.

Writing to Wordsworth in April of 1816, Lamb says:--"I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain and chain them to my shelves, _more Bodleiano_, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read but don't read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it."

Probably the germ of the essay is to be found in this pa.s.sage, as Lamb never forgot his thoughts.

Page 26, line 17 of essay. _Brinsley_. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the dramatist and a great spendthrift. He died in 1816. Lamb knew him slightly.

Page 26, line 9 from foot. _Beyond Tooke_. That is, beyond the philological theories of _The Diversions of Purley_ by John Home Tooke (1736-1812).

Page 27, line 22. _Ralph BiG.o.d_. John Fenwick, an unlucky friend of the Lambs, an antic.i.p.atory Micawber, of whom we know too little, and seem likely to find out little more. Lamb mentions him again in the essay on "Chimney Sweepers," and in that on "Newspapers," in his capacity as editor of _The Albion_, for which Lamb wrote its extinguis.h.i.+ng epigram in the summer of 1801. There are references to the Fenwicks in Mary Lamb's letters to Sarah Stoddart and in Lamb's letters; but nothing very informing. After financial embarra.s.sments in England they emigrated to America.

Page 29, line 12. _Comberbatch_. Coleridge, who had enlisted as a young man in the 15th Light Dragoons as Silas t.i.tus Comberback.

Page 29, line 16. _Bloomsbury_. Lamb was then in rooms at 20 Great Russell Street (now Russell Street), Covent Garden, which is not in Bloomsbury.

Page 29, line 27. _Should he go on acting_. The _Letters_ contain references to this habit of Coleridge's. Writing to him in 1809 Lamb says, referring among other loans to the volume of Dodsley with Vittoria Corombona ("The White Devil," by John Webster) in it:--"While I think on it, Coleridge, I fetch'd away my books which you had at the _Courier_ Office, and found all but a third volume of the old plays, containing the 'White Devil, 'Green's 'Tu Quoque,' and the 'Honest Wh.o.r.e,' perhaps the most valuable volume of them all--_that_ I could not find. Pray, if you can, remember what you did with it, or where you took it out with you a walking perhaps; send me word, for, to use the old plea, it spoils a set. I found two other volumes (you had three), the _Arcadia_ and _Daniel_, enriched with ma.n.u.script notes. I wish every book I have were so noted. They have thoroughly converted me to relish _Daniel_, or to say I relish him, for after all, I believe I did relish him."

And several years later (probably in 1820) we find him addressing Coleridge with reference to Luther's _Table Talk:_--"Why will you make your visits, which should give pleasure, matter of regret to your friends? You never come but you take away some folio, that is part of my existence. With a great deal of difficulty I was made to comprehend the extent of my loss. My maid, Becky, brought me a dirty bit of paper, which contained her description of some book which Mr.

Coleridge had taken away. It was _l.u.s.ter's Tables_, which, for some time, I could not make out. 'What! has he carried away any of the _tables_, Becky?' 'No, it wasn't any tables, but it was a book that he called _l.u.s.ter's Tables_.' I was obliged to search personally among my shelves, and a huge fissure suddenly disclosed to me the true nature of the damage I had sustained."

Allsop tells us that Lamb once said of Coleridge: "He sets his mark upon whatever he reads; it is henceforth sacred. His spirit seems to have breathed upon it; and, if not for its author, yet for his sake, we admire it."

Page 30, line 1. _John Buncle_. Most of Lamb's books are in America; Lamb's copy of _John Buncle_, with an introductory note written in by Coleridge, was sold, with other books from his library, in New York in 1848. _The Life of John Buncle, Esq_., a book highly praised by Hazlitt, was by Thomas Amory (1691?-1788), published, Part I. in 1756 and Part II. in 1766. A condensed reprint was issued in 1823 ent.i.tled _The Spirit of Buncle_, in which, Mr. W.C. Hazlitt suggests, Lamb may have had a hand with William Hazlitt.

Page 30, line 19. _Spiteful K._ James Kenney (1780-1849), the dramatist, then resident at Versailles, where Lamb and his sister visited him in 1822. He married Louisa Mercier, daughter of Louis Sebastian Mercier, the French critic, and widow of Lamb's earlier friend, Thomas Holcroft. One of their two sons was named Charles Lamb Kenney (1821-1881). Lamb recovered Margaret of Newcastle's _Letters_ (folio, 1664), which is among the books in America, as is also the Fulke Greville (small folio, 1633).

Page 31, line 4. _S.T.C.... annotations_. Lamb's copy of Daniel's _Poetical Works_, two volumes, 1718, and of Browne's _Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors_, folio, 1658, both with marginalia by himself and Coleridge, are in existence, but I cannot say where: probably in America. Lamb's copy of Beaumont and Fletcher, with Coleridge's notes (see "Old China"), is, however, safe in the British Museum. His Fulke Greville, as I have said, is in America, but I fancy it has nothing of Coleridge in it, nor has his Burton--quarto, 1621--which still exists.

Coleridge's notes in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio are not numerous, but usually ample and seriously critical. At the foot of a page of the "Siege of Corinth," on which he had written two notes (one, "O flat!

flat! flat! Sole! Flounder! Place! all stinking! stinkingly flat!"), he added:--

_N.B._--I shall not be long here, Charles!--I gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.

S.T.C.

Octr. 1811.

Underneath the initials S.T.C. are the initials W.W. which suggest that Wordsworth was present.

The Museum also has Lamb's Milton, with annotations by himself and Coleridge.

In the _Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb_, privately issued by the New York Dibdin Club in 1897, is a list of five of Lamb's books now in America containing valuable and unpublished marginalia by Coleridge: _The Life of John Buncle_, Donne's _Poems_ ("I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be vexed that I have scribbled your book. S.T.C., 2d May, 1811"), Reynolds' _G.o.d's Revenge against ... Murder_, 1651 ("O what a beautiful _concordia discordantium_ is an unthinking good man's soul!"), _The History of Philip de Commines_ in English, and Petwin's _Letters Concerning the Mind_.

Page 31. NEW YEAR'S EVE.

_London Magazine_, January, 1821.

The melancholy pessimism of this essay led to some remonstrance from robuster readers of the _London Magazine_. In addition to the letter from "A Father" referred to below, the essay produced, seven months later, in the August number of the _London Magazine_, a long poetical "Epistle to Elia," signed "Olen," in which very simply and touchingly Lamb was reminded that the grave is not the end, was asked to consider the promises of the Christian faith, and finally was offered a glimpse of some of the friends he would meet in heaven--among them Ulysses, Shakespeare and Alice W----n. Taylor, the publisher and editor of the magazine, sent Lamb a copy. He replied, acknowledging the kindness of the author, and adding:--"Poor Elia ... does not pretend to so very clear revelations of a future state of being as 'Olen' seems gifted with. He stumbles about dark mountains at best; but he knows at least how to be thankful for this life, and is too thankful, indeed, for certain relations.h.i.+ps lent him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift. He is too apt to express himself lightly, and cannot be sorry for the present occasion, as it has called forth a reproof so Christian-like."

Lamb thought the poet to be James Montgomery, but it was in reality Charles Abraham Elton. The poem was reprinted in a volume ent.i.tled _Boyhood and other Poems_, in 1835.

It is conceivable that Lamb was reasoned with privately upon the sentiments expressed in this essay; and perhaps we may take the following sonnet which he contributed over his own name to, the _London Magazine_ for April, 1821, as a kind of defiant postscript thereto, a further challenge to those who reproached him for his remarks concerning death, and who suggested that he did not really mean them:--

They talk of time, and of time's galling yoke, That like a millstone on man's mind doth press, Which only works and business can redress: Of divine Leisure such foul lies are spoke, Wounding her fair gifts with calumnious stroke.

But might I, fed with silent meditation, a.s.soiled live from that fiend Occupation-- _Improbus labor_, which my spirits hath broke-- I'd drink of time's rich cup, and never surfeit-- Fling in more days than went to make the gem That crowned the white top of Methusalem-- Yea on my weak neck take, and never forfeit, Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky, The heaven-sweet burthen of eternity.

It was also probably the present essay which led to Lamb's difference with Southey and the famous letter of remonstrance. Southey accused _Elia_ of wanting "a sounder religious feeling," and Lamb suggests in his reply that "New Year's Eve" was the chief offender. See Vol. I.

for Lamb's amplification of one of its pa.s.sages.

It may be interesting here to quote Coleridge's description of Lamb as "one hovering between heaven and earth, neither hoping much nor fearing anything."

Page 31, line 10 from foot. _Bells_. The music of bells seems always to have exerted fascination over Lamb. See the reference in the story of the "First Going to Church," in _Mrs. Leicester's School_, Vol.

III.; in his poem "Sabbath Bells," Vol. IV.; and his "John Woodvil,"

Vol. IV.

Page 31, foot. "_I saw the skirts of the departing Year_." From Coleridge's "Ode to the Departing Year," as printed in 1796 and 1797. Lamb was greatly taken by this line. He wrote to Coleridge on January 2, 1797, in a letter of which only a small portion has been printed:--"The opening [of the Ode] is in the spirit of the sublimest allegory. The idea of the 'skirts of the departing year, seen far onwards, waving in the wind,' is one of those n.o.ble Hints at which the Reader's imagination is apt to kindle into grand conceptions."

Afterwards Coleridge altered "skirts" to "train."

Page 32, line 21. _Seven.... years_. See note to "Dream-Children."

Alice W--n is identified with Ann Simmons, who lived near Blakesware when Lamb was a youth, and of whom he wrote his love sonnets.

According to the Key the name is "feigned."

Page 32, line 25. _Old Dorrell_. See the poem "Going or Gone,"

Vol. IV. There seems really to have been such an enemy of the Lamb fortunes. He was one of the witnesses to the will of John Lamb, the father--William Dorrell.

Page 33, line 5. _Small-pox at five_. There is no other evidence than this casual mention that Lamb ever suffered from this complaint.

Possibly he did not. He went to Christ's Hospital at the age of seven.

Page 33, line 13. _From what have I not fallen_. Lamb had had this idea many years before. In 1796 he wrote this sonnet (text of 1818):--

We were two pretty babes, the youngest she, The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween, And Innocence her name. The time has been We two did love each other's company; Time was, we two had wept to have been apart: But when by show of seeming good beguil'd, I left the garb and manners of a child, And my first love for man's society, Defiling with the world my virgin heart-- My loved companion dropp'd a tear, and fled, And hid in deepest shades her awful head.

Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art-- In what delicious Eden to be found-- That I may seek thee the wide world around?

Page 33, line 27. _Phantom cloud of Elia_. The speculations in the paragraph that ends with these words were fantastical at any rate to one reader, who, under the signature "A Father," contributed to the March number of the _London Magazine_ a eulogy of paternity, in which Elia was reasoned with and rebuked. "Ah! Elia! hadst thou possessed 'offspring of thine own to dally with,' thou wouldst never have made the melancholy avowal that thou hast 'almost ceased to hope!'" Lamb did not reply.

Page 33, line 7 from foot. _Not childhood alone ..._ The pa.s.sage between these words and "freezing days of December" was taken by Charles Lloyd, Lamb's early friend, as the motto of a poem, in his _Poems_, 1823, ent.i.tled "Stanzas on the Difficulty with which, in Youth, we Bring Home to our Habitual Consciousness the Idea of Death."

Page 34, line 15 from foot. _Midnight darlings_. Leigh Hunt records, in his essay "My Books," that he once saw Lamb kiss an old folio--Chapman's _Homer_.

Page 34, line 8 from foot. "_Sweet a.s.surance of a look_." A favourite quotation of Lamb's (here adapted) from Matthew Roydon's elegy on Sir Philip Sidney:--