The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 505 : V.--[STREET CONVERSATION](1813) It should seem almost impossible for a person to have

V.--[STREET CONVERSATION]

(1813)

It should seem almost impossible for a person to have arrived at the age of manhood, and never once to have heard or suspected that there have been people born before our times. Yet this fact I am obliged to conclude from the fragment of a conversation which I overheard between two of the lower order of Irish, who pa.s.sed me in Holborn the other day. One of them, it seems, had appealed in defence of his argument to the opinions or practice of their forefathers, for I heard the other exclaim "the ancients! who were they?"--"What!" retorted his companion, with an air of insolent superiority, "did you never hear of the ancients? did you never read of them?" They had got too far from me to hear the conclusion of their extraordinary discourse; but I have often thought that it would be amusing to register the sentences, and sc.r.a.ps of sentences, which one catches up in a day's walk about the town; I mean in the way of fair and honest listening, without way-laying one's neighbour for more than he would be willing to communicate. From these flying words, with the help of a little imagination, one might often piece out a long conversation foregone.

VI.--[A TOWN RESIDENCE]

(1813)

Where would a man of taste chuse his town residence, setting convenience out of the question? Palace-yard,--for its contiguity to the Abbey, the Courts of Justice, the Sittings of Parliament, Whitehall, the Parks, &c.,--I hold of all places in these two great cities of London and Westminster to be the most cla.s.sical and eligible. Next in cla.s.sicality, I should name the four Inns of Court: they breathe a learned and collegiate air; and of them chiefly,

----those bricky towers The which on Thames' broad aged back doth ride, Where now the studious Lawyers have their bowers; There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide, Till they decay'd through pride--

as Spenser describes evidently with a relish. I think he had Garden Court in his eye. The n.o.ble hall which stands there must have been built about that time. Next to the Inns of Court, Covent-Garden, for its _rus in urbe_, its wholesome scents of early fruits and vegetables, its tasteful church and arcades,--above all, the neighbouring theatres, cannot but be approved of. I do not know a fourth station comparable to or worthy to be named after these. To an antiquarian, every spot in London, or even Southwark, teems with historical a.s.sociations, local interest. He could not chuse amiss. But to me, who have no such qualifying knowledge, the Surrey side of the water is peculiarly distasteful. It is impossible to connect any thing interesting with it.

I never knew a man of taste to live, what they term, _over the bridge_.

Observe, in this place I speak solely of _chosen and voluntary_ residence.

VII.--[GRAY'S _BARD_]

(1813)

The beard of Gray's Bard, "streaming like a meteor," had always struck me as an injudicious imitation of the Satanic ensign in the _Paradise Lost_, which

----full high advanced, Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind:

till the other day I met with a pa.s.sage in Heywood's old play, _The Four Prentices of London_, which it is difficult to imagine not to be the origin of the similitude in both poets. The line in Italics Gray has almost verbatim adopted--

In Sion towers hangs his victorious flag.

Blowing defiance this way; and its shews _Like a red meteor in the troubled air_, Or like a blazing comet that foretells The fall of princes.

All here is n.o.ble, and as it should be. The comparison enlarges the thing compared without stretching it upon a violent rack, till it bursts with ridiculous explosion. The application of such gorgeous imagery to an old man's beard is of a piece with the Bardolfian bombast: "see you these meteors, these exhalations?" or the raptures of an Oriental lover, who should compare his mistress's nose to a watchtower or a steeple. The presageful nature of the meteor, which makes so fine an adjunct of the simile in Heywood, Milton has judiciously omitted, as less proper to his purpose; but he seems not to have overlooked the beauty of it, by his introducing the superst.i.tion in a succeeding book--

----like a comet burn'd, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In th' artic sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war.

VIII.--[AN AMERICAN WAR FOR HELEN]

(1813)

I have in my possession a curious volume of Latin verses, which I believe to be unique. It is ent.i.tled _Alexandri Fultoni Scoti Epigrammatorum libri quinque_. It purports to be printed at Perth, and bears date 1679. By the appellation which the author gives himself in the preface, _hypodidasculus_, I suppose him to have been usher at some school. It is no uncommon thing now a days for persons concerned in academies to affect a literary reputation in the way of their trade. The "master of a seminary for a limited number of pupils at Islington,"

lately put forth an edition of that scarce tract, the _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_ (to use his own words), with notes and head-lines!--But to our author. These epigrams of Alexander Fulton, Scotchman, have little remarkable in them besides extreme dulness and insipidity; but there is one, which, by its being marshalled in the front of the volume, seems to have been the darling of its parent, and for its exquisite flatness, and the surprising stroke of anachronism with which it is pointed, deserves to be rescued from oblivion. It is addressed, like many of the others, to a fair one:--

AD MARIULAM SUAM AUTOR

Moverunt bella olim Helenae decor atque venustas Europen inter frugiferamque Asiam.

Tam bona, quam tu, tam prudens, sin illa fuisset, Ad lites issent Africa et America!

Which, in humble imitation of mine author's peculiar poverty of stile, I have ventured thus to render into English:--

THE AUTHOR TO HIS MOGGY

For love's ill.u.s.trious cause, and Helen's charms, All Europe and all Asia rush'd to arms.

Had she with these thy polish'd sense combin'd, All Afric and America had join'd!

The happy idea of an American war undertaken in the cause of beauty ought certainly to recommend the author's memory to the countrymen of Madison and Jefferson; and the bold antic.i.p.ation of the discovery of that Continent in the time of the Trojan War is a flight beyond the Sibyll's books.

IX.--[DRYDEN AND COLLIER]

(1813)

The different way in which the same story may be told by different persons was never more strikingly ill.u.s.trated than by the manner in which the celebrated Jeremy Collier has described the effects of Timotheus's music upon Alexander, in the Second Part of his Essays. We all know how Dryden has treated the subject. Let us now hear his great contemporary and antagonist:--"_Timotheus_, a _Grecian_," says Collier, "was so great a _Master_, that he could make a Man storm and swagger like a Tempest. And then, by altering the _Notes_ and the _Time_, he would take him down again, and sweeten his Humour in a trice. One Time, when _Alexander_ was at Dinner, this Man play'd him a _Phrygian_ Air: The Prince immediately rises, s.n.a.t.c.hes up his Lance, and puts himself into a Posture of Fighting. And the Retreat was no sooner sounded by the Change of the Harmony, but his Arms were grounded, and his Fire extinct; and he sat down as orderly as if he had come from one of _Aristotle's Lectures_. I warrant you _Demosthenes_ would have been flouris.h.i.+ng about such a Business a long Hour, and may be not have done it neither. But _Timotheus_ had a nearer Cut to the Soul: He could neck a Pa.s.sion at a Stroke, and lay it Asleep. _Pythagoras_ once met with a Parcel of drunken Fellows, who were likely to be troublesome enough. He presently orders the _Musick_ to play Grave, and chop into a _Dorian_: Upon this, they all threw away their _Garlands_, and were as sober and as shame-faced as one would wish."--It is evident that Dryden, in his inspired Ode, and Collier in all this pudder of prose, meant the same thing. But what a work does the latter make with his "necking a pa.s.sion at his stroke," "making a man storm and swagger like a tempest," and then "taking him down and sweetening his humour in a trice." What in Dryden is "Softly sweet in Lydian measures," Collier calls "chopping into a Dorian."--This Collier was the same who, in his Biographical Dictionary, says of Shakespeare, that "though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining to festivity, yet _he could when he pleased be as serious as any body_."

X.--PLAY-HOUSE MEMORANDA

(1813)

I once sat in the Pit of Drury-lane Theatre next to a blind man, who, I afterwards learned, was a street musician, well known about London. The play was _Richard the Third_, and it was curious to observe the interest which he took in every successive scene, so far more lively than could be perceived in any of the company around him. At those pathetic interviews between the _Queen_ and _d.u.c.h.ess of York_, after the murder of the children, his eyes (or rather the places where eyes should have been) gushed out tears in torrents, and he sat intranced in attention, while every one about him was t.i.ttering, partly at him, and partly at the grotesque figures and wretched action of the women, who had been selected by managerial taste to personate those royal mourners. Having no drawback of sight to impair his sensibilities, he simply attended to the scene, and received its unsophisticated impression. _So much the rather her celestial light shone inward._ I was pleased with an observation which he made, when I asked him how he liked Kemble, who played _Richard_. I should have thought (said he) that that man had been reading something out of a book, if I had not known that I was in a play-house.

I was once amused in a different way by a knot of country people who had come to see a play at that same Theatre. They seemed perfectly inattentive to all the best performers for the first act or two, though the piece was admirably played, but kept poring in the play-bill, and were evidently watching for the appearance of one, who was to be the source of supreme delight to them that night. At length the expected actor arrived, who happened to be in possession of a very insignificant part, not much above a mule [? mute]. I saw their faint attempt at raising a clap on his appearance, and their disappointment at not being seconded by the audience in general. I saw them try to admire and to find out something very wonderful in him, and wondering all the while at the moderate sensation he produced. I saw their pleasure and their interest subside at last into flat mortification, when the riddle was at once unfolded by my recollecting that this performer bore the same name with an actor, then in the acme of his celebrity, at Covent-Garden, but who lately finished his theatrical and mortal career on the other side the Atlantic. They had come to see Mr. C----, but had come to the wrong house.

Is it a stale remark to say, that I have constantly found the interest excited at a play-house to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission. Formerly, when my sight and hearing were more perfect, and my purse a little less so, I was a frequenter of the upper gallery in the old Theatres. The eager attention, the breathless listening, the anxiety not to lose a word, the quick antic.i.p.ation of the significance of the scene (every sense kept as it were upon a sharp look out), which are exhibited by the occupiers of those higher and now almost out-of-sight regions (who, going seldom to a play, cannot afford to lose any thing by inattention), suffer some little diminution, as you descend to the lower or two-s.h.i.+lling ranks; but still the joy is lively and unallayed, save [that] by some little _incursion_ of _manners_, the expression of it is expected to abate somewhat of its natural liveliness. The oaken plaudits of the trunkmaker would _here_ be considered as going a little beyond the line.--In the pit first begins that accursed critical faculty, which, making a man the judge of his own pleasures, too often const.i.tutes him the executioner of his own and others! You may see the _jealousy of being unduly pleased_, the _suspicion of being taken in to admire_; in short, the vile critical spirit, creeping and diffusing itself, and spreading from the wrinkled brows and cloudy eyes of the front row sages and newspaper reporters (its proper residence), till it infects and clouds over the thoughtless, vacant countenance, of John Bull tradesmen, and clerks of counting-houses, who, but for that approximation, would have been contented to have grinned without rule, and to have been pleased without asking why. The sitting next a critic is contagious. Still now and then, a _genuine spectator_ is to be found among them, a shopkeeper and his family, whose honest t.i.tillations of mirth, and generous chucklings of applause, cannot wait or be at leisure to take the cue from the sour judging faces about them. Haply they never dreamed that there were such animals in nature as critics or reviewers; even the idea of an author may be a speculation they never entered into; but they take the mirth they find as a pure effusion of the actor-folks, set there on purpose to make them fun. I love the unenquiring grat.i.tude of such spectators. As for the Boxes, I never can understand what brings the people there. I see such frigid indifference, such unconcerned spectators.h.i.+p, such impenetrability to pleasure or its contrary, such being _in the house_ and yet not _of it_, certainly they come far nearer the nature of _the G.o.ds_, upon the system of Lucretius at least, than those honest, hearty, well-pleased, unindifferent mortals above, who, from time immemorial, have had that name, upon no other ground than situation, a.s.signed them.

Take the play-house altogether, there is a less sum of enjoyment than used to be. Formerly you might see something like the effect of a novelty upon a citizen, his wife and daughters, in the Pit; their curiosity upon every new face that entered upon the stage. The talk of how they got in at the door, and how they were crowded upon some former occasion, made a topic till the curtain drew up. People go too often now-a-days to make their ingress or egress of consequence. Children of seven years of age will talk as familiarly of the performers, aye and as knowingly (according to the received opinion) as grown persons; more than the grown persons in my time. Oh when shall I forget first seeing a play, at the age of five or six? It was _Artaxerxes_. Who played, or who sang in it, I know not. Such low ideas as actors' names, or actors'

merits, never entered my head. The mystery of delight was not cut open and dissipated for me by those who took me there. It was _Artaxerxes_ and _Arbaces_ and _Mandane_ that I saw, not Mr. Beard, or Mr. Leoni, or Mrs. Kennedy. It was all enchantment and a dream. No such pleasure has since visited me but in dreams. I was in Persia for the time, and the burning idol of their devotion in the Temple almost converted me into a wors.h.i.+pper. I was awe-struck, and believed those significations to be something more than elemental fires. I was, with Uriel, in the body of the sun.--What should I have gained by knowing (as I should have done, had I been born thirty years later) that that solar representation was a mere painted scene, that had neither fire nor light in itself, and that the royal phantoms, which pa.s.sed in review before me, were but such common mortals as I could see every day out of my father's window? We crush the faculty of delight and wonder in children, by explaining every thing. We take them to the source of the Nile, and shew them the scanty runnings, instead of letting the beginnings of that seven fold stream remain in impenetrable darkness, a mysterious question of wonderment and delight to ages.

REVIEW OF _THE EXCURSION; A POEM_

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. LONDON. 4to. pp. 447

(1814)

The volume before us, as we learn from the Preface, is "a detached portion of an unfinished poem, containing views of man, nature, and society;" to be called the Recluse, as having for its princ.i.p.al subject the "sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement;" and to be preceded by a "record in verse of the origin and progress of the author's own powers, with reference to the fitness which they may be supposed to have conferred for the task." To the completion of this plan we look forward with a confidence which the execution of the finished part is well calculated to inspire.--Meanwhile, in what is before us there is ample matter for entertainment: for the "Excursion" is not a branch (as might have been suspected) prematurely plucked from the parent tree to gratify an overhasty appet.i.te for applause; but is, in itself, a complete and legitimate production.

It opens with the meeting of the poet with an aged man whom he had known from his school days; in plain words, a Scottish pedlar; a man who, though of low origin, had received good learning and impressions of the strictest piety from his stepfather, a minister and village schoolmaster. Among the hills of Athol, the child is described to have become familiar with the appearances of nature in his occupation as a feeder of sheep; and from her silent influences to have derived a character, meditative, tender, and poetical. With an imagination and feelings thus nourished--his intellect not unaided by books, but those, few, and chiefly of a religious cast--the necessity of seeking a maintenance in riper years, had induced him to make choice of a profession, the _appellation_ for which has been gradually declining into contempt, but which formerly designated a cla.s.s of men, who, journeying in country places, when roads presented less facilities for travelling, and the intercourse between towns and villages was unfrequent and hazardous, became a sort of link of neighbourhood to distant habitations; resembling, in some small measure, in the effects of their periodical returns, the caravan which Thomson so feelingly describes as blessing the cheerless Siberian in its annual visitation, with "news of human kind."

In the solitude incident to this rambling life, power had been given him to keep alive that devotedness to nature which he had imbibed in his childhood, together with the opportunity of gaining such notices of persons and things from his intercourse with society, as qualified him to become a "teacher of moral wisdom." With this man, then, in a hale old age, released from the burthen of his occupation, yet retaining much of its active habits, the poet meets, and is by him introduced to a second character--a sceptic--one who had been partially roused from an overwhelming desolation, brought upon him by the loss of wife and children, by the powerful incitement of hope which the French Revolution in its commencement put forth, but who, disgusted with the failure of all its promises, had fallen back into a laxity of faith and conduct which induced at length a total despondence as to the dignity and final destination of his species. In the language of the poet, he

----broke faith with those whom he had laid In earth's dark chambers,

Yet he describes himself as subject to compunctious visitations from that silent quarter.