The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 444 : Don't trouble yourself about the verses. Take 'em coolly as they come.Any da

Don't trouble yourself about the verses. Take 'em coolly as they come.

Any day between this and Midsummer will do. Ten lines the extreme. There is no mystery in my incognita. She has often seen you, though you may not have observed a silent brown girl, who for the last twelve years has run wild about our house in her Christmas holidays. She is Italian by name and extraction. Ten lines about the blue sky of her country will do, as it's her foible to be proud of it. But they must not be over courtly or Lady-fied as she is with a Lady who says to her "go and she goeth; come and she cometh." Item, I have made her a tolerable Latinist.

The verses should be moral too, as for a Clergyman's family. She is called Emma Isola. I approve heartily of your turning your four vols.

into a lesser compa.s.s. 'Twill Sybillise the gold left. I shall, I think, be in town in a few weeks, when I will a.s.suredly see you. I will put in here loves to Mrs. Procter and the Anti-Capulets, because Mary tells me I omitted them in my last. I like to see my friends here. I have put my lawsuit into the hands of an Enfield pract.i.tioner--a plain man, who seems perfectly to understand it, and gives me hopes of a favourable result.

Rumour tells us that Miss Holcroft is married; though the varlet has not had the grace to make any communication to us on the subject. Who is Badman, or Bed'em? Have I seen him at Montacute's? I hear he is a great chymist. I am sometimes chymical myself. A thought strikes me with horror. Pray heaven he may not have done it for the sake of trying chymical experiments upon her,--young female subjects are so scarce!

Louisa would make a capital shot. An't you glad about Burke's case? We may set off the Scotch murders against the Scotch novels--Hare, the Great Un-hanged.

Martin Burney is richly worth your knowing. He is on the top scale of my friends.h.i.+p ladder, on which an angel or two is still climbing, and some, alas! descending. I am out of the literary world at present. Pray, is there anything new from the admired pen of the author of the _Pleasures of Hope_? Has Mrs. He-mans (double masculine) done anything pretty lately? Why sleeps the lyre of Hervey, and of Alaric Watts? Is the muse of L.E.L. silent? Did you see a sonnet of mine in Blackwood's last?

Curious construction! _Elaborata facilitas_! And now I'll tell. 'Twas written for the "_Gem_;" but the editors declined it, on the plea that it would _shock all mothers_; so they published "The Widow" instead. I am born out of time. I have no conjecture about what the present world calls delicacy. I thought "Rosamund Gray" was a pretty modest thing.

Hessey a.s.sures me that the world would not bear it. I have lived to grow into an indecent character. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, "d.a.m.n the age; I will write for Antiquity!"

_Erratum_ in sonnet:--Last line but something, for _tender_, read _tend_. The Scotch do not know our law terms; but I find some remains of honest, plain, old writing lurking there still. They were not so mealy-mouthed as to refuse my verses. Maybe, 'tis their oatmeal.

Blackwood sent me 20 for the drama. Somebody cheated me out of it next day; and my new pair of breeches, just sent home, cracking at first putting on, I exclaimed, in my wrath, "All tailors are cheats, and all men are tailors." Then I was better. [_Rest lost_.]

["Your four vols." Procter's poetical works, in three volumes, were published in 1822. Since then he had issued _The Flood of Thessaly_, 1823. He was perhaps meditating a new one-volume selection.

"Anti-Capulets"--the Basil Montagus (Montacutes).

"Badman." Louisa Holcroft married Carlyle's friend Badams, a manufacturer and scientific experimentalist of Birmingham, with whom the philosopher spent some weeks in 1827 in attempting a cure for dyspepsia (see the _Early Recollections_).

"Burke's case." William Burke and William Hare, the body-s.n.a.t.c.hers and murderers of Edinburgh, who killed persons to sell their corpses to Knox's school of anatomy. Burke was hanged a week later than this letter, on January 28. Hare turned King's evidence and disappeared. A "shot" was a subject in these men's vocabulary. The author of the Waverley novels--the Great Unknown-- had, of course, become known long before this.

"M.B."--Martin Burney. In 1818 Lamb had dedicated the prose volume of his _Works_ to Burney, in a sonnet ending with the lines:--

Free from self-seeking, envy, low design, I have not found a whiter soul than thine.

Hervey was Thomas Kibble Hervey (1799-1859), a great alb.u.m poet.

"A sonnet of mine in Blackwood"--in the number for January, 1829 (see below).

"Hessey"--of the firm of Taylor & Hessey, the late publishers of the _London Magazine_.

Another letter from Lamb to Procter, repeating the request for verses, was referred to by Canon Ainger in the preface to his edition of the correspondence. Canon Ainger printed a delightful pa.s.sage. It is disappointing not to find it among the letters proper in his latest edition.

Here (had I permission from its American owner to print it, which I have not) I should place Lamb's instructions as to playing whist drawn up for Mrs. Badams' use and as an introduction to Captain Burney's treatise on the game. It is a very interesting doc.u.ment and England has never seen it yet.

The Boston Bibliophile edition also gives a letter from Lamb to Badams apologising for his heatedness yesterday and explaining it by saying that he had been for some hours dissuading a friend from settling at Enfield "which friend would have attracted down crowds of literary men, which men would have driven me wild."]

LETTER 473

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS ALLSOP

Jan. 28, 1829.

Dear Allsop--Old Star is setting. Take him and cut him into Little Stars. Nevertheless the extinction of the greater light is not by the lesser light (Stella, or Mrs. Star) apprehended so nigh, but that she will be thankful if you can let young Scintillation (Master Star) twinkle down by the coach on Sunday, to catch the last glimmer of the decaying parental light. No news is good news; so we conclude Mrs. A.

and little a are doing well. Our kindest loves, C.L.

[I cannot explain the mystery of these Stars.]

LETTER 474

CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER

[? Jan. 29th, 1829.]

When Miss Ouldcroft (who is now Mrs. Beddome, and Bed--dom'd to her!) was at Enfield, which she was in summertime, and owed her health to its sun and genial influences, she wisited (with young lady-like impertinence) a poor man's cottage that had a pretty baby (O the yearnling!), and gave it fine caps and sweetmeats. On a day, broke into the parlour our two maids uproarious. "O ma'am, who do you think Miss Ouldcroft (they p.r.o.nounce it Holcroft) has been working a cap for?" "A child," answered Mary, in true Shandean female simplicity. "It's the man's child as was taken up for sheep-stealing." Miss Ouldcroft was staggered, and would have cut the connection; but by main force I made her go and take her leave of her _protegee_ (which I only spell with a g because I can't make a pretty j). I thought, if she went no more, the Abactor or Abactor's wife (vide Ainsworth) would suppose she had heard something; and I have delicacy for a sheep-stealer. The overseers actually overhauled a mutton-pie at the baker's (his first, last, and only hope of mutton-pie), which he never came to eat, and thence inferred his guilt. _Per occasionem cujus_ I framed the sonnet; observe its elaborate construction. I was four days about it.

THE GYPSY'S MALISON

Suck, baby, suck, Mother's love grows by giving, Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting; Black Manhood comes, when riotous guilty living Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting.

Kiss, baby, kiss, Mother's lips s.h.i.+ne by kisses, Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings; Black Manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses Tend thee the kiss that poisons 'mid caressings.

Hang, baby, hang, mother's love loves such forces, Choke the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging; Black Manhood comes, when violent lawless courses Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging.

So sang a wither'd Sibyl energetical, And bann'd the ungiving door with lips prophetical.

Barry, study that sonnet. It is curiously and perversely elaborate. 'Tis a choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed to the structure of it. See you? and was this a fourteener to be rejected by a trumpery annual? forsooth, 'twould shock all mothers; and may all mothers, who would so be shocked, bed dom'd! as if mothers were such sort of logicians as to infer the future hanging of _their_ child from the theoretical hangibility (or capacity of being hanged, if the judge pleases) of every infant born with a neck on. Oh B.C., my whole heart is faint, and my whole head is sick (how is it?) at this d.a.m.ned, canting, unmasculine unbawdy (I had almost said) age! Don't show this to your child's mother or I shall be Orpheusized, scattered into Hebras. d.a.m.n the King, lords, commons, and _specially_ (as I said on Muswell Hill on a Sunday when I could get no beer a quarter before one) all Bishops, Priests and Curates. Vale.

["Ainsworth." Referring to Robert Ainsworth's _Thesaurus_, 1736.

_Abactor_ (see Forcellini), a stealer or driver away of cattle.

Ainsworth gives only _abactus_--to drive away by force.

"The Gypsy's Malison." This is the sonnet in _Blackwood_ for January, 1829.]

LETTER 475

(_Fragment_)

CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER

[No date. Early 1829.]

The comings in of an incipient conveyancer are not adequate to the receipt of three twopenny post non-paids in a week. Therefore, after this, I condemn my stub to long and deep silence, or shall awaken it to write to lords. Lest those raptures in this honeymoon of my correspondence, which you avow for the gentle person of my Nuncio, after pa.s.sing through certain natural grades, as Love, Love and Water, Love with the chill off, then subsiding to that point which the heroic suitor of his wedded dame, the n.o.ble-spirited Lord Randolph in the play, declares to be the ambition of his pa.s.sion, a reciprocation of "complacent kindness,"--should suddenly plump down (scarce staying to bait at the mid point of indifference, so hungry it is for distaste) to a loathing and blank aversion, to the rendering probable such counter expressions as this,--"d.a.m.n that infernal twopenny postman" (words which make the not yet glutted inamorato "lift up his hands and wonder who can use them.") While, then, you are not ruined, let me a.s.sure thee, O thou above the painter, and next only under Giraldus Cambrensis, the most immortal and worthy to be immortal Barry, thy most ingenious and golden cadences do take my fancy mightily. They are at this identical moment under the snip and the paste of the fairest hands (bating chilblains) in Cambridge, soon to be transplanted to Suffolk, to the envy of half of the young ladies in Bury. But tell me, and tell me truly, gentle Swain, is that Isola Bella a true spot in geographical denomination, or a floating Delos in thy brain? Lurks that fair island in verity in the bosom of Lake Maggiore, or some other with less poetic name, which thou hast Cornwallized for the occasion? And what if Maggiore itself be but a coinage of adaptation? Of this pray resolve me immediately, for my alb.u.mess will be catechised on this subject; and how can I prompt her?

Lake Leman, I know, and Lemon Lake (in a punch bowl) I have swum in, though those lymphs be long since dry. But Maggiore may be in the moon.

Unsphinx this riddle for me, for my shelves have no gazetteer. And mayest thou never murder thy father-in-law in the Trivia of Lincoln's Inn New Square Pa.s.sage, where Searl Street and the Street of Portugal embrace, nor afterwards make absurd proposals to the Widow M. But I know you abhor any such notions. Nevertheless so did O-Edipus (as Admiral Burney used to call him, splitting the diphthong in spite or ignorance) for that matter. C.L.

["Above the painter"--James Barry, R.A., but I do not understand the allusion here.

"Giraldus Cambrensis"--the historian, Giraldus de Barri.