The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 441 : And your exquisite taste will prevent your falling into the error of Purcell, who at a

And your exquisite taste will prevent your falling into the error of Purcell, who at a pa.s.sage similar to _that_ in my first air,

Drops his bow, and stands to hear,

directed the first violin thus:--

Here the first violin must drop his _bow_.

But, besides the absurdity of disarming his princ.i.p.al performer of so necessary an adjunct to his instrument, in such an emphatic part of the composition too, which must have had a droll effect at the time, all such minutiae of adaptation are at this time of day very properly exploded, and Jackson of Exeter very fairly ranks them under the head of puns.

Should you succeed in the setting of it, we propose having it performed (we have one very tolerable second voice here, and Mr. Holmes, I dare say, would supply the minor parts) at the Greyhound. But it must be a secret to the young couple till we can get the band in readiness.

Believe me, dear Novello,

Yours truly,

C. LAMB.

Enfield, 6 Nov., '28.

[Mrs. Cowden Clarke remarks in her notes on this letter that the references to Purcell and to Jackson of Exeter are inventions. For Mr.

Holmes see note above.

Here should come a letter from Lamb to Laman Blanchard, dated Enfield, November 9, 1828, thanking him for a book and dedication. Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804-1845), afterwards known as a journalist, had just published, through Harrison Ainsworth, a little volume ent.i.tled _Lyric Offerings_, which was dedicated to Lamb. After Lamb's death Blanchard contributed to the _New Monthly Magazine_ some additional Popular Fallacies.]

LETTER 465

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS HOOD

Late autumn, 1828.

Enfield.

Dear Lamb--You are an impudent varlet; but I will keep your secret. We dine at Ayrton's on Thursday, and shall try to find Sarah and her two spare beds for that night only. Miss M. and her tragedy may be dished: so may not you and your rib. Health attend you.

Yours, T. HOOD, ESQ.

Miss Bridget Hood sends love.

[In _The Gem_, 1829, in addition to his poem, "On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born," Lamb was credited with the following piece of prose, ent.i.tled "A Widow," which was really the work of Hood (see letter above):--

A WIDOW

Hath always been a mark for mockery:--a standing b.u.t.t for wit to level at. Jest after jest hath been huddled upon her close cap, and stuck, like burrs, upon her weeds. Her sables are a perpetual "Black Joke."

Satirists--prose and verse--have made merry with her bereavements.

She is a stock character on the stage. Farce bottleth up her crocodile tears, or labelleth her empty lachrymatories. Comedy mocketh her precocious flirtations--Tragedy even girdeth at her frailty, and twitteth her with "the funeral baked meats coldly furnis.h.i.+ng forth the marriage tables."

I confess when I called the other day on my kinswoman G.--then in the second week of her widowhood--and saw her sitting, her young boy by her side, in her recent sables, I felt unable to reconcile her estate with any risible a.s.sociations. The Lady with a skeleton moiety--in the old print, in Bowles' old shop window--seemed but a type of her condition. Her husband,--a whole hemisphere in love's world--was deficient. One complete side--her left--was death-stricken. It was a matrimonial paralysis, unprovocative of laughter. I could as soon have t.i.ttered at one of those melancholy objects that drag their poor dead-alive bodies about the streets.

It seems difficult to account for the popular prejudice against lone women. There is a majority, I trust, of such honest, decorous mourners as my kinswoman: yet are Widows, like the Hebrew, a proverb and a byeword amongst nations. From the first putting on of the sooty garments, they become a stock joke--chimney-sweep or blackamoor is not surer--by mere virtue of their nigritude.

Are the wanton amatory glances of a few pairs of graceless eyes, twinkling through their cunning waters, to reflect so evil a light on a whole community? Verily the sad benighted orbs of that n.o.ble relict--the Lady Rachel Russell--blinded through unserene drops for her dead Lord,--might atone for such oglings!

Are the traditional freaks of a Dame of Ephesus, or a Wife of Bath, or a Queen of Denmark, to cast so broad a shadow over a whole sisterhood. There must be, methinks, some more general infirmity--common, probably, to all Eve-kind--to justify so sweeping a stigma.

Does the satiric spirit, perhaps, inst.i.tute splenetic comparisons between the lofty poetical pretensions of posthumous tenderness and their fulfilment? The sentiments of Love especially affect a high heroical pitch, of which the human performance can present, at best, but a burlesque parody. A widow, that hath lived only for her husband, should die with him. She is flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone; and it is not seemly for a mere rib to be his survivor.

The prose of her practice accords not with the poetry of her professions. She hath done with the world,--and you meet her in Regent Street. Earth hath now nothing left for her--but she swears and administers. She cannot survive him--and invests in the _Long_ Annuities.

The romantic fancy resents, and the satiric spirit records, these discrepancies. By the conjugal theory itself there ought to be no Widows; and, accordingly, a cla.s.s, that by our milder manners is merely ridiculed, on the ruder banks of the Ganges is literally _roasted_. C. LAMB.

"Miss M. and her tragedy." I fancy Miss M. would be Miss Mitford, and her tragedy "Rienzi," produced at Drury Lane October 9, 1828. It was a success. Hood's rib would probably be the play I have not identified.

See letter to Barton of October 11.

Here, a little out of its order, might come a letter from Lamb to Hood, December 17, 1828, which is facsimiled in a privately-printed American bibliography of Lamb, the owner of which declines to let not only me but the Boston Bibliophile Society include it with the correspondence. In it Lamb expresses regret, not so much that Hood had signed "The Widow" with Lamb's name, but that an unfortunately ambiguous jest, pointed out to him by certain friends, had crept into it. He asks that the subject may never be referred to again.

Here perhaps should come a note to Miss Reynolds, Hood's sister-in-law, accompanying Lamb's Essay on Hogarth.]

LETTER 466

CHARLES LAMB TO EDWARD MOXON

[No date. Dec., 1828.]

Dear M.,--As I see no blood-marks on the Green Lanes Road, I conclude you got in safe skins home. Have you thought of inquiring Miss Wilson's change of abode? Of the 2 copies of my drama I want one sent to Wordsworth, together with a complete copy of Hone's "Table Book," for which I shall be your debtor till we meet. Perhaps Longman will take charge of this parcel. The other is for Coleridge at Mr. Gilman's, Grove, Highgate, which may be sent, or, if you have a curiosity to see him you will make an errand with it to him, & tell him we mean very soon to come & see him, if the Gilmans can give or get us a bed. I am ashamed to be so troublesome. Pray let Hood see the "Ecclectic Review"--a rogue!

The 2'd parts of the Blackwood you may make waste paper of. Yours truly,

C.L.

[I do not identify Miss Wilson. Lamb's drama was "A Wife's Trial" in _Blackwood_ for December, 1828. The same number of the _Eclectic Review_ referred to Hood's parody of Lamb, "The Widow," as profaning Leslie's picture of the widow by its "heartless ribaldry." By the 2d parts of _Blackwood_ Lamb referred, I imagine, to the pages on which his play was not printed.]

LETTER 467

CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

[P.M. December 5, 1828.]

Dear B.B.--I am ashamed to receive so many nice Books from you, and to have none to send you in return; You are always sending me some fruits or wholesome pot-herbs, and mine is the garden of the Sluggard, nothing but weeds or scarce they. Nevertheless if I knew how to transmit it, I would send you Blackwood's of this month, which contains a little Drama, to have your opinion of it, and how far I have improved, or otherwise, upon its prototype. Thank you for your kind Sonnet. It does me good to see the Dedication to a Christian Bishop. I am for a Comprehension, as Divines call it, but so as that the Church shall go a good deal more than halfway over to the Silent Meeting house. I have ever said that the Quakers are the only _Professors_ of Christianity as I read it in the Evangiles; I say _Professors_--marry, as to practice, with their gaudy hot types and poetical vanities, they are much at one with the sinful.

Martin's frontispiece is a very fine thing, let C.L. say what he please to the contrary. Of the Poems, I like them as a volume better than any one of the preceding; particularly, Power and Gentleness; The Present; Lady Russell--with the exception that I do not like the n.o.ble act of Curtius, true or false, one of the grand foundations of old Roman patriotism, to be sacrificed to Lady R.'s taking notes on her husband's trial. If a thing is good, why invidiously bring it into light with something better? There are too few heroic things in this world to admit of our marshalling them in anxious etiquettes of precedence. Would you make a poetn on the Story of Ruth (pretty Story!) and then say, Aye, but how much better is the story of Joseph and his Brethren! To go on, the Stanzas to "Chalon" want the _name_ of Clarkson in the body of them; it is left to inference. The Battle of Gibeon is spirited again--but you sacrifice it in last stanza to the Song at Bethlehem. Is it quite orthodox to do so. The first was good, you suppose, for that dispensation. Why set the word against the word? It puzzles a weak Christian. So Watts's Psalms are an implied censure on David's. But as long as the Bible is supposed to be an equally divine Emanation with the Testament, so long it will stagger weaklings to have them set in opposition. G.o.diva is delicately touch'd. I have always thought it a beautiful story characteristic of old English times. But I could not help amusing myself with the thought--if Martin had chosen this subject for a frontispiece, there would have been in some dark corner a white Lady, white as the Walker on the waves--riding upon some mystical quadruped --and high above would have risen "tower above tower a ma.s.sy structure high" the Tenterden steeples of Coventry, till the poor Cross would scarce have known itself among the clouds, and far above them all, the distant Clint hills peering over chimney pots, piled up, Ossa-on-Olympus fas.h.i.+on, till the admiring Spectator (admirer of a n.o.ble deed) might have gone look for the Lady, as you must hunt for the other in the Lobster. But M. should be made Royal Architect. What palaces he would pile--but then what parliamentary grants to make them good!

ne'ertheless I like the frontispiece. The Elephant is pleasant; and I am glad you are getting into a wider scope of subjects. There may be too much, not religion, but too many _good words_ into a book, till it becomes, as Sh. says of religion, a rhapsody of words. I will just name that you have brought in the Song to the Shepherds in four or five if not six places. Now this is not good economy. The Enoch is fine; and here I can sacrifice Elijah to it, because 'tis ill.u.s.trative only, and not disparaging of the latter prophet's departure. I like this best in the Book. Lastly, I much like the Heron, 'tis exquisite: know you Lord Thurlow's Sonnet to a Bird of that sort on Lacken water? If not, 'tis indispensable I send it you, with my Blackwood, if you tell me how best to send them. Fludyer is pleasant. You are getting gay and Hood-ish.

What is the Enigma? money--if not, I fairly confess I am foiled--and sphynx must [_here are words crossed through_] 4 times I've tried to write eat--eat me--and the blotting pen turns it into cat me. And now I will take my leave with saying I esteem thy verses, like thy present, honour thy frontispicer, and right-reverence thy Patron and Dedicatee, and am, dear B.B.