The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 363 : Your sister Ann will tell you that your friend Louisa is going to France. Miss Skepper

Your sister Ann will tell you that your friend Louisa is going to France. Miss Skepper is out of town, Mrs. Reynolds desires to be remembered to you, and so does my neighbour Mrs. Norris, who was your doctress when you were unwell, her three little children are grown three big children. The Lions still live in Exeter Change. Returning home through the Strand, I often hear them roar about twelve oclock at night.

I never hear them without thinking of you, because you seemed so pleased with the sight of them, and said your young companions would stare when you told them you had seen a Lion.

And now my dear Barbara fare well, I have not written such a long letter a long time, but I am very sorry I had nothing amusing to write about.

Wis.h.i.+ng you may pa.s.s happily through the rest of your school days, and every future day of your life.

I remain, your affectionate Friend, M. LAMB.

My brother sends his love to you, with the kind remembrance your letter shewed you have of us as I was. He joins with me in respects to your good father and mother, and to your brother John, who, if I do not mistake his name, is your tall young brother who was in search of a fair lady with a large fortune. Ask him if he has found her yet. You say you are not so tall as Louisa--you must be, you cannot so degenerate from the rest of your family. Now you have begun, I shall hope to have the pleasure of hearing from [you] again. I shall always receive a letter from you with very great delight.

[This charming letter is to a younger sister of Matilda Betham. What the work was which in 1814 drove Lamb into an empty room I do not know. It may have been something which came to nought. Beyond the essay on Tailors (see Vol. I.) and a few brief sc.r.a.ps for _The Champion_ he did practically nothing that has survived until some verses in 1818, a few criticisms in 1819, and in 1820 the first of the _Elia_ essays for the _London Magazine_. Louisa was Louisa Holcroft, about to go to France with her mother and stepfather, James Kenney. Miss Skepper was Basil Montagu's stepdaughter, afterwards the wife of B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall). Exeter Change, where there was a menagerie, was in the Strand (see note above). There is a further reference to the tallness of John Betham in Lamb's letter to Landor in 1832.]

LETTER 210

CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN SCOTT [Dated at end: Dec. 12, 1814.]

Sir, I am sorry to seem to go off my agreement, but very particular circ.u.mstances have happened to hinder my fulfillment of it at present.

If any single Essays ever occur to me in future, you shall have the refusal of them. Meantime I beg you to consider the thing as at an end.

Yours, with thanks & acknowlg'nt C. LAMB.

Monday ev: 12 Dec., 1814.

[_See Letter to Scott above._]

LETTER 211

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH [P.M. Dec. 28, 1814.]

Dear W. your experience about tailors seems to be in point blank opposition to Burton, as much as the author of the Excursion does toto coelo differ in his notion of a country life from the picture which W.H.

has exhibited of the same. But with a little explanation you and B. may be reconciled. It is evident that he confined his observations to the genuine native London tailor. What freaks Tailor-nature may take in the country is not for him to give account of. And certainly some of the freaks recorded do give an idea of the persons in question being beside themselves, rather than in harmony with the common moderate self enjoym't of the rest mankind. A flying tailor, I venture to say, is no more in rerum natura than a flying horse or a Gryphon. His wheeling his airy flight from the precipice you mention had a parallel in the melancholy Jew who toppled from the monument. Were his limbs ever found?

Then, the man who cures diseases by words is evidently an inspired tailor. Burton never affirmed that the act of sewing disqualified the practiser of it from being a fit organ for supernatural revelation. He never enters into such subjects. 'Tis the common uninspired tailor which he speaks of. Again the person who makes his smiles to be _heard_, is evidently a man under possession; a demoniac taylor. A greater h.e.l.l than his own must have a hand in this. I am not certain that the cause which you advocate has much reason for triumph. You seem to me to subst.i.tute light headedness for light heartedness by a trick, or not to know the difference. I confess, a grinning tailor would shock me.--Enough of tailors.--

The "'scapes" of the great G.o.d Pan who appeared among your mountains some dozen years since, and his narrow chance of being submerged by the swains, afforded me much pleasure. I can conceive the water nymphs pulling for him. He would have been another Hylas. W. Hylas. In a mad letter which Capel Loft wrote to M.M. Phillips (now S'r. Rich'd.) I remember his noticing a metaphysical article by Pan, signed H. and adding "I take your correspondent to be the same with Hylas." Hylas has [? had] put forth a pastoral just before. How near the unfounded conjecture of the certainly inspired Loft (unfounded as we thought it) was to being realized! I can conceive him being "good to all that wander in that perilous flood." One J. Scott (I know no more) is edit'r of _Champ_.

Where is Coleridge?

That Review you speak of, I am only sorry it did not appear last month.

The circ.u.mstances of haste and peculiar bad spirits under which it was written, would have excused its slightness and inadequacy, the full load of which I shall suffer from its lying by so long as it will seem to have done from its postponement. I write with great difficulty and can scarce command my own resolution to sit at writing an hour together. I am a poor creature, but I am leaving off Gin. I hope you will see good will in the thing. I had a difficulty to perform not to make it all Panegyrick; I have attempted to personate a mere stranger to you; perhaps with too much strangeness. But you must bear that in mind when you read it, and not think that I am in mind distant from you or your Poem, but that both are close to me among the nearest of persons and things. I do but act the stranger in the Review. Then, I was puzzled about extracts and determined upon not giving one that had been in the Examiner, for Extracts repeated give an idea that there is a meagre allow'ce, of good things. By this way, I deprived myself of Sr. W.

Irthing and the reflections that conclude his story, which are the flower of the Poem. H. had given the reflections before me. _Then_ it is the first Review I ever did, and I did not know how long I might make it. But it must speak for itself, if Giffard and his crew do not put words in its mouth, which I expect. Farewell. Love to all. Mary keeps very bad.

C. LAMB.

[Lamb seems to have sent Wordsworth a copy of _The Champion_ containing his essay, signed Burton, Junior, "On the Melancholy of Tailors."

Wordsworth's letter of reply, containing the examples of other tailors, is no longer in existence. "A greater h.e.l.l" is a pun: the receptacle into which tailors throw sc.r.a.ps is called a h.e.l.l. See Lamb's "Satan in Search of a Wife" and notes (Vol. IV.) for more on this topic.

"W. H."--Hazlitt: referring again to his review of _The Excursion_ in _The Examiner_.

"The melancholy Jew"--Mr. Lyon Levy, a diamond merchant, who jumped off the Monument commemorating the Fire of London, on January 18, 1810.

"The ''scapes' of the great G.o.d Pan." A reference to Hazlitt's flirtation with a farmer's daughter in the Lake country, ending almost in immersion (see above). Hylas, seeking for water with a pitcher, so enraptured the nymphs of the river with his beauty that they drew him in.

Capell Lofft (1751-1824) was a lawyer and philanthropist of independent means who threw himself into many popular discussions and knew many literary men. He was the patron of Robert Bloomfield. Lamb was amused by him, but annoyed that his initials were also C. L. "M. M. Phillips"--for _Monthly Magazine_, which Phillips published.

"One J. Scott." See note above.

"Where is Coleridge?" Coleridge was now at Calne, in Wilts.h.i.+re, with the Morgans. He was being treated for the drug habit by a Dr. Page.

"That Review." Lamb's review of _The Excursion_, which, although the _Quarterly_ that contains it is dated October, 1814, must have been delayed until the end of the year. The episode of Sir W. Irthing (really Sir Alfred Irthing) is in Book VII. Lamb's foreboding as to Clifford's action was only too well justified, as we shall see.

"Mary keeps very bad." Mary Lamb, we learn from Crabb Robinson's _Diary_, had been taken ill some time between December 11 and December 24, having tired herself by writing an article on needlework for the _British Lady's Magazine_ (see Vol. I. of this edition). She did not recover until February, 1815.]

LETTER 212

CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH [P.M. illegible. ?Early Jan., 1815.]

Dear Wordsworth, I told you my Review was a very imperfect one. But what you will see in the Quarterly is a spurious one which Mr. Baviad Gifford has palm'd upon it for mine. I never felt more vexd in my life than when I read it. I cannot give you an idea of what he has done to it out of spite at me because he once sufferd me to be called a lunatic in his Thing. The _language_ he has alterd throughout. Whatever inadequateness it had to its subject, it was in point of composition the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ, and so my sister (to whom alone I read the MS.) said. That charm if it had any is all gone: more than a third of the substance is cut away, and that not all from one place, but _pa.s.sim_, so as to make utter nonsense. Every warm expression is changed for a nasty cold one. I have not the cursed alteration by me, I shall never look at it again, but for a specimen I remember I had said the Poet of the Excurs'n "walks thro' common forests as thro' some Dodona or enchanted wood, and every casual bird that flits upon the boughs, like that miraculous one in Ta.s.so, but in language more piercing than any articulate sounds, reveals to him far higher lovelays." It is now (besides half a dozen alterations in the same half dozen lines) "but in language more _intelligent_ reveals to him"--that is one I remember. But that would have been little, putting his d.a.m.nd Shoemaker phraseology (for he was a shoemaker) in stead of mine, which has been tinctured with better authors than his ignorance can comprehend--for I reckon myself a dab at _Prose_--verse I leave to my betters--G.o.d help them, if they are to be so reviewed by friend and foe as you have been this quarter. I have read "It won't do." But worse than altering words, he has kept a few members only of the part I had done best, which was to explain all I could of your "scheme of harmonies," as I had ventured to call it, between the external universe and what within us answers to it. To do this I had acc.u.mulated a good many short pa.s.sages, rising in length to the end, weaving in the Extracts as if they came in as a part of the text, naturally, not obtruding them as specimens. Of this part a little is left, but so as without conjuration no man could tell what I was driving it [? at]. A proof of it you may see (tho' not judge of the whole of the injustice) by these words: I had spoken something about "natural methodism--" and after follows "and therefore the tale of Margaret sh'd have been postponed" (I forget my words, or his words): now the reasons for postponing it are as deducible from what goes before, as they are from the 104th psalm. The pa.s.sage whence I deduced it has vanished, but clapping a colon before a _therefore_ is always reason enough for Mr. Baviad Gifford to allow to a reviewer that is not himself. I a.s.sure you my complaints are founded. I know how sore a word alterd makes one, but indeed of this Review the whole complexion is gone. I regret only that I did not keep a copy. I am sure you would have been pleased with it, because I have been feeding my fancy for some months with the notion of pleasing you. Its imperfection or inadequateness in size and method I knew, but for the _writing part_ of it, I was fully satisfied. I hoped it would make more than atonement.

Ten or twelve distinct pa.s.sages come to my mind, which are gone, and what is left is of course the worse for their having been there, the eyes are pulld out and the bleeding sockets are left. I read it at Arch's shop with my face burning with vexation secretly, with just such a feeling as if it had been a review written against myself, making false quotations from me. But I am ashamd to say so much about a short piece. How are _you_ served! and the labors of years turn'd into contempt by scoundrels.

But I could not but protest against your taking that thing as mine.

Every _pretty_ expression, (I know there were many) every warm expression, there was nothing else, is vulgarised and frozen--but if they catch me in their camps again let them spitchc.o.c.k me. They had a right to do it, as no name appears to it, and Mr. Shoemaker Gifford I suppose never wa[i]ved a right he had since he commencd author. G.o.d confound him and all caitiffs.

C. L.

[For the full understanding of this letter it is necessary to read Lamb's review (see Vol. I. of this edition).

William Gifford (1756-1826), editor of the _Quarterly_, had been a shoemaker's apprentice. Lamb calls him Mr. Baviad Gifford on account of his satires, _The Moeviad_ and _The Baviad_, against the Delia Cruscan school of poetry, of which Robert Merry had been the princ.i.p.al member.

Some of Lamb's grudge against Gifford, which was of old standing (see notes to Lamb's review, Vol. I.), was repaid in his sonnet "St. Crispin to Mr. Gifford" (see Vol. IV. of this edition). Gifford's connection with Canning, in the _Anti-Jacobin_, could not have improved his position with Lamb.

"I have read 'It won't do.'" A reference to the review of _The Excursion_ in the _Edinburgh_ for November, by Jeffrey, beginning "This will never do."]

LETTER 213

CHARLES LAMB TO MR. SARGUS [Dated at end: Feb. 23, 1815.]