The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 91 : In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smol

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding. Fielding, Smollet, Sterne, and all that cla.s.s of perpetually self-reproductive volumes--Great Nature's Stereotypes--we see them individually perish with less regret, because we know the copies of them to be "eterne." But where a book is at once both good and rare--where the individual is almost the species, and when _that_ perishes,

We know not where is that Promethean torch That can its light relumine--

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his d.u.c.h.ess--no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel.

Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to be reprinted; but old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, Milton in his prose-works, Fuller--of whom we _have_ reprints, yet the books themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we know, have not endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, so as to become stock books--it is good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of Shakspeare. I rather prefer the common editions of Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with _plates_, which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text; and without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are so much better than the Shakspeare gallery _engravings_, which _did_.

I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays, and I like those editions of him best, which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled.--On the contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are painful to look at. I have no sympathy with them. If they were as much read as the current editions of the other poet, I should prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fas.h.i.+on to modern censure? what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular?--The wretched Malone could not do worse, when he bribed the s.e.xton of Stratford church to let him white-wash the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, which stood there, in rude but lively fas.h.i.+on depicted, to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the eye-brow, hair, the very dress he used to wear--the only authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat of white paint.

By ----, if I had been a justice of peace for Warwicks.h.i.+re, I would have clapt both commentator and s.e.xton fast in the stocks, for a pair of meddling sacrilegious varlets.

I think I see them at their work--these sapient trouble-tombs.

Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear--to mine, at least--than that of Milton or of Shakspeare? It may be, that the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.

Much depends upon _when_ and _where_ you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons?

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.

Winter evenings--the world shut out--with less of ceremony the gentle Shakspeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale--

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud--to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one--and it degenerates into an audience.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the clerks--who is the best scholar--to commence upon the Times, or the Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud _pro bono publico_.

With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers' shops and public-houses a fellow will get up, and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery.

Another follows with _his_ selection. So the entire journal transpires at length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and, without this expedient no one in the company would probably ever travel through the contents of a whole paper.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's, keeps the paper! I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, "the Chronicle is in hand, Sir."

Coming in to an inn at night--having ordered your supper--what can be more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there time out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest--two or three numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing _tete-a-tete_ pictures--"The Royal Lover and Lady G----;" "The Melting Platonic and the old Beau,"--and such like antiquated scandal? Would you exchange it--at that time, and in that place--for a better book?

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the weightier kinds of reading--the Paradise Lost, or Comus, he could have _read_ to him--but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a magazine, or a light pamphlet.

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading _Candide_.

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once detected--by a familiar damsel--reclined at my ease upon the gra.s.s, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading--_Pamela_. There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I could have wished it had been--any other book. We read on very sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and--went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret.

I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street _was not_), between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner.

I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts.

An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points.

There is a cla.s.s of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate without affection--the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls--the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they "s.n.a.t.c.h a fearful joy." Martin B----, in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no circ.u.mstances of his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in those uneasy s.n.a.t.c.hes. A quaint poetess of our day has moralised upon this subject in two very touching but homely stanzas.

I saw a boy with eager eye Open a book upon a stall, And read, as he'd devour it all; Which when the stall-man did espy, Soon to the boy I heard him call, "You, Sir, you never buy a book, Therefore in one you shall not look."

The boy pa.s.s'd slowly on, and with a sigh He wish'd he never had been taught to read, Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need.

Of sufferings the poor have many, Which never can the rich annoy: I soon perceiv'd another boy, Who look'd as if he'd not had any Food, for that day at least--enjoy The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder.

This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder, Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat: No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat.

THE OLD MARGATE HOY

I am fond of pa.s.sing my vacations (I believe I have said so before) at one or other of the Universities. Next to these my choice would fix me at some woody spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords in abundance, upon the banks of my beloved Thames. But somehow or other my cousin contrives to wheedle me once in three or four seasons to a watering place. Old attachments cling to her in spite of experience.

We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment doing dreary penance at--Hastings!--and all because we were happy many years ago for a brief week at--Margate. That was our first sea-side experiment, and many circ.u.mstances combined to make it the most agreeable holyday of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea, and we had never been from home so long together in company.

Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy weather-beaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough accommodations--ill exchanged for the foppery and fresh-water niceness of the modern steam-packet? To the winds and waves thou committedst thy goodly freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons. With the gales of heaven thou wentest swimmingly; or, when it was their pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like patience. Thy course was natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed; nor didst thou go poisoning the breath of ocean with sulphureous smoke--a great sea-chimaera, chimneying and furnacing the deep; or liker to that fire-G.o.d parching up Scamander.

Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with their coy reluctant responses (yet to the suppression of anything like contempt, to the raw questions, which we of the great city would be ever and anon putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange naval implement?) 'Specially can I forget thee, thou happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and them, conciliating interpreter of their skill to our simplicity, comfortable amba.s.sador between sea and land!--whose sailor-trowsers did not more convincingly a.s.sure thee to be an adopted denizen of the former, than thy white cap, and whiter ap.r.o.n over them, with thy neat-fingered practice in thy culinary vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nurture heretofore--a master cook of Eastcheap?

How busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain; here, there, like another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations--not to a.s.sist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which that untried motion might haply raise in our crude land-fancies. And when the o'er-was.h.i.+ng billows drove us below deck (for it was far gone in October, and we had stiff and blowing weather) how did thy officious ministerings, still catering for our comfort, with cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial conversation, alleviate the closeness and the confinement of thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very inviting, little cabin!

With these additaments to boot, we had on board a fellow-pa.s.senger, whose discourse in verity might have beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, and have made mirth and wonder abound as far as the Azores.

He was a dark, Spanish complexioned young man, remarkably handsome, with an officer-like a.s.surance, and an insuppressible volubility of a.s.sertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met with then, or since. He was none of your hesitating, half story-tellers (a most painful description of mortals) who go on sounding your belief, and only giving you as much as they see you can swallow at a time--the nibbling pickpockets of your patience--but one who committed downright, daylight depredations upon his neighbour's faith. He did not stand s.h.i.+vering upon the brink, but was a hearty thoroughpaced liar, and plunged at once into the depths of your credulity. I partly believe, he made pretty sure of his company. Not many rich, not many wise, or learned, composed at that time the common stowage of a Margate packet. We were, I am afraid, a set of as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a worse name) as Aldermanbury, or Watling-street, at that time of day could have supplied. There might be an exception or two among us, but I scorn to make any invidious distinctions among such a jolly, companionable s.h.i.+p's company, as those were whom I sailed with. Something too must be conceded to the _Genius Loci_. Had the confident fellow told us half the legends on land, which he favoured us with on the other element, I flatter myself the good sense of most of us would have revolted. But we were in a new world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and the time and place disposed us to the reception of any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obliterated from my memory much of his wild fablings; and the rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be read on sh.o.r.e. He had been Aid-de-camp (among other rare accidents and fortunes) to a Persian prince, and at one blow had stricken off the head of the King of Carimania on horseback. He, of course, married the Prince's daughter. I forget what unlucky turn in the politics of that court, combining with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his quitting Persia; but with the rapidity of a magician he transported himself, along with his hearers, back to England, where we still found him in the confidence of great ladies. There was some story of a Princess--Elizabeth, if I remember--having intrusted to his care an extraordinary casket of jewels, upon some extraordinary occasion--but as I am not certain of the name or circ.u.mstance at this distance of time, I must leave it to the Royal daughters of England to settle the honour among themselves in private. I cannot call to mind half his pleasant wonders; but I perfectly remember, that in the course of his travels he had seen a phoenix; and he obligingly undeceived us of the vulgar error, that there is but one of that species at a time, a.s.suring us that they were not uncommon in some parts of Upper Egypt.

Hitherto he had found the most implicit listeners. His dreaming fancies had transported us beyond the "ignorant present." But when (still hardying more and more in his triumphs over our simplicity) he went on to affirm that he had actually sailed through the legs of the Colossus at Rhodes, it really became necessary to make a stand. And here I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity of one of our party, a youth, that had hitherto been one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his recent reading, made bold to a.s.sure the gentleman, that there must be some mistake, as "the Colossus in question had been destroyed long since;" to whose opinion, delivered with all modesty, our hero was obliging enough to concede thus much, that "the figure was indeed a little damaged." This was the only opposition he met with, and it did not at all seem to stagger him, for he proceeded with his fables, which the same youth appeared to swallow with still more complacency than ever,--confirmed, as it were, by the extreme candour of that concession. With these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in sight of the Reculvers, which one of our own company (having been the vogage before) immediately recognising, and pointing out to us, was considered by us as no ordinary seaman.

All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a different character. It was a lad, apparently very poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was ever on the sea, with a smile: and, if he caught now and then some s.n.a.t.c.hes of these wild legends, it was by accident, and they seemed not to concern him. The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. He was as one, being with us, but not of us. He heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring; and when some of us pulled out our private stores--our cold meat and our salads--he produced none, and seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had laid in; provision for the one or two days and nights, to which these vessels then were oftentimes obliged to prolong their voyage Upon a nearer acquaintance with him, which he seemed neither to court nor decline, we learned that he was going to Margate, with the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there for sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which appeared to have eaten all over him. He expressed great hopes of a cure; and when we asked him, whether he had any friends where he was going, he replied, "he _had_ no friends."

These pleasant, and some mournful pa.s.sages, with the first sight of the sea, co-operating with youth, and a sense of holydays, and out-of-door adventure, to me that had been pent up in populous cities for many months before,--have left upon my mind the fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry hours to chew upon.

Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some unwelcome comparisons), if I endeavour to account for the _dissatisfaction_ which I have heard so many persons confess to have felt (as I did myself feel in part on this occasion), _at the sight of the sea for the first time?_ I think the reason usually given--referring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying our preconceptions of them--scarcely goes deep enough into the question. Let the same person see a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in his life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little mortified. The things do not fill up that s.p.a.ce, which the idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. But they have still a correspondency to his first notion, and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very similar impression: enlarging themselves (if I may say so) upon familiarity. But the sea remains a disappointment.--Is it not, that in _the latter_ we had expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am afraid, by the law of imagination unavoidably) not a definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain compa.s.sable by the eye, but _all the sea at once_, THE COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH! I do not say we, tell ourselves so much, but the craving of the mind is to be satisfied with nothing less. I will suppose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from description. He comes to it for the first time--all that he has been reading of it all his life, and _that_ the most enthusiastic part of life,--all he has gathered from narratives of wandering seamen; what he has gained from true voyages, and what he cherishes as credulously from romance and poetry; crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation.--He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto it; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and the mariner

For many a day, and many a dreadful night, Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape;

of fatal rocks, and the "still-vexed Bermoothes;" of great whirlpools, and the water-spout; of sunken s.h.i.+ps, and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths: of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all that is terrible on earth--

Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral;

of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and sh.e.l.ls; of coral beds, and of enchanted isles; of mermaids' grots--

I do not a.s.sert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all these wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him with confused hints and shadows of all these; and when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather too most likely) from our unromantic coasts--a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him--what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment? Or if he has come to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread or amazement?--Who, in similar circ.u.mstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir,--

Is this the mighty ocean?--is this _all_?

I love town, or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritious rocks; which the amateur calls "verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs. I cannot stand all day on the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, s.h.i.+fting like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel in Staffords.h.i.+re. There is no home for me here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous a.s.semblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair honest fis.h.i.+ng town, and no more, it were something--with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something. I could abide to dwell with Meschek; to a.s.sort with fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here. Their faces become the place. I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing but the revenue,--an abstraction I never greatly cared about. I could go out with them in their mackarel boats, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their illicit countrymen--townsfolk or brethren perchance--whistling to the sheathing and unsheathing of their cutla.s.ses (their only solace), who under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. But it is the visitants from town, that come here to _say_ that they have been here, with no more relish of the sea than a pond perch, or a dace might be supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace in these regions, and have as little toleration for myself here, as for them. What can they want here? if they had a true relish of the ocean, why have they brought all this land luggage with them? or why pitch their civilised tents in the desert? What mean these scanty book-rooms--marine libraries as they ent.i.tle them--if the sea were, as they would have us believe, a book "to read strange matter in?" what are their foolish concert-rooms, if they come, as they would fain be thought to do, to listen to the music of the waves? All is false and hollow pretention. They come, because it is the fas.h.i.+on, and to spoil the nature of the place. They are mostly, as I have said, stockbrokers; but I have watched the better sort of them--now and then, an honest citizen (of the old stamp), in the simplicity of his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of their arrival. It is easy to see it in their countenance. A day or two they go wandering on the s.h.i.+ngles, picking up c.o.c.klesh.e.l.ls, and thinking them great things; but, in a poor week, imagination slackens: they begin to discover that c.o.c.kles produce no pearls, and then--O then!--if I could interpret for the pretty creatures (I know they have not the courage to confess it themselves) how gladly would they exchange their sea-side rambles for a Sunday walk on the green-sward of their accustomed Twickenham meadows!

I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, who think they truly love the sea, with its wild usages, what would their feelings be, if some of the unsophisticated aborigines of this place, encouraged by their courteous questionings here, should venture, on the faith of such a.s.sured sympathy between them, to return the visit, and come up to see--London. I must imagine them with their fis.h.i.+ng tackle on their back, as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation would it cause in Lothbury? What vehement laughter would it not excite among

The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard-street.

I am sure that no town-bred, or inland-born subjects, can feel their true and natural nourishment at these sea-places. Nature, where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not half so good-natured as by the milder waters of my natural river. I would exchange these sea-gulls for swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of Thamesis.

THE CONVALESCENT