The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 64 : Whittington and his Cat are a fine hallucination for Mr. Lamb's historic Muse, and

Whittington and his Cat are a fine hallucination for Mr. Lamb's historic Muse, and we believe he never heartily forgave a certain writer who took the subject of Guy Faux out of his hands.

A few years afterwards Lamb told Carlyle he regretted that the Faux conspiracy had failed--there would have been such a magnificent _explosion_. Carlyle cites this remark in his diary in evidence of Lamb's imbecility, but I fancy that Lamb had merely taken the measure of his visitor.

Lamb's reference to Hazlitt as an ex-Jesuit with the mention of Douay and M----th (Maynooth, the Irish Roman Catholic College), is, of course, chaff, resulting from Hazlitt's defence of this arch-Romanist.

After "Father of the Church" (page 280, line 7) Lamb had written in _The Reflector_:--

"The conclusion of his discourse is so pertinent to my subject, that I must beg your patience while I transcribe it. He has been drawing a parallel between the fire which Vaux and his accomplices meditated, and that which James and John were willing to have called down from heaven upon the heads of the Samaritans who would not receive our Saviour into their houses. 'Lastly,' he says, 'it (the powder treason) was a fire so strange that it had no example. The apostles, indeed, pleaded a mistaken precedent for the reasonableness of their demand, they desired leave to do but _even as Elias did_. The Greeks only retain this clause, it is not in the Bibles of the Church of Rome. And, really," etc.

I have collated the pa.s.sage quoted by Lamb with the original edition of the sermon. Of the Latin phrases which Taylor does not translate, the first is from Sidonius Apollinaris, _Carm._, XXII.: "The stall of the Thracian King, the altars of Busiris, the feasts of Antiphates, and the Tauric sovereignty of Thoas." _Rex Bistonius_ was Diomed, King of the Bistones, in Thrace, who fed his horses with human flesh, and was himself thrown to be their food by Hercules. Busiris, King of Egypt, seized and sacrificed all foreigners who visited this country, and he also was slain by Hercules. Antiphates was King of the Laestrygonians in Sicily, man-eating giants, who destroyed eleven of the s.h.i.+ps of Ulysses.

Thoas was King of Lemnos, and when the Lemnian women killed all the men in the island, his daughter, Hypsipyle, then elected queen, saved him, and he fled to Taurus where he became a king. This is the only legend of cruelty a.s.sociated with the name of Thoas, and of course he is not the prepetrator; the crime is that of the women.

Concerning Taylor's second quotation, I am informed that the words "_ergo quae ... tuas qui_" occur (virtually) in Prudentius, _Cathemerinon_, V., 81. The Latin is monkish, but means evidently: "But that ma.s.sacre of princes who fell unavenged, Christ brooked not, lest perchance the house that His Father had built should be overthrown. And so what tongue can unfold Thy praise, O Christ, who dost abase the disloyal people and its treacherous ruler?"

Page 284, line 11 from foot. _Bellamy's room._ The old refreshment room of the House. There is a description of it in _Sketches by Boz_--"A Parliamentary Sketch."

Page 284, line 6 from foot. _Berenice's curl._ After these words came, in _The Reflector_ version of the essay, this pa.s.sage:--

"--all, in their degrees, glittering somewhere. Suss.e.x misses her member[71] on earth, but is consoled to view him, on a starry night, siding the Great Bear. Cambridge beholds hers[72] next Scorpio. The gentle Castlereagh curdles in the Milky Way."

[71] "J---- F----, Esq."

[72] "Sir V---- G----."

The member for Suss.e.x at the time this essay was written (1811) was John Fuller, or Jack Fuller, of Rosehill, Suss.e.x, and Devons.h.i.+re Place, a bluff, eccentric character about town in those days, of huge stature and great wealth, whose house was famous for its musical soirees. Lamb calls him Ursa Major; his friend Jekyll, the wit, and one of Lamb's Old Benchers, called him the Hippopotamus. He once was forcibly removed from the House for refusing to give way and calling the Speaker "the insignificant little person in a wig." Fuller did not sit after 1812. He died in 1834. The member for Cambridge University was Sir Vicary Gibbs, then Attorney General, who in that capacity was a fierce opponent of the press, amongst those prosecuted by him being John and Leigh Hunt. From his caustic tongue he was known as Vinegar Gibbs--hence the reference to Scorpio. Castlereagh was, in 1823, no more; he had committed suicide in 1821.

Page 285. ON A Pa.s.sAGE IN "THE TEMPEST."

_London Magazine_, November 1823. Not reprinted by Lamb.

In the _Magazine_ it was ent.i.tled "Nugae Criticae. By the author of _Elia_. II. On a Pa.s.sage in 'The Tempest,'" the first contribution under this general t.i.tle being the essay on Sir Philip Sidney's sonnets in the _London Magazine_, September, 1823, reprinted in the _Last Essays of Elia_. Lamb did not continue the series. The present paper was signed "L."

An ingenious commentary upon Lamb's theory was contributed by "Laelius"

to the December _London Magazine_. After detailing his objections to Ogilby's narrative as a final solution, he put forward a theory of his own which is interesting enough to be reprinted here. Laelius wrote:--

The sense which I always attributed to the pa.s.sage is this: _uno verbo_, the Witch Sycorax was _pregnant_;--and that humanity which teaches us to spare the guilty mother for the sake of her embryo innocent, was imputed by Shakespeare to the Algerines on this occasion.... The "one thing she did" is evidently what Shakespeare in his "Merchant of Venice" with great delicacy calls "the deed of kind;" and this sense, though by no means obvious, is justly inferrible from the context. Why then should it not be preferred? I have not been able to discover any thing in the rest of the piece inconsistent with the meaning here attributed to these lines; you, perhaps, may be more successful. A friend objected to me, that the law is,--to spare the mother _only_ till the birth of her child, and therefore that the Witch, instead of being exiled at once, would have been kept till she was delivered, and then punished with death for her "manifold mischiefs." But poets are not expected to dispense justice with such nice and legal discrimination,--not to speak of what might have been the immediate necessity of expelling Sycorax from the Algerine community, either by death or banishment; the former of which was forbidden by the existing circ.u.mstances of her situation.

In connection with this theory it may be remarked that it was an old belief that during pregnancy a woman's eyes became blue. Webster, in the "d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi," makes Bosola say of the d.u.c.h.ess:--

The fins of her eyelids look most teeming blue.

I do not know of any editor of Shakespeare who has adopted Lamb's suggestion.

Page 288. ORIGINAL LETTER OF JAMES THOMSON.

_London Magazine_, November, 1824. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This letter of James Thomson is printed in this edition, because Lamb was sufficiently interested in it to copy it out; but it is believed to be a genuine work of the author of the _Seasons_, and not, as has been stated, a hoax of Lamb's. In the memoir of Thomson by Sir Harris Nicolas (revised by Peter Cunningham), prefixed to the Aldine edition of Thomson's poems, the letter will be found in its right place. It is addressed to Dr. Cramston, September, 1725.

Page 292. BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF MR. LISTON.

_London Magazine_, January, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This article was not signed, but we know it to be Lamb's from a reference in a letter to Miss Hutchinson, of January 20, 1825:--

"But did you read the 'Memoir of Liston'? and did you guess whose it was? Of all the Lies I ever put off, I value this most. It is from top to toe, every paragraph, Pure Invention; and has pa.s.sed for Gospel, has been republished in newspapers, and in the penny play-bills of the Night, as an authentic Account. I shall certainly go to the Naughty Man some day for my Fibbings."

Writing to Barton on February 10, 1825, Lamb alludes to it again, remarking, "A life more improbable for him [Liston] to have lived would not be easily invented."

To come from Lamb to facts--according to the best accounts that we have, the father of John Liston (1776?-1846) was either a watchmaker, or a subordinate official in the Custom House. He went to Soho School, afterwards became an usher at Dr. Burney's school at Gosport, and in 1799 was a master at the Grammar School of St. Martin's in Castle Street, Leicester Square. His first appearance on the stage proper was at Weymouth, where he failed utterly. Later he joined a touring company in the north of England as a serious actor, and again failed. At last, however, a manager induced him to take up comic old men's and b.u.mpkins'

parts, and his real talents were at once discovered. Thereafter he succeeded steadily, until his salary was larger than that paid to any other comedian of his time. His greatest part was Paul Pry in John Poole's play of that name, which was produced in September in the year of Lamb's essay. Liston left the stage in 1837. He married a Miss Tyrer, a favourite actress in burlesque. Liston's own tendency to punning and practical jokes must have led him to look upon this spurious biography with much favour.

Mrs. Cowden Clarke in her autobiography, _My Long Life_, says that she often met Mr. and Mrs. Liston in the Lambs' rooms in Great Russell Street.

It is interesting, in connection with Lamb's joke, to know that Liston's library contained a number of works of biblical criticism.

Page 299. A VISION OF HORNS.

_London Magazine_, January, 1825. Signed "Elia." Not reprinted by Lamb.

I had some little doubt as to whether or no to include in the present edition this fantasia on a theme no longer acceptable, since Lamb himself says he did not care to be a.s.sociated with it. "The Horns is in poor taste [he wrote to Miss Hutchinson], resembling the most laboured papers in the Spectator. I had sign'd it 'Jack Horner:' but Taylor and Hessey said, it would be thought an offensive article, unless I put my known signature to it; and wrung from me my slow consent." And again, to Barton: "I am vexed that ugly paper should have offended. I kept it as clear from objectionable phrases as possible, and it was Hessey's fault, and my weakness, that it did not appear anonymous. No more of it, for G.o.d's sake."

Lamb's objections being, however, lodged rather against the publicity of the essay's paternity than the essay itself, and the aim of the present edition being to be as complete as possible, the essay stands. Moreover it has a peculiar interest as being to a large extent an experiment in what we might call Congrevism: forming a whimsical appendix to the _Elia_ essay on the "Artificial Comedy," wherein Lamb urges upon the readers of the old licentious plays the value of dissociating them in their minds altogether from real life; looking upon them purely as fanciful dramas of an impossible society; and thus being able to enjoy their wit and high spirits without shock to the moral sensibilities. In his "Vision of Horns" Lamb seems to me to be himself dramatising this genial and reasonable view. He has carried out Congreve's method to a still higher power, and imagined a land peopled wholly by cuckolds--a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the old English and modern French comedy theory of society. Rightly the essay should follow that on the "Artificial Comedy" as an ironical postscript.

Page 304. THE ILl.u.s.tRIOUS DEFUNCT.

_New Monthly Magazine_, January, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

The footnote with which the article properly begins refers to the last effort, then in preparation, which was made to add to the life of the State Lottery. Actually, the last State Lottery in England was held on October 18, 1826.

Page 305, line 4. _Devout Chancellors of the Exchequer_. The lottery produced between 250,000 and 300,000 per annum. Its death was decreed by a Parliamentary Committee which had inquired into its merits and demerits as a means of replenis.h.i.+ng the national coffers.

Page 305, line 9. _Sorrowing contractors_. It was customary to apportion the sale of lottery tickets among speculators, who sold them again, if possible at a profit. The most prominent of these at the last was T.

Bish (see below).

Page 305, line 28. _The Blue-coat Boy_. It was the habit, which began about 1694, for a dozen boys from Christ's Hospital to be requisitioned by the lottery controllers, from whom two were selected to draw the tickets from the wheels in Coopers' Hall. An old print, given in the Rev. E. H. Pearce's _Annals of Christ's Hospital_, 1901, shows them at their work.

Page 309, line 3. _The art and mystery of puffing_. An interesting collection of lottery puffs will be found in Hone's _Every-Day Book_, Vol. II., November 15. The arch-professor of puffery in the lottery's later days was T. Bish, of Cornhill and Charing Cross, whose blandishments to the public were often presented in ingenious verse. We know from one of Mary Lamb's letters that Lamb (in addition to speculating in lottery tickets) had himself written lottery puffs twenty years earlier than this essay; but I have not been able confidently to trace any to his hand.