The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Chapter 62 : Is there a sound religious feeling in your Essays, or is there not?And what is a sound

Is there a sound religious feeling in your Essays, or is there not?

And what is a sound religious feeling? You declare yourself a Unitarian; but, as a set-off to that heterodoxy, you vaunt your bosom-friends.h.i.+p with T. N. T., "a little tainted with Socinianism," and "----, a st.u.r.dy old Athanasian." With this vaunting anomaly you make the Laureate blush, till his face tinges Derwent-water with a ruddy l.u.s.tre as of the setting sun. O Charles, Charles----if we could but "see ourselves as others see us!" Would that we ourselves could do so! But how would that benefit you? You are too amiable to wish to see Christopher North humiliated in his own estimation, and startled at the sight of _Public Derision_, like yourself! Yes----even c.o.c.kneys blush for you; and the many clerks of the India-House hang down their heads and are ashamed.

You present THE PUBLIC with a list of your friends. "W., the light, and warm--as light-hearted Ja.n.u.s of the London!" Who the devil is he? Let him cover both his faces with a handkerchief. "H. C. R., unwearied in the offices of a friend;" the correspondent and caricaturist of Wordsworth, the very identical "W----th," who "estated" you in so many "possessions," and made you proud of your "rent-roll." "W. A., the last and steadiest of that little knot of whist-players." Ah! lack-a-day, Charles, what are trumps? And "M., the n.o.ble-minded kinsman by wedlock" of the same eternal "W----th."

Pray, what is his wife's name? and were the banns published in St.

Pancras Church?----All this is very vain and very virulent; and you indeed give us portraits of your friends, each in the clare-obscure.

We were in the number of your earliest, sincerest, best, and most powerful friends, Charles; and yet, alas! for the ingrat.i.tude of the human heart, you have never so much as fortified yourself with the initials of our formidable name----"C. N. the Editor of Blackwood." Oh, that would have been worth P----r, A---- P----, G----n, and "the rest," all in a lump; better than the "Four-and-twenty Fiddlers all in a row." Or had you had the courage and the conscience to print, at full length, "CHRISTOPHER NORTH," why, these sixteen magical letters would have opened every door for you, like Sesame in the Arabian Tales. These four magical syllables, triumphant over the Laureate's "ugly characters, standing in the very front of his notice, like some bug-bear, to frighten all good Christians from purchasing," would have been a pa.s.sport for Elia throughout all the kingdoms of Christianity, and billetted you, a true soldier of the Faith, in any serious family you chose, with morning and evening prayers; a hot, heavy supper every night; a pan of hot-coals ere you were sheeted; and a good motherly body, with six unmarried daughters, to tap at your bed-room door at day-light, and summon you down stairs from a state of "_otium c.u.m dignitate_" to one of "gaiety and innocence," among damsels with scriptural names, short petticoats, and a zealous attachment to religious establishments.

We may set off against this the comment of Crabb Robinson:--

Nothing that Lamb has ever written has impressed me more strongly with the sweetness of his disposition and the strength of his affections.

Coleridge and Hazlitt also both commended the "Letter." Southey displayed a fine temper. He wrote to Lamb on November 19, 1823:--

MY DEAR LAMB--On Monday I saw your letter in the _London Magazine_, which I had not before had an opportunity of seeing, and I now take the first interval of leisure for replying to it.

Nothing could be further from my mind than any intention or apprehension of any way offending or injuring a man concerning whom I have never spoken, thought, or felt otherwise than with affection, esteem, and admiration.

If you had let me know in any private or friendly manner that you felt wounded by a sentence in which nothing but kindness was intended--or that you found it might injure the sale of your book--I would most readily and gladly have inserted a note in the next Review to qualify and explain what had hurt you.

You have made this impossible, and I am sorry for it. But I will not engage in controversy with you to make sport for the Philistines.

The provocation must be strong indeed that can rouse me to do this, even with an enemy. And if you can forgive an unintended offence as heartily as I do the way in which you have resented it, there will be nothing to prevent our meeting as we have heretofore done, and feeling towards each other as we have always been wont to do.

Only signify a correspondent willingness on your part, and send me your address, and my first business next week shall be to reach your door, and shake hands with you and your sister. Remember me to her most kindly and believe me--Yours, with unabated esteem and regards,

ROBERT SOUTHEY.

Lamb replied at once--November 21, 1823:--

DEAR SOUTHEY--The kindness of your note has melted away the mist which was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow. That accursed Q. R. had vexed me by a gratuitous speaking, of its own knowledge, that the _Confessions of a D----d_ was a genuine description of the state of the writer. Little things, that are not ill meant, may produce much ill. _That_ might have injured me alive and dead. I am in a public office, and my life is insured. I was prepared for anger, and I thought I saw, in a few obnoxious words, a hard case of repet.i.tion directed against me. I wished both magazine and review at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister (though innocent) will be still more so; for the folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was absent at that time.

I will muster up courage to see you, however, any day next week (Wednesday excepted). We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a second mortification. She will hate to see us; but come and heap embers. We deserve it; I for what I've done, and she for being my sister.

Do come early in the day, by sun-light, that you may see my _Milton_.

I am at Colebrook Cottage, Colebrook Row, Islington: a detached whitish house, close to the New River end of Colebrook Terrace, left hand from Sadler's Wells.

Will you let me know the day before?

Your penitent,

C. LAMB.

_P.S._--I do not think your handwriting at all like ****'s. I do not think many things I did think.

There the matter ended. Seven years later, however, when _The Literary Gazette_ fell upon Lamb's _Alb.u.m Verses_, in a paltry attack, Southey sent to _The Times_ a poem in defence and praise of his friend, beginning:--

Charles Lamb, to those who know thee justly dear, For rarest genius, and for sterling worth, Unchanging friends.h.i.+p, warmth of heart sincere, And wit that never gave an ill thought birth ...

Page 265, line 4 of essay. _A recent paper on "Infidelity."_ The pa.s.sage relating to Lamb and Thornton Hunt ran as follows:--

Unbelievers have not always been honest enough thus to express their real feelings; but this we know concerning them, that when they have renounced their birthright of hope, they have not been able to divest themselves of fear. From the nature of the human mind this might be presumed, and in fact it is so. They may deaden the heart and stupify the conscience, but they cannot destroy the imaginative faculty. There is a remarkable proof of this in Elia's Essays, a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original. In that upon "Witches and other Night Fears," he says: "It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superst.i.tion, who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to hear or read of any distressing story, finds all this world of fear, from which he, has been so rigidly excluded _ab extra_, in his own 'thick-coming fancies; and from his little midnight pillow this nurse-child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-d.a.m.ned murderer are tranquillity." This poor child, instead of being trained up in the way which he should go, had been bred in the ways of modern philosophy; he had systematically been prevented from knowing any thing of that Saviour who said, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of heaven;" care had been taken that he should not pray to G.o.d, nor lie down at night in reliance upon His good Providence.

Page 267, line 14 from foot. _"Given king" in bliss and a "given chamberlain" in torment._ A reference to Southey's "Vision of Judgment,"

1820, wherein George III. is received into heaven, among those coming from h.e.l.l to arraign him being Wilkes, thus described:--

Beholding the foremost, Him by the cast of his eye oblique, I knew as the firebrand Whom the unthinking populace held for their idol and hero, Lord of Misrule in his day.

Page 268, line 5. _A jest of the Devil._ Southey's early "Ballads and Metrical Tales" are rich in legends of the Devil, somewhat in the vein of Ingoldsby, though lacking Barham's rollicking fun.

Page 268, line 10. _A n.o.ble Lord._ Lord Byron, whose "Vision of Judgment," written in 1821 in ridicule of Southey's, begins:--

Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate: His keys were rusty, and the lock was dull.

Page 268, line 19. _A life of George Fox._ Southey was collecting for some years materials for a life of George Fox, the first Quaker, but he did not carry out the project.

Page 268, line 22. _The Methodists are shy._ Southey's _Life of Wesley_ was published in 1820. It was greatly admired by Coleridge.

Page 268, line 24. _The errors of that Church._ See Southey's "Ballads and Metrical Tales" again, for comic versions of legends of saints.

Page 269, line 26. _And N._ Randal Norris, Sub-Treasurer of the Inner Temple, who died in 1827.

Page 269, line 27. _T. N. T._ Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), the advocate, author of "Ion" who was to become Lamb's executor and biographer. He wrote an enthusiastic and discriminating essay on Wordsworth's genius in the _New Monthly Magazine_.

Page 269, line 31. _And W._ Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794-1852), essayist, painter and criminal, who contributed gay and whimsical articles to the _London Magazine_ over the signature "Ja.n.u.s Weatherc.o.c.k." Subsequently Wainewright was convicted of forgery, and he became also a poisoner; but he seems to have shown Lamb only his most charming side.

Page 269, line 32. _The translator of Dante._ Henry Francis Cary (1772-1844), whose _Inferno_ appeared in 1805, the whole poem being completed in 1812. He contributed to the _London Magazine_. Later in life Cary, then a.s.sistant keeper of the printed books in the British Museum, became one of Lamb's closer friends. He wrote the epitaph on his grave.

Page 269, line 33. _And Allan C._ Allan Cunningham (1784-1842), the Scotch ballad writer and author, and a regular contributor to the _London Magazine_ over the signature "Nalla."

Page 269, line 34. _And P----r._ Bryan Walter Procter (1787-1874), better known as Barry Cornwall, another contributor to the _London Magazine_. He afterwards, 1866-1868, wrote a Memoir of Lamb.

Page 269, line 35. _A----p._ Thomas Allsop (1795-1880), a stock-broker, whose sympathies were with advanced social movements. He has been called the favourite disciple of Coleridge. In 1836 he issued a volume ent.i.tled _Letters, Conversations and Recollections of Coleridge_, which contains many interesting references to Lamb.

Page 269, line 35. _G----n._ James Gillman, a doctor, residing at the Grove, Highgate, who received Coleridge into his house, in 1816, as a patient, and kept him there to the end as a friend. He afterwards began a Life of him, which was not, however, completed. Coleridge at this time, 1823, was nearly fifty-one.

Page 269, line 38. _Salutation tavern._ The Salutation and Cat, the tavern at 17 Newgate Street, opposite Christ's Hospital, where Lamb and Coleridge most resorted in the '90's. Now a new building.

Page 269, line 39. _Pantisocracy._ The chief Pantisocrats--Coleridge, Southey and Robert Lovell--who all married sisters, a Miss Fricker falling to each--were, with a few others--George Burnett among them and Favell--to establish a new and ideal communism in America on the banks of the Susquehanna. Two hours' work a day was to suffice them for subsistence, the remaining time being spent in the cultivation of the intellect. This was in 1794. Southey, however, went to Portugal, Lovell died, Coleridge was Coleridge, and Pantisocracy disappeared.

Page 269, line 40. _W----th._ William Wordsworth, the poet.

Page 270, line 1. _And M._ Thomas Monkhouse, who died in 1825, a cousin of Mary Hutchinson, William Wordsworth's wife, and of Sarah Hutchinson, her sister, and Lamb's correspondent.

Page 270, line 2. _H. C. R._ Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), the diarist and the friend of the Lambs until their death. In Crabb Robinson's reminiscences of Lamb is this pa.s.sage:--