TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"March 20th, 1822.

for a few years between the grave and the desk: they are the same, save that at the latter you are the outside machine. The "My dear Wordsworth, - A letter from foul enchanter- -, 'letters four do form his you is very grateful; I have not seen a name '— Busirare is his name in hell — that Kendal postmark so long! We are pretty has curtailed you of some domestic comforts, well, save colds and rheumatics, and a certain hath laid a heavier hand on me, not in deadness to everything, which I think I may present infliction, but in the taking away the date from poor John's loss, and another hope of enfranchisement. I dare not whisper accident or two at the same time, that has to myself a pension on this side of absolute made me almost bury myself at Dalston, incapacitation and infirmity, till years have where yet I see more faces than I could wish. sucked me dry;- Otium cum indignitate. I Deaths overset one, and put one out long had thought in a green old age (Oh green after the recent grief. Two or three have thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End, died within this last two twelvemonths, and emblematic name, how beautiful! in the so many parts of me have been numbed. Ware Road, there to have made up my One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts accounts with Heaven and the company, a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this toddling about between it and Cheshunt, person in preference to every other: the anon stretching, on some fine Isaac Walton person is gone whom it would have peculiarly morning, to Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless suited. It won't do for another. Every as a beggar; but walking, walking ever till departure destroys a class of sympathies. I fairly walked myself off my legs, dying There's Cap. Burney gone! What fun has walking! The hope is gone. I sit like whist now? what matters it what you lead. Philomel all day (but not singing), with my if you can no longer fancy him looking over breast against this thorn of a desk, with the you? One never hears anything, but the only hope that some pulmonary affliction image of the particular person occurs with may relieve me. Vide Lord Palmerston's whom alone almost you would care to share report of the clerks in the War-office, the intelligence thus one distributes oneself (Debates this morning's Times,') by which about — and now for so many parts of me I it appears in twenty years as many clerks have lost the market. Common natures do have been coughed and catarrhed out of it not suffice me. Good people, as they are into their freer graves. Thank you for called, won't serve. I want individuals. I asking about the pictures. Milton hangs am made up of queer points, and I want so over my fire-side in Covent Garden, (when many answering needles. The going away I am there,) the rest have been sold for an of friends does not make the remainder more old song, wanting the eloquent tongue that precious. It takes so much from them as should have set them off! You have gratified there was a common link. A. B. and C. me with liking my meeting with Dodd.* For make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses the Malvolio story-the thing is become in A.; but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part verity a sad task, and I eke it out with anyin B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtrac- thing. If I could slip out of it I should be tion of interchangeables. I express myself happy, but our chief-reputed assistants have muddily, capite dolente. I have a dulling cold. forsaken us. The Opium-Eater crossed us My theory is to enjoy life, but my practice once with a dazzling path, and hath as is against it. I grow ominously tired of suddenly left us darkling; and, in short, I official confinement. Thirty years have I shall go on from dull to worse, because I served the Philistines, and my neck is not cannot resist the booksellers' importunity— subdued to the yoke. You don't know how the old plea you know of authors, but I wearisome it is to breathe the air of four believe on my part sincere. Hartley I do .pent walls, without relief, day after day, all. not so often see; but I never see him in the golden hours of the day between ten and unwelcome hour. I thoroughly love and four, without ease or interposition. Tædet me harum quotidianarum formarum, these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. Oh

* See the account of the meeting between Dodd and
some of the Old

Jem White, in Elia's Essay, “On
Actors."

pardon me if I stop somewhere where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the bitterest pangs I ever felt of remorse was when a child-my kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, - but thereabouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity, I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt's kindness crossed me; the sum it was to her; the pleasure she had a right to expect that I not the old impostor-should take in eating her cake; the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like-and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.

46

'But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it more in the spirit of the donor's purpose.

"Dear C.,—It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well-they are interesting creatures at a certain agewhat a pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling—and brain sauce-did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly with no Edipean avulsion? Was the crackling the colour of the ripe pomegranate? Had you no cursed complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire? Did you flesh maiden teeth in it? Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part O could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in my life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending "My dear F.,-I scribble hastily at office. away. Teals, wigeons, snipes, barn-door Frank wants my letter presently. I and fowl, ducks, geese- your tame villatic things sister are just returned from Paris!! We -Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, have eaten frogs. It has been such a treat! fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss You know our monotonous tenor. Frogs cheeses, French pies, early grapes, musca- are the nicest little delicate things-rabbitydines, I impart as freely unto my friends as flavoured. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit! to myself. They are but self-extended; but They fricassee them; but in my mind, drest,

"Yours (short of pig) to command in everyC. L."

thing.

In the summer of 1822, Lamb and his sister visited Paris. The following is a hasty letter addressed to Field on his return.

TO MR. BARRON FIELD.

seethed, plain, with parsley and butter, would "Our joint hearty remembrances to both have been the decision of Apicius. Paris is of you. Yours, as ever,

London

a glorious picturesque old city.
looks mean and new to it, as the town of
Washington would, seen after it. But they
have no St. Paul's, or Westminster Abbey.
The Seine, so much despised by Cockneys, is
exactly the size to run through a magnificent
street; palaces a mile long on one side, lofty
Edinbro' stone (O the glorious antiques!)
houses on the other. The Thames disunites
London and Southwark. I had Talma to
supper with me. He has picked up, as I
believe, an authentic portrait of Shakspeare.
He paid a broker about 401. English for it.
It is painted on the one half of a pair of
bellows a lovely picture, corresponding
with the folio head. The bellows has old
carved wings round it, and round the visnomy
is inscribed, as near as I remember, not
divided into rhyme-I found out the rhyme

Whom have we here

Stuck on this bellows,

But the Prince of good fellows,
Willy Shakspeare?

At top

O base and coward luck!

To be here stuck. - POINS.

At bottom

Nay! rather a glorious lot is to him assign'd,
Who, like the Almighty, rides upon the wind.
PISTOL.

C. LAMB."

Soon after Lamb's return from Paris he became acquainted with the poet of the Quakers, Bernard Barton, who, like himself, was engaged in the drudgery of figures. The pure and gentle tone of the poems of his new acquaintance was welcome to Lamb, who had more sympathy with the truth of nature in modest guise than in the affected fury of Lord Byron, or the dreamy extravagancies of Shelley. Lamb had written in "Elia" of the Society of Friends with the freedom of one, who, with great respect for the principles of the founders of their faith, had little in common with a sect who shunned the pleasures while they mingled in the business of the world; and a friendly expostulation on the part of Mr. Barton led to such cordial excuses as completely won the heart of the Quaker bard. Some expression which Lamb let fall at their meeting in London, from which Mr. Barton had supposed that Lamb objected to a Quaker's writing poetry as inconsistent with his creed, induced Mr. Barton to write to Lamb on his return to Woodbridge, who replied as follows:

TO BERNARD BARTON.

:

"India House, 11th Sept. 1822. "Dear Sir,-You have misapprehended me sadly, if you suppose that I meant to impute any inconsistency in your writing poetry with

what I said, but it was spoken sportively, I am sure one of my levities, which you are not so used to as my older friends. I probably was thinking of the light in which your so indulging yourself would appear to Quakers, and put their objection in my own foolish mouth. I would eat my words (provided they should be written on not very coarse paper) rather than I would throw cold water upon your, and my once, harmless occupation.

"This is all in old carved wooden letters. The countenance smiling, sweet, and intellectual beyond measure, even as he was your religious profession. I do not remember immeasurable. It may be a forgery. They laugh at me and tell me, Ireland is in Paris, and has been putting off a portrait of the Black Prince. How far old wood may be imitated I cannot say. Ireland was not found out by his parchments, but by his poetry. I am confident no painter on either side the Channel could have painted any thing near like the face I saw. Again, would such a painter and forger have taken 401. for a thing, if authentic, worth 40007.? Talma is not in the secret, for he had not even found out the rhymes in the first inscription. He is coming over with it, and, my life to Southey's Thalaba, it will gain universal faith.

"The letter is wanted, and I am wanted. Imagine the blank filled up with all kind things.

"I have read Napoleon and the rest with delight. I like them for what they are, and for what they are not. I have sickened on the modern rhodomontade and Byronism, and your plain Quakerish beauty has captivated me. It is all wholesome cates, ay, and toothsome too, and withal Quakerish. If I were George Fox, and George Fox licenser

of the press, they should have my absolute it will satisfy the bigots on our side the imprimatur. I hope I have removed the water. Something like a parody on the song impression. of Ariel would please them better:

"I am, like you, a prisoner to the desk. I have been chained to that galley thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood. If no imaginative poet, I am sure II am a figurative one. Do 'Friends' allow puns? verbal equivocations? - they are unjustly accused of it, and I did my little best in the Imperfect Sympathies' to vindicate them. I am very tired of clerking it, but have no remedy. Did you see a Sonnet to this purpose in the Examiner ?—

Who first invented work, and bound the free
And holy-day rejoicing spirit down
To the ever-haunting importunity
Of business, in the green fields and the town,
To plough, loom, anvil, spade; and oh, most sad,
To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood?
Who but the being unblest, alien from good,
Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad
Task ever plies, 'mid rotatory burnings,
That round and round incalculably reel;
For wrath Divine hath made him like a wheel
In that red realm from which are no returnings:
Where, toiling and turmoiling, ever and aye,
He and his thoughts keep pensive working-day.'

"I fancy the sentiment exprest above will be nearly your own. The expression of it probably would not so well suit with a follower of John Woolman. But I do not know whether diabolism is a part of your creed, or where, indeed, to find an exposition of your creed at all. In feelings and matters not dogmatical, I hope I am half a Quaker. Believe me, with great respect, yours,

"C. LAMB."

"I shall always be happy to see or hear from you."

Encouraged by Lamb's kindness, Mr. Barton continued the correspondence, which became the most frequent in which Lamb had engaged for many years. The following letter is in acknowledgment of a publication of Mr. Barton's chiefly directed to oppose the theories and tastes of Lord Byron and his friends:

"Full fathom five the Atheist lies,

Of his bones are hell-dice made.'

"I want time, or fancy, to fill up the rest. sincerely sympathise with you on your doleful confinement. Of time, health, and riches, the first in order is not last in excellence. Riches are chiefly good, because they give us Time. What a weight of wearisome prison hours have I to look back and forward to, as quite cut out of life! and the sting of the thing is, that for six hours every day I have no business which I could not contract into two, if they would let me work taskwork. I shall be glad to hear that your grievance is mitigated.

"I am returning a poor letter. I was formerly a great scribbler in that way, but my hand is out of order. If I said my head too, I should not be very much out, but I will tell no tales of myself; I will therefore end (after my best thanks, with a hope to see you again some time in London), begging you to accept this letteret for a letter — a leveret makes a better present than a grown hare, and short troubles (as the old excuse goes) are best.

"I remain, dear sir, yours truly,
"C. LAMB."

The next letter will speak for itself.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

"Dec. 23rd, 1822.

"Dear Sir, I have been so distracted with business and one thing or other, I have not had a quiet quarter of an hour for epistolary purposes. Christmas, too, is come, which always puts a rattle into my morning skull. It is a visiting, unquiet, unquakerish season. I get more and more in love with solitude, and proportionately hampered with company. I hope you have some holidays at this period. I have one day - Christmas-day; alas! too few to commemorate the season. All work and no play dulls me. Company is not play, but many times hard work. To play, is for a man to do what he pleases, or to do nothing Ito go about soothing his particular fancies. I have lived to a time of life to have outlived the good hours, the nine o'clock suppers, with a bright hour or two to clear up in after

"Dear Sir, -I am ashamed not sooner to have acknowledged your letter and poem. think the latter very temperate, very serious, and very seasonable. I do not think it will convert the club at Pisa, neither do I think

wards. Now you cannot get tea before that life he was about to write. The renewal of hour, and then sit gaping, music-bothered the acquaintance was very pleasant to Lamb; perhaps, till half-past twelve brings up the who many years before used to take daily tray; and what you steal of convivial enjoy- walks with Wilson, and to call him “brother." ment after, is heavily paid for in the disquiet The following is Lamb's reply :of to-morrow's head.

"I am pleased with your liking 'John Woodvil,' and amused with your knowledge of our drama being confined to Shakspeare and Miss Baillie. What a world of fine territory between Land's End and Johnny Groat's have you missed traversing! I could almost envy you to have so much to read. I feel as if I had read all the books I want to read. Oh to forget Fielding, Steele, &c., and read 'em new!

TO MR. WALTER WILSON.

"E. I. H., 16th December, 1822.

"Dear Wilson,-Lightning, I was going to call you. You must have thought me negligent in not answering your letter sooner. But I have a habit of never writing letters but at the office; 'tis so much time cribbed out of the Company; and I am but just got out of the thick of a tea-sale, in which most of the entry of notes, deposits, &c., usually falls to my share.

"Can you tell me a likely place where I could pick up, cheap, Fox's Journal? There "I have nothing of De Foe's but two or are no Quaker circulating libraries? Elwood, three novels, and the Plague History.' I too, I must have. I rather grudge that can give you no information about him. As Sy has taken up the history of your a slight general character of what I remempeople I am afraid he will put in some ber of them (for I have not looked into them levity. I am afraid I am not quite exempt latterly), I would say that in the appearance from that fault in certain magazine articles, of truth, in all the incidents and conversations where I have introduced mention of them. that occur in them, they exceed any works Were they to do again, I would reform them. of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect Why should not you write a poetical account illusion. The author never appears in these of your old worthies, deducing them from self-narratives (for so they ought to be Fox to Woolman? but I remember you did called, or rather auto-biographies), but the talk of something of that kind, as a counter-narrator chains us down to an implicit belief part to the Ecclesiastical Sketches.' But in everything he says. There is all the would not a poem be more consecutive than a string of sonnets? You have no martyrs quite to the fire, I think, among you; but plenty of heroic confessors, spirit-martyrs, lamb-lions. Think of it; it would be better than a series of sonnets on 'Eminent Bankers.' I like a hit at our way of life, though it does well for me, better than anything short of all one's time to one's self; for which alone I rankle with envy at the rich. Books are good, and pictures are good, and money to buy them therefore good, but to buy time! or in other words, life!

minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot choose but believe them. It is like reading evidence given in a court of justice. So anxious the story-teller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter-of-fact, or a motive, in a line or two farther down he repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I say,' so and so, though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something upon their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed, it is to such principally that he writes. His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain and homely. Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes, but it is easy to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to