For who can confute A body that's mute? Or who would fight Or think of troubling An impenetrable old goblin, And stiff as stone, To convince him with arguments pro and con, Bred up at Merton, Or Mr. Hazlitt, the metaphysician,— With all your rare tone.. For tell me how should an apparition Though you talk'd for ever, Ever so clever : When his ear itself, By which he must hear, or not hear at all, Is laid on the shelf? Or put the case (For more grace), It were a female spectre How could you expect her In long speeches, With her tongue as dry as dust, In a sandy place, Where no peaches, Nor lemons, nor limes, nor oranges hang, With their sweet drench, The fiery pangs which the worms inflict, Like quibblings, memory does not deceive me, you have had some knowledge heretofore as editor of 'The Statesman,' a man of talent, and patriotic. If you can show him any facilities in his arduous undertaking, you will oblige us much. Well, and how does the land of thieves use you? and how do you pass your time, in your extra-judicial intervals? Going about the streets with a lantern, like Diogenes, looking for an honest man? You may look long enough, I fancy. Do give me some notion of the manners of the inhabitants where you are. They don't thieve all day long do they? No human property could stand such continuous battery. And what do they do when they an't stealing? "Have you got a theatre? What pieces are performed? Shakspeare's, I suppose; not so much for the poetry, as for his having once been in danger of leaving his country on account of certain 'small deer.' I "Have you poets among you? Cursed plagiarists, I fancy, if you have any. would not trust an idea, or a pocket-handkerchief of mine, among 'em. You are almost competent to answer Lord Bacon's problem, whether a nation of atheists can subsist Which the corpse may dislike, but can ne'er contradict-together. You are practically in one : Hey, Mr. Ayrton? With all your rare tone. I am, C. LAMB. One of Lamb's most intimate friends and warmest admirers, Barron Field, disappeared from the circle on being appointed to a judicial situation in New South Wales. In the following letter to him, Lamb renewed the feeling with which he had addressed Manning at the distance of a hemisphere. TO MR. FIELD. 66 Aug. 31st, 1817. "My dear Barron,-The bearer of this letter SO far across the seas is Mr. Lawrey, who comes out to you as a missionary, and whom I have been strongly importuned to recommend to you as a most worthy creature by Mr. Fenwick, a very old, honest friend of mine; of whom, if my From this it may at first appear, that the author meant to ascribe vocal talents to his friend, the Director of the Italian Opera; but it is merely a "line for rhyme." For, though the public were indebted to Mr. A. for many fine foreign singers, we believe that he never claimed to be himself a singer. 'So thievish 'tis, that the eighth commandment itself Scarce seemeth there to be.' Our old honest world goes on with little perceptible variation. Of course you have heard of poor Mitchell's death, and that G. Dyer is one of Lord Stanhope's residuaries. I am afraid he has not touched much of the residue yet. He is positively as lean as Cassius. Barnes is going to Demerara, or Essequibo, I am not quite certain which. A is turned actor. He came out in genteel comedy at Cheltenham this season, and has hopes of a London engagement. "For my own history, I am just in the same spot, doing the same thing, (videlicet, little or nothing,) as when you left me; only I have positive hopes that I shall be able to conquer that inveterate habit of smoking which you may remember I indulged in. I think of making a beginning this evening, viz., Sunday, 31st Aug., 1817, not Wednesday, 2nd Feb., 1818, as it will be perhaps when you read this for the first time. There is the difficulty of writing from one end of the globe (hemispheres I call 'em) to another! Why, half the truths I have sent you in this letter will become lies before they reach you, and some of the lies (which I have mixed for variety's sake, and to exercise your judgment in the finding of them out) may be turned into sad realities before you shall be called upon to detect them. Such are the defects of going by different chronologies. Your now is not my now; and again, your then is not my then; but my now may be your then, and vice versa. Whose head is competent to these things? "How does Mrs. Field get on in her geography? Does she know where she is by this time? I am not sure sometimes you are not in another planet; but then I don't like to ask Capt. Burney, or any of those that know anything about it, for fear of exposing my ignorance. "Our kindest remembrances, however, to Mrs. F., if she will accept of reminiscences from another planet, or at least another hemisphere. C. L." Lamb's intention of spending the rest of his days in the Middle Temple was not to be realised. The inconveniences of being in chambers began to be felt as he and his sister grew older, and in the autumn of this year they removed to lodgings in Russell-street, Covent Garden, the corner house, delightfully situated between the two great theatres. In November, 1817, Miss Lamb announced the removal to Miss Wordsworth in a letter, to which Lamb added the following: TO MISS WORDSWORTH. Bow-street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a constable to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life. "Mary has brought her part of this letter to an orthodox and loving conclusion, which is very well, for I have no room for pansies and remembrances. What a nice holyday I got on Wednesday by favour of a princess dying! C. L." CHAPTER XI. LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, SOUTHEY, MANNING, AND COLERIDGE. LAMB, now in the immediate neighbourhood of the theatres, renewed the dramatic associations of his youth, which the failure of one experiment had not chilled. Although he rather loved to dwell on the recollections of the actors who had passed from the stage, than to mingle with the happy crowds who hailed the successive triumphs of Mr. Kean, he formed some new and steady theatrical attachments. His chief favourites of this time were Miss Kelly, Miss Burrell of the Olympic, and Munden. The first, then the sole support of the English Opera, became a frequent guest in Great Russell-street, and charmed the circle there by the heartiness of her manners, the delicacy and gentleness "Dear Miss Wordsworth,-Here we are, of her remarks, and her unaffected sensibility, transplanted from our native soil. I thought as much as she had done on the stage. Miss we never could have been torn up from the Burrell, a lady of more limited powers, but Temple. Indeed it was an ugly wrench, but with a frank and noble style, was discovered like a tooth, now 'tis out, and I am easy. by Lamb on one of the visits which he paid, We never can strike root so deep in any other on the invitation of his old friend Elliston, ground. This, where we are, is a light bit of to the Olympic, where the lady performed gardener's mould, and if they take us up the hero of that happy parody of Moncrieff's, from it, it will cost no blood and groans, Giovanni in London. To her Lamb devoted like man-drakes pulled up. We are in the a little article, which he sent to the Exaindividual spot I like best, in all this great miner, in which he thus addresses her :city. The theatres, with all their noises. "But Giovanni, free, fine, frank-spirited, Covent Garden, dearer to me than any single-hearted creature, turning all the misgardens of Alcinoüs, where we are morally chief into fun as harmless as toys, or sure of the earliest peas and 'sparagus. children's make believe, what praise can we "Nov. 21st, 1817. repay to you adequate to the pleasure which you have given us? We had better be silent, for you have no name, and our mention will but be thought fantastical. You have taken out the sting from the evil thing, by what magic we know not, for there are actresses of greater merit and likelihood than you. With you and your Giovanni our spirits will hold communion, whenever sorrow or suffering shall be our lot. We have seen you triumph over the infernal powers; and pain and Erebus, and the powers of darkness, are shapes of a dream." Miss Burrell soon married a person named Gold, and disappeared from the stage. To Munden in prose, and Miss Kelly in verse, Lamb has done ample justice. Lamb's increasing celebrity, and universal kindness, rapidly increased the number of his visitors. He thus complained, in wayward mood, of them to Mrs. Wordsworth : : TO MRS. WORDSWORTH. "East-India House, 18th Feb., 1818. "My dear Mrs. Wordsworth,-I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia, cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home, is, that I am never alone. Plato's-(I write to W. W. now)Plato's double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for a moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so. I cannot walk home from office, but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with sum, and write 'paid' against this, and 'unpaid' against t'other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind, 'some darling thoughts all my own '-faint memory of some passage in a book, or the tone of an absent friend's voice-a snatch of Miss Burrell's singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face. The two operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun's two motions (earth's I mean), or, as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or, as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres-the gay science-who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, &c.—what Coleridge said at the lecture last night-who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as well have been AnteCadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in comes Mr. ——, or M—, or Demi-gorgon, or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone-a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O, the pleasure of eating alone!—eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange-for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters-(God bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never, away the harpy solitude from me. I like I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often, but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth!) and voices, all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week, would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one to myself. I am never C. L., but always C. L. & Co. He, who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some singular evening that being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bed-room window is the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I "S. T. C. is lecturing with success. I mean take them to be chorus singers of the two to hear some of the course, but lectures are theatres (it must be both of them), begin their not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I con- may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and ceive) who, being limited by their talents to you can't think why you are brought togethe burthen of the song at the play-houses, ther to hear a man read his works, which in revenge have got the common popular you could read so much better at leisure airs by Bishop, or some cheap composer, yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in pain, lest the gift of utterance should sudin chorus. At least I never can catch any denly fail the orator in the middle, as it did of the text of the plain song, nothing but the me at the dinner given in honour of me at Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. the London Tavern. 'Gentlemen,' said I, 'That fury being quenched'-the howl I mean and there I stopped; the rest my feelings -a burden succeeds of shouts and clapping, were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs. and knocking of the table. At length over- Wordsworth will go on, kindly haunting us tasked nature drops under it, and escapes with visions of seeing the lakes once more, for a few hours into the society of the sweet which never can be realised. Between us silent creatures of dreams, which go away there is a great gulf, not of inexplicable with mocks and mows at cockcrow. And moral antipathies and distances, I hope, as then I think of the words Christabel's father there seemed to be between me and that used (bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink) to say every morning by way of variety when he awoke: 'Every knell, the Baron saith, Wakes us up to a world of death '— or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale, is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to drive gentleman concerned in the stamp-office, that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon's. I think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all such people— accountants' deputy accountants. The dear abstract notion of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days, they had done promise pressed hard upon him, and he protheir worst, but I was deceived in the length cured the requisite quantity of verse from to which heads of offices, those true libertyhaters, can go. They are the tyrants, not Ferdinand, nor Nero-by a decree passed this week, they have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Dear W. W. be thankful for liberty." Among Lamb's new acquaintances was Mr. Charles Ollier, a young bookseller of considerable literary talent, which he has since exhibited in the original and beautiful tale of "Inesilla," who proposed to him the publication of his scattered writings in a collected form. Lamb acceded; and nearly all he had then written in prose and verse, were published this year by Mr. Ollier and his brother, in two small and elegant volumes. Early copies were despatched to Southey and Wordsworth; the acknowledgments of the former of whom produced a reply, from which the following is an extract : TO MR. SOUTHEY. "Monday, Oct. 26th, 1818. “ "Dear Southey,-I am pleased with your friendly remembrances of my little things. I do not know whether I have done a silly thing or a wise one, but it is of no great consequence. I run no risk, and care for no censures. My bread and cheese is stable as the foundations of Leadenhall-street, and if it hold out as long as the 'foundations of our empire in the East,' I shall do pretty well. You and W. W. should have had your presentation copies more ceremoniously sent, but I had no copies when I was leaving town for my holidays, and rather than delay, commissioned my bookseller to send them thus nakedly. By not hearing from W. W. or you, I began to be afraid Murray had not sent them. I do not see S. T. C. so often as I could wish. I am better than I deserve to be. The hot weather has been such a treat! Mary joins in this little corner in kindest remembrances to you all. C. L." Lamb's interest was strongly excited for Mr. Kenney, on the production of his comedy entitled "A Word to the Ladies." Lamb had engaged to contribute the prologue; but the a very inferior hand. Kenney, who had married Holcroft's widow, had more than succeeded to him in Lamb's regards. Holcroft had considerable dramatic skill; great force and earnestness of style, and noble sincerity and uprightness of disposition; but he was an austere observer of morals and manners; and even his grotesque characters were hardly and painfully sculptured; while Kenney, with as fine a perception of the ludicrous and the peculiar, was more airy, more indulgent, more graceful, and exhibited more frequent glimpses of "the gayest, happiest attitude of things." The comedy met with less success than the reputation of the author and brilliant experience of the past had rendered probable, and Lamb had to perform the office of comforter, as he had done on the more unlucky event to Godwin. To this play Lamb refers in the following note to Coleridge, who was contemplating a course of lectures on Shakspeare, and who sent Lamb a ticket, with sad forebodings that the course would be his last. TO MR. COLERIDGE. "Dec. 24th, 1818. "My dear Coleridge,-I have been in a state of incessant hurry ever since the receipt of your ticket. It found me incapable of attending you, it being the night of Kenney's new comedy. You know my local aptitudes at such a time; I have been a thorough rendezvous for all consultations; my head begins to clear up a little, but it has had bells in it. Thank you kindly for your ticket, though the mournful prognostic which accompanies it certainly renders its permanent pretensions less marketable; but I trust to hear many a course yet. You excepted Christmas week, by which I understood next week; I thought Christmas week was that which Christmas Sunday ushered in. We are sorry it never lies in your way to come to us; but, dear Mahomet, we will come to you. Will it be convenient to all the good people at Highgate, if we take a stage up, not next Sunday, but the following, viz., 3rd January, 1819-shall we be too late to catch a skirt of the old out-goer ?—how the years crumble from under us! We shall hope to see you before then; but, if not, let us know |