"Accountant's Office, 26th April, 1816.* better than 'Windsor Forest,' 'Dying Christian's Address,' &c. Coleridge has sent his "Dear W.,-I have just finished the tragedy to D. L. T.; it cannot be acted this pleasing task of correcting the revise of the season, and by their manner of receiving, I poems and letter. I hope they will come hope he will be able to alter it to make them out faultless. One blunder I saw and accept it for next. He is, at present, under shuddered at. The hallucinating rascal had the medical care of a Mr. Gilman (Killman?) printed battered for battened, this last not at Highgate, where he plays at leaving off conveying any distinct sense to his gaping laud—m; I think his essentials not touched; soul. The Reader (as they call 'em) had dis- he is very bad, but then he wonderfully picks covered it, and given it the marginal brand, up another day, and his face, when he repeats but the substitutory n had not yet appeared. his verses, hath its ancient glory; an archI accompanied his notice with a most pathetic angel a little damaged. Will Miss H. address to the printer not to neglect the cor- pardon our not replying at length to her rection. I know how such a blunder would kind letter? We are not quiet enough; 'batter at your peace.' With regard to the Morgan is with us every day, going betwixt works, the Letter I read with unabated Highgate and the Temple. Coleridge is satisfaction. Such a thing was wanted; absent but four miles, and the neighbourhood called for. The parallel of Cotton with of such a man is as exciting as the presence Burus I heartily approve. Iz. Walton hal- of fifty ordinary persons. 'Tis enough to be lows any page in which his reverend name within the whiff and wind of his genius for appears. 'Duty archly bending to purposes us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I of general benevolence' is exquisite. The lived with him or the Author of the Excursion, poems I endeavoured not to understand, but I should, in a very little time, lose my own to read them with my eye alone, and I think | identity, and be dragged along in the current I succeeded. (Some people will do that of other people's thoughts, hampered in a when they come out, you'll say.) As if I were to luxuriate to-morrow at some picturegallery I was never at before, and going by to-day by chance, found the door open, and having but five minutes to look about me, peeped in; just such a chastised peep I took with my mind at the lines my luxuriating eye was coursing over unrestrained, not to anticipate another day's fuller satisfaction. Coleridge is printing 'Christabel,' by Lord Byron's recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision, 'Kubla Khan,' which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it; but there is an observation, 'Never tell thy dreams,' and I am almost afraid that 'Kubla Khan' is an owl that won't bear day-light. I fear lest it should be discovered by the lantern of typography and clear reducting to letters no better than nonsense or no sense. When I was young, I used to chant with ecstacy 'MILD ARCADIANS EVER BLOOMING,' till somebody told me it was meant to be nonsense. Even yet I have a lingering attachment to it, and I think it net. How cool I sit in this office, with no "N.B.-Nothing said above to the contrary, but that I hold the personal presence of the two mentioned potent spirits at a rate as high as any; but I pay dearer; what amuses others robs me of myself; my mind is positively discharged into their greater currents, but flows with a willing violence. As to your question about work; it is far less oppressive to me than it was, from circumstances; it takes all the golden part of but it does not kill my peace as before. Some the day away, a solid lump, from ten to four; matters, but in a judicious and steady superintendence of the whole; with a wise allowance of the occasional excesses of wit and genius. In this respect, Mr. Scott differed entirely from a celebrated poet, who was induced, just a year after, to undertake the Editorship of the "New Monthly Magazine," an office for which, it may be said, with all veneration for his poetic genius, he was the most unfit person who could be found in the wide world of letters-who regarded a maga THE CHAPTER VII. "LONDON MAGAZINE"CHARACTER AND FATE OF zine as if it were a long affidavit, or a short MR. JOHN SCOTT, ITS EDITOR-GLIMPSE OF MR. THOMAS answer in Chancery, in which the absolute MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS OF LAMB TO WORDSWORTH, truth of every sentiment and the propriety of COLERIDGE, AND OTHERS. [1818 to 1825.] every jest were verified by the editor's oath or solemn affirmation; who stopped the press for a week at a comma; balanced contending epithets for a fortnight; and, at last, grew rash in despair, and tossed the nearest, and often the worst article, 'unwhipped of justice," to the impatient printer. Mr. Scott, indeed, was more fit to preside over a little commonwealth of authors than to hold a despotic rule over subject contributors; he had not the airy grace of Jeffrey by which he might give a certain familiar liveliness to the most laborious disquisitions, and shed the glancing light of fancy among party manifestoes;-nor the boisterous vigour of Wilson, riotous in power, reckless in wisdom, fusing the production of various intellects, into one brilliant reflection of his own mastermind; and it was well that he wanted these weapons of a tyranny which his chief contributors were too original and too sturdy to endure. He heartily enjoyed his position; duly appreciated his contributors and himself; and when he gave audience to some young aspirant for periodical honours at a late breakfast, amidst the luxurious confusion of newspapers, reviews, and uncut novels, lying about in fascinating litter, and carelessly enunciated schemes for bright successions of essays, he seemed destined for many years of that happy excitement in which thought perpetually glows into unruffled but energetic language, and is assured by the echoes of the world. LAMB's association with Hazlitt in the year 1820 introduced him to that of the "London Magazine," which supplied the finest stimulus his intellect had ever received, and induced the composition of the Essays fondly and familiarly known under the fantastic title of Elia. Never was a periodical work commenced with happier auspices, numbering a list of contributors more original in thought, more fresh in spirit, more sportive in fancy, or directed by an editor better qualified by nature and study to preside, than this "London." There was Lamb, with humanity ripened among town-bred experiences, and pathos matured by sorrow, at his wisest, sagest, airiest, indiscreetest, best; Barry Cornwall, in the first bloom of his modest and enduring fame, streaking the darkest passion with beauty; John Hamilton Reynolds, lighting up the wildest eccentricities and most striking features of many-coloured life with vivid fancy; and, with others of less note, Hazlitt, whose pen, unloosed from the chain which earnest thought and metaphysical dreamings had woven, gave radiant expression to the results of the solitary musings of many years. Over these contributors John Scott presided, himself a critic of remarkable candour, eloquence, and discrimination, unfettered by the dogmas of contending schools of poetry and art; apt to discern the good and beautiful in all; and having, as editor, that which Kent recog- Alas! a few days after he thus appeared nised in Lear, which subjects revere in the object of admiration and envy to a young kings, and boys admire in schoolmasters, visitor, in his rooms in York-street, he was and contributors should welcome in editors stretched on a bed of mental agony - the -authority;-not manifested in a worrying, foolish victim of the guilty custom of a teasing, intolerable interference in small world which would have laughed at him for of an English Opium Eater," held a distinguished place. Mr. De Quincy, whose youth had been inspired by enthusiastic admiration of Coleridge, shown in contributions to "The Friend," not unworthy of his master, and substantial contributions of the blessings of fortune, came up to London, and found an admiring welcome from Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, the publishers into whose hands the "London Magazine" had passed. After the good old fashion of the GREAT TRADE, these genial booksellers used to assemble their contributors round their hospitable table in Fleet Street, where Mr. De Quincy was introduced to his new allies. Among the contributors who partook of their professional regarding himself as within the sphere of its opinion, if he had not died to shame it! In a luckless hour, instead of seeking to oppose the bitter personalities of "Blackwood" by the exhibition of a serener power, he rushed with spurious chivalry into a personal contest; caught up the weapons which he had himself denounced, and sought to unmask his opponents and draw them beyond the pale of literary courtesy; placed himself thus in a doubtful position in which he could neither consistently reject an appeal to the conventional arbitrament of violence nor embrace it; lost his most legitimate opportunity of daring the unhallowed strife, and found another with an antagonist connected with the quarrel only by too zealous a festivities, was a gentleman whose subsefriendship; and, at last, met his death almost quent career has invested the recollection by lamentable accident, in the uncertain of his appearances in the familiarity of glimmer of moonlight, from the hand of one social life with fearful interest-Mr. Thomas who went out resolved not to harm him! Griffiths Wainwright. He was then a young Such was the melancholy result-first of a man; on the bright side of thirty; with a controversy too envenomed-and afterwards sort of undress military air, and the converof enthralment in usages, absurd in all, but sation of a smart, lively, clever, heartless, most absurd when applied by a literary man voluptuous coxcomb. It was whispered that to a literary quarrel. Apart from higher he had been an officer in the Dragoons; had considerations, it may befit a life destined for spent more than one fortune; and he now the listless excesses of gaiety to be cast on condescended to take a part in periodical an idle brawl;-" a youth of folly, an old literature, with the careless grace of an age of cards" may be no great sacrifice to amateur who felt himself above it. He was preserve the hollow truce of fashionable an artist also; sketched boldly and graphisociety; but for men of thought-whose cally; exhibited a portfolio of his own minds are their possession, and who seek to drawings of female beauty, in which the live in the minds of others by sympathy with voluptuous trembled on the borders of the their thoughts for them to hazard a thought- indelicate; and seized on the critical departful being because they dare not own that ment of the Fine Arts, both in and out of they prefer life to death-contemplation to the Magazine, undisturbed by the presence the grave-the preparation for eternity to or pretensions of the finest critic on Art the unbidden entrance on its terrors, would who ever wrote-William Hazlitt. On this be ridiculous if it did not become tragical. subject, he composed, for the Magazine, "Sir, I am a metaphysician!" said Hazlitt under the signature of "Janus Weatheronce, when in a fierce dispute respecting the ' cock," articles of flashy assumption — in colours of Holbein and Vandyke, words which disdainful notices of living artists were almost became things; "and nothing makes an impression upon me but abstract ideas;" and woeful, indeed, is the mockery when thinkers condescend to be duellists! set off by fascinating references to the personal appearance, accomplishments, and luxurious appliances of the writer, ever the first hero of his essay. He created a new sensaThe Magazine did not perish with its tion in the sedate circle, not only by his Editor; though its unity of purpose was lost, braided surtouts, jewelled fingers, and variit was still rich in essays of surpassing indi- ous neck-handkerchiefs, but by ostentatious vidual merit; among which the masterly contempt for everything in the world but vindication of the true dramatic style by elegant enjoyment. Lamb, who delighted to Darley; the articles of Cary, the admirable find sympathy in dissimilitude, fancied that translator of Dante; and the "Confessions he really liked him; took, as he ever did, the genial side of character; and, instead of disliking the rake in the critic, thought it pleasant to detect so much taste and goodnature in a fashionable roué; and regarded all his vapid gaiety, which to severer observers looked like impertinence, as the playful effusion of a remarkably guileless nature. We lost sight of him when the career of the "London Magazine" ended; and Lamb did not live to learn the sequel of his history. In 1819, Mr. Wordsworth, encouraged by the extending circle of his earnest admirers, announced for publication his "Peter Bell" -a poem written in the first enthusiasm of his system, and exemplifying, amidst beauty and pathos of the finest essence, some of its most startling peculiarities. Some wicked jester gifted with more ingenuity and boldness than wit, anticipated the real "Simon Pure," by a false one, burlesquing some of the characteristics of the poet's homeliest style. This grave hoax produced the following letter from Lamb, appropriately written in alternate lines of red and black ink, till the last sentence, in which the colours are alternated, word by word-even to the signature-and "Mary's love," at the close; so that "Mary" is black, and her "love" red. For its matter I mean. I cannot say the style of it quite satisfies me. It is too lyrical. The auditors to whom it is feigned to be told, do not arride me. I had rather it had been told me, the reader, at once. 'Hartleap Well' is the tale for me; in matter as good as this, in manner infinitely before it, in my poor judgment. Why did you not add 'The Waggoner'?-Have I thanked you, though, yet, for 'Peter Bell'? I would not not have it for a good deal of money. C is very foolish to scribble about books. Neither his tongue nor fingers are very retentive. But I shall not say anything to him about it. He would only begin a very long story with a very long face, and I see him far too seldom to teaze him with affairs of business or conscience when I do see him. He never comes near our house, and when we go to see him he is generally writing, or thinking: he is writing in his study till the dinner comes, and that is scarce over before the stage summons us away. The mock 'P. B.' had only this effect on me, that after twice reading it over in hopes to find something diverting in it, I reached your two books off the shelf, and set into a steady reading of them, till I had nearly finished both before I went to bed. The two of your last edition, of course, I mean. And in the morning I awoke determined to take down the Excursion.' I wish the scoundrel imitator could know this. But "Dear Wordsworth, I received a copy of why waste a wish on him? I do not believe 'Peter Bell' a week ago, and I hope the that paddling about with a stick in a pond, author will not be offended if I say I do not and fishing up a dead author, whom his much relish it. The humour, if it is meant intolerable wrongs had driven to that deed for humour, is forced; and then the price! of desperation, would turn the heart of one -sixpence would have been dear for it. of these obtuse literary BELLS. There is no Mind I do not mean your Peter Bell,' but Cock for such Peters;-hang 'em! I am a 'Peter Bell,' which preceded it about a glad this aspiration came upon the red ink week, and is in every bookseller's shop line. It is more of a bloody curse. I have window in London, the type and paper delivered over your other presents to nothing differing from the true one, the Alsager and G. D. A., I am sure, will value preface signed W. W., and the supplemen- it, and be proud of the hand from which it tary preface quoting as the author's words came. To G. D. a poem is a poem. His an extract from the supplementary preface own as good as anybody's, and, God bless to the Lyrical Ballads. Is there no law him! anybody's as good as his own; for I against these rascals? I would have this do not think he has the most distant guess Lambert Simnel whipt at the cart's tail. of the possibility of one poem being better Who started the spurious 'P. B.' I have not than another. The gods, by denying him heard. I should guess, one of the sneering the very faculty itself of discrimination, have ; but I have heard no name mentioned. effectually cut off every seed of envy in his 'Peter Bell' (not the mock one) is excellent. bosom. But with envy, they excided curiosity TO MR. WORDSWORTH. "1819. also; and if you wish the copy again, which you destined for him, I think I shall be able to find it again for you, on his third shelf, where he stuffs his presentation copies, uncut, in shape and matter resembling a lump of dry dust; but on carefully removing that stratum, a thing like a pamphlet will emerge. I have tried this with fifty different poetical works that have been given G. D. in return for as many of his own performances, and I confess I never had any scruple in taking my own again, wherever I found it, shaking the adherences off-and by this means one copy of 'my works' served for G. D.-and, with a little dusting, was made over to my good friend Dr. G—, who little thought whose leavings he was taking when he made me that graceful bow. By the way, the Doctor is the only one of my acquaintance who bows gracefully, my town acquaintance, I mean. How do you like my way of writing with two inks? I think it is pretty and motley. Suppose Mrs. W. adopts it, the next time she holds the pen for you. My dinner waits. I have no time to indulge any longer in these laborious curiosities. God bless you, and cause to thrive and burgeon whatsoever you write, and fear no inks of miserable poetYours truly, asters. closed. The dreary sea is filled up. He has C. L." The following letter (of post-mark 1822) is addressed to Trinity College, Cambridge, when Miss Wordsworth was visiting her brother, Dr. Wordsworth. "6 TO MISS WORDSWORTH. "Mary perfectly approves of the appropriation of the feathers, and wishes them peacock's for your fair niece's sake. "1822. "Dear Coleridge,-A letter written in the blood of your poor friend would indeed be of a nature to startle you; but this is nought but harmless red ink, or, as the witty mer"Dear Miss Wordsworth,-I had just cantile phrase hath it, clerk's blood. Hang written the above endearing words when 'em! my brain, skin, flesh, bone, carcase, M-tapped me on the shoulder with an soul, time is all theirs. The Royal Exchange, Gresham's Folly, hath me body and spirit. I admire some of - -'s lines on you, and I admire your postponing reading them. He is a sad tattler, but this is under the rose. Twenty years ago he estranged one friend from me quite, whom I have been regretting, but never could regain since; he almost alienated you also from me, or me from you, I don't know which. But that breach is invitation to cold goose pie, which I was not bird of that sort enough to decline. Mrs. M-, I am most happy to say, is better. Mary has been tormented with a rheumatism, which is leaving her. I am suffering from the festivities of the season. I wonder how my misused carcase holds it out. I have played the experimental philosopher Blackwood," dated Manchester, and A sonnet in " signed C. L. |