by Charles Lamb
It may detract a little from the gentility of your columns when I tell your Readers that I am – what I hinted at in my last – a Bank Clerk. Three-and-thirty years ago, when I took my first station at the desk, out of as many fellows in office one or two there were that had read a little. One could give a pretty good account of the Spectator. A second knew Tom Jones. A third recommended Telemachus. One went so far as to quote Hudibras, and was looked on as a phenomenon. But the far greater number neither cared for books, nor affected to care. They were, as I said, in their leisure hours, cricketers, punch-drinkers, play-goers, and the rest. Times are altered now. We are all readers; our young men are split up into so many book-clubs, knots of literati; we criticize; we read the Quarterly and Edinburgh, I assure you; and instead of the old, honest, unpretending literature so becoming to our profession – we read and judge of everything. I have something to do in these book-clubs, and know the trick and mystery of it. Every new publication that is likely to make a noise, must be had at any rate. By some they are devoured with avidity. These would have been readers in the old time I speak of. The only loss is, that for the good old reading of Addison or Fielding’s days is substituted that never-ending flow of thin novelties which are kept up like a ball, leaving no possible time for better things, and threatening in the issue to bury or sweep away from the earth the memory of their nobler predecessors. We read to say that we have read. No reading can keep pace with the writing of this age, but we pant and toil after it as fast as we can. I smile to see an honest lad, who ought to be at trap-ball,2 labouring up hill against this giant load, taking his toil for a pleasure, and with that utter incapacity for reading which betrays itself by a certain silent movement of the lips when the reader reads to himself, undertaking the infinite contents of fugitive poetry, or travels, what not – to see them with their snail-pace undertaking so vast a journey as might make faint a giant’s speed; keeping a volume, which a real reader would get through in an hour, three, four, five, six days, and returning it with the last leaf but one folded down. These are your readers against the grain, who yet must read or be thought nothing of – who, crawling through a book with tortoise-pace, go creeping to the next Review to learn what they shall say of it. Upon my soul, I pity the honest fellows mightily. The self-denials of virtue are nothing to the patience of these self-tormentors. If I hate one day before another, it is the accursed first day of the month, when a load of periodicals is ushered in and distributed to feed the reluctant monster. How it gapes and takes in its prescribed diet, as little savoury as that which Daniel ministered to that Apocryphal dragon,3 and not more wholesome! Is there no stopping the eternal wheels of the Press for a half century or two, till the nation recover its senses? Must we magazine it and review at this sickening rate for ever? Shall we never again read to be amused? but to judge, to criticize, to talk about it and about it? Farewell, old honest delight taken in books not quite contemporary, before this plague-token of modern endless novelties broke out upon us – farewell to reading for its own sake!
Rather than follow in the train of this insatiable monster of modern reading, I would forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on one leg, shell peas, or do whatsoever ignoble diversion you shall put me to. Alas! I am hurried on in the vortex. I die of new books, or the everlasting talk about them. I faint of Longmans. I sicken of the Constables. Blackwood and Cadell4 have me by the throat.
I will go and relieve myself with a page of honest John Bunyan, or Tom Brown. Tom anybody will do, so long as they are not of this whiffling century.
Your Old-fashioned Correspondent
LEPUS.
(New Times, 13 January 1825)
30. A Vision of Horns
My thoughts had been engaged last evening in solving the problem, why in all times and places the horn has been agreed upon as the symbol, or honourable badge, of married men. Moses’s horn, the horn of Ammon, of Amalthea, and a cornucopia of legends besides, came to my recollection, but afforded no satisfactory solution, or rather involved the question in deeper obscurity. Tired with the fruitless chase of inexplicant analogies, I fell asleep, and dreamed in this fashion.
Methought certain scales or films fell from my eyes, which had hitherto hindered these little tokens from being visible. I was somewhere in the Cornhill (as it might be termed) of some Utopia. Busy citizens jostled each other, as they may do in our streets, with care (the care of making a penny) written upon their foreheads; and something else, which is rather imagined, than distinctly imaged, upon the brows of my own friends and fellow-townsmen.
In my first surprise I supposed myself gotten into some forest – Arden, to be sure, or Sherwood; but the dresses and deportment, all civic, forbade me to continue in that delusion. Then a scriptural thought crossed me (especially as there were nearly as many Jews as Christians among them), whether it might not be the Children of Israel going up to besiege Jericho. I was undeceived of both errors by the sight of many faces which were familiar to me. I found myself strangely (as it will happen in dreams) at one and the same time in an unknown country, with known companions. I met old friends, not with new faces, but with their old faces oddly adorned in front, with each man a certain corneous excrescence. Dick Mitis, the little cheesemonger in St *’s Passage, was the first that saluted me, with his hat off – you know Dick’s way to a customer – and, I not being aware of him, he thrust a strange beam into my left eye, which pained and grieved me exceedingly; but, instead of apology, he only grinned and fleered in my face, as much as to say, ‘It is the custom of the country,’ and passed on.
I had scarce time to send a civil message to his lady, whom I have always admired as a pattern of a wife, – and do indeed take Dick and her to be a model of conjugal agreement and harmony, – when I felt an ugly smart in my neck, as if something had gored it behind, and turning round, it was my old friend and neighbour, Dulcet, the confectioner, who, meaning to be pleasant, had thrust his protuberance right into my nape, and seemed proud of his power of offending.
Now I was assailed right and left, till in my own defence I was obliged to walk sideling and wary, and look about me, as you guard your eyes in London streets; for the horns thickened, and came at me like the ends of umbrellas poking in one’s face.
I soon found that these towns-folk were the civillest best-mannered people in the world, and that if they had offended at all, it was entirely owing to their blindness. They do not know what dangerous weapons they protrude in front, and will stick their best friends in the eye with provoking complacency. Yet the best of it is, they can see the beams on their neighbours’ foreheads, if they are as small as motes, but their own beams they can in no wise discern.
There was little Mitis, that I told you I just encountered – he has simply (I speak of him at home in his own shop) the smoothest forehead in his own conceit – he will stand you a quarter of an hour together contemplating the serenity of it in the glass, before he begins to shave himself in a morning – yet you saw what a desperate gash he gave me.
Desiring to be better informed of the ways of this extraordinary people, I applied myself to a fellow of some assurance, who (it appeared) acted as a sort of interpreter to strangers – he was dressed in a military uniform, and strongly resembled Colonel —, of the guards; – and ‘pray, Sir,’ said I, ‘have all the inhabitants of your city these troublesome excrescences? I beg pardon; I see you have none. You perhaps are single.’ ‘Truly, sir,’ he replied with a smile, ‘for the most part we have, but not all alike. There are some, like Dick, that sport but one tumescence. Their ladies have been tolerably faithful – have confined themselves to a single aberration or so – these we calls Unicorns. Dick, you must know, is my Unicorn. [He spoke this with an air of invincible assurance.] Then we have Bicorns, Tricorns, and so on up to Millecorns. [Here methought I crossed and blessed myself in my dream.] Some again we have – there goes one – you see how happy the rogue looks – how he walks smiling and perking up his face, as if he though
t himself the only man. He is not married yet, but on Monday next he leads to the altar the accomplished widow Dacres, relict of our late sheriff.’
‘I see, Sir,’ said I, ‘and observe that he is happily free from the national goitre (let me call it), which distinguishes most of your countrymen.’
‘Look a little more narrowly,’ said my conductor.
I put on my spectacles; and observing the man a little more diligently, above his forehead I could mark a thousand little twinkling shadows dancing the hornpipe, little hornlets, and rudiments of horn, of a soft and pappy consistence (for I handled some of them), but which, like coral out of water, my guide informed me would infallibly stiffen and grow rigid within a week or two from the expiration of his bachelorhood.
Then I saw some horns strangely growing out behind, and my interpreter explained these to be married men whose wives had conducted themselves with infinite propriety since the period of their marriage, but were thought to have antedated their good men’s titles, by certain liberties they had indulged themselves in, prior to the ceremony. This kind of gentry wore their horns backwards, as has been said, in the fashion of the old pig-tails; and as there was nothing obtrusive or ostentatious in them, nobody took any notice of it.
Some had pretty little budding antlers, like the first essays of a young faun. These, he told me, had wives, whose affairs were in a hopeful way, but not quite brought to a conclusion.
Others had nothing to show, only by certain red angry marks and swellings in their foreheads, which itched the more they kept rubbing and chafing them; it was to be hoped that something was brewing.
I took notice that every one jeered at the rest, only none took notice of the sea-captains; yet these were as well provided with their tokens as the best among them. This kind of people, it seems, taking their wives upon so contingent tenures, their lot was considered as nothing but natural, – so they wore their marks without impeachment, as they might carry their cockades,1 and nobody respected them a whit the less for it.
I observed, that the more sprouts grew out of a man’s head, the less weight they seemed to carry with them; whereas, a single token would now and then appear to give the wearer some uneasiness. This shows that use is a great thing.
Some had their adornings gilt, which needs no explanation; while others, like musicians, went sounding theirs before them – a sort of music which I thought might very well have been spared.
It was pleasant to see some of the citizens encounter between themselves; how they smiled in their sleeves at the shock they received from their neighbour, and none seemed conscious of the shock which their neighbour experienced in return.
Some had great corneous stumps, seemingly torn off and bleeding. These, the interpreter warned me, were husbands who had retaliated upon their wives, and the badge was in equity divided between them.
While I stood discerning of these things, a slight tweak on my cheek unawares, which brought tears into my eyes, introduced to me my friend Placid, between whose lady and a certain male cousin, some idle flirtations I remember to have heard talked of; but that was all. He saw he had somehow hurt me, and asked my pardon with that round unconscious face of his, and looked so tristful and contrite for his no-offence, that I was ashamed for the man’s penitence. Yet I protest it was but a scratch. It was the least little hornet of a horn that could be framed. ‘Shame on the man,’ I secretly exclaimed, ‘who could thrust so much as the value of a hair into a brow so unsuspecting and inoffensive. What then must they have to answer for, who plant great, monstrous, timber-like, projecting antlers upon the heads of those whom they call their friends, when a puncture of this atomical tenuity made my eyes to water at this rate. All the pincers at Surgeons’ Hall cannot pull out for Placid that little hair.’
I was curious to know what became of these frontal excrescences when the husbands died; and my guide informed me that the chemists in their country made a considerable profit by them, extracting from them certain subtile essences: – and then I remembered, that nothing was so efficacious in my own for restoring swooning matrons, and wives troubled with the vapours, as a strong sniff or two at the composition, appropriately called hartshorn – far beyond sal volatile.
Then also I began to understand, why a man, who is the jest of the company, is said to be the butt – as much as to say, such a one butteth with the horn.
I inquired if by no operation these wens were ever extracted; and was told that there was indeed an order of dentists, whom they call canonists in their language, who undertook to restore the forehead to its pristine smoothness; but that ordinarily it was not done without much cost and trouble; and when they succeeded in plucking out the offending part it left a painful void, which could not be filled up; and that many patients who had submitted to the excision, were eager to marry again, to supply with a good second antler the baldness and deformed gap left by the extraction of the former, as men losing their natural hair substitute for it a less becoming periwig.
Some horns I observed beautifully taper, smooth, and (as it were) flowering. These I understand were the portions brought by handsome women to their spouses; and I pitied the rough, homely, unsightly deformities on the brows of others, who had been deceived by plain and ordinary partners. Yet the latter I observed to be by far the most common – the solution of which I leave to the natural philosopher.
One tribute of married men I particularly admired at, who, instead of horns, wore, engrafted on their forehead, a sort of horn-book. ‘This,’ quoth my guide, ‘is the greatest mystery in our country, and well worth an explanation. You must know that all infidelity is not of the senses. We have as well intellectual, as material, wittols.2 These, whom you see decorated with the Order of the Book – are triflers, who encourage about their wives’ presence the society of your men of genius (their good friends, as they call them) – literary disputants, who ten to one out-talk the poor husband, and commit upon the understanding of the woman a violence and estrangement in the end, little less painful than the coarser sort of alienation. Whip me these knaves – [my conductor here expressed himself with a becoming warmth] – whip me them, I say, who with no excuse from the passions, in cold blood seduce the minds, rather than the persons, of their friends’ wives; who, for the tickling pleasure of hearing themselves prate, dehonestate3 the intellects of married women, dishonouring the husband in what should be his most sensible part. If I must be — [here he used a plain word] let it be by some honest sinner like myself, and not by one of these gad-flies, these debauchers of the understanding, these flattery-buzzers.’ He was going on in this manner, and I was getting insensibly pleased with my friend’s manner (I had been a little shy of him at first), when the dream suddenly left me, vanishing – as Virgil speaks – through the gate of Horn.
ELIA.
(London Magazine, January 1825)
31. The Illustrious Defunct 3272/
Nought but a blank remains, a dead void space,
A step of life that promised such a race. – DRYDEN*
Napoleon has now sent us back from the grave sufficient echoes of his living renown: the twilight of posthumous fame has lingered long enough over the spot where the sun of his glory set; and his name must at length repose in the silence, if not in the darkness of night. In this busy and evanescent scene, other spirits of the age are rapidly snatched away, claiming our undivided sympathies and regrets, until in turn they yield to some newer and more absorbing grief. Another name is now added to the list of the mighty departed, a name whose influence upon the hopes and fears, the fates and fortunes of our countrymen, has rivalled, and perhaps eclipsed that of the defunct ‘child and champion of Jacobinism,’ while it is associated with all the sanctions of legitimate government, all the sacred authorities of social order and our most holy religion. We speak of one, indeed, under whose warrant heavy and incessant contributions were imposed upon our fellow-citizens, but who exacted nothing without the signet and sign-manual of most devout Chancellors of the Exchequer. N
ot to dally longer with the sympathies of our readers, we think it right to premonish them that we are composing an epicedium2 upon no less distinguished a personage than the Lottery, whose last breath, after many penultimate puffs, has been sobbed forth by sorrowing contractors, as if the world itself were about to be converted into a blank. There is a fashion of eulogy, as well as of vituperation; and though the Lottery stood for some time in the latter predicament, we hesitate not to assert that ‘multis ille bonis flebilis occidit.’3 Never have we joined in the senseless clamour which condemned the only tax whereto we became voluntary contributors, the only resource which gave the stimulus without the danger or infatuation of gambling, the only alembic which in these plodding days sublimised our imaginations, and filled them with more delicious dreams than ever flitted athwart the sensorium of Alnaschar.4
