by Charles Lamb
My love to Lloyd and to Sophia
C L
11. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Land of Shadows
Shadow-month [April]
the 16th or 17th, 1800
I send you, in this parcel, my play, which I beg you to present in my name, with my respect and love, to Wordsworth and his sister. You blame us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley;1 the woman has been ten times after us about it, and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue, but she would once write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. You read us a dismal homily upon ‘Realities.’ We know, quite as well as you do, what are shadows and what are realities. You, for instance, when you are over your fourth or fifth jorum,2 chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of realities. Shadows are cold, thin things, that have no warmth or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her friend, and a tribe of authoresses that come after you here daily, and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey, Miss Wesley, to dance after you, in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical Anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off, by that simple expedient of referring her to you; but there are more burrs in the wind. I came home t’other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, of the author but hunger about me, and whom found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss Benje, or Benjey – I don’t know how she spells her name. I just came in time enough, I believe, luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems she is one of your authoresses, that you first foster, and then upbraid us with. But I forgive you. ‘The rogue has given me potions to make me love him.’ Well; go she would not, nor step a step over our threshold, till we had promised to come and drink tea with her next night. I had never seen her before, and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. We went, however, not to be impolite. Her lodgings are up two pairs of stairs in East Street. Tea and coffee, and macaroons – a kind of cake I much love. We sat down. Presently Miss Benje broke the silence, by declaring herself quite of a different opinion from D’Israeli,3 who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the mere effect of organization. She begged to know my opinion. I attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ; but that went off very flat. She immediately conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics; and, turning round to Mary, put some question to her in French, – possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French. The explanation that took place occasioned some embarrassment and much wondering. She then fell into an insulting conversation about the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages, and concluded with asserting that the Saxon was esteemed the purest dialect in Germany. From thence she passed into the subject of poetry; where I, who had hitherto sat mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion, that no good poetry had appeared since Dr Johnson’s time. It seems the Doctor has suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way by the severity of his critical strictures in his ‘Lives of the Poets.’ I here ventured to question the fact, and was beginning to appeal to names, but I was assured ‘it was certainly the case.’ Then we discussed Miss More’s book on education, which I had never read. It seems Dr Gregory, another of Miss Benjey’s friends, has found fault with one of Miss More’s metaphors. Miss More has been at some pains to vindicate herself – in the opinion of Miss Benjey, not without success. It seems the Doctor is invariably against the use of broken or mixed metaphor, which he reprobates against the authority of Shakspeare himself. We next discussed the question, whether Pope was a poet? I find Dr Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward does not at all concur with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative merits of the ten translations of ‘Pizarro,’ and Miss Benjey or Benje advised Mary to take two of them home; she thought it might afford her some pleasure to compare them verbatim; which we declined. It being now nine o’clock, wine and macaroons were again served round, and we parted, with a promise to go again next week, and meet the Miss Porters, who, it seems, have heard much of Mr Coleridge, and wish to meet us, because we are his friends. I have been preparing for the occasion. I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to cut a tolerable second-rate figure.
Pray let us have no more complaints about shadows. We are in a fair way, through you, to surfeit sick upon them.
Our loves and respects to your host and hostess. Our dearest love to Coleridge.
Take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if Woodfall4 himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs Coleridge and little David Hartley, your little reality.
Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at any thing I have written.
C. LAMB, Umbra
Coleridge, I find loose among your papers a copy of ‘Christabel.’ It wants about thirty lines; you will very much oblige me by sending me the beginning as far as that line, –
And the spring comes slowly up this way;
and the intermediate lines between –
The lady leaps up suddenly,
The lovely Lady Christabel;
and the lines, –
She folded her arms beneath her cloak,
And stole to the other side of the oak.
The trouble to you will be small, and the benefit to us very great! A pretty antithesis! A figure in speech I much applaud.
Godwin has called upon us. He spent one evening here. Was very friendly. Kept us up till midnight. Drank punch, and talked about you. He seems, above all men, mortified at your going away. Suppose you were to write to that good-natured heathen – ‘or is he a shadow?’ If I do not write, impute it to the long postage, of which you have so much cause to complain. I have scribbled over a queer letter, as I find by perusal; but it means no mischief.
I am, and will be, yours ever, in sober sadness,
C. L.
Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguæ: in English, illiterate, a dunce, a ninny.
12. To Thomas Manning
[P.M. 20 May 1800]
Dear Manning,
I feel myself unable to thank you sufficiently for your kind letter. It was doubly acceptable to me, both for the choice poetry and the kind honest prose which it contained. It was just such a letter as I should have expected from Manning.
I am in much better spirits than when I wrote last. I have had a very eligible offer to lodge with a friend in town. He will have rooms to let at midsummer, by which time I hope my sister will be well enough to join me. It is a great object to me to live in town, where we shall be much more private, and to quit a house and neighbourhood where poor Mary’s disorder, so frequently recurring, has made us a sort of marked people. We can be nowhere private except in the midst of London. We shall be in a family where we visit very frequently … only my landlord and I have not yet come to a conclusion. He has a partner to consult. I am still on the tremble, for I do not know where we could go into lodgings that would not be, in many respects, highly exceptionable. Only God send Mary well again, and I hope all will be well! The prospect, such as it is, has made me quite happy. I have just time to tell you of it, as I know it will give you pleasure. – Farewell.
C. LAMB.
13. To Robert Lloyd
[No date: July 1800]
Dear Robert,
My mind has been so barren and idle of late, that I have done nothing. I have received many a summons from you, and have repeatedly sat down to write, and broke off from despair of sending you anything worthy your acceptance. I have had such a deadness about me. Man delights not me nor woman neither. I impute it in part, or altogether, to the stupefying effect which continued fine weather has upon me. I want some rains, or even snow and intense cold winter nights, to bind me t
o my habitation, and make me value it as a home – a sacred character which it has not attained with me hitherto. I cannot read or write when the sun shines: I can only walk.
I must tell you that, since I wrote last I have been two days at Oxford, on a visit (long put off) to Gutch’s family (my landlord). I was much gratified with the Colleges and Libraries and what else of Oxford I could see in so short a time. In the All Souls’ Library is a fine head of Bishop Taylor,1 which was one great inducement to my Oxford visit. In the Bodleian are many Portraits of illustrious Dead, the only species of painting I value at a farthing. But an indubitable good Portrait of a great man is worth a pilgrimage to go and see. Gutch’s family is a very fine one, consisting of well-grown sons and daughters, and all likely and well-favour’d. What is called a Happy family – that is, according to my interpretation, a numerous assemblage of young men and women, all fond of each other to a certain degree, and all happy together, but where the very number forbids any two of them to get close enough to each other to share secrets and be friends. That close intercourse can only exist (commonly, I think,) in a family of two or three. I do not envy large families. The fraternal affection by diffusion and multi-participation is ordinarily thin and weak. They don’t get near enough to each other.
I expected to have had an account of Sophia’s being brought to bed2 before this time; but I remain in confidence that you will send me the earliest news. I hope it will be happy.
Coleridge is settled at Keswick, so that the probability is that he will be once again united with your Brother. Such men as he and Wordsworth would exclude solitude in the Hebrides or Thule.
Pray have you seen the New Edition of Burns, including his posthumous works? I want very much to get a sight of it, but cannot afford to buy it, my Oxford Journey, though very moderate, having pared away all superfluities.
Will you accept of this short letter, accompanied with professions of deepest regard for you?
Yours unalterably,
C. LAMB.
14. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Aug. 6th, 1800.
Dear Coleridge,
I have taken to-day, and delivered to Longman and Co., Imprimis: your books, viz., three ponderous German dictionaries, one volume (I can find no more) of German and French ditto, sundry other German books unbound, as you left them, Percy’s Ancient Poetry, and one volume of Anderson’s Poets. I specify them, that you may not lose any. Secundo: a dressing-gown (value, fivepence), in which you used to sit and look like a conjuror, when you were translating ‘Wallenstein.’ A case of two razors and a shaving-box and strap. This it has cost me a severe struggle to part with. They are in a brown-paper parcel, which also contains sundry papers and poems, sermons, some few Epic Poems, – one about Cain and Abel, which came from Poole, &c., &c., and also your tragedy; with one or two small German books, and that drama in which Got-fader performs. Tertio: a small oblong box containing all your letters, collected from all your waste papers, and which fill the said little box. All other waste papers, which I judged worth sending, are in the paper parcel aforesaid. But you will find all your letters in the box by themselves. Thus have I discharged my conscience and my lumber-room of all your property, save and except a folio entitled Tyrrell’s Bibliotheca Politica, which you used to learn your politics out of when you wrote for the Post,1 mutatis mutandis, i.e., applying past inferences to modern data. I retain that, because I am sensible I am very deficient in the politics myself; and I have torn up – don’t be angry, waste paper has risen forty per cent., and I can’t afford to buy it – all Buonaparte’s Letters, Arthur Young’s Treatise on Corn, and one or two more light-armed infantry, which I thought better suited the flippancy of London discussion than the dignity of Keswick thinking. Mary says you will be in a damned passion about them when you come to miss them; but you must study philosophy. Read Albertus Magnus de Chartis Amissis five times over after phlebotomising, –’tis Burton’s recipe2 – and then be angry with an absent friend if you can. I have just heard that Mrs Lloyd is delivered of a fine boy, and mother and boy are doing well. Fie on sluggards, what is thy Sara doing? Sara is obscure. Am I to understand by her letter, that she sends a kiss to Eliza Buckingham? Pray tell your wife that a note of interrogation on the superscription of a letter is highly ungrammatical – she proposes writing my name Lamb? Lambe3 is quite enough. I have had the Anthology,4 and like only one thing in it, Lewti; but of that the last stanza is detestable, the rest most exquisite! – the epithet enviable would dash the finest poem. For God’s sake (I never was more serious), don’t make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses.5 It did well enough five years ago when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets; but, besides that, the meaning of gentle is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think but you meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to think that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer.
I have hit off the following in imitation of old English poetry, which, I imagine, I am a dab at. The measure is unmeasureable; but it most resembles that beautiful ballad of the ‘Old and Young Courtier;’ and in its feature of taking the extremes of two situations for just parallel, it resembles the old poetry certainly. If I could but stretch out the circumstances to twelve more verses, i.e., if I had as much genius as the writer of that old song, I think it would be excellent. It was to follow an imitation of Burton in prose, which you have not seen. But fate ‘and wisest Stewart’ say No.6
I can send you 200 pens and six quires of paper immediately, if they will answer the carriage by coach. It would be foolish to pack ’em up cum multis libris et cæteris,7 – they would all spoil. I only wait your commands to coach them. I would pay five-and-forty thousand carriages to read W.’s tragedy, of which I have heard so much and seen so little – only what I saw at Stowey. Pray give me an order in writing on Longman for ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ I have the first volume, and, truth to tell, six shillings is a broad shot. I cram all I can in, to save a multiplying of letters – those pretty comets with swingeing tails.
I’ll just crowd in God bless you!
Wednesday night.
C. LAMB.
15. To Thomas Manning
[P.M. 9 August 1800]
Dear Manning,
I suppose you have heard of Sophia Lloyd’s good fortune, and paid the customary compliments to the parents. Heaven keep the new-born infant from star-blasting and moon-blasting, from epilepsy, marasmus, and the devil! May he live to see many days, and they good ones; some friends, and they pretty regular correspondents, with as much wit as [? and] wisdom as will eat their bread and cheese together under a poor roof without quarrelling; as much goodness as will earn heaven if there be such a place and deserve it if there be not, but, rather than go to bed solitary, would truckle with the meanest succubus on her bed of brimstone. Here I must leave off, my benedictory powers failing me. I could curse the sheet full; so much stronger is corruption than grace in the Natural Man.
And now, when shall I catch a glimpse of your honest face-to-face countenance again – your fine dogmatical sceptical face, by punch-light? O! one glimpse of the human face, and shake of the human hand, is better than whole reams of this cold, thin correspondence – yea, of more worth than all the letters that have sweated the fingers of sensibility from Madame Sevigné and Balzac (observe my Larning!) to Sterne and Shenstone.
Coleridge is settled with his wife (with a child in her guts) and the young philosopher at Keswick with the Wordsworths. They have contrived to spawn a new volume of lyrical ballads, which is to see the light in about a month, and causes no little excitement in the literary world. George Dyer too, that good-natured heathen, is more than nine months gone with his twin volumes of ode, p
astoral, sonnet, elegy, Spenserian, Horatian, Akensidish, and Masonic verse – Clio prosper the birth! it will be twelve shillings out of somebody’s pocket. I find he means to exclude ‘personal satire,’ so it appears by his truly original advertisement. Well, God put it into the hearts of the English gentry to come in shoals and subscribe to his poems, for He never put a kinder heart into flesh of man than George Dyer’s!
Now farewell: for dinner is at hand, and yearning guts do chide.
C. L.
16. To Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Thursday, Aug. 14, 1800.
Read on and you’ll come to the Pens.
My head is playing all the tunes in the world, ringing such peals. It has just finished the ‘Merry Christ Church Bells,’ and absolutely is beginning ‘Turn again, Whittington.’ Buz, buz, buz: bum, bum, bum: wheeze, wheeze, wheeze: feu, feu, feu: tinky, tinky, tinky: craunch. I shall certainly come to be damned at last. I have been getting drunk for two days running. I find my moral sense in the last stage of a consumption, and my religion burning as blue and faint as the tops of burning bricks. Hell gapes and the Devil’s great guts cry cupboard for me. In the midst of this infernal torture, Conscience (and be damn’d to her) is barking and yelping as loud as any of them.
I have sat down to read over again your satire upon me1 in the Anthology and I think I do begin to spy out something with beauty and design in it. I perfectly accede to all your alterations, and only desire that you had cut deeper, when your hand was in.
In the next edition of the ‘Anthology’ (which Phœbus avert and those nine other wandering maids also!) please to blot out gentle-hearted, and substitute: drunken dog, ragged-head, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question. And for Charles read Tom, or Bob, or Richard for more delicacy. Damn you, I was beginning to forgive you and believe in earnest that the lugging in of my proper name was purely unintentional on your part, when looking back for further conviction, stares me in the face Charles Lamb of the India House. Now I am convinced it was all done in malice, heaped sack-upon-sack, congregated, studied malice. You Dog! your 141st page shall not save you. I own I was just ready to acknowledge that there is a something not unlike good poetry in that page, if you had not run into the unintelligible abstraction-fit about the manner of the Deity’s making spirits perceive his presence. God, nor created thing alive, can receive any honour from such thin show-box attributes.
