Selected Prose

by Charles Lamb

  It was never good times in England since the poor began to speculate upon their condition. Formerly, they jogged on with as little reflection as horses: the whistling ploughman went cheek by jowl with his brother that neighed. Now the biped carries a box of phosphorus in his leather breeches; and in the dead of night the half-illuminated beast steals his magic potion into a cleft in a barn, and half a country is grinning with new fires. Farmer Graystock said something to the touchy rustic that he did not relish, and he writes his distaste in flames. What a power to intoxicate his crude brains, just muddlingly awake, to perceive that something is wrong in the social system! – what a hellish faculty above gunpowder!

  Now the rich and poor are fairly pitted; we shall see who can hang or burn fastest. It is not always revenge that stimulates these kindlings. There is a love of exerting mischief. Think of a disrespected clod that was trod into earth, that was nothing, on a sudden by damned arts refined into an exterminating angel, devouring the fruits of the earth and their growers in a mass of fire! What a new existence! – what a temptation above Lucifer’s! Would clod be any thing but a clod, if he could resist it? Why, here was a spectacle last night for a whole country! – a Bonfire visible to London, alarming her guilty towers, and shaking the Monument with an ague fit – all done by a little vial of phosphor in a Clown’s fob! How he must grin, and shake his empty noddle in clouds, the Vulcanian Epicure! Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of Science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat? Who shall persuade the boor that phosphor will not ignite?

  Seven goodly stacks of hay, with corn-barns proportionable, lie smoking ashes and chaff, which man and beast would sputter out and reject like those apples of Asphaltes and bitumen.2 The food for the inhabitants of earth will quickly disappear. Hot rolls may say: ‘Fuimus panes, fuit quartern-loaf, et ingens gloria Apple-pasty-orum.’3 That the good old munching system may last thy time and mine, good unincendiary George, is the devout prayer of thine,

  To the last crust,

  CH. LAMB

  71. To Thomas Allsop1

  [P.M. 2 June 1832]

  At midsummer or soon after (I will let you know the previous day), I will take a day with you in the purlieus of my old haunts. No offence has been taken, any more than meant. My house is full at present, but empty of its chief pride. She is dead to me for many months. But when I see you, then I will say, Come and see me. With undiminished friendship to you both,

  Your faithful but queer

  C. LAMB.

  How you frighted me! Never write again, ‘Coleridge is dead,’ at the end of a line, and tamely come in with ‘to his friends’ at the beginning of another. Love is quicker, and fear from love, than the transition ocular from Line to Line.

  72. To Maria Fryer1

  Feb. 14, 1834.

  Dear Miss Fryer,

  Your letter found me just returned from keeping my birthday (pretty innocent!) at Dover-street. I see them pretty often. I have since had letters of business to write, or should have replied earlier. In one word, be less uneasy about me; I bear my privations very well; I am not in the depths of desolation, as heretofore. Your admonitions are not lost upon me. Your kindness has sunk into my heart. Have faith in me! It is no new thing for me to be left to my sister. When she is not violent her rambling chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this world. Her heart is obscured, not buried; it breaks out occasionally; and one can discern a strong mind struggling with the billows that have gone over it. I could be nowhere happier than under the same roof with her. Her memory is unnaturally strong; and from ages past, if we may so call the earliest records of our poor life, she fetches thousands of names and things that never would have dawned upon me again, and thousands from the ten years she lived before me. What took place from early girlhood to her coming of age principally lives again (every important thing and every trifle) in her brain with the vividness of real presence. For twelve hours incessantly she will pour out without intermission all her past life, forgetting nothing, pouring out name after name to the Waldens2 as a dream; sense and nonsense; truths and errors huddled together; a medley between inspiration and possession. What things we are! I know you will bear with me, talking of these things. It seems to ease me; for I have nobody to tell these things to now. Emma, I see, has got a harp! and is learning to play. She has framed her three Walton pictures, and pretty they look. That is a book you should read;3 such sweet religion in it – next to Woolman’s!4 though the subject be baits and hooks, and worms, and fishes. She has my copy at present to do two more from.

  Very, very tired, I began this epistle, having been epistolising all the morning, and very kindly would I end it, could I find adequate expressions to your kindness. We did set our minds on seeing you in spring. One of us will indubitably. But I am not skilled in almanac learning, to know when spring precisely begins and ends. Pardon my blots; I am glad you like your book. I wish it had been half as worthy of your acceptance as ‘John Woolman.’ But ’tis a good-natured book.

  73. To Henry Francis Cary1

  [April 1834]

  I protest I know not in what words to invest my sense of the shameful violation of hospitality, which I was guilty of on that fatal Wednesday. Let it be blotted from the calendar. Had it been committed at a layman’s house, say a merchant’s or manufacturer’s, a cheesemonger’s or greengrocer’s, or, to go higher, a barrister’s, a member of Parliament’s, a rich banker’s, I should have felt alleviation, a drop of self-pity. But to be seen deliberately to go out of the house of a clergyman drunk! a clergyman of the Church of England too! not that alone, but of an expounder of that dark Italian Hierophant, an exposition little short of his who dared unfold the Apocalypse: divine riddles both and (without supernal grace vouchsafed) Arks not to be fingered without present blasting to the touchers. And, then, from what house! Not a common glebe or vicarage (which yet had been shameful), but from a kingly repository of sciences, human and divine, with the primate of England for its guardian, arrayed in public majesty, from which the profane vulgar are bid fly. Could all those volumes have taught me nothing better!

  With feverish eyes on the succeeding dawn I opened upon the faint light, enough to distinguish, in a strange chamber not immediately to be recognized, garters, hose, waistcoat, neckerchief, arranged in dreadful order and proportion, which I knew was not mine own. ’Tis the common symptom, on awaking, I judge my last night’s condition from. A tolerable scattering on the floor I hail as being too probably my own, and if the candlestick be not removed, I assoil myself. But this finical arrangement, this finding everything in the morning in exact diametrical rectitude, torments me. By whom was I divested? Burning blushes! not by the fair hands of nymphs, the Buffam Graces?2 Remote whispers suggested that I coached it home in triumph – far be that from working pride in me, for I was unconscious of the locomotion; that a young Mentor accompanied a reprobate old Telemachus; that, the Trojan like, he bore his charge upon his shoulders, while the wretched incubus, in glimmering sense, hiccuped drunken snatches of flying on the bat’s wings after sunset. An aged servitor was also hinted at, to make disgrace more complete: one, to whom my ignominy may offer further occasions of revolt (to which he was before too fondly inclining) from the true faith; for, at a sight of my helplessness, what more was needed to drive him to the advocacy of independency?

  Occasion led me through Great Russell Street yesterday. I gazed at the great knocker. My feeble hands in vain essayed to lift it. I dreaded that Argus Portitor,3 who doubtless lanterned me out on that prodigious night. I called the Elginian marbles. They were cold to my suit. I shall never again, I said, on the wide gates unfolding, say without fear of thrusting back, in a light but a peremptory air, ‘I am going to Mr Cary’s.’ I passed by the walls of Balclutha.4 I had imaged to myself a zodiac of third Wednesdays irradiating by glimpses the Edmonton dulness. I dreamed of Highmore! I am de-vited to come on Wednesdays.

&n
bsp; Villanous old age that, with second childhood, brings linked hand in hand her inseparable twin, new inexperience, which knows not effects of liquor. Where I was to have sate for a sober, middle-aged-and-a-half gentleman, literary too, the neat-fingered artist can educe no notions but of a dissolute Silenus, lecturing natural philosophy to a jeering Chromius or a Mnasilus.5 Pudet.6 From the context gather the lost name of —.

  Notes

  EARLY ESSAYS AND SKETCHES (1811–14)

  1. On the Genius and Character of Hogarth

  1. (p. 5) an old-fashioned house in —shire: the house was Blakesware in Hertfordshire, where Lamb’s maternal grandmother, Mary Field, was housekeeper and which he visited as a child.

  2. (p. 8) Ferdinand Count Fathom: the hero of Smollett’s novel Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1754).

  3. (p. 12) somewhere in his lectures: the passage referred to is in the fourteenth of the Discourses on Painting.

  4. (p. 13) ‘Honest Whore’: 1604, a play by Thomas Dekker (1572–1632).

  5. (p. 14) Bunbury: William Henry Bunbury (1750–1811), an artist and caricaturist of private means and social prominence.

  6. (p. 16) the late Mr Barry: the painter James Barry (1741–1806), who was a Royal Academician and professor of painting.

  7. (p. 18) the Foots, the Kenricks: Samuel Foote (1720–77) and William Kenrick (1725?–79) were both popular dramatists of that period.

  8. (p. 18) Mr Burke: Edmund Burke (1728–97), politician and political and aesthetic theorist.

  9. (p. 22) Tom Jones … Blifil: characters in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).

  10. (p. 22) Strap … Random: characters in Smollett’s Roderick Random.

  11. (p. 22) Parson Adams: a character in Fielding’s Joseph Andrewes.

  12. (p. 25) Uncle Toby and Mr Shandy: characters in Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy.

  13. (p. 26) tædium … formarum: ‘the tedium of everyday things’.

  2. On the Tragedies of Shakspeare

  1. (p. 29) Mr K.: John Philip Kemble (1757–1823). He first appeared as Hamlet on 30 September 1783, at Drury Lane.

  2. (p. 29) Mrs S.: Mrs Siddons (1755–1831), John Kemble’s sister.

  3. (p. 32) Banks or Lillo: John Banks was a Restoration melodramatist; George Lillo (1693–1739) was the author of George Barnwell – The London Merchant or The History of George Barnwell (1731), mentioned later in the essay. The story, from Percy’s Reliques, tells how the apprentice, George, robs his master and kills his uncle, incited by the ambitious and attractive Millwood. For nearly a century the play was performed at Christmas and Easter holidays as an instructive moral lesson for apprentices.

  4. (p. 37) Tate and Cibber: Nahum Tate (1652–1715), dramatist and poet, and Colley Cibber (1671–1757). Lamb ironically called them Shakspeare’s Improvers in an essay of that title (Spectator, 22 November 1828), for their re-writing of some of Shakespeare’s plays.

  5. (p. 38) Mr C.’s exertions in that part: George Frederick Cooke (1756–1811). Lamb reviewed Cooke’s Richard III in the Morning Post of 8 January 1802.

  6. (p. 38) Glenalvon: a character in Home’s tragedy Douglas (1757). Lamb wrote an early poem on the play and, during his six weeks in the asylum at Hoxton, in 1795, he imagined himself to be Norval, the young ill-starred hero of Douglas.

  7. (p. 42) by chandelier light: in 1811, when Lamb was writing this, the stage was lit by chandeliers.

  8. (p. 44) the Orrery Lecturer at the Haymarket: named after Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery, the Orrery was a mechanism designed to represent the motions of the planets around the sun by means of clockwork.

  9. (p. 44) Webb: a theatrical robe-maker at Chancery Lane.

  3. Edax on Appetite

  1. (p. 46) the Editor of the Reflector: James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784–1859).

  2. (p. 46) quibus hunc … partem: ‘with these things you can alleviate the pain and rid yourself of most of this disease’.

  3. (p. 46) piacula: ways of making expiation or atonement.

  4. (p. 47) Ventri natus … mensæ: the phrases can be translated respectively, ‘glutton born’, ‘gluttony dedicated’, ‘insane appetite’, ‘abyss of edibles’, ‘indulger in feasts’, ‘no restrainer of appetite’, ‘hunter of the sumptuous’.

  5. (p. 48) old Baucis: the wife of Philemon, a good old countryman in Greek mythology. Zeus and Hermes came to earth to test men’s piety and were refused hospitality by everyone except Philemon and Baucis.

  6. (p. 49) Heliogabalus: often referred to by Lamb, Heliogabalus was a Roman Emperor (AD 218–22) famous for his beauty and the elaborate ceremonials over which he presided. The shameless extravagance of his life shocked even the Roman public. He was described as ‘insulting the intelligence of the community by horseplay of the wildest description and by childish practical joking’.

  7. (p. 49) Curii and Dentati: Curii was a famous Roman general. The pun is an allusion to Lucius Scippius Dentatus, the ‘Roman Achilles’, who was a legendary embodiment of the civic and military virtues of the plebeians in their struggles against both the patricians and external enemies.

  8. (p. 49) Mandeville … Fable of the Bees: Bernard Mandeville (1670?–1733), whose Fable of the Bees (1714) was one of Lamb’s favourite books.

  9. (p. 50) lusus naturæ: ‘sport of nature’.

  10. (p. 51) in petto: Italian for ‘undisclosed’.

  4. Hospita on the Immoderate Indulgence of the Pleasures of the Palate

  1. (p. 56) Anthropophagism: cannibalism.

  2. (p. 56) Mr Malthus’s Thoughts … Population: Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), whose very influential Essay on the Principle of Population was published in 1798. Malthus’s theory was that population increased geometrically while food supply increased only arithmetically. If economic prosperity led to an increase in population, the ultimate cost would be a food crisis which would then reduce the population to a level compatible with subsistence. This seemed to be a ‘natural’ limit to progress.

  5. The Good Clerk, A Character

  1. (p. 60) the dexter ear: the right ear.

  2. (p. 60) the George Barnwells of the day: see note 3 to ‘The Tragedies of Shakspeare’ (p. 446).

  3. (p. 61) Drayton: Michael Drayton (1563–1631), poet.

  4. (p. 61) ‘The Complete English Tradesman’: published in 1727.

  5. (p. 61) The Fable of the Bees: see note 7 to ‘Edax on Appetite’ (p. 447).

  6. (p. 63) as Solomon says: Proverbs 22:7.

  6. Wordsworth’s ‘Excursion’

  1. (p. 65) to be called the Recluse: this poem was never completed by Wordsworth.

  2. (p. 66) the caravan which Thompson so feelingly describes: in ‘Winter’ (ll. 799–809), part of James Thomson’s The Seasons, which appeared in its first complete edition in 1730.

  3. (p. 67) Walton’s Complete Angler: one of Lamb’s favourite books, by Izaak Walton (1593–1683), published in 1653.

  4. (p. 68) Dodona: Zeus’s sanctuary.

  5. (p. 68) Fairfax’s Translation: the quotation is from Edward Fairfax’s translation (1600) of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, XVI, 13. ‘Leden’ means ‘language’.

  FROM ESSAYS OF ELIA (1823) AND LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA (1833)

  7. The Two Races of Men

  1. (p. 83) Alcibiades … our late incomparable Brinsley: Alcibiades is one of the characters in Plato’s Symposium; and Brinsley is Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the extravagant dramatist.

  2. (p. 83) meum and tuum: ‘my’ and ‘your’.

  3. (p. 83) beyond Tooke: an allusion to the philological theories in The Diversions of Purley by John Horne Tooke (1736–1812).

  4. (p. 84) obolary: possessing only small coins, poor; a nonce-word coined by Lamb.

  5. (p. 84) lene tormentum: ‘gentle torment’.

  6. (p. 84) the Albion: in 1801, Lamb worked briefly on the Albion.

  7. (p. 85) periegesis: description of a place.

  8. (p. 85) cana fides: ‘distinguished grey’.

  9. (p. 86) mumping vis
nomy: begging face.

  10. (p. 86) Comberbatch: in December 1793, while still at Cambridge, Coleridge left the university and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.

  11. (p. 87) deodands: things given to God.

  12. (p. 87) spiteful K.: James Kenney (1780–1849), Irish dramatist. Lamb wrote an Epilogue to Kenney’s farce Debtor and Creditor in 1814.

  13. (p. 88) tripling their value: on one page of Lamb’s Beaumont and Fletcher folio Coleridge wrote two notes, adding at the bottom of the page ‘NB – I shall not be long here, Charles! – I gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic.’

  8. A Quakers’ Meeting

  1. (p. 90) Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud: Greek wind-gods.

  2. (p. 90) Master Zimmerman: Johann Georg Zimmerman (1728–95), Swiss philosophical writer and physician who wrote on nervous disorders and whose books were translated into every European language. He was also private physician to George III and Frederick the Great. His character was an eccentric combination of sentimentalism, melancholy and enthusiasm, which is doubtless why he appealed to Lamb.