Chapter C: Lamb (2)

The insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is
tied down would not admit of such admirable passions as
these scenes are filled with. A Puritanical obtuseness of
sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among
us, instead of the vigorous passions and virtues clad in
flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us.
Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the
differences, the quarrels, the animosities of man, a beauty
and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the iterately
inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us all
is hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation scene (let the
occasion be never so absurd or unnatural) is always sure of
applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be
complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the
amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful
similarity of disposition between them. We have a common
stock of dramatic morality out of which a writer may be
supplied without the trouble of copying from originals
within his own breast. To know the boundaries of honour, to
be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance which shall
beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to
esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a
parent is to be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a
pious cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is
found to be frail and tottering, to feel the true blows of a
real disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary
strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen an
edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine this done in a
feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense,
somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of
right and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three
hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour as opposed to
the laws of the land or a commonplace against duelling. Yet
such things would stand a writer nowadays in far better
stead than Captain Ager and his conscientious honour; and he
would be considered a far better teacher of morality than
old Rowley or Middleton if they were living.

* * * * *

Though some resemblance may be traced between the Charms in
Macbeth and the Incantations in this Play, which is supposed
to have preceded it, this coincidence will not detract much
from the originality of Shakspeare. His Witches are
distinguished from the Witches of Middleton by essential
differences. These are creatures to whom man or woman
plotting some dire mischief might resort for occasional
consultation. Those originate deeds of blood, and begin bad
impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet
with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his
destiny. He can never break the fascination. These Witches
can hurt the body: those have power over the soul. Hecate in
Middleton has a Son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare
have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended
from any parent. They are foul Anomalies, of whom we know
not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning
or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem
to be without human relations. They come with thunder and
lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of
them.--Except Hecate, they have no names; which heightens
their mysteriousness. Their names, and some of the
properties, which Middleton has given to his Hags, excite
smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious things. Their presence
cannot co-exist with mirth. But in a lesser degree the
witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their power too is,
in some measure, over the mind. They raise jars, jealousies,
strife, _like a thick scurf o'er life_.

Here surely we have the right stuff. Terse, pregnant sentences; few words, but going to the very heart of the matter. That Lamb was justly proud of his pioneer work in this field of literary research is certain, for in a short autobiography which he prepared for a friend's album--in what has been called "the briefest, and perhaps the wittiest and most truthful autobiography in the language"--he wrote as follows:

He also was the first to draw the Public attention to the
old English Dramatists, in a work called "Specimens of
English Dramatic Writers who lived about the Time of
Shakspeare," published about fifteen years since.

Of Lamb's work in this field the elder Disraeli admirably said, "He carries us on through whole scenes by a true, unerring motion. His was a poetical mind, labouring in poetry." Within the century that has elapsed since Lamb was engaged in exploring the forgotten old tomes in which lay buried so much excellent literature, the study which he started has taken its place as one of the most important of its kind, and a large library might be formed of the books and reprints which may be looked upon as direct descendants of that modest single octavo volume of 1808. During his later years Lamb devised something in the nature of a supplement when he prepared further extracts from the Garrick collection of plays in the British Museum for Hone's "Table Book" (1827), and these extracts are now generally bound up with the earlier ones in a single work.

ESSAYS

In giving this summary account of Lamb's writings it has been thought best only to keep to a very roughly chronological method, leaving his letters to be touched upon last. Finding earliest expression in poetry, he then turned to the drama, fully equipped with knowledge and a fine enthusiasm, but lacking some of the most vitally essential qualities necessary to success; he then passed more or less by force of circumstance--the need of making money and the desire to help his sister in her newly-found work--to the writing of prose and verse for children; and later he began to make wider use of the fine critical instinct of which he had given early indications in his correspondence. All of these were to be in a measure overshadowed by his achievement as essayist. That work as essayist was chiefly the product of his prime--of the days of the "London Magazine"--but he had made several notable contributions of this character during the preceding twenty years; essays which are now to be found in different posthumous collections of his writings--"Eliana," "Critical Essays," "Essays and Sketches," "Miscellaneous Prose," and so on. When, thanks to the kindly offices of Coleridge, Lamb became a contributor to the "Morning Post," he proposed to furnish some imitations of Burton, the author of the "Anatomy of Melancholy," but these, not unnaturally, being adjudged unsuitable for a daily newspaper found a place in the "John Woodvil" volume of 1802. Yet it was in the journal named that on 1st February, 1802, appeared a brief Essay in the form of a letter on "The Londoner." In this essay we have Lamb using the same phrases that he had employed a year earlier in writing to Wordsworth. In 1811-14 Lamb was contributing essays (including "On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged," "Recollections of Christ's Hospital," and on "The Melancholy of Tailors") to Leigh Hunt's "Reflector," to the "Gentleman's Magazine," and the "Champion." Eight of these essays were included in the two volume "Works" of 1818.

It was with the establishment of the "London Magazine" in 1820 that, as has been said, Lamb's great opportunity came and was greatly taken. The magazine began, as we have seen, in January, and the editor soon gathered around him a remarkably brilliant body of contributors. To their number in August was added "Elia," whose modest signature--later to become perhaps the most widely-known pen-name in our literature--was appended to an article on "The South Sea House." Thenceforward--with the occasional missing of a month here or there, balanced by other months presenting two--the essays appeared with such regularity that twenty-eight months later there were twenty-seven of the twenty-eight essays which were gathered into the volume published in 1823 as "The Essays of Elia."

The publication of the essays in volume form did not by any means indicate that the author had worked out his vein; indeed, while the book was passing through the press he was writing other essays for the "London," though not with the same regularity; afterwards he contributed to the "New Monthly" and other magazines. Such of this later work as he chose to preserve formed "The Last Essays of Elia," published ten years after the earlier work.

LETTERS

All through his working life as man of letters Lamb was engaged in manifesting that side of his genius which whilst known to but few persons during his lifetime was to be one of those most widely and most lovingly known afterwards. He was of the greatest of our letter-writers. It was perhaps but another aspect of the essayist--or rather we might say that his work as essayist was the crowning development of his sedulous habit of being himself when communing on paper with his intimate friends. It has been suggested that such finished works as are many of Lamb's letters were, so to speak, built up bit by bit, and then copied as completed wholes before being despatched to those for whom they were designed. Whether written with a running pen, as a large proportion of them undoubtedly were, or written with the patience of the essayist ponderingly in search of the _mot juste_, they are always true Lamb, individual expressions far removed from the ordinary letters of ordinary folk; they are at once informing revelations of the writer in his relations with his fellows, and they are always marked by essentially literary qualities. In his letters will be found not infrequently--both in idea and in expression--the germs of his essays.

Lamb was first revealed to the reading public as a great letter-writer in Talfourd's "Memorials of Charles Lamb" nearly seventy years ago. Since that time each further publication of the letters has brought fresh material to light which has but gone to strengthen Lamb's position as one of the first two or three letter-writers whose epistles have taken their places in English literature. If we must "place" our great men, there are not wanting critics who would accord Lamb a position at the very head of those in this particular branch. "To an idler like myself, to write and receive letters are both very pleasant;" thus Lamb in one of his earliest letters to Coleridge, and there can be little doubt that in this occupation he frequently found the truth of the statement that the labour we delight in physics pain. In communion with men of kindred tastes he must often have lost the sense of his haunting troubles in intellectual and external interests.

Two or three scraps from the letters have been quoted in the first chapter but as their peculiarly rich wit and humour, using that much-abused word in its fullest significance, can best be shown by example, we may here give a couple more. The first is from a letter written in 1810, and addressed to Manning, the correspondent with whom Lamb was most entertainingly whimsical. The second letter, given in its entirety, was addressed in 1827 to Thomas Hood.

Holcroft had finished his life when I wrote to you, and
Hazlitt has since finished his life--I do not mean his own
life, but he has finished a life of Holcroft, which is going
to press. Tuthill is Dr. Tuthill. I continue Mr. Lamb. I
have published a little book for children on titles of
honour: and to give them some idea of the difference of rank
and gradual rising, I have made a little scale, supposing
myself to receive the following various accessions of
dignity from the king, who is the fountain of honour.--As at
first, 1, Mr. C. Lamb; 2, C. Lamb, Esq.; 3, Sir C. Lamb,
Bart,; 4, Baron Lamb of Stamford; 5, Viscount Lamb; 6, Earl
Lamb; 7, Marquis Lamb; 8, Duke Lamb. It would look like
quibbling to carry it on further, and especially as it is
not necessary for children to go beyond the ordinary titles
of sub-regal dignity in our own country, otherwise I have
sometimes in my dreams imagined myself still advancing, as
9th, King Lamb; 10th, Emperor Lamb; 11th, Pope Innocent,
higher than which is nothing but the Lamb of God. Puns I
have not made many (nor punch much), since the day of my
last; one I cannot help relating. A constable in Salisbury
Cathedral was telling me that eight people dined at the top
of the spire of the cathedral, upon which I remarked that
they must be very sharp set. But in general I cultivate the
reasoning part of my mind more than the imaginative. Do you
know Kate * * *. I am so stuffed out with eating turkey for
dinner, and another turkey for supper yesterday (turkey in
Europe and turkey in Asia), that I can't jog on. It is New
Year here. That is, it was New Year half a year back, when I
was writing this. Nothing puzzles me more than time and
space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think
about them. The Persian ambassador is the principal thing
talked of now. I sent some people to see him worship the sun
on Primrose Hill at half past six in the morning 28th
November; but he did not come, which makes me think the old
fire-worshippers are a sect almost extinct in Persia. Have
you trampled on the Cross yet? The Persian ambassador's name
is Shaw Ali Mirza. The common people call him Shaw Nonsense.
While I think of it, I have put three letters besides my own
three into the India post for you, from your brother,
sister, and some gentleman whose name I forget. Will they,
have they, did they, come safe? The distance you are at cuts
up tenses by the root.

DEAR HOOD,--If I have anything in my head I will
send it to Mr. Watts. Strictly speaking he should have had
my Album verses, but a very intimate friend importuned me
for the trifles, and I believe I forgot Mr. Watts, or lost
sight at the time of his similar Souvenir. Jamieson conveyed
the farce from me to Mrs. C. Kemble, _he_ will not be in
town before the 27th. Give our kind loves to all at
Highgate, and tell them that we have finally torn ourselves
out right away from Colebrooke, where I had _no_ health, and
are about to domiciliate for good at Enfield, where I have
experienced _good_.

"Lord what good hours do we keep!
How quietly we sleep!"

See the rest in the Complete Angler. We have got our books
into our new house. I am a drayhorse if I was not asham'd of
the indigested dirty lumber as I toppled 'em out of the
cart, and blest Becky that came with 'em for her having an
unstuff'd brain with such rubbish. We shall get in by
Michael's mass. 'Twas with some pain we were evuls'd from
Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to the
door posts. To change habitations is to die to them, and in
my time I have died seven deaths. But I don't know whether
every such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence.
'Tis an enterprise, and shoves back the sense of death's
approximating, which tho' not terrible to me, is at all
times particular distasteful. My house-deaths have generally
been periodical, recurring after seven years, but this last
is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of
Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn.
Even minnows dwindle. _A parvis fiunt MINIMI._ I fear to
invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it and
rote us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come and
try it. I heard she and you were made uncomfortable by some
unworthy to be cared for attacks, and have tried to set up
a feeble counter-action through the Table Book of last
Saturday. Has it not reach'd you, that you are silent about
it? Our new domicile is no manor house, but new, and
externally not inviting, but furnish'd within with every
convenience. Capital new locks to every door, capital grates
in every room, with nothing to pay for incoming and the rent
£10 less than the Islington one. It was built a few years
since at £1,100 expense, they tell me, and I perfectly
believe it. And I get it for £35 exclusive of moderate
taxes. We think ourselves most lucky. It is not our
intention to abandon Regent Street, and West End
perambulations (monastic and terrible thought!) but
occasionally to breathe the FRESHER AIR of the
metropolis. We shall put up a bedroom or two (all we want)
for occasional ex-rustication, where we shall visit, not be
visited. Plays too we'll see--perhaps our own. Urbani
Sylvani, and Sylvan Urbanuses in turns. Courtiers for a
spurt, then philosophers. Old homely tell-truths and
learn-truths in the virtuous shades of Enfield. Liars again
and mocking gibers in the coffee-houses and resorts of
London. What can a mortal desire more for his bi-parted
nature?

O the curds and cream you shall eat with us here!
O the turtle soup and lobster sallads we shall devour with you there!
O the old books we shall peruse here!
O the new nonsense we shall trifle with over there!
O Sir T. Browne!--here.
O Mr. Hood and Mr. Jerdan there! thine, C(urbanus) L(sylvanus)
(ELIA ambo)--

Inclos'd are verses which Emma sat down to write, her first,
on the eve after your departure. Of course they are only for
Mrs. H.'s perusal. They will shew you at least that one of
our party is not willing to cut old friends. What to call
'em I don't know. Blank verse they are not, because of the
rhymes.--Rhimes they are not, because of the blank verse.
Heroics they are not, because they are lyric, lyric they are
not, because of the Heroic measure. They must be called EMMAICS.--

* * * * *

The full charm of the long early letters, with their pleasant expatiations on literary themes can scarcely be sampled without doing violence. The various editions in which the letters are obtainable will be found referred to in the bibliographical list at the end of this little book. In illustration of their continued appreciation it may be mentioned that three editions have been published during the past year or so, each of which contains letters denied to the others. The latest edition--that of Mr. E. V. Lucas--is also the fullest, both in the number of letters included and in the elaboration of its annotatory matter.

* * * * *

[Transcript of the Handwritten Letter To John Clare.]

India house 31 Aug 1822

Dear Clare, I thank you heartily for your present. I am an
inveterate old Londoner, but while I am among your choice
collections, I seem to be native to them, and free of the
country. The quantity of your observation has astonished me.
What have most pleased me have been Recollections after a
Ramble, and those Grongar Hill kind of pieces in eight
syllable lines, my favourite measure, such as Cowper Hill
and Solitude. In some of your story telling Ballads the
provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too
profuse with them. In poetry slang [underlined] of every
kind is to be avoided. There is a rustick Cockneyism
as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to
Helpstone. The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I
think is to be found in Shenstones. Would his
Schoolmistress, the prettiest of poems, have been better, if
he had used quite the Goody's own language? Now and then a
home rusticism is fresh & startling, but where nothing is
gained in expression, it is out of tenor. It may make
people [crossed out] folks smile and stare, but the
ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will
prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted, as
you deserve to be. Excuse my freedom, and take the same
liberty with my puns [underlined].

I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of
all sorts, there is a methodist hymn for Sundays, and a
farce for Saturday night. Pray give them a place on your
shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of which I have
duplicate, that I may return in an equal number to your
welcome presents--

I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the London for
August.

Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs.
The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look
about for them. Make Mrs. Clare pick off the hind quarters,
boil them plain, with parsley and butter. The
four [crossed out] fore quarters are not so good. She may
let them hop off by themselves. Yours sincerely, Cha^s
Lamb.

THE ESSAYS OF ELIA

"Shakespeare himself might have read them and Hamlet have acted them; for truly was our excellent friend of the genuine line of Yorick." Thus it was that Leigh Hunt referred to the essays which without doubt stand as the most characteristic of Charles Lamb's contributions to literature. His reputation, as was recognized and acknowledged within a few years of his death, "will ultimately rest on the Essays of Elia, than which our literature rejoices in few things finer."

The intimate footing upon which he puts himself and his reader, is perhaps not so much a peculiarity of his own as it is the dominant note always in the work of your born essayist. He discourses high truth or fresh philosophy, truest poetry, richest wit, or the most delicate humour, he presents personal experiences with that simplicity of pure camaraderie which assumes that the reader could do the same--if he had the mind, as Lamb himself put it when wittily snubbing Wordsworth. In most books, as De Quincey has pointed out, the author figures as a mere abstraction, "without sex or age or local station," whom the reader banishes from his thoughts, but in the case of Lamb and that brilliant line of authors to which he belongs, we must know something of the man himself, and as I have said earlier, we get it abundantly scattered up and down his writings. Even if we do not happen to be acquainted with the actual biography, we can build up in our minds on reading the essays of Elia a life story not far removed from actuality, though it would be wanting in any hint of tragedy. It is this intimacy which at once attracts and repels readers, attracts all those who are, in however small a degree, kindred spirits, and repels, perhaps, others. The quaintness, oddity, flippancy, are wrought together with deep thought, poetry, and feeling to a wonderful degree. The very diversity of theme and manner--this varying change from grave to gay, from lively to severe--is indeed but a reflection of life itself, which with the most fortunate of us dashes our smiles with tears, and even to the most unfortunate imparts something of pleasure and delight.

The "Essays of Elia" may fittingly be dealt with as at once the most representative and the finest of his writings. Great as is the range of their subjects, it will be found that they are more or less unified by the author's individuality both in point of view and in treatment, that they are all informed with what has been termed Lamb's calm and self-reposing spirit, that they are all more or less strongly marked by that style which, based upon a loving study of the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century writers, was yet for the most part distinguished by concision and ease. He took from his models their richness of language without their prolixity, their felicity of expression without their tendency to the elaboration of conceits; he unconsciously employed their varied styles, to form an individual style of his own.

It is only possible in one small section of a small volume such as this to indicate a portion of the wealth in the Elia series, so varied are the themes which inspired the essayist: the delicious drollery of the "Dissertation upon Roast Pig"; the immortal characterization of "Mrs. Battle's Opinions upon Whist"; the pleasant personal touches in a score of the essays; the cry of stifled affection in "Dream Children"; the whimsicality of "Popular Fallacies"; each of these, and as many again unspecified might be made the subject of separate comment. Indeed, for variety in unity there are few books to compare with our Elia. In the opening essay--the first of the series to appear in the "London Magazine," the one to stand in the forefront of the volume--Lamb blends reminiscences with fancy, as he continued to do frequently throughout the series, in a way that is as suggestive to the seeker after autobiographical data as it is engaging to the reader in search of nothing further than the rich delight which comes of passing time with a literary gem. Lamb pictures "The South Sea House" as it was when he knew it thirty years earlier--he speaks of it as forty years. There is a presentation of the old place, fallen more or less completely upon days of desuetude, with some wonderfully-limned portraits of the officials. Here is the deputy-cashier, Thomas Tame:

He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken
him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading
to Westminster Hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of
the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to
be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the
applications of their inferiors. While he held you in
converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy.
The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the
comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just
awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did
not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its
original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have
posed him. What was it then? Was he rich! Alas, no! Thomas
Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly
gentle folks, when I fear all was not well at all times
within. She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident
she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was
noble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of
relationship, which I never thoroughly understood--much less
can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of
day--to the illustrious but unfortunate house of
Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This
was the thought, the sentiment, the bright solitary star of
your lives, ye mild and happy pair, which cheered you in the
night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station!
This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead
of glittering attainments, and it was worth them all
together. You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it
as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise
could reach you through it. _Decus et solamen._

Then at the close Elia says, "Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while--peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic--insubstantial--like Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece; be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past." The names may have been mostly fantastic--in one case we know that it was not, for "Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters" is known to delvers among dead books--the types are immortal. In this first essay we find in such sentences as "their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers," an illustration of Lamb's wonderful use of what an antipathetic critic might term an informal superfluity of syllables.

The next essay, reflecting the atmosphere of "Oxford in the Vacation," was written presumably during a holiday visit to the University of Cambridge, though Elia touching upon matters concerning church holidays breaks off with--

... but I am wading out of my depths. I am not the man to
decide the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority--I
am plain Elia--no Selden, nor Archbishop Usher--though at
present in the thick of their books here in the heart of
learning, under the shadow of mighty Bodley.

Then follows a passage eminently characteristic of Elia's happy manner of playing with a theme:

I can here play the gentleman, enact the student To such a
one as myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of
the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so
pleasant to while away a few idle weeks at one or other
of the universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of
the year, falls in pat with _ours_. Here I can take my walks
unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree of standing I
please. I seem admitted _ad eundem_. I fetch up past
opportunities. I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that
it rings for _me_. In moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or
a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a Gentleman
Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master of Arts.
Indeed I do not think I am much unlike that respectable
character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers
in spectacles drop a bow or curtsey as I pass, wisely
mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black,
which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend
quadrangle I can be content to pass for nothing short of a
Seraphic doctor.

The walks at these times are so much one's own--the tall
trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen! The halls
deserted, and with open doors inviting one to slip in
unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder or noble or
royal Benefactress (that should have been ours), whose
portrait seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, and
to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by the
way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique
hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen
fire-places, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were
baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for
Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is
hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes
forth a Manciple.

The next essay, "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," should be read along with an earlier one, which does not belong actually to the Elia series, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital." In the later essay Lamb affected to look at the school as it might have been to a scholar less fortunately circumstanced than himself, a boy far from his family and friends, and the boy whom he selected was that one of his school companions whom he knew best and with whom in manhood he had sustained the closest friendship--S. T. Coleridge. That friend he thus apostrophizes in a passage which has frequently been quoted:

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring
of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before
thee--the dark pillar not yet turned--Samuel Taylor
Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen
the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still,
entranced with admiration (while he weighed the
disproportion between the _speech_ and the _garb_ of the
young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet
intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus (for
even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such
philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or
Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to
the accents of the inspired charity-boy!

"The Two Races of Men," divides men into those who borrow and those who lend, the theme being followed out with great humour, and going on to those "whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers," and then giving pleasant bits about Coleridge--under his _nomme de guerre_ of Comberbatch--and his theory that "the title to property in a book ... is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the same." "Should he go on acting upon this theory," adds Elia, "which of our shelves is safe?"

"New Year's Eve" suggests a train of reflections--not, in the platitudinous manner of looking back over the errors of the past year and making good resolutions for the coming one--but on mortality generally, and on the passing of time and the passing of life:

I am not content to pass away like a weaver's shuttle! These
metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught
of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that
smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the
inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green
earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural
solitude, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up
my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age
to which I am arrived; I and my friends; to be no younger,
no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age;
or drop like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.

Next comes the immortal "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist,"--Mrs. Battle, whose wish for "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game" has become almost proverbial so commonly is it repeated, whose heart-whole devotion to her game will make true Elians whist players when bridge is forgotten. In "A Chapter on Ears," Elia expatiates upon his insensibility to music; in "All Fool's Day" he puts wisdom under motley in a truly Shakespearian fashion, with the fine conclusion, "and take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition."

"The Quakers' Meeting" is a delicate and impressive verbal representation of the spirit of Quakerdom as revealed to one not a Quaker but ready to appreciate the quietist spirit. Those who have never attended a meeting of the kind feel that they have realized its significance when they come across a passage such as this:

More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word
having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away
with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the
milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that
fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue,
that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive.
You have bathed with stillness--O, when the spirit is sore
fettered, even tired to sickness of the janglings and
nonsense noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it
is, to go and seat yourself for a quiet half hour, upon some
undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers!

Then follows a quaint Elian touch of humour in the application of a line of Wordsworth's far from that poet's intention: "Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like--as in the pasture--'forty feeding like one.'"

An encounter in a coach with a loquacious gentleman whom he took to be a school-master set Lamb musing on the differences between "The Old and the New School-Master," on the way in which the pedagogue is differentiated by the very conditions of his labours not only from his boys but from his fellows generally; he is a man for whom life is in a measure poisoned, "nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses." Incidentally too, Elia informs us that the school-master

is so used to teaching that he wants to be teaching you. One
of these professors, upon my complaining that these little
sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I
was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to
instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his
seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of
a school-master are coarse or thin.

The next essay--the only one in "The Essays of Elia" volume which had not appeared in the "London Magazine"--is a pretty bit about "Valentine's Day." This is followed by an inquiry into the existence of "Imperfect Sympathies," the writer declaring that he had been trying all his life--without success--to like Scotsmen, and that he had the same imperfect sympathy with Jews. The Scotsmen are too precise, too matter of fact at once in their own statements and those to which alone they will attend. This would of itself be sufficient to establish the "imperfect sympathy," for in another connection Lamb had declared his preference for "a matter of lie man."

"Witches and Other Night Fears" is an examination, in which whimsicality is blent with deep seriousness, of the night terrors of imaginative childhood; Elia showed how a picture in an old time Bible history had shaped his fears and made his nights hideous for several years of his early childhood, though he holds that "It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them direction." He suggests that the kind of fear is purely spiritual, and incidentally gives a characteristically quaint turn in "My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them."

In "My Relations" we have an excellent instance of Lamb's veiled autobiography; he begins by saying that he has no brother or sister and at once proceeds to a close and analytical portrait of his "cousin," James Elia, that supposed personage being Charles Lamb's own brother John, who died in November, 1821, a few months after the original appearance of this essay. "Mackery End in Hertfordshire," continues the theme of relations with another striking piece of portraiture in another supposed cousin of Elia's, Bridget (really Mary Lamb). In limning his sister he was of course hampered somewhat by her terrible affliction, but wonderfully has he surmounted it, and delightful indeed it is to follow the narrative of the "cousins'" visit to unknown cousins at the old place in "the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire."

Dealing with the subject of "Modern Gallantry" Elia shows how it is wanting in the true spirit of gallantry which should consist not in compliments to youth and beauty but in reverence to sex.

"The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple" is one of the essays richest at once in personal recollections, in wonderful portraiture, and in those subtle literary touches which impart their peculiar flavour to the whole. A sketch of the author's father as Lovel was quoted from this essay in the opening chapter. Elia's observation, his felicity of expression, his originality of thought, a hint of his playfulness, may all be recognized in the very commencement of this delicious essay:

I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life in
the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its
fountain, its river, I had almost said--for in those young
years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that
watered our pleasant places?--these are my oldest
recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself
more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of
Spenser, where he speaks of this spot:

"There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide,
Till they decayd through pride."

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What
a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first
time--the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street,
by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares,
its classic green recesses! what a cheerful, liberal look
hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks
the greater garden, that goodly pile

"Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,"

confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more
fantastically shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the
cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure)
right opposite the stately stream, which washes the
garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and
seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man
would give something to have been born in such places. What
a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where
the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how
many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my
contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its
recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the
wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now
almost effaced sun-dials with their moral inscriptions,
seeming co-evals with that Time which they measured, and to
take their revelations of its flight immediately from
heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light!
How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by
the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never
catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests
of sleep!

"Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!"

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous
embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness
of communication, compared with the simple altar-like
structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It
stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it
almost everywhere vanished?

In this essay, too, we have a happy sentence where, noting an error into which his memory had betrayed him, Elia wrote of his own narratives: "They are, in truth, but shadows of fact--verisimilitudes, not verities--or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history."

Dealing with "Grace Before Meat" Elia takes up an unconventional position and defends it with spirit. It is something of an impertinence to offer up thanks before an orgy of superfluous luxuries, a "grace" is only fitting for a poor man sitting down before the necessaries for which he may well feel thankful. Even such a theme Lamb finds a fruitful occasion for pertinent literary illustration and criticism, contrasting--from Milton's "Paradise Lost"--the feast proffered by the Tempter to Christ in the wilderness with "the temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer."

With "My First Play" Elia returned to one of those autobiographic themes in which he is so often at his happiest. He represents the emotions of the child of six or seven at the theatre and contrasts them with those that follow when the child has reached his teens. "At school all play-going was inhibited." He concludes, and, most readers will agree, concludes with justice, that "we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six."

"Dream Children," again, has much in it of the story of the writer's childhood, blent with sorrow over his brother's recent death and interwoven with a fanciful imagining of what might have been. Elia pictures himself talking to his two children of his own childhood's days when visiting grandmother Field:

When suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice
looked out at her eyes with such a reality of
re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood
there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I
stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my
view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but
two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance,
which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the
effects of speech: "We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor
are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum
father. We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We
are only what might have been, and must wait upon the
tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have
existence, and a name"--and immediately awaking, I found
myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had
fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my
side--but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.

This little essay, the most beautiful of the series, is as essentially pathetic as anything in our literature, bringing tears to the eyes at every reading though known almost by heart.

The essay on "Distant Correspondents," in the form of a playful epistle to a friend, B. F. (_i.e._, Barron Field, also a contributor to the "London Magazine") has much that is characteristic of the writer. In it he plays--as he does in other letters to distant friends--on the way in which "this confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents" renders writing difficult; in it he airs his fondness for a pun and enlarges upon the fugacity of that form of fun, its inherent incapacity for travel; and in it, too, he gives some indication--we have several such indications in his letters--of his fondness for hoaxing his friends with invented news about other friends, or with questions on supposititious problems set forth as actualities.

The next essay, "The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers," might be cited as one of those most fully representing the characteristics of Lamb's work as essayist. It has its touches of personal reminiscences, it deals with an out-of-the-way subject in a surprisingly engaging manner, and it is full of those quaint turns of expression, those more or less recondite words which Elia re-introduced from the older writers, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, etc., as he had re-introduced the dramatic writings of the seventeenth century. Here is a passage which may be said to be thoroughly representative at once of Elia's manner of looking at things, as well as his own manner of describing them. Elia is discussing "Saloop."

I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it
happens, but I have always found that this composition is
surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young
chimney-sweeper--whether the oily particles (sassafras is
slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous
concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to
adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged
practitioners; or whether Nature, sensible that she had
mingled too much of bitter wood in the lot of these raw
victims, caused to grow out of the earth her sassafras for a
sweet lenitive; but so it is, that no possible taste or
odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a
delicate excitement comparable to this mixture. Being
penniless, they will yet hang their black heads over the
ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible, seemingly
no less pleased than those domestic animals--cats--when they
purr over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something
more in these sympathies than philosophy can inculcate.

In this essay also we have an example--one of how many!--of Lamb's happiness in hitting upon an illustration, even though it be of the ludicrous; mentioning the wonderful white of the sweep-boy's teeth he adds, "It is, as when

'A sable cloud
Turns forth her silver lining on the night.'"

"A Dissertation upon Roast Pig" is perhaps the most widely known of all the essays of Elia. Its delightful drollery, its very revelling in the daintiness of sucking-pig, its wonderfully rich literary presentation, its deliberate acceptance of wild improbability as historic basis, all unite to give it special place in the regard of readers. The theme is of course familiar. It is that of a small Chinese boy playing with fire who burnt down his father's flimsy hut so that a whole litter of piglings was roasted in the conflagration. The boy touched one of the incinerated little ones to feel if it were alive; burnt his fingers and applied them to his mouth. His father returned and did the same, and thus roast sucking-pig became a new dish. Lamb plays with his subject with an inimitable mock earnestness.

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these
tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with
something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete
custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be
curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what
effect this process might have towards intenerating and
dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the
flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we
should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we
censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto.

The subject Charles Lamb professed to take from a Chinese manuscript of his friend Manning's, and there have not been wanting critics who have sought for literary germs from which this essay might have sprung. Such will find in the seventeenth-century "Letters writ by a Turkish Spy" the origin of roasted meat referred to the days of sacrifice when one of the priests touching a burning beast hurt his fingers and applied them to his mouth--with precisely the same sequel which followed on Bo-bo's escapade.

"A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People" is a delicate--perhaps partly ironical--description of a bachelor's objections to his married friends flaunting their happiness in his face. In the last three of the essays we have Lamb as critic of the stage--partly, as in the Dramatic Specimens, of its literature, "On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century;" and partly on its actors, "On some of the Old Actors" and "On the Acting of Munden." Here again we have proofs of his instinctive critical power, his finely perfected method of expressing his appreciation of men and books.

The "Last Essays of Elia," published the year before Lamb's death, open with a "Character of the late Elia"--an admirable piece of self-portraiture in which Lamb hit off with great felicity some of his own characteristics, physical and intellectual. In the first of the essays, "Blakesmoor in H----shire," the author let his memory and fancy play about the old house, lately razed, in which his grandmother Field had held sway as housekeeper, in which as child he had passed many happy holidays. Its tapestries, its haunted room, its "tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon," its Justice Hall, its "costly fruit garden, with its sun-baked southern wall," its "noble Marble Hall, with its Mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Cæsars--stately busts in marble--ranged round," each of these recalled by memory suggests some deep thought or some pleasant turn. The opening passage at once sets the note of the whole, and may be taken as a representation of Lamb's contemplative mood:

I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at
will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family
mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better
passion than envy; and contemplations on the great and good,
whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants,
weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of
modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present
aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think,
attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church.
In the latter it is chance but some present human
frailty--an act of inattention on the part of some of the
auditory--or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on
that of the preacher--puts us by our best thoughts,
disharmonizing the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou
know the beauty of holiness? go alone on some week-day,
borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool
aisles of some country church: think of the piety that has
kneeled there--the congregations, old and young, that have
found consolation there--the meek pastor, the docile
parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross
conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the
place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as
the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee.

"Poor Relations" is a beautiful example of humour--provoking to smiles while touching to tears--with a wonderful introductory piling up of definitions: "A Poor Relation--is the most irrelevant thing in nature,--a piece of impertinent correspondency,--a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity,--an unwelcome remembrancer," and so on. "This theme of poor relations is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending." The essay includes three or four admirable examples of Elia's felicity in drawing typical characters with just that touch of oddity that makes them live as individuals. The theatre which we have seen always made its triple appeal to Lamb--from the study, from the front, and from the boards--inspired the next three essays, "Stage Illusions," "To the Shade of Elliston," and "Ellistoniana." The first is an example of subtle criticism showing how it is that we get enjoyment out of unlovely attributes on the stage, thanks to the "exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us," that things are not altogether what they seem to be. In the two essays on Elliston we have at once an eloquent tribute to a stage-magnate of his day and a fine character portrait.