for the proud time when I
planned, when I had present to my mind, the materials, as well as
the scheme, of the Hymns entitled _Spirit_, _Sun_, _Earth_, _Air_,
_Water_, _Fire_ and _Man_; and the Epic Poem on what still appears
to me the one only fit subject remaining for an epic poem--Jerusalem
besieged and destroyed by Titus.
planned, when I had present to my mind, the materials, as well as
the scheme, of the Hymns entitled _Spirit_, _Sun_, _Earth_, _Air_,
_Water_, _Fire_ and _Man_; and the Epic Poem on what still appears
to me the one only fit subject remaining for an epic poem--Jerusalem
besieged and destroyed by Titus.
Selection of English Letters
I have had three grand hawls since I
last wrote to you. The pulpit, repentance-stool, King's seat, and
God knows how much of carved wainscot, from the kirk of Dunfermline,
enough to coat the hall to the height of seven feet:--supposing
it boarded above, for hanging guns, old portraits, intermixed with
armour, &c. --it will be a superb entrance-gallery: this is hawl the
first. Hawl second is twenty-four pieces of the most splendid Chinese
paper, twelve feet high by four wide, a present from my cousin Hugh
Scott, enough to finish the drawing-room and two bedrooms. Hawl third
is a quantity of what is called Jamaica cedar-wood, enough for fitting
up both the drawing-room and the library, including the presses,
shelves, &c. : the wood is finely pencilled and most beautiful,
something like the colour of gingerbread; it costs very little more
than oak, works much easier, and is never touched by vermin of any
kind. I sent Mr. Atkinson a specimen, but it was from the plain end of
the plank; the interior is finely waved and variegated. Your kind
and unremitting exertions in our favour will soon plenish the
drawing-room. Thus we at present stand. We have a fine old English
cabinet, with china, &c. -and two superb elbow-chairs, the gift of
Constable, carved most magnificently, with groups of children, fruit,
and flowers, in the Italian taste: they came from Rome, and are much
admired. It seems to me that the mirror you mention, being framed in
carved box, would answer admirably well with the chairs, which are of
the same material. The mirror should, I presume, be placed over
the drawing-room chimney-piece; and opposite to it I mean to put an
antique table of mosaic marbles, to support Chantrey's bust. A good
sofa would be desirable, and so would the tapestry screen, if really
fresh and beautiful; but as much of our furniture will be a little
antiquated, one would not run too much into that taste in so small an
apartment. For the library I have the old oak chairs now in the little
armoury, eight in number, and we might add one or two pair of the
ebony chairs you mention. I should think this enough, for many seats
in such a room must impede access to the books; and I don't mean
the library to be on ordinary occasions a public room. Perhaps the
tapestry-screen would suit better here than in the drawing-room. I
have one library table here, and shall have another made for atlases
and prints. For the hall I have four chairs of black oak. In other
matters we can make it out well enough. In fact, it is my object
rather to keep under my new accommodations at first, both to avoid
immediate outlay, and that I may leave room for pretty things which
may occur hereafter. I would to Heaven I could take a cruise with you
through the brokers, which would be the pleasantest affair possible,
only I am afraid I should make a losing voyage of it. Mr. Atkinson has
missed a little my idea of the oratory, fitting it up entirely as
a bookcase, whereas I should like to have had recesses for
curiosities--for the Bruce's skull--for a crucifix, &c. , &c. -in short,
a little cabinet instead of a book-closet. Four sides of books would
be perfectly sufficient; the other four, so far as not occupied by
door or window, should be arranged tastefully for antiquities, &c. ,
like the inside of an antique cabinet, with drawers, and shottles, and
funny little arches. The oak screen dropped as from the clouds: it is
most acceptable; I might have guessed there was only one kind friend
so ready to supply hay to my hobby-horse. You have my views in these
matters and your own taste; and I will send the _needful_ when
you apprise me of the amount total. Where things are not quite
satisfactory, it is better to wait a while on every account, for the
amusement is over when one has room for nothing more. The house is
completely roofed, &c. , and looks worthy of Mrs. Terry's painting. I
never saw anything handsomer than the grouping of towers, chimneys,
&c. upon the roof, when seen at a proper distance.
Once more, let me wish you joy of your professional success. I can
judge, by a thousand minute items, of the advance you make with the
public, just as I can of the gradual progress of my trees, because I
am interested in both events. You may say, like Burke, you were not
'coaxed and dandled into eminence' but have fought your way gallantly,
shown your passport at every barrier, and been always a step in
advance, without a single retrograde movement. Every one wishes to
advance rapidly, but when the desired position is gained, it is far
more easily maintained by him whose ascent has been gradual, and whose
favour is founded not on the unreasonable expectations entertained
from one or two seasons, but from an habitual experience of the power
of pleasing during several years. You say not a word of poor Wattles.
I hope little Miss has not put his nose out of joint entirely.
I have not been very well--a whoreson thickness of blood, and a
depression of spirits arising from the loss of friends (to whom I
am now to add poor Wedderburne), have annoyed me much; and _Peveril_
will, I fear, smell of the apoplexy. I propose a good rally, however,
and hope it will be a powerful effect. My idea is, _entre nous_, a
Scotch archer in the French King's guard, _tempore_ Louis XI, the most
picturesque of all times.
TO J. B. S. MORRITT
_A brave face to the world_
Edinburgh, 6 _Feb. _ 1826.
MY DEAR MORRITT,
It is very true I have been, and am in danger, of a pecuniary loss,
and probably a very large one, which in the uncertainty I look at as
to the full extent, being the manly way of calculating such matters,
since one may be better, but can hardly be worse. I can't say I
feel overjoyed at losing a large sum of hard-earned money in a most
unexpected manner, for all men considered Constable's people secure as
the Bank; yet, as I have obtained an arrangement of payment convenient
for every body concerned, and easy for myself, I cannot say that I
care much about the matter. Some economical restrictions I will make;
and it happened oddly that they were such as Lady Scott and myself
had almost determined upon without this compulsion. Abbotsford will
henceforth be our only establishment; and during the time I must be
in town, I will take my bed at the Albyn Club. We shall also break
off the rather excessive hospitality to which we were exposed, and no
longer stand host and hostess to all that do pilgrimage to Melrose.
Then I give up an expensive farm, which I always hated, and turn
all my odds and ends into cash. I do not reckon much on my literary
exertions--I mean in proportion to former success--because popular
taste may fluctuate. But with a moderate degree of the favour which
I have always had, my time my own, and my mind unplagued about other
things, I may boldly promise myself soon to get the better of this
blow. In these circumstances, I should be unjust and ungrateful to ask
or accept the pity of my friends. I for one, do not see there is much
occasion for making moan about it. My womankind will be the greater
sufferers,--yet even they look cheerily forward; and, for myself, the
blowing off my hat in a stormy day has given me more uneasiness.
I envy your Brighton party, and your fine weather. When I was at
Abbotsford the mercury was down at six or seven in the morning more
than once. I am hammering away at a bit of a story from the old affair
of the _diablerie_ at Woodstock in the Long Parliament times. I don't
like it much. I am obliged to hamper my fanatics greatly too much
to make them effective; but I make the sacrifice on principle; so,
perhaps, I shall deserve good success in other parts of the work.
You will be surprised when I tell you that I have written a volume in
exactly fifteen days. To be sure, I permitted no interruptions. But
then I took exercise, and for ten days of the fifteen attended the
Court of Session from two to four hours every day. This is nothing,
however, to writing _Ivanhoe_ when I had the actual cramp in my
stomach; but I have no idea of these things preventing a man
from doing what he has a mind. My love to all the party at
Brighton--fireside party I had almost said, but you scorn my
words--seaside party then be it. Lady Scott and Anne join in kindest
love. I must close my letter, for one of the consequences of our
misfortunes is, that we dine every day at half-past four o'clock;
which premature hour arises, I suppose, from sorrow being hungry as
well as thirsty. One most laughable part of our tragic comedy was,
that every friend in the world came formally, just as they do here
when a relation dies, thinking that the eclipse of _les beaux yeux de
ma cassette_ was perhaps a loss as deserving of consolation.
TO MARIA EDGEWORTH
_Time's revenges_
Edinburgh, 23 _June_, 1830.
MY DEAR MISS EDGEWORTH,
Nothing would be so valuable to me as the mark of kindness which you
offer, and yet my kennel is so much changed since I had the pleasure
of seeing you, that I must not accept of what I wished so sincerely
to possess. I am the happy owner of two of the noble breed, each of
gigantic size, and the gift of that sort of Highlander whom we call a
High Chief, so I would hardly be justified in parting with them even
to make room for your kind present, and I should have great doubts
whether the mountaineers would receive the Irish stranger with due
hospitality. One of them I had from poor Glengarry, who, with all the
wild and fierce points of his character, had a kind, honest, and
warm heart. The other from a young friend, whom Highlanders call
MacVourigh, and Lowlanders MacPherson of Cluny. He is a fine spirited
boy, fond of his people and kind to them, and the best dancer of a
Highland reel now living. I fear I must not add a third to Nimrod and
Bran, having little use for them except being pleasant companions. As
to labouring in their vocation, we have only one wolf which I know
of, kept in a friend's menagerie near me, and no wild deer. Walter
has some roebucks indeed, but Lochore is far off, and I begin to
feel myself distressed at running down these innocent and beautiful
creatures, perhaps because I cannot gallop so fast after them as to
drown sense of the pain we are inflicting. And yet I suspect I am like
the sick fox; and if my strength and twenty years could come back, I
would become again a copy of my namesake, remembered by the sobriquet
of Walter _ill tae hauld_ (to hold, that is). 'But age has clawed
me in its clutch,' and there is no remedy for increasing disability
except dying, which is an awkward score.
There is some chance of my retiring from my official situation upon
the changes in the Court of Session. They cannot reduce my office,
though they do not wish to fill it up with a new occupant. I shall be
therefore _de trop_; and in these days of economy they will be better
pleased to let me retire on three parts of my salary than to keep me a
Clerk of Session on the whole; and small grief at our parting, as the
old horse said to the broken cart. And yet, though I thought such a
proposal when first made was like a Pisgah peep at Paradise, I cannot
help being a little afraid of changing the habits of a long life all
of a sudden and for ever. You ladies have always your work-basket and
stocking-knitting to wreak an hour of tediousness upon. The routine of
business serves, I suspect, for the same purpose to us male wretches;
it is seldom a burden to the mind, but a something which must be done,
and is done almost mechanically; and though dull judges and duller
clerks, the routine of law proceedings, and law forms, are very unlike
the plumed troops and the tug of war, yet the result is the same.
The occupation's gone. The morning, that the day's news must all be
gathered from other sources--that the jokes which the principal Clerks
of Session have laughed at weekly for a century, and which would not
move a muscle of any other person's face, must be laid up to perish
like those of Sancho in the Sierra Morena--I don't above half like
forgetting all these moderate habits, and yet
Ah, freedom is a noble thing!
as says the old Scottish poet. So I will cease my regrets, or lay them
by to be taken up and used as arguments of comfort, in case I do not
slip my cable after all, which is highly possible. Lockhart and Sophia
have taken up their old residence at Chiefswood. They are very fond of
the place; and I am glad also my grandchildren will be bred near the
heather, for certain qualities which I think are best taught there.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
1772-1834
TO CHARLES LAMB
_A sympathetic reply_[1]
28 _Sept. _ 1796.
Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon
me and stupefied my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter;
I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your
anguish by any other consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest
fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit:
much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation; but
in storms, like these, that shake the dwelling and make the heart
tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of
the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter
of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter
that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a
Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness
and made drunken with wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in
frequent prayer to 'his God and your God'; the God of mercies, and
father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless
of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows
it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be roused from
a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of
the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the
blackness and amazement of a sudden horror by the glories of God
manifest and the hallelujahs of angels.
As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning
what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man called by
sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness,
and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God. We cannot arrive at any
portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ;
and they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most
difficult parts of His character, and, bowed down and crushed under
foot, cry in fullness of faith, 'Father, Thy will be done. '
I wish above measure to have you for a little while here--no visitants
shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings--you shall be quiet, and
your spirit may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your
father's helplessness prevent you, and unless you are necessary to
him. If this be not the case, I charge you write me that you will
come.
I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or
despair--you are a temporary sharer in human miseries, that you may
be an eternal partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any
means it be possible, come to me.
[Footnote 1: See Letter, p. 355. ]
TO JOSEPH COTTLE
_Literary adventurers_
[1798. ]
MY DEAR COTTLE,
Neither Wordsworth nor myself could have been otherwise than
uncomfortable, if any but yourself had received from us the first
offer of our tragedies, and of the volume of Wordsworth's poems. At
the same time, we did not expect that you could with prudence and
propriety, advance such a sum as we should want at the time we
specified. In short, we both regard the publication of our tragedies
as an evil. It is not impossible but that in happier times they may be
brought on the stage: and to throw away this chance for a mere trifle,
would be to make the present moment act fraudulently and usuriously
towards the future time.
My tragedy employed and strained all my thoughts and faculties for
six or seven months; Wordsworth consumed far more time, and far more
thought, and far more genius. We consider the publication of them
an evil on any terms; but our thoughts were bent on a plan for the
accomplishment of which a certain sum of money was necessary, (the
whole) at that particular time, and in order to do this we resolved,
although reluctantly, to part with our tragedies: that is, if we
could obtain thirty guineas for each, and at less than thirty guineas
Wordsworth will not part with the copyright of his volume of poems. We
shall offer the tragedies to no one, for we have determined to procure
the money some other way. If you choose the volume of poems, at
the price mentioned, to be paid at the time specified, i. e. thirty
guineas, to be paid sometime in the last fortnight of July, you may
have them; but remember, my dear fellow! I write to you now merely as
a bookseller, and entreat you, in your answer, to consider yourself
only; as to us, although money is necessary to our plan [that of
visiting Germany], yet the plan is not necessary to our happiness; and
if it were, W. would sell his poems for that sum to some one else,
or we could procure the money without selling the poems. So I entreat
you, again and again, in your answer, which must be immediate,
consider yourself only.
Wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_, that
he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden
estate to let him the house, after their first agreement is expired,
so he must quit it at midsummer; whether we shall be able to procure
him a house and furniture near Stowey, we know not, and yet we must:
for the hills, and the woods, and the streams, and the sea, and the
shores would break forth into reproaches against us, if we did not
strain every nerve to keep their poet among them. Without joking, and
in serious sadness, Poole and I cannot endure to think of losing him.
At all events, come down, Cottle, as soon as you can, but before
midsummer, and we will procure a horse easy as thy own soul, and we
will go on a roam to Lynton and Lynmouth, which, if thou comest in
May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak
of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast valley of
stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new
honours only from the winter's snow. At all events come down, and
cease not to believe me much and affectionately your friend.
TO JOSIAH WADE
_A public example_
Bristol, 26 _June_, 1814.
DEAR SIR,
For I am unworthy to call any good man friend--much less you, whose
hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my entreaties for
your forgiveness, and for your prayers.
Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been
attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that
reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for
others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In
short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and
you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for
a good man to have.
I used to think the text in St. James that 'he who offendeth in one
point, offends in all,' very harsh; but I now feel the awful, the
tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have
I not made myself guilty of! Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my
benefactors--injustice! _and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!
_--self-contempt for my repeated promise-breach, nay, too often,
actual falsehood!
After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified
narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made
public, that, at least, some little good may be effected by the
direful example!
May God Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate,
and, in his heart, grateful
S. T. C.
TO THOMAS ALLSOP
_Himself and his detractors_
2 _Dec. _ 1818.
MY DEAR SIR,
I cannot express how kind I felt your letter. Would to Heaven I had
had many with feelings like yours, 'accustomed to express themselves
warmly and (as far as the word is applicable to you), even
enthusiastically'. But alas! during the prime manhood of my intellect
I had nothing but cold water thrown on my efforts. I speak not now of
my systematic and most unprovoked maligners. On _them_ I have retorted
only by pity and by prayer. These may have, and doubtless have, joined
with the frivolity of 'the reading public' in checking and almost in
preventing the sale of my works; and so far have done injury to
my _purse_. _Me_ they have not injured. But I have loved with
enthusiastic self-oblivion those who have been so well pleased that
I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into
_their_ main stream, that they could find nothing but cold praise and
effective discouragement of every attempt of mine to roll onward in a
distinct current of my own; who _admitted_ that the _Ancient Mariner_,
the _Christabel_, the _Remorse_, and some pages of the _Friend_
were not without merit, but were abundantly anxious to acquit their
judgements of any blindness to the very numerous defects. Yet they
_knew_ that to _praise_, as mere praise, I was characteristically,
almost constitutionally, indifferent. In sympathy alone I found at
once nourishment and stimulus; and for sympathy _alone_ did my heart
crave. They knew, too, how long and faithfully I have acted on the
maxim, never to admit the _faults_ of a work of genius to those who
denied or were incapable of feeling and understanding the _beauties_;
not from wilful partiality, but as well knowing that in _saying_ truth
I should, to such critics, convey falsehood. If, in one instance, in
my literary life I have appeared to deviate from this rule, first,
it was not till the fame of the writer (which I had been for fourteen
years successfully toiling like a second Ali to build up) had been
established; and secondly and chiefly, with the purpose and, I may
safely add, with the _effect_ of rescuing the necessary task from
Malignant Defamers, and in order to set forth the excellences and the
trifling proportion which the defects bore to the excellences. But
this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures are too
liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed--the
mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved _by_
you, for those who love you. Add, as a more general cause, the fact
that I neither am nor ever have been of any party. What wonder, then,
if I am left to decide which has been my worst enemy, the broad,
pre-determined abuse of the _Edinburgh Review_, &c. , or the cold and
brief compliments, with the warm _regrets_, of the _Quarterly_? After
all, however, I have now but one sorrow relative to the ill success of
my literary toils (and toils they have been, _though not undelightful
toils_), and this arises wholly from the almost insurmountable
difficulties which the anxieties of to-day oppose to my completion
of the great work, the form and materials of which it has been the
employment of the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years
to mature and collect.
If I could but have a tolerably numerous audience to my first, or
first and second Lectures on the _History of Philosophy_, I should
entertain a strong hope of success, because I know that these lectures
will be found by far the most interesting and _entertaining_ of any
that I have yet delivered, independent of the more permanent interest
of rememberable instruction. Few and unimportant would the errors of
men be, if they did but know, first, _what they themselves meant_;
and, secondly, what the _words_ mean by which they attempt to convey
their meaning, and I can conceive no subject so well fitted to
exemplify the mode and the importance of these two points as the
History of Philosophy, treated as in the scheme of these lectures.
TO THE SAME
_The Great Work described_
_Jan. _ 1821.
. . . I have already the _written_ materials and contents, requiring
only to be put together from the loose papers and commonplace or
memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether of omission,
addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, and the
opportunity of seeing the whole collectively bring with them of course
(1) Characteristics of Shakespeare's dramatic works, with a critical
review of each play; together with a relative and comparative critique
on the kind and degree of the merits and demerits of the dramatic
works of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger. The
History of the English Drama; the accidental advantages it afforded
to Shakespeare, without in the least detracting from the perfect
originality or proper creation of the Shakespearian Drama; the
contradistinction of the latter from the Greek Drama, and its still
remaining _uniqueness_, with the causes of this, from the combined
influences of Shakespeare himself, as man, poet, philosopher, and
finally, by conjunction of all these, dramatic poet; and of the age,
events, manners, and state of the English language. This work, with
every art of compression, amounts to three volumes of about five
hundred pages each. (2) Philosophical Analysis of the Genius and Works
of Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, and Calderon, with similar, but
more compressed criticisms on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, Rabelais, and
others, during the predominance of the Romantic Poetry. In one large
volume. These two works will, I flatter myself, form a complete code
of the principles of judgement and feeling applied to works of Taste;
and not of Poetry only, but of Poesy in all its forms, Painting,
Statuary, Music, &c. , &c. (3) The History of Philosophy considered
as a Tendency of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human
Reason, to discover by its own Strength the Origin and Laws of Man and
the World, from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac. Two volumes.
(4) Letters on the Old and New Testament, and on the Doctrine
and Principles held in common by the Fathers and Founders of the
Reformation, addressed to a candidate for Holy Orders, including
advice on the Plan and Subjects of Preaching, proper to a Minister of
the Established Church.
To the completion of these four works, I have literally nothing more
to do than to _transcribe_; but, as I before hinted, from so many
scraps and _sibylline_ leaves, including margins of books and blank
pages, that, unfortunately, I must be my own scribe, and not done by
myself, they will be all but lost; or perhaps (as has been too often
the case already) furnish feathers for the caps of others; some for
this purpose, and some to plume the arrows of detraction, to be let
fly against the luckless bird from whom they had been plucked or
moulted.
In addition to these--of my GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which
more than twenty years of my life have been devoted, and on which
my hopes of extensive and permanent utility, of fame, in the noblest
sense of the word, mainly rest--that, by which I might,
As now by thee, by all the good be known,
When this weak frame lies moulder'd in the grave,
Which self-surviving I might call my own,
Which folly cannot mar, nor hate deprave--
The incense of those powers, which, risen in flame,
Might make me dear to Him from whom they came.
Of this work, to which all my other writings (unless I except my
Poems, and these I can exclude in part only) are introductory and
preparative; and the result of which (if the premises be, as I, with
the most tranquil assurance, am convinced they are--insubvertible,
the deductions legitimate, and the conclusions commensurate, and only
commensurate, with both) must finally be a revolution of all that has
been called _philosophy_ or metaphysics in England and France, since
the era of the commencing predominance of the mechanical system at
the restoration of our second Charles, and with this the present
fashionable views, not only of religion, morals, and politics but
even of the modern physics and physiology. You will not blame the
earnestness of my expressions, nor the high importance which I attach
to this work: for how, with less noble objects, and less faith in
their attainment, could I stand acquitted of folly, and abuse of time,
talents, and learning in a labour of three-fourths of my intellectual
life? Of this work, something more than a volume has been dictated
by me, so as to exist fit for the press, to my friend and enlightened
pupil, Mr. Green; and more than as much again would have been evolved
and delivered to paper, but that, for the last six or eight months,
I have been compelled to break off our weekly meeting, from the
necessity of writing (alas! alas! of attempting to write) for
purposes, and on the subjects, of the passing day. Of my poetic works
I would fain finish the _Christabel_! Alas!
for the proud time when I
planned, when I had present to my mind, the materials, as well as
the scheme, of the Hymns entitled _Spirit_, _Sun_, _Earth_, _Air_,
_Water_, _Fire_ and _Man_; and the Epic Poem on what still appears
to me the one only fit subject remaining for an epic poem--Jerusalem
besieged and destroyed by Titus.
TO THE SAME
_Reminiscences_
4 March, 1822.
My Dearest Friend,
I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week
past--my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days;
--The night's dismay
Sadden'd and stunned the intervening day;
but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my
dreams through any of Swedenborg's Hells _modérés_; but arose this
morning lighter and with a sense of _relief_. . . .
I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you
sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from
my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or
inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases
of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to
worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated,
nay, naturalised, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my
superiors--a large number of our governors, and almost _all_ of those
whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, _viz. _
our committee governors, were such--and as neither awake nor asleep
have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ's Hospital,
I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and
consequence--just like what we used to feel at school when the boys
came running to us--'Coleridge! here's your friends want you--they are
quite _grand_,' or 'It is quite a _lady_'--when I first heard who you
were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation
that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any
sudden reawakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh,
from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in
escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a
milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such
a nice lady;--and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the
pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet
or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and
genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only
things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and
what I was then, I still am.
God bless you and yours.
ROBERT SOUTHEY
1774-1843
TO JOSEPH COTTLE
_Question of copyrights_
Greta Hall, 20 _April_, 1808.
My dear Cottle,. . .
What you say of my copyrights affected me very much. Dear Cottle, set
your heart at rest on that subject. It ought to be at rest. These were
yours, fairly bought, and fairly sold. You bought them on the chance
of their success, which no London bookseller would have done; and had
they not been bought, they could not have been published at all. Nay,
if you had not purchased _Joan of Arc_, the poem never would have
existed, nor should I, in all probability, ever have obtained that
reputation which is the capital on which I subsist, nor that power
which enables me to support it.
But this is not all. Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten
those true and most essential acts of friendship which you showed me
when I stood most in need of them? Your house was my house when I had
no other. The very money with which I bought my wedding-ring, and paid
my marriage fees, was supplied by you. It was with your sisters I left
Edith during my six months' absence, and for the six months after my
return it was from you that I received, week by week, the little on
which we lived, till I was enabled to live by other means. It is not
the settling of a cash account that can cancel obligations like these.
You are in the habit of preserving your letters, and if you were
not, I would entreat you to preserve _this_, that it might be seen
hereafter. Sure I am, there never was a more generous or a kinder
heart than yours; and you will believe me when I add, that there does
not live that man upon earth, whom I remember with more gratitude
and more affection. My heart throbs and my eyes burn with these
recollections. Good night! my dear old friend and benefactor.
TO JOHN MAY
_Waterloo_
Liège, 6 _Oct. _ 1815. Six p. m.
My dear friend,
I have a happy habit of making the best of all things; and being just
at this time as uncomfortable as the dust and bustle, and all the
disagreeables of an inn in a large filthy manufacturing city can make
me, I have called for pen, ink, and paper, and am actually writing in
the bar, the door open to the yard opposite to this unwiped table, the
doors open to the public room, where two men are dining, and talking
French, and a woman servant at my elbow is lighting a fire for our
party. Presently the folding-doors are to be shut, the ladies are to
descend from their chambers, the bar will be kept appropriated to our
house, the male part of the company will get into good humour, dinner
will be ready, and then I must lay aside the grey goose-quill. As a
preliminary to these promised comforts, the servant is mopping the
hearth, which is composed (like a tesselated pavement) of little
bricks about two inches long by half an inch wide, set within a broad
black stone frame. The fuel is of fire-balls, a mixture of pulverized
coal and clay. I have seen a great deal and heard a great deal,--more,
indeed, than I can keep pace with in my journal, though I strive hard
to do it; but I minute down short notes in my pencil-book with all
possible care, and hope, in the end, to lose nothing. . . .
Flanders is a most interesting country. Bruges, the most striking city
I have ever seen, an old city in perfect preservation. It seems as if
not a house had been built during the last two centuries, and not a
house suffered to pass to decay. The poorest people seem to be well
lodged, and there is a general air of sufficiency, cleanliness,
industry, and comfort, which I have never seen in any other place. The
cities have grown worse as we advanced. At Namur we reached a dirty
city, situated in a romantic country; the Meuse there reminded me of
the Thames from your delightful house, an island in size and shape
resembling that upon which I have often wished for a grove of poplars,
coming just in the same position. From thence along the river to this
abominable place, the country is, for the greater part, as lovely as
can be imagined. . . .
Our weather hitherto has been delightful. This was especially
fortunate at Waterloo and at Ligny, where we had much ground to walk
over. It would surprise you to see how soon nature has recovered from
the injuries of war. The ground is ploughed and sown, and grain and
flowers and seeds already growing over the field of battle, which is
still strewn with vestiges of the slaughter, caps, cartridges, boxes,
hats, &c. We picked up some French cards and some bullets, and we
purchased a French pistol and two of the eagles which the infantry
wear upon their caps. What I felt upon this ground, it would be
difficult to say; what I saw, and still more what I heard, there is no
time at present for saying. In prose and in verse you shall some day
hear the whole. At Les Quatre Bras, I saw two graves, which probably
the dogs or the swine had opened. In the one were the ribs of a human
body, projecting through the mould; in the other, the whole skeleton
exposed. Some of our party told me of a third, in which the worms were
at work, but I shrunk from the sight. You will rejoice to hear that
the English are as well spoken of for their deportment in peace as in
war. It is far otherwise with the Prussians. Concerning them there is
but one opinion; their brutality is said to exceed that of the French,
and of their intolerable insolence I have heard but too many proofs.
That abominable old Frederic made them a military nation, and this is
the inevitable consequence. This very day we passed a party on their
way towards France--some hundred or two. Two gentlemen and two ladies
of the country, in a carriage, had come up with them; and these
ruffians would not allow them to pass, but compelled them to wait and
follow the slow pace of foot soldiers! This we ourselves saw. Next to
the English, the Belgians have the best character for discipline. . . .
I bought at Bruges a French History of Brazil, just published by M.
Alphonse de Beauchamp, in 3 vols. 8vo. He says, in his Preface, that
having finished the first two volumes, he thought it advisable to see
if any new light had been thrown upon the subject by modern authors.
Meantime, a compilation upon this history had appeared in England,
but the English author, Mr. Southey, had brought no new lights; he had
promised much for his second volume, but the hope of literary Europe
had been again deceived, for this second volume, so emphatically
promised, had not appeared. I dare say no person regrets this delay
so much as M. Beauchamp, he having stolen the whole of his two first
volumes, and about the third part of the other, from the very Mr.
Southey whom he abuses. He has copied my references as the list of his
own authorities (MSS. and all), and he has committed blunders which
prove, beyond all doubt, that he does not understand Portuguese. I
have been much diverted by this fellow's impudence.
The table is laid, and the knives and forks rattling a pleasant note
of preparation, as the woman waiter arranges them.
God bless you! I have hurried through the sheet, and thus pleasantly
beguiled what would have been a very unpleasant hour. We are all well,
and your god-daughter has seen a live emperor at Brussels. I feel the
disadvantage of speaking French ill, and understanding it by the ear
worse. Nevertheless, I speak it without remorse, make myself somehow
or other understood, and get at what I want to know. Once more, God
bless you, my dear friend.
To HENRY TAYLOR
_Anastasius Hope_
Keswick, 15 _July_, 1831.
. . . Have you seen the strange book which Anastasius Hope left
for publication, and which his representatives, in spite of all
dissuasion, have published? His notion of immortality and heaven is,
that at the consummation of all things he, and you, and I, and John
Murray, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Lambert the fat man, and the living
skeleton, and Queen Elizabeth, and the Hottentot Venus, and Thurtell,
and Probert, and the twelve Apostles, and the noble army of martyrs,
and Genghis Khan, and all his armies, and Noah with all his ancestors
and all his posterity--yea, all men and all women, and all children
that have ever been or ever shall be, saints and sinners alike--are
all to be put together, and made into one great celestial eternal
human being. He does not seem to have known how nearly this approaches
to Swedenborg's fancy. I do not like the scheme. I don't like the
notion of being mixed up with Hume, and Hunt, and Whittle Harvey, and
Philpotts, and Lord Althorpe, and the Huns, and the Hottentots, and
the Jews, and the Philistines, and the Scotch, and the Irish. God
forbid! I hope to be I myself; I, in an English heaven, with you
yourself--you, and some others, without whom heaven would be no heaven
to me. God bless you!
TO EDWARD MOXON
_Recollections of the Lambs_
Keswick, 2 _Feb. _ 1836.
My dear sir,
I have been too closely engaged in clearing off the second volume of
Cowper to reply to your inquiries concerning poor Lamb sooner. His
acquaintance with Coleridge began at Christ's Hospital; Lamb was
some two years, I think, his junior. Whether he was ever one of the
_Grecians_ there, might be ascertained, I suppose, by inquiring. My
own impression is, that he was not. Coleridge introduced me to him
in the winter of 1794-5, and to George Dyer also, from whom, if his
memory has not failed, you might probably learn more of Lamb's early
history than from any other person. Lloyd, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt
became known to him through their connexion with Coleridge.
When I saw the family (one evening only, and at that time), they were
lodging somewhere near Lincoln's Inn, on the western side (I forget
the street), and were evidently in uncomfortable circumstances. The
father and mother were both living; and I have some dim recollection
of the latter's invalid appearance. The father's senses had failed him
before that time. He published some poems in quarto. Lamb showed me
once an imperfect copy: the _Sparrow's Wedding_ was the title of the
longest piece, and this was the author's favourite; he liked, in his
dotage, to hear Charles read it.
His most familiar friend, when I first saw him, was White, who held
some office at Christ's Hospital, and continued intimate with him as
long as he lived. You know what Elia says of him. He and Lamb were
joint authors of the _Original Letters of Falstaff_. Lamb, I believe,
first appeared as an author in the second edition of Coleridge's
_Poems_ (Bristol, 1797), and, secondly, in the little volume of blank
verse with Lloyd (1798). Lamb, Lloyd, and White were inseparable in
1798; the two latter at one time lodged together, though no two men
could be imagined more unlike each other. Lloyd had no drollery in his
nature; White seemed to have nothing else. You will easily understand
how Lamb could sympathize with both.
Lloyd, who used to form sudden friendships, was all but a stranger
to me, when unexpectedly he brought Lamb down to visit me at a little
village (Burton) near Christchurch, in Hampshire, where I was lodging
in a very humble cottage. This was in the summer of 1797, and then, or
in the following year, my correspondence with Lamb began. I saw more
of him in 1802 than at any other time, for I was then six months
resident in London. His visit to this county was before I came to it;
it must have been either in that or in the following year: it was to
Lloyd and to Coleridge.
I had forgotten one of his schoolfellows, who is still living--C. V.
Le Grice, a clergyman at or near Penzance. From him you might learn
something of his boyhood.
Cottle has a good likeness of Lamb, in chalk, taken by an artist named
Robert Hancock, about the year 1798. It looks older than Lamb was at
that time; but he was old-looking.
Coleridge introduced him to Godwin, shortly after the first number
of the _Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review_ was published, with a
caricature of Gillray's, in which Coleridge and I were introduced with
asses' heads, and Lloyd and Lamb as toad and frog. Lamb got warmed
with whatever was on the table, became disputatious, and said things
to Godwin which made him quietly say, 'Pray, Mr. Lamb, are you toad
or frog? ' Mrs. Coleridge will remember the scene, which was to her
sufficiently uncomfortable. But the next morning S. T. C. called on
Lamb, and found Godwin breakfasting with him, from which time their
intimacy began.
His angry letter to me in the _Magazine_ arose out of a notion that
an expression of mine in the _Quarterly Review_ would hurt the sale of
_Elia_; some one, no doubt, had said that it would. I meant to serve
the book, and very well remember how the offence happened. I had
written that it wanted nothing to render it altogether delightful but
a _saner_ religious feeling. _This_ would have been the proper word if
any other person had written the book. Feeling its extreme unfitness
as soon as it was written, I altered it immediately for the first word
which came into my head, intending to remodel the sentence when it
should come to me in the proof; and that proof never came. There can
be no objection to your printing all that passed upon the occasion,
beginning with the passage in the _Quarterly Review_, and giving his
letter.
I have heard Coleridge say that, in a fit of derangement, Lamb fancied
himself to be young Norval. He told me this in relation to one of his
poems.
If you will print my lines to him upon his _Album Verses_, I will
send you a corrected copy. You received his letters, I trust, which
Cuthbert took with him to town in October. I wish they had been more,
and wish, also, that I had more to tell you concerning him, and what
I have told were of more value. But it is from such fragments of
recollection, and such imperfect notices, that the materials for
biography must, for the most part, be collected.
=CHARLES LAMB=
1775-1834
TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
_Temporary frenzy_
27 _May_, 1796.
. . . Coleridge! I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through
at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six
weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant
spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat
rational now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was! And many a vagary
my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were
told. My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw
you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem
in blank verse, which, if I finish, I publish. . . . Coleridge! it may
convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you
in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined
to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.
TO THE SAME
_A friend in need_
_Thursday, 11 June_, 1796.
. . . After all, you cannot, nor ever will, write anything with which I
shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came
to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding
with recent wounds. Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed
hope. You had
--many an holy lay
That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way;
I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant
on the sense. When I read in your little volume your nineteenth
effusion, or the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the
_Sigh_, I think I hear _you_ again. I image to myself the little smoky
room at the _Salutation and Cat_, where we have sat together through
the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy. When you
left London, I felt a dismal void in my heart. I found myself cut off,
at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. 'How blest with
ye the path could I have trod of quiet life! ' In your conversation you
had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief.
But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did
its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but
feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of
this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind,
but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined,
alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A
correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my
lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it: I will
not be very troublesome! At some future time I will amuse you with
an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my
frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy:
for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream
not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of
fancy till you have gone mad!
last wrote to you. The pulpit, repentance-stool, King's seat, and
God knows how much of carved wainscot, from the kirk of Dunfermline,
enough to coat the hall to the height of seven feet:--supposing
it boarded above, for hanging guns, old portraits, intermixed with
armour, &c. --it will be a superb entrance-gallery: this is hawl the
first. Hawl second is twenty-four pieces of the most splendid Chinese
paper, twelve feet high by four wide, a present from my cousin Hugh
Scott, enough to finish the drawing-room and two bedrooms. Hawl third
is a quantity of what is called Jamaica cedar-wood, enough for fitting
up both the drawing-room and the library, including the presses,
shelves, &c. : the wood is finely pencilled and most beautiful,
something like the colour of gingerbread; it costs very little more
than oak, works much easier, and is never touched by vermin of any
kind. I sent Mr. Atkinson a specimen, but it was from the plain end of
the plank; the interior is finely waved and variegated. Your kind
and unremitting exertions in our favour will soon plenish the
drawing-room. Thus we at present stand. We have a fine old English
cabinet, with china, &c. -and two superb elbow-chairs, the gift of
Constable, carved most magnificently, with groups of children, fruit,
and flowers, in the Italian taste: they came from Rome, and are much
admired. It seems to me that the mirror you mention, being framed in
carved box, would answer admirably well with the chairs, which are of
the same material. The mirror should, I presume, be placed over
the drawing-room chimney-piece; and opposite to it I mean to put an
antique table of mosaic marbles, to support Chantrey's bust. A good
sofa would be desirable, and so would the tapestry screen, if really
fresh and beautiful; but as much of our furniture will be a little
antiquated, one would not run too much into that taste in so small an
apartment. For the library I have the old oak chairs now in the little
armoury, eight in number, and we might add one or two pair of the
ebony chairs you mention. I should think this enough, for many seats
in such a room must impede access to the books; and I don't mean
the library to be on ordinary occasions a public room. Perhaps the
tapestry-screen would suit better here than in the drawing-room. I
have one library table here, and shall have another made for atlases
and prints. For the hall I have four chairs of black oak. In other
matters we can make it out well enough. In fact, it is my object
rather to keep under my new accommodations at first, both to avoid
immediate outlay, and that I may leave room for pretty things which
may occur hereafter. I would to Heaven I could take a cruise with you
through the brokers, which would be the pleasantest affair possible,
only I am afraid I should make a losing voyage of it. Mr. Atkinson has
missed a little my idea of the oratory, fitting it up entirely as
a bookcase, whereas I should like to have had recesses for
curiosities--for the Bruce's skull--for a crucifix, &c. , &c. -in short,
a little cabinet instead of a book-closet. Four sides of books would
be perfectly sufficient; the other four, so far as not occupied by
door or window, should be arranged tastefully for antiquities, &c. ,
like the inside of an antique cabinet, with drawers, and shottles, and
funny little arches. The oak screen dropped as from the clouds: it is
most acceptable; I might have guessed there was only one kind friend
so ready to supply hay to my hobby-horse. You have my views in these
matters and your own taste; and I will send the _needful_ when
you apprise me of the amount total. Where things are not quite
satisfactory, it is better to wait a while on every account, for the
amusement is over when one has room for nothing more. The house is
completely roofed, &c. , and looks worthy of Mrs. Terry's painting. I
never saw anything handsomer than the grouping of towers, chimneys,
&c. upon the roof, when seen at a proper distance.
Once more, let me wish you joy of your professional success. I can
judge, by a thousand minute items, of the advance you make with the
public, just as I can of the gradual progress of my trees, because I
am interested in both events. You may say, like Burke, you were not
'coaxed and dandled into eminence' but have fought your way gallantly,
shown your passport at every barrier, and been always a step in
advance, without a single retrograde movement. Every one wishes to
advance rapidly, but when the desired position is gained, it is far
more easily maintained by him whose ascent has been gradual, and whose
favour is founded not on the unreasonable expectations entertained
from one or two seasons, but from an habitual experience of the power
of pleasing during several years. You say not a word of poor Wattles.
I hope little Miss has not put his nose out of joint entirely.
I have not been very well--a whoreson thickness of blood, and a
depression of spirits arising from the loss of friends (to whom I
am now to add poor Wedderburne), have annoyed me much; and _Peveril_
will, I fear, smell of the apoplexy. I propose a good rally, however,
and hope it will be a powerful effect. My idea is, _entre nous_, a
Scotch archer in the French King's guard, _tempore_ Louis XI, the most
picturesque of all times.
TO J. B. S. MORRITT
_A brave face to the world_
Edinburgh, 6 _Feb. _ 1826.
MY DEAR MORRITT,
It is very true I have been, and am in danger, of a pecuniary loss,
and probably a very large one, which in the uncertainty I look at as
to the full extent, being the manly way of calculating such matters,
since one may be better, but can hardly be worse. I can't say I
feel overjoyed at losing a large sum of hard-earned money in a most
unexpected manner, for all men considered Constable's people secure as
the Bank; yet, as I have obtained an arrangement of payment convenient
for every body concerned, and easy for myself, I cannot say that I
care much about the matter. Some economical restrictions I will make;
and it happened oddly that they were such as Lady Scott and myself
had almost determined upon without this compulsion. Abbotsford will
henceforth be our only establishment; and during the time I must be
in town, I will take my bed at the Albyn Club. We shall also break
off the rather excessive hospitality to which we were exposed, and no
longer stand host and hostess to all that do pilgrimage to Melrose.
Then I give up an expensive farm, which I always hated, and turn
all my odds and ends into cash. I do not reckon much on my literary
exertions--I mean in proportion to former success--because popular
taste may fluctuate. But with a moderate degree of the favour which
I have always had, my time my own, and my mind unplagued about other
things, I may boldly promise myself soon to get the better of this
blow. In these circumstances, I should be unjust and ungrateful to ask
or accept the pity of my friends. I for one, do not see there is much
occasion for making moan about it. My womankind will be the greater
sufferers,--yet even they look cheerily forward; and, for myself, the
blowing off my hat in a stormy day has given me more uneasiness.
I envy your Brighton party, and your fine weather. When I was at
Abbotsford the mercury was down at six or seven in the morning more
than once. I am hammering away at a bit of a story from the old affair
of the _diablerie_ at Woodstock in the Long Parliament times. I don't
like it much. I am obliged to hamper my fanatics greatly too much
to make them effective; but I make the sacrifice on principle; so,
perhaps, I shall deserve good success in other parts of the work.
You will be surprised when I tell you that I have written a volume in
exactly fifteen days. To be sure, I permitted no interruptions. But
then I took exercise, and for ten days of the fifteen attended the
Court of Session from two to four hours every day. This is nothing,
however, to writing _Ivanhoe_ when I had the actual cramp in my
stomach; but I have no idea of these things preventing a man
from doing what he has a mind. My love to all the party at
Brighton--fireside party I had almost said, but you scorn my
words--seaside party then be it. Lady Scott and Anne join in kindest
love. I must close my letter, for one of the consequences of our
misfortunes is, that we dine every day at half-past four o'clock;
which premature hour arises, I suppose, from sorrow being hungry as
well as thirsty. One most laughable part of our tragic comedy was,
that every friend in the world came formally, just as they do here
when a relation dies, thinking that the eclipse of _les beaux yeux de
ma cassette_ was perhaps a loss as deserving of consolation.
TO MARIA EDGEWORTH
_Time's revenges_
Edinburgh, 23 _June_, 1830.
MY DEAR MISS EDGEWORTH,
Nothing would be so valuable to me as the mark of kindness which you
offer, and yet my kennel is so much changed since I had the pleasure
of seeing you, that I must not accept of what I wished so sincerely
to possess. I am the happy owner of two of the noble breed, each of
gigantic size, and the gift of that sort of Highlander whom we call a
High Chief, so I would hardly be justified in parting with them even
to make room for your kind present, and I should have great doubts
whether the mountaineers would receive the Irish stranger with due
hospitality. One of them I had from poor Glengarry, who, with all the
wild and fierce points of his character, had a kind, honest, and
warm heart. The other from a young friend, whom Highlanders call
MacVourigh, and Lowlanders MacPherson of Cluny. He is a fine spirited
boy, fond of his people and kind to them, and the best dancer of a
Highland reel now living. I fear I must not add a third to Nimrod and
Bran, having little use for them except being pleasant companions. As
to labouring in their vocation, we have only one wolf which I know
of, kept in a friend's menagerie near me, and no wild deer. Walter
has some roebucks indeed, but Lochore is far off, and I begin to
feel myself distressed at running down these innocent and beautiful
creatures, perhaps because I cannot gallop so fast after them as to
drown sense of the pain we are inflicting. And yet I suspect I am like
the sick fox; and if my strength and twenty years could come back, I
would become again a copy of my namesake, remembered by the sobriquet
of Walter _ill tae hauld_ (to hold, that is). 'But age has clawed
me in its clutch,' and there is no remedy for increasing disability
except dying, which is an awkward score.
There is some chance of my retiring from my official situation upon
the changes in the Court of Session. They cannot reduce my office,
though they do not wish to fill it up with a new occupant. I shall be
therefore _de trop_; and in these days of economy they will be better
pleased to let me retire on three parts of my salary than to keep me a
Clerk of Session on the whole; and small grief at our parting, as the
old horse said to the broken cart. And yet, though I thought such a
proposal when first made was like a Pisgah peep at Paradise, I cannot
help being a little afraid of changing the habits of a long life all
of a sudden and for ever. You ladies have always your work-basket and
stocking-knitting to wreak an hour of tediousness upon. The routine of
business serves, I suspect, for the same purpose to us male wretches;
it is seldom a burden to the mind, but a something which must be done,
and is done almost mechanically; and though dull judges and duller
clerks, the routine of law proceedings, and law forms, are very unlike
the plumed troops and the tug of war, yet the result is the same.
The occupation's gone. The morning, that the day's news must all be
gathered from other sources--that the jokes which the principal Clerks
of Session have laughed at weekly for a century, and which would not
move a muscle of any other person's face, must be laid up to perish
like those of Sancho in the Sierra Morena--I don't above half like
forgetting all these moderate habits, and yet
Ah, freedom is a noble thing!
as says the old Scottish poet. So I will cease my regrets, or lay them
by to be taken up and used as arguments of comfort, in case I do not
slip my cable after all, which is highly possible. Lockhart and Sophia
have taken up their old residence at Chiefswood. They are very fond of
the place; and I am glad also my grandchildren will be bred near the
heather, for certain qualities which I think are best taught there.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
1772-1834
TO CHARLES LAMB
_A sympathetic reply_[1]
28 _Sept. _ 1796.
Your letter, my friend, struck me with a mighty horror. It rushed upon
me and stupefied my feelings. You bid me write you a religious letter;
I am not a man who would attempt to insult the greatness of your
anguish by any other consolation. Heaven knows that in the easiest
fortunes there is much dissatisfaction and weariness of spirit:
much that calls for the exercise of patience and resignation; but
in storms, like these, that shake the dwelling and make the heart
tremble, there is no middle way between despair and the yielding up of
the whole spirit unto the guidance of faith. And surely it is a matter
of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter
that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a
Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness
and made drunken with wormwood, I conjure you to have recourse in
frequent prayer to 'his God and your God'; the God of mercies, and
father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless
of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows
it not, and your mother is in heaven. It is sweet to be roused from
a frightful dream by the song of birds, and the gladsome rays of
the morning. Ah, how infinitely more sweet to be awakened from the
blackness and amazement of a sudden horror by the glories of God
manifest and the hallelujahs of angels.
As to what regards yourself, I approve altogether of your abandoning
what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man called by
sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness,
and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God. We cannot arrive at any
portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ;
and they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most
difficult parts of His character, and, bowed down and crushed under
foot, cry in fullness of faith, 'Father, Thy will be done. '
I wish above measure to have you for a little while here--no visitants
shall blow on the nakedness of your feelings--you shall be quiet, and
your spirit may be healed. I see no possible objection, unless your
father's helplessness prevent you, and unless you are necessary to
him. If this be not the case, I charge you write me that you will
come.
I charge you, my dearest friend, not to dare to encourage gloom or
despair--you are a temporary sharer in human miseries, that you may
be an eternal partaker of the Divine nature. I charge you, if by any
means it be possible, come to me.
[Footnote 1: See Letter, p. 355. ]
TO JOSEPH COTTLE
_Literary adventurers_
[1798. ]
MY DEAR COTTLE,
Neither Wordsworth nor myself could have been otherwise than
uncomfortable, if any but yourself had received from us the first
offer of our tragedies, and of the volume of Wordsworth's poems. At
the same time, we did not expect that you could with prudence and
propriety, advance such a sum as we should want at the time we
specified. In short, we both regard the publication of our tragedies
as an evil. It is not impossible but that in happier times they may be
brought on the stage: and to throw away this chance for a mere trifle,
would be to make the present moment act fraudulently and usuriously
towards the future time.
My tragedy employed and strained all my thoughts and faculties for
six or seven months; Wordsworth consumed far more time, and far more
thought, and far more genius. We consider the publication of them
an evil on any terms; but our thoughts were bent on a plan for the
accomplishment of which a certain sum of money was necessary, (the
whole) at that particular time, and in order to do this we resolved,
although reluctantly, to part with our tragedies: that is, if we
could obtain thirty guineas for each, and at less than thirty guineas
Wordsworth will not part with the copyright of his volume of poems. We
shall offer the tragedies to no one, for we have determined to procure
the money some other way. If you choose the volume of poems, at
the price mentioned, to be paid at the time specified, i. e. thirty
guineas, to be paid sometime in the last fortnight of July, you may
have them; but remember, my dear fellow! I write to you now merely as
a bookseller, and entreat you, in your answer, to consider yourself
only; as to us, although money is necessary to our plan [that of
visiting Germany], yet the plan is not necessary to our happiness; and
if it were, W. would sell his poems for that sum to some one else,
or we could procure the money without selling the poems. So I entreat
you, again and again, in your answer, which must be immediate,
consider yourself only.
Wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_, that
he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden
estate to let him the house, after their first agreement is expired,
so he must quit it at midsummer; whether we shall be able to procure
him a house and furniture near Stowey, we know not, and yet we must:
for the hills, and the woods, and the streams, and the sea, and the
shores would break forth into reproaches against us, if we did not
strain every nerve to keep their poet among them. Without joking, and
in serious sadness, Poole and I cannot endure to think of losing him.
At all events, come down, Cottle, as soon as you can, but before
midsummer, and we will procure a horse easy as thy own soul, and we
will go on a roam to Lynton and Lynmouth, which, if thou comest in
May, will be in all their pride of woods and waterfalls, not to speak
of its august cliffs, and the green ocean, and the vast valley of
stones, all which live disdainful of the seasons, or accept new
honours only from the winter's snow. At all events come down, and
cease not to believe me much and affectionately your friend.
TO JOSIAH WADE
_A public example_
Bristol, 26 _June_, 1814.
DEAR SIR,
For I am unworthy to call any good man friend--much less you, whose
hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my entreaties for
your forgiveness, and for your prayers.
Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been
attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that
reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for
others the road to that heaven, from which his crimes exclude him! In
short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and
you will form as tolerable a notion of my state, as it is possible for
a good man to have.
I used to think the text in St. James that 'he who offendeth in one
point, offends in all,' very harsh; but I now feel the awful, the
tremendous truth of it. In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have
I not made myself guilty of! Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my
benefactors--injustice! _and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!
_--self-contempt for my repeated promise-breach, nay, too often,
actual falsehood!
After my death, I earnestly entreat that a full and unqualified
narration of my wretchedness, and of its guilty cause, may be made
public, that, at least, some little good may be effected by the
direful example!
May God Almighty bless you, and have mercy on your still affectionate,
and, in his heart, grateful
S. T. C.
TO THOMAS ALLSOP
_Himself and his detractors_
2 _Dec. _ 1818.
MY DEAR SIR,
I cannot express how kind I felt your letter. Would to Heaven I had
had many with feelings like yours, 'accustomed to express themselves
warmly and (as far as the word is applicable to you), even
enthusiastically'. But alas! during the prime manhood of my intellect
I had nothing but cold water thrown on my efforts. I speak not now of
my systematic and most unprovoked maligners. On _them_ I have retorted
only by pity and by prayer. These may have, and doubtless have, joined
with the frivolity of 'the reading public' in checking and almost in
preventing the sale of my works; and so far have done injury to
my _purse_. _Me_ they have not injured. But I have loved with
enthusiastic self-oblivion those who have been so well pleased that
I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into
_their_ main stream, that they could find nothing but cold praise and
effective discouragement of every attempt of mine to roll onward in a
distinct current of my own; who _admitted_ that the _Ancient Mariner_,
the _Christabel_, the _Remorse_, and some pages of the _Friend_
were not without merit, but were abundantly anxious to acquit their
judgements of any blindness to the very numerous defects. Yet they
_knew_ that to _praise_, as mere praise, I was characteristically,
almost constitutionally, indifferent. In sympathy alone I found at
once nourishment and stimulus; and for sympathy _alone_ did my heart
crave. They knew, too, how long and faithfully I have acted on the
maxim, never to admit the _faults_ of a work of genius to those who
denied or were incapable of feeling and understanding the _beauties_;
not from wilful partiality, but as well knowing that in _saying_ truth
I should, to such critics, convey falsehood. If, in one instance, in
my literary life I have appeared to deviate from this rule, first,
it was not till the fame of the writer (which I had been for fourteen
years successfully toiling like a second Ali to build up) had been
established; and secondly and chiefly, with the purpose and, I may
safely add, with the _effect_ of rescuing the necessary task from
Malignant Defamers, and in order to set forth the excellences and the
trifling proportion which the defects bore to the excellences. But
this, my dear sir, is a mistake to which affectionate natures are too
liable, though I do not remember to have ever seen it noticed--the
mistaking those who are desirous and well pleased to be loved _by_
you, for those who love you. Add, as a more general cause, the fact
that I neither am nor ever have been of any party. What wonder, then,
if I am left to decide which has been my worst enemy, the broad,
pre-determined abuse of the _Edinburgh Review_, &c. , or the cold and
brief compliments, with the warm _regrets_, of the _Quarterly_? After
all, however, I have now but one sorrow relative to the ill success of
my literary toils (and toils they have been, _though not undelightful
toils_), and this arises wholly from the almost insurmountable
difficulties which the anxieties of to-day oppose to my completion
of the great work, the form and materials of which it has been the
employment of the best and most genial hours of the last twenty years
to mature and collect.
If I could but have a tolerably numerous audience to my first, or
first and second Lectures on the _History of Philosophy_, I should
entertain a strong hope of success, because I know that these lectures
will be found by far the most interesting and _entertaining_ of any
that I have yet delivered, independent of the more permanent interest
of rememberable instruction. Few and unimportant would the errors of
men be, if they did but know, first, _what they themselves meant_;
and, secondly, what the _words_ mean by which they attempt to convey
their meaning, and I can conceive no subject so well fitted to
exemplify the mode and the importance of these two points as the
History of Philosophy, treated as in the scheme of these lectures.
TO THE SAME
_The Great Work described_
_Jan. _ 1821.
. . . I have already the _written_ materials and contents, requiring
only to be put together from the loose papers and commonplace or
memorandum books, and needing no other change, whether of omission,
addition, or correction, than the mere act of arranging, and the
opportunity of seeing the whole collectively bring with them of course
(1) Characteristics of Shakespeare's dramatic works, with a critical
review of each play; together with a relative and comparative critique
on the kind and degree of the merits and demerits of the dramatic
works of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger. The
History of the English Drama; the accidental advantages it afforded
to Shakespeare, without in the least detracting from the perfect
originality or proper creation of the Shakespearian Drama; the
contradistinction of the latter from the Greek Drama, and its still
remaining _uniqueness_, with the causes of this, from the combined
influences of Shakespeare himself, as man, poet, philosopher, and
finally, by conjunction of all these, dramatic poet; and of the age,
events, manners, and state of the English language. This work, with
every art of compression, amounts to three volumes of about five
hundred pages each. (2) Philosophical Analysis of the Genius and Works
of Dante, Spenser, Milton, Cervantes, and Calderon, with similar, but
more compressed criticisms on Chaucer, Ariosto, Donne, Rabelais, and
others, during the predominance of the Romantic Poetry. In one large
volume. These two works will, I flatter myself, form a complete code
of the principles of judgement and feeling applied to works of Taste;
and not of Poetry only, but of Poesy in all its forms, Painting,
Statuary, Music, &c. , &c. (3) The History of Philosophy considered
as a Tendency of the Human Mind to exhibit the Powers of the Human
Reason, to discover by its own Strength the Origin and Laws of Man and
the World, from Pythagoras to Locke and Condillac. Two volumes.
(4) Letters on the Old and New Testament, and on the Doctrine
and Principles held in common by the Fathers and Founders of the
Reformation, addressed to a candidate for Holy Orders, including
advice on the Plan and Subjects of Preaching, proper to a Minister of
the Established Church.
To the completion of these four works, I have literally nothing more
to do than to _transcribe_; but, as I before hinted, from so many
scraps and _sibylline_ leaves, including margins of books and blank
pages, that, unfortunately, I must be my own scribe, and not done by
myself, they will be all but lost; or perhaps (as has been too often
the case already) furnish feathers for the caps of others; some for
this purpose, and some to plume the arrows of detraction, to be let
fly against the luckless bird from whom they had been plucked or
moulted.
In addition to these--of my GREAT WORK, to the preparation of which
more than twenty years of my life have been devoted, and on which
my hopes of extensive and permanent utility, of fame, in the noblest
sense of the word, mainly rest--that, by which I might,
As now by thee, by all the good be known,
When this weak frame lies moulder'd in the grave,
Which self-surviving I might call my own,
Which folly cannot mar, nor hate deprave--
The incense of those powers, which, risen in flame,
Might make me dear to Him from whom they came.
Of this work, to which all my other writings (unless I except my
Poems, and these I can exclude in part only) are introductory and
preparative; and the result of which (if the premises be, as I, with
the most tranquil assurance, am convinced they are--insubvertible,
the deductions legitimate, and the conclusions commensurate, and only
commensurate, with both) must finally be a revolution of all that has
been called _philosophy_ or metaphysics in England and France, since
the era of the commencing predominance of the mechanical system at
the restoration of our second Charles, and with this the present
fashionable views, not only of religion, morals, and politics but
even of the modern physics and physiology. You will not blame the
earnestness of my expressions, nor the high importance which I attach
to this work: for how, with less noble objects, and less faith in
their attainment, could I stand acquitted of folly, and abuse of time,
talents, and learning in a labour of three-fourths of my intellectual
life? Of this work, something more than a volume has been dictated
by me, so as to exist fit for the press, to my friend and enlightened
pupil, Mr. Green; and more than as much again would have been evolved
and delivered to paper, but that, for the last six or eight months,
I have been compelled to break off our weekly meeting, from the
necessity of writing (alas! alas! of attempting to write) for
purposes, and on the subjects, of the passing day. Of my poetic works
I would fain finish the _Christabel_! Alas!
for the proud time when I
planned, when I had present to my mind, the materials, as well as
the scheme, of the Hymns entitled _Spirit_, _Sun_, _Earth_, _Air_,
_Water_, _Fire_ and _Man_; and the Epic Poem on what still appears
to me the one only fit subject remaining for an epic poem--Jerusalem
besieged and destroyed by Titus.
TO THE SAME
_Reminiscences_
4 March, 1822.
My Dearest Friend,
I have been much more than ordinarily unwell for more than a week
past--my sleeps worse than my vigils, my nights than my days;
--The night's dismay
Sadden'd and stunned the intervening day;
but last night I had not only a calmer night, without roaming in my
dreams through any of Swedenborg's Hells _modérés_; but arose this
morning lighter and with a sense of _relief_. . . .
I shall make you smile, as I did dear Mary Lamb, when I say that you
sometimes mistake my position. As individual to individual, from
my childhood, I do not remember feeling myself either superior or
inferior to any human being; except by an act of my own will in cases
of real or imagined moral or intellectual superiority. In regard to
worldly rank, from eight years old to nineteen, I was habituated,
nay, naturalised, to look up to men circumstanced as you are, as my
superiors--a large number of our governors, and almost _all_ of those
whom we regarded as greater men still, and whom we saw most of, _viz. _
our committee governors, were such--and as neither awake nor asleep
have I any other feelings than what I had at Christ's Hospital,
I distinctly remember that I felt a little flush of pride and
consequence--just like what we used to feel at school when the boys
came running to us--'Coleridge! here's your friends want you--they are
quite _grand_,' or 'It is quite a _lady_'--when I first heard who you
were, and laughed at myself for it with that pleasurable sensation
that, spite of my sufferings at that school, still accompanies any
sudden reawakening of our school-boy feelings and notions. And oh,
from sixteen to nineteen what hours of Paradise had Allen and I in
escorting the Miss Evanses home on a Saturday, who were then at a
milliner's whom we used to think, and who I believe really was, such
a nice lady;--and we used to carry thither, of a summer morning, the
pillage of the flower gardens within six miles of town, with Sonnet
or Love Rhyme wrapped round the nose-gay. To be feminine, kind, and
genteelly (what I should now call neatly) dressed, these were the only
things to which my head, heart, or imagination had any polarity, and
what I was then, I still am.
God bless you and yours.
ROBERT SOUTHEY
1774-1843
TO JOSEPH COTTLE
_Question of copyrights_
Greta Hall, 20 _April_, 1808.
My dear Cottle,. . .
What you say of my copyrights affected me very much. Dear Cottle, set
your heart at rest on that subject. It ought to be at rest. These were
yours, fairly bought, and fairly sold. You bought them on the chance
of their success, which no London bookseller would have done; and had
they not been bought, they could not have been published at all. Nay,
if you had not purchased _Joan of Arc_, the poem never would have
existed, nor should I, in all probability, ever have obtained that
reputation which is the capital on which I subsist, nor that power
which enables me to support it.
But this is not all. Do you suppose, Cottle, that I have forgotten
those true and most essential acts of friendship which you showed me
when I stood most in need of them? Your house was my house when I had
no other. The very money with which I bought my wedding-ring, and paid
my marriage fees, was supplied by you. It was with your sisters I left
Edith during my six months' absence, and for the six months after my
return it was from you that I received, week by week, the little on
which we lived, till I was enabled to live by other means. It is not
the settling of a cash account that can cancel obligations like these.
You are in the habit of preserving your letters, and if you were
not, I would entreat you to preserve _this_, that it might be seen
hereafter. Sure I am, there never was a more generous or a kinder
heart than yours; and you will believe me when I add, that there does
not live that man upon earth, whom I remember with more gratitude
and more affection. My heart throbs and my eyes burn with these
recollections. Good night! my dear old friend and benefactor.
TO JOHN MAY
_Waterloo_
Liège, 6 _Oct. _ 1815. Six p. m.
My dear friend,
I have a happy habit of making the best of all things; and being just
at this time as uncomfortable as the dust and bustle, and all the
disagreeables of an inn in a large filthy manufacturing city can make
me, I have called for pen, ink, and paper, and am actually writing in
the bar, the door open to the yard opposite to this unwiped table, the
doors open to the public room, where two men are dining, and talking
French, and a woman servant at my elbow is lighting a fire for our
party. Presently the folding-doors are to be shut, the ladies are to
descend from their chambers, the bar will be kept appropriated to our
house, the male part of the company will get into good humour, dinner
will be ready, and then I must lay aside the grey goose-quill. As a
preliminary to these promised comforts, the servant is mopping the
hearth, which is composed (like a tesselated pavement) of little
bricks about two inches long by half an inch wide, set within a broad
black stone frame. The fuel is of fire-balls, a mixture of pulverized
coal and clay. I have seen a great deal and heard a great deal,--more,
indeed, than I can keep pace with in my journal, though I strive hard
to do it; but I minute down short notes in my pencil-book with all
possible care, and hope, in the end, to lose nothing. . . .
Flanders is a most interesting country. Bruges, the most striking city
I have ever seen, an old city in perfect preservation. It seems as if
not a house had been built during the last two centuries, and not a
house suffered to pass to decay. The poorest people seem to be well
lodged, and there is a general air of sufficiency, cleanliness,
industry, and comfort, which I have never seen in any other place. The
cities have grown worse as we advanced. At Namur we reached a dirty
city, situated in a romantic country; the Meuse there reminded me of
the Thames from your delightful house, an island in size and shape
resembling that upon which I have often wished for a grove of poplars,
coming just in the same position. From thence along the river to this
abominable place, the country is, for the greater part, as lovely as
can be imagined. . . .
Our weather hitherto has been delightful. This was especially
fortunate at Waterloo and at Ligny, where we had much ground to walk
over. It would surprise you to see how soon nature has recovered from
the injuries of war. The ground is ploughed and sown, and grain and
flowers and seeds already growing over the field of battle, which is
still strewn with vestiges of the slaughter, caps, cartridges, boxes,
hats, &c. We picked up some French cards and some bullets, and we
purchased a French pistol and two of the eagles which the infantry
wear upon their caps. What I felt upon this ground, it would be
difficult to say; what I saw, and still more what I heard, there is no
time at present for saying. In prose and in verse you shall some day
hear the whole. At Les Quatre Bras, I saw two graves, which probably
the dogs or the swine had opened. In the one were the ribs of a human
body, projecting through the mould; in the other, the whole skeleton
exposed. Some of our party told me of a third, in which the worms were
at work, but I shrunk from the sight. You will rejoice to hear that
the English are as well spoken of for their deportment in peace as in
war. It is far otherwise with the Prussians. Concerning them there is
but one opinion; their brutality is said to exceed that of the French,
and of their intolerable insolence I have heard but too many proofs.
That abominable old Frederic made them a military nation, and this is
the inevitable consequence. This very day we passed a party on their
way towards France--some hundred or two. Two gentlemen and two ladies
of the country, in a carriage, had come up with them; and these
ruffians would not allow them to pass, but compelled them to wait and
follow the slow pace of foot soldiers! This we ourselves saw. Next to
the English, the Belgians have the best character for discipline. . . .
I bought at Bruges a French History of Brazil, just published by M.
Alphonse de Beauchamp, in 3 vols. 8vo. He says, in his Preface, that
having finished the first two volumes, he thought it advisable to see
if any new light had been thrown upon the subject by modern authors.
Meantime, a compilation upon this history had appeared in England,
but the English author, Mr. Southey, had brought no new lights; he had
promised much for his second volume, but the hope of literary Europe
had been again deceived, for this second volume, so emphatically
promised, had not appeared. I dare say no person regrets this delay
so much as M. Beauchamp, he having stolen the whole of his two first
volumes, and about the third part of the other, from the very Mr.
Southey whom he abuses. He has copied my references as the list of his
own authorities (MSS. and all), and he has committed blunders which
prove, beyond all doubt, that he does not understand Portuguese. I
have been much diverted by this fellow's impudence.
The table is laid, and the knives and forks rattling a pleasant note
of preparation, as the woman waiter arranges them.
God bless you! I have hurried through the sheet, and thus pleasantly
beguiled what would have been a very unpleasant hour. We are all well,
and your god-daughter has seen a live emperor at Brussels. I feel the
disadvantage of speaking French ill, and understanding it by the ear
worse. Nevertheless, I speak it without remorse, make myself somehow
or other understood, and get at what I want to know. Once more, God
bless you, my dear friend.
To HENRY TAYLOR
_Anastasius Hope_
Keswick, 15 _July_, 1831.
. . . Have you seen the strange book which Anastasius Hope left
for publication, and which his representatives, in spite of all
dissuasion, have published? His notion of immortality and heaven is,
that at the consummation of all things he, and you, and I, and John
Murray, and Nebuchadnezzar, and Lambert the fat man, and the living
skeleton, and Queen Elizabeth, and the Hottentot Venus, and Thurtell,
and Probert, and the twelve Apostles, and the noble army of martyrs,
and Genghis Khan, and all his armies, and Noah with all his ancestors
and all his posterity--yea, all men and all women, and all children
that have ever been or ever shall be, saints and sinners alike--are
all to be put together, and made into one great celestial eternal
human being. He does not seem to have known how nearly this approaches
to Swedenborg's fancy. I do not like the scheme. I don't like the
notion of being mixed up with Hume, and Hunt, and Whittle Harvey, and
Philpotts, and Lord Althorpe, and the Huns, and the Hottentots, and
the Jews, and the Philistines, and the Scotch, and the Irish. God
forbid! I hope to be I myself; I, in an English heaven, with you
yourself--you, and some others, without whom heaven would be no heaven
to me. God bless you!
TO EDWARD MOXON
_Recollections of the Lambs_
Keswick, 2 _Feb. _ 1836.
My dear sir,
I have been too closely engaged in clearing off the second volume of
Cowper to reply to your inquiries concerning poor Lamb sooner. His
acquaintance with Coleridge began at Christ's Hospital; Lamb was
some two years, I think, his junior. Whether he was ever one of the
_Grecians_ there, might be ascertained, I suppose, by inquiring. My
own impression is, that he was not. Coleridge introduced me to him
in the winter of 1794-5, and to George Dyer also, from whom, if his
memory has not failed, you might probably learn more of Lamb's early
history than from any other person. Lloyd, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt
became known to him through their connexion with Coleridge.
When I saw the family (one evening only, and at that time), they were
lodging somewhere near Lincoln's Inn, on the western side (I forget
the street), and were evidently in uncomfortable circumstances. The
father and mother were both living; and I have some dim recollection
of the latter's invalid appearance. The father's senses had failed him
before that time. He published some poems in quarto. Lamb showed me
once an imperfect copy: the _Sparrow's Wedding_ was the title of the
longest piece, and this was the author's favourite; he liked, in his
dotage, to hear Charles read it.
His most familiar friend, when I first saw him, was White, who held
some office at Christ's Hospital, and continued intimate with him as
long as he lived. You know what Elia says of him. He and Lamb were
joint authors of the _Original Letters of Falstaff_. Lamb, I believe,
first appeared as an author in the second edition of Coleridge's
_Poems_ (Bristol, 1797), and, secondly, in the little volume of blank
verse with Lloyd (1798). Lamb, Lloyd, and White were inseparable in
1798; the two latter at one time lodged together, though no two men
could be imagined more unlike each other. Lloyd had no drollery in his
nature; White seemed to have nothing else. You will easily understand
how Lamb could sympathize with both.
Lloyd, who used to form sudden friendships, was all but a stranger
to me, when unexpectedly he brought Lamb down to visit me at a little
village (Burton) near Christchurch, in Hampshire, where I was lodging
in a very humble cottage. This was in the summer of 1797, and then, or
in the following year, my correspondence with Lamb began. I saw more
of him in 1802 than at any other time, for I was then six months
resident in London. His visit to this county was before I came to it;
it must have been either in that or in the following year: it was to
Lloyd and to Coleridge.
I had forgotten one of his schoolfellows, who is still living--C. V.
Le Grice, a clergyman at or near Penzance. From him you might learn
something of his boyhood.
Cottle has a good likeness of Lamb, in chalk, taken by an artist named
Robert Hancock, about the year 1798. It looks older than Lamb was at
that time; but he was old-looking.
Coleridge introduced him to Godwin, shortly after the first number
of the _Anti-Jacobin Magazine and Review_ was published, with a
caricature of Gillray's, in which Coleridge and I were introduced with
asses' heads, and Lloyd and Lamb as toad and frog. Lamb got warmed
with whatever was on the table, became disputatious, and said things
to Godwin which made him quietly say, 'Pray, Mr. Lamb, are you toad
or frog? ' Mrs. Coleridge will remember the scene, which was to her
sufficiently uncomfortable. But the next morning S. T. C. called on
Lamb, and found Godwin breakfasting with him, from which time their
intimacy began.
His angry letter to me in the _Magazine_ arose out of a notion that
an expression of mine in the _Quarterly Review_ would hurt the sale of
_Elia_; some one, no doubt, had said that it would. I meant to serve
the book, and very well remember how the offence happened. I had
written that it wanted nothing to render it altogether delightful but
a _saner_ religious feeling. _This_ would have been the proper word if
any other person had written the book. Feeling its extreme unfitness
as soon as it was written, I altered it immediately for the first word
which came into my head, intending to remodel the sentence when it
should come to me in the proof; and that proof never came. There can
be no objection to your printing all that passed upon the occasion,
beginning with the passage in the _Quarterly Review_, and giving his
letter.
I have heard Coleridge say that, in a fit of derangement, Lamb fancied
himself to be young Norval. He told me this in relation to one of his
poems.
If you will print my lines to him upon his _Album Verses_, I will
send you a corrected copy. You received his letters, I trust, which
Cuthbert took with him to town in October. I wish they had been more,
and wish, also, that I had more to tell you concerning him, and what
I have told were of more value. But it is from such fragments of
recollection, and such imperfect notices, that the materials for
biography must, for the most part, be collected.
=CHARLES LAMB=
1775-1834
TO SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
_Temporary frenzy_
27 _May_, 1796.
. . . Coleridge! I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through
at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six
weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant
spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat
rational now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was! And many a vagary
my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were
told. My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw
you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem
in blank verse, which, if I finish, I publish. . . . Coleridge! it may
convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you
in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined
to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.
TO THE SAME
_A friend in need_
_Thursday, 11 June_, 1796.
. . . After all, you cannot, nor ever will, write anything with which I
shall be so delighted as what I have heard yourself repeat. You came
to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding
with recent wounds. Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed
hope. You had
--many an holy lay
That, mourning, soothed the mourner on his way;
I had ears of sympathy to drink them in, and they yet vibrate pleasant
on the sense. When I read in your little volume your nineteenth
effusion, or the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth, or what you call the
_Sigh_, I think I hear _you_ again. I image to myself the little smoky
room at the _Salutation and Cat_, where we have sat together through
the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy. When you
left London, I felt a dismal void in my heart. I found myself cut off,
at one and the same time, from two most dear to me. 'How blest with
ye the path could I have trod of quiet life! ' In your conversation you
had blended so many pleasant fancies that they cheated me of my grief.
But in your absence the tide of melancholy rushed in again, and did
its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but
feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of
this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind,
but habits are strong things, and my religious fervours are confined,
alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devotion. A
correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my
lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it: I will
not be very troublesome! At some future time I will amuse you with
an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my
frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy:
for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream
not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of
fancy till you have gone mad!
