I believe Stoddart
promising
to go with me
another year prevented that plan.
another year prevented that plan.
Selection of English Letters
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! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively
so.
TO THE SAME
_The tragedy_
27 _Sept_. 1796.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may
have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on
our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor dear, dearest
sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of our own mother. I
was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She
is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to
an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses; I eat, and drink, and
sleep, and have my judgement, I believe, very sound. My poor father
was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.
Mr. Norris, of the Bluecoat School, has been very kind to us, and we
have no other friend; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and
able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter as
possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me 'the
former things are passed away', and I have something more to do than
to feel.
God Almighty have us in His keeping!
Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past
vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish
mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a
book, I charge you.
Your own judgement will convince you not to take any notice of this
yet to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have reason
and strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of
coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty
love you and all of us!
TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
_The delights of London_
30 _Jan_. 1801.
I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into
Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am
afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I
never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London,
until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of
you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of
the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and
customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness
round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen,
drunken scenes, rattles;--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of
the night; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon
houses and pavements, the printshops, the old book-stalls, parsons
cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the
pantomimes--London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power
of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into
night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the
motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these
emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But
consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent
great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have
had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering
of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was
born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a
book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog, (only
exceeding him in knowledge,) wherever I have moved, old chairs,
old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old
school,--these are my mistresses,--have I not enough, without your
mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that
the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies,
and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in
more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and
tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider
the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to
satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of
a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading
upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have
been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the
inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should
certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and yourself; and a kiss
from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play!
TO THOMAS MANNING
_At the Lakes_
London, 24 _Sept_. 1802.
My dear Manning,
Since the date of my last letter I have been a traveller. A strong
desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to
go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that
I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend
some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never
to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection. However,
I am very glad I did not go, because you had left Paris (I see) before
I could have set out.
I believe Stoddart promising to go with me
another year prevented that plan. My next scheme (for to my restless,
ambitious mind London was become a bed of thorns) was to visit the
far-famed peak in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, without
breeches. _This_ my purer mind rejected as indelicate. And my final
resolve was a tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to Keswick,
without giving Coleridge any notice, for my time, being precious, did
not admit of it. He received us with all the hospitality in the world,
and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of the country. He
dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable
house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great
floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and asleep.
We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in
the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mountains
into colours, purple, &c. , &c. We thought we had got into fairy-land.
But that went off (as it never came again; while we stayed we had no
more fine sunsets); and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just
in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their
heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight
before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine
old fellows, Skiddaw, &c. I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about
that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the
night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge
had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique,
ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big
enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Aeolian harp, and
an old sofa, half bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading
view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren: what a night! Here
we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's
cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people,
and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and
saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been
in London, and passed much time with us: he is now gone into Yorkshire
to be married. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater
(where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater;
I forget the name; to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over
the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw,
and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied
myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call
_romantic_, which I very much suspected before: they make such a
spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them,
till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the
lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired when she
got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which
nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with
the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most
manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with
a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and
then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and
ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure,
in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three
weeks; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation
I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among
mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any one, to
come home and _work_. I felt very _little_. I had been dreaming I was
a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform
in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me.
Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to
live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to
those great places where I wandered about, participating in their
greatness. After all, I could not _live_ in Skiddaw. I could spend
a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of
seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine
away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a fine creature.
My habits are changing, I think, i. e. from drunk to sober. Whether
I shall be happier or not remains to be proved. I shall certainly be
more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the
fat, and the marrow, and the kidneys, i. e. the night, glorious,
care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our
mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright
and brilliant! --O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical
resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any
spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such
shame-worthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The
truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about
my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St.
Gothard, but it is just now nearest my heart. Fenwick is a ruined man.
He is hiding himself from his creditors, and has sent his wife and
children into the country. Fell, my other drunken companion (that has
been: _nam hic caestus artemque repono_), is turned editor of a Naval
Chronicle. Godwin continues a steady friend, though the same facility
does not remain of visiting him often. X. has detached Marshall from
his house; Marshall, the man who went to sleep when the _Ancient
Mariner_ was reading; the old, steady, unalterable friend of the
Professor. Holcraft is not yet come to town. I expect to see him, and
will deliver your message. Things come crowding in to say, and no
room for 'em. Some things are too little to be told, i. e. to have a
preference; some are too big and circumstantial. Thanks for yours,
which was most delicious. Would I had been with you, benighted, &c. !
I fear my head is turned with wandering. I shall never be the same
acquiescent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, for I shall not
like to hazard a letter, not knowing where the fates have carried you.
Farewell, my dear fellow.
TO THE SAME
_Dissuasion from Tartary_
19 _Feb_. 1803.
MY DEAR MANNING,
The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity,
but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake don't
think any more of 'Independent Tartary'. What are you to do among such
Ethiopians? Is there no _lineal descendant_ of Prester John? Is the
chair empty? Is the sword unswayed? --depend upon it they'll never
make you their king, as long as any branch of that great stock
is remaining. I tremble for your Christianity. . . . Read Sir John
Mandeville's Travels to cure you, or come over to England. There is
a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk with him,
and hear what he says first. Indeed, he is no very favourable specimen
of his countrymen! But perhaps the best thing you can do, is to _try_
to get the idea out of your head. For this purpose repeat to yourself
every night, after you have said your prayers, the words, Independent
Tartary, Independent Tartary, two or three times, and associate with
them the _idea_ of _oblivion_ ('tis Hartley's method with obstinate
memories), or say, Independent, Independent, have I not already got
an _independence_? That was a clever way of the old Puritans,
pun-divinity. My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to
bury such _parts_ in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable,
horse-belching, Tartar-people! Some say they are Cannibals; and then,
conceive a Tartar-fellow _eating_ my friend, and adding the _cool
malignity_ of mustard and vinegar! I am afraid 'tis the reading of
Chaucer has misled you; his foolish stories about Cambuscan, and the
ring, and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such things,
'tis all the poet's _invention_; but if there were such darling things
as old Chaucer sings, I would _up_ behind you on the horse of brass,
and frisk off for Prester John's country. But these are all tales;
a horse of brass never flew, and a king's daughter never talked with
birds! The Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchy set. You'll
be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them. Pray _try_ and cure
yourself. Take hellebore (the counsel is Horace's, 'twas none of my
thought _originally_). Shave yourself oftener. Eat no saffron, for
saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like yellow. Pray, to avoid
the fiend. Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. _Shave the upper_
_lip_. Go about like an European. Read no books of voyages (they are
nothing but lies), only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy
_under_. Above all, don't go to any sights of _wild beasts. That
has been your ruin_. Accustom yourself to write familiar letters, on
common subjects, to your friends in England, such as are of a moderate
understanding. And think about common things more. . . . I supped last
night with Rickman, and met a merry _natural_ captain, who pleases
himself vastly with once having made a pun at Otaheite in the O.
language. 'Tis the same man who said Shakespeare he liked, because
he was so _much of the gentleman_. Rickman is a man 'absolute in all
numbers'. I think I may one day bring you acquainted, if you do not
go to Tartary first; for you'll never come back. Have a care, my dear
friend, of Anthropophagi! their stomachs are always craving. 'Tis
terrible to be weighed out at five pence a-pound. To sit at table (the
reverse of fishes in Holland), not as a guest, but as a meat.
God bless you: do come to England. Air and exercise may do great
things. Talk with some minister. Why not your father?
God dispose all for the best. I have discharged my duty.
To MRS. WORDSWORTH
_Friends' importunities_
East India House, 18 _Feb_. 1818.
MY DEAR MRS. WORDSWORTH,
I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My
sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I
consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it
in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more
ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia,
cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and
friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home,
is, that I am never alone. Plato's--(I write to W. W. now)--Plato's
double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in
the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for
a moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office,
which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never
so. I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers
his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am
pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or
compare sum with sum, and write 'paid' against this, and 'unpaid'
against t'other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind 'some
darling thoughts all my own',--faint memory of some passage in a book,
or the tone of an absent friend's voice--a snatch of Miss Burrell's
singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face. The two
operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as
the sun's two motions (earth's, I mean), or, as I sometimes turn
round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking
longitudinally in the front; or, as the shoulder of veal twists round
with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney. But there are
a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres--the gay science--who come to
me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British
Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, &c. --what Coleridge said at the lecture
last night--who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible
use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as well have been
Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian
hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should
find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its intervals,
perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at
the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in
between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come
to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of
them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for
a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door,
in comes Mr. ----, or Mr. ----, or Demi-gorgon, or my brother, or
somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O, the pleasure of eating
alone! --eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they
come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of
orange--for my meat turns into stone when anyone dines with me, if I
have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into
acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God
bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still
greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring
upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they
leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to
these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is,
this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes
by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its
dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always
like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (_divine_
forsooth! ) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a
week would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I
assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to
myself. I am never C. L. , but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it
not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious
monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even
there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week,
generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the
hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bed-room window is
the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I take them
to be chorus singers of the two theatres (it must be _both of them_),
begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who,
being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the
play-houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop, or
some cheap composer, arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in
chorus. At least, I never can catch any of the text of the plain song,
nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. 'That fury
being quench'd'--the howl I mean--a burden succeeds of shouts and
clapping, and knocking of the table. At length overtasked nature drops
under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet
silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at
cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel's father used
(bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink! ) to say every morning by way
of variety when he awoke:
Every knell, the Baron saith,
Wakes us up to a world of death--
or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale,
is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not
that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so
anxious to drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and
cards, and a cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea
between office confinement and after-office society, how little time
I can call my own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an
inference. I would not that I know of have it otherwise. I only wish
sometimes I could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces
and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome, and carried
away, leaving regret, but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude, at
being so often favoured with that kind northern visitation. My London
faces and noises don't hear me--I mean no disrespect, or I should
explain myself, that instead of their return 220 times a year, and
the return of W. W. , &c. , seven times in 104 weeks, some more equal
distribution might be found. I have scarce room to put in Mary's kind
love, and my poor name . . . --goes on lecturing. . . . I mean to hear some
of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the
lecturer may be. If _read_, they are dismal flat, and you can't think
why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you
could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore,
I am always in pain, lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail
the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honour
of me at the London Tavern. 'Gentlemen,' said I, and there I stopped;
the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs.
Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the
lakes once more, which never can be realised. Between us there is a
great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I
hope, as there seemed to be between me and that gentleman concerned
in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon's. I
think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all
such people--accountants' deputy accountants. The dear abstract notion
of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather
poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such
beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her
of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days,
they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which
heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go. They are the
tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this week, they
have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one
o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Dear
W.
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! All now seems to me vapid, comparatively
so.
TO THE SAME
_The tragedy_
27 _Sept_. 1796.
MY DEAREST FRIEND,
White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may
have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on
our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor dear, dearest
sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of our own mother. I
was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She
is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be moved to
an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses; I eat, and drink, and
sleep, and have my judgement, I believe, very sound. My poor father
was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.
Mr. Norris, of the Bluecoat School, has been very kind to us, and we
have no other friend; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and
able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter as
possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me 'the
former things are passed away', and I have something more to do than
to feel.
God Almighty have us in His keeping!
Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past
vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish
mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a
book, I charge you.
Your own judgement will convince you not to take any notice of this
yet to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have reason
and strength left to take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of
coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty
love you and all of us!
TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
_The delights of London_
30 _Jan_. 1801.
I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into
Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am
afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey.
Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I
never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London,
until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of
you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of
the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and
customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness
round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen,
drunken scenes, rattles;--life awake, if you awake, at all hours of
the night; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon
houses and pavements, the printshops, the old book-stalls, parsons
cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the
pantomimes--London itself a pantomime and a masquerade--all these
things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power
of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into
night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the
motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these
emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But
consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent
great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?
My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have
had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering
of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was
born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a
book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog, (only
exceeding him in knowledge,) wherever I have moved, old chairs,
old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old
school,--these are my mistresses,--have I not enough, without your
mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that
the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies,
and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in
more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and
tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider
the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to
satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of
a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading
upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have
been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the
inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should
certainly have laughed with dear Joanna.
Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and yourself; and a kiss
from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play!
TO THOMAS MANNING
_At the Lakes_
London, 24 _Sept_. 1802.
My dear Manning,
Since the date of my last letter I have been a traveller. A strong
desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to
go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that
I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend
some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never
to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection. However,
I am very glad I did not go, because you had left Paris (I see) before
I could have set out.
I believe Stoddart promising to go with me
another year prevented that plan. My next scheme (for to my restless,
ambitious mind London was become a bed of thorns) was to visit the
far-famed peak in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, without
breeches. _This_ my purer mind rejected as indelicate. And my final
resolve was a tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to Keswick,
without giving Coleridge any notice, for my time, being precious, did
not admit of it. He received us with all the hospitality in the world,
and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of the country. He
dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable
house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great
floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and asleep.
We got in in the evening, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in
the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mountains
into colours, purple, &c. , &c. We thought we had got into fairy-land.
But that went off (as it never came again; while we stayed we had no
more fine sunsets); and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just
in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their
heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight
before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine
old fellows, Skiddaw, &c. I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about
that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed for the
night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge
had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique,
ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big
enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Aeolian harp, and
an old sofa, half bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading
view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren: what a night! Here
we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's
cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons (good people,
and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night), and
saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been
in London, and passed much time with us: he is now gone into Yorkshire
to be married. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater
(where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater;
I forget the name; to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over
the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw,
and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied
myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call
_romantic_, which I very much suspected before: they make such a
spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them,
till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the
lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired when she
got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which
nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones), and with
the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most
manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with
a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and
then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and
ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure,
in my life. But I am returned (I have now been come home near three
weeks; I was a month out), and you cannot conceive the degradation
I felt at first, from being accustomed to wander free as air among
mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by any one, to
come home and _work_. I felt very _little_. I had been dreaming I was
a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform
in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me.
Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to
live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to
those great places where I wandered about, participating in their
greatness. After all, I could not _live_ in Skiddaw. I could spend
a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of
seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine
away, I know. Still, Skiddaw is a fine creature.
My habits are changing, I think, i. e. from drunk to sober. Whether
I shall be happier or not remains to be proved. I shall certainly be
more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the
fat, and the marrow, and the kidneys, i. e. the night, glorious,
care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our
mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright
and brilliant! --O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical
resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any
spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such
shame-worthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The
truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about
my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St.
Gothard, but it is just now nearest my heart. Fenwick is a ruined man.
He is hiding himself from his creditors, and has sent his wife and
children into the country. Fell, my other drunken companion (that has
been: _nam hic caestus artemque repono_), is turned editor of a Naval
Chronicle. Godwin continues a steady friend, though the same facility
does not remain of visiting him often. X. has detached Marshall from
his house; Marshall, the man who went to sleep when the _Ancient
Mariner_ was reading; the old, steady, unalterable friend of the
Professor. Holcraft is not yet come to town. I expect to see him, and
will deliver your message. Things come crowding in to say, and no
room for 'em. Some things are too little to be told, i. e. to have a
preference; some are too big and circumstantial. Thanks for yours,
which was most delicious. Would I had been with you, benighted, &c. !
I fear my head is turned with wandering. I shall never be the same
acquiescent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, for I shall not
like to hazard a letter, not knowing where the fates have carried you.
Farewell, my dear fellow.
TO THE SAME
_Dissuasion from Tartary_
19 _Feb_. 1803.
MY DEAR MANNING,
The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity,
but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake don't
think any more of 'Independent Tartary'. What are you to do among such
Ethiopians? Is there no _lineal descendant_ of Prester John? Is the
chair empty? Is the sword unswayed? --depend upon it they'll never
make you their king, as long as any branch of that great stock
is remaining. I tremble for your Christianity. . . . Read Sir John
Mandeville's Travels to cure you, or come over to England. There is
a Tartar-man now exhibiting at Exeter Change. Come and talk with him,
and hear what he says first. Indeed, he is no very favourable specimen
of his countrymen! But perhaps the best thing you can do, is to _try_
to get the idea out of your head. For this purpose repeat to yourself
every night, after you have said your prayers, the words, Independent
Tartary, Independent Tartary, two or three times, and associate with
them the _idea_ of _oblivion_ ('tis Hartley's method with obstinate
memories), or say, Independent, Independent, have I not already got
an _independence_? That was a clever way of the old Puritans,
pun-divinity. My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to
bury such _parts_ in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable,
horse-belching, Tartar-people! Some say they are Cannibals; and then,
conceive a Tartar-fellow _eating_ my friend, and adding the _cool
malignity_ of mustard and vinegar! I am afraid 'tis the reading of
Chaucer has misled you; his foolish stories about Cambuscan, and the
ring, and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such things,
'tis all the poet's _invention_; but if there were such darling things
as old Chaucer sings, I would _up_ behind you on the horse of brass,
and frisk off for Prester John's country. But these are all tales;
a horse of brass never flew, and a king's daughter never talked with
birds! The Tartars, really, are a cold, insipid, smouchy set. You'll
be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them. Pray _try_ and cure
yourself. Take hellebore (the counsel is Horace's, 'twas none of my
thought _originally_). Shave yourself oftener. Eat no saffron, for
saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like yellow. Pray, to avoid
the fiend. Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. _Shave the upper_
_lip_. Go about like an European. Read no books of voyages (they are
nothing but lies), only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy
_under_. Above all, don't go to any sights of _wild beasts. That
has been your ruin_. Accustom yourself to write familiar letters, on
common subjects, to your friends in England, such as are of a moderate
understanding. And think about common things more. . . . I supped last
night with Rickman, and met a merry _natural_ captain, who pleases
himself vastly with once having made a pun at Otaheite in the O.
language. 'Tis the same man who said Shakespeare he liked, because
he was so _much of the gentleman_. Rickman is a man 'absolute in all
numbers'. I think I may one day bring you acquainted, if you do not
go to Tartary first; for you'll never come back. Have a care, my dear
friend, of Anthropophagi! their stomachs are always craving. 'Tis
terrible to be weighed out at five pence a-pound. To sit at table (the
reverse of fishes in Holland), not as a guest, but as a meat.
God bless you: do come to England. Air and exercise may do great
things. Talk with some minister. Why not your father?
God dispose all for the best. I have discharged my duty.
To MRS. WORDSWORTH
_Friends' importunities_
East India House, 18 _Feb_. 1818.
MY DEAR MRS. WORDSWORTH,
I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My
sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I
consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it
in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more
ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia,
cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and
friendly recollections. The reason why I cannot write letters at home,
is, that I am never alone. Plato's--(I write to W. W. now)--Plato's
double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally re-united in
the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for
a moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office,
which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never
so. I cannot walk home from office but some officious friend offers
his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am
pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or
compare sum with sum, and write 'paid' against this, and 'unpaid'
against t'other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind 'some
darling thoughts all my own',--faint memory of some passage in a book,
or the tone of an absent friend's voice--a snatch of Miss Burrell's
singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face. The two
operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as
the sun's two motions (earth's, I mean), or, as I sometimes turn
round till I am giddy, in my back parlour, while my sister is walking
longitudinally in the front; or, as the shoulder of veal twists round
with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney. But there are
a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres--the gay science--who come to
me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British
Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, &c. --what Coleridge said at the lecture
last night--who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible
use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as well have been
Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian
hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should
find it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its intervals,
perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at
the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in
between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come
to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of
them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for
a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go,
mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury
them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door,
in comes Mr. ----, or Mr. ----, or Demi-gorgon, or my brother, or
somebody, to prevent my eating alone--a process absolutely
necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O, the pleasure of eating
alone! --eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they
come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of
orange--for my meat turns into stone when anyone dines with me, if I
have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then _that_ wine turns into
acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters--(God
bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still
greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring
upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they
leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to
these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is,
this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes
by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, with all its
dreary stifling consequences, follows. Evening company I should always
like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (_divine_
forsooth! ) and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a
week would be as much as I should covet to be in company, but I
assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to
myself. I am never C. L. , but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it
not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious
monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even
there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week,
generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the
hour I ought always to be a-bed; just close to my bed-room window is
the club-room of a public-house, where a set of singers, I take them
to be chorus singers of the two theatres (it must be _both of them_),
begin their orgies. They are a set of fellows (as I conceive) who,
being limited by their talents to the burthen of the song at the
play-houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by Bishop, or
some cheap composer, arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in
chorus. At least, I never can catch any of the text of the plain song,
nothing but the Babylonish choral howl at the tail on't. 'That fury
being quench'd'--the howl I mean--a burden succeeds of shouts and
clapping, and knocking of the table. At length overtasked nature drops
under it, and escapes for a few hours into the society of the sweet
silent creatures of dreams, which go away with mocks and mows at
cockcrow. And then I think of the words Christabel's father used
(bless me, I have dipt in the wrong ink! ) to say every morning by way
of variety when he awoke:
Every knell, the Baron saith,
Wakes us up to a world of death--
or something like it. All I mean by this senseless interrupted tale,
is, that by my central situation I am a little over-companied. Not
that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so
anxious to drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and
cards, and a cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea
between office confinement and after-office society, how little time
I can call my own. I mean only to draw a picture, not to make an
inference. I would not that I know of have it otherwise. I only wish
sometimes I could exchange some of my faces and voices for the faces
and voices which a late visitation brought most welcome, and carried
away, leaving regret, but more pleasure, even a kind of gratitude, at
being so often favoured with that kind northern visitation. My London
faces and noises don't hear me--I mean no disrespect, or I should
explain myself, that instead of their return 220 times a year, and
the return of W. W. , &c. , seven times in 104 weeks, some more equal
distribution might be found. I have scarce room to put in Mary's kind
love, and my poor name . . . --goes on lecturing. . . . I mean to hear some
of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the
lecturer may be. If _read_, they are dismal flat, and you can't think
why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you
could read so much better at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore,
I am always in pain, lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail
the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honour
of me at the London Tavern. 'Gentlemen,' said I, and there I stopped;
the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs.
Wordsworth _will_ go on, kindly haunting us with visions of seeing the
lakes once more, which never can be realised. Between us there is a
great gulf, not of inexplicable moral antipathies and distances, I
hope, as there seemed to be between me and that gentleman concerned
in the Stamp Office, that I so strangely recoiled from at Haydon's. I
think I had an instinct that he was the head of an office. I hate all
such people--accountants' deputy accountants. The dear abstract notion
of the East India Company, as long as she is unseen, is pretty, rather
poetical; but as she makes herself manifest by the persons of such
beasts, I loathe and detest her as the scarlet what-do-you-call-her
of Babylon. I thought, after abridging us of all our red-letter days,
they had done their worst; but I was deceived in the length to which
heads of offices, those true liberty-haters, can go. They are the
tyrants; not Ferdinand, nor Nero. By a decree passed this week, they
have abridged us of the immemorially-observed custom of going at one
o'clock of a Saturday, the little shadow of a holiday left us. Dear
W.
