No More Learning



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8817
CHARLES LAMB
(1775-1834)
BY ALFRED AINGER
1
O Find anything new to write about Charles Lamb might tax
the ingenuity of the most versatile and resourceful critic in
the Old or New World. And yet experience shows that the
lovers of Elia are never weary of listening for something more about
him, and continue to welcome whatever crumbs of anecdote or frag-
ments of biographical fact may have yet escaped collection. And
this very circumstance shows that Lamb stands in a category of
English-speaking humorists which is not large. Of whom could be
said precisely the same thing, except such few as Shakespeare, Gold-
smith, Johnson, Scott, - writers, that is to say, in whom the human
personality is as interesting or even more so than anything they
have written ? We are interested in Shakespeare's personality, in-
deed, because of the very little we know about him. We are inter-
ested in Goldsmith or Lamb because we know so much, and feel
towards them more as personal friends than as authors.
The personality of Lamb, indeed, is so inwrought and intertwined
with the very fibre of his essays and letters that it is impossible to
separate criticism of the one fr tha of the other. His life is
written in the confidential utterances of his essays; and his occas-
ional verse embodies allusions, even more intimate and touching, to
the sadder epochs and incidents of that life. The saddest of all such
incidents was in the first instance recorded in the most famous of
all his lyrics — the Old Familiar Faces); though Lamb rightly and
wisely withdrew, when the first spasm of bitter emotion was past,
the stanza concerning his mother's death.
Egotism in a writer is either the most unattractive of qualities
or the most engaging. We either rejoice in it or resent it. There
is hardly a third course possible. We resent it when it is a mere
"trap for admiration, or a palpable desire to establish the writer's
importance. We welcome it when the heart is pure, when there is
the requisite genius and individuality to make it precious. But the
writer who indulges in perpetual confidences as to self must be like
Cæsar's wife, “beyond suspicion”: the faintest tinge of self-conscious-
ness is fatal to the charm of self-disclosure. Charles Lamb possesses
XV-552


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8818
CHARLES LAMB
ness.
this charm; and hence his extraordinary popularity with thousands
even of those whose acquaintance with his favorite authors would
not of itself suffice to make them appreciate his multifarious allusive-
Lamb was a man of widest reading; and in directions in which
the ordinary reader even now, after seventy years or so, is little
versed. But thus far back, it is not too much to say that the very
names of the old English writers on whom Lamb's love of poetry
had been chiefly fed, were unknown to the bulk of the magazine
readers whom in his essays he first addressed. It was not therefore
to exhibit his reading or his antiquarian research, that he interlarded
his discourse with the words of Massinger or Marlowe, Marvell or
Sidney, Fuller or Sir Thomas Browne. He did not even, for the
most part, introduce his quotations with any names attached. He
cited them usually without even inverted commas. He had himself
roamed at will in gardens and orchards of exquisite beauty and
flavor, and could not help pouring what he had gathered at the
feet of his readers. And his instinct did not fail him in taking this
course. It was a curiously bold step, that of daring, when invited to
contribute essays to the London Magazine, to depart from the famil-
iar didactic or allegorical type which had been set by the Spectator
or Rambler, and trust to the perennial attraction of the humblest
human experiences. The South Sea House' was not an alluring
title for the first essay he contributed. The (South Sea Bubble)
might have been; but all that remained of the once famous specu-
lation was a building and a staff of clerks. But yet every dingiest
and most old-fashioned institution in which men go to and fro about
their business has its human side; and wherever there were men,
or the traditions of men, Lamb could make their companionship full
of charm. And how exquisite a thing did he make out of the memo-
ries of that old building where only two years of his own boyish life
were spent:-
“This was once a house of trade, a centre of busy interests. The throng
of merchants was here, the quick pulse of gain; and here some forms of
business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still
to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state
apartments in palaces, — deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling
clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms, with
venerable faces of beadles, doorkeepers — directors seated in form on solemn
days (to proclaim a dead dividend), at long worm-eaten tables that have been
mahogany, with tarnished gilt leather coverings, supporting many silver ink-
stands long since dry _ »
« There are many echoes,” Goethe said, “but few voices. It is
the « voices » in literature that become classics. The echoes have
their short life and then die away. Lamb is one of such voices; and
»
))
(C


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CHARLES LAMB
8819
(
thus he has lived, and will live. It was not a voice that protested or
proclaimed much, - and certainly never from the. housetops, — but it
was his own. Compounded of many simples,” like the melancholy
of Jaques in the forest, Lamb's humor was altogether free from the
self-assertion or the discontent of the exiled philosopher of Arden.
His sweet acquiescence in the burdens and sorrows of his life was
rather that of the laughing philosopher Touchstone, whom Shake-
speare has pitted against the more specious moralist. He would have
pleaded that if the manner he had adopted was strange or ill-favored,
it was at least his own. ”
It is remarkable that Lamb's most universally popular essay, that
on Roast Pig,' is by no means one of his most characteristic. It is
not too much to say that many inferior humorists could have made a
success almost as great out of the same material. For in this case
Lamb had a really humorous notion put into his head. Given the
accidental discovery of the gastronomic value of cooked meat, the
humorous possibilities are at once perceptible. It is where the raw
material of the essay is nothing and the treatment everything that
the real individuality of Lamb stands forth. It is in such essays as
the Praise of Chimney-Sweepers,' or (Mrs. Battle on Whist, or the
(Recollections of an old Manor-House in Hertfordshire,' that we are
to look for what gives Lamb his unique place in literature and in
the hearts of those who love him.
There is food, however, for many tastes in Charles Lamb. There
is the infinite pathos of such a revelation as that in Dream Child-
ren,' which for delicate beauty and tenderness has no rival in Eng-
lish literature; there is the consummate observation and criticism of
human character in Imperfect Sympathies’; there is the perfection
of narrative art in such an anecdote as that told in Barbara S. );
there is the supreme æsthetic quality, as where he descants on the
superiority of Shakespeare to any of his contemporaries, or where he
compels our admiration for the moral value of such a satirist as
Hogarth. We are always discovering some new faculty in Lamb, and
passing from one to another with astonishing suddenness,— from the
poet to the humorist, from the moral teacher to the æsthetic critic;
and all the while the manner is often so like that of the gossip and
j ester that the reader would undervalue it as very easy writing,”
did we not know by Lamb's own confessions that his most lucid and
a pparently facile confidences were often wrung from him with slow
pain. ” So certain is it always that “easy writing) makes “hard
reading, and that the most seeming-casual of essays, if it is to live,
must have something in it of the life-blood of the writer.
And beyond all question it is the personal experiences of Lamb
that generate the supreme quality of all he wrote. It is the beauty
»


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8820
CHARLES LAMB
-
of his character — its charity and tenderness, its capacity for lifelong
sacrifice and devotion, fruits of the discipline it had undergone - that
constitutes the soil which nourished even the lightest flowers and
graces of his style. Lamb had contemporaries and rivals in his own
walk, each with rare and attractive gifts of his own,- Hazlitt and
Leigh Hunt. We owe much to both of these. Each was endowed
with critical faculties of the highest order. Each in his own line has
done memorable service in establishing the true canons of literary
criticism. Each wrote a style of his own, as perfect for its purpose
as can be conceived. Yet neither of these is loved, and lives in
men's hearts, like Charles Lamb. The amiability of Leigh Hunt is
too merely amiable: it has not its roots in the deep and strengthen-
ing earth of human discipline. Hazlitt was altogether wanting in the
quality. He showed “light, but without (sweetness ): without the
latter grace no writer can make himself dear to his readers.
Moreover, no writer has ever attained this most enviable distinc-
tion except when his own life has been told in minutest detail, either
by himself or others. In the instance of Lamb, his writings are in
the main personal confidences; and in addition we possess his let-
ters,—the most complete as well as the most fascinating disclosure of
a personality in our literature,—as well as having the testimony of
troops of friends. ” There is something that wins and touches us all
in the frank disclosure of a private history. What would Goldsmith
have been to us but for Washington Irving and John Forster; or
Johnson without Boswell; or Scott without Lockhart, and the frank
and deeply pathetic admissions of his own Journal ? The sorrows
and the struggles of these widely different men draw us to them.
Our delight in all that they have written for us is heightened and
sanctified by our pity for the individual man. And this is the reward
of the true men, who live out their real selves before us, and there-
fore are a joy forever; while the men who only pose, live their brief
hour on the stage and then cease to be!
alped anger


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CHARLES LAMB
8821
THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES
JANUARY 1798
1
HAVE had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days -
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies-
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I loved a love once, fairest among women:
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man:
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.
Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood :
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.
Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother!
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces.
For some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed:
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
HESTER
W"
'HEN maidens such as Hester die,
Their place ye may not well supply,
Though ye among a thousand try,
With vain endeavor.
A month or more hath she been dead,
Yet cannot I by force be led
To think upon the wormy bed
And her together.
A springy motion in her gait,
A rising step, did indicate


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882 2
CHARLES LAMB
Of pride and joy no common rate,
That flushed her spirit.
I know not by what name beside
I shall it call: if 'twas not pride,
It was a joy to that allied,
She did inherit.
Her parents held the Quaker rule,
Which doth the human feeling cool;
But she was trained in Nature's school -
Nature had blest her.
A waking eye, a prying mind,
A heart that stirs, is hard to bind;
A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind,
Ye could not Hester.
ON AN INFANT DYING AS SOON AS BORN
I
SAW where in the shroud did lurk
A curious frame of Nature's work.
A floweret crushed in the bud,
A nameless piece of Babyhood,
Was in a cradle-coffin lying;
Extinct, with scarce the sense of dying;
So soon to exchange the imprisoning womb
For darker closets of the tomb!
She did but ope an eye, and put
A clear beam forth, then straight up shut
For the long dark: ne'er more to see
Through glasses of mortality.
Riddle of destiny, who can show
What thy short visit meant, or know
What thy errand here below ?
Shall we say that Nature blind
Checked her hand and changed her mind,
Just when she had exactly wrought
A finished pattern without fault ?
Could she flag, or could she tire,
Or lacked she the Promethean fire
(With her nine moons' long workings sickened)
That should thy little limbs have quickened ?


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CHARLES LAMB
8823
Limbs so firm they seemed to assure
Life of health, and days mature:
Woman's self in miniature!
Limbs so fair they might supply
(Themselves now but cold imagery)
The sculptor to make Beauty by.
Or did the stern-eyed Fate descry
That babe or mother - one must die:
So in mercy left the stock,
And cut the branch, to save the shock
Of young years widowed; and the pain,
When single state comes back again
To the lone man who, 'reft of wife,
Thenceforwards drags a maimèd life?
The economy of Heaven is dark;
And wisest clerks have missed the mark,
Why Human Buds, like this, should fall,
More brief than fly ephemeral,
That has his day; while shriveled crones
Stiffen with age to stocks and stones,
And crabbed use the conscience sears
In sinners of an hundred years.
Mother's prattle, mother's kiss,
Baby fond, thou ne'er wilt miss.
Rites, which custom does impose,
Silver bells and baby clothes;
Coral redder than those lips,
Which pale death did late eclipse;
Music framed for infant's glee,
Whistle never tuned for thee:
Though thou want'st not, thou shalt have them,-
Loving hearts were they which gave them.
Let not one be missing; nurse,
See them laid upon the hearse
Of infant slain by doom perverse.
Why should kings and nobles have
Pictured trophies to their grave;
And we, churls, to thee deny
Thy pretty toys with thee to lie,
A more harmless vanity?


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8824
CHARLES LAMB
IN MY OWN ALBUM
F
RESH clad from heaven in robes of white,
A young probationer of light,
Thou wert my soul, an album bright,
A spotless leaf: but thought and care,
And friend and foe, in foul or fair,
Have “written strange defeatures there;
And Time with heaviest hand of all,
Like that fierce writing on the wall,
Hath stamped sad dates he can't recall;
And error gilding worst designs-
Like speckled snake that strays and shines-
Betrays his path by crooked lines;
And vice hath left his ugly blot;
And good resolves, a moment hot,
Fairly begun— but finished not;
And fruitless, late remorse doth trace -
Like Hebrew lore, a backward pace
Her irrecoverable race.
Disjointed numbers, sense unknit,
Huge reams of folly, shreds of wit,
Compose the mingled mass of it.
My scalded eyes no longer brook
Upon this ink-blurred thing to look:
Go, shut the leaves, and clasp the book.
IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES
From the Essays of Elia)
I am of a constitution so general, that it consorts and sympathizeth with
all things; I have no antipathy, or rather idiosyncrasy, in anything. Those
natural repugnances do not touch me, nor do I behold with prejudice the
French, Italian, Spaniard, or Dutch. — (RELIGIO MEDICI. )
WHAT the author of the Religio Medici,' mounted upon the
airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and con-
jectural essences, in whose categories of being the possible
took the upper hand of the actual, should have overlooked the
T"


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CHARLES LAMB
8825
impertinent individualities of such poor concretions as mankind,
is not much to be admired. It is rather to be wondered at, that
in the genus of animals he should have condescended to distin-
guish that species at all. For myself,- earth-bound and fettered
to the scene of my activities,
-
I can
« Standing on earth, not rapt above the sky," —
I confess that I do feel the differences of mankind, national or
individual, to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indif.
ferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a
matter of taste or distaste; or when once it becomes indifferent,
it begins to be disrelishing. I am, in plainer words, a bundle of
prejudices — made up of likings and dislikings — the veriest thrall
to sympathies, apathies, antipathies. In a certain sense, I hope
it may be said of me that I am a lover of my species.
feel for all indifferently, but I cannot feel towards all equally.
The more purely English word that expresses sympathy will bet-
ter explain my meaning. I can be a friend to a worthy man, who
upon another account cannot be my mate or fellow. I cannot
like all people alike.
I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am
obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot
like me — and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who
attempted to do it. There is something more plain and ingen-
uous in their mode of proceeding. We know one another at
first sight. There is an order of imperfect intellects (under
which mine must be content to rank) which in its constitution is
essentially anti-Caledonian. The owners of the sort of faculties
I allude to have minds rather suggestive than comprehensive.
They have no pretenses to much clearness or precision in their
ideas, or in their manner of expressing them. Their intellectual
wardrobe (to confess fairly) has few whole pieces in it. They
are content with fragments and scattered pieces of Truth. She
presents no full front to them a feature or side-face at the
most. Hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system,
is the utmost they pretend to. They beat up a little game per-
adventure, “and leave it to knottier heads, more robust constitu-
tions, to run it down. The light that lights them is not steady
and polar, but mutable and shifting; waxing, and again waning.
Their conversation is accordingly. They will throw out a ran-
dom word in or out of season, and be content to let it pass for


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8826
CHARLES LAMB
what it is worth. They cannot speak always as if they were
upon their oath, but must be understood, speaking or writing,
with some abatement. They seldom wait to mature a proposi-
tion, but e'en bring it to market in the green ear. They delight
to impart their defective discoveries as they arise, without wait-
ing for their development. They are no systematizers, and
would but err more by attempting it. Their minds, as I said
before, are suggestive merely.
The brain of a true Caledonian (if I am not mistaken) is
constituted upon quite a different plan. His Minerva is born
in panoply. You are never admitted to see his ideas in their
growth — if indeed they do grow, and are not rather put to-
gether upon principles of clockwork. You never catch his mind
in an undress. He never hints or suggests anything, but un-
lades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness.
brings his total wealth into company, and gravely unpacks it.
His riches are always about him. He never stoops to catch a
glittering something in your presence to share it with you,
before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You
cannot cry halves to anything that he finds. He does not find,
but bring. You never witness his first apprehension of a thing.
His understanding is always at its meridian - you never see
the first dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings of
self-suspicion. Surmises, guesses, misgivings, half-intuitions, semi-
consciousnesses, partial illuminations, dim instincts, embryo con-
ceptions, have no place in his brain or vocabulary. The twilight
of dubiety never falls upon him. Is he orthodox — he has no
doubts. Is he an infidel he has none either. Between the
affirmative and the negative there is no borderland with him.
You cannot hover with him upon the confines of truth, or wan-
der in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the
path. You cannot make excursions with him, for he sets you
right. His taste never fluctuates. His morality never abates.
He cannot compromise or understand middle actions. There
can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book.
His affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak
upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor · like a sus-
pected person in an enemy's country. "A healthy book! ” said
one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that
appellation to John Buncle,'"Did I catch rightly what you
said ? I have heard of a man in health, and of a healthy state


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CHARLES LAMB
8827
>
of body; but I do not see how that epithet can be properly
applied to a book. ”
Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a
Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are
unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your
oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da
Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr.
After he had
examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked my
beauty (a foolish name it goes by among my friends); when he
very gravely assured me that he had considerable respect for
my character and talents” (so he was pleased to say), “but had
not given himself much thought about the degree of my per-
sonal pretensions. ” The misconception staggered me, but did not
seem much to disconcert him. Persons of this nation are par-
ticularly fond of affirming a truth which nobody doubts. They
do not so properly affirm as annunciate it. They do indeed
appear to have such a love of truth (as if like virtue it were
valuable for itself) that all truth becomes equally valuable,
whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed
or such as is impossible to become a subject of disputation. I
was present not long since at a party of North Britons, where a
son of Burns was expected, and happened to drop a silly expres-
sion (in my South British way), that I wished it were the father
instead of the son; when four of them started up at once to in-
form me that “that was impossible, because he was dead. ” An
impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive.
Swift has hit off this part of their character — namely, their
love of truth — in his biting way, but with an illiberality that
necessarily confines the passage to the margin. The tediousness
of these people is certainly provoking. I wonder if they ever
tire one another. In my early life I had a passionate fondness
for the poetry of Burns, I have sometimes foolishly hoped to
ingratiate myself with his countrymen by expressing it. But I
have always found that a true Scot resents your admiration of
his compatriot even more than he would your contempt of him.
The latter he imputes to your «imperfect acquaintance with
many of the words he uses”; and the same objection makes it
a presumption in you to suppose that you can admire him.
.
Thomson they seem to have forgotten. Smollett they have neither
forgotten nor forgiven for his delineation of Rory and his com-
panion upon their first introduction to our metropolis. Speak of


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8828
CHARLES LAMB
run
(
Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's
History compared with his Continuation of it.
What the his-
torian had continued 'Humphrey Clinker'?
I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews. They are a
piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which Stonehenge is
in its nonage. They date beyond the Pyramids. But I should
not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that
nation. I confess that I have not the nerves to enter their syn-
agogues. Old prejudices cling about me. I cannot shake off the
story of Hugh of Lincoln. Centuries of injury, contempt, and
hate on the one side, of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate
on the other, between our and their fathers, must and ought to
affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it can
clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as “candor,"
"liberality,” the light of a nineteenth century,” can close up the
breaches of so deadly a disunion. A Hebrew is nowhere con-
genial to me. He is least distasteful on 'Change; for the mercan-
tile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark.
I boldly confess that I do not relish the approximation of Jew
and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal
endearments have, to me, something hypocritical and unnatural
in them. I do not like to see the Church and Synagogue kissing
and congeeing in awkward postures of an affected civility. If
they are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether?
Why keep up a form of separation when the life of it is fled ?
If they can sit with us at table, why do they keck at our cook-
ery? I do not understand these half convertites. Jews Christian-
izing — Christians Judaizing — puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A
moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a
wet Quaker. The spirit of the synagogue is essentially separative.
Braham would have been more in keeping if he had abided by
the faith of his forefathers. There is a fine scorn in his face,
which nature meant to be of Christians. The Hebrew spirit is
strong in him, in spite of his proselytism. He cannot conquer
the Shibboleth. How it breaks out when he sings, « The Child-
ren of Israel passed through the Red Sea! ” The auditors for
the moment are as Egyptians to him, and he rides over our necks
in triumph. There is no mistaking him. Braham has a strong
expression of sense in his countenance, and it is confirmed by
his singing. The foundation of his vocal excellence is sense.
He sings with understanding, as Kemble delivered dialogue. He
.


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CHARLES LAMB
8829
would sing the Commandments and give an appropriate char-
acter to each prohibition. His nation in general have not over-
sensible countenances,— how should they ? — but you seldom see
a silly expression among them. Gain and the pursuit of gain
sharpen a man's visage. I never heard of an idiot being born
among them.
Some admire the Jewish female physiognomy. I
admire it, but with trembling. Jael had those full dark inscru-
table eyes.
In the negro countenance you will often meet with strong
traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards
some of these faces — or rather masks — that have looked out
kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and high-
ways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls these images of God
cut in ebony. ” But I should not like to associate with them, to
share my meals and my good-nights with them— because they
are black.
I love Quaker ways and Quaker worship. I venerate the
Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when
I meet any of their people in my path. When I am ruffled or
disturbed by any occurrence, the sight or quiet voice of a Quaker
acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air and taking off a
load from the bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers (as Des-
demona would say) “to live with them. ” I am all over sophis-
ticated with humors, fancies, craving hourly sympathy. I must
have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, ambigui-
ties, and a thousand whimwhams, which their simpler taste can
do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My ap-
petites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn)
Eve dressed for the angel, my gusto too excited
>
« To sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse. ”
The indirect answers which Quakers are often found to return
to a question put to them may be explained, I think, without
the vulgar assumption that they are more given to evasion and
equivocating than other people. They naturally look to their
words more carefully, and are more cautious of committing them-
selves. They have a peculiar character to keep up on this head.
They stand in a manner upon their veracity. A Quaker is by
law exempted from taking an oath. The custom of resorting
to an oath in extreme cases, sanctified as it is by all religious
antiquity, is apt (it must be confessed) to introduce into the laxer


## p. 8830 (#454) ###########################################

8830
CHARLES LAMB
»
-
sort of minds the notion of two kinds of truth: the one applicable
to the solemn affairs of justice, and the other to the common
proceedings of daily intercourse. As truth bound upon the con-
science by an oath can be but truth, so in the common affirma-
tions of the shop and the market-place a latitude is expected
and conceded upon questions wanting this solemn covenant.
Something less than truth satisfies. It is common to hear a per-
son say, “You do not expect me to speak as if I were upon
my oath. ” Hence a great deal of incorrectness and inadvertency,
short of falsehood, creeps into ordinary conversation; and a kind
of secondary or laic truth is tolerated, where clergy-truth-oath-
truth — by the nature of the circumstances is not required. A
Quaker knows none of this distinction. His simple affirmation
being received, upon the most sacred occasions, without any
further test, stamps a value upon the words which he is to use
upon the most indifferent topics of life. He looks to them natur-
ally with more severity. You can have of him no more than his
word. He knows if he is caught tripping in a casual expression,
he forfeits, for himself at least, his claim to the invidious ex-
emption. He knows that his syllables are weighed; and how far
a consciousness of this particular watchfulness exerted against a
person has a tendency to produce indirect answers, and a divert-
ing of the question by honest means, might be illustrated, and
the practice justified, by a more sacred example than is proper to
be adduced upon this occasion. The admirable presence of mind
which is notorious in Quakers upon all contingencies might be
traced to this imposed self-watchfulness, if it did not seem rather
an humble and secular scion of that old stock of religious con-
stancy which never bent or faltered in the primitive Friends, or
gave way to the winds of persecution, to the violence of judge
or accuser, under trials and racking examinations. “You will
never be the wiser, if I sit here answering your questions till
midnight,” said one of those upright Justicers to Penn, who had
been putting law cases with a puzzling subtlety. “Thereafter as
the answers may be,” retorted the Quaker.
The astonishing composure of this people is sometimes ludi-
crously displayed in lighter instances. I was traveling in a stage-
coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest
nonconformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover,
where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before
My friends confined themselves to the tea-table.
(C
us.
I in my


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CHARLES LAMB
8831
way took supper. When the landlady brought in the bill, the
eldest of my companions discovered that she had charged for
both meals. This was resisted. Mine hostess was very clamorous
and positive. Some mild arguments were used on the part of
the Quakers, for which the heated mind of the good lady seemed
by no means a fit recipient. The guard came in with his usual
peremptory notice. The Quakers pulled out their money and
formally tendered it, --so much for tea; I, in humble imitation,
tendering mine for the supper which I had taken. She would
not relax in her demand. So they all three quietly put up their
silver, as did myself, and marched out of the room; the eldest
and gravest going first, with myself closing up the rear, who
thought I could not do better than follow the example of such
grave and warrantable personages. We got in. The steps went
up.
The coach drove off. The murmurs of mine hostess, not
very indistinctly or ambiguously pronounced, became after a time
inaudible; and now, my conscience, which the whimsical scene
had for a while suspended, beginning to give some twitches, I
waited, in the hope that some justification would be offered by
these serious persons for the seeming injustice of their conduct.
To my great surprise not a syllable was dropped on the subject.
They sat as mute as at a meeting. At length the eldest of them
broke silence by inquiring of his next neighbor, “Hast thee
heard how indigos go at the India House? ”
DREAM-CHILDREN: A REVERY
From the Essays of Elia)
C"
HILDREN love to listen to stories about their elders when they
were children; to stretch their imagination to the concep-
tion of a traditionary great-uncle or grandame whom they
never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about
me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother
Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk (a hundred times
bigger than that in which they and papa lived) which had been
the scene
- so at least it was generally believed in that part
of the country — of the tragic incidents which they had lately
become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the
Wood. ' Certain it is that the whole story of the children and
their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon


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8832
CHARLES LAMB
upon it.
the chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the
Robin Redbreasts, till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set
up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story
Here Alice put on one of her dear mother's looks, too
tender to be called upbraiding.
Then I went on to say how religious and how good their
great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by
everybody, though she was not indeed the mistress of this great
house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects
she might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her
by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and more fash-
ionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the ad-
joining county; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had
been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in a
sort while she lived, — which afterwards came to decay, and was
nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried
away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and
looked as awkward as if someone were to carry away the old
tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey and stick them up in
Lady C—'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as
much as to say,
That would be foolish indeed. ”
And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was
attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry
too, of the neighborhood for many miles round, to show their
respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and
religious woman; so good, indeed, that she knew all the Psaltery
by heart, ay! and a great part of the Testament besides. Here
little Alice spread her hands.
Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-
grandmother Field once was, and how in her youth she
esteemed the best dancer (here Alice's little right foot played
an involuntary movement, till upon my looking grave it desisted)
- the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel
disease called a cancer came, and bowed her down with pain;
but it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop,
but they were still upright, because she was so good and reli-
gious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a
lone chamber of the great lone house, and how she believed that
an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight glid-
ing up and down the great staircase near where she slept, but
she said “those innocents would do her no harm ”; and how
was


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CHARLES LAMB
8833
frightened I used to be,-though in those days I had my maid
to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious
as she,- and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded
all his eyebrows and tried to look courageous.
Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren: hav-
ing us to the great house in the holidays, where I in particular
used to spend many hours by myself in gazing upon the old
busts of the twelve Cæsars, that had been Emperors of Rome,
till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be
turned into marble with them; how I never could be tired with
roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms,
with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken
panels with the gilding almost rubbed out; sometimes in the
spacious old-fashioned gardens which I had almost to myself,
unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross
me; and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls
without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were for-
bidden fruit, unless now and then, and because I had more pleas-
ure in strolling about among the old melancholy looking yew-trees
or the firs, and picking up the red berries and the fir-apples,
which were good for nothing but to look at, or in lying about
upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me,
or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself
ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grate-
ful warmth, or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in
the fish-pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a
great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state,
as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings. I had more pleas-
ure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavors of
peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such-like common baits of child-
Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch
of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated
dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them
for the present as irrelevant.
Then in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, though
their great-grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in
an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John
L- , because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a
king to the rest of us, and instead of moping about in solitary
corners like some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome
horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves,
XV—553
ren.


## p. 8834 (#458) ###########################################

8834
CHARLES LAMB
and make it carry him half over the country in a morning, and
join the hunters when there were any out,- and yet he loved
the old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to
be always pent up within their boundaries; and how their uncle
grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the
admiration of everybody, but of their great-grandmother Field
most especially; and how he used to carry me upon his back
when I was a lame-footed boy,- for he was a good bit older
than me,- many a mile when I could not walk for pain; and
how in after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not
always (I fear) make allowances enough for him when he was
impatient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate
he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how when he
died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he
had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life
and death; and how I bore his death as I thought pretty well
at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though
I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he
would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long,
and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed
his kindness and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be
alive again to be quarreling with him (for we quarreled some-
times) rather than not have him again, and was as uneasy with-
out him as he their poor uncle must have been when the doctor
took off his limb. Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if
their little mourning which they had on was not for Uncle John,
and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on about their
uncle, but to tell them some stories about their pretty dead
mother.
Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes,
sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice
W—n; and as much as children could understand, I explained
to them what coyness and difficulty and denial meant in maid-
ens: when suddenly turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice
looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment,
that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or
whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the
children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still
receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were
seen in the uttermost distance, which without speech strangely
impressed upon me the effects of speech:-“We are not of
-


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CHARLES LAMB
8835
wait upon
Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of
Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing, less than nothing,
and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must
the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before
we have existence and a name. ” And immediately awakening, I
found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair where I had
fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side;
but John L-(or James Elia) was gone for ever.
A QUAKERS' MEETING
From the Essays of Elia!
STILL-BORN Silence! thou that art
Flood-gate of the deeper heart!
Offspring of a heavenly kind !
Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind!
Secrecy's confidant, and he
Who makes religion mystery!
Admiration's speaking'st tongue !
Leave, thy desert shades among,
Reverend hermits' hallowed cells,
Where retired Devotion dwells !
With thy enthusiasms come,
Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb!
Rich. FLECKNOE.
R.
EADER, wouldst thou know what true peace and quiet mean;
wouldst thou find a refuge from the noises and clamors
of the multitude; wouldst thou enjoy at once solitude and
society; wouldst thou possess the depth of thine own spirit in
stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy
species; — wouldst thou be alone and yet accompanied; solitary,
yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in
countenance; a unit in aggregate, a simple in composite; - come
with me into a Quakers' Meeting.
Dost thou love silence deep as that “before the winds were
made”? Go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the
profundities of the earth; shut not up thy casements, nor pour
wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faithed, self-
mistrusting Ulysses. Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting.
For a man to refrain even from good words and to hold his
peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude it is great mas-
tery.


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8836
CHARLES LAMB
What is the stillness of the desert compared with this place ?
what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes ? Here the god-
dess reigns and revels. “Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud,”
do not with their interconfounding uproars more augment the
brawl, nor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed
sounds, than their opposite (Silence, her sacred self) is multiplied
and rendered more intense by numbers and by sympathy. She
too hath her deeps that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a
positive more and less, and closed eyes would seem to obscure
the great obscurity of midnight.
There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal.
By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The
perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but
nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting. Those first
hermits did certainly understand this principle when they retired
into Egyptian solitudes, not singly but in shoals, to enjoy one
another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his
brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness.
ular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through
a long winter evening with a friend sitting by, - say a wife,-
he or she too (if that be probable) reading another, without inter-
ruption or oral communication ? Can there be no sympathy with-
out the gabble of words ? Away with this inhuman, shy, single,
shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master Zimmer-
mann, a sympathetic solitude.
To pace alone in the cloisters or side aisles of some cathedral
time-stricken,
(Or under hanging mountains,
Or by the fall of fountains,
In sec.
is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those enjoy who
come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted sol-
itude. This is the loneliness “to be felt. ” The Abbey Church
of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as
the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are
no tombs, no inscriptions -
«sands, ignoble things,
Dropt from the ruined sides of kings; »
but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into the
foreground: SILENCE, eldest of things — language of old Night -


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CHARLES LAMB
8837
primitive Discourser -- to which the insolent decays of molder-
ing grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and as we may say
unnatural progression.
« How reverend is the view of these hushed heads
Looking tranquillity!
»
Nothing-plotting, naught-caballing, unmischievous synod! con-
vocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a
lesson dost thou read to council and to consistory! If my pen
treat of you lightly, -as haply it will wander, - yet my spirit
hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when, sitting among
you in deepest peace, which some outwelling tears would rather
confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your begin.
nings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. I
have witnessed that which brought before my eyes your heroic
tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of
the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you,-
for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and
offscouring of Church and Presbytery. I have seen the reeling
sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle with the
avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit
of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently
sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remember Penn
before his accusers, and Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted
up in spirit, as he tells us, and “the judge and the jury became
as dead men under his feet. ”
Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend
to you above all church narratives to read Sewel's History of
the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the Journals
of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and
affecting than anything you will read of Wesley and his col-
leagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you
mistrust; no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly
or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that
much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a byword in
your mouth), James Naylor: what dreadful sufferings, with what
patience he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue
with red-hot irons, without a murmur; and with what strength of
mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigma-
tized as blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could
renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifulest humility, yet
>>


## p. 8838 (#462) ###########################################

8838
CHARLES LAMB
keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still! — so different from
the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who,
when they apostatize, a postatise all, and think they can never
get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to
the renunciation of some saving truths with which they had been
mingled, not implicated.
Get the writings of John Woolman by heart, and love the
early Quakers.
How far the followers of these good men in our days have
kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have sub-
stituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine.
I have seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove
sate visibly brooding. Others again I have watched, when my
thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could pos-
sibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all,
and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce
controversial workings. If the spiritual pretensions of the Qua-
kers have abated, at least they make few pretenses. Hypocrites
they certainly are not in their preaching. It is seldom indeed
that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only
now and then a trembling female, generally ancient, voice is
heard,- you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it pro-
ceeds,— with a low buzzing musical sound laying out a few words
which she thought might suit the condition of some present,"
with a quaking diffidence which leaves no possibility of suppos-
ing that anything of female vanity was mixed up where the tones
were so full of tenderness and a restraining modesty. The men,
for what I have observed, speak seldomer,
Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample
of the old Foxian orgasm. It was a man of giant stature, who,
as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced from head to foot
equipt in iron mail. His frame was of iron too. But he was
malleable. I saw him shake all over with the spirit-- I dare not
say of delusion.
The strivings of the outer man were unutter-
able: he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw
I
the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail; his joints all
seemed loosening: it was a figure to set off against Paul preach-
ing. The words he uttered were few and sound: he was evi-
dently resisting his will — keeping down his own word-wisdom
with more mighty effort than the world's orators strain for theirs.
“He had been a wit in his youth,” he told us with expressions
((
(C


## p. 8839 (#463) ###########################################

CHARLES LAMB
8839
of a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the impres-
sion had begun to wear away that I was enabled, with something
like a smile, to recall the striking incongruity of the confession
- understanding the term in its worldly acceptation -- with the
frame and physiognomy of the person before me. His brow
would have scared away the Levities — the Jocos Risus-que-
faster than the Loves fled the face of Dis at Enna.