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C. L."

things to say should be silenced for want of time. My rooms are luxurious; one is for 1007. This Custom-and-Duty-Age would prints and one for books; a summer and a have made the Preacher on the Mount take winter-parlour. When shall I ever see you out a licence, and St. Paul's Epistles not in them? missible without a stamp. O that you may find means to go on! But alas! where is Sir G. Beaumont ?-Sotheby? What is become of the rich Auditors in Albemarle Street? Your letter has saddened me.

MISS LAMB TO MRS. HAZLITT.

"November 7th, 1809.

"My dear Sarah,-The dear, quiet, lazy, "I am so tired with my journey, being up delicious month we spent with you is rememall night, I have neither things nor words bered by me with such regret that I feel in my power. I believe I expressed my quite discontented and Winterslow-sick. I admiration of the pamphlet. Its power over assure you I never passed such a pleasant me was like that which Milton's pamphlets time in the country in my life, both in the must have had on his contemporaries, who house and out of it-the card-playing were tuned to them. What a piece of quarrels, and a few gaspings for breath, prose! Do you hear if it is read at all? I am out of the world of readers. I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up unto the old things.

"I have put up shelves. You never saw a book-case in more true harmony with the contents, than what I've nailed up in a room, which, though new, has more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see-as one sometimes gets a friend in the middle of life, who becomes an old friend in a short

continues to cover it; not a ray of meaning dawns through it. With sullen and angry hope he reaches for the Vulgate, his old and sworn enemy, the treacherous confederate of the Roman Antichrist, which he so gladly, when he can, rebukes for idolatrous falsehood, that had dared place

aid.

Within the sanctuary itself their shrines,
Abominations—

Now O thought of humiliation-he must entreat its
See! there has the sly spirit of apostacy worked-in
a phrase, which favours the doctrine of purgatory, the
intercession of saints, or the efficacy of prayers for the
dead; and what is worst of all, the interpretation is
plausible. The original Hebrew might be forced into
this meaning and no other meaning seems to lie in it,
none to hover above it in the heights of allegory, none to
lurk beneath it even in the depths of Cabala! This is the
work of the Tempter; it is a cloud of darkness conjured
up between the truth of the sacred letters and the eyes
of his understanding, by the malice of the evil-one, and
for a trial of his faith! Must he then at length confess,
must he subscribe the name of LUTHER to an exposition
which consecrates a weapon for the hand of the idolatrous
Hierarchy Never! Never!

"There still remains one auxiliary in reserve, the translation of the Seventy. The Alexandrine Greeks, anterior to the Church itself, could intend no support to its corruptions-The Septuagint will have profaned the Altar of Truth with no incense for the nostrils of the universal Bishop to snuff up. And here again his hopes are baffled! Exactly at this perplexed passage had the Greek translator given his understanding a holiday, and made his pen supply its place. O honoured Luther! as easily mightest thou convert the whole City of Rome,

after your swift footsteps up the high hills, excepted; and those draw-backs are not unpleasant in the recollection. We have got some salt butter, to make our toast seem like yours, and we have tried to eat meat suppers, but that would not do, for we left our appetites behind us, and the dry loaf, which offended you, now comes in at night unaccompanied; but, sorry am I to add, it is soon followed by the pipe. We smoked the very first night of our arrival.

"Great news! I have just been inter

with the Pope and the conclave of Cardinals inclusively, as strike a spark of light from the words, and nothing but words, of the Alexandrine version. Disappointed, despondent, enraged, ceasing to think, yet continuing his brain on the stretch in solicitation of a thought; and gradually giving himself up to angry fancies, to recollections of past persecutions, to uneasy fears, and inward defiances, and floating images of the Evil Being, their supposed personal author; he sinks, without perceiving it, into a trance of slumber; during which his brain retains its waking energies, excepting that what would have been mere thoughts before, now, (the action and counterweight of his senses and of their impressions being withdrawn) shape and condense themselves into things, into realities! Repeatedly half-wakening, and his eye-lids as often reciosing, the objects which really surround him form the place and scenery of his dream. All at once he sees the arch-fiend coming forth on the wall of the room, from the very spot, perhaps, on which his eyes had been fixed, vacantly, during the perplexed moments of his former meditation: the inkstand which he had at the same time been using, becomes associated with it; and in that struggle of rage, which in these distempered dreams almost constantly precedes the helpless terror by the pain of which we are finally awakened, he imagines that he hurls it at the intruder, or not improbably in the first instant of awakening, while yet both his imagination and his eyes are possessed by the dream, he actually hurls it. Some weeks after, perhaps, during which interval he had often mused on the incident, undetermined whether to deem it a visitation of Satan to him in the body or out of the body, he discovers for the first time the dark spot on his wall, and receives it as a sign and pledge vouchsafed to him of the event having actually taken place."

rupted by Mr. Daw, who came to tell me he was yesterday elected a Royal Academician. He said none of his own friends voted for him, he got it by strangers, who were pleased with his picture of Mrs. White.

"Charles says he does not believe Northcote ever voted for the admission of any one. Though a very cold day, Daw was in a prodigious perspiration, for joy at his good fortune.

"More great news! My beautiful green curtains were put up yesterday, and all the doors listed with green baize, and four new boards put to the coal-hole, and fastening hasps put to the windows, and my dyed Manning-silk cut out.

"We had a good cheerful meeting on Wednesday, much talk of Winterslow, its woods and its sun-flowers. I did not so much like Pat Winterslow as I now like him for having been with us at Winterslow. We roasted the last of his 'Beech of oily nut prolific' on Friday at the Captain's. Nurse is now established in Paradise, alias the incurable ward of Westminster Hospital. I have seen her sitting in most superb state, surrounded by her seven incurable companions. They call each other ladies; nurse looks as if she would be considered as the first lady in the ward; only one seemed at all likely to rival her in dignity.

"A man in the India House has resigned, by which Charles will get twenty pounds a year, and White has prevailed on him to write some more lottery puffs; if that ends in smoke the twenty pounds is a sure card, and has made us very joyful.

"I continue very well, and return you very sincere thanks for my good health and improved looks, which have almost made Mrs. die with envy. She longs to come to Winterslow as much as the spiteful elder sister did to go to the well for a gift to spit diamonds.

"Jane and I have agreed to boil a round of beef for your suppers when you come to town again. She (Jane) broke two of the Hogarth glasses, while we were away, whereat I made a great noise. Farewell. Love to William, and Charles's love and good wishes for the speedy arrival of the 'Life of Holcroft,' and the bearer thereof.

"Yours, most affectionately,

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"Charles told Mrs. Hazlitt had found a well in his garden, which, water being scarce in your county, would bring him in two hundred a year; and she came, in great haste, the next morning, to ask me if it were true.

"Your brother and sister are quite well.”

The country excursions, with which Lamb sometimes occupied his weeks of vacation, were taken with fear and trembling-often foregone-and finally given up, in consequence of the sad effects which the excitements of travel and change produced in his beloved companion. The following refers to one of these disasters :

TO MR. HAZLITT.

"August 9th, 1810.

"Dear H.,-Epistemon is not well. Our pleasant excursion has ended sadly for one of us. You will guess I mean my sister. She got home very well (I was very ill on the journey) and continued so till Monday night, when her complaint came on, and she is now absent from home.

"I am glad to hear you are all well. I think I shall be mad if I take any more journeys with two experiences against it. I find all well here. Kind remembrances to Sarah,—have just got her letter.

"H. Robinson has been to Blenheim, he says you will be sorry to hear that we should not have asked for the Titian Gallery there. One of his friends knew of it, and asked to see it. It is never shown but to those who inquire for it.

"The pictures are all Titians, Jupiter and Ledas, Mars and Venuses, &c., all naked pictures, which may be a reason they don't show it to females. But he says they are very fine; and perhaps it is shown separately to put another fee into the shower's pocket. Well, I shall never see it.

"I have lost all wish for sights. God bless you. I shall be glad to see you in London. "Yours truly, C. LAMB."

"Thursday."

Mr. Wordsworth's Essay on Epitaphs, afterwards appended to "The Excursion," produced the following letter:

now.

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

6

through so many thousand applications, many of them no doubt quite misplaced, as "Friday, 19th Oct. 1810. E. I. Ho. I have seen in Islington churchyard (I think) "Dear W.,-Mary has been very ill, which an Epitaph to an infant, who died 'Etatis you have heard, I suppose, from the Mon- four months,' with this seasonable inscription tagues. She is very weak and low spirited appended, Honour thy father and thy I was much pleased with your con- mother; that thy days may be long in the tinuation of the Essay on Epitaphs. It is land,' &c. Sincerely wishing your children the only sensible thing which has been long life to honour, &c. written on that subject, and it goes to the bottom. In particular I was pleased with your translation of that turgid epitaph into the plain feeling under it. It is perfectly a test.

But what is the reason we have no good epitaphs after all?

"I remain,

C. LAMB."

CHAPTER VI.

LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, ETC., CHIEFLY RESPECTING
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS.
[1815 to 1818.]

their utmost spleen, by the appearance, in 1814, of "The Excursion," (in the quarto form marked by the bitter flippancy of Lord Byron); and by the publication, in 1815, of two volumes of Poems, some of which only were new. The following letters are chiefly expressive of Lamb's feelings respecting these remarkable works, and the treatment which his own Review of the latter received from Mr. Gifford, then the Editor of the Quarterly Review, for which it was written. The following letter is in acknowledgment of an early copy of "The Excursion."

"A very striking instance of your position might be found in the churchyard of Dittonupon-Thames, if you know such a place. Ditton-upon-Thames has been blessed by the residence of a poet, who, for love or money, THE admirers of Wordsworth-few, but I do not well know which, has dignified energetic and hopeful-were delighted, and every grave-stone, for the last few years, his opponents excited to the expression of with bran-new verses, all different, and all ingenious, with the author's name at the bottom of each. This sweet Swan of Thames has artfully diversified his strains and his rhymes, that the same thought never occurs twice; more justly, perhaps, as no thought ever occurs at all, there was a physical impossibility that the same thought should recur. It is long since I saw and read these inscriptions, but I remember the impression was of a smug usher at his desk in the intervals of instruction, levelling his pen. Of death, as it consists of dust and worms, and mourners and uncertainty, he had never thought; but the word 'death' he had often seen separate and conjunct with other words, till he had learned to speak of all its attributes as glibly as Unitarian Belsham will discuss you the attributes of the word 'God' in a pulpit; and will talk of infinity with a tongue that dangles from a skull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination two inches, or further than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to the soundingboard of the pulpit.

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"1814.

"Dear Wordsworth,-I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great armful of poetry which you have sent me; and to get it before the rest of the world too! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you, but M. B. came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it, but we expect "But the epitaphs were trim, and sprag, restitution in a day or two. It is the noblest and patent, and pleased the survivors of conversational poem I ever read—a day in Thames Ditton above the old mumpsimus of Heaven. The part (or rather main body) 'Afflictions Sore.'. . . . To do justice though, which has left the sweetest odour on my it must be owned that even the excellent memory (a bad term for the remains of an feeling which dictated this dirge when new, impression so recent) is the Tales of the must have suffered something in passing Church-yard;—the only girl among seven

brethren, born out of due time, and not many more, for it will be a stock book with duly taken away again;-the deaf man me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. and the blind man ;-the Jacobite and the There is a great deal of noble matter about Hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; mountain scenery, yet not so much as the Scarron-entry of the rusticating parson to overpower and discountenance a poor upon his solitude;-these were all new to Londoner or south-countryman entirely, me too. My having known the story of though Mary seems to have felt it occasionMargaret (at the beginning), a very old ally a little too powerfully, for it was her acquaintance, even as long back as when I remark during reading it, that by your saw you first at Stowey, did not make her system it was doubtful whether a liver in reappearance less fresh. I don't know what towns had a soul to be saved. She almost to pick out of this best of books upon the trembled for that invisible part of us in her. best subjects for partial naming. That "Save for a late excursion to Harrow, and gorgeous sunset is famous ;* I think it must a day or two on the banks of the Thames have been the identical one we saw on Salis- this summer, rural images were fast fading bury Plain five years ago, that drew P from my mind, and by the wise provision of from the card-table, where he had sat from the Regent, all that was country-fy'd in the rise of that luminary to its unequalled Parks is all but obliterated. The very colour setting; but neither he nor I had gifted eyes of green is vanished; the whole surface of to see those symbols of common things glo- Hyde Park is dry crumbling sand (Arabia rified, such as the prophets saw them in Arenosa), not a vestige or hint of grass ever that sunset-the wheel, the potter's clay, having grown there; booths and drinkingthe washpot, the wine-press, the almond-places go all round it for a mile and half, I tree rod, the baskets of figs, the four-fold am confident-I might say two miles in visaged head, the throne, and Him that sat circuit-the stench of liquors, bad tobacco, thereon.† dirty people and provisions, conquers the air, and we are stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park."

"One feeling I was particularly struck with, as what I recognised so very lately at Harrow Church on entering in it after a hot and secular day's pleasure, the instantaneous coolness and calming, almost transforming properties of a country church just entered; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness, or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being pure country, exactly what you have reduced into words-but I am feeling that which I cannot express. The reading your lines about it fixed me for a time, a monument in Harrow Church; do you know it? with its fine long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high site, as far as Salisbury spire itself almost.

"I shall select a day or two, very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to

• The passage to which the allusion applies does not picture a sunset, but the effect of sunlight on a receding mist among the mountains, in the second book of "The

Excursion."

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Lamb was delighted with the proposition, made through Southey, that he should review "The Excursion" in the "Quarterly "

though he had never before attempted contemporaneous criticism, and cherished a dislike to it, which the event did not diminish. The ensuing letter was addressed while meditating on his office, and uneasy lest he should lose it for want of leisure.

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"1814.

"My dear W.-I have scarce time or quiet to explain my present situation, how unquiet and distracted it is, owing to the absence of some of my compeers, and to the deficient state of payments at E. I. H., owing to bad peace speculations in the calico market. (I write this to W. W., Esq., Collector of Stamp Duties for the conjoint Northern Counties, not to W. W., Poet.) I go back, and have for these many days past, to evening work, generally at the rate of nine hours a day. The nature of my work, too, puzzling and

its being a characteristic speech. * That it was no settled comparative estimate of Voltaire with any of his own tribe of buffoonsno injustice, even if you spoke it, for I dared say you never could relish Candide.' I know I tried to get through it about a twelvemonth since, and couldn't for the dulness. Now I think I have a wider range in buffoonery than you. Too much toleration perhaps.

"I finish this after a raw ill-baked dinner fast gobbled up to set me off to office again, after working there till near four. O how I wish I were a rich man, even though I were squeezed camel-fashion at getting through that needle's eye that is spoken of in the Written Word. Apropos ; is the Poet of The Excursion' a Christian? or is it the Pedlar and the Priest that are?

"I find I miscalled that celestial splendour of the mist going off, a sunset. That only shows my inaccuracy of head.

hurrying, has so shaken my spirits, that
my sleep is nothing but a succession of
dreams of business I cannot do, of as-
sistants that give me no assistance, of
terrible responsibilities. I reclaimed your
book, which Hazlitt has uncivilly kept, only
two days ago, and have made shift to read it
again with shattered brain. It does not lose
-rather some parts have come out with a
prominence I did not perceive before-but
such was my aching head yesterday (Sunday),
that the book was like a mountain landscape
to one that should walk on the edge of a
precipice; I perceived beauty dizzily. Now,
what I would say is, that I see no prospect
of a quiet half-day, or hour even, till this
week and the next are past. I then hope to
get four weeks' absence. and if then is time
enough to begin, I will most gladly do what
is required, though I feel my inability, for
my brain is always desultory, and snatches
off hints from things, but can seldom follow
a 'work' methodically. But that shall be
no excuse. What I beg you to do is, to let |
me know from Southey, if that will be time
enough for the Quarterly.' i.e., suppose it
done in three weeks from this date (19th
Sept.): if not, it is my bounden duty to
express my regret, and decline it. Mary
thanks you, and feels highly grateful for
your 'Patent of Nobility,' and acknowledges
the author of 'The Excursion' as the legiti-
mate Fountain of Honour. We both agree,
that, to our feeling, Ellen is best as she is.
To us there would have been something re-
pugnant in her challenging her Penance as a
Dowry; the fact is explicable, but how few
are those to whom it would have been
rendered explicit. The unlucky reason of
the detention of 'The Excursion' was Hazlitt,
for whom M. Burney borrowed it, and, after sealed book."
reiterated messages, I only got it on Friday.
His remarks had some vigour in them;
particularly something about an old ruin.
being too modern for your Primeval Nature,
and about a lichen. I forget the passage, but
the whole wore an air of despatch. That
objection which M. Burney had imbibed
from him about Voltaire, I explained to
M. B. (or tried) exactly on your principle of

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"Do, pray, indulge me by writing an answer to the point of time mentioned above, or let Southey. I am ashamed to go bargaining in this way, but indeed I have no time I can reckon on till the first week in October. God send I may not be disappointed in that! Coleridge swore in a letter to me he would review 'The Excursion' in the 'Quarterly.' Therefore, though that shall not stop me, yet if I can do anything, when done, I must know of him if he has anything ready, or I shall fill the world with loud exclaims.

"I keep writing on, knowing the postage is no more for much writing, else so fagged and dispirited I am with cursed India House work, I scarce know what I do. My left arm reposes on The Excursion.' I feel what it would be in quiet. It is now a

The next letter was written after the fatal critique was despatched to the Editor, and before its appearance.

* The passage in which the copy of "Candide," found

in the apartment of the Recluse, is described as "the Hazlitt to energetic vindication of Voltaire from the

dull production of a scoffer's brain," which had excited

charge of dulness. Whether the work, written in mockery of human hopes, be dull, I will not venture to determine; but I do not hesitate, at any risk, to avow a conviction that no book in the world is more adapted to

make a good man wretched.

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