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'So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be !'-&c., &c.

whose custom it is, without any deserving, is too metaphysical, and your taste too to importune authors to give unto them correct; at least I must allege something their books.' I am sorry 'tis imperfect, as against you both, to excuse my own dotagethe lottery board annexed to it also is. Methinks you might modernise and elegantise this Supersedeas, and place it in front of your Joan of Arc, as a gentle hint to Messrs. Parke, &c. One of the happiest emblems, and comicalest cuts, is the owl and little chirpers, page 63.

“Wishing you all amusement, which your true emblem-fancier can scarce fail to find in even bad emblems, I remain your caterer to command, "C. LAMB.

"Love and respects to Edith. I hope she is well. How does your Calendar prosper ?"

TO MR. SOUTHEY.

"Nov. 8th, 1798.

“I perfectly accord with your opinion of old Wither; Quarles is a wittier writer, but Wither lays more hold of the heart. Quarles

But you allow some elaborate beauties-you should have extracted 'em. 'The Ancient Marinere' plays more tricks with the mind than that last poem, which is yet one of the finest written. But I am getting too dogmatical; and before I degenerate into abuse, I will conclude with assuring you that I am "Sincerely yours,

"C. LAMB.

"I am going to meet Lloyd at Ware on Saturday, to return on Sunday. Have you any commands or commendations to the

metaphysician? I shall be very happy if you will dine or spend any time with me in your way through the great ugly city; but I know you have other ties upon you in these parts.

"Love and respects to Edith, and friendly remembrances to Cottle."

66

thinks of his audience when he lectures; Wither soliloquises in company with a full heart. What wretched stuff are the 'Divine Fancies' of Quarles! Religion appears to him no longer valuable than it furnishes matter for quibbles and riddles; he turns In this year, Mr. Cottle proposed to publish God's grace into wantonness. Wither is like an annual volume of fugitive poetry by an old friend, whose warm-heartedness and various hands, under the title of the " Annual estimable qualities make us wish he possessed Anthology;" to which Coleridge and Southey more genius, but at the same time make us were principal contributors, the first volume willing to dispense with that want. I always of which was published in the following year. love W., and sometimes admire Q. Still that To this little work Lamb contributed a short portrait poem is a fine one; and the extract religious effusion in blank verse, entitled from 'Shepherds' Hunting' places him in a "Living without God in the World." The starry height far above Quarles. If you following letter to Southey refers to this wrote that review in 'Crit. Rev.,' I am sorry poem by its first words, "Mystery of God," you are so sparing of praise to the 'Ancient and recurs to the rejected sonnet to his Marinere ;'- -so far from calling it as you sister; and alludes to an intention, afterdo, with some wit, but more severity, 'Awards changed, of entitling the proposed Dutch Attempt,' &c., I call it a right English collection "Gleanings." attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they celebrate. I never so deeply felt the pathetic as in that part,

'A spring of love gush'd from my heart,
And I bless'd them unaware-'

It stung me into high pleasure through sufferings. Lloyd does not like it; his head

TO MR. SOUTHEY.

"Nov. 28th, 1798.

"I can have no objection to your printing 'Mystery of God' with my name, and all due acknowledgments for the honour and favour of the communication; indeed, 'tis a poem that can dishonour no name. Now, that is in the true strain of modern modestovanitas. But for the sonnet, I heartily wish it, as I thought it was, dead and

.

forgotten. If the exact circumstances under by a caricature of Gilray's, in which Coleridge and Southey were introduced with asses' heads, and Lloyd and Lamb as toad and frog. In the number for July appeared the well-known poem of the "New Morality," in which all the prominent objects of the hatred of these champions of religion and order were introduced as offering homage to Lepaux, a French charlatan,—of whose existence Lamb had never even heard.

which I wrote could be known or told, it would be an interesting sonnet; but, to an indifferent and stranger reader, it must appear a very bald thing, certainly inadmissible in a compilation. I wish you could affix a different name to the volume; there is a contemptible book, a wretched assortment of vapid feelings, entitled Pratt's Gleanings, which hath damned and impropriated the title for ever. Pray think of some other. The gentleman is better known (better had he remained unknown) by an Ode to Benevolence, written and spoken for and at the annual dinner of the Humane Society, who walk in procession once a-year, with all the objects of their charity before them, to return God thanks for giving them such benevolent hearts."

At this time Lamb's most intimate associates were Lloyd and Jem White, the author of the Falstaff Letters. When Lloyd was in town, he and White lodged in the same house, and were fast friends, though no two men could be more unlike, Lloyd having no drollery in his nature, and White nothing else. "You will easily understand," observes Mr. Southey, in a letter with which he favoured the publisher, "how Lamb could sympathise with both.”

The literary association of Lamb with Coleridge and Southey drew down upon him the hostility of the young scorners of the "Anti-Jacobin," who luxuriating in boyish pride and aristocratic patronage, tossed the arrows of their wit against all charged with innovation, whether in politics or poetry, and cared little whom they wounded. No one could be more innocent than Lamb of political heresy; no one more strongly opposed to new theories in morality, which he always regarded with disgust; and yet he not only shared in the injustice which accused his friends of the last, but was confounded in the charge of the first, his only crime being that he had published a few poems deeply coloured with religious enthusiasm, in conjunction with two other men of genius, who were dazzled by the glowing phantoms which the French Revolution had raised. The very first number of the " AntiJacobin Magazine and Review" was adorned

"Couriers and Stars, sedition's evening host,
Thou Morning Chronicle, and Morning Post,
Whether ye make the Rights of Man' your theme,
Your country libel, and your God blaspheme,
Or dirt on private worth and virtue throw,
Still blasphemous or blackguard, praise Lepaux.
And ye five other wandering bards, that move
In sweet accord of harmony and love,

C- -dge and S-th-y, L-d, and L-b and Co.,
Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux!"

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fatherless, and his wife destitute. Ex his the future happiness of mankind, not with disce, his friends Lamb and Southey." It the inspiration of the poet, but with the was surely rather too much even for partisans, when denouncing their political opponents as men who "dirt on private worth and virtue threw," thus to slander two young men of the most exemplary character-one, of an almost puritanical exactness of demeanour and conduct—and the other, persevering in a life of noble self-sacrifice, chequered only by the frailties of a sweet nature, which endeared him even to those who were not admitted to the intimacy necessary to appreciate the touching example of his severer virtues !

grave and passionless voice of the oracle. There was nothing better calculated at once to feed and to make steady the enthusiasm of youthful patriots than the high speculations, in which he taught them to engage on the nature of social evils and the great destiny of his species. No one would have suspected the author of those wild theories, which startled the wise and shocked the prudent, in the calm, gentlemanly person who rarely said anything above the most gentle common-place, and took interest in little beyond the whist-table. His peculiar opinions were entirely subservient to his love of letters. He thought any man who had written a book had attained a superiority

class, and could scarcely understand other distinctions. Of all his works Lamb liked his "Essay on Sepulchres" the best—a short development of a scheme for preserving in one place the memory of all great writers deceased, and assigning to each his proper station, quite chimerical in itself, but accompanied with solemn and touching musings on life and death and fame, embodied in a style of singular refinement and beauty.

If Lamb's acquaintance with Coleridge and Southey procured for him the scorn of the more virulent of the Anti-Jacobin party, he showed by his intimacy with another dis-over his fellows which placed him in another tinguished object of their animosity, that he was not solicitous to avert it. He was introduced by Mr. Coleridge to one of the most remarkable persons of that stirring time-the author of "Caleb Williams," and of the "Political Justice." The first meeting between Lamb and Godwin did not wear a promising aspect. Lamb grew warm as the conviviality of the evening advanced, and indulged in some freaks of humour which had not been dreamed of in Godwin's philosophy; and the philosopher, forgetting the equanimity with which he usually looked on the vicissitudes of the world or the whisttable, broke into an allusion to Gilray's caricature, and asked, “Pray, Mr. Lamb, are you toad or frog?" Coleridge was apprehensive of a rupture; but calling the next morning on Lamb, he found Godwin seated at breakfast with him; and an interchange of civilities and card-parties was established, which lasted through the life of Lamb, whom Godwin only survived a few months. Indifferent altogether to the politics of the age, Lamb could not help being struck with productions of its new-born energies, so remarkable as the works and the character of Godwin. He seemed to realise in himself what Wordsworth long afterwards described, "the central calm at the heart of all agitation." Through the medium of his mind the stormy convulsions of society were seen "silent as in a picture." Paradoxes the most daring wore the air of deliberate wisdom as he pronounced them. He foretold

CHAPTER V.
[1799, 1800.]

LETTERS TO SOUTHEY, COLERIDGE, MANNING, AND

WORDSWORTH.

THE year 1799 found Lamb engaged during his leisure hours in completing his tragedy of John Woodvil, which seems to have been finished about Christmas, and transmitted to Mr. Kemble. Like all young authors, who are fascinated by the splendour of theatrical representation, he longed to see his conceptions embodied on the stage, and to receive his immediate reward in the sympathy of a crowd of excited spectators. The hope was vain ;—but it cheered him in many a lonely hour, and inspired him to write when exhausted with the business of the day, and when the less powerful stimulus of the press would have been insufficient to rouse him. In the mean time he continued to correspond

with Mr. Southey, to send him portions of his play, and to reciprocate criticisms with him. The following three letters, addressed to Mr. Southey in the spring of this year, require no commentary.

TO MR. SOUTHEY.

"Jan. 21st, 1799.

"I am to blame for not writing to you before on my own account; but I know you can dispense with the expressions of gratitude or I should have thanked you before for all May's kindness.* He has liberally supplied the person I spoke to you of with money, and had procured him a situation just after himself had lighted upon a similar one, and engaged too far to recede. But May's kindness was the same, and my thanks to you and him are the same. May went about on this business as if it had been his own. But you knew John May before this, so I will be silent.

"I shall be very glad to hear from you when convenient. I do not know how your Calendar and other affairs thrive; but above all, I have not heard a great while of your Madoc-the opus magnum. I would willingly send you something to give a value to this letter; but I have only one slight passage to send you, scarce worth the sending, which I want to edge in somewhere into my play, which, by the way, hath not received the addition of ten lines, besides, since I saw you. A father, old Walter Woodvil, (the witch's PROTÉGÉ) relates this of his son John, who 'fought in adverse armies,' being a royalist, and his father a parliamentary man.

'I saw him in the day of Worcester fight, Whither he came at twice seven years,

Under the discipline of the Lord Falkland, (His uncle by the mother's side,

Who gave his youthful politics a bent

Quite from the principles of his father's house ;)
There did I see this valiant Lamb of Mars,
This sprig of honour, this unbearded John,
This veteran in green years, this sprout, this Woodvil,
(With dreadless ease guiding a fire-hot steed,
Which seem'd to scorn the manage of a boy,)

Prick forth with such a mirth into the field,

To mingle rivalship and acts of war
Even with the sinewy masters of the art,-

You would have thought the work of blood had been
A play-game merely, and the rabid Mars
Had put his harmful hostile nature off,
To instruct raw youth in images of war,
And practice of the unedged players' foils.
The rough fanatic and blood-practised soldiery

See ante, p. 31.

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"Dear Southey, I have received your little volume, for which I thank you, though I do not entirely approve of this sort of intercourse, where the presents are all on one side. I have read the last Eclogue again with great pleasure. It hath gained considerably by abridgment, and now I think it wants nothing but enlargement. You will call this one of tyrant Procrustes' criticisms, to cut and pull so to his own standard; but the old lady is so great a favourite with me, I want to hear more of her; and of 'Joanna' you have given us still less. But the picture of the rustics leaning over the bridge, and the old lady travelling abroad on summer evening to see her garden watered, are images so new and true, that I decidedly prefer this 'Ruin'd Cottage' to any poem in the book. Indeed I think it the only one that will bear comparison with your 'Hymn to the Penates,' in a former volume.

"I compare dissimilar things, as one would a rose and a star, for the pleasure they give us, or as a child soon learns to choose between a cake and a rattle; for dissimilars have mostly some points of comparison. The next best poem, I think, is the first Eclogue; 'tis very complete, and abounding in little pictures and realities. The remainder Eclogues, excepting only the 'Funeral,' I do not greatly admire. I miss one, which had at least as

of the 'Sailor' is also imperfect. Any dissenting minister may say and do as much.

"These remarks, I know, are crude and unwrought, but I do not lay claim to much

wise of things, but fasten upon particulars.
After all, there is a great deal in the book
that I must, for time, leave unmentioned, to
deserve my thanks for its own sake, as well
as for the friendly remembrances implied in
the gift. I again return you my thanks.
"Pray present my love to Edith.

good a title to publication as the 'Witch,' clusion of our bills of lading. The finishing or the 'Sailor's Mother.' You call'd it the 'Last of the Family.' The 'Old Woman of Berkeley' comes next; in some humours I would give it the preference above any. But who the devil is Matthew of Westminster? accurate thinking. I never judge systemYou are as familiar with these antiquated monastics, as Swedenborg, or, as his followers affect to call him, the Baron, with his invisibles. But you have raised a very comic effect out of the true narrative of Matthew of Westminster. "Tis surprising with how little addition you have been able to convert, with so little alteration, his incidents, meant for terror, into circumstances and food for the spleen. The Parody is not so successful; it has one famous line, indeed, which conveys the finest death-bed image I ever met with: 'The doctor whisper'd the nurse, and the surgeon knew

what he said.'

But the offering the bride three times bears not the slightest analogy or proportion to the fiendish noises three times heard! In 'Jaspar,' the circumstance of the great light is very affecting. But I had heard you mention it before. The 'Rose' is the only insipid piece in the volume; it hath neither thorns nor sweetness; and, besides, sets all chronology and probability at defiance.

"Cousin Margaret,' you know, I like. The allusions to the Pilgrim's Progress are particularly happy, and harmonise tacitly and delicately with old cousins and aunts. To familiar faces we do associate familiar scenes, and accustomed objects; but what hath Apollidon and his sea-nymphs to do in these affairs? Apollyon I could have borne, though he stands for the devil, but who is Apollidon? I think you are too apt to conclude faintly, with some cold moral, as in the end of the poem called 'The Victory'—

TO MR. SOUTHEY.

"C. L."

"March 20th, 1799.

"I am hugely pleased with your 'Spider,' 'your old freemason,' as you call him. The three first stanzas are delicious; they seem to me a compound of Burns and Old Quarles, those kind of home-strokes, where more is felt than strikes the ear; a terseness, a jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter. The measure, too, is novel and pleasing. I could almost wonder, Rob. Burns, in his lifetime never stumbled upon it. The fourth stanza is less striking, as being less original. The fifth falls off. It has no felicity of phrase, no old-fashioned phrase or feeling.

'Young hopes, and love's delightful dreams,'

savour neither of Burns nor Quarles; they seem more like shreds of many a modern sentimental sonnet. The last stanza hath nothing striking in it, if I except the two concluding lines, which are Burns all over. could be looked to. I am sure this is a kind I wish, if you concur with me, these things of writing, which comes ten-fold better recommended to the heart, comes there more like a neighbour or familiar, than thousands 'Be thou her comforter, who art the widow's friend;' of Hamnels and Zillahs and Madelons. I beg you will send me the 'Holly-tree,' if it a single common-place line of comfort, which at all resemble this, for it must please me. bears no proportion in weight or number to I have never seen it. I love this sort of the many lines which describe suffering. poems, that open a new intercourse with the This is to convert religion into mediocre most despised of the animal and insect race. feelings, which should burn, and glow, and tremble. A moral should be wrought into the body and soul, the matter and tendency of a poem, not tagged to the end, like a 'God send the good ship into harbour,' at the con

I think this vein may be further opened. Peter Pindar hath very prettily apostrophised a fly; Burns hath his mouse and his louse; Coleridge less successfully hath made overtures of intimacy to a jackass, therein

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