mended above the profane mockery of the Stuarts and their Book of Sports." Lamb had said the same thing to Barton in a letter in the spring, 1824, referring there to "Southey's book" as his authority-this being The Book of the Church, 1824. Page 194, line 13. Native... Hertfordshire. This was a slight exaggeration. Lamb was London born and bred. But Hertfordshire was his mother and grandmother's county, and all his love of the open air was centred there (see the essay on Mackery End," page 75). Page 194, line 30. My health. Lamb had really been seriously unwell for some time, as the Letters tell us. 66 Page 194, line 34. I was fifty. Lamb was fifty on February 10, 1825. Page 194, line 35. I had grown to my desk. In his first letter to Barton (September 11, 1822) Lamb wrote: "I am like you a prisoner to the desk. I have been chained to that galley thirty years, a long shot. I have almost grown to the wood." Again, to Wordsworth: "I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing) with my breast against this thorn of a Desk." Boldero, Merryweather . . . Feigned names Page 195, line 29. of course. It was Boldero that Lamb pretended was Leigh Hunt's true name (see page 337). And in his fictitious biography of Liston (Vol. I., page 248) Liston's mother was said to have been a Miss Merryweather. In Lamb's early city days there was a banking firm in Cornhill, called Boldero, Adey, Lushington & Boldero. Page 195, line 30. Esto perpetua! "Be thou continual." Page 196, line 6. I could walk it away. Writing to Wordsworth in March 1822, concerning the possibility of being pensioned off, Lamb had said: "I had thought in a green old age (O green thought!) to have retired to Ponder's End-emblematic name-how beautiful! in the Ware road, there to have made up my accounts with heaven and the Company, toddling about between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching on some fine Izaac Walton morning, to Hoddsdon or Amwell, careless as a Beggar, but walking walking ever till I fairly walkd myself off my legs, dying walking." And again, writing to Southey after the emancipation, he says (August, 1825): "Mary walks her twelve miles a day some days, and I twenty on others. 'Tis all holiday with me now, you know." Page 196, line 15. "That's born . . ." I know no more the way to temporal rule, Than he that's born and has his years come to him In a rough desart. Middleton's Mayor of Queenborough," Act I., Scene 1, lines 101-103. From Page 196, line 36. A Tragedy by Sir Robert Howard. "The Vestal Virgin; or, The Roman Ladies," by Sir Robert Howard (1626-1698). Lamb included this passage in the "Serious Fragments" at the end of the Garrick plays (see Vol. IV.). Page 197, line 18. Ch John Chambers, son of the Rev. Thomas Chambers, Vicar of Radway-Edgehill, Warwickshire, and an old Christ's Hospitaller, to whom Lamb wrote the famous letter on India House society, printed in the Letters, Canon Ainger's edition, under December, 1818. John Chambers lived until 1872, and had many stories of Lamb. Page 197, line 18. Do Probably Henry Dodwell, to whom Lamb wrote the letters of July, 1816, from Calne, and that of October, 7, 1827, thanking him for a gift of a sucking pig. But there seems (see the letter to Chambers above referred to) to have been also a clerk named Dowley. It was Dodwell who annoyed Lamb by reading The Times till twelve o'clock every morning. Page 197, line 19. Pl. According to the late H. G. Bohn's notes on Chambers' letter, this was W. D. Plumley. Lamb's Page 197, line 26. My "works." See note on page 401. The old India House ledgers of Lamb's day are no longer in existence, but a copy of Booth's Tables of Interest is preserved, with some mock notices from the press on the fly leaves in Lamb's hand. portrait by Meyer was bought for the India Office in 1902. Page 197, line 28. Aquinas. The first complete edition of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1570, filled seventeen folios. Page 197, line 38. My own master. As a matter of fact Lamb found the time rather heavy on his hands now and then; and he took to searching for beauties in the Garrick plays in the British Museum (see Vol. IV. of this edition) as a refuge. The Elgin marbles were moved there in 1816. Page 198, line 3. Everlasting flints. Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint. Page 198, line 26. " Romeo and Juliet," Act II., Scene 6, lines 16, 17. Lucretian pleasure. A reference to the beginning of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, Book II. :— Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis, E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem, which Munro translates: "It is sweet, when on the great sea the winds trouble its waters, to behold from land another's deep distress." Page 198, line 29. And what is it all for? At these words, in the London Magazine, came the passage: "I recite those verses of Cowley, which so mightily agree with my constitution. "Business! the frivolous pretence Of human lusts to shake off innocence : Business! the thing which I of all things hate: Or I repeat my own lines, written in my Clerk state :— "Who first invented work-and bound the free To the ever-haunting importunity Of business, in the green fields, and the town- For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel- "O this divine Leisure !-Reader, if thou art furnished with the Old Series of the London, turn incontinently to the third volume (page 367), and you will see my present condition there touched in a 'Wish' by a daintier pen than I can pretend to. I subscribe to that Sonnet toto corde." The sonnet referred to, beginning They talk of time and of time's galling yoke, will be found quoted on page 329. It was, of course, by Lamb himself. To the other sonnet he gave the title "Work" (see Vol. V., page 55). Cowley's lines are from "The Complaint." Page 198, line 31. NOTHING-TO-DO. Lamb wrote to Barton in 1827: "Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps-good works." Page 198, line 36. "As low as to the fiends." First Player. Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel, As low as to the fiends! Hamlet," Act II., Scene 2, lines 517-519. Page 198, line 37.. I am no longer. In the London Magazine "I am no longer Js D- -n. Page 198, line 37. " I am Retired Leisure. And add to these retired Leisure, Page 198, line 41. Cum dignitate. cum dignitate"-"Ease with dignity." Page 199, line 1. Opus operatum est. performed." Milton, Il Penseroso, lines 49-50. "The ceremony has been Page 199. THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826, where it was one of the Popular Fallacies, under the title, "That my Lord Shaftesbury and Sir William Temple are models of the Genteel Style in Writing.— We should prefer saying-of the Lordly and the Gentlemanly. Nothing," &c. Page 199, line 5. My Lord Shaftesbury. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the grandson of the great statesman, and the author of the Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times, 1711, and other less known works. In the essay "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading" (page 172) Lamb says, "Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me. Page 199, line 5. Sir William Temple. Sir William Temple (16281699), diplomatist and man of letters, the patron of Swift, and the husband of the letter-writing Dorothy Osborne. His first diplomatic mission was in 1665, to Christopher Bernard von Glialen, the princebishop of Munster, who grew the northern cherries (see page 200). Afterwards he was accredited to Brussels and the Hague, and subsequently became English ambassador at the Hague. He was recalled in 1670, and spent the time between then and 1674, when he returned, in adding to his garden at Sheen, near Richmond, and in literary pursuits. He re-entered active political life in 1674, but retired again in 1680, and moved to an estate near Farnham; which he named Moor Park, laid out in the Dutch style, and made famous for its wall fruit. Hither Swift came, as amanuensis, in 1689, and he was there, with intervals of absence, in 1699, when Temple died, "and with him," Swift wrote in his Diary, "all that was good and amiable among men." He was buried in Westminster Abbey, but his heart, by his special wish, was placed in a silver casket under the sundial at Moor Park, near his favourite window seat. Temple's essays, under the title Miscellanea, were published in 1680 and 1692; his works, in several volumes, between 1700 and 1709. The best-known essay is that on "Ancient and Modern Learning," but Lamb refers also to those "On Health and Long Life," "Of the Cure of the Gout," "Of Gardening." The quotation on pages 200 and 201 does not exactly end Temple's garden essay, as Lamb says. Lamb has slightly altered Temple's punctuation. Abraham Cowley's Essays, including one on "The Garden," had been published in his Works in 1668. Page 201, line 21. Say with Horace. The Epistles, I., xviii., lines 104-112. Page 202. BARBARA S. In This little story exhibits, perhaps better than anything that Lamb wrote, his curious gift of blending fact and fancy, of building upon a foundation of reality a structure of whimsicality and invention. the late Charles Kent's edition of Lamb's works is printed a letter from Miss Kelly, the actress, and a friend of the Lambs, in which the true story is told; for it was she, as indeed Lamb admitted to Wordsworth in a letter in 1825, who told him the incident—" beautifully," he says elsewhere. By Mr. Kent's kind permission I am able to quote passages from Miss Kelly's letter, which was written in 1875 I perfectly remember relating an incident of my childhood to Charles Lamb and his dear sister, and I have not the least doubt that the intense interest he seemed to take in the recital, induced him to adopt it as the principal feature in his beautiful story of "Barbara S--." Much, however, as I venerate the wonderful powers of Charles Lamb as a writer-grateful as I ever must feel to have enjoyed for so many years the friendship of himself and his dear sister, and proudly honoured as I am by the two exquisite sonnets he has given to the world as tributary to my humble talent, I have never been able thoroughly to appreciate the extraordinary skill with which he has, in the construction of his story, desired and contrived so to mystify and characterize the events, as to keep me out of sight, and render it utterly impossible for any one to guess at me as the original heroine. . . In the year 1799, Miss Jackson, one of my mother's daughters, by her first husband, was placed under the special care of dear old Tate Wilkinson, proprietor of the York Theatre, there to practice, as in due progression, what she had learned of Dramatic Art, while a Chorus Singer at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, coming back, as she did after a few years, as the wife of the late celebrated, inimitable Charles Mathews, to the Haymarket Theatre. In 1799, through the influence of my uncle, Michael Kelly, the celebrated singer and composer of that day, I was allowed to become a miniature chorister in her place. . . . One Saturday, during the limited season of nine months in the year, Mr. Peake (dear, good old gentleman !) looking, as I remember he always did-anxiously perplexed-doubtless as to how he could best dole out the too frequently insufficient amount provided for the ill-paid company, silently looked me in the face, while he carefully folded a very dirty, ragged bank note-put it into my hand, patted my cheek, and with a slight pressure on my shoulder, hinting there was no time for our usual gossip-as good as said, "go, my dear," and I hurried down the long gallery, lined down each side with performers of all degrees, more than one of whom whispered as passed-" Is it full pay, dear?" I nodded Yes," and proceeded to my seat on the window of the landing-place. It was a great comfort in those days, to have a bank-note to look at; but not always easy to open one. Mine had been cut and repaired with a line of gum paper, about twenty times as thick as the note itself, threatening the total destruction of the thin part. Now observe in what small matters Fanny and Barbara, were in a marked degree different characters. Barbara, at 11 years of age, was some time before she felt the different size of a guinea to a half guinea, held tight in her hand. I, at nine years old, was not so untaught, or innocent. I was a woman of the world. I took nothing for granted. I had a deep respect for Mr. Peake, but the join might have disfigured the note-destroyed its currency; and it was my business to see all safe. So, I carefully opened it. A two pound-note instead of one! The blood rushed into my face, the tears into my eyes, and for a moment, something like an ecstasy of joy passed through my mind. "Oh! what a blessing to my dear mother!"-"To whom?' -in an instant said my violently beating heart,-"My mother?" Why she would spurn me for the wish. How shall I ever own to her my guilty thought? I trembled violently-I staggered back on my way to the Treasury, but no one would let me pass, until I said, "But Mr. Peake has given me too much." "Too much, has he?" said one, and was followed by a coarse, cold, derisive, general laugh. Oh! how it went to my heart; but on I went. "If you please, Mr. Peake, you have given me a twoA what?" "A two, Sir !" " "A two!-God bless my soul !-tut-tut-tut-tut-dear, dear, dear!—God bless my soul ! There, dear," and without another word, he, in exchange, laid a one pound note on the desk; a new one, quite clean,-a bright, honest looking note,-mine, the one I had a right to, my own, within the limit of my poor deservings. Thus, my dear sir, I give (as you say you wish to have the facts as accurately stated as possible) the simple, absolute truth. As a matter of fact Miss Kelly did afterwards play in Morton's "Children in the Wood," to Lamb's great satisfaction. The incident of the roast fowl is in that play. In Vol. I., page 184 and onwards, will be found more than one eulogy of Miss Kelly's acting. See also notes in that volume, where Lamb's two sonnets upon her will be found. |