6

reading it, but it might be lost. Can you put me in a way of sending it safely? The kind-hearted owner trusted it to me for six months; I think I was about as many days in getting through it, and I do not think that I skipped a word of it. I have quoted G. F. in my 'Quaker Meeting,' as having said he was lifted up in spirit' (which I felt at the time to be not a Quaker phrase), and the judge and the jury were as dead men under his feet.' I find no such words in his journal, and I did not get them from Sewell, and the latter sentence I am sure I did not mean to invent; I must have put some other Quaker's words into his mouth. Is it a fatality in me, that everything I touch turns into a 'a lye?' I once quoted two lines from a translation of Dante, which Hazlitt very greatly admired, and quoted in a book as proof of the stupendous power of that poet, but no such lines are to be found in the translation, which has been searched for the purpose. I must have dreamed them, for I am quite certain I did not forge them knowingly. What a misfortune to have a lying memory! Your description of Mr. M's place makes me long for a pippin, and some carraways, and a cup of sack, in his orchard, when the sweets of the night came in. Farewell. "C. LAMB."

In the beginning of the year 1823, the "Essays of Elia," collected in a volume, were published by Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who had become the proprietors of the "London Magazine." The book met with a rapid sale, while the magazine in which its contents had appeared declined. The anecdote of the three Quakers gravely walking out of the inn where they had taken tea on the road, on an extortionate demand, one after the other, without paying anything,* had excited some gentle remonstrance on the part of Barton's sister, to which Lamb thus replied.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

"Dear Sir-The approbation of my little book by your sister is very pleasing to me. The Quaker incident did not happen to me, but to Carlisle the surgeon, from whose mouth I have twice heard it, at an interval of ten or twelve years, with little or no variation, and have given it exactly as I could remember it. The gloss which your sister or you have put upon it does not strike me as correct. Carlisle drew no inference from it against the honesty of the Quakers, but only in favour of their surprising coolness; that they should be capable of committing a good joke, with an ut

* See Elia's "Imperfect Sympathies," vol. ii., p. 73.

ter insensibility to its being any jest at all. I have reason to believe in the truth of it, because, as I have said, I heard him repeat it without variation at such an interval. The story loses sadly in print, for Carlisle is the best storyteller I ever heard. The idea of the discovery of roasting pigs I also borrowed from my friend Manning, and am willing to confess both my plagiarisms. Should fate so order it that you shall be in town with your sister, mine bids me say that she shall have great pleasure in being introduced to her.

"They have dragged me again into the magazine, but I feel the spirit of the thing in my own mind quite gone. 'Some brains' (I think Ben Jonson says it) will endure but one skinning.' We are about to have an inundation of poetry from the Lakes-Wordsworth and Southey are coming up strong from the north. How did you like Hartley's sonnets? The first, at least, is vastly fine. Í am ashamed of the shabby letters I send, but I am by nature anything but neat. Therein my mother bore me no Quaker. I never could seal a letter without dropping the wax on one side, besides scalding my fingers. I never had a seal, too, of my own. Writing to a great man lately, who is moreover very heraldic, I borrowed a seal of a friend who, by the female side, claims the protectoral arms of Cromwell. How they must have puzzled my correspondent! My letters are generally charged as double at the postoffice, from their inveterate clumsiness of foldure; so you must not take it disrespectful to yourself if I send you such ungainly scraps. I think I lose 100l. a year at the India House, owing solely to my want of neatness in making up accounts. How I puzzle 'em out at last is the wonder. I have to do with millions!

"It is time to have done my incoherences.
"Believe me yours truly,

Lamb thus records a meeting with the poets.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

"C. LAMB."

"April, 1823. "Dear Sir-I wished for you yesterday. I dined in Parnassus, with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Rogers, and Tom Moore -half the poetry of England constellated and clustered in Gloucester Place! It was a delightful evening! Coleridge was in his finest vein of talk-had all the talk; and let 'em talk as they will of the envy of poets, I am sure not one there but was content to be nothing but a listener. The Muses

were dumb while Apollo lectured on his and their fine art. It is a lie that poets are envious; I have known the best of them, and can speak to it, that they give each other their merits, and are the kindest critics as well as the best authors. I am scribbling a muddy epistle with an aching head, for we did not quaff Hippocrene last night; marry, it was hippocrass rather. Pray accept this as a letter in the mean time."

*

*

*

*

Here is an apology for a letter, referring to the vignette on the titlepage of one of his friend's books.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

"May, 1823.

"Dear Sir-I am vexed to be two letters in your debt, but I have been quite out of the vein lately. A philosophical treatise is wanting of the causes of the backwardness with which persons, after a certain time of life, set about writing a letter. I always feel as if I had nothing to say, and the per formance generally justifies the presentiment.

*

*

*

"I do not exactly see why the goose and little goslings should emblematize a Quaker poet that has no children or but one. But, after all, perhaps it is a pelican. The 'Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin' around it I cannot decipher. The songster of the night pouring out her effusions amid an audience of madge owlets would be at least intelligible. A full pause here comes upon me as if I had not a word more left. I will shake my brain. Once! Twice!-nothing comes up. George Fox recommends waiting on these occasions. wait. Nothing comes. G. Fox-that sets me off again. I have finished the Journal,' and 400 more pages of the 'Doctrinals,' which I picked up for 7s. 6d. If I get on at this rate, the society will be in danger of having two Quaker poets to patronise."

I

The following letter was addressed to Mr. Procter, in acknowledgment of a miniature of Pope which he had presented to Lamb.

TO MR. PROCTER.

"Dear Lad-You must think me a brute beast, a rhinoceros, never to have acknowledged the receipt of your precious present. But, indeed, I am none of those shocking things, but have arrived at that indisposition to letter-writing which would make it a hard exertion to write three lines to a king

to spare a friend's life. Whether it is that the Magazine paying me so much a page, I am loath to throw away composition--how much a sheet do you give your correspondents? I have hung up Pope, and a gem it is, in my town room; I hope for your approval. Though it accompanies the Essay on Man,' I think that was not the poem he is here meditating. He would have looked up, somehow affectedly, as if he were just conceiving Awake, my St. John.' Neither is he in the Rape of the Lock' mood exactly. I think he has just made out the last lines of the Epistle to Jervis,' between gay and tender,

And other beauties envy Wortley's eyes.'

"I'll be hanged if that isn't the line. He is brooding over it with a dreamy phantom of Lady Mary floating before him. He is thinking which is the earliest possible day and hour that she will first see it. What a miniature piece of gentility it is! Why did you give it me? I do not like you enough to give you anything so good.

"I have dined with T. Moore and breakfasted with Rogers since I saw you; have much to say about them when we meet, which, I trust, will be in a week or two. I have been overwatched and overpoeted since Wordsworth has been in town. I was obliged, for health sake, to wish him gone; but, now he is gone, I feel a great loss. I am going to Dalston to recruit, and have serious thoughts of-altering my condition, that is, of taking to sobriety. What do you advise me?

"Rogers spake very kindly of you, as everybody does, and none with so much reason as your

"C. L."

CHAPTER XIII.

[1823.]

Lamb's Controversy with Southey.

In the year 1823 Lamb appeared, for the first and only time of his life, before the public as an assailant; and the object of his attack was one of his oldest and fastest friends, Mr. Southey. It might, indeed, have been predicted of Lamb, that if ever he did enter the arena of personal controversy, it would be with one who had obtained a place in his affection;

for no motive less powerful than the resentment of friendship which deemed itself wounded could place him in a situation so abhorrent to his habitual thoughts. Lamb had, up to this time, little reason to love reviews or reviewers; and the connexion of Southey with "The Quarterly Review," while he felt that it raised, and softened, and refined the tone of that powerful organ of a great party, sometimes vexed him for his friend. His indignation also had been enlisted on behalf of Hazlitt and Hunt, who had been attacked in this work in a manner which he regarded as unfair; for the critics had not been content with descanting on the peculiarities in the style and taste of the one, or reprobating the political or personal vehemence of the other-which were fair subjects of controversy-but spoke of them with a contempt which every man of letters had a right to resent as unjust. He had been much annoyed by an allusion to himself in an article on "Hazlitt's Political Essays," which appeared in the Review for November, 1819, as "one whom we should wish to see in more respectable company;" for he felt a compliment paid him at the expense of a friend as a grievance far beyond any direct attack on himself. He was also exceedingly hurt by a reference made in an article on Dr. Reid's work "On Nervous Affections," which appeared in July, 1822, to an essay which he had contributed some years before to a collection of tracts published by his friend, Mr. Bazil Montague, on the effect of spirituous liquors, entitled "The Confessions of a Drunkard." The contribution of this paper is a striking proof of the prevalence of Lamb's personal regards over all selfish feelings and tastes; for no one was less disposed than he to Montague's theory or practice of abstinence; yet he was willing to gratify his friend by this terrible picture of the extreme effects of intemperance, of which his own occasional deviations from the right line of sobriety had given him hints and glimpses. The reviewer of Dr. Reid, adverting to this essay, speaks of it as "a fearful picture of the consequences of intemperance, which we happen to know is a true tale." How far it was from actual truth, the "Essays of Elia," the production of a later day, in which the maturity of his feeling, humour, and reason is exhibited, may sufficiently show. These articles were not written by Mr. Southey, but they prepared Lamb to feel acutely any attack from the Review; and a paragraph in an article in the number for July, 1823, entitled " Progress of Infidelity," in which he recognised the hand of his old friend, gave poignancy to all the painful associations which had arisen from the same work, and concentrated them in one bitter feeling. After recording some of the confessions