TO MR. PROCTER. "My dear Procter-I am ashamed not to have taken the drift of your pleasant letter, which I find to have been pure invention. But jokes are not suspected in Baotian Enfield. We are plain people, and our talk is of corn, and cattle, and Waltham markets. Besides, I was a little out of sorts when I received it. The fact is, I am involved in a case which has fretted me to death, and I have no reliance except on you to extricate me. I am sure you will give me your best legal advice, having no professional friend besides, but Robinson and Talfourd, with neither of whom, at present, I am on the best of terms. My brother's widow left a will, made during the lifetime of my brother, in which I am named sole executor, by which she bequeaths forty acres of arable property, which it seems she held under covert baron, unknown to my brother, to the heirs of the body of Elizabeth Dowden, her married daughter by a first husband, in fee simple, recoverable by fine; invested property, mind, for there is the difficulty; subjected to leet and quit rent; in short, worded in the most guarded terms, to shut out the property from Isaac Dowden, the husband. Intelligence has just come of the death of this person in India, where he made a will, entailing this property (which seemed entangled enough already) to the heirs of his body, that should not be born of his wife; for it seems, by the law in India, natural children can recover. They have put the cause into exchequer process here, removed by certiorari from the native courts; and the question is, whether I should, as executor, try the cause here, or again re-remove it to the Supreme Sessions at Bangalore, which I understand I can, or plead a hearing before the privy council here. As it involves all the little property of Elizabeth Dowden, I am anxious to take the fittest steps, and what may be least expensive. For God's sake assist me, for the case is so embarrassed that it deprives me of sleep and appetite. M. Burney thinks there is a case like it in chap. 170, sec. 5, in Fearn's Contingent Remainders.' Pray read it over with him dispassionately, and let me have the result. The complexity lies in the questionable power of the husband to alienate in usum; enfeoffments whereof he was only collaterally seised, &c. "I had another favour to beg, which is the beggarliest of beggings. A few lines of verse for a young friend's album (six will be enough). M. Burney will tell you who she is I want 'em for. A girl of gold. Six lines-make 'em eightsigned Barry C- They need not be very good, as I chiefly want 'em as a foil to mine. But I shall be seriously t obliged by any refuse scrap. We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul prophesied that women should be headstrong, lovers of their own wills, having albums.' I fled hither to escape the albumean persecution; and had not been in my new house twenty-four hours, when the daughter of the next house came in with a friend's album to beg a contribution, and the following day intimated she had one of her own. Two more have sprung up since. If I take the wings of the morning and fly unto the uttermost parts of the earth, there will albums be. New Holland has albums. But the age is to be complied with. M. B. will tell you the sort of girl I request the ten lines for. Somewhat of a pensive cast, what you admire. The lines may come before the law question, as that cannot be determined before Hilary Term, and I wish your deliberate judgment on that. The other may be flimsy and superficial. And if you have not burnt your returned letter, pray resend it me, as a monumental token of my stupidity." Lamb was as unfortunate in his communications with the annuals as unhappy in the importunities of the fair owners of albums. His favourite pieces were omitted; and a piece not his, called "The Widow," was, by a license of friendship, which Lamb forgave, inserted in one of them. He thus complains of these grievances in a letter which he wrote on the marriage of the daughter of a friend to a great theoretical chymist. TO MR. PROCTER. "Rumour tells us that Miss is married. Who is -? I hear he is a great chymist. I am sometimes chymical myself. A thought strikes me with horror. Pray Heaven he may not have done it for the sake of trying chymical experiments upon her-young female subjects are so scarce. An't you glad about Burke's case? We may set off the Scotch murders against the Scotch novels. Hare, the Great Un hanged. "M. B. is richly worth your knowing. He is on the top scale of my friendship ladder, on which an angel or two is still climbing, and some, alas! descending. Did you see a sonnet of mine in Blackwood's last? Curious construction! Elaborata facilitas! And now I'll tell. "Twas written for 'The Gem,' but the editors declined it on the plea that it would shock all mothers; so they published 'The Widow' instead. I am born out of time. I have no conjecture about what the present world calls delicacy. I thought Rosamund Gray' was a pretty modest thing. Hessey assures me that the world would not bear it. I have lived to grow into an indecent character. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, Hang the age, I will write for antiquity!' "Erratum in sonnet. Last line but something, for tender, read tend. The Scotch do not know our law terms; but I find some remains of honest, plain old writing lurking there still. They were not so mealy-mouth'd as to refuse my verses. Maybe 'tis their oatmeal. "Blackwood sent me 7. for the drama. Somebody cheated me out of it next day; and my new pair of breeches, just sent home, cracking at first putting on, I exclaimed, All tailors are cheats, and all men are tailors.' Then I was better." The next contains Lamb's thanks for the verses he had begged for Miss Isola's album. They comprehended a compliment turning on the words Isola Bella. TO MR. PROCTER. "The comings in of an incipient conveyancer are not adequate to the receipt of three twopenny post non-paids in a week. Therefore, after this, I condemn my pen to long and deep silence, or shall awaken it to write to lords. Lest those raptures in this honeymoon of my correspondence you avow for the visitations of my Nuncio, after passing through certain natural grades, as Love, Love and Water, Love with the chill off, then subsiding to that point which the heroic suiter of his wedded dame, the noble-spirited Lord Randolph in the play, declares to be the ambition of his passion, a reciprocation of 'complacent kindness,' it suddenly plump down (scarce staying to bait at the mid point of indifference, so hungry it is for distaste) to a loathing and blank aversion, to the rendering probable such counter expressions as this, 'Hang that infernal twopenny postman (words which make the messenger lift up his hands and wonder who can use them'). While, then, you are not ruined, let me assure thee, oh thou above the painter, and next only under Giraldus Cambrensis, the most immortal and worthy to be immortal Barry, thy most ingenious and golden cadences do take my fancy mightily. But tell me, and tell me truly, gentle swain, is that Isola Bella a true spot in geographical denomination, or a floating Delos in thy brain. Lurks that fair island in verity in the bosom of Lake Maggiore, or some other with less poetic name, which thou hast Cornwallized for the occasion. And what if Maggiore itself be but a coinage of adaptation? Of this, pray re solve me immediately, for my albumess will be catechised on this subject; and how can I prompt her? Lake Leman I know, and Lemon Lake (in a punch bowl) I have swum in, though those lymphs be long since dry. But Maggiore may be in the moon. Unsphynx this riddle for me, for my shelves have no gazetteer." The following letters contain a noble instance of Lamb's fine consideration and exquisite feeling in morality. TO MR. PROCTER. "When Miss was at Enfield, which she was in sum mer-time, and owed her health to its sun and genial influences, she visited (with young ladylike impertinence) a poor man's cottage that had a pretty baby (oh the yearnling!), gave it fine caps and sweetmeats. On a day broke into the parlour our two maids uproarious, 'Oh, ma'am, who do you think Miss has been working a cap for? A child,' answered Mary, in true Shandean female simplicity. It's the man's child as was taken up for sheep-stealing.' Miss was staggered, and would have cut the connexion, but by main force I made her go and take her leave of her protégée. 1 thought, if she went no more, the Abactor or Abactor's wife (vide Ainsworth) would suppose she had heard something; and I have delicacy for a sheep-stealer. The overseers actually overhauled a mutton-pie at the baker's (his first, last, and only hope of mutton-pie), which he never came to eat, and thence inferred his guilt. Per occasionem cujus, I framed the sonnet; observe its elaborate construction. I was four days about it. 'THE GIPSY'S MALISON. "Suck, baby, suck! mother's love grows by giving, Kiss, baby, kiss! mother's lips shine by kisses, Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings; So sang a wither'd beldam energetical, And bann'd the ungiving door with lips prophetical.' "Barry, study that sonnet. It is curiously and perversely elaborate. 'Tis a choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed to the structure of it. See you? and was this a fourteener to be rejected by a trumpery annual? forsooth, 'twould shock all mothers; and may all mothers, who would so be shocked, be hanged! as if mothers were such sort of logicians as to infer the future hanging of their child from the theoretical hangibility (or capacity of being hanged, if the judge pleases) of every infant born with a neck on. Oh B. C., my whole heart is faint, and my whole head is sick (how is it?) at this cursed, canting, unmasculine age!" * * * There is a little Latin letter about the same time to the same friend. TO MR. PROCTER. "Facundissime Poeta! quanquam istiusmodi epitheta ora toribus potiùs quam poetis attinere facilè scio-tamen, facundissime! "Commoratur nobiscum jamdiu, in agro Enfeldiense, scilicet, leguleius futurus, illustrissimus Martinus Burneius, otium agens, negotia nominalia, et officinam clientum vacuam, paululum fugiens. Orat, implorat te-nempe, Martinus-ut si (quòd Dii faciant) fortè fortunâ, absente ipso, advenerit tardus cliens, eum certiorem feceris per literas hûc missas. Intelligisne? an me Anglicè et barbaricè ad te hominem perdoctum scribere oportet? C. AGNUS. "Si status de franco tenemento datur avo, et in eodem facto si mediate vel immediate datur hæredibus vel hæredibus corporis dicti avi, postrema hæc verba sunt Limitationis non Perquisitionis. "Dixi. CARLAGNULUS." An allusion to Rogers, worthy of both, occurs in a letter TO BERNARD BARTON. "June 3, 1829. "Dear B. B.-To get out of home themes, have you seen Southey's Dialogues?" His lake descriptions, and the account of his library at Keswick, are very fine. But he needed not have called up the ghost of More to hold the conversations with, which might as well have passed between A. and B., or Caius and Lucius. It is making too free with a defunct chancellor and martyr. "I feel as if I had nothing further to write about. Oh! I forgot; the prettiest letter I ever read, that I have received. from Pleasures of Memory' Rogers, in acknowledgment of a sonnet I sent him on the loss of his brother. |