The Best Letters of Charles Lamb Part 21

TO BERNARD BARTON.

_December_ 23, 1822.

Dear Sir,--I have been so distracted with business and one thing or other, I have not had a quiet quarter of an hour for epistolary purposes. Christmas, too, is come, which always puts a rattle into my morning skull. It is a visiting, unquiet, unquakerish season. I get more and more in love with solitude, and proportionately hampered with company. I hope you have some holidays at this period. I have one day,--Christmas Day; alas! too few to commemorate the season. All work and no play dulls me. Company is not play, but many times bard work. To play, is for a man to do what he pleases, or to do nothing,--to go about soothing his particular fancies. I have lived to a time of life to have outlived the good hours, the nine-o'clock suppers, with a bright hour or two to clear up in afterwards. Now you cannot get tea before that hour, and then sit gaping, music bothered perhaps, till half-past twelve brings up the tray; and what you steal of convivial enjoyment after, is heavily paid for in the disquiet of to-morrow's head.

I am pleased with your liking "John Woodvil," and amused with your knowledge of our drama being confined to Shakspeare and Miss Baillie.

What a world of fine territory between Land's End and Johnny Groat's have you missed traversing! I could almost envy you to have so much to read. I feel as if I had read all the books I want to read. Oh, to forget Fielding, Steele, etc., and read 'em new!

Can you tell me a likely place where I could pick up cheap Fox's Journal? There are no Quaker circulating libraries? Elwood, too, I must have. I rather grudge that Southey has taken up the history of your people; I am afraid he will put in some levity. I am afraid I am not quite exempt from that fault in certain magazine articles, where I have introduced mention of them. Were they to do again, I would reform them.

Why should not you write a poetical account of your old worthies, deducing them from Fox to Woolman? But I remember you did talk of something of that kind, as a counterpart to the "Ecclesiastical Sketches." But would not a poem be more consecutive than a string of sonnets? You have no martyrs _quite to the fire,_ I think, among you, but plenty of heroic confessors, spirit-martyrs, lamb-lions. Think of it; it would be better than a series of sonnets on "Eminent Bankers." I like a hit at our way of life, though it does well for me,--better than anything short of _all one's time to one's self;_ for which alone I rankle with envy at the rich. Books are good, and pictures are good, and money to buy them therefore good; but to buy _time,_--in other words, life!

The "compliments of the time" to you, should end my letter; to a Friend, I suppose, I must say the "sincerity of the season:" I hope they both mean the same. With excuses for this hastily penned note, believe me, with great respect,

C. LAMB.

LXXIII.

TO MISS WORDSWORTH.

Mary perfectly approves of the appropriation of the _feathers,_ and wishes them peac.o.c.k's for your fair niece's sake.

_Christmas_, 1822.

Dear Miss Wordsworth,--I had just written the above endearing words when Monkhouse tapped me on the shoulder with an invitation to cold goose pie, which I was not bird of that sort enough to decline. Mrs. Monkhouse, I am most happy to say, is better Mary has been tormented with a rheumatism, which is leaving her, I am suffering from the festivities of the season. I wonder how my misused carcase holds it out. I have played the experimental philosopher on it, that's certain. w.i.l.l.y shall be welcome to a mince-pie and a bout at commerce whenever he comes. He was in our eye. I am glad you liked my new year's speculations; everybody likes them, except the author of the "Pleasures of Hope." Disappointment attend him! How I like to be liked, and _what I do_ to be liked! They flatter me in magazines, newspapers, and all the minor reviews; the Quarterlies hold aloof. But they must come into it in time, or their leaves be waste paper. Salute Trinity Library in my name. Two special things are worth seeing at Cambridge,--a portrait of Cromwell at Sidney, and a better of Dr. Harvey (who found out that blood was red) at Dr.

Davy's; you should see them. Coleridge is pretty well; I have not seen, him, but hear often of him, from Allsop, who sends me hares and pheasants twice a week; I can hardly take so fast as he gives. I have almost forgotten butcher's meat as plebeian. Are you not glad the cold is gone? I find winters not so agreeable as they used to be "when winter bleak had charms forme," I cannot conjure up a kind similitude for those snowy flakes. Let them keep to twelfth-cakes!

Mrs. Paris, our Cambridge friend, has been in town. You do not know the Watfords in Trampington Street. They are capital people. Ask anybody you meet, who is the biggest woman in Cambridge, and I 'll hold you a wager they'll say Mrs. Smith; she broke down two benches in Trinity Gardens,--one on the confines of St. John's, which occasioned a litigation between the Societies as to repairing it. In warm weather, she retires into an ice-cellar (literally!), and dates the returns of the years from a hot Thursday some twenty years back. She sits in a room with opposite doors and windows, to let in a thorough draught, which gives her slenderer friends tooth-aches. She is to be seen in the market every morning at ten cheapening fowls, which I observe the Cambridge poulterers are not sufficiently careful to stump.

Having now answered most of the points contained in your letter, let me end with a.s.suring you of our very best kindness, and excuse Mary for not handling the pen on this occasion, especially as it has fallen into so much better hands! Will Dr. W. accept of my respects at the end of a foolish letter?

C. L.

LXXIV.

TO MR. AND MRS. BRUTON. [1]

_January_ 6, 1823.

The pig was above my feeble praise. It was a dear pigmy. There was some contention as to who should have the ears; but in spite of his obstinacy (deaf as these little creatures are to advice), I contrived to get at one of them.

It came in boots, too, which I took as a favor. Generally these petty-toes, pretty toes I are missing: but I suppose he wore them to look taller.

He must have been the least of his race. His little foots would have gone into the silver slipper. I take him to have beec a Chinese and a female.

If Evelyn could have seen him, he would never have farrowed two such prodigious volumes, seeing how much good can be contained in--how small a compa.s.s!

He crackled delicately.

I left a blank at the top of my letter, not being determined which to address it to j so farmer and farmer's wife will please to divide our thanks. May your granaries be full, and your rats empty, and your chickens plump, and your envious neighbors lean, and your laborers busy, and you as idle and as happy as the day is long!

VIVE L'AGRICULTURE!

How do you make your pigs so little?

They are vastly engaging at the age.

I was so myself.

Now I am a disagreeable old hog, A middle-aged gentleman-and-a-half; My faculties (thank G.o.d!) are not much impaired.

I have my sight, hearing, taste, pretty perfect, and can read the Lord's Prayer in common type, by the help of a candle, without making many mistakes....

Many happy returns, not of the pig, but of the New Year, to both. Mary, for her share of the pig and the memoirs, desires to send the same.

Yours truly,

C. LAMB.

[1] Hertfords.h.i.+re connections of the Lambs.

LXXV.

TO BERNARD BARTON. [1]

_January_ 9, 1823.

Throw yourself on the world without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you!

Throw yourself, rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock slap-dash headlong upon iron spikes. If you had but five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. Hitherto you have been at arm's length from them. Come not within their grasp. I have known many authors want for bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers,--what not,--rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found them. Oh, you know not--may you never know!--the miseries of subsisting by authors.h.i.+p.

'Tis a pretty appendage to a situation like yours or mine, but a slavery, worse than all slavery, to be a bookseller's dependant, to drudge your brains for pots of ale and b.r.e.a.s.t.s of mutton, to change your free thoughts and voluntary numbers for ungracious task-work. Those fellows hate _us_. The reason I take to be that, contrary to other trades, in which the master gets all the credit (a Jeweller or silversmith for instance), and the journeyman, who really does the fine work, is in the background, in _our_ work the world gives all the credit to us, whom _they_ consider as _their_ journeymen, and therefore do they hate us, and cheat us, and oppress us, and would wring the blood of as out, to put another sixpence in their mechanic pouches! I contend that a bookseller has a _relative honesty_ towards authors, not like his honesty to the rest of the world. Baldwin, who first engaged me as Elia, has not paid me up yet (nor any of us without repeated mortifying appeals). Yet how the knave fawned when I was of service to him! Yet I daresay the fellow is punctual in settling his milk-score, etc.

Keep to your bank, and the bank will keep you. Trust not to the public; you may hang, starve, drown yourself, for anything that worthy _personage_ cares. I bless every star that Providence, not seeing good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me upon the stable foundation of Leadenhall. Sit down, good B.B., in the banking-office; what! is there not from six to eleven P.M. six days in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie! what a superfluity of man's time, if you could think so,--enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. Oh, the corroding, torturing, tormenting thoughts that disturb the brain of the unlucky wight who must draw upon it for daily sustenance! Henceforth I retract all my foul complaints of mercantile employment; look upon them as lovers' quarrels.

I was but half in earnest. Welcome, dead timber of a desk, that makes me live! A little grumbling is a wholesome medicine for the spleen, but in my inner heart do I approve and embrace this our close, but unhara.s.sing, way of life. I am quite serious. If you can send me Fox, I will not keep it _six weeks_, and will return it, with warm thanks to yourself and friend, without blot or dog's-ear. You will much oblige me by this kindness.

Yours truly,

C. LAMB.

[1] The Quaker poet. Mr. Barton was a clerk in the bank of the Messrs.

Alexander, of Woodbridge, in Suffolk. Encouraged by his literary success, he thought of throwing up his clerks.h.i.+p and trusting to his pen for a livelihood,--a design from which he was happily diverted by his friends.