The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume V Part 19

C. LAMB.

I hope Edith is better; my kindest remembrances to her. You have a good deal of trifling to forgive in this letter.

[This is Lamb's first letter to Southey that has been preserved.

Probably others came before it. Southey now becomes Lamb's chief correspondent for some months. In Canon Ainger's transcript the letter ends with "Love and remembrances to Cottle."

Southey's _Joan of Arc_, second edition, had been published by Cottle in 1798. It has no frontispiece: the print of Joan of Arc must have come separately.

Phillips was Sir Richard Phillips (1767-1840), editor of the _Monthly Magazine_ and the publisher satirised in Sorrow's _Lavengro_.

The Calendar ultimately became the _Annual Anthology_. Southey had at first an idea of making it a poetical calendar or almanac.

"That old lady of prolific memory." Lamb is thinking, I imagine, of the story in Howell's _Familiar Letters_ (also in Evelyn's _Diary_) of the "Wonder of Nature" near the Hague. "That Wonder of Nature is a Church-monument, where an Earl and a Lady are engraven with 365 Children about them, which were all deliver'd at one Birth." The story tells that a beggar woman with twins asked alms of the Countess, who denying that it was possible for two children to be born at once and vilifying the beggar, that woman cursed her and called upon G.o.d to show His judgment upon her by causing her to bear "at one birth as many Children as there are days in the year, which she did before the same year's end, having never born Child before." Howell seems to have been convinced of the authenticity of the story by the spectacle of the christening basin used by the family. The beggar, who spoke on the third day of the year, meant as many days as had been in that year--three.

Edith was Southey's wife.]

LETTER 35

CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY

Oct. 18th, 1798.

Dear Southey,--I have at last been so fortunate as to pick up Wither's Emblems for you, that "old book and quaint," as the brief author of "Rosamund Gray" hath it; it is in a most detestable state of preservation, and the cuts are of a fainter impression than I have seen.

Some child, the curse of antiquaries and bane of bibliopolical rarities, hath been dabbling in some of them with its paint and dirty fingers, and in particular hath a little sullied the author's own portraiture, which I think valuable, as the poem that accompanies it is no common one; this last excepted, the Emblems are far inferior to old Quarles. I once told you otherwise, but I had not then read old Q. with attention. I have picked up, too, another copy of Quarles for ninepence!!! O tempora! O lectores!--so that if you have lost or parted with your own copy, say so, and I can furnish you, for you prize these things more than I do.

You will be amused, I think, with honest Wither's "Supersedeas to all them whose custom it is, without any deserving, to importune authors to give unto them their books." I am sorry 'tis imperfect, as the 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. Park, &c. One of the happiest emblems and comicalest cuts is the owl and little chirpers, page 63.

Wis.h.i.+ng you all amus.e.m.e.nt, 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?

[This letter contains Lamb's first reference to _Rosamund Gray_, his only novel, which had been published a little earlier in the year.

"Wither's _Emblems_, an 'old book and quaint,'" was one of the few volumes belonging to old Margaret, Rosamund's grandmother (Chapter I).

See next letter and note.

Wither's _Emblems_ was published in 1635; Quarles' in the same year. I give Wither's "Supersedeas" in the Appendix to my large edition, vol.

vii., together with a reproduction of the owl and little chirpers from the edition of 1635.]

LETTER 36

CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY

[October 29, 1798.]

Dear Southey,--I thank you heartily for the Eclogue; it pleases me mightily, being so full of picture-work and circ.u.mstances. I find no fault in it, unless perhaps that Joanna's ruin is a catastrophe too trite: and this is not the first or second time you have clothed your indignation, in verse, in a tale of ruined innocence. The old lady, spinning in the sun, I hope would not disdain to claim some kindred with old Margaret. I could almost wish you to vary some circ.u.mstances in the conclusion. A gentleman seducer has so often been described in prose and verse; what if you had accomplished Joanna's ruin by the clumsy arts and rustic gifts of some country-fellow? I am thinking, I believe, of the song,

"An old woman clothed in grey, Whose daughter was charming and young, And she was deluded away By Roger's false nattering tongue."

A Roger-Lothario would be a novel character: I think you might paint him very well. You may think this a very silly suggestion, and so, indeed, it is; but, in good truth, nothing else but the first words of that foolish ballad put me upon scribbling my "Rosamund." But I thank you heartily for the poem. Not having anything of my own to send you in return--though, to tell truth, I am at work upon something, which if I were to cut away and garble, perhaps I might send you an extract or two that might not displease you; but I will not do that; and whether it will come to anything, I know not, for I am as slow as a Fleming painter when I compose anything. I will crave leave to put down a few lines of old Christopher Marlow's; I take them from his tragedy, "The Jew of Malta." The Jew is a famous character, quite out of nature; but, when we consider the terrible idea our simple ancestors had of a Jew, not more to be discommended for a certain discolouring (I think Addison calls it) than the witches and fairies of Marlow's mighty successor. The scene is betwixt Barabas, the Jew, and Ithamora, a Turkish captive exposed to sale for a slave.

BARABAS (_A precious rascal_.)

"As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about, and poison wells; And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves, I am content to lose some of my crowns, That I may, walking in my gallery, See'm go pinioned along by my door.

Being young, I studied physic, and began To practise first upon the Italian: There I enriched the priests with burials, And always kept the s.e.xton's arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells; And, after that, was I an engineer, And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany, Under pretence of serving [helping] Charles the Fifth, Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.

Then after that was I an usurer, And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, And tricks belonging unto brokery, I fill'd the jails with bankrupts in a year, And with young orphans planted hospitals, And every moon made some or other mad; And now and then one hang'd himself for grief, Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll.

How I with interest tormented him."

Now hear Ithamore, the other gentle nature, explain how he spent his time:--

ITHAMORE (_A comical dog_.)

"Faith, master, in setting Christian villages on fire, Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.

One time I was an hostler at [in] an inn, And in the night-time secretly would I steal To travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats.

Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel'd, I strowed powder on the marble stones, And therewithal their knees would rankle so, That I have laugh'd a-good to see the cripples Go limping home to Christendom on stilts."

BARABAS

"Why, this is something"--

There is a mixture of the ludicrous and the terrible in these lines, brimful of genius and antique invention, that at first reminded me of your old description of cruelty in h.e.l.l, which was in the true Hogarthian style. I need not tell _you_ that Marlow was author of that pretty madrigal, "Come live with me, and be my Love," and of the tragedy of "Edward II.," in which are certain _lines_ unequalled in our English tongue. Honest Walton mentions the said madrigal under the denomination of "certain smooth verses made long since by Kit Marlow."

I am glad you have put me on the scent after old Quarles. If I do not put up those eclogues, and that shortly, say I am no true-nosed hound. I have had a letter from Lloyd; the young metaphysician of Caius is well, and is busy recanting the new heresy, metaphysics, for the old dogma, Greek. My sister, I thank you, is quite well. She had a slight attack the other day, which frightened me a good deal; but it went off unaccountably. Love and respects to Edith.

Yours sincerely, C. LAMB.

[The eclogue was "The Ruined Cottage," in which Joanna and her widowed mother are at first as happy as Rosamund Gray and old blind Margaret. As in Lamb's story so in Southey's poem, this state of felicity is overturned by a seducer.

"An old woman clothed in gray." This ballad still eludes research. Lamb says that the first line put him upon writing _Rosamund Gray_, but he is generally supposed to have taken his heroine's name from a song by Charles Lloyd, ent.i.tled "Rosamund Gray," published among his _Poems_ in 1795. At the end of the novel Matravis, the seducer, in his ravings, sings the ballad.

The "something" upon which Lamb was then at work was his play "John Woodvil," in those early days known as "Pride's Cure."

"Your old description of cruelty in h.e.l.l." In "Joan of Arc." See Letter 3.

"If I do not put up those eclogues." Lamb does not return to this subject.

Lloyd had just gone to Cambridge, to Caius College.]