The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb Volume V Part 40

I will now transcribe the "Londoner" (No. 1), and wind up all with affection and humble servant at the end.

THE LONDONER. No. 1.

In compliance with my own particular humour, no less than with thy laudable curiosity, Reader, I proceed to give thee some account of my history and habits. I was born under the nose of St. Dunstan's steeple, just where the conflux of the eastern and western inhabitants of this twofold city meet and justle in friendly opposition at Temple-bar. The same day which gave me to the world saw London happy in the celebration of her great annual feast. This I cannot help looking upon as a lively type or omen of the future great goodwill which I was destined to bear toward the City, resembling in kind that solicitude which every Chief Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever concerns her interests and well-being. Indeed, I consider myself in some sort a speculative Lord Mayor of London: for, though circ.u.mstances unhappily preclude me from the hope of ever arriving at the dignity of a gold chain and spital sermon, yet thus much will I say of myself, in truth, that _Whittington_ himself with his _Cat_ (just emblem of _vigilance_ and a _furred gown_), never went beyond me in affection, which I bear to the citizens. Shut out from serving them in the most honourable mode, I aspire to do them benefit in another, scarcely less honourable; and if I cannot, by virtue of office, commit vice and irregularity to the _material Counter_, I will, at least, erect a _spiritual one_, where they shall be _laid fast by the heels_. In plain words, I will do my best endeavour to _write them down_.

To return to _myself_ (from whence my zeal for the Public good is perpetually causing me to digress), I will let thee, Reader, into certain more of my peculiarities. I was born (as you have heard), bred, and have pa.s.sed most of my time, in a _crowd_. This has begot in me an entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes. This aversion was never interrupted or suspended, except for a few years in the younger part of my life, during a period in which I had fixed my affections upon a charming young woman. Every man, while the _pa.s.sion_ is upon him, is for a time at least addicted to groves and meadows, and purling streams. During this short period of my existence, I contracted just enough familiarity with rural objects to understand tolerably well ever after the _Poets_, when they declaim in such pa.s.sionate terms in favour of a _country life_.

For my own part, now the _fit_ is long past, I have no hesitation in declaring, that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury-Lane Theatre just at the hour of five, give me ten thousand finer pleasures, than I ever received from all the flocks of _silly sheep_, that have whitened the plains of _Arcadia_ or _Epsom Downs_.

This pa.s.sion for crowds is no where feasted so full as in London. The man must have a rare _recipe_ for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet-street. I am naturally inclined to _hypochondria_, but in London it vanishes, like all other ills. Often when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour, till tears have wetted my cheek for inutterable sympathies with the mult.i.tudinous moving picture, which she never fails to present at all hours, like the s.h.i.+fting scenes of a skilful Pantomime.

The very deformities of London, which give distaste to others, from habit do not displease me. The endless succession of shops, where Fancy (miscalled Folly) is supplied with perpetual new gauds and toys, excite in me no puritanical aversion. I gladly behold every appet.i.te supplied with its proper food. The obliging customer, and the obliged tradesmen-- things which live by bowing, and things which exist but for homage, do not affect me with disgust; from habit I perceive nothing but urbanity, where other men, more refined, discover meanness. I love the very smoke of London, because it has been the medium most familiar to my vision. I see grand principles of honour at work in the dirty ring which encompa.s.ses two combatants with fists, and principles of no less eternal justice in the tumultuous detectors of a pickpocket. The salutary astonishment with which an execution is surveyed, convinces me more forcibly than an hundred volumes of abstract polity, that the universal instinct of man, in all ages, has leaned to order and good government.

Thus an art of extracting morality, from the commonest incidents of a town life, is attained by the same well-natured alchemy, with which the _Foresters of Arden_ in a beautiful country

Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in every thing--

Where has spleen her food but in London--humour, interest, curiosity, suck at her measureless b.r.e.a.s.t.s without a possibility of being satiated.

Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke--what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?

Reader, in the course of my peregrinations about the great city, it is hard, if I have not picked up matter, which may serve to amuse thee, as it has done me, a winter evening long. When next we meet, I purpose opening my budget--Till when, farewell.

"What is all this about?" said Mrs. Shandy. "A story of a c.o.c.k and a bull," said Yorick: and so it is; but Manning will take good-naturedly what _G.o.d will send him_ across the water: only I hope he won't _shut_ his _eyes_, and _open_ his _mouth_, as the children say, for that is the way to _gape_, and not to _read_. Manning, continue your laudable purpose of making me your register. I will render back all your remarks; and _I, not you_, shall have received usury by having read them. In the mean time, may the great Spirit have you in his keeping, and preserve our Englishmen from the inoculation of frivolity and sin upon French earth.

_Allons_--or what is it you say, instead of _good-bye_?

Mary sends her kind remembrance, and covets the remarks equally with me.

C. LAMB.

[The reference to the "word-banker" and "register" is explained by Manning's first letter to Lamb from Paris, in which he says: "I ... beg you to keep all my letters. I hope to send you many--and I may in the course of time, make some observations that I shall wish to recall to my memory when I return to England."

"Are you and the First Consul _thick_?"--Napoleon, with whom Manning was destined one day to be on terms. In 1803, on the declaration of war, when he wished to return to England, Manning's was the only pa.s.sport that Napoleon signed; again, in 1817, on returning from China, Manning was wrecked near St. Helena, and, waiting on the island for a s.h.i.+p, conversed there with the great exile.

"Rumfordising." A word coined by Lamb from Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count von Rumford, the founder of the Royal Inst.i.tution, the deviser of the Rumford stove, and a tireless scientific and philosophical experimentalist.

"Smellfungus." An allusion to Sterne's attack on Smollett, in _The Sentimental Journey_: "The lamented Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on; but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pa.s.sed by was discoloured or distorted."

"The _Post_." Lamb had been writing criticisms of plays; but Stuart, as we have seen, wanted them on the same night as the performance and Lamb found this impossible.

"I have done but one thing"--"The Londoner," referred to later.

"The Professor's Rib"--G.o.dwin's second wife, the widow Clairmont (mother of Jane Clairmont), whom he had married in December, 1801.

"Fell"--R. Fell, author of a _Tour through the Batavian Republic_, 1801.

Later he compiled a _Life of Charles James Fox_, 1808. Lamb knew him, as well as Fenwick, through G.o.dwin.

"_Apropos_, I think you wrong about my play." _John Woodvil_ had just been published and Lamb had sent Manning a copy. Manning, in return, had written from Paris early in February: "I showed your Tragedy to Holcroft, who had taste enough to discover that 'tis full of poetry--but the plot he condemns _in toto_. Tell me how it succeeds. I think you were ill advised to retrench so much. I miss the beautiful Branches you have lopped off and regret them. In some of the pages the sprinkling of words is so thin as to be quite _outre_. There you were wrong again."

"The Londoner" was published in the _Morning Post_, February 1, 1802. I have quoted the article from that paper, as Lamb's copy for Manning has disappeared. Concerning it Manning wrote, in his next letter--April 6, 1802--"I like your 'Londoner' very much, there is a deal of happy fancy in it, but it is not strong enough to be seen by the generality of readers, yet if you were to write a volume of essays in the same stile you might be sure of its succeeding."]

LETTER 95

CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN RICKMAN

16, Mitre Court Buildings, Inner Temple, April 10, 1802.

Dear Rickman,--The enclosed letter explains itself. It will save me the danger of a corporal interview with the man-eater who, if very sharp-set, may take a fancy to me, if you will give me a short note, declaratory of probabilities. These from him who hopes to see you once or twice more before he goes hence, to be no more seen: for there is no tipple nor tobacco in the grave, whereunto he hasteneth.

C. LAMB.

How clearly the Goul writes, and like a gentleman!

[A friend of Burnett, named Simonds, is meant. Lamb calls him a "Goul"

in another letter, and elsewhere says he eats strange flesh. See note on page 232.]

LETTER 96

CHARLES LAMB TO THOMAS MANNING

[No date. ?End of April, 1802.]

My dear Manning,--Although something of the latest, and after two months' waiting, your letter was highly gratifying. Some parts want a little explication; for example, "the G.o.d-like face of the First Consul." _What G.o.d_ does he most resemble? Mars, Bacchus, or Apollo? or the G.o.d Serapis who, flying (as Egyptian chronicles deliver) from the fury of the dog Anubis (the hieroglyph of an English mastiff), lighted on Monomotapa (or the land of apes), by some thought to be Old France, and there set up a tyranny, &c. Our London prints of him represent him gloomy and sulky, like an angry Jupiter. I hear that he is very small, even less than me, who am "less than the least of the Apostles," at least than they are painted in the Vatican. I envy you your access to this great man, much more than your seances and conversaziones, which I have a shrewd suspicion must be something dull. What you a.s.sert concerning the actors of Paris, that they exceed our comedians, "bad as ours are," is _impossible_. In one sense it may be true, that their fine gentlemen, in what is called genteel comedy, may possibly be more brisk and _degage_ than Mr. Caulfield or Mr. Whitfield; but have any of them the power to move _laughter in excess_? or can a Frenchman _laugh_? Can they batter at your judicious ribs till they _shake_, nothing both to be so shaken? This is John Bull's criterion, and it shall be mine. You are Frenchified. Both your tastes and morals are corrupt and perverted.

By-and-by you will come to a.s.sert, that Buonaparte is as great a general as the old Duke of c.u.mberland, and deny that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen. Read "Henry the Fifth" to restore your orthodoxy. All things continue at a stay-still in London. I cannot repay your new novelties with my stale reminiscences. Like the prodigal, I have spent my patrimony, and feed upon the superannuated chaff and dry husks of repentance; yet sometimes I remember with pleasure the hounds and horses, which I kept in the days of my prodigality. I find nothing new, nor anything that has so much of the gloss and dazzle of novelty, as may rebound in narrative, and cast a reflective glimmer across the channel.

Something I will say about people that you and I know. Fenwick is still in debt, and the Professor has not done making love to his new spouse. I think he never looks into an almanack, or he would have found by the calendar that the honeymoon was extinct a moon ago. Lloyd has written to me and names you. I think a letter from Maison Magnan (is that a person or a thing?) would gratify him. G. Dyer is in love with an Ideot who loves a Doctor, who is incapable of loving anything but himself. A puzzling circle of perverse Providences! A maze as un-get-out-again-able as the House which Jack built. Southey is Secretary to the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer; 400 a year. Stoddart is turned Doctor of Civil Law, and dwells in Doctors' Commons. I fear _his_ commons are short, as they say. Did I send you an epitaph I scribbled upon a poor girl who died at nineteen, a good girl and a pretty girl, and a clever girl, but strangely neglected by all her friends and kin?

"Under this cold marble stone Sleep the sad remains of one Who, when alive, by few or none Was loved, as loved she might have been, If she prosperous days had seen, Or had thriving been, I ween.

Only this cold funeral stone Tells she was beloved by one, Who on the marble graves his moan."

Brief, and pretty, and tender, is it not? I send you this, being the only piece of poetry I have _done_, since the muses all went with T. M.

to Paris. I have neither stuff in my brain, nor paper in my drawer, to write you a longer letter. Liquor and company and wicked tobacco a'nights, have quite dispericraniated me, as one may say; but you who spiritualise upon Champagne may continue to write long letters, and stuff 'em with amus.e.m.e.nt to the end. Too long they cannot be, any more than a codicil to a will which leaves me sundry parks and manors not specified in the deed. But don't be _two months_ before you write again.

These from merry old England, on the day of her valiant patron St.

George.

C. LAMB.

[This letter is usually dated 1803, but I feel sure it should be 1802.

Southey had given up his Irish appointment in that year, and G.o.dwin's honeymoon began in December, 1801.