FINAL MEMORIALS OF CHARLES LAMB. CHAPTER I. LETTERS OF LAMB TO COLERIDGE, IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1796. IN the year 1795, Charles Lamb resided with his father, mother, and sister, in lodgings at No. 7, Little Queen Street, Holborn. The father was rapidly sinking into dotage; the mother suffered under an infirmity which deprived her of the use of her limbs; and the sister not only undertook the office of daily and nightly attendance on her mother, but sought to add by needlework to their slender resources. Their income then consisted of an annuity which Mr. Lamb the elder derived from the old Bencher, Mr. Salt, whom he had faithfully served for many years; Charles's salary, which, being that of a clerk of three years' standing in the India House, could have been but scanty; and a small payment made for board by an old maiden aunt, who resided with them. In this year Lamb, being just twenty years of age, began to write verses, partly incited by the example of his only friend, Coleridge, whom he regarded with as much reverence as affection, and partly inspired by an attachment to a young lady residing in the neighborhood of Islington, who is commemorated in his early verses as "the fair-haired maid." How his love prospered we cannot ascertain; but we know how nobly that love, and all hope of the earthly blessings attendant on such an affection, were resigned on the catastrophe which darkened the following year. In the meantime, his youth was lonely-rendered more so by the recollection of the society of Coleridge, who had just left London—of Coleridge in the first bloom of life and genius, unshaded by the mysticism which it afterwards glorified-full of boundless ambition, love, and hope! There was a tendency to insanity in his family, which had been more than once developed in his sister; and it was no matter of surprise that in the dreariness of his solitude it fell upon him; and that, at the close of the year, he was subjected for a few weeks to the restraint of the insane. The wonder is, that amidst all the difficulties, the sorrows, and the excitements of his succeeding forty years, it never recurred. Perhaps the true cause of this remarkable exemption—an exemption the more remarkable when his afflictions are considered in association with one single frailty—will be found in the sudden claim made on his moral and intellectual nature by a terrible exigency, and by his generous answer to that claim; so that a life of self-sacrifice was rewarded by the reservation of unclouded reason. The following letter to Coleridge, then residing at Bristol, which is undated, but which is proved by circumstances to have been written in the spring of 1796, and which is probably the earliest of Lamb's letters which have been preserved, contains his own account of this seizure. Allusion to the same event will be perceived in two letters of the same year, after which no reference to it appears in his correspondence, nor can any be remembered in his conversations with his dearest friends. TO MR. COLERIDGE. Dear C, make yourself perfectly easy about May. I paid his bill when I sent your clothes. I was flush of money, and I am so still to all the purposes of a single life; so give yourself no further concern about it. would be superfluous to me if I had it. The money When Southey becomes as modest as his predecessor Milton, and publishes his Epics in duodecimo, I will read 'em; a guinea a book is somewhat exorbitant, nor have I the opportunity of borrowing the work. The extracts from it in the Monthly Reviews, and the short passages in your Watchman, seem to me much superior to any thing in his partnership account with Lovell. Your poems I shall procure forthwith. There were noble lines in what you inserted in one of your numbers, from "Religious Musings;" but I thought them elaborate. I am somewhat glad you have given up that paper; it must have been dry, unprofitable, and of dissonant mood to your disposition. I wish you success in all your undertakings, and am glad to hear you are employed about the "Evidences of Religion." There is need of multiplying such books a hundred fold in this philosophical age, to prevent converts to atheism, for they seem too tough disputants to meddle with afterwards. Le Grice is gone to make puns in Cornwall. He has got a tutorship to a young boy living with his mother, a widowlady. He will, of course, initiate him quickly in "whatsoever things are lovely, honorable, and of good report.' Coleridge! I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I was! And many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told. My sonnets I have extended to the number of nine since I saw you, and will some day communicate to you. I am beginning a poem in blank verse, which, if I finish, I publish. White is on the eve of publishing (he took the hint from Vortigern) "Original Letters of Falstaff, Shallow," &c., a copy you shall have when it comes out. They are without exception the best imitations I ever saw. Coleridge! it may convince you of my regards for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy. The Sonnet I send you has small merit as poetry; but you will be curious to read it when I tell you it was written in my prison-house in one of my lucid intervals. TO MY SISTER. If from my lips some angry accents fell, And troubled thoughts, clouding the purer well, With these lines, and with that sister's kindest remembrances to C, I conclude. Yours, sincerely, Your "Conciones ad Populum politics that ever came in my way. LAMB. are the most eloquent Write when convenient-not as a task, for there is nothing in this letter to answer. We cannot send our remembrances to Mrs. C., not having seen her, but, believe me, our best good wishes attend you both. My civic and poetic compliments to Southey, if at Bristol;-why, he is a very Leviathan of Bards—the small minnow, I! In the spring of this year, Coleridge proposed the association of those first efforts of the young clerk in the India House, which he had prompted and praised, with his own, in a new edition of his Poems, to which Mr. Charles Lloyd also proposed to contribute. The following letter comprises Sonnets transmitted to Coleridge for this purpose, accompanied by remarks so characteristic as to induce the hope that the reader will forgive the introduction of these small gems of verse which were published in due course, for the sake of the original setting. TO MR. COLERIDGE. I am in such violent pain with the headache, that I am fit for nothing but transcribing, scarce for that. When I get your poems, and the "Joan of Arc," I will exercise my presumption in giving you my opinion of 'em. The mail does not come in before to-morrow (Wednesday) morning. The following Sonnet was composed during a walk down into Hertfordshire early in last summer :— The Lord of Light shakes off his drowsyhed,* Proud city, and thy sons I leave behind, That mindest me of many a pleasure gone, And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on, The last line is a copy of Bowles's, "To the green hamlet in the peaceful plain. Your ears are not so very fastidious; many people would not like words so prosaic and familiar in a Sonnet as Islington and Hertfordshire. The next was written within a day or two of the last, on revisiting a spot where the scene was laid of my first Sonnet "that mocked my step with many a lonely glade." When last I roved these winding wood-walks green, Oft-times would Anna seek the silent scene, Shrouding her beauties in the lone retreat. Meets me self-wandering, where in happier days * "Drowsyhed" I have met with, I think, in Spenser. 'Tis an old thing, but it rhymes with led, and rhyming covers a multitude of licenses. -C. Lamb's Manuscripts. |