Eminent Women , Series, OF THE U N I VERS ITY Of ILLINOIS Tom Turner Collection B L2 \ a Bo Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. University of Illinois Library JCT 3<1 BST NOV 2 7 IS 57 ) *4 L161 — H41 ) ■ Eminent Women Series EDITED BY JOHN H. INGRAM MARY LAMB (All rights reserved.} Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/marylamb00gilc_0 MAEY LAMB LY MRS. GILCHRIST NEW EDITION. LONDON: W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE. S.W. 1889. All rights reserved.) LONDON : PRINTED BT W. H. ALLEN & CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE, 3 L =2 /$! HtJ ; PREFACE. I am indebted to Mrs, Henry Watson, a granu- by JLamb (p. !24S), together with an omitted paragraph from a published letter (p. 84), which confirms what other letters also show, — that the temporary estrange- ment between Lamb and Coleridge was mainly due to the influence of the morbid condition of mind of their common friend, Charles Lloyd. My thanks are also due to Mr. Potts for some bibliographic details respecting the various editions of the Tales from Shakespeare. Reprinted here, for the first time, is a little essay on Needle-work (regarded from an industrial, not an “ art” point of view), by Mary Lamb (p. 186), unearthed from an obscure and long-deceased periodical — The British Lady’s Magazine — for which I have to thank Mr. Edward Solly, F.R.S. VI PREFACE. The reader will find, also, the only letter that has been preserved from Coleridge to Lamb, who destroyed all the rest in a moment of depression (pp. 24-6) . This letter is given, without exact date or name of the person to whom it was addressed, in Gillman’s un- finished Life of Coleridge , as having been written “ to a friend in great anguish of mind on the sudden death of his mother,” and has, I believe, never before been identified. But the internal evidence that it was to Lamb is decisive. In taking Mary as the central figure in the fol- lowing narrative, woven mainly from her own and her brother’s letters and writings, it is to that least explored time, from 1796 to 1815 — before they had made the acquaintance of Judge Talfourd, Proctor, Patmore, De Quincey, and other friends, who have left written memorials of them — that we are brought nearest; the period, that is, of Charles’ youth and early manhood. For Mary was the elder by ten years ; and there is but little to tell of the last twenty of her eighty-three years of life, when the burthen of age was added to that of her sad malady. The burial-register of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, in which church-yard Lamb’s father, mother and aunt Hetty were buried, shows that the father survived his wife’s tragic death nearly three years instead of only a few months as Talfourd, and others following him, PREFACE. vn have supposed. It is a date of some interest because not till then did brother and sister begin together their life of “ double singleness ” and entire mutual devotion. Also, in sifting the letters for facts and dates, I find that Lamb lived in Chapel Street, Penton- ville not, as Talfourd and Proctor thought, a few months, but three years, removing thither almost immediately after the mother’s death. It is a trifle, yet not without interest to the lovers of Lamb, for these were the years in which he met in his daily walks, and loved but never accosted, the beautiful Quakeress “ Hester/' whose memory is enshrined in the poem beginning “ When Maidens such as Hester die.” Anne Gilchrist. Keats Corner, Hampstead. ■ IX CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Parentage and Childhood . . CHAPTEE II. Birth of Charles. — Coleridge. — Domestic Toils and Trials. — Their Tragic Culmination. — Letters to and from Coleridge CHAPTEE III. Death of Aunt Hetty. — Mary removed from the Asylum. — Charles Lloyd. — A Visit to Nether Stowey, and Intro- duction to Wordsworth and his Sister. — Anniversary of the Mother’s Death. — Mary ill again. — Estrangement between Lamb and Coleridge.— Speedy Keconcilement . CHAPTEE IV. Death of the Father. — Mary comes Home to live . — A Kemoval. — First Verses. — A Literary Tea-Party. — Another Move. — Friends increase CHAPTEE V. Personal Appearance and Manners. — Health. — Influence of Mary’s Illnesses upon her Brother .... CHAPTEE VI. Visit to Coleridge at Greta Hall. — Wordsworth and his Sister in London. — Letters to Miss Stoddart. — Coleridge goes to Malta. — Letter to Dorothy Wordsworth on the Death of her Brother John CHAPTEE VII. Mary in the Asylum again. — Lamb’s Letter with a Poem of hers. — Her slow Eecovery. — Letters to Sarah Stoddart. —The Tales from Shakespeare begun. — Hazlitt’s Portrait of Lamb. — Sarah’s Lovers. — The Farce of Mr. H. h PAGE 1 18 36 55 64 81 99 CONTENTS. CHAPTER Yin. The Tales from Shakespeare. — Letters to Sarah Stoddar . lib CHAPTER IX. Correspondence with Sarah Stoddart. — Hazlitt. — A Court- ship and Wedding at which Mary is Bridesmaid . . 129 CHAPTER X. Mrs. Leicester's SchooL — A Removal. — Poetry for Children • 158 CHAPTER XI. The Hazlitts again. — Letters to Mrs. Hazlitt. — Two Visits to Winterslow. — Mr. Dawe, R.A. — Birth of Hazlitt’s Son. — Death of Holcroft ... ... 170 CHAPTER XII. An Essay on Needle-work 185 CHAPTER XHI. Letters to Miss Betham and her little Sister. — To Words- worth. — Manning’s Return. — Coleridge goes to Highgate. —Letter to Miss Hutchinson on Mary’s state. — Removal to Russell Street. — Mary’s Letter to Dorothy Words- worth. — Lodgings at Dalston. — Death of John Lamb and Captain Burney 195 CHAPTER XIV. Hazlitt’s Divorce. — Emma Isola. — Mrs. Cowden Clarke’s Recollections of Mary. — The Visit to France. — Removal to Colebrook Cottage. — A Dialogue of Reminiscences . 217 CHAPTER XV. Lamb’s Ill-health. — Retirement from the India House, and subsequent Illness. — Letter from Mary to Lady Stod- dart. — Colebrook Cottage quitted. — Mary’s constant Attacks. — A Home given up. — Board with the West- woods. — Death of Hazlitt. — Removal to Edmonton. — Marriage of Emma Isola. — Mary’s sudden Recovery. — 111 again. — Death of Coleridge. — Death of Charles. — Mary’s Last Days and Death . .... 235 LIST OF AUTHORITIES. Life , Letters , and Writings of Charles Lamb. Edited by Percy Fitzgerald , M.A., F.S.A. 1376. The Works of Charles Lamb. Edited by Charles Kent [in which, for the first time, the dates and original mode of publication were affixed to the Essays, &c.]. 1878. Poetry for Children , by Charles and Mary Lamb. Edited by Richard Herne Shepherd. 1878. Mrs. Leicester’s School , by Charles and Mary Lamb . Tales from Shakespeare , by Charles and Mary Lamb. 1807. Final Memorials of Charles Lamb , by Talfourd. 1848. Charles Lamb: A Memoir , by Barry Cornwall. 1866. Mary and Charles Lamb , by W. Carew Hazlitt. 1874. My Friends and Acquaintance, by P. G. Patmore. 1854. Letters, Conversations , and Recollections of Coleridge , by Thomas Allsop: Third edition. 1864. Early Recollections of Coleridge, by J. Cottle. 1837. Biographia Literaria, by Coleridge. Second edition. 1847. Life of Coleridge, by Gillman. Yol. I. 1838. Memoirs and Letters of Sara Coleridge. Edited by her Daughter. 1873. Life of Wordsworth, by Rev. Dr. C. Wordsworth. 1851. LIST OF AUTHORITIES. Xll A Chronological List of the Writings of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt , preceded by an Essay on Lamb , and List of his Works , by Alex . Ireland ; printed for private circu- lation. (The copy used contains many MS. additions by the Author.) 1868. ^collections of Writers , by Charles and Mary Cow den Clarke. 1878. Six Life Studies of Famous Women , by M. Betham Edwards Diary , Reminiscences , and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson. Edited by Dr. Sadler. 1869. Memoir of William Hazlitt , by W. Carew Hazlitt. 1867. William Godwin , his Friends and Contemporaries , by Kegan 1880. 1825, 1826. Autobiographical Sketches. Lakes and Lake Poets. De Quincey. 1868. Paul. 1876, MARY LAMB CHAPTER I. Parentage and Childhood. 1764-1775. — 2Et. 1-10. The story of Mary Lamb's life is mainly the story or a brother and sister's love ; of how it sustained tnem under the shock of a terrible calamity and made beau- tiful and even happy a life which must else ha v e sunk into desolation and despair. 11 It is a record, too, of many friendships. Round the biographer of Mary as of Charles, the blended stream of whose lives cannot be divided into two distinct currents, there gathers a throng of faces — radiant im- mortal faces some, many homely every-day faces, a few almost grotesque — whom he can no more shut out of his pages, if he would give a faithful picture of life and character, than Charles or Mary could have shut their humanity-loving hearts or hospitable doors against them. First comes Coleridge, earliest and best beloved friend of all, to whom Mary was “ a most dear heart's sister"; Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy ; Southey; Hazlitt who, quarrel with whom he might, could not 1 2 MARY LAMB . effectually quarrel with the Lambs ; his wife, also, without whom Mary would have been a comparatively silent figure to us, a presence rather than a voice. But all kinds were welcome so there were but cha- racter ; the more variety the better. “ I am made up of queer points,” wrote Lamb, “ and I want so many answering needles.” And of both brother and sister it may be said that their likes wore as well as most people's loves. Mary Anne Lamb was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, on the 3rd of December 1764 — year of Hogarth's death. She was the third, as Charles was the youngest, of seven children all of whom died in infancy save these two and an elder brother John, her senior by two years. One little sister Elizabeth, who came when Mary was four years old, lived long enough to imprint an image on the child's memory which, helped by a few relics, remained for life. “ The little cap with white satin ribbon grown yellow with long keeping and a lock of light hair,” wrote Mary when she was near sixty, "always brought her pretty fair face to my view so that to this day I seem to have a perfect recollection of her features.” The family of the Lambs came originally from Stamford in Lincolnshire, as Charles himself once told a correspondent. Nothing else is known of Mary's ancestry; nor yet even the birth-place or earliest circumstances of John Lamb the father. If, however, we may accept on Mr. Cowden Clarke's authority, corroborated by internal evidence, the little story of Susan Yates , contributed by Charles to Mrs. Leicester’s School , as embodying some of his father's earliest re- collections, he was born of parents “ in no very affluent circumstances” in a lonely part of the Fen country, PARENTAGE . 3 seven miles from the nearest church an occasional visit to which, “just to see how goodness thrived” was a feat to be remembered, such bad and dangerous walk- ing was it in the fens in those days, “ a mile as good as four.” What is quite certain is that while John Lamb was still a child his family removed to Lincoln, with means so straitened that he was sent to service in London. Whether his father were dead or, sadder still, in a lunatic asylum — since we are told with emphasis that the hereditary seeds of madness in the Lamb family came from the fathers side — it is beyond doubt ^thtrt misfortune of some kind must have been the cause of the child's being sent thus prematurely to earn his bread in service. His subsequently becoming a barrister's clerk seems to indicate that his early nurture and edu- cation had been of a gentler kind than this rough thrusting out into the world of a mere child would otherwise imply : in confirmation of which it is to be noted that afterwards, in the dark crisis of family mis- fortune, an “ old gentlewoman of fortune ” appears on the scene as a relative. In spite of early struggles J ohn Lamb grew up A merry cheerful man. A merrier man, A man more apt to frame matter for mirth, Mad jokes and antics for a Christmas-eve, Making life social and the laggard time To move on nimbly, never yet did cheer The little circle of domestic friends. Inflexibly honest and upright too, with a dash of chivalry in his nature; who is not familiar with his portrait as “ Lovel *' in The Benchers of the Inner Temple ? Elizabeth his wife, a native of Ware, whose maiden name was Field, was many years younger than himself. She was a handsome, dignified-looking 1 * 4 MARY LAMB. woman ; like her husband fond of pleasure ; a good and affectionate mother, also, in the main, yet lacking insight into the characters of her children — into Mary's at any rate, towards whom she never manifested that maternal tenderness which makes the heart wise what- ever the head may be. Mary, a shy, sensitive, nervous, affectionate child, who early showed signs of a liability to brain disorder, above all things needed tender and judicious care. “ Her mother loved her," wrote Charles in after years, “ as she loved us all, with a mother's love; but in opinion, in feeling and sentiment and disposition bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter that she never understood her right — never could believe how much she loved her — but met her caresses, her protestations of filial affection too .fre- quently with coldness and repulse. Still she was a good mother. God forbid I should think of her but most respectfully, most affectionately. Yet she would always love my brother above Mary, who was not worthy of one-tenth of that affection which Mary had a right to claim." John, the eldest, a handsome, lively, active boy, was just what his good looks and his being the favourite were likely to make of a not very happily endowed nature. “ Dear little selfish craving John " he w r as in childhood, and dear big selfish John he remained in manhood; treated with tender indulgence by his brother and sister who cheerfully exonerated him from taking up any share of the burthen of sorrow and privation which became the portion of his family by the time he was grown up and prosperously afloat. A maiden aunt, a worthy but uncanny old soul whose odd silent ways and odder witch-like mutterings and mumblings coupled with a wild look in her eyes CHILDHOOD . 5 as she peered out from under her spectacles, made her an object of dread rather than love to Mary as after- wards to Charles in whom she garnered up her heart, completed the family group but did not add to its harmony for she and her sister-in-law ill agreed. They were in “ their different ways,” wrote Mary, looking back on childhood from middle-life, “ the best creatures in the world ; but they set out wrong at first. They made each other miserable for full twenty years of their lives. My mother was a perfect gentlewoman ; my aunty as unlike a gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good old woman to be ; so that my dear mother (who, though you do not know it. is always in my poor head and heart), used to distress and weary her with incessant and unceasing attention and polite- ness to gain her affection. The old woman could not return this in kind and did not know what to make of it — thought it all deceit, and used to hate my mother with a bitter hatred ; which, of course, was soon returned with interest.- A little frankness and looking into each other's characters at first would have spared all this, and they would have lived as they died, fond of each other for the last ten years of their lives. When we grew up and harmonised them a little, they sincerely loved each other.” In these early days Mary's was a comfortable v though a very modest home ; a place of “ snug fire-sides, the low-built roof7~parlours ten feet by ten, frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home ” ; a wholesome soil to be planted in which permitted no helplessness in the practical details of domestic life ; above poverty in the act ual th ough^not m the conventional sense of t he w ord. Such book-learning as fell to her lot was obtained at a day-school in Fetter Lane, Holborn, 6 MARY LAMB . where, notwithstanding the inscription over the door, “ Mr. William Bird, Teacher of Mathematics and Lan- guages,'' reading in the mother-tongue, writing and “ ciphering ” were all that was learned. The school- room looked into a dingy, discoloured garden, in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Build- ings ; and there boys were taught in the morning and their sisters in the afternoon by “ a gentle usher '' named Starkey, whose subsequent misfortunes have rescued him and Mary's school-days from oblivion. For, having in his old age drifted into an almshouse at Newcastle, the tale of his wanderings and his woes found its way into print and finally into Hone's Every Day Book , where, meeting the eyes of Charles and Mary Lamb, it awakened in both old memories which took shape in the sketch called Captain Starkey . “ Poor Starkey, when young, had that peculiar stamp of old-fashionedness in his face which makes it impossible for a beholder to predict any particular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven-and-thirty. This antique caste always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always the abject thing he came to. My sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when he was at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and poverty, a life-long poverty she thinks, could at no time have effaced the marks of native gentility which were once so visible in a face otherwise strikingly ugly, thin, and careworn. From her recollections of him, she thinks that he would have wanted bread before he would have begged or borrowed a halfpenny. c If any of the girls,' she says, c who were my school- fellows should be reading through their aged spectacles SCHOOL- DA YS. 7 tidings from the dead of their youthful friend Starkey, they will feel a pang as I do at having teased his gentle spirit/ “ They were big girls, it seems, too old to attend his instructions with the silence necessary ; and, however old age and a long state of beggary seems to have reduced his writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days his language occasionally rose to the bold and figurative, for, when he was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was, e Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven can make you/ Once he was missing for a day or two ; he had run away. A little, old, unhappy- looking man brought him back — it was his father, and he did no business in the school that day but sat moping in a corner with his hands before his face ; the girls, his tormentors, in pity for his case, for the rest of the day forbore to annoy him. “ ‘ I had been there but a few months/ adds she, ‘ when Starkey, who w'as the chief instructor of us girls, communicated to us a profound secret, that the tragedy of Cato was shortly to be acted by the elder boys, and that we were to be invited to the representa- tion/ That Starkey lent a helping hand in fashioning the actors she remembers ; and, but for his unfortu- nate person, he might have had some distinguished part in the scene to enact. As it was he had the arduous task of prompter assigned to him and his feeble voice was heard clear and distinct repeating the text during the whole performance. She describes he recollection of the caste of characters even now with a relish : — Martia, by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa, and of whom she never after- wards heard tidings; Lucia, by Master Walker, whose 8 MARY LAMB. sister was her particular friend ; Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly declaimer but a plain boy, and shorter by a head than his two sons in the scene, &c. In con- clusion, Starkey appears to have been one of those mild spirits which, not originally deficient in under- standing, are crushed by penury into dejection and feebleness. He might have proved a useful adjunct, if not an ornament to society, if fortune had taken him into a very little fostering; but wanting that he became a captain — a by-word — and lived and died a broken bulrush.” But the chief and best part of Mary's education was due to the fact that her father's employer, Mr. Salt, had a good library “ into which she was tumbled early ” and suffered to “ browse there without much selection or prohibition.” A little selection, however, would have made the pasturage all the wholesomer to a child of Mary's sensitive brooding nature; for the witch-stories and cruel tales of the sufferings of the martyrs on which she pored all alone, as her brother did after her, wrought upon her tender brain and lent their baleful aid to nourish those seeds of madness which she inherited ; as may be inferred from a sub- sequent adventure. When tripping to and from school or playing in the Temple Gardens Mary must sometimes, though we have no record of the fact, have set eyes on Oliver Goldsmith : for the first^ten years of her life were the last of his ; spent, though with frequent sojourns elsewhere, in the Temple. And in the Temple church- yard he was buried, just ten months before the birth of Charles. The London born and bred child had occasional tastes of joyous, healthful life in the country, for her mother VISITS TO THE COUNTRY. 9 !uid hospitable relatives in her native county, pleasant Hertfordshire. Specially was there a great-aunt married to a substantial yeoman named Gladman living at Mackery End within a gentle walk of Wheat- hampstead, the visits to whom remained in Mary's memory as the most delightful recollections of her childhood. In after life she embodied them, mingling fiction with fact, in a story called Louisa Manners or the Farm House where she tells in sweet and child-like words of the ecstasy of a little four-year-old girl on finding herself for the first time in the midst of fields quite full of bright shining yellow flowers with sheep and young lambs feeding; of the inexhaustible interest of the farm-yard, the thresher in the barn with his terrifying flail and black beard, the collecting of eggs* and searching for scarce violets (“ if we could find eggs and violets too, what happy children we were ”) ; of the hay- making and the sheep-shearing, the great wood fires and the farm-house suppers. This will recall to the reader Elia's Mackery End ; how, forty years afterwards, brother and sister re- visited the old farm-house one day in the midst of June and how Bridget (so he always called Mary in print) “ remembered her old acquaintance again ; some altered features, of course, a little grudged at. At first, indeed, she was ready to disbelieve for joy ; but the scene soon re-confirmed itself in her affections, and she traversed every out-post of the old mansion, to the wood-house, the orchard, the place where the pigeon- house had stood (house and birds were alike flown), with a breathless impatience of recognition which was more pardonable perhaps than decorous at the age of fifty odd. But Bridget in some things is behind her years." 10 MARY LAMB . " . . . The only thing left was to get into the house, and that was a difficulty which to me singly would have been insurmountable, for I am terribly shy in making myself known to strangers and out-of-date kinsfolk. Love, stronger than scruple, winged my cousin in without me; but she soon returned with a creature that might have sat to a sculptor for the image of Welcome. ... To have seen Bridget and her, — it was like the meeting of the two scriptural cousins ! There was a grace and dignity, an amplitude of form and stature answering to her mind in this farmer's wife, which would have shined in a palace. . . ” To return to the days of childhood, Mary also paid visits to her maternal grandmother Field, house- keeper to the Plumers at their stately but forsaken mansion of Blakesware ; but here the pleasure was mingled with a kind of weird solemnity. Mary has left on record her experiences in a tale which forms a sort of pendant to Blakesmoor in H- shire by Elia. Her story is called Margaret Green , the Young Ma- hometan , also from Mrs . Leicester’s School and, apart from a slight framework of invention (“ Mrs. Beres- ford/' her grandmother, being represented as the owner instead of housekeeper of the mansion), is minutely auto- biographical. “ Every morning when she (Mrs. Beres- ford) saw me she used to nod her head very kindly and say * How do you do, little Margaret? 9 But I do not recollect that she ever spoke to me during the remainder of the day, except indeed after I had read the psalms and the chapters which was my daily task; then she used constantly to observe that I im- proved in my reading and frequently added, f I never heard a child read so distinctly/ When my daily portion of reading was over I had a taste of needle- BLARES WAHE. 11 work, wliich generally lasted half an hour. I was not allowed to pass more time in reading or work, because niy eyes were very weak, for which reason I was always set to read in the large-print family Bible. I was very fond of reading, and when I could, unobserved, steal a few minutes as they were intent on their work, I used to delight to read in the historical part of the Bible; but this, because of my eyes, was a forbidden pleasure, and the Bible being never removed out of the room, it was only for a short time together that I dared softly to lift up the leaves and peep into it. As I was permitted to walk in the garden or wander about the— house whenever I pleased, I used to leave the parlour for hours together, and make out my own solitary amusement as well as I could. My first visit was always to a very large hall, which, from being paved with marble, was called the Marble Hall. The heads of the twelve Caesars were hung round the hall. Every day I mounted on the chairs to look at them and to read the inscriptions underneath, till I became perfectly familiar with their names and features. Hogarth^s prints were below the Caesars. I was very fond of looking at them and endeavouring to make out their meaning. An old broken battledore and some shuttle-cocks with most of the feathers missing were on a marble slab in one corner of the hall, which constantly reminded me that there had once been younger inhabitants here than the old lady and her grey-headed servants. In another corner stood a marble figure of a satyr; every day I laid my hand on his shoulder to feel how cold he was. This hall opened into a room full of family portraits. They were all in dresses of former times ; some were old men and women, and some were children. I used 12 MAEY LAMB. to long to have a fairy's power to call the children down from their frames to play with me. One little girl in particular, who hung by the side of the glass door which opened into the garden, I often invited to walk there with me; but she still kept her station, one arm round a little lamb’s neck and in her hand a large bunch of roses. From this room I usually proceeded to the garden. When I was weary of the garden I wandered over the rest of the house. The best suite of rooms I never saw by any other light than what glimmered through the tops of the window-shutters, which, however, served to show the carved chimney- pieces and the curious old ornaments about the rooms ; but the worked furniture and carpets of which I heard such constant praises I could have but an im- perfect sight of, peeping under the covers which were kept over them by the dim light; for I constantly lifted up a corner of the envious cloth that hid these highly praised rareties from my view. “ The bedrooms were also regularly explored by me, as well to admire the antique furniture as for the sake of contemplating the tapestry hangings which were full of Bible history. The subject of the one which chiefly attracted my attention was Hagar and her son Ishmael. Every day I admired the beauty of the youth, and pitied the forlorn state of him and his mother in the wilderness. At the end of the gallery into which these tapestry rooms opened was one door which, having often in vain attempted to open, I concluded to be locked ; and finding myself shut out, I was very desirous of seeing what it contained and, though still foiled in the attempt, I every day endea- voured to turn the lock, which, whether by constantly trying I loosened, being probably a very old one, or BLAKE8WARE. V6 tliat the door was not locked but fastened tight by time, I know not ; to my great joy, as I was one day trying the lock as usual, it gave way, and I found myself in this so long desired room. “It proved to be a very large library. This was indeed a precious discovery. I looked round on the books with the greatest delight : I thought I would read them every one. I now forsook all my favourite haunts and passed all my time here. I took down first one book, then another. If you never spent whole mornings alone in a large library, you cannot conceive the pleasure of taking down books in the constant hope of finding an entertaining book among them ; yet, after many days, meeting with nothing but disappointment, it became less pleasant All the books within my reach were folios of the gravest cast. I could understand very little that I read in them, and the old dark print and the length of the lines made my eyes ache. “ When I had almost resolved to give up the search as fruitless, I perceived a volume lying in an obscure corner of the room. I opened it; it was a charming print, the letters were almost as large as the type of the family Bible. In the first page I looked into I saw the name of my favourite Ishmael, whose face I knew so well from the tapestry, and whose history I had often read in the Bible. I sat myself down to read this book with the greatest eagerness. The title of it was Mahometanism Explained .... A great many of the leaves were torn out, but enough remained to make me imagine that Ishmael was the true son of Abraham. I read here that the true descendants of Abraham were known by a light which streamed from the middle of their foreheads. It said that 14 MARY LAMB . Ishmael’s father and mother first saw this light stream- ing from his forehead as he was lying asleep in the cradle. I was very sorry so many of the leaves were torn out, for it was as entertaining as a fairy tale. I used to read the history of Ishmael and then go and look at him in the tapestry, and then read his history again. When I had almost learned the history of Ishmael by heart, I read the rest of the book, and then I came to the history of Mahomet who was there said to be the last descendant of Abraham. “ If Ishmael had engaged so much of my thoughts, how much more so must Mahomet ? His history was full of nothing but wonders from the beginning to the end. The book said that those who believed all the wonderful stories which were related of Mahomet were called Mahometans and True Believers; I concluded that I must be a Mahometan, for I believed every word I read. “ At length I met with something which I also believed, though I trembled as I read it. This was, that after we are dead we are to pass over a narrow bridge which crosses a bottomless gulf. The bridge was described to be no wider than a silken thread, and it is said that all who were not Mahometans would slip on one side of this bridge and drop into the tremendous gulf that had no bottom. I considered myself as a Mahometan, yet I was perfectly giddy whenever I thought of passing over this bridge. One day, seeing the old lady totter across the room, a sudden terror seized me for I thought how would she ever be able to get over the bridge ? Then, too, it was that I first recollected that my mother would also be in imminent danger ; for I imagined she had never heard the name of Mahomet, because I foolishly BLAKESWARE. 15 conjectured this book had been locked up for ages in the library and was utterly unknown to the rest of the world. “ All my desire was now to tell them the discovery I had made ; for, I thought, when they knew of the existence of Mahometanism Explained they would read it and become Mahometans to ensure themselves a safe passage over the silken bridge. But it wanted more courage than I possessed to break the matter to my intended converts ; I must acknowledge that I had ~\feen reading without leave ; and the habit of never speaking or being spoken to considerably increased the difficulty. “ My anxiety on this subject threw me into a fever. I was so ill that my mother thought it necessary to sleep in the same room with me. In the middle of the night I could not resist the strong desire I felt to tell her what preyed so much on my mind. “ I awoke her out of a sound sleep and begged she would be so kind as to be a Mahometan. She was very much alarmed, for she thought I was delirious, which I believe I was ; for I tried to explain the reason of my request, but it was in such an incoherent manner that she could not at all comprehend what I was talking about. The next day a physician was sent for and he discovered, by several questions that he put to me, that I had read myself into a fever. He gave mtr medicines and ordered me to be kept very quiet and said he hoped in a few days I should be very well ; but as it was a new case to him, he never having attended a little Mahometan before, if any lowness continued after he had removed the fever he would, with my mother's permission, take me home with him to study this extraordinary case at his leisure ; and 16 MARY LAMB . added that he could then hold a consultation with his wife who was often very useful to him in prescribing remedies for the maladies of his younger patients.” In the sequel, this sensible and kindly doctor takes his little patient home, and restores her by giving her child-like wholesome pleasures and rational sympathy. I fear that this only shadowed forth the wise tenderness with which Mary Lamb would have treated such a child rather than what befell herself ; and that with the cruelty of ignorance * Mary’s mother and grand- mother suffered her young spirit to do battle still, in silence and inward solitariness, with the phantoms imagination conjured up in her too-sensitive brain. | “ Polly, what are those poor crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking always?” was worthy Mrs v Field’s wav of endeavouring to win the confidence of thethougnt- tijl suffering child. The word- in the story, “ my mother almost wholly discontinued talking to me,” “ I scarcely ever heard a word addressed to me from morning to night ” have a ring of truth, of bitter experience in them, which makes the heart ache. Yet it was no result of sullenness on either side, least of all did it breed any ill-feeling on Mary^s. It was simple stu- pidity, lack of insight or sympathy in the elders; and on hers was repaid by the sweetest affection and, in after years, by a self-sacrificing devotion which, carried at last (nr beyond her strength, led to the great calamity of her life. Grandmother Field was a fine old character, however, as the reader of Elia well knows. She had A mounting spirit, one that entertained Scorn of base action, deed dishonourable Or aught unseemly. Like her daughter, Mrs. Lamb, she had been a GRANDMOTHER FIELD . 17 Yiandsome stately woman in her prime and when heot with age and pain, for she suffered from a cruel malady, cheerful patience and fortitude gave her dignity of another and a higher kind. But, like her daughter, she seems to have been wanting in those finer elements of tenderness and sympathy which were of vital consequence in the rearing up of a child smitten like Mary with a hereditary tendency to madness. 2 18 MARY LAMB. CHAPTER II. Birth of Charles. — Coleridge. — Domestic Toils and Trials. — Their Tragic Culmination. — Letters to and from Coleridge. 1775-1796. — 2Et. 11-32. On the 10th of February 1775 arrived a new member into the household group in Crown Office Row — Charles, the child of his father’s old age, the “ weakly but very pretty babe/’ who was to prove their strong support. And now Mary was no longer a lonely girl. She was just old bnougn to be trusted to nurse and tend the baby and she became a mother to it. In after life she spoke of the comfort, the wholesome curative influence upon her young troubled mind, which this devotion to Charles in his infancy brought with it. And as he grew older rich was her reward ; for he repaid the debt with a love half filial, half fraternal, than which no human tie was ever stronger or more sublimely adequate to the strain of a terrible emergency. As his young mind unfolded he found in her intelligence and love the same genial fostering influences that had cherished his feeble frame into health and strength. It was with his little hand in hers that he first trod the Temple gardens, and spelled out the inscriptions on the sun-dials and on the tomb- THE LITTLE BROTHER. 19 stones in the old burying-ground and wondered, find- ing only lists of the virtues “ where all the naughty people were buried ? ” Like Mary, his disposition was so different from that of his gay, pleasure-loving parents that they but ill understood “and gave them- selves little trouble about him," which also tended to draw brother and sister closer together. There are no other records of Mary's girlhood than such as may be gathered from the story of her brother's early life ; of how when he was five and she was fifteen she came near to losing him from small-pox, Aunt Hetty grieving over him “ the only thing in the world she loved" as she was wont to say, with a mother's tears. And how, three years later (in 1782), she had to give up his daily companionship and see him, now grown a handsome boy with “ crisply curling black hair, clear brown complexion, aquiline, slightly Jewish cast of features, winning smile, and glittering, restless eyes," equipped as a Christ's Hospital boy and, with Aunt Hetty, to ... peruse him round and round, And hardly know him in his yellow coats, Bed leathern belt and gown of russet blue. Coleridge was already a Blue Coat boy but older and too high above Charles in the school for comradeship then. To Lamb, with home close at hand, it was a happy time; but Coleridge, homeless and friendless in the great city, had no mitigations of the rough Spartan discipline which prevailed ; and the weekly whole holidays when, turned adrift in the streets from morn till night, he had nothing but a crust of bread in his pockets and no resource but to beguile the pangs of hunger in summer with hours of bathing in the New River and in winter with furtive hanging round book- 2 * 20 MARY LAMB stalls wrought permanent harm to his fine-strung organisation. Nor did the gentleness of his disposition* or the brilliancy of his powers, save him from the birch-loving brutalities of old Boyer, who was wont to- add an extra stripe “ because he was so ugly.” In the Lamb household the domestic outlook grew dark as soon as Mary was grown up, for her father's facul- ties and her mother's health failed early ; and when, in his fifteenth year, Charles left Christ's Hospital it was- already needful for him to take up the burthens of a man on his young shoulders ; and for Mary not only to make head against sickness, helplessness, old age with its attendant exigencies but to add to the now straitened means by taking in millinery work. For eleven years, as she has told us, she main- tained herself by the needle; from the age of twenty- one to thirty-two, that is. It was not in poor old Aunt Hetty's nature to be helpful either. “ She was from morning till night poring over good books and devotional exercises. . . . The only secular employ- ment I remember to have seen her engaged in was the splitting of French beans and dropping them into a basin of fair water,'' says Elia. Happily, a clerk- ship in the South Sea House, where his brother already was, enabled Charles to maintain his parents and a better post in the India House was obtained two years afterwards. Nor were there wanting snatches of pleasant holiday sometimes shared by Mary. Of one, a visit to the sea, there is a beautiful reminiscence in The Old Margate Hoy, written more than thirty years afterwards. “ It was our first sea-side experiment/' he says, “ and many circumstances combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of my life. We had neither of us seen the sea '' (he was fifteen and Mary TOILS AND TRIALS. 21 twenty-six), “and we had never been from home so long together in company.” The disappointment they both felt at the first sight of the sea he explains with -one of his subtle and p-efaumf^suggestions. “ Is it mot” . . . says he, “that we had expected to behold (absurdly I grant, but by the law of imagination inevitably) not a definite object compassable by the eye, but all the sea at once y the commensurate antagonist of the earth ? Whereas the eye can but take in a ‘ slip of salt water/” The whole passage is one of Elia's finest. Then Coleridge too, who had remained two years longer at Christ's Hospital than Lamb and after he went up to Cambridge in 1791 continued to pay frequent visits to London, spent many a glorious •evening, not only those memorable ones with Charles in the parlour of the “ Salutation and Cat/' but in his home ; and was not slow to discover Mary's fine quali- ties and to take her into his brotherly heart as a little poem, written so early as 1794, to cheer his friend during a serious illness of hers testifies : — Cheerily, dear Charles ! Thou thy best friend shalt cherish many a year Such warm presages feel I of high hope. For not uninterested the dear maid I ’ye viewed — her soul affectionate yet wise, Her polished wit as mild as lambent glories That play around a sainted infant’s head. The year 1795 witnessed changes for all. The father, now wholly in his dotage, was pensioned off by Mr. Salt and the family had to exchange their old home in the Temple for straitened lodgings in Little truth, disuse has made me awkward at it. I know I behaved myself, particularly at Tom Poole’s and at Cruikshank’s most like a sulky child ; but company and converse are strange to me. It was kind in you all to endure me as you did. “ Are you and your dear Sara — to me also very dear because very kind — agreed yet about the management of little Hartley ? And how go on the little rogue’s teeth ? ” The mention of his address in the foregoing letter^ shows that Lamb and his father had already quitted: Little Queen Street. It is probable that they did so,, indeed, immediately after the great tragedy ; to escape,, not only from the painful associations of the spot but also from the cruel curiosity which its terrible noto- riety must have drawn upon them. The season was coming round which could not but renew his and Mary’s grief and anguish in the recollection of that “day of horrors.” “ Friday next, Coleridge,” he writes, “ is the day (September 22nd) on which my mother died and in the letter is enclosed that beautiful and affect- ing poem beginning * — Alas ! how am T changed ? Where be the tears, The sobs, and forced suspensions of the breath, THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY. 49 And all the dull desertions of the heart. With which I hung o’er my dead mother’s corse ? Where be the blest subsidings of the storm Within ? The sweet resignedness of hope Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love In which I bowed me to my Father’s will ? . 3 ^ — => i Q Mary’s was a silent grief. But those few casual pathetic words written years afterwards speak her life-long sorrow, — “ my dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart/’ She continued quiet in her lodgings, free from relapse till toward the end of the year. On the 10th December Charles wrote in bad spirits, — “ My teasing lot makes me too confused for a clear judgment of things ; too selfish for sympathy. . . . My sister is pretty well, thank God. We think of you very often. God bless you. Continue to be my correspondent, and I will strive to fancy that this world is not c all barrenness.’ ” But by Christmas Day she was once more in the jisyjjim. In sad solitude he gave utterance, again in verse form, to his overflowing grief and love : — I am a widow’d thing now thou art gone ! Now thou art gone, my own familiar friend, Companion, sister,, helpmate, counsellor ! Alas ! that honour’d mind whose sweet reproof And meekest wisdom in times past have smooth’d The unfilial harshness of my foolish speech, And made me loving to my parents old (Why is this so, ah God ! why is this so ?) That honour’d mind become a fearful blank, Her senses lock’d up, and herself kept out From human sight or converse, while so many Of the foolish sort are left to roam at large, Doing all acts of folly and sin and shame ? Thy paths are mystery ! * 50 MARY LAMB . Yet I will not think Sweet friend, but we shall one day meet and live In quietness and die so, fearing God. Or if not , and these false suggestions be A fit of the weak nature, loth to part With what it loved so long and held so dear ; If thou art to be taken and I left (More sinning, yet unpunish’d save in thee,) It is the will of God, and we are clay In the potter’s hand ; and at the worst are made From absolute nothing, vessels of disgrace, Till His most righteous purpose wrought in us, Our purified spirits find their perfect rest. To add to these sorrows Coleridge had, for some time, been growing negligent as a correspondent. So early as April Lamb had written, after affectionate enquiries for Hartley “ the minute philosopher " and Hartley's mother,— “ Coleridge, I am not trifling, nor are' these matter-of-fact questions only. You are all very dear and precious to me. Do what you will, Coleridge, you may hurt and vex me by your silence but you cannot estrange my heart from you all. I cannot scatter friend- ships like chuck-farthings, nor let them drop from mine hand like hour-glass sand. I have but two or three people in the world to whom I am more than indifferent and I can't afford to whistle them off to the winds." And again, three months after his return from Stowey, he wrote sorrowfully almost plaintively, re- monstrating for Lloy d's sake and his own : — “ You use Lloyd very ill, never writing to him. I tell you again that his is not a mind with which you should play tricks. He deserves more tenderness from you. For myself, I must spoil a little passage of Beaumont and Fletcher's to adapt it to my feelings : I am prouder That I was once your friend, tlio’ now forgot, Than to have had another true to me. MAEY ILL AGAIN. 51 If you don't write to me now, as I told Lloyd, I shall get angry and call you hard names — ' Manchineel ' " (alluding to a passage in a poem of Coleridge's, where he compares a false friend to the treacherous man- chineel tree * which mingles its own venom with the rain and poisons him who rests beneath its shade) “ and I don't know what else. I wish you would send me my great-coat. The snow and the rain season is at hand and I have but a wretched old coat, once my father's, to keep 'em off and that is transitory. When time drives flocks from field to fold, When ways grow foul and blood gets cold, I shall remember where I left my coat. Meet emblem wilt thou be, old Winter, of a friend's neglect — cold, cold, cold ! " But this fresh stroke of adversity, sweeping away the fond hope Charles had begun to cherish that “ Mary would never be so ill again," roused his friend's some- times torpid but deep and enduring affection for him into action. “ You have writ me many kind letters, and I have answered none of them," says Lamb, on the 28th of January 1798. “ I don't deserve your attentions. An unnatural indifference has been creeping on me since my last misfortunes or I should have seized the first opening of a correspondence with you. These last afflictions, Coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my will. They found me unprepared. ... I have been very querulous, impatient under the rod — full of little jealousies and heart-burnings. I had well-nigh quarrelled with Charles Lloyd ; and for no other reason, I believe, than that the good creature did all he could to make me happy. The truth is I thought * Hippomane Mancinella , one of the Euphorbiacea , a native of South America. 4 * UNIVERSITY OF 52 MARY LAMB . he tried to force my mind from its natural and proper bent. He continually wished me to be from home ; he was drawing me from the consideration of my poor dear Mary's situation rather than assisting me to gain a proper view of it with religious consolations. I wanted to be left to the tendency of my own mind in a solitary state which in times past, T knew, had led to quietness and a patient bearing of the yoke. He was hurt that I was not more constantly with him ; but he was living with White (Jem White, an old school- fellow, author of Falstaff’s Letters), a man to whom I had never been accustomed to impart my dearest feelings though, from long habits of friendliness and many a social and good quality, I loved him very much. I met company there sometimes, indiscriminate com- pany. Any society almost, when I am in affliction, is sorely painful to me. I seem to breathe more freely, to think more collectedly, to feel more properly and calmly when alone. All these things the good creature did with the kindest intentions in the world but they produced in me nothing but soreness and discontent. I became, as he complained, ‘ jaundiced * towards him . . . but he has forgiven me; and his smile, I hope, will draw all such humours from me. I am recovering, God be praised for it, a healthiness of mind, something like calmness ; but I want more religion. . . . Mary is recovering ; but I see no opening yet of a situation for her. Your invitation went to mv very heart; but you have a power of exciting interest, of leading all hearts captive, too forcible to admit of Mary's being with you. I consider her as perpetually on the brink of madness. I think you would almost make her dance within an inch of the precipice : she must be with duller fancies and A BRIEF ESTRANGEMENT, 53 cooler intellects. I know a young man of this de- scription, who has suited her these twenty years, and may live to do so still, if we are one day restored to each other.” But the clouds gathered up again between the friends, generated partly by a kind of intellectual arrogance_ whereof Coleridge afterwards accused him- self (he was often but too self-depreciatory in after life) which, in spite of Lamb's generous and un- bounded admiration for his friend, did at last both irritate and hurt him ; still more by the influence of Lloyd who, himself slighted as he fancied, and full of a morbid sensitiveness “bordering on derangement,” sometimes indeed overleaping that border, worked upon Lamb's soreness of feeling till a brief estrange- ment ensued. Lamb had not yet learned to be on his guard with Lloyd. Years afterwards he wrote of him to Coleridge : “ He is a sad tattler ; but this is under the rose. Twenty years ago he estranged one friend from me quite, whom I have been regretting, but never could regain since. He almost alienated you also from me or me from you, I don't know which : but that breach is closed. The ‘ dreary sea' is filled up. He has lately been at work ‘ telling again,' as they call it, a most gratuitous piece of mischief, and has caused a coolness betwixt me and (not a friend but) an intimate acquaintance. I suspect, also, he saps Manning's faith in me who am to Manning more than an acquaintance.” The breach was closed, indeed, almost as soon as opened. But Coleridge went away to Germany for fourteen months and the correspondence was mean- while suspended. When it was resumed Lamb was, in some respects, an altered man ; he was passing from 54 MAR Y LAMB. youth to maturity, enlarging the circle of his acquain- tance and entering on more or less continuous literary work ; whilst, on the other hand, the weaknesses which accompanied the splendid endowments of his friend were becoming but too plainly apparent; and though they never for a moment lessened Lamb's affection, nay, with his fine humanity seemed to give rather an added tenderness to it, there was inevitably a less deferential, a more humorous and playful tone on his side in their intercourse. ; “ Bless you, old sophist who, next to human nature, taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing," says he to the poet-philosopher by-and-by. And the weak side of his friend's style, too, received an occasional sly thrust ; as for instance when on forwarding him some books he writes in 1800 “ I detained Statius wilfully, out of a reverent regard to your style. Statius they tell me is turgid." CHAPTER IV. Death of the Father. — Mary comes Home to live. — A Removal. — First Yerses. — A Literary Tea-Party. — Another Move. — Friends increase. 1 799-1800. — iEt. 35-36. The feeble flame of life in Lamb's father flickered on for two years and a half after his wife’s death. He was laid to rest at last beside her and his sister Hetty in the churchyard of St. Andrew's, Holborn (now swept away in the building of the Holborn Viaduct), on the 13th of April 1799, and Mary came home, once more. There is no mention of either fact in Lamb's letters ; for Coleridge was away in Germany; and with Southey, who was almost the sole corre- spondent of this year, the tie was purely intellectual and never even in that kind a close one. A significant allusion to Mary there is, however, in a letter to him dated May 20 : “ Mary was never in better health or spirits than now." But neither the happiness of sharing Charles's home again nor anything else could save her from the constant recurrence of her malady; nor, in these early days, from the painful notoriety of what had befallen her; and they were soon regarded as unwelcome inmates in the Chapel Street lodgings. 56 MARY LAMB. Early in 1800 he tells Coleridge : “ Soon after I wrote to you last an offer was made me by Gutch (you must remember him at Christ's) to come and lodge with him at his house in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. This was a very comfortable offer to me, the rooms being at a reasonable rent and including the use of an old servant, besides being infinitely preferable to ordinary lodgings in our case as you must perceive. As Gutch knew all our story and the perpetual lia- bility to a recurrence in my sister's disorder, probably to the end of her life, I certainly think the offer very generous and very friendly. I have got three rooms (including servant) under £34 a year. Here I soon found myself at home, and here, in six weeks after, Mary was well enough to join me. So we are once more settled. I am afraid we are not placed out of the reach of future interruptions ; but I am determined to take what snatches of pleasure we can, between the acts of our distressful drama. I have passed two days at Oxford, on a visit, which I have long put off, to Gutch's family. The sight of the Bodleian Library and, above all, a fine bust of Bishop Taylor at All Souls' were particularly gratifying to me. Unluckily it was not a family where I could take Mary with me, and I am afraid there is something of dishonesty in any pleasure I take without her. She never goes anywhere." And to Manning : “ It is a great object to me to live in town." [Pentonville then too much of a gossiping country suburb !] “ We can be nowhere private except in the midst of London." By the summer Mary was not only quite well but making a first essay in verse — the theme, a playful mockery of her brother's boyish love for a pictured beauty at Blakesware described in his essay, — u that MARTS FIRST VERSES. 57 Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery and a lamb, that hung next the great bay window, with the bright yellow H shire hair, and eye of watchet hue — so like my Alice ! I am persuaded she was a true Elia — Mildred Elia, I take it. From her and from my passion for her — for I first learned love from a picture — Bridget took the hint of those pretty whimsical lines which thou mayest see if haply thou hast never seen them, reader, in the margin. But my Mildred grew not old like the imaginary Helen.” With brotherly pride he sends them to Coleridge . “ How do you like this little epigram ? It is not my writing, nor had I any finger in it. If you concur with me in thinking it very elegant and very original, I shall be tempted to name the author to you. I will just hint that it is almost or quite a first attempt : — HELEN. High-born Helen, round your dwelling These twenty years I ’ve paced in vain ; Haughty beauty, thy lover’s duty Hath been to glory in his pain. High-born Helen, proudly telling Stories of thy cold disdain ; I starve, I die, now you comply, And I no longer can complain. These twenty years I ’ve lived on tears, Dwelling forever on a frown ; On sighs I ’ve fed, your scorn my bread; I perish now you kind are grown. Can I who loved my beloved, But for the scorn “ was in her eye Can I be moved for my beloved, When she “ returns me sigh for sigh ” ? In stately pride, by my bed-side High-born Helen’s portrait ’s hung ; Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays Are nightly to the portrait sung. 68 MARY LAMB. To that I weep, nor ever sleep, Complaining all night long to her. Helen grown old , no longer cold , Said, “ You to all men I prefer.” Lamb inserted this and another by Mary, a serious and tender little poem, the Dialogue between a Mother and Child beginning O lady, lay your costly robes aside, No longer may you glory in your pride, in the first collected edition of his works. Mary now began also to go out with her brother, and the last record of this year in the Coleridge correspondence discloses them at a literary tea-party, not in the character of lions but only as friends of a lion — Coleridge — who had already become, in his frequent visits to town, the prey of some third-rate admiring literary ladies, notably of a certain Miss Wesley (niece of John Wesley) and of her friend Miss Benger, authoress of a Life of Tobin , &c. “You blame us for giving your direction to M\ss Wesley,” says the letter; “the woman has been ten times after us about it and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue, but that she would once write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. You read us a dismal homily upon f Realities/ We know quite as well as you do what are shadows and what are realities. You, for instance, when you are over your fourth or fifth jorum, chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of realities. Shadows are cold, thin things that have no warmth or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her friend and a tribe of authoresses that come after you here daily and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged A LITERARY TEA-PARTY. 59 that mopsey Miss Wesley to dance after you in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you, but there are more burs in the wind. I came home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, 1 am sure, of the author but hunger about me ; and whom found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss Benjay or Benje ... I just came in time enough, I believe, luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems she is one of your authoresses that you first foster and then upbraid us with. But I forgive you. e The rogue has given me potions to make me love him.' Well, go she would not nor step a step over our threshold till we had promised to come to drink tea with her next night. I had never seen her before and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. We went, however, not to be impolite. Her lodgings are up two pair of stairs in East Street. Tea and coffee and macaroons — a kind of cake — much love. We sat down. Presently Miss Benjay broke the silence by declaring herself quite of a different opinion from D’Israeli , who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the mere effect of organization. She begged to know my opinion. I attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ, but that went off very flat. She immediately conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics ; and turning round to Mary, put some question to her in French, possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French, The explanation that took place occasioned some em- barrassment and much wondering. She then fell 60 MARY LAMB. into an insulting conversation about the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages and con- cluded with asserting that the Saxon was esteemed the purest dialect in Germany. From thence she passed into the subject of poetry where I, who had hitherto sat mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson's time. It seems the doctor has suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way, by the severity of his critical strictures in his Lives of the Poets . I here ventured to question the fact and was beginning to appeal to names but I was assured f it was certainly the case/ Then we discussed Miss More's [Hannah] book on education, which I had never read. It seems Dr. Gregory, another of Miss Benjay's friends, had found fault with one of Miss More's metaphors. Miss More has been at some pains to vindicate herself, in the opinion of Miss Benjay not without success. It seems the Doctor is invariably against the use of broken or mixed metaphor which he reprobates, against the authority of Shakspeare himself. We next discussed the question whether Pope was a poet? I find Dr. Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward does not at all concur with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative merits of the ten translations of Pizarro and Miss Benjay or Benje advised Mary to take two of them home (she thought it might afford her some pleasure to compare them verbatim ), which we declined. It being now nine o'clock, wine and macaroons were again served round, and we parted with a promise to go again next week and meet the Miss Porters who, MITRE COURT. 61 it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge and wish to see us because we are his friends. I have been preparing for the occasion. I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to cut a tolerable second-rate figure. “ . . . Take no thought about your proof-sheets ; they shall be done as if Woodfall himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and little David Hartley, your little reality. Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at anything I have written. “ I am, and will be, “ Yours ever in sober sadness, “ Land of Shadows, C. Lamb. Umbra . “ Shadow month 16th or 17th, J800. “ Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius Ungues : in English — illiterate, a dunce, a ninny .” Mr. Gutch seems to have soon repented him of his friendly deed : — “ I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable at Our Lady’s next feast/’ writes Lamb to Manning. “ I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms which look out (when you stand a-tip-toe) over the Thames and Surrey hills. . . . My bed faces the river so as by perking up on my haunches and supporting my carcase with my elbows, without much wrying my neck I can see the white sails glide by the bottom of the King’s Bench Walk as I lie in my bed. ... casement windows with small panes to look more like a cottage. . . . There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance and shall be able to lock my friends out 62 MARY LAMB . as often as I desire to hold free converse with my immortal mind, for my present lodgings resemble a minister’s levee, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call ’em) since I have resided in town. Like the country mouse that had tasted a little of urbane manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self, without mouse-traps and time-traps.” These rooms were at No. 16, Mitre Court Buildings, and here Lamb and his sister lived for nine years. But far from “nibbling his own cheese” by himself, there for nine years he and Mary gathered round their hearth and homely, hospitable supper-table with its bread and cheese in these early days and by-and- by its round of beef or “winter hand of pork,” an ever lengthening succession of friends, cronies and acquaint- ance. There came Manning with his “fine, sceptical, dogmatical face *’ ; and George Dyer, with his head full of innutritious learning and his heart of the milk of kindness. And Godwin the man of strange contrasts, a bold thinker yet ignorant as a child of human nature and weakly vain ; with such a “ noisy fame,” for a time, as if he were “ Briareus Centimanus or a Tityus tall enough to pull Jupiter from his heavens,” and then soon forgotten, or remembered only to be denounced; for a year the loving husband of one of the sweetest and noblest of women and after her death led captive by the coarse flatteries and vulgar pretensions of one of the commonest. “ Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin ? ” said, from a neighbouring balcony, she who in a few months became his second wife and in a few more had alienated some of his oldest friends and earned the cordial dislike of all, even of Lamb. “ I will be buried with this inscription over me, ‘ Here lies C. L., the woman-hater/ I mean that hated one FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. 63 woman ; for the rest, God bless ’em,” was his whim- sical way of venting his feelings towards her ; and Shelley experienced the like though he expressed them less pungently. Then there was Holcroft who had fought his way up from grimmest poverty, misery and ignorance to the position of an accomplished literary man ; and fine old Captain Burney who had been taught his accidence by Eugene Aram and had sailed round the world with Captain Cook. And his son, ‘ noisy Martin ’ with the * spotless soul/ for forty years boy and man, Mary’s favourite; and Phillips of the Marines who was with Captain Cook at his death and shot the savage that killed him ; and Rickman “ the finest fellow to drop in a’ nights,” Southey’s great friend, though he f never read his poetry/ as Lamb tells; staunch Crabb Robinson; Fanny Kelly, with her “ divine plain face ” who died but the other day at the age of ninety odd ; and Mr. Dawe, R.A., a figure of nature’s own purest comedy. All these and many more frequented the home of Charles and Mary Lamb in these years and live in their letters. 64 MARY LAMll. CHAPTER V. Personal Appearance and Manners. — Health. — Influence of Mary’s Illnesses upon Her Brother. No description of Mary Lamb's person in youth is to be found ; but hers was a kind of face which time treats gently, adding with one hand while he takes away with the other; compensating by deepened traces of thought and kindliness the loss of youthful fresh- ness^ Like her brother, her features were well formed. “(Her face was pale and somewhat square, very placid, with grey, intelligent eyes '* says Proctor who first saw r her when she was about fifty- three. “ Eyes brown, soft and penetrating }’ says another friend, Mrs. Cowden Clarke, confirming the observation that it is difficult to judge of the colour of expressive eyes. She, too, lays stress upon the strong resemblance to Charles and especially on a smile like his, “ winning in the extreme." De Quincey speaks of her as “that Madonna-like lady." The only original portrait of her in existence, I believe, is that by the late \Mr. Cary (son of Lamb's old friend), now in the nossession of Mr. Edward Hughes, and engraved in the Memoir of Lamb by Barry Corn- wall; also in Scribner’s Magazine for March 1881 where it is accompanied by a letter from Mr. Cary which states that it was painted in 1834 when Mary was seventy/ She stands a little behind her brother, resting one hand on him and one on the back of his chair. There MARY’S PORTRAIT. 65 is a characteristic sweetness in her attitude and the countenance is full of goodness and intelligence; whilst the finer modelling of Charles’ features and the intel- lectual beauty of his head are rendered with considerable success, — Crabb Robinson's strictures notwithstanding who, it appears, saw not the original, but a poor copy of the figure of Charles./ It was from Cary’s picture that Mr. Armitage, R.A. executed the portraits of the Lambs in the large fresco on the walls of University College Hall, Among its many groups (of which Crabb Robinson, who commissioned the fresco, is the central figure), that containing the Lambs includes also Words- worth, Coleridge, Blake, and Southey,; By an un- fortunate clause in the deed of gift the fresco, which is painted in monochrome, is forbidden to be cleaned, even with bread-crumb; it is therefore already very dingy. In stature, Mary was under the middle size and her bodily frame was strong.] She could walk fifteen miles with ease ; her brother speaks of their having walked thirty miles together and, even at sixty years of age, she was capable of twelve miles “most days /^Regard- less of weather, too, as Lei gh H unt pleasantly tells, in his Familiar Epistle in Verse to Lamb : — You ’ll guess why I can’t see the snow-covered streets, Without thinking of you and your visiting feats, When you call to remembrance how you and one more, When I wanted it most, used to knock at my door ; For when the sad winds told us rain would come down, Or when snow upon snow fairly clogg’d up the town, And dun-yellow fogs brooded over its white, So that scarcely a being was seen towards night, Then — then said the lady yclept near and dear : Now, mind what I tell you — the Lambs will be here. So I poked up the flame, and she got out the tea, And down we both sat as prepared as could be ; And then, sure as fate came the knock of you two, Then the lanthorn, the laugh, and the “ Well, how cl ! ye do ? r * 5 156 MARY LAMB . Mary’s manners were easy, quiet, unpretending; to her brother gentle and tender always, says Mrs. Cowden-Clarke. ^ She had often an upward look of peculiar meaning when directed towards him, as though to give him an assurance that all was well with her ; and a way of repeating his words assentingly when he spoke .l o ^ her. “ He once said, with his peculiar mode of tenderness beneath blunt, abrupt speech, ‘ You must die first, Mary.’ She nodded with her little quiet nod and sweet smile, ‘Yes, I must die first, Charles/ ” When they were in com- pany together her eyes followed him everywhere ; and even when he was talking at the other end of the room, she would supply some word he wanted. ‘ Her voice was soft and persuasive, with at times a certain catch, a kind of emotional stress in breathing, which gave a charm to her reading of poetry and a capti- vating earnestness to her mode of speech when ad- dressing those she liked. It was a slight check that had an eager yearning effect in her voice, creating a softened resemblance to her brother’s stammer’ — that “ pleasant little stammer,” as Barry Cornwall called it, “just enough to prevent his making speeches; just enough to make you listen eagerly for his words.” Like him, too, she took jmuff. “ She had a small, white, delicately-formed hand ; and as it hovered above the tortoise-shell snuff-box, the act seemed yet another link of association between the brother and sister as they sat together over their favourite books.” Mary’s dress was always plain and neat ; not changing much with changing fashions ; yet, with no unfeminine affectation of complete indifference. “ I do dearly love worked muslin,” says she, in one of her letters and the “ Manning silks ” were worn with no ECONOMY AND GENEROSITY. 67 little satisfaction. As she advanced in years she usually wore black stuff or silk ; or, on great occasions, a “ doVe^ coloured silk, with a kerchief of snow-white muslin folded across her bosom/* with a cap of the kind in fashion in her youth, a deep-frilled border, and — aHbow”^nThe top. Mary's severe nurture, though undoubtedly it bore with too heavy a strain on her physical and mental constitution, fitted her morally and practically for the task which she and her brother fulfilled to admiration — that of making an income which, for two-thirds of their joint lives, could not have exceeded two or three hundreds a year, suffice for the heavy expense of her yearly illnesses, for an open-handed hospitality and for the wherewithal to help a friend in need, not to speak of their extensive acquaintance among “ the great race of borrowers/' He was, says de Quincey, “princely — nothing short of that in his . beneficence. . . . Never anyone have I known in this world upon whom for bounty, for indulgence and forgiveness, for charitable construction of doubtful or mixed actions, and for regal munificence, you might have thrown yourself with so absolute a reliance as upon this com- paratively poor Charles Lamb." [There was a certain old-world fashion in Mary's speech corresponding to her appearance, which was quaint and pleasant ; “ yet she was oftener a listener than a speaker, and beneath her sparing talk and retiring manner few would have suspected the ample information and large intelligence that lay concealed." But for her portrait sweetly touched in with subtle tender strokes, such as he who knew and loved her best could alone give, we must turn to Elia's Mackery End: — “ . . . I have obligations to Bridget extending 5 ♦ 68 MARY LAMB beyond tlie period of memory. We house together, old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness, with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king^s offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits, yet so as f with a difference/ We are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings, as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood than expressed ; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordi- nary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered. We are both great readers, in different directions. While I am hanging over, for the thou- sandth time, some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern 4ade_ or adventu re, whereof our common reading table is daily fed with assiduously fresh supplies. Narrative teases me,^J have little concern in the progress of events. -iShe must have a story — well, ill, or indifferently told — so there be life stirring in it and plenty of good or evil accidents. The fluctuations of fortune in fiction — and almost in real life — have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the- way humours and opinions — heads with some diverting twist in them — the oddities of authorship, please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. She holds nature more clever. . . . We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive ; and I have observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this : that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out that I was in the ELIA'S DESCRIPTION OF MARY . 69 right and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have differed upon moral points, upon something proper to be done or let alone, whatever heat of opposition or steadiness of conviction I set out with, I am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way of thinking. /■ I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with a gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in company ; at which times she will answer yes or no to a question without fully understanding its purport, which is provoking and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occa- sions. When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly ; but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably. . . . “ In seasons of distress she is the truest comforter, but in the teasing accidents and minor perplexities which do not call out the ivill to meet them, she some- times maketh matters worse by an excess of partici- pation. If she does not always divide your trouble, upon the pleasanter occasions of life she is sure always to treble your satisfaction. She is excellent to be at a play with, or upon a visit ; but best when she goes a journey with you / 5 “ Little could anyone observing Miss Lamb in the habitual serenity of her demeanour,” writes Talfourd, u guess the calamity in which she had partaken, or the malady which frightfully chequered her life. From Mr. Lloyd who, although saddened by impending delusion, was always found accurate in his recollection 70 MARY LAMB . of long past events and conversations, I learned that she had described herself, on her recovery from the fatal attack, as having experienced while it was sub- siding such a conviction that she was absolved in heaven from all taint of the deed in which she had been the agent — such an assurance that it was a dispensation of Providence for good, though so terrible — such a sense that her mother knew her entire innocence and shed down blessings upon her, as though she had seen the reconcilement in solemn vision — that she was not sorely afflicted by the recollection. It was as if the old Greek notion of the necessity for the unconscious shedder of blood, else polluted though guiltless, to pass through a religious purification, had, in her case, been happily accomplished ; so that not only was she without remorse, but without other sorrow than attends on the death of an infirm parent in a good old age. She never shrank from alluding to her mother when any topic connected with her own youth made such a reference, in ordinary respects, natural ; but spoke of her as though no fearful remembrance was associated with the image ; so that some of her most intimate friends who knew of the disaster believed that she had never become aware of her own share in its horrors. It is still more singular that in the wanderings of her insanity, amidst all the vast throngs of imagery she presented of her early days, this picture never recurred or, if ever it did, not associated with shapes of terror/ 3 ] Perhaps this was not so surprising as at first sight it appears ; for the deed was done in a state of frenzy, in which the brain could no more have received a definite impression of the scene than waves lashed by storm can reflect an image. Her knowledge of the HER MALADY. 71 facts was never coloured by consciousness but came to her from without “as a tale that is told.” The state- ment, also, that Mary could always speak calmly of her mother, seems to require some qualification. Emma Isola, Lamb's adopted daughter, afterwards Mrs. Moxon, once asked her, ignorant of the facts, why she never spoke of her mother and was answered only with a cry of distress ; probably the question coming abruptly and from a chilcl confronted her in a new, sudden and peculiarly painful way with the tragedy of her youth. “ Miss Lamb would have been remarkable for the sweetness of her disposition, the clearness of her under- standing, and the gentle wisdom of all her acts and words,” continues Talfourd, “even if these qualities had not been presented in marvellous contrast with the distractions under which she suffered for weeks, latterly for months in every year. There was no tinge of in- sanity discernible in her manner to the most observant eye ; not even in those distressful periods when the premonitory symptoms had apprised her of its approach, and she was making preparations for seclusion.” This, too, must be taken with some qualification. In a letter from Coleridge to Matilda Betham, he mentions that Mary had been to call on the Godwins “ and that her manner of conversation had greatly alarmed them (dear excellent creature ! such is the restraining power of her love for Charles Lamb over her mind, that he is always the last person in whose presence any alienation of her understanding betrays itself) ; that she talked far more, and with more agitation concerning me than about G. Burnet [the too abrupt mention of whose death had upset her ; he was an old friend and one of the original Pantisocratic group] and told Mrs. Godwin that she herself had written to William Wordsworth 72 MARY LAMB. exhorting him to come to town immediately, for that my mind was seriously unhinged/” To resume. “ Her character/' wrote Talfourd, “in all its essential sweet- ness, was like her brother's ; while, by a temper more placid, a spirit of enjoyment more serene, she was enabled to guide, to counsel, to cheer him and to protect him on the verge of the mysterious calamity from the depths of which she rose so often unruffled to his side. To a friend in any difficulty she was the most comfortable of advisers, the wisest of consolers. Hazlitt used to say that he never met with a woman who could reason and had met with only one thoroughly reasonable — the sole exception being Mary Lamb. She did not wish, however, to be made an exception, to the general disparagement of her sex ; for in all her thoughts and feelings she was most womanly — keeping under even undue subordination to her notion of a woman's pro- vince, an intellect of rare excellence which flashed out when the restraints of gentle habit and humble manner / were withdrawn by the terrible force of disease. Though her conversation in sanity was never marked by smart- ness or repartee, seldom rising beyond that of a sensible quiet gentlewoman appreciating and enjoying the talents of her friends, it was otherwise in her madness. Lamb in his letter to Miss Fryer announcing his determi- nation to be entirely with her, speaks of her pouring out memories of all the events and persons of her younger days; but he does not mention what I am able from repeated experiences to add, that her ramb- lings often sparkled with brilliant description and shattered beauty. She would fancy herself in the days of Queen Anne or George the First ; and describe the brocaded dames and courtly manners as though she had been bred among them, in the best style of the old HER MALADY . 73 comedy. It was all broken and disjointed, so that the hearer could remember little of her discourse ; but the fragments were like the jewelled speeches of Congreve, only shaken from their settings. There was sometimes even a vein of crazy logic running through them, asso- ciating things essentially most dissimilar, but connecting them by a verbal association in strange order. As a mere physical instance of deranged intellect, her con- dition was, I believe, extraordinary ; it was as if the finest elements of the mind had been shaken into fantastic combinations, like those of a kaleidoscope/” The immediate cause of her attacks would generally seem to have been excitement or over-fatigue causing, in the first instance, loss of sleep, a feverish restlessness and ending in the compI^'OTerthrow of reason. C( Her relapses,” says Proctor, “ were nob dependent on the seasons ; they came in hot summer and with the freezing winters. The only remedy seems to have been extreme quiet when any slight symptom of uneasiness was apparent. If any exciting talk occurred Charles had to dismiss his friend with a whisper. If any stupor or extraordinary silence was observed then he had to rouse her instantly. He has been seen to take the kettle from the fire and place it for a moment on her head- dress, in order to startle her into recollection.” Once the sudden announcement of the marriage of a young friend — whose welfare she had at heart — restored her, in a moment, after a protracted illness, “ as if by an electrical stroke, to the entire possession of her senses.” But if no precautions availed to remove the premonitory symptom, then would Mary -“as gently as possible prepare her brother for the duty he must perform ; and thus, unless he could stave off the terrible separation till Sunday, oblige him to ask leave of absence from the 74 MARY LAMB. office, as if i'or a clay’s pleasure — a bitter mockery ! On one occasion Mr. Charles Lloyd met them slowly pacing together a little foot-path in Hoxton fields, both weeping bitterly and found, on joining them, that they were taking their solemn way to the accustomed asylum/' Holiday trips were almost always followed by a seizure ; and never did Mary set out on one but with her own hands she packed a strait-waistcoat. The attacks were commonly followed by a period of extreme depression, a sense of being shattered, and by a painful loss of self-reliance. These were but temporary states, however. Mary’s habitual frame of mind was, as Talfourd says, serene and capable of placid enjoyment. In her letters to Sarah Stoddart there are some affecting and probably unique dis- closures of how one who is suffering from madness feels ; and what, taught by her own experience,' Mary regarded as the most important points in the manage- ment of the insane. In reference to her friend’s mother who was thus afflicted, she writes : — “ Do not, I conjure you, let her unhappy malady afflict you too deeply. I speak from experience and from the opportunity I have had of much observation in such cases that insane people, in the fancies they take into their heads, do not feel as one in a sane state of mind does under the real evil of poverty, the perception of having done wrong, or of any such thing that runs in their heads. “ Think as little as you can, and let your wdiole care be to be certain that she is treated with tender - ness. I lay a stress upon this because it is a thing of which people in her state are uncommonly susceptible, and which hardly anyone is at all aware of; a hired nurse never , even though in all other respects they HER MALADY. 75 are good kind of people. I do not think your own presence necessary, unless she takes to you very much , except for the purpose of seeing with your own eyes that she is very kindly treated. “ I do long to see you ! God bless and comfort you.” And again, a few weeks later : — “ After a very feverish night I writ a letter to you and I have been distressed about it ever since. That which gives me most concern is the way in which I talked about your mother’s illness, and which I have since feared you might construe into my having a doubt of your showing her proper attention without my impertinent interference. God knows, nothing of this kind was ever in my thoughts, but I have entered very deeply into your affliction with regard to youi mother ; and while I was writing, the many poor souls in the kind of desponding way she is whom I have seen came fresh into my mind, and all the mis- management with which I have seen them treated was strong in my mind, and I wrote under a forcible impulse which I could not at the time resist, but I have fretted so much about it since that I think it is the last time I will ever let my pen run away with me. “ Your kind heart will, I know, even if you have been a little displeased, forgive me when I assure you my spirits have been so much hurt by my last illness, that, at times, I hardly know what I do. I do not mean to alarm you about myself, or to plead an excuse ; but I am very much otherwise than you have always known me. I do not think anyone perceives me altered, but I have lost all self-confidence in my own actions, and one cause of my low spirits is that I never feel satisfied with anything I do — a perception 76 MARY LAMB. of not being in a sane state perpetually haunts me. I am ashamed to confess this weakness to you ; which, as I am so sensible of, I ought to strive to conquer. But I tell you, that you may excuse any part of my letter that has given offence ; for your not answering it, when you are such a punctual correspondent, has made me very uneasy. “ Write immediately, my dear Sarah, but do not notice this letter, nor do not mention anything I said relative to your poor mother. Your handwriting will convince me you are friends with me ; and if Charles, who must see my letter, was to know I had first written foolishly and then fretted about the event of my folly, he would both ways be angry with me. “ I would desire you to direct to me at home, but your hand is so well known to Charles that that would not do. Thereiore, taKe no notice of my megrims till we meet, which I most ardently long to do. An hour spent in your company would be a cordial to my drooping heart. “ Write, I beg, by the return of post; and as I am very anxious to hear whether you are, as I fear, dis- satisfied with me, you shall, if you please, direct my letter to nurse. I do not mean to continue a secret correspondence, but you must oblige me with this one letter. In future I will always show my letters before they go, which will be a proper check upon my way- ward pen.” But it was upon her brother that the burthen lay heaviest. It was on his brain that the cruel image of the mother’s death-scene was burnt in, and that the grief and loneliness consequent on Mary's ever recurring attacks pressed sorest. “ His anxiety for her health, even in his most con- EFFECT UPON HER BROTHER. 77 trivial moments, was unceasing. If, in company, he perceived she looked languid, he would repeatedly ask her, ‘Mary, does your head ache?' Don't you feel unwell ? and would be satisfied by none of her gentle assurances that his fears were groundless. He was always fearful of her sensibilities being too deeply engaged and if, in her presence, any painful accident or history was discussed, he would turn the conversa- tion with some desperate joke." Miss Betham related to Talfourd that, once when she was speaking to Miss Lamb of her brother and in her earnestness Mary had laid her hand kindly on the eulogist's shoulder, he came up hastily and interrupted them saying, ‘ Come, come, we must not talk sentimentally ? and took up the conversation in his gayest strain. The constant anxiety, the forebodings, the unre- mitting watchful scrutiny of his sister's state, produced a nervous tension and irritability that pervaded his whole life and manifested themselves in many different ways. “ When she discovers symptoms of approaching illness," he once wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth, "it is not easy to say what is best to do. Being by our- selves is bad, and going out is bad. I get so irritable and wretched with fear, that I constantly hasten on the disorder. You cannot conceive the misery of such a foresight. I am sure that for the week before she left me I was little better than light-headed. I now am calm, but sadly, taken down and flat." Well might he say, “ my waking life has much of the confusion, the trouble and obscure perplexity of an ill dream." For he, too, had to wrestle in his own person with the same foe, the same hereditary tendency; though, after One overthrow of reason in his youth, he wrestled sue- 78 MARY LAMB. cessfully, But the frequent allusions in his letters, especially in later years, to attacks of nervous fever, sleeplessness, and depression “ black as a smith's beard, Vulcanic, Stygian " show how near to the brink he was sometimes dragged. “ You do not know how sore and weak a brain I have, or you would allow for many things which you set down to whim," he wrote to Godwin. And again, when there had been some coolness between them : “ . . . did the black Hypo- chondria never gripe thy heart till thou hast taken a friend for an enemy ? The foul fiend, Flibbertigibbet leads me over four-inched bridges to course my own shadow for a traitor. . . ” “ Yet, nervous, tremulous as he seemed," writes Talfourd, € so slight of frame that he looked only fit for the most placid fortune, when the dismal emer- gencies which chequered his life arose, he acted with as much promptitude and vigour as if he were strung with Herculean sinews/ ‘ Such fortitude in his manners, and such a ravage of suffering in his coun- tenance did he display/ said Coleridge, ‘as went to the hearts of his friends/ It was rather by the violence of the reaction that a keen observer might have estimated the extent of these sufferings ; by that x escape from the pressure of agony, into a fantastic/ sometimes almost a demoniac ‘ mirth which made Lamb a problem to strangers while it endeared him thousand- fold to those who really knew him/ The child of impulse ever to appear And yet through duty’s path strictly to steer, O Lamb, thou art a mystery to me ! Thou art so prudent, and so mad with wildness — wrote Charles Lloyd. Sweet and strong must have been the nature upon EFFECT UPON HER BROTHER. 79 which the crush of so severe a destiny produced no soreness, no bitterness, no violence but only the rebound of a wild fantastic gaiety. In his writings not only is there an entire absence of the morbid, the querulous, I can find but one expression that breathes of what his sombre experiences were. It is in that most masterly of all his criticisms (unless it be the one on Lear), the Genius and Character of Hogarth, where, in the sublime description of the Bedlam scene in the Rake’s Progress , he tells of “the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness/” In one apparent way only did the calamity which overshadowed his life, exert an influence on his genius. It turned him, as Talfourd finely suggests, “to seek a kindred interest in the sterner stuff of old tragedy — to catastrophes more fearful even than his own — to the aspects of pale passion, to shapes of heroic daring and more heroic suffering, to the agonising contests of opposing affections and the victories of the soul over calamity and death which the old English drama discloses, and in the contemplation of which he saw his own suffer- ing nature at once mirrored and exalted.” In short, no man ever stood more nobly the test of life-long affliction : f a deep distress had humanised his soul/ Only on one point did the stress of his difficult lot find him vulnerable, one flaw bring to light — a ten- dency to counteract his depression and take the edge off his poignant anxieties by a too free use of stimulants. The manners of his day, the custom of producing wine and strong drinks on every possible occasion, bore hard on such a craving and fostered a man’s weak- ness. But Lamb maintained to the end a good standing fight with the enemy and, if not whoily 80 MARY LAMB . victorious, still less was he wholly defeated. So much on account of certain home anxieties to which Mary's letters to Sarah Stoddart make undisguised allusion. 81 CHAPTER VI. Visit to Coleridge at Greta Hall. — Wordsworth and his Sister in London. — Letters to Miss Stoddart. — Coleridge goes to Malta. — Letter to Dorothy Wordsworth on the Death of her Brother J ohn. 1802-1805. — JEt. 38-41. In the summer of 1802, when holiday time came round Charles was seized with * a strong desire of visiting remote regions ; 9 and after some whimsical deliberations his final resolve was to go with Mary to see Coleridge at the Lakes. “ I set out with Mary to Keswick," he tells Man- ning, “ without giving any notice to Coleridge [who was now living at Greta Hall, soon to become Southey's home for the rest of his life] for my time being precious did not admit of it. We got in in the even- ing, travelling in a post-chaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunset which transmuted the mountains into all colours, purple, &c. We thought we had got into fairy-land; but that went off (and it never came again while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets) and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impres- C. 6 MARY LAMB . sion I never received from objects of sight before nor do I suppose I ever can again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, &c., I shall never forget ye, how ye lay about that night like an intrenchment ; gone to bed, as it seemed, for the night but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study which is a large antique, ill- shaped room with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church ; shelves of scattered folios, an iEolian harp and an old sofa half-bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw and his broad-breasted brethren. •What a night!” The Poet had now a second son, or rather a third (for the second had died in infancy), Derwent, a fine bright, fair, broad-chested little fellow not quite two years old, with whom Charles and Mary were delighted. A merry sprite he was, in a yellow frock which obtained for him the nick-name of Stumpy Canary, who loved to race from kitchen to parlour and from parlour to kitchen just putting in his head at the door with roguish smile to catch notice, then oft’ again, shaking his little sides with laughter. He fairly won their hearts and long after figures in their letters as Pi-pos Pot- pos, his own way of pronouncing striped opossum and spotted opossum, which he would point out triumph- antly in his picture book. Hartley, now six, was a prema- turely grave and thoughtful child who had already, as a curious anecdote told by Crabb Robinson shows, begun to take surprising plunges into “ the metaphysic well without a bottom ” ; for once when asked something about himself and called by name he said, “ Which Hartley ? ” “ Why, is there more than one Hartley ? ” \es, there's a deal of Hartleys; there 's Picture WITH COLERIDGE AT GRETA IIALL . 8 6 Hartley [Hazlitt had painted his portrait] and Shadow Hartley and there *s Echo Hartley and there *s Catch- me-fast Hartley,” seizing his own arm with the other hand ; thereby showing, said his father, that “ he had begun to reflect on what Kant calls the great and inexplicable mystery that man should be both his own subject and object and that these should yet be one ! ” Three delightful weeks they stayed. So we have seen,” continues Lamb to Manning, “ Keswick, Gras- mere, Ambleside, Ulswater (where the Clarksons live), and a place at the other end of Ulswater; I forget the name [Patterdale] to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. Mary was exces- sively tired when she got about half-way up Skiddaw but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones) and, with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water, she surmounted it most manfully. Oh its fine black head ! and the bleak air atop of it with the prospect of mountains all about and about making you giddy ; and then Scotland afar off and the border countries so famous in song and ballad ! It was a day that will stand out like a mountain, T am sure, in my life.” Wordsworth was away at Calais but the Lambs stayed a day or so in his cottage with the Clarksons (he of slavery abolition fame and she i{ one of the friendliest, comfortablest women we know who made the little stay one of the pleasantest times we ever passed”) ; saw Lloyd again but remained distrustful of him on account of the seeds of bitterness he had once sown between the friends, and finally got home very pleasantly: *6 * 34 MARY LAMB . Mary a good deal fatigued, finding the difference between going to a place and coming from it, but not otherwise the worse. “ Lloyd has written me a fine letter of friendship }J says Lamb, soon after his return, “ all about himself and Sophia and love and cant which I have not answered. I have not given up the idea of writing to him but it will be done very plainly and sincerely, w ithout acrimony ” They found the Wordsworths (the poet and his sister, that is, for he was not yet married though just about to be) lodging near their own quarters, saw much of them, pioneered them through Bartlemy Fair ; and now, on Mary’s part, was formed that intimacy with Dorothy which led to her being their constant visitor and sometimes their house-guest when she was in London. As great a contrast in most respects, to Dorothy Wordsworth as the whole range of womankind could have furnished was Mary’s other friend and cor- respondent, Sarah Stoddart, afterwards Mrs. Hazlitt. Sarah was the only daughter of a retired lieutenant in the navy, a Scotchman who had settled down on a little property at Winterslow near Salisbury which she ultimately inherited. She was a young lady with a business-like determination to marry and with many suitors ; but, far from following the old injunction to be off with the old love before being on with the new, she always cautiously kept the old love dangling till she was quite sure the new was the more eligible. Mary’s letters to her have happily been preserved and published by Miss Stoddart’s grandson, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, in his Mary and Charles Lamb. The first, dated September 21, 1803. was written after Miss Stoddart had been staying with LETTER TO SARAH STODDART . 85 the Lambs and when a decision had been arrived at that she should accompany her only brother, Dr. Stod- dart, to Malta where he had just been appointed King’s Advocate. Mary’s spelling and here and there even a little slip in the matter of grammar have been retained as seeming part of the individuality of the letters : — “ I returned from my visit yesterday and was very much pleased to find your letter; for I have been very anxious to hear how you are going on. I could hardly help expecting to see you when I came in ; yet though I should have rejoiced to have seen your merry face again, I believe it was better as it was, upon the whole ; and all things considered, it is certainly better you should go to Malta. The terms you are upon with your lover [a Mr. Turner to whom she was engaged] does (as you say it will) appear wondrous strange to me ; however, as I cannot enter into your feelings I certainly can have nothing to say to it, only that I sincerely wish you happy in your own way however odd that way may appear to me to be. I would begin now to advise you to drop all correspondence w r ith William [not William Hazlitt but an earlier admirer] ; but, as I said before, as I cannot enter into your feel- ings and views of things, your ivays not being my ivays, why should I tell you what I would do in your situa- tion ? So, child, take thy own ways and God prosper thee in them ! “ One thing my advising spirit must say ; use as little secresy as possible, make a friend of your sister- in-law ; you know I was not struck with her at first sight but, upon your account, I have watched and marked her very attentively and while she was eating a bit of cold mutton in our kitchen we had a serious conversation. From the frankness of her manner I 86 MARY LAMB. am convinced she is a person I could make a friend of ; why should not you? We talked freely about you : she seems to have a just notion of your character and will be fond of you if you will let her.” After instancing the misunderstandings between her own mother and aunt already quoted, Mary continues : — “ My aunt and my mother were wholly unlike you and your sister yet, in some degree, theirs is the secret history, I believe, of all sisters-in-law and you will smile when I tell you I think myself the only woman in the world who could live with a brother's wife and make a real friend of her, partly from early observation of the unhappy example I have just given you and partly from a knack I know I have of looking into people's real characters and never expect- ing them to act out of it — never expecting another to do as I would in the same case. When you leave your mother and say if you never see her again you shall feel no remorse and when you make a Jewish bargain with your lover , all this gives me no offence because it is your nature and your temper and I do not expect or want you to be otherwise than you are. I love you for the good that is in you and look for no change. “ Bat certainly you ought to struggle with the evil that does most easily beset you — a total want of polite- ness in behaviour, I would say modesty of behaviour but that I should not convey to you my idea of the word modesty ; for I certainly do not mean that you want real modesty and what is usually called false or mock modesty I certainly do not wish you to possess; yet I trust you know what I mean well enoughs Secresy , though you appear all frankness, is certainly ON FRANKNESS. 87 a grand failing of yours ; it is likewise your brother’s and, therefore, a family failing. By secresy I mean you both want the habit of telling each other, at the moment, everything that happens, where you go and what you do — that free communication of letters and opinions just as they arrive as Charles and I do — and which is, after all, the only ground-work of friendship. Your brother, I will answer for it, will never tell his wife or his sister all that is in his mind ; he will receive letters and not [mention it]. This is a fault Mrs. Stoddart can never [tell him of] but she can and will feel it though on the whole and in every other respect she is happy with him. Begin, for God’s sake, at the first and tell her everything that passes. At first she may hear you with indifference, but in time this will gain her affection and confidence; show her all your letters (no matter if she does not show hers). It is a pleasant thing for a friend to put into one’s hand a letter just fresh from the post. I would even say, begin with showing her this but that it is freely written and loosely and some apology ought to be made for it which I know not how to make, for I must write freely or not at all. “ If you do this she will tell your brother, you will say; and what then, quotha? It will beget a freer communication amongst you which is a thing devoutly to be wished. “ God bless you and grant you may preserve your integrity and remain unmarried and penniless, and make William a good and a happy wife.” No wonder Mary’s friendships were so stable and so various with this knack of hers of looking into another’s real character and never expecting him or her to act out of it or to do as she would in the same 88 MARY LAMB. case; taking no offence, looking for no change and asking for no other explanation than that it was her friend's nature. It is an epitome of social wisdom and of generous sentiment. Coleridge had long been in bad health and worse spirits; and what he had first ignorantly used as a remedy was now become his tyrant — opium; for a time the curse of his life and the blight of his splendid powers. Sometimes — Adown Lethean streams his spirit drifted; sometimes he was stranded “ in a howling wilderness of ghastly dreams ” waking and sleeping, followed by deadly languors which opium caused and cured and caused again, driving him round in an accursed circle. He came up to London at the beginning of 1804, was much with the Lambs if not actually their guest, and finally decided to try change and join his friend Dr. Stoddart in Malta where he landed April 18tli. Mary, full of earnest and affectionate solicitude, sent a letter by him to Sarah Stoddart who had already arrived, bespeaking a warm and indulgent welcome for her suffering friend : — “ I will just write a few hasty lines to say Coleridge is setting off sooner than we expected and I every moment expect him to call in one of his great hurrys for this. We rejoiced with exceeding great joy to hear of your safe arrival. I hope your brother will return home in a few years a very rich man. Seventy pounds in one fortnight is a pretty beginning. “ I envy your brother the pleasure of seeing Cole- ridge drop in unexpectedly upon him ; we talk — but it is but wild and idle talk — of following him. He is to get my brother some snug little place of a thousand COLERIDGE GOES TO MALTA. 89 a year and we are to leave all and come and live among ye. What a pretty dream. “Coleridge is* very ill. I dread the thoughts of his long voyage. Write as soon as he arrives whether he does or not, and tell me how he is. . . . “ He has got letters of recommendation to Governor Ball and God knows who ; and he will talk and talk and be universally admired. But I wish to write for him a letter of recommendation to Mrs. Stoddart and to yourself to take upon ye, on his first arrival, to be kind affectionate nurses ; and mind, now, that you perform this duty faithfully and write me a good account of yourself. Behave to him as you would to me or to Charles if we came sick and unhappy to you. “ I have no news to send you ; Coleridge will tell you how we are going on. Charles has lost the news- paper [an engagement on the Morning Post , which Coleridge had procured for him] but what we dreaded as an evil has proved a great blessing, for we have both strangely recovered our health and spirits since this has happened; and I hope, when I write next, I shall be able to tell you Charles has begun something which will produce a little money for it is not well to be very poor which we certainly are at this present writing. “ I sit writing here and thinking almost you will see it to-morrow ; and what a long, long time it will be ere you receive this. When I saw your letter I fancy 'd you were even just then in the first bustle of a new reception, every moment seeing new faces and staring at new objects when, at that, time, everything had become familiar to you ; and the strangers, your new dancing partners, had perhaps become gossiping fire- side friends. You tell me of your gay, splendid doings tell me, likewise, what manner of home-life you lead 90 MARY LAMB . Is a quiet evening in a Maltese drawing-room as plea- sant as those we have passed in Mitre Court and Bell Yard? Tell me all about it, everything pleasant and everything unpleasant that befalls you. “ I want you to say a great deal about yourself. Are you happy ? and do you not repent going out ? I wish I could see you for one hour only. “Remember me affectionately to your sister and brother, and tell me when you write if Mrs. Stoddart likes Malta and how the climate agrees with her and with thee. “We heard you were taken prisoners, and for several days believed the tale. “ How did the pearls and the fine court finery bear the fatigues of the voyage and bow often have they been worn and admired ? “ Rickman wants to know if you are going to be married yet. Satisfy him in that little particular when you write. “ The Fenwicks send their love and Mrs. Reynolds her love and the little old lady her best respects. “ Mrs. Jeffries, who I see now and then, talks of you with tears in her eyes and when she heard you was taken prisoner, Lord ! how frightened she was. She has heard, she tells me, that Mr. Stoddart is to have a pension of two thousand a year whenever he chooses to return to England “ God bless you and send you all manner of com- forts and happinesses." Mrs. Reynolds was another ' little old lady/ a familiar figure at the Lambs' table. She had once been Charles's schoolmistress ; had made an unfor- tunate marriage and would have gone under in the social stream but for his kindly hand. Out of their LETTER TO SARAH STODDART. 91 slender means he allowed her thirty pounds a year. She tickled Hood’s fancy when he too became a fre- quent guest there ; and he has described her as formal, fair and flaxen-wigged like an elderly wax doll, speaking as if by an artificial apparatus, through some defect in the palate and with a slight limp and a twist occasioned by running too precipitately down Greenwich hill in her youth ! She remembered Goldsmith who had once lent her his Deserted Village. In those days of universal warfare and privateering it was an anxious matter to have a friend tossing in the Bay of Biscay, gales and storms apart ; so that tidings from Sarah had been eagerly watched for : — “ Your letter,” writes Mary, “ which contained the news of Coleridge’s arrival was a most welcome one ; for we had begun to entertain very unpleasant appre- hensions for his safety ; and your kind reception of the forlorn wanderer gave me the greatest pleasure and I thank you for it in my own and my brother’s name. I shall depend upon you for hearing of his welfare for he does not write himself ; but as long as we know he is safe and in such kind friends’ hands we do not mind. Your letters, my dear Sarah, are to me very, very precious ones. They are the kindest, best, most natural ones I ever received. The one containing the news of the arrival of Coleridge is, perhaps, the best I ever saw; and your old friend Charles is of my opinion. We sent it off to Mrs. Coleridge and the Wordsworths — as well because we thought it our duty to give them the first notice we had of our dear friend’s safety as that we were proud of showing our Sarah’s pretty letter. “ The letters we received a few days after from you and your brother were far less welcome ones. I rejoiced 02 MARY LAMB . to hear your sister is well but I grieved for the loss of the dear baby and I am sorry to find your brother is not so successful as he expected to be ; and yet I am almost tempted to wish his ill-fortune may send him over to us again. He has a friend, I understand, who is now at the head of the Admiralty ; why may he not return and make a fortune here? “1 cannot condole with you very sincerely upon your little failure in the fortune-making way. If you regret it, so do I. But I hope to see you a comfort- able English wife ; and the forsaken, forgotten William, of English-partridge memory I have still a hankering after. However, I thank you for your frank commu- nication and I beg you will continue it in future ; and if I do not agree with a good grace to your having a Maltese husband, I will wish you happy, provided you make it a part of your marriage articles that your husband shall allow you to come over sea and make me one visit; else may neglect and overlookedness be your portion while you stay there. “ I would condole with you when the misfortune has befallen your poor leg ; but such is the blessed distance we are at from each other that I hope, before you receive this, you have forgot it ever happened. “ Our compliments to the high ton at the Maltese court. Your brother is so profuse of them to me that, being, as you know, so unused to them, they perplex me sadly ; in future I beg they may be discontinued. They always remind me of the free, and I believe very improper letter I wrote to you while you were at the Isle of Wight [that already given advising frankness] . The more kindly you and your brother and sister took the impertinent advice contained in it the more certain I feel that it was unnecessary and, therefore, highly LETTER TO SARAH STODDART. 93 improper. Do not let your brother compliment me into the memory of it again. “ My brother has had a letter from your mother which has distressed him sadly — about the postage of some letters being paid by my brother. Your silly brother, it seems, has informed your mother (I did not think your brother could have been so silly) that Charles had grumbled at paying the said postage. The fact was just at that time we were very poor having lost the Morning Post and we were beginning to practise a strict economy. My brother, who never makes up his mind whether he will be a miser or a spendthrift, is at all times a strange mixture of both '' [rigid in those small economies which enabled him to be not only just but generous on small means]. “Of this failing the even economy of your correct brother's temper makes him an ill judge. The miserly part of Charles, at that time smarting under his recent loss, then happened to reign triumphant ; and he would not write or let me write so often as he wished because the postage cost two and fourpence. Then came two or three of your poor mother's letters nearly together; and the two and fourpences he wished but grudged to pay for his own he was forced to pay for hers. In this dismal distress he applied to Fenwick to get his friend Motley to send them free from Portsmouth. This Mr. Fenwick could have done for half a word's speaking ; but this he did not do ! Then Charles foolishly and unthinkingly com- plained to your brother in a half-serious, half -joking way ; and your brother has wickedly and with malice aforethought told your mother. O fye upon him ! what will your mother think of us? “I, too, feel my share of blame in this vexatious business ; for I saw the unlucky paragraph in my 94 MARY LAMB. brothers letter ; and I had a kind of foreboding that it would come to your mother’s ears — although I had a higher idea of your brother's good sc’ise than I find deserved. By entreaties and prayer I might have evailed on my brother to say nothing about it. But make a point of conscience never to interfere or cross brother in the humour he happens to be in. It ways appears to me to be a vexatious kind of tyranny at women have no business to exercise over men, which, merely because they having a better judgment , they have power to do. Let men alone and at last we jnd they come round to the right way which we> by a kind of intuition, perceive at once. But better, far better that we should let them often do wrong than that they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows. “ Charles is sadly fretted now, I know, at what to say to your mother. I have made this long preamble about it to induce you, if possible, to re-instate us in your mothers good graces. Say to her it was a jest misunderstood ; tell her Charles Lamb is not the shabby fellow she and her son took him for but that he is, now and then, a trifle whimsical or so. I do not ask your brother to do this for I am offended with him for the mischief he has made. “ I feel that I have too lightly passed over the inter- esting account you sent me of your late disappointment. It was not because I did not feel and completely enter into the affair with you. You surprise and please me with the frank and generous way in which you deal with your lovers, taking a refusal from their so pru- dential hearts with a better grace and more good humour than other women accept a suitor^ service. Continue this open artless conduct and I trusc you will COLERIDGE’S WANDERINGS. 95 at iast find some man who has sense enough to know jou are well worth risking a peaceable life of poverty for. I shall yet live to see you a poor but happy English wife. “ Remember me most affectionately to Coleridge, and I thank you again and again for all your kindness to him. To dear Mrs. Stoddart and your brother I beg my best love ; and to you all I wish health and happiness and a soon return to old England. “ I have sent to Mr. BurreTs for your kind present, but unfortunately he is not in town. I am impatient to see my fine silk handkerchiefs and I thank you for them not as a present, for I do not love presents, but as a remembrance of your old friend. Farewell. “ I am, my best Sarah, “ Your most affectionate Friend, “ Mary Lamb.” “ Good wishes and all proper remembrances from old nurse, Mrs. Jeffries, Mrs. Reynolds, Mrs. Rickman, &c. Long live Queen Hoop-oop-oop-oo and all the old merry phantoms.” Sarah Stoddart returned to England before the year was out. Coleridge remained in Malta, filling tempo- rarily, at the request of Sir Alexander Ball, governor of the island, the post of public secretary till the end of September, 1805 when his friends lost track of him altogether for nearly a year ; during which he visited Paris, wandered through Italy, Sicily, Cairo, and saw Vesuvius in December when “the air was so consolidated with a massy cloud-curtain that it appeared like a mountain in basso-relievo in an inter- minable wall of some pantheon ” ; and after narrowly escaping imprisonment at the hands of Napoleon. MARY LAMB . suddenly reappeared amongst liis triends in the autumn of 1806. To the Wordsworths, brother and sister and young wife, for the three were one in heart, this year of 1805 had been one of overwhelming sorrow. Their brother John, the brave and able ship’s captain who yet loved “ all quiet things '' as dearly as William “ although he loved more silently,” and was wont to carry that beloved brother's poems to sea and con them to the music of the winds and waves; whose cherished scheme, so near fulfilment, it was to realise enough to settle in a cottage at Grasmere and devote his earnings to the poet's use so that he might pursue his way unharassed by a thought of money, — this brother was shipwrecked on the Bill of Portland just as he was starting, and whilst the ship was yet in the pilot’s hands, on what was to have been, in how lifferent a sense, his last voyage. Six weeks beneath the moving sea He lay in slumber quietly ; Unforced by wind or wave To quit the ship for which he died (All claims of duty satisfied) ; And there they found him at her side, And bore him to the grave. After waiting awhile in silence beiore a grief of such magnitude Mary wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth. She speaks as one acquainted with a life-long sorrow yet who has learned to find its companionship not bitter: — “ I thank you, my kind friend, for your most com- fortable letter; till I saw your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that I should do well to write to you though I have often attempted it ; but I always left off dissatisfied with what I had written, and feeling that I was doing an improper thing to LETTER TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH 97 intrude upon your sorrow. I wished to tell you that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind and sweet memory of the dead which you so happily describe as now almost begun ; but I fell that it was improper and most grating to the feelings of the afflicted to say to them that the memory of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not .only of their dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would see every object with and through your lost brother and that that would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you I felt and well knew from my own experience in sorrow ; but till you yourself began to feel this I didn't dare tell you so ; but I send you some poor lines which I wrote under this conviction of mind and before I heard Coleridge was returning home. I will transcribe them now, before I finish my letter, lest a false shame prevent me then for I know they are much worse than they ought to be, written as they were with strong feeling and on such a subject ; every line seems to me to be borrowed : but I had no better way of expressing my thoughts and I never have the power of altering or amending anything I have once laid aside with dissatisfaction Why is he wandering on the sea ? Coleridge should now with Wordsworth be. By slow degrees he’d steal away Their woe and gently bring a ray (So happily he’d time relief) Of comfort from their very grief. He ’d tell them that their brother dead, When years have passed o’er their head, Will be remembered with such holy, True, and perfect melancholy, That ever this lost brotiier John Will be their heart’s companion v 98 MARY LAMB . His voice they *11 always hear, His face they ’ll always see ; There ’s nought in life so sweet As such a memory. Thus for a moment are we permitted to see that, next to love for her brother, the memory of her dead mother and friendship for Coleridge were the deep and sacred influences of Mary's life. 09 CHAPTER VII. Mary in the Asylum again. — Lamb’s Letter with a Poem of hers. — Her slow Recovery. — Letters to Sarah Stoddart. — The Tales from Shakespeare begun. — Hazlitt’s Portrait of Lamb. — ^arah^s -Lovers. — The FarciTdf Mr. U. 1805-6. — 2Et. 41-2. The letter to Miss Wordsworth called forth a response ; but, alas ! Mary was in sad exile when it arrived and Charles, with a heart full of grief, wrote for her : — “ 14th June 1805. “Your long kind letter has not been thrown away (for it has given me great pleasure to find you are all resuming your old occupations and are better) ; but poor Mary, to whom it is addressed, cannot yet relish it. She has been attacked by one of her severe illnesses and is at present from home . Last Monday week was the day she left me and I hope I may calcu- late upon having her again in a month or little more. I am rather afraid late hours have, in this case, con- tributed to her indisposition. ... I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary ; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All 7 * 100 MARY LAMB . my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand ; and when I hope to have her well again with me it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her, for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself hy resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell with me. She lives but for me ; and I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in this upbraiding of myself I am offending against her for I know that she has clung to me for better for worse; and if the balance has been against her hitherto it was a noble trade. . . . “ I cannot resist transcribing three or four lines which poor Mary made upon a picture (a ‘ Holy Family ’) which we saw at an auction only one week before she left home. She was then beginning to show signs of ill-boding. They are sweet lines, and upon a sweet picture ; but I send them only as the last memorial of her : — "Vikgin and Child, L. da Yinci. Maternal lady, with thy virgin grace, Heaven-horn thv Jesus seemeth sure, Ana thou a virgin pure. Lady most perfect, when thy angel face Men look upon, they wish to be A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee. "You had her lines about the f Lady Blanch.’ You CHARLES TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH. 101 have not had some which she wrote upon a copy of a girl from Titian which I had hung up where that print of Blanch and the Abbess (as she beautifully interpreted two female figures from L. da Vinci) had hung in our room. 'Tis light and pretty : — Who art thou, fair one, who usurp’st the place Of Blanch, the lady of the matchless grace? Come, fair and pretty tell to me Who in thy life-time thou might’st be ? Thou pretty art and fair, But with the Lady Blanch thou never must compare. No need for Blanch her history to tell, Whoever saw her face, they there did read it well ; But when I look on thee, I only know There lived a pretty maid some hundred years ago. “ This is a little unfair, to tell so much about our- selves and to advert so little to your letter, so full of comfortable tidings of you all. But my own cares press pretty close upon me and you can make allow- ances. That you may go on gathering strength and peace is my next wish to Mary's recovery. “ I had almost forgot your repeated invitation. Supposing that Mary will be well and able there is another ability which you may guess at which I can- not promise myself. In prudence we ought not to come. This illness will make it still more prudential to wait. It is not a balance of this way of spending our money against another way but an absolute question of whether we shall stop now or go on wasting away the little we have got beforehand which my wise conduct has already encroached upon one half." Pity it is that the little poem on the ‘ Lady Blanch' should have perished, as I fear it has, if it contained as ‘ sweet lines ' as the foregoing. 102 MARY LAMB . Little more than a month after this (July 27), Charles writes cheerfully to Manning : — “My old housekeeper has shown signs of con- valescence and will shortly resume the power of the keys, so I shan’t be cheated of my tea and liquors. Wind in the West which promotes tranquillity. Have leisure now to anticipate seeing thee again. Have been taking leave [it was a very short leave] of tobacco in a rhyming address. Had thought that vein had long since closed up. Find I can rhyme and reason too. Think of studying mathematics to restrain the fire of my genius which George Dyer recommends. Have frequent bleedings at the nose which shows plethoric. Maybe shall try the sea myself, that great scene of wonders. Got incredibly sober and regular ; shave oftener and hum a tune to signify cheerfulness and gallantry. “ Suddenly disposed to sleep, having taken a quart of pease with bacon and stout. Will not refuse nature who has done such things for me ! “ Nurse ! don’t call me unless Mr. Manning comes. — What ! the gentleman in spectacles ? — Yes. Dormit . C. L. “ Saturday, Hot noon.’’ But although Mary was sufficiently recovered to return home at the end of the summer she continued much shaken by the severity of this attack and so also did her brother all through the autumn; as the follow- ing letters to Sarah Stoddart and still more one already quoted (pp. 75-6) show r “ September 1805. “ Certainly you are the best letter- writer (besides writing the best hand) in the world. I have just been LETTER TO SARAH STODDART. 103 reading over again your two long letters and I perceive they make me very envious. I have taken a bran new pen and put on my spectacles and am peering with all my might to see the lines in the paper which the sight of your even lines had well-nigh tempted me to rule; and ' Ihave moreover taken two pinches of snuff extraordinary to clear my head which feels more cloudy than com- mon this fine cheerful morning. cc All I can gather from your clear and, I have no doubt, faithful history of Maltese politics is that the good doctor, though a firm friend, an excellent fancier of brooches, a good husband, an upright advocate and, in short, all that they say upon tombstones (for I do not recollect that they celebrate any fraternal virtues there)— yet is he but a moody brother; that your sister-in-law is pretty much like what all sisters-in-law have been since the first happy invention of the marriage state; that friend Coleridge has undergone no alteration by crossing the Atlautic [geography was evidently no part of Captain Starkey's curriculum] for his friendliness to you as well as the oddities you mention are just what one ought to look for from him ; and that you, my dear Sarah, have proved yourself just as unfit to flourish in a little proud garrison town as I did shrewdly suspect you were before you went there. “ If I possibly can I will prevail upon Charles to write to your brother by the conveyance you mention ; but he is so unwell I almost fear the fortnight will slip away before I can get him in the right vein. Indeed, it has been sad and heavy times with us lately. When I am pretty well his low spirits throw me back again; and when he begins to get a little cheerful then I do the same kind office for him. I heartily wish 104 MARY LAMB. for the arrival of Coleridge ; a few such evenings as we have sometimes passed with him would wind us up and set us going again. “ Do not say anything when you write of our low spirits; it will vex Charles. You would laugh or you would cry, perhaps both, to see us sit together looking at each other with long and rueful faces and saying * How do you do ? ' and ( How do you do?' and then we fall a crying and say we will be better on the morrow. He says we are like tooth-ache and his friend gum- boil which, though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort. “ I rejoice to hear of your mother's amendment ; when you can leave her with any satisfaction to yourself — which, as her sister, I think I understand by your letter, is with her, I hope you may soon be able to do — let me know upon what plan you mean to come to town. Your brother proposed your being six months in town and six with your mother ; but he did not then know of your poor mother's illness. By his desire I enquired for a respectable family for you to board with and from Captain Burney I heard of one I thought would suit you at that time. He particularly desires I would not think of your being with us, not thinking, I conjecture, the house of a single man respectable enough. Your brother gave me most unlimited orders to domineer over you, to be the inspector of all your actions and to direct and govern you with a stern voice and a high hand ; to be, in short, a very elder brother over you. Does the hearing of this, my meek pupil, make you long to come to London ? I am making all the proper enquiries, against the time, of the newest and most LETTER TO SARAH ST 0 ED ART. 105 approved modes (being myself mainly ignorant in these points) of etiquette and nicely correct maidenly manners. “ But to speak seriously. I mean, when we meet, that we will lay our heads together and consult and contrive the best way of making the best girl in the world the fine lady her brother wishes to see her and believe me, Sarah, it is not so difficult a matter as one is apt to imagine. I have observed many a demure lady who passes muster admirably well who, I think, we could easily learn to imitate in a week or two. We will talk of these things when we meet. In the mean- time I give you free leave to be happy and merry at Salisbury in any way you can. Has the partridge season opened any communication between you and William? As I allow you to be imprudent till I see you, I shall expect to hear you have invited him to taste his own birds. Have you scratched him out of your will yet? Rickman is married and that is all the news I have to send you. I seem, upon looking over my letter again, to have written too lightly of your distresses at Malta; but, however I may have written, believe me I enter very feelingly into all your troubles. I love you and I love your brother ; and between you, both of whom, I think, have been to blame, I know not what to say — only this I say, — try to think as little as possible of past miscarriages ; it was perhaps so ordered by Providence that you might return home to be a comfort to your mother.” No long holiday trip was to be ventured on while Mary continued thus shaken and depressed. “ We have been two tiny excursions this summer, for three or four days each, to a place near Harrow and to Egham where Cooper’s Hill is and that is the total history of 106 MARY LAMB. our rustication this year ” Charles tells Wordsworth. In October Mary gives a slightly better account of herself : — “ I have made many attempts at writing to you, but it has always brought your troubles and my own so strongly into my mind, that I have been obliged to leave off and make Charles write for me. I am resolved now, however few lines I write, this shall go ; for I know, my kind friend, you will like once more to see my own handwriting. “ I have been for these few days past in rather better spirits, so that I begin almost to feel myself once more a living creature and to hope for happier times ; and in that hope I include the prospect of once more seeing my dear Sarah in peace and comfort in our old garret. How did I wish for your presence to cheer my drooping heart when I returned home from banishment. “ Is your being with or near your poor dear mother necessary to her comfort ? Does she take any notice of you ? And is there any prospect of her recovery ? How I grieve for her, for you. . . . “ I went to the Admiralty, about your mother's pension ; from thence I was directed to an office in Lincoln’s Inn. . . . They informed me it could not be paid to any person but Mr. Wray without a letter of attorney. ... Do not let us neglect this business and make use of me in any way you can. c( I have much to thank you and your kind brother for. I kept the dark silk, as you may suppose. You have made me very fine ; the brooch is very beautiful. Mrs. Jeffries wept for gratitude when she saw your present; she desires all manner of thanks and good LETTER TO SARAH SIOBBART. 107 wishes. Your maid’s sister has gone to live a few miles from town. Charles, however, found her out and gave her the handkerchief. “ I want to know if you have seen William and if there is any prospect in future there. All you said in your letter from Portsmouth that related to him w r as so burnt in the fumigating that we could only make out that it was unfavourable but not the particulars ; tell us again how you go on or if you have seen him. I conceit affairs will somehow be made up between you at last. “I want to know how your brother goes on. Is he likely to make a very good fortune and in how long a time? And how is he in the way of home comforts — I mean is he very happy with Mrs. Stoddart? This was a question I could not ask while you were there and perhaps is not a fair one now; but I want to know how you all went on and, in short, twenty little foolish questions that one ought, perhaps, rather to ask when we meet than to write about. But do make me a little acquainted with the inside of the good .doctor's house and what passes therein. "Was Coleridge often with you? or did your brother and Col. argue long arguments till be- tween the two great argue-ers there grew a little coolness ; or perchance the mighty friendship between Coleridge and your Sovereign governor. Sir Alexander Ball, might create a kind of jealousy; for we fancy something of a coolness did exist from the little mention of C. ever made in your brother's letters. "Write us, my good girl, a long gossiping letter answering all these foolish questions — and tell me any silly thing you can recollect — any, the least particular, will be interesting to us and we will never tell tales 108 MARY LAMB. out of school ; but we used to wonder and wonder how you all went on; and when you was coming home we said ‘ Now we shall hear all from Sarah/ “ God bless you, my dear friend. ... If you have sent Charles any commissions he has not executed write me word — he says he has lost or mislaid a letter desiring him to inquire about a wig. Write two letters — one of business and pensions and one all about Sarah Stoddart and Malta. "We have got a picture of Charles; do you think your brother would like to have it? If you do, can you put us in a way how to send it ? 99 Mary's interest in her friend and her friend's affairs is so hearty one cannot choose but share it and would gladly see what “ the best letter-writer in the world " had to tell of Coleridge and Stoddart and the long arguments and little jealousies ; and whether f William' had continued to dangle on, spite of distance and discouragement ; and even to learn that the old lady received her pension and her wig in safety. But curi- osity must remain unsatisfied for none of Miss Stoddart's letters have been preserved. "The picture of Charles" was, we may feel pretty sure, one which William Hazlitt painted this year of Lamb ‘in the costume of a Venetian senator.' It is, on all accounts, a peculiarly interesting portrait. Lamb was just thirty; and it gives, on the whole, a striking impression of the nobility and beauty of form and feature which characterised his head and partly realises Proctor's description — " a countenance so full of sen- sibility that it came upon you like a new thought which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards"; though the subtle lines which gave that wondrous sweetness of expression to the mouth are not fully HAZLITTS PORTRAIT OF LAMB . 109 rendered. Compared with the drawing by Hancock, done when Lamb was twenty-three, engraved in Cottle’s Early Recollections of Coleridge , each may be said to corroborate the truth of the other, allowing for difference of age and aspect, — Hancock’s being in profile, Hazlitt’s (of which there is a good lithograph in Barry Cornwall’s Memoir ) nearly full face. The print from it prefixed to Fitzgerald’s Lamb is almost unrecognisable. It was the last time Hazlitt took brush in hand, his grandson tells us ; and it comes as a pleasant surprise — an indication that he was too modest in estimating his own gifts as a painter ; and that the freshness of feeling and insight he displayed as an art critic were backed by some capacity for good workmanship. It was whilst this portrait was being painted that the acquaintance between Lamb and Hazlitt ripened into an intimacy which, with one or two brief interruptions, was to be fruitful, invigorating on both sides and life- long. Hazlitt was at this time staying with his brother J ohn, a successful miniature-painter and a member of the Godwin circle much frequented by the Lambs. 1“ It is not well to be very poor which we certainly are at this present,” Mary had lately written. This it was which spurred her on to undertake her first literary venture, the Tales from Shakespeare . The nature of the malady from which she suffered Inade continuous mental exertion distressing and probably injurious ; so that without this spur she would never, we may be sure, have dug and planted her little plot in the field of literature and made of it a sweet and pleasant place for the young where they may play and be nourished, regardless of time and change. The first hint of any such scheme occurs in a letter to Sarah Stoddart dated 110 MARY LAMB. April 22, 1806, written the very day she had left the Lambs : — “[I have heard that Coleridge was lately going through Sicily to Rome with a party ; but that, being unwell, he returned back to Naples. We think there is some mistake in this account and that his intended journey to Rome was in his former jaunt to Naples. If you know that at that time he had any such intention will you write instantly ? for I do not know whether I ought to write to Mrs. Coleridge or not. “ I am going to make a sort of promise to myself and to you that I will write you kind of journal-like letters of the daily what-we-do matters, as they occur. This day seems to me a kind of new era in our time. It is not a birthday, nor a new year's day, nor a leave- off smoking day; but it is about an hour after the time of leaving you, our poor Phoenix, in the Salisbury stage and Charles has iust left me to go to his lodgings [a room to work in free from the distraction of constant visitors just hired experimentally] and I am holding a solitary consultation with myself as to how I shall employ myself. “Writing plays, novels, poems and all manner of such like vapouring and vapourish schemes are floating in my head which, at the same time, aches with the thought of parting from you and is perplext at the idea of I cannot tell what-about-notion that I have not made you half so comfortable as I ought to have done and a melancholy sense of the dull prospect you have before you on your return home. Then I think I will make my new gown ; and now I consider the white petticoat will be better candle-light work ; and then I look at the fire and think if the irons was but down. SARAH 9 8 MERITS AND DEMERITS. Ill I would iron my gowns — you having put me out ot conceit of mangling. “ So much for an account of my own confused head ; and now for yours. Returning home from the inn we took that to pieces and canvassed you, as you know is our usual custom. We agreed we should miss you sadly, and that you had been what you yourself dis- covered, not at all in our way ; and although, if the postmaster should happen to open this, it would appear to him to be no great compliment yet you, who enter so warmly into the interior of our affairs, will under- stand and value it as well as what we likewise asserted that since you have been with us you have done but one foolish thing, vide Pinckhorn (excuse my bad Latin, if it should chance to mean exactly contrary to what I intend). We praised you for the very friendly way in which you regarded all our whimsies and, to use a phrase of Coleridge, understood usT' We had, in short, no drawback on our eulogy on your merit except lamenting the want of respect you have to yourself, the want of a certain dignity of action, you know what I mean, which — though it only broke out in the accept- ance of the old justice’s book and was, as it were, smothered and almost extinct while you were here — yet is it so native a feeling in your mind that you will do whatever the present moment prompts you to do, that I wish you would take that one slight offence seriously to heart and make it a part of your daily consideration to drive this unlucky propensity, root and branch, out of your character. Then, mercy on us, what a perfect little gentlewoman you will be ! ! ! “ You are not yet arrived at the first stage of your journey ; yet have I the sense of your absence so strong upon me that I was really thinking what news I had 112 MARY LAMB. to send you, and what had happened since you had left us. Truly nothing, except that Martin Burney met us in Lincoln's Inn Fields and borrowed fourpence, of the repayment of which sum I will send you due notice. “ Friday . — Last night I told Charles of your matri- monial overtures from Mr. White and of the cause of that business being at a standstill . Your generous conduct in acquainting Mr. White with the vexatious affair at Malta highly pleased him. He entirely ap- proves of it. You would be quite comforted to hear what he said on the subject. “ He wishes you success ; and when Coleridge comes will consult with him about what is best to be But I charge you be most strictly cautious how you proceed yourself. Do not give Mr. W. any reason to think you indiscreet ; let him return of his own accord and keep the probability of his doing so full in your mind ; so, I mean, as to regulate your whole conduct by that expectation. Do not allow yourself to see, or in any way renew your acquaintance with William nor do any other silly thing of that kind ; for you may depend upon it he will be a kind of spy upon you and, if he observes nothing that he disapproves of you will certainly hear of him again in time. “ Charles is gone to finish the farce [Mr. H.] and I am to hear it read this night. I am so uneasy between my hopes and fears of how I shall like it that I do not know what I am doing. I need not tell you so for before I send this I shall be able to tell you all about it. If I think it will amuse you I will send you a copy. The bed was very cold last night . “ I have received your letter and am happy to hear Shat your mother has been so well in your absence THE FARCE. 113 which I wish had been prolonged a little, for you have been wanted to copy out the Farce, in the writing ot which I made many an unlucky blunder. “ The said Farce I carried (after many consultations of who was the most proper person to perform so important an office) to Wroughton, the manager of Drury Lane. He was very civil to me ; said it did not depend upon himself, but that he would put it into the proprietors hands, and that we should certainly have an answer from them. “ I have been unable to finish this sheet before, for Charles has taken a week's holliday from his lodging to rest himself after his labour, and we have talked of nothing but the Farce night and day; but yesterday I carried it to Wroughton, and since it has been out of the way our minds have been a little easier. I wish you had been with us to have given your opinion. I have half a mind to scribble another copy and send it you. I like it very much, and cannot help having great hopes of its success. “ I would say I was very sorry for the death of Mr. White's father, but not knowing the good old gentle- man, I cannot help being as well satisfied that he is gone, for his son will feel rather lonely, and so, perhaps, he may chance to visit again Winterslow. You so well describe your brother's grave lecturing letter, that you make me ashamed of part of mine. I would fain re-write it, leaving out my c sage advice ' ; but if I begin another letter something may fall out to prevent me from finishing it, and, therefore, skip over it as well as you can; it shall be the last I ever send you. “ It is well enough when one is talking to a friend to hedge in an odd word by way of counsel now and then : 8 114 MARY LAMB. but there is something mighty irksome in its staring upon one in a letter, where one ought only to see kind words and friendly remembrances. “ I have heard a vague report from the Dawes (the pleasant-looking young lady we called upon was Miss Dawe) that Coleridge returned back to Naples; they are to make further inquiries and let me know the particulars. We have seen little or nothing of Manning since you went. Your friend George Burnett calls as usual for Charles to point out something for him. I miss you sadly, and but for the fidget I have been in about the Farce, I should have missed you still more. I am sorry you cannot get your money ; continue to tell us all your perplexities, and do not mind being called Widow Blackacre. “ Say all in your mind about your Lover ; now Charles knows of it, he will be as anxious to hear as me. All the time we can spare from talking of the characters and plot of the Farce, we talk of you. I have got a fresh bottle of brandy to-day ; if you were here you should have a glass, three parts brandy , so you should. I bought a pound of bacon to-day, not so good as yours. I wish the little caps were finished. I am glad the medicines and the cordials bore the fatigue of their journey so well. I promise you I will write often, and not mind the postage. God bless you. Charles does not send his love because he is not here. Write as often as ever you can. Do not work too hard.” There is a little anecdote of Sarah Stoddart, told by her grandson, which helps to mitigate our astonishment at Mary's too hospitable suggestion in regard to the brandy. Lieutenant Stoddart would sometimes, while sipping his grog, say to his children, “ John, will you FIRST LETTER TO HAZLITT. 115 liave some ? ” “ No thank you, father.” “ Sarah, will you ? ” “ Yes, please, father.” “ Not,” adds Mr. Hazlitt, “that she ever indulged to excess; but she was that sort of woman.” Very far, certainly, from “the perfect little gentlewoman” Mary hoped one day to see her ; but friendly, not without brains, with a kindly heart, and her worst qualities such, surely, as spread themselves freely on the surface, but strike no deep or poisonous roots. “ Do not mind being called Widow Blackacre,” says Mary, alluding to one of the characters in Wycherley's Plain Dealer . It certainly was not gratifying to be likened to that “perverse, bustling, masculine, pettifogging, and litigious” lady, albeit Macaulay speaks of her as Wycherley's happiest creation. When Hazlitt returned to Wem, Lamb sent him his first letter full of friendly gossip : — “ ... We miss you, as we foretold we should. One or two things have happened which are beneath the dignity of epistolary communication, but which, seated about our fireside at night (the winter hands of pork have begun), gesture and emphasis might have talked into some importance. Something about Rickman's wife, for instance ; how tall she is, and that she visits pranked up like a Queen of the May with green streamers ; a good-natured woman though, which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor. Something, too, about Monkey [Louisa Martin], which can’t so well be written ; how it set up for a fine lady, and thought it had got lovers and was obliged to be convinced of its age from the parish register, where it was proved to be only twelve, and an edict issued that it should not give it self airs yet this four years ; and how it got leave to 116 MARY LAMB . be called Miss by grace. These, and such like hows were in my head to tell you, but who can write? Also how Manning is come to town in spectacles, and studies physic; is melancholy, and seems to have something in his head which he don't impart. Then, how I am going to leave off smoking. . . . You dis- appoint me in passing over in absolute silence the Blenheim Leonardo. Didn't you see it ? Excuse a lover's curiosity. I have seen no pictures of note since, except Mr. Dawe's gallery. It is curious to see how differently two great men treat the same subject, yet both excellent in their way. For instance, Milton and Mr. Dawe. Mr. D. has chosen to illustrate the story of Samson exactly in the point of view in which Milton has been most happy ; the interview between the Jewish hero, blind and captive, and Dalilah. Milton has imagined his locks grown again, strong as horse- hair or porcupine's bristles ; doubtless shaggy and black, as being hairs ‘ which of a nation armed con- tained the strength.' I don't remember he says black ; but could Milton imagine them to be yellow? Do you? Mr. Dawe, with striking originality of con- ception, has crowned him with a thin yellow wig ; in colour precisely like Dyson's, in curl and quantity resembling Mrs. Professor's (Godwin's wife) ; his limbs rather stout, about such a man as my brother or Rickman, but no Atlas, nor Hercules, nor yet so long as Dubois, the clown of Sadler’s Wells. This was judicious, taking the spirit of the story rather than the fact ; for doubtless God could communicate national salvation to the trust of flax and tow as well as hemp and cordage, and could draw down a temple with a golden tress, as soon as with all the cables of the British navy. . . . LETTER TO HAZLITT. 117 “Wasn’t you sorry for Lord Nelson? I have followed him in fancy ever since I saw him in Pall Mall (I was prejudiced against him before), looking just as a hero should look, and I have been very much cut about it indeed. He was the only pretence of a great man we had. Nobody is left of any name at all. His secretary died by his side. I imagined him a Mr. Scott, to be the man you met at Hume’s, but I learn from Mrs. Hume it is not the same. . . . What other news is there, Mary? What puns have I made in the last fortnight? You never remember them. You have no relish for the comic. r Oh, tell Hazlitt not to forget to send the American Farmer . I daresay it ’s not as good as he fancies ; but a book ’s a book.’ . . .” Mary was no exclusive lover of her brother’s old folios, his “ragged veterans” and “midnight dar- lings,” but a miscellaneous reader with a decided leaning to modern tales and adventures — to “ a story, well, ill, or indifferently told, so there be life stirring in it,” as Elia has told. It may be worth noting here that the Mr. Scott mentioned above, who was not the secretary killed by Nelson’s side, was his chaplain and, though not killed, he received a wound in the skull of so curious a nature as to cause occasionally a sudden suspension of memory. In the midst of a sentence he would stop abruptly, losing, apparently, all mental consciousness ; and after a lapse of time, would resume at the very word with which he had left off, wholly unaware of any breach of continuity ; as one who knew him has often related to me. 118 MARY LAMB. CHAPTER VIII. The Tales from Shakespeare . — Letters to Sarah Stoddart. 1806. — iEt. 42. Once begun, the Tales from Shakespeare were worked at with spirit and rapidity. By May 10th Charles writes to Manning : — “ [Mary] says you saw her writings about the other day, and she wishes you should know what they are. She is doing for Godwin's bookseller twenty of Shake- speare's plays, to be made into children’s tales. Six are already done by her ; to wit. The Tempest , A Winter’s Tale y Midsummer Night’s Dream , Much Ado about Nothing , The Two Gentlemen of Verona , and Cymbeline . The Merchant of Venice is in forwardness. I have done Othello and Macbeth , and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people, besides money. It is to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally I think you 'd think." “ Godwin's bookseller " was really Godwin himself, who at his wife's urgent entreaty had just started a “ Magazine " of children's books in Hanway Street, hoping thus to add to his precarious earnings as an author. His own name was in such ill odour with the TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE. 119 orthodox that he used his foreman's — Thomas Hodgkins — over the shop door and on the title pages, whilst the juvenile books which he himself wrote were published under the name of Baldwin. When the business was removed to Skinner Street it was carried on in his wife’s name. “My tales are to be published in separate story- books/' Mary tells Sarah Stoddart. “ I mean in single stories, like the children's little shilling books. I cannot send you them in manuscript, because they are all in the Godwins' hands ; but one will be pub- lished very soon, and then you shall have it all in 'print. I go on very well, and have no doubt but I shall always be able to hit upon some such kind of job to keep going on. I think I shall get fifty pounds a year at the lowest calculation ; but as I have not yet seen any money of my own earning, for we do not expect to be paid till Christmas, I do not feel the good fortune that has so unexpectedly befallen me half so much as I ought to do. But another year no doubt I shall perceive it. . . . Charles has written Macbeth , Othello , King Lear , and has begun Hamlet ; you would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Night’s Dream ; or rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff and he groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it. “ If I tell you that you Widow Blackacre-ise you must tell me 1 Tale- ise, for my Tales seem to be all the subject matter I write about ; and when you see them you will think them poor little baby -stories to make such a talk about." 120 MARY LAMB And a month later she says : — “ The reason I have not written so long is that I worked and worked in hopes to get through my task before the holidays began ; but at last I was not able, for Charles was forced to get them now, or he could not have had any at all ; and having picked out the best stories first these latter ones take more time, being more perplext and unmanageable. I have finished one to-day, which teazed me more than all the rest put together. They sometimes plague me as bad as your lovers do you. How do you go on, and how many new ones have you had lately ? " “Mary is just stuck fast in All’s Well that Ends Well’’ writes Charles. “ She complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boys' clothes. She begins to think Shakespeare must have wanted imagination ! I, to encourage her (for she often faints in the prosecution of her great work), flatter her with telling how well such and such a play is done. But she is stuck fast, and I have been obliged to promise to assist her." At last Mary, in a postscript to her letter to Sarah, adds : “ I am in good spirits just at this present time, for Charles has been reading over the Tale I told you plagued me so much, and he thinks it one of the very best. You must not mind the many wretchedly dull \etters I have sent you ; for, indeed, I cannot help it ; my mind is always so wretchedly dry after poring over my work all day. But it will soon be over. I am cooking a shoulder of lamb (Hazlitt dines with us), it will be ready at 2 o'clock if you can pop in and eat a bit with us." Mary took a very modest estimate of her own achieve- ment; but time has tested it, and passed it on to TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE. 121 generation after generation of children, and the last makes it as welcome as the first. Hardly a year passes but a new edition is absorbed ; and not by children only, but by the young generally, for no better intro- duction to the study of Shakspeare can be desired. Of the twenty plays included in the two small volumes which were issued in January 1807, fourteen, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , A Winters’s Tale , Much Ado about Nothing , As You Like It , The Two Gentlemen of Verona , The Merchant of Venice , Cymbeline , All’s Well that Ends Well , The Taming of the Shrew , The Comedy of Errors , Measure for Measure , Twelfth Night , and Pericles , Prince of Tyre , were by Mary ; and the remaining six, the great tragedies, by Charles. Her share was the more difficult and the less grateful, not only on account of the more adding significantly that it would do to roast after it had served its turn to paint swans by/* (Lamb's Recol- lections of a Royal Academician .) The following year the visit to Winterslow was repeated, but not with the same happy results. In a letter written during his stay to Mr. Basil Montague Charles says : “ My head has received such a shock by an all-night journey on the top of the coach that I shall have enough to do to nurse it into its natural pace before I go home. I must devote myself to imbecility ; I must be gloriously useless while I stay here. The city of Salisbury is full of weeping and wailing. The bank has stopped payment, and every- body in the town kept money at it or has got some of its notes. Some have lost all they had in the world. It is the next thing to seeing a city with the plague within its walls ; and I do suppose it to be the un- happiest county in England this, where I am making holiday. We purpose setting out for Oxford Tuesday fortnight, and coming thereby home. But no more night-travelling; my head is sore (understand it of the inside) with that deduction from my natural rest which I suffered coming down. Neither Mary nor MARY ILL AGAIN. 179 I can spare a morsel of our rest, it is incumbent on us to be misers of it.” The visit to Oxford was paid, Hazlitt accompanying them and much enhancing the enjoyment of it, especially of a visit to the picture gallery at Blenheim. “ But our pleasant excursion has ended sadly for one of us / 5 he tells Hazlitt on his return. “ My sister got home very w r ell (I was very ill on the journey) and continued so till Monday night, when her complaint came on, and she is now absent from home. I think I shall be mad if I take any more journeys with two experiences against it. I have lost all wish for sights.” It was a long attack ; at the end of October Mary was still “ very weak and low-spirited,” and there were domestic misadventures not calculated to improve matters. “We are in a pickle,” says Charles to Wordsworth. “ Mary, from her affectation of physiognomy, has hired a stupid, big, country wench, who looked honest as she thought, and has been doing her work some days, but without eating ; and now it comes out that she was ill when she came, with lifting her mother abcut (who is now with God) when she was dying, and with riding up from Norfolk four days and nights in the waggon, and now she lies in her bed a dead weight upon our humanity, incapable of getting up, refusing to go to an hospital, having nobody in town but a poor asthmatic uncle, and she seems to have made up her mind to take her flight to heaven from our bed. Oh for the little wheelbarrow which trundled the hunchback from door to door to try the various charities of different pro- fessions of mankind! Here's her uncle just crawled up, he is far liker death than she. In this perplexity 12 * 180 MARY LAMB . such topics as Spanish papers and Monkhouses sink into insignificance. What shall we do ? " The perplexity seems to have cleared itself up some- how speedily, for in a week's time Mary herself wrote to Mrs. Hazlitt, not very cheerfully, but with no allu- sion to this particular disaster : — “Nov. 30, 1810. “ I have taken a large sheet of paper, as if I were going to write a long letter ; but that is by no means my intention, for I have only time to write three lines to notify what I ought to have done the moment I received your welcome letter ; namely, that I shall be very much joyed to see you. Every morning lately I have been expecting to see you drop in, even before your letter came ; and I have been setting my wits to work to think how to make you as comfortable as the nature of our inhospitable habits will admit. I must work while you are here, and I have been slaving very hard to get through with something before you come, that I may be quite in the way of it, and not teize you with complaints all day that I do not know what to do. “ I am very sorry to hear of your mischance. Mrs. Rickman has just buried her youngest child. I am glad I am an old maid, for you see there is nothing but misfortunes in the marriage state* Charles was drunk last night, and drunk the night before; which night before was at Godwin's, where we went, at a short summons from Mr. G., to play a solitary rubber, which was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. and little Mrs. Liston ; and after them came Henry Robin- son, who is now domesticated at Mr. Godwin's fireside, and likely to become a formidable rival to Tommy Turner. We finished there at twelve o'clock, Charles and Liston brim full of gin and water and snuff, after GOSSIP. 181 which Henry Robinson spent a long evening by our fireside at home, and there was much gin and water drunk, albeit only one of the party partook of it, and H. R. professed himself highly indebted to Charles for the useful information he gave him on sundry matters of taste and imagination, even after Charles could not speak plain for tipsiness. But still he swallowed the flattery and the spirits as savourily as Robinson did his cold water. “ Last night was to be a night, but it was not. There was a certain son of one of Martin’s employers, one young Mr. Blake, to do whom honour Mrs. Burney brought forth, first rum, then a single bottle of cham- paine, long kept in her secret hoard ; then two bottles of her best currant wine, which she keeps for Mrs. Rick- man, came out; and Charles partook liberally of all these beverages, while Mr. Young Blake and Mr. Ireton talked of high matters, such as the merits of the Whip Club, and the merits of red and white champaine. Do I spell that last word right? Rickman was not there, so Ireton had it all his own way. “ The alternating Wednesdays will chop off one day in the week from your jolly days, and I do not know how we shall make it up to you, but I will contrive the best I can. Phillips comes again pretty regularly, to the great joy of Mrs Reynolds. Once more she hears the well-loved sounds of i How do you . do, Mrs. Reynolds ? and how does Miss Chambers do ? 3 “ I have spun out my three lines amazingly; now for family news. Your brother's little twins are not dead, but Mrs. John Hazlitt and her baby may be for any- thing I know to the contrary, for I have not been there for a prodigious long time. Mrs. Holcroft still goes about from Nicholson to Tuthill, and Tuthill to God- 182 MARY LAMB. win, and from Godwin to Nicholson, to consult on the publication or no publication of the life of the good man, her husband. It is called The Life Everlasting . How does that same Life go on in your parts? Good- bye, God bless you. I shall be glad to see you when you come this way. €€ I am going in great haste to see Mrs. Clarkson, for I must get back to dinner, which I have hardly time to do. I wish that dear, good, amiable woman would go out of town. I thought she was clean gone, and yesterday there was a consultation of physicians held at her house to see if they could keep her among them here a few weeks longer/’ The concluding volumes of this same Life Ever- lasting remained unprinted somewhere in a damp hamper, Mr. Carew Hazlitt tells us : for, in truth, the admirable fragment of autobiography Holcroft dictated on his death-bed contained the cream of the matter, and was all the public cared to listen to. Mary continuing “ in a feeble and tottering condi- tion/’ Charles found it needful to make a decisive stand on her behalf against the exhaustion and excitement of incessant company, and especially against the disturbed rest, which resulted from sharing her room with 9 guest. “Nov. 28, 1810. “ Mary has been very ill indeed since you saw her,” he wrote to Hazlitt, “ as ill as she can be to remain at home. But she is a good deal better now, owing to a very careful regimen. She drinks nothing but water, and never goes out ; she does not even go to the Captain’s?^ Her indisposition has been ever since that night you left town, the night Miss Wordsworth came. Her coming, and that d d Mrs. Godwin coming CHARLES TO HAZLITT. 183 and staying so late that night so overset her that she lay broad awake all that night, and it was by a miracle that she escaped a very bad illness, which I thoroughly expected. I have made up my mind that she shall never have any one in the house again with her, and that no one shall sleep with her, not even for a night; for it is a very serious thing to be always living with a kind of fever upon her, and therefore I am sure you will take it in good part if I say that if Mrs. Hazlitt comes to town at any time, however glad we shall be to see her in the day-time, I cannot ask her to spend a night under our roof. Some decision we must come to; for the harassing fever that we have both been in, owing to Miss Wordsworth's comings is not to be borne, and I would rather be dead than so alive. However, owing to a regimen and medicines which Tuthill has given her, who very kindly volunteered the care of her, she is a great deal quieter, though too much harassed by company, who cannot or will not see how late hours and Society teaze her." The next letter to Sarah is a cheerful one, as the occasion demanded. It is also the last to her that has been preserved, probably the last that was written; for, a few months later, Hazlitt fairly launched himself on a literary career in London, and took up his abode next door to Jeremy Bentham, at 19 York Street, Westminster, — once Milton's house. “ Oct. 2, 1811. “ I have been a long time anxiously expecting the happy news that I have just received. I address you because, as the letter has been lying some days at the India House. I hope you are able to sit up 184 MAE v t^MB. and read my congratulations on the little live boy you have been so many years wishing for. As we old women say, c May he live to be a great comfort to you ! 9 I never knew an event of the kind that gave me so much pleasure as the little long-looked- for-come-at-last's arrival; and I rejoice to hear his honour has begun to suck. The word was not dis- tinctly written, and I was a long time making out the solemn fact. I hope to hear from you soon, for I am anxious to know if your nursing labours are attended with any difficulties. 1 wish you a happy getting -up and a merry christening ! “ Charles sends his love ; perhaps, though, he will write a scrap to Hazlitt at the end. He is now looking over me. He is always in my way, for he has had a month's holiday at home. But I am happy to say they end on Monday, when mine begin, for I am going to pass a week at Richmond with Mrs. Burney. She has been dying, but she went to the Isle of Wight and recovered once more, and she is finishing her recovery at Richmond. When there, I mean to read novels and play at Piquet all day long/' “ My blessing and heaven’s be upon him/' added Charles, u and make him like his father, with something a better temper and a smoother head of hair, and then all the men and women must love him/' , . . ♦ I8i> CHAPTER XII. An Essay on Needle- work. 1814.— .Et. 50. Towards the end of 1814 Crabb Robinson called on Mary Lamb and found her suffering from great fatigue after writing an article on needle-work for the British Lady’s Magazine , which was just about to start on a higher basis than its predecessors. It undertook to provide something better than the usual fashion plates, silly tales and sillier verses then generally thought suitable for women ; and, to judge by the early num- bers, the editor kept the promise of his introductory address and deserved a longer lease of life for his magazine than it obtained. Mary’s little essay appeared in the number for April 1815; and is on many accounts interesting. It con- tains several autobiographic touches ; it is the only known instance in which she has addressed herself to full-grown readers, ana it is sagacious and far- seeing. For Mary does not treat of needle- work as an art, but as a factor in social life. She pleads both for the sake of the bodily welfare of the many thou- sands of women who have to earn their bread by it. 186 MARY LAMB . and of the mental well-being of those who have not so to do, that it should be regarded, like any other mechanical art, as a thing to be done for hire; and that what a woman does work at should be real work, something, that is, which yields a return either of mental or of pecuniary profit. She also exposes the fallacy of the time-honoured maxim “a penny saved is a penny earned,” by the ruthless logic of experience. But the reader shall judge for himself; the Magazine has become so rare a book that I will here subjoin the little essay in full : — ON NEEDLE-WORK. Mr. Editor, “ In early life I passed eleven years in the exer- cise of my needle for a livelihood. Will you allow me to address your readers, among whom might perhaps be found some of the kind patronesses of my former humble labours, on a subject widely connected with female life — the state of needle-work in this country. “ To lighten the heavy burthen which many ladies impose upon themselves is one object which I have in view; but, I confess, my strongest motive i3 to excite attention towards the industrious sisterhood to which I once belonged. “ From books I have been informed of the fact upon which The British Lady’s Magazine chiefly founds it& pretensions ; namely, that women have, of late, been rapidly advancing in intellectual improvement. Much may have been gained in this way, indirectly, for that class of females for whom I wish to plead. Needle- work and intellectual improvement are naturally in a state of warfare. But I am afraid the root of the evil has not, as yet, been struck at. Work-women of every ON NEEDLE-WORK. 187 description were never in so much distress for want of employment. “ Among the present circle of my acquaintance I am proud to rank many that may truly be called respect- able ; nor do the female part of them in their mental attainments at all disprove the prevailing opinion of that intellectual progression which you have taken as the basis of your work ; yet I affirm that I know not a single family where there is not some essential draw- back to its comfort which may be traced to needle- work done at home , as the phrase is for all needle-work performed in a family by some of its own members, and for which no remuneration in money is received or expected. “ In money alone, did I say ? I would appeal to all the fair votaries of voluntary housewifery whether, in the matter of conscience, any one of them ever thought she had done as much needle-work as she ought to have done. Even fancy-work, the fairest of the tribe ! How delightful the arrangement of her materials ! The fixing upon her happiest pattern, how pleasing an anxiety ! How cheerful the commence- ment of the labour she enjoys ! But that lady must be a true lover of the art, and so industrious a pursuer of a predetermined purpose, that it were pity her energy should not have been directed to some wiser end, who can affirm she neither feels weariness during the execu- tion of a fancy piece, nor takes more time than she had calculated for the performance. ce Is it too bold an attempt to persuade your readers that it would prove an incalculable addition to general happiness and the domestic comfort of both sexes, if needle- work were never practised but for a remunera- tion in money ? As nearly, however, as this desirable 188 MARY LAMB. thing can be effected, so much more nearly will woman be upon an equality with men as far as respects the mere enjoyment of life. As far as that goes, I believe it is every woman's opinion that the condition of men is far superior to her own. iC * They can do what they like/ we say. Do not these words generally mean they have time to seek out whatever amusements suit their tastes? We dare not tell them we have no time to do this; for if they should ask in what manner we dispose of our time we should blush to enter upon a detail of the minutiae which compose the sum of a woman's daily employ- ment. Nay, many a lady who allows not herself one quarter of an hour’s positive leisure during her waking hours, considers her own husband as the most indus- trious of men if he steadily pursue his occupation till the hour of dinner, and will be perpetually lamenting her own idleness. “ Real business and real leisure make up the portions of men's time : — two sources of happiness which we certainly partake of in a very inferior degree. To the execution of employments in which the faculties of the body or mind are called into busy action there must be a consoling importance attached, which feminine duties (that generic term for all our business) cannot aspire to. “ In the most meritorious discharges of those duties the highest praise we can aim at is ,to be accounted the helpmates of man; who, in return for all he does for us, expects, and justly expects, us to do all in our power to soften and sweeten life. “ In how many ways is a good woman employed in thought or action through the day that her good man may be enabled to feel his leisure hours real , substantial THE BE TIES OF WOMEN. 189 holiday and perfect respite from the cares of business ! Not the least part to be done to accomplish this end is to fit herself to become a conversational companion ; that is to say, she has to study and understand the subjects on which he loves to talk. This part of our duty, if strictly performed, will be found by far our hardest part. The disadvantages we labour under from an education differing from a manly one make the hours in which we sit and do nothing in men ; s company too often anything but a relaxation ; although as to pleasure and instruction time so passed may be esteemed more or less delightful. “To make a man's home so desirable a place as to preclude his having a wish to pass his leisure hours at any fireside in preference to his own, I should humbly take to be the sum and substance of woman's domestic ambition. I would appeal to our British ladies, who are generally allowed to be the most jealous and suc- cessful of all women in the pursuit of this ooject, I would appeal to them who have been most successful in the performance of this laudable service, in behalf of father, son, husband or brother, whether an anxious desire to perform this duty well is not attended with enough of mental exertion, at least, to incline them to the opinion that women may be more properly ranked among the contributors to than the partakers of the undisturbed relaxation of men. “ If a family be so well ordered that the master is never called in to its direction, and yet he perceives comfort and economy well attended to, the mistress of that family (especially if children form a part of it), has, I apprehend, as large a share of womanly employ- ment as ought to satisfy her own sense of duty ; even though the needle-book and thread-case were quite laid 190 MARY LAMB. aside, and slie cheerfully contributed her part to the slender gains of the corset-maker, the milliner, the dress-maker, the plain worker, the embroidress and all the numerous classifications of females supporting themselves by needle-work, that great staple commodity which is alone appropriated to the self-supporting part of our sex. “ Much has been said and written on the subject of men engrossing to themselves every occupation and calling. After many years of observation and reflection I am obliged to acquiesce in the notion that it cannot well be ordered otherwise. “ If, at the birth of girls, it were possible to foresee in what cases it would be their fortune to pass a single life, we should soon find trades wrested from their present occupiers and transferred to the exclusive possession of our sex. The whole mechanical business of copying writings in the law department, for instance, might very soon be transferred with advantage to the poorer sort of women, who, with very little teaching, would soon beat their rivals of the other sex in facility and neatness. The parents of female children who were known to be destined from their birth to maintain themselves through the whole course of their lives with like certainty as their sons are, would feel it a duty incumbent on themselves to strengthen the minds, and even the bodily constitutions, of their girls so circum- stanced, by an education which, without affronting the preconceived habits of society, might enable them to follow some occupation now considered above the capacity, or too robust for the constitution of our sex. Plenty of resources would then lie open for single women to obtain an independent livelihood, when every parent would be upon the alert to encroach upon WOMEN'S DIFFICULTIES. 391 some employment, now engrossed by men, for such of their daughters as would then be exactly in the same predicament as their sons now are. Who, for instance, would lay by money to set up his sons in trade, give premiums and in part maintain them through a long apprenticeship ; or, which men of moderate incomes frequently do, strain every nerve in order to bring them up to a learned profession; if it were in a very high degree probable that, by the time they were twenty years of age, they would be taken from this trade or profession, and maintained during the re- mainder of their lives by the person whom they should marry. Yet this is precisely the situation in which every parent whose income does not very much exceed the moderate, is placed with respect to his daughters. “ Even where boys have gone through a laborious education, superinducing habits of steady attention accompanied with the entire conviction that the business which they learn is to be the source of their future distinction, may it not be affirmed that the persevering industry required to accomplish this desirable end causes many a hard straggle in the minds of young men, even of the most hopeful disposition? What, then, must be the disadvantages under which a very young woman is placed who is required to learn a trade, from which she can never expect to reap any profit, but at the expense of losing that place in society to the possession of which she may reasonably look forward, inasmuch as it is by far the most common lot , namely, the con- dition of a happy English wife ? “ As I desire to offer nothing to the consideration of your readers but what, at least as far as my own obser- vation goes, I consider as truths confirmed by experi- ence, I will only say that, were I to follow the bent of 192 MARY LAMB . my own speculative opinion, I should be inclined to persuade every female over whom I hoped to have any influence to contribute all the assistance in her power to those of her own sex who may need it, in the employments they at present occupy, rather than to force them into situations now filled wholly by men. With the mere exception of the profits which they have a right to derive by their needle, I would take nothing from the industry of man which he already possesses. “ ‘ A penny saved is a penny earned/ is a maxim not true unless the penny be saved in the same time in which it might have been earned. I, who have known what it is to work for money earned , have since had much experience in working for money saved ; and I consider, from the closest calculation I can make, that a penny saved in that way bears about a true propor- tion to a farthing earned . I am no advocate for women who do not depend on themselves for subsis- tence, proposing to themselves to earn money . My reasons for thinking it not advisable are too numerous to state — reasons deduced from authentic facts and strict observations on domestic life in its various shades of comfort. But if the females of a family nominally supported by the other sex find it necessary to add something to the common stock, why not endeavour to do something by which they may produce money in its true shape ? “ It would be an excellent plan, attended with very little trouble, to calculate every evening how much money bas been saved by needle-work done in the family , and compare the result with the daily portion of the yearly income. Nor would it be amiss to make a memorandum of the time passed in this way, adding BUSY IDLENESS. 193 also a guess as to what share it lias taken up in the thoughts and conversation. This would be an easy mode of forming a true notion and getting at the exact worth of this species of home industry, and perhaps might place it in a different light from any in which it has hitherto been the fashion to consider it. (t Needle-work taken up as an amusement may not be altogether unamusing. We are all pretty good judges of what entertains ourselves, but it is not so easy to pronounce upon what may contribute to the entertainment of others. At all events, let us not confuse the motives of economy with those of simple pastime. If saving be no object, and long habit have rendered needle- work so delightful an avocation that we cannot think of relinquishing it, there are the good old contrivances in which our grand-dames were wont to beguile and lose their time — knitting, knotting netting, carpet-work, and the like ingenious pursuits — those so often praised but tedious works which are so long in the operation that purchasing the labour has seldom been thought good economy. Yet, by a certain fascination, they have been found to chain down the great to a self-imposed slavery, from which they considerately or haughtily excused the needy. These may be esteemed lawful and lady-like amusements. But, if those works more usually denominated useful yield greater satisfaction, it might be a laudable scruple of conscience, and no bad test to herself of her own motive, if a lady w r ho had no absolute need were to give the money so saved to poor needle- women belong- ing to those branches of employment from which she has borrowed these shares of pleasurable labour. “Sempronia.” 13 194 MARY LAMB. Had Mary lived now she would, perhaps, have spoken a wiser word than has yet been uttered on the social question of how best to develop, strengthen, give free and fair scope to that large part of a woman's nature and field of action which are the same in kind as man’s, without detriment to the remaining qualities and duties peculiar to her as woman. She told Crabb Robinson that “ writing was a most painful occupation, which only necessity could make her attempt; and that she had been learning Latin merely to assist her in acquiring a correct style.” But there is no trace of feebleness or confusion in her manner of grasping a sub- ject ; no want of Latin, nor of anything else to improve her excellent style. She did enough to show that had her brain not been devastated for weeks and latterly for months in every year by an access of madness, she would have left, besides her tales for children, some permanent addition to literature, or given a recog- nisable impetus to thought. As it was, Mary relin- quished all attempt at literary work when an increase in Charles' income released her from the duty of earning ; and as her attacks became longer and more frequent her “ fingers grew nervously averse ” even to letter-writing. ID5 CHAPTER XIII. Letters to Miss Betham and her little Sister. — To Wordsworth. — Manning’s Return. — Coleridge goes to Highgate. — Letter to Miss Hutchinson on Mary’s state. — Removal to Russell Street. — Mary’s Letter to Dorothy Wordsworth. — Lodgings at Dalston. — Death of John Lamb and Captain Burney. 1815-21. — .zEt. 51 — 57. In a letter to Southey, dated May 16th, 1815, Lamb says : “ Have you seen Matilda Betham’s Lay of Marie ? I think it very delicately pretty as to senti- ment, 8lc” Matilda, the daughter of a country clergyman of ancient lineage (author of learned and laborious Genealogical Tables , &c. &c.), was a lady of many talents and ambitions ; especially of the laudable one, not so common in those days, to lighten the burthen of a large family of brothers and sisters by earning her own living. She went up to London, taught herself miniature painting, exhibited at Somerset House, gave Shakespeare readings, wrote a Bio- graphical Dictionary of Celebrated Women , contributed verses to the magazines ; and, last not least, by her genuine love of knowledge, and her warm and kindly heart, won the cordial liking of many men of genius, 13 * 196 MARY LAMB. notably of Coleridge, Southey, and the Lambs. When this same Lay of Marie was on the stocks, Mary took an earnest interest in its success, as the following letter prettily testifies : — “ My brother and myself return you a thousand thanks for your kind communication. We have read your poem many times over with increased interest, and very much wish to see you to tell you how highly we have been pleased with it. May we beg one favour ? I keep the manuscript, in the hope that you will grant it. It is that either now, or when the whole poem is completed, you will read it over with us. When I say with us , of course I mean Charles. I know that you have many judicious friends, but I have so often known my brother spy out errors in a manuscript which has passed through many judicious hands, that I shall not be easy if you do not permit him to look yours carefully through with you ; and also you must allow him to correct the press for you. If I knew where to find you I would call upon you. Should you feel nervous at the idea of meeting Charles in the capacity of a severe censor , give me a line, and I will come to you anywhere and convince you in five minutes that he is even timid, stammers, and can scarcely speak for modesty and fear of giving pain when he finds himself placed in that kind of office. Shall I appoint a time to see you here when he is from home? I will send him out any time you will name; indeed I am always naturally alone till four o’clock. If you are nervous about coming, remember I am equally so about the liberty I have taken, and shall be till we meet and laugh off our mutual fears.’ * u I return you by a careful hand the MSS.,” MATILDA BETH AM. 197 wrote Charles. “Did I not ever love your verses? The domestic half will be a sweet heirloom to have in the family. ’Tis fragrant with cordiality. What friends you must have had, or dreamed of having ! and what a widow’s cruse of heartiness you have doled among them ! ” But as to the correction of the press, that proved a rash suggestion on Mary’s part ; for the task came at an untoward time, and Charles had to write a whimsical-repentant letter, which must have gone far to atone for his shortcoming : — “ All this while 1 have been tormenting myself with the thought of having been ungracious to you, and you have been all the while accusing yourself. Let us absolve one another and be quiet. My head is in such a state from incapacity for business, that I certainly know it to be my duty not to undertake the veriest trifle in addition. I hardly know how I can go on. I have tried to get some redress by explaining my health, but with no great success. No one can tell how ill I am, because it does not come out to the exterior of my face, but lies in my skull, deep and invisible. I wish I was leprous, and black- jaundiced skin-over, or that all was as well within as my cursed looks. You must not think me worse than I am. 1 am determined not to be overset, but to give up business rather, and get ’em to allow me a trifle for services past. Oh, that I had been a shoe- maker, or a baker, or a man of large independent fortune. Oh, darling laziness ! Heaven of Epicurus ! Saint’s Everlasting Rest ! that I could drink vast potations of thee through unmeasured Eternity. Otium cum vel sine dignitate. Scandalous, dishonourable, any kind of repose. I stand not upon the dignified 198 MARY LAMB. sort. Accursed, damned desks, trade, commerce, business. Inventions of that old original busy-body, brain-working Satan — Sabbathless, restless Satan. A curse relieves ; do you ever try it ? A strange letter to write to a lady, but more honeyed sentences will not distil. I dare not ask who revises in my stead. I have drawn you into a scrape, and am ashamed, but I know no remedy. My unwellness must be my apology. God bless you (tho' he curse the India House and fire it to the ground ), and may no unkind error creep into Marie. May all its readers like it as well as I do, and everybody about you like its kind author no worse ! Why the devil am I never to have a chance of scribbling my own free thoughts in verse or prose again ? Why must I write of tea and drugs, and price goods and bales of indigo ? Farewell. . . .” Miss Betham possessed the further merit of having a charming little sister, for such she must surely have been to be the cause and the recipient of such a letter as the following from Mary. Barbara Betham was then fourteen years old : — “ November 2, 1814. “ It is very long since I have met with such an agreeable surprise as the sight of your letter, my kind kind young friend, afforded me. Such a nice letter as it is too ; and what a pretty hand you write ! I congratulate you on this attainment with great pleasure, because I have so often felt the disadvantage of my own wretched handwriting. You wish for London news. I rely upon your sister Ann for gratifying you in this respect, yet I have been endeavouring to recollect whom you might have seen here, and what may have happened to them since, and this effort has only brought the image of little LETTER TO A CHILD. 199 Barbara Betham, unconnected with any other person, so strongly before my eyes, that I seem as if I had no other subject to write upon. Now I think I see you with your feet propped upon the fender, your two hands spread out upon your knees — an attitude you always chose when we were in familiar confidential conversation together — telling me long stories of your own home, where now you say you are ‘ moping on with the same thing every day/ and which then presented nothing but pleasant recollections to your mind. How well I remember your quiet, steady face bent over your book. One day, conscience-stricken at having wasted so much of your precious time in reading, and feeling yourself, as you prettily said, ‘ quite useless to me/ you went to my drawers and hunted out some unhemmed pocket-handkerchiefs, and by no means could I prevail upon you to resume your story-books till you had hemmed them all. I re- member, too, your teaching my little maid to read, your sitting with her a whole evening to console her for the death of her sister, and that she, in her turn, endeavoured to become a comforter to you, the next evening, when you wept at the sight of Mrs. Holcroft, from whose school you had recently eloped because you were not partial to sitting in the stocks. Those tears, and a few you dropped when my brother teased you about your supposed fondness for an apple- dumpling, were the only interruptions to the calm contentedness of your unclouded brow. “ We still remain the same as you left us, neither taller, nor wiser, or perceptibly older; but three years must have made a great alteration in you. How very much, dear Barbara, I should like to see you ! “ We still live in Temple Lane, but I am now 200 MARY LAMB. sitting in a room you never saw. Soon after you left us we were distressed by the cries of a cat, which seemed to proceed from the garrets adjoining to ours, and only separated from ours by a locked door on the farther side of my brothers bed-room, which you know was the little room at the top of the kitchen stairs. We had the lock forced, and let poor puss out from behind a panel of the wainscot, and she lived with us from that time, for we were in gratitude bound to keep her, as she had introduced us to four untenanted, unowned rooms, and by degrees we have taken possession of these unclaimed apartments, first putting up lines to dry our clothes, then moving my brother’s bed into one of these more commodious than his own rooms ; and last winter, my brother being unable to pursue a work he had begun, owing to the kind interruptions of friends who were more at leisure than himself, I persuaded him that he might write at ease in one of these rooms, as he could not then hear the door-knock, or hear himself denied to be at home, which was sure to make him call out and convict the poor maid in a fib. Here, I said, he might be, almost really not at home. So I put in an old grate, and made him a fire in the largest of these garrets, and carried in his own table and one chair, and bid him write away and consider himself as much alone as if he were in a lodging in the midst of Salisbury Plain, or any other wide, unfrequented place where he could expect few visitors to break in upon his solitude. I left him quite delighted with his new acquisition, but in a few hours he came down again, with a sadly dismal face. He could do nothing, he said, with those bare white-washed walls before his eyes. He could not write in that dull unfurnished prison ! LET 1 Ell TO A CHILD. 201 “ The next day, before he came home from his office, I had gathered up various bits of old carpeting to cover the floor ; and to a little break the blank look of the bare walls I hung up a few old prints that used to ornament the kitchen ; and after dinner, with great boast of what improvement I had made, I took Charles once more into his new study. A week of busy labours followed, in which I think you would not have disliked to be our assistant. My brother and I almost covered the walls with prints, for which purpose he cut out every print from every book in his old library, coming in every now and then to ask my leave to strip a fresh poor author, which he might not do, you know, with- out my permission, as I am elder sister. There was such pasting, such consultation upon these portraits, and where the series of pictures from Ovid, Milton, and Shakspeare would show to most advantage, and in what obscure corners authors of humble rank should be allowed to tell their stories. All the books gave up their stores but one, a translation from Ariosto, a delicious set of four and twenty prints, and for which I had marked out a conspicuous place ; when lo, we found at the moment the scissors were going to work, that a part of the poem was printed at the back of every picture ! What a cruel disappointment ! To con- clude this long story about nothing, the poor despised garret is now called the print room, and is become our most familiar sitting-room. . . . The lions still live in Exeter Change. Returning home through the Strand, I often hear them roar about twelve o’clock at night. I never hear them without thinking of you, because you seemed so pleased with the sight of them, and said your young companions would stare when you told them you had seen a lion. 202 MARY LAMB . “ And now, my dear Barbara, farewell. I have not written such a long letter a long time, but I am very sorry I had nothing amusing to write about. Wishing you may pass happily through the rest of your school- days and every future day of your life, “ I remain, “ Your affectionate friend, “ M. Lamb. “ My brother sends his love to you. You say you are not so tall as Louisa — you must be ; you cannot so degenerate from the rest of your family ” [“ the measure- less Bethams/’ Lamb called them]. “Now you have begun I shall hope to have the pleasure of hearing from you again. I shall always receive a letter from you with very great delight.” The next is a joint letter to Wordsworth, in acknow- ledgment of an early copy of The Excursion , in which Charles holds the pen and is the chief spokesman ; but Mary puts in a judicious touch of her own : — “ August 14th, 1814. “ I cannot tell you how pleased I was at the receipt of the great armful of poetry which you have sent me ; and to get it before the rest of the world, too ! I have gone quite through with it, and was thinking to have accomplished that pleasure a second time before I wrote to thank you, but Mr. Burney came in the night (while we were out) and made holy theft of it; but we expect restitution in a day or two. It is the noblest conversational poem I ever read — a day in heaven. The part (or rather main body) which has left the sweetest odour on my memory (a bad term for the remains of an impression so recent) is the Tales of LETTER TO WORDSWORTH . 203 the Churchyard ; the only girl among seven brethren born out of due time, and not duly taken away again ; the deaf man and the blind man; the Jacobite and the Hanoverian, whom antipathies reconcile; the Scarron- entry of the rusticating parson upon his solitude; these were all new to me too. My having known the story of Margaret (at the beginning) a very old acquain- tance, even as long back as when I first saw you at Stowey, did not make her reappearance less fresh. I don’t know what to pick out of this best of books upon the best subjects for partial naming. That gorgeous sunset is famous ; I think it must have been the identical one we saw on Salisbury Plain five years ago, that drew Phillips from the card-table, where he had sat from the rise of that luminary to its unequalled set ; but neither he nor I had gifted eyes to see those symbols of common things glorified, such as the prophet saw them in that sunset — the wheel, the potter’s clay, the wash-pot, the wine-press, the almond-tree rod, the basket of figs, the four-fold visaged head, the throne and Him that sat thereon.” [It was a mist glori- fied by sunshine, not a sunset, which the poet had de- scribed, as Lamb afterwards discovered.] “One feeling I was particularly struck with, as what I noticed so very lately at Harrow Church on entering it after a hot and secular day's pleasure, the instantaneous cool- ness and calming, almost transforming, properties of a country church just entered ; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being pure country, exactly what you have reduced into words ; but I am feeling that which I cannot express. Reading your lines about it fixed me for a time, a monu- ment in Harrow Church. Do you know it? With 204 MARY LAMB. its fine long spire, white as washed marble, to be seen, by vantage of its high site, as far as Salisbury spire itself almost. “ I shall select a day or two, very shortly, when I am coolest in brain, to have a steady second reading, which I feel will lead to many more, for it will be a stock- book with me while eyes or spectacles shall be lent me. There is a great deal of noble matter about mountain- scenery, yet not so much as to overpower and discounte- nance a poor Londoner or south-countryman entirely, though Mary seems to have felt it occasionally a little too powerfully ; for it was her remark during reading it that by your system it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved. She almost trembled for that invisible part of us in Irer. “ C. Lamb and Sister.” Manning, who had latterly been “ tarrying on the skirts of creation ” in far Thibet and Tartary, beyond the reach even of letters, now at last, in 1815, appeared once more on the horizon at the %i half-way house ” of Canton, to which place Lamb hazarded a letter, — a most incomparable “lying letter,” and another to confess the cheat to St. Helena : — “ Have you recovered the breathless, stone-staring astonishment into which you must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was living in St. Helena ? What an event in the solitude of the seas ! like finding a fish’s bone at the top of Plinlimmon. . . . Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false Nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran new gown to wear when you come. 1 am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave MANNING AND COLERIDGE. 205 tobacco ! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised. The soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain.” Manning brought with him on his return much material for compiling a Chinese Dictionary ; which purpose, however, remained unfulfilled. He left no other memorial of himself than his friendship with Lamb. “ You see but his husk or shrine. He discloses not, save to select worshippers, and will leave the world without anyone hardly but me knowing how stupendous a creature he is,” said Lamb of him. Henceforth their intercourse was chiefly personal. Coleridge also, who of late had been almost as much lost to his friends as if he too were in Tartary or Thibet, though now and then “like a re-appearing star” standing up before them when least expected, was at the beginning of April 1816 once more in London, endeavouring to get his tragedy of Remorse accepted at Covent Garden. “ Nature, who conducts every creature by instinct to its best end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his abode at a chemist’s labora- tory in Norfolk Street,” writes Lamb to Wordsworth. “ She might as well as have sent a Helluo Liborum for cure to the Vatican. He has done pretty well as yet. Tell Miss Hutchinson my sister is every day wishing to be quietly sitting down to answer her very kind letter, but while C. stays she can hardly find a quiet time; God bless him ! ” But Coleridge was more in earnest than Lamb supposed in his determination to break through his thraldom to opium. Either way, he himself believed that death was imminent : to go on was deadly, and a physician of eminence had told him that to abstain 206 MARY LAMB. altogether would, probably, be equally fatal. He there- fore found a medical man willing to undertake the care of him : to exercise absolute surveillance for a time and watch the results. It is an affecting letter in which he commits himself into Mr. Gillman's hands: — “You will never hear anything but truth from me, prior habits render it out of my power to tell an untruth, but unless carefully observed I dare not promise that I should not, with regard to this detested poison, be capable of acting one. . . . For the first week I must not be permitted to leave your house, unless with you. Delicately or indelicately, this must be done, and both the servants and the assistant must receive absolute commands from you. The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone the horrors I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me. 'If (as I feel for the first time a soothing confidence it will prove) I should leave you restored to my moral and bodily health, it is not myself only that will love and honour you ; every friend I have (and thank God ! in spite of this wretched vice I have many and warm ones, who were friends of my youth and have never deserted me) will thank you with reverence/’ That confidence was justified, those thanks well earned. In the middle of April l^lfibColeridge took up his abode with the Gill mans at No 3 The Grove, at Highgate, and found there a serene haven in which he anchored for the rest of life ; freeing himself by slow degrees from the opium bondage, though too shattered in frame ever to recover sound health ; too far spent, morally and mentally, by the long struggles and abasements he had gone through to renew the splendours of his youth. That “ shaping spirit of COLERIDGE. 20 7 imagination ” with which nature had endowed him drooped languidly, save in fitful moments of fervid talk; that “fertile, subtle, expansive understanding ” could not fasten with the long-sustained intensity needful to grapple victoriously with the great problems that filled his mind. The look of “ timid earnestness ” which Carlyle noted in his eyes expressed a mental attitude — a mixture of boldness and fear, a desire to seek truth at all hazards, yet also to drag Authority with him, as a safe and comfortable prop to rest on. But his eloquence had lost none of its richness and charm, his voice none of its sweetness. “ His face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory, an arch- angel a little damaged/’ says Lamb to Wordsworth. “ He is absent but four miles, and the neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet/’ Besides the renewed proximity of these two oldest and dearest of friends, two new ones, both very young, both future biographers of Lamb, were in these years added to the number of his intimates, — Talfourd in 1815, Proctor in 1817. Leigh Hunt had become one probably as early as 1812; Crabb Robinson in 1806; Thomas Hood, who stood in the front rank of his younger friends, and Bernard Barton, the Quaker Poet, Lamb's chief correspondent during the last ten years of his life, not until 1822-3. The years did not pass without each bringing a recurrence of one, sometimes of two severe attacks of Mary’s disorder. In the autumn of 1815 Charles repeats again the sad story to Miss Hutchinson : — “ I am forced to be the replier to your letter, for 208 MARY LAMB. Mary has been ill and gone from home these five weeks yesterday. She has left me very lonely and very miserable. I stroll about, but there is no rest but at one’s own fireside, and there is no rest for me there now. I look forward to the worse half being past, and keep up as well as I can. She has begun to show some favourable symptoms. The return of her disorder has been frightfully soon this time, with scarce a six months’ interval. I am almost afraid my worry of spirits about the E. I. House was partly the cause of her illness ; but one always imputes it to the cause next at hand ; more probably it comes from some cause we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts sad great slices out of the time, the little time we shall have to live together. I don’t know but the recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain her death better than if we had no partial separations. But I won’t talk of death. I will imagine us immortal or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be taking our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget we are assailable ; we are strong for the time as rocks, — ‘ the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs.' Poor C. Lloyd 5 ' [he was suffering from the same dread malady], “ poor Priscilla ! I feel I hardly feel enough for him; my own calamities press about me and involve me in a thick integument not to be reached at by other folks' misfortunes. But I feci all I can — all the kindness I can towards you all." More and more sought by an enlarging circle of friends, chambers in the Temple offered facilities for the dropping in of acquaintance upon the Lambs at LETTER TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH. 209 all hours of the day and night, which, social as they were, was harassing, wearing, and, to Mary, very injurious. This it was, doubtless, which induced them to take the step announced by her in the following letter to Dorothy Wordsworth : — “ November 21, 1817. “ Your kind letter has given us very great pleasure ; the sight of your handwriting was a most welcome surprise to us. We have heard good tidings of you by all our friends who were so fortunate as to visit you this summer, and rejoice to see it confirmed by yourself. You have quite the advantage in volunteering a letter ; there is no merit in replying to so welcome a stranger. “ We have left the Temple. I think you will be sorry to hear this. I know I have never been so well satisfied with thinking of you at Rydal Mount, as when I could connect the idea of you with your own Grasmere Cottage. Our rooms were dirty and out of repair, and the inconveniences of living in chambers became every year more irksome, and so, at last, we mustered up resolution enough to leave the good old place that so long had sheltered us, and here we are, living at a brazier's shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, a place all alive with noise and bustle ; Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front, and Covent Garden from our back windows. The hubbub of the carriages returning from the play does not annoy me in the least; strange that it does not, for it is quite tremendous. I quite enjoy looking out of the window and listening to the calling up of the carriages, and the squabbles of the coachmen and linkboys. It is the oddest scene to look down upon ; 14 210 MARY LAMB . I am sure you would be amused with it. It is well I am in a cheerful place, or I should have many mis- givings about leaving the Temple. I look forward with great pleasure to the prospect of seeing my good friend, Miss Hutchinson. I wish Rydal Mount, with all its inhabitants enclosed, were to be transplanted with her, and to remain stationary in the midst of Covent Garden. I passed through the street lately where Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth lodged; several fine new houses, which were then just rising out of the ground, are quite finished, and a noble entrance made that way into Portland Place. I am very sorry for Mr. De Quincey. What a blunder the poor man made when he took up his dwelling among the mountains ! I long to see my friend Pypos. Cole- ridge is still at Little Hampton with Mrs. Gillman; he has been so ill as to be confined to his room almost the whole time he has been there. “ Charles has had all his Hogarths bound in a book; they were sent home yesterday, and now that I have them altogether, and perceive the advantage of peeping close at them through my spectacles, I am reconciled to the loss of their hanging round the room, which has been a great mortification to me. In vain I tried to console myself with looking at our new chairs and carpets, for we have got new chairs and carpets covering all over our two sitting rooms ; I missed my old friends, and could not be comforted. Then I would resolve to learn to look out of the window, a habit I never could attain in my life, and I have given it up as a thing quite impracticable — yet, when I was at Brighton last summer, the first week I never took my eyes off from the sea, not even to look in a book : I had not seen the sea for sixteen SUBURBAN LODGINGS . 21 L years. Mrs. Morgan, who was with ns, kept her liking, and continued her seat in the window till the very last, while Charles and I played truants and wandered among the hills, which we magnified into little mountains, and almost as good as Westmoreland scenery. Certainly we made discoveries of many pleasant walks, which few of the Brighton visitors have ever dreamed of — for, like as is the case in the neighbourhood of London, after the first two or three miles we are sure to find ourselves in a perfect soli- tude. I hope we shall meet before the walking faculties of either of us fail; you say you can walk fifteen miles with ease ; that is exactly my stint, and more fatigues me ; four or five miles every third or fourth day, keeping very quiet between, was all Mrs. Morgan could accomplish. God bless you and yours. Love to all and each one/* In the spring of 1820 the Lambs took lodgings at Stoke Newington without, however, giving up the Bussell Street home, — for the sake of rest and quiet; the change from the Temple to Covent Garden not having proved much of a success in that respect, and the need grown serious. Even Lamb's mornings at the office and his walk thence were besieged by officious acquaintance: then, as he tells Wordsworth, “ up I go, mutton on table, hungry as a hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agree- able abstraction of mastication. Knock at the door ; in comes Mr. Hazlitt, or Mr. Burney, or Morgan Demi Gorgon, or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone — a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O the pleasure of eating alone ! eating my dinner alone ! let me think of it. But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary 14 * 212 MARY LAMB . that I should open a bottle of orange ; for my meat turns into a stone when any one dines with me if I have not wine. Wine can mollify stones ; then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters — (God bless ’em ! I love some of ’em dearly) — and with the hatred a still greater aver- sion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening; but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go ! . . . Evening company I should always like had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces ( divine forsooth !) and voices all the golden morning ; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in company ; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two or one to myself. I am never C. L., but always C. L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone preserve me from the more prodigious mon- strosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me.” . . . It was during the Bussell Street days that the Lambs made the acquaintance of Vincent Novello. He had a little daughter, Mary Victoria, afterwards Mrs. Cowden-Clarke, whose heart Mary won, leaving many sweet and happy impressions of herself graven there, which eventually took shape in her Recollections of Writers . Mrs. Novello had lost a baby in the spring of 1820, and from the quiet of Stoke Newington Mary wrote her a sweet letter of condolence : — “ Spring. 1820. “ Since we heard of your sad sorrow, you have LETTER TO MRS. NOVELLO. 213 been perpetually in our thoughts ; therefore you may well imagine how welcome your kind remembrance of us must be. I know not how to thank you for it. You bid me write a long letter; but my mind is so possessed with the idea that you must be occupied with one only thought, that all trivial matters seem impertinent. I have just been reading again Mr. Hunt's delicious essay [Deaths of Little Children] , which, I am sure, must have come so home to your hearts. I shall always love him for it. I feel that it is all that one can think, but which no one but he could have done so prettily. May he lose the memory of his own babies in seeing them all grow old around him. Together with the recollection of your dear baby the image of a little sister I once had comes as fresh into my mind as if I had seen her lately. . . . I long to see you, and I hope to do so on Tuesday or Wednesday in next week. Percy Street ! I love to write the word. What comfortable ideas it brings with it! We have been pleasing ourselves, ever since we heard this unexpected piece of good news, with the anticipation of frequent drop-in visits and all the social comfort of what seems almost next-door neigh- bourhood. Our solitary confinement has answered its pur- pose even better than I expected. It is so many years since I have been out of town in the spring that I scarcely knew of the existence of such a season. I see, every day, some new flower peeping out of the ground, and watch its growth; so that I have a sort of intimate friendship with each. I know the effect of every change of weather upon them — have learned all their names, the duration of their lives, and the whole progress of their domestic economy. My land- 214 MARY LAMB. lady, a nice, active old soul that wants but one year of eighty, and her daughter, a rather aged young gentle- woman, are the only labourers in a pretty large garden; for it is a double house, and two long strips of ground are laid into one, well stored with fruit trees, which will be in full blossom the week after I am gone, and flowers, as many as can be crammed in, of all sorts and kinds. But flowers are flowers still ; and I must confess I would rather live in Russell Street all my life, and never set my foot but on the London pavement, than be doomed always to enjoy the silent pleasures I now do. We go to bed at ten o'clock. Late hours are life-shortening things, but I would rather run all risks, and sit every night — at some places I could name — wishing in vain at eleven o’clock for the entrance of the supper tray, than be always up and alive at eight o'clock breakfast as I am here. We have a scheme to reconcile these things. We have an offer of a very low-rented lodging a mile nearer town than this. Our notion is to divide our time in alternate weeks between quiet rest and dear London weariness. We give an answer to-morrow; but what that will be at this present writing I am unable to say. In the present state of our undecided opinion, a very heavy rain that is now falling may turn the scale. . . . Dear rain, do go away, and let us have a fine chearful sunset to argue the matter fairly in. My brother walked seventeen miles yesterday before dinner. And, notwithstanding his long walk to and from the office, we walk every evening ; but I by no means perform in this way so well as I used to do. A twelve mile walk, one hot Sunday morning, made my feet blister, and they are hardly well now. . . .” “ A fine cheerful sunset" did smile, it seems, upon LOSS OF FRIENDS. 215 the project of permanent country lodgings ; for during the next three years the Lambs continued to alternate between “ dear London weariness ” in Russell Street, and rest and quiet work at Dalston. Years they were which produced nearly all the most delightful of the Essays of Elia . The year 1821 closed gloomily : — “I stepped into the Lambs’ cottage at Dalston,” writes Crabb Robinson in his diary, Nov. 18 ; “ Mary pale and thin, just recovered from one of her attacks. They have lost their brother John, and feel the loss.” And the very same week died fine old Captain Burney. He had been made Admiral but a fortnight before his death. These gaps among the old familiar faces struck chill to their hearts. In a letter to Wordsworth of the following spring Lamb says : We are pretty well, save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor John's loss, and another accident or two at the same time that have made me almost bury myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish. Deaths overset one, and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died within the last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other ; the person is gone whom it would have pecu- liarly suited. It won't do for another. Every depar- ture destroys a class of sympathies. There 's Captain Burney gone! What fun has whist now? What matters it what you lead if you can no longer fancy him looking over you ? One never hears anything, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone, almost, you would care to share the intelli- 216 MARY LAMB . gence. Thus one distributes oneself about, and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market.” It was while John's death was yet recent that Lamb wrote some tender recollections of him (fact and fiction blended according to Elia's wont) in Dream Chil- dren , a Reverie, telling how handsome and spirited he had been in his youth, “ and how when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death ; and how I bore his death, as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me ; and though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed his kindness and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again to be quarrelling with him (for we quarrelled sometimes) rather than not have him again.” £ 1 ? CHAPTER XIV. Hazlitt’s Divorce. — Emma Isola. — Mrs. Cowden Clarke’s Recol- lections of Mary. — The Visit to France. — Removal to Colebrook Cottage. — A Dialogue of Reminiscences. 1822-3. — JEt. 58-59. For some years matters had not gone smoothly between Sarah Hazlitt and her husband. He was hard to live with, and she seems to have given up the attempt to make the best of things, and to have sunk into a hind of apathy in which even the duties of a house- wife were ill-performed ; but his chief complaint was that “ she despised him and his abilities.” In this Hazlitt was, probably, unjust to Sarah; for she was neither stupid nor unamiable. From 1819 onwards he had absented himself from home continually, living either at the Huts, a small inn on the edge of Salisbury Plain, or in London lodgings. But in this year of 1822 his unhappy passion for Sarah Walker brought about a crisis ; and what had been only a negative kind of evil became unendurable. He prevailed upon Sarah to consent to a divorce. It was obtained, in Edinburgh, by Mrs. Hazlitt taking what, in Scotch law, is called “ the oath of calumny ” which, — the suit being undefended, — entitled her to a dissolution of the marriage tie. They then returned singly to Winter- 218 MARY LAMB . slow, he to the Huts and she to her cottage. If they married with but little love, they seem to have parted without any hate. One tie remained — the strong affection each had for their son, who was some- times with one, sometimes with the other, '[fjazlitt's wholly unrequited passion for Sarah W alker soon burned itself to ashes ; and in two years time he tried another experiment in marriage which was even less success- ful than the first ; for his bride, like Milton’s, declined to return homcTwith him after the wedding tour, and he saw her face no more. But, unlike Milton, he was little discomposed at the circumstance. Sarah, grown a wiser if not a more dignified woman, did not renew the scheming ways of her youth. She continued to stand high in the esteem of Hazlitt's mother and sister, and often stayed with them. x The Lambs abated none of their old cordiality; Mary wrote few letters now, but Charles sent her a friendly one sometimes. It was to her he gave the first account of absent-minded George Dyer^s feat of walking straight into the New River, in broad daylight, on leaving their door in Colebrook Row. Towards Hazlitt, also, their friend- ship seemed substantially unchanged let him be as splenetic and wayward as he might. “We cannot afford to cast off our friends because they are not all we could wish,” said Mary Lamb once when he had written some criticisms on Wordsworth and Coleridge, in which glowing admiration was mixed with savage ridicule in such away that, as Lamb said, it was “like saluting a man,— f Sir, you are the greatest man I ever saw,’ and then pulling him by the nose.’’ But it needed only for Hazlitt himself to be traduced and vilified, as he so often was, by the political adversaries and critics of those days, for Lamb to rally to his side and JEMMA ISOLA. 219 fearlessly pronounce him to be, “in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.” As a set-off against the already mentioned sorrows of this time, a new element of cheerfulness was intro- duced into the Lamb household ; for it was in the course of the summer of 1823 that, during a visit to Cambridge, they first saw Emma Isola, a little orphan child of whom they soon grew so fond that eventually she became their adopted daughter, their solace aud comfort. To Mary especially was this a happy inci- dent. “For,” says Mrs. Cowden Clarke in the Recol- lections already alluded to, “ she had a most tender sympathy with the young,” — as the readers of Mrs. Leicester's School will hardly need telling. “ She was encouraging and affectionate towards them, and won them to regard her with a familiarity and fondness rarely felt by them for grown people who are not their relations. She threw herself so entirely into their way of thinking and contrived to take an estimate of things so completely from their point of view, that she made them rejoice to have her for their co-mate in affairs that interested them. While thus lending herself to their notions she, with a judiciousness peculiar to her, imbued her words with the wisdom and experience that belonged to her maturer years ; so that while she seemed but the listening, concurring friend, she was also the helping, guiding friend. Her monitions never took the form of reproof, but were always dropped in with the air of agreed propositions, as if they grew out of the subject in question, and presented them- selves as matters of course to both her young com- panions and herself.” The following is a life-like picture, from the same hand, of Mary among the 220 MARY LAMB . children she gathered round her in these llussell Street days, — Hazlitt's little son William, Victoria Novello (Mrs. Clarke herself), and Emma Isola. Victoria used “to come to her on certain mornings, when Miss Lamb promised to hear her repeat her Latin gram- mar, and hear her read poetry with the due musically rhythmical intonation. Even now the breathing mur- mur of the voice in which Mary Lamb gave low but melodious utterance to those opening lines of the Paradise Lost : — Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe, — sounding full and rounded and harmonious, though so subdued in tone, rings clear and distinct in the memory of her who heard the reader. Tlie echo of that gentle voice vibrates, through the lapse of many a revolving year, true and unbroken in the heart where the low- breathed sound first awoke response, teaching together with the fine appreciation of verse music the finer love of intellect conjoined with goodness and kindness. . . . “ One morning, just as Victoria was about to repeat her allotted task, in rushed a young boy who, like herself, enjoyed the privilege of Miss Lamb’s instruction in the Latin language. His mode of entrance — hasty and abrupt — sufficiently denoted his eagerness to have his lesson heard at once and done with, that he might be gone again ; accordingly Miss Lamb, asking Victoria to give up her turn, desired the youth — Hazlitt’s son — to repeat his pages of grammar first. Off he set, rattled through the first conjugation post-haste ; darted through the second without drawing breath ; and so on right through in no time. The rapidity, the volubility, the triumphant slap-dash of the feat perfectly dazzled MBS. COWDEN CLABKE’S BECOLLECTIONS. 221 the imagination of poor Victoria, who stood admiring by, an amazed witness of the boy's proficiency. She herself, a quiet plodding little girl, had only by dint of diligent study and patient, persevering poring been able to achieve a slow learning and as slow a repetition of her lessons. This brilliant, off-hand method of despatching the Latin grammar was a glory she had never dreamed of. Her ambition was fired, and the next time she presented herself book in hand before Miss Lamb, she had no sooner delivered it into her hearer's than she attempted to scour through her verb at the same rattling pace which had so excited her admiration. Scarce a moment and her stumbling scamper was checked. ‘Stay, stay! how's this? What are you about, little Vicky? 5 asked the laughing voice of Mary Lamb. c Oh, I see. Well, go on ; but gently, gently ; no need of hurry.’ She heard to an end and then said, ( I see what we have been doing — trying to be as quick and clever as William, fancying it vastly grand to get on at a great rate as he does. But there s this difference ; it 's natural in him while it ’s imitation in you. Now, far better go on in your old staid way — Avhich is your own way — than try to take up a way that may become him, but can never become you, even were you to succeed in acquiring it. We'll each of us keep to our own natural ways, and then we shall be sure to do our best.’ " And when Victoria and Emma Isola met there, Mary entered into their girlish friendship, let them have their gossip out in her own room if tired of the restraint of grown- up company and once, before Emma’s return to school, took them to Dulwich and gave them a charming little dinner of roast fowl and custard pudding." . . . “ Plea- sant above all," says the surviving guest and narrator, 222 MARY LAMB . “ is the memory of the cordial voice which said in a way to put the little party at its fullest ease, ‘Now, remember, we all pick our bones. It isn’t considered vulgar here to pick bones/ “Once, when some visitors chanced to drop in unex- pectedly upon her and her brother/’ continues Mrs. Clarke, “just as they were sitting down to their plain dinner of a bit of roast mutton, with her usual frank hospitality she pressed them to stay and partake, cutting up the small joint into five equal portions, and saying in her simple, easy way, so truly her own, * There ’s a chop apiece for us, and we can make up with bread and cheese if we want more/ ” The more serious demands upon her sympathy and judgment made, after childhood was left behind, by the young, whether man or woman, she met with no less tenderness, tact, and wisdom. Once, for instance, when she thought she perceived symptoms of an unexplained dejection in her young friend Victoria, “how gentle was her sedate mode of reasoning the matter, after delicately touching upon the subject and endeavouring to draw forth its avowal ! More as if mutually discussing and consulting than as if question- ing, she endeavoured to ascertain whether uncertainties or scruples of faith had arisen in the young girl’s mind and had caused her preoccupied abstracted manner. If it were any such source of disturbance, how wisely and feelingly she suggested reading, reflecting, weigh- ing; if but a less deeply-seated depression, how sensibly she advised adopting some object to rouse energy and interest ! She pointed out the efficacy of studying a language (she herself at upwards of fifty years of age began the acquirement of French and Italian) as a remedial measure, and advised Victoria to devote her- FRAGMENTS OF TALK. 223 self to a younger brother she had, in the same way that she had attended to her own brother Charles in his infancy, as the wholesomest and surest means of all for cure.” Allsop, Coleridge's friend, speaks in the same strain of how when a young man overwhelmed with what then seemed the hopeless ruin of his prospects, he found Charles and Mary Lamb not wanting in the hour of need. " I have a clear recollection,” says he, ‘'of Miss Lamb’s addressing me in a tone which acted at once as a solace and support, and after as a stimulus, to which I owe more perhaps than to the more extended arguments of all others.” On the whole Mary was a silent woman. It was her forte rather to enable others to talk their best by the charm of an earnest, speaking countenance and a responsive manner ; and there are but few instances in which any of her words have been preserved. In that memorable conversation at Lamb’s table on "Persons one would like to have seen,” reported by Hazlitt, when it was a question of women, " I should like vastly to have seen Ninon de L'Enclos,'' said Mary. When Queen Caroline's trial was pending and her character and conduct the topic in every mouth, Mary said she did not see that it made much difference whether the Queen was what they called guilty or not — meaning, probably,, that the stream was so plainly muddy at the fountain-head it was idle to enquire what ill places it had passed through in its course. Or else, perhaps, that, either way, the King's conduct was equally odious. The last observation of hers I can find recorded, is at first sight, unlike herself : — "How stupid old people are ! ” It was that unimaginative incapacity to sympathise 224 MARY LAMB . with the young, so alien to her own nature, no doubt, which provoked the remark. Of her readiness to help all that came within her reach there is a side-glimpse in some letters of Lamb's, — the latest to see the light, — which come, as other interesting contributions to the knowledge of Lamb's writings have done (notably those of the late Mr. BabsonJ, from over the Atlantic. In The Century Magazine for September 1882 are seven letters to John Howard Payne, an American playwright, whom Lamb was endeavouring to help in his but partially successful struggle to earn a livelihood by means of adaptations for the stage in London and Paris. Mrs. Cowden-Clarke speaks of this Mr. Payne as the acquaintance whom Mary Lamb, “ ever thoughtful to procure a pleasure for young people," had asked to call and see the little Victoria, then at school at Boulogne, on his way to Paris. He proved a good friend to Mary herself during that trip to France which, with a courage amounting to rashness, she and Charles undertook in the summer of 1822. “I went to call on the Lambs to take leave, they setting out for France next morning,” writes Crabb Robinson in his diary, June 17th. “I gave Miss Lamb a letter for Miss Williams, to whom I sent a copy of Mrs. Leicester's School. The Lambs have a Frenchman as their companion and Miss Lamb’s nurse, in case she should be ill. Lamb was in high spirits ; his sister rather nervous/’ The privation of sleep entailed in such a journey combined with the excitement, produced its inevitable result and Mary was taken with one of her severest attacks in the diligence on the way to Amiens. There, happily, they seem to have found Mr. Payne, who assisted Charles to make the necessary arrangements JOHN HOWARD PAYNE. 225 for her remaining under proper care till the return of reason, and then he went on to Paris, where he stayed with the Kennys, who thought him dull and out of sorts, as well he might be. Two months afterwards we he^r of Mary as being in Paris. Charles, his holiday over, had been obliged to return to England. “ Mary Lamb has begged me to give her a day or two,” says Crabb Robinson. “ She comes to Paris this evening, and stays here a week. Her only male friend is a Mr. Payne, whom she praises exceedingly for his kindness and attentions to Charles. He is the author of Brutus , and has a good face.” It was in the following year that most of the letters to Mr. Payne, published in the Century , were written. They disclose Mary and her brother zealous to repay one good turn with another by watching the success of his dramatic efforts and endeavouring to negociate favourably for him with actors and managers. “ All Pacha will do. I sent my sister the first night, not having been able to go myself, and her report of its effect was most favourable. . . . My love to my little wife at Versailles, and to her dear mother. . . . I have no mornings (my day begins at 5 p.m.) to transact business in, or talents for it, so I employ Mary, who has seen Robertson, who says that the piece which is to be operafied was sent to you six weeks since, &e. &c. Mary says you must write more show- able letters about these matters, for with all our trouble of crossing out this word, and giving a cleaner turn to th* other, and folding down at this part, and squeezing an obnoxious epithet into a corner, she can hardly communicate their contents without offence What, man, put less gall in your ink, or write me biting tragedy ! ” . . . 15 226 MARY LAMB. The piece which was sent to Mr. Payne in Paris to be “ operafied " was probably Clari, the Maid of Milan . Bishop wrote or adapted the music : it still keeps possession of the stage and contains “Home sweet Home/' which plaintive, well-worn ditty earned for its writer among his friends the title of the “ Home- less Poet of Home." He ended his days as American Consul at Tunis. This year's holiday (1823), spent at Hastings, was one of unalloyed pleasure and refreshment. “ I have given up my soul to walking/' Lamb writes. “ There are spots, inland bays, &c., which realise the notions of Juan Fernandez. The best thing I lit upon, by accident, was a small country church (by whom or when built unknown), standing bare and single in the midst of a grove, with no house or appearance of habitation within a quarter of a mile, only passages diverging from it through beautiful woods to so many farm-houses. There it stands, like the first idea of a church, before parishioners were thought of, nothing but birds for its congregation; or, like a hermit's oratory (the hermit dead), or a mausoleum ; its effect singularly impressive, like a church found in a desert isle to startle Crusoe with a home image. ... I am a long time reconciling to town after one of these excursions. Home is become strange, and will remain so yet awhile ; home is the most unforgiving of friends, and always resents absence; I know its cordial looks will return, but they are slow in clearing up." The “ cordial looks," however, of the Russell Street home never did return. The plan of the double lodgings, there and at Dalston, was a device of double discomforts ; the more so as “ at my town lodgings," he afterwards confesses to Bernard Barton, “ the COLE BROOK COTTAGE . 22 7 mistress was always quarrelling with our maid; and at my place of rustication the whole family were always beating one another, brothers beating sisters (one, a most beautiful girl, lamed for life), father beating sons and daughters, and son again beating his father, knocking him fairly down, a scene I never before witnessed, but was called out of bed by the unnatural blows, the parricidal colour of which, though my morals could not but condemn, yet my reason did heartily approve, and in the issue the house was quieter for a day or so than I had ever known." It was time, indeed, for brother and sister to have a house of their own over their heads, means now amply sufficing. A few weeks after their return Lamb took Colebrook Cottage, at Islington. It was detached, faced the New River, had six good rooms, and a spacious garden behind. “You enter without passage/' he writes, “ into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough with old books, and above is a lightsome drawing-room, full of choice prints. I feel like a great lord, never having had a house before." A new acquaintance, a man much after Lamb’s heart, at whose table he and Mary were, in the closing years of his life, more frequent guests than at any other — “ Mr. Carey, the Dante man " — was added to their list this year. “He is a model of a country parson, lean (as a curate ought to be), modest, sensible, no obtruder of Church dogmas, quite a different man from Southey," says Lamb of him. “ Quite a different man from Southey’' had a peculiar sting in it at this moment, for Southey had just struck a blow at Elia in the Quarterly , as unjust in purport as it was odious in manner, — detraction in the guise of praise. Lamb 15 * 228 MARY LAMB. answered him this very autumn in the London Maga- zine : a noble answer it is, which seems to have awakened something like compunction in Southey's exemplary but pharisaic soul. At all events he made overtures for a reconciliation, which so touched Lamb's generous heart, he was instantly ready to take blame upon himself for having written the letter. “ I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister, though innocent, still more so," he says, “for the folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was absent at that time.'* By which token we know that Mary did not escape the usual sad effects of change and fatigue in the removal to Colebrook Cottage. Means were easy, home comfortable now ; but many a wistful backward glance did brother and sister cast to the days of early struggle, with their fuller life, keener pleasures, and better health. It was not long after they were settled in Colebrook Cottage that they opened their hearts on this theme in that beautiful essay by Elia called Old China — Wordsworth’s fa- vourite, — in which Charles, for once, made himself Mary's — or as he calls her Cousin Bridget's — mouth- piece. Whilst sipping tea out of “ a set of extraordinary blue china, a recent purchase," . . . writes Elia, “I could not help remarking how favourable circumstances had been to us ot late years that we could afford to please the eye, sometimes, with trifles of this sort ; when a passing sentiment seemed to overshade the brow of my companion ; — I am quick at detecting these summer clouds in Bridget. “ ‘ I wish the good old times would come again,' she said, ‘ when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor ; but there was a middle state ' BRIDGETS RETROSPECT. 229 — so she was pleased to ramble on — ‘ in which I am sure we were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and O how much ado I had to get you to consent in those times !), we were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for and against , and think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt the money that we paid for it. “ ‘ Do you remember the brown suit which you made to hang upon you till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare — and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden ? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you should be too late, — and when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures, — and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome, — and when you presented it to me, — and when we were exploring the perfectness of it ( collating , you called it), — and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak, — was there no pleasure in being a poor man ? or can those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about 230 MARY LAMB. in that over- worn suit, your old corbeau, for four or five weeks longer than you should have done to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen — or sixteen shillings, was it ? — a great affair we thought it then — which you had lavished on the old folio? Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now. “ ‘ When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo which we christened the “ Lady Blanch,” when you looked at the purchase and thought of the money, and thought of the money and looked again at the picture — was there no pleasure in being a poor man ? Now you have nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi's and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet, do you ? “ ‘ Then do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter’s Bar, and Waltham when we had a holiday — holidays and all other fun are gone now we are rich — and the little hand-basket in which I used to deposit our day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad, — and how you would pry about at noontide for some decent house where we might go in and produce our store — only paying for the ale that you must call for — and speculated upon the looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a table-cloth, and wish for such another honest hostess as Izaak Walton has described many a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea when he went a-fishing — and some- times they would prove obliging enough and some- times they would look grudgingly upon us — but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our plain food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator his BRIDGETS RETROSPECT. 231 Trout Hall? Now, when we go out a day’s pleasuring, which is seldom moreover, we ride part of the way, and go into a fine inn and order the best of dinners, never debating the expense — which after all never has half the relish of those chance country snaps, when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage and a pre- carious welcome. “ ‘ You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you remember where it was we used to sit when we saw the Battle of Hexham, and the Surrender of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children in the Wood, — when we squeezed out our shillings a-piece to sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery, where you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me, and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me — and the pleasure was the better for a little shame — and when the curtain drew up what cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Bosalind in Arden or with Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say that the gallery was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially, — that the relish of such exhibitions must be in pro- portion to the infrequency of going, — that the company we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to what was going on on the stage, because a word lost would have been a chasm which it was impossible for them to fill up. With such reflections we consoled our pride then — and I appeal to you whether as a woman I met generally with less attention and accom- modation than I have done since in more expensive situations in the house ? The getting in, indeed, and 232 MARY LAMB. the crowding up those inconvenient stair-cases was bad enough — but there was still a law of civility to woman recognized to quite as great an extent as we ever found in the other passages — and how a little difficulty over- come heightened the snug seat and the play afterwards ! Now we can only pay our money and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then — but sight and all I think is gone with our poverty. “ ‘ There was pleasure in eating strawberries before they became quite common — in the first dish of peas while they were yet dear — to have them for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now ? If we were to treat ourselves now — that is to have dainties a little above our means — it would be selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that makes what I call a treat — when two people living together as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in a cheap luxury which both like, while each apologises and is willing to take both halves ot the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making much of them- selves in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how to make much of others. But now — what I mean by the word — we never do make much of our- selves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest poor of all, but persons, as we were, just above poverty. “ ‘ I know what you were going to say — that it is mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all meet, — and much ado we used to have every thirty- first night of December to account for our exceedings — many a long face did you make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we ELIA'S REPLY . 233 had spent so much — or that we had not spent so much — or that it was impossible we should spend so much next year — and still we found our slender capital de- creasing ; but then, betwixt ways and projects and compromises of one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge and doing without that for the future — and the hope that youth brings and laughing spirits (in which you were never poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion, with “ lusty brimmers” (as you used to quote it out of hearty , cheerful Mr. Cotton , as you called him) we used to “ welcome in the coming guest.” Now we have no reckonings at all at the end of the old year — no flattering promises about the new year doing better for us/ “Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occa- sions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, how- ever, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of poor — hundred pounds a year. * It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I am afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to struggle with as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It strengthened and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you now complain of. The resisting power, those natural dilations of the youthful spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten — with us are long since passed away. Competence to age is supple- mentary youth, a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride where we 234 MARY LAMB. formerly walked ; live better and lie softer — and we shall be wise to do so — than we had means to do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those days return — could you and I once more walk our thirty miles a day, — could Bannister and Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I be young again to see them, — could the good old one-shilling gallery days return — they are dreams, my cousin, now — but could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa, be once more struggling up those inconvenient stair-cases, pushed about and squeezed and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers, — could I once more hear those anxious shrieks of yours, and the delicious f Thank God we are safe/ which always followed when the topmost stair conquered let in the first light of the whole cheerful theatre down beneath us — I know not the fathom-line that ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in than Crossus had, or the great Jew R. is supposed to have, to purchase it.” . . . These fire-side confidences between brother and sister bring back, in all the warmth and fulness of life, that past mid which the biographer has been groping and listening to echoes. CHAPTER XV. Lamb’s Ill-health. — Retirement from the India House, and sub- sequent Illness. — Letter from Mary to Lady Stoddart. — Cole- brook Cottage left. — Mary’s constant Attacks. — Home given up. — Board with the Westwoods. — Death of Hazlitt. — Removal to Edmonton. — Marriage of Emma Isola. — Mary’s sudden Recovery. — 111 again. — Death of Coleridge. — Death of Charles. — Mary’s Last Days and Death. 1824-47. — iEt. 60-83. The year 1824 was one of the best Mary ever enjoyed. Alas ! it was not the precursor of others like it, but rather a farewell gleam before the clouds gathered up thicker and thicker till the light of reason was perma- nently obscured. In November Charles wrote to Miss Hutchinson : “ We had promised our dear friends the Monkhouses *’ [relatives of Mrs. Wordsworth] — “pro- mised ourselves, rather — a visit to them at Ramsgate ; but I thought it best, and Mary seemed to have it at heart too, not to go far from home these last holidays. It is connected with a sense of unsettlement, and secretly I know she hoped that such abstinence would be friendly to her health. She certainly has escaped her sad yearly visitation, whether in consequence of it, or of faith in it, and we have to be thankful for a good 1824. To get such a notion in our heads may go a great way another year. Not that we quite confined ourselves ; 236 MARY LAMB . but, assuming Islington to be head-quarters, we made timid flights to Ware, Watford, &c., to try how trouts tasted, for a night out or so, not long enough to make the sense of change oppressive, but sufficient to scour the rust of home.” With Lamb it was quite otherwise. The letters of this year show that health and spirits were flagging sorely^ He had, ever since 1820, been working at high pressure; producing in steady, rapid succession, his matchless Essays in the London Magazine , and this at the end of a long day's office work. His delicate, nervous organisation could not fail to suffer from the continued strain ; not to mention the ever present and more terrible one of his sister’s health. At last his looks attracted the notice of one of his chiefs, and it was intimated that a resignation might be accepted ; as it was after some anxious delays ; and a provision for Mary, if she survived, was guaran- teed in addition to his comfortable pension. The sense of freedom was almost overwhelming. “ Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to us,” he writes. “ Leigh Hunt and Montgomery, after their releasements, describe the shock of their emancipation much as I feel mine. But it hurt their frames ; I eat, drink, and sleep as sound as ever.” A reaction did come, however. Lamb continued pretty well through ^e spring, but in the summer he was prostrated by a severeLattack of nervous fever. In July he wrote to Bernard Barton : “ My nervous attack has so unfitted me that I have not courage to sit down to a letter. My poor pittance in the London you will see is drawn from my sickness” ( The Con- valescent, which appeared July 1825). MARY TO LADY STODDART. 2 37 One more glimpse of Mary in a letter from her own hand. Again the whole summer was being spent in lodgings at Enfield, whence Mary wrote to congratu- late her old friend Mrs., now Lady, Stoddart — her husband having become Chief Justice of Malta — on the marriage of a daughter : — “ August 9, 1827. "My dear Lady-Friend, — My brother called at our empty cottage [Colebrook] yesterday, and found the cards of your son, and his friend Mr. Hine, under the door ; which has brought to my mind that I am in danger of losing this post, as I did the last, being at that time in a confused state of mind — for at that time we were talking of leaving, and persuading our- selves that we were intending to leave town and all our friends, and sit-down for ever, solitary and for- gotten here. . . . lHgre we are, and we have locked up our house, and left it to take care of itself ; but, at present, we do not design to extend our rural life beyond Michaelmas. Your kind letter was most welcome to me, though the good news contained in it was already known to me. Accept my warmest con- gratulations, though they come a little of the latest. In my next I may probably have to hail you grand- mama, or to felicitate you on the nuptials of pretty Mary who, whatever the beaux of Malta may think of her, I can only remember her round shining face, and her * O William ! dear William ! 3 when we visited her the other day at school. Present my love and best wishes — a long and happy married life to dear Isabella — I love to call her Isabella ; but in truth, having left your other letter in town, I recollect no other name she has. The same love and the same wishes — in futuro — to my friend Mary. Tell her that her € dear 238 MARY LAMB. William ’ grows taller, and improves in manly looks and man-like behaviour every time I see him. What is Henry about ? and what should one wish for him ? If he be in search of a wife, I will send him out Emma Isola. “You remember Emma, that you were so kind as to invite to your ball ? She is now with us; and I am moving heaven and earth, that is to say, I am pressing the matter upon all the very few friends I have that are likely to assist me in such a case, to get her into a family as governess ; and Charles and I do little else here than teach her something or other all day long. “ We are striving to put enough Latin into her to enable her to begin to teach it to young learners. So much for Emma — for you are so fearfully far away that I fear it is useless to implore your patronage for her. ... “ I expect a pacquet of manuscript from you. You promised me the office of negociating with booksellers and so forth for your next work.” [Lady Stoddart published several tales under the name of Blackford.] “Is it in good forwardness? Or do you grow rich and indolent now ? It is not surprising that your Maltese story should find its way into Malta ; but I was highly pleased with the idea of your pleasant surprise at the sight of it. I took a large sheet of paper, in order to leave Charles room to add something more worth reading than my poor mite. May we all meet again once more.” It was to escape the “ dear weariness ” of incessant friendly visitors, which they were now less than ever able to bear, that they had taken refuge in the Enfield lodging. “ W e have been here near three months, and shall ENFIELD. 239 stay two more if people will let us alone; but they persecute us from village to village/' Lamb writes to Bernard Barton in August. At the end of that time they decided to return to Colebrook Cottage no more, but to take a house at Enfield. The actual process of taking it was witnessed by a spectator, a perfect stranger at the time, on whose memory it left a lively picture. “ Leaning idly out of a window, I saw a group of three issuing from the ‘ gambogy-looking ' cottage close at hand, — a slim, middle-aged man, in quaint, uncontemporary habili- ments, a rather shapeless bundle of an old lady, in a bonnet like a mob cap, and a young girl ; while before them bounded a riotous dog (Hood's immortal ‘Dash'), holding a board with ‘This House to Let' on it in his jaws. Lamb was on his way back to the house- agent, and that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken the premises. “ I soon grew to be on intimate terms with my neighbours/' continues the writer of this pleasant remi- niscence — Mr. Westwood, in Notes and Queries, vol. x. — “ who let me loose in his library. . . . My heart yearns even now to those old books. Their faces seem all familiar to me, even their patches and blotches — the work of a wizened old cobbler hard by — for little wotted Lamb of Roger Parkes and Charles Lewises. A gobbler was his book-binder, and the rougher the restoration the better. . . . When any notable visitors made their appearance at the cottage, Mary Lamb's benevolent tap at my window-pane seldom failed to summon me out, and I was presently ensconced in a quiet corner of their sitting-room, half hid in some great man's shadow. “Of the discourse of these dii majoves I have no 240 MARY LAMB. recollection now ; but the faces of some of them 1 can still partially recall. Hazlitt's face, for instance, keen and aggressive, with eyes that flashed out epigram. Tom Hood's, a methodist parson's face, not a ripple breaking the lines of it, though every word he dropped was a pun, and every pun roused roars of laughter. Leigh Hunt's, parcel genial, parcel democratic, with as much rabid politics on his lips as honey from Mount Hybla. Miss Kelly [the little Barbara S. of Elia], plain but engaging, the most unprofessional of actresses and unspoiled of women ; the bloom of the child on her cheek undefaced by the rouge, to speak in metaphors. She was one of the most dearly welcome of Lamb's guests. Wordsworth's, farmerish and respectable, but with something of the great poet occasionally breaking out, and glorifying forehead and eyes. . . Mary did not escape her usual seizure. “ You will understand my silence, 5 ' writes Lamb to his Quaker friend, “ when I tell you that my sister, on the very eve of entering into a new house we have taken at Enfield, was surprised with an attack of one of her sad long illnesses, which deprive me of her society, though not of her domestication, for eight or nine weeks together. I see her, but it does her no good. But for this, we have the snuggest, most comfortable house, with every- thing most compact and desirable. Colebrook is a wilderness. The books, prints, &c. are come here, and the New River came down with us. The familiar prints, the busts, the Milton, seem scarce to have changed their rooms. One of her last observations was, f How frightfully like this is to our room at Islington,' — our upstair room she meant. We have tried quiet here for four months, and I will answer LONELINESS. 241 for the comfort of it enduring.” And again, later: “ I have scarce spirits to write. JJIne weeks are com- pleted, and Mary does not get any better. It is perfectly exhausting. Enfield and everything is very gloomy. But for long experience, I should fear her ever getting well.” She did get “pretty well and comfortable again” before the year was quite out, but it did not last long. Times grew sadder and sadder for the faithful brother. There are two long, oft-quoted letters to Bernard Barton, written in July 1829, which who has ever read without a pang? “My sister is again taken ill,” he says, “and I am obliged to remove her out of the house for many weeks, I fear, before I can hope to have her again. I have been very desolate indeed. My loneliness is a little abated by our young friend Emma having just come here for her holidays, and a school-fellow of hers that was with her. Still the house is not the same, though she is the same. Mary had been pleasing herself with the prospect of seeing her at this time ; and with all their company, the house feels at times a frightful solitude. . . . But town, with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was. ... I was fright- fully convinced of this as I passed houses and places — empty caskets now. I have ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. . . . Less than a month I hope will bring home Mary. - She is at Fulham, looking better in her health than ever, but sadly rambling, and scarce showing any pleasure in seeing me, or curiosity when I should come again. But the old feelings will come back again, and we shall drown old sorrows over a game of picquet again. But Tis a tedious cut out of a 16 242 MARY LAMB. life of fifty-four to lose twelve or thirteen weeks every year or two. And, to make me more alone, our ill- tempered maid is gone [Becky] who, with all her airs, was yet a home-piece of furniture, a record of better days. The young thing that has succeeded her is good and attentive, but she is nothing; and I have no one here to talk over old matters with. Scolding and quarrelling have something of familiarity and a community of interest ; they imply acquaintance ; they are of resentment which is of the family of dearness. Well, I shall write merrier anon. 'Tis the present copy of my countenance I send, and to complain is a little to alleviate. May you enjoy yourself as far as the wicked world will let you, and think that you are not quite alone as I am.” To the friends who came to see him he made no complaints, nor showed a sad countenance ; but it was hard that he might not relieve his drear solitude by the sights and sounds of beloved London. “ O never let the lying poets be believed,” he writes to Wordsworth, “who Tice men from the cheerful haunts of streets ; or think they mean it not of a country village. In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers ; but to have a little teazing image of a town about one ; country folks that do not look like country folks ; shops two yards square ; half-a-dozen apples and two penn'orth of over-looked ginger -bread for the lofty fruiterers of Oxford Street ; and for the immortal book and print stalls, a circulating library that stands still, where the show-picture is a last year's valentine. . . . The very blackguards here are de- generate ; the topping gentry, stock-brokers ; the pas- sengers too many to insure your quiet or let you go HOME GIVEN UP . 243 about whistling or gaping, too few to be the fine, indifferent pageants of Fleet Street. ... A garden was the primitive prison till man, with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haber- dashers, goldsmiths, taverns, satires, epigrams, puns, — these all came in on the town part and the thither side of innocence. . . .” In the same letter he announces that they have been obliged to give up home alto- gether, and have “ taken a farewell of the pompous, troublesome trifle called house-keeping, and settled down into poor boarders and lodgers at next door with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield. Here we have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them, with the garden but to see it grow, with the tax-gatherer but to hear him knock, with the maid but to hear her scolded. Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us save as spectators of the pageant. We are fed, we know not how; quietists, confiding ravens. . . . Mary must squeeze out a line propria manu , but indeed her fingers have been incorrigibly nervous to letter- writing for a long inter- val. 'Twill please you all to hear that, though I fret like a lion in a net, her present health and spirits are better than they have been for some time past. She is absolutely three years and a half younger since we adopted this boarding plan ! . . . Under this roof I ought now to take my rest, but that back-looking ambition, more delightful, tells me I might yet be a Londoner ! Well, if ever we do move, we have encumbrances the less to impede us ; all our furniture has faded under the auc- tioneer's hammer, going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal, and we have only a spoon or two left to bless us. Clothed we came into Enfield, 16 * 244 MARY LAMB . and naked we must go out of it. I would live in London shirtless, bookless/’ Now that Mary was recovered they did venture to try once more the experiment of London lodgings at 24 Southampton Buildings, Holborn, where Hazlitt had often stayed. But the result was worse even than could have been anticipated. May 12, 1830, Lamb writes: “ I have brought my sister to Enfield, being sure she had no hope of recovery in London. Her state of mind is deplorable beyond any example. I almost fear whether she has strength, at her time of life, ever to get out of it. Here she must be nursed and neither see nor hear of anything in the world out of her sick chamber. The mere hearing that Southey had called at our lodgings totally upset her. Pray see him or hear of him at Mr. Rickman’s and excuse my not writing to him. I dare not write or receive a letter in her presence/’ Another old friend, the one whom, next to Cole- ridge, Wordsworth and Manning, Lamb valued most, died this year. Hazlitt’s strength had been for some time declining; and during the summer of 1830 he lay at his lodgings, 6 Prith Street, Soho, languishing in what was to prove his death illness, though he was but fifty-two ; his mind clear and active as ever, look- ing back, as he said, upon his past life which * seemed as if he had slept it out in a dream or shadow on the side of the hill of knowledge, where he had fed on books, on thoughts, on pictures and only heard in half-murmurs the trampling of busy feet or the noises of the throng below/ ‘ I have had a happy life,’ were his last words. Unfortunate in love and marriage, perhaps scarcely capable of friendship, he found the warmth of life, the tie that bound him to humanity MARTIN BURNEY. 245 in the fervour of his admiration for all that is great, or beautiful, or powerful in literature, in art, in heroic achievement. His ideas, as he said of himself, were