CHARLES LAMB'S LETTERS.*

CHARLES LAMB'S Letters are as characteristic of this fine humorist as his Essays. It is scarcely too much to say that not one of them could have been written by any other pen than Elia's. The consummate literary art of the essays is not to be found in the correspondence, nor is such art to be desired. Pope laboured at his letters for years, so that it is a weari- some toil to read them. Swift wrote his off-hand, and no age is likely to destroy their charm. How much effort Ella put forth in pen-and-ink intercourse with his friends it is impos- sible to say, but throughout these volumes there is every sign of spontaneity. And it is to be remembered that many of Lamb's letters, perhaps the larger number, were written when seated on his office-stool, and while exposed every moment to interruption.

It is now more than fifty years since Talfourd published the Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of his Life. Eleven years later, Mary Lamb being then dead, he published his Final Memorials. The arrangement was unfortunate, but it was inevitable. Not only was Talfourd forced to use great reticence during Mary Lamb's lifetime, but even the letters quoted could not always be given entire, and in many cases they con

• The Letters of Charles Lamb. Newly Arranged, with Additions. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Alfred Ainger. 2 vols. London; Macmillan.

sist of fragments only. An editor working under such condi- tions is terribly weighted; and yet, though more than one attempt has been since made to edit Lamb's Letters, Talfourd had no rival worthy of the name until Canon Ainger undertook the task. If he has produced incomparably the best edition in point of form, and at the same time the most complete edition we possess, it must be remembered that from all sides he has received materials and, to use his own expression, "kind services." We do not, therefore, depreciate Talfourd when we say that these two volumes, edited with loving care and full- ness of knowledge, must be the edition that every admirer of Ella will put upon his shelves. With the Letters Mr. Ainger completes his labours upon Lamb ; and it is a satisfaction of no onlinary kind to book-lovers, to possess for the first time the entire works of this incomparable essayist in an edition worthy of the author.

And now it will be well to explain what Mr. Ainger has done in making this "final collection." Nowhere can the story of Southey's life be read more vividly than in his letters ; and Lamb's letters also, as his editor points out, "when read con- secutively, and with the help of such supplementary informa- tion as can be provided in notes, form an almost complete biography." To supply this information in concise notes is, therefore, one of the editor's duties; and in addition to his own large acquaintance with the subject, he has had the good fortune to gain several valuable details from friends and corre- spondents. Here, for instance, is a fact too interesting to be omitted. Lamb's loveliest poem is in memory of "Hester," the charming Quakeress to whom he gave his silent love. In his notes to the Poems, Mr. Ainger observes ;—" Her name was Hester Savory, but no other fact about her seems recoverable." Now, however, he learns from a niece of Hester that she married, and died of fever eight months afterwards. Miss Savory has a miniature of the sprightly beauty who lives in Lamb's verse, and Canon Ainger writes :—" I have seen this miniature, which, even after reading Lamb's tender and beautiful lyric, is anything but disappointing. It is a bright-eyed gypsy face, such as we know so well from the canvas of Reynolds."

Sixty years since, many of Lamb's allusions would have been readily understood which are now altogether obscure ; and the editor's research has enabled him to explain many a difficult passage, and to illustrate many a reference to contemporary and now forgotten writers. There are two ways in which a, correspondence extending over many years can be published. In the five thick volumes of letters printed in Messrs. Elwin and Courthope's Pope, the plan adopted is to print each section separately, regardless of chronology ; so that the letters of Pope and Gay appear consecutively, and the letters of Pope and Bolingbroke, and so on throughout. Where many hundred letters have to be printed with the answers they call forth, this, perhaps, is the only method practicable ; but it has the obvious disadvantage of carrying the reader again and again over the same ground. When, for example, we reach the year 1732 in the correspondence with Gay, we return to 1714 in order to begin the series of letters between Pope and the Arbuthnots. In one edition of Lamb's works, a similar course has been pur- sued without the justification that can be alleged by the Pope editors ; but Mr. Ainger, we are glad to say, gives the letters in chronological order. With great good sense, too, he has declined to print every insignificant note written by Lamb simply because he wrote it. It is, indeed, absurd that a man of genius cannot ask a friend to dinner or send him a bill of health without having his words garnered up for future generations. There is, perhaps, some interest in Oliver Goldsmith's tailor's bills, for they reveal a little the character of the man ; but when Lamb 'writes:—" DEAR A.,—I am better ; Mary quite well. We expected to see you before. I can't write long letters. So a friendly love to you all,"—it is obvious that such a note is no more worthy of preservation than if it had been written by his hatter. More than one modern edition of a great author has been spoilt by the whole- sale publication of the sweepings of his desk and study. If an editor dreads the responsibility of selection, it is obvious that he is unfitted for the task he has undertaken.

Four hundred and seventeen letters are included in these volumes. By far the larger number pf them are, of course, familiar to the reader; but Canon Ainger has had the good for- tune to secure some never before printed that are rich in Lamb's rare humour, or that show his courage and critical sagacity. To his friend Manning, the eccentric and learned Chinese scholar, Lamb, it will be remembered, wrote some of his most humorous letters, and Mr. Ainger, who has had the use of the autographs, has been able to add to their number. Of these, the most characteristic specimen is to be found in the notes, since it came too late under the editor's notice for insertion in the text. On receiving from Wordsworth a copy of the Lyrical Ballads, Lamb replied in due form, and added, he says, unfortunately, that no single piece had moved him so much as "The Ancient Mariner," "The Mad Mother," or the "Lines at Tintern Abbey." Upon this, Wordsworth, who had just before expressed "an almost insurmountable aversion from letter- writing," sent a long epistle of four pages regretting that Lamb's range of sensibility was not more extended, "with a deal of stuff about a certain union of tenderness and imagina- tion which in the sense he used imagination was not the characteristic of Shakespeare, but which Milton possessed in a degree far exceeding other poets, which union as the highest species of poetry, and chiefly deserving that name, he was most proud to aspire to." Wordsworth then gave two passages to illustrate his assertion, and having quoted them, Lamb adds :—

" You see both these are good poetry ; but after one has been reading Shakespeare twenty of the best years of one's life, to have a fellow start up and prate about some unknown quality which Shakespeare possessed in a degree inferior to Milton and somebody else ! ! This was not to be ail my castigation. Coleridge, who had not written to me some months before, starts up from his bed of sickness to reprove me for my hardy presumption ; four long pages equally sweaty and more tedious came from him, assuring me that when the works of a man of true genius such as W. undoubtedly was, do not please me at first sight, I should suspect the fault to lie in me and not in them,' etc., etc. What am I to do with such people ? I certainly shall write them a very merry letter."

Lamb had the highest appreciation of Wordsworth's genius ; but as a critic, he was from early manhood thoroughly inde- pendent and not at all inclined to admire by order. After quoting a lovely poem, he observes :—" This is choice and genuine, and so are many, many more. But one does not like to have 'em rammed down one's throat. Pray take it—it's very good—let me help you—eat faster." Unfortunately, Wordsworth's lack of humour prevented him from seeing the absurdity of this ramming process.

With Lamb, humour often runs into the wildest extrava- gance. He revels in absurdities, and when once this spirit of mirth takes hold of him, the fun grows fast and furious. A series of letters, hitherto in manuscript, written for the kind purpose of amusing Mr. Dibdin—a young man in bad health —are full to overflowing of this characteristic. Mr. Dibdin was staying at Hastings, where Lamb himself once " did dreary penance," so he advises his sick friend to-

" Go to the little church, which is a very Protestant Loretto, and seems dropt by some angel for the use of a hermit, who was at once parishioner and a whole parish. It is not too big. Go in the night, bring it away in your portmanteau, and I will plant it in my garden. It must have been erected in the very infancy of British Christianity, for the two or three first converts. Seven people would crowd it like a Caledonian Chapel. The minister that divides the Word, therefore, must give lumping pennyworths. If the glebe-land is proportionate, it may yield ten potatoes. Tithes out of it could be no more split than a hair. The first-fruits must be its last, for 'twould never produce a couple. Go and see, but not without your spectacles."

Then Lamb writes what he calls a cheerful letter, for he "loves to make things comfortable," in which he enumerates the discomforts of a wet Sunday in a lonely lodging by the sea-side :—

"This will find you sitting after breakfast, which you will have prolonged as far as you can with consistency to the poor hand- maid that has the reversion of the tea-leaves ; making two nibbles of your last morsel of stale roll (you cannot have hot new ones on the Sabbath), and reluctantly coming to an end because when that is done what can you do till dinner ? You cannot go to the beach, for the rain is drowning the sea. You cannot go to the library, for it's shut. You are not religious enough to go to church. 0! it is worth while to cultivate piety to the gods to have something to fill the heart up on a wet Sunday. You cannot cast accounts, for your ledger is being eaten up with moths in the Ancient Jewry. You cannot go to market, for it closed last night. You cannot look into the shops, their backs are shut upon you. You cannot divert yourself with a stray acquaintance, for you have picked none up. You cannot bear the chiming of bells, for they invite you to a banquet where you are no visitant. You cannot count those endless vials on the mantelpiece with any hope of making a variation of their numbers. You have counted your spiders ; your Bastile is exhausted. Anything to deliver you from this intolerable weight of ennui. You are too ill to shake it off ; not ill enough to submit to it, and to lie down as a lamb under it. The tyranny of sickness is nothing to the cruelty of convalescence ; 'tis to have

thirty tyrants for one. That pattering rain drops on your brain. You'll be worse after dinner, for you must dine at one to-day, that Betty may go to afternoon service. She insists upon having her chopped hay."

Of the Dibdin series of letters Canon Ainger observes that, "if their form is at times of the most extravagant, the true kindness of heart that prompted them will not be overlooked."

"Life when its first heats are over," said Pope, "is all down-hill." Lamb began to go down bill early, and it is painful to remember that the great sorrow that he had to face when a young man grew with the years, and became worse in those leisure days he had sighed for so often and found so burdensome when they came. In his latest letter to his early friend Manning, written in the year of his death, and hitherto unpublished, he writes thus sadly of his sister without mentioning her name, and of his own desolate state. Yet even in this letter, it will be seen that the old humour breaks out in his allusions to the translator of Dante :—

"Twenty weeks nigh has she been now violent, with but a few sound months before, and these in such dejection that her fever might seem a relief to it. Tuthill led me to expect that this ill- ness would lengthen with her years, and it has cruelly,—with that new feature of despondency after. I am with her alone now in a proper house. She is, I hope, recovering. We play Picquet, and it is like the old times awhile, then goes off. I struggle to town rarely, and then to see London, with little other motive—for what is left there hardly ? The streets and shops entertaining ever, else I feel as in a desert, and get me home to my cave. Save that once a month I pass a day, a gleam in my life, with Cary at the Museum (he is the flower of clergymen), and breakfast next morning with Robinson. I look to this as a treat. It sustains me. C. is a dear fellow, with but two vices, which in any less good than himself would be crimes past redemption. He has no relish for Parson Adams —hints that he might not be a very great Greek scholar after all (does Fielding hint that he was a Porson ?), and prefers Ye shepherds so cheerful and gay' and My banks

they are furnished with bees,' to The Schoolmistress.' walk nine or ten miles a day, alway up the road, dear London- wards. Fields, flowers, birds, and green lanes I have no heart for. The bare road is cheerful, and almost good as a street. I saunter to the Red Lion duly, as you used to the Peacock."

Elia's heart was heavy with sadness when he wrote this letter in May, 1834; in July, Coleridge died, and his "great and dear spirit" haunted Lamb. Canon Ainger, in his biography, observes that this was his death-blow ; "the blank left him helplessly alone." Lamb died before the year was out, and thus in life and death the most musical poet of the century and the most gifted of English essayists are closely linked together. Of the two, if Coleridge has gained the highest admiration, Lamb has won the larger share of love. And perhaps there is no writer of this century who is more secure of fame and affection in the next.