BOOKS.
LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB.*
THE two volumes of Lamb's letters published by Talfourd in 1837 and 1848, were of necessity not chronologically arranged.. We are grateful to Mr. Hazlitt for his recast,—although, as Goldsmith's enjoyment of the haunch was "clogged with a coxcomb and Kitty his wife," our delight in Mr. B azlitt's issue is hampered by what he calls an " elucidatory clavis and variorum notes." Talfourd's brief memorial has always appeared to us a model of biographical handling, in its condensed narra- tive of Lamb's own life, its judicious presentment of hie associates, its abstinence from impertinent explanation,—above all in the contagious enthusiasm which trained the mind of a generation knowing little of Lamb to appreciate and not to misunderstand him. Those who remember Ticknor's amused but contemptuous notice of "these people "—namely,. Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, Godwin—and his disparaging contrast- of their vulgarity with the gentle culture of the literary class whom he was in the habit of meeting at Lord Holland's table, will see that authoritative acceptance of Lamb as a classic was not in those days a matter of course ; and will hail the un- designed coincidence by which Talfourd, comparing the very same social group with keen enjoyment of both, yet shows, like Mrs. Primrose, that while he "vastly liked" the society of Holland House, Lamb's Wednesday suppers at the Temple "had his- warm heart." When, therefore, we find Mr. Hazlitt in his preface impugning Talfourd's lucidity and zeal, aspersing his- parts of speech, "his punctuation and orthography, nay, his grammar;" accusing him of inaccuracy and slovenliness, pro- nouncing his running commentary "fulsomely euphuistic [l] and redolent to excess of a benevolent but rather lamentable camaraderie," we are challenged to a somewhat critical survey of his own editorial qualifications. We learn that Mr. Hazlitt esteems the letters of Walpole, Lamb, Southey, to be the most valuable "epistolary documents" in the language, ignoring those of Pope, than which Thackeray finds no volumes in our literature more delightful, of Lyttelton, Lady Mary, Chesterfield, even Cowper. The " Clavis " further "predicates," among other flowers of speech, that Walpole was "the pivot of a well-born circle, which has reflected back on him the celebrity which he- possesses through it and it through him ;" that the corre- spondence with Coleridge "places before us almost Montaigne- like the thoughts and joys and sorrows of one young man to another ;" that "we ourselves, not having mingled in that circle" (the Lamb-Talfourd circle to wit, not the well-born Walpole 0 Letters of Charles Lamb. By the late Sir T. N. Talfoard. Revised and, Enlarged by W. Carew Hazlitt. Leann : Hell and Bens. circle), "are capable of contemplating it with a lengthened per- spective and a less brotherly bias." The "Variorum Notes" contain errors which a little care might have prevented. Fuseli's designs for Cowper's Milton, of which Mr. Hazlitt knows nothing, are mentioned in Sonthey's Cowper (Vol. III., p. 12) ; Nature and Art was not written by Mr. Inchbald ; the "primitive signification" of " puny " is recent (pais tie), not inferior or minor, as Mr. Hazlitt seems to think ; Wordsworth's collection of books was not in any sense a good one,—De Quincey's scornful description of them is borne out by our own recollection of the library at Rydal Mount; the un- called-for sneers at Coleridge's illustrious representatives involves apparently a confusion between the names of Patteson and Coleridge ; " bear'st thou rather," in the letter to Novello (II., 328), is a misreading, repeated here from Mr. Hazlitt's earlier volume, for the Miltonic " hear'st thou rather," see Jane libentius audis. On the other hand, one of Talfourd's few slips is left uncorrected. Of a young gentleman who had "spoken slightingly of religion," Lamb is said to have inquired at the close of the evening, " Pray, Sir, did you come here in a hat or in a turban P" The young gentleman was the author of Philip can Artevelde, and we heard the story from his lips. He had not spoken slightingly of religion, but defended Mahometanism as a belief. As the departing guests were looking for their hats, Lamb stammered out, "Where is Mr. Taylor's turban ?" More serious, because more exasperating, is Mr. Hazlitt's habit of play- ing the scholiast to Lamb's jokes.. A verbal jest sparkles as it is recorded, becomes vapid if explained ; but Mr. Hazlitt waits upon his author as the Spruch-sprecher followed up the Hoff-narr at the Duke of Austria's board, informing us that this is a pun, that a hoax, the other a "jocular allusion ;" letting us know that Alahomet and the mountain is an old proverb ; that eacallus is Latin for "a hood ;" that mar-
guerite means "a daisy ;" that the son, "or, rather, the grandson," of Nimshi was named Jehu ; that "silver and gold have I none," is taken from the Acts of the Apostles ;—nay, citing at full length the venerable ingenues elidicisse which even Colonel Newcome esteemed too hackneyed for quotation.
Yet bad editing cannot seriously impair, as good editing can hardly improve, the inimitable letters of Charles Lamb. That subtle essence, loosely known as "humour," a happy grouping of incongruities inlaid upon and interwoven with a deep and ever- present melancholy which finds vent in reckless prodigality of fun, was poured on Lamb in fuller proportion, perhaps, than on any other English writer. To taste the full flavour of his quips and quiddities, a reader's mind must either by construction be akin to his, or must have educated itself into such flexibility that it can simulate and wear at will all the moods and temperaments in which genius chooses to be clad. Lamb's mind had a full dress and an undress costume,—the first warn in his essays and his magnifi- cent criticisms ; the other in his letters, which reflect, like Southey's and Cowper's, his daily moods, and record his daily experiences, but are seasoned with deeper wit than theirs, and with far more exuberant whim. His rich diction, due mainly to his intimacy with our older writers, exalts the commonest subjects as unexpectedly as his wit transmutes them. The pleasures of the table are poetised by his touch into ethereal regalements of the gods. The gustatory harmonies of brawn, snipes, sucking-pig, buttered onions, hare "roasted hard and brown, with gravy and melted butter," cease to be sensual in his loving, lingering description, refined into an idealistic sensuousness which is almost intellectual. He was wont to divide the entities of life into Things and Fancies,—Things pestered him from 10 till 4 at his desk in the India House ; Fancies bore no brother near the throne in his leisure talk and correspondence ; and the intrusion of " literal rogues," incarnating concrete propositions and discordant with im- perfect sympathies, moved his most clamorous and diverting anger. This made him the prince of mystifiers. He confides to Bernard Barton that he has hoaxed the newspapers with a circum- stantial account of Liston's death, Liston being alive and well. To Manning, in China, he writes a mel ncholy letter, announcing that he was ruined and had found a retreat in the Fishmongers' Almshouses ; that Mary was dead, entreating with her latest breath that she might wear in her coffin a silk gown which Manning had sent her ; that Coleridge had passed away, living just long enough to close the eyes of Wordsworth, leaving behind him forty thousand uncompleted treatises, and an epic poem in twenty-four books on the "Wanderings of Cain." He tells Barron Field that their fiiend Will Weatherall has married a servant-maid ; consults him gravely how they are to receive her ; whether domestic topics must not, from a point of delicacy, be kept out of the conversation ; how they shall com- port themselves in Mrs. William's presence to their own maid Becky, whether treating her with customary chiding, or with unusual deferential civility, as due to a person of great worth thrown by the caprice of fate into a humble station.
Much of Lamb's fantastic whimsicality is due to a natural reserve, whereby he shrinks alarmed from utterance on subjects sacred to him, from the defence of truth, the avowal of religious feeling, of grave sympathy, of deep affection. "Anything awful," he says to Southey, "makes me laugh." Full of reverence and tenderness, the open expression of either seems to startle him, and he will pass from a momentary revelation of profound and serious insight to some wild invention which makes us "doubt truth to be liar," or wind up a. tremulous avowal of regard with a jesting freedom that seems rudeness to those who have not the key to his sensibility. Nor can we ever forget as we read that the sadness of temperament which these engrafted oddities masked was not constitutional or fanciful, not the scholar's melancholy, or the courtier's, or the lover's, but, as Jaques says, "a melancholy of mine own," due to an ever-present sorrow, darkening long periods of his life, and limiting its brighter intervals to a fearful joy. Biography reveals nothing more elevating than the devotion with which, while yet almost a lad, he took up the lifelong burden of com- panionship and support to his noble but afflicted sister, nothing more pathetic than the tale of annual suffering which encroached each year more cruelly on the dual loneliness of the pair ; the frolic of his talk and pen was a refuge from the sadness of his heart, as in his portrait smiles irradiate a countenance wreathed naturally into lines of pain.
We write as veteran Agnophilites (hero, Mr. Hazlitt would say, a pun is evidently intended), longing to participate and extend the fruition of which we fear a nascent generation tastes less avidly than did their elders. We would direct younger students to Lamb's account of the rattlesnake in an exhibition ; of the clerk in the India House who came drunk to the office, and laughed ; of his landlord, Mr. Thomas Westwood, with his "rising endorsation" of person, and his one John-Gilpin anec- dote; to the speculations on rick-burning ; the letter to Moxon on Miss Isola's receipt from him of a new watch; his apprehen- sions that Hood's dog ' Dash ' will go mad, since his snarls are becoming illogical and he wags his tail perpendicularly, with his advice that 'Dash's' teeth having been drawn, he should be kept in his madness to amuse the children by his lunes. Those who know Lamb well will smile at each one of these reminders as they succeed ; we shall be pleased to think that those who know him not may remember our recommendation of him gratefully when they come to read. Our memory takes a leap of forty years, and we recall our own first delighted perusal of E/ia as a school prize at fifteen years old, our gradual acquisition of Rosamund Gray, "Mr. H.," the criticisms, the poems ; our adoption of them as a touchstone by which to test the intellectual metal of our youthful literary cronies. Were the volumes lost to the world to-morrow, we could almost from memory reproduce them ; yet still, when in the pleasant half-hour that closes the busy day we reach a haphazard hand to our book-case for a soothing chat with some one of the tried friends who await our pleasure on the shelves, we are pleased if touch and sight reveal that we have clutched a volume of our Lamb ; sure to find food for mind and heart in his deep eloquence, his old-world book knowledge, his suggestive wisdom, his heart-easing mirth.
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