"The title-page to stand thus :- POEMS BY CHARLES LAMB, OF THE INDIA HOUSE. Under this title the following motto, which, for want of room, I put over leaf, and desire you to insert, whether you like it or no. May not a gentleman choose what arms, mottoes, or armorial bearings the Herald will give him leave, without consulting his republican friend, who might advise none? May not a publican put up the sign of the Saracen's Head, or even though his undiscerning neighbour should prefer, as more genteel, the Cat and Gridiron ? MOTTO. 'This beauty in the blossom of my youth, In the best language my true tongue could tell me, 66 In another letter (dated July 1, 1796) he urges Coleridge to do something to bring our elder bards into more general fame. "I write with indignation," he writes, when, in books of criticism, I find no mention of such men as Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher,- -men with whom succeeding dramatic writers (Otway alone excepted) can bear no manner of comparison !" In many of these early letters we can watch Lamb gradually learning 'the great language' of his favourite authors; he does not merely quote them; he is constantly, in his characteristic manner, adapting their utterances to express his own thoughts: "for myself, Cp. vol. ii. p. 164, 11. 1.-15; vide Ainger's Letters, vol, i. pp. 23, 47. 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, tho' now forgot, To Southey he sends, in 1798, in lieu of anything of his own, a few lines of old Christopher Marlow's,' taken from his tragedy, Jew of Malta; in the comments which follow we have the rough draft of the wellknown criticism, to be found on page 46, vol. i. of the present edition. "The Jew is a famous character, quite out of nature; but, when we consider the terrible idea our simple ancestors had of a Jew, not more to be discommended for a certain discolouring (I think Addison calls it) than the witches and fairies of Marlow's mighty successor." The scene quoted is betwixt Barabbas and Ithamore. In the 66 Specimens" Lamb wisely substituted Barabbas' famous soliloquy for the lines in question, in which he finds "a mixture of the ludicrous and the terrible, brimful of genius and antique invention, that at first reminded me of your own description of cruelty in hell, which was in the true Hogarthian style. "I need not tell you," he adds, 66 that Marlow was author of that pretty madrigal, 'Come live with me and be my Love,' and of the tragedy of Edward II., in which are certain lines unequalled in our English tongue." Honest Walton mentions the said madrigal under the denomination of "certain smooth verses made long since by Kit Marlow."† The following from a letter to Wordsworth (Oct. 13, 1800) throws important light on the prices of books and their scarcity at the beginning of the century :-" The books which you want, I calculate at about £8. Ben Jonson is a guinea book. Beaumont and Fletcher, in folio, the right folio, not now to be met with; the octavos are about £3. As to any other dramatists, I do not know where Cp. vol. il. p. 81, 11. 10-12; Ainger's Letters, vol. i. p. 83. † Cp. vol. L. p. 92; and Ainger's Letters, i. 91-93. to find them, except what are in Dodsley's old plays, which are about £3 also. Massinger I never saw but at one shop, and it is now gone; but one of the editions of Dodsley contains about a fourth (the best) of his plays. Congreve, and the rest of King Charles' moralists, are cheap and accessible. Marlowe's plays and poems are totally vanished; only one edition of Dodsley retains one, and the other two of his plays; but John Ford is the man after Shakespeare.' some "Beaumont and Fletcher in folio, the right one, not to be met with;" it is impossible to pass over the words without recalling Bridget's tender recollections of a certain midnight adventure :-"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 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 in the over-worn suit-your old corbeaufor 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. * Among its most cherished possessions the British Museum numbers this famous old folio, doubly sanctified by its associations with Lamb and with another, as great, and only less beloved; for the volume is throughout enriched with Marginalia from the pen of "S. T. C." One annotation in particular arrests attention :—“N.B. I shall not be long here, Charles-I gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic. S. T. C.Oct. 1811." Among Lamb's miscellaneous fragments there is found an extract from a MS. note of S. T. C. in my Beaumont and Fletcher, dated April 17th, 1807.' "Midnight. "God bless you, dear Charles Lamb, I am dying: I feel I have not many weeks left. "Mr Gilman's, In sketching, however slightly, the story of Lamb's rediscovery of the Elizabethan dramatists, it is impossible to omit reference to 'the first heirs of his invention,' the 'miniature romance' of Rosamund Gray and the 'miniature drama' of Pride's Purge, or John Woodvil. The failure of the play was as inevitable as its composition. "When I first wrote John Woodvil," Lamb himself explains in his dedication to Coleridge of the 1818 edition of his works, "Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger were then a first love, and from what I was so freshly conversant in, what wonder if my language imperceptibly took a tinge?" Its failure had not cured the author's pride in this first experiment in dramatic composi * C. 45. i. 7. + Cp. Fitzgerald's Lamb's Letters, &c. Vol. II. p. 25, tion, this skilful mosaic of Elizabethan reminiscences. "One piece, Coleridge, I have ventured to publish in its original form, though I have heard you complain of a certain over-imitation of the antique in the style. If I could see my way of getting rid of the objection, without re-writing it entirely, I would make some sacrifices." The success of the romance, 'the secret of its charm,' as Mr Ainger has justly observed, 'in the face of improbabilities and unrealities of many kinds, is one of the curiosities of literature.' To the list of its heterogeneous materials, enumerated by Lamb's biographer, I would suggest the addition of Daniel's Story of Isulia,' from the pastoral tragicomedy of Hymen's Triumph.' It is from this story that the quotations in Chapter IV. are derived, and I cannot help thinking that, to some extent, 'Isulia' and 'Sirthis' are the prototypes of 'Rosamund' and 'Allan.' Certainly one feels in Lamb's story something of that same charm which called forth Coleridge's enthusiasm for Daniel's gentlyflowing verse. * It is an interesting fact that Lamb's copy of Daniel, even as his Beaumont and Fletcher, is still extant, enriched with manuscript notes by the same hand.† "I wish every book I have," he writes in June 1807, 'were so noted. They have thoroughly converted me to relish Daniel, or to say I relish him, for after all, I believe I did relish him." "I have done two books," Lamb writes to his friend Thomas Manning, in February 1808, "since the failure of my farce (i.e., Mr H.'); they will both be out this summer. The one is a juvenile book, the Adventures of Ulysses, intended to be an introduction to the reading of Telemachus! It is done out of the Odyssey, not from the Greek (I would not mislead you), nor yet from Pope's Odyssey, but * Cp. vol. 1. p. 108. The volume was till recently in the possession of W. C. Hazlitt; at the Hazlitt' Sale last month it fetched £13, 10s. It is sincerely to be wished that the book will ultimately find a place by the side of 'The Beaumont and Fletcher.' |