Specimen of Lamb's Humor.—Death of Mr. Norris.—Garrick Plays.—Letters to Barton.—Opinions on Books.—Breakfast with Mr. N. P. Willis.—Moves to Enfield.—Caricature of Lamb.—Albums and Acrostics.—Pains of Leisure.— The Barton Correspondence.—Death of Hazlitt.—Munden's Acting and Quitting the Stage.—Lamb becomes a Boarder.—Moves to Edmonton.— Metropolitan Attachments.—Death of Coleridge.—Lamb's Fall and Death.— Death of Mary Lamb.—POSTSCRIPT.
With the expiration of the "London Magazine," Lamb's literary career terminated. A few trifling contributions to the "New Monthly," and other periodicals, are scarcely sufficient to qualify this statement.
It may be convenient, in this place, to specify some of those examples of humor and of jocose speech for which Charles Lamb in his lifetime was well known. These (not his best thoughts) can be separated from the rest, and may attract the notice of the reader, here and there, and relieve the tameness of a not very eventful narrative.
It is possible to define wit (which, as Mr. Coleridge says, is "impersonal"), and humor also; but it is not easy to distinguish the humor of one man from that of all other humorists, so as to bring his special quality clearly before the apprehension of the reader. Perhaps the best (if not the most scientific) way might be to produce specimens of each. In Charles Lamb's case, instances of his humor are to be found in his essays, in his sayings (already partially reported), and throughout his letters, where they are very frequent. They are often of the composite order, in which humor, and wit, and (sometimes) pathos are intermingled. Sometimes they merely exhibit the character of the man.
He once said of himself that his biography "would go into an epigram." His sayings require greater space. Some of those which have been circulated are apocryphal. The following are taken chiefly from his letters, and from my own recollections.
In his exultation on being released from his thirty-four years of labor at the India House, he says, "Had I a little son, I would christen him 'Nothing to do'" (This is in the "Superannuated Man.")
Speaking of Don Quixote, he calls him "the errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse."
On being asked by a schoolmistress for some sign indicative of her calling, he recommended "The Murder of the Innocents."
I once said something in his presence which I thought possessed smartness. He commended me with a stammer: "Very well, my dear boy, very well; Ben (taking a pinch of snuff), Ben Jonson has said worse things than that-and b-b-better." [1]
His young chimney-sweepers, "from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys) in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind."
His saying to Martin Burney has been often repeated—"O Martin, if dirt were trumps, what a hand you would hold!"
To Coleridge: "Bless you, old sophist, who next to human nature taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing."
To Mr. Gilman, a surgeon ("query Kill-man?"), he writes, "Coleridge is very bad, but he wonderfully picks up, and his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory—an archangel a little damaged."
To Wordsworth (who was superfluously solemn) he writes, "Some d-d people have come in, and I must finish abruptly. By d—d, I only mean deuced."
The second son of George the Second, it was said, had a very cold and ungenial manner. Lamb stammered out in his defence that "this was very natural in the Duke of Cu-Cum-ber-land."
To Bernard Barton, of a person of repute: "There must be something in him. Such great names imply greatness. Which of us has seen Michael Angelo's things? yet which of us disbelieves his greatness?"
To Mrs. H., of a person eccentric: "Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one—may be he has tired him out."
"Charles," said Coleridge to Lamb, "I think you have heard me preach?" "I n—n—never heard you do anything else," replied Lamb.
One evening Coleridge had consumed the whole time in talking of some "regenerated" orthodoxy. Leigh Hunt, who was one of the listeners, on leaving the house, expressed his surprise at the prodigality and intensity of Coleridge's religious expressions. Lamb tranquillized him by "Ne-ne- never mind what Coleridge says; he's full of fun."
There were, &c., &c., "and at the top of all, Hunger (eldest, strongest of the Passions), predominant, breaking down the stony fences of shame."
The Bank, the India House, and other rich traders look insultingly on the old deserted South Sea House, as on "their poor neighbor out of business."
To a Frenchman, setting up Voltaire's character in opposition to that of Christ, Lamb asserted that "Voltaire was a very good Jesus Christ—for the French."
Of a Scotchman: "His understanding is always at its meridian. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border land with him. You cannot hover with him on the confines of truth."
On a book of Coleridge's nephew he writes, "I confess he has more of the Sterne about him than the Sternhold. But he saddens into excellent sense before the conclusion."
As to a monument being erected for Clarkson, in his lifetime, he opposes it, and argues, "Goodness blows no trumpet, nor desires to have it blown. We should be modest for a modest man."
"M. B. is on the top scale of my friendship's ladder, which an angel or two is still climbing; and some, alas! descending."
A fine sonnet of his (The Gipsy's Malison) being refused publication, he exclaimed, "Hang the age! I will write for Antiquity."
Once, whilst waiting in the Highgate stage, a woman came to the door, and inquired in a stern voice, "Are you quite full inside?" "Yes, ma'am," said Charles, in meek reply, "quite; that plateful of Mrs. Gilman's pudding has quite filled us."
Mrs. K., after expressing her love for her young children, added, tenderly, "And how do you like babies, Mr. Lamb?" His answer, immediate, almost precipitate, was "Boi-boi-boiled, ma'am."
Hood, tempting Lamb to dine with him, said, "We have a hare." "And many friends?" inquired Lamb.
It being suggested that he would not sit down to a meal with the Italian witnesses at the Queen's trial, Lamb rejected the imputation, asserting that he would sit with anything except a hen or a tailor.
Of a man too prodigal of lampoons and verbal jokes, Lamb said, threateningly, "I'll Lamb-pun him."
On two Prussians of the same name being accused of the same crime, it was remarked as curious that they were not in any way related to each other. "A mistake," said he; "they are cozens german."
An old lady, fond of her dissenting minister, wearied Lamb by the length of her praises. "I speak, because I know him well," said she.
"Well, I don't;" replied Lamb; "I don't; but d—n him, at a 'venture.'"
The Scotch, whom he did not like, ought, he said, to have double punishment; and to have fire without brimstone.
Southey, in 1799, showed him a dull poem on a rose. Lamb's criticism was, "Your rose is insipid: it has neither thorns nor sweetness."
A person sending an unnecessarily large sum with a lawyer's brief, Lamb said "it was 'a fee simple.'"
Mr. H. C. Robinson, just called to the bar, tells him, exultingly, that he is retained in a cause in the King's Bench. "Ah" (said Lamb), "the great first cause, least understood."
Of a pun, Lamb says it is a "noble thing per se. It is entire. It fills the mind; it is as perfect as a sonnet; better. It limps ashamed, in the train and retinue of humor." [2]
Lamb's puns, as far as I recollect, were not frequent; and, except in the case of a pun, it is difficult to divest a good saying of the facts surrounding it without impoverishing the saying itself. Lamb's humor is generally imbedded in the surrounding sense, and cannot often be disentangled without injury.
I have said that the proprietorship of the "London Magazine," in the year 1821, became vested in Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, under whom it became a social centre for the meeting of many literary men. The publication, however, seems to have interfered with the ordinary calling of the booksellers; and the sale was not therefore (I suppose) sufficiently important to remunerate them for the disturbance of their general trade. At all events, it was sold to Mr. Henry Southern, the editor of "The Retrospective Review," at the expiration of 1825, after having been in existence during five entire years. In Mr. Southern's hands, under a different system of management, it speedily ceased.
In 1826 (January) Charles Lamb suffered great grief from the loss of a very old friend, Mr. Norris. It may be remembered that he was one of the two persons who went to comfort Lamb when his mother so suddenly died. Mr. Norris had been one of the officers of the Inner Temple or Christ's Hospital, and had been intimate with the Lambs for many years; and Charles, when young, used always to spend his Christmases with him. "He was my friend and my father's friend," Lamb writes, "all the life I can remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships ever since. Old as I am, in his eyes I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called me 'Charley.' I have none to call me Charley now. He was the last link that bound me to the Temple."
It was after his death that Lamb once more resorted to the British Museum, which he had been in the habit of frequenting formerly, when his first "Dramatic Specimens" were published. Now he went there to make other extracts from the old plays. These were entitled "The Garrick Plays," and were bestowed upon Mr. Hone, who was poor, and were by him published in his "Every Day Book." Subsequently they were collected by Charles himself, and formed a supplement to the earlier "Specimens." Lamb's labors in this task were by no means trivial. "I am now going through a course of reading" (of old plays), he writes; "I have two thousand to go through."
Lamb's correspondence with his Quaker friend, Bernard Barton ("the busy B," as Hood called him), whose knowledge of the English drama was confined to Shakespeare and Miss Baillie, went on constantly. His letters to this gentleman comprised a variety of subjects, on most of which Charles offers him good advice. Sometimes they are less personal, as where he tells him that "six hundred have been sold of Hood's book, while Sion's songs do not disperse so quickly;" and where he enters (very ably) into the defects and merits of Martin's pictures, Belshazzar and Joshua, and ventures an opinion as to what Art should and should not be. He is strenuous in advising him not to forsake the Bank (where he is a clerk), and throw himself on what the chance of employ by booksellers would afford. "Throw yourself, rather, from the steep Tarpeian rock, headlong upon the iron spikes. Keep to your bank, and your bank will keep you. Trust not to the Public," he says. Then, referring to his own previous complaints of official toil, he adds, "I retract all my fond complaints. Look on them as lovers' quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome, dead timber of a desk that gives me life. A little grumbling is wholesome for the spleen; but in my inner heart I do approve and embrace this our close but unharassing way of life."
Lamb's opinions on books, as well as on conduct, making some deduction for his preference of old writers, is almost always sound. When he is writing to Mr. Walter Wilson, who is editing De Foe, he says of the famous author of "Robinson Crusoe,"—
"In appearance of truth his works exceed any works of fiction that I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. It is like reading evidence in a court of justice. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Facts are repeated in varying phrases till you cannot choose but believe them." His liking for books (rather than his criticism on them) is shown frequently in his letters. "O! to forget Fielding, Steele, &c., and to read 'em new," he says. Of De Foe, "His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain and homely." Again, he speaks of "Fielding, Smollett, Sterne,— great Nature's stereotypes." "Milton," he says, "almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him." Of Shenstone he speaks as "the dear author of the Schoolmistress;" and so on from time to time, as occasion prompts, of Bunyan, Isaac Walton, and Jeremy Taylor, and Fuller, and Sir Philip Sidney, and others, in affectionate terms. These always relate to English authors. Lamb, although a good Latinist, had not much of that which ordinarily passes under the name of Learning. He had little knowledge of languages, living or dead. Of French, German, Italian, &c., he knew nothing; and in Greek his acquirements were very moderate. These children of the tongues were never adopted by him; but in his own Saxon English he was a competent scholar, a lover, nice, discriminative, and critical.
The most graphic account of Lamb at a somewhat later period of his life appears in Mr. N. P. Willis's "Pencillings by the Way." He had been invited by a gentleman in the Temple, Mr. R—— (Robinson?), to meet Charles Lamb and his sister at breakfast. The Lambs lived at that time "a little way out of London, and were not quite punctual. At last they enter —"the gentleman in black small-clothes and gaiters, short and very slight in person, his head set on his shoulders with a thoughtful forward bent, his hair just sprinkled with gray, a beautiful deep-set eye, an aquiline nose, and a very indescribable mouth. Whether it expressed most humor or feeling, good nature or a kind of whimsical peevishness, or twenty other things which passed over it by turns, I cannot in the least be certain."
This is Mr. Willis's excellent picture of Lamb at that period. The guest places a large arm-chair for Mary Lamb; Charles pulls it away, saying gravely, "Mary, don't take it; it looks as if you were going to have a tooth drawn." Miss Lamb was at that time very hard of hearing, and Charles took advantage of her temporary deafness to impute various improbabilities to her, which, however, were so obvious as to render any denial or explanation unnecessary. Willis told Charles that he had bought a copy of the "Elia" in America, in order to give to a friend. "What did you give for it?" asked Lamb. "About seven and sixpence." "Permit me to pay you that," said Lamb, counting out the money with earnestness on the table; "I never yet wrote anything that could sell. I am the publisher's ruin. My last poem won't sell,—not a copy. Have you seen it?" No; Willis had not. "It's only eighteenpence, and I'll give you sixpence towards it," said Lamb; and he described where Willis would find it, "sticking up in a shop window in the Strand." Lamb ate nothing, but inquired anxiously for some potted fish, which Mr. R—— used to procure for him. There was none in the house; he therefore asked to see the cover of the pot which had contained it; he thought it would do him good. It was brought, and on it was a picture of the fish. Lamb kissed it, and then left the table, and began to wander about the room, with an uncertain step, &c.
This visit must have taken place, I suppose, at or after the time when Lamb was living at Colebrook Cottage; and the breakfast took place probably in Mr. Henry Crabbe Robinson's chambers in the Temple, where I first met Wordsworth.
In the year 1827 Lamb moved into a small house at Enfield, a "gamboge- colored house," he calls it, where I and other friends went to dine with him; but it was too far from London, except for rare visits.—It was rather before that time that a very clever caricature of him had been designed and engraved ("scratched on copper," as the artist termed it) by Mr. Brook Pulham. It is still extant; and although somewhat ludicrous and hyperbolical in the countenance and outline, it certainly renders a likeness of Charles Lamb. The nose is monstrous, and the limbs are dwarfed and attenuated. Lamb himself, in a letter to Bernard Barton (10th August, 1827), adverts to it in these terms: "'Tis a little sixpenny thing—too like by half—in which the draughtsman has done his best to avoid flattery." Charles's hatred for annuals and albums was continually breaking out: "I die of albophobia." "I detest to appear in an annual," he writes; "I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates." "Coleridge is too deep," again he says, "among the prophets, the gentleman annuals." "If I take the wings of the morning, and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, there will albums be." To Southey he writes about this time, "I have gone lately into the acrostic line. I find genius declines with me; but I get clever." The reader readily appreciates the distinction which the humorist thus cleverly (more than cleverly) makes. In proof of his subdued quality, however, under the acrostical tyranny, I quote two little unpublished specimens addressed to the Misses Locke, whom he had never seen.
To M. L. [Mary Locke.]
Must I write with pen unwilling, And describe those graces killing, Rightly, which I never saw? Yes—it is the album's law.
Let me then invention strain, On your excelling grace to feign. Cold is fiction. I believe it Kindly as I did receive it; Even as I. F.'s tongue did weave it.
To S. L. [Sarah Locke.]
Shall I praise a face unseen, And extol a fancied mien, Rave on visionary charm, And from shadows take alarm? Hatred hates without a cause,
Love may love without applause, Or, without a reason given, Charmed be with unknown heaven. Keep the secret, though unmocked, Ever in your bosom Locked.
After the transfer to Mr. Southern of the "London Magazine," Lamb was prevailed upon to allow some short papers to be published in the "New Monthly Magazine."
They were entitled "Popular Fallacies," and were subsequently published conjointly with the "Elia Essays." He also sent brief contributions to the "Athenaeum" and the "Englishman," and wrote some election squibs for Serjeant Wilde, during his then contest for "Newark." But his animal spirits were not so elastic as formerly, when his time was divided between official work and companionable leisure; the latter acting as a wholesome relief to his mind when wearied by labor.
On this subject hear him speaking to Bernard Barton, to whom, as to others, he had formerly complained of his harassing duties at the India House, and of his delightful prospect of leisure. Now he writes, "Deadly long are the days, with but half an hour's candle-light and no fire-light. The streets, the shops remain, but old friends are gone." "I assure you" (he goes on) "no work is worse than overwork. The mind preys on itself— the most unwholesome food. I have ceased to care almost for anybody." To remedy this tedium, he tries visiting; for the houses of his old friends were always open to him, and he had a welcome everywhere. But this visiting will not revive him. His spirits descended to zero—below it. He is convinced that happiness is not to be found abroad. It is better to go "to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner." Again he says, "Home, I have none. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a forlornes head. What I can do, and overdo, is to walk. I am a sanguinary murderer of time. But the snake is vital. Your forlorn—C. L."
These are his meditations in 1829, four years only after he had rushed abroad, full of exaltation and delight, from the prison of a "work-a-day" life, into the happy gardens of boundless leisure. Time, which was once his friend, had become his enemy. His letters, which were always full of goodness, generally full of cheerful humor, sink into discontent. "I have killed an hour or two with this poor scrawl," he writes. It is unnecessary to inflict upon the reader all the points of the obvious moral that obtrudes itself at this period of Charles Lamb's history. It is clear that the Otiosa Eternitas was pressing upon his days, and he did not know how to find relief. Although a good Latin scholar,—indeed, fond of writing letters in Latin,—he did not at this period resort to classical literature. I heard him indeed once (and once only) quote the well-known Latin verse from the Georgics, "O Fortunatos," &c., but generally he showed himself careless about Greeks and Romans; and when (as Mr. Moxon states) "a traveller brought him some acorns from an ilex that grew over the tomb of Virgil, he valued them so little that he threw them at the hackney coachmen as they passed by his window."
I have been much impressed by Lamb's letters to Bernard Barton, which are numerous, and which, taken altogether, are equal to any which he has written. The letters to Coleridge do not exhibit so much care or thought; nor those to Wordsworth or Manning, nor to any others of his intellectual equals. These correspondents could think and speculate for themselves, and they were accordingly left to their own resources. "The Volsces have much corn." But Bernard Barton was in a different condition; he was poor. His education had been inferior, his range of reading and thinking had been very confined, his knowledge of the English drama being limited to Shakespeare and Miss Baillie. He seems, however, to have been an amiable man, desirous of cultivating the power, such as it was, which he possessed; and Lamb therefore lavished upon him—the poor Quaker clerk of a Suffolk banker—all that his wants or ambition required; excellent worldly counsel, sound thoughts upon literature and art, critical advice on his own verses, letters which in their actual value surpass the wealth of many more celebrated collections. Lamb's correspondence with Barton, whom he had first known in 1822, continued until his death.
In 1830 (September 18th) Hazlitt died. It is unnecessary to enter into any enumeration of his remarkable qualities. They were known to all his friends, and to some of his enemies. In Sir Edward Lytton's words, "He went down to the dust without having won the crown for which he so bravely struggled. He who had done so much for the propagation of thought, left no stir upon the surface when he sank." I will not in this place attempt to weave the moral which nevertheless lies hid in his unrequited life. At that time the number of Lamb's old intimates was gradually diminished. The eternally recurring madness of his sister was more frequent. The hopelessness of it—if hope indeed ever existed—was more palpable, more depressing. His own spring of mind was fast losing its power of rebound. He felt the decay of the active principle, and now confined his efforts to morsels of criticism, to verses for albums, and small contributions to periodicals, which (excepting only the "Popular Fallacies") it has not been thought important enough to reprint. To the editor of the "Athenaeum," indeed, he laments sincerely over the death of Munden. This was in February, 1832, and was a matter that touched his affections. "He was not an actor" (he writes), "but something better." To a reader of the present day—even to a contemporary of Lamb himself—there was something almost amounting to extravagance in the terms of his admiration. Yet Munden was, in his way, a remarkable man; and although he was an actor in farce, he often stood aloof and beyond the farce itself. The play was a thing merely on which to hang his own conceptions. These did not arise from the drama, but were elsewhere cogitated, and were interleaved, as it were, with the farce or comedy which served as an excuse for their display. The actor was to all intents and purposes sui generis.
To speak of my own impressions, Munden did not affect me much in some of his earlier performances; for then he depended on the play. Afterwards, when he took the matter into his own hands, and created personages who owed little or nothing to the playwright, then he became an inventor. He rose with the occasion. Sic ivit ad astra. In the drama of "Modern Antiques," especially, space was allowed him for his movements. The words were nothing. The prosperity of the piece depended exclusively on the genius of the actor. Munden enacted the part of an old man credulous beyond ordinary credulity; and when he came upon the stage there was in him an almost sublime look of wonder, passing over the scene and people around him, and settling apparently somewhere beyond the moon. What he believed in, improbable as it was to mere terrestrial visions, you at once conceived to be quite possible,—to be true. The sceptical idiots of the play pretend to give him a phial nearly full of water. He is assured that this contains Cleopatra's tear. Well; who can disprove it? Munden evidently recognized it. "What a large tear!" he exclaimed, Then they place in his hands a druidical harp, which to vulgar eyes might resemble a modern gridiron. He touches the chords gently; "pipes to the spirit ditties of no tone;" and you imagine Aeolian strains. At last William Tell's cap is produced. The people who affect to cheat him, apparently cut the rim from a modern hat, and place the skull-cap in his hands; and then begins the almost finest piece of acting that I ever witnessed. Munden accepts the accredited cap of Tell with confusion and reverence. He places it slowly and solemnly on his head, growing taller in the act of crowning himself. Soon he swells into the heroic size,—a great archer,—and enters upon his dreadful task. He weighs the arrow carefully; he tries the tension of the bow, the elasticity of the string; and finally, after a most deliberate aim, he permits the arrow to fly, and looks forward at the same time with intense anxiety. You hear the twang, you see the hero's knitted forehead, his eagerness; you tremble: at last you mark his calmer brow, his relaxing smile, and are satisfied that the son is saved! It is difficult to paint in words this extraordinary performance, which I have several times seen; but you feel that it is transcendent. You think of Sagittarius, in the broad circle of the Zodiac; you recollect that archery is as old as Genesis; you are reminded that Ishmael, the son of Hagar, wandered about the Judaean deserts, and became an archer.
The old actor is now dead; but on his last performance, when he was to act Sir Robert Bramble, on the night of his taking final leave of the stage, Lamb greatly desired to be present. He had always loved the actors, especially the old actors, from his youth; and this was the last of the Romans. Accordingly Lamb and his sister went to the Drury Lane; but there being no room in the ordinary parts of the house (boxes or pit), Munden obtained places for his two visitors in the orchestra, close to the stage. He saw them carefully ushered in, and well posted; then acted with his usual vigor, and no doubt enjoyed the plaudits wrung from a thousand hands. Afterwards, in the interval between the comedy and the farce, he was seen to appear cautiously, diffidently, at the low door of the orchestra (where the musicians enter), and beckon to his friends, who then perceived that he was armed with a mighty pot of porter, for their refreshment. Lamb, grateful for the generous liquid, drank heartily, but not ostentatiously, and returned the pot of beer to Munden, who had waited to remove it from fastidious eyes. He then retreated into the farce; and then he retired—forever.
After Munden's retirement Lamb almost entirely forsook the theatre; and his habits became more solitary. He had not relinquished society, nor professedly narrowed the circle of his friends. But insensibly his visitors became fewer in number, and came less frequently. Some had died; some had grown old; some had increased occupation to care for. His old Wednesday evenings had ceased, and he had placed several miles of road between London (the residence of their families) and his own home. The weight of years, indeed, had its effect in pressing down his strength and buoyancy; his spirit no longer possessed its old power of rebound. Even the care of housekeeping (not very onerous, one would suppose) troubled Charles and his sister so much, that they determined to abandon it. This occurred in 1829. Then they became boarders and lodgers, with an old person (T. W.), who was their next-door neighbor at Enfield; and of him Lamb has given an elaborate description. T. W., his new landlord or housekeeper, he says, is seventy years old; "he has something, under a competence;" he has one joke, and forty pounds a year, upon which he retires in a green old age: he laughs when he hears a joke, and when (which is much oftener) he hears it not. Having served the greater parish offices, Lamb and his sister become greater, being his lodgers, than they were when substantial householders. The children of the village venerate him for his gentility, but wonder also at him for a gentle indorsation of the person, not amounting to a hump, or, if one, then like that of the buffalo, and coronative of as mild qualities.
Writing to Wordsworth (and speaking as a great landed proprietor), he says, "We have ridded ourselves of the dirty acres; settled down into poor boarders and lodgers; confiding ravens." The distasteful country, however, still remains, and the clouds still hang over it. "Let not the lying poets be believed, who entice men from the cheerful streets," he writes. The country, he thinks, does well enough when he is amongst his books, by the fire and with candle-light; but day and the green fields return and restore his natural antipathies; then he says, "In a calenture I plunge into St. Giles's." So Lamb and his sister leave their comfortable little house, and subside into the rooms of the Humpback. Their chairs, and tables, and beds also retreat; all except the ancient bookcase, full of his "ragged veterans." This I saw, years after Charles Lamb's death, in the possession of his sister, Mary. "All our furniture has faded," he writes, "under the auctioneer's hammer; going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal." Four years afterwards (in 1833) Lamb moves to his last home, in Church Street, Edmonton, where he is somewhat nearer to his London friends.
Very curious was the antipathy of Charles to objects that are generally so pleasant to other men. It was not a passing humor, but a life-long dislike. He admired the trees, and the meadows, and murmuring streams in poetry. I have heard him repeat some of Keats's beautiful lines in the Ode to the Nightingale, about the "pastoral eglantine," with great delight. But that was another thing: that was an object in its proper place: that was a piece of art. Long ago he had admitted that the mountains of Cumberland were grand objects "to look at;" but (as he said) "the houses in streets were the places to live in." I imagine that he would no more have received the former as an equivalent for his own modest home, than he would have accepted a portrait as a substitute for a friend. He was, beyond all other men whom I have met, essentially metropolitan. He loved "the sweet security of streets," as he says: "I would set up my tabernacle there."
In the spring of 1834, Coleridge's health began to decline. Charles had written to him (in reply) on the 14th April, at which time his friend had been evidently unwell; for Lamb says that he is glad to see that he could write so long a letter. He was indeed very ill; and no further personal intercourse (I believe) took place between Charles and his old schoolfellow. Coleridge lay ill for months; but his faculties seem to have survived his bodily decay. He died on the 25th July, 1834; yet on the 5th of that month he was able to discourse with his nephew on Dryden and Barrow, on Lord Brook, and Fielding, and Richardson, without any apparent diminution of judgment. Even on the 10th (a fortnight only before his death) there was no symptom of speedy dissolution: he then said, "The scenes of my early life have stolen into my mind like breezes blown from the Spice Islands." Charles's sorrow was unceasing. "He was my fifty years' old friend" (he says) "without a dissension. I cannot think without an ineffectual reference to him." Lamb's frequent exclamations, "Coleridge is dead! Coleridge is dead!" have been already noticed.
And now the figures of other old friends of Charles Lamb, gradually (one by one), slip out of sight. Still, in his later letters are to be found glimpses of Wordsworth and Southey, of Rogers and Hood, of Cary (with whom his intimacy increases); especially may be noted Miss Isola, whom he tenderly regarded, and after whose marriage (then left more alone) he retreats to his last retreat, in Church Street, Edmonton.
From details let us escape into a more general narrative. The latest facts need not be painfully enumerated. There is little left, indeed, to particularize. Mary's health fluctuates, perhaps, more frequently than heretofore. At one time she is well and happy; at another her mind becomes turbid, and she is then sheltered, as usual, under her brother's care. The last Essays of Elia are published;—friends visit him;—and he occasionally visits them in London. He dines with Talfourd and Cary. The sparks which are brought out are as bright as ever, although the splendor is not so frequent. Apparently the bodily strength, never great, but sufficient to move him pleasantly throughout life, seemed to flag a little. Yet he walks as usual. He and his sister "scramble through the Inferno:" (as he says to Gary), "Mary's chief pride in it was, that she should some day brag of it to you." Then he and Mary became very poorly. He writes, "We have had a sick child, sleeping, or not sleeping, next to me, with a pasteboard partition between, who killed my sleep. My bedfellows are Cough and Cramp: we sleep three in a bed. Don't come yet to this house of pest and age." This is in 1833. At the end of that year (in December) he writes (once more humorously) to Rogers, expressing, amongst other things, his love for that fine artist, Stothard: "I met the dear old man, and it was sublime to see him sit, deaf, and enjoy all that was going on mirthful with the company. He reposed upon the many graceful and many fantastic images he had created." His last letter, written to Mrs. Dyer on the day after his fall, was an effort to recover a book of Mr. Cary, which had been mislaid or lost, so anxious was he always that every man should have his own.
In December, 1834, the history of Charles Lamb comes suddenly to a close. He had all along had a troubled day: now came the night. His spirits had previously been tolerably cheerful; reading and conversing, as heretofore, with his friends, on subjects that were familiar to him. There was little manifest alteration or falling off in his condition of mind or body. He took his morning walks as usual. One day he stumbled against a stone, and fell. His face was slightly wounded; but no fatal (or even alarming) consequence was foreboded. Erysipelas, however, followed the wound, and his strength (never robust) was not sufficient to enable him to combat successfully that inflammatory and exhausting disease. He suffered no pain (I believe); and when the presence of a clergyman was suggested to him, he made no remark, but understood that his life was in danger; he was quite calm and collected, quite resigned. At last his voice began to fail, his perceptions became confused, and he sank gradually, very gradually, until the 27th of December, 1834; and then—he died! It was the fading away or disappearance of life, rather than a violent transit into another world.
He died at Edmonton; not, as has been supposed, at Enfield, to which place he never returned as to a place of residence, after he had once quitted it.
It is not true that he was ever deranged, or subjected to any restraint, shortly before his death. There never was the least symptom of mental disturbance in him after the time (1795-6) when he was placed for a few weeks in Hoxton Asylum, to allay a little nervous irritation. If it were necessary to confirm this assertion, which is known to me from personal observation and other incontrovertible evidence, I would adduce ten of his published letters (in 1833) and several in 1834; one of them bearing date only four days before his death. All these documents afford ample testimony of his clear good sense and kind heart, some of them, indeed, being tinged with his usual humor.
Charles Lamb was fifty-nine years old at his death; of the same age as Cromwell, between whom and himself there was of course no other similitude. A few years before, when he was about to be released from his wearisome toil at the India House, he said exultingly, that he was passing out of Time into Eternity. But now came the true Eternity; the old Eternity,—without change or limit; in which all men surrender their leisure, as well as their labor; when their sensations and infirmities (sometimes harassing enough) cease and are at rest. No more anxiety for the debtor; no more toil for the worker. The rich man's ambition, the poor man's pains, at last are over. Hic Jacet. That "forlorn" inscription is the universal epitaph. What a world of moral, what speculations, what pathetic wishes, and what terrible dreams, lie enshrouded in that one final issue, which we call—DEATH.
To him who never gave pain to a human being, whose genius yielded nothing but instruction and delight, was awarded a calm and easy death. No man, it is my belief, was ever loved or lamented more sincerely than Charles Lamb. His sister (his elder by a decade) survived him for the space of thirteen years.
By strict economy, without meanness; with much unpretending hospitality; with frequent gifts and lendings, and without any borrowing,—he accumulated, during his thirty-three years of constant labor, the moderate sum of two thousand pounds. No more. That was the sum, I believe, which was eventually shared amongst his legatees. His other riches were gathered together and deposited elsewhere; in the memory of those who loved him,— and there were many of them,—or amongst others of our Anglo-Saxon race, whose minds he has helped to enrich and soften.
The property of Charles Lamb, or so much as might be wanted for the purpose, was by his will directed to be applied towards the maintenance and comfort of his sister; and, subject to this primary object, it was vested in trustees for the benefit of Miss Isola—Mrs. Moxon.
Mary Lamb's comforts were supplied, with anxiety and tenderness, throughout the thirteen years during which she survived her brother. I went to see her, after her brother's death; but her frequent illnesses did not render visits at all times welcome or feasible. She then resided in Alpha Road, Saint John's Wood, under the care of an experienced nurse. There was a twilight of consciousness in her,—scarcely more,—at times; so that perhaps the mercy of God saved her from full knowledge of her great loss. Charles, who had given up all his days for her protection and benefit,—who had fought the great battle of life so nobly,—left her "for that unknown and silent shore," where, it is hoped, the brother and sister will renew the love which once united them on earth, and made their lives holy. Mary Lamb died on the 2Oth May, 1847; and the brother and sister now lie near each other (in the same grave) in the churchyard of Edmonton, in Middlesex.
[1] This, with a small variation, is given in Mr. Thomas Moore's autobiography. I suppose I must have repeated it to him, and that he forgot the precise words.
[2] I fear that I have not, in all the foregoing instances, set forth with sufficient precision the grounds or premises upon which the jests were founded. There were, moreover, various other sayings of Lamb, which do not come into the above catalogue; as where—when enjoying a pipe with Dr. Parr, that Divine inquired how he came to acquire the love of smoking so much, he replied, "I toiled after it as some people do after virtue."— When Godwin was expatiating on the benefit of unlimited freedom of thought, especially in matters of religion, Lamb, who did not like this, interrupted him by humming the little child's song of "Old Father Longlegs won't say his prayers," adding, violently, "Throw him down stairs!"—He consoles Mr. Crabbe Robinson, suffering under tedious rheumatism, by writing, "Your doctor seems to keep you under the long cure."—To Wordsworth, in order to explain that his friend A was in good health, he writes, "A is well; he is proof against weather, ingratitude, meat underdone, and every weapon of fate." The story of Lamb replying to some one, who insisted very strenuously on some uninteresting circumstances being "a matter of fact," by saying that he was "a matter of lie" man, is like Leigh Hunt, who, in opposing the frequent confessions of "I'm in love," asserted, in a series of verses, that he was "In hate."—Charles hated noise, and fuss, and fine words, but never hated any person. Once, when he had said, "I hate Z," some one present remonstrated with him: "Why, you have never seen him." "No," replied Lamb, "certainly not; I never could hate any man that I have once seen."—Being asked how he felt when amongst the lakes and mountains of Cumberland, he replied that he was obliged to think of the Ham and Beef shop near Saint Martin's Lane; this was in order to bring down his thoughts from their almost too painful elevation to the sober regions of every-day life.
In the foregoing little history, I have set forth such facts as tend, in my opinion, to illustrate my friend's character. One anecdote I have omitted, and it should not be forgotten. Lamb, one day, encountered a small urchin loaded with a too heavy package of grocery. It caused him to tremble and stop. Charles inquired where he was going, took (although weak) the load upon his own shoulder, and managed to carry it to Islington, the place of destination. Finding that the purchaser of the grocery was a female, he went with the urchin before her, and expressed a hope that she would intercede with the poor boy's master, in order to prevent his being overweighted in future. "Sir," said the dame, after the manner of Tisiphone, frowning upon him, "I buy my sugar, and have nothing to do with the man's manner of sending it." Lamb at once perceived the character of the purchaser, and taking off his hat, said, humbly, "Then I hope, ma'am, you'll give me a drink of small beer." This was of course refused. He afterwards called upon the grocer, on the boy's behalf—with what effect I do not know.
