in the 1798 edition, came the quaintly particular passage which I have thrown into italics:—
"Besides, it was Margaret's bed-time, for she kept very good hours—indeed, in the distribution of her meals, and sundry other particulars, she resembled the livers in the antique world, more than might well beseem a creature of this—none but Rosamund could get her mess of broth ready, or put her night caps on—(she wore seven, the undermost was of flannel)—
"'You know, love, I can do nothing to help myself—here I must stay till you return.'
"So the new friends parted for that night—Elinor having made Margaret promise to give Rosamund leave to come and see her the next day."
Shelley's praise of Rosamund Gray has often been quoted: writing to Leigh Hunt, in 1819, he said, "What a lovely thing is Rosamund Gray! How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest parts of our nature is in it!" Lamb mentions Julia de Roubigné in the text, and there is little doubt that he was influenced by Mackenzie's story. The epistolary form into which Rosamund Gray lapses is maintained throughout in Julia de Roubigné (1777), and there is a similar intensity of emotion and suggestion of fatality in both correspondences. There is, however, in Julia de Roubigné nothing of the sweet simplicity and limpid clarity of Lamb's earlier chapters; which may be described as his (perhaps unconscious) contribution to the revolt against convention that Coleridge and Wordsworth were leading in the same year in the Lyrical Ballads.
How far Lamb was recording fact in this story we do not know; but the letters seem to reflect his own frame of mind at that time—following upon his mother's death and his abandonment of his daydreams with the fair-haired maid of his sonnets. In this case we have the unusual spectacle of a masculine writer conveying his feelings through a feminine medium. But on pages 17–18 Lamb seems to be writing both as himself and his sister. Compare the passage at the foot of page 17 with Lamb's letter to Coleridge of October 17, 1796, where he quotes his sister as saying, "The spirit of my mother seems to descend and smile upon me," and the last paragraph on page 17 is paraphrased in Lamb's lines (composed at the same time that he was working on Rosamund Gray) "Written soon after the Preceding Poem," October, 1797. Again, the second paragraph on page 21 must exactly represent Lamb's hopes and wishes in connection with his sister at that date.
Rosamund Gray and her grandmother (if they had any real existence) are said to have lived in one of the group of cottages called Blenheims, between Blakesware and Ware, in the days when Lamb visited his grandmother at Blakesware house. These cottages were pulled down in 1895. But then Lamb's Anna—of the love sonnets—is also said to have lived at Blenheims; and they cannot possibly be identical. Old Margaret and Mrs. Field, Lamb's grandmother, may have had some traits in common, and the description of Blakesware, where Mrs. Field was housekeeper, is recognisable; but these researches cannot be pursued to any real purpose. According to a letter to Southey in October, 1798, "nothing but the first words" of the ballad—
An old woman clothed in gray,
Whose daughter was charming and young,
And she was deluded away
By Roger's false flattering tongue—
put Lamb "upon scribbling … Rosamund." This is quite conceivably the case. Whether we are to suppose that Lamb took not only the motive of his story, but also the word Gray, from this stanza, cannot be said; but it is generally thought that he found the name Rosamund Gray in a song thus entitled in his friend Charles Lloyd's Poems on Various Occasions, 1795. There is a suggestion that Lloyd may have had particular interest in the book in the circumstance that copies exist bearing the imprint of Pearson, a bookseller at Birmingham, where Lloyd lived. The Birmingham edition indeed is considered to be the first. Writing to Southey in May, 1799, Lamb says that Rosamund sells well in London.
Old Thomas Billet (page 28) was not the true name of the Widford innkeeper. It was Clemitson (see the poem "Going or Gone"). Lamb again used the name Billet, for his father's old Lincoln friend, in "Poor Relations." Nor was Ben Moxam the name of the Blakesware gardener, but Ben Carter. The Wilderness was actually the name given to the wood at the back of Blakesware house.
On the passage concerning the epitaphs, on pages 29–30, Talfourd wrote: "The reflections he [Lamb] makes on the eulogistic character of all the inscriptions are drawn from his own childhood; for when a very little boy, walking with his sister in a churchyard, he suddenly asked her, 'Mary, where do the naughty people lie?'"
Southey has a poem, "The Ruined Cottage," among his English Eclogues, which is practically a poetical paraphase of Rosamund Gray. I do not know whether Southey's version was taken from an independent source or whether it was a compliment to Lamb. Lamb's tale had, however, come first.
Finally, it may be remarked that in Barry Cornwall's Poems, Galignani, 1829, is a poem entitled "Rosamund Gray," which from the evidence of its few opening lines was to have been a blank verse adaptation of Lamb's theme.
Page 35. Curious Fragments.
John Woodvil, 1802, and Works, 1818.
Lamb engaged upon these experiments in the manner of Burton, always a favourite author with him, at the suggestion of Coleridge. We find him writing to Manning (March 17, 1800): "He [Coleridge] has lugged me to the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me, for a first plan, the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the anatomist of melancholy." Writing again to Manning a little later, probably in April, 1800, Lamb mentions having submitted two imitations of Burton to Stuart, the editor of the Morning Post, and states also that he has written the lines entitled "Conceipt of Diabolic Possession"—originally, in the John Woodvil volume, a part of these "Fragments," but afterwards, in the Works, separated from them. In August, 1800, Lamb tells Coleridge he has written the ballad in the manner of the "Old and Young Courtier," also originally part of these "Fragments," and mentions further that Stuart had rejected the proposed contribution.
Of Lamb's imitations the first two are most akin to the original in spirit, but the whole performance is curiously happy and a perfect illustration of his fellowship with the Elizabethans. Our language probably contains no more successful impersonation of any author: for the time being Lamb's mind approximated to that of Burton, while reserving enough individuality to make a new thing as well as a very subtle and exact echo. The Burton extracts and the Letters of Sir John Falstaff, written four or five years earlier (in which Lamb certainly had a hand: see pp. 225 and 491), represent in prose the same devotion to the Elizabethans that John Woodvil represents in verse. With 1800, when Lamb was twenty-five, this immediately derivative impulse ceased; but it is certain that without such interesting exercises in the manner of his favourite period his ripest work would have been far less rich.
The differences in text between the 1802 and 1818 editions are very slight. They are merely changes of punctuation and spelling—some twenty-four in all—with the exception that on page 39, line 18 "common sort" was originally "mobbe." Concerning this change Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, in The Athenæum, December 28, 1901, has an interesting note. Lamb, he says, made it "for the best of good reasons, because in the meantime he had recollected that to attribute
