the sev'nWho in God's presence, nearest to his throne,
Stand ready at command.
Paradise Lost, III., lines 648–650.
Uriel's station was the sun. See also Paradise Lost, III. 160, IV. 577 and 589, and IX. 60.
Page 187. Wordsworth's "Excursion."
The Quarterly Review, October, 1814. Not reprinted by Lamb.
Wordsworth's Excursion was published in 1814; and it seems to have been upon his own suggestion, made, probably, to Southey, who was a power in the Quarterly office, that Lamb should review it. In his letter to Wordsworth of August 29, 1814, Lamb expressed a not too ready willingness. Writing again a little later, when the review was done, he spoke of "the circumstances of haste and peculiar bad spirits" under which it was written, viewing it without much confidence; and adding, "But it must speak for itself, if Gifford and his crew do not put words in its mouth, which I expect." As Lamb expected, so it happened. Lamb's next letter, after the publication of the October Quarterly (which does not seem to have come out until very late in the year), ran thus:—
"Dear Wordsworth—I told you my Review was a very imperfect one. But what you will see in the Quarterly is a spurious one which Mr. Baviad Gifford has palm'd upon it for mine. I never felt more vexd in my life than when I read it. I cannot give you an idea of what he has done to it out of spite at me because he once sufferd me to be called a lunatic in his Thing. The language he has alterd throughout. Whatever inadequateness it had to its subject, it was in point of composition the prettiest piece of prose I ever writ, and so my sister (to whom alone I read the MS.) said. That charm if it had any is all gone: more than a third of the substance is cut away and that not all from one place, but passim, so as to make utter nonsense. Every warm expression is changed for a nasty cold one. I have not the cursed alteration by me, I shall never look at it again, but for a specimen I remember—I had said the Poet of the Excursn 'walks thro' common forests as thro' some Dodona or enchanted wood and every casual bird that flits upon the boughs, like that miraculous one in Tasso, but in language more piercing than any articulate sounds, reveals to him far higher lovelays.' It is now (besides half a dozen alterations in the same half dozen lines) 'but in language more intelligent reveals to him'—that is one I remember. But that would have been little, putting his damnd Shoemaker phraseology (for he was a shoemaker) in stead of mine which has been tinctured with better authors than his ignorance can comprehend—for I reckon myself a dab at Prose—verse I leave to my betters—God help them, if they are to be so reviewed by friend and foe as you have been this quarter. I have read 'It won't do.'[65] But worse than altering words, he has kept a few members only of the part I had done best which was to explain all I could of your 'scheme of harmonies' as I had ventured to call it between the external universe and what within us answers to it. To do this I had accumulated a good many short passages, rising in length to the end, weaving in the Extracts as if they came in as a part of the text, naturally, not obtruding them as specimens. Of this part a little is left, but so as without conjuration no man could tell what I was driving it [? at]. A proof of it you may see (tho' not judge of the whole of the injustice) by these words—I had spoken something about 'natural methodism—' and after follows 'and therefore the tale of Margaret shd have been postponed' (I forget my words, or his words): now the reasons for postponing it are as deducible from what goes before, as they are from the 104th psalm. The passage whence I deduced it, has vanished, but clapping a colon before a therefore is always reason enough for Mr. Baviad Gifford to allow to a reviewer that is not himself. I assure you my complaints are founded. I know how sore a word alterd makes one, but indeed of this Review the whole complexion is gone. I regret only that I did not keep a copy. I am sure you would have been pleased with it, because I have been feeding my fancy for some months with the notion of pleasing you. Its imperfection or inadequateness in size and method I knew, but for the writing part of it, I was fully satisfied. I hoped it would make more than atonement. Ten or twelve distinct passages come to my mind which are gone, and what is left is of course the worse for their having been there, the eyes are pulld out and the bleeding sockets are left. I read it at Arch's shop with my face burning with vexation secretly, with just such a feeling as if it had been a review written against myself, making false quotations from me. But I am ashamd to say so much about a short piece. How are you served! and the labors of years turn'd into contempt by scoundrels.
"But I could not but protest against your taking that thing as mine. Every pretty expression, (I know there were many) every warm expression, there was nothing else, is vulgarised and frozen—but if they catch me in their camps again let them spitchcock me. They had a right to do it, as no name appears to it, and Mr. Shoemaker Gifford I suppose never waved a right he had since he commencd author. God confound him and all caitiffs.
"C. L."
[65] "This will never do"—the beginning of the review in the Edinburgh.—Ed.
The word "lunatic" refers to the Quarterly's review in December, 1811, of The Dramatic Works of John Ford, by Henry William Weber, Sir Walter Scott's assistant, where, alluding to the comments on Ford in Lamb's Specimens, quoted by Weber, the reviewer described them as "the blasphemies of a maniac." See page 57 of this volume for Lamb's actual remarks on Ford. Southey wrote Gifford a letter of remonstrance, and Gifford explained that he had used the words without knowledge of Lamb's history—knowing of him nothing but his name—and adding that he would have lost his right arm sooner than have written what he did had he known the circumstances. The late Mr. Dykes Campbell, whose opinion in such matters was of the weightiest, declined to let Gifford escape with this apology. Reviewing in The Athenæum for August 25, 1894, a new edition of Lamb's Dramatic Specimens, Mr. Campbell wrote thus:—
Had Gifford merely called Lamb a "fool" or a "madman," the epithet would have been mere "common form" as addressed by the Quarterly of those days to a wretch who was a friend of other wretches such as Hunt and Hazlitt; but he went far beyond such common form and used language of the utmost precision. Weber, wrote Gifford, "has polluted his pages with the blasphemies of a poor maniac, who it seems once published some detached scenes from the 'Broken Heart.' For this unfortunate creature every feeling mind will find an apology in his calamitous situation." This passage has no meaning at all if it is not to be taken as a positive statement that Lamb suffered from chronic mental derangement; yet Gifford when challenged confessed that when he wrote it he had known absolutely nothing of Lamb, except his name! It seems to have struck neither Gifford nor Southey that this was no excuse at all, and something a good deal worse than no excuse—that even as an explanation it was not such as an honourable man would have cared to offer. Gifford added a strongly-worded expression of his feeling of remorse on learning that his blows had fallen with cruel effect on a sore place. Both feeling and expression may have been sincere, for, under the circumstances, only a fiend would be incapable of remorse. But the excuse or explanation is open to much suspicion, owing to the fact (revealed in the Murray "Memoirs") that Lamb's friend Barron Field had been Gifford's collaborator in the preparation of the article in which the offending passage occurs. Field was well acquainted with Lamb's personal and family history, and while the article was in progress the collaborators could hardly have avoided some exchange of ideas on a subject which stirred one of them so deeply. Gifford may have said honestly enough, according to his lights, that only a maniac could have written the note quoted by Weber, a remark which would naturally draw from Field some confidences regarding Lamb's history. This is, of course, pure assumption, but it is vastly more reasonable and much more likely to be in substantial accordance with the facts than Gifford's statement that when he called Lamb a poor maniac, whose calamitous situation offered a sufficient apology for his blasphemies,
