Softly slumber, soft repose,
Such as mock the painter's skill,
Such as innocence bestows,
Harmless infant, lull thee still!
The line quoted by Lamb from Cowper is the first of "The Jackdaw." Cowper's praise of Bourne resembles Lamb's. He writes: "I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him."
Page 392, line 4. A recent writer. Lamb himself.
Page 395, line 19. There is a tragic Drama. "The Wife's Trial" (see Vol. IV.). More properly a comic drama.
Page 395, line 27. But if to write in Albums be a sin. A reference probably to the attack on Lamb's book made a year earlier in the Literary Gazette, which occasioned Southey's spirited lines to The Times in defence of his friend.
Page 396, middle. But the disease has gone forth. Four years before, in 1827, Lamb had protested to Bernard Barton against the Album exactions:—
"If I go to—— thou art there also, O all pervading Album! All over the Leeward Islands, in Newfoundland, and the Back Settlements, I understand there is no other reading. They haunt me. I die of Albophobia!"
Page 397. The Death Of Munden.
The Athenæum, February 11, 1832, under the title, "Munden, the Comedian." Signed "C. Lamb." Not reprinted by Lamb.
The article was preceded by this editorial note:—
A brief Memoir in a paper like the Athenæum, is due to departed genius, and would certainly have been paid to Munden, whose fame is so interwoven with all our early and pleasant recollections, even though we had nothing to add to the poor detail of dates and facts already registered in the daily papers. The memory of a player, it has been said, is limited to one generation; he
"—struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more!"
But this cannot be true, seeing that many whose fame will soon be counted by centuries, yet live to delight us in Cibber; and that others of our latter days, have been enbalmed, in all their vital spirit, by Elia himself; in whose unrivalled volume Cockletop is preserved as in amber, and where Munden will live for aye, making mouths at Time and Oblivion. We were thus apologizing to ourselves for the unworthy epithet we were about to scratch on perishable paper to this inimitable actor, when we received the following letter, which our readers will agree with us is worth a whole volume of bald biographies.
This preamble was probably written by Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789–1864), who became supreme editor of The Athenæum in 1830. Joseph Shepherd Munden died on February 6, 1832. He had first made his mark in 1780, when Lamb was five. His Covent Garden career lasted, with occasional migrations, from 1790 to 1811. Munden's first appearance at Drury Lane was in 1813. It was in 1815 that he created the part of Old Dozy, in T. Dibdin's "Past Ten O'clock and a Rainy Night." His farewell of the stage was taken in 1824.
Page 397, line 7. Lewis. "Gentleman" Lewis (1748?-1811), the original Faulkland in "The Rivals." It was he who said that Lamb's farce, "Mr. H.," might easily have been turned into a success by a practical dramatist. Hazlitt called him "the greatest comic mannerist perhaps that ever lived." His full name is William Thomas Lewis.
Page 397, line 8. Parsons, Dodd, etc. See note on page 465. Parsons was at Drury Lane practically from 1762 to 1795 and Dodd from 1766 to 1796.
Page 398, line 4. "Johnny Gilpin." This benefit, for William Dowton (1764–1851), was held on April 28, 1817. The first piece was "The Rivals," with Dowton as Mrs. Malaprop. In "Johnny Gilpin" (Genest gives no author's name) Munden played Anthony Brittle.
Page 398, line 6. Liston's Lubin Log. This was one of Listen's great parts—in "Love, Law and Physic," by Lamb's friend, James Kenney (1780–1849), produced in 1812.
Page 398, at the end. A gentleman … whose criticism I think masterly. This was Talfourd, who several years before had been dramatic critic to The Champion. I quote the first portion of his article: "Mr. Munden appears to us to be the most classical of actors. He is that in high farce, which Kemble was in high tragedy. The lines of these great artists are, it must be admitted, sufficiently distinct; but the same elements are in both—the same directness of purpose, the same singleness of aim, the same concentration of power, the same iron-casing of inflexible manner, the same statue-like precision of gesture, movement and attitude. The hero of farce is as little affected with impulses from without, as the retired Prince of Tragedians. There is something solid, sterling, almost adamantine, in the building up of his most grotesque characters. When he fixes his wonder-working face in any of its most amazing varieties, it looks as if the picture were carved out from a rock by Nature in a sportive vein, and might last for ever. It is like what we can imagine a mask of the old Grecian Comedy to have been, only that it lives, and breathes, and changes. His most fantastical gestures are the grand ideal of farce. He seems as though he belonged to the earliest and the stateliest age of Comedy, when instead of superficial foibles and the airy varieties of fashion, she had the grand asperities of man to work on, when her grotesque images had something romantic about them, and when humour and parody were themselves heroic."
Page 398. Thoughts on Presents of Game, &c.
The Athenæum, November 30, 1833. Signed "Elia." Not reprinted by Lamb.
The quoted passage at the head of this little essay is from Lamb's "Popular Fallacy," XV., "That we must not look a gift-horse in the mouth." It was probably placed there by the editor of The Athenæum. The present essay may be taken as a postscript to the "Dissertation on Roast Pig." The late Mr. Charles Kent, in his Centenary edition of Lamb, printed it next that essay, under the heading "A Recantation."
Page 399, line 1. Old Mr. Chambers. The Rev. Thomas Chambers, Vicar of Radway-Edgehill, in Warwickshire, and father of Charles and John Chambers, who were at Christ's Hospital, but after Lamb's day. John was a fellow clerk of Lamb's at the India House. A letter from Lamb to Charles Chambers is in existence (see Hazlitt's The Lambs, page 138), in which Lamb makes other ecstatic remarks on delicate feeding. Incidentally he says that bullock's heart is a substitute for hare. Mr. Hazlitt says that the Warwickshire vicar left a diary in which he recorded little beyond the dinners he used to give or eat.
Page 399, line 10. Mrs. Minikin. Writing to his friend Dodwell in October, 1827, concerning the gift of a little pig (which suggests that
