and kind of women," Mary Lamb.
The terati Talfourd's day were clearly hardier of digestion than their descendants are. Roast lamb, boiled beef, "heaps of smoking roasted potatoes," pots of porter—a noontide meal for a hodman—and the hour midnight! One is reminded, à propos of Miss Lamb's robust viands, that Elia somewhere confesses to "an occasional nightmare;" "but I do not," he adds, "keep a whole stud of them." To go deeper into this matter, to speculate upon the possible germs, the first vague intimations to the mind of Coleridge of the weird spectra of "The Ancient Mariner," the phantasmagoria of "Kubla Khan," would be, perhaps, over-refining. "Barry Cornwall," too, Lamb tells us, "had his tritons and his nereids gambolling before him in nocturnal visions." No wonder!
It is not intended here to re-thresh the straw left by Talfourd, Fitzgerald, Canon Ainger, and others, in the hope of discovering something new about Charles Lamb. In this quarter, at least, the wind shall be tempered to the reader—shorn as he is by these pages of a charming letter or two. So far as fresh facts are concerned, the theme may fairly be considered exhausted. Numberless writers, too, have rung the changes upon "poor Charles Lamb," "dear Charles Lamb," "gentle Charles Lamb," and the rest—the final epithet, by the way being one that Elia, living, specially resented:
"For God's sake," he wrote to Coleridge. "don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five years ago, when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines to feed upon such epithets; but besides that the meaning of 'gentle' is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think but you meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to believe that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer."
The indulgent pity conventionally bestowed upon Charles Lamb—one of the most manly, self-reliant of characters, to say nothing of his genius—is absurdly' misplaced.
Still farther be it from us to blunt the edge of appetite by sapiently essaying to "analyze" and account for Lamb's special zest and flavor, as though his writings, or any others worth the reading, were put together upon principles of clockwork. We are perhaps over-fond of these arid pastimes nowadays. It is not the "sweet musk-roses," the "apricocks and dewberries" of literature that please us best; like Bottom the Weaver, we prefer the "bottle of hay." What a mockery of right enjoyment our endless prying and sifting, our hunting of riddles in metaphors, innuendoes in tropes, ciphers in Shakspeare! Literature exhausted, we may turn to art, and resolve, say, the Sistine Madonna (I deprecate the Manes of the "Divine Painter") into some ingenious and recondite rebus. For such critical chopped-hay—sweeter to the modern taste than honey of Hybla—Charles Lamb had little relish. "I am, sir," he once boasted to an analytical, unimaginative proser who had insisted upon explaining some quaint passage in Marvell or Wither, "I am, sir, a matter-of-lie man." It was his best warrant to sit at the Muses' banquet. Charles Lamb was blessed with an intellectual palate as fine as Keats's, and could enjoy the savor of a book (or of that dainty, "in the whole mundus edibilis the most delicate," Roast Pig, for that matter) without pragmatically asking, as the king did of the apple in the dumpling, "how the devil it got there." His value as a critic is grounded in this capacity of naïve enjoyment (not of pig, but of literature), of discerning beauty and making us discern it—thus adding to the known treasures and pleasures of mankind.
Suggestions not unprofitable for these later days lurk in these traits of Elia the student and critic. How worthy the imitation, for instance, of those disciples who band together to treat a fine poem (of Browning, say, or Shelley) as they might a chapter in the Revelation—speculating sagely upon the import of the seven seals and the horns of the great beast, instead of enjoying the obvious beauties of their author. To the schoolmaster—whose motto would seem too often to be the counsel of the irate old lady in Dickens, "Give him a meal of chaff!"—Charles Lamb's critical methods are rich in suggestion. How many ingenuous boys, lads in the very flush and hey-day of appreciativeness of the epic virtues, have been parsed, declined, and conjugated into an utter detestation of the melodious names of Homer and Virgil! Better far for such victims had they, instead of aspiring to the vanities of a "classical education," sat, like Keats, unlearnedly at the feet of quaint Chapman, or Dryden, or even of Mr. Pope.
Perhaps, by way of preparative to the reading of Charles Lamb's letters, it will be well to run over once more the leading facts of his life. First let us glance at his outward appearance. Fortunately there are a number of capital pieces of verbal portraiture of Elia.
Referring to the year 1817, "Barry Cornwall" wrote:
"Persons who had been in the habit of traversing Covent Garden at that time of night, by extending their walk a few yards into Russell Street have noticed a small, spare man clothed in black, who went out every morning, and returned every afternoon as the hands of the clock moved toward certain hours. You could not mistake him. He was somewhat stiff in his manner, and almost clerical in dress, which indicated much wear. He had a long, melancholy face, with keen, penetrating eyes; and he walked with a short, resolute step citywards. He looked no one in the face for more than a moment, yet contrived to see everything as he went on. No one who ever studied the human features could pass him by without recollecting his countenance; it was full of sensibility, and it came upon you like new thought, which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards: it gave rise to meditation, and did you good. This small, half-clerical man was—Charles Lamb."
His countenance is thus described by Thomas Hood:
"His was no common face, none of those willow-pattern ones which Nature turns out by thousands at her potteries, but more like a chance specimen of the Chinese ware—one to the set; unique, antique, quaint, you might have sworn to it piecemeal—a separate affidavit to each feature."
Mrs. Charles Mathews, wife of the comedian, who met Lamb at a dinner, gives an amusing account of him:—
"Mr. Lamb's first appearance was not prepossessing. His figure was small and mean, and no man was certainly ever less beholden to his tailor. His 'bran' new suit of black cloth (in which he affected several times during the day to take great pride, and to cherish as a novelty that he had looked for and wanted) was drolly contrasted with his very rusty silk stockings, shown from his knees, and his much too large, thick shoes, without polish. His shirt rejoiced in a wide, ill-plaited frill, and his very small, tight, white neckcloth was hemmed to a fine point at the ends that formed part of a little bow. His hair was black and sleek, but not formal, and his face the gravest I ever saw, but indicating great intellect, and resembling very much the portraits of Charles I."
From this sprightly and not too flattering sketch we may turn to Serjeant Talfourd's tender and charming portrait—slightly idealized, no doubt; for the man of the coif held a brief for his friend, and was a poet besides:—
"Methinks I see him before me now as he appeared then, and as he continued without any perceptible alteration to me, during the twenty years of intimacy which followed, and were closed by his death. A light frame, so fragile that it seemed as if a breath would overthrow it, clad in clerk-like black, was surmounted by a head of form and expression the most noble and sweet. His black hair curled crisply about an expanded forehead; his eyes, softly brown, twinkled with varying expression, though the prevalent expression was sad; and the nose, slightly curved, and delicately carved at the nostril, with the lower outline of the face delicately oval, completed a head which was finely placed upon the shoulders, and gave importance and even dignity to a diminutive and shadowy stem. Who shall describe his countenance, catch its quivering sweetness, and fix it forever in words? There are none, alas! to answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep thought, striving with humor; the lines of suffering wreathed into cordial mirth, and a smile of painful sweetness, present an image to the mind it can as little describe as lose. His
