unctuous and palate-soothing flesh of geese, wild and tame, nightingales' brains, the sensorium of a young sucking pig, or any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the judgment of you and the cook of Gonville.

"C. LAMB."

CHAPTER VII

[1801 to 1804.]

John Woodvil Rejected, Published, and Reviewed-Letters to Manning Wordsworth, and Coleridge.

THE ominous postponement of Lamb's theatrical hopes wat followed by their disappointment at the commencement of the century. He was favoured with at least one interview by the stately manager of Drury Lane, Mr. Kemble, who extended his highbred courtesy even to authors, whom he invariably attended to the door of his house in Great Russell-street, and bade them "beware of the step." Godwin's catastrophe had probably rendered him less solicitous to encounter a similar peril; which the fondest admirers of "John Woodvil" will not regret that it escaped. While the occasional roughness of its verse would have been felt as strange to ears as yet unused to the old dramatists whom Lamb's Specimens had not then made familiar to the town, the delicate beauties enshrined within it would scarcely have been perceived in the glare of he theatre. Exhibiting "the depth, and not the tumults of the soul;" presenting a female character of modest and retiring loveliness and noble purpose, but undistracted with any violent emotion; and developing a train of circumstances which work out their gentle triumphs on the heart only of the hero, without stirring accident or vivid grouping of persons, it would. scarcely have supplied sufficient of coarse interest to disarm the critical spirit which it would certainly have encountered in all its bitterness. Lamb cheerfully consoled himself by publishing it; and, at the close of the year 1801, it appeared in a small volume, of humble appearar ce, with the " Fragments of Burton" (to which Lamb alluded in one of his previous letters), two of his quarto ballads, and the "Helen" of

his sister.

The daring peculiarities attracted the notice of the Edin. burgh reviewers, then in the infancy of their slashing career

"At

and it was immolated, in due form, by the self-constituted judges, who, taking for their motto "Judex damnatur cùm nocens absolvitur," treated our author as a criminal convicted of publishing, and awaiting his doom from their sentence. With the gay recklessness of power, at once usurped and irresponsible, they introduced Lord Mansfield's wild construction of the law of libel into literature; like him, holding every prima facie guilty who should be caught in the act of publishing a book, and referring to the court to decide whether sentence should be passed on him. The article on "John Woodvil," which adorned their third number, is a curious example of the old style of criticism vivified by the impulses of youth. We wonder now, and probably the writer of the article, if he is living, will wonder with us, that a young critic should seize on a little eighteen-penny book, simply printed, without any preface; make elaborate merriment of its outline, and, giving no hint of its containing one profound thought or happy expression, leave the reader of the review at a loss to suggest a motive for noticing such vapid absurdities. This article is written in a strain of grave banter, the theme of which is to congratulate the world on having a specimen of the rudest condition of the drama, "a man of the age of Thespis." length," says the reviewer, "even in composition a mighty veteran has been born. Older than Æschylus, and with all the spirit of originality, in an age of poets who had before them the imitations of some thousand years, he comes forward to establish his claim to the ancient hircus, and to satiate the most remote desires of the philosophic antiquary." On this text the writer proceeds, selecting for his purpose whatever, torn from its context, appeared extravagant and crude, and ending without the slightest hint that there is merit or promise of merit in the volume. There certainly was no malice or desire to give pain in all this; it was merely the result of the thoughtless adoption, by lads of gayety and talents, of the old critical canons of the monthly reviews, which had been accustomed to damn all works of unpatronised genius in a more summary way and after a duller fashion. These very critics wrought themselves into good-nature as they broke into deeper veins of thought; grew gentler as they grew wiser; and sometimes, even when, like Balaam, they came to curse, like him, they ended with "blessing altogether," as in the review of the "Excursion," which, beginning in the old strain, "This will never do," proceeded to give examples of its noblest passages, and to grace them with worthiest eulogy. And now, the spirit of the writers thus ridiculed, especially of Wordsworth, breathes through the pages of this very review,

and they not seldom wear the "rich embroidery" of the lan guage of the poet once scoffed at by their literary corporation as too puerile for the nursery.

Lamb's occasional connexion with newspapers introduced him to some of the editors and contributors of that day, who sought to repair the spirit wasted by perpetual exertion in the protracted conviviality of the evening, and these associates sometimes left poor Lamb with an aching head, and a purse exhausted by the claims of their necessities upon it. Among those was Fenwick, immortalized as the Bigod of "Elia,' who edited several ill-fated newspapers in succession, and was the author of many libels, which did his employers no good and his majesty's government no harm. These connexions will explain some of the allusions in the following letters.

TO MR. MANNING.

"I heard that you were going to China,* with a commission from the Wedgwoods to collect hints for their pottery, and to teach the Chinese perspective. But I did not know that London lay in your way to Pekin. I am seriously glad of it, for I shall trouble you with a small present for the Em peror of Usbeck Tartary, as you go by his territories; it is a fragment of a 'Dissertation on the state of political parties .n England at the end of the eighteenth century,' which will, no doubt, be very interesting to his Imperial Majesty. It was written originally in English for the use of the two-and-twenty readers of The Albion' (this calculation includes a printer, four pressmen, and a devil); but, becoming of no use when 'The Albion' stopped, I got it translated into Usbeck Tartar by my good friend Tibet Kulm, who is come to London with a civil invitation from the Cham to the English nation to go over to the worship of the Lama.

"The Albion' is dead; dead as nail in door; and my revenues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of an opening to The Morning Chronicle ! ! !' Mr. Manning, by means of that common dispenser of benevolence, Mister Dyer. I have not seen Perry, the editor, yet; but I am preparing a specimen. Shall have a difficult job to manage, for you must know that Mr. Perry, in common with the grea body of the whigs, thinks 'The Albion' very low. I find I must rise a peg or so, be a little more decent, and less abusive; for, to confess the truth, I had arrived to an abomi

* Mr. Manning had begun to be haunted with the idea of China, and to talk of going thither, which he accomplished some years afterward, without an motive but a desire to see that great nation.

nable pitch; I spared neither age nor sex when my cue was given me. N'importe (as they say in French), any climate will suit me. So you are about to bring your old face-making face to London. You could not come in a better time for my purposes; for I have just lost Rickman, a faint idea of whose character I sent you. He is gone to Ireland for a year or two, to make his fortune; and I have lost by his going what seems to me I never can recover-a finished man. His memory will be to me as the brazen serpent to the Israelites; I shall look up to it to keep me upright and honest. But he may yet bring back his honest face to England one day. I wish your affairs with the Emperor of China had not been so urgent, that you might have stayed in Great Britain a year or two longer, to have seen him; for, judging from my own experience, I almost dare pronounce you never saw his equal. I never saw a man that could be at all second or substitute for him in any sort.

and

and

and

and But Mr. Burke has

Imagine that what is here erased was an apology and explanation, perfectly satisfactory, you may be sure! for rating this man so highly at the expense of and M - and explained this phenomenon of our nature very prettily in his letter to a member of the National Assembly, or else in his appeal to the old Whigs, I forget which; do you remember an instance from Homer (who understood these matters tolerably well) of Priam driving away his other sons with expressions of wrath and bitter reproach, when Hector was just dead.

"I live where I did in a private manner, because I don't like state. Nothing so disagreeable to me as the clamours and applauses of the mob. For this reason I live in an obscure situation in one of the courts of the Temple.

"C L."

"I send you all of Coleridge's letters* to me which I have preserved: some of them are upon the subject of my play. I also send you Kemble's two letters, and the prompter's courteous epistle, with a curious critique on Pride's Cure, by a young Physician from EDINBRO',' who modestly suggests quite another kind of plot. These are monuments of my appointment which I like to preserve.

dis

'In Coleridge's letters you will find a good deal of amusement, to see genuine talent struggling against a pompous dis

* Lamb afterward, in some melancholy mood, destroyed all Coleridge's letsers, and was so vexed with what he had done that he never preserved any tters which he received afterward.

play of it I also send you the Professor's letter to me (carefu. professor! to conceal his name even from his correspondent), ere yet the Professor's pride was cured. Oh! monstrous and almost satanical pride!

"You will carefully keep all (except the Scotch Doctor's, which burn) in statu quo, till I come to claim mine own.

“C. LAMB.”

The following is in reply to a pressing invitation from Mr. Wordsworth to visit him at the Lakes.

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't now care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet-street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet-street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the printshops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes-London itself a pantomime and masquerade-all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impel me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to But consider, what must I have been doing all my life not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?

me.

My attachments are all local, purely local; I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a bookcase which has fol lowed me about, like a faithful dog (only exceeding him in knowledge), wherever I have moved; old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school