Ye politicians, tell me, pray, Why thus with woe and care rent? Some wind has blown the wig away, And left the Heir Apparent. Similarly, though here with savage scorn, rather than with good-humoured derision, he wrote, about this very time (1800), in the Albion his apostrophe to Sir James Mackintosh : Though thou'rt like Judas, an apostate black, The Tragedy, just now referred to as having been completed by Charles Lamb in 1799, was not published until early in 1802. Originally entitled "Pride's Cure," it was in the end called, more simply, after the hero of it, JOHN WOODVIL. Having been placed in the hands of John Kemble, with an eye to its production on the boards of Drury Lane, it was retained so long that the author at length applied for the manager's decision. He was thereupon quietly informed that the manuscript had been somehow lost-a cool suggestion being added that another copy should be sent in for consideration. Fortunately the rough draft of the play was still in existence. This having been fairly written out, the MS. was again submitted to Kemble, only, however, to be handed back a little later on, when the manager, according to his wont, bowed out the disappointed author, politely bidding him beware, as he did so, of that wellworn door-step, at the lessee's private entrance in Great Russell Street, which so many another aspiring dramatist, before and since, has found facile descendus rather than a gradus ad Parnassum. When the rejected tragedy was at length published, it was reviewed in a tone of the gravest banter in the third number of the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey writing of it as evidently the work of a man of the age of Thespis! The reviewer, serio-comically, descanted, besides, upon the antiquity of Lamb's muse and language and versification, describing his rhetorical figures as having about them all the careless indelicacy of ancient manners. Until the early part of 1809 the Lambs continued to reside at 16, Mitre Court Buildings, in the Temple. There it was they wrote together MRS. LEICESTER'S SCHOOL, to which Charles contributed three, and his sister seven, stories, purporting to be the history of several young ladies related by themselves. There afterwards they wrote in collaboration their wellknown TALES FROM SHAKSPERE, fourteen being from the pen of Mary Lamb, and six from the hand of her brother. During the last year of their sojourn in Mitre Court Buildings, Charles produced, less as a paraphrase than as a prose epitome of Chapman's Odyssey, his admirable version of THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES, a work designed by him, and not unworthily, as a companion volume to Bishop Fénélon's Telemachus. Another work produced by Charles Lamb in 1808-one that was published for him by the Messrs. Longman-was his twofold masterpiece, in the way, that is, of selection and annotation, known as SPECIMENS OF THE ENGLISH DRAMATIC POETS who lived about the time of Shakspere. Upon quitting Mitre Court Buildings, the Lambs settled down, hard by, for another interval of nine years, from 1809 to 1817, in the top story at 4, Inner Temple Lane; and it was during the earlier period of their sojourn there that they brought out together their POETRY FOR CHILDREN. There Charles, who was greatly enamoured with the locality, meant to have lived and died, though the abode, when dispassionately regarded, had, it is true, but small attrac tions. The apartments, as their occupant himself described them with an odd sort of gusto, looked out upon a gloomy court like a churchyard, adorned with three trees and a pump. The period of the Lambs' occupancy of these chambers, however, is considered by Talfourd to have been about the happiest in all Charles's life. There his Wednesday nights acquired their greatest lustre, and, it might even be added, a certain amount of celebrity. There he gathered about him his troops of friends-people worthy of that name, as being his intimate and congenial companions. The mere reckoning up of their names is like counting the stars in a constellation. The chief among them, however, need alone here be enumerated : Pre-eminent in Lamb's eyes, on the score at once of affection and of admiration, was Coleridge, whose naïf inquiry upon one occasion, "Charles, did you ever hear me preach ?" drew from the irrepressible humorist the answer, "I n-never heard you do anything else!" He it was, also, that most dearly loved of all his friends, whom, at another time, he likened so irresistibly to a "damaged archangel!" Conspicuous among these friends, besides, was Martin Burney, to whom, as everybody knows, Lamb observed, in the middle of a rubber, "If dirt were trumps, Martin, w- what hands you would hold!" There, too, was Wordsworth, whose genius he so reverenced, yet whom he is actually said, once, in his freakish humour, to have shaken, not by the hand but by the nose, with a How d'ye do, old Lakey poet?" Writing to him another while, in spite of Wordsworth's constitutional solemnity, "Some d-d people have come in, and I must finish abruptly," but adding quietly in a preposterous postscript, "by d-d I only mean deuced.' Barry Cornwall, it was, another of these intimates, who drew from him the remark, in reference to some observation, evidencing a certain degree of smartness, Very well, my dear boy, very well; B-Ben Jonson has said worse things, and b-b-better!" Crabb Robinson's announcement of his maiden brief, elicited from Lamb, in the same spirit of mockery, the profane ejaculation, "Thou first great cause, least understood!" Southey's indifterent lyric about a rose incited the wicked wit in a kindred mood to remark, Your rose is insipid, it has neither thorns nor sweetness.' John Rickman, Clerk of the House of Commons, another of these trea sured friends, was referred to by Lamb, after a very different fashion, as "a fine rattling fellow, who has gone through life laughing at solemn apes; hugely literate; talking Greek with Porson, nonsense with me; fullest of matter with least verbosity." While of another intimate, Thomas Manning,Charles declared enthusiastically, "He discloses not, save to select worshippers; and will leave the world without any one hardly but me knowing how stupendous a creature he is." " The cherished companions of Charles Lamb were for the most part book worms, critics, authors, and social oddities. Many were celebrities. A few were hardly presentable. His surroundings were of the homeliest, his habits completely unfashionable. Yet his Wednesday evenings (when he and his sister had their At Homes) were the delight of his own chosen circle, especially in the winter time, when the card-table was drawn out, and the fire crackling, and the long-sixes lit, the snuff-box ready for any one's handling, the kettle singing on the hob, glasses and bottle and cold viands within reach of those who cared for them. The familiar guests did what they liked, there, read or chatted, came and went as they pleased, books and needlework lying about -veritable At Homes, with a sense of slippered, almost of slip-shod, ease, and an utter forgetfulness of anything in the shape of ceremony. Every one took his part in the conversation. But among them all, as William Hazlitt tells us, "no one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in halfa-dozen half sentences as Elia himself." At these times, according to John Forster's testimony also, "no one said such startling things as Lamb." Then his quips and cranks were at their blithest, and his puns, squandered about ad libitum, running at times into the most fantastic extravagances. Many of his more brilliant mots, however, had about them the punster's doom of evanescence, as Talfourd wittily ejaculates in their regard "a moment bright, then gone ever!" Towards the close of 1817 the Lambs again removed, and this time finally, from the Temple. Quitting the top story of 4, Inner Temple Lane, they took up their abode for the next six years at 20, Russell Street, Covent Garden. Their apartments, which were there, on the first floor, were situated over what was then a brazier's, what afterwards became a bookseller's, and what is nowa-days, as it has been for many years past, a ham and beef shop. It is the corner house, the side of which looks out upon Bow Street, the site being that upon which stood, in Dryden's time, what was long famous as Will's Coffee House. A twelvemonth after this change of residence, there was published, in 1818, in two small volumes, the first edition of the Works of Charles Lamb, comprising among them, not only his moderately-sized collection of poems, his tragedy of John Woodvil, and his story of Rosamund Gray, but with them those masterly criticisms on Hogarth and Shakspere, which, issued from the press anonymously (in 1811) in the pages of the Reflector, until thus reprinted, with acknowledgment as his, had remained for seven years altogether unnoticed. At the beginning of 1820, when Charles Lamb was completing his forty-fifth year, and when his intellectual powers were at their best and brightest, there came for him what he soon made plain to himself and to everybody else was his priceless opportunity. In the January of that year there was started by the Messrs. Baldwin, Craddock and Joy, in half-crown monthly numbers, The London Magazine. Its editor at the outset was Mr. John Scott, who had previously conducted, until its demise, the Champion newspaper. Under his supervision and guidance there was collected together a brilliant band of contributors. Hazlitt was the dramatic and art critic of the new publication. He there sketched the wonders of Fonthill Abbey, expatiated on the matchless beauties of the Elgin Marbles, and poured forth in a series of a dozen papers his radiant Table Talk. De Quincey there confided to the ear of the public his Confessions of an Opium Eater, and realized for the first time to many the inner marvels of the genius of Jean Paul Richter. Carlyle there produced his maiden work illustrative of the Life and Writings of Schiller. The translator of Dante, the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, there appended to Dr. Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" other later memoirs by way of continuation. Among the lyrists on the London were John Keats and James Montgomery. There, too, Thomas Hood wrote his first poem of any pretension. There Allan Cunningham recounted the traditional tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry. There trolled his simple ditties, John Clare, the Northamptonshire Poet. There flaunted for a while among the best of them, under the guise of an ex-officer of Dragoons, one seemingly of the curled darlings of Mayfair, who descanted vivaciously upon art, letters, and society, under the nom de plume of Janus Weathercock. This was no other than the atrocious miscreant Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the murderer, among others, with the deadliest delibera tion (after effecting insurances upon her life, to the amount of £18,000 sterling) of his beautiful young sister-in-law, Helen Abercrombie, whose assassination the scoundrel afterwards justified, with a curl of his moustache, and a lisping sneer, upon the plea that "she had such d- d thick ankles!" Lord Lytton has transfixed the reptile with his pen-like another scorpion added to a cabinet of horrors-as the Gabriel Varney of "Lucretia." So deceptive, however, was this dastardly assassin, even in the eyes of the most discerning of his brother contributors, that Charles Lamb could write of him to Southey as "the light and warm as light-hearted Janus." Pre-eminent among this motley array of contributors, the pride and boast of the London Magazine, as he very soon came to be, was Charles Lamb himself, in his newlyassumed capacity as Elia the Essayist. Even here, nevertheless, in this greatest of all his literary successes, he can hardly be said, in a pecuniary sense, to have struck upon a golden vein. The largest amount of remuneration he ever received as Elia from the London Magazine was at the rate of £170 a year for two years together. Jocularly, he used to speak of himself as the Publishers' ruin, exclaiming once in a letter to Procter, "Damn the age! I'll write for antiquity!" Between the August of 1820 and the November of 1822 he had contributed as many as twenty-seven Elian Essays to the London Magazine. These, with another reprinted from the Indicator, were, in 1823, collected together, and issued from the press as a substantive publication. The magazine had long before this passed into the hands of the Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, as its publishers and proprietors. At uncertain intervals Charles Lamb continued to write in its pages under his favourite signature; notably after the commencement of a new and enlarged series of the London at the beginning of 1825. It was in the April number of that year, for example, that he gave to the world his bewitching little sketch of "Barbara SConfronting page 500 of this Popular Centenary Edition, will be found the facsimile of a note in the Essayist's handwriting, in which he states distinctly in so many words, "Barbara S-shadows under that name Miss Kelly's early life," adding, "and I had the anecdote beautifully from her.' As it happens-to my very great pleasure be it said-I can repeat in Charles Lamb's own words a sentence of his occurring in this very essay. "I have had the honour (I must ever call it) once to have been admitted to the teatable of Miss Kelly." It can scarcely be matter of surprise, therefore, that while engaged upon this very labour of love for me, the editing of the writings of the Master Essayist, I should have challenged Miss Kelly to throw some light upon her old friend's bewildering announcement. In answer to that challenge Miss Kelly, with a distinctness and precision of memory befitting eighteen rather than eighty-five, has now given, through the following communication, penned fifty years after the famous Elian Essay was first printed, her own charming version of the incident : My Dear Sir, THE TRUE STORY OF BARBARA S BAYSWATER, September 28, 1875. I perfectly remember relating an incident of my childhood to Charles Lamb and his dear sister, and I have not the least doubt that the intense interest he seemed to take in the recital, induced him to adopt it as the principal feature in his beautiful story of "Barbara S." Much, however, as I venerate the wonderful powers of Charles Lamb as a writer-grateful as I ever must feel to have enjoyed for so many years the friendship of himself and his dear sister, and proudly honoured as I am by the two exquisite sonnets he has given to the world as tributary to my humble talent, I have never been able thoroughly to appreciate the extraordinary skill with which he has, in the construction of his story, desired and contrived so to mystify and characterize the events, as to keep me out of sight, and render it utterly impossible for any one to guess at me as the original heroine. Such, I know, was his intention, otherwise, so to have avoided and altered the facts in every point as he has done, would have surprised and disheartened me. As it is, I persuade myself, that I only second his delicate motives, when I object to appear in the garb in which he has so skilfully presented the young lady. So that if I am to be, as it seems, considered and announced as the bonâ fide heroine of the tale, I frankly declare, that I infinitely prefer the position and feelings of "little Fanny Kelly" to those of Miss Barbara. The question is, how truly, and to what extent, it even "shadows" the early life of Frances Maria Kelly? I was not a little playhouse 'Super," snatched from respectable poverty, to be plunged (alas! as such too often are) without instruction, or protection, into a life of risk to health and morals. I was a well-born, cared for child, of a devoted mother, whose position and education as a gentlewoman, taught her that self-esteem which, with /mental courage, patient endurance, and unceasing sacrifices, enabled her with her five children to "take arms against a siège of troubles." In the year 1799, Miss Jackson, one of my mother's daughters, by her first husband, was placed under the special care of dear old Tate Wilkinson, proprietor of the York Theatre, there to practice, as in due progression, what she had learned of Dramatic Art, while a Chorus Singer at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, coming back, as she did after a few years, as the wife of the late celebrated, inimitable Charles Mathews, to the Haymarket Theatre. In 1799, through the influence of my uncle, Michael Kelly, the celebrated singer and composer of that day, I was allowed to become a miniature chorister in her place; causing, I assure you, considerable animadversion among the supernumerary class, as to the shameful impropriety of giving "that little thing" one pound a week, as regular salary. Be it known, however, that though only nine years of age, I could read and sing at sight, any piece of music put into my hands; and when through John Kemble (as I have already told in public, and am even now recording in my reminiscences) I had the Duke of York, in Richard III. given me to study, I came on the following day to rehearsal quite perfect in the words, and when told by what action to express the sneer at Gloucester's deformity, I said (as poor Barbara could not have said), "Thank you, ma'am, my mother told me how that should be done." Whilst I write, I feel myself something too intrusive, but Miss Barbara must give me my rights, and stand content upon her own merits. About this time, my father had been four years from home, which he left selfbanished, to avoid the then consequences of incurring debts he could not pay, and which he never would have incurred but in absurd imitation of the princely life his brother Michael was led into with almost equal rashness. And I must needs hint, that as under Michael Kelly's very peculiar domestic circumstances, an influence existed to which my mother could not make her pride succumb, the "brother and uncle' fell very short of his supposed responsibility, and our struggle was indeed a very sad one. " I am now coming briefly to the "Drury Lane Treasury," on which (with now and then a half-guinea, ill spared-under the wax seal of a letter from York), was our only dependance. Any one may know the state of England at that time. All our men gone to the war. Dancers learning to make their own shoes. Bread-a shilling and a penny per quartern. Sugar- one shilling per pound. Salt-sixpence. Tea (fit to drink)-ten shillings. Green ditto-twelve shillings. &c. &c. One Saturday, during the limited season of nine months in the year, Mr. Peake (dear, good old gentleman !) looking, as I remember he always didanxiously perplexed-doubtless as to how he could best dole out the too frequently insufficient amount provided for the ill-paid company, silently looked me in the face, while he carefully folded a very dirty, ragged bank note-put it into my hand, patted my cheek, and with a slight pressure on my shoulder, hinting there was no time for our usual gossip-as good as said go, my dear,' and I hurried down the long gallery, lined down each side with performers of all degrees, more than one of whom whispered as I passed -"Is it full pay, dear?" I nodded " Yes," and proceeded to my seat on the window of the landing-place. |