S.T.C

Octr. 1811.

Underneath the initials S.T.C. are the initials W.W. which suggest that Wordsworth was present.

The Museum also has Lamb's Milton, with annotations by himself and
Coleridge.

In the Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Charles Lamb, privately issued by the New York Dibdin Club in 1897, is a list of five of Lamb's books now in America containing valuable and unpublished marginalia by Coleridge: The Life of John Buncle, Donne's Poems ("I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb, and then you will not be vexed that I have scribbled your book. S.T.C., 2d May, 1811"), Reynolds' God's Revenge against … Murder, 1651 ("O what a beautiful concordia discordantium is an unthinking good man's soul!"), The History of Philip de Commines in English, and Petwin's Letters Concerning the Mind.

Page 31. NEW YEAR'S EVE.

London Magazine, January, 1821.

The melancholy pessimism of this essay led to some remonstrance from robuster readers of the London Magazine. In addition to the letter from "A Father" referred to below, the essay produced, seven months later, in the August number of the London Magazine, a long poetical "Epistle to Elia," signed "Olen," in which very simply and touchingly Lamb was reminded that the grave is not the end, was asked to consider the promises of the Christian faith, and finally was offered a glimpse of some of the friends he would meet in heaven—among them Ulysses, Shakespeare and Alice W——n. Taylor, the publisher and editor of the magazine, sent Lamb a copy. He replied, acknowledging the kindness of the author, and adding:—"Poor Elia … does not pretend to so very clear revelations of a future state of being as 'Olen' seems gifted with. He stumbles about dark mountains at best; but he knows at least how to be thankful for this life, and is too thankful, indeed, for certain relationships lent him here, not to tremble for a possible resumption of the gift. He is too apt to express himself lightly, and cannot be sorry for the present occasion, as it has called forth a reproof so Christian-like."

Lamb thought the poet to be James Montgomery, but it was in reality Charles Abraham Elton. The poem was reprinted in a volume entitled Boyhood and other Poems, in 1835.

It is conceivable that Lamb was reasoned with privately upon the sentiments expressed in this essay; and perhaps we may take the following sonnet which he contributed over his own name to, the London Magazine for April, 1821, as a kind of defiant postscript thereto, a further challenge to those who reproached him for his remarks concerning death, and who suggested that he did not really mean them:—

They talk of time, and of time's galling yoke,
That like a millstone on man's mind doth press,
Which only works and business can redress:
Of divine Leisure such foul lies are spoke,
Wounding her fair gifts with calumnious stroke.
But might I, fed with silent meditation,
Assoiled live from that fiend Occupation—
Improbus labor, which my spirits hath broke—
I'd drink of time's rich cup, and never surfeit—
Fling in more days than went to make the gem
That crowned the white top of Methusalem—
Yea on my weak neck take, and never forfeit,
Like Atlas bearing up the dainty sky,
The heaven-sweet burthen of eternity.

It was also probably the present essay which led to Lamb's difference with Southey and the famous letter of remonstrance. Southey accused Elia of wanting "a sounder religious feeling," and Lamb suggests in his reply that "New Year's Eve" was the chief offender. See Vol. I. for Lamb's amplification of one of its passages.

It may be interesting here to quote Coleridge's description of Lamb as "one hovering between heaven and earth, neither hoping much nor fearing anything."

Page 31, line 10 from foot. Bells. The music of bells seems always to have exerted fascination over Lamb. See the reference in the story of the "First Going to Church," in Mrs. Leicester's School, Vol. III.; in his poem "Sabbath Bells," Vol. IV.; and his "John Woodvil," Vol. IV.

Page 31, foot. "I saw the skirts of the departing Year." From Coleridge's "Ode to the Departing Year," as printed in 1796 and 1797. Lamb was greatly taken by this line. He wrote to Coleridge on January 2, 1797, in a letter of which only a small portion has been printed:—"The opening [of the Ode] is in the spirit of the sublimest allegory. The idea of the 'skirts of the departing year, seen far onwards, waving in the wind,' is one of those noble Hints at which the Reader's imagination is apt to kindle into grand conceptions." Afterwards Coleridge altered "skirts" to "train."

Page 32, line 21. Seven…. years. See note to "Dream-Children."
Alice W—n is identified with Ann Simmons, who lived near Blakesware
when Lamb was a youth, and of whom he wrote his love sonnets.
According to the Key the name is "feigned."

Page 32, line 25. Old Dorrell. See the poem "Going or Gone," Vol. IV. There seems really to have been such an enemy of the Lamb fortunes. He was one of the witnesses to the will of John Lamb, the father—William Dorrell.

Page 33, line 5. Small-pox at five. There is no other evidence than this casual mention that Lamb ever suffered from this complaint. Possibly he did not. He went to Christ's Hospital at the age of seven.

Page 33, line 13. From what have I not fallen. Lamb had had this idea many years before. In 1796 he wrote this sonnet (text of 1818):—

We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,
The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween,
And Innocence her name. The time has been
We two did love each other's company;
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart:
But when by show of seeming good beguil'd,
I left the garb and manners of a child,
And my first love for man's society,
Defiling with the world my virgin heart—
My loved companion dropp'd a tear, and fled,
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.
Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art—
In what delicious Eden to be found—
That I may seek thee the wide world around?

Page 33, line 27. Phantom cloud of Elia. The speculations in the paragraph that ends with these words were fantastical at any rate to one reader, who, under the signature "A Father," contributed to the March number of the London Magazine a eulogy of paternity, in which Elia was reasoned with and rebuked. "Ah! Elia! hadst thou possessed 'offspring of thine own to dally with,' thou wouldst never have made the melancholy avowal that thou hast 'almost ceased to hope!'" Lamb did not reply.

Page 33, line 7 from foot. Not childhood alone … The passage between these words and "freezing days of December" was taken by Charles Lloyd, Lamb's early friend, as the motto of a poem, in his Poems, 1823, entitled "Stanzas on the Difficulty with which, in Youth, we Bring Home to our Habitual Consciousness the Idea of Death."

Page 34, line 15 from foot. Midnight darlings. Leigh Hunt records, in his essay "My Books," that he once saw Lamb kiss an old folio—Chapman's Homer.

Page 34, line 8 from foot. "Sweet assurance of a look." A favourite quotation of Lamb's (here adapted) from Matthew Roydon's elegy on Sir Philip Sidney:—

A sweet attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks.

A portion of the poem is quoted in the Elia essay on "Some Sonnets of
Sir Philip Sidney."

Page 37. MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST.

London Magazine, February, 1821.

Mrs. Battle was probably, in real life, to a large extent Sarah Burney, the wife of Rear-Admiral James Burney, Lamb's friend, and the centre of the whist-playing set to which he belonged. The theory that Lamb's grandmother, Mrs. Field, was the original Mrs. Battle, does not, I think, commend itself, although that lady may have lent a trait or two. It has possibly arisen from the relation of the passage in the essay on Blakesware, where Mrs. Battle is said to have died in the haunted room, to that in "Dream-Children," where Lamb says that Mrs. Field occupied this room.

The fact that Mrs. Battle and Mrs. Burney were both Sarahs is a small piece of evidence towards their fusion, but there is something more conclusive in the correspondence. Writing in March, 1830, concerning the old whist days, to William Ayrton, one of the old whist-playing company, and the neighbour of the Burneys in Little James Street, Pimlico, Lamb makes use of an elision which, I think, may be taken as more than support of the theory that Mrs. Battle and Mrs. Burney were largely the same—practically proof. "Your letter, which was only not so pleasant as your appearance would have been, has revived some old images; Phillips (not the Colonel), with his few hairs bristling up at the charge of a revoke, which he declares impossible; the old Captain's significant nod over the right shoulder (was it not?); Mrs. B——'s determined questioning of the score, after the game was absolutely gone to the d——l." Lamb, I think, would have written out Mrs. Burney in full had he not wished to suggest Mrs. Battle too.

This conjecture is borne out by the testimony of the late Mrs. Lefroy, in her youth a friend of the Burneys and the Lambs, who told Canon Ainger that though Mrs. Battle had many differing points she was undoubtedly Mrs. Burney. But of course there are the usual cross-trails—the reference to the pictures at Sandham; to Walter Plumer; to the legacy to Lamb; and so forth. Perhaps among the Blakesware portraits was one which Lamb chose as Mrs. Battle's presentment; perhaps Mrs. Field had told him of an ancient dame who had certain of Mrs. Battle's characteristics, and he superimposed Mrs. Burney upon this foundation.

For further particulars concerning the Burney whist parties see the notes to the "Letter to Southey," Vol. I.

Admiral Burney (1750-1821), a son of Dr. Burney, the historian of music, and friend of Johnson and Reynolds, was the brother of Fanny Burney, afterwards Madame d'Arblay. See also "The Wedding," page 275 of this volume, for another glimpse of Lamb's old friend. Admiral Burney wrote An Essay on the Game of Whist, which was published in 1821. As he lived until November, 1821, he probably read the present essay. Writing to Wordsworth, March 20, 1822, Lamb says: "There's Capt. Burney gone!—what fun has whist now; what matters it what you lead, if you can no longer fancy him looking over you?"

Page 37, line 1 of essay. "A clean hearth." To this, in the London
Magazine, Lamb put the footnote:—

"This was before the introduction of rugs, reader. You must remember the intolerable crash of the unswept cinder, betwixt your foot and the marble."

Page 37, line 8 of essay. Win one game, and lose another. To this, in the London Magazine, Lamb put the note:—

"As if a sportsman should tell you he liked to kill a fox one day,
and lose him the next."

Page 38, line 26. Mr. Bowles. The Rev. William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), whose sonnets had so influenced Coleridge's early poetical career. His edition of Pope was published in 1806. I have tried in vain to discover if Mr. Bowles' MS. and notes for this edition are still in existence. If so, they might contain Lamb's contribution. But it is rather more likely, I fear, that Lamb invented the story. The game of ombre is in Canto III. of The Rape of the Lock.

The only writing on cards which we know Lamb to have done, apart from this essay, is the elementary rules of whist which he made out for Mrs. Badams quite late in his life as a kind of introduction to the reading of Admiral Burney's treatise. This letter is in America and has never been printed except privately; nor, if its owner can help it, will it.

Page 40, line 26. Old Walter Plumer. See the essay on "The South-Sea
House."

Page 42, line 18 from foot. Bad passions. Here came in the London Magazine, in parenthesis, "(dropping for a while the speaking mask of old Sarah Battle)."

Page 43, line 2. Bridget Elia. This is Lamb's first reference in the essays to Mary Lamb under this name. See "Mackery End" and "Old China."

A little essay on card playing in the Every-Day Book, the authorship of which is unknown, but which may be Hone's, ends with the following pleasant passage:—

Cousin Bridget and the gentle Elia seem beings of that age wherein lived Pamela, whom, with "old Sarah Battle," we may imagine entering their room, and sitting down with them to a square game. Yet Bridget and Elia live in our own times: she, full of kindness to all, and of soothings to Elia especially;—he, no less kind and consoling to Bridget, in all simplicity holding converse with the world, and, ever and anon, giving us scenes that Metzu and De Foe would admire, and portraits that Deuner and Hogarth would rise from their graves to paint.

Page 43. A CHAPTER ON EARS.

London Magazine, March, 1821.

Lamb was not so utterly without ear as he states. Crabb Robinson in his diary records more than once that Lamb hummed tunes, and Barron Field, in the memoir of Lamb contributed by him to the Annual Biography and Obituary for 1836, mentions his love for certain beautiful airs, among them Kent's "O that I had wings like a dove" (mentioned in this essay), and Handel's "From mighty kings." Lamb says that it was Braham who awakened a love of music in him. Compare Lamb's lines to Clara Novello, Vol. IV., page 101, and also Mary Lamb's postscript to his "Free Thoughts on Eminent Composers," same volume.

Page 43, foot. I was never … in the pillory. This sentence led to an amusing article in the London Magazine for the next month, April, 1821, entitled "The Confessions of H.F.V.H. Delamore, Esq.," unmistakably, I think, by Lamb, which will be found in Vol. I. of this edition, wherein Lamb confesses to a brief sojourn in the stocks at Barnet for brawling on Sunday, an incident for the broad truth of which we have the testimony of his friend Brook Pulham.

Page 44, lines 6 and 7. "Water parted from the sea," "In Infancy."
Songs by Arne in "Artaxerxes," Lamb's "First Play" (see page 113).

Page 44, line 11. Mrs. S——. The Key gives "Mrs. Spinkes." We meet a Will Weatherall in "Distant Correspondents," page 120; but I have not been able to discover more concerning either.

Page 44, line 17. Alice W——n. See note to "Dream Children."

Page 44, line 26. My friend A. Probably William Ayrton (1777-1818), the musical critic, one of the Burneys' whist-playing set, and a friend and correspondent of Lamb's. See the musical rhyming letter to him from Lamb, May 17, 1817.

Page 47, line 5. My friend, Nov——. Vincent Novello (1781-1861), the organist, the father of Mrs. Cowden Clarke, and a great friend of Lamb.

Page 47, footnote. Another friend of Vincent Novello's uses the same couplet (from Watt's Divine Songs for Children, Song XXVIII., "For the Lord's Day, Evening") in the description of glees by the old cricketers at the Bat and Ball on Broad Halfpenny Down, near Hambledon—I refer to John Nyren, author of The Young Cricketer's Tutor, 1833. There is no evidence that Lamb and Nyren ever met, but one feels that they ought to have done so, in Novello's hospitable rooms.

Page 48, line 3. Lutheran beer. Edmund Ollier, the son of Charles Ollier, the publisher of Lamb's Works, 1818, in his reminiscences of Lamb, prefixed to one edition of Elia, tells this story: "Once at a musical party at Leigh Hunt's, being oppressed with what to him was nothing but a prolonged noise … he said—'If one only had a pot of porter, one might get through this.' It was procured for him and he weathered the Mozartian storm."

In the London Magazine this essay had the following postscript:—

"P.S.—A writer, whose real name, it seems, is Boldero, but who has been entertaining the town for the last twelve months, with some very pleasant lucubrations, under the assumed signature of Leigh Hunt, in his Indicator, of the 31st January last, has thought fit to insinuate, that I Elia do not write the little sketches which bear my signature, in this Magazine; but that the true author of them is a Mr. L——b. Observe the critical period at which he has chosen to impute the calumny!—on the very eve of the publication of our last number—affording no scope for explanation for a full month—during which time, I must needs lie writhing and tossing, under the cruel imputation of nonentity.—Good heavens! that a plain man must not be allowed to be—

"They call this an age of personality: but surely this spirit of
anti-personality (if I may so express it) is something worse.

"Take away my moral reputation: I may live to discredit that
calumny.

"Injure my literary fame,—I may write that up again—

"But when a gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he?

"Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle at the best. But here is an assassin who aims at our very essence; who not only forbids us to be any longer, but to have been at all. Let our ancestors look to it—

"Is the parish register nothing? Is the house in Princes-street, Cavendish-square, where we saw the light six-and-forty years ago, nothing? Were our progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Boldero was known to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name, transplanted into England, in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing? Are the archives of the steel yard, in succeeding reigns (if haply they survive the fury of our envious enemies) showing that we flourished in prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the commonwealth, nothing?

"Why then the world, and all that's in't is nothing—
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia is nothing.—

"I am ashamed that this trifling writer should have power to move
me so."

Leigh Hunt, in The Indicator, January 31 and February 7, 1821, had reprinted from The Examiner a review of Lamb's Works, with a few prefatory remarks in which it was stated: "We believe we are taking no greater liberty with him [Charles Lamb] than our motives will warrant, when we add that he sometimes writes in the London Magazine under the signature of Elia."

In The Indicator of March 7, 1821, Leigh Hunt replied to Elia. Leigh Hunt was no match for Lamb in this kind of raillery, and the first portion of the reply is rather cumbersome. At the end, however, he says: "There was, by the bye, a family of the name of Elia who came from Italy,—Jews; which may account for this boast about Genoa. See also in his last article in the London Magazine [the essay on "Ears"] some remarkable fancies of conscience in reference to the Papal religion. They further corroborate what we have heard; viz. that the family were obliged to fly from Genoa for saying that the Pope was the author of Rabelais; and that Elia is not an anagram, as some have thought it, but the Judaico-Christian name of the writer before us, whose surname, we find, is not Lamb, but Lomb;—Elia Lomb! What a name! He told a friend of ours so in company, and would have palmed himself upon him for a Scotchman, but that his countenance betrayed him."

It is amusing to note that Maginn, writing the text to accompany the Maclise portrait of Lamb in Fraser's Magazine in 1835, gravely states that Lamb's name was really Lomb, and that he was of Jewish extraction.

The subject of Lamb's birth reopened a little while later. In the "Lion's Head," which was the title of the pages given to correspondence in the London Magazine, in the number for November, 1821, was the following short article from Lamb's pen:—

"ELIA TO HIS CORRESPONDENTS.—A Correspondent, who writes himself Peter Ball, or Bell,—for his hand-writing is as ragged as his manners—admonishes me of the old saying, that some people (under a courteous periphrasis I slur his less ceremonious epithet) had need have good memories. In my 'Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,' I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born. Bell clamours upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good identity in question, (see P.S. to my 'Chapter on Ears,') I profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my remoter origin from Italy. But who does not see, except this tinkling cymbal, that in that idle fiction of Genoese ancestry I was answering a fool according to his folly—that Elia there expresseth himself ironically, as to an approved slanderer, who hath no right to the truth, and can be no fit recipient of it? Such a one it is usual to leave to his delusions; or, leading him from error still to contradictory error, to plunge him (as we say) deeper in the mire, and give him line till he suspend himself. No understanding reader could be imposed upon by such obvious rhodomontade to suspect me for an alien, or believe me other than English.—To a second Correspondent, who signs himself 'a Wiltshire man,' and claims me for a countryman upon the strength of an equivocal phrase in my 'Christ's Hospital,' a more mannerly reply is due. Passing over the Genoese fable, which Bell makes such a ring about, he nicely detects a more subtle discrepancy, which Bell was too obtuse to strike upon. Referring to the passage (in page 484 of our second volume), I must confess, that the term 'native town,' applied to Calne, primâ facie seems to bear out the construction which my friendly Correspondent is willing to put upon it. The context too, I am afraid, a little favours it. But where the words of an author, taken literally, compared with some other passage in his writings, admitted to be authentic, involve a palpable contradiction, it hath been the custom of the ingenuous commentator to smooth the difficulty by the supposition, that in the one case an allegorical or tropical sense was chiefly intended. So by the word 'native,' I may be supposed to mean a town where I might have been born; or where it might be desirable that I should have been born, as being situate in wholesome air, upon a dry chalky soil, in which I delight; or a town, with the inhabitants of which I passed some weeks, a summer or two ago, so agreeably, that they and it became in a manner native to me. Without some such latitude of interpretation in the present case, I see not how we can avoid falling into a gross error in physics, as to conceive that a gentleman may be born in two places, from which all modern and ancient testimony is alike abhorrent. Bacchus cometh the nearest to it, whom I remember Ovid to have honoured with the epithet 'Twice born.' But not to mention that he is so called (we conceive) in reference to the places whence rather than the places where he was delivered,—for by either birth he may probably be challenged for a Theban—in a strict way of speaking, he was a filius femoris by no means in the same sense as he had been before a filius alvi, for that latter was but a secondary and tralatitious way of being born, and he but a denizen of the second house of his geniture. Thus much by way of explanation was thought due to the courteous 'Wiltshire man.'—To 'Indagator,' 'Investigator,' 'Incertus,' and the rest of the pack, that are so importunate about the true localities of his birth—as if, forsooth, Elia were presently about to be passed to his parish—to all such churchwarden critics he answereth, that, any explanation here given notwithstanding, he hath not so fixed his nativity (like a rusty vane) to one dull spot, but that, if he seeth occasion, or the argument shall demand it, he will be born again, in future papers, in whatever place, and at whatever period, shall seem good unto him.

"Modò me Thebis—modò Athenis.