Volume 2 — THE LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA (continued 2)
Reading edition
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Page 279. A DEATH-BED.
Hone's Table Book, Vol. I., cols. 425-426, 1827. Signed "L.," and dated London, February 10, 1827. The essay is very slightly altered from a letter written by Lamb to Crabb Robinson, January 20, 1827, describing the death of Randal Morris. It was printed in the first edition only of the Last Essays of Elia; its place being taken afterwards by the "Confessions of a Drunkard," an odd exchange. The essay was omitted, in deference, it is believed, to the objection of Mrs. Norris to her reduced circumstances being made public. As the present edition adheres to the text of the first edition, "The Death-Bed" is included in its original place as decided by the author. The "Confessions of a Drunkard" will be found in Vol. I.
Randal Norris was for many years sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple (see postscript to the essay on the "Old Benchers"). Writing to Wordsworth in 1830 Lamb spoke of him as "sixty years ours and our father's friend." An attempt has been made to identify him with the Mr. Norris of Christ's Hospital who was so kind to the Lambs after the tragedy of September, 1796. I cannot find any trace of Randal Norris having been connected with anything but the law and the Inner Temple; but possibly the Mr. Norris of the school was a relative.
Mrs. Randal Norris was connected with Widford, the village adjoining Blakesware, where she had known Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother. It was thither that she and her son retired after Randal Norris's death, to join her daughters, Miss Betsy and Miss Jane, who had a school for girls known as Goddard House School. Lamb kept up his friendship with them to the end, and they corresponded with Mary Lamb after his death. Mrs. Norris died in 1843, aged seventy-eight, and was buried at Widford. The grave of Richard Norris, the son, is also there. He died in 1836. One of the daughters, Elizabeth, married Charles Tween, of Widford, and lived until 1894. The other daughter, Jane, married Arthur Tween, his brother, and lived until 1891.
Mary Lamb was a bridesmaid at the Norris's wedding and after the ceremony accompanied the bride and bridegroom to Richmond for the day. So one of their daughters told Canon Ainger.
Crabb Robinson seems to have exerted himself for the family, as Lamb wished. Mr. W.C. Hazlitt says that an annuity of £80 was settled upon Mrs. Norris.
Page 279, last line. To the last he called me Jemmy. In the letter to Crabb Robinson—"To the last he called me Charley. I have none to call me Charley now."
Page 280, line 2. That bound me to B——. In the letter to Crabb Robinson—"that bound me to the Temple."
Page 280, line 14. Your Corporation Library. In the letter—"The Temple Library."
Page 280, line 19. He had one Song. Garrick's "Hearts of Oak."
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Page 281. OLD CHINA.
London Magazine, March, 1823.
This essay forms a pendant, or complement, to "Mackery End in Hertfordshire," completing the portrait of Mary Lamb begun there. It was, with "The Wedding," Wordsworth's favourite among the Last Essays.
Page 282, line 23. The brown suit. P.G. Patmore, in his recollections of Lamb in the Court Journal, 1835, afterwards reprinted, with some alterations, in his My Friends and Acquaintances, stated that Lamb laid aside his snuff-coloured suit in favour of black, after twenty years of the India House; and he suggests that Wordsworth's stanzas in "A Poet's Epitaph" was the cause:—
But who is he, with modest looks, And clad in homely russet brown? He murmurs near the running brooks A music sweeter than their own.
He is retired as noontide dew, Or fountain in a noon-day grove; And you must love him, ere to you He will seem worthy of your love.
Whatever Patmore's theory may be worth, it is certain that Lamb adhered to black after the change.
Page 282, line 25. Beaumont and Fletcher. See note to "Books and Reading."
Page 282, line 27. Barker's. Barker's old book-shop was at No. 20 Great Russell Street, over which the Lambs went to live in 1817. It had then, however, become Mr. Owen's, a brazier's (Wheatley's London Past and Present gives Barker's as 19, but a contemporary directory says 20). Great Russell Street is now Russell Street.
Page 282, line 30. From Islington. This would be when Lamb and his sister lived at 36 Chapel Street, Pentonville, a stone's throw from the Islington boundary, in 1799-1800, after the death of their father.
Page 283, line 11. The "Lady Blanch." See Mary Lamb's poem on this picture, Vol. IV. and note.
Page 283, line 15. Colnaghi's. Colnaghi, the printseller, then in Cockspur Street, now Pall Mall East. After this word came in the London Magazine "(as W—— calls it)." The reference, Mr. Rogers Rees tells me, is to Wainewright's article "C. van Vinkbooms, his Dogmas for Dilletanti," in the same magazine for December, 1821, where he wrote: "I advise Colnaghi and Molteno to import a few impressions immediately of those beautiful plates from Da Vinci. The … and Miss Lamb's favourite, 'Lady Blanche and the Abbess,' commonly called 'Vanitas et Modestia' (Campanella, los. ed.), for I foresee that this Dogma will occasion a considerable call for them—let them, therefore, be ready."
Page 283, line 5 from foot. To see a play. "The Battle of Hexham" and "The Surrender of Calais" were by George Colman the Younger; "The Children in the Wood," a favourite play of Lamb's, especially with Miss Kelly in it, was by Thomas Morton. Mrs. Bland was Maria Theresa Bland, née Romanzini, 1769-1838, who married Mrs. Jordan's brother. Jack Bannister we have met, in "The Old Actors."
Page 286, line 12. The Great yew R——. This would be Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836), the founder of the English branch of the family and the greatest financier of modern times.
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Page 286. POPULAR FALLACIES.
This series of little essays was printed in the New Monthly Magazine in 1826, beginning in January. The order of publication there was not the same as that in the Last Essays of Elia; one of the papers, "That a Deformed Person is a Lord," was not reprinted by Lamb at all (it will be found in Vol. I. of this edition); and two others were converted into separate essays (see "The Sanity of True Genius" and "The Genteel Style in Writing").
After Lamb's death a new series of Popular Fallacies was contributed to the New Monthly Magazine by L.B. (Laman Blanchard) in 1835, preceded by an invocation to the spirit of Charles Lamb.
Page 286. I.—THAT A BULLY is ALWAYS A COWARD.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.
Page 287, line 1. Hickman. This would be Tom Hickman, the pugilist. In Hazlitt's fine account of "The Fight," Hickman or the Gas-Man, "vapoured and swaggered too much, as if he wanted to grin and bully his adversary out of the fight." And again, "'This is the grave digger' (would Tom Hickman exclaim in the moments of intoxication from gin and success, showing his tremendous right hand); 'this will send many of them to their long homes; I haven't done with them yet.'" But he went under to Neale, of Bristol, on the great day that Hazlitt describes.
Page 287, line 2. Him of Clarissa. Mr. Hickman, in Richardson's novel Clarissa, the lover of Miss Bayes.
Page 287. II.—THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.
Page 287. III.—THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.
Page 288, line 12. In Mandeville. In Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, a favourite book of Lamb's. See Vol. I., note to "The Good Clerk."
Page 288. IV.—THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING, ETC.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.
Page 288. V.—THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.
Page 290. VI.—THAT ENOUGH is AS GOOD AS A FEAST.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.
Page 291. VII.—OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN THE WRONG.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.
Page 291, line 4 from foot. Little Titubus. I do not know who this was, if any more than an abstraction; but it should be remembered that Lamb himself stammered.
Page 292. VIII.—THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, ETC.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.
Page 292. IX.—THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST.
New Monthly Magazine, January, 1826.
Compare the reflections on puns in the essay on "Distant Correspondents." Compare also the review of Hood's Odes and Addresses (Vol. I.). Cary's account of a punning contest after Lamb's own heart makes the company vie with each in puns on the names of herbs. After anise, mint and other words had been ingeniously perverted Lamb's own turn, the last, was reached, and it seemed impossible that anything was left for him. He hesitated. "Now then, let us have it," cried the others, all expectant. "Patience," he replied; "it's c-c-cumin."
Page 293, line 18. One of Swift's Miscellanies. This joke, often attributed to Lamb himself, will be found in Ars Punica, sine flos Linguarum, The Art of Punning; or, The Flower of Languages, by Dr. Sheridan and Swift, which will be found in Vol. XIII. of Scott's edition of Swift. Among the directions to the punster is this:—
Rule 3. The Brazen Rule. He must have better assurance, like Brigadier C——, who said, "That, as he was passing through a street, he made to a country fellow who had a hare swinging on a stick over his shoulder, and, giving it a shake, asked him whether it was his own hair or a periwig!" Whereas it is a notorious Oxford jest.
Page 294, line 8. Virgil … broken Cremona. Swift (as Lamb explained in the original essay in the New Monthly Magazine), seeing a lady's mantua overturning a violin (possibly a Cremona), quoted Virgil's line: "Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremonæ!" (Eclogues, IX., 28), "Mantua, alas! too near unhappy Cremona."
Page 294. X.—THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES.
New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826.
Whether a Mrs. Conrady existed, or was invented or adapted by Lamb to prove his point, I have not been able to discover. But the evidence of Lamb's "reverence for the sex," to use Procter's phrase, is against her existence. The Athenæum reviewer on February 16, 1833, says, however, quoting the fallacy: "Here is a portrait of Mrs. Conrady. We agree with the writer that 'no one that has looked on her can pretend to forget the lady.'" The point ought to be cleared up.
Page 296. XI.—THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT-HORSE IN THE MOUTH.
New Monthly Magazine, April, 1826.
Page 297, line 13. Our friend Mitis. I do not identify Mitis among Lamb's many friends.
Page 297, line 11 from foot. Presentation copies. The late Mr. Thomas Westwood, the son of the Westwoods with whom the Lambs lived at Edmonton, writing to Notes and Queries some thirty-five years ago, gave an amusing account of Lamb pitching presentation copies out of the window into the garden—a Barry Cornwall, a Bernard Barton, a Leigh Hunt, and so forth. Page 298, line 6. Odd presents of game. Compare the little essay on "Presents of Game," Vol. I.
Page 298. XII.—THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY.
New Monthly Magazine, March, 1826. In that place the first sentence began with the word "Two;" the second ended with "of our assertions;" and (fourteenth line of essay) it was said of the very poor man that he "can ask" no visitors. Lamb, in a letter, wished Wordsworth particularly to like this fallacy and that on rising with the lark.
Page 300, line 9. It has been prettily said. By Lamb himself, or more probably by his sister, in Poetry for Children, 1809. See "The First Tooth," Vol. III., which ends upon the line
A child is fed with milk and praise.
Page 301, line 3. There is yet another home. Writing to Mrs. Wordsworth on February 18, 1818, Lamb gives a painful account, very similar in part to this essay, of the homeless home to which he was reduced by visitors. But by the time he wrote the essay, when all his day was his own, the trouble was not acute. He tells Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, "My tirade against visitors was not meant particularly at you or A.K. I scarce know what I meant, for I do not just now feel the grievance. I wanted to make an article." Compare the first of the "Lepus" papers in Vol. I.
Page 301, line 20. It is the refreshing sleep of the day. After this sentence, in the magazine, came this passage:—
"O the comfort of sitting down heartily to an old folio, and thinking surely that the next hour or two will be your own—and the misery of being defeated by the useless call of somebody, who is come to tell you, that he is just come from hearing Mr. Irving! What is that to you? Let him go home, and digest what the good man said to him. You are at your chapel, in your oratory."
Mr. Irving was the Rev. Edward Irving (1792-1834), whom Lamb knew slightly and came greatly to admire.
Page 302. XIII.—THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MY DOG.
New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826.
Compare "A Bachelor's Complaint." I cannot identify the particular friend whom Lamb has hidden under asterisks; although his cousin would seem to have some likeness to one of the Bethams mentioned in the essay "Many Friends" (Vol. I.), and in the letter to Landor of October, 1832 (usually dated April), after his visit to the Lambs.
Page 304, line 15. Honorius dismiss his vapid wife. Writing to Bernard Barton on March 20, 1826, Lamb says:—"In another thing I talkd of somebody's insipid wife, without a correspondent object in my head: and a good lady, a friend's wife, whom I really love (don't startle, I mean in a licit way) has looked shyly on me ever since. The blunders of personal application are numerous. I send out a character every now and then, on purpose to exercise the ingenuity of my friends."
Page 304, line 11 from foot. Merry, of Delia Cruscan memory. Robert Merry (1755-1798), an affected versifier who settled in Florence as a young man, and contributed to the Florence Miscellany. He became a member of the Delia Cruscan Academy, and on returning to England signed his verses, in The World, "Delia Crusca." A reply to his first effusion, "Adieu and Recall to Love," was written by Mrs. Hannah Cowley, author of The Belle's Stratagem, and signed "Anna Matilda;" this correspondence continued; a fashion of sentiment was thus started; and for a while Delia Cruscan poetry was the rage. The principal Delia Cruscan poems were published in the British Album in 1789, and the collection was popular until Gifford's Baviad (followed by his Mæviad) appeared in 1791, and satirised its conceits so mercilessly that the school collapsed. A meeting with Anna Matilda in the flesh and the discovery that she was twelve years his senior had, however, put an end to Merry's enthusiasm long before Gifford's attack. Merry afterwards threw in his lot with the French Revolution, and died in America. He married, as Lamb says, Elizabeth Brunton, an excellent tragic actress, in 1791. But that was in England. The journey to America came later.
The story of Merry's avoidance of the lady of his first choice is probably true. Carlo Antonio Delpini was a famous pantomimist in his day at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and the Haymarket. He also was stage manager at the Opera for a while, and occasionally arranged entertainments for George IV. at Brighton. He died in 1828.
Page 305. XIV.—THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK.
New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826.
Compare "The Superannuated Man," to which this little essay, which, with that following, is one of Lamb's most characteristic and perfect works, serves as a kind of postscript.
Page 308. XV.—THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB.
New Monthly Magazine, February, 1826.
Page 309. XVI.—THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE.
New Monthly Magazine, September, 1826.
This was the last of the series and Lamb's last contribution to the New Monthly Magazine.