Читать книгу The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb - Charles Lamb - Страница 171

Old Memorandum of the Months

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November,

All the rest have thirty and one,

Except February, which hath twenty-eight alone.

The omitted couplet runs:—

Except in Leap Year, at which time

February's days are twenty-nine.

To Lamb's protests Hone replied as follows, on May 1:—

To this correspondent it may be demurred and given in proof, that neither in February, nor at any other time in the year 1825, had he, or could he, have had existence; and that whenever he is seen, he is only an impertinence and an interpolation upon his betters. To his "floral honours" he is welcome; in the year 992, he slew St. Oswald, archbishop of York, in the midst of his monks, to whom the greater periwinkle, Vinca Major, is dedicated. For this honour our correspondent should have waited till his turn arrived for distinction. His ignorant impatience of notoriety is a mark of weakness, and indeed it is only in compassion to his infirmity that he has been condescended to; his brothers have seen more of the world, and he should have been satisfied by having been allowed to be in their company at stated times, and like all little ones, he ought to have kept respectful silence. Besides, he forgets his origin; he is illegitimate; and as a burthen to "the family," and an upstart, it has been long in contemplation to disown him, and then what will become of him? If he has done any good in the world he may have some claim upon it, but whenever he appears, he seems to throw things into confusion. His desire to alter the title of this work excites a smile—however, when he calls upon the editor he shall have justice, and be compelled to own that it is calumny to call this the Every-Day—but—one—Book.

In Vol. II. of the Every-Day Book February 29 was again omitted. He did not come to his own until the Year Book in 1831.

Page 351. II.—Captain Starkey.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., July 21, 1825. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.

On July 9 Hone gave extracts from a small pamphlet entitled Memoirs of the Life of Benj. Starkey, late of London, but now an inmate of the Freemen's Hospital, in Newcastle. Written by himself. With a portrait of the Author and a Facsimile of his handwriting. William Hall, Newcastle, 1818. This pamphlet is not interesting, except in calling forth Lamb's reminiscences.

Page 351, line 9. My sister. Mary Lamb, who was born in 1764, would probably have been at Bird's school at the time of her brother's birth. Her period there may have been 1774–1778.

Page 351, line 25. Fetter Lane. In a directory for 1773 I find William Bird, Academy, 3 Bond Stables, Fetter Lane. Bond Stables have now disappeared, although there is still the passage joining Fetter Lane and Bartlett's Buildings.

Page 354. III.—Twelfth of August.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., August 12, 1825. Not reprinted by Lamb.

While George IV., who was born on August 12, 1762, was Prince of Wales, a very long period, his birthday was kept on its true date. But after his accession to the throne in 1820 his birthday was kept on April 23, St. George's Day. Hence Lamb's protest. This is probably the only kind reference to George IV. in all Lamb's writings.

Lamb already (Morning Post, 1802, see page 44, and London Magazine, 1823) had rehearsed the theme both of this letter and of that on the "Twenty-ninth of February." In his "Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age" the forlorn condition of February 29 is more than once mentioned, while the grievance of August 12 against April 23 is thus described:—

"The King's health being called for after this, a notable dispute arose between the Twelfth of August (a jealous old Whig gentlewoman) and the Twenty-Third of April (a new-fangled lady of the Tory stamp) as to which of them should have the honour to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter, affirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to have lain with her, till her rival had basely supplanted her; whom she represented as little better than a kept mistress, who went about in fine clothes, while she (the legitimate Birthday) had scarcely a rag, &c."

Page 354, line 4 of letter. Poor relative of ours. February 29 (see page 349).

Page 355, line 11. George of Cappadocia, etc. George of Cappadocia was a Bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century, murdered by the populace. There was once a tendency to confuse him with St. George of England. George of Leyden was probably a slip of the pen for John of Leyden, the Anabaptist of Münster. George-a-Green, the hero of the History of George-a-Green, the Pindar of Wakefield, the stoutest opponent that Robin Hood ever met. The story was dramatised in a play attributed to Robert Green. George Dyer was Lamb's friend.

Page 355, line 15. Dismission of a set of men. Referring to the King's overthrow of the Whigs in the Caroline of Brunswick ferment.

To Lamb's letter Hone printed a clever reply.

Page 356. IV.—The Ass.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., October 5, 1825. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.

The germ of this paper is found in a letter from Lamb to John Payne Collier in 1821 thanking him for the gift of his Poetical Decameron. After quoting the three lines also quoted in this essay, Lamb remarks, in the letter, "Cervantes, Sterne, and Coleridge, have said positively nothing for asses compared with this."

The immediate cause of the communication to the Every-Day Book was a previous article in praise of asses. Hone prefixed to Lamb's paper the following remarks: "The cantering of Tim Tims [who had written of asses on September 19] startles him who told of his 'youthful days,' at the school wherein poor 'Starkey' cyphered part of his little life. C. L., 'getting well, but weak' from painful and severe indisposition, is 'off and away' for a short discursion. Better health to him, and good be to him all his life. Here he is."

Lamb wrote to Hone in humorous protest against the implication of the phrase "Here he is," immediately above the title "The Ass." "My friends are fairly surprised [he said] that you should set me down so unequivocally for an ass. … Call you that friendship?"

Page 356, foot. "Between the years 1790 and 1800." This passage refers to an article in a previous issue of the Every-Day Book (see Vol. I., September 19) on cruelty to animals, where we read:—

Legislative discussion and interference have raised a feeling of kindness towards the brute creation which slumbered and slept in our forefathers. Formerly, the costermonger was accustomed to make wounds for the express purpose of producing torture. He prepared to drive an ass, that had not been driven, with his knife. On each side of the back bone, at the lower end, just above the tail, he made an incision of two or three inches in length through the skin, and beat into these incisions with his stick till they became open wounds, and so remained, while the ass lived to be driven to and from market, or through the streets of the metropolis. A costermonger, now, would shrink from this, which was a common practice between the years 1790 and 1800.

Page 357, line 9. "Lay on," etc. Anaxarchus, the philosopher, having offended Alexander the Great, was pounded in a stone mortar. During the process he exclaimed: "Pound the body of Anaxarchus; thou dost not pound the soul." Lamb proposed to use the phrase "You beat but on the case of Elia" in the preface to the Essays of Elia as a monition to adverse critics, but he changed his mind.

Page 358, foot. Jem Boyer. See the Elia essay on "Christ's Hospital" in Vol. II. (page 22), and notes to same. "As in præsenti perfectum format in avi"—"as in the present tense makes avi in the perfect"—was the first of the mnemonic rules for the formation of verbs in the old Latin primer (see the old Eton Latin Grammar). Lamb himself makes the pun in a letter to Mrs. Shelley in 1827.

Page 359. V.—In Re Squirrels.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. I., October 18, 1825. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.

On October 7 Hone had reprinted a letter on squirrels from the Gentleman's Magazine. Lamb's postscript to that letter, as this little communication may be called, was thus introduced:—

"Be it remembered, that C. L. comes here and represents his relations, that is to say, on behalf of the recollections, being the next of kin, of him, the said C. L., and of sundry persons who are 'aye treading' in the manner of squirrels aforesaid; and thus he saith:—"

Page 359, line 12. Mr. Urban's correspondent. Mr. Urban—Sylvanus Urban—the dynastic name of the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. "I know not," says the correspondent, "whether any naturalist has observed that their [squirrels'] teeth are of a deep orange colour."

Page 359, line 22. The author of the "Task" somewhere …

The squirrel, flippant, pert, and full of play,

He sees me, and at once, swift as a bird,

Ascends the neighb'ring beech; there whisks his brush,

And perks his ears, and stamps and scolds aloud,

With all the prettiness of feigned alarm,

And anger insignificantly fierce.

Cowper, The Task, Book VI., "The Winter's Walk at Noon," lines 315–320.

Page 359, foot. As for their "six quavers," etc. The writer in the Gentleman's Magazine describes his squirrels as dancing in their cages to exact time.

Page 359, foot. Along with the "melodious," etc. Referring to the preceding essay, "The Ass."

Page 360. VI.—An Appearance of the Season.

Every-Day Book, Vol. II., January 28, 1826. /a>Not reprinted by Lamb.

We know this to be Lamb's because the original copy was preserved at Rowfant, together with that of many other of Lamb's contributions to Hone's books.

The article in the London Magazine for December, 1822, to which Lamb refers, is entitled "A Few Words about Christmas." It is one of the best of the imitations of Lamb, of which there are many in that periodical, and was possibly from Hood's pen. A full description of Hood's "Progress of Cant" follows Lamb's little paper in the Every-Day Book, probably written by Hone. See page 431.

The motto under the Beadle's picture is from "Lear," Act IV., Scene 6, line 162.

Page 360, line 6 of essay. Within the bills. Within the bills of mortality. Geographically speaking, the phrase "within the bills" was the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth century counterpart of our phrase "within the radius." But the associations of the two terms are very different. The bills were the Bills of Mortality, or lists of deaths (also births) drawn up by the Parish Clerks of London and published by them on Thursdays. Devised as a means of publishing the increase or decrease of the ever-recurrent Plague, the bills were begun in 1592, were resumed during a visitation in 1603, and from that year, except for some interruption at the time of the Great Fire, they appeared week by week, until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Page 361. VII.—The Months.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. II., April 16, 1826. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb. I have collated the extracts with Lamb's edition of The Queene-like Closet.

Hone's prefixed note runs: "C. L., whose papers under these initials on 'Captain Starkey,' 'The Ass, No. 2,' and 'Squirrels,' besides other communications, are in the first volume, drops the following pleasant article 'in an hour of need.'"

Mrs. Hannah Woolley, afterwards Mrs. Challinor, was born about 1623. The first edition of The Queene-like Closet was 1672; she wrote also, or is supposed to have written, The Ladies' Directory, or Choice Experiments of Preserving and Candying, 1661; The Cook's Guide, 1664; The Ladies' Delight, 1672; The Gentlewoman's Companion, 1675.

Page 365, line 3. I remember Bacon … This possibly is the passage referred to:—

Neither let us be thought to sacrifice to our mother the earth, though we advise, that in digging or ploughing the earth for health, a quantity of claret wine be poured thereon (History of Life and Death, Operation 5, No. 33).

Page 365, last line of essay. Surely Swift must have seen … Swift's Directions to Servants was published in 1745, after the author's death.

Page 366. VIII.—Reminiscence of Sir Jeffery Dunstan.

Hone's Every-Day Book, Vol. II., June 22, 1826. Signed "C. L." Not reprinted by Lamb.

The following account of the Garrat election was given in Sir Richard Phillips' A Morning's Walk from London to Kew, 1817, quoted by Hone:—

Southward of Wandsworth, a road extends nearly two miles to the village of Lower Tooting, and nearly midway are a few houses, or hamlet, by the side of a small common, called Garrat, from which the road itself is called Garrat Lane. Various encroachments on this common led to an association of the neighbours about three-score years since, when they chose a president, or mayor, to protect their rights; and the time of their first election being the period of a new parliament, it was agreed that the mayor should be re-chosen after every general election. Some facetious members of the club gave, in a few years, local notoriety to this election; and, when party spirit ran high in the days of Wilkes and Liberty, it was easy to create an appetite for a burlesque election among the lower orders of the Metropolis. The publicans at Wandsworth, Tooting, Battersea, Clapham, and Vauxhall, made a purse to give it character; and Mr. Foote rendered its interest universal, by calling one of his inimitable farces "The Mayor of Garrat."

In 1826, the year of Hone's literary outburst on the subject, which should be referred to by any one curious in the matter, an attempt was made to revive the Garrat humours; but it was too late for success; the joke was dead.

Dunstan was a stunted, quick-witted and quick-tongued dealer in old wigs—a well-known street and tavern figure in his day. He contested Garrat in 1781 against "Sir" John Harper ("who made an oath against work in his youth and was never known to break it"). Sir John then won. Dunstan's speech is quoted in full by Hone from an old broadside. "Gentlemen," he said, "as I am not an orator or personable man, be assured I am an honest member." When Harper died in 1785 Sir Jeffery was returned, as many as 50,000 people attending the election. Dunstan used to recite his speeches in public-houses, where collections were made for him; but this means of livelihood was impaired by the loss of his teeth, which he sold one night for ten shillings and a sufficiency of liquor to some merry London Hospital students. He died in 1797 when Lamb was twenty-two.

Page 366, line 5 of essay. About 1790 or 1791. Lamb was at the South-Sea House.

Page 367, line 27. Dr. Last. In Samuel Foote's play, "The Devil on Two Sticks," 1778.

Page 367, foot. My Lord Foppington. Lord Foppington in "The Relapse," by Congreve. Foppington remarks: "To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own." Lamb uses the same speech for the motto of his "Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading."

Page 368. IX.—Mrs. Gilpin Riding To Edmonton.

Hone's Table Book, Vol. II., columns 79–81, 1827. Not reprinted by Lamb.

We know Lamb to have written this, from the evidence of an unpublished letter and the original "copy" and picture, once preserved at Rowfant. Lamb's letter to Hone, enclosing Hood's drawing, runs thus:—

[No date: early July, 1827.]

"Dear H.,

"This is Hood's, done from the life, of Mary getting over a style here. Mary, out of a pleasant revenge, wants you to get it engrav'd in Table Book to surprise H., who I know will be amus'd with you so doing.

"Append some observations about the awkwardness of country styles about Edmonton, and the difficulty of elderly Ladies getting over 'em.——

"That is to say, if you think the sketch good enough.

"I take on myself the warranty.

"Can you slip down here some day and go a Green-dragoning?

"C. L.

"Enfield (Mrs. Leishman's, Chase).

"If you do, send Hood the number, No. 2 Robert St., Adelphi, and keep the sketch for me."

Lamb subsequently appended the observations himself. The text of his little article, changing Mary Lamb into Mrs. Gilpin, followed in Mr. Locker-Lampson's album. The postmark is July 17, 1827.

Lamb was fond of jokes about styles. Writing to Dodwell, of the India House, from Calne, in the summer of 1816, he said, after dating his letter old style: "No new style here, all the styles are old, and some of the gates too for that matter."

Page 369. X.—The Defeat of Time.

Hone's Table Book, Vol. II., columns 335–340, 1827. Not reprinted by Lamb.

In 1827 was published Thomas Hood's poem, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, with the following dedication to Lamb:—

To Charles Lamb

My Dear Friend,

I thank my literary fortune that I am not reduced, like many better wits, to barter dedications, for the hope or promise of patronage, with some nominally great man; but that where true affection points, and honest respect, I am free to gratify my head and heart by a sincere inscription. An intimacy and dearness, worthy of a much earlier date than our acquaintance can refer to, direct me at once to your name: and with this acknowledgment of your ever kind feeling towards me, I desire to record a respect and admiration for you as a writer, which no one acquainted with our literature, save Elia himself, will think disproportionate or misplaced. If I had not these better reasons to govern me, I should be guided to the same selection by your intense yet critical relish for the works of our great Dramatist, and for that favourite play in particular which has furnished the subject of my verses.

It is my design, in the following Poem, to celebrate an allegory, that immortality which Shakespeare has conferred on the Fairy mythology by his Midsummer Night's Dream. But for him, those pretty children of our childhood would leave barely their names to our maturer years; they belong, as the mites upon the plum, to the bloom of fancy, a thing generally too frail and beautiful to withstand the rude handling of Time: but the Poet has made this most perishable part of the mind's creation equal to the most enduring; he has so intertwined the Elfins with human sympathies, and linked them by so many delightful associations with the productions of nature, that they are as real to the mind's eye, as their green magical circles to the outer sense.

It would have been a pity for such a race to go extinct, even though they were but as the butterflies that hover about the leaves and blossoms of the visible world.

I am,

My dear Friend,

Yours most truly,

T. Hood.

Lamb's "Defeat of Time" is a paraphrase of the first part of Hood's poem.

Page 371, line 10. "In the flowery spring," etc. From Chapman's Translation of Homer's "Hymn to Pan," 31–33.

Page 373, line 15 from foot. Sir Thomas Gresham. It is told of Sir Thomas Gresham (1519?-1579), the founder of the Royal Exchange, that as a baby his life was saved by the chirping of a grasshopper, as related here. But cold veracity says not. The legend seems to have had its origin in the grasshopper crest of the Greshams, but it has been found that this crest was worn by an ancestor of Sir Thomas's who lived a hundred years earlier.

Page 375. An Autobiographical Sketch.

Lamb wrote this little sketch for William Upcott (1779–1845), the autograph collector and assistant librarian of the London Institution. Upcott permitted John Forster to quote it in the New Monthly Magazine for April, 1835, shortly after Lamb's death. It is here printed from the original MS. in the possession of Mr. B. B. MacGeorge, of Glasgow, contained in a MS. volume entitled "Reliques of my Contemporaries. William Upcott." Whether or no Lamb ever caught a swallow flying is not known; but everything else in the autobiography is true. The reference to Mr. Upcott's book may be to the album in which this sketch was written, or to a new edition of the Biographical Dictionary of Living Authors, published in 1816, in which Upcott is supposed to have had a hand. I cannot discover whether a second edition of this work was published. There is none at the British Museum, nor at the London Institution, of which Upcott was librarian. In the first edition, A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland … 1816, Lamb figures thus:—

"Lamb, Charles, was born in London, in 1775, and educated at Christ's Hospital. He is at present a clerk in the India House, and has published [a list of six books follows] … "

"Lamb, Miss, sister of the preceding, has published Mrs. Leicester's School, 12mo, 1808; Poetry for Children, 2 vs., 12mo, 1809."

Upcott is not considered to have done more than to collect some of the materials for the Dictionary, which was the work of John Watkins and Frederick Shoberl.

Lamb's sense of time was never good: the Elia essays were published in 1823 and the Specimens in 1808, fully four years and nineteen years before the date of this autobiography. The joke about the Works will be found also in the original version of the "Character of the Late Elia."

Page 376. Shakespeare's Improvers.

The Spectator, November 22, 1828. Not reprinted by Lamb.

This letter was drawn forth by some remarks on the spurious version of "King Lear," which was then being played; or, as The Spectator phrased it, "Shakespeare murdered by Nahum Tate—Covent Garden aiding and abetting." See page 383 for another letter to the same paper. See also the essay on "Shakespeare's Tragedies," 1810, for a first idea of the indictment now more fully drawn up.

Page 376, line 2 of letter. Tate's "King Lear." Nahum Tate (1652–1715), Poet Laureate, was the author, with Nicholas Brady (1659–1726), of the rhymed version of the Psalms which bears their names, 1696, a rival of the version of 1549 by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins. He also wrote verses and plays, original and doctored. His version of "King Lear"—"The History of King Lear"—was produced in 1681. Therein Cordelia and Edgar are at the outset shown to be in love. After the usual frustrations they are united at the close, and Lear, who does not die, pronounces his blessing over them. Cordelia thus addresses Edgar in the first act:—

When, Edgar, I permitted your addresses,

I was the darling daughter of a king,

Nor can I now forget my royal birth,

And live dependent on my lover's fortune.

I cannot to so low a fate submit,

And therefore study to forget your passions,

And trouble me upon this theme no more.

Tate also rewrote "Richard II." and Webster's "White Devil."

Page 376, foot. "Coriolanus." Lamb refers to Tate's play, "The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth," produced in 1682. Aufidius threatens to violate only Virgilia:—

For soon as I've secur'd my rival's life,

All stain'd i' th' husband's blood, I'll force the wife.—

She stabs herself rather than be dishonoured; and it is Nigridius who mangles, gashes, racks and distorts the little son of Coriolanus.

Page 377, line 3. Shadwell. The version of "Timon of Athens," by Thomas Shadwell (1642?-1692), Poet Laureate, is "The History of Timon of Athens, the Man Hater," produced at the Dorset Garden Theatre in 1678. Timon's last words are:—

Timon. I charge thee live, Evandra. Thou lov'st me not if thou wilt not obey me; Thou only! Dearest! Kind! Constant thing on earth, Farewell.

Dies.

Evandra. He's gone! he's gone! would all the world were so. I must make haste, or I shall not o'ertake Him in his flight. Timon, I come, stay for me, Farewell, base world.

Stabs herself. Dies.

Evandra was played not only by Mrs. Betterton, but also by Mrs. Bracegirdle.

Page 377, foot. "Macbeth." The new version of "Macbeth" was probably by Sir William Davenant (1606–1668). There is an edition as early as 1673.

Macduff's chariot is greatly insisted upon. His servant remarks in the same scene:—

This is the entrance o' th' Heath; and here

He order'd me to attend him with the chariot,

and a little later, to Macduff's question, "Where are our children?" Lady Macduff replies:—

They are securely sleeping in the chariot.

Lady Macbeth's final repentance leads her to address her husband thus:—

You may in peace resign the ill-gain'd crown.

Why should you labour still to be unjust?

There has been too much blood already spilt.

Make not the subjects victims to your guilt.

resign your kingdom now,

And with your crown put off your guilt.

Page 379. Saturday Night.

The Gem, 1830. Signed "Nepos." Not reprinted by Lamb.

This little essay was written to accompany an engraving of Wilkie's picture with the same title. Whether Lamb's grandmother was as he has recorded we cannot know; his reminiscences of her in "Dream Children" and "The Grandam" are very different. That was Mrs. Field; Lamb, I think, never knew a paternal grandmother. The recollection of the fly in the eye seems to have an authentic air.

Page 380, line 9. Burking. After Burke and Hare, who suffocated their victims and sold them to the hospitals for dissection. Burke was executed in January, 1829.

Page 381. Estimate of De Foe's Secondary Novels.

This criticism was written for Wilson's Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel de Foe, 1830. It will be found on page 636 of the third of Wilson's volumes. Lamb never reprinted it.

Walter Wilson (1781–1847) had been a bookseller, and a fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the India House. Later he entered at the Inner Temple. In addition to his work on De Foe, he wrote The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches in London, Westminster and Southwark, including the Lives of their Ministers, a work in four volumes. Lamb, as his Letters tell us, helped Wilson with advice concerning De Foe. He also seems to have wished the "Ode to the Treadmill" to be included; but it was not.

This criticism of the Secondary Novels is usually preceded in the editions of Lamb's works by the following remarks contained in Lamb's letter to Wilson of December 16, 1822, which Wilson printed as page 428 of Vol. III., but they do not rightly form part of the article, which Lamb wrote seven years later, in 1829. I quote from the original MS. in the Bodleian:—

"In the appearance of truth, in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The Author never appears in these self-narratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather Autobiographies) but the Narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in every thing he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot chuse but believe them. It is like reading Evidence given in a Court of Justice. So anxious the storyteller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact, or a motive, in a line or two farther down he repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I say,' so and so—though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something upon their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed it is to such principally that he writes. His style is elsewhere beautiful, but plain and homely. Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes, but it is easy to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower conditions of readers; hence it is an especial favourite with sea-faring men, poor boys, servant-maids, &c. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while they are worthy from their deep interest to find a shelf in the Libraries of the wealthiest, and the most learned. His passion for matter-of-fact narrative, sometimes betrayed him into a long relation of common incidents which might happen to any man, and have no interest but the intense appearance of truth in them, to recommend them. The whole latter half, or two thirds, of Colonel Jack is of this description. The beginning of Colonel Jack is the most affecting natural picture of a young thief that was ever drawn. His losing the stolen money in the hollow of a tree, and finding it again when in despair, and then being in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and several similar touches in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep knowledge of human nature; and, putting out of question the superior romantic interest of the latter, in my mind very much exceed Crusoe. Roxana (1st edition) is the next in Interest, though he left out the best part of it [in] subsequent Editions, from a foolish hyper criticism of his friend Southerne. But Moll Flanders, the account of the Plague, &c. &c. are all of one family, and have the same stamp of character."

One point in this 1822 criticism requires notice—that touching the first edition of Roxana. According to a letter from Lamb to Wilson, Lamb considered the curiosity of Roxana's daughter to be the best part of Roxana. But the episode of the daughter does not come into the first edition of the book (1724) at all, and is thought by some critics not to be De Foe's. Mr. Aitken, De Foe's latest editor, doubts the Southerne story altogether. In any case, Lamb was wrong in recommending the first edition for its completeness, for the later ones are fuller. It was upon the episode of Susannah that Godwin based his play, "Faulkener," for which Lamb wrote a prologue in praise of De Foe. Godwin's preface stated that the only edition of Roxana then available—in 1807—in which to find the full story of Roxana's daughter, was that of 1745. Godwin turned the avenging daughter into a son.

Writing to Wilson on the publication of his Memoirs of De Foe, Lamb says: "The two papers of mine will puzzle the reader, being so akin. Odd, that never keeping a scrap of my own letters, with some fifteen years' interval I should have nearly said the same things." (According to the dating of the letters the interval was not fifteen years, but seven.) Lamb also remarks, "De Foe was always my darling."

For a further criticism of De Foe see "The Good Clerk," page 148 of the present volume, and the notes to the same.

In introducing the criticism of the Secondary Novels, Wilson wrote:—