Читать книгу The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb - Charles Lamb - Страница 172

It may call for some surprise that De Foe should be so little known as a novelist, beyond the range of "Robinson Crusoe." To recall the attention of the public to his other fictions, the present writer is happy to enrich his work with some original remarks upon his secondary novels by his early friend, Charles Lamb, whose competency to form an accurate judgment upon the subject, no one will doubt who is acquainted with his genius.

Page 382, foot. Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us. … Referring to Coleridge's remarks, see the Biographia Literaria, Vol. II., chapter iv.

Page 383, line 8. An ingenious critic. Lamb himself, in the 1822 criticism quoted above.

Page 383. Clarence Songs.

The Spectator, July 24, 1830.

Concerning Lamb's theory that "Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill" was written upon Prince William, the editor of The Spectator remarks that it had reference to George IV.—a monarch upon whom Lamb himself had done his share of rhyming. Lamb was at Christ's Hospital from 1782–1789. Prince William, who was born in 1765, became a midshipman in 1779. His promotion to lieutenant came in 1785, and to captain in the following year. The ballad to which Lamb refers is called "Duke William's Frolic." It relates how Duke William and a nobleman, dressing themselves like sailors, repaired to an inn to drink. While there the Press gang came; the Duke was said to have been impudent to the lieutenant and was condemned to be flogged. The ballad (as given in Mr. John Ashton's Modern Street Ballads, 1888) ends:—

Then instantly the boatswain's mate began for to undress him,

But, presently, he did espy the star upon his breast, sir;

Then on their knees they straight did fall, and for mercy soon did call,

He replied, You're base villains, thus using us poor sailors.

No wonder that my royal father cannot man his shipping,

'Tis by using them so barbarously, and always them a-whipping.

But for the future, sailors all, shall have good usage, great and small,

To hear the news, together all cried, May God bless Duke William.

He ordered them fresh officers that stood in need of wealth,

And with the crew he left some gold, that they might drink his health,

And when that they did go away, the sailors loud huzzaèd,

Crying, Blessed be that happy day whereon was born Duke William.

Tom Sheridan, the dramatist's son, was born in 1775, and died in 1817, so that in 1783 he was only eight years old.

Page 385. Recollections of a Late Royal Academician.

The Englishman's Magazine, September, 1831. Not reprinted by Lamb.

In the magazine the title ran:—

"PETER'S NET

"'All is fish that comes to my net'

"No. 1.—Recollections of a Late Royal Academician"

Moxon had taken over The Englishman's Magazine, started in April, 1831, in time to control the August number, in which had appeared a notice stating, of Elia, that "in succeeding months he promiseth to grace" the pages of the magazine "with a series of essays, under the quaint appellation of 'Peter's Net.'" The magazine, however, lived only until the October number. Writing to Moxon at the time that he sent the MS. of this essay, Lamb remarked:—

"The R. A. here memorised was George Dawe, whom I knew well, and heard many anecdotes of, from Daniels and Westall, at H. Rogers's; to each of them it will be well to send a magazine in my name. It will fly like wildfire among the Royal Academicians and artists. … The 'Peter's Net' does not intend funny things only. All is fish. And leave out the sickening 'Elia' at the end. Then it may comprise letters and characters addressed to Peter; but a signature forces it to be all characteristic of the one man, Elia, or the one man, Peter, which cramped me formerly."

George Dawe was born in 1781, the son of Philip Dawe, a mezzotint engraver. At first he engraved too, but after a course of study in the Royal Academy schools he took to portrait-painting, among his early sitters being William Godwin. Throughout his career he painted portraits, varied at first with figure subjects of the kind described by Lamb. He was made an Associate in 1809 and an R.A. in 1814. His introduction to royal circles came with the marriage of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold in 1816. After her death he went to Brussels in the suite of the Duke of Kent, and painted the Duke of Wellington. It was in 1819 that he visited St. Petersburg, remaining nine years, and painting nearly four hundred portraits, first of the officers who fought against Napoleon, and afterwards of other personages. He left in 1828, but returned in 1829 after a visit to England, and a short but profitable sojourn in Berlin. He died in 1829, and was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's. A passage in his will shows Dawe to have been a rather more interesting character than Lamb suggests, and his Life of George Morland, 1807, has considerable merit.

Coleridge also knew Dawe well. Dawe painted a picture on a subject in "Love," drew Coleridge's portrait and took a cast of his face; and in 1812 Coleridge thus recommends him to Mrs. Coleridge's hospitality:—

He is a very modest man, his manners not over polished, and his worst point is that he is (at least, I have found him so) a fearful questionist, whenever he thinks he can pick up any information, or ideas, poetical, historical, topographical, or artistical, that he can make bear on his own profession. But he is sincere, friendly, strictly moral in every respect, I firmly believe even to innocence, and in point of cheerful indefatigableness of industry, in regularity, and temperance—in short, in a glad, yet quiet, devotion of his whole being to the art he has made choice of, he is the only man I ever knew who goes near to rival Southey—gentlemanly address, person, physiognomy, knowledge, learning and genius being of course wholly excluded from the comparison.

Many years later, however, Coleridge endorsed Dawe's funeral card in the following terms, "The Grub" being the nickname by which Dawe was known:—

I really would have attended the Grub's Canonization in St. Paul's, under the impression that it would gratify his sister, Mrs. Wright; but Mr. G. interposed a conditional but sufficiently decorous negative. "No! Unless you wish to follow his Grubship still further down." So I pleaded ill health. But the very Thursday morning I went to Town to see my daughter, for the first time, as Mrs. Henry Coleridge, in Gower Street, and, odd enough, the stage was stopped by the Pompous Funeral of the unchangeable and predestinated Grub, and I extemporised:—

"As Grub Dawe pass'd beneath the Hearse's Lid,

On which a large Resurgam met the eye,

Col, who well knew the Grub, cried, Lord forbid! I trust, he's only telling us a lie!"

S. T. Coleridge.

Page 385, line 2 of essay. To the Russian. Among Dawe's court paintings was an equestrian portrait of Alexander I., twenty feet high. His collection of portraits painted during his residence in Russia was lodged in a gallery built for it in the Winter Palace.

Page 385, line 11 of essay. "Timon" as it was last acted. Referring to the performance of "Timon of Athens," given exactly as in Shakespeare's day, with no women in the cast, at Drury Lane on October 28, 1816.

Page 385, line 9 from foot. The Haytian. I can find no authority for Lamb's suggestion that Dawe might have gone to Hayti to paint the court of Christophe. Probably Lamb based the theory, as a joke, upon a story of Dawe which Sir Anthony Carlisle, the surgeon, and a friend of Lamb's, used to tell. The story is told in The Library of the Fine Arts, 1831, in the following terms:—

In a conversation with Sir A. Carlisle, that eminent surgeon told Dawe that he had lately sent to Bartholemew's Hospital a negro of prodigious power and fine form, such as he had never before seen, and the sight of whom had given him better conceptions of the beauty of Grecian sculpture than he had previously possessed. Struck with this account Dawe went to the Hospital where he found the man had been discharged. Any other person would here have given up the pursuit, but Dawe was not to be baffled in a favourite object; he accordingly commenced a strict search through all those parts of the town where such a person was likely to be found; and at length, after much inquiry, found him on board a ship about to sail for the West Indies. Dawe, though his means at that time were not so great as they afterwards became, induced the man to go home with him, where he maintained him some time; and the Negro having among other instances of his strength, told him of his once seizing a buffalo by the nostrils and bearing it down to the ground, Dawe was so struck by the fact as suited for the composition of a powerful picture, that he placed the man in the posture he described, and drew him in that attitude. When the picture was sent for the premium of the British Institution, several of the governors objected to it as being a portrait and not an historical picture; notwithstanding this, however, the better judgment of the majority awarded it the prize.

Page 386, line 2. Widow H. This was probably Mrs. Hope, wife of Thomas Hope, the famous virtuoso and patron, who had just died—in February, 1831. Dawe was one of his less capable protégés. It was Mr. and Mrs. Hope whom Dubost, the French painter, out of pique, caricatured as "Beauty and the Beast." On the exhibition of the picture in public, the incident caused some notoriety, and George Dyer's friend Jekyll was engaged in the subsequent law-suit.

Page 386, line 16 from foot. His father. Philip Dawe, mezzotint engraver, who flourished 1760–1780, the friend of George Morland and the pupil of that painter's father, Henry Robert Morland (1730?-1797), and engraver of many of his pictures. George Dawe wrote George Morland's life.

Page 386, line 13 from foot. Carrington and Bowles. Properly, Carington Bowles, of 69 St. Paul's Churchyard. The laundress washing was probably Lamb's recollection of one of the well-known pair, "Lady's-Maid Ironing" and "Lady's-Maid Soaping Linen," by Henry Morland, the originals of which are in the National Gallery. I cannot identify among the hundreds of Carington Bowles' publications in the British Museum the picture that Lamb so much admired in the Hornsey Road. But the inn would probably be that which is now The King's Head (or Yard of Pork), at the corner of Crouch End Hill (a continuation of Hornsey Lane), Crouch Hill, Coleridge Road and Broadway. The picture has gone.

Page 387, line 14 from foot. He proceeded Academician. Lamb wrote to Manning in 1810, "Mr. Dawe is made associate of the Royal Academy. By what law of association, I can't guess."

Page 388, line 15 from foot. Sampson … Dalilah. The letters contain an earlier account of the picture. Writing to Hazlitt in 1805 Lamb says: "I have seen no pictures of note since, except Mr. Dawe's gallery. It is curious to see how differently two great men treat the same subject, yet both excellent in their way: for instance, Milton and Mr. Dawe. Mr. Dawe has chosen to illustrate the story of Sampson exactly in the point of view in which Milton has been most happy: the interview between the Jewish Hero, blind and captive, and Dalilah. Milton has imagined his Locks grown again, strong as horse-hair or porcupine's bristles; doubtless shaggy and black, as being hairs 'which of a nation armed contained the strength.' I don't remember, he says black: but could Milton imagine them to be yellow? Do you? Mr. Dawe with striking originality of conception has crowned him with a thin yellow wig, in colour precisely like Dyson's, in curl and quantity resembling Mrs. Professor's,[73] his Limbs rather stout, about such a man as my Brother or Rickman—but no Atlas nor Hercules, nor yet so bony as Dubois, the Clown of Sadler's Wells. This was judicious, taking the spirit of the story rather than the fact: for doubtless God could communicate national salvation to the trust of flax and tow as well as hemp and cordage, and could draw down a Temple with a golden tress as soon as with all the cables of the British navy."

[73] Mrs. Godwin.—Ed.

Page 390, line 11. Half a million. Probably nearer £100,000. Dawe, however, lost much of this by money-lending, and died worth only £25,000.

Page 391. The Latin Poems of Vincent Bourne.

The Englishman's Magazine, September, 1831.

This article was unsigned, but it is known to be by Lamb from internal evidence and from the following letter to Moxon, the publisher of the magazine:—

"Dear M.—I have ingeniously contrived to review myself.

"Tell me if this will do. Mind, for such things as these—half quotations—I do not charge Elia price. Let me hear of, if not see you.

"Peter."

Lamb's Album Verses, the book reviewed, had been published by Moxon a year earlier. It contained nine translations from Vincent Bourne.

Further particulars of Vincent Bourne (1695–1747), a master at Westminster, are given in the notes to Lamb's translations in the poetical volume. His Poemata appeared in 1734, the best edition being that of the Rev. John Mitford, Bernard Barton's friend, published in 1840. Lamb first read Bourne as late as 1815. Writing to Wordsworth in April of that year he says of Bourne: "What a heart that man had, all laid out upon town scenes, a proper counterpoise to some people's rural extravagances." And again in the same letter: "What a sweet, unpretending, pretty-mannered, matter-ful creature, sucking from every flower, making a flower of every thing—his diction all Latin, and his thoughts all English." And in the Elia essay "On the Decay of Beggars" Bourne is called "most classical, and at the same time, most English, of the Latinists!"

Page 391, foot. Cowper … out of the four. Cowper, who was Bourne's pupil at Westminster, translated twenty-three of the poems, but there were only four in early editions of his works. Lamb and Cowper did not clash in their translations, except in the case of the lines on the sleeping infant quoted later in this essay. Cowper's version ran thus:—

Sweet babe, whose image here expressed,

Does thy peaceful slumbers show,

Guilt or fear, to break thy rest,

Never did thy spirit know.

Softly slumber, soft repose,

Such as mock the painter's skill,

Such as innocence bestows,

Harmless infant, lull thee still!

The line quoted by Lamb from Cowper is the first of "The Jackdaw." Cowper's praise of Bourne resembles Lamb's. He writes: "I love the memory of Vinny Bourne. I think him a better Latin poet than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid, and not at all inferior to him."

Page 392, line 4. A recent writer. Lamb himself.

Page 395, line 19. There is a tragic Drama. "The Wife's Trial" (see Vol. IV.). More properly a comic drama.

Page 395, line 27. But if to write in Albums be a sin. A reference probably to the attack on Lamb's book made a year earlier in the Literary Gazette, which occasioned Southey's spirited lines to The Times in defence of his friend.

Page 396, middle. But the disease has gone forth. Four years before, in 1827, Lamb had protested to Bernard Barton against the Album exactions:—

"If I go to—— thou art there also, O all pervading Album! All over the Leeward Islands, in Newfoundland, and the Back Settlements, I understand there is no other reading. They haunt me. I die of Albophobia!"

Page 397. The Death Of Munden.

The Athenæum, February 11, 1832, under the title, "Munden, the Comedian." Signed "C. Lamb." Not reprinted by Lamb.

The article was preceded by this editorial note:—

A brief Memoir in a paper like the Athenæum, is due to departed genius, and would certainly have been paid to Munden, whose fame is so interwoven with all our early and pleasant recollections, even though we had nothing to add to the poor detail of dates and facts already registered in the daily papers. The memory of a player, it has been said, is limited to one generation; he

"—struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more!"

But this cannot be true, seeing that many whose fame will soon be counted by centuries, yet live to delight us in Cibber; and that others of our latter days, have been enbalmed, in all their vital spirit, by Elia himself; in whose unrivalled volume Cockletop is preserved as in amber, and where Munden will live for aye, making mouths at Time and Oblivion. We were thus apologizing to ourselves for the unworthy epithet we were about to scratch on perishable paper to this inimitable actor, when we received the following letter, which our readers will agree with us is worth a whole volume of bald biographies.

This preamble was probably written by Charles Wentworth Dilke (1789–1864), who became supreme editor of The Athenæum in 1830. Joseph Shepherd Munden died on February 6, 1832. He had first made his mark in 1780, when Lamb was five. His Covent Garden career lasted, with occasional migrations, from 1790 to 1811. Munden's first appearance at Drury Lane was in 1813. It was in 1815 that he created the part of Old Dozy, in T. Dibdin's "Past Ten O'clock and a Rainy Night." His farewell of the stage was taken in 1824.

Page 397, line 7. Lewis. "Gentleman" Lewis (1748?-1811), the original Faulkland in "The Rivals." It was he who said that Lamb's farce, "Mr. H.," might easily have been turned into a success by a practical dramatist. Hazlitt called him "the greatest comic mannerist perhaps that ever lived." His full name is William Thomas Lewis.

Page 397, line 8. Parsons, Dodd, etc. See note on page 465. Parsons was at Drury Lane practically from 1762 to 1795 and Dodd from 1766 to 1796.

Page 398, line 4. "Johnny Gilpin." This benefit, for William Dowton (1764–1851), was held on April 28, 1817. The first piece was "The Rivals," with Dowton as Mrs. Malaprop. In "Johnny Gilpin" (Genest gives no author's name) Munden played Anthony Brittle.

Page 398, line 6. Liston's Lubin Log. This was one of Listen's great parts—in "Love, Law and Physic," by Lamb's friend, James Kenney (1780–1849), produced in 1812.

Page 398, at the end. A gentleman … whose criticism I think masterly. This was Talfourd, who several years before had been dramatic critic to The Champion. I quote the first portion of his article: "Mr. Munden appears to us to be the most classical of actors. He is that in high farce, which Kemble was in high tragedy. The lines of these great artists are, it must be admitted, sufficiently distinct; but the same elements are in both—the same directness of purpose, the same singleness of aim, the same concentration of power, the same iron-casing of inflexible manner, the same statue-like precision of gesture, movement and attitude. The hero of farce is as little affected with impulses from without, as the retired Prince of Tragedians. There is something solid, sterling, almost adamantine, in the building up of his most grotesque characters. When he fixes his wonder-working face in any of its most amazing varieties, it looks as if the picture were carved out from a rock by Nature in a sportive vein, and might last for ever. It is like what we can imagine a mask of the old Grecian Comedy to have been, only that it lives, and breathes, and changes. His most fantastical gestures are the grand ideal of farce. He seems as though he belonged to the earliest and the stateliest age of Comedy, when instead of superficial foibles and the airy varieties of fashion, she had the grand asperities of man to work on, when her grotesque images had something romantic about them, and when humour and parody were themselves heroic."

Page 398. Thoughts on Presents of Game, &c.

The Athenæum, November 30, 1833. Signed "Elia." Not reprinted by Lamb.

The quoted passage at the head of this little essay is from Lamb's "Popular Fallacy," XV., "That we must not look a gift-horse in the mouth." It was probably placed there by the editor of The Athenæum. The present essay may be taken as a postscript to the "Dissertation on Roast Pig." The late Mr. Charles Kent, in his Centenary edition of Lamb, printed it next that essay, under the heading "A Recantation."

Page 399, line 1. Old Mr. Chambers. The Rev. Thomas Chambers, Vicar of Radway-Edgehill, in Warwickshire, and father of Charles and John Chambers, who were at Christ's Hospital, but after Lamb's day. John was a fellow clerk of Lamb's at the India House. A letter from Lamb to Charles Chambers is in existence (see Hazlitt's The Lambs, page 138), in which Lamb makes other ecstatic remarks on delicate feeding. Incidentally he says that bullock's heart is a substitute for hare. Mr. Hazlitt says that the Warwickshire vicar left a diary in which he recorded little beyond the dinners he used to give or eat.

Page 399, line 10. Mrs. Minikin. Writing to his friend Dodwell in October, 1827, concerning the gift of a little pig (which suggests that the "Recantation" was of more recent date than the reader is asked to suppose), Lamb uses "crips" again. "'And do it nice and crips.' (That's the Cook's word.) You'll excuse me, I have been only speaking to Becky about the dinner to-morrow." This seems to establish the fact that Mrs. Minikin was Becky's name when she was exalted into print. Becky however had left long before 1833.

Page 400. Table-Talk by the Late Elia.

The Athæneum, January 4, May 31, June 7, July 19, 1834. Not reprinted by Lamb.

The phrase, "the late Elia," has reference to the preface to the Last Essays of Elia, published in 1833, in which his death is spoken of.

Page 400, line 3 of essay. 'Tis unpleasant to meet a beggar. A different note is struck in the Elia essay "On the Decay of Beggars": "Reader, do not be frightened at the hard words, imposition, imposture—give, and ask no questions."

Page 400, line 4 from foot. Will Dockwray. I have not been able to find anything about this Will Dockwray. Such Ware records as I have consulted are silent concerning him. There was a Joseph Dockwray, a rich Quaker maltster, at Ware in the eighteenth century. In the poem "Going or Gone," which mentions many of Lamb's acquaintances in his early Widford days (Widford is only three miles from Ware), there is mentioned a Tom Dockwra, who also eludes research.

Page 401, line 15. "We read the 'Paradise Lost' as a task." Johnson, in his "Life of Milton," in the Lives of the Poets, says: "'Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure." For other remarks on Milton see page 428.

Page 401, foot. So ends "King Lear." Lamb means that the tragedy is virtually done. There are of course some dozen lines more, after the last of those quoted in Lamb's piecemeal; which I have corrected by the Globe Edition. Lear's praise of Caius—"he's a good fellow … and will strike"—was applied by Lamb to his father in the character sketch of him in the Elia essay "On the Old Benchers" (see also the essay on the "Genius of Hogarth," for earlier remarks, 1810, on this subject).

Page 402, first quotation. "Served not for gain. …" From the Fool's song in "Lear," Act II., Scene 4:—

That, sir, which serves and seeks for gain,

And follows but for form,

Will pack when it begins to rain,

And leave thee in the storm.

Page 402, second and third quotations. "The Nut-Brown Maid." This poem is given in the Percy Reliques. The oldest form of it is in Arnolde's Chronicle, 1502. Lamb quotes from the penultimate stanza. Matthew Prior (1664–1721), who wrote a version under the title "Henry and Emma," was a favourite with Lamb. In Miss Isola's Extract Book he copied Prior's "Female Phaeton." In this connection a passage from the obituary notice of Lamb, written by Barren Field in the Annual Biography and Obituary, 1836, has peculiar interest. The doctrine referred to is "suppression in writing":—

We remember, at the very last supper we ate with him (Mr. Serjeant Talfourd will recollect it too), he quoted a passage from Prior's "Henry and Emma," in illustration of this doctrine and discipline; and yet he said he loved Prior as much as any man, but that his "Henry and Emma" was a vapid paraphrase of the old poem of "The Nutbrowne Mayde." For example, at the dénouement of the ballad, Prior made Henry rant out to his devoted Emma:—

"In me behold the potent Edgar's heir,

Illustrious earl; him terrible in war

Let Loire confess, for she has felt his sword,

And trembling fled before the British Lord,"

and so on for a dozen couplets, heroic, as they are called. And then Mr. Lamb made us mark the modest simplicity with which the noble youth disclosed himself to his mistress in the old poem:—

"Now understand,

To Westmoreland,

Which is my heritage, (in a parenthesis, as it were,) I will you bring; And with a ring, By way of marriage, I will you take And lady make As shortly as I can: Thus have ye won An earle's son And not a banish'd man."

Page 403, line 14 from foot. M—— sent to his friend L——. M—— probably stands for Basil Montagu, Lamb's friend, and the editor of the volume in which "Confessions of a Drunkard" appeared. L—— was probably Lamb himself.

Page 403, line 11 from foot. Penotier. The friend disguised under this name has not been identified. Nor has Parson W—— or F—— in a later paragraph. Mr. B. B. MacGeorge tells me that he has a copy of John Woodvil inscribed in Lamb's hand to the Rev. J. Walton (or Watson).

Page 404, line 19. 39th of Exodus. Lamb meant 39th of Genesis—the story of Joseph.

Page 405, line 12. C——. See Allsop's Letters and Conversations of S. T. Coleridge, 1836, Vol. I., page 206, or where Allsop quotes Lamb as saying, "I made that joke first (the Scotch corner in hell, fire without brimstone), though Coleridge somewhat licked it into shape."

Page 405, line 7 from foot. Chapman's Homer. It would have been quite possible for Shakespeare to have read part of Chapman's Homer before he wrote "Troilus and Cressida." That play was probably written in 1603, and seven books of Chapman's Iliad came out in 1598, and the whole edition somewhere about 1609. Mr. Lee thinks that Shakespeare had read Chapman. The whole of the Odyssey was published in 1614. It was from this version that Lamb prepared his Adventures of Ulysses, 1808.

Page 406. The Death of Coleridge.

Not printed by Lamb. These reflections were copied from the album of Mr. Keymer by John Forster, and quoted in the memorial article upon Lamb written by him in the New Monthly Magazine for February, 1835, which he then edited. "Lamb never fairly recovered from the death of Coleridge," said Forster.

He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself) until his own great spirit joined his friend. He had a habit of venting his melancholy in a sort of mirth. He would, with nothing graver than a pun, "cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighed" upon it. In a jest, or a few light phrases, he would lay open the last recesses of his heart. So in respect of the death of Coleridge. Some old friends of his saw him two or three weeks ago, and remarked the constant turning and reference of his mind. He interrupted himself and them almost every instant with some play of affected wonder, or astonishment, or humorous melancholy, on the words, "Coleridge is dead." Nothing could divert him from that, for the thought of it never left him.

It was then that Forster asked Lamb to inscribe something in Mr. Keymer's album: the passage on Coleridge was the result. Keymer was a London bookseller—the same to whom Bernard Barton, after Lamb's death, sent a character sketch of Lamb (see Bernard Barton and His Friends, page 113). Lamb, I might add, was much offended, as he told Mr. Fuller Russell, by a request from The Athenæum, immediately after Coleridge's death, for an article upon him.

Coleridge died in the house of James Gillman, in the Grove, Highgate, July 25, 1834, five months before Lamb's death. On his deathbed Coleridge had written, in pencil, in a copy of his Poetical Works, against the poem "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison," the words: "Ch. and Mary Lamb—dear to my heart, yea, as it were, my heart. S. T. C. Aet. 63, 1834. 1797–1834—37 years!"

Coleridge's will contained this clause:—

And further, as a relief to my own feelings by the opportunity of mentioning their names, that I request of my executor, that a small plain gold mourning ring, with my hair, may be presented to the following persons, namely: To my close friend and ever-beloved schoolfellow, Charles Lamb—and in the deep and almost life-long affection of which this is the slender record; his equally-beloved sister, Mary Lamb, will know herself to be included …

The names of five other friends followed.

Page 407. Cupid's Revenge.

This paraphrase of Beaumont and Fletcher's play of the same name is placed here on account of the mystery of its date. Probably it belongs to a stage in Lamb's career some years earlier. It was printed first in Harper's Magazine, December, 1858, with the following prefatory note:—

The autograph MS. of this unpublished Tale by Charles Lamb came into our hands in the following manner: Thomas Allsop, Esq., who came to this country a few months since in consequence of his alleged complicity in the attempt made upon the life of Louis Napoleon by Orsini, was for many years an intimate friend and correspondent of Coleridge and Lamb. He is known as the author of the Recollections, etc., of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published nearly a quarter of a century ago. He brought with him in his flight to America a number of manuscripts of his friends. Among these were a volume of "Marginalia" by Coleridge; a series of notes by Lamb, nearly a hundred in all, many of them highly characteristic of the writer; and the tale of "Cupid's Revenge" which appears to have remained unpublished in consequence of the cessation of the magazine for which it was written. These MSS. have all been placed in our hands. In an early number we propose to publish a selection from the letters of Lamb, and the "Marginalia" of Coleridge.

(Editors of Harper's Magazine.)

A large number of the notes from Lamb to Allsop were published, as promised, under the editorship of George William Curtis. Allsop died in 1880.