The Best Letters of Charles Lamb. Charles Lamb
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Charles Lamb's letters, it will be well to run over once more the leading facts of his life. First let us glance at his outward appearance. Fortunately there are a number of capital pieces of verbal portraiture of Elia.
Referring to the year 1817, "Barry Cornwall" wrote:
"Persons who had been in the habit of traversing Covent Garden at that time of night, by extending their walk a few yards into Russell Street have noticed a small, spare man clothed in black, who went out every morning, and returned every afternoon as the hands of the clock moved toward certain hours. You could not mistake him. He was somewhat stiff in his manner, and almost clerical in dress, which indicated much wear. He had a long, melancholy face, with keen, penetrating eyes; and he walked with a short, resolute step citywards. He looked no one in the face for more than a moment, yet contrived to see everything as he went on. No one who ever studied the human features could pass him by without recollecting his countenance; it was full of sensibility, and it came upon you like new thought, which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards: it gave rise to meditation, and did you good. This small, half-clerical man was—Charles Lamb."
His countenance is thus described by Thomas Hood:
"His was no common face, none of those willow-pattern ones which Nature turns out by thousands at her potteries, but more like a chance specimen of the Chinese ware—one to the set; unique, antique, quaint, you might have sworn to it piecemeal—a separate affidavit to each feature."
Mrs. Charles Mathews, wife of the comedian, who met Lamb at a dinner, gives an amusing account of him:—
"Mr. Lamb's first appearance was not prepossessing. His figure was small and mean, and no man was certainly ever less beholden to his tailor. His 'bran' new suit of black cloth (in which he affected several times during the day to take great pride, and to cherish as a novelty that he had looked for and wanted) was drolly contrasted with his very rusty silk stockings, shown from his knees, and his much too large, thick shoes, without polish. His shirt rejoiced in a wide, ill-plaited frill, and his very small, tight, white neckcloth was hemmed to a fine point at the ends that formed part of a little bow. His hair was black and sleek, but not formal, and his face the gravest I ever saw, but indicating great intellect, and resembling very much the portraits of Charles I."
From this sprightly and not too flattering sketch we may turn to Serjeant Talfourd's tender and charming portrait—slightly idealized, no doubt; for the man of the coif held a brief for his friend, and was a poet besides:—
"Methinks I see him before me now as he appeared then, and as he continued without any perceptible alteration to me, during the twenty years of intimacy which followed, and were closed by his death. A light frame, so fragile that it seemed as if a breath would overthrow it, clad in clerk-like black, was surmounted by a head of form and expression the most noble and sweet. His black hair curled crisply about an expanded forehead; his eyes, softly brown, twinkled with varying expression, though the prevalent expression was sad; and the nose, slightly curved, and delicately carved at the nostril, with the lower outline of the face delicately oval, completed a head which was finely placed upon the shoulders, and gave importance and even dignity to a diminutive and shadowy stem. Who shall describe his countenance, catch its quivering sweetness, and fix it forever in words? There are none, alas! to answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep thought, striving with humor; the lines of suffering wreathed into cordial mirth, and a smile of painful sweetness, present an image to the mind it can as little describe as lose. His personal appearance and manner are not unjustly characterized by what he himself says in one of his letters to Manning, [1] 'a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.'"
The writings of Charles Lamb abound in passages of autobiography. "I was born," he tells us in that delightful sketch, "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," "and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said—for in those young years what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?—these are of my oldest recollections." His father, John Lamb, the "Lovel" of the essay cited, had come up a little boy from Lincolnshire to enter the service of Samuel Salt—one of those "Old Benchers" upon whom the pen of Elia has shed immortality, a stanch friend and patron to the Lambs, the kind proprietor of that "spacious closet of good old English reading" upon whose "fair and wholesome pasturage" Charles and his sister, as children, "browsed at will."
John Lamb had married Elizabeth Field, whose mother was for fifty years housekeeper at the country-seat of the Plumers, Blakesware, in Hertfordshire, the "Blakesmoor" of the Essays, frequent scene of Lamb's childish holiday sports—a spacious mansion, with its park and terraces and "firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel and day-long murmuring wood-pigeon;" an Eden it must have seemed to the London-bred child, in whose fancy the dusty trees and sparrows and smoke-grimed fountain of Temple Court had been a pastoral. Within the cincture of its excluding garden-walls, wrote Elia in later years, "I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet, [2]—
"'Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines;
Curl me about, ye gadding vines;
And oh, so close your circles lace
That I may never leave this place:
But lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briers, nail me through.'"
At Blakesware, too, was the room whence the spirit of Sarah Battle—that "gentlewoman born"—winged its flight to a region where revokes and "luke-warm gamesters" are unknown.
To John and Elizabeth Lamb were born seven children, only three of whom, John, Mary, and Charles, survived their infancy. Of the survivors, Charles was the youngest, John being twelve and Mary ten years his senior—a fact to be weighed in estimating the heroism of Lamb's later life. At the age of seven, Charles Lamb, "son of John Lamb, scrivener, and Elizabeth, his wife," was entered at the school of Christ's Hospital—"the antique foundation of that godly and royal child King Edward VI." Of his life at this institution he has left us abundant and charming memorials in the Essays, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital," and "Christ's Hospital Five-and-thirty Years Ago,"—the latter sketch corrective of the rather optimistic impressions of the former.
With his schoolfellows Charles seems to have been, despite his timid and retiring disposition (he said of himself, "while the others were all fire and play, he stole along with all the self-concentration of a young monk"), a decided favorite. "Lamb," wrote C. V. Le Grice, a schoolmate often mentioned in essay and letter, "was an amiable, gentle boy, very sensible and keenly observing, indulged by his schoolfellows and by his master on account of his infirmity of speech. … I never heard his name mentioned without the addition of Charles, although, as there was no other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary; but there was an implied kindness in it, and it was a proof that his gentle manners excited that kindness."
For us the most important fact of the Christ's Hospital school-days is the commencement of Lamb's life-long friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two years his senior, and the object of his fervent hero-worship. Most of us, perhaps, can find the true source of whatever of notable good or evil we have effected in life in the moulding influence of one of these early friendships or admirations. It is the boy's hero, the one he loves and reverences among his schoolfellows—not his taskmaster—that is his true teacher, the setter of the broader standards by which he is to abide through life. Happy the man the feet of whose early idols have not been of clay.
It was under the quickening influence of the eloquent, precocious genius of the "inspired charity boy" that Charles Lamb's ideals and ambitions shaped themselves out of the haze of a child's conceptions. Coleridge at sixteen was already a poet, his ear attuned to the subtlest melody of verse, and his hand rivalling, in preluding fragments, the efforts of his maturer years; he was already a philosopher, rapt in Utopian, schemes and mantling hopes as enchanting—and as chimerical—as the pleasure-domes and caves of ice decreed by Kubla Khan; and the younger lad became his ardent disciple.
Lamb quitted Christ's Hospital, prematurely, in November, 1787, and