Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
of the volume; so that if you are referred to page 50, you may find five of them – you may find page 50 five times over before you come to the right one. For which reason we shall dispense ourselves, in respect to this volume, with our usual punctuality of reference, for the reference must be laboriously minute, and even then will impose a troublesome search. In the mere and humble task of editing, the Serjeant has been by no means fortunate.
Lying about in such confusion as the fractions of the biography do at present, we shall perhaps be rendering a slight service if we bring together from the two different publications the leading events of the life of Lamb.
"Charles Lamb," says the first publication, "was born on the 18th February 1775, in Crown-office Row, in the Inner Temple, where he spent the first seven years of his life." At the age of seven he was presented to the school of Christ's Hospital, and there remained till his fifteenth year. His sweetness of disposition rendered him a general favourite. From one of his schoolfellows we have the following account of him: – "Lamb," says Mr Le Grice, "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. His countenance was mild; his complexion clear brown, with an expression which might lead you to think that he was of Jewish descent. His eyes were not each of the same colour – one was hazel, the other had specks of gray in the iris, mingled as we see red spots in the bloodstone. His step was plantigrade, (Mr Le Grice must be a zoologist – Lamb would have smiled to hear himself so scientifically described,) which made his walk slow and peculiar, adding to the staid appearance of his figure. 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 manner excited that kindness." Mr Le Grice adds that, in the sketch Lamb gave in his Recollections of Christ's Hospital, he drew a faithful portrait of himself. "While others were all fire and play, he stole along with all the self-concentration of a young monk." He had, in fact, only passed from cloister to cloister, and, during the holidays, it was in the Temple that he found his home and his only place of recreation. This cloistering-in of his mind was the early and constant peculiarity of his life. He would have made an excellent monk; in those good old times, be it understood, when it was thought no great scandal if there was a well-supplied cellarage underneath the cloister.
After quitting Christ's Hospital, he was employed for some time in the South Sea House, but on the 5th April 1792 obtained that appointment in the accountant's office in the East India Company which was his stay and support, in more senses than one, through life.
A little anecdote is here introduced, which strikes us as very characteristic. It reveals the humorist, ready to appreciate and promote a jest even at his own expense, and at the easy sacrifice of his own dignity or self-respect: but it reveals something more and sadder; it seems to betray a broken, melancholy spirit, that was no longer disposed to contend for its claim to respect from others. "In the first year of his clerkship," says Mr Le Grice, "Lamb spent the evening of the 5th November with some of his former schoolfellows, who, being amused with the particularly large and flapping brim of his round hat, pinned it up on the sides in the form of a cocked hat. Lamb made no alteration in it, but walked home in his usual sauntering gait towards the Temple. As he was going down Ludgate Hill, some gay young men, who seemed not to have passed the London Tavern without resting, exclaimed, 'The veritable Guy! – no man of straw!' and with this exclamation they took him up, making a chair with their arms, carried him, seated him on a post in St Paul's Churchyard, and there left him. This story Lamb told so seriously, that the truth of it was never doubted. He wore his three-cornered hat many evenings, and retained the name of Guy ever after. Like Nym, he quietly sympathised in the fun, and seemed to say 'that was the humour of it.'" Some one may suggest that probably Lamb was himself in the same condition, on this 5th of November, as the young men "who had not passed the London Tavern without resting," and that therefore all peculiar significance of the anecdote, as it bears upon his character and disposition, is entirely lost. But Lamb relates the story himself, and afterwards, and when there is no question of sobriety, quietly acquiesces and participates in the absurd joke played upon himself.
At this time his most constant companion was one Jem White, who wrote some imaginary "Letters of John Falstaff." These letters Lamb went about all his life praising, and causing others to praise, but seems never to have found any one to share his admiration. As even Mr Talfourd has not a good word to throw away upon the literary merits of Jem White, we may safely conclude that Lamb's friendship had in this instance quite overruled his critical judgment.
But the associate and friend who really exercised a permanent and formative influence upon his mind, was a man of a very different stamp – Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They had been schoolfellows at Christ's Hospital, and, though no particular intimacy existed at that time, the circumstance formed a foundation for a future friendship. "While Coleridge," writes Mr Talfourd, "remained at the university, they met occasionally on his visits to London; and when he quitted it and came to town, full of mantling hopes and glorious schemes, Lamb became his admiring disciple. The scene of these happy meetings was a little public-house, called the Salutation and Cat, in the neighbourhood of Smithfield, where they used to sup, and remain long after they had 'heard the chimes at midnight.'"
These suppers at the Salutation and Cat, in Smithfield, seem to carry back the imagination far beyond the period here alluded to; they seem to transport us to the times of Oliver Goldsmith, or to take us across the water into Germany, where poetry and philosophy may still occasionally find refuge in the beer-shop. They were always remembered by Lamb as the brightest spots of his life. "I think I hear you again," he says, writing to Coleridge. "I imagine to myself the little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poetry." And in another place he alludes to "those old suppers at our old inn – when life was fresh and topics exhaustless – and you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness." It was in these interviews that the project was started, we believe, of publishing a volume of poems, the joint production of the two friends.
But this pleasing project, and all the poetry of life, was for a time to give place, in the history of Lamb, to a domestic tragedy of the most afflicting nature. It is here that the Final Memorials take up the thread of the biography. It was on the 22d September 1796, that the terrible event took place which cast so perpetual a shade, and reflected also so constant an honour, on the life of Lamb. He was living at this time with his father, mother, and sister, in lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn. After being engaged in his taskwork at the India House, he returned in the evening to amuse his father by playing cribbage. The old man had sunk into dotage and the miserable selfishness that so often attends on old age. If his son wished to discontinue for a time the game at cribbage, and turn to some other avocation, or the writing of a letter, he would pettishly exclaim, – "If you don't play cribbage, I don't see the use of your coming home at all." The mother also was an invalid, and Miss Lamb, we are told, was worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery, by attention to needlework by day, and to her mother by night, until the insanity which had been manifested more than once broke out into frenzy. "It appeared," says the account extracted from the Times, (an account of the inquest, in which the names of the parties are suppressed,) "that while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the calls of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks approached her parent. The child by her cries quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late. The dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room."
The following is the letter which Lamb wrote to Coleridge shortly after the event. From this it appears that it was he, and not the landlord, who took the knife from the hand of the lunatic.
"My Dearest Friend, – White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines.