this company, probably from Sept., 1791 to Feb., 1792. His brother John was with the company when Lamb entered its employ. b. 48-49. Living accounts . . . puzzle me.— "Here Elia begins his 'matter-of-lie' career. Lamb was at this time in the Accountants' Office of the India House, living among figures all day."-Lucas in his edition of The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (1903). 928b. 9. Picture still hangs.-This picture, if it ever existed, has been lost. 930b. 45-47. These names are borrowed from Shakspere's The Taming of the Shrew, Induction, sc. 2, 93-98, in which one of the servants says to Christopher Sly: Lucas suggests, in his edition of The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, that the germ of this essay is probably found in the following passage from a letter to Wordsworth, dated April 9, 1816: "Thanks for the books you have given me and for all the books you mean to give me. I will bind up the Political Sonnets and Ode according to your suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain and chain them to my shelves More Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For of these who borrow, some read slow, some mean to read but don't read, and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money, they never fail to make use of it." More Bodleiano.-Until the middle of the eighteenth century it was the custom in the Bodleian Library to have some books fastened with chains. 939b. 10ff. Lamb's Letters contain several references to Coleridge's habit of borrowing books. See especially the letters to Coleridge dated June 7, 1809, and Autumn, 1820 (Lucas's ed., pp. 400 and 544). 13. Bloomsbury.-A noted district in London; Lamb never lived there. 15-16. Reformed posture.-These figures, which once guarded the entrance, had been removed to the rear of the hall. 940a. 1. Widower-volume. John Buncle was originally published in two volumes, only one of which remained on Lamb's shelf. 38-40. The authorship of these lines is credited to Lamb. 944. MRS. BATTLE'S OPINIONS ON WHIST Hunt reprinted this essay in The London Journal after the following statement: "Here followeth, gentle reader, the immortal record of Mrs. Battle and her whist; a game which the author, as thou wilt see, wished that he could play forever; and, accordingly, in the deathless pages of his wit, forever will he play it." Critics have identified Mrs. Battle with Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother, and with Sarah Burney, the wife of Lamb's friend James Burney, and the center of a prominent whist club. If any identification is necessary, the latter suits well. MACKERY END, IN HERTFORDSHIRE Mackery End was the name of a farm in Hertfordshire. Lamb had visited there once before, about 1780. b. 11-12. Freethinkers.-The following among Lamb's friends might be included in this description: Godwin, Hazlitt, Hunt, Thomas Holcroft, and John Thelwall, 945a. 1. In this fashion.-Cf. the following statement by Ruskin in his "Of Queen's Gardens," Sesame and Lilies, II: "Without, however, venturing here on any attempt at decision how much novel-reading should be allowed, let us at least clearly assert this, that whether novels, or poetry, or history be read, they should be chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their possession of good. The chance and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, or hide itself in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl; but the emptiness of an author oppresses her, and his amiable folly degrades her. And if she can have access to a good library of old and classical books, there need be no choosing at all. Keep the modern magazine and novel out of your girl's way; turn her loose into the old library every wet day, and let her alone. She will find what is good for her; you cannot; for there is just this difference between the making of a girl's character and a boy's-you may chisel a boy into shape. as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower 946. does, she will wither without sun; she will 'Her household motions light and free. Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do The lines quoted by Ruskin are from Wordsworth's She Was a Phantom of Delight, 13-14 (p. 295). DREAM-CHILDREN 948. This reverie is as exquisite a piece of prose as anything Lamb ever wrote; it is one of the choicest bits of prose writing in English literature. The essay was inspired by the death of Lamb's brother John, which occurred on Oct. 26. 1821. Writing to Wordsworth March 20, 1822, Lamb said: "We are pretty well save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to everything, which I think may date from poor John's loss, and another acciIdent or two at the same time, that has made me almost bury myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish. Deaths over-set one and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died within this last two twelvemths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other-the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly nited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a class of sympathies. There's Capt. Burney gone!what fun has whist now? what matters it what you lead, if you can no longer fancy him looking over you? One never hears anything, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence. Thus one distributes oneself about-and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve. I want individuals. I am made up of queer points and I want so many answering needles. The 951. going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. . . . I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day 954. between 10 and 4 without ease or interposi- Alfred Ainger, in Charles Lamb (English ... "The death of this brother, wholly unsympathetic as he was with Charles, served to bring home to him his loneliness. He was left in the world with but one near relation [his sister Mary], and that one too often removed from him for months at a time by the saddest of afflictions. No wonder if he became keenly aware of his solitude. No wonder if his thoughts turned to what might have been, and he looked back to those boyish days when he wandered in the glades of Blakesware with Alice by his side. . . . For no reason that is apparent, while he retains his grandmother's real name, he places the house in Norfolk, but all the details that follow are drawn from Blakesware. . . . Inexpressibly touching, when we have once learned to penetrate the thin disguise in which he clothes them, are the hoarded memoirs, the tender regrets, which Lamb, writing by his 'lonely hearth,' thus ventures to commit to the uncertain sympathies of the great public. More touching still is the almost superhuman sweetness with which he deals with the character of his lately lost brother. . . . And there is something of the magic of genius, unless, indeed, it was a burst of uncontrollable anguish, in the revelation with which his dream ends." ... A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG In a letter written to his friend Bernard Barton, March 11, 1823, Lamb says that the idea of the discovery of roasting pigs was borrowed from his friend Manning. The fact that Manning had spent some years in China may account for the fantastic scenery of the story. The central idea of the essay, however, has been found in The Turkish Spy, an Italian work by Giovanni Paulo Marana (1684), and elsewhere. Lamb writes of the subject of the essay in a letter to Coleridge dated March 9, 1822. Influenced by this essay, several persons sent pigs to Lamb. Forster, J. Walter Savage Landor, 2 vols. (London, Chapman, 1869); abridged as Vol. 1 of Forster's edition of Landor's Works (1874). Robinson, H. C.: Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, 3 vols., ed. by T. Sadler (London, Macmillan, 1869); 2 vols. (1872; Boston, Fields, 1869, 1874). Whiting, L.: The Florence of Landor (Boston, Little, 1905, 1912). CRITICISM Blackwood's Magazine, “Imaginary Conversations," "The Poetry of Landor," The Atlantic Monthly, July, 1902 (90:126). Bradley, W.: The Early Poems of Walter Savage Landor. A Study of his Development and Debt to Milton. (London, Bradbury, 1914). Dawson, W. J.: The Makers of English Prose (New York and London, Revell, 1906). De Quincey, T.: "Notes on Walter Savage Landor," Tait's Magazine, Jan. and Feb., 1847: Collected Writings, ed. Masson (London, Black, 1889-90, 1896-97), 11, 394. Works, 8 vols., ed., with a Life, by J. Forster De Vere, A.: "Landor's Poetry," Essays, Chiefly (London, Chapman, 1874-76). Works, 10 vols., ed. by C. G. Crump (London, Dent, 1891-93). Selections, ed., with a Preface, by S. Colvin (Golden Treasury ed. London and New York, Macmillan, 1882, 1895). Selections, ed. by W. B. S. Clymer (Athenæum Press ed. Boston, Ginn, 1898). Poems, selections, ed. by E. Radford (Canterbury Poets ed. London, Scott, 1887). on Poetry, 2 vols. (New York, Macmillan, 1887). Dowden, E.: Studies in Literature (London, Paul, 1878). Edinburgh Review, The: "Imaginary Conversations," March, 1824 (80-67); "The Hellenics," April, 1850 (91:408). Emerson, R. W.: Natural History of Intellect (1893): The Complete Works, 12 vols. (Centenary ed.: Boston, Houghton, 1904). Imaginary Conversations, 5 vols. (Boston, Roberts, Evans, E. W.: Walter Savage Landor: A Critical 1883). Imaginary Conversations, selections. 3 vols., ed. by H. Ellis (Camelot ed.: London, Scott, 1889). Selections from the Imaginary Conversations (prose only), ed. by A. G. Newcomer (New York, Holt, 1899). Study (New York, Putnam, 1892). Fyvie, J.: Some Literary Eccentrics (New York, Pott, 1906). Henley, W. E.: Views and Reviews (Chicago, Scribner, 1890). Hewlett, H. G.: The Contemporary Review, Aug., 1871 (18:109). Imaginary Conversations, selections, ed. by J. P. Horne, R. II.: A New Spirit of the Age, 2 vols. Mahaffy (London, Blackie, 1909). Imaginary Conversations, selections, ed. by F. a. Cavenagh (Oxford Univ. Press, 1914). Pentameron, The, and Other Imaginary Conversations, ed., with a Preface, by H. Ellis (Camelot ed. London, Scott, 1889). (1844); ed. by W. Jerrold (London, Frowde, 1907). Lowell, J. R.: "Some Letters of Landor." Latest Literary Essays; Collected Writings, 10 vols. (Boston, Houghton, 1890-92; London, Macmillan). Letters and Other Unpublished Writings, ed. by North American Review, The: "Forster's Life and BIOGRAPHY Colvin, S.: Landor (English Men of Letters Series: London, Macmillan, 1878; New York, Harper). Field, Kate: "Last Days of Landor," The At lantic Monthly, April, May, June, 1866 (17:385, 540, 684). Works of Landor," Jan., 1877 (124:132). Payne, W. M.: The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century (New York, Holt, 1907, 1909). Saintsbury, G.: Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860, Second Series (London, Dent, 1895; New York, Scribner). Scudder, H. E.: "Landor as a Classic," Men and Stedman, E. C.: Victorian Poets (Boston, Hough ton, 1875, 1884). Stephen, L.: "Landor's Imaginary Conversations," Hours in a Library, 3 vols (London, Smith, 1874-79; New York and London, Putnam, 1897); 4 vols. (1907). Swinburne, A. C.: Miscellanies (London, Chatto, 1886, 1911; New York, Scribner). Symons, A.: "The Poetry of Landor," The Atlantic Monthly, June, 1906 (97:808); The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (London, Constable, 1909; New York, Dutton). Tatham, E. H. R.: "Unpublished Letters of W. S. Landor," The Fortnightly Review, Feb., 1910 (93:361). Woodberry, G. E.: Studies in Letters and Life (Boston, Houghton, 1890); Makers of Literature (New York, Macmillan, 1901). BIBLIOGRAPHY "Few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the general public so little, as Walter Savage Landor. Of all celebrated authors, he has hitherto been one of the least popular. Nevertheless he is among the most striking figures in the history of English literature; striking alike by his character and his powers. The place occupied by Landor among English men of letter is a place apart. He wrote on many subjects and in many forms, and was strong both in imagination and criticism. He was equally master of Latin and English, and equally at home in prose Wheeler, S.: In his edition of Landor's Letters and verse. He cannot properly be associated with and other Unpublished Writings CRITICAL NOTES (1897), 57 any given school, or, indeed, with any given epoch of our literature, as epochs are usually counted, but stands alone, alike by the character of his mind and by the tenor and circumstances of his life. . . . Everything he says must be his own. On the other hand, it is no part of Landor's originality to provoke attention, as many even of illustrious writers have done, by emphasis or singularity of style. Arbitrary and vehement beyond 5 other men in many of his thoughts, in their utterance he is always sober and decorous. He delivers himself of whatever is in his mind with an air, to borrow an expression of his own, 'majes10 tically sedate.'"-Sidney Colvin, in Landor (English Men of Letters Series, 1881). I came as one whose thoughts half linger, Half run before; 959. 20 The youngest to the oldest singer GEBIR This poem was suggested to Landor by an Arabian tale, The History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt, which he found in Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance (1785), lent him by his friend Rose Aylmer. Gebir is a prince of Spain who makes war upon Charoba in fulfillment of a VOW to avenge hereditary wrongs. Charoba is aided by her nurse, the sorceress Dalicia. Although the first meeting of Gebir and Charoba changes their enmity to love, the story ends tragically as a result of Dalicia's misunderstanding of the true situation. Landor first attempted the poem in Latin and in English, but finally decided to write it in English. Later he translated it into Latin. It was republished in 1859 as one of the Hellenics. (See p. 975a, n. 2.) "Gebir was published in 1798, the year of the Lyrical Ballads, and. in its individual way, it marks an epoch almost as distinctly. No blank verse of comparable caliber had appeared since the death of Milton, and, though the form was at times actually reminiscent both of Milton and of the Latin structure of some of the portions as they were originally composed, it has a quality which still remains entirely its own. Cold, sensitive, splendid, so precise, so restrained, keeping step with such a stately music, scarcely any verse in English has a more individual harmony, more equable, more refreshingly calm to the ear."-Symons, in The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (1909). In the selections printed here, Landor's spelling has been somewhat modernized, such forms as toucht, fixt, and lookt being changed to touch'd, fix'd, look'd. On Landor's spelling see his Imaginary Conversations, "Archdeacon Hare and Walter Landor," and De Quincey's Orthographic Mutineers (Collected Writings, ed. Masson, 11, 437). 960. 90 ff. The passage upon which the incident of the wrestling match is based is as follows: "Now the chief shepherd was a beautiful person, and of a goodly stature and aspect. One day when he had committed his flocks to the other shepherds, and wandered far away from them, he saw a fair young lady rising out of the sea, who walked towards him and saluted him graciously. He returned her salutation, and she began to converse with him.-'Young man,' said she, 'will you wrestle with me for a wager that I shall lay against you?'-'What will you lay, fair lady,' said the shepherd, 'and what can I stake against you?'-'If you give me a fall,' said the lady, 'I will be yours, and at your disposal,-and if I give you a fall you shall give me a beast out of your flock.' 'I am content,' said the shepherd,-so he went towards her, and she met him, and wrestled with him, and presently gave him a fall. She then took a beast out of the flock, and carried it away with her into the sea. "She came every evening afterwards, and did the same, until the shepherd was desperately in love with her :-So the flock was diminished, and the shepherd was pining away with love and grief. 964. "One day King Gebirus, passing by the shepherd, found him sitting very pensive by his flocks; so he came near and spoke to him. 'What misfortune hath befallen thee, shepherd? why art thou so altered and dejected? thy flock also diminishes, and gives less milk every day?'-Upon this the shep- 965. - herd took courage, and told the king all that had befallen him by the lady of the sea." 961. 159. "W. Wordsworth borrowed this shell, friend and companion during his early years in Wales (1795-98). He was indebted to her for the book which gave him his hint for Gebir. The poem was written after hearing the news of her death in India in 1800. Colvin says of this poem (Landor; English Men of Letters Series): "Just, natural, simple, severely and at the same time hauntingly melodious, however baldly or stoically they may strike the ear attuned to more highpitched lamentations, these the lines which made afterwards so deep an impression upon Charles Lamb. Tipsy or sober, it is reported of that impressionable spirit a few years before his death, he would always be repeating Rose Aylmer. LYRICS, TO IANTHE are A number of lyrics referring to Ianthe, written and published at various times, are here grouped together in the order suggested by Colvin in the Golden Treasury edition of Selections from Landor. It is probable that a number of Landor's other lyrics also were addressed to Ianthe. Colvin says of these poems (Landor: English Men of Letters Series): "From these years, about 1802-1806, dates the chief part of Landor's verses written to or about Ianthe. Whether in the form of praise, of complaint, or of appeal, these verses are for the most part general in their terms, and do not enable us definitely to retrace the course of an attachment on which Landor never ceased to look back as the strongest of his life, and for the object of which he continued until her death to entertain the most chivalrous and tender friendship. Landor's verses in this class, although not in the first rank of lovepoetry, nevertheless express much contained passion in their grave, concise way, and seldom fail to include, within the polished shell of verse, a solid and appropriate kernel, however minute, of thought." PAST RUIN'D ILION HELEN LIVES Helen was the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta. Paris carried her off to Troy (Ilion), and by so doing caused the Trojan War. After the fall of Troy, Helen returned to Menelaus. A FIESOLAN IDYL This poem admirably phrases Landor's passion for flowers. In a letter to H. Crabb Robinson, Landor writes: "I like white flowers better than any others; they resemble fair women. Lily, tuberose, orange, and the truly English syringa are my heart's delight. I do not mean to say that they supplant the rose and violet in my affections, for these are our first loves, before we grew too fond of considering and too fond of displaying our acquaintance with others of sounding titles." -H. C. Robinson's Diary (1869), 2, 518. |