Charles Lamb - The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

Page 223,line 19. Mrs. Harlow. Sarah Harlowe (1765–1852), a low-comedy actress, who played many of Mrs. Jordan's parts. She left the stage in 1826.

Page 224,line 5. Wilkinson … in a "Walk for a Wager." In "Walk for a Wager; or, A Bailiff's Bet," a musical farce, the hero, Hookey Walker, was impersonated by John Penbury Wilkinson, and Miss Kelly played Emma.

Page 224,line 12. "Amateurs and Actors" … Mr. Peak. A musical farce, by Richard Brinsley Peake (1792–1847), produced in 1818.

Page 224,last paragraph. Last week's article. That on "The Hypocrite," preceding this (see notes above). "A New Way to Pay Old Debts," published 1632, is a comedy by Massinger, in which Sir Giles Overreach is the leading character.

Page 225.Four Reviews.

These four reviews, together with that of Wordsworth's Excursion , written five years earlier ( see page 187), and that of Hood and Reynolds' Odes and Addresses ( see page 335), make up the total number of reviews that Lamb is known positively to have written. We know from his Letters that in 1803 he was trying to review Godwin's Chaucer , and again in 1821 he writes to Taylor that he is busy on a review for a friend; but neither of these articles has come to light. The fact is that Lamb always reviewed with difficulty, and after his bitter experience with Gifford ( see note on page 470) he was more than ever disinclined to attempt that form of writing.

Page 225.I.—"Falstaff's Letters."

Examiner , September 5 and 6, 1819. Signed ****. Reprinted in The Indicator , January 24, 1821. Not reprinted by Lamb.

James White, born in the same year as Lamb, was nominally the author of this book, but there is strong reason to believe that Lamb had a big share in it. Jem White, who is now known solely by the pleasant figure that he cuts in the Elia essay "The Praise of Chimney Sweepers," was at school with Lamb at Christ's Hospital, receiving his nomination from Thomas Coventry, Samuel Salt's friend and fellow Bencher. Lamb saw much of White for a few years after leaving school, finding him, on the merry side, as congenial a companion as he could wish.

It was Lamb who, probably in 1795, when they both were only twenty, induced White to study Shakespeare; and it is impossible to believe that a friend of Lamb's, whom he saw nearly every night, could have been composing a full-blooded Shakespearian joke, and Lamb have no hand in it. Southey, indeed, in a letter to Edward Moxon after Lamb's death, states the fact that Lamb and White were joint authors of Falstaff's Letters , as if there were no doubt about it.

My own impression is that Lamb's fingers certainly held the pen when the Dedication to Master Samuel Irelaunde was written.

And very characteristically Elian is the following explanation, in the preface, of certain gaps in the Letters :—

"Reader, whenever as journeying onward in thy epistolary progress, a chasm should occur to interrupt the chain of events, I beseech thee blame not me, but curse the rump of roast pig. This maiden-sister, conceive with what pathos I relate it, absolutely made use of several, no doubt invaluable letters, to shade the jutting protuberances of that animal from disproportionate excoriation in its circuitous approaches to the fire."

Either Lamb wrote that, or to James White's influence we owe some of the most cherished mannerisms of Elia . Be that as it may, it is probably true that White's zest in the making of this book helped towards Lamb's Elizabethanising.

Lamb admired Falstaff's Letters more than it is possible quite to understand except on the supposition that he had a share in it; or, at any rate, that it brought back to him the memory of so many pleasant nights. He never, says Talfourd, omitted to buy a copy when he saw one in the sixpenny box of a bookstall, in order to give it with superlative recommendations to a friend. For example, after sending it to Manning, he asks: "I hope by this time you are prepared to say the Falstaff Letters are a bundle of the sharpest, queerest, profoundest humours of any these juice-drained latter times have spawned?" The little volume is now very rare. A second edition was published in 1797 and reprints in 1877 and 1905. The full title runs: Original Letters, &c., of Sir John Falstaff and his friends; now first made public by a gentleman, a descendant of Dame Quickly, from genuine manuscripts which have been in the possession of the Quickly Family near four hundred years . 1796. "White," said J. M. Gutch, another schoolfellow, "was known as Sir John among his friends." See the footnote to the Elia essay on "The Old Actors".

Page 225,first line of essay. The Roxburgh sale. The library of the third Duke of Roxburgh was sold, in a forty-five days' sale, between May 18 and July 8, 1812.

Page 229.II.—Charles Lloyd's Poems.

Examiner , October 24 and 25, 1819. Signed ****. Not reprinted by Lamb. Lamb and Lloyd had been intimate friends in 1797 and 1798, when they produced together Blank Verse , and when for a while Lloyd shared rooms with James White. But serious differences arose which need not be inquired into here, and after 1800 they drifted apart and were never really friendly again. Lloyd settled among the Lakes, where at frequent intervals for many years he became the prey of religious mania. In 1818, however, the clouds effectually dispersed for a while, and, returning to London, he resumed the poetical activity of his early life. The new pieces in Nugæ Canoræ , 1819, were the first-fruit of this period, which lasted until 1823. He then relapsed into his old state and died, lost to the world, in 1839. Writing to Lloyd concerning his later poetry Lamb said: "Your lines are not to be understood reading on one leg."

In Lloyd's poem, "Desultory Thoughts in London," 1821, are portraits of both Coleridge and Lamb. One stanza on Lamb has these lines:—

It is a dainty banquet, known to few,

To thy mind's inner shrine to have access;

While choicest stores of intellect endue

That sanctuary, in marvellous excess.

Those lambent glories ever bright and new,

Those, privileged to be its inmates, bless!

This shows that Lloyd retained his old affection and admiration for Lamb, just as Lamb's willingness to review Lloyd shows that he had forgotten the past. The quotations have been corrected from Lloyd's pages.

Page 230,line 15. Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1759–1797), the first wife of William Godwin, and the advocate of women's independence. Charles Lloyd had known her in his early London days.

Page 232.III.—Barron Field's Poems.

Examiner , January 16 and 17, 1820. Signed ****. Not reprinted by Lamb.

Barron Field (1786–1846), son of Henry Field, apothecary to Christ's Hospital, was long one of Lamb's friends, possibly through his brother, a fellow clerk of Lamb's in the India House. See the Elia essays on "Distant Correspondents" and "Mackery End," and notes. Field was in Australia from 1817 to 1824 as Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. His First-Fruits of Australian Poetry was printed privately in 1819 and afterwards added as an appendix to Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales , 1825.

Page 232. Motto. "I first adventure. … " An adaptation of the couplet in Hall's satires:—

I first adventure. Follow me who list,

And be the second English satirist.

This couplet was placed by Field on the threshold of the poems in the Geographical Memoirs , borrowed, I imagine, from Lamb's review.

Page 232,line 11 from foot. Thiefland. Compare the Elia essay "Distant Correspondents."