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

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.