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

The time would fail me if I were to attempt to enumerate all those circumstances, some pleasant, some attended with some pain, which, seen through the mist of distance, come sweetly softened to the memory. But I must crave leave to remember our transcending superiority in those invigorating sports, leap-frog, and basting the bear; our delightful excursions in the summer holidays to the New River, near Newington, where, like otters, we would live the long day in the water, never caring for dressing ourselves when we had once stripped; our savoury meals afterwards, when we came home almost famished with staying out all day without our dinners; our visits at other times to the Tower, where, by antient privilege, we had free access to all the curiosities; our solemn processions through the City at Easter, with the Lord Mayor's largess of buns, wine, and a shilling, with the festive questions and civic pleasantries of the dispensing Aldermen, which were more to us than all the rest of the banquet; our stately suppings in public, where the well-lighted hall, and the confluence of well-dressed company who came to see us, made the whole look more like a concert or assembly, than a scene of a plain bread and cheese collation; the annual orations upon St. Matthew's day, in which the senior scholar, before he had done, seldom failed to reckon up, among those who had done honour to our school by being educated in it, the names of those accomplished critics and Greek scholars, Joshua Barnes and Jeremiah Markland (I marvel they left out Camden while they were about it). Let me have leave to remember our hymns and anthems, and well-toned organ; the doleful tune of the burial anthem chanted in the solemn cloisters, upon the seldom-occurring funeral of some school-fellow; the festivities at Christmas, when the richest of us would club our stock to have a gaudy day, sitting round the fire, replenished to the height with logs, and the penniless, and he that could contribute nothing, partook in all the mirth, and in some of the substantialities of the feasting; the carol sung by night at that time of the year, which, when a young boy, I have so often lain awake to hear from seven (the hour of going to bed) till ten, when it was sung by the older boys and monitors, and have listened to it, in their rude chanting, till I have been transported in fancy to the fields of Bethlehem, and the song which was sung at that season by angels' voices to the shepherds.

Nor would I willingly forget any of those things which administered to our vanity. The hem-stitched bands, and town-made shirts, which some of the most fashionable among us wore; the town-girdles, with buckles of silver, or shining stone; the badges of the sea-boys; the cots, or superior shoe-strings of the monitors; the medals of the markers, (those who were appointed to hear the Bible read in the wards on Sunday morning and evening,) which bore on their obverse in silver, as certain parts of our garments carried in meaner metal, the countenance of our Founder, that godly and royal child, King Edward the Sixth, the flower of the Tudor name—the young flower that was untimely cropt as it began to fill our land with its early odours—the boy patron of boys—the serious and holy child who walked with Cranmer and Ridley—fit associate, in those tender years, for the bishops and future martyrs of our Church, to receive, or (as occasion sometimes proved,) to give instruction.

"But, ah! what means the silent tear?

Why, e'en mid joy, my bosom heave?

Ye long-lost scenes, enchantments dear!

Lo! now I linger o'er your grave.

——Fly, then, ye hours of rosy hue,

And bear away the bloom of years!

And quick succeed, ye sickly crew

Of doubts and sorrows, pains and fears!

Still will I ponder Fate's unalter'd plan,

Nor, tracing back the child, forget that I am man." [30]

[30]Lines meditated in the cloisters of Christ's Hospital, in the "Poetics" of Mr. George Dyer.

Table of Contents

I.—REYNOLDS AND LEONARDO DA VINCI

II.—[THE NEW ACTING]

III.—[BOOKS WITH ONE IDEA IN THEM]

IV.—[A SYLVAN SURPRISE]

V.—[STREET CONVERSATION]

VI.—[A TOWN RESIDENCE]

VII.—[GRAY'S BARD]

VIII.—[AN AMERICAN WAR FOR HELEN]

IX.—[DRYDEN AND COLLIER]

X.—PLAY-HOUSE MEMORANDA

Table of Contents

(1813)

The Reynolds Gallery has upon the whole disappointed me. Some of the portraits are interesting. They are faces of characters whom we (middle-aged gentlemen) were born a little too late to remember, but about whom we have heard our fathers tell stories, till we almost fancy to have seen them. There is a charm in the portrait of a Rodney, or a Keppel, which even a picture of Nelson must want for me. I should turn away after a slight inspection from the best likeness that could be made of Mrs. Anne Clark; but Kitty Fisher is a considerable personage. Then the dresses of some of the women so exactly remind us of modes which we can just recall; of the forms under which the venerable relationships of aunt or mother first presented themselves to our young eyes; the aprons, the coifs, the lappets, the hoods. Mercy on us, what a load of head-ornaments seem to have conspired to bury a pretty face in the picture of Mrs. Long, yet could not ! Beauty must have some "charmed life" to have been able to surmount the conspiracy of fashion in those days to destroy it. The portraits which least pleased me were those of boys as infant Bacchuses, Jupiters, &c. But the Artist is not to be blamed for the disguise. No doubt the parents wished to see their children deified in their life-time. It was but putting a thunderbolt (instead of a squib) into young master's hands, and a whey-faced chit was transformed into the infant Ruler of Olympus, him who was afterwards to shake heaven and earth with his black brow. Another good boy pleased his grandmama with saying his prayers so well, and the blameless dotage of the good old woman imagined in him an adequate representative of the infancy of the awful prophet Samuel. But the great historical compositions, where the Artist was at liberty to paint from his own idea—the Beaufort and the Ugolino ;—why then, I must confess, pleading the liberty of Table-Talk for my presumption, that they have not left any very elevating impressions upon my mind. Pardon a ludicrous comparison. I know, Madam, you admire them both; but placed opposite to each other as they are at the Gallery, as if to set the one work in competition with the other, they did remind me of the famous contention for the prize of deformity, mentioned in the 173d number of the Spectator . The one stares and the other grins; but is their common dignity in their countenances? Does any thing of the history of their life gone by peep through the ruins of the mind in the face, like the unconquerable grandeur that surmounts the distortions of the Laocoon?—The figures which stand by the bed of Beaufort are indeed happy representations of the plain unmannered old Nobility of the English Historical Plays of Shakspeare; but for any thing else—give me leave to recommend these Macaroons.

After leaving the Reynolds Gallery, where, upon the whole, I received a good deal of pleasure, not feeling that I had quite had my fill of paintings, I stumbled upon a picture in Piccadilly (No. 22, I think), which purports to be a portrait of Francis the First by Leonardo da Vinci. Heavens, what a difference! It is but a portrait as most of those I had been seeing; but placed by them it would kill them, swallow them up as Moses's rod the other rods. Where did those old painters get their models? I see no such figures, not in my dreams, as this Francis, in the character, or rather with the attributes of John the Baptist. A more than mortal majesty in the brow and upon the eyelid—an arm muscular, beautifully formed—the long graceful massy fingers compressing, yet so as not to hurt, a lamb more lovely, more sweetly shrinking, than we can conceive that milk-white one which followed Una. The picture altogether looking as if it were eternal—combining the truth of flesh with a promise of permanence like marble.