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

——a spot like which

Astronomer in the sun's lucent orb

Through his glaz'd optic tube yet never saw.

There is no reason in nature why a chimney-sweeper should not indulge a taste for rural objects, but somehow the ideas were discordant. It struck upon me like an inartificial discord in music. It was a combination of urbs in rure , which my experience had not prepared me to anticipate.

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(1813)

It should seem almost impossible for a person to have arrived at the age of manhood, and never once to have heard or suspected that there have been people born before our times. Yet this fact I am obliged to conclude from the fragment of a conversation which I overheard between two of the lower order of Irish, who passed me in Holborn the other day. One of them, it seems, had appealed in defence of his argument to the opinions or practice of their forefathers, for I heard the other exclaim "the ancients! who were they?"—"What!" retorted his companion, with an air of insolent superiority, "did you never hear of the ancients? did you never read of them?" They had got too far from me to hear the conclusion of their extraordinary discourse; but I have often thought that it would be amusing to register the sentences, and scraps of sentences, which one catches up in a day's walk about the town; I mean in the way of fair and honest listening, without way-laying one's neighbour for more than he would be willing to communicate. From these flying words, with the help of a little imagination, one might often piece out a long conversation foregone.

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(1813)

Where would a man of taste chuse his town residence, setting convenience out of the question? Palace-yard—for its contiguity to the Abbey, the Courts of Justice, the Sittings of Parliament, Whitehall, the Parks, &c.—I hold of all places in these two great cities of London and Westminster to be the most classical and eligible. Next in classicality, I should name the four Inns of Court: they breathe a learned and collegiate air; and of them chiefly,

——those bricky towers

The which on Thames' broad aged back doth ride,

Where now the studious Lawyers have their bowers;

There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide,

Till they decay'd through pride—

as Spenser describes evidently with a relish. I think he had Garden Court in his eye. The noble hall which stands there must have been built about that time. Next to the Inns of Court, Covent-Garden, for its rus in urbe , its wholesome scents of early fruits and vegetables, its tasteful church and arcades—above all, the neighbouring theatres, cannot but be approved of. I do not know a fourth station comparable to or worthy to be named after these. To an antiquarian, every spot in London, or even Southwark, teems with historical associations, local interest. He could not chuse amiss. But to me, who have no such qualifying knowledge, the Surrey side of the water is peculiarly distasteful. It is impossible to connect any thing interesting with it. I never knew a man of taste to live, what they term, over the bridge . Observe, in this place I speak solely of chosen and voluntary residence.

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(1813)

The beard of Gray's Bard, "streaming like a meteor," had always struck me as an injudicious imitation of the Satanic ensign in the Paradise Lost , which

——full high advanced,

Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind:

till the other day I met with a passage in Heywood's old play, The Four Prentices of London , which it is difficult to imagine not to be the origin of the similitude in both poets. The line in Italics Gray has almost verbatim adopted—

In Sion towers hangs his victorious flag.

Blowing defiance this way; and its shews

Like a red meteor in the troubled air , Or like a blazing comet that foretells The fall of princes.

All here is noble, and as it should be. The comparison enlarges the thing compared without stretching it upon a violent rack, till it bursts with ridiculous explosion. The application of such gorgeous imagery to an old man's beard is of a piece with the Bardolfian bombast: "see you these meteors, these exhalations?" or the raptures of an Oriental lover, who should compare his mistress's nose to a watchtower or a steeple. The presageful nature of the meteor, which makes so fine an adjunct of the simile in Heywood, Milton has judiciously omitted, as less proper to his purpose; but he seems not to have overlooked the beauty of it, by his introducing the superstition in a succeeding book—

——like a comet burn'd,

That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge

In th' artic sky, and from his horrid hair

Shakes pestilence and war.

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(1813)

I have in my possession a curious volume of Latin verses, which I believe to be unique. It is entitled Alexandri Fultoni Scoti Epigrammatorum libri quinque . It purports to be printed at Perth, and bears date 1679. By the appellation which the author gives himself in the preface, hypodidasculus , I suppose him to have been usher at some school. It is no uncommon thing now a days for persons concerned in academies to affect a literary reputation in the way of their trade. The "master of a seminary for a limited number of pupils at Islington," lately put forth an edition of that scarce tract, the Elegy in a Country Churchyard (to use his own words), with notes and head-lines!—But to our author. These epigrams of Alexander Fulton, Scotchman, have little remarkable in them besides extreme dulness and insipidity; but there is one, which, by its being marshalled in the front of the volume, seems to have been the darling of its parent, and for its exquisite flatness, and the surprising stroke of anachronism with which it is pointed, deserves to be rescued from oblivion. It is addressed, like many of the others, to a fair one:—

Moverunt bella olim Helenæ decor atque venustas

Europen inter frugiferamque Asiam.

Tam bona, quam tu, tam prudens, sin illa fuisset,

Ad lites issent Africa et America!

Which, in humble imitation of mine author's peculiar poverty of stile, I have ventured thus to render into English:—

For love's illustrious cause, and Helen's charms,

All Europe and all Asia rush'd to arms.

Had she with these thy polish'd sense combin'd,

All Afric and America had join'd!

The happy idea of an American war undertaken in the cause of beauty ought certainly to recommend the author's memory to the countrymen of Madison and Jefferson; and the bold anticipation of the discovery of that Continent in the time of the Trojan War is a flight beyond the Sibyll's books.

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(1813)

The different way in which the same story may be told by different persons was never more strikingly illustrated than by the manner in which the celebrated Jeremy Collier has described the effects of Timotheus's music upon Alexander, in the Second Part of his Essays. We all know how Dryden has treated the subject. Let us now hear his great contemporary and antagonist:—" Timotheus , a Grecian ," says Collier, "was so great a Master , that he could make a Man storm and swagger like a Tempest. And then, by altering the Notes and the Time , he would take him down again, and sweeten his Humour in a trice. One Time, when Alexander was at Dinner, this Man play'd him a Phrygian Air: The Prince immediately rises, snatches up his Lance, and puts himself into a Posture of Fighting. And the Retreat was no sooner sounded by the Change of the Harmony, but his Arms were grounded, and his Fire extinct; and he sat down as orderly as if he had come from one of Aristotle's Lectures . I warrant you Demosthenes would have been flourishing about such a Business a long Hour, and may be not have done it neither. But Timotheus had a nearer Cut to the Soul: He could neck a Passion at a Stroke, and lay it Asleep. Pythagoras once met with a Parcel of drunken Fellows, who were likely to be troublesome enough. He presently orders the Musick to play Grave, and chop into a Dorian : Upon this, they all threw away their Garlands , and were as sober and as shame-faced as one would wish."—It is evident that Dryden, in his inspired Ode, and Collier in all this pudder of prose, meant the same thing. But what a work does the latter make with his "necking a passion at his stroke," "making a man storm and swagger like a tempest," and then "taking him down and sweetening his humour in a trice." What in Dryden is "Softly sweet in Lydian measures," Collier calls "chopping into a Dorian."—This Collier was the same who, in his Biographical Dictionary, says of Shakespeare, that "though his genius generally was jocular, and inclining to festivity, yet he could when he pleased be as serious as any body ."