Mary Lamb. Gilchrist Anne Burrows

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СКАЧАТЬ which thou mayest see if haply thou hast never seen them, reader, in the margin. But my Mildred grew not old like the imaginary Helen."

      With brotherly pride he sends them to Coleridge: "How do you like this little epigram? It is not my writing, nor had I any finger in it. If you concur with me in thinking it very elegant and very original, I shall be tempted to name the author to you. I will just hint that it is almost or quite a first attempt: —

HELEN

      High-born Helen, round your dwelling

      These twenty years I've paced in vain;

      Haughty beauty, thy lover's duty

      Hath been to glory in his pain.

      High-born Helen, proudly telling

      Stories of thy cold disdain;

      I starve, I die, now you comply,

      And I no longer can complain.

      These twenty years I've lived on tears,

      Dwelling forever on a frown;

      On sighs I've fed, your scorn my bread;

      I perish now you kind are grown.

      Can I who loved my beloved,

      But for the scorn "was in her eye";

      Can I be moved for my beloved,

      When she "returns me sigh for sigh"?

      In stately pride, by my bed-side

      High-born Helen's portrait's hung;

      Deaf to my praise, my mournful lays

      Are nightly to the portrait sung.

      To that I weep, nor ever sleep,

      Complaining all night long to her.

      Helen grown old, no longer cold.

      Said, "You to all men I prefer."

      Lamb inserted this and another by Mary, a serious and tender little poem, the Dialogue between a Mother and Child beginning

      O lady, lay your costly robes aside,

      No longer may you glory in your pride,

      in the first collected edition of his works.

      Mary now began also to go out with her brother, and the last record of this year in the Coleridge correspondence discloses them at a literary tea-party, not in the character of lions but only as friends of a lion – Coleridge – who had already become, in his frequent visits to town, the prey of some third-rate admiring literary ladies, notably of a certain Miss Wesley (niece of John Wesley) and of her friend Miss Benger, authoress of a Life of Tobin, &c.

      "You blame us for giving your direction to Miss Wesley," says the letter; "the woman has been ten times after us about it and we gave it her at last, under the idea that no further harm would ensue, but that she would once write to you, and you would bite your lips and forget to answer it, and so it would end. You read us a dismal homily upon 'Realities.' We know quite as well as you do what are shadows and what are realities. You, for instance, when you are over your fourth or fifth jorum, chirping about old school occurrences, are the best of realities. Shadows are cold, thin things that have no warmth or grasp in them. Miss Wesley and her friend and a tribe of authoresses that come after you here daily and, in defect of you, hive and cluster upon us, are the shadows. You encouraged that mopsey Miss Wesley to dance after you in the hope of having her nonsense put into a nonsensical anthology. We have pretty well shaken her off by that simple expedient of referring her to you, but there are more burs in the wind. I came home t'other day from business, hungry as a hunter, to dinner, with nothing, I am sure, of the author but hunger about me; and whom found I closeted with Mary but a friend of this Miss Wesley, one Miss Benjay or Benje … I just came in time enough, I believe, luckily to prevent them from exchanging vows of eternal friendship. It seems she is one of your authoresses that you first foster and then upbraid us with. But I forgive you. 'The rogue has given me potions to make me love him.' Well, go she would not nor step a step over our threshold till we had promised to come to drink tea with her next night. I had never seen her before and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar. We went, however, not to be impolite. Her lodgings are up two pair of stairs in East Street. Tea and coffee and macaroons – a kind of cake – much love. We sat down. Presently Miss Benjay broke the silence by declaring herself quite of a different opinion from D'Israeli, who supposes the differences of human intellect to be the mere effect of organization. She begged to know my opinion. I attempted to carry it off with a pun upon organ, but that went off very flat. She immediately conceived a very low opinion of my metaphysics; and turning round to Mary, put some question to her in French, possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French. The explanation that took place occasioned some embarrassment and much wondering. She then fell into an insulting conversation about the comparative genius and merits of all modern languages and concluded with asserting that the Saxon was esteemed the purest dialect in Germany. From thence she passed into the subject of poetry where I, who had hitherto sat mute and a hearer only, humbly hoped I might now put in a word to some advantage, seeing that it was my own trade in a manner. But I was stopped by a round assertion that no good poetry had appeared since Dr. Johnson's time. It seems the doctor has suppressed many hopeful geniuses that way, by the severity of his critical strictures in his Lives of the Poets. I here ventured to question the fact and was beginning to appeal to names but I was assured 'it was certainly the case.' Then we discussed Miss More's [Hannah] book on education, which I had never read. It seems Dr. Gregory, another of Miss Benjay's friends, had found fault with one of Miss More's metaphors. Miss More has been at some pains to vindicate herself, in the opinion of Miss Benjay not without success. It seems the Doctor is invariably against the use of broken or mixed metaphor which he reprobates, against the authority of Shakspeare himself. We next discussed the question whether Pope was a poet? I find Dr. Gregory is of opinion he was not, though Miss Seward does not at all concur with him in this. We then sat upon the comparative merits of the ten translations of Pizarro and Miss Benjay or Benje advised Mary to take two of them home (she thought it might afford her some pleasure to compare them verbatim), which we declined. It being now nine o'clock, wine and macaroons were again served round, and we parted with a promise to go again next week and meet the Miss Porters who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge and wish to see us because we are his friends. I have been preparing for the occasion. I crowd cotton in my ears. I read all the reviews and magazines of the past month against the dreadful meeting, and I hope by these means to cut a tolerable second-rate figure.

      "… Take no thought about your proof-sheets; they shall be done as if Woodfall himself did them. Pray send us word of Mrs. Coleridge and little David Hartley, your little reality. Farewell, dear Substance. Take no umbrage at anything I have written.

"I am, and will be,"Yours ever in sober sadness,"Land of Shadows, C. Lamb. Umbra"Shadow month 16th or 17th, 1800

      "Write your German as plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguæ: in English – illiterate, a dunce, a ninny."

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