The Best Letters of Charles Lamb. Charles Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ by what he himself says in one of his letters to Manning, [1] 'a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel.'"

      The writings of Charles Lamb abound in passages of autobiography. "I was born," he tells us in that delightful sketch, "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," "and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said—for in those young years what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?—these are of my oldest recollections." His father, John Lamb, the "Lovel" of the essay cited, had come up a little boy from Lincolnshire to enter the service of Samuel Salt—one of those "Old Benchers" upon whom the pen of Elia has shed immortality, a stanch friend and patron to the Lambs, the kind proprietor of that "spacious closet of good old English reading" upon whose "fair and wholesome pasturage" Charles and his sister, as children, "browsed at will."

      John Lamb had married Elizabeth Field, whose mother was for fifty years housekeeper at the country-seat of the Plumers, Blakesware, in Hertfordshire, the "Blakesmoor" of the Essays, frequent scene of Lamb's childish holiday sports—a spacious mansion, with its park and terraces and "firry wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel and day-long murmuring wood-pigeon;" an Eden it must have seemed to the London-bred child, in whose fancy the dusty trees and sparrows and smoke-grimed fountain of Temple Court had been a pastoral. Within the cincture of its excluding garden-walls, wrote Elia in later years, "I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet, [2]—

      "'Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines;

       Curl me about, ye gadding vines;

       And oh, so close your circles lace

       That I may never leave this place:

       But lest your fetters prove too weak,

       Ere I your silken bondage break,

       Do you, O brambles, chain me too,

       And, courteous briers, nail me through.'"

      At Blakesware, too, was the room whence the spirit of Sarah Battle—that "gentlewoman born"—winged its flight to a region where revokes and "luke-warm gamesters" are unknown.

      To John and Elizabeth Lamb were born seven children, only three of whom, John, Mary, and Charles, survived their infancy. Of the survivors, Charles was the youngest, John being twelve and Mary ten years his senior—a fact to be weighed in estimating the heroism of Lamb's later life. At the age of seven, Charles Lamb, "son of John Lamb, scrivener, and Elizabeth, his wife," was entered at the school of Christ's Hospital—"the antique foundation of that godly and royal child King Edward VI." Of his life at this institution he has left us abundant and charming memorials in the Essays, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital," and "Christ's Hospital Five-and-thirty Years Ago,"—the latter sketch corrective of the rather optimistic impressions of the former.

      With his schoolfellows Charles seems to have been, despite his timid and retiring disposition (he said of himself, "while the others were all fire and play, he stole along with all the self-concentration of a young monk"), a decided favorite. "Lamb," wrote C. V. Le Grice, a schoolmate often mentioned in essay and letter, "was an amiable, gentle boy, very sensible and keenly observing, indulged by his schoolfellows and by his master on account of his infirmity of speech. … I never heard his name mentioned without the addition of Charles, although, as there was no other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary; but there was an implied kindness in it, and it was a proof that his gentle manners excited that kindness."

      For us the most important fact of the Christ's Hospital school-days is the commencement of Lamb's life-long friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two years his senior, and the object of his fervent hero-worship. Most of us, perhaps, can find the true source of whatever of notable good or evil we have effected in life in the moulding influence of one of these early friendships or admirations. It is the boy's hero, the one he loves and reverences among his schoolfellows—not his taskmaster—that is his true teacher, the setter of the broader standards by which he is to abide through life. Happy the man the feet of whose early idols have not been of clay.

      It was under the quickening influence of the eloquent, precocious genius of the "inspired charity boy" that Charles Lamb's ideals and ambitions shaped themselves out of the haze of a child's conceptions. Coleridge at sixteen was already a poet, his ear attuned to the subtlest melody of verse, and his hand rivalling, in preluding fragments, the efforts of his maturer years; he was already a philosopher, rapt in Utopian, schemes and mantling hopes as enchanting—and as chimerical—as the pleasure-domes and caves of ice decreed by Kubla Khan; and the younger lad became his ardent disciple.

      Lamb quitted Christ's Hospital, prematurely, in November, 1787, and the companionship of the two friends was for a time interrupted. To part with Coleridge, to exchange the ease and congenial scholastic atmosphere of the Hospital for the res angusta domi, for the intellectual starvation of a life of counting-house drudgery, must have been a bitter trial for him. But the shadow of poverty was upon the little household in the Temple; on the horizon of the future the blackening clouds of anxieties still graver were gathering; and the youngest child was called home to share the common burden.

      Charles Lamb was first employed in the South Sea House, where his brother John [3]—a cheerful optimist, a dilettante in art, genial, prosperous, thoroughly selfish, in so far as the family fortunes were concerned an outsider—already held a lucrative post. It was not long before Charles obtained promotion in the form of a clerkship with the East India Company—one of the last kind services of Samuel Salt, who died in the same year, 1792—and with the East India Company he remained for the rest of his working life.

      Upon the death of their generous patron the Lambs removed from the Temple and took lodgings in Little Queen Street, Holborn; and for Charles the battle of life may be said to have fairly begun. His work as a junior clerk absorbed, of course, the greater part of his day and of his year. Yet there were breathing-spaces: there were the long evenings with the poets; with Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley—"the sweetest names, which carry a perfume in the mention;" there were the visits to the play, the yearly vacation jaunts to sunny Hertfordshire. The intercourse with Coleridge, too, was now occasionally renewed. The latter had gone up to Cambridge early in 1791, there to remain—except the period of his six months' dragooning—for the nest four years. During his visits to London it was the habit of the two schoolfellows to meet at a tavern near Smithfield, the "Salutation and Cat" to discuss the topics dear to both: and it was about this time that Lamb's sonnet to Mrs. Siddons, his first appearance in print, was published in the "Morning Chronicle."

      The year 1796 was a terribly eventful one for the Lambs. There was a taint of insanity in the family on the father's side, and on May 27, 1796, we find Charles writing to Coleridge these sad words—doubly sad for the ring of mockery in them:—

      "My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now and don't bite any one. But mad I was!" [4]

      Charles, thanks to the resolution with which he combated the tendency, and to the steadying influence of his work at the desk—despite his occasional murmurs, his best friend and sheet-anchor in life—never again succumbed to the family malady; but from that moment, over his small household, Madness—like Death in Milton's vision—continually "shook its dart," and at best only "delayed to strike." [5]

      It was in the September of 1796 that the calamity befell which has tinged the story of Charles and Mary Lamb with the sombrest hues of the Greek tragedy. The family were still in the Holborn lodgings—the mother an invalid, the father sinking into a second childhood. Mary, in addition to the burden of ministering to her parents, was working for their support СКАЧАТЬ