TO COLERIDGE,
August, 6, 1800.
Dear Coleridge,—I have taken to-day and delivered to Longman and Co., Imprimis: your books, viz., three ponderous German dictionaries, one volume (I can find no more) of German and French ditto, sundry other German books unbound, as you left them, Percy's Ancient Poetry, and one volume of Anderson's Poets. I specify them, that you may not lose any. Secundo: a dressing-gown (value, fivepence), in which you used to sit and look like a conjuror when you were translating "Wallenstein." A case of two razors and a shaving-box and strap. This it has cost me a severe struggle to part with. They are in a brown-paper parcel, which also contains sundry papers and poems, sermons, some few Epic poems,—one about Cain and Abel, which came from Poole, etc., and also your tragedy; with one or two small German books, and that drama in which Got-fader performs. Tertio: a small oblong box containing all your letters, collected from all your waste papers, and which fill the said little box. All other waste papers, which I judged worth sending, are in the paper parcel aforesaid. But you will find all your letters in the box by themselves. Thus have I discharged my conscience and my lumber-room of all your property, save and except a folio entitled Tyrrell's "Bibliotheca Politica," which you used to learn your politics out of when you wrote for the Post,—mutatis mutandis, i. e., applying past inferences to modern data. I retain that, because I am sensible I am very deficient in the politics myself; and I have torn up—don't be angry; waste paper has risen forty per cent, and I can't afford to buy it—all Bonaparte's Letters, Arthur Young's Treatise on Corn, and one or two more light-armed infantry, which I thought better suited the flippancy of London discussion than the dignity of Keswick thinking. Mary says you will be in a passion about them when you come to miss them; but you must study philosophy. Read Albertus Magnus de Chartis Amissis five times over after phlebotomizing,—'t is Burton's recipe,—and then be angry with an absent friend if you can. Sara is obscure. Am I to understand by her letter that she sends a kiss to Eliza Buckingham? Pray tell your wife that a note of interrogation on the superscription of a letter is highly ungrammatical! She proposes writing my name Lambe? Lamb is quite enough. I have had the Anthology, and like only one thing in it,—Lewti; but of that the last stanza is detestable, the rest most exquisite! The epithet enviable would dash the finest poem. For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. [1] It did well enough five years ago, when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets: but, besides that, the meaning of "gentle" is equivocal at best, and almost always means "poor-spirited;" the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce think but you meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to think you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a cordial to some green-sick sonneteer.
[1] An allusion to Coleridge's lines, "This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison," wherein he styles Lamb "my gentle-hearted Charles."