THE LAMBKIN MSS. AND MR. BELLOC
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—Your valued bibliographer classifies the Remains of the Rev. J. A. Lambkin among the verse attributable to their editor. I feel very strongly the impiety of this error. For, although the influence of that eminent divine is traceable in the Dedicatory Ode prefixed by Mr. Belloc to the Remains of his great mentor, it is nevertheless in the realm of prose that we must look for Lambkin's main contributions to knowledge and literature. True it is that the late Fellow of Burford's justly famed Newdigate Poem is included in the definitive edition—indeed, Mr. Belloc must have felt the impossibility of rejecting its claims to such inclusion—yet, if I may quote a delightful "Lambkinism" which deserves a wider fame, "One swallow does not make a summer"; and, as one who owes a goodly part of the culture discernible (as I trust) in this letter to the author of the Article on the North-West Corner of the Mosaic Pavement at Bignor, I feel I should be untrue to the memory of my late dear tutor if I allowed such glories to be catalogued as if they formed part of the verses of a mere poet. No, sir, Lambkin is "this England's" Seneca, and all who treasure a great cultural inheritance should rally to do justice to its Remains. The late Dr. Pusey, whose character held so much in common with that of his younger disciple, never tired of narrating that wonderful instance of Lambkin's profound yet finely epigrammatic Latinity which is connected with the death of the late Pastor of Bremen, I think. I was present on that occasion, and can testify that, far from any library, Mr. Lambkin, after a short silence lasting perhaps for two minutes, whispered the words Requiescat in Pace—surely the most terse and crisp of potential epitaphs and one almost certain to secure the immediate popularity which it obtained, falling as it did upon the receptive soil afforded by the Oxford Movement from which event in our history the expression dates. As the fact is not generally known, perhaps, sir, you will allow me to state here that the present Sir Ezra Crumpton-Padge of Whortlebury Towers, near Brixton, is now the sole surviving link between the author of Physiology of the Elephant and our own times, the claims to this honour made by M. Lamkinski, President-elect of the Kacheefucan Soviet, having been expressly refuted by that gentleman's father-in-law, M. Georgeovitch Bernardenko Shavkin, the well-known big-game hunter and editor of Agapé.
Curiously enough Mr. Belloc's fine monograph on the "Padge" System of Rhetoric makes no allusion to this interesting example of what we may surely describe, in the truest sense of Lambkin's happiest aphorism, as a "survival of the fittest." Your bibliographer will doubtless wish to note these errata. Meanwhile I trust the importance of the subject may condone in some measure for the length of this letter.—Yours, etc.,
R. N. Green-Armytage [Curator L.L.].
Lambkin Library, Whortleboro', near Weston-S.-Mare, January 10th.