"We have got a picture of Charles; do you think your brother would like to have it? If you do, can you put us in a way how to send it?"
Mary's interest in her friend and her friend's affairs is so hearty one cannot choose but share it and would gladly see what "the best letter-writer in the world" had to tell of Coleridge and Stoddart and the long arguments and little jealousies; and whether 'William' had continued to dangle on, spite of distance and discouragement; and even to learn that the old lady received her pension and her wig in safety. But curiosity must remain unsatisfied for none of Miss Stoddart's letters have been preserved.
"The picture of Charles" was, we may feel pretty sure, one which William Hazlitt painted this year of Lamb 'in the costume of a Venetian senator.' It is, on all accounts, a peculiarly interesting portrait. Lamb was just thirty; and it gives, on the whole, a striking impression of the nobility and beauty of form and feature which characterised his head and partly realises Proctor's description—"a countenance so full of sensibility that it came upon you like a new thought which you could not help dwelling upon afterwards"; though the subtle lines which gave that wondrous sweetness of expression to the mouth are not fully rendered. Compared with the drawing by Hancock, done when Lamb was twenty-three, engraved in Cottle's Early Recollections of Coleridge, each may be said to corroborate the truth of the other, allowing for difference of age and aspect,—Hancock's being in profile, Hazlitt's (of which there is a good lithograph in Barry Cornwall's Memoir) nearly full face. The print from it prefixed to Fitzgerald's Lamb is almost unrecognisable. It was the last time Hazlitt took brush in hand, his grandson tells us; and it comes as a pleasant surprise—an indication that he was too modest in estimating his own gifts as a painter; and that the freshness of feeling and insight he displayed as an art critic were backed by some capacity for good workmanship.
It was whilst this portrait was being painted that the acquaintance between Lamb and Hazlitt ripened into an intimacy which, with one or two brief interruptions, was to be fruitful, invigorating on both sides and life-long. Hazlitt was at this time staying with his brother John, a successful miniature-painter and a member of the Godwin circle much frequented by the Lambs.
"It is not well to be very poor which we certainly are at this present," Mary had lately written. This it was which spurred her on to undertake her first literary venture, the Tales from Shakespeare. The nature of the malady from which she suffered made continuous mental exertion distressing and probably injurious; so that without this spur she would never, we may be sure, have dug and planted her little plot in the field of literature and made of it a sweet and pleasant place for the young where they may play and be nourished, regardless of time and change. The first hint of any such scheme occurs in a letter to Sarah Stoddart dated April 22, 1806, written the very day she had left the Lambs:—
"I have heard that Coleridge was lately going through Sicily to Rome with a party; but that, being unwell, he returned back to Naples. We think there is some mistake in this account and that his intended journey to Rome was in his former jaunt to Naples. If you know that at that time he had any such intention will you write instantly? for I do not know whether I ought to write to Mrs. Coleridge or not.
"I am going to make a sort of promise to myself and to you that I will write you kind of journal-like letters of the daily what-we-do matters, as they occur. This day seems to me a kind of new era in our time. It is not a birthday, nor a new year's day, nor a leave-off smoking day; but it is about an hour after the time of leaving you, our poor Phœnix, in the Salisbury stage and Charles has just left me to go to his lodgings "Writing plays, novels, poems and all manner of such like vapouring and vapourish schemes are floating in my head which, at the same time, aches with the thought of parting from you and is perplext at the idea of I cannot tell what-about-notion that I have not made you half so comfortable as I ought to have done and a melancholy sense of the dull prospect you have before you on your return home. Then I think I will make my new gown; and now I consider the white petticoat will be better candle-light work; and then I look at the fire and think if the irons was but down I would iron my gowns—you having put me out of conceit of mangling. "So much for an account of my own confused head; and now for yours. Returning home from the inn we took that to pieces and canvassed you, as you know is our usual custom. We agreed we should miss you sadly, and that you had been what you yourself discovered, not at all in our way; and although, if the postmaster should happen to open this, it would appear to him to be no great compliment yet you, who enter so warmly into the interior of our affairs, will understand and value it as well as what we likewise asserted that since you have been with us you have done but one foolish thing, vide Pinckhorn (excuse my bad Latin, if it should chance to mean exactly contrary to what I intend). We praised you for the very friendly way in which you regarded all our whimsies and, to use a phrase of Coleridge, understood us. We had, in short, no drawback on our eulogy on your merit except lamenting the want of respect you have to yourself, the want of a certain dignity of action, you know what I mean, which—though it only broke out in the acceptance of the old justice's book and was, as it were, smothered and almost extinct while you were here—yet is it so native a feeling in your mind that you will do whatever the present moment prompts you to do, that I wish you would take that one slight offence seriously to heart and make it a part of your daily consideration to drive this unlucky propensity, root and branch, out of your character. Then, mercy on us, what a perfect little gentlewoman you will be!!! "You are not yet arrived at the first stage of your journey; yet have I the sense of your absence so strong upon me that I was really thinking what news I had to send you, and what had happened since you had left us. Truly nothing, except that Martin Burney met us in Lincoln's Inn Fields and borrowed fourpence, of the repayment of which sum I will send you due notice.