"In appearance of truth his works exceed any works of fiction that I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. It is like reading evidence in a court of justice. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Facts are repeated in varying phrases till you cannot choose but believe them." His liking for books (rather than his criticism on them) is shown frequently in his letters. "O! to forget Fielding, Steele, &c., and to read 'em new," he says. Of De Foe, "His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain and homely." Again, he speaks of "Fielding, Smollett, Sterne,— great Nature's stereotypes." "Milton," he says, "almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him." Of Shenstone he speaks as "the dear author of the Schoolmistress;" and so on from time to time, as occasion prompts, of Bunyan, Isaac Walton, and Jeremy Taylor, and Fuller, and Sir Philip Sidney, and others, in affectionate terms. These always relate to English authors. Lamb, although a good Latinist, had not much of that which ordinarily passes under the name of Learning. He had little knowledge of languages, living or dead. Of French, German, Italian, &c., he knew nothing; and in Greek his acquirements were very moderate. These children of the tongues were never adopted by him; but in his own Saxon English he was a competent scholar, a lover, nice, discriminative, and critical.
The most graphic account of Lamb at a somewhat later period of his life appears in Mr. N. P. Willis's "Pencillings by the Way." He had been invited by a gentleman in the Temple, Mr. R—— (Robinson?), to meet Charles Lamb and his sister at breakfast. The Lambs lived at that time "a little way out of London, and were not quite punctual. At last they enter —"the gentleman in black small-clothes and gaiters, short and very slight in person, his head set on his shoulders with a thoughtful forward bent, his hair just sprinkled with gray, a beautiful deep-set eye, an aquiline nose, and a very indescribable mouth. Whether it expressed most humor or feeling, good nature or a kind of whimsical peevishness, or twenty other things which passed over it by turns, I cannot in the least be certain."
This is Mr. Willis's excellent picture of Lamb at that period. The guest places a large arm-chair for Mary Lamb; Charles pulls it away, saying gravely, "Mary, don't take it; it looks as if you were going to have a tooth drawn." Miss Lamb was at that time very hard of hearing, and Charles took advantage of her temporary deafness to impute various improbabilities to her, which, however, were so obvious as to render any denial or explanation unnecessary. Willis told Charles that he had bought a copy of the "Elia" in America, in order to give to a friend. "What did you give for it?" asked Lamb. "About seven and sixpence." "Permit me to pay you that," said Lamb, counting out the money with earnestness on the table; "I never yet wrote anything that could sell. I am the publisher's ruin. My last poem won't sell,—not a copy. Have you seen it?" No; Willis had not. "It's only eighteenpence, and I'll give you sixpence towards it," said Lamb; and he described where Willis would find it, "sticking up in a shop window in the Strand." Lamb ate nothing, but inquired anxiously for some potted fish, which Mr. R—— used to procure for him. There was none in the house; he therefore asked to see the cover of the pot which had contained it; he thought it would do him good. It was brought, and on it was a picture of the fish. Lamb kissed it, and then left the table, and began to wander about the room, with an uncertain step, &c.
This visit must have taken place, I suppose, at or after the time when Lamb was living at Colebrook Cottage; and the breakfast took place probably in Mr. Henry Crabbe Robinson's chambers in the Temple, where I first met Wordsworth.
In the year 1827 Lamb moved into a small house at Enfield, a "gamboge- colored house," he calls it, where I and other friends went to dine with him; but it was too far from London, except for rare visits.—It was rather before that time that a very clever caricature of him had been designed and engraved ("scratched on copper," as the artist termed it) by Mr. Brook Pulham. It is still extant; and although somewhat ludicrous and hyperbolical in the countenance and outline, it certainly renders a likeness of Charles Lamb. The nose is monstrous, and the limbs are dwarfed and attenuated. Lamb himself, in a letter to Bernard Barton (10th August, 1827), adverts to it in these terms: "'Tis a little sixpenny thing—too like by half—in which the draughtsman has done his best to avoid flattery." Charles's hatred for annuals and albums was continually breaking out: "I die of albophobia." "I detest to appear in an annual," he writes; "I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates." "Coleridge is too deep," again he says, "among the prophets, the gentleman annuals." "If I take the wings of the morning, and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, there will albums be." To Southey he writes about this time, "I have gone lately into the acrostic line. I find genius declines with me; but I get clever." The reader readily appreciates the distinction which the humorist thus cleverly (more than cleverly) makes. In proof of his subdued quality, however, under the acrostical tyranny, I quote two little unpublished specimens addressed to the Misses Locke, whom he had never seen.
To M. L. [Mary Locke.]
Must I write with pen unwilling,
And describe those graces killing,
Rightly, which I never saw?
Yes—it is the album's law.
Let me then invention strain,
On your excelling grace to feign.
Cold is fiction. I believe it
Kindly as I did receive it;
Even as I. F.'s tongue did weave it.
To S. L. [Sarah Locke.]
Shall I praise a face unseen,
And extol a fancied mien,
Rave on visionary charm,
And from shadows take alarm?
Hatred hates without a cause,