I cannot finish more fitly than with Barry Cornwall’s dainty touch, about her habit of snuff-taking, in common with Charles: “She had a small, white, delicately formed hand, and, as it hovered above the tortoise-shell snuff-box, the act seemed another link of association between the brother and sister, as they sat over their favourite books.”
These favourite books were almost all the same, chiefly the Elizabethan dramatists, notably Shakespeare; but, unlike Charles—“narrative teases me,” he owned—she was fond of modern romance and read many novels. “She must have a story—well, ill, or indifferently told—so there be life stirring in it,” Elia wrote of Bridget, in his subtle portraiture of her in “Mackery End.” Otherwise their intellectual tastes were in entire accord; and she was but a little behind him in having almost a tinge of genius in her keen critical faculty. She came naturally to a happy command of pure limpid English, which gave to her style the charm of her own personal flavour. This flavour was made the more racy by a delicate humour, exceptional in her sex.
These genuine literary qualities first had a chance to show themselves in the year 1806, while they were living in the Temple. Charles writes: “Mary is doing for Godwin’s book-seller twenty of Shakspeare’s plays, to be made into children’s tales.... I have done ‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth,’ and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the little people, besides money. It’s to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done them capitally, I think you’d think.” And again: “Mary is just stuck fast in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well.’ She complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boy’s clothes. She begins to think Shakspeare must have wanted—imagination!” And she, too, has left a pretty picture of their common work: “You would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while, and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out he has made something of it.”
She certainly had the more difficult task in dealing with the comedies, and it was she who wrote the greater part of the preface, an admirable piece of musical English, ending thus: “ ... pretending to no other merit than as faint and imperfect stamps of Shakespear’s matchless imagination, whose plays are strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity.” The little book—“Tales from Shakespear, Designed for the Use of Young Persons, Embellished with Copper-plates,” (by Mulready)—came out in 1807, and was such a sudden and assured success with older persons as well, that a second edition was soon called for. Frequent editions are still in demand. The new preface stated that, though the tales had been meant for children, “they were found adapted better for an acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the state of womanhood.”
She also did the larger share of “Mrs. Leicester’s School”—a collection of charming tales for children, over some of which Coleridge used to gush, and Landor roar in admiration, in his best Boythorn manner. A volume of “Poetry for Children, by the Author of ‘Mrs. Leicester’s School,’” was published later. After this her literary productions consisted only of occasional magazine articles, to one of which, “On Needle-Work,” I have already referred.
THE COTTAGE IN COLEBROOK ROW.
For the stories in prose, their authoress found the local scenery and colour in her memories of her youthful visits to Mackery End and to Blakesware. Indeed, the stories are supposed to be told to each other by the young ladies in a school at Amwell—the rural village which slopes up from the Lea and the New River, only one mile from Ware.
At intervals during these years, there had been short excursions out of town, longer country trips, and journeys to visit friends far from London. Charles had spent a fortnight at Nether Stowey with Coleridge, in the summer of 1797, and there had made the acquaintance of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. She was, of all women he had known, Coleridge said, “the truest, most inevitable and, at the same time, the quickest and readiest in sympathy with either joy or sorrow, with laughter or with tears, with the realities of life, or the larger realities of the poets.” She formed a warm friendship for Mary, and, like her, she had clouds come over her reason, though not till very late in life.
During another vacation, Lamb spent a few days with Hazlitt in Wiltshire, and in other summer holidays he visited Oxford and Cambridge. He bore the country always very bravely for the sake of the friends with whom he was staying.