[72] "Sir V—— G——."
The member for Sussex at the time this essay was written (1811) was John Fuller, or Jack Fuller, of Rosehill, Sussex, and Devonshire Place, a bluff, eccentric character about town in those days, of huge stature and great wealth, whose house was famous for its musical soirées. Lamb calls him Ursa Major; his friend Jekyll, the wit, and one of Lamb's Old Benchers, called him the Hippopotamus. He once was forcibly removed from the House for refusing to give way and calling the Speaker "the insignificant little person in a wig." Fuller did not sit after 1812. He died in 1834. The member for Cambridge University was Sir Vicary Gibbs, then Attorney General, who in that capacity was a fierce opponent of the press, amongst those prosecuted by him being John and Leigh Hunt. From his caustic tongue he was known as Vinegar Gibbs—hence the reference to Scorpio. Castlereagh was, in 1823, no more; he had committed suicide in 1821.
[Page 285.] On a Passage in "The Tempest."
London Magazine, November 1823. Not reprinted by Lamb.
In the Magazine it was entitled "Nugæ Criticæ. By the author of Elia. II. On a Passage in 'The Tempest,'" the first contribution under this general title being the essay on Sir Philip Sidney's sonnets in the London Magazine, September, 1823, reprinted in the Last Essays of Elia. Lamb did not continue the series. The present paper was signed "L."
An ingenious commentary upon Lamb's theory was contributed by "Lælius" to the December London Magazine. After detailing his objections to Ogilby's narrative as a final solution, he put forward a theory of his own which is interesting enough to be reprinted here. Lælius wrote:—
The sense which I always attributed to the passage is this: uno verbo, the Witch Sycorax was pregnant;—and that humanity which teaches us to spare the guilty mother for the sake of her embryo innocent, was imputed by Shakespeare to the Algerines on this occasion.... The "one thing she did" is evidently what Shakespeare in his "Merchant of Venice" with great delicacy calls "the deed of kind;" and this sense, though by no means obvious, is justly inferrible from the context. Why then should it not be preferred? I have not been able to discover any thing in the rest of the piece inconsistent with the meaning here attributed to these lines; you, perhaps, may be more successful. A friend objected to me, that the law is,—to spare the mother only till the birth of her child, and therefore that the Witch, instead of being exiled at once, would have been kept till she was delivered, and then punished with death for her "manifold mischiefs." But poets are not expected to dispense justice with such nice and legal discrimination,—not to speak of what might have been the immediate necessity of expelling Sycorax from the Algerine community, either by death or banishment; the former of which was forbidden by the existing circumstances of her situation.
In connection with this theory it may be remarked that it was an old belief that during pregnancy a woman's eyes became blue. Webster, in the "Duchess of Malfi," makes Bosola say of the Duchess:—
The fins of her eyelids look most teeming blue.