[Page 335.] "Odes and Addresses to Great People."
The New Times, April 12, 1825. Now reprinted for the first time.
We know this review to be by Lamb from the evidence of a letter to Coleridge on July 2, 1825, in reply to one in which Coleridge taxed Lamb with the authorship of the book. Coleridge wrote:—
But my dear Charles, it was certainly written by you, or under you, or una cum you. I know none of your frequent visitors capacious and assimilative enough of your converse to have reproduced you so honestly, supposing you had left yourself in pledge in his lockup house.... [Added later] No! Charles, it is you. I have read them over again, and I understand why you have an'on'd the book. The puns are nine in ten good, many excellent, the Newgatory transcendent!... Then moreover and besides, to speak with becoming modesty, excepting my own self, who is there but you who could write the musical lines and stanzas that are intermixed [with the personalities and puns]?
(The "Newgatory" pun was in the Friendly Epistle to Mrs. Elizabeth Fry:—
I like your carriage, and your silken grey,
Your dove-like habits, and your silent teaching,
But I don't like your Newgatory preaching.)
Lamb replied:—
"The Odes are four-fifths done by Hood, a silentish young man you met at Islington one day, an invalid. The rest are Reynolds's, whose sister H. has recently married. I have not had a broken finger in them. They are hearty, good-natured things, and I would put my name to 'em cheerfully, if I could as honestly. I complimented 'em in a newspaper, with an abatement for those puns you laud so. They are generally an excess. A Pun is a thing of too much consequence to be thrown in as a make-weight. You shall read one of the 'Addresses' over and miss the puns, and it shall be quite as good, and better, than when you discover 'em. A Pun is a noble thing per se: O never lug it in as an accessory. A Pun is a sole object for Reflection (vide my 'Aids' to that recessment from a savage state)—it is entire, it fills the mind; it is perfect as a sonnet, better. It limps ashamed in the train and retinue of Humour: it knows it should have an establishment of its own. The one, for instance, I made the other day,——I forget what it was.
"Hood will be gratified, as much as I am, by your mistake. I liked 'Grimaldi' the best; it is true painting of abstract clowning, and that precious concrete of a clown: and the rich succession of images, and words almost such, in the first half of the 'Magnum Ignotum.'"
Other evidence is supplied by the Forster collection at South Kensington, which contains a copy of the review with a message for Lamb scribbled on it.