Yours most gratefully,
SAMUEL ROGERS.
Another sonnet to Rogers will be found on p. 100.
* * * * *
Page 61. The Gipsy's Malison.
First printed in Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1829. Lamb had sent it to The Gem, but, as he told Procter in a letter on January 22, 1829: "The editors declined it, on the plea that it would shock all mothers; so they published the 'Widow' [Hood's parody of Lamb] instead. I am born out of time. I have no conecture about what the present world calls delicacy. I thought Rosamund Gray was a pretty modest thing. Hessey assures me that the world would not bear it. I have lived to grow into an indecent character. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Hang[27] the age, I will write for Antiquity!'"
In another letter to Procter, Lamb tells the sonnet's history:—
"January 29, 1829.
"When Miss Ouldcroft (who is now Mrs. Beddam [Badams], and Bed-dam'd to her!) was at Enfield, which she was in summer-time, and owed her health to its suns and genial influences, she visited (with young lady-like impertinence) a poor man's cottage that had a pretty baby (O the yearnling!), gave it fine caps and sweetmeats. On a day, broke into the parlour our two maids uproarious. 'O ma'am, who do you think Miss Ouldcroft (they pronounce it Holcroft) has been working a cap for?' 'A child," answered Mary, in true Shandean female simplicity.' 'Tis the man's child as was taken up for sheep-stealing.' Miss Ouldcroft was staggered, and would have cut the connection; but by main force I made her go and take her leave of her protégée. I thought, if she went no more, the Abactor or the Abactor's wife (vide Ainsworth) would suppose she had heard something; and I have delicacy for a sheep-stealer. The overseers actually overhauled a mutton-pie at the baker's (his first, last, and only hope of mutton pie), which he never came to eat, and thence inferred his guilt. Per occasionem cujus, I framed the sonnet; observe its elaborate construction. I was four days about it. [Here came the sonnet.] Barry, study that sonnet. It is curiously and perversely elaborate. 'Tis a choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed to the structure of it. See you? and was this a fourteener to be rejected by a trumpery annual? forsooth,'twould shock all mothers; and may all mothers, who would so be shocked, be damned! as if mothers were such sort of logicians as to infer the future hanging of their child from the theoretical hangibility (or capacity of being hanged, if the judge pleases) of every infant born with a neck on. Oh B.C.! my whole heart is faint, and my whole head is sick (how is it?) at this damned canting unmasculine age!"
[Footnote 27: Talfourd. Canon Ainger gives "Damn">[