Page 114. To Emma Button.
Included in a letter from Lamb to John Aitken, editor of The Cabinet,
July 5, 1825.
Page 114. Written upon the cover of a blotting book. The Mirror, May 7, 1836.
Identified by Mr. Walter Jerrold. First collected by Mr. Thomas
Hutchinson.
* * * * *
Page 115. POLITICAL AND OTHER EPIGRAMS.
Lamb was not a politician, but he had strong—almost passionate—prejudices against certain statesmen and higher persons, which impelled him now and then to sarcastic verse. The earliest examples in this vein that can be identified are two quatrains from the Morning Post in January, 1802, printed on page 115, and the epigram on Sir James Mackintosh in The Albion, printed on the same page, to which Lamb refers in the Elia essay on "Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago" (see Vol. II.). Until a file of The Albion turns up we shall never know how active Lamb's pen was at that time. The next belong to the year 1812—in The Examiner (see page 116)—and we then leap another seven years or so until 1819-1820, Lamb's busiest period as a caustic critic of affairs—in The Examiner, possibly the Morning Chronicle, and principally in The Champion. After 1820, however, he returned to this vein very seldom, and then with less bitterness and depth of feeling. "The Royal Wonders," in The Times for August 10, 1830 (see page 122), and "Lines Suggested by a Sight of Waltham Cross," in the Englishman's Magazine, September, 1831 (written, however, some years earlier), on page 121, being his latest efforts that we know of. Of course there must be many other similar productions to which we have no clue—the old Morning Post days doubtless saw many an epigram that cannot now be definitely claimed for Lamb—but those that are preserved here sufficiently show how feelingly Lamb could hate and how trenchantly he could chastise. Others that seem to me likely to be Lamb's I could have included; but it is well to dispense as much as possible with the problematic. For example, I suspect Lamb of the authorship of several of the epigrams quoted in The Examiner in 1819 and 1820 from the Morning Chronicle. He used to send verses to the Morning Chronicle at that time, and Leigh Hunt, the editor of The Examiner, would naturally be pleased to give anything of his friend's an additional publicity.
The majority of the epigrams printed in this section might have remained unidentified were it not that in 1822 John Thelwall, who owned and edited The Champion in 1818-1820, issued a little volume entitled The Poetical Recreations of "The Champion," wherein Lamb's contributions were signed R. et R. This signature being appended to certain poems of which we know Lamb to have been the author—as "The Three Graves," which he sent also to the London Magazine (in 1825), and which he was in the habit of reading or reciting to his friends—enables us to ascertain the authorship of the others. A note placed by Thelwall above the index of the book states, "it is much to be regretted that, by mere oversight, or rather mistake, several of the printed epigrams of R. et R. have been omitted;" but a search through the files of The Champion has failed to bring to light any others with Lamb's adopted signature.
The origin of the signature R. et R. is unknown. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald suggests that it might stand for Romulus and Remus, but offers no supporting theory. He might have added that so unfamiliar a countenance is in these epigrams shown by their author, that the suggestion of a wolf rather than a Lamb might have been intended. Lamb's principal political epigrams were drawn from him by his intense contempt for the character of George IV., then Prince of Wales. His treatment of Caroline of Brunswick, as we see, moved Lamb to utterances of almost sulphurous indignation not only for the prince himself, but for all who were on his side, particularly Canning. Lamb, we must suppose, was wholly on the side of the queen, thus differing from Coleridge, who when asked how his sympathies were placed would admit only to being anti-Prince.
John Thelwall (1764-1834)—Citizen Thelwall—was one of the most popular and uncompromising of the Radicals of the seventeen-nineties. He belonged to the Society of the Friends of the People and other Jacobin confederacies. In May, 1794, he was even sent to the Tower (with Home Tooke and Thomas Hardy) for sedition; moved to Newgate in October; and tried and acquitted in December. Lamb first met him, I fancy, in 1797, when Thelwall was intimate with Coleridge. After 1798 Thelwall's political activities were changed for those of a lecturer on more pacific subjects, and later he opened an institution in London where he taught elocution and corrected the effects of malformation of the organs of speech. He bought The Champion in 1818, and held it for two or three years, but it did not succeed. Thelwall died in 1834. Among his friends were Coleridge, Haydon, Hazlitt, Southey, Crabb Robinson and Lamb, all of whom, although they laughed at his excesses and excitements as a reformer, saw in him an invincible honesty and sincerity.