"The Albion" is dead—dead as nail in door—and my revenues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of opening to the "Morning Chronicle," !!! Mister Manning, by means of that common dispenser of benevolence, Mister Dyer. I have not seen Perry the editor yet: but I am preparing a specimen. I shall have a difficult job to manage, for you must know that Mister Perry, in common with the great body of the Whigs, thinks "The Albion" very low. I find I must rise a peg or so, be a little more decent and less abusive; for, to confess the truth, I had arrived to an abominable pitch; I spared neither age nor sex when my cue was given me. N'importe (as they say in French): any climate will suit me. So you are about to bring your old face-making face to London. You could not come in a better time for my purposes; for I have just lost Rickman, a faint idea of whose character I sent you. He is gone to Ireland for a year or two, to make his fortune; and I have lost by his going, what [it] seems to me I can never recover—a finished man. His memory will be to me as the brazen serpent to the Israelites,—I shall look up to it, to keep me upright and honest. But he may yet bring back his honest face to England one day. I wish your affairs with the Emperor of China had not been so urgent, that you might have stayed in Great Britain a year or two longer, to have seen him; for, judging from my own experience, I almost dare pronounce you never saw his equal. I never saw a man that could be at all a second or substitute for him in any sort.
Imagine that what is here erased was an apology and explanation, perfectly satisfactory you may be sure! for rating this man so highly at the expense of ——, and ——, and ——, and M——, and ——, and ——, and ——. But Mister Burke has explained this phenomenon of our nature very prettily in his letter to a Member of the National Assembly, or else in his Appeal to the old Whigs, I forget which. Do you remember an instance, from Homer (who understood these matters tolerably well) of Priam driving away his other sons with expressions of wrath and bitter reproach, when Hector was just dead.
I live where I did, in a private manner, because I don't like state. Nothing is so disagreeable to me as the clamours and applauses of the mob. For this reason I live in an obscure situation in one of the courts of the Temple.
C. L.
[Manning had taken up Chinese at Cambridge, and in 1800 he had moved to
Paris to study the language under Dr. Hagan. He did not, however, go to
China until 1806. The Wedgwoods were Coleridge's patrons. Lamb's
reference to them is, of course, a joke.
The Morning Chronicle was then the chief Whig paper, the principal opponent of the Morning Post. I have, I think, traced two or three of Lamb's contributions to the Chronicle at this period, but they are not of his best. He quickly moved on to the Post, but, as we shall see, only for a short period.
Rickman went to Dublin in 1801 with Abbot, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and was appointed Deputy-Keeper of the Privy Seal. He returned in February, 1802.
The reference to Burke is to his justification of his particular solicitude for the Crown, as the part of the British Constitution then in danger, though not in itself more important than the other parts, in the "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs." The Priam-Hector illustration is there employed.
"Homer." See The Iliad, Book 24, lines 311-316. Pope translates thus:—
Next on his sons his erring fury falls,
Polites, Paris, Agathon, he calls;
His threats Dïphobus and Dius hear,
Hippothoüs, Pammon, Helenus the seer,
And generous Antiphon: for yet these nine
Survived, sad relics of his numerous line.