I am setting out to engage Mr. Dyer to your Party, but what the issue of my adventure will be, cannot be known, till the wafer has closed up this note for ever.
Yours truly,
C. LAMB.
Friday.
[We have already met Miss Hayes. Miss Betham was a friend of Dyer, as we shall see.]
LETTER 171
CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM GODWIN
March 11, 1808.
Dear Godwin,—The giant's vomit was perfectly nauseous, and I am glad you pointed it out. I have removed the objection. To the other passages I can find no other objection but what you may bring to numberless passages besides, such as of Scylla snatching up the six men, etc., that is to say, they are lively images of shocking things. If you want a book, which is not occasionally to shock, you should not have thought of a tale which was so full of anthropophagi and wonders. I cannot alter these things without enervating the Book, and I will not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London booksellers should refuse it. But speaking as author to author, I must say that I think the terrible in those two passages seems to me so much to preponderate over the nauseous, as to make them rather fine than disgusting. Who is to read them, I don't know: who is it that reads Tales of Terror and Mysteries of Udolpho? Such things sell. I only say that I will not consent to alter such passages, which I know to be some of the best in the book. As an author I say to you an author, Touch not my work. As to a bookseller I say, Take the work such as it is, or refuse it. You are as free to refuse it as when we first talked of it. As to a friend I say, Don't plague yourself and me with nonsensical objections. I assure you I will not alter one more word.
[This letter refers to the proofs of Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses, his prose paraphrase for children of Chapman's translation of the Odyssey, which Mrs. Godwin was publishing. Godwin had written the following letter:—
"Skinner St., March 10, 1808.