"The following lines." Lamb's poem "The Grandame" was presumably included in this letter. See Vol. IV. Mary Field, Lamb's grandmother, died July 31, 1792, aged seventy-nine, and was buried in Widford churchyard. She had been for many years housekeeper in the Plumer family at Blakesware. On William Plumer's moving to Gilston, a neighbouring seat, in 1767, she had sole charge of the Blakesware mansion, where her grandchildren used to visit her. Compare Lamb's Elia essays "Blakesmoor in H——shire" and "Dream-Children,"
N. Biggs was the printer of Coleridge's Poems, 1797.
Lamb had begun his amendment of Coleridge's "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" in his letter of June 10. Coleridge's illustrative personifications, here referred to, are in that poem. The extract book from which Lamb copied his quotations from Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger was, he afterwards tells us, destroyed; but similar volumes, which he filled later, are preserved. Many of his extracts he included in his Dramatic Specimens.
Writing to Charles Lloyd, sen., in 1809, Lamb says of Cowper as a translator of Homer that he "delays you … walking over a Bowling Green."
Canon Ainger possessed a copy of the book translated by Lamb's
fellow-clerk. It was called Sentimental Tablets of the Good Pamphile.
"Translated from the French of M. Gorjy by P. S. Dupuy of the East India
House, 1795." Among the subscribers' names were Thomas Bye (5 copies),
Ball, Evans, Savory (2 copies), and Lamb himself.]
LETTER 5
CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE
[Probably begun on Wednesday, June 29. P.M. July 1, 1796.]
The first moment I can come I will, but my hopes of coming yet a while yet hang on a ticklish thread. The coach I come by is immaterial as I shall so easily by your direction find ye out. My mother is grown so entirely helpless (not having any use of her limbs) that Mary is necessarily confined from ever sleeping out, she being her bed fellow. She thanks you tho' and will accompany me in spirit. Most exquisite are the lines from Withers. Your own lines introductory to your poem on Self run smoothly and pleasurably, and I exhort you to continue 'em. What shall I say to your Dactyls? They are what you would call good per se, but a parody on some of 'em is just now suggesting itself, and you shall have it rough and unlicked. I mark with figures the lines parodied.
4.—Sórely your Dáctyls do drág along lim'p-footed.
5.—Sád is the méasure that han'gs a clod roúnd 'em so,
6.—Méagre, and lan'guid, procláiming its wrétchedness.
1.—Wéary, unsátisfied, nót little sic'k of 'em.
11.—Cóld is my tíred heart, Í have no chárity.
2.—Páinfully tráv'lling thus óver the rúgged road.
7.—Ó begone, Méasure, half Látin, half En'glish, then.
12.—Dismal your Dáctyls are, Gód help ye, rhyming Ones.