Before I say what it was I wanted, and what found, I ought to acknowledge that Mr. Lucas draws a proper distinction between the Essays of Elia and the Letters of Charles Lamb, one, however, which he might not have drawn if the Letters of Cowper had not been published long after Lamb began to write letters. That being the fact, he has to derive Lamb’s Letters from Cowper’s Poems, and Elia’s Essays from Cowper’s Letters, rather a chassez-croisez piece of work. Except for that necessity I think he might have gone as near as Mr. Saintsbury does (in A Letter Book) to fining the difference between Essays and Letters to one of “full dress” and “undress.” To me the difference is much greater, is precisely, indeed, the difference between Charles Lamb and Elia. Lamb’s alias was not (like Sterne’s) a stalking-horse; it was a mask and domino. With the name he put on the thing signified, or as much of it as he cared for, gave himself Lincolnshire ancestry, shifted at ease his own relatives, his early loves, the haunts of his youth, and used them the more freely for his occasions. Yet he treated his form with respect, neither let it run down, nor stepped out of character. Elia sometimes borrowed from Lamb. The “Convict” letter to Barron Field yielded its bitter-sweet to an essay, but was transformed in the taking. Not to speak profanely, there was an Assumption of the Lamb. In the Letters whim is master: Lamb is Will o’ the Wisp. From essay to essay Elia may change like Harlequin, but each single essay is ruled by one mood. Elia was evidently, if not avowedly, a debtor. Whiffs of Sir Thomas Browne, of Addison, Burton, Shakespeare, Montaigne (or Florio) float up from the page as you read. So they do in Lamb’s Letters. But there is one very signally in Lamb, not so evident in Elia, and it was that which I looked for in Mr. Lucas’s Appendix III, where, sure enough, among Lamb’s books I found:
Howell (James), Epistolae Ho-Elianae, 1645-55.
There, beyond doubt, is the source of more than a little of Lamb’s whimsicality.
James Howell, who was born in 1593, third of the many children of the Reverend Thomas Howell, curate of Llangammarch and other places in Brecknockshire, was a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, a good deal of a scholar (able, as he boasted, to say his prayers in a different language on every day of the week and in all of them on Sundays), something of an adventurer, much of a traveller, and a man who never lost a job for lack of asking for it. He was variously employed, commercially in France and Italy, diplomatically in Spain (where he was when Prince Charles would, and did, a-wooing go), in Germany also, and the North of England: a traveller to better purpose than Coryat, who slightly preceded him. He returned from each country he visited set up in its language, and able to discourse reasonably upon its politics, religion and economics. None the less, as I suppose, he was idle, for he never made money or kept an employment. He was perpetually scribbling, if you can call that an employment; the bibliographical list of his “Works” contains something like seventy numbers. Many of them are pamphlets, political, controversial, allegorical and what not. If there had been any journals he would have been a journalist—for that, out of due time, was he born. He wrote much on philology, and pretty well; he wrote a deal of poetry too, and very badly. I shall only inflict two specimens upon the reader. This is the opening of a “small hymn” for Christmas Day:
“Hail holy Tyde
Wherein a Bride,
A Virgin (which is more)
Brought forth a Son,
The lyke was done
Ne’er in this world before—;”