“My old New River has presented no extraordinary novelties lately. But there hope sits day after day speculating upon traditionary gudgeons. I think she has taken the fisheries. I now know the reason why our forefathers were denominated East and West Angles. Yet is there no lack of spawn, for I wash my hands in fishets that come through the pump every morning, thick as motelings—little things that perish untimely, and never taste the brook. You do not tell me of those romantic Land Bays that be as thou goest to Lovers’ Seat, neither of that little Churchling in the midst of a wood (in the opposite direction nine furlongs from the town), that seems dropt by the Angel that was tired of carrying two packages; marry, with the other he made shift to pick his flight to Loretto. Inquire out and see my little Protestant Loretto. It stands apart from trace of human habitation, yet hath it pulpit, reading-desk, and trim front of massiest marble, as if Robinson Crusoe had reared it to soothe himself with old church-going images. I forget its Xtian name, and what She Saint was its gossip.
“You should also go to No. 13, Standgate Street, a Baker, who has the finest collection of marine monsters in ten sea counties; sea-dragons, polypi, mer-people, most fantastic. You have only to name the old Gentleman in black (not the Devil), that lodged with him a week (he’ll remember) last July, and he will show courtesy. He is by far the foremost of the Savans. His wife is the funniest thwarting little animal! They are decidedly the Lions of green Hastings. Well, I have made an end of my say;—my epistolary time is gone by when I could have scribbled as long (I will not say as agreeable) as thine was to both of us. I am dwindled to notes and letterets. But in good earnest I shall be most happy to hail thy return to the waters of old Sir Hugh. There is nothing like inland murmurs, fresh ripples, and our native minnows.
“He sang in meads how sweet the brooklets ran,
To the rough ocean and red restless sands.
I design to give up smoking; but I have not yet fixed upon the equivalent vice. I must have quid pro quo, or quo pro quid, as Tom Woodgate would correct me. My service to him.
“C. L.”
The letter came to hand too late for me to hunt the “Lions;” but on a subsequent visit to the same Cinque Port with my wife, though we verified the little Loretto, we could not find the Baker, or even his man, howbeit we tried at every shop that had the least sign of bakery or cakery in its window. The whole was a batch of fancy bread; one of those fictions which the writer was apt to pass off upon his friends.
The evening meetings at Colebrooke Cottage—where somebody, who was somebody, or a literary friend, was sure to drop in—were the more grateful to me, as the London Magazine was now in a rapid decline; some of its crack contributors had left it off, and the gatherings of the clan to eat, drink, and be merry, were few and far between. There was indeed one Venison Feast whereat, I have heard, the scent lay more than breast high, and the sport was of as rich a quality; but it was my chance to be absent from the pack. At former dinners, however, I had been a guest, and a sketch of one of them may serve to introduce some of the principal characters of our “London in the Olden Time.”
On the right hand then of the Editor sits Elia, of the pleasant smile, and the quick eyes—Procter said of them that “they looked as if they could pick up pins and needles”—and a wit as quick as his eyes, and sure, as Hazlitt described, to stammer out the best pun and the best remark in the course of the evening. Next to him, shining verdantly out from the grave-coloured suits of the literati, like a patch of turnips amidst stubble and fallow, behold our Jack i’ the Green—John Clare! In his bright, grass-coloured coat, and yellow waistcoat (there are greenish stalks too, under the table), he looks a very Cowslip, and blooms amongst us as Goldsmith must have done in his peach-blossom. No wonder the door-keeper of the Soho Bazaar, seeing that very countrified suit, linked arm-in-arm with the Editorial sables, made a boggle at admitting them into his repository, having seen, perchance, such a made-up Peasant “playing at playing” at thimble-rig about the Square. No wonder the gentleman’s gentleman, in the drab-coat and sealing-wax smalls, at W—— ’s, was for cutting off our Green Man, who was modestly the last in ascending the stairs as an interloper, though he made amends afterwards by waiting almost exclusively on the Peasant, perfectly convinced that he was some eccentric Notable of the Corinthian order, disguised in Rustic. Little wonder either, that in wending homewards on the same occasion through the Strand, the Peasant and Elia, Sylvanus et Urban, linked comfortably together; there arose the frequent cry of “Look at Tom and Jerry—there goes Tom and Jerry!” for truly, Clare in his square-cut green coat, and Lamb in his black, were not a little suggestive of Hawthorn and Logic, in the plates to “Life in London.”
But to return to the table. Elia—much more of House Lamb than of Grass Lamb—avowedly caring little or nothing for Pastoral; cottons, nevertheless, very kindly to the Northamptonshire Poet, and still more to his ale, pledging him again and again as “Clarissimus,” and “Princely Clare,” and sometimes so lustily, as to make the latter cast an anxious glance into his tankard. By his bright happy look, the Helpstone Visitor is inwardly contrasting the unlettered country company of Clod, and Hodge and Podge, with the delights of “London” society Elia, and Barry, and Herbert, and Mr. Table Talk, cum multis—aliis—i.e. a multiplicity of all. But besides the tankard, the two “drouthie neebors” discuss Poetry in general[10], and Montgomery’s “Common Lot” in particular, Lamb insisting on the beauty of the tangental sharp turn at “O! she was fair!” thinking, mayhap, of his own Alice W——, and Clare swearing “Dal” (a clarified d—n) “Dal! if it isn’t like a Dead Man preaching out of his coffin!” Anon, the Humorist begins to banter the Peasant on certain “Clare-obscurities” in his own verses, originating in a contempt for the rules of Priscian, whereupon the accused, thinking with Burns,