“Thursday night, 10 o’clock.—No! Charles, it is you. I have read them over again, and I understand why you have anon’d the book. The puns are nine in ten good—many excellent—the Newgatory transcendent. And then the exemplum sine exemplo of a volume of personalities and contemporaneities, without a single line that could inflict the infinitesimal of an unpleasance on any man in his senses; saving and except perhaps in the envy-addled brain of the despiser of your Lays. If not a triumph over him, it is at least an ovation. Then, moreover, and besides, to speak with becoming modesty, excepting my own self, who is there but you who could write the musical lines and stanzas that are intermixed?
“Here Gillman, come up to my garret, and driven back by the guardian spirits of four huge flower-holders of omnigenous roses and honeysuckles—(Lord have mercy on his hysterical olfactories! what will he do in Paradise? I must have a pair or two of nostril-plugs, or nose-goggles laid in his coffin)—stands at the door, reading that to M’Adam, and the washerwoman’s letter, and he admits the facts. You are found in the manner, as the lawyers say! so, Mr. Charles! hang yourself up, and send me a line, by way of token and acknowledgment. My dear love to Mary. God bless you and your Unshamabramizer,
“S. T. COLERIDGE.”
It may be mentioned here, that instead of feeling “the infinitesimal of an unpleasance” at being Addressed in the Odes, the once celebrated Mr. Hunt presented to the Authors a bottle of his best “Permanent Ink,” and the eccentric Doctor Kitchiner sent an invitation to dinner.
From Colebrooke, Lamb removed to Enfield Chase,—a painful operation at all times, for as he feelingly misapplied Wordsworth, “the moving accident was not his trade.” As soon as he was settled, I called upon him, and found him in a bald-looking yellowish house, with a bit of a garden, and a wasp’s nest convanient, as the Irish say, for one stung my pony as he stood at the door. Lamb laughed at the fun; but, as the clown says, the whirligig of time brought round its revenges. He was one day bantering my wife on her dread of wasps, when all at once he uttered a horrible shout,—a wounded specimen of the species had slily crawled up the leg of the table, and stung him in the thumb. I told him it was a refutation well put in, like Smollett’s timely snowball. “Yes,” said he, “and a stinging commentary on Macbeth—
“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.”
There were no pastoral yearnings concerned in this Enfield removal. There is no doubt which of Captain Morris’s Town and Country Songs would have been most to Lamb’s taste. “The sweet shady side of Pall-Mall,” would have carried it hollow. In courtesy to a friend, he would select a green lane for a ramble, but left to himself, he took the turnpike road as often as otherwise. “Scott,” says Cunningham, “was a stout walker.” Lamb was a porter one. He calculated Distances, not by Long Measure, but by Ale and Beer Measure. “Now I have walked a pint.” Many a time I have accompanied him in these matches against Meux, not without sharing in the stake, and then, what cheerful and profitable talk! For instance, he once delivered to me orally the substance of the Essay on the Defect of Imagination in Modern Artists, subsequently printed in the Athenæum. But besides the criticism, there were snatches of old poems, golden lines and sentences culled from rare books, and anecdotes of men of note. Marry, it was like going a ramble with gentle Izaak Walton, minus the fishing.
To make these excursions more delightful to one of my temperament, Lamb never affected any spurious gravity. Neither did he ever act the Grand Senior. He did not exact that common copy-book respect, which some asinine persons would fair command on account of the mere length of their years. As if, forsooth, what is bad in itself, could be the better for keeping; as if intellects already mothery, got anything but grandmothery by lapse of time! In this particular, he was opposed to Southey, or rather (for Southey has been opposed to himself) to his Poem on the Holly Tree.