As to his liberality in a pecuniary sense, he passed (says Lamb of Elia) with some people, through having a settled but moderate income, for a great miser. And in truth he knew the value of money, its power, its usefulness. One January night he told me with great glee that at the end of the late year he had been able to lay by—and thence proceeded to read me a serio-comic lecture on the text, of “Keep your hand out of your Pocket.” The truth is, Lamb, like Shakspeare in the universality of his sympathies, could feel, pro tempore, what belonged to the character of a Gripe-all. The reader will remember his capital Note in the “Dramatic Specimens,” on “the decline of Misers, in consequence of the Platonic nature of an affection for Money,” since Money was represented by “flimsies,” instead of substantial coin, the good old solid sonorous dollars and doubloons, and pieces of eight, that might be handled, and hugged, and rattled, and perhaps kissed. But to this passion for hoarding he one day attributed a new origin. “A Miser,” he said, “is sometimes a grand personification of Fear. He has a fine horror of Poverty. And he is not content to keep Want from the door, or at arm’s length,—but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!” Such was his theory: now for his practice. Amongst his other guests, you occasionally saw an elderly lady, formal, fair, and flaxen-wigged, looking remarkably like an animated wax doll,—and she did visit some friends or relations, at a toyshop near St. Dunstan’s. When she spoke, it was as if by an artificial apparatus, through some defect in her palate, and she had a slight limp and a twist in her figure, occasioned—what would Hannah More have said!—by running down Greenwich Hill! This antiquated personage had been Lamb’s Schoolmistress—and on this retrospective consideration, though she could hardly have taught him more than to read his native tongue—he allowed her in her decline, a yearly sum, equal to—what shall I say?—to the stipend which some persons of fortune deem sufficient for the active services of an all-accomplished gentlewoman in the education of their children. Say, thirty pounds per annum.
Such was Charles Lamb. To sum up his character, on his own principle of antagonism, he was, in his views of human nature, the opposite of Crabbe; in Criticism, of Gifford; in Poetry, of Lord Byron; in Prose, of the last new Novelist; in Philosophy, of Kant; and in Religion, of Sir Andrew Agnew. Of his wit I have endeavoured to give such samples as occurred to me; but the spirit of his sayings was too subtle and too much married to the circumstances of the time to survive the occasion. They had the brevity without the levity of wit—some of his puns contained the germs of whole essays. Moreover, like Falstaff, he seemed not only witty himself but the occasion of it by example in others. “There is M******” said he, “who goes about dropping his good things as an Ostrich lays her eggs, without caring what becomes of them.” It was once my good fortune to pick up one of Mr. M.’s foundlings, and it struck me as particularly in Lamb’s own style, containing at once a pun and a criticism. “What do you think,” asked somebody, “of the book called ‘A Day in Stowe Gardens?’” Answer: “A Day ill-bestowed.”
It is now some years ago, since I stood with other mourners in Edmonton Church Yard, beside a grave in which all that was mortal of Elia was deposited. It may be a dangerous confession to make, but I shed no tear; and scarcely did a sigh escape from my bosom. There were many sources of comfort. He had not died young. He had happily gone before that noble sister, who not in selfishness, but the devotion of a unique affection, would have prayed to survive him but for a day, lest he should miss that tender care which had watched over him upwards from a little child. Finally he had left behind him his works, a rare legacy! and above all, however much of him had departed, there was still more of him that could not die—for as long as Humanity endures and man owns fellowship with man, the spirit of Charles Lamb will still be extant!
******
On the publication of the Odes and Addresses, presentation copies were sent at the suggestion of a friend, to Mr. Canning and Sir Walter Scott. The minister took no notice of the little volume; but the novelist did, in his usual kind manner. An eccentric friend in writing to me, once made a number of colons, semicolons, &c., at the bottom of the paper, adding
“And these are my points that I place at the foot,
That you may put stops that I can’t stop to put.”
It will surprise no one, to observe that the author of Waverley had as little leisure for punctuation.
“SIR WALTER SCOTT has to make thankful acknowledgments for the copy of the Odes to Great People with which he was favoured and more particularly for the amusement he has received from the perusal. He wishes the unknown author good health good fortune and whatever other good things can best support and encourage his lively vein of inoffensive and humorous satire.
Abbotsford Melrose 4th May”