"What a dislocation of comfort is comprised in that word moving! Such a heap of little nasty things, after you think all is got into the cart; old dredging-boxes, worn-out brushes, gallipots, vials, things that it is impossible the most necessitous person can ever want, but which the women, who preside on these occasions, will not leave behind, if it was to save your soul; they'd keep the cart ten minutes to stow in dirty pipes and broken matches, to show their economy. Then you can find nothing you want for many days after you get into your new lodgings. You must comb your hair with your fingers, wash your hands without soap, go about in dirty gaiters. Was I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret. Our place of final destination—I don't mean the grave, but No. 4, Inner Temple-lane—looks out upon a gloomy church yard-like court, called Hare-court, with three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it? I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old."
A clever artist might readily transfer the following picture to the canvass, though his imagination were naught. It describes the misfortune of a 'cisled' fellow-clerk in the East India House, akin to one whom he elsewhere mentions, as 'pouring down goblet after goblet, the second to see where the first is gone, the third to see no harm happens to the second, a fourth to say there is another coming, and a fifth to say he is not sure he is the last:'
"The E. I. H. has been thrown into a quandary by the strange phenomenon of poor —— —— whom I have known man and madman twenty-seven years, he being elder here than myself by nine years and more. He was always a pleasant, gossiping, half-headed, muzzy, dozing, dreaming, walk-about, inoffensive chap; a little too fond of the creature; who isn't at times? but —— had not brains to work off an over-night's surfeit by ten o'clock next morning, and, unfortunately, in he wandered the other morning, drunk with last night, and with a superfœtation of drink taken in since he set out from bed. He came staggering under his double burthen, like trees in Java, bearing at once blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard you or some other traveller tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament; some wretched calico that he had moped his poor oozy front with had rendered up its native dye, and the devil a bit would he consent to wash it, but swore it was characteristic, for he was going to the sale of indigo, and set up a laugh which I did not think the lungs of mortal man were competent to. It was like a thousand people laughing, or the Goblin Page. He imagined afterward that the whole office had been laughing at him, so strange did his own sounds strike upon his nonsensorium. But —— has laugh'd his last laugh, and awoke the next day to find himself reduced from an abused income of £600 per annum to one-sixth of the sum, after thirty-six years' tolerably good service. The quality of mercy was not strained in his behalf; the gentle dews dropped not on him from heaven."
Lamb was a creature of ardent sympathies. His social affections were as fresh and tender as those of childhood; and in the subjoined extract from a letter to Wordsworth, these characteristics are admirably portrayed:
"Deaths overset one, and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died within this last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other: the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a class of sympathies. There's Capt. Burney gone! What fun has whist now?—what matters it what you lead, if you can not fancy him looking over you? One never hears any thing, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence: thus one distributes oneself about—and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve. I want individuals. I am made up of queer points, and I want so many answering needles. The going away of friend does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A., but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables."
But gentle-spirited as he was, Lamb knew how to use the polished weapon of satire. Witness his 'Letter to Southey,' and the following keen sonnet upon the editor of the Quarterly Review. It is a revenge for the severely-expressed 'distaste of a small though acute mind, for an original power which it could not appreciate, and which disturbed the conventional associations of which it was master.' Gifford was originally a shoe-maker. The sonnet is entitled, 'Saint Crispin to Mr. Gifford,' and dated 'Saint Crispin's Eve':
"All unadvised, and in an evil hour,
Lured by aspiring thoughts, my son, you daft
The lowly labors of the 'Gentle Craft'
For learned toils, which blood and spirit sour.
All things, dear pledge, are not in all men's power;
The wiser sort of shrub affects the ground:
And sweet content of mind is oftener found
In cobbler's parlor, than in critic's bower.
The sorest work is what doth cross the grain;
And better to this hour you had been plying
Tho obsequious awl, with well-waxed finger flying,
Than ceaseless thus to till a thankless vein:
Still teasing muses, which are still denying;
Making a stretching-leather of your brain."
The annexed ludicrous account of a temporary indisposition, was addressed to Bernard Barton, the well-known Quaker poet. It breathes the very spirit of 'Elia:'
"Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day-mare—'a whoreson lethargy,' Falstaff call it—an indisposition to do any thing—a total deadness and distaste—a suspension of vitality—an indifference to locality—a numb, soporifical, good-for-nothingness—an ossification all over—an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events—a mind stupor—a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot, and my excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it's three-and-twenty furlongs from hence to the end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say; nothing is of more importance than another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge ——'s wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it; a cipher, an 0! I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest. I am weary of the world, and the world is weary of me. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end to-morrow, I should just say, 'will it?' I have not volition enough left to dot my i's, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull is a Grub-street attic to let—not so much as a joint-stool left in it; my hand writes, not I; just as chickens run about a little, when their heads are off. O for a vigorous fit of gout, of cholic, tooth-ache—an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain is life—the sharper, the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold—a six or seven weeks' unintermitting chill, and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and every thing? Yet do I try all I can to cure it; I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all only seem to make me worse instead of better. I sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find any visible amendment!
"It is just fifteen minutes after twelve; Thurtell is by this time a good way on his journey, baiting at Scorpion perhaps; Ketch is bargaining for his cast coat and waistcoat; the Jew demurs at first at three half-crowns, but, on consideration that he may get somewhat by showing 'em in the town, finally closes."