I like you, and your book, ingenuous Hone!
In whose capacious, all-embracing leaves
The very marrow of tradition’s shown;
And all that history—much that fiction—weaves.
By every sort of taste your work is graced.
Vast stores of modern anecdote we find,
With good old story quaintly interlaced—
The theme as various as the reader’s mind.
Rome’s lie-fraught legends you so truly paint—
Yet kindly—that the half-turn’d Catholic
Scarcely forbears to smile at his own saint,
And cannot curse the candid Heretic.
Rags, relics, witches, ghosts, fiends, crowd your page;
Our father’s mummeries we well-pleased behold;
And, proudly conscious of a purer age,
Forgive some fopperies in the times of old.
Verse-honouring Phœbus, Father of bright Days,
Must needs bestow on you both good and many,
Who, building trophies to his children’s praise,
Run their rich Zodiac through, not missing any.
Dan Phœbus loves your book—trust me, friend Hone—
The title only errs, he bids me say:
For while such art—wit—reading—there are shown,
He swears, ’tis not a work of every day.
C. Lamb
QUATORZAINS
TO THE AUTHOR OF “QUATRAINS.”
In feeling, like a stricken deer, I’ve been
Self-put out from the herd, friend Lamb; for I
Imagined all the sympathies between
Mankind and me had ceased, till your full cry
Of kindness reach’d and roused me, as I lay
“Musing—on divers things foreknown:” it bid
Me know, in you, a friend; with a fine gay
Sincerity, before all men it chid,
Or rather, by not chiding, seem’d to chide
Me, for long absence from you; re-invited
Me, with a herald’s trump, and so defied
Me to remain immured; and it requited
Me, for others’ harsh misdeeming—which I trust is
Now, or will be, known by them, to be injustice.
I am “ingenuous:” it is all I can
Pretend to; it is all I wish to be;
Yet, through obliquity of sight in man,
From constant gaze on tortuosity,
Few people understand me: still, I am
Warmly affection’d to each human being;
Loving the right, for right’s sake; and, friend Lamb,
Trying to see things as they are; hence, seeing
Some “good in ev’ry thing” however bad,
Evil in many things that look most fair,
And pondering on all: this may be mad-
ness, but it is my method; and I dare
Deductions from a strange diversity
Of things, not taught within a University.