possesses in common with the ancients, but with diminished claims to our


love and honor to the full extent of his difference from them? Or are these


very differences additional proofs of poetic wisdom, at once results and sym


bols of living power as contrasted with lifeless mechanism, of free and rival


originality as contradistinguished from servile imitation, or more accurately,


[from] a blind copying of effects instead of a true imitation of the essential


principles? Imagine not I am about to oppose genius to rules. No! the com


parative value of these rules is the very cause to be tried. The spirit of poetry,


like all other living powers, must of necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were


it only to unite power with beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself;


but a living body is of necessity an organized one�and what is organization


but the connection of parts to a whole, so that each part is at once end and


means! This is no discovery of criticism; it is a necessity of the human mind�


4. Coleridge is opposing the view that because ments and "organic form." Mechanical form Shakespeare violates the critical "rules" based on results from imposing a system of preexisting rules


classical drama�the unities, for instance�his on the literary material. Shakespeare's organic


dramatic successes are marred by his irregularities form, on the other hand, evolves like a plant by an


and reflect the work of an uncultivated genius that inner principle and according to the unique laws


operates without artistry or judgment. His argu-of its own growth, until it achieves an organic


ment is based on a distinction between the unity.


"mechanical form" central to earlier critical assess


.


488 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of meter and measured


sounds as the vehicle and involucrum5 of poetry, itself a fellow growth from


the same life, even as the bark is to the tree.


No work of true genius dare want its appropriate form; neither indeed is


there any danger of this. As it must not, so neither can it, be lawless! For it is


even this that constitutes its genius�the power of acting creatively under laws


of its own origination. How then comes it that not only single Zoili,6 but whole


nations have combined in unhesitating condemnation of our great dramatist,


as a sort of African nature, fertile in beautiful monsters, as a wild heath where


islands of fertility look greener from the surrounding waste, where the loveliest


plants now shine out among unsightly weeds and now are choked by their


parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the weed without


snapping the flower. In this statement I have had no reference to the vulgar


abuse of Voltaire,7 save as far as his charges are coincident with the decisions


of his commentators and (so they tell you) his almost idolatrous admirers. The


true ground of the mistake, as has been well remarked by a continental critic,8


lies in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form. The form is


mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not


necessarily arising out of the properties of the material, as when to a mass of


wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The


organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from


within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the per


fection of its outward form. Such is the life, such the form. Nature, the prime


genial9 artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in


forms. Each exterior is the physiognomy of the being within, its true image


reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror. And even such is the appro


priate excellence of her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare, himself a nature


humanized, a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an


implicit wisdom deeper than consciousness.


1812 1930


From The Statesman's Manual


[ON SYMBOL AND ALLEGORY] 1


The histories and political economy2 of the present and preceding century


partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy, and are the -prod


's. Outer covering of part of a plant. or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and 6. Plural of "Zoilus," who in classical times was Foresight in 1816; it was intended to show that the the standard example of a bad critic. Scriptures, properly interpreted, provide the uni7. The French writer Voltaire (1694-1778) vexed versal principles that should guide lawmakers in British nationalists with his description of Shake-meeting the political and economic emergencies of speare as a barbarous, irregular, and sometimes that troubled era. His discussion there of symbol, indecent natural genius. in contradistinction both to allegory and to meta8. August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845), phor, has been often cited and elaborated in treat- German critic and literary historian, whose Lec-ments of symbolism in poetry. Coleridge's analysis, tures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808-09) however, is directed not to poetry but to his view proposed the distinction between mechanical and that the persons and events in biblical history sigorganic form that Coleridge develops in this lec-nify timeless and universal, as well as particular


ture. and local, truths.


9. Creative. 2. The increasingly prestigious intellectual disci- I. Coleridge published Tlte Statesman's Manual, pline of economics.


.


THE STATESMAN'S MANUAL / 489


wet of an unenlivened generalizing Understanding. In the Scriptures they are


the living educts3 of the Imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power,


which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it


were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of


the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and


consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors. These are


the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld, when the hand of the Lord was upon him,


and he saw visions of God as he sat among the captives by the river of Chebar.


Whithersoever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit


to go: for the spirit of the living creature was in the xvheels also.4 The truths and


the symbols that represent them move in conjunction and form the living


chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity. Hence, by


a derivative, indeed, but not a divided, influence, and though in a secondary


yet in more than a metaphorical sense, the Sacred Book is worthily intitled


the WORD OF GOD. Hence too, its contents present to us the stream of time


continuous as Life and a symbol of Eternity, inasmuch as the Past and the


Future are virtually contained in the Present. According therefore to our rel


ative position on its banks the Sacred History becomes prophetic, the Sacred


Prophecies historical, while the power and substance of both inhere in its


Laws, its Promises, and its Comminations.5 In the Scriptures therefore both


Facts and Persons must of necessity have a twofold significance, a past and a


future, a temporary and a perpetual, a particular and a universal application.


They must be at once Portraits and Ideals. Eheul paupertina philosophia in paupertinam religionem ducit:6�A hunger-


bitten and idea-less philosophy naturally produces a starveling and comfortless


religion. It is among the miseries of the present age that it recognizes no


medium between Literal and Metaphorical. Faith is either to be buried in the


dead letter,7 or its name and honors usurped by a counterfeit product of the


mechanical understanding, which in the blindness of self-complacency con


founds SYMBOLS with ALLEGORIES. Now an Allegory is but a translation of


abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstrac


tion from objects of the senses; the principal being more worthless even than


its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former shapeless to boot.


On the other hand a Symbol (o EOTLV ct.L TauTrp/opiKOv)8 is characterized by


a translucence of the Special9 in the Individual or of the General in the Espe


cial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the


Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which


it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a


living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative. The other are but


empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter,


less beautiful but not less shadowy than the sloping orchard or hillside pasture-


field seen in the transparent lake below. Alas! for the flocks that are to be led


3. Those things that are educed�i.e., brought 5. Divine threats of punishment for sins. forth, evolved. 6. Alas! a poverty-stricken philosophy leads to a


4. Slightly altered from the prophet Ezekiel's poverty-stricken religion (Latin). vision of the Chariot of God, when he had been 7. I.e., the Scriptures read entirely literally.


"among the captives by the river of Chebar" (Eze-8. Which is always tautegorical (Greek). Coleridge


kiel 1.1�20). Ezekiel was among the Jews who had coined this word and elsewhere defined "tautegor


been taken into captivity in Babylonia by King ical" as "expressing the same subject but with a dif-


Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C.E. He was put in a ference."


community of Jewish captives at Tel-Abib on the 9. That which pertains to the species.


banks of the Chebar canal.


.


490 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE


forth to such pastures! "It shall even he as when the hungry dreameth, and


behold! he eateth; but he waketh and his soul is empty: or as when the thirsty


444


dreameth, and behold he drinketh; but he awaketh and is faint!"1


* * * The fact therefore, that the mind of man in its own primary and con


stitutional forms represents the laws of nature, is a mystery which of itself


should suffice to make us religious:2 for it is a problem of which God is the


only solution, God, the one before all, and of all, and through all!�True nat


ural philosophy is comprised in the study of the science and language of sym


bols. The power delegated to nature is all in every part: and by a symbol I


mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech or form of


fancy, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents.


Thus our Lord speaks symbolically when he says that "the eye is the light of


the body."3 The genuine naturalist is a dramatic poet in his own line: and such


as our myriad-minded Shakespeare is, compared with the Racines and Meta


stases,4 such and by a similar process of self-transformation would the man


be, compared with the Doctors of the mechanic school,5 who should construct


his physiology on the heaven-descended, Know Thyself.6


[THE SATANIC HERO]7


* * * In its state of immanence (or indwelling) in reason and religion, the


WILL appears indifferently, as wisdom or as love: two names of the same


power, the former more intelligential,8 the latter more spiritual, the former


more frequent in the Old, the latter in the New Testament. But in its utmost


abstraction and consequent state of reprobation,9 the Will becomes satanic


pride and rebellious self-idolatry in the relations of the spirit to itself, and


remorseless despotism relatively to others; the more hopeless as the more


obdurate by its subjugation of sensual impulses, by its superiority to toil and


pain and pleasure; in short, by the fearful resolve to find in itself alone the


one absolute motive of action, under which all other motives from within and from without must be either subordinated or crushed.


This is the character which Milton has so philosophically as well as sublimely embodied in the Satan of his Paradise Lost. Alas! too often has it been embodied in real life! Too often has it given a dark and savage grandeur to the historic page! And wherever it has appeared, under whatever circumstances of time and country, the same ingredients have gone to its composition; and it has been identified by the same attributes. Hope in which there is no Cheerfulness; Steadfastness within and immovable Resolve, with outward Restlessness and whirling Activity; Violence with Guile; Temerity with Cunning; and, as the result of all, Interminableness of Object with perfect Indifference of


1. Slightly altered from Isaiah 29.8. 6. The Roman Juvenal, in Satires 11.27 of Horace 2. This paragraph is from appendix C of The (Quintas Horatius Flaccus), had said that "From Statesman's Manual. Heaven it descends, 'Know Thyself.' " The original


3. Matthew 6.22: "The light of the body is the saying, "Know Thyself," was attributed by classical eye." authors to the Delphic oracle.


4. Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782), a minor Italian 7. From The Statesman's Manual, appendix C. poet and author of opera librettos. Jean Racine Coleridge analyzes the character of Milton's Satan (1639�1699), the great French author of verse and goes on to recognize, and to warn his age tragedies. Set on dissociating himself from his against, the appeal of that type of Romantic hero youthful support for the Revolution, Coleridge (exemplified above all by the protagonists in enjoyed finding fault with French philosophy and Byron's romances and in his drama, Manfred), culture. "Naturalist": one who studies natural sci-which was in large part modeled on the Satan of ence. Paradise Lost.


5. I.e., learned men who hold a mechanistic phi-8. Intellectual. losophy of nature. 9. In its theological sense: rejection by God.


.


CHARLES LAMB / 491


Means; these are the qualities that have constituted the COMMANDING GENIUS! these are the Marks that have characterized the Masters of Mischief, the Liberticides, and mighty Hunters of Mankind, from NIMROD1 to NAPOLEON. And from inattention to the possibility of such a character as well as from ignorance of its elements, even men of honest intentions too frequently become fascinated. Nay, whole nations have been so far duped by this want of insight and reflection as to regard with palliative admiration, instead of wonder and abhorrence, the Molocks2 of human nature, who are indebted, for the far larger portion of their meteoric success, to their total want of principle, and who surpass the generality of their fellow creatures in one act of courage only, that of daring to say with their whole heart, "Evil, be thou my good!"3�All systemso far is power; and a systematic criminal, self-consistent and entire in wickedness, who entrenches villainy within villainy, and barricades crime by crime, has removed a world of obstacles by the mere decision, that he will have no


obstacles, but those of force and brute matter.


1816


1. In Genesis 10.9 Nimrod is described as "a ment Moloch is an idol to whom firstborn children mighty hunter before the Lord." The passage was are sacrificed. Milton adopted the name for the


traditionally interpreted to signify that Nimrod warlike fallen angel in Satan's company (see Par-


hunted down men, hence that he was the proto-adise Lost 2.43-107). type of all tyrants and bloody conquerors. 3. Spoken by Satan, Paradise Lost 4.110.


2. Molochs, monsters of evil. In the Old Testa- CHARLES LAMB 1775-1834


Charles Lamb was a near contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He numbered


these two poets among his close friends, published his own early poems in combi


nation with those of Coleridge in 1796 and 1797, and supported the Lyrical Ballads


and some of the other new poetry of his time. Yet Lamb lacks almost all the traits


and convictions we think of as characteristically "Romantic." He happily lived all his


life in the city and its environs. He could not abide Shelley or his poetry, and he


distrusted Coleridge's supernaturalism and Wordsworth's oracular sublimities and


religion of nature, preferring those elements in their poems that were human and


realistic. In an age when many of the important writers were fervent radicals and


some became equally fervent reactionaries, Lamb remained uncommitted in both


politics and religion, and although on intimate terms with such dedicated reformers


as William Hazlitt, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Leigh Hunt, he chose


them as friends, as he said, not for their opinions but "for some individuality of


character which they manifested." In his own writings he shared Wordsworth's con


cern with memories' power to transform the present moment and, like him, inter


jected a sense of the ideal into his representations of the actual and everyday. "The


streets of London," Hazlitt wrote, assessing the essays Lamb published under the


pseudonym Elia in the London Magazine, "are his fairy-land, teeming with wonder,


with life and interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye of


childhood." Lamb was born in London at the Inner Temple, center of the English legal profes


sion. His father, who began his working life as a footman, was assistant to a lawyer


there. His paternal as well as maternal grandparents were servants. At the age of


.


49 2 / CHARLES LAMB


seven he entered Christ's Hospital, the "Bluecoat School" of his essay "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago." Childhood ended early. He left the school before he was fifteen and soon thereafter became a clerk in the accounting department of the East India Company, a huge commercial house, where he remained for thirty-three years. His adult life was quiet and unadventurous, but under its calm surface lay great tragedy. When he was twenty-two his beloved sister, Mary, ten years his senior, exhausted by her labors as a dressmaker and the work of caring for her invalid parents, began to show signs of a breakdown. One day she turned in a manic rage on the little girl who was her apprentice. When Mrs. Lamb tried to intercede, her daughter stabbed her in the heart. The jury's verdict was lunacy, but the intercession of her father's former employer spared Mary permanent confinement in an asylum. Instead, she was remanded to the custody of Charles, who devoted the rest of his life to her and their common household. Mary's attacks of insanity recurred, and when the terribly familiar symptoms began to show themselves, Charles and Mary would walk arm in arm and weeping to the asylum, carrying a straitjacket with them.


Most of the time, however, Mary was her normally serene and gracious self, and shared her brother's love of company and genius for friendship. The evening gatherings at the Lambs' attracted a varied company that included many of the leading writers and artists of England. Charles drew furiously on a pipe of strong tobacco and drank copiously; as the alcohol eased his habitual stammer, his puns and practical jokes grew ever more outrageous. He had, in fact, a complex temperament, in which the playfulness overlay a somber melancholy and the eccentricity sometimes manifested a touch of malice.


To supplement his salary at the East India House, Lamb had early turned to writing in a variety of literary forms: sonnets; blank verse; a sentimental novel; a tragedy; and a farce, Mr. H , which was hissed by the audience, including its honest author, when it was produced at Drury Lane (the uneasiness with the theater that informs his essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare" probably reflects this experience). He also collaborated with his sister, Mary, on a series of children's books, including the excellent Tales from Shakespeare, and wrote some brilliant critical commentaries in his anthology, important for the Elizabethan revival of that period, titled Specimensof English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare. Not until 1820, however, at the age of forty-five, did Lamb discover the form that would make his name, when he began to write essays for John Scott's new London Magazine.


Lamb's achievement in those contributions to the London was to accommodate the intimacies of the familiar essay, a genre dating back to Montaigne in the sixteenth century, to a modern world of magazine writing that aimed to reach a general public. The Essays ofElia make the magazine�an impersonal medium that contributed conspicuously to the information overload of the age�appear to be a forum in which a reader might really know an author. A sense of the paradoxes of that project�a sense that the illusions of personality in the personal essay might be easily debunked�is never far away in Lamb's writings, lending a fascinating edge to their charm and complicating the autobiographical impulse that seems to link them to the works of his contemporaries. Under the pseudonym Elia, which, Lamb said, was the name of an Italian clerk he had known briefly while employed in the South Sea House, Lamb projects in his essays the character of a man who is whimsical but strong-willed, self- deprecating yet self-absorbed, with strong likes and dislikes, a specialist in nostalgia and in that humor which balances delicately on the verge of pathos. But Elia is also, as Lamb noted, an anagram for "a lie": the essays' seemingly unguarded self-revelation is intertwined with the cunning of a deliberate and dedicated artist in prose. And to write about himself Lamb developed a prose style that was colored throughout by archaic words and expressions that continually alluded to literary precursors, including the works of other eccentrics such as Robert Burton and Laurence Sterne�as if he were suggesting that he was most distinctively himself when most immersed in his beloved old books.


.


ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE / 49 3


From On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation1


* * * [S]uch is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in


at the eye and ear at a play-house, compared with the slow apprehension


oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink


the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to


identify in our minds, in a perverse manner, the actor with the character which


he represents. It is difficult for a frequent play-goer to disembarrass the idea


of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth,


while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S.2 * * *


Never let me be so ungrateful as to forget the very high degree of satisfaction


which I received some years back from seeing for the first time a tragedy of


Shakespeare performed, in which these two great performers sustained the


principal parts. It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hith


erto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life after for this


juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find


to our cost that instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and


brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have let go


a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance. How cruelly this operates upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus


cramped and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be


judged from that delightful sensation of freshness, with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped being performed. 44


4


It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the plays of


Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of


almost any other dramatist whatever. Their distinguished excellence is a rea


son that they should be so. There is so much in them, which comes not under


the province of acting, with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing


to do.


The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of passion;


and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more hold upon the


eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously possesses. For this


reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons talk themselves into a fit


of fury, and then in a surprising manner talk themselves out of it again, have


always been the most popular upon our stage. And the reason is plain,


because the spectators are here most palpably appealed to, they are the


proper judges in this war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be


formed round such "intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the direct object of


the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in Shakespeare above all,


how obvious it is, that the form of speaking, whether it be in soliloquy or dia


logue, is only a medium, and often a highly artificial one, for putting the


reader or spectator into possession of that knowledge of the inner structure


and workings of a mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have


arrived at in that form of composition by any gift short of intuition. We do here


as we do with novels written in the epistolary form. How many improprieties,


perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with in Clarissa3 and other


1. Published under Lamb's name in the magazine 1823) and his sister Sarah Siddons (1755-1831). The Reflector in 1811 . 3. Samuel Richardson's novel in letters, published 2. Acclaimed actors John Philip Kemble (1757� 1747�48, admired across Europe for its illumina


.


494 / CHARLES LAMB


books, for the sake of the delight which that form upon the whole gives us.


But the practice of stage representation reduces every thing to a controversy


of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous blasphemings of Bajazet4 to


the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must play the orator. * 4 *


The character of Hamlet is perhaps that by which, since the days of Bet


terton,5 a succession of popular performers have had the greatest ambition to


distinguish themselves. The length of the part may be one of their reasons.


But for the character itself, we find it in a play, and therefore we judge it a fit


subject of dramatic representation. The play itself abounds in maxims and


reflections beyond any other, and therefore we consider it as a proper vehicle


for conveying moral instruction. But Hamlet himself�what does he suffer


meanwhile by being dragged forth as a public schoolmaster, to give lectures


to the crowd! Why, nine parts in ten of what Hamlet does, are transactions


between himself and his moral sense, they are the effusions of his solitary


musings, which he retires to holes and corners and the most sequestered parts


of the palace to pour forth; or rather, they are the silent meditations with


which his bosom is bursting, reduced to words for the sake of the reader, who


must else remain ignorant of what is passing there. These profound sorrows,


these light-and-noise-abhorring ruminations, which the tongue scarce dares


utter to deaf walls and chambers, how can they be represented by a gesticu


lating actor, who comes and mouths them out before an audience, making


four hundred people his confidants at once? I say not that it is the fault of the


actor so to do; he must pronounce them ore rotundo,6 he must accompany


them with his eye; he must insinuate them into his auditory by some trick of


eye, tone, or gesture, or he fails. He must be thinking all the while of his


appearance, because he knows that all the while the spectators are judging of it.


And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet. It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of thought


and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise would never earn


it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual acquisition gained this way


may, for aught I know, be inestimable; but I am not arguing that Hamlet


should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being


acted. * * * The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of


meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions, that while


we are reading any of his great criminal characters,�Macbeth, Richard, even


Iago,�we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the


ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to


overleap those moral fences. * * * But when we see these things represented,


the acts which they do are comparatively everything, their impulses nothing.


The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those images of


night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with


which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to


murder Duncan,7�when we no longer read it in a book, when we have given


up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing,


and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing


don of the mysteries of the human heart. 5. Thomas Betterton (1635?�1710), acclaimed


4. Ottoman sultan; more than one dramatic char-tragedian. acter is based on this historical figure, but Lamb 6. Latin: "with well turned speech" or, literally,


likely refers to a performance of Nicholas Rowe's "with rounded mouth." Tamerlane (first staged 1701). 7. Macbeth 2.1.


.


ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE / 495


to commit a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed


it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the


natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close


pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally


destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the deed


doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence: it rather seems


to belong to history,�to something past and inevitable, if it has any thing to


do with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is


present to our minds in the reading. So to see Lear acted,�to see an old man tottering about the stage with a


walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing


in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and


relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in


me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machin


ery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inade


quate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to


represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Mil


ton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of


Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual; the explosions of his


passion are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to


the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is


laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought


on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal


infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not


Lear, but we are Lear,�we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur


which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his


reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from


the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it Iisteth,8 at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. * * * Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage. But how many dramatic personages are there in Shakespeare, which, though more tractable and feasible (if I may so speak) than Lear, yet from some circumstance, some adjunct to their character, are improper to be shewn to our bodily eye. Othello


for instance. Nothing can be more soothing, more flattering to the nobler parts


of our natures, than to read of a young Venetian lady of highest extraction,


through the force of love and from a sense of merit in him whom she loved,


laying aside every consideration of kindred, and country, and colour, and wed


ding with a coal-black Moor�(for such he is represented, in the imperfect


state of knowledge respecting foreign countries in those days, compared with


our own, or in compliance with popular notions, though the Moors are now


well enough known to be by many shades less unworthy of a white woman's


fancy)�it is the perfect triumph of virtue over accidents,9 of the imagination


over the senses. She sees Othello's colour in his mind.1 But upon the stage,


when the imagination is no longer the ruling faculty, but we are left to our


poor unassisted senses, I appeal to every one that has seen Othello played,


whether he did not, on the contrary, sink Othello's mind in his colour; whether


he did not find something extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded


caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether the actual sight of the thing


8. Echo of Christ's discussion of the mysteries of qualities that are extraneous to�i.e., not of the spiritual rebirth in John 3.8. essence of�an object.


9. "Accidents" in the sense used for properties or I. Othello 1.3.247.


.


496 / CHARLES LAMB


did not over-weigh all that beautiful compromise which we make in reading.


And the reason it should do so is obvious, because there is just so much reality


presented to our senses as to give a perception of disagreement, with not


enough of belief in the internal motives,�all that which is unseen,�to over


power and reconcile the first and obvious prejudices. What we see upon a


stage is body and bodily action; what we are conscious of in reading is almost


exclusively the mind, and its movements: and this I think may sufficiently


account for the very different sort of delight with which the same play so often


affects us in the reading and the seeing.


1811 1811


Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago'


In Mr. Lamb's Works, published a year or two since, I find a magnificent


eulogy on my old school, such as it was, or now appears to him to have been,


between the years 1782 and 1789. It happens very oddly that my own standing


at Christ's was nearly corresponding with his; and, with all gratitude to him


for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring together


whatever can be said in praise of them, dropping all the other side of the


argument most ingeniously. I remember L. at school, and can well recollect that he had some peculiar


advantages, which I and others of his schoolfellows had not. His friends lived


in town, and were near at hand; and he had the privilege of going to see them


almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was


denied to us. The present worthy subtreasurer to the Inner Temple2 can


explain how that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while


we were battening upon our quarter of a penny loaf�our crug�moistened


with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leath


ern jack3 it was poured from. Our Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless,


and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking, were enriched for him


with a slice of "extraordinary bread and butter," from the hot loaf of the Tem


ple. The Wednesday's mess of millet, somewhat less repugnant�(we had three


banyan to four meat days4 in the week)�was endeared to his palate with a


lump of double-refined,5 and a smack of ginger (to make it go down the more


glibly) or the fragrant cinnamon. In lieu of our half-pickled Sundays, or quite


fresh boiled beef on Thursdays (strong as caro equina6), with detestable mar


igolds floating in the pail to poison the broth�our scanty mutton scrags on


1. Christ's Hospital, London (founded in 1 552 by Charles Lamb. The Inner Temple is one of the four Edward VI), was run as a free boarding school for Inns of Court, the center of the English legal pro-


the sons of middle-class parents in straitened fession.


financial circumstances. Its students were known 3. A leather vessel coated on the outside with


as "Bluecoat Boys," from their uniform of a long pitch. "Crug": bread (slang). "Small beer": beer


blue gown and yellow stockings. Lamb had in 1813 low in alcoholic content. "Piggins": small wooden


published a magazine article, "Recollections of pails.


Christ's Hospital," that the present essay under-4. "Banyan . . . days": nautical term for days when


takes to supplement by presenting the less formal no meat is served; it derives from banian, a member


side of school life. The "I" or narrator of the essay of a Hindu caste to whom meat is forbidden. "Mil


is Elia�a device that allows Lamb to combine his let": a cereal.


own experiences (L.'s) with those of Coleridge, his 5. Sugar.


older contemporary at the school. 6. Horsemeat (Latin).


2. Randal Norris, who had befriended young


.


CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO / 497


Friday�and rather more savory, but grudging, portions of the same flesh,


rotten-roasted7 or rare, on the Tuesdays (the only dish which excited our appe


tites, and disappointed our stomachs, in almost equal proportion)�he had his


hot plate of roast veal, or the more tempting griskin8 (exotics unknown to our


palates), cooked in the paternal kitchen (a great thing), and brought him daily


by his maid or aunt! I remember the good old relative (in whom love forbade


pride) squatting down upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters,


disclosing the viands (of higher regale than those cates which the ravens min


istered to the Tishbite);9 and the contending passions of L. at the unfolding.


There was love for the bringer; shame for the thing brought, and the manner


of its bringing; sympathy for those who were too many to share in it; and, at


top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest of the passions!) predominant, breaking


down the stony fences of shame, and awkwardness, and a troubling over-


consciousness. I was a poor friendless boy. My parents, and those who should care for me,


were far away. Those few acquaintances of theirs, which they could reckon


upon being kind to me in the great city, after a little forced notice, which they


had the grace to take of me on my first arrival in town, soon grew tired of my


holiday visits. They seemed to them to recur too often, though I thought them


few enough; and, one after another, they all failed me, and I felt myself alone


among six hundred playmates. O the cruelty of separating a poor lad from his early homestead! The yearn


ings which I used to have towards it in those unfledged years! How, in my


dreams, would my native town (far in the west) come back, with its church,


and trees, and faces! How I would wake weeping, and in the anguish of my


heart exclaim upon sweet Calne in Wiltshire!1 To this late hour of my life, I trace impressions left by the recollections of


those friendless holidays. The long warm days of summer never return but


they bring with them a gloom from the haunting memory of those whole-day


leaves, when, by some strange arrangement, we were turned out for the livelong


day, upon our own hands, whether we had friends to go to or none. I remember


those bathing excursions to the New River which L. recalls with such relish,


better, I think, than he can�for he was a home-seeking lad, and did not much


care for such water pastimes: How merrily we would sally forth into the fields;


and strip under the first warmth of the sun; and wanton like young dace2 in


the streams; getting us appetites for noon, which those of us that were pen


niless (our scanty morning crust long since exhausted) had not the means of


allaying�while the cattle, and the birds, and the fishes were at feed about us


and we had nothing to satisfy our cravings�the very beauty of the day, and


the exercise of the pastime, and the sense of liberty, setting a keener edge


upon them! How faint and languid, finally, we would return, towards nightfall,


to our desired morsel, half-rejoicing, half-reluctant that the hours of our


uneasy liberty had expired! It was worse in the days of winter, to go prowling about the streets object-


less�shivering at cold windows of print shops, to extract a little amusement;


or haply, as a last resort in the hopes of a little novelty, to pay a fifty-times


7. Overdone. "Scrags": necks. 1. Coleridge had come to school from Ottery St. 8. The lean part of a loin of pork. Mary, Devonshire, in the southwest of England. 9. The prophet Elijah, who was fed by the ravens 2. A small quick-darting fish. in 1 Kings 17. "Cates": delicacies.


.


498 / CHARLES LAMB


repeated visit (where our individual faces should be as well known to the


warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower�to whose


levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive title to admission.3


L.'s governor (so we called the patron who presented us to the foundation)4


lived in a manner under his paternal roof. Any complaint which he had to


make was sure of being attended to. This was understood at Christ's, and was


an effectual screen to him against the severity of masters, or worse tyranny of


the monitors. The oppressions of these young brutes are heart-sickening to


call to recollection. I have been called out of my bed, and waked for the pur


pose, in the coldest winter nights�and this not once, but night after night�


in my shirt, to receive the discipline of a leathern thong and eleven other


sufferers, because it pleased my callow overseer, when there has been any


talking heard after we were gone to bed, to make the six last beds in the


dormitory, where the youngest children of us slept, answerable for an offense


they neither dared to commit nor had the power to hinder. The same execrable


tyranny drove the younger part of us from the fires, when our feet were per


ishing with snow; and, under the cruelest penalties, forbade the indulgence


of a drink of water when we lay in sleepless summer nights fevered with the


season and the day's sports. There was one H , who, I learned, in after days was seen expiating some maturer offense in the hulks.5 (Do I flatter myself in fancying that this might


be the planter of that name, who suffered�at Nevis, I think, or St. Kitts6�


some few years since? My friend Tobin was the benevolent instrument of


bringing him to the gallows.) This petty Nero actually branded a boy who had


offended him with a red-hot iron; and nearly starved forty of us with exacting


contributions, to the one-half of our bread, to pamper a young ass, which,


incredible as it may seem, with the connivance of the nurse's daughter (a


young flame of his) he had contrived to smuggle in, and keep upon the leads7


of the ward, as they called our dormitories. This game went on for better than


a week, till the foolish beast, not able to fare well but he must cry roast meat�


happier than Caligula's minion,8 could he have kept his own counsel�but


foolisher, alas! than any of his species in the fables�waxing fat, and kicking,


in the fullness of bread, one unlucky minute would needs proclaim his good


fortune to the world below; and, laying out his simple throat, blew such a


ram's-horn blast, as (toppling down the walls of his own Jericho)9 set con


cealment any longer at defiance. The client was dismissed, with certain


attentions, to Smithfield; but I never understood that the patron underwent


any censure on the occasion. This was in the stewardship of L.'s admired


Perry.' Under the same facile administration, can L. have forgotten the cool impu


nity with which the nurses used to carry away openly, in open platters, for


their own tables, one out of two of every hot joint, which the careful matron


had been seeing scrupulously weighed out for our dinners? These things were


3. The Bluecoat Boys had the right of free admis-6. Islands in the West Indies. sion to the royal menagerie, then housed in the 7. A flat roof.


Tower of London. "Levee": a formal morning 8. The favorite horse of the Roman emperor Calig


reception. ula, who was fed gilded oats and appointed to the


4. I.e., who vouched for a candidate for entrance post of chief consul. to Christ's Hospital. Lamb's patron was Samuel 9. Joshua toppled the walls of Jericho by trumpet


Salt, a lawyer and member of Parliament for whom blasts (Joshua 6.16-20).


Lamb's father served as clerk. 1. John Perry, steward of the school, described in


5. Prison ship. (In Lamb's time the plural "hulks" Lamb's earlier essay. "Smithfield": a market for had come to be used for the singular.) horses and cattle.


.


CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO / 49 9


daily practiced in that magnificent apartment which L. (grown connoisseur


since, we presume) praises so highly for the grand paintings "by Verrio,2 and


others," with which it is "hung round and adorned." But the sight of sleek,


well-fed bluecoat boys in pictures was, at that time, I believe, little consolatory


to him, or us, the living ones, who saw the better part of our provisions carried


away before our faces by harpies; and ourselves reduced (with the Trojan in


the hall of Dido) To feed our mind with idle portraiture.3


L. has recorded the repugnance of the school to gags, or the fat of fresh beef boiled; and sets it down to some superstition. But these unctuous morsels are never grateful4 to young palates (children are universally fat-haters), and in strong, coarse, boiled meats, unsalted, are detestable. A gag-eater in our time was equivalent to a ghoul, and held in equal detestation. suffered under the imputation. . . . 'Twas said


He ate strange flesh.5 He was observed, after dinner, carefully to gather up the remnants left at


his table (not many nor very choice fragments, you may credit me)�and, in


an especial manner, these disreputable morsels, which he would convey away


and secretly stow in the settle that stood at his bedside. None saw when he


ate them. It was rumored that he privately devoured them in the night. He


was watched, but no traces of such midnight practices were discoverable.


Some reported that on leave-days he had been seen to carry out of the bounds


a large blue check handkerchief, full of something. This then must be the


accursed thing. Conjecture next was at work to imagine how he could dispose


of it. Some said he sold it to the beggars. This belief generally prevailed. He


went about moping. None spake to him. No one would play with him. He was


excommunicated; put out of the pale of the school. He was too powerful a boy


to be beaten, but he underwent every mode of that negative punishment which


is more grievous than many stripes. Still he persevered. At length he was


observed by two of his schoolfellows, who were determined to get at the secret,


and had traced him one leave-day for the purpose, to enter a large worn-out


building, such as there exist specimens of in Chancery Lane, which are let


out to various scales of pauperism, with open door and a common staircase.


After him they silently slunk in, and followed by stealth up four flights, and


saw him tap at a poor wicket, which was opened by an aged woman, meanly


clad. Suspicion was now ripened into certainty. The informers had secured


their victim. They had him in their toils. Accusation was formally preferred,


and retribution most signal was looked for. Mr. Hathaway, the then steward


(for this happened a little after my time), with that patient sagacity which


tempered all his conduct, determined to investigate the matter before he pro


ceeded to sentence. The result was that the supposed mendicants, the receiv


ers or purchasers of the mysterious scraps, turned out to be the parents of �, an honest couple come to decay�whom this seasonable supply had, in all


2. Antonio Verrio, Italian painter of the 17th cen-paintings in Dido's temple to Juno. tury. While living in England, he painted a large 4. Pleasing.


picture of the mathematics students of Christ's 5. Loosely quoted from Shakespeare's Antony and Hospital being received by James II. Cleopatra 1.4.67.


3. Virgil's Aeneid 1.464; Aeneas is inspecting the


.


500 / CHARLES LAMB


probability, saved from mendicancy; and that this young stork, at the expense of his own good name, had all this while been only feeding the old birds!� The governors on this occasion, much to their honor, voted a present relief to the family of � �, and presented him with a silver medal. The lesson which the steward read upon RASH JUDGMENT, on the occasion of publicly delivering the medal to� , I believe would not be lost upon his auditory.�I had left school then, but I well remember . He was a tall, shambling youth, with a cast'in his eye, not at all calculated to conciliate hostile prejudices. I have since seen him carrying a baker's basket. I think I heard he did not do quite


so well by himself as he had done by the old folks.


I was a hypochondriac6 lad; and the sight of a boy in fetters, upon the day


of my first putting on the blue clothes, was not exactly fitted to assuage the


natural terrors of initiation. I was of tender years, barely turned of seven; and


had only read of such things in books, or seen them but in dreams. I was told


he had run away. This was the punishment for the first offense.�As a novice


I was soon after taken to see the dungeons. These were little, square, Bedlam7


cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket�a


mattress, I think, was afterwards substituted�with a peep of light, let in


askance, from a prison orifice at top, barely enough to read by. Here the poor


boy was locked in by himself all day, without sight of any but the porter who


brought him his bread and water�who might not s-peah to him�or of the


beadle, who came twice a week to call him out to receive his periodical chas


tisement, which was almost welcome, because it separated him for a brief


interval from solitude�and here he was shut up by himself of nights out of


the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves, and super


stition incident to his time of life, might subject him to. This was the penalty


for the second offense. Wouldst thou like, reader, to see what became of him in the next degree?


The culprit, who had been a third time an offender, and whose expulsion was at this time deemed irreversible, was brought forth, as at some solemn auto da fe, arrayed in uncouth and most appalling attire�all trace of his late "watchet weeds"8 carefully effaced, he was exposed in a jacket resembling those which London lamplighters formerly delighted in, with a cap of the same. The effect of this divestiture was such as the ingenious devisers of it could have anticipated. With his pale and frighted features, it was as if some of those disfigurements in Dante9 had seized upon him. In this disguisement he was brought into the hall (L.'s favorite state room), where awaited him the whole number of his schoolfellows, whose joint lessons and sports he was thenceforth to share no more; the awful presence of the steward, to be seen for the last time; of the executioner beadle, clad in his state robe for the occasion; and of two faces more, of direr import, because never but in these extremities visible. These were governors; two of whom by choice, or charter, were always accustomed to officiate at these Ultima Su-p-plicia;' not to mitigate (so at least we understood it), but to enforce the uttermost stripe. Old Bamber Gascoigne, and Peter Aubert, I remember, were colleagues on one occasion,


6. Melancholy, heretics under the Spanish Inquisition. 7. St. Mary of Bethlehem, an insane asylum in 9. I.e., of the sinners in Dante's inferno-, see canto London. 20. 8. Blue clothes. "Auto da fe": act of faith (literal 1. Extreme punishments (Latin). trans.); the ceremony before the execution of


.


CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO / 501


when the beadle turning rather pale, a glass of brandy was ordered to prepare


him for the mysteries. The scourging was, after the old Roman fashion, long


and stately. The lictor2 accompanied the criminal quite round the hall. We


were generally too faint, with attending to the previous disgusting circum


stances, to make accurate report with our eyes of the degree of corporal suf


fering inflicted. Report, of course, gave out the back knotty and livid. After


scourging, he was made over, in his San Benito,1 to his friends, if he had any


(but commonly such poor runagates were friendless), or to his parish officer,


who, to enhance the effect of the scene, had his station allotted to him on the


outside of the hall gate. These solemn pageantries were not played off so often as to spoil the general


mirth of the community. We had plenty of exercise and recreation after school


hours; and, for myself, I must confess that I was never happier than in them.


The Upper and the Lower Grammar Schools were held in the same room; and


an imaginary line only divided their bounds. Their character was as different


as that of the inhabitants on the two sides of the Pyrenees. The Rev. James


Boyer was the Upper master; but the Rev. Matthew Field presided over that


portion of the apartment of which I had the good fortune to be a member. We


lived a life as careless as birds. We talked and did just what we pleased, and


nobody molested us. We carried an accidence, or a grammar, for form; but,


for any trouble it gave us, we might take two years in getting through the verbs


deponent,4 and another two in forgetting all that we had learned about them.


There was now and then the formality of saying a lesson, but if you had not


learned it, a brush across the shoulders (just enough to disturb a fly) was the


sole remonstrance. Field never used the rod; and in truth he wielded the cane


with no great good will�holding it "like a dancer." It looked in his hands


rather like an emblem than an instrument of authority; and an emblem, too,


he was ashamed of. He was a good, easy man, that did not care to ruffle his


own peace, nor perhaps set any great consideration upon the value of juvenile


time. He came among us, now and then, but often stayed away whole days


from us; and when he came it made no difference to us�he had his private


room to retire to, the short time he stayed, to be out of the sound of our noise.


Our mirth and uproar went on. We had classics of our own, without being


beholden to "insolent Greece or haughty Rome,"5 that passed current among


us�Peter Wilkins�the Adventures of the Hon. Captain Robert Boyle�the


Fortunate Bluecoat Boy6�and the like. Or we cultivated a turn for mechanic


and scientific operations; making little sun-dials of paper; or weaving those


ingenious parentheses called cat cradles; or making dry peas to dance upon


the end of a tin pipe; or studying the art military over that laudable game


"French and English,"7 and a hundred other such devices to pass away the


time�mixing the useful with the agreeable�as would have made the souls


of Rousseau and John Locke8 chuckle to have seen us. Matthew Field belonged to that class of modest divines who affect to mix


2. A Roman officer who cleared the way for the 6. All three were popular adventure stories or chief magistrates. romances of the day.


3. The yellow robe worn by the condemned 7. A game in which contestants, with eyes closed, heretic at an auto da fe. draw lines on a sheet of paper covered with dots.


4. Verbs with an active meaning but passive form. The winner is the contestant whose line touches "Accidence": a table of the declension of nouns the most dots.


and conjugation of verbs in Greek and Latin. 8. Two philosophers who recommended systems


5. Ren Jonson's "To the Memory of. . . William of education that combined theory with practical Shakespeare," line 39. experience.


.


502 / CHARLES LAMB


in equal proportion the gentleman, the scholar, and the Christian; but, I know


not how, the first ingredient is generally found to be the predominating dose


in the composition. He was engaged in gay parties, or with his courtly bow at


some episcopal levee, when he should have been attending upon us. He had


for many years the classical charge of a hundred children, during the four or


five first years of their education, and his very highest form seldom proceeded


further than two or three of the introductory fables of Phaedrus.9 How things


were suffered to go on thus, I cannot guess. Boyer, who was the proper person


to have remedied these abuses, always affected, perhaps felt, a delicacy in


interfering in a province not strictly his own. I have not been without my


suspicions, that he was not altogether displeased at the contrast we presented


to his end of the school. We were a sort of Helots to his young Spartans.1 He


would sometimes, with ironic deference, send to borrow a rod of the Under


Master, and then, with sardonic grin, observe to one of his upper boys, "how


neat and fresh the twigs looked." While his pale students were battering their


brains over Xenophon and Plato, with a silence as deep as that enjoined by


the Samite, we were enjoying ourselves at our ease in our little Goshen.2 We


saw a little into the secrets of his discipline, and the prospect did but the more


reconcile us to our lot. His thunders rolled innocuous for us: his storms came


near, but never touched us; contrary to Gideon's miracle, while all around


were drenched, our fleece was dry.3 His boys turned out the better scholars;


we, I suspect, have the advantage in temper. His pupils cannot speak of him


without something of terror allaying their gratitude; the remembrance of Field


comes back with all the soothing images of indolence, and summer slumbers,


and work like play, and innocent idleness, and Elysian exemptions, and life


itself a "playing holiday." Though sufficiently removed from the jurisdiction of Boyer, we were near


enough (as I have said) to understand a little of his system. We occasionally


heard sounds of the Ululantes, and caught glances of Tartarus.4 B. was a rabid


pedant. His English style was cramped to barbarism. His Easter anthems (for


his duty obliged him to those periodical flights) were grating as scrannel


pipes.5�He would laugh, aye, and heartily, but then it must be at Flaccus's


quibble about Rex6�or at the tristis severitas in vultu, or inspicere in patinas,


of Terence7�thin jests, which at their first broaching could hardly have had


vis8 enough to move a Roman muscle.�-He had two wigs, both pedantic, but


of different omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild


day. The other, an old, discolored, unkempt, angry caxon,9 denoting frequent


and bloody execution. Woe to the school, when he made his morning appear


ance in his passy, or passionate wig. No comet expounded surer.1�-J. B. had a


9. A Roman of the 1st century C.E., author of a "Ululantes": howling sufferers. verse translation of Aesop's fables. 5. Harsh pipes, an echo of Milton's "Lycidas," line


1. The Spartans exhibited drunken Helots (slaves) 124. as a warning example to their children. 6. In Horace's Satires 1.7 there is a pun on Rex as 2. Where the Israelites dwelled, protected from both a surname and the word for king. the swarms of flies with which the Lord plagued 7. In Terence's Andrea 5.2 one character says of


the Egyptians in Exodus 8.22. "Samite": Pythago-a notorious liar that he has "a sober severity in his


ras of Samos, Greek mathematician and philoso-countenance." In his Adelphi 3.3, after a father has


pher (6th century B.C.E.), who forbade his pupils advised his son to look into the lives of men as a


to speak until they had studied with him five years. mirror, the slave advises the kitchen scullions "to


3. Judges 6.37�38. As a sign to Gideon, the Lord look into the stew pans" as a mirror. soaked his sheepskin while leaving the earth 8. Force (Latin); a term in rhetorical theory.


around it dry. 9. A type of wig.


4. In the Aeneid 6.557�58 Aeneas hears the I. Comets were superstitiously regarded as omens groans and the sound of the lash from Tartarus, of disaster.


the infernal place of punishment for the wicked.


.


CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO / 503


heavy hand. I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child


(the maternal milk hardly dry upon its lips) with a "Sirrah, do you presume to


set your wits at me?"�-Nothing was more common than to see him make a


headlong entry into the schoolroom, from his inner recess, or library, and,


with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out, "Od's my life, sirrah" (his


favorite adjuration), "I have a great mind to whip you"�then, with as sudden


a retracting impulse, fling back into his lair�and, after a cooling lapse of some


minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context)


drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been


some Devil's Litany, with the expletory yell�"and I WILL, too."�In his gentler


moods, when the rabidus furor was assuaged, he had resort to an ingenious


method, peculiar, for what I have heard, to himself, of whipping the boy, and


reading the Debates,2 at the same time; a paragraph, and a lash between; which


in those times, when parliamentary oratory was most at a height and flourish


ing in these realms, was not calculated to impress the patient with a veneration


for the diffuser graces of rhetoric. Once, and but once, the uplifted rod was known to fall ineffectual from his


hand�when droll squinting W having been caught putting the inside of


the master's desk to a use for which the architect had clearly not designed it,


to justify himself, with great simplicity averred, that he did not know that the


thing had been forewarned. This exquisite irrecognition of any law antecedent


to the oral or declaratory struck so irrestibly upon the fancy of all who heard


it (the pedagogue himself not excepted)�that remission was unavoidable.


L. has given credit to B.'s great merits as an instructor. Coleridge, in his literary life,3 has pronounced a more intelligible and ample encomium on


them. The author of the Country Spectator-4 doubts not to compare him with


the ablest teachers of antiquity. Perhaps we cannot dismiss him better than


with the pious ejaculation of C.�when he heard that his old master was on


his deathbed: "Poor J. B.!�may all his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted


to bliss by little cherub boys all head and wings, with no bottoms to reproach


his sublunary infirmities." Under him were many good and sound scholars bred.�First Grecian5 of my time was Lancelot Pepys Stevens, kindest of boys and men, since Co


grammar-master (and inseparable companion) with Dr. T e. What an edi


fying spectacle did this brace of friends present to those who remembered the


antisocialities of their predecessors!�You never met the one by chance in the


street without a wonder, which was quickly dissipated by the almost immediate


sub-appearance of the other. Generally arm-in-arm, these kindly coadjutors


lightened for each other the toilsome duties of their profession, and when, in


advanced age, one found it convenient to retire, the other was not long in


discovering that it suited him to lay down the fasces6 also. Oh, it is pleasant,


as it is rare, to find the same arm linked in yours at forty, which at thirteen


helped it to turn over the Cicero De Amicitia,7 or some tale of Antique Friend


ship, which the young heart even then was burning to anticipate!�Co


2. The record of debates in Parliament. "Rabidus Cambridge) on a Christ's Hospital scholarship. furor": mad rage (Latin). 6. The bundle of rods, serving as the handle of an


3. I.e., Biographia Literaria. ax, carried before the Roman magistrates as a sym4. Thomas Middleton, who was at school with bol of office. This is a facetious reference to the Lamb and Coleridge, edited the magazine Country birch-rod a schoolmaster habitually carried at a


Spectator (1792�93) and later became bishop of time when flogging was almost part of the curric-


Calcutta. ulum.


5. The Grecians were the small group of superior 7. Cicero's essay On Friendship. scholars selected to be sent to a university (usually


.


504 / CHARLES LAMB


Grecian with S. was Th , who has since executed with ability various diplomatic functions at the Northern courts. Th was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of speech, with raven locks.�Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed him (now Bishop of Calcutta), a scholar and a gentleman in his teens. He has the reputation of an excellent critic; and is author (besides the CountrySpectator) of a Treatise on the Greek Article, against Sharpe. M. is said to bear his miter high in India, where the regni novitas8 (I dare say) sufficientlyjustifies the bearing. A humility quite as primitive as that of Jewel or Hooker9 might not be exactly fitted to impress the minds of those Anglo-Asiatic diocesans with a reverence for home institutions, and the church which those fathers watered. The manners of M. at school, though firm, were mild and unassuming.� Next to M. (if not senior to him) was Richards, author of the Aboriginal Britons, the most spirited of the Oxford Prize Poems; a pale, studious Gre-


cian.�Then followed poor S , ill-fated M ! of these the Muse is silent.1 Finding some of Edward's race


Unhappy, pass their annals by.2 Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies,


with hope like a fiery column before thee�the dark pillar not yet turned� Samuel Taylor Coleridge�-Logician, Metaphysician, Rard!�How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandola3), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of amblichus, or Plotinus4 (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar�while the walls of the old Grey Friars5 re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy!�Many were the "wit combats" (to dally awhile with the words of old Fuller) between him and C. V. Le G , "which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon, and an English man-of-war; Master Coleridge, like the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances. C. V. L., with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds,


by the quickness of his wit and invention."6


Nor shalt thou, their compeer, be quickly forgotten, Allen, with the cordial smile, and still more cordial laugh, with which thou wert wont to make the old cloisters shake, in thy cognition of some poignant jest of theirs; or the anticipation of some more material, and, peradventure, practical one, of thine own. Extinct are those smiles, with that beautiful countenance, with which (for thou wert the Nireus formosus7 of the school), in the days of thy maturer waggery, thou didst disarm the wrath of infuriated town-damsel, who, incensed by provoking pinch, turning tigress-like round, suddenly converted by thy angel look, exchanged the half-formed terrible "bl ," for a gentler


greeting�"bless thy handsome face!"


8. Newness of the reign (Latin). 4. Neoplatonist philosophers. 9. Famous divines in the 16th century during the 5. Christ's Hospital was located in buildings that early period of the Anglican Church. had once belonged to the Grey Friars (i.e., Fran


1. Lamb identified these students as Scott, who ciscans). died insane, and Maunde, who was expelled from 6. Lamb adapts to Coleridge and Charles Valen


the school. tine Le Grice the famous description of the wit


2. Altered from Matthew Prior's "Carmen Secu-combats between Shakespeare (the "man-of-war") lare" (1700). "Edward's race": applied to the stu-and Ben Jonson (the "great galleon") in Thomas


dents of Christ's Hospital, founded by Edward VI. Fuller's Worthies of England (1662).


3. Pico della Mirandola, the brilliant and charm-7. The handsome Nireus; a Greek warrior in ing humanist and philosopher of the Italian Homer's Iliad 2.


Renaissance.


.


DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND BEADING / 505


Next follow two, who ought to be now alive, and the friends of Elia�the


junior Le G and F ; who impelled, the former by a roving temper, the


latter by too quick a sense of neglect�ill capable of enduring the slights poor


Sizars8 are sometimes subject to in our seats of learning�exchanged their


Alma Mater for the camp; perishing, one by climate, and one on the plains of


Salamanca: Le G , sanguine, volatile, sweet-natured; F , dogged, faith


ful, anticipative of insult, warmhearted, with something of the old Roman


height about him. Fine, frank-hearted Fr- , the present master of Hertford, with Marma


duke T ,9 mildest of missionaries�and both my good friends still�close


the catalogue of Grecians in my time.


1820 1823


Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading1


To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own. �Lord Foppington in The Relapse2


An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so much struck with this bright


sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great


improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this


head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to


other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love


to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I


cannot sit and think. Books think for me.


I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan


Wild too low.3 I can read any thing which I call a book. There are things in


that shape which I cannot allow for such.


In this catalogue of books which are no books�biblia a-biblia�I reckon


Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and let


tered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works


of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soamejenyns, and, generally, all those


volumes which "no gentleman's library should be without":4 the Histories of


Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy.5 With these


exceptions, I can read almost any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic,


so unexcluding.


8. An undergraduate at Cambridge University ond. For a contrast to his bookishness, see Words- who receives an allowance from the college and worth's "Expostulation and Reply" and "The Tables


who in former times was expected in return to per-Turned" (pp. 250-52).


form certain menial duties. "Le G ": Samuel Le 2. The would-be man of fashion in Sir John Van-


Grice, who became an army officer and died in the brugh's comedy of 1696, The Relapse.


West Indies. "F ": Joseph Favell. 3. Two extremes in 18th-century prose: the third


9. Marmaduke Thompson. "Fr ": Frederick earl of Shaftesbury (1671�1713), philosopher and William Franklin. essayist, and the gang leader who inspired Henry


1. Published in the London Magazine, July 1822, Fielding's 1743 crime novel Jonathan Wild the and revised for Last Essays of Elia (1833), Lamb's Great. essay, although often tongue in cheek, shrewdly 4. Elia's list begins with the types of books sold by challenges the hierarchies the era's reviewers and stationers and ends with those authored by ven


others used to rank different kinds of writing and erated and prolific moralists, philosophers, and


sort out good, tasteful readers from bad. Elia's historians of the 18th century.


fondness for novels from circulating libraries is as 5. Josephus (37�100 C.E.), historian of the Jewish


unusual as his willingness to present himself as a people; William Paley (1743-1805), theologian


receptive reader first and an original author sec-and philosopher.


.


506 / CHARLES LAMB


I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in hooks' clothing


perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into


the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-


bound semblance of a volume, and hope it is some kind-hearted play-book,


then, opening what "seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Popula


tion Essay.6 To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find�Adam Smith.7 To


view a well-arranged assortment of blockheaded Encyclopaedias (Anglicanas


or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco,8 when a tithe of


that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would ren


ovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself


again in the world.9 I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them, to


warm my ragged veterans in their spoils. To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the desideratum of a volume. Mag


nificence comes after. This, when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished upon


all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would not dress a set of Magazines, for


instance, in full suit. The dishabille,1 or half-binding (with Russia backs ever)


is our costume. A Shakespeare, or a Milton (unless the first editions), it were


mere foppery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession of them confers no


distinction. The exterior of them (the things themselves being so common),


strange to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of property in the


owner. Thomson's Seasons,2 again, looks best (I maintain it) a little torn, and


dog's-eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves,


and worn out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond Russia), if we would


not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old "Circulating Library" Tom


Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield!3 How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that


have turned over their pages with delight!�of the lone sempstress, whom they


may have cheered (milliner, or harder-working mantuamaker)4 after her long


day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when she has snatched an hour,


ill spared from sleep, to steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup,5 in spelling


out their enchanting contents! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What


better condition could we desire to see them in? In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding.


V Fielding, Smollet, Sterne,6 and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive


volumes�Great Nature's Stereotypes7�we see them individually perish with


less regret, because we know the copies of them to be "eterne."8 But where a


book is at once both good and rare�where the individual is almost the species,


and when that perishes,


6. Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of 3. Novels by Henry Fielding and Oliver Gold- Population, first published 1798, had by 1822 been smith, published in 1748 and 1766. through several editions and prompted several 4. Milliners were seamstresses specializing in


responses, including ones by Lamb's friends God-bonnet-making; mantua-makers were dressmak


win and Hazlitt. ers. Mary Lamb, a great reader of novels borrowed


7. The early-18th-century dramatists Richard from circulating libraries, was a mantua-maker. Steele and George Farquhar, contrasted with the 5. The waters of the river Lethe, which flowed author of The Wealth of Nations (1776). through Hades, caused forgetfulness.


8. Russia and Morocco are two varieties of leather 6. The novelists Tobias Smollett (1721�177I)and used in book-binding. Laurence Sterne (1713-1768).


9. Paracelsus (1493-1541) and Ramon Lull 7. Refers to the molds that at the start of the 19th (1235�1317), authors with connections to century had begun to be employed in the printing


alchemy�the search for the philosopher's stone, process, considerably enhancing the speed and


which could transmute base metals into gold, and efficiency of book production.


for the elixir of life. 8. Lady Macbeth, suggesting the killing of Banquo


1. Negligent or casual dress. and Fleance; "in them nature's copy's not eterne" 2. James Thomson's widely read poem of natural (Shakespeare, Macbeth 3.2.39). description, published in 1730.


.


DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND BEADING / 507


We know not where is that Promethean torch


That can its light relumine�9 such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by his Duch


ess'�no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and


keep safe such a jewel.


Not only rare volumes of this description, which seem hopeless ever to be reprinted; but old editions of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, 2 Milton in his prose-works, Fuller3�of whom we have reprints, yet the books themselves, though they go about, and are talked of here and there, we know, have not endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever will) in the national heart, so as to become stock books�it is good to possess these in durable and costly covers. I do not care for a First Folio of Shakespeare. I rather prefer the common editions of Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with plates, which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text; and without pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are so much better than the Shakespeare gallery engravings, which did.4 I have a community of feeling with my countrymen about his Plays, and 1 like those editions of him best, which have been oftenest tumbled about and handled.�On the contrary, 1 cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The Octavo editions are painful to look at.5 I have no sympathy with them. If they were as much read as the current editions of the other poet, I should prefer them in that shape to the older one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy.6 What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure? what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular?�The wretched Malone could not do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him white-wash the painted effigy of old Shakespeare,7 which stood there, in rude but lively fashion depicted, to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the eye-brow, hair, the very dress he used to wear�the only authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, of these curious parts and parcels of him. They covered him over with a coat of white paint. By , if I had been a justice of peace for Warwickshire, I would have clapt both commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair


of meddling sacrilegious varlets.


I think I see them at their work�these sapient trouble-tombs.


Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear�to mine, at least�


9. Cf. Othello's words as he contemplates Desdemona's murder (Shakespeare, Othello 5.2.12�


13).


1. The 1667 biography of her husband by the poet and playwright Margaret Cavendish.


2. Jeremy Taylor (1613�1667), author of Holy Living and Holy Dying.


3. Anglican clergyman and antiquarian Thomas Fuller (1608-1661).


4. Illustrations by leading English artists were provided for the deluxe edition of Shakespeare issued


by the print seller John Boydell in 1802. Elia favors


the editions that were prepared by Nicholas Rowe


and his publisher Jacob Tonson starting in 1709.


5. Francis Beaumont (1585?�1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625), Elizabeth dramatists and


collaborators: Lamb's folio edition of their works is


also mentioned in "Old China." Folio editions are


distinguished from octavo by size: folio is the larg


est format for books, produced when a full-sized


printer's sheet is folded once, whereas an octavo


book is sized for pages folded so that each is one-


eighth the size of a full sheet. By Lamb's day, book


formats were to an extent correlated with their


contents: the more cultural authority granted the


type of literature or the author, the larger the for


mat.


6. Robert Burton's vast treatise from 1621; there was an 1800 reprint. Burton's unmethodical, mot


ley prose, which seemingly broaches a thousand


topics to take on one, gave Lamb a model for his


style in the Elia essays.


7. Shakespeare editor Edmund Malone (1741� 1812). The repainting of Shakespeare's bust


occurred in 1793.


.


508 / CHARLES LAMB


than that of Milton or of Shakespeare? It may be, that the latter are more


staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which


carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.8


Much depends upon -when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taldng up the Fairy Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons?9


Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.


Winter evenings�the world shut out�with less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale� These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud�to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one�and it degenerates


into an audience.


Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.


A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the clerks�who is the best scholar�to commence upon the Times, or the Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud pro hono publico.' With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers' shops and public-houses a fellow will get up, and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery. Another follows with his selection. So the entire journal transpires at length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and, without this expedient no one in the company would probably ever travel through the contents of a whole paper.


Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment. What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's,2 keeps the paper' I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out incessantly, "the Chronicle is in


hand, Sir."


Coming in to an inn at night�having ordered your supper�what can be more delightful than to find lying in the window-seat, left there time out of mind by the carelessness of some former guest�two or three numbers of the old Town and Country Magazine, with its amusing tete-a-tete pictures�"The Royal Lover and Lady G "; "The Melting Platonic and the old Beau,"� and such like antiquated scandal? Would you exchange it�at that time, and


in that place�for a better book?


Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret it so much for the weightier


kinds of reading�the Paradise Lost, or Comus, he could have read to him�


but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with his own eye a magazine, or


a light pamphlet.


I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading Candide.3 I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once


8. Poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe 1. For the common good (Latin). (1564-1593); poets Michael Drayton (1563-2. Coffeehouse in London's Fleet Street.


1631), William Drummond of Hawthornden 3. Voltaire, the author of the satirical Candide, or


(1585-1649), and Abraham Cowley (1610-1667). Optimism (1759), was notorious for his freethink


9. Launcelot Andrewes (1551-1626). ing in religious matters.


.


DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS AND BEADING / 509


detected�by a familiar damsel�reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Prim


rose Hill (her Cythera),4 reading�Pamela.5 There was nothing in the book to


make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated herself down


by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I could have wished it


had been�any other book. We read on very sociably for a few pages; and, not


finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and-�went away. Gentle


casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one


between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret.


I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow- hill (as yet Skinner's-street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner.6 I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot,7 or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to the five points.8


There is a class of street-readers, whom I can never contemplate without affection�the poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls�the owner, with his hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, and thinking when they will have done. Venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny themselves the gratification, they "snatch a fearful joy."9 Martin B in this way, by daily fragments, got through two volumes of Clarissa,2 when the stallkeeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no circumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book with half the satisfaction which he took in those uneasy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day3 has moralised upon this subject in two


very touching but homely stanzas. I saw a boy with eager eye


Open a book upon a stall,


And read, as he'd devour it all;


Which when the stall-man did espy,


Soon to the boy I heard him call,


"You, Sir, you never buy a book,


Therefore in one you shall not look."


The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh


He wish'd he never had been taught to read,


Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need.


Of sufferings the poor have many,


Which never can the rich annoy:


4. Greek island sacred to the goddess of love. Saints. "Primrose Hill": a green space in north London. 9. Cf. the description of schoolboys' play in Tho


5. Samuel Richardson's 1740 novel in letters mas Gray's 1742 "Ode on a Distant Prospect of chronicling the failed seduction of a very virtuous Eton College" (line 40).


maidservant. 1. The Lambs' friend Martin Burney, nephew of


6. Theologian Nathaniel Lardner (1684-1768). the novelist Frances Burney. 7. The padded yoke a London market porter wore 2. A million-word novel, Samuel Richardson's to help him carry his burden. Clarissa (1747-48) took up seven volumes.


8. The five points of Calvinist belief: Original Sin, 3. Mary Lamb. The poem had appeared earlier in Predestination, Irresistible Grace, Particular the Lambs' Poetry for Children (1809).


Redemption, and the Final Perseverance of the


.


51 0 / CHARLE S LAM B I soon perceiv'd another boy, Who look'd as if he'd not had any Food, for that day at least�enjoy The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder, Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny, Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat: No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat. 1822 1833


Old China


I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see any


great house, I inquire for the china closet, and next for the picture gallery. I


cannot defend the order of preference, but by saying that we have all some


taste or other, of too ancient a date to admit of our remembering distinctly


that it was an acquired one. I can call to mind the first play, and the first


exhibition, that I was taken to; but I am not conscious of a time when china


jars and saucers were introduced into my imagination. I had no repugnance then�why should I now have?�to those little, lawless,


azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and women float


about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world before perspective�a


china teacup. I like to see my old friends�whom distance cannot diminish�figuring


up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on terra firma still�for so


we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue, which the decorous


artist, to prevent absurdity, had made to spring up beneath their sandals.


I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if possible, with still


more womanish expressions.


Here is a young and courtly mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a salver�


two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect! And here the same


lady, or another�for likeness is identity on teacups�is stepping into a little


fairy boat, moored on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a dainty


mincing foot, which in a right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world)


must infallibly land her in the midst of a flowery mead�a furlong off on the


other side of the same strange stream! Farther on�if far or near can be predicated of their world�see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays.1 Here�a cow and rabbit couchant,2 and coextensive�so objects show, seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay.3 I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson4 (which we


are old-fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon), some of these


speciosa miracula5 upon a set of extraordinary old blue china (a recent pur


chase) which we were now for the first time using; and could not help remark


ing how favorable circumstances had been to us of late years that we could


afford to please the eye sometimes with trifles of this sort�when a passing


1. An English country dance. 3. The old European name for China. 2. Lying down with the head raised (term from 4. A Chinese green tea. heraldry). 5. Shining wonders (Latin).


.


OLD CHINA / 511


sentiment seemed to overshade the brows of my companion. I am quick at


detecting these summer clouds in Bridget.6 "I wish the good old times would come again," she said, "when we were not


quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor; but there was a middle


state"�so she was pleased to ramble on�"in which I am sure we were a great


deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have money enough


and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph. When we coveted a cheap


luxury (and, O! how much ado I had to get you to consent in those times!)�


we were used to have a debate two or three days before, and to weigh the for


and against, and think what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could


hit upon, that should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when


we felt the money that we paid for it. "Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till


all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare�and all because


of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher,7 which you dragged home late at night


from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks


before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a


determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when you set


off from Islington,8 fearing you should be too late�and when the old book


seller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for


he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures�and


when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome�and when


you presented it to me�and when we were exploring the perfectness of it


(collating, you called it)�and while I was repairing some of these loose leaves


with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be left till daybreak�


was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes


which you wear now, and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become


rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it


about in that overworn suit�your old corbeau9�for four or five weeks longer


than you should have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of


fifteen�or sixteen shillings was it?�a great affair we thought it then�which


you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that


pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old pur


chases now. "When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number


of shillings upon that print after Leonardo,1 which we christened the 'Lady


Blanch'; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money�and


thought of the money, and looked again at the picture�was there no pleasure


in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but to walk into Colnaghi's,2


and buy a wilderness of Leonardos. Yet do you? "Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to Enfield, and Potter's Bar,


and Waltham,3 when we had a holiday�holidays, and all other fun, are gone


now we are rich�and the little hand-basket in which I used to deposit our


6. In Lamb's essays, his name for his sister, Mary. 2. Colnaghi was a London print seller. In the issue 7. The Elizabethan dramatic collaborators, whose of the London Magazine in which "Old China" first plays were first collected in a large folio volume in appeared, the artist Thomas Griffiths Wainewright


1647. (using the signature "C. van Vinkboom") works


8. In the north of London, where the Lambs had some advice for Colnaghi into his essay: namely, been living. to immediately "import a few impressions .. . of


9. A dark green cloth, almost black (hence its those beautiful plates from Da Vinci," including name, the French for raven). "Miss Lamb's favourite, 'Lady Blanche,' " as he


1. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1 519), the great Ital-foresees that this issue "will occasion a considerian painter. The painting is the one known as Mod-able call for them." esty and Vanity. 3. All three are suburbs to the north of London.


.


512 / CHARLES LAMB


day's fare of savory cold lamb and salad�and how you would pry about at


noontide for some decent house, where we might go in and produce our


store�only paying for the ale that you must call for�and speculate upon the


looks of the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow us a tablecloth�


and wish for such another honest hostess as Izaak Walton has described many


a one on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went-fishing�and sometimes


they would prove obliging enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly


upon us�but we had cheerful looks still for one another, and would eat our


plain food savorily, scarcely grudging Piscator4 his Trout Hall? Now�when


we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom, moreover, we ride part of the


way�and go into a fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debating the


expense-�which, after all, never has half the relish of those chance country


snaps,5 when we were at the mercy of uncertain usage and a precarious


welcome. "You are too proud to see a play anywhere now but in the pit. Do you


remember where it was we used to sit, when we saw the Battle of Hexham,


and the Surrender of Calais,6 and Bannister and Mrs. Bland in the Children


in the Wood'�when we squeezed out our shillings apiece to sit three or four


times in a season in the one-shilling gallery�where you felt all the time that


you ought not to have brought me-�and more strongly I felt obligation to you


for having brought me�and the pleasure was the better for a little shame�


and when the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in the house, or


what mattered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind


in Arden, or with Viola at the Court of Ilyria.8 You used to say that the gallery


was the best place of all for enjoying a play socially�that the relish of such


exhibitions must be in proportion to the infrequency of going�that the com


pany we met there, not being in general readers of plays, were obliged to attend


the more, and did attend, to what was going on, on the stage�because a word


lost would have been a chasm, which it was impossible for them to fill up.


With such reflections we consoled our pride then�and I appeal to you


whether, as a woman, I met generally with less attention and accommodation


than I have done since in more expensive situations in the house? The getting


in indeed, and the crowding up those inconvenient staircases, was bad


enough�but there was still a law of civility to woman recognized to quite as


great an extent as we ever found in the other passages�and how a little dif


ficulty overcome heightened the snug seat and the play, afterwards! Now we


can only pay our money and walk in. You cannot see, you say, in the galleries


now. 1 am sure we saw, and heard too, well enough then�but sight, and all,


I think, is gone with our poverty. "There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they became quite


common�in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear�to have them


for a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? If we were to treat


ourselves now�that is, to have dainties a little above our means, it would be


selfish and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow ourselves beyond


what the actual poor can get at that makes what I call a treat�when two


people living together, as we have done, now and then indulge themselves in


a cheap luxury, which both like; while each apologizes, and is willing to take


4. The fisherman in Izaak Walton's Complete 7. By Thomas Morton (1764-1838). Angler (1653). 8. Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It and 5. Snacks. Viola in his Twelfth Night. 6. Comedies by George Colman (1762�1836).


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OLD CHINA / 513


both halves of the blame to his single share. I see no harm in people making


much of themselves, in that sense of the word. It may give them a hint how


to make much of others. But now�what I mean by the word�we never do


make much of ourselves. None but the poor can do it. I do not mean the


veriest poor of all, but persons as we were, just above poverty. "I know what you were going to say, that it is mighty pleasant at the end of


the year to make all meet�and much ado we used to have every Thirty-first


Night of December to account for our exceedings�many a long face did you


make over your puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out how we


had spent so much�or that we had not spent so much�or that it was impos


sible we should spend so much next year�and still we found our slender


capital decreasing�but then, betwixt ways, and projects, and compromises of


one sort or another, and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without that


for the future�and the hope that youth brings, and laughing spirits (in which


you were never poor till now), we pocketed up our loss, and in conclusion,


with 'lusty brimmers' (as you used to quote it out of hearty cheerful Mr. Cot-


ton,9 as you called him), we used to welcome in 'the coming guest.' Now we


have no reckoning at all at the end of the old year�no flattering promises


about the new year doing better for us." Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occasions that when she gets


into a rhetorical vein, I am careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, however,


smiling at the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured


up out of a clear income of poor hundred pounds a year. "It is true we


were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin. I


am afraid we must put up with the excess, for if we were to shake the superflux


into the sea, we should not much mend ourselves. That we had much to


struggle with, as we grew up together, we have reason to be most thankful. It


strengthened and knit our compact closer. We could never have been what


we have been to each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which you


now complain of. The resisting power�those natural dilations of the youthful


spirit, which circumstances cannot straiten�with us are long since passed


away. Competence to age is supplementary youth, a sorry supplement indeed,


but I fear the best that is to be had. We must ride where we formerly walked:


live better and lie softer�and shall be wise to do so�than we had means to


do in those good old days you speak of. Yet could those days return�could


you and 1 once more walk our thirty miles a day�could Bannister and Mrs.


Bland again be young, and you and I be young to see them�could the good


old one-shilling gallery days return�they are dreams, my cousin, now�but


could you and I at this moment, instead of this quiet argument, by our well-


carpeted fireside, sitting on this luxurious sofa�be once more struggling up


those inconvenient staircases, pushed about, and squeezed, and elbowed by


the poorest rabble of poor gallery scramblers�could I once more hear those


anxious shrieks of yours�and the delicious Thank God, we are safe, which


always followed when the topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the


whole cheerful theater down beneath us�I know not the fathom line that


ever touched a descent so deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in


1


than Croesus had, or the great Jew R is supposed to have, to purchase


9. Charles Cotton (1630-1687), a favorite poet of I. Nathan Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836) foundLamb's. The quotations are from his poem "The ed the English branch of the great European bank-


New Year." "Lusty brimmers": glasses filled to the ing house.


brim.


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514 / JANE AUSTEN


it. And now do just look at that merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella,


big enough for a bed-tester,2 over the head of that pretty insipid half Madon


naish chit of a lady in that very blue summerhouse."


1823 1823


2. Bed canopy. JANE AUSTEN 1775-1817


Although nowadays her portrait adorns coffee mugs and T-shirts, and journalists, making much of the movie adaptations of her novels, like to imagine her as the center of attention at Hollywood parties, Jane Austen spent her short, secluded life away from the spotlight. Other members of her large family�she was one of eight children born to an Anglican clergyman and his wife�appear to have lived more in the world and closer to this turbulent period's great events than she did. Two brothers fought as naval officers in the Napoleonic War; another became the banker to the flashy London set of the prince regent; her cousin Eliza, born in India, wed a captain in the French army who perished by the guillotine. Austen, however, spent most of her life in Hampshire, the same rural area of southern England in which she was born. Her formal education was limited to a short time at boarding school. Otherwise she and her beloved sister Cassandra had to scramble, like most girls of their class, into what education they could while at home and amidst their father's books. As neither Austen daughter married, home was where these two remained the whole of their adult lives.


Jane Austen turned down a proposal of marriage in 1802, possibly intuiting how difficult it would be to combine authorship with life as a wife, mother, and gentry hostess. She had started writing at the age of twelve, for her family's amusement and her own, and in 1797 began sending work to publishers in London. At that stage they were for the most part unreceptive. In 1803 one paid .10 for the copyright of the novel we know as Northanger Abbey, but then declined to publish it, so that Austen had at last, after tangled negotiations, to buy it back. Finally she published Sense and Sensibility (1811) at her own expense, then Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814). Next�by this time under the prestigious auspices of John Murray, who was also Byron's publisher�came Emma (1816) and, posthumously, after Austen's death at forty-one, Persuasion and a revised version of Northanger Abbey (both 1818). The Austen name was never publicly associated with any of these books, whose discreet title pages merely identified "a lady" as the author (though, as was also the case with Scott's Waverley novels, success made Austen's authorship an open secret). The modesty of that signature, however, is belied by the assurance of Austen's narrative voice, the confidence with which (to adapt the famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice) it subjects "truths universally acknowledged" to witty critical scrutiny.


The six novels are all, in Austen's words, "pictures of domestic life in country villages." The world they depict might seem provincial and insular. For the most part the working classes are absent or present only as silent servants; the soldiers and sailors who were protecting England from Napoleon are presented mainly as welcome additions to a ball. Yet the novels also document with striking detail how, within those country villages, the boundaries that had formerly defined the category of "the gentleman" were becoming permeable under the influence of the changes wrought by revolution and war, and how competition for social status was becoming that much fiercer. Through their heroines, readers can see, as well, how harshly the hard facts of economic life bore down on gentlewomen during this period when a lady's security


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JANE AUSTEN / 515


depended on her making a good marriage. The conundrum at the center of the fiction is whether such a marriage can be compatible with the independence of mind and moral integrity that Austen, like her heroines, cherishes.


Austen also wrote so as to explore what the novel form could be and do. Along with the reviewers of the time, she criticized the form, but unlike them, she did so to perfect it. With striking flexibility the new narrative voice that she introduced into novel writing shifts back and forth between a romantic point of view and an irony that reminds us of romance's limits�that reminds us that romance features its own sort of provincialism. At the same time Austen also distanced the novel form from the didactic agenda cultivated by her many contemporaries who were convinced that the only respectable fiction was the antiromance that weaned its readers of their romantic expectations. Her delight in mocking their preachy fictions is not only evident in the parodies that she wrote in the 1790s (including Love and Friendship, a forerunner of George Eliot's "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists") but is a feature of her mature novels, which as a rule conclude in ways that deviate quite flagrantly from the patterns of rewards and punishment a moralist might prefer. "I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern," the narrator of Northanger Abbey declares in a parting shot, and in characteristic epigrammatic style, "whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience." "[Pictures of perfection," Austen wrote in a letter, "make me sick and wicked."


Austen's example is so central to what the novel as a form has become that it can be difficult from our present-day vantage point to recognize the iconoclasm in her depictions of the undervalued business of everyday life. It can be hard to see how much her originality�her creation of characters who are both ordinary and unforgettable, her accounts of how they change�challenged her contemporaries' expectations about novels' plots, setting, and characterization. Her dissent from those expectations is palpable, however, in a "Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from Various Quarters," the satire Austen wrote after Emma, and which assembles the various "hints" she had received from well-wishers about what she should write next. The immediate occasion for the "Plan" was the series of letters Austen received from the Reverend James Stanier Clarke, librarian to the prince regent, who having conveyed to her the prince's wish that Emma should be dedicated to him, continued the correspondence so as to suggest topics that Austen should engage for the next novel� in particular, a historical romance about the royal house of Saxe Cobourg. Austen in reply affirmed the comic spirit of all her works: "I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter."


Love and Friendship This work, an anarchic parody written when the author was fourteen, puts front and center Austen's gifts for ironic assassination and her sharp-eyed sense of the preachiness not simply of her period's moralists but more particularly of her period's rebels against orthodox morality. In this miniaturized novel in letters, Austen constructs a world whose inhabitants are absurdly faithful to codes of conduct they extract from their readings of novels in letters. The protagonists of Love and Friendship are energetic students of the cliches of fashionable sentimentalism. They adore Nature, like many poets favoring the romantic Scottish Highlands and picturesque Wales; they know that free spirits, true radicals, should elevate the dictates of the heart over the head. The young Austen calls attention to the messages about gender roles embedded in novel writers' celebrations of the strong feelings that make heroines swoon. She shares Wollstonecraft's impatience with how, as the latter put it in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (see p. 170), the culture makes women slaves to their emotions�"blown about by every momentary gust of feeling." This


.


51 6 / JANE AUSTEN


work is usually classified among Austen's juvenilia, but it has the worldliness and bravado we expect from a much older author. Our text modernizes the irregular spelling and, to a lesser extent, the punctuation of the manuscript, which Austen titled "Love and Freindship."


Love and Friendship A Novel in a Series of Letters


"Deceived in Friendship & Betrayed in Love"


LETTER THE FIRST From Isabel to Laura


How often, in answer to my repeated entreaties that you would give my daughter a regular detail of the misfortunes and adventures of your life, have you said "No, my friend, never will I comply with your request till I may be no longer in danger of again experiencing such dreadful ones." Surely that time is now at hand. You are this day fifty-five. If a woman may ever be said to be in safety from the determined perseverance of disagreeable lovers and the cruel persecutions of obstinate fathers, surely it must be at such a time of life.


Isabel


LETTER THE SECOND Laura to Isabel


Although I cannot agree with you in supposing that I shall never again be exposed to misfortunes as unmerited as those I have already experienced, yet to avoid the imputation of obstinacy or ill nature, I will gratify the curiosity of your daughter; and may the fortitude with which I have suffered the many afflictions of my past life prove to her a useful lesson for the support of those which may befall her in her own.


Laura


LETTER THE THIRD Laura to Marianne


As the daughter of my most intimate friend I think you entitled to that knowledge of my unhappy story, which your mother has so often solicited me to give you. My father was a native of Ireland and an inhabitant of Wales; my mother was the natural daughter of a Scotch peer by an Italian opera-girl1� I was born in Spain and received my education at a convent in France.


When I had reached my eighteenth year I was recalled by my parents to my paternal roof in Wales. Our mansion was situated in one of the most romantic parts of the vale of Usk.2 Though my charms are now considerably softened and somewhat impaired by the misfortunes I have undergone, I was once beautiful. But lovely as I was, the graces of my person were the least of my perfections. Of every accomplishment3 accustomary to my sex, I was mistress. When in the convent, my progress had always exceeded my instructions, my


1. Illegitimate daughter of a Scottish nobleman Tourism, and Romantic Landscape" at Norton Lit- and a woman who danced in the ballet corps of an erature Online. opera company. 3. Central to the curriculum of female education, 2. River valley in south Wales that had been cel-"accomplishments" were the skills in music, dance, ebrated by William Gilpin in his handbook for and drawing that were supposed to make young tourists in quest of picturesque scenes, Observa-ladies better companions for their future hustions on the River Wye (1782). See "Tintern Abbey, bands.


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LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP / 517


acquirements had been wonderful for my age, and I had shortly surpassed my masters. In my mind, every virtue that could adorn it was centered; it was the rendezvous of every good quality and of every noble sentiment.


A sensibility4 too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my friends, my acquaintance, and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called. Alas! how altered now! Though indeed my own misfortunes do not make less impression on me than they ever did, yet now I never feel for those of an other. My accomplishments too, begin to fade�I can neither sing so well nor dance so gracefully as I once did�and I have entirely forgot the Minuet Dela Cour.5


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE FOURTH Laura to Marianne


Our neighbourhood was small, for it consisted only of your mother. She may probably have already told you that, being left by her parents in indigent circumstances, she had retired into Wales on economical motives. There it was our friendship first commenced. Isabel was then one and twenty�Though pleasing both in her person and manners (between ourselves) she never possessed the hundredth part of my beauty or accomplishments. Isabel had seen the world. She had passed two years at one of the first boarding schools in London, had spent a fortnight in Bath,6 and had supped one night in Southampton.7


"Beware, my Laura, (she would often say) beware of the insipid vanities and idle dissipations of the metropolis of England; beware of the unmeaning luxuries of Bath and of the stinking fish of Southampton."


"Alas! (exclaimed I) how am I to avoid those evils I shall never be exposed to? What probability is there of my ever tasting the dissipations of London, the luxuries of Bath, or the stinking fish of Southampton? I who am doomed to waste my days of youth and beauty in an humble cottage in the vale of Usk."


Ah! little did I then think I was ordained so soon to quit that humble cottage for the deceitful pleasures of the world.


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE FIFTH Laura to Marianne


One evening in December as my father, my mother, and myself were arranged in social converse round our fireside, we were on a sudden greatly astonished by hearing a violent knocking on the outward door of our rustic cot.8


My father started�"What noise is that?" (said he.) "It sounds like a loud


4. Sensibility, as a term designating the individual's capacity for sensitive emotional reaction, was celebrated in much late-18th-century literature at the same time that it was studied in medicine, investigations of the human nervous system especially. Sensibility was often linked to sympathy� the ability to enter into the feelings of another per- son�and hence to pity and benevolence, and was in this context assessed as a source of social harmony.


5. Literally, the court minuet�the stately formal dance that in the 18th century would begin a ball and be followed by livelier country dances. 6. Fashionable spa town in the west of England. 7. Port town in the south of England, in Austen's home county of Hampshire. 8. Cottage.


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51 8 / JANE AUSTEN


rapping at the door"�(replied my mother.) "It does indeed." (cried I.) "I am of your opinion; (said my father) it certainly does appear to proceed from some uncommon violence exerted against our unoffending door." "Yes, (exclaimed I) I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance."


"That is another point (replied he;) We must not pretend to determine on what motive the person may knock�though that someone does rap at the door, I am partly convinced."


Here, a second tremendous rap interrupted my father in his speech and somewhat alarmed my mother and me.


"Had we not better go and see who it is? (said she) The servants are out." "I think we had." (replied I.) "Certainly, (added my father) by all means." "Shall we go now?" (said my mother.) "The sooner the better." (answered he). "Oh! let no time be lost." (cried I.)


A third more violent rap than ever again assaulted our ears. "I am certain there is somebody knocking at the door." (said my mother.) "I think there must," (replied my father) "I fancy the servants are returned; (said I) I think I hear Mary going to the door." "I'm glad of it (cried my father) for I long to know who it is."


I was right in my conjecture; for Mary instantly entering the room informed us that a young gentleman and his servant were at the door, who had lost their way, were very cold, and begged leave to warm themselves by our fire.


"Won't you admit them?" (said I) "You have no objection, my dear?" (said my Father.) "None in the world." (replied my mother.)


Mary, without waiting for any further commands, immediately left the room and quickly returned, introducing the most beauteous and amiable youth I had ever beheld. The servant, she kept to herself.


My natural sensibility had already been greatly affected by the sufferings of the unfortunate stranger, and no sooner did I first behold him, than I felt that on him the happiness or misery of my future life must depend.


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE SIXTH Laura to Marianne


The noble youth informed us that his name was Lindsay�for particular reasons, however, I shall conceal it under that of Talbot. He told us that he was the son of an English baronet,9 that his mother had been many years no more, and that he had a sister of the middle size. "My father (he continued) is a mean and mercenary wretch�it is only to such particular friends as this dear party that I would thus betray his failings. Your virtues, my amiable Polydore (addressing himself to my father), yours, dear Claudia, and yours, my charming Laura, call on me to repose in you my confidence." We bowed. "My Father, seduced by the false glare of fortune and the deluding pomp of title, insisted on my giving my hand to Lady Dorothea. No, never, exclaimed I. Lady Dorothea is lovely and engaging; I prefer no woman to her; but, know sir, that I scorn to marry her in compliance with your wishes. No! Never shall it be said that I obliged my father."


We all admired the noble manliness of his reply. He continued.


"Sir Edward was surprised; he had perhaps little expected to meet with so


9. A baronet, a member of the lower aristocracy, is entitled to be called "Sir" and can pass on his title to his son.


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LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP / 51 9


spirited an opposition to his will. 'Where, Edward, in the name of wonder (said he) did you pick up this unmeaning gibberish? You have been studying novels, I suspect.' I scorned to answer: it would have been beneath my dignity. I mounted my horse and, followed by my faithful William, set forwards for my aunt's."


"My father's house is situated in Bedfordshire, my aunt's in Middlesex, and, though I flatter myself with being a tolerable proficient in geography, I know not how it happened, but I found myself entering this beautiful vale, which I find is in South Wales, when I had expected to have reached my aunt's."1


"After having wandered some time on the banks of the Usk without knowing which way to go, I began to lament my cruel destiny in the bitterest and most pathetic manner. It was now perfectly dark, not a single star was there to direct my steps, and I know not what might have befallen me, had I not at length discerned through the solemn gloom that surrounded me a distant light, which, as I approached it, I discovered to be the cheerful blaze of your fire. Impelled by the combination of misfortunes under which I laboured, namely fear, cold, and hunger, I hesitated not to ask admittance, which at length I have gained; and now, my adorable Laura (continued he, taking my hand), when may I hope to receive that reward of all the painful sufferings I have undergone during the course of my attachment to you, to which I have ever aspired? Oh! when will you reward me with yourself?"


"This instant, dear and amiable Edward." (replied I.) We were immediately united by my father, who though he had never taken orders had been bred to the church.2


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE SEVENTH Laura to Marianne


We remained but a few days after our marriage in the vale of Usk. After taking an affecting farewell of my father, my mother, and my Isabel, I accompanied Edward to his aunt's in Middlesex. Philippa received us both with every expression of affectionate love. My arrival was indeed a most agreeable surprise to her, as she had not only been totally ignorant of my marriage with her nephew, but had never even had the slightest idea of there being such a person in the world.


Augusta, the sister of Edward, was on a visit to her when we arrived. I found her exactly what her brother had described her to be�of the middle size. She received me with equal surprise, though not with equal cordiality, as Philippa. There was a disagreeable coldness and forbidding reserve in her reception of me which was equally distressing and unexpected. None of that interesting sensibility or amiable sympathy in her manners and address to me which should have distinguished our introduction to each other. Her language was neither warm, nor affectionate, her expressions of regard were neither animated nor cordial; her arms were not opened to receive me to her heart, though my own were extended to press her to mine.


A short conversation between Augusta and her brother, which I accidentally


1. Bedfordshire is in the eastern midlands of both. England; Middlesex is just northwest of London; 2. Laura's father has never been ordained. This and south Wales is many miles to the southwest of marriage is not legal.


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52 0 / JANE AUSTEN


overheard, increased my dislike to her, and convinced me that her heart was no more formed for the soft ties of love than for the endearing intercourse of friendship.


"But do you think that my father will ever be reconciled to this imprudent connection?" (said Augusta.)


"Augusta (replied the noble youth) I thought you had a better opinion of me, than to imagine I would so abjectly degrade myself as to consider my father's concurrence in any of my affairs, either of consequence or concern to me. Tell me, Augusta, tell me with sincerity; did you ever know me consult his inclinations or follow his advice in the least trifling particular since the age of fifteen?"


"Edward (replied she) you are surely too diffident in your own praise. Since you were fifteen only!�My dear brother, since you were five years old, I entirely acquit you of ever having willingly contributed to the satisfaction of your father. But still I am not without apprehensions of your being shortly obliged to degrade yourself in your own eyes by seeking a support for your wife in the generosity of Sir Edward."


"Never, never, Augusta, will I so demean myself, (said Edward). Support! What support will Laura want which she can receive from him?"


"Only those very insignificant ones of victuals and drink." (answered she.)


"Victuals and drink! (replied my husband in a most nobly contemptuous manner) and dost thou then imagine that there is no other support for an exalted mind (such as is my Laura's) than the mean and indelicate employment of eating and drinking?"


"None that I know of so efficacious." (returned Augusta).


"And did you then never feel the pleasing pangs of love, Augusta? (replied my Edward). Does it appear impossible to your vile and corrupted palate to exist on love? Can you not conceive the luxury of living in every distress that poverty can inflict, with the object of your tenderest affection?"


"You are too ridiculous (said Augusta) to argue with; perhaps, however, you may in time be convinced that. . . ."


Here I was prevented from hearing the remainder of her speech, by the appearance of a very handsome young woman, who was ushered into the room at the door of which I had been listening. On hearing her announced by the name of "Lady Dorothea," I instantly quitted my post and followed her into the parlour, for I well remembered that she was the lady proposed as a wife for my Edward by the cruel and unrelenting baronet.


Although Lady Dorothea's visit was nominally to Philippa and Augusta, yet


I have some reason to imagine that (acquainted with the marriage and arrival


of Edward) to see me was a principal motive to it.


I soon perceived that, though lovely and elegant in her person and though


easy and polite in her address, she was of that inferior order of beings with


regard to delicate feeling, tender sentiments, and refined sensibility, of which


Augusta was one.


She stayed but half an hour and neither, in the course of her visit, confided


to me any of her secret thoughts, nor requested me to confide in her any of


mine. You will easily imagine therefore, my dear Marianne, that I could not


feel any ardent affection or very sincere attachment for Lady Dorothea.


Adieu. Laura


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LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP / 521


LETTER THE EIGHTH Laura to Marianne, in continuation


Lady Dorothea had not left us long before another visitor, as unexpected a one as her Ladyship, was announced. It was Sir Edward, who, informed by Augusta of her brother's marriage, came doubtless to reproach him for having dared to unite himself to me without his knowledge. But Edward, foreseeing his design, approached him with heroic fortitude as soon as he entered the room, and addressed him in the following manner.


"Sir Edward, I know the motive of your journey here�You come with the base design of reproaching me for having entered into an indissoluble engagement with my Laura without your consent�But, Sir, I glory in the act�. It is my greatest boast that I have incurred the displeasure of my father!"


So saying, he took my hand and, whilst Sir Edward, Philippa, and Augusta were doubtless reflecting with admiration on his undaunted bravery, led me from the parlour to his father's carriage, which yet remained at the door and in which we were instantly conveyed from the pursuit of Sir Edward.


The postilions3 had at first received orders only to take the London road; as soon as we had sufficiently reflected, however, we ordered them to drive to M ., the seat of Edward's most particular friend, which was but a few miles distant.


At M . we arrived in a few hours; and on sending in our names were immediately admitted to Sophia, the wife of Edward's friend. After having been deprived during the course of three weeks of a real friend (for such I term your mother), imagine my transports at beholding one, most truly worthy of the name. Sophia was rather above the middle size; most elegantly formed. A soft languor spread over her lovely features, but increased their beauty.�It was the characteristic of her mind�. She was all sensibility and feeling. We flew into each other's arms and, after having exchanged vows of mutual friendship for the rest of our lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our hearts�. We were interrupted in this delightful employment by the entrance of Augustus (Edward's friend), who was just returned from a solitary ramble.


Never did I see such an affecting scene as was the meeting of Edward and Augustus.


"My life! my soul!" (exclaimed the former) "My adorable angel!" (replied the latter) as they flew into each other's arms. It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself�We fainted alternately on a sofa.4


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE NINTH From the same to the same


Towards the close of the day we received the following letter from Philippa.


Sir Edward is greatly incensed by your abrupt departure; he has taken back Augusta with him to Bedfordshire. Much as I wish to enjoy again your charming society, I cannot determine to snatch you from that of such dear and


3. The servants mounted on and guiding the comedy The Critic (1779) directs the actors play- horses that draw a coach. ing the mother and son to "Faint alternately in each 4. A stage direction in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's other's arms."


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522 / JANE AUSTEN


deserving friends�When your visit to them is terminated, I trust you will return to the arms of your


Philippa


We returned a suitable answer to this affectionate note and, after thanking her for her kind invitation, assured her that we would certainly avail ourselves of it, whenever we might have no other place to go to. Though certainly nothing could, to any reasonable being, have appeared more satisfactory than so grateful a reply to her invitation, yet I know not how it was, but she was certainly capricious enough to be displeased with our behaviour and in a few weeks after, either to revenge our conduct, or relieve her own solitude, married a young and illiterate fortune-hunter. This imprudent step (though we were sensible5 that it would probably deprive us of that fortune which Philippa had ever taught us to expect) could not on our own accounts excite from our exalted minds a single sigh; yet fearful lest it might prove a source of endless misery to the deluded bride, our trembling sensibility was greatly affected when we were first informed of the event. The affectionate entreaties of Augustus and Sophia that we would for ever consider their house as our home, easily prevailed on us to determine never more to leave them�. In the society of my Edward and this amiable pair, I passed the happiest moments of my life: Our time was most delightfully spent, in mutual protestations of friendship, and in vows of unalterable love, in which we were secure from being interrupted by intruding and disagreeable visitors, as Augustus and Sophia had, on their first entrance in the neighbourhood, taken due care to inform the surrounding families that, as their happiness centered wholly in themselves, they wished for no other society. But alas! my dear Marianne, such happiness as I then enjoyed was too perfect to be lasting. A most severe and unexpected blow at once destroyed every sensation of pleasure. Convinced as you must be from what I have already told you concerning Augustus and Sophia, that there never were a happier couple, I need not, I imagine, inform you that their union had been contrary to the inclinations of their cruel and mercenary parents, who had vainly endeavoured with obstinate perseverance to force them into a marriage with those whom they had ever abhorred, but, with an heroic fortitude worthy to be related and admired, they had both constantly refused to submit


to such despotic power.


After having so nobly disentangled themselves from the shackles of parental authority by a clandestine marriage, they were determined never to forfeit the good opinion they had gained in the world in so doing, by accepting any proposals of reconciliation that might be offered them by their fathers�to this farther trial of their noble independence, however, they never were exposed.


They had been married but a few months when our visit to them commenced, during which time they had been amply supported by a considerable sum of money which Augustus had gracefully purloined from his unworthy father's escritoire,6 a few days before his union with Sophia.


By our arrival their expenses were considerably increased, though their means for supplying them were then nearly exhausted. But they, exalted creatures! scorned to reflect a moment on their pecuniary distresses and would have blushed at the idea of paying their debts.�Alas! what was their reward for such disinterested behaviour? The beautiful Augustus was arrested and we were all undone. Such perfidious treachery in the merciless perpetrators of


5. Conscious, aware. 6. Writing desk.


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LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP / 52 3


the deed will shock your gentle nature, dearest Marianne, as much as it then affected the delicate sensibility of Edward, Sophia, your Laura, and of Augustus himself. To complete such unparalleled barbarity, we were informed that an execution in the house would shortly take place.7 Ah! what could we do but what we did! We sighed and fainted on the sofa.


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE TENTH


Laura in continuation


When we were somewhat recovered from the overpowering effusions of our grief, Edward desired that we would consider what was the most prudent step to be taken in our unhappy situation, while he repaired to his imprisoned friend to lament over his misfortunes. We promised that we would, and he set forwards on his journey to town. During his absence we faithfully complied with his desire and, after the most mature deliberation, at length agreed that the best thing we could do was to leave the house of which we every moment expected the officers of justice to take possession. We waited therefore with the greatest impatience for the return of Edward, in order to impart to him the result of our deliberations�. But no Edward appeared�. In vain did we count the tedious moments of his absence�in vain did we weep�in vain even did we sigh�no Edward returned�. This was too cruel, too unexpected a blow to our gentle sensibility�we could not support it�we could only faint�. At length, collecting all the resolution I was mistress of, I arose and, after packing up some necessary apparel for Sophia and myself, I dragged her to a carriage I had ordered, and instantly we set out for London. As the habitation of Augustus was within twelve miles of town, it was not long ere we arrived there, and no sooner had we entered Holborn8 than, letting down one of the front glasses,9 I enquired of every decent-looking person that we passed "If they had seen my Edward?"


But as we drove too rapidly to allow them to answer my repeated enquiries, I gained little, or indeed, no information concerning him. "Where am I to drive?" said the postilion. "To Newgate,1 gentle youth (replied I), to see Augustus." "Oh! no, no, (exclaimed Sophia) I cannot go to Newgate; I shall not be able to support the sight of my Augustus in so cruel a confinement�my feelings are sufficiently shocked by the recital of his distress, but to behold it will overpower my sensibility." As I perfectly agreed with her in the justice of her sentiments, the postilion was instantly directed to return into the country. You may perhaps have been somewhat surprised, my dearest Marianne, that in the distress I then endured, destitute of any support, and unprovided with any habitation, I should never once have remembered my father and mother or my paternal cottage in the vale of Usk. To account for this seeming forgetfulness I must inform you of a trifling circumstance concerning them which I have as yet never mentioned�. The death of my parents a few weeks after my departure is the circumstance I allude to. By their decease I became the lawful inheritress of their house and fortune. But alas! the house had never been their own, and their fortune had only been an annuity2 on their own lives.


7. I.e., the goods in the house, as property of a 1. A prison. That Augustus is thought to be there debtor who has forfeited them, will be seized by a indicates he has been arrested as a thief rather sheriff s officer. than as a debtor. 8. District in London. 2. Annual payment of a set sum. 9. Window of the coach.


.


52 4 / JANE AUSTEN


Such is the depravity of the world! To your mother I should have returned with pleasure, should have been happy to have introduced to her my charming Sophia, and should have with cheerfulness have passed the remainder of my life in their dear society in the vale of Usk, had not one obstacle to the execution of so agreeable a scheme intervened; which was the marriage and removal of your mother to a distant part of Ireland.


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE ELEVENTH Laura in continuation


"I have a relation in Scotland (said Sophia to me as we left London) who, I am certain, would not hesitate in receiving me." "Shall I order the boy to drive there?" said I�but instantly recollecting myself, exclaimed "Alas, I fear it will be too long a journey for the horses." Unwilling however to act only from my own inadequate knowledge of the strength and abilities of horses, I consulted the postilion, who was entirely of my opinion concerning the affair. We therefore determined to change horses at the next town and to travel post3 the remainder of the journey�. When we arrived at the last inn we were to stop at, which was but a few miles from the house of Sophia's relation, unwilling to intrude our society on him unexpected and unthought of, we wrote a very elegant and well-penned note to him containing an account of our destitute and melancholy situation, and of our intention to spend some months with him in Scotland. As soon as we had dispatched this letter, we immediately prepared to follow it in person and were stepping into the carriage for that purpose, when our attention was attracted by the entrance of a coroneted coach and four4 into the inn-yard. A gentleman considerably advanced in years descended from it�. At his first appearance my sensibility was wonderfully affected and ere I had gazed at him a second time, an instinctive sympathy whispered to my heart, that he was my grandfather.


Convinced that I could not be mistaken in my conjecture, I instantly sprang from the carriage I had just entered, and following the venerable stranger into the room he had been shewn to, I threw myself on my knees before him and besought him to acknowledge me as his grandchild.�He started, and, after having attentively examined my features, raised me from the ground and throwing his grandfatherly arms around my neck, exclaimed, "Acknowledge thee! Yes, dear resemblance of my Laurina and my Laurina's daughter, sweet image of my Claudia and my Claudia's mother, I do acknowledge thee as the daughter of the one and the granddaughter of the other." While he was thus tenderly embracing me, Sophia, astonished at my precipitate departure, entered the room in search of me�. No sooner had she caught the eye of the venerable peer, than he exclaimed with every mark of astonishment�"Another granddaughter ! Yes, yes, I see you are the daughter of my Laurina's eldest girl; your resemblance to the beauteous Matilda sufficiently proclaims it." "Oh!" replied Sophia, "when I first beheld you the instinct of nature whispered me that we were in some degree related�But whether grandfathers, or grandmothers, I could not pretend to determine." He folded her in his arms, and whilst they were tenderly embracing, the door of the apartment opened and a most beautiful young man appeared. On perceiving him Lord St. Clair started


3. By speedy and expensive post coach. with the image of a crown, indicating its occupant's 4. The coach, drawn by four horses, is adorned noble rank.


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LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP / 52 5


and, retreating back a few paces, with uplifted hands, said, "Another grandchild! What an unexpected happiness is this! to discover in the space of three minutes, as many of my descendants! This, I am certain, is Philander, the son of my Laurina's third girl, the amiable Bertha; there wants now but the presence of Gustavus to complete the union of my Laurina's grandchildren."


"And here he is; (said a graceful youth who that instant entered the room) here is the Gustavus you desire to see. I am the son of Agatha, your Laurina's fourth and youngest daughter." "I see you are indeed; replied Lord St. Clair� But tell me (continued he, looking fearfully towards the door) tell me, have I any other grandchildren in the house." "None, my Lord." "Then I will provide for you all without further delay�Here are four banknotes of 50. each�Take them and remember I have done the duty of a grandfather�." He instantly left the room and immediately afterwards the house.


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE TWELFTH


Laura in continuation


You may imagine how greatly we were surprised by the sudden departure of Lord St. Clair. "Ignoble grandsire!" exclaimed Sophia. "Unworthy grandfather!" said I, and instantly fainted in each other's arms. How long we remained in this situation I know not; but when we recovered we found ourselves alone, without either Gustavus, Philander, or the banknotes. As we were deploring our unhappy fate, the door of the apartment opened and "Macdonald" was announced. He was Sophia's cousin. The haste with which he came to our relief so soon after the receipt of our note spoke so greatly in his favour that I hesitated not to pronounce him, at first sight, a tender and sympathetic friend. Alas! he little deserved the name�for though he told us that he was much concerned at our misfortunes, yet by his own account it appeared that the perusal of them had neither drawn from him a single sigh, nor induced him to bestow one curse on our vindictive stars�. He told Sophia that his daughter depended on her returning with him to Macdonald Hall, and that as his cousin's friend he should be happy to see me there also. To Macdonald Hall, therefore, we went, and were received with great kindness by Janetta, the daughter of Macdonald, and the mistress of the mansion. Janetta was then only fifteen; naturally well disposed, endowed with a susceptible heart, and a sympathetic disposition, she might, had these amiable qualities been properly encouraged, have been an ornament to human nature; but, unfortunately, her father possessed not a soul sufficiently exalted to admire so promising a disposition, and had endeavoured by every means in his power to prevent its increasing with her years. He had actually so far extinguished the natural noble sensibility of her heart, as to prevail on her to accept an offer from a young man of his recommendation. They were to be married in a few months, and Graham was in the house when we arrived. We soon saw through his character�. He was just such a man as one might have expected to be the choice of Macdonald. They said he was sensible, well-informed, and agreeable; we did not pretend to judge of such trifles, but, as we were convinced he had no soul, that he had never read the Sorrows ofWerter,5 and that his hair bore not


5. Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Goethe's translated from its original German. It is often seen novel in letters telling the story of the title char-as a founding text of the European Romantic acter's hopeless love, was a hit in England when movement.


.


52 6 / JANE AUSTEN


the slightest resemblance to auburn, we were certain that Janetta could feel no affection for him, or at least that she ought to feel none. The very circumstance of his being her father's choice, too, was so much in his disfavour, that had he been deserving her in every other respect, yet that of itself ought to have been a sufficient reason in the eyes of Janetta for rejecting him. These considerations we were determined to represent to her in their proper light and doubted not of meeting with the desired success from one naturally so well disposed, whose errors in the affair had only arisen from a want of proper confidence in her own opinion, and a suitable contempt of her father's. We found her, indeed, all that our warmest wishes could have hoped for; we had no difficulty to convince her that it was impossible she could love Graham, or that it was her duty to disobey her father; the only thing at which she rather seemed to hesitate was our assertion that she must be attached to some other person. For some time, she persevered in declaring that she knew no other young man for whom she had the smallest affection; but upon explaining the impossibility of such a thing she said that she believed she did like Captain M'Kenzie better than anyone she knew besides. This confession satisfied us and, after having enumerated the good qualities of M'Kenzie and assured her that she was violently in love with him, we desired to know whether he had


ever in anywise declared his affection to her.


"So far from having ever declared it, I have no reason to imagine that he has ever felt any for me." said Janetta. "That he certainly adores you (replied Sophia) there can be no doubt�. The attachment must be reciprocal�. Did he never gaze on you with admiration�tenderly press your hand�drop an involuntary tear�and leave the room abruptly?" "Never (replied she) that I remember�he has always left the room indeed when his visit has been ended, but has never gone away particularly abruptly or without making a bow." "Indeed, my love (said I) you must be mistaken�: for it is absolutely impossible that he should ever have left you but with confusion, despair, and precipitation�. Consider but for a moment, Janetta, and you must be convinced how absurd it is to suppose that he could ever make a bow, or behave like any other person." Having settled this point to our satisfaction, the next we took into consideration was to determine in what manner we should inform M'Kenzie of the favourable opinion Janetta entertained of him�. We at length agreed to acquaint him with it by an anonymous letter which Sophia drew up in the following manner.


Oh! happy lover of the beautiful Janetta; oh! enviable possessor of her


heart whose hand is destined to another, why do you thus delay a confes


sion of your attachment to the amiable object of it ? Oh! consider that a


few weeks will at once put an end to every flattering hope that you may


now entertain, by uniting the unfortunate victim of her father's cruelty to


the execrable and detested Graham.


Alas! why do you thus so cruelly connive at the projected misery of her


and of yourself by delaying to communicate that scheme which had doubt


less long possessed your imagination? A secret union will at once secure


the felicity of both.


The amiable M'Kenzie, whose modesty, as he afterwards assured us, had been the only reason of his having so long concealed the violence of his affection for Janetta, on receiving this billet flew on the wings of love to Macdonald Hall and so powerfully pleaded his attachment to her who inspired it that,


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LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP / 527


after a few more private interviews, Sophia and I experienced the satisfaction of seeing them depart for Gretna Green,6 which they chose for the celebration of their nuptials, in preference to any other place, although it was at a considerable distance from Macdonald Hall.


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE THIRTEENTH Laura in Continuation


They had been gone nearly a couple of hours, before either Macdonald Or Graham had entertained any suspicion of the affair�. And they might not even then have suspected it, but for the following little accident. Sophia, happening one day to open a private drawer in Macdonald's library with one of her own keys, discovered that it was the place where he kept his papers of consequence and amongst them some banknotes of considerable amount. This discovery she imparted to me; and having agreed together that it would be a proper treatment of so vile a wretch as Macdonald to deprive him of money, perhaps dishonestly gained, it was determined that the next time we should either of us happen to go that way, we would take one or more of the banknotes from the drawer. This well-meant plan we had often successfully put in execution; but alas! on the very day of Janetta's escape, as Sophia was majestically removing the fifth banknote from the drawer to her own purse, she was suddenly most impertinently interrupted in her employment by the entrance of Macdonald himself, in a most abrupt and precipitate manner. Sophia (who, though naturally all winning sweetness, could when occasions demanded it call forth the dignity of her sex) instantly put on a most forbidding look, and, darting an angry frown on the undaunted culprit, demanded in a haughty tone of voice "Wherefore her retirement was thus insolently broken in on?" The unblushing Macdonald, without even endeavouring to exculpate himself from the crime he was charged with, meanly endeavoured to reproach Sophia with ignobly defrauding him of his money. The dignity of Sophia was wounded; "Wretch (exclaimed she, hastily replacing the banknote in the drawer) how darest thou to accuse me of an act, of which the bare idea makes me blush?" The base wretch was still unconvinced and continued to upbraid the justly offended Sophia in such opprobrious language, that at length he so greatly provoked the gentle sweetness of her nature, as to induce her to revenge herself on him by informing him of Janetta's elopement, and of the active part we had both taken in the affair. At this period of their quarrel I entered the library and was, as you may imagine, equally offended as Sophia at the ill-grounded accusations of the malevolent and contemptible Macdonald. "Base miscreant (cried I) how canst thou thus undauntedly endeavour to sully the spotless reputation of such bright excellence? Why dost thou not suspect my innocence as soon?" "Be satisfied Madam (replied he) I do suspect it, and therefore must desire that you will both leave this house in less than half an hour."


"We shall go willingly; (answered Sophia) our hearts have long detested thee, and nothing but our friendship for thy daughter could have induced us to remain so long beneath thy roof."


"Your friendship for my daughter has indeed been most powerfully exerted


6. A town in southern Scotland, in which marriages of minors could be quickly performed without questions being asked. It was for this reason the destination of many eloping couples during the period.


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52 8 / JANE AUSTEN


by throwing her into the arms of an unprincipled fortune-hunter." (replied he.)


"Yes, (exclaimed I) amidst every misfortune, it will afford us some consolation to reflect that by this one act of friendship to Janetta, we have amply discharged every obligation that we have received from her father."


"It must indeed be a most grateful reflection, to your exalted minds." (said he.)


As soon as we had packed up our wardrobe and valuables, we left Macdonald Hall, and after having walked about a mile and a half we sat down by the side of a clear limpid stream to refresh our exhausted limbs. The place was suited to meditation�. A grove of full-grown elms sheltered us from the east�. A bed of full-grown nettles from the west�. Before us ran the murmuring brook and behind us ran the turnpike road. We were in a mood for contemplation and in a disposition to enjoy so beautiful a spot. A mutual silence, which had for some time reigned between us, was at length broke by my exclaiming� "What a lovely scene! Alas, why are not Edward and Augustus here to enjoy its beauties with us?"


"Ah! my beloved Laura (cried Sophia) for pity's sake, forbear recalling to my remembrance the unhappy situation of my imprisoned husband. Alas, what would I not give to learn the fate of my Augustus! to know if he is still in Newgate, or if he is yet hung. But never shall I be able so far to conquer my tender sensibility as to enquire after him. Oh! do not, I beseech you, ever let me again hear you repeat his beloved name�. It affects me too deeply�. I cannot bear to hear him mentioned; it wounds my feelings."


"Excuse me, my Sophia, for having thus unwillingly offended you�" replied I�and then changing the conversation, desired her to admire the noble grandeur of the elms which sheltered us from the eastern zephyr.7 "Alas! my Laura (returned she) avoid so melancholy a subject, I entreat you.�Do not again wound my sensibility by observations on those elms. They remind me of Augustus�. He was like them, tall, majestic�he possessed that noble grandeur which you admire in them."


I was silent, fearful lest I might any more unwillingly distress her by fixing on any other subject of conversation which might again remind her of Augustus.


"Why do you not speak, my Laura?" (said she, after a short pause) "I cannot support this silence�you must not leave me to my own reflections; they ever recur to Augustus."


"What a beautiful sky! (said I) How charmingly is the azure varied by those delicate streaks of white!"


"Oh! my Laura (replied she, hastily withdrawing her eyes from a momentary glance at the sky) do not thus distress me by calling my attention to an object which so cruelly reminds me of my Augustus's blue satin waistcoat striped with white! In pity to your unhappy friend, avoid a subject so distressing." What could I do? The feelings of Sophia were at that time so exquisite, and the tenderness she felt for Augustus so poignant, that I had not the power to start any other topic, justly fearing that it might in some unforeseen manner again awaken all her sensibility by directing her thoughts to her husband.� Yet to be silent would be cruel; she had entreated me to talk.


7. A breeze; usually one from the west.


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LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP / 52 9


From this dilemma I was most fortunately relieved by an accident truly apropos;8 it was the lucky overturning of a gentleman's phaeton,9 on the road which ran murmuring behind us. It was a most fortunate accident as it diverted the attention of Sophia from the melancholy reflections which she had been before indulging. We instantly quitted our seats and ran to the rescue of those who but a few moments before had been in so elevated a situation as a fashionably high phaeton, but who were now laid low and sprawling in the dust�. "What an ample subject for reflection on the uncertain enjoyments of this world, would not that phaeton and the life of Cardinal Wolsey afford a thinking mind!"1 said I to Sophia as we were hastening to the field of action.


She had not time to answer me, for every thought was now engaged by the horrid spectacle before us. Two gentlemen, most elegantly attired but weltering in their blood, was what first struck our eyes�we approached�they were Edward and Augustus�Yes, dearest Marianne, they were our husbands. Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground�I screamed and instantly ran mad�. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again.�For an hour and a quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation�Sophia fainting every moment and 1 running mad as often. At length a groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share of life) restored us to ourselves�. Had we indeed before imagined that either of them lived, we should have been more sparing of our grief�but as we had supposed when we first beheld them that they were no more, we knew that nothing could remain to be done but what we were about�. No sooner therefore did we hear my Edward's groan than, postponing our lamentations for the present, we hastily ran to the dear youth and kneeling on each side of him implored him not to die�. "Laura (said he, fixing his now languid eyes on me) I fear I have been overturned."


I was oveijoyed to find him yet sensible�.


"Oh! tell me, Edward (said I) tell me, I beseech you, before you die, what has befallen you since that unhappy day in which Augustus was arrested and we were separated�"


"I will" (said he) and instantly fetching a deep sigh, expired��. Sophia immediately sunk again into a swoon�. My grief was more audible. My voice faltered, my eyes assumed a vacant stare, my face became as pale as death, and my senses were considerably impaired�.


"Talk not to me of phaetons (said I, raving in a frantic, incoherent manner)� give me a violin�. I'll play to him and soothe him in his melancholy hours�-Beware, ye gentle nymphs, of Cupid's thunderbolts, avoid the piercing shafts of Jupiter�Look at that grove of firs�I see a leg of mutton�They told me Edward was not dead; but they deceived me�they took him for a cucumber�" Thus I continued, wildly exclaiming on my Edward's death�. For two hours did I rave thus madly and should not then have left off, as I was not in the least fatigued, had not Sophia, who was just recovered from her swoon, entreated me to consider that night was now approaching and that the damps began to fall. "And whither shall we go (said I) to shelter us from either?" "To that white cottage." (replied she, pointing to a neat building which


8. Opportune. royal grace during the reign of Henry VIII. Laura, 9. Type of open carriage, named for the over-like any well-trained schoolgirl of the 18 th century, adventurous charioteer of Greek mythology. knows how to moralize on topics from English his1. The reference is to Cardinal Wolsey's fall from tory.


.


53 0 / JANE AUSTEN


rose up amidst the grove of elms and which I had not before observed�) I agreed, and we instantly walked to it�we knocked at the door�it was opened by an old woman; on being requested to afford us a night's lodging, she informed us that her house was but small, that she had only two bedrooms, but that however, we should be welcome to one of them. We were satisfied and followed the good woman into the house, where we were greatly cheered by the sight of a comfortable fire�. She was a widow and had only one daughter, who was then just seventeen�One of the best of ages; but alas! she was very plain and her name was Bridget


Nothing therefore could be expected from her�she could not be supposed to possess either exalted ideas, delicate feelings, or refined sensibilities�She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil, and obliging young woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her�she was only an object of contempt�.


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE FOURTEENTH Laura in continuation


Arm yourself, my amiable young friend, with all the philosophy you are mistress of; summon up all the fortitude you possess, for alas! in the perusal of the following pages your sensibility will be most severely tried. Ah! what were the misfortunes I had before experienced and which I have already related to you, to the one I am now going to inform you of. The death of my father, my mother, and my husband, though almost more than my gentle nature could support, were trifles in comparison to the misfortune I am now proceeding to relate. The morning after our arrival at the cottage, Sophia complained of a violent pain in her delicate limbs, accompanied with a disagreeable headache. She attributed it to a cold caught by her continued faintings in the open air as the dew was falling the evening before. This, I feared, was but too probably the case; since how could it be otherwise accounted for that I should have escaped the same indisposition, but by supposing that the bodily exertions I had undergone in my repeated fits of frenzy had so effectually circulated and warmed my blood as to make me proof against the chilling damps of night, whereas Sophia, lying totally inactive on the ground, must have been exposed to all their severity. I was most seriously alarmed by her illness, which, trifling as it may appear to you, a certain instinctive sensibility whispered me would in the end be fatal to her.


Alas! my fears were but too fully justified; she grew gradually worse, and I daily became more alarmed for her.�At length she was obliged to confine herself solely to the bed allotted us by our worthy landlady�. Her disorder turned to a galloping consumption2 and in a few days carried her off. Amidst all my lamentations for her (and violent you may suppose they were) I yet received some consolation in the reflection of my having paid every attention to her that could be offered in her illness. I had wept over her every day�had bathed her sweet face with my tears and had pressed her fair hands continually in mine�. "My beloved Laura (said she to me, a few hours before she died) take warning from my unhappy end and avoid the imprudent conduct which has occasioned it . . . beware of fainting-fits . . . Though at the time they may be refreshing and agreeable, yet, believe me, they will in the end, if too


2. A rapidly developing case of tuberculosis.


.


LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP / 531


often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your constitution


My fate will teach you this .. . I die a martyr to my grief for the loss of Augustus. . . . One fatal swoon has cost me my life. . . . Beware of swoons, dear Laura .. . A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the body and, if not too violent, is, I dare say, conducive to health in its consequences�Run mad as often as you choose; but do not faint�".


These were the last words she ever addressed to me .. . It was her dying advice to her afflicted Laura, who has ever most faithfully adhered to it.


After having attended my lamented friend to her early grave, I immediately (though late at night) left the detested village in which she died, and near which had expired my husband and Augustus. I had not walked many yards from it before I was overtaken by a stagecoach, in which I instantly took a place, determined to proceed in it to Edinburgh, where I hoped to find some kind pitying friend who would receive and comfort me in my afflictions.


It was so dark when I entered the coach that I could not distinguish the number of my fellow travellers; I could only perceive that they were many. Regardless, however, of any thing concerning them, I gave myself up to my own sad reflections. A general silence prevailed�a silence, which was by nothing interrupted but by the loud and repeated snores of one of the party.


"What an illiterate villain must that man be! (thought I to myself) What a total want of delicate refinement must he have who can thus shock our senses by such a brutal noise! He must, I am certain, be capable of every bad action! There is no crime too black for such a character!" Thus reasoned I within myself, and doubtless such were the reflections of my fellow travellers.


At length, returning day enabled me to behold the unprincipled scoundrel who had so violently disturbed my feelings. It was Sir Edward, the father of my deceased husband. By his side sat Augusta, and on the same seat with me were your mother and Lady Dorothea. Imagine my surprise at finding myself thus seated amongst my old acquaintance. Great as was my astonishment, it was yet increased, when, on look[ing] out of [the] windows, I beheld the husband of Philippa, with Philippa by his side, on the coach-box,3 and when, on looking behind, I beheld Philander and Gustavus in the basket.4 "Oh! heavens, (exclaimed I) is it possible that I should so unexpectedly be surrounded by my nearest relations and connections?" These words roused the rest of the party, and every eye was directed to the corner in which I sat; "Oh! my Isabel (continued I, throwing myself across Lady Dorothea into her arms) receive once more to your bosom the unfortunate Laura. Alas! when we last parted in the vale of Usk, I was happy in being united to the best of Edwards; I had then a father and a mother, and had never known misfortunes�But now deprived of every friend but you�".


"What! (interrupted Augusta) is my brother dead then? Tell us, I entreat you, what is become of him?" "Yes, cold and insensible5 nymph, (replied I) that luckless swain, your brother, is no more, and you may now glory in being the heiress of Sir Edward's fortune."


Although I had always despised her from the day I had overheard her conversation with my Edward, yet in civility I complied with hers and Sir Edward's entreaties that I would inform them of the whole melancholy affair. They were


3. Seat for the driver. the cheapest fares were seated. 4. The overhanging back compartment on the out- 5. Incapable of feeling, callous, side of a stagecoach, where the passengers paying


.


53 2 / JANE AUSTEN


greatly shocked�Even the obdurate heart of Sir Edward and the insensible one of Augusta were touched with sorrow by the unhappy tale. At the request of your mother I related to them every other misfortune which had befallen me since we parted. Of the imprisonment of Augustus and the absence of Edward�of our arrival in Scotland�of our unexpected meeting with our grandfather and our cousins�of our visit to Macdonald Hall�of the singular service we there performed towards Janetta-�of her father's ingratitude for it


of his inhuman behaviour, unaccountable suspicions, and barbarous treatment of us, in obliging us to leave the house


of our lamentations on the loss of Edward and Augustus and finally of the melancholy death of my beloved companion.


Pity and surprise were strongly depictured in your mother's countenance, during the whole of my narration, but I am sorry to say, that to the eternal reproach of her sensibility, the latter infinitely predominated. Nay, faultless as my conduct had certainly been during the whole course of my late misfortunes and adventures, she pretended to find fault with my behaviour in many of the situations in which I had been placed. As I was sensible myself, that I had always behaved in a manner which reflected honour on my feelings and refinement, I paid little attention to what she said, and desired her to satisfy my curiosity by informing me how she came there, instead of wounding my spotless reputation with unjustifiable reproaches. As soon as she had complied with my wishes in this particular and had given me an accurate detail of everything that had befallen her since our separation (the particulars of which, if you are not already acquainted with, your mother will give you), I applied to Augusta for the same information respecting herself, Sir Edward, and Lady Dorothea.


She told me that, having a considerable taste for the beauties of nature, her curiosity to behold the delightful scenes it exhibited in that part of the world had been so much raised by Gilpin's tour to the Highlands,6 that she had prevailed on her father to undertake a tour of Scotland and had persuaded Lady Dorothea to accompany them. That they had arrived at Edinburgh a few days before and from thence had made daily excursions into the country around in the stage coach they were then in, from one of which excursions they were at that time returning. My next enquiries were concerning Philippa and her husband, the latter of whom, I learned, having spent all her fortune, had recourse for subsistence to the talent in which he had always most excelled, namely, driving, and that having sold everything which belonged to them, except their coach, had converted it into a stage, and in order to be removed from any of his former acquaintance, had driven it to Edinburgh from whence he went to Sterling7 every other day; that Philippa, still retaining her affection for her ungrateful husband, had followed him to Scotland and generally accompanied him in his little excursions to Sterling. "It has only been to throw a little money into their pockets (continued Augusta) that my father has always travelled in their coach to view the beauties of the country since our arrival in Scotland�for it would certainly have been much more agreeable to us to visit the Highlands in a post-chaise8 than merely to travel from Edin


6. Gilpin's Observations, Relative Chiefly to Pic-burgh. turesque Beauty . . . Oil Several Parts of Great Brit-8. Augusta wishes that they had hired on their ain; Particularly the High-Lands of Scotland own a smaller, more comfortable carriage, rather (1789). than traveling in a public stagecoach that follows 7. Stirling, a town forty miles northeast of Edin-a predetermined route.


.


LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP / 53 3


burgh to Sterling and from Sterling to Edinburgh every other day in a crowded and uncomfortable stage." I perfectly agreed with her in her sentiments on the affair, and secretly blamed Sir Edward for thus sacrificing his daughter's pleasure for the sake of a ridiculous old woman, whose folly in marrying so young a man ought to be punished. His behaviour, however, was entirely of a piece with his general character; for what could be expected from a man who possessed not the smallest atom of sensibility, who scarcely knew the meaning of sympathy, and who actually snored�.


Adieu. Laura


LETTER THE FIFTEENTH Laura in continuation


When we arrived at the town where we were to breakfast, I was determined to speak with Philander and Gustavus, and to that purpose as soon as I left the carriage, I went to the basket and tenderly enquired after their health, expressing my fears of the uneasiness of their situation. At first they seemed rather confused at my appearance, dreading no doubt that I might call them to account for the money which our grandfather had left me and which they had unjustly deprived me of, but finding that I mentioned nothing of the matter, they desired me to step into the basket, as we might there converse with greater ease. Accordingly I entered, and whilst the rest of the party were devouring green tea and buttered toast, we feasted ourselves in a more refined and sentimental manner by a confidential conversation. I informed them of everything which had befallen me during the course of my life, and at my request they related to me every incident of theirs.


"We are the sons, as you already know, of the two youngest daughters which Lord St. Clair had by Laurina, an Italian opera girl. Our mothers could neither of them exactly ascertain who were our fathers; though it is generally believed that Philander is the son of one Philip Jones, a bricklayer, and that my father was Gregory Staves, a stay-maker9 of Edinburgh. This is, however, of little consequence, for as our mothers were certainly never married to either of them, it reflects no dishonour on our blood, which is of a most ancient and unpolluted kind. Bertha (the mother of Philander) and Agatha (my own mother) always lived together. They were neither of them very rich; their united fortunes had originally amounted to nine thousand pounds, but as they had always lived upon the principal of it, when we were fifteen it was diminished to nine hundred. This nine hundred, they always kept in a drawer in one of the tables which stood in our common sitting parlour, for the convenience of having it always at hand. Whether it was from this circumstance, of its being easily taken, or from a wish of being independent, or from an excess of sensibility (for which we were always remarkable), I cannot now determine, but certain it is that when we had reached our fifteenth year, we took the nine hundred pounds and ran away. Having obtained this prize we were determined to manage it with economy and not to spend it either with folly or extravagance. To this purpose we therefore divided it into nine parcels, one of which we devoted to victuals, the second to drink, the third to housekeeping, the fourth to carriages, the fifth to horses, the sixth to servants, the seventh to amusements, the eighth to clothes, and the ninth to silver buckles. Having thus


9. Maker of corsets.


.


53 4 / JANE AUSTEN


arranged our expenses for two months (for we expected to make the nine hundred pounds last as long), we hastened to London and had the good luck to spend it in seven weeks and a day, which was six days sooner than we had intended. As soon as we had thus happily disencumbered ourselves from the weight of so much money, we began to think of returning to our mothers, but accidentally hearing that they were both starved to death, we gave over the design and determined to engage ourselves to some strolling company of players, as we had always a turn for the stage. Accordingly, we offered our sendees to one and were accepted; our company was indeed rather small, as it consisted only of the manager, his wife, and ourselves, but there were fewer to pay and the only inconvenience attending it was the scarcity of plays, which for want of people to fill the characters we could perform�. We did not mind trifles, however�. One of our most admired performances was Macbeth, in which we were truly great. The manager always played Banquo himself, his wife my Lady Macbeth. I did the three witches, and Philander acted all the rest. To say the truth, this tragedy was not only the best, but the only play we ever performed; and after having acted it all over England and Wales, we came to Scotland to exhibit it over the remainder of Great Britain. We happened to be quartered in that very town, where you came and met your grandfather�. We were in the inn-yard when his carriage entered and, perceiving by the arms1 to whom it belonged, and, knowing that Lord St. Clair was our grandfather, we agreed to endeavour to get something from him by discovering the relationship�. You know how well it succeeded�. Having obtained the two hundred pounds, we instantly left the town, leaving our manager and his wife to act Macbeth by themselves, and took the road to Sterling, where we spent our little fortune with great eclat.2 We are now returning to Edinburgh to get some


preferment3 in the acting way; and such, my dear cousin, is our history."


I thanked the amiable youth for his entertaining narration, and after expressing my wishes for their welfare and happiness, left them in their little habitation and returned to my other friends who impatiently expected me.


My adventures are now drawing to a close, my dearest Marianne; at least for the present.


When we arrived at Edinburgh, Sir Edward told me that, as the widow of his son, he desired I would accept from his hands of four hundred a year. I graciously promised that I would, but could not help observing that the unsympathetic baronet offered it more on account of my being the widow of Edward than in being the refined and amiable Laura.


I took up my residence in a romantic village in the Highlands of Scotland, where I have ever since continued, and where I can, uninterrupted by unmeaning visits, indulge, in a melancholy solitude, my unceasing lamentations for the death of my father, my mother, my husband, and my friend.


Augusta has been for several years united to Graham, the man of all others most suited to her; she became acquainted with him during her stay in Scotland.


Sir Edward, in hopes of gaining an heir to his title and estate, at the same time married Lady Dorothea�. His wishes have been answered. Philander and Gustavus, after having raised their reputation by their per


1. The coat of arms painted on the side of a noble- success. man's or noblewoman's carriage. 3. Advancement. 2. French: literally, brilliant display; conspicuous


.


PLAN OF A NOVEL / 535


formances in the theatrical line at Edinburgh, removed to Covent Garden, where they still exhibit under the assumed names of Lewis and Quick.'1 Philippa has long paid the debt of nature;5 her husband, however, still continues to drive the stage-coach from Edinburgh to Sterling:�


Adieu, my dearest Marianne. Laura


1790 1922


Plan of a Novel, According to Hints from Various Quarters1


Scene to be in the country, heroine the daughter of a clergyman, one who after having lived much in the world had retired from it, and settled in a curacy,2 with a very small fortune of his own.�He, the most excellent man that can be imagined, perfect in character, temper, and manners�without the smallest drawback or peculiarity to prevent his being the most delightful companion to his daughter from one year's end to the other.�Heroine a faultless character herself�, perfectly good, with much tenderness and sentiment, and not the least wit�very highly accomplished, understanding modern languages and (generally speaking) everything that the most accomplished young women learn, but particularly excelling in music�her favourite pursuit�and playing equally well on the piano forte and harp�and singing in the first stile. Her person, quite beautiful�dark eyes and plump cheeks.�Book to open with the description of father and daughter�who are to converse in long speeches, elegant language�and a tone of high, serious sentiment.�The father to be induced, at his daughter's earnest request, to relate to her the past events of his life. This narrative will reach through the greatest part of the first volume� as besides all the circumstances of his attachment to her mother and their marriage, it will comprehend his going to sea as chaplain to a distinguished naval character about the court, his going afterwards to court himself, which introduced him to a great variety of characters and involved him in many interesting situations, concluding with his opinion of the benefits to result from tythes being done away, and his having buried his own mother (heroine's lamented grandmother) in consequence of the high priest of the parish in which she died, refusing to pay her remains the respect due to them. The father to be of a very literary turn, an enthusiast in literature, nobody's enemy but his own3�at the same time most zealous in the discharge of his pastoral

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