Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 Letters 1821-1842 by Lamb Charles Lamb Mary Lucas E V Edward Verrall Editor
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page
Ebook has 2940 lines and 191404 words, and 59 pages
Believe me, yours truly, C. LAMB.
LETTER 272
CHARLES LAMB TO S.T. COLERIDGE
May 1st ,
Mr. Gilman's, Highgate.
Extract from a MS. note of S.T.C. in my Beaumont and Fletcher, dated April 17th 1807.
"God bless you, dear Charles Lamb, I am dying; I feel I have not many weeks left."
LETTER 273
CHARLES LAMB TO JAMES GILLMAN
Dear Sir--You dine so late on Friday, it will be impossible for us to go home by the eight o'clock stage. Will you oblige us by securing us beds at some house from which a stage goes to the Bank in the morning? I would write to Coleridge, but cannot think of troubling a dying man with such a request.
Yours truly, C. LAMB.
If the beds in the town are all engaged, in consequence of Mr. Mathews's appearance, a hackney-coach will serve. Wednes'y. 2 May '21.
We shall neither of us come much before the time.
LETTER 274
CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN PAYNE COLLIER
May 16, 1821.
Dear J.P.C.,--Many thanks for the "Decameron:" I have not such a gentleman's book in my collection: it was a great treat to me, and I got it just as I was wanting something of the sort. I take less pleasure in books than heretofore, but I like books about books. In the second volume, in particular, are treasures--your discoveries about "Twelfth Night," etc. What a Shakespearian essence that speech of Osrades for food!--Shakespeare is coarse to it--beginning "Forbear and eat no more." Osrades warms up to that, but does not set out ruffian-swaggerer. The character of the Ass with those three lines, worthy to be set in gilt vellum, and worn in frontlets by the noble beasts for ever--
"Thou would, perhaps, he should become thy foe, And to that end dost beat him many times: He cares not for himself, much less thy blow."
Cervantes, Sterne, and Coleridge, have said positively nothing for asses compared with this.
I write in haste; but p. 24, vol. i., the line you cannot appropriate is Gray's sonnet, specimenifyed by Wordsworth in first preface to L.B., as mixed of bad and good style: p. 143, 2nd vol., you will find last poem but one of the collection on Sidney's death in Spenser, the line,
"Scipio, Caesar, Petrarch of our time."
This fixes it to be Raleigh's: I had guess'd it to be Daniel's. The last after it, "Silence augmenteth rage," I will be crucified if it be not Lord Brooke's. Hang you, and all meddling researchers, hereafter, that by raking into learned dust may find me out wrong in my conjecture!
N.B.--The best pen I could borrow at our butcher's: the ink, I verily believe, came out of the kennel.
LETTER 275
CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER
C. LAMB.
Thursday.
I am sorry the London Magazine is going to be given up.
LETTER 276
CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN TAYLOR
Margate, June 8, 1821.
The other passage, which you have queried, is to my ear correct. Pray let it stand.
D'r S'r, yours truly, C. LAMB.
On second consideration, I do enclose the proof.
LETTER 277
CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN TAYLOR
July 21, 1821.
Thanking you for your extract from M'r. E.'s letter,
I remain, D'r Sir,
Your obliged,
C. LAMB.
LETTER 278
CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES ABRAHAM ELTON
India House
to which place all letters addressed to C.L. commonly come.
My dear Sir, You have overwhelmed me with your favours. I have received positively a little library from Baldwyn's. I do not know how I have deserved such a bounty. We have been up to the ear in the classics ever since it came. I have been greatly pleased, but most, I think, with the Hesiod,--the Titan battle quite amazed me. Gad, it was no child's play--and then the homely aphorisms at the end of the works--how adroitly you have turned them! Can he be the same Hesiod who did the Titans? the latter is--
But to read the Days and Works, is like eating nice brown bread, homely sweet and nutritive. Apollonius was new to me. I had confounded him with the conjuror of that name. Medea is glorious; but I cannot give up Dido. She positively is the only Fine Lady of Antiquity: her courtesy to the Trojans is altogether queen-like. Eneas is a most disagreeable person. Ascanius a pretty young master. Mezentius for my money. His dying speech shames Turpin--not the Archbishop I mean, but the roadster of that name.
I have been ashamed to find how many names of classics you have introduced me to, that before I was ignorant of. Your commendation of Master Chapman arrideth me. Can any one read the pert modern Frenchify'd notes, &c., in Pope's translation, and contrast them with solemn weighty prefaces of Chapman, writing in full faith, as he evidently does, of the plenary inspiration of his author--worshipping his meanest scraps and relics as divine--without one sceptical misgiving of their authenticity, and doubt which was the properest to expound Homer to their countrymen. Reverend Chapman! you have read his hymn to Pan --why, it is Milton's blank verse clothed with rhyme. Paradise Lost could scarce lose, could it be so accoutred.
I shall die in the belief that he has improved upon Homer, in the Odyssey in particular--the disclosure of Ulysses of himself, to Alcinous, his previous behaviour at the song of the stern strife arising between Achilles and himself but you know all these things quite as well as I do. But what a deaf ear old C. would have turned to the doubters in Homer's real personality! They might as well have denied the appearance of J.C. in the flesh.--He apparently believed all the fables of H.'s birth, &c.
I will say nothing of the tenderest parts in your own little volume, at the end of such a slatternly scribble as this, but indeed they cost us some tears. I scrawl away because of interruptions every moment. You guess how it is in a busy office--papers thrust into your hand when your hand is busiest--and every anti-classical disavocation.
LETTER 279
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page