To Charles Lamb

Answer to Acrostics on the Names of Two Friends.

Charmed with the lines thy hand has sent, Honour I feel thy compliment, Amongst thy products that have won the ear Ranged in thy verse two friends most dear. Lay not thy winning pen away, Each line thou writest we bid thee stay. Still ask to charm us with another lay.

Long-linked, long-lived by public fame, A friend to misery whate'er its claim, Marvel I must if e'er we find Bestowed by Heaven a kindlier mind.

The two friends were Cecilia Catherine Lawton (see page 64) and Edward Hogg (see page 109). In reply Lamb says (Good Friday, 1830):--"I do assure you that your verses gratified me very much, and my sister is quite proud of them. For the first time in my life I congratulated myself upon the shortness and meanness of my name. Had it been Schwartzenberg or Esterhazy it would have put you to some puzzle."

Later in the same letter, referring to the present acrostic, he said speaking of Harriet Isola, Emma's sister, she "blames my last verses as being more written on Mr. Williams than on yourself; but how should I have parted whom a Superior Power has brought together?"

Page 107. To the Book.

Written for the Album of Sophia Elizabeth Frend, afterwards the wife of Augustus De Morgan, the mathematician (1806-1871), and mother of the novelist Mr. William De Morgan. Her father was William Frend (1757-1841), the reformer and a friend of Crabb Robinson and George Dyer. The lines were printed in Mrs. De Morgan's Three Score Years and Ten, as are also those that follow--"To S.F."

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Page 108. To R Q.

From the Album of Rotha Quillinan.

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Page 109. To S.L.... To M.L.

I have not been able to identify the Lockes. The J.F. of the last line might be Jane Field. Copies of these poems are preserved at South Kensington.

Page 109. An Acrostic against Acrostics.

Edward Hogg was a friend of Mr. Williams (see above). These verses were first printed in The Lambs by Mr. W.C. Hazlitt.

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Page 110. On being Asked to Write in Miss Westwood's Album.

Frances Westwood was the daughter of the Westwoods, with whom the Lambs were domiciled at Enfield Chase in 1829-1832. See letters to Gillman and Wordsworth (November 30, 1829, and January 22, 1830) for description of the Westwoods. The only son, Thomas Westwood, who died in 1888, and was an authority on the literature of angling, contributed to Notes and Queries some very interesting reminiscences of the Lambs in those days. This poem and that which follows it were sent to Notes and Queries by Thomas Westwood (June 4, 1870).

It is concerning these lines that Lamb writes to Barton, in 1827:-- "Adieu to Albums--for a great while--I said when I came here, and had not been fixed two days, but my Landlord's daughter (not at the Pot-house) requested me to write in her female friend's, and in her own. If I go to ---- thou art there also, O all pervading Album! All over the Leeward Islands, in Newfoundland, and the Back Settlements, I understand there is no other reading. They haunt me. I die of Albo-phobia!"

Page 111. Un Solitaire.

E.I., who made the drawing in question, would be Emma Isola. The verses were copied by Lamb into his Album, which is now in the possession of Mrs. Alfred Morrison.

Page 111. To S[arah] T[homas].

From Lamb's Album. I have not been able to trace this lady.

Page 111. To Mrs. Sarah Robinson.

From the copy preserved among Henry Crabb Robinson's papers at Dr. Williams' Library. Sarah Robinson was the niece of H.C.R., who was the pilgrim in Rome. The stranger to thy land was Emma Isola, Fornham, in Suffolk, where she was living, being near to Bury St. Edmunds, the home of the Robinsons.

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Page 112. To Sarah.

From the Album of Sarah Apsey. Lamb seems to have known very many Sarahs.

Page 112. To Joseph Vale Asbury.

From Lamb's Album. Jacob (not Joseph, as Lamb supposed) Vale Asbury was the Lambs' doctor at Enfield. There are extant two amusing letters from Lamb to Asbury.

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Page 113. To D.A.

From Lamb's Album. Dorothy Asbury, the wife of the doctor.

Page 113. To Louisa Morgan.

From Lamb's Album. Louisa Morgan was probably the daughter of Coleridge's friend, John Morgan, of Calne, in Wiltshire, with whom the Lambs stayed in 1817--the same Morgan--"Morgan demigorgon"--who ate walnuts better than any man Lamb knew, and munched cos-lettuce like a rabbit (see letters to Coleridge in August, 1814). Southey and Lamb each allowed John Morgan £10 a year in his old age and adversity, beginning with 1819.

Page 113. To Sarah James of Beguildy.

Sarah James was Mary Lamb's nurse, and the sister of the Mrs. Parsons with whom she lived during the last years of her life. Miss James was the daughter of the rector of Beguildy, in Shropshire. The verses are reprinted from My Lifetime by the late John Hollingshead, who was the great-nephew of Miss James and Mrs. Parsons.

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Page 114. To Emma Button.

Included in a letter from Lamb to John Aitken, editor of The Cabinet, July 5, 1825.

Page 114. Written upon the cover of a blotting book. The Mirror, May 7, 1836.

Identified by Mr. Walter Jerrold. First collected by Mr. Thomas Hutchinson.

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Page 115. POLITICAL AND OTHER EPIGRAMS.

Lamb was not a politician, but he had strong--almost passionate--prejudices against certain statesmen and higher persons, which impelled him now and then to sarcastic verse. The earliest examples in this vein that can be identified are two quatrains from the Morning Post in January, 1802, printed on page 115, and the epigram on Sir James Mackintosh in The Albion, printed on the same page, to which Lamb refers in the Elia essay on "Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago" (see Vol. II.). Until a file of The Albion turns up we shall never know how active Lamb's pen was at that time. The next belong to the year 1812--in The Examiner (see page 116)--and we then leap another seven years or so until 1819-1820, Lamb's busiest period as a caustic critic of affairs--in The Examiner, possibly the Morning Chronicle, and principally in The Champion. After 1820, however, he returned to this vein very seldom, and then with less bitterness and depth of feeling. "The Royal Wonders," in The Times for August 10, 1830 (see page 122), and "Lines Suggested by a Sight of Waltham Cross," in the Englishman's Magazine, September, 1831 (written, however, some years earlier), on page 121, being his latest efforts that we know of. Of course there must be many other similar productions to which we have no clue--the old Morning Post days doubtless saw many an epigram that cannot now be definitely claimed for Lamb--but those that are preserved here sufficiently show how feelingly Lamb could hate and how trenchantly he could chastise. Others that seem to me likely to be Lamb's I could have included; but it is well to dispense as much as possible with the problematic. For example, I suspect Lamb of the authorship of several of the epigrams quoted in The Examiner in 1819 and 1820 from the Morning Chronicle. He used to send verses to the Morning Chronicle at that time, and Leigh Hunt, the editor of The Examiner, would naturally be pleased to give anything of his friend's an additional publicity.

The majority of the epigrams printed in this section might have remained unidentified were it not that in 1822 John Thelwall, who owned and edited The Champion in 1818-1820, issued a little volume entitled The Poetical Recreations of "The Champion," wherein Lamb's contributions were signed R. et R. This signature being appended to certain poems of which we know Lamb to have been the author--as "The Three Graves," which he sent also to the London Magazine (in 1825), and which he was in the habit of reading or reciting to his friends--enables us to ascertain the authorship of the others. A note placed by Thelwall above the index of the book states, "it is much to be regretted that, by mere oversight, or rather mistake, several of the printed epigrams of R. et R. have been omitted;" but a search through the files of The Champion has failed to bring to light any others with Lamb's adopted signature.

The origin of the signature R. et R. is unknown. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald suggests that it might stand for Romulus and Remus, but offers no supporting theory. He might have added that so unfamiliar a countenance is in these epigrams shown by their author, that the suggestion of a wolf rather than a Lamb might have been intended. Lamb's principal political epigrams were drawn from him by his intense contempt for the character of George IV., then Prince of Wales. His treatment of Caroline of Brunswick, as we see, moved Lamb to utterances of almost sulphurous indignation not only for the prince himself, but for all who were on his side, particularly Canning. Lamb, we must suppose, was wholly on the side of the queen, thus differing from Coleridge, who when asked how his sympathies were placed would admit only to being anti-Prince.

John Thelwall (1764-1834)--Citizen Thelwall--was one of the most popular and uncompromising of the Radicals of the seventeen-nineties. He belonged to the Society of the Friends of the People and other Jacobin confederacies. In May, 1794, he was even sent to the Tower (with Home Tooke and Thomas Hardy) for sedition; moved to Newgate in October; and tried and acquitted in December. Lamb first met him, I fancy, in 1797, when Thelwall was intimate with Coleridge. After 1798 Thelwall's political activities were changed for those of a lecturer on more pacific subjects, and later he opened an institution in London where he taught elocution and corrected the effects of malformation of the organs of speech. He bought The Champion in 1818, and held it for two or three years, but it did not succeed. Thelwall died in 1834. Among his friends were Coleridge, Haydon, Hazlitt, Southey, Crabb Robinson and Lamb, all of whom, although they laughed at his excesses and excitements as a reformer, saw in him an invincible honesty and sincerity.

Before leaving this subject I should like to quote the following lines from The Champion of November 4 and 5, 1820:--