MY dear Sarah,—I have taken a large sheet of paper, as if I were going to write a long letter; but that is by no means my intention, for I only have time to write three lines to notify what I ought to have done the moment I received your welcome letter. Namely, that I shall be very much joyed to see you. Every morning lately I have been expecting to see you drop in, even before your letter came; and I have been setting my wits to work to think how to make you as comfortable as the nature of our inhospitable habits will admit. I must work while you are here; and I have been slaving very hard to get through with something before you come, that I may be quite in the way of it, and not teize you with complaints all day that I do not know what to do.
I am very sorry to hear of your mischance. Mrs. Rickman has just buried her youngest child. I am glad I am an old maid; for, you see, there is nothing but misfortunes in the marriage state.
Charles was drunk last night, and drunk
the night before; which night before was at Godwin’s, where we went, at a short summons from
Mr. G., to play a solitary rubber, which was
interrupted by
| 1811 | CONVIVIAL NIGHTS | 427 |
Last night was to be a night, but it was not. There was a certain son of one of Martin’s employers, one young Mr. Blake; to do whom honour, Mrs. Burney brought forth, first rum, then a single bottle of champaine, long kept in her secret hoard; then two bottles of her best currant wine, which she keeps for Mrs. Rickman, came out; and Charles partook liberally of all these beverages, while Mr. Young Blake and Mr. Ireton talked of high matters, such as the merits of the Whip Club, and the merits of red and white champaine. Do I spell that last word right? Rickman was not there, so Ireton had it all his own way.
The alternating Wednesdays will chop off one day in the week from your jolly days, and I do not know how we shall make it up to you; but I will contrive the best I can. Phillips comes again pretty regularly, to the great joy of Mrs. Reynolds. Once more she hears the well-loved sounds of, ‘How do you do, Mrs. Reynolds? How does Miss Chambers do?’
I have spun out my three lines amazingly. Now for family news. Your brother’s little twins are not dead, but Mrs. John Hazlitt and her baby may be, for any thing I know to the contrary, for I have not been there for a prodigious long time. Mrs. Holcroft still goes about from Nicholson to Tuthil, and from Tuthil to Godwin, and from Godwin to Tuthil, and from Tuthil to Godwin, and from Godwin to Tuthil, and from Tuthil to Nicholson, to consult on the publication, or no publication, of the life of the good man, her husband. It is called the Life Everlasting. How does that same Life go on in your parts? Good bye, God bless you. I shall be glad to see you when you come this way.
I am going in great haste to see Mrs. Clarkson, for I must get back to
dinner, which I have hardly time to do. I wish that dear, good, amiable
woman would go out of town. I thought she was
| 428 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | 1811 |
[This letter is dated by Mr. Hazlitt November 30, 1810, but I doubt if that can be right. See extract from Crabb Robinson in the note to Letter 185, on page 422, testifying to Lamb’s sobriety between November 9 and December 23.
Liston was John Liston (1776?-1846), the actor, whose mock biography Lamb wrote some years later (see Vol. I. of this edition, page 248). His wife was a diminutive comedienne, famous as Queen Dollalolla in “Tom Thumb.” Lamb may have known Liston through the Burneys, for he is said to have been an usher in Dr. Burney’s school—Dr. Charles Burney, Captain Burney’s brother.
“Henry Robinson.” Crabb Robinson’s Diary shows us that his domestication by Godwin’s fireside was not of long duration. I do not know who Tommy Turner was. Mr. Ireton was probably William Ayrton, the musical critic, a friend and neighbour of the Burneys, and later a friend of the Lambs, as we shall see.
“The alternating Wednesdays.” The Lambs seem to have given up their weekly Wednesday evening, which now became fortnightly. Later it was changed to Thursday and made monthly. Mrs. Reynolds had been a Miss Chambers.]
MY dear Matilda,—Coleridge has
given me a very chearful promise that he will wait on Lady Jerningham any day you will be pleased to
appoint; he offered to write to you; but I found it was to be done tomorrow, and as I am pretty well acquainted with his
tomorrows, I thought good to let you know his determination today. He is in
town today, but as he is often going to Hammersmith for a night or two, you had
better perhaps send the invitation through me, and I will manage it for you as
well as I can. You had better let him have four or five days’ previous
notice, and you had better send the invitation as soon as you can; for he seems
tolerably well just now. I mention all these betters, because I wish to do the
best I can for you, perceiving, as I do, it is a thing
| 1811 | MISS DUNCAN | 429 |
You have been very good of late to let me come and see you so seldom, and you are a little goodish to come so seldom here, because you stay away from a kind motive. But if you stay away always, as I fear you mean to do, I would not give one pin for your good intentions. In plain words, come and see me very soon; for though I be not sensitive as some people, I begin to feel strange qualms for having driven you from me.
Alas! Wednesday shines no more to me now.
Miss Duncan played famously in the new comedy, which went off as famously. By the way, she put in a spiteful piece of wit, I verily believe of her own head; and methought she stared me full in the face. The words were “As silent as an author in company.” Her hair and herself looked remarkably well.
[I place this undated letter here on account of that which follows.
Angelica Catalani (1782-1849) was the great singer. I find no record of Coleridge’s meeting with her.
“Miss Duncan.” Praise of this lady in Miss Hardcastle and other parts will be found in Leigh Hunt’s Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres, 1807. At this time she was playing with the Drury Lane Company at the Lyceum. They produced several new plays.]
THERE—don’t read any further, because the
Letter is not intended for you but for Coleridge, who might perhaps not have opened it directed to him
suo nomine. It is to invite C. to
| 430 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Oct. |
[This is Lamb’s only existing letter to Coleridge’s friend, John Morgan.
Coleridge had not found a lodging and was still with the Morgans at 7 Portland Place, Hammersmith.
Alderman Sir William Curtis, M.P., afterwards Lord Mayor of London, was the subject of much ridicule by the Whigs and Radicals, and the hero of Peter Pindar’s satire “The Fat Knight and the Petition.” It was he who first gave the toast of the three R.’s—“reading, riting and rithmetic” (see Letter 328).]
MY dear Sarah,—I have been a long time anxiously expecting the happy news that I have just received. I address you because, as the letter has been lying some days at the India House, I hope you are able to sit up and read my congratulations on the little live boy you have been so many years wishing for. As we old women say, ‘May he live to be a great comfort to you!’ I never knew an event of the kind that gave me so much pleasure as the little long-looked-for-come-at-last’s arrival; and I rejoiced to hear his honour has begun to suck—the word was not distinctly written and I was a long time making out the solemn fact. I hope to hear from you soon, for I am desirous to know if your nursing labours are attended with any difficulties. I wish you a happy getting-up, and a merry christening.
Charles sends his love, perhaps though he
will write a scrap to Hazlitt at the
end. He is now looking over me, he is always in my way, for he has had a
month’s holydays at home, but I am happy to say they end on Monday—when
mine begin, for I am going to pass a week at Richmond with Mrs. Burney. She has been dying, but she went
to the Isle of Wight and recovered once more, and she is
| 1811 | WILLIAM HAZLITT THE THIRD | 431 |
I cannot help accompanying my sister’s congratulations to Sarah with some of my own to you on this happy occasion of a man child being born—
Delighted Fancy already sees him some future rich alderman or opulent merchant; painting perhaps a little in his leisure hours for amusement like the late H. Bunbury, Esq.
Pray, are the Winterslow Estates entailed? I am afraid lest the young dog when he grows up should cut down the woods, and leave no groves for widows to take their lonesome solace in. The Wem Estate of course can only devolve on him, in case of your brother leaving no male issue.
Well, my blessing and heaven’s be upon him, and make him like his father, with something a better temper and a smoother head of hair, and then all the men and women must love him.
Martin and the Card-boys join in congratulations. Love to Sarah. Sorry we are not within Caudle-shot.
If the widow be assistant on this notable occasion, give our due respects and kind remembrances to her.
[William Hazlitt’s son, William Hazlitt, afterwards the Registrar, was born on September 26, 1811. He had been preceded by another boy, in 1809, who lived, however, only a few months.
“H. Bunbury.” Henry William Bunbury, the caricaturist and painter, and the husband of Goldsmith’s friend, Catherine Horneck, the “Jessamy Bride.” He died in 1811.
The Card-boys would be Lamb’s Wednesday visitors.
Here should come a letter from Lamb to Charles Lloyd, Senior, dated September 8, 1812, not available for this edition. It is printed in Charles Lamb and the Lloyds: a letter of criticism of Mr. Lloyd’s translation of the Epistles of Horace.
| 432 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | 1812 |
A letter from Lamb to Charles Lloyd, Junior, belonging to this period, is now no more, in common with all but two of his letters, the remainder of which were destroyed by Lloyd’s son, Charles Grosvenor Lloyd. Writing to Daniel Stuart on October 13, 1812, Wordsworth says, “Lamb writes to Lloyd that C.’s play [Coleridge’s “Remorse”] is accepted.”
We now come to a period of three years in Lamb’s life which is represented in the correspondence by only two or three letters. Not until Letter 196, August 9, 1814, does he return to his old manner. During this time Lamb is known to have written his first essay on Christ’s Hospital, his “Confessions of a Drunkard,” the little but excellent series of Table-Talk in The Examiner and some verses in the same paper. Possibly he wrote many letters too, but they have disappeared. We know from Crabb Robinson’s Diary that it was a social period with the Lambs; the India House work also becoming more exacting than before.]
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