Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to John Clare, 31 August 1822
India House, 31 Aug., 1822.
DEAR Clare—I
thank you heartily for your present. I am an inverate old Londoner, but while I
am among your choice collections, I seem to be native to them, and free of the
country. ![]()
| 570 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | August |
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The quantity of your observation has
astonished me. What have most pleased me have been Recollections after a Ramble, and those Grongar Hill kind of pieces in eight
syllable lines, my favourite measure, such as Cowper Hill and Solitude. In some of your story-telling Ballads the provincial
phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too profuse with them. In poetry
slang of every kind is to be avoided. There is a
rustick Cockneyism, as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to
Helpstone. The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I think is to be found
in Shenstone. Would his Schoolmistress, the prettiest
of poems, have been better, if he had used quite the Goody’s own
language? Now and then a home rusticism is fresh and startling, but where
nothing is gained in expression, it is out of tenor. It may make folks smile
and stare, but the ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will
prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted, as you deserve to be.
Excuse my freedom, and take the same liberty with my puns.
I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of
all sorts, there is a methodist hymn for Sundays, and a farce for Saturday
night. Pray give them a place on your shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of
which I have [a] duplicate, that I may return in equal number to your welcome
presents.
I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the London for August.
Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs.
The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for them. Make
Mrs. Clare pick off the hind
quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and butter. The fore quarters are not
so good. She may let them hop off by themselves.
Yours sincerely,
Chas. Lamb.
John Clare (1793-1864)
Rural poet and autodidact; he published
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life
and Scenery (1820) and was a writer for the
London
Magazine; his later years were spent in an asylum for the insane.
Martha Clare [née Turner] (1800-1871)
Rural poet and autodidact; he published
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life
and Scenery (1820) and was a writer for the
London
Magazine; his later years were spent in an asylum for the insane.
William Shenstone (1714-1763)
English poet and landscape gardener; author of
The Schoolmistress
(1737, 1742) "A Pastoral Ballad" (1743).
The London Magazine. (1820-1829). Founded by John Scott as a monthly rival to
Blackwood's, the
London Magazine included among its contributors Charles Lamb, John Clare, Allan Cunningham,
Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Hood.
Sir John Denham (1615-1669)
Coopers Hill: a Poeme. (London: Tho. Walkley, 1642). A topographical poem or British georgic concerned with the outbreak of the Civil War; the
poem was considerably revised when reprinted in 1655, political circumstances having
changed.
