Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning, [9 August 1800]
DEAR Manning,—I suppose you have heard of Sophia Lloyd’s good fortune, and paid the customary
compliments to the parents. Heaven keep the new-born infant from star-blasting
and moon-blasting, from epilepsy, marasmus, and the devil! May he live to see
many days, and they good ones; some friends, and they pretty regular
correspondents, with as much wit as wisdom as will eat their bread and cheese
together under a poor roof without quarrelling; as much goodness as will earn
heaven! Here I must leave off, my benedictory powers failing me. I could curse
the sheet full; so much stronger is corruption than grace in the Natural Man.
And now, when shall I catch a glimpse of your honest
face-to-face countenance again—your fine dogmatical
sceptical face, by punch-light? O! one glimpse of the human face, and
shake of the human hand, is better than whole reams of this cold, thin
correspondence—yea, of more worth than all the letters that have sweated the
fingers of sensibility from Madame
Sévigné and Balzac
(observe my Larning!) to Sterne and
Shenstone.
Coleridge is settled with his wife and
the young philosopher at Keswick with
the Wordsworths. They have contrived to
spawn a new volume of lyrical
ballads, which is to see the light in about a month, and causes no
little excitement in the literary world. George Dyer too, that good-natured heathen, is
more than nine months gone with his twin volumes of ode, pastoral, sonnet,
elegy, Spenserian, Horatian, Akensidish, and Masonic
verse—Clio prosper the birth! it will
be twelve shillings out of somebody’s pocket. I find he means to exclude
“personal satire,” so it appears by his truly original
advertisement. Well, God put it into the hearts of the English gentry to come
in shoals and subscribe to his poems, for He never put a kinder heart into
flesh of man than George Dyer’s!
Now farewell: for dinner is at hand.
Mark Akenside (1721-1770)
English poet and physician, author of
The Pleasures of Imagination
(1744); his
Odes on Several Subjects (1743) was also widely
admired.
Hartley Coleridge [Old Bachelor] (1796-1849)
The eldest son of the poet; he was educated at Merton College, Oxford, contributed essays
in the
London Magazine and
Blackwood's, and
published
Lives of Distinguished Northerns (1832).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
English poet and philosopher who projected
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
with William Wordsworth; author of
Biographia Literaria (1817),
On the Constitution of the Church and State (1829) and other
works.
George Dyer (1755-1841)
English poet, antiquary, and friend of Charles Lamb; author of
Poems
and Critical Essays (1802),
Poetics: or a Series of Poems and
Disquisitions on Poetry, 2 vols (1812),
History of the
University and Colleges of Cambridge, 2 vols (1814) and other works.
Horace (65 BC-8 BC)
Roman lyric poet; author of
Odes,
Epistles, Satires, and the
Ars Poetica.
Sophia Lloyd [née Pemberton] (d. 1830)
The wife of the poet Charles Lloyd, with whom she eloped in 1799; they lived at Old
Brathay, near Ambleside in the Lake District.
Thomas Manning (1772-1840)
Educated at Caius College, Cambridge, he traveled in China and Tibet, and was a life-long
friend of Charles Lamb.
William Mason (1725-1797)
English poet, the friend and biographer of Thomas Gray; author of
Odes (1756),
Elfrida (1752), and
The
English Garden (4 books, 1772-81).
Marie de Sévigné (1626-1696)
French woman of letters; the manner of her correspondence was imitated throughout the
eighteenth century.
William Shenstone (1714-1763)
English poet and landscape gardener; author of
The Schoolmistress
(1737, 1742) "A Pastoral Ballad" (1743).
Edmund Spenser (1552 c.-1599)
English poet, author of
The Shepheards Calender (1579) and
The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596).
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
Clergyman and novelist; author of
The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy (1759-67) and
A Sentimental Journey through France and
Italy (1768).
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
With Coleridge, author of
Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth
survived his early unpopularity to succeed Robert Southey as poet laureate in 1843.
