DEAR C.,—It
gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well—they are
interesting creatures at a certain age—what a pity such buds should blow out
into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling—and brain
sauce—did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little,
just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly with no Œdipean avulsion?
Was the crackling the colour of the ripe pomegranate? Had you no complement of
boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire? Did you
flesh maiden teeth in it? Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest
guess what part Owen could play in the business. I never
knew him give anything away in my life. He would not begin with strangers. I
suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of
time being absent, the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess an
honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending away.
Teals, wigeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese—your tame villatic
things—Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted
char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely
unto my friends as to myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I
stop somewhere—where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than
the sensual rarity—there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs
are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an
affront, an undervaluing done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in
a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the bitterest pangs of
remorse I ever felt was when a child—when my kind old aunt had strained her
pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home
through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, but
thereabouts—a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of
taught-charity I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the
pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt’s kindness
crossed me—the sum it was to her—the pleasure she had a right to expect that
I—not the old impostor—should take in eating her cake—the cursed ingratitude by
which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated
| 562 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | March |
But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it more in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.
Yours (short of pig) to command in everything.
