Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. VI-VII. Letters
Charles Lamb to James Gillman, 26 October 1829
Chase-Side, Enfield, 26th Oct., 1829.
DEAR Gillman,—Allsop brought
me your kind message yesterday. How can I account for having not visited
Highgate this long time? Change of place seemed to have changed me. How grieved
I was to hear in what indifferent health Coleridge has been, and I not to know of it! A little school
divinity, well applied, may be healing. I send him honest Tom of Aquin; that was always an obscure great
idea to me: I never thought or dreamed to see him in the flesh, but
t’other day I rescued him from a stall in Barbican, and brought him off
in triumph. He comes to greet Coleridge’s
acceptance, for his shoe-latchets I am unworthy to unloose. Yet there are
pretty pro’s and con’s, and such unsatisfactory learning in him.
Commend me to the question of etiquette—“utrum annunciatio debuerit fieri per
angelum”—Quæst. 30, Articulus 2. I protest, till now I had thought
Gabriel a fellow of some mark and livelihood, not a
simple esquire, as I find him. Well, do not break your lay brains, nor I
neither, with these curious nothings. They are nuts to our dear friend, whom
hoping to see at your first friendly hint that it will be convenient, I end
with begging our very kindest loves
to Mrs. Gillman. We have had a sorry
house of it here. Our spirits have been reduced till we were at hope’s
end what to do—obliged to quit this house, and afraid to engage another, till
in extremity I took the desperate resolve of kicking house and all down, like
Bunyan’s pack; and here we are
in a new life at board and lodging, with an honest couple our neighbours. We
have ridded ourselves of the cares of dirty acres; and the change, though of
less than a week, has had the most beneficial effects on Mary already. She looks two years and a half
younger for it. But we have had sore trials.
God send us one happy meeting!—Yours faithfully,
Thomas Allsop (1795-1880)
English silk merchant and stockbroker who was the friend and biographer of Coleridge
(1836) and a member of Charles Lamb's circle.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 c.-1274)
Italian philosopher and saint of the Catholic Church; he was the author of
Summa theologica (1267-73).
John Bunyan (1628-1688)
Dissenting preacher and autobiographer; he published
Grace Abounding to
the Chief of Sinners (1666) and
Pilgrim's Progress
(1678).
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.
Anne Gillman [née Harding] (1779 c.-1860)
Of Highgate, the daughter of James Harding; in 1807 she married the surgeon James
Gillman, afterwards Coleridge's friend and patron.
James Gillman (1782-1839)
The Highgate surgeon with whom Coleridge lived from 1816 until his death in 1834; in 1838
he published an incomplete
Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Mary Anne Lamb (1764-1847)
Sister of Charles Lamb with whom she wrote Tales from Shakespeare (1807). She lived with
her brother, having killed their mother in a temporary fit of insanity.