Mary’s love? Yes. Mary Lamb quite well.
DEAR Sarah,—I
found my way to Northaw on Thursday and a very good woman behind a counter, who
says also that you are a very good lady but that the woman who was with you
| 854 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | May |
Poor Emma, the first moment we were alone, took me into a corner, and said, “Now, pray, don’t drink; do check yourself after dinner, for my sake, and when we get home to Enfield, you shall drink as much as ever you please, and I won’t say a word about it.” How I behaved, you may guess, when I tell you that Mrs. Williams and I have written acrostics on each other, and she hoped that she should have “no reason to regret Miss Isola’s recovery, by its depriving her of our begun correspondence.” Emma stayed a month with us, and has gone back (in tolerable health) to her long home, for she comes not again for a twelvemonth. I amused Mrs. Williams with an occurrence on our road to Enfield. We travelled with one of those troublesome fellow-passengers in a stage-coach, that is called a well-informed man. For twenty miles we discoursed about the properties of steam, probabilities of carriages by ditto, till all my science, and more than all, was exhausted, and I was thinking of escaping my torment by getting up on the outside, when, getting into Bishops Stortford, my gentleman, spying some farming land, put an unlucky question to me: “What sort of a crop of turnips I thought we should have this year?” Emma’s eyes turned to me, to know what in the world I could have to say; and she burst into a violent fit of laughter, maugre her pale, serious cheeks, when, with the greatest gravity, I replied, that “it depended, I believed, upon boiled legs of mutton.” This clench’d our conversation; and my Gentleman, with a face half wise, half in scorn, troubled us with no more conversation, scientific or philosophical, for the remainder of the journey. Ayrton was here yesterday, and as learned to the full as my fellow-traveller. What a pity that he will spoil a wit and a devilish pleasant fellow (as he is) by wisdom! He talk’d on Music; and by having read Hawkins and Burney recently I was enabled to talk of Names, and show more knowledge than he had suspected I possessed; and-in the end he begg’d me to shape my thoughts upon paper, which I did after he was gone, and sent him.
| 1830 | MARTIN BURNEY’S ODDITIES | 855 |
|
Just as the whim bites. For my part,
I do not care a farthing candle
For either of them, or for Handel.
Cannot a man live free and easy,
Without admiring Pergolesi!
Or thro’ the world with comfort go
That never heard of Doctor
Blow!
So help me God, I hardly have;
And yet I eat, and drink, and shave,
Like other people, (if you watch it,)
And know no more of stave and crotchet
Than did the un-Spaniardised Peruvians;
Or those old ante-queer-Diluvians
That lived in the unwash’d world with
Jubal,
Before that dirty Blacksmith
Tubal,
By stroke on anvil, or by summ’at,
Found out, to his great surprise, the gamut.
I care no more for Cimerosa
Than he did for Salvator
Rosa,
Being no Painter; and bad luck
Be mine, if I can bear that Gluck!
Old Tycho Brahe
and modern Herschel
Had something in them; but who’s Purcel?
The devil, with his foot so cloven,
For aught I care, may take Beethoven;
And, if the bargain does not suit,
I’ll throw him Weber in to boot!
There’s not the splitting of a splinter
To chuse ’twixt him last named, and Winter.
Of Doctor Pepusch old queen Dido
Knew just as much, God knows, as I do.
I would not go four miles to visit
Sebastian Bach—or Batch—which is
it?
No more I would for Bononcini.
I shall not say a word about [to grieve] ’em,
Because they’re living. So I leave ’em.
|
Martin Burney is as odd as ever. We had
a dispute about the word “heir,” which I contended was pronounced
like “air;” he said that might be in common parlance; or that we
might so use it, speaking of the “Heir-at-Law,” a comedy; but that in the
Law Courts it was necessary to give it a full aspiration, and to say Hayer; he thought it might even vitiate a cause, if a
Counsel pronounced it otherwise. In conclusion, he “would consult
Serjeant Wilde;” who gave
it against him. Sometimes he falleth into the water, sometimes into the fire.
He came down here, and insisted on reading Virgil’s “Eneid” all through with me (which he did,) because a Counsel
must know Latin. Another time he read out all the Gospel of
St. John, because Biblical quotations are very emphatic in a Court
of Justice. A third time, he would carve a fowl, which he did very
ill-favoredly, because “we did not know how indispensable it was for a
Barrister to do all those sort of things well.
| 856 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | June |
I am —— with this long scrawl, but I thought in your exile, you might like a letter. Commend me to all the wonders in Derbyshire, and tell the devil I humbly kiss—my hand to him. Yours ever,
