| CHARLES LAMB. | 77 |
Most literary men of extensive reputation have met with odd and unexpected testimonies of the admiration they have excited in quarters where they would have least looked for it, and which has been set forth in a fashion drolly discordant with their tastes and habits of feeling; and Lamb was not without these testimonies. One of them he related to me as having mightily tickled his sense of the ludicrous. A young gentleman in the country, of a “literary turn,”
“A clerk foredoomed his father’s soul to cross, Who penned a stanza when he should engross,” |
| 78 | CHARLES LAMB. |
It was excessively amusing to hear Lamb describe his droll embarrassment, on the reception of this naive and original mode of paying court to a man who almost piqued himself on having no eye or taste for personal comeliness, even in women, while anything like coxcombry in a man made him sick; and who yet had so exquisite a sense of what was due to the feelings of others, that when a young lady who was staying at his house, had been making some clothes for the child of a poor gipsy woman in the neighbourhood, whose husband was afterwards convicted of sheep-stealing, would not allow her (the young lady) to quit the village without going to see and take leave of her unhappy protegée,—on the express plea that otherwise the felon’s wife might imagine that she had heard of her husband’s “misfortune,” and was ashamed to go near her. “I have a delicacy for a sheep-stealer,” said he.*
|
* See a letter to Mr. Procter, printed in the “Athenæum” immediately after his death, in which Lamb himself gives an account of this incident; also an exquisite sonnet, embodying the woman’s supposed feel- |
| CHARLES LAMB. | 79 |
There are many who duly appreciate, and are ready enough to extol, the beauty and the merits of this delicacy to the personal feelings of others, and a few who can sympathize with it even in extreme cases like the one just cited; but I never knew any one who was capable of uniformly, and at all costs, practising it, except Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt,—both of whom extended it to the lowest and vilest of man and woman kind; would give the wall to a beggar if it became a question which of the two should cede it, and if they had visited a convicted felon in his cell, would have been on tenter-hooks all the time, lest anything might drop from them to indicate that they had less consideration for the object of their visit than if he had been the most “respectable” of men.
The name of William Hazlitt reminds me that a writer* of some pleasing “recollections” of Charles Lamb, in the number of the New Monthly Magazine immediately following his death, speaking of Lamb’s
ings towards her child on the occasion of its father’s conviction. * Mr. Forster, I believe. |
| 80 | CHARLES LAMB. |
|
* In a subsequent portion of these Memorials I have done what I could to supply this deficiency, as |
| CHARLES LAMB. | 81 |
But Hazlitt, to say nothing of his unpopular manners, and his unlucky disposition to “call a knave a knave, and Chartres Chartres,” could not abstain from speaking the truth even of his best friends, when they happened to treat him as he felt that only an enemy should be treated; and the man who does this must reckon upon outliving every friend he has in the world, die when he may.
|
regards the last twelve years of Hazlitt’s life, during which period alone I knew him. Those, however, were by far the most remarkable years of his literary life, and I believe I saw and knew more of him during those years than any other of his friends. |
| ≪ PREV | NEXT ≫ |
