(Mary shall send you all the news, which I find I have left out.)
MY dear Mrs. Wordsworth, I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in the midst of Commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to glide into arithmetical figures and names of Goods, Cassia, Cardemoms, Aloes, Ginger, Tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections.
The reason why I cannot write letters at home is, that I am
never alone. Plato’s (I write to
W. W. now)
Plato’s double animal parted never longed [?
more] to be reciprocally reunited in the system of its first creation, than I
sometimes do to be but for a moment single and separate. Except my
morning’s walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for
that reason, I am never so. I cannot walk home from office but some officious
friend offers his damn’d unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the
morning I am pestered. I could sit and gravely cast up sums in great Books, or
compare sum with sum, and write Paid against this
and Unp’d against t’other, and yet
reserve in some “corner of my mind” some darling thoughts all my
own—faint memory of some passage in a Book—or the tone of an absent
friend’s Voice—a snatch or Miss
Burrell’s singing—a gleam of Fanny Kelly’s divine plain face—The two operations might
be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun’s two motions
(earth’s I mean), or as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my
back parlour, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front—or as the
shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the
chimney—but there are a set of amateurs of the Belle Lettres—the gay
science—who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism,
of British Institutions, Lalla Rooks
&c., what Coleridge said at the
Lecture last night—who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible use
Reading can be to them but to talk of, might as well have been Ante-Cadmeans
born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptn.
hieroglyph as long as the Pyramids will last before they
| 1818 | EVENING HARASSMENTS | 511 |
He, who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me
from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself. I forget bed
time, but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week,
generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I
ought always to be abed, just close to my bedroom window, is the club room of a
public house, where a set of singers, I take them to be chorus-singers of the
two theatres (it must be both of them), begin their orgies. They are a set of
fellows (as I conceive) who being limited by their talents to the burthen of
the song at the play houses, in revenge have got the common popular airs by
Bishop or some cheap composer
arranged for choruses, that is, to be sung all in chorus. At least I never can
catch any of the text of the plain song,
| 512 | LETTERS OF C. AND M. LAMB | Feb. |
W. H. goes on lecturing against
W. W. and making copious use of
quotations from said W. W. to give a zest to said
lectures. S. T. C. is lecturing with
success. I have not heard either him or H. but I dined
with S. T. C. at Gilman’s a Sunday or 2 since and he was well and in
good spirits. I mean to hear some of the course, but lectures are not much
to my taste, whatever the Lecturer may be. If read,
they are dismal flat, and you can’t think why you are brought
together to hear a man read his works which you could read so much better
at leisure yourself; if delivered extempore, I am always in pain lest the
gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did
me at the dinner given in honor of me at the London Tavern.
“Gentlemen” said I, and there I stoppt,—the rest my feelings
were under the necessity of supplying. Mrs.
Wordsworth will go on, kindly
haunting us with visions of seeing the lakes once more
| 1818 | THE TRUE TYRANTS | 513 |
We have spent two very pleasant Evenings lately with Mr. Monkhouse.
