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TO J. HOWARD PAYNE.

[1823.]

'My Dear Miss Lamb,—I have enclosed for you Mr. Payne's piece called 'Grandpapa,' which I regret to say is not thought to be of the nature that will suit this theatre; but as there appears to be much merit in it, Mr. Kemble strongly recommends that you should send it to the English Opera House, for which it seems to be excellently adapted. As you have already been kind enough to be our medium of communication with Mr. Payne, I have imposed this trouble upon you; but if you do not like to act for Mr. Payne in the business, and have no means of disposing of the piece, I will forward it to Paris or elsewhere as you think he may prefer.

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Very truly yours,

"T. R. C. G., 8th Feb., 1823."

"HENRY ROBERTSON.

"Dr. P- -We have just received the above, and want your instructions. It strikes me as a very merry little piece, that should be played by very young actors. It strikes me that Miss Clara Fisher would play the boy exactly. She is just such a forward chit. No young man would do it without its appearing absurd, but in a girl's hands it would have just all the reality that a short dream of an act requires. Then for the sister, if Miss Stevenson that was were Miss Stevenson and younger, they two would carry it off. I do not know who they have got in that young line, besides Miss C. F., at Drury, nor how you would like Elliston to have it has he not had it? I am thick with Arnold, but I have always heard that the very slender profits of the English Opera House do not admit of his giving above a trifle, or next to none, for a piece of this kind. Write me what I should do, what you would ask, &c. The music (printed) is returned with the piece, and the French original. Tell Mr. Grattan I thank him for his book, which as far as I have read it is a very companionable one. I have but just received it. It came the same hour with your packet from Cov. Gar., i.e., yester-night late, to my

summer residence, where, tell Kenney, the cow is quiet. Love to all at Versailles. Write quickly. "C. L.

"I have no acquaintance with Kemble at all, having only met him once or twice; but any information, &c., I can get from R., who is a good fellow, you may command. I am sorry the rogues are so dilatory, but I distinctly believe they mean to fulfil their engagement. I am sorry you are not here to see to these things. I am a poor man of business, but command me to the short extent of my tether. My sister's kind remembrance ever.

"C. L."

The offerings of pig still continued. This time it was an acquaintance of Manning in Hertfordshire-Farmer Bruton of Wheathampstead-whose wife, in a letter of May 28th, 1819, to the Chinese explorer, Lamb terms "a glorious woman"—who was the donor of that most welcome of arrivals in the way of viand.

TO MR. AND MRS. BRUTON.1

"Twelfth Day, 1823.

"The pig was above my feeble praise. It was a dear pigmy. There was some contention as to who should have the ears; but, in spite of his obstinacy (deaf as these little creatures are to advice), I contrived to get at one of them.

"It came in boots too, which I took as a favour. Generally these petty-toes, pretty toes! are missing; but I suppose he wore them to look taller.

"He must have been the least of his race. His little foots would have gone into the silver slipper. I take him to have been a Chinese and a female.

"If Evelyn could have seen him, he would never have farrowed two such prodigious volumes;2 seeing how much good can be contained in-how small a compass!

1 [Babson's Eliana, 1866, p. 422.]

2["Sylva and Terra," 2 vols., 1786, edited by Hunter, not Evelyn's editions, which were printed at different times, the latter in a small duodecimo.]

"He crackled delicately.

“I left a blank at the top of my letter, not being determined which to address it to; so farmer and farmer's wife will please to divide our thanks. May your granaries be full, and your rats empty, and your chickens plump, and your envious neighbours lean, and your labourers busy, and you as idle and as happy as the day is long. Vive l'Agriculture!

"How do you make your pigs so little? They are vastly engaging at the age; I was so myself. Now I am a disagreeable old boy, a middle-aged gentleman and a half. My faculties (thank God) are not much impaired.

CHAPTER IV.

PUBLICATION OF "ELIA "—LETTERS TO BARTON, PAYNE, PROCTER, MISS HUTCHINSON, LLOYD, HOOD, CARY, AND ALLSOP.

IN

[1823.]

N the beginning of the year 1823, the Essays of Elia, collected in a volume, were published by Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who had become the proprietors of the "London Magazine."

[In a letter to one of his publishers, of December 7th, 1822, Lamb explains the origin of the name, which he chose to assume as his nom de plume. "Poor Elia," he writes, "the real (for I am but a counterfeit), is dead. The fact is, a person of that name, an Italian, was a fellow-clerk of mine at the South Sea House, thirty (not forty) years ago, when the characters I described there existed, but had left it, like myself, many years; and I having a brother now there, and doubting how he might relish certain descriptions in it, I clapt down the name of 'Elia' to it, which passed off pretty well, for Elia himself added the function of an author to that of a scrivener, like myself. I went the other day (not having seen him for a year) to laugh over with him at my usurpation of his name, and found him, alas! no more than a name, for he died of consumption eleven months ago, and I knew not of it."

Lamb had originally intended that the book should have a prefatory introduction, as follows:

DEDICATION.

To the Friendly and Judicious Reader,

who will take these Papers, as they were meant; not understanding every thing perversely in its absolute and literal

sense, but giving fair construction, as to an after-dinner conversation; allowing for the rashness and necessary incompleteness of first thoughts; and not remembering, for the purpose of an after taunt, words spoken peradventure after the fourth glass, the Author wishes (what he would will for himself" plenty of good friends to stand by him, good books to solace him, prosperous events to all his honest undertakings, and a candid interpretation to his most hasty words and actions. The other sort (and he hopes many of them will purchase his book too) he greets with the curt invitation of Timon, Uncover, dogs, and lap: " or he dismisses them with the confident security of the philosopher," you beat but on the case of Elia."

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But the idea was eventually relinquished, for, as Lamb observes: "The Essays want no Preface: they are all Preface. Let Elia come forth bare as he was born; and, in a postscript to Taylor, he insists: "N.B. No Preface; " and so preface there was not.

In the number of the "London Magazine" for August, 1822, there is, under the "Lion's Head," a short statement, explanatory of the paper entitled "The Confessions of a Drunkard, which had been attacked in the "Quarterly." “The truth is, the writer (possibly Lamb himself) had been reading among the essays of a contemporary, who has perversely been confounded with him, a paper in which Edax (or the Great Eater) humorously complaineth of an inordinate appetite; and it struck him that a better paper-of deeper interest and wider usefulness-might be made out of the imagined experience of a Great Drinker. . . . We deny not that a portion of his own experiences may have passed into the picture (as who that is not a washy fellow but must at some time have felt the after-operation of a too generous cup ?)."]

The book met with a fair sale at first, while the magazine, in which its contents had appeared, declined. The anecdote of the three Quakers gravely walking out of the inn where they had taken tea on the road, on an extortionate

[This appears to have been first printed in Basil Montagu's little book called Some Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented Liquors," 12mo., 1818.]