TO MRS. HAZLITT. “Nov. 1823. “Dear Mrs. H.,-Sitting down to write a letter is such a painful operation to Mary, that you must accept me as her proxy. You have seen our house. What I now tell you is literally true. Yesterday week, George Dyer called upon us, at one o'clock (bright noon day) on his way to dine with Mrs. Barbauld at Newington. He sat with Mary about half an hour, and took leave. The maid saw him go out from her kitchen window; but suddenly losing sight of him, ran up in a fright to Mary. G. D., instead of keeping the slip that leads to the gate, had deliberately, staff in hand, in broad open day, marched into the New River. He had not his spectacles on, and you know his absence. Who helped him out, they can hardly tell; but between 'em they got him out, drenched thro' and thro'. A mob collected by that time, and accompanied him in. Send for the Doctor!' they said: and a one-eyed fellow, dirty and drunk, was fetched from the Public House at the end, where it seems he lurks, for the sake of picking up water-practice, having formerly had a medal from the Humane Society for some rescue. By his advice, the patient was put between blankets; and when I came home at four to dinner I found G. D. a-bed, and raving, light-headed with the brandy-and-water which the doctor had administered. He sung, laughed, whimpered, screamed, babbled of guardian angels, would get up and go home; but we kept him there by force; and by next morning he departed sobered, and seems to have received no injury. All my friends are open-mouthed 1 [In the "Athenæum " for 1835, Procter says:-"I happened to call at Lamb's house about ten minutes after this accident; I saw before me a train of water running from the door to the river. Lamb had gone for a surgeon; the maid was running about distraught with dry clothes on one arm, and the dripping habiliments of the involuntary bather in the other. Miss Lamb, agitated, and whimpering forth Poor Mr. Dyer,' in the most forlorn voice, stood plunging her hands into the wet pockets of his trousers, to fish up the wet coin. Dyer himself, an amiable little old man, who took water internally, and eschewed strong liquors, lay on his host's bed, hidden by blankets; his head, on which was his short gray hair, alone peered out; and this, having been rubbed dry by a resolute hand,-(by the maid's, I believe, who assisted at the about having paling before the river, but I cannot see that, because a lunatic chooses to walk into a river with his eyes open at midday, I am any the more likely to be drowned in it, coming home at midnight. "I have had the honour of dining at the Mansion House, on Thursday last, by special card from the Lord Mayor, who never saw my face, nor I his; and all from being a writer in a magazine! The dinner costly, served on massy plate, champagne, pines, &c.; forty-seven present, among whom the Chairman and two other directors of the India Company. There's for you! and got away pretty sober! Quite saved my credit! "We continue to like our house prodigiously. Does Mary Hazlitt go on with her novel, or has she begun another? I would not discourage her, tho' we continue to think it (so far) in its present state not saleable. "Our kind remembrances to her and hers and you and yours. Yours truly, "C. LAMB. "I am pleased that H. liked my letter to the Laureate.”1 rescue,) looked as if it were bristling with a thousand needles. Lamb, moreover, in his anxiety, had administered a formidable dose of Cogniac and water to the sufferer, and he (used only to the simple element) babbled without cessation."] [Coleridge, according to Allsop, also approved entirely of it. "I am much delighted with Lamb's letter to Southey; I have read it many times; Lamb feels firm, and has taken sure ground."] CHAPTER VI. RECONCILIATION WITH SOUTHEY LETTERS TO HIM, HARRISON AINSWORTH, MRS. HAZLITT, BARTON, AND CARY. S% [1823-4.] OUTHEY came to London in November, 1823, and wrote proposing to call at Islington; and on the 21st Lamb thus replied: TO MR. SOUTHEY. "E. I. H., 21st November, 1823. "Dear Southey,—The kindness of your note has melted away the mist which was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow. That accursed 'Quarterly Review' had vexed me by a gratuitous speaking, of its own knowledge, that the 'Confessions of a Drunkard' was a genuine description of the state of the writer. Little things, that are not ill meant, may produce much ill. That might have injured me alive and dead. I am in a public office, and my life is insured. I was prepared for anger, and I thought I saw, in a few obnoxious words, a hard case of repetition directed against me. I wish both magazine and review at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister (though innocent) will be still more so; for the folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was absent at that time. "I will muster up courage to see you, however, any day next week (Wednesday excepted). We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a second mortification. She will hate to see us; but come and heap embers. We deserve it, I for what I've done, and she for being my sister. "Do come early in the day, by sun-light, that you may see my Milton.1 "I am at Colebrook Cottage, Colebrook Row, Islington. A detached whitish house, close to the New River, end of Colebrook Terrace, left hand from Sadler's Wells. 66 Will you let me know the day before? "C. LAMB. "P.S.-I do not think your hand-writing at all like Hunt's. I do not think many things I did think." In the following letter Lamb anticipates the meeting : TO BERNARD BARTON. " November 22nd, 1823. "Dear B. B.,—I am ashamed of not acknowledging your kind little poem, which I must needs like much; but I protest I thought I had done it at the moment. Is it possible a letter has miscarried? Did you get one in which I sent you an extract from the poems of Lord Stirling? I should wonder if you did, for I sent you none such. There was an incipient lie strangled in the birth. Some people's conscience is so tender! But, in plain truth, I thank you very much for the verses. I have a very kind letter from the Laureate, with a self-invitation to come and shake hands with me. This is truly handsome and noble! 'Tis worthy of my old idea of Southey. Shall not I, think you, be covered with a red suffusion? "You are too much apprehensive of your complaint: I know many that are always ailing of it, and live on to a good old age. I know a merry fellow (you partly know him) who, when his medical adviser told him he had drunk away all that part, congratulated himself (now his liver was gone) that he should be the longest liver of the two. "The best way in these cases is to keep yourself as ignorant as you can, as ignorant as the world was before Galen, of the entire inner construction of the animal man; not to be conscious of a midriff; to hold kidneys 1 [The portrait of Milton already mentioned.] (save of sheep and swine) to be an agreeable fiction; not to know whereabouts the gall grows; to account the circulation of the blood an idle whimsey of Harvey's; to acknowledge no mechanism not visible. For, once fix the seat of your disorder, and your fancies flux into it like bad humours. Those medical gentries choose each his favourite part; one takes the lungs, another the aforesaid liver, and refer to that, whatever in the animal economy is amiss. Above all, use exercise, take a little more spirituous liquors, learn to smoke, continue to keep a good conscience, and avoid tampering with hard terms of art-viscosity, scirrhosity, and those bugbears by which simple patients are scared into their graves. Believe the general sense of the mercantile world, which holds that desks are not deadly. It is the mind, good B. B., and not the limbs, that taints by long sitting. Think of the patience of tailors, think how long the Lord Chancellor sits, think of the brooding hen! I protest I cannot answer thy sister's kind inquiry; but I judge, I shall put forth no second volume. More praise than buy; and T. and H. are not particularly disposed for martyrs. Thou wilt see a funny passage, and yet a true history, of George Dyer's aquatic incursion in the next 'London.'1 Beware his fate, when thou comest to see me at my Colebrook Cottage. I have filled my little space with my little thoughts. I wish thee ease on thy sofa, but not too much indulgence on it. From my poor desk, thy fellow-sufferer, this bright November, "C. L." Southey went to Colebrook Cottage, as proposed; the awkwardness of meeting went off in a moment; and the affectionate intimacy, which had lasted for almost twenty years, was renewed, to be interrupted only by death. About this time, Lamb added to his list of friends the late WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH, son of a solicitor at Manchester. He was at present a youth of eighteen, and had not published anything giving a hint of that genius which he subsequently developed. But in the letter below there is some allusion suggestive of proofs passing between Lamb and himself. Mr. Ainsworth, then resident at Man1 [The paper entitled "Amicus Redivivus."] |