Walter Wilson (1781-1847) had been a bookseller, and a fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the India House. Later he entered at the Inner Temple. In addition to his work on De Foe, he wrote The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches in London, Westminster and Southwark, including the Lives of their Ministers, a work in four volumes. Lamb, as his Letters tell us, helped Wilson with advice concerning De Foe. He also seems to have wished the "Ode to the Treadmill" (see Vol. V., page 67) to be included; but it was not. This criticism of the Secondary Novels is usually preceded in the editions of Lamb's works by the following remarks contained in Lamb's letter to Wilson of December 16, 1822, which Wilson printed as page 428 of Vol. III., but they do not rightly form part of the article, which Lamb wrote seven years later, in 1829. I quote from the original MS. in the Bodleian: : "In the appearance of truth, in all the incidents and conversations that occur in them, they exceed any works of fiction I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. The Author never appears in these selfnarratives (for so they ought to be called, or rather Autobiographies) but the Narrator chains us down to an implicit belief in every thing he says. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Dates are painfully pressed upon the memory. Facts are repeated over and over in varying phrases, till you cannot chuse but believe them. It is like reading Evidence given in a Court of Justice. So anxious the storyteller seems that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact, or a motive, in a line or two farther down he repeats it, with his favourite figure of speech, 'I say,' so and so-though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something upon their memories, and has a wonderful effect upon matter-of-fact readers. Indeed it is to such principally that he writes. His style is elsewhere beautiful, but plain and homely. Robinson Crusoe is delightful to all ranks and classes but it is easy to see that it is written in phraseology peculiarly adapted to the lower conditions of readers; hence it is an especial favourite with seafaring men, poor boys, servant-maids, &c. His novels are capital kitchen-reading, while they are worthy from their deep interest to find a shelf in the Libraries of the wealthiest, and the most learned. passion for matter-of-fact narrative, sometimes betrayed him into a long relation of common incidents which might happen to any man, and have no interest but the intense appearance of truth in them, to recommend them. The whole latter half, or two thirds, of Colonel Jack is of this description. The beginning of Colonel Jack is the most affecting natural picture of a young thief that was ever drawn. losing the stolen money in the hollow of a tree, and finding it again when in despair, and then being in equal distress at not knowing how to dispose of it, and several similar touches in the early history of the Colonel, evince a deep knowledge of human nature; and, putting out of His His question the superior romantic interest of the latter, in my mind very much exceed Crusoe. Roxana (1st edition) is the next in Interest, though he left out the best part of it [in] subsequent Editions, from a foolish hyper criticism of his friend Southerne. But Moll Flanders, the account of the Plague, &c. &c. are all of one family, and have the same stamp of character.' One point in this 1822 criticism requires notice-that touching the first edition of Roxana. According to a letter from Lamb to Wilson, Lamb considered the curiosity of Roxana's daughter to be the best part of Roxana. But the episode of the daughter does not come into the first edition of the book (1724) at all, and is thought by some critics not to be De Foe's. Mr. Aitken, De Foe's latest editor, doubts the Southerne story altogether. In any case, Lamb was wrong in recommending the first edition for its completeness, for the later ones are fuller. It was upon the episode of Susannah that Godwin based his play "Faulkener," for which Lamb wrote a prologue (see Vol. V., page 123) in praise of De Foe. Godwin's preface stated that the only edition of Roxana then available—in 1807—in which to find the full story of Roxana's daughter, was that of 1745. Godwin turned the avenging daughter into a son. Writing to Wilson on the publication of his Memoirs of De Foe, Lamb says: "The two papers of mine will puzzle the reader, being so akin. Odd, that never keeping a scrap of my own letters, with some fifteen years' interval I should have nearly said the same things." (According to the dating of the letters the interval was not fifteen years, but seven.) Lamb also remarks, "De Foe was always my darling." For a further criticism of De Foe see "The Good Clerk," page 129 of the present volume, and the notes to the same. In introducing the criticism of the Secondary Novels, Wilson wrote: " It may call for some surprise that De Foe should be so little known as a novelist, beyond the range of Robinson Crusoe." To recall the attention of the public to his other fictions, the present writer is happy to enrich his work with some original remarks upon his secondary novels by his early friend, Charles Lamb, whose competency to form an accurate judgment upon the subject, no one will doubt who is acquainted with his genius. Page 327, line 10. Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us... Probably referring to Coleridge's remarks on the Nurse and her repetitions, in his Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare. See Bohn's edition, page 324. Page 327, line 19. An ingenious critic. Lamb himself, in the 1822 criticism quoted above. Page 328. CLARENCE SONGS. The Spectator, July 24, 1830. These letters have not hitherto been reprinted in any collection of Lamb's writings. Concerning Lamb's theory that "Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill" was written upon Prince William, the editor of The Spectator remarks that it had reference to George IV.-a monarch upon whom Lamb himself had done his share of rhyming (see Vol. V. under the heading "Epigrams, Political and Others"). Lamb was at Christ's Hospital from 1782-1789. Prince William, who was born in 1765, became a midshipman in 1779. His promotion to lieutenant came in 1785, and to captain in the following year. The ballad to which Lamb refers is called "Duke William's Frolic." It relates how Duke William and a nobleman, dressing themselves like sailors, repaired to an inn to drink. While there the Press gang came; the Duke was said to have been impudent to the lieutenant and was condemned to be flogged. The ballad (as given in Mr. John Ashton's Modern Street Ballads, 1888) ends :— Then instantly the boatswain's mate began for to undress him, But, presently, he did espy the star upon his breast, sir; Then on their knees they straight did fall, and for mercy soon did call, No wonder that my royal father cannot man his shipping, But for the future, sailors all, shall have good usage, great and small, He ordered them fresh officers that stood in need of wealth, Crying, Blessed be that happy day whereon was born Duke William. Tom Sheridan, the dramatist's son, was born in 1775, and died in 1817, so that in 1783 he was only eight years old. Page 329. A TRUE STORY. The Talisman, 1831. "By Charles Lamb." This story has not hitherto been collected in any edition of Lamb's writings; nor has it, I think, been reprinted anywhere. My attention was drawn to it by Mr. J. H. Swann, of the Manchester Free Library, who found it among the Lamb papers of the late Alexander Ireland. The Talisman for 1831, edited by Z. M. Watts, i.e., Zillah (i.e., Priscilla) Maden Watts, wife of Alaric A. Watts, the great maker of albums and souvenirs, was composed of both original and borrowed material. Lamb's curious little story, so different from his ordinary writing, but I think, in its quiet, wistful narrative manner, unmistakably his, may have been borrowed; but I have not discovered any earlier home. Page 331. RECOLLECTIONS OF A LATE ROYAL ACADEMICIAN. The Englishman's Magazine, September, 1831. Not reprinted by Lamb. In the magazine the title ran :— "PETER'S NET "All is fish that comes to my net' "No. I.-Recollections of a Late Royal Academician" Moxon had taken over The Englishman's Magazine, started in April, 1831, in time to control the August number, in which had appeared a notice stating, of Elia, that "in succeeding months he promiseth to grace" the pages of the magazine "with a series of essays, under the quaint appellation of 'PETER'S NET.'" The magazine, however, lived only until the October number. Writing to Moxon at the time that he sent the MS. of this essay, Lamb remarked :: "The R. A. here memorised was George Dawe, whom I knew well, and heard many anecdotes of, from Daniels and Westall, at H. Rogers's; to each of them it will be well to send a magazine in my name. It will fly like wildfire among the Royal Academicians and artists. . . The Peter's Net' does not intend funny things only. All is fish. And leave out the sickening Elia' at the end. Then it may comprise letters and characters addressed to Peter; but a signature forces it to be all characteristic of the one man, Elia, or the one man, Peter, which cramped me formerly." George Dawe was born in 1781, the son of Philip Dawe, a mezzotint engraver. At first he engraved too, but after a course of study in the Royal Academy schools he took to portrait-painting, among his early sitters being William Godwin. Throughout his career he painted portraits, varied at first with figure subjects of the kind described by Lamb. He was made an associate in 1809 and an R.A. in 1814. His introduction to royal circles came with the marriage of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold in 1816. After her death he went to Brussels in the suite of the Duke of Kent, and painted the Duke of Wellington. It was in 1819 that he visited St. Petersburg, remaining nine years, and painting nearly four hundred portraits, first of the officers who fought against Napoleon, and afterwards of other personages. He left in 1828, but returned in 1829 after a visit to England, and a short but profitable sojourn in Berlin. He died in 1829, and was buried in the crypt of St. Paul's. A passage in his will shows Dawe to have been a rather more interesting character than Lamb suggests, and his Life of George Morland, 1807, has considerable merit. Coleridge also knew Dawe well. Dawe painted a picture on a subject in "Love," drew Coleridge's portrait and took a cast of his face; and in 1812 Coleridge thus recommends him to Mrs. Coleridge's hospitality : He is a very modest man, his manners not over polished, and his worst point is that he is (at least, Í have found him so) a fearful questionist, whenever he thinks he can pick up any information, or ideas, poetical, historical, topographical, or artistical, that he can make bear on his own profession. But he is sincere, friendly, strictly moral in every respect, I firmly believe even to innocence, and in point of cheerful indefatigableness of industry, in regularity, and temperance-in short, in a glad, yet quiet, devotion of his whole being to the art he has made choice of, he is the only man I ever knew who goes near to rival Southey-gentlemanly address, person, physiognomy, knowledge, learning and genius being of course wholly excluded from the comparison. Many years later, however, Coleridge endorsed Dawe's funeral card in the following terms, "The Grub being the nickname by which Dawe was known : I really would have attended the Grub's Canonization in St. Paul's, under the im pression that it would gratify his sister, Mrs. Wright; but Mr. G. interposed a conditional but sufficiently decorous negative. "No! Unless you wish to follow his Grubship still further down." So I pleaded ill health. But the very Thursday morning I went to Town to see my daughter, for the first time, as Mrs. Henry Coleridge, in Gower Street, and, odd enough, the stage was stopped by the Pompous Funeral of the unchangeable and predestinated Grub, and I extemporised : "As Grub Dawe pass'd beneath the Hearses Lid, Col, who well knew the Grub, cried, Lord forbid ! S. T. COLERIDGE. There is a curious similarity in tone between the present essay and a letter of Joseph Highmore to Sir Edward Walpole, dated February 28, 1764, printed in the Gentleman's Magazine, April, 1816, concerning one Vanderstraaten, a Dutch Dawe, which Lamb admired sufficiently to copy into his Commonplace Book. By the kindness of Mrs. Alfred Morrison, in whose possession this volume now is, I have been permitted to make extracts. The first paragraph of Highmore's description runs thus: There lived in Wyld-street, about fifty years ago, a Dutch Painter of Landscapes, whose name was Vanderstraaten; he was perhaps the most expeditious painter that ever lived; it is said of him that he has painted 30 landscapes in a day, of the size commonly called a three-quarter, that is, such as contains a head. They tell a story in the following manner : he had large pots or pans of colour round him, on the ground; one or two of blue, of different degrees, mixed for the sky; others of what he called cloud colours; others of greens, &c., &c. : when all was prepared, he calls to his lad, Here, poy, pring a claut; then he talks on as he works, and dipping a large brush in the blue pot, spreads over the top of the cloth, and again in the lighter blue, &c., continuing it down as low as to the horizon, and cries, Dare is de sky. Then dipping another brush in the pot prepared for clouds, and dabbing here and there, cries out again, Dare is de clouds. Then again in a kind of azure colour for the greatest distance, and spreading it along under the horizon, Dare is de forestreet; which is a Dutch term (but I am not sure of the orthography, though I am of the sound of the word). Then again for a nearer part another colour, Dare is de second cround; and once more, for the nearest or forwardst part, Dare is de first cround; and lastly, with a small pencil, a man fishing, Dare is de man a fishing. Poy, pring anoder Cloot, &c. And so on for the 30. Page 331, line 10. Apelles. The patron of Apelles, the Greek painter, was Alexander the Great. Page 331, line 11. To the Russian. Among Dawe's court paintings was an equestrian portrait of Alexander I., twenty feet high. His collection of portraits painted during his residence in Russia was lodged in a gallery built for it in the Winter Palace. Page 331, line 19. "Timon" as it was last acted. Referring to the performance of "Timon of Athens," given exactly as in Shakespeare's day, with no women in the cast, at Drury Lane on October 28, 1816. Page 331, line 21. Dame Venetia Digby. The wife of Sir Kenelm Digby, Van Dyck's friend. The portrait is in the royal collection at Windsor. It was to this lady that Ben Jonson addressed the series of poems in Underwood entitled "Eupheme." ." This is Page 331, line 26. "With Tartar faces thronged. Lamb's perversion of Milton's line (Paradise Lost, XII., 644):— With dreadful faces throng'd and fiery arms. Page 331, line 29. The Haytian. I can find no authority for Lamb's suggestion that Dawe might have gone to Hayti to paint the Probably Lamb based the theory, as a joke, court of Christophe. |