您可以在百度里搜索“The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5 艾草文学(www.321553.xyz)”查找最新章节！

　　LETTER 36

　　CHARLES LAMB TO ROBERT SOUTHEY

　　[October 29, 1798.]

　　Dear Southey,—I thank you heartily for the Eclogue; it pleases me mightily, being so full of picture-work and circumstances. I find no fault in it, unless perhaps that Joanna's ruin is a catastrophe too trite: and this is not the first or second time you have clothed your indignation, in verse, in a tale of ruined innocence. The old lady, spinning in the sun, I hope would not disdain to claim some kindred with old Margaret. I could almost wish you to vary some circumstances in the conclusion. A gentleman seducer has so often been described in prose and verse; what if you had accomplished Joanna's ruin by the clumsy arts and rustic gifts of some country-fellow? I am thinking, I believe, of the song,

　　"An old woman clothed in grey,

　　Whose daughter was charming and young,

　　And she was deluded away

　　By Roger's false nattering tongue."

　　A Roger-Lothario would be a novel character: I think you might paint him very well. You may think this a very silly suggestion, and so, indeed, it is; but, in good truth, nothing else but the first words of that foolish ballad put me upon scribbling my "Rosamund." But I thank you heartily for the poem. Not having anything of my own to send you in return—though, to tell truth, I am at work upon something, which if I were to cut away and garble, perhaps I might send you an extract or two that might not displease you; but I will not do that; and whether it will come to anything, I know not, for I am as slow as a Fleming painter when I compose anything. I will crave leave to put down a few lines of old Christopher Marlow's; I take them from his tragedy, "The Jew of Malta." The Jew is a famous character, quite out of nature; but, when we consider the terrible idea our simple ancestors had of a Jew, not more to be discommended for a certain discolouring (I think Addison calls it) than the witches and fairies of Marlow's mighty successor. The scene is betwixt Barabas, the Jew, and Ithamora, a Turkish captive exposed to sale for a slave.

　　BARABAS (A precious rascal.)

　　"As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights,

　　And kill sick people groaning under walls:

　　Sometimes I go about, and poison wells;

　　And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,

　　I am content to lose some of my crowns,

　　That I may, walking in my gallery,

　　See'm go pinioned along by my door.

　　Being young, I studied physic, and began

　　To practise first upon the Italian:

　　There I enriched the priests with burials,

　　And always kept the sexton's arms in ure

　　With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells;

　　And, after that, was I an engineer,

　　And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany,

　　Under pretence of serving [helping] Charles the Fifth,

　　Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.

　　Then after that was I an usurer,

　　And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,

　　And tricks belonging unto brokery,

　　I fill'd the jails with bankrupts in a year,

　　And with young orphans planted hospitals,

　　And every moon made some or other mad;

　　And now and then one hang'd himself for grief,

　　Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll.

　　How I with interest tormented him."

　　Now hear Ithamore, the other gentle nature, explain how he spent his time:—

　　ITHAMORE (A comical dog.)

　　"Faith, master, in setting Christian villages on fire,

　　Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.

　　One time I was an hostler at [in] an inn,

　　And in the night-time secretly would I steal

　　To travellers' chambers, and there cut their throats.

　　Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneel'd,

　　I strowed powder on the marble stones,

　　And therewithal their knees would rankle so,

　　That I have laugh'd a-good to see the cripples

　　Go limping home to Christendom on stilts."

　　BARABAS

　　"Why, this is something"—

　　There is a mixture of the ludicrous and the terrible in these lines, brimful of genius and antique invention, that at first reminded me of your old description of cruelty in hell, which was in the true Hogarthian style. I need not tell you that Marlow was author of that pretty madrigal, "Come live with me, and be my Love," and of the tragedy of "Edward II.," in which are certain lines unequalled in our English tongue. Honest Walton mentions the said madrigal under the denomination of "certain smooth verses made long since by Kit Marlow."

　　I am glad you have put me on the scent after old Quarles. If I do not put up those eclogues, and that shortly, say I am no true-nosed hound. I have had a letter from Lloyd; the young metaphysician of Caius is well, and is busy recanting the new heresy, metaphysics, for the old dogma, Greek. My sister, I thank you, is quite well. She had a slight attack the other day, which frightened me a good deal; but it went off unaccountably. Love and respects to Edith.

　　Yours sincerely,

　　C. LAMB.

　　[The eclogue was "The Ruined Cottage," in which Joanna and her widowed mother are at first as happy as Rosamund Gray and old blind Margaret. As in Lamb's story so in Southey's poem, this state of felicity is overturned by a seducer.

　　"An old woman clothed in gray." This ballad still eludes research. Lamb says that the first line put him upon writing Rosamund Gray, but he is generally supposed to have taken his heroine's name from a song by Charles Lloyd, entitled "Rosamund Gray," published among his Poems in 1795. At the end of the novel Matravis, the seducer, in his ravings, sings the ballad.

　　The "something" upon which Lamb was then at work was his play "John

　　Woodvil," in those early days known as "Pride's Cure."

　　"Your old description of cruelty in hell." In "Joan of Arc." See Letter 3.

　　"If I do not put up those eclogues." Lamb does not return to this subject.

　　Lloyd had just gone to Cambridge, to Caius College.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5