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　　LETTER 246

　　CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

　　[This letter is written in black and red ink, changing with each line.]

　　[P.M. April 26, 1819.]

　　Dear Wordsworth, I received a copy of Peter Bell a week ago, and I hope the author will not be offended if I say I do not much relish it. The humour, if it is meant for humour, is forced, and then the price. Sixpence would have been dear for it. Mind, I do not mean your Peter Bell, but a Peter Bell which preceded it about a week, and is in every bookseller's shop window in London, the type and paper nothing differing from the true one, the preface signed W.W., and the supplementary preface "ing as the author's words an extract from supplementary preface to the Lyrical Balads. Is there no law against these rascals? I would have this Lambert Simnel whipt at the cart's tail. Then there is Rogers! he has been re-writing your Poem of the Stride, and publishing it at the end of his "Human Life." Tie him up to the Cart, hangman, while you are about it. Who started the spurious P.B. I have not heard. I should guess, one of the sneering brothers—the vile Smiths—but I have heard no name mentioned. Peter Bell (not the mock one) is excellent. For its matter, I mean. I cannot say that the style of it quite satisfies me. It is too lyrical. The auditors to whom it is feigned to be told, do not arride me. I had rather it had been told me, the reader, at once. Heartleap Well is the tale for me, in matter as good as this, in manner infinitely before it, in my poor judgment. Why did you not add the Waggoner? Have I thanked you, though, yet, for Peter Bell? I would not not have it for a good deal of money. C—— is very foolish to scribble about books. Neither his tongue nor fingers are very retentive. But I shall not say any thing to him about it. He would only begin a very long story, with a very long face, and I see him far too seldom to teaze him with affairs of business or conscience when I do see him. He never comes near our house, and when we go to see him, he is generally writing, or thinking he is writing, in his study till the dinner comes, and that is scarce over before the stage summons us away. The mock P. B. had only this effect on me, that after twice reading it over in hopes to find _some_thing diverting in it, I reach'd your two books off the shelf and set into a steady reading of them, till I had nearly finished both before I went to bed. The two of your last edition, of course, I mean. And in the morning I awoke determining to take down the Excursion. I wish the scoundrel imitator could know this. But why waste a wish on him? I do not believe that paddling about with a stick in a pond and fishing up a dead author whom his intolerable wrongs had driven to that deed of desperation, would turn the heart of one of these obtuse literary Bells. There is no Cock for such Peters. Damn 'em. I am glad this aspiration came upon the red ink line. It is more of a bloody curse. I have delivered over your other presents to Alsager and G. D.—A. I am sure will value it and be proud of the hand from which it came. To G. D. a poem is a poem. His own as good as any bodie's, and god bless him, any bodie's as good as his own, for I do not think he has the most distant guess of the possibility of one poem being better than another. The Gods by denying him the very faculty itself of discrimination have effectually cut off every seed of envy in his bosom. But with envy, they excided Curiosity also, and if you wish the copy again, which you destined for him, I think I shall be able to find it again for you—on his third shelf, where he stuffs his presentation copies, uncut, in shape and matter resembling a lump of dry dust, but on carefully removing that stratum, a thing like a Pamphlet will emerge. I have tried this with fifty different Poetical Works that have been given G. D. in return for as many of his own performances, and I confess I never had any scruple in taking my own again wherever I found it, shaking the adherencies off—and by this means one Copy of "my Works" served for G.D. and with a little dusting was made over to my good friend Dr.

　　Stoddart, who little thought whose leavings he was taking when he made me that graceful bow. By the way, the Doctor is the only one of my acquaintance who bows gracefully, my Town acquaintance I mean. How do you like my way of writing with two Inks? I think it is pretty and mottley. Suppose Mrs. W. adopts it, the next time she holds the pen for you.

　　[The ink differs with every word of the following paragraph:—]

　　My dinner waits. I have no time to indulge any longer in these laborious curiosities. God bless you and cause to thrive and to burgeon whatsoever you write, and fear no inks of miserable poetasters.

　　Yours truly

　　CHARLES LAMB.

　　Mary's love.

　　[The Peter Bell to which Lamb refers was written by John Hamilton Reynolds (1796-1852), the friend of Keats, and later Hood's brother-in-law. The parody is a travesty of Wordsworth generally rather than of Peter Bell, which had not then been published.

　　James and Horace Smith, of the Rejected Addresses, which contained a parody of Wordsworth under the title "The Baby's Debut," had nothing to do with it. Lamb's indignation was shared by Coleridge, who wrote as follows to Taylor and Hessey, the publishers, on April 16, 1819, on the announcement of Reynolds' work:—

　　Dear Sirs, I hope, nay I feel confident, that you will interpret this note in th' real sense—namely, as a proof of the esteem and respect which I entertain toward you both. Looking in the Times this morning I was startled by an advertisement of PETER BELL—a Lyrical Ballad—with a very significant motto from one of our Comedies of Charles the IInd's reign, tho' what it signifies I wish to ascertain. Peter Bell is a Poem of Mr. Wordsworth's—and I have not heard, that it has been published by him.—If it have, and with his name (I have reason to believe, that he never published anonymously) and this now advertised be a ridicule on it—I have nothing to say—But if it have not, I have ventured to pledge myself for you, that you would not wittingly give the high respectability of your names to an attack on a Manuscript work, which no man could assail but by a base breach of trust.

　　It is stated in the article on Reynolds in the Dictionary of National Biography that Coleridge asserted positively that Lamb was the objectionable parodist; but this letter suggests that that was not so.

　　"Peter Bell (not the mock one)." Crabb Robinson's Diary, in the original MS., for June 6, 1812, contains this passage:—

　　With C. Lamb. Lent him Peter Bell. To my surprise he finds nothing in it good. He complains of the slowness of the narrative, as if that were not the art of the Poet. W. he says has great thoughts, but here are none of them. He has no interest in the Ass. These are to me inconceivable judgments from C. L. whose taste in general I acquiesce in and who is certainly an enthusiast for W.

　　Again, on May 11, 1819, after the poem was published, Robinson says:—

　　L. spoke of Peter Bell which he considers as one of the worst of Wordsworth's works. The lyric narrative L. has no taste for. He is disgusted by the introduction, which he deems puerile and the story he thinks ill told, though he allows the idea to be good.

　　"Rogers." At the end of Samuel Rogers' poem, Human Life, 1819, is a ballad, entitled "The Boy of Egremond," which has for subject the same incident as that in Wordsworth's "Force of Prayer"—beginning

　　What is good for a bootless bene?

　　—the death of the Young Romilly as he leapt across the Strid. In Wordsworth the answer to the question is "Endless sorrow." Rogers' poem begins:—

　　"Say what remains when hope is fled?"

　　She answered "Endless weeping."

　　Wordsworth's Peter Bell was published a week after the mock one. To The Waggoner we shall come shortly.

　　The significance of the allusion to Coleridge is not perfectly clear; but I imagine it to refer to the elaborate examination of Wordsworth's poetry in the Biographia Literaria.

　　"These obtuse literary Bells." Peter Bell, in the poem, sounds the river with his staff, and draws forth the dead body of the ass's master. Lamb passes, in his curse, to a reference to St. Peter.

　　"Taking my own again." This, if, as one may suppose, adapted from Molière's "Je reprendre mon bien partout où je le trouve," is an indication that Lamb knew the Frenchman's comedies.

　　Here should come a business note to John Rickman dated May 21, 1819, given in the Boston Bibliophile edition.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 5