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　　LETTER 351

　　CHARLES LAMB TO BERNARD BARTON

　　[P.M. August 17, 1824.]

　　Dear B.B.—I congratulate you on getting a house over your head. I find the comfort of it I am sure. At my town lodgings the Mistress was always quarrelling with our maid; and at my place of rustication, the whole family were always beating one another, brothers beating sisters (one a most beautiful girl lamed for life), father beating sons and daughters, and son again beating his father, knocking him fairly down, a scene I never before witnessed, but was called out of bed by the unnatural blows, the parricidal colour of which, tho' my morals could not but condemn, yet my reason did heartily approve, and in the issue the house was quieter for a day or so than I had ever known. I am now all harmony and quiet, even to the sometimes wishing back again some of the old rufflings. There is something stirring in these civil broils.

　　The Album shall be attended to. If I can light upon a few appropriate rhymes (but rhymes come with difficulty from me now) I shall beg a place in the neat margin of your young housekeeper.

　　The Prometheus Unbound, is a capital story. The Literal rogue! What if you had ordered Elfrida in sheets! She'd have been sent up, I warrant you. Or bid him clasp his bible (i.e. to his bosom)-he'd ha clapt on a brass clasp, no doubt.—

　　I can no more understand Shelly than you can. His poetry is "thin sewn with profit or delight." Yet I must point to your notice a sonnet conceivd and expressed with a witty delicacy. It is that addressed to one who hated him, but who could not persuade him to hate him again. His coyness to the other's passion (for hate demands a return as much as Love, and starves without it) is most arch and pleasant. Pray, like it very much.

　　For his theories and nostrums they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is miching malice and mischief in 'em. But for the most part ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of 'em—Many are wiser and better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better for reading Sh——y.

　　I wonder you will sow your correspondence on so barren a ground as I am, that make such poor returns. But my head akes at the bare thought of letter writing. I wish all the ink in the ocean dried up, and would listen to the quills shivering [? shrivelling] up in the candle flame, like parching martyrs. The same indisposit'n to write it is has stopt my Elias, but you will see a futile Effort in the next No., "wrung from me with slow pain."

　　The fact is, my head is seldom cool enough. I am dreadfully indolent. To have to do anything-to order me a new coat, for instance, tho' my old buttons are shelled like beans— is an effort.

　　My pen stammers like my tongue. What cool craniums those old enditers of Folios must have had. What a mortify'd pulse. Well, once more I throw myself on your mercy— Wishing peace in thy new dwelling— C. LAMB.

　　[The Lambs gave up their "country lodgings" at Dalston on moving to Colebrooke Row.

　　"The album." See next letter to Barton.

　　"The Prometheus Unbound." A bookseller, asked for Prometheus Unbound, Shelley's poem, had replied that Prometheus was not to be had "in sheets." Elfrida was a dramatic poem by William Mason, Gray's friend.

　　This is Shelley's poem (not a sonnet) which Lamb liked:—

　　LINES TO A REVIEWER

　　Alas! good friend, what profit can you see

　　In hating such an hateless thing as me?

　　There is no sport in hate, where all the rage

　　Is on one side. In vain would you assuage

　　Your frowns upon an unresisting smile,

　　In which not even contempt lurks, to beguile

　　Your heart by some faint sympathy of hate.

　　Oh conquer what you cannot satiate!

　　For to your passion I am far more coy

　　Then ever yet was coldest maid or boy

　　In winter-noon. Of your antipathy

　　If I am the Narcissus, you are free

　　To pine into a sound with hating me.

　　Hazlitt writes of Shelley in his essay "On Paradox and Commonplace" in Table Talk; but he does not make this remark there. Perhaps he said it in conversation.

　　"The next Number." The "futile Effort" was "Blakesmoor in H——shire" in the London Magazine for September, 1824.

　　Here should come a note from Lamb to Cary, August 19, 1824, in which Lamb thanks him for his translation of The Birds of Aristophanes and accepts an invitation to dine.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6