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　　LETTER 472

　　CHARLES LAMB TO B.W. PROCTER

　　Jan. 22nd, 1829.

　　Don't trouble yourself about the verses. Take 'em coolly as they come. Any day between this and Midsummer will do. Ten lines the extreme. There is no mystery in my incognita. She has often seen you, though you may not have observed a silent brown girl, who for the last twelve years has run wild about our house in her Christmas holidays. She is Italian by name and extraction. Ten lines about the blue sky of her country will do, as it's her foible to be proud of it. But they must not be over courtly or Lady-fied as she is with a Lady who says to her "go and she goeth; come and she cometh." Item, I have made her a tolerable Latinist. The verses should be moral too, as for a Clergyman's family. She is called Emma Isola. I approve heartily of your turning your four vols. into a lesser compass. 'Twill Sybillise the gold left. I shall, I think, be in town in a few weeks, when I will assuredly see you. I will put in here loves to Mrs. Procter and the Anti-Capulets, because Mary tells me I omitted them in my last. I like to see my friends here. I have put my lawsuit into the hands of an Enfield practitioner—a plain man, who seems perfectly to understand it, and gives me hopes of a favourable result.

　　Rumour tells us that Miss Holcroft is married; though the varlet has not had the grace to make any communication to us on the subject. Who is Badman, or Bed'em? Have I seen him at Montacute's? I hear he is a great chymist. I am sometimes chymical myself. A thought strikes me with horror. Pray heaven he may not have done it for the sake of trying chymical experiments upon her,—young female subjects are so scarce! Louisa would make a capital shot. An't you glad about Burke's case? We may set off the Scotch murders against the Scotch novels—Hare, the Great Un-hanged.

　　Martin Burney is richly worth your knowing. He is on the top scale of my friendship ladder, on which an angel or two is still climbing, and some, alas! descending. I am out of the literary world at present. Pray, is there anything new from the admired pen of the author of the Pleasures of Hope? Has Mrs. He-mans (double masculine) done anything pretty lately? Why sleeps the lyre of Hervey, and of Alaric Watts? Is the muse of L.E.L. silent? Did you see a sonnet of mine in Blackwood's last? Curious construction! Elaborata facilitas! And now I'll tell. 'Twas written for the "Gem;" but the editors declined it, on the plea that it would shock all mothers; so they published "The Widow" instead. I am born out of time. I have no conjecture about what the present world calls delicacy. I thought "Rosamund Gray" was a pretty modest thing. Hessey assures me that the world would not bear it. I have lived to grow into an indecent character. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, "Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!"

　　Erratum in sonnet:—Last line but something, for tender, read tend. The Scotch do not know our law terms; but I find some remains of honest, plain, old writing lurking there still. They were not so mealy-mouthed as to refuse my verses. Maybe, 'tis their oatmeal.

　　Blackwood sent me £20 for the drama. Somebody cheated me out of it next day; and my new pair of breeches, just sent home, cracking at first putting on, I exclaimed, in my wrath, "All tailors are cheats, and all men are tailors." Then I was better. [Rest lost.]

　　["Your four vols." Procter's poetical works, in three volumes, were published in 1822. Since then he had issued The Flood of Thessaly, 1823. He was perhaps meditating a new one-volume selection.

　　"Anti-Capulets"—the Basil Montagus (Montacutes).

　　"Badman." Louisa Holcroft married Carlyle's friend Badams, a manufacturer and scientific experimentalist of Birmingham, with whom the philosopher spent some weeks in 1827 in attempting a cure for dyspepsia (see the Early Recollections).

　　"Burke's case." William Burke and William Hare, the body-snatchers and murderers of Edinburgh, who killed persons to sell their corpses to Knox's school of anatomy. Burke was hanged a week later than this letter, on January 28. Hare turned King's evidence and disappeared. A "shot" was a subject in these men's vocabulary. The author of the Waverley novels—the Great Unknown— had, of course, become known long before this.

　　"M.B."—Martin Burney. In 1818 Lamb had dedicated the prose volume of his Works to Burney, in a sonnet ending with the lines:—

　　Free from self-seeking, envy, low design,

　　I have not found a whiter soul than thine.

　　Hervey was Thomas Kibble Hervey (1799-1859), a great album poet.

　　"A sonnet of mine in Blackwood"—in the number for January, 1829 (see below).

　　"Hessey"—of the firm of Taylor & Hessey, the late publishers of the London Magazine.

　　Another letter from Lamb to Procter, repeating the request for verses, was referred to by Canon Ainger in the preface to his edition of the correspondence. Canon Ainger printed a delightful passage. It is disappointing not to find it among the letters proper in his latest edition.

　　Here (had I permission from its American owner to print it, which I have not) I should place Lamb's instructions as to playing whist drawn up for Mrs. Badams' use and as an introduction to Captain Burney's treatise on the game. It is a very interesting document and England has never seen it yet.

　　The Boston Bibliophile edition also gives a letter from Lamb to Badams apologising for his heatedness yesterday and explaining it by saying that he had been for some hours dissuading a friend from settling at Enfield "which friend would have attracted down crowds of literary men, which men would have driven me wild."] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6