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　　LETTER 420

　　CHARLES LAMB TO MRS. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

　　Enfield, July 26th, 1827.

　　Dear Mrs. Shelley,—At the risk of throwing away some fine thoughts, I must write to say how pleased we were with your very kind remembering of us (who have unkindly run away from all our friends) before you go. Perhaps you are gone, and then my tropes are wasted. If any piece of better fortune has lighted upon you than you expected, but less than we wish you, we are rejoiced. We are here trying to like solitude, but have scarce enough to justify the experiment. We get some, however. The six days are our Sabbath; the seventh—why, Cockneys will come for a little fresh air, and so—

　　But by your month, or October at furthest, we hope to see Islington: I like a giant refreshed with the leaving off of wine, and Mary, pining for Mr. Moxon's books and Mr. Moxon's society. Then we shall meet.

　　I am busy with a farce in two acts, the incidents tragi-comic. I can do the dialogue commey fo: but the damned plot—I believe I must omit it altogether. The scenes come after one another like geese, not marshalling like cranes or a Hyde Park review. The story is as simple as G[eorge] D[yer], and the language plain as his spouse. The characters are three women to one man; which is one more than laid hold on him in the "Evangely." I think that prophecy squinted towards my drama.

　　I want some Howard Paine to sketch a skeleton of artfully succeeding scenes through a whole play, as the courses are arranged in a cookery book: I to find wit, passion, sentiment, character, and the like trifles: to lay in the dead colours,—I'd Titianesque 'em up: to mark the channel in a cheek (smooth or furrowed, yours or mine), and where tears should course I'd draw the waters down: to say where a joke should come in or a pun be left out: to bring my personae on and off like a Beau Nash; and I'd Frankenstein them there: to bring three together on the stage at once; they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw them.

　　I am teaching Emma Latin to qualify her for a superior governess-ship; which we see no prospect of her getting. 'Tis like feeding a child with chopped hay from a spoon. Sisyphus—his labours were as nothing to it.

　　Actives and passives jostle in her nonsense, till a deponent enters, like Chaos, more to embroil the fray. Her prepositions are suppositions; her conjunctions copulative have no connection in them; her concords disagree; her interjections are purely English "Ah!" and "Oh!" with a yawn and a gape in the same tongue; and she herself is a lazy, block-headly supine. As I say to her, ass in praesenti rarely makes a wise man in futuro.

　　But I daresay it was so with you when you began Latin, and a good while after.

　　Good-by! Mary's love.

　　Yours truly, C. LAMB.

　　[This is the second letter to Mrs. Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the widow of the poet and the author of Frankenstein. She had been living in England since 1823; and in 1826 had issued anonymously The Last Man. That she kept much in touch with the Lambs' affairs we know by her letters to Leigh Hunt.

　　Major Butterworth has kindly supplied me with a copy of her letter to Mary Lamb which called forth Lamb's reply. It runs thus:—

　　Kentish Town, 22 July, 1827.

　　My dear Miss Lamb,

　　You have been long at Enfield—I hardly know yet whether you are returned—and I quit town so very soon that I have not time to—as I exceedingly wish—call on you before I go. Nevertheless believe (if such familiar expression be not unmeet from me) that I love you with all my heart—gratefully and sincerely—and that when I return I shall seek you with, I hope, not too much zeal—but it will be with great eagerness.

　　You will be glad to hear that I have every reason to believe that the worst of my pecuniary troubles are over—as I am promised a regular tho' small income from my father-in-law. I mean to be very industrious on other accounts this summer, so I hope nothing will go very ill with me or mine.

　　I am afraid Miss Kelly will think me dreadfully rude for not having availed myself of her kind invitation. Will you present my compliments to her, and say that my embarassments, harassings and distance from town are the guilty causes of my omission—for which with her leave I will apologize in person on my return to London.

　　All kind and grateful remembrances to Mr. Lamb, he must not forget me nor like me one atom less than I delight to flatter myself he does now, when again I come to seize a dinner perforce at your cottage. Percy is quite well—and is reading with great extacy (sic) the Arabian Nights. I shall return I suppose some one day in September. God bless you.

　　Yours affectionately,

　　MARY W. SHELLEY.

　　Commey fo is Lamb's comme il faut.

　　"In the 'Evangely.'" If by Evangely he meant Gospel, Lamb was a little confused here, I think. Probably Isaiah iv. I was in his mind: "and in that day seven women shall take hold of one man." But he may also have half remembered Luke xvii. 35.

　　"I am teaching Emma Latin." Mary Lamb contributed to Blackwood's Magazine for June, 1829, the following little poem describing Emma Isola's difficulties in these lessons:—

　　TO EMMA, LEARNING LATIN, AND DESPONDING

　　Droop not, dear Emma, dry those falling tears,

　　And call up smiles into thy pallid face,

　　Pallid and care-worn with thy arduous race:

　　In few brief months thou hast done the work of years.

　　To young beginnings natural are these fears.

　　A right good scholar shalt thou one day be,

　　And that no distant one; when even she,

　　Who now to thee a star far off appears,

　　That most rare Latinist, the Northern Maid—

　　The language-loving Sarah[1] of the Lake—

　　Shall hail thee Sister Linguist. This will make

　　Thy friends, who now afford thee careful aid,

　　A recompense most rich for all their pains,

　　Counting thy acquisitions their best gains.

　　[Footnote 1: Daughter of S.T. Coleridge, Esq.; an accomplished linguist in the Greek and Latin tongues, and translatress of a History of the Abipones.]

　　A letter to an anonymous correspondent, in the summer of 1827, has an amusing passage concerning Emma Isola's Latin. Lamb says that they made Cary laugh by translating "Blast you" into such elegant verbiage as "Deus afflet tibi." He adds, "How some parsons would have goggled and what would Hannah More say? I don't like clergymen, but here and there one. Cary, the Dante Cary, is a model quite as plain as Parson Primrose, without a shade of silliness."

　　On July 21, 1827, is a letter to Mr. Dillon, whom I do not identify, saying that Lamb has been teaching Emma Isola Latin for the past seven weeks.

　　"Ass in praesenti." This was Boyer's joke, at Christ's Hospital (see Vol. I. of this edition).

　　Here should come a letter from Lamb to Edward White, of the India House, dated August 1, 1827, in which Lamb has some pleasantry about paying postages, and ends by heartily commending White to mind his ledger, and keep his eye on Mr. Chambers' balances.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6