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　　LETTER 289

　　CHARLES LAMB TO JOHN CLARE

　　India House, 31 Aug., 1822.

　　Dear Clare—I thank you heartily for your present. I am an inveterate old Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections, I seem to be native to them, and free of the country. The quantity of your observation has astonished me. What have most pleased me have been Recollections after a Ramble, and those Grongar Hill kind of pieces in eight syllable lines, my favourite measure, such as Cowper Hill and Solitude. In some of your story-telling Ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too profuse with them. In poetry slang of every kind is to be avoided. There is a rustick Cockneyism, as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone. The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I think is to be found in Shenstone. Would his Schoolmistress, the prettiest of poems, have been better, if he had used quite the Goody's own language? Now and then a home rusticism is fresh and startling, but where nothing is gained in expression, it is out of tenor. It may make folks smile and stare, but the ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted, as you deserve to be. Excuse my freedom, and take the same liberty with my puns.

　　I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of all sorts, there is a methodist hymn for Sundays, and a farce for Saturday night. Pray give them a place on your shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of which I have [a] duplicate, that I may return in equal number to your welcome presents.

　　I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the London for August.

　　Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs. The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for them. Make Mrs. Clare pick off the hind quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and butter. The fore quarters are not so good. She may let them hop off by themselves.

　　Yours sincerely,

　　CHAS. LAMB.

　　[John Clare (1793-1864) was the Northamptonshire poet whom the London Magazine had introduced to fame. Octavius Gilchrist had played to him the same part that Capell Lofft had to Bloomfield. His first volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published in January, 1820; his next, The Village Minstrel, in September of the next year. These he had probably sent to Lamb. Helpstone was Clare's birthplace. Lamb's two little return volumes were his Works. The sonnet in the August London Magazine was not signed by Clare. It runs thus:—

　　TO ELlA

　　ELIA, thy reveries and vision'd themes

　　To Care's lorn heart a luscious pleasure prove;

　　Wild as the mystery of delightful dreams,

　　Soft as the anguish of remember'd love:

　　Like records of past days their memory dances

　　Mid the cool feelings Manhood's reason brings,

　　As the unearthly visions of romances

　　Peopled with sweet and uncreated things;—

　　And yet thy themes thy gentle worth enhances!

　　Then wake again thy wild harp's tenderest strings,

　　Sing on, sweet Bard, let fairy loves again

　　Smile in thy dreams, with angel ecstacies;

　　Bright o'er our souls will break the heavenly strain

　　Through the dull gloom of earth's realities.

　　Clare addressed to Lamb a sonnet on his Dramatic Specimens which was printed in Hone's Year Book in 1831.

　　Here should come a letter from Lamb to Ayrton dated Sept. 5, 1822, referring to the writer's "drunken caput" and loss of memory.

　　Here should come a letter from Lamb to Mrs. James Kenney, dated Sept. 11, 1822, in which Lamb says that Mary Lamb had reached home safely from France, and that she failed to smuggle Crabb Robinson's waistcoat. He adds that the Custom House people could not comprehend how a waistcoat, marked Henry Robinson, could be a part of Miss Lamb's wearing apparel. At the end of the letter is a charming note to Mrs. Kenney's little girl, Sophy, whom Lamb calls his dear wife. He assures her that the few short days of connubial felicity which he passed with her among the pears and apricots of Versailles were some of the happiest of his life.] The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6