from it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances or half-happy at best-of emancipated 'prentices and little tradesfolks, with here and there a servant-maid that has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capacity of enjoying a free hour; and livelily expressing the hollowness of a day's pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that day look anything but comfortable. quired the cause of them. So taxed, I honestly made confession of my infirmity, and added that I was afraid that I should eventually be obliged to resign his service. He spoke some 5 words of course to hearten me, and there the matter rested. A whole week I remained b bouring under the impression that I had acted imprudently in my disclosure; that I had foolishly given a handle against myself, and had 10 been anticipating my own dismissal. A week passed in this manner, the most anxious one, I verily believe, in my whole life, when on the evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about quitting my desk to go home (it might be about But besides Sundays, I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the prospect of its recurrence, 15 eight o'clock,) I received an awful summons to attend the presence of the whole assembled firm in the formidable back parlour. I thought now my time is surely come, I have done for myself, I am going to be told that they have no longer occasion for me. L, I could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was a little relief to me,-when to my utter astonishment B―, the eldest partner, began a formal harangue to me on the length of my services, I believe, alone kept me up through the year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did the glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me? or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent 20 in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a taste of it it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting 25 my very meritorious conduct during the whole upon the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I have said, 30 I could scarcely have sustained my thralldom. Independently of the rigours of attendance, of the time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find out that? I protest I never had the confidence to think as much). He went on to descant on the expediency of retiring at a certain time of life, (how my heart panted!) and asking me a few questions as to the amount of my own property, of which I have a little, ended with a proposal, to which his three partners nodded a grave assent, that I should I have ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during my latter years, had increased to 35 accept from the house, which I had served so such a degree, that it was visible in all the lines of my countenance. My health and my good spirits flagged. I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I should be found unequal. Besides my daylight servitude, I served 40 over again all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years of age, and no prospect of emancipation presented itself. I had grown to my desk, 45 as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul. My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me upon the trouble legible in my countenance; but I did not know that it had raised 50 the suspicions of any of my employers, when on the fifth of last month, a day ever to be remembered by me, L-5, the junior partner in the firm, calling me on one side, directly taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly in- 55 4 Strictly speaking, Lamb's "native fields" were the London streets, but he often visited relatives in Hertfordshire. The names of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and Lacy, mentioned further on, were invented by Lamb. well, a pension for life to the amount of twothirds of my accustomed salary-a magnificent offer! I do not know what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes after eight I went home-forever. This noble benefit-gratitude forbids me to conceal their names-I owe to the kindness of the most munificent firm in the world-the house of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and Lacy. Esto perpetua! For the first day or two I felt stunned-overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old Bastile,' suddenly May you live forever. The prison in Paris, the storming of which on July 14, 1789, marked the beginning of the French Revolu tion. let loose after a forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity,-for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage 10 my estates in Time for me. And here let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly nor without weighing their own resources, to forego their customary employment all at once, for there may be danger in it. 15 since; to visit my old desk-fellows-my co day in the year, been closely associated-being suddenly removed from them-they seemed as dead to me. There is a fine passage, which may serve to illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy 5 by Sir Robert Howard, speaking of a friend's death: I feel it by myself, but I know that my resources are sufficient; and now that those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my condi 'Twas but just now he went away; To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have been fain to go among them once or twice brethren of the quill-that I had left below in the state militant. Not all the kindness with which they received me could quite restore to me that pleasant familiarity, which I had some of our old jokes, but methought they went off but faintly. My old desk; the peg where I hung my hat, were appropriated to another. I knew it must be, but I could not tion. I am in no hurry. Having all holidays, 20 heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked I am as though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon me, I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, as I used to do in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If Time were trouble- 25 take it kindly. D—l take me, if I did not some, I could read it away; but I do not read in that violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but candlelight Time, I used to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now) 30 just when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; I let it come to me. I am like the man. feel some remorse-beast, if I had not-at quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of my toils for six-and-thirty years, that soothed for me with their jokes and conundrums the ruggedness of my professional road. Had it been so rugged then, after all? or was I a coward simply? Well, it is too late to repent; and I also know that these suggestions are a common fallacy of the mind on such occasions. But that's born and has his years come to him, 35 my heart smote me. I had violently broken In some green desert. "Years!" you will say; "what is this superannuated simpleton calculating upon? He has already told us he is past fifty." I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, 40 but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; 45 the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's Time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me threefold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any 50 preceding thirty. "Tis a fair rule-of-three sum. Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the commencement of my freedom, and of which all traces are not gone, one was, that the bands betwixt us. It was at least not courteous. I shall be some time before I get quite reconciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies, yet not for long, for again and again I will come among ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell Ch- dry, sarcastic, and friendly! Do—, mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly! Pl, officious to do, and to volunteer, good services!-and thou, thou dreary pile, fit mansion for a Gresham or a Whittington 10 of old, stately house of Merchants; with thy labyrinthine passages, and light-excluding, pent-up offices, where candles for one-half the year supplied the place of the sun's light; unhealthy contributor to my weal, stern fosterer of my living, farewell! In thee remain, and not in the obscure collection of some wandering bookseller, my "works!" Dryden's brother-in-law, and joint author with him a vast tract of Time had intervened since I 55 of the Indian Queen. The lines are from the Vestal Vir quitted the Counting-House. I could not conceive of it as an affair of yesterday. The partners, and the clerks with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours of each gin, or The Roman Ladies. Thomas Gresham (d. 1579?), a noted financier of Elizabeth's time, was the founder of the Royal Exchange and of Gresham College. 10 Sir Richard Whittington (d. 1423) was a famous Lord Mayor of London. There let them rest, as I do from my labours, piled on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in folio than ever Aquinas11 left, and full as useful! My mantle I bequeath among ye. Monday? All days are the same. Sunday itself that unfortunate failure of a holiday, as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the great5 est quantity of pleasure out of it is melted down into a week-day. I can spare to go to church now, without grudging the huge cantie which it used to seem to cut out of the holiday. I have Time for everything. I can visit a sick friend. I can interrupt the man of much o cupation when he is busiest. I can insult over him with an invitation to take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor this fine May-morning It is Lucretian pleasure to behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in the world, carking and caring; like horses in a mill, drudg ing on in the same eternal round-and what is it all for? A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do: he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come and A fortnight has passed since the date of my first communication. At that period I was approaching to tranquillity, but had not reached it. I boasted of a calm indeed, but it was comparative only. Something of the first flutter was left; an unsettling sense of novelty; 10 the dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel. I was a poor Carthusian, 12 from strict cellular discipline suddenly by some revolution returned 15 upon the world. I am now as if I had never been other than my own master. It is natural to me to go where I please, to do what I please. I find myself at eleven o'clock in the day in Bond Street,13 and it seems to me that I have 20 been sauntering there at that very hour for years past. I digress into Soho, to explore a bookstall. Methinks I have been thirty years a collector. There is nothing strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine picture in the 25 swallow up those accursed cotton mills? Take morning. Was it ever otherwise? What has become of Fish Street Hill? Where is Fenchurch Street?14 Stones of old Mincing Lane, which I have worn with my daily pilgrimage for six-and-thirty years, to the footsteps of 30 what toilworn clerk are your everlasting flints now vocal? I indent the gayer flags of Pall Mall. It is 'Change time, and I am strangely among the Elgin marbles, 15 It was no hyperbole when I ventured to compare the change 35 with any settled purpose. I walk about; not in my condition to a passing into another world. Time stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day of the week or of the month. Each day used to be individually felt by me 40 When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the in its reference to the foreign post-days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations. The genius of each day was upon me distinctly during the 45 whole of it, affecting my appetite, spirits, &c. The phantom of the next day, with the dreary five to follow, sate as a load upon my poor Sabbath recreations. What charm has washed me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down As low as to the fiends. 17 I am no longer clerk to the Firm of, &c. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace, nor to and from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. state of the opera. Opus operatum est.13 1 have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task-work, and have the rest of the day to myself. ON THE DEATH OF COLERIDGE (Nov. 21, 1834) When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it that Ethiop white? What is gone of Black 50 was without grief. It seemed to me that he long 11 The famous scholastic theologian, Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). 12 The Carthusians were an order of Monks founded in 1036; their discipline was very strict. 13 In the "West End" the quarter of fashionable shops. Pall Mall and Soho Square are in the same locality. 14 Streets in the City near the India House. See note on Fish street, pp. 280, 292. 15 The Elgin marbles, among the finest specimens of Greek sculpture, were originally part of the decorations of the Parthenon. They are now in the British Museum, having been brought from Greece by the Earl of Elgin. See Keats' Sonnet, p. 529. had been on the confines of the next world,that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved 16 An allusion to a famous passage in Lucretius: Sweet it is, when the winds are troubling the waters on the wide sea, to contemplate from the shore the great hardship of another, not because it is a delicious satisfac tion to feel that anyone should be made miserable, but because it is consoling to discern from what evils we ourselves are free.-De Rerum Natura, II. 1-4. 17 From the player's declamation in Hamlet, II. ii. 475. 18 My work is done. assassin is Glenalvon?? Do we think of anything but of the crime which he commits, and the rack which he deserves? That is all which we really think about him. Whereas in cor5 responding characters in Shakespeare, so little do the actions comparatively affect us, that while the impulses, the inner mind in all its perverted greatness, solely seems real and is exclusively attended to, the crime is comparatively nothing. But when we see these things represented, the acts which they do are comparatively everything, their impulses nothing. The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those images of night and then that I could not grieve. But, since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men and books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations. He was a Grecian (or in the first form) at Christ's Hospital, where I was Deputy-Grecian; and the same subordination and deference to him I have 10 preserved through a life-long acquaintance. Great in his writings, he was greatest in his conversation. In him was disproved that old maxim, that we should allow every one his share of talk. He would talk from morn to 15 horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that dewy eve, nor cease till far midnight; yet who ever would interrupt him? who would obstruct that continuous flow of converse, fetched from Helicon or Zion? He had the tact of making the unintelligible seem plain. Many who read 20 vantage-ground of abstraction which reading the abstruser parts of his "Friend" would complain that his works did not answer to his spoken wisdom. They were identical. But he had a tone in oral delivery which seemed to convey sense to those who were otherwise im- 25 it in Mr. K.'s3 performance of that part, the perfect recipients. He was my fifty-years-old friend without a dissension. Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love the 30 totally destroy all the delight which the words faithful Gilmans2 more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel. KING LEAR (From The Tragedies of Shakespeare, Collected Works, 1818) solemn prelude with which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to murder Duncan,-when we no longer read it in a book, when we have given up that possesses over seeing, and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing to commit a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which in the book convey, where the deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence; it rather seems to belong to history, to something past and inevitable, if it 35 has anything to do with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the reading. So to see Lear acted,-to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of meditation rather 40 turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy than of interest or curiosity as to their actions, that while we are reading any of his great criminal characters,-Macbeth, Richard, even Iago, we think not so much of the crimes night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. But which they commit, as of the ambition, the 45 the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to overleap those moral fences. Barnwell' is a wretched murderer; there is a certain fitness between his neck and the rope; he is the legitimate heir to the gallows; nobody 50 who thinks at all can think of any alleviating circumstances in his case to make him a fit object of mercy. Or to take an instance from the higher tragedy, what else but a mere contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear; they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion 1i. e. from Greek or Hebrew literature, or perhaps 55 are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turnmore generally from profane or sacred letters. 2 Coleridge had found a refuge in his last years in the house of Mr. Gilman, a physician who had helped him in his struggle against the opium habit. A character in a prose tragedy of that name by George Lillo (1693-1739). 2 A character in John Home's tragedy Douglas, acted in Edinburgh, 1756. Edmund Kean (1787?-1833), the most famous English tragedian of his day, especially in Shakespearean rôles. dicious and dispassionate as thou art, the real state of things in that distracted country; it having pleased the Queen's Majesty to think of appointing me her deputy, in order to bring 5 the rebellious to submission. Spenser. Wisely and well considered; but more worthily of her judgment than her affection. May your lordship overcome, as you have ever done, the difficulties and dangers Essex. We grow weak by striking at random: and knowing that I must strike, and strike heavily, I would fain see exactly where the stroke shall fall. ing up and disclosing to the bottom, that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear,-we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and 10 you foresee. storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions 15 and abuses of mankind. What have looks, or tones, to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when, in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds 20 them that "they themselves are old?" What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show; it is too hard and stony; it 25 of heat as iron, and as impenetrable to light as must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate' has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Some attribute to the Irish all sorts of excesses; others tell us that these are old stories; that there is not a more inoffensive race of merry creatures under heaven, and that their crimes are all hatched for them here in England, by the incubation of printers' boys, and are brought to market at times of distressing Idearth in news. From all that I myself have seen of them, I can only say that the civilized (I mean the richer and titled) are as susceptible granite. The half-barbarous are probably worse; the utterly barbarous may be somewhat better. Like game-cocks, they must spur when they meet. One fights because he Garrick and his followers, the showmen of 30 fights an Englishman; another, because the the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending!-as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through,the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only 35 decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,-why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy? As if the childish 40 pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station,-as if, at his years and 'with his experience, anything was left but to die. Walter Savage Landor 1775-1864 ESSEX AND SPENSER1 (Imaginary Conversations, 1834) Essex. Instantly on hearing of thy arrival from Ireland, I sent a message to thee, good Edmund, that I might learn, from one so ju 4 Nahum Tate (1652-1715), a poet and playwright who gained an unenviable reputation as an adapter of several of Shakespeare's plays, among them King Lear. In his version, Cordelia survives and marries Edgar. David Garrick, the celebrated English actor, a contemporary of Dr. Johnson. 1 In 1580 the poet Spenser went to Ireland as secretary 45 fellow he quarrels with comes from a distant county; a third, because the next parish is an eyesore to him, and his fist-mate is from it. The only thing in which they all agree as proper law is the tooth-for-tooth act. Luckily, we have a bishop who is a native, and we call him before the Queen. He represented to Her Majesty that everything in old Ireland tended to re-produce its kind,-crimes among others; and he declared frankly that if an honest man is murdered, or, what is dearer to an honest man, if his honour is wounded in the person of his wife, it must be expected that he will retaliate. Her Majesty delivered it as her opin to Lord Grey, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, who undertook to put down the rebellion of Desmond, a powerful Munster chief. The English policy involved exterminstion of the natives and the desolation of the country. In the eyes of Englishmen the Irish chiefs were a band of barbarians, the enemies of law and order, and Spenser 50 came to look upon the Irish with the loathing that animated most Englishmen of his time. He spent prac tically the rest of his life in Ireland as an agent of the government, and was rewarded for his services by the grant of Kilcolman Castle, formerly a Desmond possession, in County Cork. In 1594 there was a new uprising in Ulster, headed by Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone. Br 1598 the rebellion had spread to Munster, and Kilcolman Castle was sacked and burnt. Spenser and his wife escaped, but their young child perished in the flames. The poet returned to England just as the Queen was preparing to send her favorite Essex to end the rebellion. It is at this juncture that the conversation between Esser and Spenser is imagined by Landor to have taken place. The law of retaliation, as "an eye for an eye,' etc. |