[In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture, the Misenheimers probe the ironic wit and technique of four lesser-known Elian essays.]

To refer to ‘another Elia’ will to some seem paradoxical, since those who know him know that there is only one Elia, true and everlasting, and that he is likely to remain unique across the ages yet to be born. Elia's most memorable artistic strengths have been seen by posterity as residing primarily in the realm of the nostalgic and prominently in the mode of the ironic, though neither is all pervasive. Indeed, as recently as 1984, when the sesquicentennial of the death of Charles Lamb was observed, essays appeared in both popular news magazines and scholarly journals alike celebrating the aesthetic universality of Elian nostalgia, alive and well as we approach the end of the twentieth century. To seem to contradict or to deny, therefore, the sacrosanctity of the true Elia would seem unequivocally presumptuous and wrongheaded.

This paper is in no way designed to detract from the Elia whom we know and love but, rather, to explore combinations of techniques and attitudes which seem to harken away from the firmly defined centre of Elian accomplishment. Since in December 1984 it was my privilege to address the Society at some length on the nature of Elian nostalgia, it occurred to me, when invited to another visit with you, that it might be interesting to examine together several of Elia's essays that lie outside what has been identified as his mainstream and to see how these pieces stand apart, in large measure, from the nostalgic vein which Lamb so richly and unforgettably mined. The irony of these pieces does not stem chiefly from reflection and wistful recollection associated with interpretation of reminiscence, but is an irony which evolves from intellectual examination of the state of man. These ‘essays in a minor key’ reveal, of course, the same penetrating intellect and rich associative imagination as those on which Elia's contemporary fame rests; yet some are too regularly neglected even by scholars with a close familiarity with all aspects of Elian art. It thus seems timely to consider four of these less celebrated works, to see whether or not they represent a different side of the Elia who is now eternalized in the nostalgic familiar essay. The four pieces to be examined today are ‘The Two Races of Men’, ‘Grace before Meat’, ‘Witches, and Other Night Fears,’ and ‘The Tombs in the Abbey’.

I

Of these four, probably the best known is ‘The Two Races of Men’, though even it remains less frequently the subject of scholarly scrutiny than such paramount nostalgic works as ‘Old China’ and ‘Dream Children’, despite its appearance in reputable anthologies. In his account of the evolution of Elia, George Barnett reminds us that ‘The Two Races of Men’ was ‘… the outgrowth of [Lamb's] experiences with book borrowers’.¹ It would seem reasonable to assume that another related facet of Lamb's life, namely his love of books and of book collecting, would have partially influenced the content of the essay, as might the intellectual cross-pollination which characterized the relationship of Lamb and William Hazlitt, for example. And indeed, ‘The Two Races of Men’ shows some similarities to Hazlitt's piece entitled ‘On the Conversation of Authors’, no longer very well known.

The title of this essay leads the reader to expect something different from what he finds. It suggests an essay of expository classification or definition well enough, of course, but the categories of distinction which Elia chooses are hardly what for most people would come immediately to mind. In his opening sentence, his classification reveals ‘the men who borrow’ and ‘the men who lend’; and though these ‘two original diversities’ are perhaps, upon reflection, virtually the most basic to which the human species can be reduced, they are not what are expected and thus are tinged with a superb blend of the ironic and the satiric. The qualities of irony and satire, to be sustained throughout the essay, are richly mined forthwith as the opening paragraph continues through Elia's remarking ‘the infinite superiority of the former [the men who borrow], which [he chooses] to designate as the great race. …’² The ‘men who lend’ are said, however, to be ‘born degraded’. And whereas the former are open and instinctively sovereign, the latter are ‘lean and suspicious’.

The world does not think of Elia surely as primarily a writer of exposition, as indeed he is not (though he regularly catalogues and defines); but in ‘The Two Races of Men’, the same intensity of creative imagination which supplements the drama of life is brought to bear by Elia upon a direct, somewhat nonchalant categorization of the human race fraught with satiric wit. The irony which sometimes heightens the nostalgic essays here is applied to expository analysis, and the combination both surprises and pleases. He shores up the initial two-fold division, in which the borrowers possess the ascendancy, by mentioning the likes of Alcibiades, Falstaff, Sir Richard Steele, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan as being among the greatest borrowers of all the ages. And in reference to these four diverse figures, Elia concludes the second paragraph of the essay with the exclamation ‘… what a family likeness in all four!’³ It is to be noted that this statement is punctuated with the exclamation point, as if to signify surprise, insight, and irony.

The exclamation of the announcement of these ‘greatest borrowers of all’ serves to anticipate the third paragraph, in which each of the six sentences also is followed by the exclamation point (a mark seldom used in the essays which are predominantly nostalgic in tone and theme):

What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower! what rosy gills! what a beautiful reliance on Providence doth he manifest,—taking no more thought than lilies! What contempt for money—accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better than dross! What a liberal confounding of those pedantic distinctions of meum and tuum! or rather, what a noble simplification of language (beyond Tooke), resolving these supposed opposites into one clear, intelligible pronoun adjective!—What near approaches doth he make to the primitive community,—to the extent of one-half of the principle at least!—⁴

Here is Elia at some of his satiric best, in expository elaboration through tongue-in-cheek recitation, without bitterness or cynicism, skeptically humorous and derisively mocking without carrying the sardonicism to an extreme.

In turn, then, the next paragraph, of still further refinement and variation extending the characterization of ‘the great race’, the borrowers of this world, utilizes the exclamation point another six times to underscore strength of declaration, so that by now the essayist has assumed a stance ever so slightly hortatory, softened in part by the naturalness of the flow of Elian prose. There is nothing really acerbic here, but the ironic vision is penetrating and impressive.

Having provided a lengthy introductory analysis of ‘those who borrow’, Elia now offers a specific example in the character of one Ralph Bigod, Esq., an old friend, known by Lamb as John Fenwick, the editor of the Albion. Bigod is shown as a very nearly perfect example of the classic borrower whose own predilection leads to extremity; but for us, the readers, perhaps more important than Bigod's exemplary personification of borrower is Elia's reaction as he recollects his deceased friend:

When I think of this man; his fiery glow of heart; his swell of feeling; how magnificent, how ideal he was; how great at the midnight hour; and when I compare with him the companions with whom I have associated since, I grudge the saving of a few idle ducats, and think that I am fallen into the society of lenders, and little men.⁵

The irony is replete; for though Elia has cast back through memory to a review of his friend's essential character, what emerges is a brief analysis of self, a small epiphany, in which the contrast between Bigod and Elia shows the essayist is not to be a member of the ‘great race’.

It is interesting to note that although this essay ostensibly is an expository piece which purports to examine the two races of men, in point of fact it dwells upon one: the borrowers. Only very short references are made to lenders, with perhaps the most poignant being Elia's self-perception as he stands for the opposite of the ideal which Bigod represented.

The continuing refinement of Elia's categories and examples constitutes one of the special charms of this essay. Having pondered his own identity as a lender and as a member of the society of little men, Elia now must warn his readers about a sub-class of borrower whom, through the chagrin of personal experience, he has come to fear:

To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations!⁶

The deliberate distortion of Comberbacke, the name under which Coleridge enlisted in the Light Dragoons, into Comberbatch carries with it the ironic indictment of Elia's personal friend who in the arena of books achieves a level of the ideal similar to that of the feckless Bigod, except that in terms of unobtrusive repayment Coleridge as borrower possesses enviable quality, and especially to Elia of the ‘lower race’:

To lose a Volume to C. carries some sense and meaning in it. You are sure that he will make one hearty meal on your viands, if he can give no account of the platter after it. …

Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C.—he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his—(in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not infrequently, vying with the originals)—in no very clerkly hand—legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne … I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C.⁷

This admonition to the reader, indeed a gentle admonition, serves to bring the essay full circle. Elia lets us see, through a looking-glass capable of very subtle distinction, how even as bibliophile he must succumb, and must advise us to succumb, to the wiles of so appreciative and compensatory a borrower of books as Coleridge, and thus how Elia by choice relegates himself to the inferior role of lender. There exists in this conclusion a peculiar poignancy for an essay presumably expository.

It was mentioned earlier that ‘The Two Races of Men’ was the result of Lamb's experiences with book borrowers and that at least partially his love of books and of book collecting might have influenced the content of the essay, as might other intellectual influences. It is interesting to note that ultimately the essay virtually transcends the notion of borrowing and lending books in its wider, more far-reaching scheme of human classification into the two generic groups. For his opening sentence, Elia has written:

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend.⁸

In addition to the other acknowledged possible influences, was Lamb, through Elia, in some wry and intricate configuration of thought and mind, recalling the advice of Polonius to Laertes, who is enjoined to

Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry,

a passage followed immediately by the further advice ‘To thine own self be true’? Has it happened that even in the face of the proffered wisdom of a sage but ineffectual Polonius, Lamb's insight into the plight of man can admit of no other plan of classification by which to describe the entire race? The wit, the satire, the irony, even to the extent of a possibly mock self-deprecation, seem those of a somewhat more pungent Elia, whose gentleness and wistfulness almost miraculously remain intact. The words of Polonius have perhaps achieved a new and fresh irony from the Elian imagination, from the Elian pen.

II

Approximately one month following the death of John Lamb (or James Elia, as Lamb called him), Dorothy Wordsworth remarked in a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson:

It gave us great concern to hear of the death of John Lamb. Though his brother and sister did not see very much of him the loss will be deeply felt; pray tell us particularly how they are; and give our love to them. I fear Charles' pen will be stopped for a time. What delightful papers he has lately written for that otherwise abominable magazine! The old King's Benchers is exquisite—indeed the only one I do not quite like is the Grace before Meat.⁹

The pivotal word in Dorothy's letter may well be ‘quite’: ‘… indeed the only one I do not quite like is the Grace before Meat’ [italics are mine]. For though the readers of the world have disclaimed no essay by Elia, they have their favorites; and it would seem that ‘Grace before Meat’ is not among them for the majority of readers. Modern anthologies which include Lamb and literary bibliographies which chronicle scholarship would seem to attest to a less popular place in readers' affections for ‘Grace before Meat’ than for many of the other Elian effusions. In fairness, one must say that those who like the essay like it with total passion and are very dogged in their admiration of it. Miss Wordsworth says that she did not ‘quite’ like it. Why, does one suppose?

As in ‘The Two Races of Men’, the title ‘Grace before Meat’ leads the reader to expect something other than what he finds. Elian wit and humour, as we know, regularly operate from this basic principle, leading those who know Elia well to see in his approach to the discussion of many subjects what can be called a certain intellectual ambidexterity. The reader perceives but is often surprised by the unusual, unexpected turn of thought, on the one hand; yet, on the other, having come to know and to love this Elian technique, he rouses himself to expect the unexpected. And in the case of ‘Grace before Meat’, in which Elia posits the inappropriateness of saying grace at a table surrounded by gluttons and gourmets (as they salivate over rich foods for which all earth and ocean have been ransacked), the idea might well shock the sensibilities of anyone holding to the traditional view of the importance of a blessing before partaking of any meal, regardless of immediate circumstances and conditions, and despite the humour interjected into the suggestion by the essayist.

Another thought that may not have occurred to most of us but that obviously is important to Elia and that the world could assuredly do worse than take to heart is, Why confine our grace to eating? He confronts his readers with an implied questioning of values:

I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts—a grace before Milton—a grace before Shakespeare—a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?¹⁰

Despite the advice, of Polonius to ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’, Elia still sees the human race as consisting of borrowers and lenders; and in that perception, there is a hint of astringent social criticism, if, as pointed out earlier, softened by the wit of the treatment and the characteristic naturalness of the prose itself. And similarly, in ‘Grace before Meat’, Elia in a sense turns critic again. One might speculate as to whether Dorothy Wordsworth found the critical side of Elia less disarming, or whether his desire to forego grace before gourmandizing somehow offended, or whether his entire approach to the subject she found mysteriously unacceptable. She did not ‘quite’ like the essay. Did she then dislike it?

Elia's overview of man's saying grace before eating is richly stated in several memorable passages:

It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters. The heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion.¹¹

and

We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousness of some kinds of food beyond others, though that is a meaner and inferior gratitude; but the proper object of the grace is sustenance, not relishes; daily bread, not delicacies; the means of life, and not the means of pampering the carcass.¹²

and

Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the banquets of angels and children; to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse; to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged, refection of the poor and humble man: but at the heaped-up boards of the pampered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, less timed and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the noise of those better befitting organs would be, which children hear tales of, at Hog's Norton.¹³

The humour is there. The insight is there. The truth is there. The humour of the truth of the critical insight is probing, for some unsettling. Would Miss Wordsworth perhaps have found the humour unsuited to the topic?

For some readers, Elia's invoking of the temptation scene in the wilderness as described by Milton in Paradise Regained and his labelling it ‘the severest satire upon full tables and surfeits’ has been a source of sophisticated humour; for others, it has apparently bordered on heresay. He quotes the elaborate scene of the banquet provided by Satan:

A table richly spread in regal mode,
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort
And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,
Gris-amber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore,
Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained
Pontus, and Lucrine Bay, and Afric coast.

and then immediately comments further:

The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates would go down without the recommendatory preface of a benediction. They are like to be short graces where the devil plays the host.¹⁴

Perhaps there have been readers who have perceived a bordering on blasphemy in this passage. In any case, Elia goes on to say that Milton lacks his customary sense of decorum in this section of the great poem:

I am afraid the poet wants his usual decorum in this place. Was he thinking of the old Roman luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge? This was a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus. The whole banquet is too civic and culinary, and the accompaniments altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted, holy scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, which the cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that disturbed him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been taught better.¹⁵

A wryness of irony has crept into the piece.

Though Lamb did not succeed in his attempts in the acted drama (and we recall a time at Drury Lane when he helped to hiss his own play from the stage), his penchant for the drama of life comes forward delightfully near the end of ‘Grace before Meat’ in his description of the two Methodist divines of different persuasions who, in their mutual courtesy, finally forego the speaking of grace at teatime. This is truly a scene from which comic drama is made:

With what spirit might not Lucian have painted two priests, of his religion, playing into each other's hands the compliment of performing or omitting a sacrifice,—the hungry God meantime, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going away in the end without his supper.¹⁶

Is it barely possible that Dorothy could have accepted the scene of the vying of the Methodist divines, but that she threw up her hands at the image of the hungry God with the expectant nostrils? Or is she on the same track as Southey, to whom Lamb attempted to justify the essay as a serious work? Regardless, ‘Grace before Meat’ has yet to realize the fullest appreciation among the readers of the world. Unfortunately for too many its aesthetic destiny is yet to be fulfilled.

And as for the borrowers and lenders, ‘Grace before Meat’, like several other of Elia's essays, was written on East India House paper, in the face of which fact George Barnett reminds us that ‘it is tempting to conclude that [it was] written on office time’.¹⁷

III

Among Lamb's numerous references to his childhood, his tone is almost universally nostalgic. In ‘The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple’ he refers to the Temple with obvious affection as being for him pleasantly associated with his earliest years.¹⁸ In ‘My First Play’ he recounts with joy the experiences he had as a child at Drury Lane. He says of this magical time:

… I knew nothing, understood nothing, discriminated nothing. I felt all, loved all, wondered all—Was nourished, I could not tell how—¹⁹

Even in ‘Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’, while Lamb certainly condemns some of the more questionable practices of his old school, he does so with humour and with respect for the later achievements of many of its pupils.²⁰

In his essay ‘Witches, and Other Night Fears’, however, Lamb uses an entirely different tone. From the first it is much more serious than are most of Elia's essays. As he recounts his preoccupation with a book in his father's library called History of the Bible by Stackhouse, he conveys effectively his unwilling but unrelenting fascination with the work, particularly with a picture of, as he tells us, ‘the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen’.²¹ Lamb remembers vividly the organization of the book which arranged Old Testament stories, each followed by an objection and then by a solution. He explains that the solution always put an end to doubts, or at least that was its intention. For Lamb, being a thoughtful and sensitive child, this presentation of objections had the effect of teaching him that there were infidels who did object to the Bible stories he had previously accepted as fact. Lamb observes, ‘Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.’²² In consequence of Lamb's inadvertently damaging the book, it was forbidden to him. After that, he gradually forgot about the objections but not about the picture of the witch.²³

With a note of dark intensity, Lamb tells us about his childhood sufferings which were perhaps a preamble to the suffering which both he and Mary had to endure as adults:

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The nighttime solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life—so far as memory serves in things so long ago—without an assurance, which realised its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel—… I owe—not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy—but the shape and manner of their visitations. … Had I never met with the picture, the fears would have come self-pictured in some shape or other—²⁴

Lamb clearly feels that all children have at least some difficulty with unreasonable fears and nightmares. Indeed, he cites as an example Thornton Hunt, Leigh Hunt's son, who, though reared deliberately without exposure to superstition, apparition, goblin, or even the existence of evil, ‘will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the cell-damned murderer are tranquillity’.²⁵

In the midst of his description of his nightly terrors Lamb makes what David Cecil suggests may be an oblique reference to the neglect, or at least the indifference, of his parents.²⁶ Certainly Lamb was much younger than either John or Mary. His father was doubtless preoccupied with serving Samuel Salt as a means of supporting his family, and his mother was busy running her household which included her sister-in-law. That the two women were incompatible we have no doubt.²⁷ That his sister and his aunt undertook much of Lamb's care we also know to be true. It may be that though they loved him dearly, neither Mary nor his Aunt Hetty had any inkling of his nightly torment. Apparently he did not consider it their responsibility to know because he says:

Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm—the hoping for a familiar voice—when they wake screaming—and find none to soothe them—what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves!²⁸

Toward the end of this essay, Lamb takes heart by observing that he no longer suffers unduly from unnerving visions in the night. He even speculates about the soul's creative powers during sleep, pointing inevitably to Coleridge's creation of ‘Kubla Khan’; but though he achieves at least some degree of sanguinity concerning dreams, in this essay, with its subject perhaps too near the source of his own family tragedy, Lamb is never able to manage his usual light, bantering tone. For him, though in his middle years and long free of nightly torture, frightening dreams hold too much truth to be gently mocked or humorously effaced.

IV

Even though a number of Lamb's essays are the elaborations of ideas first found in his letters,²⁹ only ‘The Tombs in the Abbey’ lived first in its entirety as a part of a letter. That fact is only one of several which set this particular essay outside the general mode of Elia. The letter which contained ‘The Tombs in the Abbey’ is one which Lamb wrote in 1823 to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate and Lamb's close friend since 1795. Over the twenty-eight years of their friendship, Lamb and Southey had exchanged numerous very cordial letters; but this letter is very different. For one thing, Lamb is writing in answer to a slight criticism of Elia which had appeared in a review by Southey headed ‘Progress of Infidelity’ in the Quarterly Review. In the review, Southey, speaking of the imaginative faculty which engenders fear, says:

There is a remarkable proof of this in Elia's Essays, a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original.³⁰

Although Edwin Marrs observes that Southey had written this passage in kindness, Lamb was deeply hurt by it. His distress was probably increased by an element of shock as well as by the fact that Southey, in referring to ‘Witches, and Other Night Fears’, had quoted a passage which mentioned Thornton Hunt by name. Southey had also been rather harsh in his comments on Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt, two of Lamb's good friends. Lamb could not know that Southey had revised the offending passage, substituting ‘sounder’ for ‘saner’, and had intended to revise it still further when he read proof. Unfortunately, Gifford failed to send him the proof sheets.³¹ To further complicate and distress Lamb's feelings, he had a long-standing feud with the Quarterly Review and with Gifford in particular. Southey's review, indeed, constituted the fifth offence against Lamb in the Quarterly Review.³² At first Lamb did not read the review and determined, because of his love and respect for Southey, to treat the affair with silence. After he did read it, he felt compelled to answer, if only to praise his friends whom Southey had castigated. Hence his reply entitled ‘Letter of Elia to Robert Southey’ appeared in the London Magazine on October 8, 1823.

Earlier in the letter to Southey, Lamb expresses his feelings concerning the offending review, but he then launches into a topic which has just come forcibly to his attention. That he should choose to discuss in this letter his outrage over the introduction into Westminster Abbey of fees for viewing the tombs is significant for two reasons. First, Lamb refers in some detail to Southey's days at Westminster School and, being hurt with his friend, recalls by oblique reference an escapade in which Southey had, in his last year at Westminster, been involved and which contributed to his being expelled.³³ Doubtless Lamb's knowledge of this incident had come from Southey himself. Lamb says:

Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the pretext, that an indiscriminate admission would expose the Tombs to violation. Remember your boy-days. Did you ever see, or hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free to all? Do the rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such speculations? It is all that you can do to drive them into your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for antiquities; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would be no longer the rabble.³⁴

Lamb continues with a more pointed attack on Southey:

For forty years that I have known the Fabric, the only well-attested charge of violation adduced, has been—a ridiculous dismemberment committed upon the effigy of that amiable spy, Major André. And is it for this—the wanton mischief of some school-boy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Translantic Freedom—or the remote possibility of such a mischief occurring again, so easily to be prevented by stationing a constable within the walls, if the vergers are incompetent to the duty—is it upon such wretched pretences, that the people of England are made to pay a new Peter's Pence, so long abrogated; or must content themselves with contemplating the ragged Exterior of their Cathedral? The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic?—³⁵

The second reason which makes Lamb's discussion of ‘these Sellers. … of the Temple’³⁶ significant is that he sees Southey as the one person who can eradicate this objectionable practice because as Poet Laureate Southey has powerful influence. Lamb uses his personal knowledge of Southey's deep religious orientation, his abiding respect for antiquities, and his continuing loyalty to his old school to urge him to speak out in print against a practice Lamb deems an abomination. Lamb speaks, as always quite eloquently; but his underlying tone is of total outrage, an emotion to which he rarely gives expression:

You owe it to the place of your education; you owe it to your learned fondness for the architecture of your ancestors; you owe it to the venerableness of your ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened and called in question through these practices—to speak aloud your sense of them; never to desist raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away with and abolished; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against the decent, though low-in-purse, enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must commit an injury against his family economy, if he would be indulged with a bare admission within its walls. … In vain the public prints have taken up this subject, in vain such poor nameless writers as myself express their indignation. A word from you, Sir—a hint in your Journal—would be sufficient to fling open the doors of the beautiful Temple again, as we can remember them when we were boys.³⁷

Perhaps as a reply to Southey's comments on the imagination in the offending review, Lamb continues by saying:

At that time of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us, have suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so much silver!—If we had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission (as we certainly should have done) would the sight of those old tombs have been as impressive to us (while we had been weighing anxiously prudence against sentiment) as when the gates stood open, as those of the adjacent Park; when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a shorter or longer time, as that lasted? Is the being shown over a place the same as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it? In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person find entrance (out of service time) under the sum of two shillings. The rich and the great will smile at the anticlimax, presumed to lie in those two short words. But you can tell them, Sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for enlarged feeling, how much taste and genius, may coexist, especially in youth, with a purse incompetent to this demand.—³⁸

Although members of the press took up the cause, some siding with Southey and others defending Lamb with great vigor, Southey had no wish to quarrel and proved this by sending, as Lucas reports, a wholly admirable private reply dated November 19, 1823:

My Dear Lamb—On Monday I saw your letter in the London Magazine, which I had not before had an opportunity of seeing, and I now take the first interval of leisure for replying to it.

Nothing could be further from my mind than any intention or apprehension of any way offending or injuring a man concerning whom I have never spoken, thought, or felt otherwise than with affection, esteem, and admiration.

If you had let me know in any private or friendly manner that you felt wounded by a sentence in which nothing but kindness was intended—or that you found it might injure the sale of your book—I would most readily and gladly have inserted a note in the next Review to qualify and explain what had hurt you.

You made this impossible, and I am sorry for it. But I will not engage in controversy with you to make sport for the Philistines.

The provocation must be strong indeed that can rouse me to do this, even with an enemy. And if you can forgive an unintended offence as heartily as I do the way in which you have resented it, there will be nothing to prevent our meeting as we have heretofore done, and feeling towards each other as we have always been wont to do.

Only signify a correspondent willingness on your part, and send me your address, and my first business next week shall be to reach your door, and shake hands with you and your sister. Remember me to her most kindly and believe me—Yours, with unabated esteem and regards,

Robert Southey³⁹

As Marrs puts it, ‘Southey and Lamb consequently exchanged marvelously gracious private letters, and the air was cleared forever’.⁴⁰

Lamb replied at once:

Dear Southey—The kindness of your note has melted away the mist which was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow. That accursed Q. R. had vexed me by a gratuitous speaking, of its own knowledge, that the Confessions of a D———d was a genuine description of the state of the writer. Little things, that are not ill meant, may produce much ill. That might have injured me alive and dead! I am in a public office, and my life is insured. I was prepared for anger, and I thought I saw, in a few obnoxious words, a hard case of repetition against me. I wish both magazine and review at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister (though innocent) will be still more so; for the folly was done without her knowledge, and has made her uneasy ever since. My guardian angel was absent at that time.

I will muster up courage to see you, however, any day next week (Wednesday excepted). We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a second mortification. She will hate to see us; but come and heap embers. We deserve it; I for what I've done, and she for being my sister.

Do come early in the day, by sun-light, that you may see my Milton.

I am at Colebrook Cottage, Colebrook Row, Islington: a detached whitish house, close to the New River end of Colebrook Terrace, left hand from Sadler's Wells.

Will you let me know the day before?

Your penitent,

C. Lamb⁴¹

The generous spirits of both men united to heal the rift in their long friendship and to carry that friendship with renewed strength to the end of Lamb's life. But, from a misunderstanding between these two friends, both of whom are now eternalized in literary history, there has emerged a perhaps unexpected Elian essay, ‘The Tombs in the Abbey’, whose genesis is unique and whose tone suggests a minor key.

Another Elia? Who can say? Perhaps so, perhaps no. Elia is multi-faceted, complex, wondrous. One remembers that Flaubert once wrote to a friend:

The most beautiful works … are serene in aspect, unfathomable … Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint.⁴²

The small apertures of Elia, each in its turn, reveal a world of intellectual concern and depth of sensitivity standing equally erect and strong with the magic, the uniqueness, of his beloved ventures into the nostalgic.

Notes

1. George L. Barnett, Charles Lamb: The Evolution of Elia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 90.

2. Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia, introd. Geoffrey Tillotson (London: Dent, 1965), p. 26. Hereafter cited as Lamb.

3. Ibid., 27

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 29

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., 30-31

8. Ibid., 26.

9. E.V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb (New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1905), II, p. 91

10. Lamb, 107

11. Ibid., 108

12. Ibid., 109

13. Ibid., 111-112

14. Ibid., 109

15. Ibid., 109-110

16. Ibid., 112

17. Barnett, 118

18. Lamb, 96-106

19. Ibid., 117

20. Ibid., 14-26

21. Ibid., 77

22. Ibid., 78

23. Ibid., 77-78

24. Ibid., 78-79

25. Ibid., 79

26. David Cecil, A Portrait of Charles Lamb (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983), pp. 10-11.

27. Katharine Anthony, The Lambs: A Story of Pre-Victorian England (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1945), p. 8.

28. Lamb, 79

29. George L. Barnett, Charles Lamb (Boston: Twayne Publishers, A Division of G.K. Hall and Co., 1976), p. 87

30. Edwin W. Marrs, Jr. (ed), The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), Vol. III, p. 133.

31. Ibid., 133

32. Ibid., 132.

33. William Haller, The Early Life of Robert Southey 1774-1803 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1917), p.42.

34. Lamb, 244.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., 242-243

38. Ibid., 243

39. Lucas, 157-158

40. Marrs, 133

41. Lucas, 158-159

42. Maynard Mack, ‘The Life of Learning’, American Council of Learned Societies Newsletter (ACLS), XXXIV (Winter-Spring 1983), 8.