iāno in language so ridiculously and exclusively appropriate to himself, that it would have made you merry. It was even as if he was looking into a sort of moral looking-glass, without knowing what it was, and, seeing his own very, very Godwinship, had by a merry conceit christened it in your name, not without some annexment of me and Wordsworth. I replied by laughing in the first place at the capricious nature of his nicety, that what was gross in folio should become doublerefined in octavo foolscap or pickpocket quartos, blind slavish egotism in small pica, manly discriminating self-respect in double primer, modest as maiden's blushes between boards, or in calf-skin, and only not obscene in naked sheets. And then in a deep and somewhat sarcastic tone, tried to teach him to speak more reverentially of his betters, by stating what and who they were, by whom honoured, by whom depreciated. Well! this gust died away. I was going home to look over his Duncity; he begged me to stay till his return in half an hour. I, meaning to take nothing more the whole evening, took a crust of bread, and Mary Lamb made me a glass of punch of most deceitful strength. Instead of half an hour, Godwin stayed an hour and a half. In came his wife, Mrs. Fenwick, and four young ladies, and just as Godwin returned, supper came in, and it was now useless to go (at supper I was rather a mirth-maker than merry). I was disgusted at heart with the grossness and vulgar insanocecity of this dim-headed prig of a philosophocide, when, after supper, his ill stars impelled him to renew the contest. I begged him not to goad me, for that I feared my feelings would not long remain in my power. He (to my wonder and indignation) persisted (I had not deciphered the cause), and then, as he well said, I did "thunder and lighten at him" with a vengeance for more than an hour and a half. Every effort of selfdefence only made him more ridiculous. If I had been Truth in person, I could not have spoken more accurately; but it was truth in a war-chariot, drawn by the three Furies, and the reins had slipped out of

the goddess's hands! . . . Yet he did not absolutely give way till that stinging contrast which I drew between him as a man, as a writer, and a benefactor of society, and those of whom he had spoken so irreverently. In short, I suspect that I seldom, at any time and for so great a length of time, so continuously displayed so much power, and do hope and trust that never did I display one half the scorn and ferocity. The next morning, the moment when I awoke, O mercy! I did feel like a very wretch. I got up and immediately wrote and sent off by a porter, a letter, I dare affirm an affecting and eloquent letter to him, and since then have been working for him, for I was heart-smitten with the recollection that I had said all, all in the presence of his wife. But if I had known all I now know, I will not say that I should not have apologised, but most certainly I should not have made such an apology, for he confessed to Lamb that he should not have persisted in irritating me, but that Mrs. Godwin had twitted him for his prostration before me, as if he was afraid to say his life was his own in my presence. He admitted, too, that although he never to the very last suspected that I was tipsy, yet he saw clearly that something unusual ailed me, and that I had not been my natural self the whole evening. What a poor creature! attack a man who had been so kind to him at the instigation of such a woman! And what a woman to instigate him to quarrel with me, who with as much power as any, and more than most of his acquaintances, had been perhaps the only one who had never made a butt of him who had uniformly spoken respectfully to him. But it is past! And I trust will teach me wisdom in future.

To

I have undoubtedly suffered a great deal from a cowardice in not daring to repel unassimilating acquaintances who press forward upon my friendship; but I dare aver, that if the circumstances of each particular case were examined, they would prove on the whole honourable to me rather than otherwise. But I have had enough and done enough. Hereafter

I shall show a different face, and calmly unform those who press upon me that my health, spirits, and occupation alike make it necessary for me to confine myself to the society of those with whom I have the nearest and highest connection. So help me God! I will hereafter be quite sure that I do really and in the whole of my heart esteem and like a man before I permit him to call me friend.

I am very anxious that you should go on with your Madoc. If the thought had happened to suggest itself to you originally and with all these modifications and polypus tendrils with which it would have caught hold of your subject, I am afraid. that you would not have made the first voyage as interesting at least as it ought to be, so as to preserve entire the fit proportion of interest. But go on!

I shall call on Longman as soon as I receive an answer from him to a note which I sent. . .

I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into Ĉumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere; but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchman, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all

hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the printshops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes - London itself a pantomime and a masqueradeall these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?

My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books,) for groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a bookcase which has followed me about like a faithful dog, (only exceeding him in knowledge,) wherever I have moved, old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school, these are my mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends of any thing. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind: and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been confinedly called; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this

No

Had you written one week before you did, I certainly should have obeyed your injunction; you should have seen me before my letter. I will explain to you my situation. There are six of us in one department. Two of us (within these four days) are confined with severe fevers; and two more, who belong to the Tower Militia, expect to have marching orders on Friday. Now six are absolutely necessary. I have already asked and obtained two young hands to supply the loss of the feverites, and, with the other prospect before me, you may believe I cannot decently ask leave of absence for myself. All I can promise (and I do promise, with the sincerity of St. Peter, and the contrition of Sinner Peter if I fail) that I will come the very first spare week, and go nowhere till I have been to Cambridge. matter if you are in a state of pupilage when I come; for I can employ myself in Cambridge very pleasantly in the mornings. Are there not libraries, halls, colleges, books, pictures, statues? I wish you had made London in your way. There is an exhibition quite uncommon in Europe, which could not have escaped your genius, a live rattlesnake, ten feet in length, and the thickness of a big leg. I went to see it last night by candle light. We were ushered into a room very little bigger than ours at Pentonville. A man and woman and four boys live in this room, joint tenants with nine snakes, most of them such as no remedy has been discovered for their bite. We walked into the middle, which is formed by a halfmoon of wired boxes, all mansions of snakes whip-snakes, thunder-snakes,

pig-nose-snakes, American vipers, and this monster. He lies curled up in folds. Immediately a stranger entered (for he is used to the family, and sees them play at cards,) he set up a rattle like a watchman's in London, or near as loud, and reared up a head, from the midst of these folds, like a toad, and shook his head, and showed every sign a snake can show of irritation. I had the foolish curiosity to strike the wires with my finger, and the devil flew at me with his toad-mouth wide open; the inside of his mouth is quite white. I had got my finger away, nor could he well have bit me with his big mouth, which would have been certain death in five minutes. But it frightened me so much, that I did not recover my voice for a minute's space. I forgot, in my fear, that he was secured. You would have forgot too, for 'tis incredible how such a monster can be confined in small gauzy-looking wires. I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to heaven you could see it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large thigh. I could not retreat without infringing on another box; and just behind, a little devil not an inch from my back had got his nose out, with some difficulty and pain, quite through the bars! He was soon taught better manners. All the snakes were curious, and objects of terror: but this monster, like Aaron's serpent, swallowed up the impression of the rest. He opened his cursed mouth, when he made at me, as wide as his head was broad. I hallooed out quite loud, and felt pains all over my body with the fright.

I have had the felicity of hearing George Dyer read out one book of the Farmer's Boy. I thought it rather childish. No doubt, there is originality in it (which, in yourself-taught geniuses, is a most rare quality, they generally getting hold of some bad models, in a scarcity of books, and forming their taste on them), but no selection. All is described.

Mind, I have only heard read one book.
Yours sincerely,
Philo-Snake,

C. L.

TO THOMAS MANNING

24th Sept., 1802, LONDON.

My dear Manning,

Since the date of my last letter I have been a traveller. A strong desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind, that I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend sometime in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly intend never to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection. However, I am very glad I did not go, because you had left Paris (I see) before I could have set out. I believe Stoddart promising to go with me another year, prevented that plan. My next scheme (for to my restless, ambitious mind London was become a bed of thorns) was to visit the far-famed peak in Derbyshire, where the Devil sits, they say, without breeches. This my purer mind rejected as indelicate. And my final resolve was, a tour to the Lakes. I set out with Mary to Keswick, without giving Coleridge any notice, for my time, being precious, did not admit of it. He received us with all the hospitality in the world, and gave up his time to show us all the wonders of the country. He dwells upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, in a comfortable house, quite enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains: great floundering bears and monsters they seemed, all couchant and asleep. We got in in the evening, travelling in a postchaise from Penrith, in the midst of a gorgeous sunshine, which transmuted all the mountains into colours, purple, &c., &c. We thought we had got into fairyland. But that went off (as it never came again; while we stayed we had no more fine sunsets;) and we entered Coleridge's comfortable study just in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark with clouds upon their heads. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. Glorious creatures, fine old fellows, Skiddaw, &c., I never shall forget ye, how ye lay about that night, like an intrenchment;

gone to bed, as it seemed, for the night, but promising that ye were to be seen in the morning. Coleridge had got a blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church, shelves of scattered folios, an Æolian harp, and an old sofa, half bed, &c. And all looking out upon the last fading view of Skiddaw, and his broad-breasted brethren what a night! Here we stayed three full weeks, in which time I visited Wordsworth's cottage, where we stayed a day or two with the Clarksons, (gcod people, and most hospitable, at whose house we tarried one day and night,) and saw Lloyd. The Wordsworths were gone to Calais. They have since been in London, and past much time with us: he is now gone into Yorkshire to be married. So we have seen Keswick, Grasmere, Ambleside, Ulswater, (where the Clarksons live,) and a place at the other end of Ulswater; I forget the name: to which we travelled on a very sultry day, over the middle of Helvellyn. We have clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, and I have waded up the bed of Lodore. In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before: they make such a spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them, till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the lamps do after an illumination. Mary was excessively tired when she got about half-way up Skiddaw, but we came to a cold rill (than which nothing can be imagined more cold, running over cold stones,) and with the reinforcement of a draught of cold water she surmounted it most manfully. Oh, its fine black head, and the bleak air atop of it, with a prospect of mountains all about and about, making you giddy; and then Scotland afar off, and the border countries so famous in song and ballad! It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure, in my life. But I am returned, (I have now been come home near three weeks; I was a month out,) and you cannot conceive the degradation I felt at first, from

being accustomed to wander free as air among mountains, and bathe in rivers without being controlled by anyone, to come home and work. I felt very little. I had been dreaming I was a very great man. But that is going off, and I find I shall conform in time to that state of life to which it has pleased God to call me. Besides, after all, Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in for good and all then amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to those great places where I wandered about, participating in their greatness. After all, I could not live in Skiddaw. I could spend a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away, know. Still, Skiddaw is a fine creature. My habits are changing, I think, i.e., from drunk to sober. Whether I shall be happy or not remains to be proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat, and the marrow, and the kidneys, i.e., the night, glorious care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright and brilliant! O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any spiritous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such shameworthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me. This is a pitful tale to be read at St. Gothard, but it is just now nearest my heart. Fenwick is a ruined man.

He

is hiding himself from his creditors, and has sent his wife and children into the country. Fell, my other drunken companion, (that has been: nam hic cæstus artemque repono,) is turned editor of a Naval Chronicle. Godwin continues a steady friend, though the same facility does not remain of visiting him often. That has detached Marshall from his house; Marshall, the man who went to sleep when the Ancient Mariner was reading; the old, steady, unalterable

friend of the Professor. Holcroft is not yet come to town. I expect to see him, and will deliver your message. Things come crowding in to say, and no room for 'em. Some things are too little to be told, i.e., to have a preference; some are too big and circumstantial. Thanks for yours, which was most delicious. Would I had been with you, benighted, &c.! I fear my head is turned with wandering. I shall never be the same acquiescent being. Farewell. Write again quickly, for I shall not like to hazard a letter, not knowing where the fates have carried you. Farewell, my dear fellow.

C. LAMB.

TO THOMAS MANNING

Dec. 25th, 1815.

Dear old friend and absentee,

This is Christmas Day 1815 with us; what it may be with you I don't know, the 12th of June next year perhaps; and if it should be the consecrated season with you, I don't see how you can keep it. You have no turkeys; you would not desecrate the festival by offering up a withered Chinese Bantam, instead of the savoury grand Norfolcian holocaust, that smokes all around my nostrils at this moment from a thousand firesides. Then what puddings have you? Where will you get holly to stick in your churches, or churches to stick your dried tea-leaves (that must be the substitute) in? What memorials you can have of the holy time, I see not. A chopped missionary or two may keep up the thin idea of Lent and the wilderness; but what standing evidence have you of the Nativity? 'Tis our rosy-cheeked, home-stalled divines, whose faces shine to the tune of "Unto us a child is born," faces fragrant with the mincepies of half a century, that alone can authenticate the cheerful mystery. I feel my bowels refreshed with the holy tide; my zeal is great against the unedified heathen. Down with the Pagodas down with the idols - Ching-chong-fo and his foolish priesthood! Come out of Babylon, O my friend! for her time is come; and the child that is native, and