Let me recollect:--How he mourns over the ruins of Blakesmoor (once his
home on holidays), "reduced to an antiquity"! How he stalks, ghost-like,
through the desolate rooms of the South Sea House, or treads the avenues
of the Temple, where the benchers ("supposed to have been children once")
are pacing the stony terraces! Then there is the inimitable Sarah Battle
(unconquered even by Chance), arming herself for the war of whist; and the
young Africans, "preaching from their chimney-pulpits lessons of patience
to mankind." If your appetite is keen, by all means visit Bobo, who
invented roast pig: if gay, and disposed to saunter through the pleasant
lanes of Hertfordshire, go to Mackery End, where the Gladmans and Brutons
will bid you welcome: if grave, let your eyes repose on the face of dear
old Bridget Elia, "in a season of distress the truest comforter." Should
you wish to enlarge your humanity, place a few coins (maravedis) in the
palm of one of the beggars (the "blind Tobits") of London, and try to
believe his tales, histories or fables, as though they were the veritable
stories (told by night) on the banks of the famous Tigris. Do not despise
the poorest of the poor--even the writer of valentines: "All valentines
are not foolish," as you may read in Elia's words; and "All fools' day"
may cheer you, as the fool in "Lear" may make you wise and tolerant.
I could go on for many pages--to the poor relations, and the old books,
and the old actors; to Dodd, who "dying put on the weeds of Dominic;" and
to Mrs. Jordan and Dickey Suet (both whom I well remember); to Elliston,
always on the stage; to Munden, with features ever changing; and to
Liston, with only one face: "But what a face!" I forbear. I pass also over
Comberbatch (Coleridge), borrower of books, and Captain Jackson, and
Barbara S. (Miss Kelly), and go to the rest of my little history. The
"Popular Fallacies," which in course of time followed, and were eventually
added to the second series and re-published, are in manner essays also on
a small scale, brief and dealing with abstract subjects more than the
"Elia." It may be interesting to know that Lamb's two favorites were "That
home is home, though it is never so homely," and "That we should rise with
the lark." In the first of these he enters into all the discomforts and
terrible distractions of a poor man's home; in the second he descants on
the luxuries of bed, and the nutritious value of dreams: "The busy part of
mankind," he says, "are content to swallow their sleep by wholesale: we
choose to linger in bed and digest our dreams." The last "Fallacy" is
remarkable for a sentence which seems to refer to Alice W.: "We were never
much in the world," he says; "disappointment early struck a dark veil
between us and its dazzling illusions:" he then concludes with, "We once
thought life to be something; but it has unaccountably fallen from us
before its time. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why
should we get up?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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