The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous ProseLamb, Charles
General
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous Prose
Lamb, Charles
English literature
her dialogue with Hermes, the _Star of Lethe_, as he is called by one of
these prodigal phrases which Mr. Keats abounds in, which are each a poem
in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a
picture, all the dim regions and their inhabitants, and the sudden
coming of a celestial among them; the charming of her into woman's shape
again by the God; her marriage with the beautiful Lycius; her magic
palace, which those who knew the street, and remembered it complete from
childhood, never remembered to have seen before; the few Persian mutes,
her attendants,
----who that same year
Were seen about the markets: none knew where
They could inhabit;----
the high-wrought splendours of the nuptial bower, with the fading of the
whole pageantry, Lamia, and all, away, before the glance of
Apollonius,--are all that fairy land can do for us. They are for younger
impressibilities. To _us_ an ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy;
and therefore we recur again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of
Isabella and the pot of basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we
have cited, and which we think should disarm criticism, if it be not in
its nature cruel; if it would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to
roses redness, nor light to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the
moon out of the skies, rather than acknowledge she is fair.
SIR THOMAS MORE
(1820)
Of the writings of this distinguished character little is remembered at
present beyond his _Utopia_, and some Epigrams. But there is extant a
massive folio of his Theological Works in English, partly Practical
Divinity, but for the greater part Polemic, against the grand Lutheran
Heresy, just then beginning to flower. From these I many years ago made
some extracts, rejecting only the antiquated orthography, (they being
intended only for my own amusement) except in some instances of proper
names, &c. I send them you as I find them, thinking that some of your
readers may consider them as curious. The first is from a Tract against
Tyndale, called the _Confutation of Tyndale's Answer_.[40] The author of
_Religio Medici_ somewhere says, "his conscience would give him the lye,
if she should say that he absolutely detested or hated any essence _but
the Devil_." Whether Browne was not out in his metaphysics, when he
supposed himself capable of hating, that is, _entertaining a personal
aversion to_, a being so abstracted, or such a Concrete of all
irreconcileable abstractions rather, as usually passes for the meaning
of that name, I contend not; but that the same hatred in kind, which he
professed against our great spiritual enemy, was in downright earnest
cultivated and defended by More against that portentous phenomenon in
those times, a _Heretic_, from his speeches against Luther and Tyndale
cannot for a moment be doubted. His account of poor Hytton which follows
(a reformado priest of the day) is penned with a wit and malice
hyper-satanic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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