The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 1: Miscellaneous Prose — John Shaqi
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
This morning, May 2, 1662, having first broken my fast upon eggs and
cooling salades, mellows, water-cresses, those herbes, according to
_Villanovus_ his prescription, who disallows the use of meat in a
morning as gross, fat, hebetant, _feral_, altogether fitter for wild
beasts than men, _e contra_ commendeth this herb-diete for gentle,
humane, active, conducing to contemplation in most men, I betook myselfe
to the nearest fields. (Being in London I commonly dwell in the
_suburbes_, as airiest, quietest, _loci musis propriores_, free from
noises of caroches, waggons, mechanick, and base workes, workshoppes,
also sights, pageants, spectacles of outlandlish birds, fishes,
crocodiles, _Indians_, mermaids, adde quarrels, fightings, wranglings of
the common sort, _plebs_, the rabble, duelloes with fists, _proper to
this island_, at which the stiletto'd and secrete _Italian_ laughs.)
Withdrawing myselfe from these buzzing and illiterate vanities, with a
_bezo las manos_ to the city, I begin to inhale, draw in, snuff up, as
horses _dilatis naribus_ snort the fresh aires, with exceeding great
delight, when suddenly there crosses me a procession sad, heavy,
dolourous, tristfull, melancholick, able to change mirth into dolour,
and overcast a clearer atmosphere than possibly the neighbourhoods of so
great a citty can afford. An old man, a poore man, deceased, is borne on
men's shoulders to a poore buriall, without solemnities of hearse,
mourners, plumes, _mutæ personæ, those personate actors that will weep
if yee skew them a piece of silver_; none of those customed civilities
of children, kinsfolk, _dependants_, following the coffin; he died a
poore man, his friends _assessores opum, those cronies of his that stuck
by him so long as he had a penny_, now leave him, forsake him, shun him,
desert him; they think it much to follow his putrid and stinking carcase
to the grave; his children, if he had any, for commonly the case stands
thus, this poore man his son dies before him, he survives, poore,
indigent, base, dejected, miserable, &c. or if he have any which survive
him, _sua negotia agunt_, they mind their own business, forsooth,
cannot, will not, find time, leisure, _inclination, extremum munus
perficere_, to follow to the pit their old indulgent father, which loved
them, stroked them, caressed them, cockering them up, _quantum potuit_,
as farre as his means extended, while they were babes, chits, _minims_,
hee may rot in his grave, lie stinking in the sun _for them_, have no
buriall at all, they care not. _O nefas!_ Chiefly I noted the coffin to
have been _without a pall_, nothing but a few planks, of cheapest wood
that could be had, _naked_, having none of the ordinary _symptomata_ of
a funerall, those _locularii_ which bare the body having on diversely
coloured coats, _and none black_: (one of these reported the deceased to
have been an almsman seven yeares, a pauper, harboured and fed in the
workhouse of St.
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