The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2: Elia and The Last Essays of EliaLamb, Charles
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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2: Elia and The Last Essays of Elia
Lamb, Charles
English essays
Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief running into rage) in
the Poem,--the last in the collection accompanying the above,--which
from internal testimony I believe to be Lord Brooke's,--beginning with
"Silence augmenteth grief,"--and then seriously ask himself, whether
the subject of such absorbing and confounding regrets could have been
_that thing_ which Lord Oxford termed him.
NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO
Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember that he ever
deliberately walked into the Exhibition at Somerset House in his life.
He might occasionally have escorted a party of ladies across the way
that were going in; but he never went in of his own head. Yet the
office of the Morning Post newspaper stood then just where it does
now--we are carrying you back, Reader, some thirty years or more--with
its gilt-globe-topt front facing that emporium of our artists' grand
Annual Exposure. We sometimes wish, that we had observed the same
abstinence with Daniel.
A word or two of D.S. He ever appeared to us one of the finest
tempered of Editors. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, was equally
pleasant, with a dash, no slight one either, of the courtier. S. was
frank, plain, and English all over. We have worked for both these
gentlemen.
It is soothing to contemplate the head of the Ganges; to trace the
first little bubblings of a mighty river;
With holy reverence to approach the rocks,
Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song.
Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's exploratory ramblings
after the cradle of the infant Nilus, we well remember on one fine
summer holyday (a "whole day's leave" we called it at Christ's
Hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun, not very well provisioned
either for such an undertaking, to trace the current of the New
River--Middletonian stream!--to its scaturient source, as we had read,
in meadows by fair Amwell. Gallantly did we commence our solitary
quest--for it was essential to the dignity of a DISCOVERY, that no eye
of schoolboy, save our own, should beam on the detection. By flowery
spots, and verdant lanes, skirting Hornsey, Hope trained us on in many
a baffling turn; endless, hopeless meanders, as it seemed; or as if
the jealous waters had _dodged_ us, reluctant to have the humble spot
of their nativity revealed; till spent, and nigh famished, before set
of the same sun, we sate down somewhere by Bowes Farm, near Tottenham,
with a tithe of our proposed labours only yet accomplished; sorely
convinced in spirit, that that Brucian enterprise was as yet too
arduous for our young shoulders.
Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the traveller is the
tracing of some mighty waters up to their shallow fontlet, than it is
to a pleased and candid reader to go back to the inexperienced essays,
the first callow flights in authorship, of some established name in
literature; from the Gnat which preluded to the Æneid, to the Duck
which Samuel Johnson trod on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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