* * * * * Page 61. _The Gipsy's Malison_. First printed in _Blackwood's Magazine_, January, 1829. Lamb had sent it to _The Gem_, but, as he told Procter in a letter on January 22, 1829: "The editors declined it, on the plea that it would _shock all mothers;_ so they published the 'Widow' [Hood's parody of Lamb] instead. I am born out of time. I have no conecture about what the present world calls delicacy. I thought _Rosamund Gray_ was a pretty modest thing. Hessey assures me that the world would not bear it. I have lived to grow into an indecent character. When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Hang[27] the age, I will write for Antiquity!'" In another letter to Procter, Lamb tells the sonnet's history:-- "_January_ 29, 1829. "When Miss Ouldcroft (who is now Mrs. Beddam [Badams], and Bed-dam'd to her!) was at Enfield, which she was in summer-time, and owed her health to its suns and genial influences, she visited (with young lady-like impertinence) a poor man's cottage that had a pretty baby (O the yearnling!), gave it fine caps and sweetmeats. On a day, broke into the parlour our two maids uproarious. 'O ma'am, who do you think Miss Ouldcroft (they pronounce it Holcroft) has been working a cap for?' 'A child," answered Mary, in true Shandean female simplicity.' 'Tis the man's child as was taken up for sheep-stealing.' Miss Ouldcroft was staggered, and would have cut the connection; but by main force I made her go and take her leave of her protégée. I thought, if she went no more, the Abactor or the Abactor's wife (_vide_ Ainsworth) would suppose she had heard something; and I have delicacy for a sheep-stealer. The overseers actually overhauled a mutton-pie at the baker's (his first, last, and only hope of mutton pie), which he never came to eat, and thence inferred his guilt. _Per occasionem cujus_, I framed the sonnet; observe its elaborate construction. I was four days about it. [Here came the sonnet.] Barry, study that sonnet. It is curiously and perversely elaborate. 'Tis a choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed to the structure of it. See you? and was this a fourteener to be rejected by a trumpery annual? forsooth,'twould shock all mothers; and may all mothers, who would so be shocked, be damned! as if mothers were such sort of logicians as to infer the future hanging of _their_ child from the theoretical hangibility (or capacity of being hanged, if the judge pleases) of every infant born with a neck on. Oh B.C.! my whole heart is faint, and my whole head is sick (how is it?) at this damned canting unmasculine age!" [Footnote 27: Talfourd. Canon Ainger gives "Damn"] * * * * * COMMENDATORY VERSES Page 61. _To the Author of Poems, published under the name of Barry Cornwall_. Printed in the _London Magazine_, September, 1820.