The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb. Charles Lamb
What, ho, Barnardine!
Bar. [Within.] A pox o' your throats! Who makes that noise there? What are you?
Pom. Your friends, sir; the hangman. You must be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death.
Bar. [Within.] Away, you rogue, away! I am sleepy.
Abhor. Tell him he must awake, and that quickly too.
Pom. Pray, Master Barnardine, awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards.
Abhor. Go in to him, and fetch him out.
Pom. He is coming, sir, he is coming; I hear his straw rustle.
Abhor. Is the axe upon the block, sirrah?
Pom. Very ready, sir.
Act IV., Scene 3, lines 23–40.
Page 73, line 3. The Angel in Milton.
Made so adorn for they delight the more,
So awful, that with honour thou may'st love
Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.
Paradise Lost, VIII., 576–578.
Page 73, line 10. An ancestor. This punctilious hero may have been an ancestor of the Plumers, of Blakesware. See the Elia essay on "Blakesmoor, in H——shire."
Page 73, line 7 from foot. A waistcoat that had been mine. The clothes of his clients became the hangman's perquisites. In Lamb's letter to Bernard Barton concerning Thurtell (January 9, 1824) this subject is again played with.
The present essay led to some amusing speculation in the next number of The Reflector, signed M., as to the origin of Jack Ketch. Some of the questions propounded to Pensilis are almost in Lamb's own manner:—
Supposing the race of Ketches to be extinct, what cross does Pensilis think necessary to re-produce the breed? I have a very pretty knack myself at guessing what mixtures of different bloods will generate the ordinary professions of life; as a judge, an alderman, a bishop, &c., &c. but shall be happy to defer to his superior knowledge in this particular experiment of the art. Your correspondent, no doubt, is aware, how many generations it will frequently take a family, who value themselves upon their exterior, to wear out any little deformity; as, for instance, a snub nose, or a long chin. I could mention one noble family, whom it has cost a dozen intermarriages with the yeomanry, to introduce a stouter pair of legs among them; and another, which has been obliged to go through a course of milk-maids, to throw a little colour into their cheeks. Has your correspondent ever considered in what term of years a spirit of Ketchicism may be introduced into a family; and conversely, in how many generations the milk of human kindness may be instilled into, what Burke would call, a pure, unsophisticated dephlegmated, defecated Ketch?
Page 74. On the Danger of Confounding Moral with Personal Deformity.
The Reflector, No. II. Reprinted in the Works, 1818.
Page 79, line 16. The tales of our nursery. In his Elia essay "Dream Children" Lamb recalls his grandmother's narration of the old story of the "Children in the Wood."
Page 79, lines 20–21. Mrs. Radcliffe … Mr. Monk Lewis. The popularity of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), whose Mysteries of Udolpho appeared in 1794, and of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818), whose rival exercise in grisly romance, The Monk, was published in 1795, was then (1811) still considerable, although on the wane.
Page 80. On the Ambiguities Arising from Proper Names.
The Reflector, No. II., 1811. Not reprinted by Lamb.
This paper is known to be Lamb's because he tells the story, in much the same words, in a letter to Wordsworth dated February 1, 1806. The young man who made the mistake of confusing Spencer and Spenser was a brother of Coleridge's Mary Evans. The Hon. William Robert Spencer (1769–1834), the second son of the third Duke of Marlborough, was a Society poet well enough known in his day—the first decade of the last century. His only poem that has survived is "Beth Gelert," a ballad often included in children's poetry books.
In Lamb's Letters the poet Spenser is usually spelt Spencer.
Page 81. On the Genius and Character of Hogarth.
The Reflector, No. III., 1811. The title there ran: "On the Genius and Character of Hogarth; with some Remarks on a Passage in the Writings of the late Mr. Barry." The article was signed L. It was reprinted in the Works, 1818.
Many of Hogarth's pictures, framed in black, hung round Lamb's sitting-room in his various homes. In 1817 Mary Lamb, writing to Dorothy Wordsworth, says that the Hogarths have been taken down from the walls and pasted into a book, but there is proof that some at any rate were framed both at Islington and Enfield.
Hazlitt in his Sketches of the Principal Picture-galleries in England, 1824, wrote, "Of the pictures in the Rake's Progress we shall not here say anything … because they have already been criticised by a writer, to whom we could add nothing, in a paper which ought to be read by every lover of Hogarth and of English genius." The reference was to Lamb's essay.
Page 82, line 1. Old-fashioned house in——shire. Lamb refers again to Blakesware, in Hertfordshire. In a letter to Southey, Oct. 31, 1799, Lamb mentions the Blakesware Hogarths. This would suggest that Hogarth was the first artist that he knew, so many of his recollections dating from the old Hertfordshire days.
Page 84, line 1. Kent, or Caius. See "Table Talk," pages 401–2 of the present volume, for an amplification of this passage many years later. Lamb's version of "Lear" in Tales from Shakespear, 1807, has similar praise of Kent.
Page 84, last line. Ferdinand Count Fathom. See Chapter XXVII. of Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, 1754:—
When he beheld the white cliffs of Albion, his heart throbbed with all the joy of a beloved son, who, after a tedious and fatiguing voyage, reviews the chimnies of his father's house: he surveyed the neighbouring coast of England with fond and longing eyes, like another Moses reconnoitring the land of Canaan from the top of mount Pisgah; and to such a degree of impatience was he inflamed by the sight, that instead of proceeding to Calais, he resolved to take his passage directly from Boulogne, even if he should hire a vessel for the purpose.
Page 88. Footnote. Somewhere in his [Reynolds'] lectures. The passage is in the fourteenth of the Discourses on Painting—on Gainsborough:—
After this admirable artist [Hogarth] had spent the greater part of his life in an active, busy, and, we may add, successful attention to the ridicule of life; after he had invented a new species of dramatic painting, in which probably he will never be equalled, and had stored his mind with infinite materials to explain and illustrate the domestic and familiar scenes of common life, which were generally, and ought to have been always, the subject of his pencil; he very imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great