LETTER 103

Charles Lamb to Thomas Manning [November, 1802.]

My dear Manning,--I must positively write, or I shall miss you at Toulouse. I sit here like a decayed minute hand (I lie; _that_ does not _sit_), and being myself the exponent of no time, take no heed how the clocks about me are going. You possibly by this time may have explored all Italy, and toppled, unawares, into Etna, while you went too near those rotten-jawed, gap-toothed, old worn-out chaps of hell,--while I am meditating a quiescent letter to the honest postmaster at Toulouse. But in case you should not have been _felo de se_, this is to tell you, that your letter was quite to my palate--in particular your just remarks upon Industry, damned Industry (though indeed you left me to explore the reason), were highly relishing.

I've often wished I lived in the Golden Age, when shepherds lay stretched upon flowers, and roused themselves at their leisure,--the genius there is in a man's natural idle face, that has not learned his multiplication table! before doubt, and propositions, and corollaries, got into the world! _Now_, as Joseph Cottle, a Bard of Nature, sings, going up Malvern Hills,

"How steep! how painful the ascent! It needs the evidence of _close deduction_ To know that ever I shall gain the top."

You must know that Joe is lame, so that he had some reason for so singing. These two lines, I assure you, are taken _totidem literis_ from a very _popular_ poem. Joe is also an Epic Poet as well as a Descriptive, and has written a tragedy, though both his drama and epopoiea are strictly _descriptive_, and chiefly of the _Beauties of Nature_, for Joe thinks _man_ with all his passions and frailties not a proper subject of the _Drama_. Joe's tragedy hath the following surpassing speech in it. Some king is told that his enemy has engaged twelve archers to come over in a boat from an enemy's country and way-lay him; he thereupon pathetically exclaims--

"_Twelve_, dost thou say? Where be those dozen villains!"

Cottle read two or three acts out to us, very gravely on both sides, till he came to this heroic touch,--and then he asked what we laughed at? I had no more muscles that day. A poet that chooses to read out his own verses has but a limited power over you. There is a bound where his authority ceases.

Apropos: if you should go to Florence or to Rome, inquire what works are extant in gold, silver, bronze, or marble, of Benvenuto Cellini, a Florentine artist, whose Life doubtless, you have read; or, if not, without controversy you must read: so hark ye, send for it immediately from Lane's circulating library. It is always put among the romances, very properly; but you have read it, I suppose. In particular, inquire at Florence for his colossal bronze statue (in the grand square or somewhere) of Perseus. You may read the story in Tooke's "Pantheon." Nothing material has _transpired_ in these parts. Coleridge has indited a violent philippic against Mr. Fox in the "Morning Post," which is a compound of expressions of humility, gentlemen-ushering-in most arrogant charges. It will do Mr. Fox no real injury among those that know him.

[Manning's letter of September 10 had told Lamb he was on his way to Toulouse.

Cottle's epic was _Alfred_. The quoted lines were added in the twelfth edition. He had also written _John the Baptist_.

"Cellini's Life." Lamb would probably have read the translation by Nugent, 1771. Cellini's Perseus in bronze is in the Loggia de' Lanzi at Florence.]