Chapter 16

CHARLES LAMB TO CHARLES ABRAHAM ELTON

India House

to which place all letters addressed to C.L. commonly come.

[August 17, 1821 (?).]

My dear Sir, You have overwhelmed me with your favours. I have received positively a little library from Baldwyn's. I do not know how I have deserved such a bounty. We have been up to the ear in the classics ever since it came. I have been greatly pleased, but most, I think, with the Hesiod,--the Titan battle quite amazed me. Gad, it was no child's play--and then the homely aphorisms at the end of the works--how adroitly you have turned them! Can he be the same Hesiod who did the Titans? the latter is--

"-----wine Which to madness does incline."

But to read the Days and Works, is like eating nice brown bread, homely sweet and nutritive. Apollonius was new to me. I had confounded him with the conjuror of that name. Medea is glorious; but I cannot give up Dido. She positively is the only Fine Lady of Antiquity: her courtesy to the Trojans is altogether queen-like. Eneas is a most disagreeable person. Ascanius a pretty young master. Mezentius for my money. His dying speech shames Turpin--not the Archbishop I mean, but the roadster of that name.

I have been ashamed to find how many names of classics (and more than their names) you have introduced me to, that before I was ignorant of. Your commendation of Master Chapman arrideth me. Can any one read the pert modern Frenchify'd notes, &c., in Pope's translation, and contrast them with solemn weighty prefaces of Chapman, writing in full faith, as he evidently does, of the plenary inspiration of his author--worshipping his meanest scraps and relics as divine--without one sceptical misgiving of their authenticity, and doubt which was the properest to expound Homer to their countrymen. Reverend Chapman! you have read his hymn to Pan (the Homeric)--why, it is Milton's blank verse clothed with rhyme. Paradise Lost could scarce lose, could it be so accoutred.

I shall die in the belief that he has improved upon Homer, in the Odyssey in particular--the disclosure of Ulysses of himself, to Alcinous, his previous behaviour at the song of the stern strife arising between Achilles and himself (how it raises him above the _Iliad_ Ulysses!) but you know all these things quite as well as I do. But what a deaf ear old C. would have turned to the doubters in Homer's real personality! They might as well have denied the appearance of J.C. in the flesh.--He apparently believed all the fables of H.'s birth, &c.

Those notes of Bryant have caused the greatest disorder in my brain-pan. Well, I will not flatter when I say that we have had two or three long evening's _good reading_ out of your kind present.

I will say nothing of the tenderest parts in your own little volume, at the end of such a slatternly scribble as this, but indeed they cost us some tears. I scrawl away because of interruptions every moment. You guess how it is in a busy office--papers thrust into your hand when your hand is busiest--and every anti-classical disavocation.

[_Conclusion cut away_.]

[Sir Charles Abraham Elton (1778-1853) seems to have sent Lamb a number of his books, principally his _Specimens of the Classical_ _Poets ... from Homer to Tryphiodorus translated into English Verse_, Baldwin, 1814, in three volumes. Lamb refers first to the passage from Hesiod's _Theogony_, and then to his _Works and Days_ (which Chapman translated)--"Dispensation of Providence to the Just and Unjust."

Apollonius Rhodius was the author of _The Argonautics_. Lamb then passes on to Virgil. For the death of Mezentius see the _Aeneid_, Book X., at the end. The makers of broadsides had probably credited Dick Turpin with a dying speech.

"Those notes of Bryant." Lamb possibly refers to Jacob Bryant's _Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer_, 1775, or his pamphlet on the Trojan War, 1795, 1799.

"Your own little volume." Probably _The Brothers and Other Poems_, by Elton, 1820.]