Frolic, Gentle Lamb

CHARLES LAMB AND HIS FRIENDS--Will D. Howe--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

The rapt one, of the godlike forehead,

The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth;

And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,

Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

Thus, in his Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg, Poet William Wordsworth solemnized the deaths of Poet-Critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Essayist Charles Lamb. Inhabitants of London's historic Inner Temple saw Lamb in a somewhat different context. Sometimes the door of his house near the Thames would open, and out would come Essayist Lamb and his sister Mary, carrying a strait jacket, and quietly crying. All Inner Temple Lane knew that meant that Mary was about to go insane again, and that Charles was taking her to the safety of the local asylum. They also knew that Charles had once been confined there himself, when family worries caused a temporary loss of his mind. The year after he was discharged, Mary suddenly seized a kitchen knife, wounded her imbecile father and stabbed her mother through the heart. Thereafter Charles made a vow never to leave his sister. Unmarried, devoted, they lived together for 35 years (1799-1834). Author Howe's touching study centers around the eccentric, fascinating household of this most curious pair in English literature.

Postage Pilferer. For 33 years Charles worked as a clerk in the East India Company, totting up sales figures for tea, indigo, silks and spices. Neighbors used to set their watches when his tiny figure emerged in the morning. Dressed in black, his spindly legs sheathed in Chinese silk stockings, and carrying a green umbrella, Lamb walked placidly to work. He "looked no one in the face for more than a moment, yet contrived to see everything." Perched on his high office stool, he mailed, at the East India Company's expense, the numerous letters written by his youthful friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.*

Out of office hours, Lamb wrote poems, essays, plays, and made pioneer researches into the then-forgotten works of Elizabethan dramatists. He was warmly but discreetly generous. "The greatest pleasure I know," he once said, "is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out-by accident." He protected his thin skin by constantly laughing at himself. When his first produced play, Mr. H-, flopped, Lamb was found in the front row hissing louder than anyone else.

Once a week Mary opened up the big mahogany table in the book-lined living room and made ready for one of the famous Lamb literary evenings. Once Coleridge talked for two hours without stopping, while Wordsworth nodded approvingly from time to time. Asked later if he had understood what Coleridge was talking about, Wordsworth replied: "Not one syllable." Strangest visitor of all was Painter and Essayist Thomas Griffiths Wainewright--who suddenly departed for Paris. Reason: over a period of years he had quietly poisoned his uncle, his mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law.

Scintillant Insanity. "No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half-a-dozen half sentences as [Lamb] does," wrote Hazlitt. But not even Charles could vie with Mary Lamb in her milder moments of semi-insanity. Then she would imagine she was living in the reign of Queen Anne and electrify her hearers with fantastic, brilliant descriptions of her "life at court."

In 1806 Charles and Mary began work on one of the most celebrated collaborations in English literature--Tales from Shakespeare. Though many of Charles's once-famed puns (sample: "The king never dies, which may be the reason that it always REIGNS here") and Essays of Elia (which include the famed Dissertation upon Roast Pig) seem almost as dated as their author's Chinese silk stockings, the Tales have become a classic. But the authors collaborated only twice again (Poetry for Children and Mrs. Leicester's School). In 1834 Charles slipped, fell, contracted erysipelas, died. Mary, who barely kept her sanity, survived him by 13 years, spent nearly every evening walking to & from his grave.

* "It would be interesting," says Author Howe, "to speculate on the gain to literature of this graft." Coleridge liked the idea so much that he tried to persuade the secretary of a Member of Parliament to send him a free supply of Government sealing wax.

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