The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 705 pages of information about The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6.

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 705 pages of information about The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6.

Suffice it that after sad spirits prolonged thro’ many of its months, as it called them, we have cast our skins, have taken a farewell of the pompous troublesome trifle calld housekeeping, and are settled down into poor boarders and lodgers at next door with an old couple, the Baucis and Baucida of dull Enfield.  Here we have nothing to do with our victuals but to eat them, with the garden but to see it grow, with the tax gatherer but to hear him knock, with the maid but to hear her scolded.  Scot and lot, butcher, baker, are things unknown to us save as spectators of the pageant.  We are fed we know not how, quietists, confiding ravens.  We have the otium pro dignitate, a respectable insignificance.  Yet in the self condemned obliviousness, in the stagnation, some molesting yearnings of life, not quite kill’d, rise, prompting me that there was a London, and that I was of that old Jerusalem.  In dreams I am in Fleetmarket, but I wake and cry to sleep again.  I die hard, a stubborn Eloisa in this detestable Paraclete.  What have I gained by health? intolerable dulness.  What by early hours and moderate meals?—­a total blank.  O never let the lying poets be believed, who ’tice men from the chearful haunts of streets—­or think they mean it not of a country village.  In the ruins of Palmyra I could gird myself up to solitude, or muse to the snorings of the Seven Sleepers, but to have a little teazing image of a town about one, country folks that do not look like country folks, shops two yards square, half a dozen apples and two penn’orth of overlookd gingerbread for the lofty fruiterers of Oxford Street—­and, for the immortal book and print stalls, a circulating library that stands still, where the shew-picture is a last year’s Valentine, and whither the fame of the last ten Scotch novels has not yet travel’d (marry, they just begin to be conscious of the Red Gauntlet), to have a new plasterd flat church, and to be wishing that it was but a Cathedral.  The very blackguards here are degenerate.  The topping gentry, stock brokers.  The passengers too many to ensure your quiet, or let you go about whistling, or gaping—­too few to be the fine indifferent pageants of Fleet Street.  Confining, room-keeping thickest winter is yet more bearable here than the gaudy months.  Among one’s books at one’s fire by candle one is soothed into an oblivion that one is not in the country, but with the light the green fields return, till I gaze, and in a calenture can plunge myself into Saint Giles’s.  O let no native Londoner imagine that health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet and recreative study, can make the country any thing better than altogether odious and detestable.  A garden was the primitive prison till man with promethean felicity and boldness luckily sinn’d himself out of it.  Thence followd Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, playhouses, satires, epigrams, puns—­these all came in on the town part, and the thither side of innocence.  Man found out inventions.

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The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 6 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.