blunt the edge of delicate desire? Did you flesh
maiden teeth in it? Not that I sent the pig, or
can form the remotest guess what part Owen could play
in the business. I never knew him give anything
away in my life. He would not begin with strangers.
I suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but
at the unlucky juncture of time being absent, the
present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess
an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could
never think of sending away. Teals, wigeons,
snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese—your
tame villatic things—Welsh mutton, collars
of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted
char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines,
I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself.
They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop
somewhere—where the fine feeling of benevolence
giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity—there
my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs
are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself.
Nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing
done to Nature who bestowed such a boon upon me, if
in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift.
One of the bitterest pangs of remorse I ever felt was
when a child—when my kind old aunt had
strained her pocketstrings to bestow a sixpenny whole
plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the
Borough, I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant,
but thereabouts—a look-beggar, not a verbal
petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity
I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little
in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of
a sudden my old aunt’s kindness crossed me—the
sum it was to her—the pleasure she had a
right to expect that I—not the old impostor
—should take in eating her cake—the
cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of a
Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose.
I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously,
that I think I never suffered the like—and
I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy,
and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake
has long been masticated, consigned to dunghill with
the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.
But when Providence, who is better to us all than
our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation
and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it more
in the spirit of the donor’s purpose.
Yours (short of pig) to command in everything.
C.L.
[This letter probably led to the immediate composition
of the Elia essay “A Dissertation on
Roast Pig” (see Vol. II. of the present
edition), which was printed in the London Magazine
for September, 1822. See also “Thoughts
on Presents of Game,” Vol. I. of this edition.
“Owen.” Lamb’s landlord in
Russell Street.
“My kind old aunt... the Borough.”
This is rather perplexing. Lamb, to the best
of our knowledge, never as a child lived anywhere but
in the Temple. His only aunt of whom we know
anything lived with the family also in the Temple.
But John Lamb’s will proves Lamb to have had
two aunts. The reference to the Borough suggests
therefore that the aunt in question was not Sarah
Lamb (Aunt Hetty) but her sister.]