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And upon wet days in my library, I conjure up the image of the thin, bent old gentleman Charles Lamb to sit over against me, and I watch his kindly, beaming eye, as he recites with poor stuttering voice, between the whiffs of his pipe, over and over, those always new stories of "Christ's Hospital," and the cherished "Blakesmoor," and "Mackery End."
Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR! have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam" till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility?
Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too fervently in your idol worship, walks and windings of BLAKESMOOR! for this, or what sin of mine, has the plough passed over your pleasant places? I sometimes think that as men, when they die, do not die all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be a hope a germ to be revivified.
His lameness was caused by the fall of a stone in 1796, but I doubt if the leg were really amputated. The description in this essay of Blakesware, the seat of the Plumers, is supplemented by the essay entitled "Blakesmoor in H shire."
By Blakesmoor Lamb meant Blakesware, the manor-house near Widford, in Hertfordshire, where his grandmother, Mary Field, had been housekeeper for many years. Compare the essay "Dream-Children." Blakesware, which was built by Sir Francis Leventhorpe about 1640, became the property of the Plumers in 1683, being then purchased by John Plumer, of New Windsor, who died in 1718.
Compared with his possession of its beauties, its walks, tapestried walls and family portraits, nay, even of the ghosts of former proprietors, the possession by the legal owner was utterly nugatory, unreal: "Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its twelve Cæsars;... mine, too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair of authority.... Mine, too whose else? thy costly fruit-garden ... thy ampler pleasure-garden ... thy firry wilderness.... I was the true descendant of those old W 's, and not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places."
Lamb's friend Southey, in writing to a correspondent, pronounces the following opinion: "Lamb is printing his play, which will please you by the exquisite beauty of its poetry, and provoke you by the exquisite silliness of its story." This visit was, in later years, recorded in the charming paper entitled "Blakesmoor in H shire."
Mine too, BLAKESMOOR, was thy noble Marble Hall, with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Cæsars stately busts in marble ranged round: of whose countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of my wonder; but the mild Galba had my love. There they stood in the coldness of death, yet freshness of immortality.
What would the Christian Hero, writing to his Prue that he would be with her in a pint of wine's time, have said to "Blakesmoor" and "Oxford in the Vacation"? Yet Lamb and Steele are both consummate masters of the essay, and Holmes, in the "Autocrat", has given it a new charm.
What cool craniums those old inditers of folios must have had, what a mortified pulse! Well, once more I throw myself on your mercy. Wishing peace in thy new dwelling, The essay "Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire," in the "London Magazine" for September, 1824. December 1, 1824.