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Once, when he was talking to me about the men of Charles Lamb’s day—The London Magazine set—I asked him what kind of a man was the notorious and infamous Griffiths Wainewright. In a moment Borrow’s face changed: his mouth broke into a Carker-like smile, his eyes became elongated to an expression that was at once fawning and sinister, as he said, “Wainewright!
But we’ll open the gate for you.” I drove along the side-road and they followed slowly behind. When I pulled up at the windmill, another boy, barefooted and curly-headed, ran out of the barn to tie my team for me. He was a handsome one, this chap, fair-skinned and freckled, with red cheeks and a ruddy pelt as thick as a lamb’s wool, growing down on his neck in little tufts.
The conductors are too hurried and too preoccupied pocketing their share of the receipts to keep count. “When he passes, I just look blank!” remarked the ingenious youth. Of all the individuals, however, in the community, our idle class suffer the most acutely from lack of time, though, like Charles Lamb’s gentleman, they have all there is.
Her broad, healthy, red face had a look of blank idiocy and the fixed stare in her eyes was unpleasant, in spite of their meek expression. She wandered about, summer and winter alike, barefooted, wearing nothing but a hempen smock. Her coarse, almost black hair curled like lamb’s wool, and formed a sort of huge cap on her head.
He was now beyond the fear of being tempted to commit forgery, and being hung in consequence—a possibility, which was the occasion of one of Lamb’s wittiest letters. The gentle Elia made merry over the chance of a Quaker poet being hung. Amiable and liberal as was Bernard Barton, he could and did strike hard when occasion required.
There are bon mots, like many of Charles Lamb’s, which are a sort of facetious hybrids, we hardly know whether to call them witty or humorous; there are rather lengthy descriptions or narratives, which, like Voltaire’s “Micromégas,” would be more humorous if they were not so sparkling and antithetic, so pregnant with suggestion and satire, that we are obliged to call them witty.
Not only in Walpole’s case and Gray’s, but also in Charles Lamb’s, we apply the same rules of criticism to the letters as we apply to the published utterances that appeared in the writer’s lifetime.
Murdock, for often, when he looked at that lady, his eyes “skrinkled up,” although there was not a smile on his face. “A week is all I need,” Mrs. Murdock declared. “If it worn’t for other folks who are keeping me waiting, I’d have that hull place fixed as clean as a whistle in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Now I’ll put a price on everything, so’s you won’t be bothered what to charge.
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