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Updated: June 24, 2025
Writing to P.G. Patmore in 1827 Lamb says: "I have been to a funeral, where I made a pun, to the consternation of the rest of the mourners."
He talked also of Walt Whitman and Coventry Patmore, and asked the last news of Allingham: when suddenly, as it seemed, the little horse came again, in his winter coat, and carried us to the station, and that day was done. There is a bit of description of Emerson as he appeared at a political meeting in his earlier years which I love to remember.
Coventry Patmore used the octosyllabic stanza perfectly, inasmuch as he never left it either heavily or thinly packed. Moreover those first poems had a composure which was the prelude to the peace of the Odes.
"He that wrongs his friend, Wrongs himself more; and ever bears about A silent court of justice in his breast; Himself the judge and jury, and himself The prisoner at the bar, ever condemned. And that drags down his life." How easy to keep free from sin, How hard that freedom to recall! For dreadful truth it is, that men Forget the heavens from which they fall. Cov. Patmore.
I end here upon Hardy and Meredith; because this parting of the ways to open optimism and open pessimism really was the end of the Victorian peace. There are many other men, very nearly as great, on whom I might delight to linger: on Shorthouse, for instance, who in one way goes with Mrs. Browning or Coventry Patmore. I mean that he has a wide culture, which is called by some a narrow religion.
Mary Lamb speaks of him as helping the Sheridans, father and son, with a pantomime; but of the work we know nothing definite. I do not consider the play printed in part in the late Charles Kent's edition of Lamb, on the authority of P.G. Patmore, either to be by Lamb or to correspond to Mary Lamb's description. His testamentary beneficence. Lamb was not joking.
There was Collier, who afterwards became My Lord Patmore; Rooke, who rose to be a major-general in the English army; Hales, for many years Governor of Chelsea Hospital; Venner, the son of one of Cromwell's soldiers, who had strange notions about a fifth monarchy which was to be held by our Lord himself, but who was a good fighting man; and some others who came to nothing and left no mark.
London society has put him even more out of patience than usual with Liverpool dinners, and I know he is wishing he were at home at this moment. Last evening he was reading to me the rare and beautiful "Espousals" of Coventry Patmore. Have you seen "The Angel in the House" yet?
"And this is 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' And here's a sonnet, 'It was not like your great and gracious ways' ? Coventry Patmore. Well, young man, you've a catholic taste." "I don't rightly belong to any church," said Dickie gravely. "My mother is a Methodist." Lorrimer moved; abruptly away and moved abruptly back. "Where were you educated, Dick?"
But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. The suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity of Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano of Francis Thompson.
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