go to market, for it closed last night. You cannot
look in to the shops, their backs are shut upon you.
You cannot read the Bible, for it is not good reading
for the sick and the hypochondriacal. You cannot
while away an hour with a friend, for you have no
friend round that Wrekin. You cannot divert yourself
with a stray acquaintance, for you have picked none
up. You cannot bear the chiming of Bells, for
they invite you to a banquet, where you are no visitant.
You cannot cheer yourself with the prospect of a tomorrow’s
letter, for none come on Mondays. You cannot count
those endless vials on the mantlepiece with any hope
of making a variation in their numbers. You have
counted your spiders: your Bastile is exhausted.
You sit and deliberately curse your hard exile from
all familiar sights and sounds. Old Ranking poking
in his head unexpectedly would just now be as good
to you as Grimaldi. Any thing to deliver you
from this intolerable weight of Ennui. You are
too ill to shake it off: not ill enough to submit
to it, and to lie down as a lamb under it. The
Tyranny of Sickness is nothing to the Cruelty of Convalescence:
’tis to have Thirty Tyrants for one. That
pattering rain drops on your brain. You’ll
be worse after dinner, for you must dine at one to-day,
that Betty may go to afternoon service. She insists
upon having her chopped hay. And then when she
goes out, who
was something to you, something
to speak to—what an interminable afternoon
you’ll have to go thro’. You can’t
break yourself from your locality: you cannot
say “Tomorrow morning I set off for Banstead,
by God”: for you are book’d for Wednesday.
Foreseeing this, I thought a
cheerful letter
would come in opportunely. If any of the little
topics for mirth I have thought upon should serve you
in this utter extinguishment of sunshine, to make
you a little merry, I shall have had my ends.
I love to make things comfortable. [
Here is an
erasure.] This, which is scratch’d out was
the most material thing I had to say, but on maturer
thoughts I defer it.
P.S.—We are just sitting down to dinner
with a pleasant party, Coleridge, Reynolds the dramatist,
and Sam Bloxam: to-morrow (that is, to_day_),
Liston, and Wyat of the Wells, dine with us. May
this find you as jolly and freakish as we mean to
be.
C. LAMB.
[Addressed to “T. Dibdin Esq’re.
No. 4 Meadow Cottages, Hastings, Sussex.”
“You have counted your spiders.”
Referring, I suppose, to Paul Pellisson-Fontanier,
the academician, and a famous prisoner in the Bastille,
who trained a spider to eat flies from his hand.
“Grimaldi”—Joseph Grimaldi,
the clown. Ranking was one of Dibdin’s
employers.
“A pleasant party.” Reynolds, the
dramatist, would be Frederic Reynolds (1764-1841);
Bloxam we have just met; and Wyat of the Wells was
a comic singer and utility actor at Sadler’s
Wells.
Canon Ainger remarks that as a matter of fact Dibdin
was a religious youth.]