NOTES LAMB'S SPECIMENS THE history of Lamb's Specimens was told so clearly by the late Mr. Dykes Campbell in The Athenæum for August 25, 1894, in an article that has not been reprinted, that I have preferred to transfer his words to these pages rather than offer my own, which in such a matter must have less of authority. The sudden death of Mr. Dykes Campbell in the midst of his exhaustive and inspired studies in the period of Coleridge and Lamb was a blow which other students of that period can never too much regret. Certain slight additions to Mr. Dykes Campbell's narrative, which I have made, are in square brackets. "In the quaint little 'Autobiography' which Lamb wrote in 1827 [see Vol. I., page 320], after giving a modestly incomplete list of his Works (including those he had left behind him at the India House), he adds with an air of just satisfaction, 'He also was the first to draw the public attention to the old English Dramatists in a work called Specimens of English Dramatic Writers who lived about the Time of Shakspeare, published about fifteen years since.' In reality nineteen years had elapsed, for the book was issued in 1808. The preparation of the material for publication had engaged his attention during 1807 and a part of 1808, but of letters written while it was going on, only five have come down to us, and in only one of them is the book even mentioned. [One other letter referring to the matter has since come to light, from Lamb to Clarkson, in June, 1807, and another written by Hazlitt, printed in Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's Lamb and Hazlitt, 1900, wherein, on January 10, 1808, Hazlitt speaks of 'some lively notes he [Lamb] is at present writing on dead authors.'] "Notwithstanding the scantiness of our direct information, however, the history of the work may easily be gathered from published correspondence. This opens in May, 1796, with the rich series of letters addressed to Coleridge, many passages in which show that the writer was already, at the beginning of his twenty-first year, deeply read in the works of some of the dramatists who lived about the time of Shakespeare.' In June he transcribed for Coleridge's benefit passages from 'A Wife for a Month,' 'Bonduca,' 'A Very Woman,' and The Two Noble Kinsmen,' taken from 'a little extract-book I keep, which is full of quotations, from Beaumont and Fletcher in particular, in which authors I can't help thinking there is a greater richness of poetical fancy than in any one, Shakespeare excepted. . . . I mean not to lay myself open by saying they exceed Milton, and perhaps Collins in sublimity. But don't you conceive all poets, after Shakespeare, yield to 'em in variety of genius? Massinger treads close on their heels; but you are most probably as well acquainted with his writings as your humble servant." [The later extract books, by the way, are now preserved by Mr. Godfrey Locker-Lampson at Rowfant. In addition to a number of the passages from old plays, Lamb copied into them many old ballads and other things that pleased his fancy.] "Three months later [in September, 1796] the shock occasioned by a real tragedy in his own family quenched all appetite for the fictitious. 'I burned all my own verses,' he wrote to Coleridge in December, 'all my book of extracts from Beaumont and Fletcher and a thousand sources; but before the spring of 1797 the clouds had broken, and Lamb had resumed both the writing of verse and the reading of the dramatists. In April he referred to the exquisite thing yeleped "The Faithful Shepherdess," and asked Coleridge to rejoice with him in the acquisition of Fairfax's Godfrey of Bullen for half-a-crown. The old favourite passages from the dramatists were probably retranscribed into a new note-book [this is proved by the Rowfant treasures], for three out of the four sent in the letter of the previous summer found a place in the Specimens; one of them-that from Massinger-having in the meantime been chosen as motto for Lamb's contributions to the joint volume (with Coleridge and Lloyd) published in 1797 [see Vol. V. of this edition, page 282]; while another—that from The Two Noble Kinsmen'-had blossomed anew in Coleridge's 'Osorio.' [Thus] in 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' Palamon and Arcite are conversing in prison. Says Arcite : This is all our world: We shall know nothing here but one another; In 'Osorio Alhadra, describing her life in prison, says :— In darkness I remained, counting the clocks "When, in 1798-1799, the friendship with Coleridge underwent a brief eclipse, Southey became Lamb's confidant. Of the old playwrights, Marlowe was then in the ascendant, and of the old poets, Wither and Quarles. It was at this time that Lamb's enthusiasm crystallised in the form of John Woodvil [see Vol. V., pp. 131 and 350], and that Southey was taught to see the beauties of the writings by which it had been inspired. In the following year [1800] the spell was cast over Wordsworth, who was proselytised to the length of desiring to buy the works of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and their peers a commission of inquiry as to the cost having been sent to Lamb. But probably no one, or hardly any one outside Lamb's little circle, which was then at its smallest, cared for any of the Elizabethans except Shakespeare; and even Shakespeare at that period was kept in evidence mainly by the acting of mutilated stage-versions of his plays, and by the aid of an active but purblind set of editors and scholiasts.1 Lamb, however, was never discouraged, and in this wintry time, by much reading and study, kept his love for the old masters warm. "In June, 1804, Southey informed Coleridge that he had proposed to Messrs. Longman to publish a collection of the scarcer and better old poets, beginning with Piers Plowman. If it be done,' he added, 'my name must stand to the prospectus, and Lamb shall take the job and the emolument-for whom in fact I invented it, being a fit thing to be done and he the man fit to do it.' [In May of the same year, I might interpolate, Southey had written to his wife: 'I saw Longman yesterday, who was very glad to see me. I am trying to make him publish a collection of the scarce old English poets, which will be the fittest thing in the world for Lamb to manage, if he likes it; or, perhaps, to manage with my co-operation.'] George Ellis's recently published and successful Specimens of the Early English Poets probably stood in the way of Southey's scheme, for when he himself undertook the task for Messrs. Longman he was made to begin his selections at the point at which Ellis had stopped. As Lamb was at this time almost desperately in need of some paying literary work, the frustration of Southey's benevolent scheme must have been a great disappointment. But we shall probably not be far wrong if we assume that out of the correspondence respecting the proposals arose the first idea of a comprehensive selection from the old dramatists—a department which had not entered into the scheme either as formed by Southey or as modified by the publishers. The single letter of 1804 which survives chances to be addressed to Southey, but it has no concern with literature; and if the idea of the Specimens had occurred to Lamb at this time, it must have gone to sleep for lack of encouragement, seeing that in the autumn of 1805 he felt that he 'must do something, or we shall get very poor.' Relief was sought in the composition of Mr. H- [see Vol. V., pp. 180 and 368], a task which occupied all his leisure during the ensuing six months. It was on the failure of the farce at Drury Lane in December, 1806, that Lamb set about the Specimens, apparently under an arrangement with Messrs. Longman. That he did not content himself with the material supplied by his own shelves or by private borrowings, but ransacked the rich stores of the British Museum, is shown by the preface, in which he states that more than a third part of the extracts are from plays which are to be found only in the British Museum, and in some scarce private libraries;' and though no special mention is there made of the Garrick collection, he states in his letter to Hone of January, 1827 1 Mr. Dykes Campbell probably exaggerates a little. The editors were not so ignorant as he suggests. Malone, for example, had a wonderful collection of old plays. [see page 397], that he had used it in 1807-1808. But my time was but short,' he wrote, 'and my subsequent leisure has discovered in it a treasure rich and exhaustless beyond what I then imagined.' The probability is that his earlier Museum researches were necessarily confined to the brief office holidays of 1807 and 1808—perhaps to the former only, for in February, 1808, Lamb told Manning the book would be 'out this summer.' [The letter to Clarkson mentioned above shows that part of the summer holiday of 1807 was given to the Museum.] As the Monthly Review, however, did not notice the Specimens until April, 1809, it is likely that publication had been delayed until the end of 1808, and that Lamb had, consequently, been able to utilise his second summer holiday. The letters of the period are scanty, and the only mention of the Specimens occurs in one to Manning. Longman is to print it,' he writes, and be at all the expense and risk, and I am to share the profits after all deductions, i.e., a year or two hence I must pocket what they please to tell me is due to me. But the book is such as I am glad there should be. It is done out of old plays at the Museum, and out of Dodsley's collection, &c.' "Talfourd tells us that the Specimens was 'received with more favour than Lamb's previous works,' but that its influence spread slowly. This is the less surprising seeing that the Monthly critic proclaimed that in the notes he found 'nothing very remarkable except the style, which is formally abrupt and elaborately quaint,' while he resented the strong eulogies bestowed on some of the dramatists. [This critic also asked if Comus was not good enough for Mr. Lamb, on the ground that Lamb said in the last sentence of the Preface that no good serious drama had been written since the death of Charles I. except Samson Agonistes. Lamb wrote to Coleridge: 'So because they do not know, or won't remember, that Comus was written long before, I am to be set down as an undervaluer of Milton. Coleridge, do kill these reviews, or they will kill us; kill all we like. Be a friend to all else, but their foe.' In the Annual Review for 1808 was an admirably discriminating and appreciative article, possibly (see Lamb's letter of June 7, 1809) from Coleridge's pen. The critic quotes the notes on 'The Witch' (page 144) and 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' (page 341) as particularly fine, and considers the mad scene from 'The Spanish Tragedy' (page 8) the gem of the selections.] "The great quarterlies allowed this book, the publication of which constituted an epoch in the study of one of the most important sections of our national literature, to pass unnoticed-an omission all the more remarkable seeing that, with the exception of Lamb himself, no men, perhaps, were so much interested in its subject as the respective editors of the Edinburgh [Francis Jeffrey] and the Quarterly [William Gifford, editor of Massinger, 1805], the first number of the Quarterly appearing almost simultaneously with the Specimens. [Later, however, as will be seen in the note to Ford's 'Broken Heart' (see page 610), the Quarterly referred to Lamb in the most unfortunate terms.] The sale cannot have been large, for the majority of the copies now extant |