modes of being in all seasons), felt our appetite return, and taken up a book, that we can be considered as at all returned to ourselves. And even then our sensations are rather empirical than positive, as after sleep we stretch out our hands to know whether we are awake. This is the time for reading. Books are then indeed “a world both pure and good", into which we enter with all our hearts, after our revival from illness and respite from the tomb, as with the freshness and novelty of youth. They are not merely acceptable as without too much exertion they pass the time and relieve ennui, but from a certain suspension and deadening of the passions, and abstraction of worldly pursuits, they may be said to bring back and be friendly to the guileless and enthusiastic tone of feeling with which we formerly read them. Sickness has weaned us pro tempore from contest and cabal; and we are fain to be docile and children again. All strong changes in our present pursuits throw us back upon the past. This is the shortest and most complete emancipation from our late discomfiture. We wonder that anyone who has read the History of a Foundling1 should labour under an indigestion, nor do we comprehend how a perusal of the Fairy Queen should not ensure the true believer an uninterrupted succession of halcyon days. Present objects bear a retrospective meaning, and point to "a foregone conclusion". Returning back to life with half-strung nerves and shattered strength, we seem as when we first entered it with uncertain purposes and faltering aims. The machine has received a shock, and it moves on more tremulously than before, and not all at once, in the beaten track. Startled at the approach of death, we are willing to get as far from it as we can by making a proxy of our former selves; and finding the precarious tenure by which we hold existence, and its last sands running out, we 1 Fielding's Tom Jones. gather up and make the most of the fragments that memory has stored up for us. Everything is seen through a medium of reflection and contrast. We hear the sound of merry voices in the street, and this carries us back to the recollections of some country town or village group “We see the children sporting on the shore, And hear the mighty waters roaring evermore ". A cricket chirps on the hearth, and we are reminded of Christmas gambols long ago. The very cries in the street seem to be of a former date, and the dry toast eats very much as it did-twenty years ago. A rose smells doubly sweet after being stifled with tinctures and essences, and we enjoy the idea of a journey and an inn the more for having been bed-rid. But a book is the secret and sure charm to bring all these implied associations to a focus. I should prefer an old one, Mr. Lamb's favourite, the Journey to Lisbon1, or the Decameron, if I could get it; but, if a new one, let it be Paul Clifford. That book has the singular advantage of being written by a gentleman, and not about his own class. The characters he commemorates are every moment at fault between life and death, hunger and forced loan on the public; and therefore the interest they take in themselves, and which we take in them, has no cant or affectation in it, but is "lively, audible, and full of vent". A set of well-dressed gentlemen, picking their teeth with a graceful air after dinner, and endeavouring to keep their cravats from the slightest discomposure, and saying the most insipid things in the most insipid manner, do not make a scene. Well, then, I have got the new paraphrase on the Beggar's Opera, am fairly embarked in it; and at the end of the first volume, where I am galloping across the heath with the three highwaymen, while the moon is shining full 1 Fielding's Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. upon them, feel my nerves so braced, and my spirits so exhilarated, that, to say truth, I am scarce sorry for the occasion that has thrown me upon the work and the author-have quite forgot my SICK ROOм, and more than ready to recant the doctrine that Free Admission 1 to the theatre is "The true pathos and sublime for I feel as I read that if the stage shows us the masks of men and the pageant of the world, books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. They are the first and last, the most home-felt, the most heart-felt of all our enjoyments! THER CHARLES LAMB. (1775-1834.) XLIV. ALL FOOLS' DAY. HE compliments of the season to my worthy masters, and a merry first of April to us all! Many happy returns of this day to you-and you and you, Sir,-nay, never frown, man, nor put a long face upon the matter. Do not we know one another? what need of ceremony among friends? we have all a touch of that same-you understand me-a speck of the motley. Beshrew the man who on such a day as this, the general festival, should affect to stand aloof. I am none of those sneakers. I am free of the corporation, and care not who knows it. He that meets me in the forest to-day, shall meet with no wiseacre, I can tell him. Stultus sum. 1 The subject of a paper by Hazlitt in The New Monthly in the same year as this essay. Translate me that, and take the meaning of it to yourself for your pains. What, man! we have four quarters of the globe on our side, at the least computation. Fill us a cup of that sparkling gooseberry-we will drink no wise, melancholy, politic port on this day—and let us troll the catch of Amiens 1-duc ad me-duc ad me -how goes it? Here shall he see, Gross fools as he. Now would I give a trifle to know, historically and authentically, who was the greatest fool that ever lived. I would certainly give him a bumper. Marry, of the present breed, I think I could without much difficulty name you the party. Remove your cap a little further, if you please: it hides my bauble. And now each man bestride his hobby, and dust away his bells to what tune he pleases. I will give you, for my part, The crazy old church clock, Good master Empedocles 2, you are welcome. It is long since you went a salamander-gathering down Ætna. Worse than samphire-picking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy your worship did not singe your mustachios. Ha, Cleombrotus! and what salads in faith did you light upon at the bottom of the Mediterranean? You were founder, I take it, of the disinterested sect of the Calenturists 4. Gebir5, my old freemason, and prince of plasterers at 1 As You Like It, ii. 5. 2 This portion of the essay was apparently suggested by Milton's account of the Paradise of Fools, P. L. iii. 471. 3 A native of Ambracia, who flung himself into the sea after reading Plato on Immortality. 4 Calenture is a tropical fever which sometimes produces in sailors an hallucination that causes them to leap overboard. "Jabir ibn Haijan, an Arabian alchemist of the eighth century. Babel, bring in your trowel, most Ancient Grand! You have claim to a seat here at my right hand, as patron of the stammerers. You left your work, if I remember Herodotus correctly, at eight hundred million toises1, or thereabout, above the level of the sea. Bless us, what a long bell-rope you must have pulled, to call your top workmen to their luncheon on the low grounds of Shinar. Or did you send up your garlic and onions by a rocket? I am a rogue if I am not ashamed to show you our Monument on Fish Street Hill, after your altitudes. we think it somewhat. Yet What, the magnanimous Alexander in tears? —cry, baby, put its finger in its eye, it shall have another globe, round as an orange, pretty moppet! Mister Adams 2-'odso, I honour your coat-pray do us the favour to read to us that sermon, which you lent to Mistress Slipslop-the twenty and second in your portmanteau there-on Female Incontinence-the same-it will come in most irrelevantly and impertinently seasonable to the time of day. Good Master Raymund Lully, you look wise. Pray correct that error. Duns, spare your definitions. I must fine you a bumper, or a paradox. We will have nothing said or done syllogistically this day. Remove those logical forms, waiter, that no gentleman break the tender shins of his apprehension stumbling across them. Landor in his poem Gebir, following the example of Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance, makes Gebir a character of ancient Egyptian history, and adds the fact that he was punished by heaven for his attempt to build a city. Hence Lamb's association of Gebir with Babel. 1A toise=6'395 English feet. 2 Parson Adams and Mrs. Slipslop are characters in Fielding's Joseph Andrews. The former suggested the Vicar of Wakefield. *The "enlightened doctor" (1234-1315), noted for the vanity with which he propounded his fantastic logical doctrines. Johannes Duns Scotus, Doctor Subtilis (d. 1308), the philosophical opponent of Aquinas. |