The Sun.
London, England, 1866-11-01 00:00:00

NEW ZEALAND.

The London agent of the New Zealand Govern-
ment (Mr. John Morrison) has received the follow-
ing telegram from the Secretary to the Colonial
Government :

" GALLED Oct. 19.

" The Ne w Zealand Legislature is still in ses-
sion. Mr. Stafford has reconstructed the Ministry.
" The stamp duties were carried by a large
majority.
" The yield of gold and the revenue are increas-

ing.
" Country tranquil.
" The 14th, 50th, and 57th Regiments are leav-

ing.
" The Governor is going on a tour into the in-

terior."

LITERATURE.

" Barry Cornwall's" Memoirs of " Elia."
Charles Lamb. A Memoir. By Bryan Procter.
One Volume. Pp. 252. Moxon and Co.

For this charming volume the lovers of the de-
lightful " Elia" have reason to be grateful to
" Barry Cornwall." At the very outset of our
remarks, indeed, we, for one, would hero frankly
acknowledge ourselves to be so. We accept Mr.
Procter's recollections of his dear old friend with
more than pleasure, with livelier feelings even than
those of admiration, we accept them with a sense of
gratitude. They are jotted down, as their author
himself tolls us, in his seventy-seventh year
thirty-two years after the death of Charles Lamb—
one good half-century after the occasion upon
which Elia and Barry Cornwall were first brought
together, after they first began their affectionate
and thenceforth memorable friendship. Written
though these pages aro, however, long after the
termination by death of that very notable friend-
ship, it is surprising to observe how vividly the
survivor's retrospective survey brings forth to
the view of this later generation the whole
career, and character, and genius, and idiocyn-
cracy of the man he himself, so long ago and so
thoroughly appreciated. It is a likeness drawn from
memory—and that, moreover, as we have said, after
the lapse of two-and-thirty years—and it is one that
has been drawn thus more accurately from memory
than the vast majority of likenesses are when taken
from the life, from a deliberate succession of actual
sittings. Already, it is true, Charles Lamb has
been sketched after a similar fashion, sometimes
almost to the very life, by a series of tenderly ap-
preciative delineators of his most whimsical, yet
thoroughly delightful and thoroughly loveable in -
dividuality. William Hazlitt, alone, in effect, three
several times sketched him, doing so, moreover,
with the subtlest delicacy of touch—first of all in
his " Spirit of the Age," afterwards in his " Table
Talk," and finally in his "Plain Speaker." Leigh
Hunt again pencilled him, so to speak, in a sort of
vignette and quite casually, as it were, in the course
of his " Autobiography." John Forster, too, with a
few bold but delicate strokes of the pen, as one might
say drew him in profile after the fashion of Retsch's
Outlines—and that, too, very shortly indeed, after
Elia's demise—in the pages of the New Monthly
Magazine. Sir Thomas Talfourd, again, long after-
wards painted his portraiture with singular vivid-
ness of colouring in a book that was termed (hap-
pily for us by what is now rendered a flagrant
misnomer) " Final Memorials" about him that
radiant limning of Charles Lamb,by Talfourd, for the
first time revealing to us, as by a startling application
of the brilliant effects of chiaroscuro, those hitherto
concealed lights and shadows, those brighter lights
and blacker shadows which, unsuspected by the
world at large, had all that while been dignifying
the history, the eminently tragic and pathe tic his-
tory, of this long-beloved and most delectable
humorist. And now as the very last and as the very
best of all these commemorative tributes to Charles
Lamb, to Elia, to that wisest, and wittiest, and
raciest of all our wise, witty, and racy essayists—
there come to us, crowning and perfecting the
whole delightful series of such portraitures of him
as we have but just now enumerated—these, in
very truth and deed, Final Memorials of Charles
Lamb—m emorials jotted down in his green old age
but with a clear, a firm, and a loving hand, by
Elia's true and trusty friend of two-and-thirty years
ago, Bryan Waller Procter, otherwise Barry Corn-
wall. The book, in every point of view, is worthy
at once of the author and of his subject. It must
realize its writer's purpose—or we are very much
mistaken—even in his own estimation of it. A re-
sult, by the way, which is but very rarely indeed
arrived at—more especially when, as in the present
instance, the author's judgment has by long culture
been rendered refined and sensitive in regard to
blemishes and shortcomings, even to the length of
fastidiousness. Not without emotion in fact could
he even have prepared himself for the task—
judging from his own acknowledgments. In merely
reading over once more (as a refreshing prelimi-
nary, we presume, to his Retrospect)—in merely
reading over once more those old familiar Essays,
meaning the Essays of Elia, he tells us—" Some
of them affect me with a grave pleasure, amounting
to pain. I seem to import into them the very feel-
ing with which he wrote them ; his looks and move-
ments are transfigured, and communicated to me by
the poor art of the printer. His voice, so sincere
and earnest, rings in my ear again. He was no
Feignwell: apart from his joke, never was a man so
real, and free from pretence. No one, as I believe,
will ever taste the flavour of certain writers as he
has done. He was the last true lover of Anti-
quity." Together, moreover, with Charles Lamb's
own dear old delightful face—sweet-mouthed,
large-browed, bright-eyed Elia, with his stam-
mering talk and " immaterial legs," as Tom Hood
called them, Elia in rusty black, like a lay-
ecclesiastic, as Sir Boyle Roche might have it, and
hugging under his arm, if not kissing it, some
rusty old black-letter folio—together, we say, with
Charles Lamb's well-remembered features, form,
voice, gait, manner, tout ensemble—how many others
of his associates must have thronged back upon
Barry Cornwall's remembrance ! As affording us a
succinct commemoration of some among the pick of
those past and gone familiars, let us take a certain
anonymous T. W.'s recollections of the " set," jotted
down by him very recently at Brussels and, of
course still more recently, published in the columns
of Notes and Queries. Writing of Charles
Lamb and his Contemporaries, as he still
recalls them bodily, as it were, not as will be seen
conversationally to his recollection, " J. W." says
in Notes and Queries—" Of the discourse of these
dii majores I have no recollection now ; but the
faces of some of them I can still partially recall.
llazlitt's, for instance, keen and aggressive, with
eyes that flashed out epigram. Tom Hood's, a
Methodist parson's face : not a ripple breaking
the lines of it, though every word he dropped was a
pun, and every pun roused a roar of laughter.
Leigh Hunt's,parcel genial, parcel democratic, with
as much rabid politics on his lips as honey from
Mount Hybla. Miss Kelly's, plain, but engaging.
(The most unprofessional of actresses, and unspoiled
of women : the bloom of the child on her cheek, un-
defaced by the rouge, to speak in a metaphor.) She
was one of the most dearly welcome of Lamb's
guests. Wordsworth's, farmerish and. respectable,
but with something of the great poet occasionally
breaking out, and glorifying forehead and eyes.
Then there was Martin Burney, ugliest of men,
hugest of eaters, honestest of friends. I see him
closeted with Alary Lamb, reading the Gospel of St.
John for the first time. And Sheridan Knowles,
burly and jovial, striding into Lamb's breakfast
room one spring morning—a great bunch of May
blossom in bis hand. And George Darley, scholar
and poet—slow of speech and gentle of strain : Miss
Kelly's constant shadow in her walks amongst the
Enfield woodlands." Reverting, however, to the
more copious recollections that are here set forth of
these and others in the goodly book recently penned
and issued from the press for the delight of this later
generation (the first instalment of posterity to Elia)
we would adduce here at once without further
parley evidence distinct and conclusive that,
charmed as we acknowledge ourselves to have
been with the work as a whole, we have not viewed
it by any means through a species of infatuation, re-
maining obtuse even to those minor flaws and
petty deficiences which are in truth inevitable
in all remotely retrospective recollections of this
character. To this end we would here parti-
cularize two instances in which it appears to us that
Mr. Procter would do well, before allowing the
work to go into another edition, by subjecting the
text as it at present stands to some slight revision
or emendation. In the first of these instances he is
evidently in some confusion (quite unconsciously to
himself) as to the paternity of a very simple phrase—
to wit, that of browsing upon certain portions of
literature. At page 23, in the first instance, he dis-
tinctly attributes the authorship of the phrase to
Charles Lamb_remarking, " He and his sister were
(to use his own words) ' tumbled into a spacious
closet of good old English reading, and browsed at
will on that fair and wholesome pasturage." Never-
theless, at page 50 Barry Cornwall—eschewing
rll italics indicative of quotation puts forth

the very same phrase quite as distinctly as his own
observing that " Coleridge had browsed and expa-
tiated over all the rich regions of literature at home
and abroad." Yet, after all this, at page 70,
when quoting from Hazlitt's " Conversations of
Authors," he makes the author of that book
about authors, he makes Hazlitt himself remark
in reference to Charles Lamb —" He follows
learning as its shadow, but as such he is re-
spectable. [lmagine a respectable shadow, by the
way !] He browses on the husks and leaves of books."
After which—whose, we may surely ask,
bewilderment, was originally this oft-mentioned
phrase about browsing on book-lore—Hazlitt's,
Procter's, or Lamb's? It is a trivial blunder in
itself, no doubt, but still, if worth the making'
worth also the rectifying ! As to the other ineis
already alluded to, though not yet particularised,
it occurs where, speaking of Sir Joshua, Dir.
Procter, not content with remarking, Reynolds
was, indeed, the finest painter," even goes so far
as to assert that he was " especially the most superb
colourist of the English school." Au assertion that
might have passed muster when Sir Joshua's ad'
mirable pictures first left his easel, and in truth
also for some few years afterwards—but that now,
alas ! when the once radiant pigments have paled
and faded away ghost-like upon the canvass, can
only be regarded as provocative of the thought that
they at any rate (whatever Charles Lamb may have
been in Hazlitt's estimate of him) are not among
the shadows that are even respectable ! Of the
personal history of our charming Essayist, as that
history is here related, we are certainly not in this
place about to give the mere epitome of an epitome.
Rather than that, we would refer the reader to the
book itself, confident that long before he has closed
it he will be grateful to us for the recommendation.
In the mere typography of it, it is the goodliest
book we have handled for some time past—an amPle
imperial-octavo, in solid, sombre, brown binding)
on thick toned paper, in noble type that in tbil
rattling railway time gives one's eyes a sense 0'
gratification to look at. Interleaved among the
letter-press, besides all this, there are five
admirably lithographed portraits, taken frnel
very curious original drawings, pencilled fr°ll/,
the life—three out of the five portraits 0'
Charles Lamb himself, the other two being P°,,r-
traits of his Father and of his Sister—of his weak";
minded and all-but imbecile Father, and of his 00
unhappy Sister. The two latter are very distressing
indeed to look at, more especially however the last:
mentioned—remembering, as who can fail to do that
has once read of it, the terrible history of Diary
Lamb's alliction. As to the three portraits
Lamb, they are all of them wonderfully interesting
—one by Cary, one by Meyer, one, and that a veil
noble one indeed, by Hazlitt—Mr. Procter's 013;
favourite among the three, we presume, seeing
that he has selected it for his frontispiece. -Al-
most immediately preceding the appearance
of Barry Cornwall's book-,
at
appeared, it may be remembered, a little square-c°
tome about" Charles Lamb, his Friends, his Haunts,
and his Books," a work penned by Mr. Percy Fit
gerald as a not unwelcome sweeping together nt
stray anecdote, and personal traditions, sbo°
our delightful Elia, littered up and down in various
directions and hitherto uncollected—having eseaPeui
even the eager and loving researches institute''
among others, by such men as Leigh Hunt an',
Thomas Talfourd, in regard to anything at all, n°
matter how apparently trivial, connected in any vilt
with. Lamb and his Contemporaries. That pleasan
little volume of Mr. Fitzgerald's we noticed at the
time of its publication with the praise to which If
conceive it was entitled. Intrinsically, however' .t
,
was no more than it affected to be itself, named'
a thing of shreds and patches, jottings by the vial;
mere aids to a juster appreciation of the simple an;
noble character, of the quaint and delightful genius
of Charles Lamb as a ripe English Scholar, and
~1
one of the truest and raciest of all our Eng°,
Humorists. That little book, in point of fact, Ny'r
in its way a simple avant courier to the ft
more important and valuable tribute to Lam'
which was then already known to be in preparati°
by his old friend Barry Cornwall, and which we 113/,(3
now had the gratification of welcoming with hear'
felt words of mingled gratitude and admiratieni
Altogether the book is as good as any friend ee
either Charles Lamb or Barry Cornwall could hal
wished it to be. It is written, from first to last'
with manly affection, in all sincerity and in all truth-
fulness.