Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1862-10-30
The Grave of Charles Lamb.


In the churchyard of Edmonton the inquir-
ing traveller may, after considerable search,
find the grave of Charles and Mary Lamb.
The churchyard is large, and has an air of
neglect and desolatiOn, and one of the most
neglected parts of it is the grave of the man
whose memory gives the whole scene an in
terest. The grace as a little aoay back from a
Slde path, and IS OUergrOCB 1Clth nettleS and
long grass, while over it towers a hdeous
erection of the tluted order of village archi-
lecture, designed to perpetuate the name of
certain Gideon Rippon, of Eagle House. On
the tombstone, between the dates recording
that Charles Lamb died December II, 1884,
aged fifty and that Mary Anne Lamb
died May 20, 1S47, aged eighty years, are in
serted twelve of the very worst verses that
the ingenuity of friends could have struck
out. In the beautiful and touching lines in
which Wordsworth sketched the character
and the history of his friend he tells us that
he meant the earlier portion of the piece to
be placed on Lambs tombstone, but that other
arrangements had been made. The visitor to
Edmonton may see what was the effusion that
was preferred to Wordsworth's. 1t begins by
declaring that Lambs meek and harmless
mirth ''no more shall gladden. our domestic
hearth" 1t goes on to assure the deceased
that he is not all lost-and that his writings
shall "win many an English bosom pleased to
see that old and happier vein revived in thee"
Everything is in a sort of rude harmOny-the
nettles, the shrine of Gideon Rippon, and the
doggerel. We go out to see the grave of one
of the most charming and original English
writers of the nineteenth century, and we find
a bank of weeds and supereminent mass of
stone or stucco in honor of bank clerk, and
a set of verses for which the schoolboy of
Lord Macaulay's Essays would have been de-,
servedly flogged.
Charles Lamb was one of the
brightest wits and one of the noblest charac-
tiers of the generation that has Just passed
away. But his fun is rather reconcile, and
might easily have no charms for those whose
notions of fun are of broader kind He was,
as Wordsworth said of him, 'good, if e'er a
good man lived" But his goodness was not
OF the sort that the run of men take much
heed OF. The goodness of man who has a
strong sense, among many personal distresses,
of the value Of life, who has a horror of
phraseology that he would consider unmean-
ing or sectarian, and whose good deeds have
all been done at home, hardly answers to the
popular estimate of good man. We cannot get
all the world to care about such character,
and it is, perhaps, better that when feeling is
absent its absence should be undisguised. At
any rate, there is no nonsense or hypocrisy
about the Edmonton authorities. They have
no artificial enthusiasm for the man resting in
their churchyard. They do not trouble their
heads about him, and they do not pretend to.
All this is, however, in great degree nat
ter of chance, and some day probably there
will be vicar, beadle, or sexton at Ed
monitor, who is devoted to his ESSAYS of Ella,
and who will clear the nettles away.
This ChurChyard, or indeed anU nhurnh-
yard-only that the Edmonton churchyard is
little more neglected than most others
may also awaken in us a few reflections as to
literary influence generally. Literary work
ers, like all others, are gathered into the COM
mon grave, not only in the sense that thew
themselves perish, but that their work ceases,
except in rare instances, to have any great
prominence, and is lost in the general in
tluence of the past on the present. There
have been few writers, such as Luther, and
Bacon, and Voltaire, who have really mould
ed the thoughts of succeeding generations in
away so distinctly their own that we cannot
lose the sense of their personal eminence in
the contemplation of the general history of
human thought. But, with most writer's, this
is not so. They are but part of general
movement. They carry the thinking world
some little way in particular direction, and
then that which they have done becomes abb
sorbed in the general way of thinking, which
is habitual to the men and the nations that
come after them.
THE LAKE POETS.
The Lake Poets and their friends have stood
apart from the generation in which they lived.
At first their writings were abused and ridi-
duled by the many, and admired with some
thing of the exaggeration of contradiction by
the few. Then they were for few years SUI
preme. A generation of young gentlemen
grew up to whom Wordsworth was the source
of all that was definite in poetcal feeling, and
to whom Coleridge opened vision of a new
christian philosophy. They know no wit like
the wit of Charles Lamb, and honestly tried,
if they failed, to find comfort in the laborious
pedantry of The Doctor Now Wordsworth
is little read by the young. They prefer
mourning imaginary friends in the metre of
IN Nentoriam, or indulging in those combina-
ton of lines of various length, and those mys-
,g,,l til H.