personalities, gossipy tabloid anecdotes, and, as in the Journal, much detail about the inhabitants, natural history and topography of North America. Indeed, Lamb’s intellectual meanderings hark back to when Renaissance humanist scholars wrote elaborate treatises which, at an individual, virtuosic level were a means of showcasing their scholarship, while at the level of public service imbued learning with a moral dimension, yet in as diverting a fashion as possible. Certainly a didactic agenda is consistent with Lamb’s post-military profession of schoolmaster, and is reinforced in the so-called Advertisement prefacing the Memoir, where he declares his aim to be ‘to instruct as much as possible the young and unguarded, by furnishing the example of his own life without self-disguise or vanity’ (p. iv). But the reader is left with a sense that the impetus of the Memoir is away from its putative subject of service in the American War, rather as that famous English treatise, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (first published 1621), employs its many digressions – of anatomy, of the misery of scholars, of the air, of love, and so on – so that both writer and reader might forget and subsequently conquer melancholy itself. Lamb’s technique is similarly Burtonesque, in that it is divergent in content and therefore centrifugal in effect, allowing readers only small glimpses of Sergeant Lamb at war as they are made to observe a world in which he and his service record are minor events. Graves instead adapts the broad humanist goal of delightful instruction to create an ethnography of warfare: within the framework of a lively and interesting tale his digressive strategies are convergent and thus centripetal, in that they keep drawing us back towards Lamb and the profession of soldiering, making these the centre of the reader’s imaginative orbit. In dealing with the topic of warfare itself, Lamb prefers an abstract and often indirect approach. For example, stimulated by Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion that the patriot army might make effective use of bows and pikes when it can’t obtain sufficient firearms, he slips on his schoolmaster’s gown and discourses at length on medieval archery and classical spear formations, eventually coming out in favour of firearms (Lamb, Memoir, pp.
England militia (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, pp. 212–13). Graves’s manifesto justifying his reworking of Lamb’s works takes the form of the clever and decorously fictional ‘Roger Lamb’s Note of Explanation’, supposedly produced in December 1814 as a preface to this ‘rewrite’ of the ‘original story’ (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 7). Here ‘Lamb’ professes his ‘vexations and disappointments’ (p. 5) over his publisher’s decision to divide that story into first the Journal, ‘in which he would include the more general and striking parts […] and fat it up with extracts drawn from dependable works of travel and biography’ (p. 6), and then the Memoir, turned into ‘a sad hotch-potch of religious sentiment and irrelevant anecdote’ (p. 7) by ‘a hackney writer, some hedge-parson or other, who could strike the note of contrition that the middling public would heed’ (p. 6). His damning critique of Lamb’s works aside, Graves’s case for the significance of his project rests on the achievements of the British soldier. His narrator argues that the present hostilities with France would greatly favour the book, as calling attention to the thankless heroism once displayed in America by the same regiments then triumphantly engaged under Lord Wellington in the Spanish Peninsula. (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 5) More specifically, his rhetoric hinges on those markers of the soldier’s trade – the details of his uniform – that signify tradition, comradeship and unit pride: I asked this question of old Mr Courtney: ‘When is it, sir, that old campaigners speak most earnestly about the hazards, fatigues, triumphs, and frolics that they have lived through together?’ ‘It is’ (I informed him in the same breath) ‘when a new war is in progress and when the regiments whose badges and facings they once wore are again hotly engaged.’ (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 6)