The Collected Works of Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb. Charles Lamb

to their sister, they delude her with a story of their having sent Lorenzo abroad to look after their merchandises; but the spirit of her lover appears to Isabella in a dream, and discovers how and where he was stabbed, and the spot where they have buried him. To ascertain the truth of the vision, she sets out to the place, accompanied by her old nurse, ignorant as yet of her wild purpose. Her arrival at it, and digging for the body, is described in the following stanzas, than which there is nothing more awfully simple in diction, more nakedly grand and moving in sentiment, in Dante, in Chaucer, or in Spenser:—

      She gaz'd into the fresh-thrown mould, as though

       One glance did fully all its secrets tell;

       Clearly she saw, as other eyes would know

       Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well;

       Upon the murderous spot she seem'd to grow

       Like to a native lily of the dell:

       Then with her knife, all sudden, she began

       To dig more fervently than misers can.

      Soon she turn'd up a soiled glove, whereon

       Her silk had play'd in purple fantasies,

       She kiss'd it with a lip more chill than stone,

       And put it in her bosom, where it dries

       And freezes utterly unto the bone

       Those dainties made to still an infant's cries:

       Then 'gan she work again; nor stay'd her care,

       But to throw back at times her veiling hair.

      That old nurse stood beside her wondering,

       Until her heart felt pity to the core

       At sight of such a dismal labouring,

       And so she kneeled, with her locks all hoar,

       And put her lean hands to the horrid thing:

       Three hours they labour'd at this travail sore;

       At last they felt the kernel of the grave,

       And Isabella did not stamp and rave.

      To pursue the story in prose:—They find the body, and with their joint strengths sever from it the head, which Isabella takes home, and wrapping it in a silken scarf, entombs it in a garden-pot, covers it with mould, and over it she plants sweet basil, which, watered with her tears, thrives so that no other basil tufts in all Florence throve like her basil. How her brothers, suspecting something mysterious in this herb, which she watched day and night, at length discover the head, and secretly convey the basil from her; and how from the day that she loses her basil she pines away, and at last dies [—for this], we must refer our readers to the poem, or to the divine germ of it in Boccaccio. It is a great while ago since we read the original; and in this affecting revival of it we do but

       Weep again a long-forgotten woe.

      More exuberantly rich in imagery and painting is the story of the Lamia. It is of as gorgeous stuff as ever romance was composed of. Her first appearance in serpentine form—

      ——a beauteous wreath with melancholy eyes—

      her dialogue with Hermes, the Star of Lethe, as he is called by one of these prodigal phrases which Mr. Keats abounds in, which are each a poem in a word, and which in this instance lays open to us at once, like a picture, all the dim regions and their inhabitants, and the sudden coming of a celestial among them; the charming of her into woman's shape again by the God; her marriage with the beautiful Lycius; her magic palace, which those who knew the street, and remembered it complete from childhood, never remembered to have seen before; the few Persian mutes, her attendants,

      ——who that same year

       Were seen about the markets: none knew where

       They could inhabit;——

      the high-wrought splendours of the nuptial bower, with the fading of the whole pageantry, Lamia, and all, away, before the glance of Apollonius—are all that fairy land can do for us. They are for younger impressibilities. To us an ounce of feeling is worth a pound of fancy; and therefore we recur again, with a warmer gratitude, to the story of Isabella and the pot of basil, and those never-cloying stanzas which we have cited, and which we think should disarm criticism, if it be not in its nature cruel; if it would not deny to honey its sweetness, nor to roses redness, nor light to the stars in Heaven; if it would not bay the moon out of the skies, rather than acknowledge she is fair.

      SIR THOMAS MORE

       Table of Contents

      (1820)

Of the writings of this distinguished character little is remembered at present beyond his Utopia, and some Epigrams. But there is extant a massive folio of his Theological Works in English, partly Practical Divinity, but for the greater part Polemic, against the grand Lutheran Heresy, just then beginning to flower. From these I many years ago made some extracts, rejecting only the antiquated orthography, (they being intended only for my own amusement) except in some instances of proper names, &c. I send them you as I find them, thinking that some of your readers may consider them as curious. The first is from a Tract against Tyndale, called the Confutation of Tyndale's Answer.[40] The author of Religio Medici somewhere says, "his conscience would give him the lye, if she should say that he absolutely detested or hated any essence but the Devil." Whether Browne was not out in his metaphysics, when he supposed himself capable of hating, that is, entertaining a personal aversion to, a being so abstracted, or such a Concrete of all irreconcileable abstractions rather, as usually passes for the meaning of that name, I contend not; but that the same hatred in kind, which he professed against our great spiritual enemy, was in downright earnest cultivated and defended by More against that portentous phenomenon in those times, a Heretic, from his speeches against Luther and Tyndale cannot for a moment be doubted. His account of poor Hytton which follows (a reformado priest of the day) is penned with a wit and malice hyper-satanic. It is infinitely diverting in the midst of its diabolism, if it be not rather, what Coleridge calls,

      Too wicked for a smile, too foolish for a tear.

[40] To some foregone Tract of More's, of which I have lost the title.

      ——"now to the intent that ye may somewhat see what good Christian faith Sir Thomas Hytton was of, this new saint of Tindale's canonization, in whose burning Tindale so gaily glorieth, and which hath his holiday so now appointed to him, that St. Polycarpus must give him place in the Calendar, I shall somewhat show you what wholesome heresies this holy martyr held. First ye shall understand, that he was a priest, and falling to Luther's sect, and after that to the sect of Friar Huskin and Zwinglius, cast off matins and mass, and all divine service, and so became an apostle, sent to and fro, between our English heretics beyond the sea, and such as were here at home. Now happed it so, that after he had visited here his holy congregations in divers corners and luskes lanes, and comforted them in the Lord to stand stiff with the devil in their errors and heresies, as he was going back again at Gravesend, God considering the great labour that he had taken already, and determining to bring his business to his well-deserved end, gave him suddenly such a favour and so great a grace in the visage, that every man that beheld him took him for a thief. For whereas there had been certain linen clothes pilfered away that were hanging on an hedge, and Sir Thomas Hytton was walking not far off suspiciously in the meditation of his heresies: the people doubting that the beggarly knave had stolen the clouts, fell in question with him and searched him, and so found they certain letters secretly conveyed in his coat, written from evangelical brethren here unto the evangelical heretics beyond the sea. And upon those letters founden, he was with his letters brought before the most Rev. Father in God the Archbishop