Lend Your Books to Such a One
In December 1820 Charles Lamb published in the London Magazine an essay entitled “The Two Races of Men” – about the men who lend books and the men who borrow them – and ended by saying that if a man were “Blessed with a moderate collection” of books, and his heart overflowed to lend them
let it be to such a one as S. T. C. – he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his – (in matter oftentimes, an almost in quantity not infrequently, vying with the originals) in no very clerkly hand – legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now alas! wandering in Pagan Lands. –
Coleridge’s practice of writing notes in the margins and on the blank leaves of books is now well known, but during his lifetime it seems not to have been known outside the circle of his intimate acquaintance. He referred to this propensity two or three times in print himself, and the first generation of his editors – his nephew Henry Nelson Coleridge and his daughter Sara – published enough of his marginalia to represent, up to about 1850, more than a third of the corpus of his published prose writing. What has been previously published in only a fragment of what can now be recovered from nearly 700 volumes (not counting seventy books that he is known to have annotated although we have no transcript of the notes and the books are lost) – a total of more than 8000 single notes. Among these, the notes that have survived from Lamb’s books have a special status: many of them are early in date, all are coloured by affection and are vibrant with critical vivacity and responsive delight.
We do not know how many of Lamb’s books Coleridge annotated, but we have – or know of – more than Lamb mentioned in his essay. The Daniel survives, and so does the Fulke Greville, but not the Burton. Although we have two copies of Sir Thomas Browne with Coleridge’s notes, neither of them belongs to Lamb; but one of them – a collective edition of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Religio Medici, Sepulchrall Urnes, and The Garden of Cyrus (1659) – was bought by Lamb for Coleridge just before he sailed for the Mediterranean in the spring of 1804, and has written in it – in Lamb’s hand as well as Coleridge’s – a record of the occasion.
/ Lamb wrote: / C Lamb March 9th 1804 bought for S. T. Coleridge / and Coleridge wrote: / N. B. It was on the 10th; on which day I dined & punched at Lamb’s – & exulted in the having procured the Hydriotaphia, & all the rest lucro posito. S. T. C.
On the front flyleaves, Coleridge wrote a long letter to Sara Hutchinson commending the book to her; the book may never have been delivered to her as intended – it went to Malta by mistake, Coleridge had it in Highgate in 1818, and the volume was still in his possession when he died. The letter to Sara Hutchinson was published (with suitable revision) in Blackwood’s in 1819, ostensibly by James Gillman but probably by Coleridge himself, the first of the marginalia to appear in public with acknowledgement. This may have been the book by Sir Thomas Browne that Lamb was thinking of when he wrote his essay, even though it was not his own book.
The long and intimate friendship between Lamb and Coleridge was anchored at one end in Christ’s Hospital (“He was a Grecian ... when I was a deputy Grecian; and the same subordination and deference to him I have preserved through a life-long acquaintance”) and in the smoky rooms of the Salutation and Cat in 1794 at a turning-point in Coleridge’s private life; it was tempered by much shared distaste and much shared delight in the course of Coleridge’s comings and goings before he came to safe moorings on Highgate Hill. Throughout their friendship, and especially in the earlier years, Lamb’s passion for collecting old and neglected books from the barrows in the Barbican and elsewhere overflowed in Coleridge’s direction – as with the Thomas Browne – in the form of gifts and of books picked up on request. The list of books that we know came to Coleridge through Lamb is not long, but all the books were important ones although some of them were important to Coleridge at too early a date to be annotated.
In Lamb’s earliest surviving letters we can see him, with uncanny critical insight, drawing attention to unusual books. So strongly did he communicate his enthusiasm for old books, and so unstintingly share his pleasure in new discoveries and old loves, that Coleridge sometimes thought the discoveries were his own when they weren’t. In the fragmentary record of their correspondence we find Lamb recommending Walton’s Compleat Angler to Coleridge in June 1796 (as to Robert Lloyd in 1801), Amory’s Life of John Buncle in June 1797, Chapman’s Homer in 1802; and he may have had something to do with Coleridge’s acquisition of a little volume of Marcus Aurelius in Jeremy Collier’s translation (1701) early in 1804 in which he wrote many marginal notes over a period of years. By 1806 Lamb was already at work on his Specimens of English Dramatic Poetry, and the aura of that fascination reached Coleridge before the book was published in 1808, not least to reinforce his own earlier admiration for the poems of John Donne. These are only a few identifiable moments in a rich and continuous process in which Coleridge did not always wait upon Lamb, and the traffic was not all in one direction. Lamb blessed Coleridge for first bringing him to Jeremy Taylor for consolation; it may have been in 1803 at a crisis in Lamb’s life that Coleridge wrote two notes in Lamb’s copy of Jeremy Taylor’s Eniautos (1678); and Lamb came to be even more extravagantly eloquent in his praise of Taylor’s genius than Coleridge was. It was Lamb’s copy of Taylor’s Polemicall Discourses (1674) that Coleridge annotated more densely than any other book; once he had embarked upon his policy of “spoiling” in 1808 he accumulated more than 250 notes in it and seems never to have returned the book to Lamb. The first principle of book-ownership, ascribed to Coleridge by Lamb, applied handsomely in this case: “the title to property in a book ... is in exact ratio to the claimant’s powers of understanding and appreciating the same.”
Many of the marginalia that have survived in Lamb’s books were written in 1808 and 1811 at the time of Coleridge’s first two sets of literary lectures in London. These represent the richest vein in Coleridge’s early annotations and have important implications for what was to become a settled habit: he knew that Lamb would read the notes, and he knew how Lamb would read them. In establishing a silent critical dialogue with Lamb, Coleridge established what was to become the distinctive character of dialogue in his marginalia – sometimes a dialogue with the owner of the book, sometimes an internal dialogue with himself, most often a dialogue between himself and the author although the author be centuries dead.
In Lamb’s copy of Samuel Daniel’s Poetical Works (1718) Coleridge addressed a letter to Lamb on a front flyleaf, dated 10 February 1808; it ends – “Have I injured thy Book -? or wilt though ‘like it the better therefore?’ But I have done as I would gladly be done by – thee, at least. –” When Lamb wrote on 7 June 1809 to congratulate Coleridge on “the appearance of The Friend” and to say that he had fetched away from the Courier office what books of his he could find – Dodsley’s Old Plays (one volume missing, which was to cause trouble later), Sidney’s Arcadia, and “‘Daniel,’ enriched with manuscript notes” – he said: “I wish every book I have were so noted. They have thoroughly converted me to relish Daniel, or to say I relish him, for, after all, I believe I did relish him ... Your notes are excellent. Perhaps you’ve forgot them.” “Ostrich oblivion” was one of the idiosyncrasies Lamb liked affectionately to ascribe to Coleridge; and the grave byplay continued in the spring of 1811 in Lamb’s copy of Donne’s Poems (1669).
/ – on a front flyleaf: / N. B. Tho’ I have scribbled in it, this is & was Mr Charles Lamb’s Book, who is likewise the Possessor & (I believe) lawful Proprietor of all Volumes of the “Old Plays” excepting one.
/ – again: / N. B. Spite of Appearances, this Copy is the better for the Mss. Notes. The Annotator himself says so. S. T. C.
/ – on a back flyleaf: / I shall die soon, my dear Charles Lamb; and then you will not be vexed that I had bescribbled your Books. 2 May, 1811.
Very similar to this last note is a note on Lamb’s copy of Beaumont and Fletcher:
N. B. I will not be long here, Charles! – & gone, you will not mind my having spoiled a book in order to leave a Relic. S. T. C. – Octr 1811. –
Lamb’s approval of the notes on Daniel and on Sidney’s Arcadia encouraged Coleridge in 1811 (if he needed any encouragement) to write more than fifty notes in Lamb’s copy of Donne’s Poems and a few in his tattered folio of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays (1679); in the same year he wrote more notes in the Polemicall Discourses. In “The Two Races of Men” Lamb said that Coleridge had taken away his Opera Bonaventurae, “Browne on Urn Burial” (“C. will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties”), a volume of Dodsley, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Walton’s Compleat Angler, Amory’s Life of John Buncle. In some of these there is certainly an element of playful fiction: Coleridge had, or had access to, plenty of Thomas Browne without filching Lamb’s Hydriotaphia. But not all the details are circumstantial moonshine. There are traces of Bonaventure in the notebooks; the volume of Dodsley was indeed missing; we know that Coleridge annotated Lamb’s copy of Amory; and there is no reason to doubt that, of the various copies of Burton that Coleridge is known to have used from time to time, one was Lamb’s and he wrote notes in it (though it too has vanished).
If it were not for the sombre fate of Lamb’s “ragged regiment” we should probably know much more than we do about Coleridge’s use of Lamb’s books. Lamb bequeathed his library to Mary who lived until 1847. Edward Moxon, publisher, and husband of Emma Isola, had been appointed Lamb’s executor but did not take possession of the books until after Mary’s death, by which time some had drifted away. Crabb Robinson on 27 April 1848 gave an elliptical but indignant account of what then happened.
I had a chat with ... Talfourd about Moxon, who has really sold Lamb’s books to some American. Talfourd is displeased with this, and reasonably. / Moxon / tells him that these were worth nothing, and that he got only £10 by them. This cannot be true, and if true so much the worse. Moxon told me at first that he would give the books to the University College; but afterwards said they were not worth their accepting.
Moxon gave some books away indiscriminately to friends and, beyond the few sold for £10 to his friend Charles Welford, burned the rest. In February 1848, Bartlett and Welford of New York printed a catalogue of sixty titles, stating in a prefatory note that
The notes, remarks, &c., referred to and quoted ... in the following list, are warranted to be all in the autograph of Lamb (except when otherwise mentioned) ... no attempt has been made to re-clothe his “shivering folios”; they are precisely in the state in which he possessed and left him.
At a private sale these were sold for $479.75. The last five titles in the catalogue, shown as “Books with notes by S. T. Coleridge”, were all bought by George T Strong for $108.50: Amory’s John Buncle, Donne’s Poems, Reynold’s Gods Revenge agaynst the Cryinge, and Execrable Sinne of Murther (1657), The History of Philip de Comines (1674), and Petvin’s Letters Concerning Mind (1750). Strong, a perceptive collector of early printed books and outstanding association books, gave an account of the five Coleridge-Lamb books in the Literary World in 1853, with transcripts of some of the notes; he also sent transcripts to Derwent Coleridge to be used in his edition of Notes Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous (1853). Strong’s library was sold in 1887 and four of the five Coleridge books are now in permanent collections – in Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and the Huntington Library. Only the most modest item – Amory’s John Buncle – is missing, but it must be lurking shyly somewhere because it was in the possession of the Rosenbach Company in 1947.
As for the others, the Beaumont and Fletcher found its way to the British Museum library where it has been so skilfully cleaned up, repaired, and rebound that Lamb would no longer recognise it; Jeremy Taylor’s Eniautos is at Yale; the Polemicall Discourses came to the British Museum by way of the Gillman family; also in the British Museum is Lamb’s copy of Milton’s Poetical Works, two volumes of a mixed set and of different sizes, with many textual notes by Lamb but only one short note by Coleridge. The Fulke Greville that Lamb accused James Kenney of taking away to France for the edification of his bride was already annotated by Coleridge but has disappeared since it came up in a sale in 1903.
Two other Lamb-Coleridge transactions in books can be added. One is the subject of that letter of August-September 1820 which turned out to be the first draft for “The Two Races of Men”.
Dear C.,
Why will you make your visits, which should give pleasure, matter of regret to your friends? You never come but you take away some folio that is part of my existence. With a great deal of difficulty I was made to comprehend the extent of my loss. My maid Becky brought me a dirty bit of paper, which contained her description of some book which Mr. Coleridge had taken away. It was “Luster’s Tables,” which, for some time, I could not make out. “What! has he carried away any of the tables, Becky?” “No, it wasn’t any tables, but it was a book that he called Luster’s Tables.” I was obliged to search personally among my shelves, and a huge fissure suddenly disclosed to me the true nature of the damage I had sustained. That book, C., you should not have taken away, for it is not mine; it is the property of a friend, who does not know its value, nor indeed have I been very sedulous in explaining to him the estimate of it; but was rather contented in giving a sort of corroboration to a hint that he let fall, as to its being suspected to be not genuine, so that in all probability it would have fallen to me as a deodand; not but I am sure it is Luther’s as I am sure that Jack Bunyan wrote the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” but it was not for me to pronounce upon the validity of testimony that had been disputed by learneder clerks than I. So I quietly let it occupy the place it had usurped upon my shelves, and should never have thought of issuing an ejectment against it ... I have several such strangers that I treat with more than Arabian courtesy; there’s a copy of More’s fine poem, which is none of mine; but I cherish it as my own ... So you see I had no right to lend you that book; I may lend you my own books, because it is at my own hazard, but it is not honest to hazard a friend’s property; I always make that distinction. I hope you will bring it with you, or send it by Hartley; or he can bring that, and you the “Polemical Discourses,” and come and eat some atoning mutton with us one of these days shortly ... So come all four – men and books I mean – my third shelf (northern compartment) from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out its two eye-teeth.
Your wronged friend,
C. Lamb.
Whether or not Coleridge went to eat atoning mutton, he began on about 25 September 1819 (if not before) to write marginal notes in “Luster’s Tables”, that is, Colloquia Mensalia; or, Dr Martin Luther’s Divine Discourses at his Table (1652). The original owner of the book was Edward White, an old acquaintance in the East India House. Assisted no doubt by Lamb’s deviousness, White may already have forgotten the book or later gave it to Lamb. Whether it passed back and forth between Coleridge and Lamb during the fifteen years of life that remained to Coleridge we do not know. Coleridge had written more than 100 notes in it and had it in his possession when he died, and like the Polemicall Discourses it came to the British Museum through the Gillman family.
On a March day in 1829 Lamb found in a stall in the Barbican “one of whom I have oft heard and had dreams, but never saw in the flesh – that is, in sheepskin – The whole theological works for THOMAS AQUINAS!” His “arms aked with lugging it a mile to the stage, but the burden was pleasure, such as old Anchises was to the shoulders of Aeneas – of the Lady to the Lover in old romance, who having to carry her to the top of a high mountain – the price of obtaining her – clamber’d with her to the top, and fell dead with fatigue.” In October he wrote to Gillman to apologize for not knowing, because of his infrequent visits to Highgate, that Coleridge had been “in indifferent health.”
A little school divinity, well applied, may be healing. I send him honest Tom of Aquin; that was always an obscure great idea to me: I never thought or dreamed to see him in the flesh, but t’other day I rescued him from a stall in the Barbican, and brought him off in triumph. He comes to greet Coleridge’s acceptance, for his shoe-latchets I am unworthy to unloose. Yet there are pretty pro’s and con’s, and such unsatisfactory learning in him ... Well, do not break your lay brains, nor I neither, with these curious nothings. They are nuts to our dear friends...
This sounds like a gift, but Lamb evidently intended otherwise for he wrote a little later asking for the loan of two of Coleridge’s volumes of Thomas Fuller and added: “Also give me back Him of Aquinum.” I should like to be persuaded that Coleridge ignored this please, and that these are the five great folios from a broken set of twenty volumes of Aquinas that Derwent Coleridge inherited and that are now in the Victoria College Library where they still make the arms ache to lift them down from the shelves. But that is not the case. Coleridge had in fact left behind at Allan Bank in 1810 his own five folios of Aquinas; they were kept at Rydal Mount until his death, and these are the ones that in the end went to Derwent. This time Lamb did get his books back.