of peace for Warwickshire, I would have clapt both commentator and sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair
of meddling sacrilegious varlets.
I think I see them at their work?these sapient trouble-tombs.
Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear?to mine, at least?
9. Cf. Othello's words as he contemplates Desdemona's murder (Shakespeare, Othello 5.2.12?
13).
1. The 1667 biography of her husband by the poet and playwright Margaret Cavendish.
2. Jeremy Taylor (1613?1667), author of Holy Living and Holy Dying.
3. Anglican clergyman and antiquarian Thomas Fuller (1608-1661).
4. Illustrations by leading English artists were provided for the deluxe edition of Shakespeare issued
by the print seller John Boydell in 1802. Elia favors
the editions that were prepared by Nicholas Rowe
and his publisher Jacob Tonson starting in 1709.
5. Francis Beaumont (1585??1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625), Elizabeth dramatists and
collaborators: Lamb's folio edition of their works is
also mentioned in 'Old China.' Folio editions are
distinguished from octavo by size: folio is the larg
est format for books, produced when a full-sized
printer's sheet is folded once, whereas an octavo
book is sized for pages folded so that each is one-
eighth the size of a full sheet. By Lamb's day, book
formats were to an extent correlated with their
contents: the more cultural authority granted the
type of literature or the author, the larger the for
mat.
6. Robert Burton's vast treatise from 1621; there was an 1800 reprint. Burton's unmethodical, mot
ley prose, which seemingly broaches a thousand
topics to take on one, gave Lamb a model for his
style in the Elia essays.
7. Shakespeare editor Edmund Malone (1741? 1812). The repainting of Shakespeare's bust
occurred in 1793.
.
508 / CHARLES LAMB
than that of Milton or of Shakespeare? It may be, that the latter are more
staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which
carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.8
Much depends upon -when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taldng up the Fairy Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons?9
Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.
Winter evenings?the world shut out?with less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale? These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud?to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one?and it degenerates
into an audience.
Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.
A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so much individual time) for one of the clerks?who is the best scholar?to commence upon the Times, or the Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud pro hono publico.' With every advantage of lungs and elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers' shops and public-houses a fellow will get up, and spell out a paragraph, which he communicates as some discovery. Another follows with his selection. So the entire journal transpires at length by piece-meal. Seldom-readers are slow readers, and, without this expedient no one in the company would probably ever travel through the contents of a whole paper.
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment. What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at Nando's,2 keeps the paper' I am sick of hearing the waiter bawling out
