The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 | Page 6

reads, seems as
though it read not,) never fails to consult the quis sculpsit in the corner,
before he pronounces some rare piece to be a Vivares, or a
Woollet--methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, _Who is Elia?_
Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgotten
humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long
since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your
mind as one of the self-same college--a votary of the desk--a notched
and cropt scrivener--one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick
people are said to do, through a quill.
Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my humour,
my fancy--in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your man of

letters requires some relaxation--(and none better than such as at first
sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies)--to while away
some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos, cottons,
raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first place
******* and then it sends you home with such increased appetite to
your books ***** not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste
wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally,
the impression of sonnets, epigrams, _essays_--so that the very parings
of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an author. The
enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among the
cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its ease over
the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation.--It feels its
promotion. ***** So that you see, upon the whole, the literary dignity
of Elia is very little, if at all, compromised in the condescension.
Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities incidental to
the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain flaws,
which a cunning carper might be able to pick in this Joseph's vest. And
here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret the abolition,
and doing-away-with altogether, of those consolatory interstices, and
sprinklings of freedom, through the four seasons,--the _red-letter days_,
now become, to all intents and purposes, _dead-letter days_. There was
Paul, and Stephen, and Barnabas--
Andrew and John, men famous in old times
--we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as I was at
school at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the same token, in the
old Baskett Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy posture--holy
Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flaying, after the famous Marsyas
by Spagnoletti.--I honoured them all, and could almost have wept the
defalcation of Iscariot--so much did we love to keep holy memories
sacred:--only methought I a little grudged at the coalition of the better
Jude with Simon-clubbing (as it were) their sanctities together, to make
up one poor gaudy-day between them--as an economy unworthy of the
dispensation.
These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life--"far off
their coming shone."--I was as good as an almanac in those days. I
could have told you such a saint's-day falls out next week, or the week
after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity, would,

once in six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better than one of
the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign the wisdom of my civil
superiors, who have judged the further observation of these holy tides
to be papistical, superstitious.
Only in a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses
the Bishops had, in decency, been first sounded--but I am wading out
of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and
ecclesiastical authority--I am plain Elia--no Selden, nor Archbishop
Usher--though at present in the thick of their books, here in the heart of
learning, under the shadow of the mighty Bodley.
I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a one as
myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of
academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle
weeks at, as one or other of the Universities. Their vacation, too, at this
time of the year, falls in so pat with ours. Here I can take my walks
unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I please. I
seem admitted ad eundem. I fetch up past opportunities. I can rise at the
chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for me. In moods of humility I can
be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock vein rises, I strut a
Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I proceed Master of Arts.
Indeed I do not think I am much unlike