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

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 that respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and bed-makers in spectacles, drop a bow or curtsy, as I pass, wisely mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black, which favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle, I can be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor.
The walks at these times are so