Chapter LXXXIX: Letter 201: To Allsop

March 22nd, 1822. My dear Friend,

Mr. Watson is but now returned. I was about to set off to your house and take turns with Mrs. Allsop in watching you. It is a comfort to hear from Watson that he thinks you look not only better than when he saw you before, but more promisingly.

Si tibi deficiant medici, medici tibi fiant
Haec tria: mens hilaris, requies, moderata dieta

is the adage of the old Schola Salernitana, and his belief and judgment. Would to God that there were any druggist or apothecary within the king's dominions where I could procure for you the first ingredient of the recipe, fresh and genuine. I would soon make up the prescription, have the credit of curing you, and then make my fortune by advertising the nostrum under the name of Dr. Samsartorius, _Carbonijugius's Panacea Salernitana----iensis_.

You will have thought, I fear, that I had forgotten my promise of sending you Charles Lamb's _epistola porcina_. But it was not so. I now enclose it, and when you return it I will make a copy for you if you wish it, for I think that writing in your present state will be most injurious to you.

I am interrupted--"a poor lad, very ragged, he says Mr. Dowling has sent him to you to show you his poetry."--"Well! desire him to step up, Maria!"

As soon as Mr. Green left me, Mrs. Gillman delivered your letter. I am not sorry, therefore, that the _Wild Irish Boy_ made it too late to finish the above for that day's post. His name, poor lad! is Esmond Wilton; his mother, I guess, was poetical. But I will reserve him for a dish on our table of chat when we meet.--In reply to your affectionate letter what can I say, but that from all that you say, write or do, I receive but two impressions; first a full, cordial, and unqualified assurance of your love towards me, a genial unclouded faith in the entireness and steadfastness of your more than friendship, sustained and renewed by the consciousness of a responsive attachment in myself, that blends the affections of parent, brother and friend,--

A love of thee that seems, yet cannot greater be;

and secondly, impressions of grief or joy, according, and in proportion to, the information I receive, or the inferences that I draw, respecting your health, ease of heart and mind, and all the events, incidents, and circumstances, that affect, or are calculated to affect, both or either. Only this in addition--whatever _else_ may pass through your mind, never, from any motive, or with any view, withhold from me your thoughts, your feelings, and your sorrows. What if they be momentary, winged thoughts, not native, that blowing weather has driven out of their course, and to which your mind has allowed thorough flight, but neither nest, perch, nor halting room? Send them onward to pass through mine; and between us both, we shall be better able to give a good account of them! What if they are the offspring of low or perturbed spirits--the changelings of ill health or disquietude? So much the rather communicate them. When on the white paper, they are already out of _us_; and when the letter is gone, they will not stay long behind; the very anticipation of the answer will have answered them, and superseded the need, though not the wish, of its arrival. And shall I not, think you, take them for what they are? With what comfort, with what security, could I receive or read your letters, or you mine, if we either of us had reason to believe, that whatever affliction had befallen, or discomfort was harassing, or anxiety was weighing on the heart, the other would say no word of or about it, under the plea of not transplanting thorns, or whatever other excuse a depressed fancy might invent, in order to transmute _unfriendly withholding_ into a self-sacrifice of tenderness. If you had come to stay with me while I lay on a bed of pain, it would grieve you indeed, if, from an imagined duty of not grieving you, I should suppress every expression of suffering, and not tell you where my pain was, or whether it was greater or less. _Grant_ that I was rendered anxious or heavy at heart, or keenly sorrowful, by any tidings you had communicated respecting yourself! _Should_ it not be so? Ought it not to be so? Will not the Joy be greater when the Cloud is passed off--greater in _kind_, nobler, better--because I should feel it was my _right_? And is there not a dignity and a hidden Healing in the suffering itself--which is soothed in the wish and tempered in the endeavour of removing, or lessening, or supporting it, in the Soul of a dear Friend? However trifling my vexations are, yet if they vex me, and I am writing to you, to you I will unbosom them, my dear ... and my serious sorrows and hindrances I will still less keep back from you. General Truths, Discussions, Poems, Queries--all these are parts of my nature, _often_ uppermost; and when they are so, you have them--and I like well to write to, and to hear from you on them--but these I might write to the Public: and with all Christian respect for that gentleman, I love your little finger better than his whole multitudinous Body.

Give my love to Mrs. Allsop, and tell her I will try to deserve hers.

Ever and ever God bless you, my dearest friend.

S. T. COLERIDGE.

T. Allsop, Esq.

* * * * *

"The letter here alluded to," says Allsop, "is a most delightful communication from Charles Lamb; which, with the hints thrown out by Manning, as to the probable origin of roast meat, were afterwards interwoven into that paper on _Roast Pig_, one of the best of Lamb's productions."

9 Mch. 1822.
Dear C.,

It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the Pig turned out so
well--they are interesting creatures at a certain age. What a pity
such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all
some of the crackling--and brain sauce--did you remember to rub it
with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis?
Did the eyes come away kindly with no Œdipean avulsion?--was the
crackling the colour of the ripe pomegranate?--had you no damned
complement of boiled neck of mutton before it to blunt the edge of
delicate desire?--did you flesh maiden teeth in it?

Not that I sent the Pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen
(our landlord) could play in the business. I never knew him give any
thing away in his life--he would not begin with strangers. I suspect
the Pig after all was meant for me--but at the unlucky juncture of
time being absent, the present, somehow, went round to Highgate.

To confess an honest truth, a Pig is one of those things I could never
think of sending away. Teals, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowls,
ducks, geese, your tame villatic things--Welsh mutton--collars of
brawn--sturgeon, fresh and pickled--your potted char--Swiss
cheeses--French pies--early grapes--muscadines,--I impart as freely to
my friends as to myself,--they are but _self_-extended; but pardon me
if I stop somewhere--_where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a
higher smack than the sensual rarity; there my friends_ (or any good
man) _may command me_; but pigs are pigs; and I myself am therein
nearest to myself; nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing
done to Nature, who bestowed such a boon upon me, if, in a churlish
mood, I parted with the precious gift. One of the bitterest pangs I
ever felt of remorse was when a child--my kind old aunt had strained
her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my
way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man--not a
mendicant--but thereabouts; a _look-beggar_--not a verbal
petitionist--and, in the coxcombry of taught charity, I gave away the
cake to him. I walked on a little _in all the pride of an evangelical
peacock_, when of a sudden my old aunt's kindness crossed me--_the sum
it was to her_--_the pleasure that she had a right to expect that I,
not the old impostor, should take in eating her cake_--the damned
ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had
frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart
so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like. And I was
right; it was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to
me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to the
dunghill, with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.

But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me
a Pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act
towards it more in the spirit of the donor's purpose.

Yours (short of Pig) to command in everything,

C. L.