Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/678



HERE is no harder fate than to be immortalized as a fool; to have one's name—which merits nothing sterner than oblivion—handed down to generations as an example of silliness, or stupidity, or presumption; to be enshrined pitilessly in the amber of the "Dunciad," or in the delicate satire of Madame du Deffand; to be laughed at forever because of Charles Lamb's impatient and inextinguishable raillery. When an industrious young authoress named Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger—a model of painstaking insignificance—invited Charles and Mary Lamb to drink tea with her one cold December night, she little dreamed she was achieving a deathless and unenviable fame, and that, when her half-dozen books should have lapsed into comfortable obscurity, she herself should never be fortunate enough to be forgotten. It is a cruel chance which crystallizes the folly of an hour, and makes it outlive our most serious endeavors. Perhaps we should do well to consider this painful possibility before hazarding an acquaintance with the Immortals.

Miss Benger did more than hazard. She pursued the Immortals with malignant zeal. She bribed Mrs. Inchbald's servant-maid into lending her cap and apron and tea-tray, and, so equipped, penetrated into the inmost sanctuary of that literary lady, who seems to have taken the intrusion in good part. She was equally adroit in seducing Mary Lamb—as the Serpent seduced Eve—when Charles Lamb was the ultimate object of her designs. Coming home to dinner one day, "hungry as a hunter," he found to his dismay the two women closeted together, and trusted he was in time to prevent their exchanging vows of eternal friendship, though not—as he discovered later—in time to save himself from an engagement to drink tea with the stranger ("I had never seen her before, and could not tell who the devil it was that was so familiar") the following night. What happened is told in a letter to Coleridge; one of the best-known and one of the longest letters Lamb ever wrote,—he is so brimful of his grievance. Miss Benger's lodgings were up two flights of stairs in East Street. She entertained her guests with tea, coffee, macaroons, and "much love." She talked to them, or rather at them, upon purely literary topics,—as, for example, Miss Hannah More's Strictures on Female Education, which they had never read. She addressed Mary Lamb in French,—"possibly having heard that neither Mary nor I understood French,"—and she favored them with Miss Seward's opinion of Pope. She asked Lamb, who was growing more miserable every moment, if he agreed with D'Israeli as to the influence of organism upon intellect, and when he tried to parry the question with a pun upon organ—"which went off very flat"—she despised him for his feeble flippancy. She advised Mary to carry home two translations of Pizarro, so that she might compare them verbatim (an offer hastily declined), and she made them both promise to return the following week—which they never did—to meet Miss Jane Porter and her sister, "who, it seems, have heard much of Mr. Coleridge, and wish to meet us because we are his friends." It is a comédie larmoyante. We sympathize hotly with Lamb when we read his letter; but there is something piteous in the thought of the poor little hostess going complacently to bed that night, and never realizing that she had made her one unhappy flight for fame.

There were people, strange as it may appear, who liked Miss Benger's evenings. Miss Aikin assures us that "her circle of acquaintances extended with her reputation, and with the knowledge of her excellent qualities, and she was often enabled to assemble as guests at her humble