Anser, apis, vitulus, populos et regna gubernant ... but of the three the pen is the most predominant. I know you have a commanding one, but you must not let it tyrannise in that manner, as you have done lately. Some give it out that there was a hair in it, or that your ink was too thick with gall, else it would not have so bespattered and shaken the reputation of a royal architect.”
Of his whimsicality I find examples enough to drown in. There is his pleasant tale to a cousin just off to the Dutch wars, of the soldier who had been there and returned, and being asked what exploits he had done, answered, That he had cut off a Spaniard’s legs. “Reply being made that that was no great matter, it had been something if he had cut off his head; O, said he, you must consider his head was off before.” And the other, truly excellent, of that Earl of Kildare who, arraigned before the Lord-Deputy for having set fire to, and burned down, the Church of Cashel, excused himself by saying that he would never have done such a thing had he not understood that the Bishop was inside. But here is from a letter a piece so exactly in Lamb’s vein when he is turning a whimsical notion about and about, and at each turn enhancing it, that I feel sure Howell _aut diabolus_ must have taught it him:
First, the theme--“I was according to your desire to visit the late new-married couple more than once, and to tell you true, I never saw such a disparity between two that were made one flesh in all my life; he handsome outwardly, but of odd conditions; she excellently qualified, but hard-favoured; so that the one may be compared to a cloth of tissue doublet cut upon coarse canvas, the other to a buckram petticoat lined with satin.”
Then, like Lamb, he begins to hang up his conceits:
“I think _Clotho_ had her fingers smutted in snuffing the candle when she began to spin the thread of her life.... A blind man is fittest to hear her sing; one would take delight to see her dance if masked, and it would please you to discourse with her in the dark, for then she is best company. When you marry, I wish you such an inside of a wife, but from such an outward phisnomy the Lord deliver you.”
Phisnomy, or visnomy, is a word which Lamb has made his own.