Chapter Laidlaw to Landor of L by Biographical Dictionary of English Literature

Laidlaw to Landor

Laidlaw, William (1780-1845).—Poet, son of a border farmer, became steward and amanuensis to Sir W. Scott, and was the author of the beautiful and well-known ballad, Lucy’s Flittin’.

Laing, David (1793-1878).—Antiquary, son of a bookseller in Edinburgh, with whom he was in partnership until his appointment, in 1837, as librarian of the Signet Library. He edited many of the publications of the Bannatyne Club, of which he was secretray(1823-61). He was also Honorary Professor of Antiquities to the Royal Scottish Academy. Among the more important works which he edited were Baillie’s Letters and Journals (1841-2), John Knox’s Works (1846-64), and the poems of Sir D. Lyndsay, Dunbar, and Henryson.

Laing, Malcolm (1762-1818).—was a country gentleman in Orkney. He completed Henry’s History of Great Britain, and wrote a History of Scotland from the Union of the Crowns to the Union of the Kingdoms (1802). He was an assailant of the authenticity of the Ossianic poems, and wrote a dissertation on the Participation of Mary Queen of Scots in the Murder of Darnley. He did much to improve the agriculture of Orkney.

Lamb, Lady Caroline (1785-1828).—Novelist, daughter of 3rd Earl of Bessborough, married the Hon. William Lamb, afterwards Lord Melbourne and Prime Minister. She wrote three novels, which, though of little literary value, attracted much attention. The first of these, Glenarvon (1816), contained a caricature portrait of Lord Byron, with whom the authoress had shortly before been infatuated. It was followed by Graham Hamilton (1822), and Ada Reis (1823). Happening to meet the hearse conveying the remains of Byron, she became unconscious, and fell into mental alienation, from which she never recovered.

Lamb, Charles (1775-1834).—Essayist and poet, was born in London, his father being confidential clerk to Samuel Salt, one of the benchers of the Inner Temple. After being at a school in the neighbourhood, he was sent by the influence of Mr. Salt to Christ’s Hospital, where he remained from 1782-89, and where he formed a lifelong friendship with Coleridge. He was then for a year or two in the South Sea House, where his elder brother John was a clerk. Thence he was in 1792 transferred to the India House, where he remained until 1825, when he retired with a pension of two-thirds of his salary. Mr. Salt died in 1792, and the family, consisting of the father, mother, Charles, and his sister Mary, ten years his senior, lived together in somewhat straitened circumstances, John, comparatively well off, leaving them pretty much to their own resources. In 1796 the tragedy of Lamb’s life occurred. His sister Mary, in a sudden fit of insanity, killed her mother with a table-knife. Thenceforward, giving up a marriage to which he was looking forward, he devoted himself to the care of his unfortunate sister, who became, except when separated from him by periods of aberration, his lifelong and affectionate companion—the “Cousin Bridget” of his essays. His first literary appearance was a contribution of four sonnets to Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects (1796). Two years later he published , along with his friend Charles Lloyd, Blank Verse, the little vol. including The Old Familiar Faces, and others of his best known poems, and his romance, Rosamund Gray, followed in the same year. He then turned to the drama, and produced John Woodvil, a tragedy, and Mr. H., a farce, both failures, for although the first had some echo of the Elizabethan music, it had no dramatic force. Meantime the brother and sister were leading a life clouded by poverty and by the anxieties arising from the condition of the latter, and they moved about from one lodging to another. Lamb’s literary ventures so far had not yielded much either in money or fame, but in 1807 he was asked by W. Godwin (q.v.) to assist him in his “Juvenile Library,” and to this he, with the assistance of his sister, contributed the now famous Tales from Shakespeare, Charles doing the tragedies and Mary the comedies. In 1808 they wrote, again for children, The Adventures of Ulysses, a version of the Odyssey, Mrs. Leicester’s School, and Poetry for Children (1809). About the same time he was commissioned by Longman to edited selections from the Elizabethan dramatists. To the selections were added criticisms, which at once brought him the reputation of being one of the most subtle and penetrating critics who had ever touched the subject. Three years later his extraordinary power in this department was farther exhibited in a series of papers on Hogarth and Shakespeare, which appeared in Hunt’s Reflector. In 1818 his scattered contributions in prose and verse were collected as The Works of Charles Lamb, and the favour with which they were received led to his being asked to contribute to the London Magazine the essays on which his fame chiefly rests. The name “Elia” under