The particulars disclosed by the letters of 1823 and 1824 are so generally unimportant, that it is unnecessary to refer to them. Lamb, indeed, became acquainted with the author of "Virginius" (Sheridan Knowles), with Mr. Macready, and with the writers in the "London Magazine" (which then had not been long established). And he appears gradually to discover that his work at the India House is wearisome, and complains of it in bitter terms: "Thirty years have I served the Philistines" (he writes to Wordsworth), "and my neck is not subdued to the yoke." He confesses that he had once hoped to have a pension on "this side of absolute incapacity and infirmity," and to have walked out in the "fine Isaac Walton mornings, careless as a beggar, and walking, walking, and dying walking;" but he says, "the hope is gone. I sit like Philomel all day (but not singing), with my breast against this thorn of a desk."

The character of his letters at this time is not generally lively; there is, he says, "a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor John's (his brother's) loss. Deaths overset one. Then there's Captain Burney gone. What fun has whist now?" He proceeds, "I am made up of queer points. My theory is to enjoy life; but my practice is against it." The only hope he has, he says, is, "that some pulmonary affection may relieve me." The success which attended the "Elia" Essays did not comfort him, nor the (pecuniary) temptations of the bookseller to renew them. "The spirit of the thing in my own mind is gone" (he writes). "Some brains," as Ben Jonson says, "will endure but one skimming." Notwithstanding his melancholy humor, however, there is Hope in the distance, which he does not see, and Freedom is not far off.

It was during this period of Lamb's life (1823) that the quarrel between him and his old friend Robert Southey took place. Southey had long been (as was well known) one of the most constant and efficient contributors to the "Quarterly Review;" and Lamb assigned to him the authorship of one of the Review articles, in which he himself was scantily complimented, and his friends Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt denounced. Sir T. Talfourd thinks that Mr. Southey was not the author of the offending essay. Be that as it may, Lamb was then of opinion that his old Tory friend was the enemy. In a letter to Bernard Barton (July, 1823) he writes, "Southey has attacked 'Elia' on the score of infidelity. He might have spared an old friend. I hate his Review, and his being a Reviewer;" but he adds, "I love and respect Southey, and will not retort." However, in the end, irritated by the calumny, or (which is more probable) resenting compliments bestowed on himself at the expense of his friends, he sat down and penned his famous "Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, Esq.," which appeared in the "London Magazine" for October, 1823, and which was afterwards published amongst his collected letters.

This letter, I remember, produced a strong sensation in literary circles; and Mr. Southey's acquaintances smiled, and his enemies rejoiced at it. Indeed, the letter itself is a remarkable document. With much of Lamb's peculiar phraseology, it is argumentative, and defends the imaginary weaknesses or faults, against which (as he guesses) the "Quarterly" reproofs had been levelled. The occasion having gone by, this letter has been dismissed from most minds, except that part of it which exhibits Lamb's championship on behalf of Hunt and Hazlitt, and which is more touching than anything to be found in controversial literature.

Lamb's letter was unknown to his sister until after it appeared in the Magazine, it being his practice to write his letters in Leadenhall Street. It caused her a good deal of annoyance when she saw it in print. It is pleasant to think, however, that it was the means of restoring the old intimacy between Southey and Lamb, and also of strengthening the friendship between Lamb and Hazlitt, which some misunderstanding, at that time, had a little loosened.

When I was married (October, 1824), Lamb sent me a congratulatory letter, which, as it was not published by Sir T. Talfourd, and is, moreover, characteristic, I insert here, from the MS.

"MY DEAR PROCTER: I do agnize a shame in not having been to pay my congratulations to Mrs. Procter and your happy self; but on Sunday (my only morning) I was engaged to a country walk; and in virtue of the hypostatical union between us, when Mary calls, it is understood that I call too, we being univocal.

"But indeed I am ill at these ceremonious inductions. I fancy I was not born with a call on my head, though I have brought one down upon it with a vengeance. I love not to pluck that sort of frail crude, but to stay its ripening into visits. In probability Mary will be at Southampton Row this morning, and something of that kind be matured between you; but in any case not many hours shall elapse before I shake you by the hand.

"Meantime give my kindest felicitations to Mrs. Procter, and assure her I look forward with the greatest delight to our acquaintance. By the way, the deuce a bit of cake has come to hand, which hath an inauspicious look at first; but I comfort myself that that Mysterious Service hath the property of Sacramental Bread, which mice cannot nibble, nor time moulder.

"I am married myself—to a severe step-wife—who keeps me, not at bed and board, but at desk and board, and is jealous of my morning aberrations. I cannot slip out to congratulate kinder unions. It is well she leaves me alone o' nights—the d-d Day-hag Business. She is even now peeping over me to see I am writing no Love Letters. I come, my dear—Where is the Indigo Sale Book?

"Twenty adieus, my dear friends, till we meet.

"Yours most truly,

"C. LAMB.

"Leadenhall, Nov. 11th, '24."

The necessity for labor continued for some short time longer. At last (in the beginning of the year 1825) deliverance came. Charles had previously intimated his wish to resign. The Directors of the East India House call him into their private room, and after complimenting him on his long and meritorious services, they suggest that his health does not appear to be good; that a little ease is expedient at his time of life, and they then conclude their conversation by suddenly intimating their intention of granting him a pension, for his life, of two thirds of the amount of his salary; "a magnificent offer," as he terms it. He is from that moment emancipated; let loose from all ties of labor, free to fly wheresoever he will. At the commencement of the talk Charles had had misgivings, for he was summoned into the "formidable back parlor," he says, and thought that the Directors were about to intimate that they had no further occasion for his services. The whole scene seems like one of the summer sunsets, preceded by threatenings of tempest, when the dark piles of clouds are separated and disappear, lost and swallowed by the radiance which fills the whole length and breadth of the sky, and looks as if it would be eternal. "I don't know what I answered," Lamb says, "between surprise and gratitude; but it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and I was told that I was free from that hour to leave their service. I stammered out a bow, and, at just ten minutes after eight, I went home—forever."

At this time Lamb's salary was six hundred pounds per annum. The amount of two thirds of this sum, therefore, would be an annuity of four hundred pounds. But an annual provision was also made for his sister, in case she should survive him; and this occasioned a small diminution. In exact figures, he was to receive three hundred and ninety-one pounds a year during the remainder of his life, and then an annuity was to become payable to Mary Lamb. His sensations, first of stupefaction, and afterwards of measureless delight, will be seen by reference to his exulting letters of this period. First he writes to Wordsworth of "the good that has befallen me." These are his words: "I came home—forever—on Tuesday last. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from Time into Eternity." * * * "Mary wakes every morning with an obscure feeling that some good has happened to us."—To Bernard Barton his words are, "I have scarce steadiness of head to compose a letter. I am free, B. B.; free as air. I will live another fifty years." * * * "Would I could sell you some of my leisure! Positively the best thing a man can have to do is—NOTHING: and next to that, perhaps, Good Works." —To Miss Hutchinson he writes, "I would not go back to my prison for seven years longer for ten thousand pounds a year. For some days I was staggered, and could not comprehend the magnitude of my deliverance—was confused, giddy. But these giddy feelings have gone away, and my weather- glass stands at a degree or two above 'CONTENT.' All being holidays, I feel as if I had none; as they do in heaven, where 'tis all Red Letter days."

Lamb's discharge or relief was timely and graciously bestowed. It opened a bright vista through which he beheld (in hope) many years of enjoyment; scenes in which his spirit, rescued from painful work, had only to disport itself in endless delights. He had well earned his discharge. He had labored without cessation for thirty-three years; had been diligent, and trusted—a laborer worthy of his hire. And the consciousness of this long and good service must have mingled with his reward and sweetened it. It is a great thing to have earned your meal—your rest,—whatever may be the payment in full for your deserts. You have not to force up gratitude from oblivious depths, day by day, for undeserved bounty. In Lamb's case it happened, unfortunately, that the activity of mind which had procured his repose, tended afterwards to disqualify him from enjoying it. The leisure, that he had once reckoned on so much, exceeded, when it came, the pains of the old counting-house travail. It is only the imbecile, or those brought up in complete lazihood, who can encounter successfully the monotony of "nothing to do," and can slumber away their lives unharmed amongst the dumb weeds and flowers.

In the course of a short time it appeared that he was unable to enjoy, so perfectly as he had anticipated, his golden time of "Nothing to do," his Liberia. He therefore took long walks into the country. He also acquired the companionship of the large dog Dash, much given to wandering, to whose erratic propensities (Lamb walking at the rate of fourteen miles a day) he eventually became a slave. The rambling, inconstant dog rendered the clear, serene day of leisure almost turbid; and he was ultimately (in order to preserve for Charles some little remaining enjoyment) bestowed upon another master. Lamb was always (as I have said) fond of walking, and he had some vague liking, I suppose, for free air and green pastures; although he had no great relish specially for the flowers and ornaments of the country. I have often walked with him in the neighborhood of our great city; and I do not think that he ever treasured up in his memory the violets (or other flowers), the songs of birds, or the pictures of sheep or kine dotting the meadows. Neither his conversation nor writings afforded evidence that he had done so. It is not easy, therefore, to determine what the special attractions were that drew him out of London, which he loved, into the adjoining country, where his walks oftenest lay.

At the time of Lamb's deliverance from office labor, he was living in Colebrook Row. It was there that George Dyer, whose blindness and absence of mind rendered it almost dangerous for him to wander unaccompanied about the suburbs of London, came to visit him on one occasion. By accident, instead of entering the house door, Dyer's aqueous instincts led him towards the water, and in a moment he had plunged overhead in the New River. I happened to go to Lamb's house, about an hour after his rescue and restoration to dry land, and met Miss Lamb in the passage, in a state of great alarm: she was whimpering, and could only utter, "Poor Mr. Dyer! Poor Mr. Dyer!" in tremulous tones. I went up stairs, aghast, and found that the involuntary diver had been placed in bed, and that Miss Lamb had administered brandy and water, as a well-established preventive against cold. Dyer, unaccustomed to anything stronger than the "crystal spring," was sitting upright in the bed, perfectly delirious. His hair had been rubbed up, and stood out like so many needles of iron gray. He did not (like Falstaff) "babble of green fields," but of the "watery Neptune." "I soon found out where I was," he cried out to me, laughing; and then he went wandering on, his words taking flight into regions where no one could follow. Charles Lamb has commemorated this immersion of his old friend, in his (Elia) essay of "Amicus Redivivus."

In the summer of 1826 Lamb published, in "Blackwood's Magazine," a little drama in one act, entitled "The Wife's Trial." It was founded on Crabbe's poetical tale of "The Confidant;" and contains the germ of a plot, which undoubtedly might have been worked out with more effect, if Lamb had devoted sufficient labor to that object.

Amongst the remarkable persons whom Charles became acquainted with, in these years, was Edward Irving. Lamb used to meet him at Coleridge's house at Highgate, and elsewhere; and he came to the conclusion that he was (as indeed he was) a fine, sincere, spirited man, terribly slandered. Edward Irving, who issued, like a sudden light, from the obscure little town of Annan, in Scotland, acquired, in the year 1822, a wide reputation in London. He was a minister of the Scotch Church, and before he came to England had acted as an assistant preacher to Dr. Chalmers. In one of Charles's letters (in 1835) to Bernard Barton (who had evidently been measuring Irving by a low Quaker standard), he takes the opportunity of speaking of the great respect that he entertained for the Scotch minister. "Let me adjure you" (writes Charles), "have no doubt of Irving. Let Mr. ——[?] drop his disrespect." "Irving has prefixed a dedication, of a missionary character, to Coleridge—most beautiful, cordial, and sincere. He there acknowledges his obligations to S. T. C., at whose Gamaliel feet he sits weekly, rather than to all men living." Again he writes, "Some friend said to Irving, 'This will do you no good' (no good in worldly repute). 'That is a reason for doing it,' quoth Irving. I am thoroughly pleased with him. He is firm, out-speaking, intrepid, and docile as a pupil of Pythagoras. "In April, 1825, Lamb writes to Wordsworth to the same effect. "Have you read the noble dedication of Irving's Missionary Sermons?" he inquires; and then he repeats Irving's fine answer to the suggested impolicy of publishing his book with its sincere prefix.

Poor Edward Irving! whom I always deeply respected, and knew intimately for some years, and who was one of the best and truest men whom it has been my good fortune to meet in life! He entered London amidst the shouts of his admirers, and he departed in the midst of contumely; sick, and sad, and maligned, and misunderstood; going back to his dear native Scotland only to die. The time has long passed for discussing the truths or errors of Edward Irving's peculiar creed; but there can be no doubt that he himself was true and faithful till death, and that he preached only what he entirely believed. And what can man do more? If he was wrong, his errors arose from his extreme modesty, his extreme veneration for the subject to which he raised his thoughts.

In the last year of Edward Irving's life (1834), he was counselled by his physician to pass the next winter in a milder climate—that "it was the only safe thing for him." Prevented from ministering in his own church, where "he had become an embarrassment," he travels into the rural places, subdued and chastened by his weakness,—to the Wye and the Severn—to the fine mountains and pleasant places of Wales. Sometimes he thinks himself better. He quits London (forever) in the early part of September, and on the 23d of that month he writes to his wife that he is "surely better, for his pulse has come to be under 100." He passes by Cader Idris, and Snowdon—by Bedgelert to Bangor, "a place of repose;" but gets wet whilst viewing the Menai Bridge, and had "a fevered night;" yet he is able to droop on to Liverpool. Thence (the love of his native land drawing him on) he goes northwards, instead of to the south. He reaches Glasgow, where "he thinks of organizing a church;" although Dr. Darling "decidedly says that he cannot humanly live over the winter." Yet he still goes on with his holy task; he writes "pastoral letters," and preaches, and prays, and offers kind advice. His friends, from Kirkcaldy and elsewhere, come to see him, where, "for a few weeks still, he is visible, about Glasgow. In the sunshine—in a lonely street, his gaunt, gigantic figure rises feebly against the light." At last he lies down on "the bed from which he is never to rise;" his mind wanders, and his articulation becomes indistinct; but he is occasionally understood, and is heard murmuring (in Hebrew) parts of the 23d Psalm, "The Lord is my Shepherd: He leadeth me beside the still waters." And thus gradually sinking, at the close of a gloomy Sunday night in December, he dies.

Mr. Thomas Carlyle, his friend (the friend of his youth), has written an eloquent epitaph upon him; not partial, for they differed in opinion—but eloquent, and very touching. I read it over once or twice in every year. Edward Irving's last words, according to his statement, were, "In life and in death I am the Lord's." Carlyle then adds, "But for Irving, I had never known what the communion of man with man means. He was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with; the best man I have ever (after trial enough) found in this world, or now hope to find."

So Edward Irving went to the true and brave enthusiasts who have gone before him. He died on his final Sabbath (7th December, 1834), and left the world and all its troubles behind him.

[1] The first Essays of Elia were published by Taylor and Hessey under the title "Elia," in 1823. The second Essays were, together with the "Popular Fallacies," collected and published under the title of "The Last Essays of Elia," by Moxon, in 1833.



CHAPTER VII.

Specimen of Lamb's Humor.—Death of Mr. Norris.—Garrick Plays.—Letters to Barton.—Opinions on Books.—Breakfast with Mr. N. P. Willis.—Moves to Enfield.—Caricature of Lamb.—Albums and Acrostics.—Pains of Leisure.— The Barton Correspondence.—Death of Hazlitt.—Munden's Acting and Quitting the Stage.—Lamb becomes a Boarder.—Moves to Edmonton.— Metropolitan Attachments.—Death of Coleridge.—Lamb's Fall and Death.— Death of Mary Lamb.—POSTSCRIPT.



With the expiration of the "London Magazine," Lamb's literary career terminated. A few trifling contributions to the "New Monthly," and other periodicals, are scarcely sufficient to qualify this statement.

It may be convenient, in this place, to specify some of those examples of humor and of jocose speech for which Charles Lamb in his lifetime was well known. These (not his best thoughts) can be separated from the rest, and may attract the notice of the reader, here and there, and relieve the tameness of a not very eventful narrative.

It is possible to define wit (which, as Mr. Coleridge says, is "impersonal"), and humor also; but it is not easy to distinguish the humor of one man from that of all other humorists, so as to bring his special quality clearly before the apprehension of the reader. Perhaps the best (if not the most scientific) way might be to produce specimens of each. In Charles Lamb's case, instances of his humor are to be found in his essays, in his sayings (already partially reported), and throughout his letters, where they are very frequent. They are often of the composite order, in which humor, and wit, and (sometimes) pathos are intermingled. Sometimes they merely exhibit the character of the man.

He once said of himself that his biography "would go into an epigram." His sayings require greater space. Some of those which have been circulated are apocryphal. The following are taken chiefly from his letters, and from my own recollections.

In his exultation on being released from his thirty-four years of labor at the India House, he says, "Had I a little son, I would christen him 'Nothing to do'" (This is in the "Superannuated Man.")

Speaking of Don Quixote, he calls him "the errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse."

On being asked by a schoolmistress for some sign indicative of her calling, he recommended "The Murder of the Innocents."

I once said something in his presence which I thought possessed smartness. He commended me with a stammer: "Very well, my dear boy, very well; Ben (taking a pinch of snuff), Ben Jonson has said worse things than that-and b-b-better." [1]

His young chimney-sweepers, "from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys) in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind."

His saying to Martin Burney has been often repeated—"O Martin, if dirt were trumps, what a hand you would hold!"

To Coleridge: "Bless you, old sophist, who next to human nature taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing."

To Mr. Gilman, a surgeon ("query Kill-man?"), he writes, "Coleridge is very bad, but he wonderfully picks up, and his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory—an archangel a little damaged."

To Wordsworth (who was superfluously solemn) he writes, "Some d-d people have come in, and I must finish abruptly. By d—d, I only mean deuced."

The second son of George the Second, it was said, had a very cold and ungenial manner. Lamb stammered out in his defence that "this was very natural in the Duke of Cu-Cum-ber-land."

To Bernard Barton, of a person of repute: "There must be something in him. Such great names imply greatness. Which of us has seen Michael Angelo's things? yet which of us disbelieves his greatness?"

To Mrs. H., of a person eccentric: "Why does not his guardian angel look to him? He deserves one—may be he has tired him out."

"Charles," said Coleridge to Lamb, "I think you have heard me preach?" "I n—n—never heard you do anything else," replied Lamb.

One evening Coleridge had consumed the whole time in talking of some "regenerated" orthodoxy. Leigh Hunt, who was one of the listeners, on leaving the house, expressed his surprise at the prodigality and intensity of Coleridge's religious expressions. Lamb tranquillized him by "Ne-ne- never mind what Coleridge says; he's full of fun."

There were, &c., &c., "and at the top of all, Hunger (eldest, strongest of the Passions), predominant, breaking down the stony fences of shame."

The Bank, the India House, and other rich traders look insultingly on the old deserted South Sea House, as on "their poor neighbor out of business."

To a Frenchman, setting up Voltaire's character in opposition to that of Christ, Lamb asserted that "Voltaire was a very good Jesus Christ—for the French."

Of a Scotchman: "His understanding is always at its meridian. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border land with him. You cannot hover with him on the confines of truth."

On a book of Coleridge's nephew he writes, "I confess he has more of the Sterne about him than the Sternhold. But he saddens into excellent sense before the conclusion."

As to a monument being erected for Clarkson, in his lifetime, he opposes it, and argues, "Goodness blows no trumpet, nor desires to have it blown. We should be modest for a modest man."

"M. B. is on the top scale of my friendship's ladder, which an angel or two is still climbing; and some, alas! descending."

A fine sonnet of his (The Gipsy's Malison) being refused publication, he exclaimed, "Hang the age! I will write for Antiquity."

Once, whilst waiting in the Highgate stage, a woman came to the door, and inquired in a stern voice, "Are you quite full inside?" "Yes, ma'am," said Charles, in meek reply, "quite; that plateful of Mrs. Gilman's pudding has quite filled us."

Mrs. K., after expressing her love for her young children, added, tenderly, "And how do you like babies, Mr. Lamb?" His answer, immediate, almost precipitate, was "Boi-boi-boiled, ma'am."

Hood, tempting Lamb to dine with him, said, "We have a hare." "And many friends?" inquired Lamb.

It being suggested that he would not sit down to a meal with the Italian witnesses at the Queen's trial, Lamb rejected the imputation, asserting that he would sit with anything except a hen or a tailor.

Of a man too prodigal of lampoons and verbal jokes, Lamb said, threateningly, "I'll Lamb-pun him."

On two Prussians of the same name being accused of the same crime, it was remarked as curious that they were not in any way related to each other. "A mistake," said he; "they are cozens german."

An old lady, fond of her dissenting minister, wearied Lamb by the length of her praises. "I speak, because I know him well," said she.

"Well, I don't;" replied Lamb; "I don't; but d—n him, at a 'venture.'"

The Scotch, whom he did not like, ought, he said, to have double punishment; and to have fire without brimstone.

Southey, in 1799, showed him a dull poem on a rose. Lamb's criticism was, "Your rose is insipid: it has neither thorns nor sweetness."

A person sending an unnecessarily large sum with a lawyer's brief, Lamb said "it was 'a fee simple.'"

Mr. H. C. Robinson, just called to the bar, tells him, exultingly, that he is retained in a cause in the King's Bench. "Ah" (said Lamb), "the great first cause, least understood."

Of a pun, Lamb says it is a "noble thing per se. It is entire. It fills the mind; it is as perfect as a sonnet; better. It limps ashamed, in the train and retinue of humor." [2]

Lamb's puns, as far as I recollect, were not frequent; and, except in the case of a pun, it is difficult to divest a good saying of the facts surrounding it without impoverishing the saying itself. Lamb's humor is generally imbedded in the surrounding sense, and cannot often be disentangled without injury.

I have said that the proprietorship of the "London Magazine," in the year 1821, became vested in Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, under whom it became a social centre for the meeting of many literary men. The publication, however, seems to have interfered with the ordinary calling of the booksellers; and the sale was not therefore (I suppose) sufficiently important to remunerate them for the disturbance of their general trade. At all events, it was sold to Mr. Henry Southern, the editor of "The Retrospective Review," at the expiration of 1825, after having been in existence during five entire years. In Mr. Southern's hands, under a different system of management, it speedily ceased.

In 1826 (January) Charles Lamb suffered great grief from the loss of a very old friend, Mr. Norris. It may be remembered that he was one of the two persons who went to comfort Lamb when his mother so suddenly died. Mr. Norris had been one of the officers of the Inner Temple or Christ's Hospital, and had been intimate with the Lambs for many years; and Charles, when young, used always to spend his Christmases with him. "He was my friend and my father's friend," Lamb writes, "all the life I can remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships ever since. Old as I am, in his eyes I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called me 'Charley.' I have none to call me Charley now. He was the last link that bound me to the Temple."

It was after his death that Lamb once more resorted to the British Museum, which he had been in the habit of frequenting formerly, when his first "Dramatic Specimens" were published. Now he went there to make other extracts from the old plays. These were entitled "The Garrick Plays," and were bestowed upon Mr. Hone, who was poor, and were by him published in his "Every Day Book." Subsequently they were collected by Charles himself, and formed a supplement to the earlier "Specimens." Lamb's labors in this task were by no means trivial. "I am now going through a course of reading" (of old plays), he writes; "I have two thousand to go through."

Lamb's correspondence with his Quaker friend, Bernard Barton ("the busy B," as Hood called him), whose knowledge of the English drama was confined to Shakespeare and Miss Baillie, went on constantly. His letters to this gentleman comprised a variety of subjects, on most of which Charles offers him good advice. Sometimes they are less personal, as where he tells him that "six hundred have been sold of Hood's book, while Sion's songs do not disperse so quickly;" and where he enters (very ably) into the defects and merits of Martin's pictures, Belshazzar and Joshua, and ventures an opinion as to what Art should and should not be. He is strenuous in advising him not to forsake the Bank (where he is a clerk), and throw himself on what the chance of employ by booksellers would afford. "Throw yourself, rather, from the steep Tarpeian rock, headlong upon the iron spikes. Keep to your bank, and your bank will keep you. Trust not to the Public," he says. Then, referring to his own previous complaints of official toil, he adds, "I retract all my fond complaints. Look on them as lovers' quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome, dead timber of a desk that gives me life. A little grumbling is wholesome for the spleen; but in my inner heart I do approve and embrace this our close but unharassing way of life."

Lamb's opinions on books, as well as on conduct, making some deduction for his preference of old writers, is almost always sound. When he is writing to Mr. Walter Wilson, who is editing De Foe, he says of the famous author of "Robinson Crusoe,"—

"In appearance of truth his works exceed any works of fiction that I am acquainted with. It is perfect illusion. It is like reading evidence in a court of justice. There is all the minute detail of a log-book in it. Facts are repeated in varying phrases till you cannot choose but believe them." His liking for books (rather than his criticism on them) is shown frequently in his letters. "O! to forget Fielding, Steele, &c., and to read 'em new," he says. Of De Foe, "His style is everywhere beautiful, but plain and homely." Again, he speaks of "Fielding, Smollett, Sterne,— great Nature's stereotypes." "Milton," he says, "almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him." Of Shenstone he speaks as "the dear author of the Schoolmistress;" and so on from time to time, as occasion prompts, of Bunyan, Isaac Walton, and Jeremy Taylor, and Fuller, and Sir Philip Sidney, and others, in affectionate terms. These always relate to English authors. Lamb, although a good Latinist, had not much of that which ordinarily passes under the name of Learning. He had little knowledge of languages, living or dead. Of French, German, Italian, &c., he knew nothing; and in Greek his acquirements were very moderate. These children of the tongues were never adopted by him; but in his own Saxon English he was a competent scholar, a lover, nice, discriminative, and critical.

The most graphic account of Lamb at a somewhat later period of his life appears in Mr. N. P. Willis's "Pencillings by the Way." He had been invited by a gentleman in the Temple, Mr. R—— (Robinson?), to meet Charles Lamb and his sister at breakfast. The Lambs lived at that time "a little way out of London, and were not quite punctual. At last they enter —"the gentleman in black small-clothes and gaiters, short and very slight in person, his head set on his shoulders with a thoughtful forward bent, his hair just sprinkled with gray, a beautiful deep-set eye, an aquiline nose, and a very indescribable mouth. Whether it expressed most humor or feeling, good nature or a kind of whimsical peevishness, or twenty other things which passed over it by turns, I cannot in the least be certain."

This is Mr. Willis's excellent picture of Lamb at that period. The guest places a large arm-chair for Mary Lamb; Charles pulls it away, saying gravely, "Mary, don't take it; it looks as if you were going to have a tooth drawn." Miss Lamb was at that time very hard of hearing, and Charles took advantage of her temporary deafness to impute various improbabilities to her, which, however, were so obvious as to render any denial or explanation unnecessary. Willis told Charles that he had bought a copy of the "Elia" in America, in order to give to a friend. "What did you give for it?" asked Lamb. "About seven and sixpence." "Permit me to pay you that," said Lamb, counting out the money with earnestness on the table; "I never yet wrote anything that could sell. I am the publisher's ruin. My last poem won't sell,—not a copy. Have you seen it?" No; Willis had not. "It's only eighteenpence, and I'll give you sixpence towards it," said Lamb; and he described where Willis would find it, "sticking up in a shop window in the Strand." Lamb ate nothing, but inquired anxiously for some potted fish, which Mr. R—— used to procure for him. There was none in the house; he therefore asked to see the cover of the pot which had contained it; he thought it would do him good. It was brought, and on it was a picture of the fish. Lamb kissed it, and then left the table, and began to wander about the room, with an uncertain step, &c.

This visit must have taken place, I suppose, at or after the time when Lamb was living at Colebrook Cottage; and the breakfast took place probably in Mr. Henry Crabbe Robinson's chambers in the Temple, where I first met Wordsworth.

In the year 1827 Lamb moved into a small house at Enfield, a "gamboge- colored house," he calls it, where I and other friends went to dine with him; but it was too far from London, except for rare visits.—It was rather before that time that a very clever caricature of him had been designed and engraved ("scratched on copper," as the artist termed it) by Mr. Brook Pulham. It is still extant; and although somewhat ludicrous and hyperbolical in the countenance and outline, it certainly renders a likeness of Charles Lamb. The nose is monstrous, and the limbs are dwarfed and attenuated. Lamb himself, in a letter to Bernard Barton (10th August, 1827), adverts to it in these terms: "'Tis a little sixpenny thing—too like by half—in which the draughtsman has done his best to avoid flattery." Charles's hatred for annuals and albums was continually breaking out: "I die of albophobia." "I detest to appear in an annual," he writes; "I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates." "Coleridge is too deep," again he says, "among the prophets, the gentleman annuals." "If I take the wings of the morning, and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, there will albums be." To Southey he writes about this time, "I have gone lately into the acrostic line. I find genius declines with me; but I get clever." The reader readily appreciates the distinction which the humorist thus cleverly (more than cleverly) makes. In proof of his subdued quality, however, under the acrostical tyranny, I quote two little unpublished specimens addressed to the Misses Locke, whom he had never seen.

To M. L. [Mary Locke.]

Must I write with pen unwilling, And describe those graces killing, Rightly, which I never saw? Yes—it is the album's law.

Let me then invention strain, On your excelling grace to feign. Cold is fiction. I believe it Kindly as I did receive it; Even as I. F.'s tongue did weave it.

To S. L. [Sarah Locke.]

Shall I praise a face unseen, And extol a fancied mien, Rave on visionary charm, And from shadows take alarm? Hatred hates without a cause,

Love may love without applause, Or, without a reason given, Charmed be with unknown heaven. Keep the secret, though unmocked, Ever in your bosom Locked.

After the transfer to Mr. Southern of the "London Magazine," Lamb was prevailed upon to allow some short papers to be published in the "New Monthly Magazine."

They were entitled "Popular Fallacies," and were subsequently published conjointly with the "Elia Essays." He also sent brief contributions to the "Athenaeum" and the "Englishman," and wrote some election squibs for Serjeant Wilde, during his then contest for "Newark." But his animal spirits were not so elastic as formerly, when his time was divided between official work and companionable leisure; the latter acting as a wholesome relief to his mind when wearied by labor.

On this subject hear him speaking to Bernard Barton, to whom, as to others, he had formerly complained of his harassing duties at the India House, and of his delightful prospect of leisure. Now he writes, "Deadly long are the days, with but half an hour's candle-light and no fire-light. The streets, the shops remain, but old friends are gone." "I assure you" (he goes on) "no work is worse than overwork. The mind preys on itself— the most unwholesome food. I have ceased to care almost for anybody." To remedy this tedium, he tries visiting; for the houses of his old friends were always open to him, and he had a welcome everywhere. But this visiting will not revive him. His spirits descended to zero—below it. He is convinced that happiness is not to be found abroad. It is better to go "to my hole at Enfield, and hide like a sick cat in my corner." Again he says, "Home, I have none. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a forlornes head. What I can do, and overdo, is to walk. I am a sanguinary murderer of time. But the snake is vital. Your forlorn—C. L."

These are his meditations in 1829, four years only after he had rushed abroad, full of exaltation and delight, from the prison of a "work-a-day" life, into the happy gardens of boundless leisure. Time, which was once his friend, had become his enemy. His letters, which were always full of goodness, generally full of cheerful humor, sink into discontent. "I have killed an hour or two with this poor scrawl," he writes. It is unnecessary to inflict upon the reader all the points of the obvious moral that obtrudes itself at this period of Charles Lamb's history. It is clear that the Otiosa Eternitas was pressing upon his days, and he did not know how to find relief. Although a good Latin scholar,—indeed, fond of writing letters in Latin,—he did not at this period resort to classical literature. I heard him indeed once (and once only) quote the well-known Latin verse from the Georgics, "O Fortunatos," &c., but generally he showed himself careless about Greeks and Romans; and when (as Mr. Moxon states) "a traveller brought him some acorns from an ilex that grew over the tomb of Virgil, he valued them so little that he threw them at the hackney coachmen as they passed by his window."

I have been much impressed by Lamb's letters to Bernard Barton, which are numerous, and which, taken altogether, are equal to any which he has written. The letters to Coleridge do not exhibit so much care or thought; nor those to Wordsworth or Manning, nor to any others of his intellectual equals. These correspondents could think and speculate for themselves, and they were accordingly left to their own resources. "The Volsces have much corn." But Bernard Barton was in a different condition; he was poor. His education had been inferior, his range of reading and thinking had been very confined, his knowledge of the English drama being limited to Shakespeare and Miss Baillie. He seems, however, to have been an amiable man, desirous of cultivating the power, such as it was, which he possessed; and Lamb therefore lavished upon him—the poor Quaker clerk of a Suffolk banker—all that his wants or ambition required; excellent worldly counsel, sound thoughts upon literature and art, critical advice on his own verses, letters which in their actual value surpass the wealth of many more celebrated collections. Lamb's correspondence with Barton, whom he had first known in 1822, continued until his death.

In 1830 (September 18th) Hazlitt died. It is unnecessary to enter into any enumeration of his remarkable qualities. They were known to all his friends, and to some of his enemies. In Sir Edward Lytton's words, "He went down to the dust without having won the crown for which he so bravely struggled. He who had done so much for the propagation of thought, left no stir upon the surface when he sank." I will not in this place attempt to weave the moral which nevertheless lies hid in his unrequited life. At that time the number of Lamb's old intimates was gradually diminished. The eternally recurring madness of his sister was more frequent. The hopelessness of it—if hope indeed ever existed—was more palpable, more depressing. His own spring of mind was fast losing its power of rebound. He felt the decay of the active principle, and now confined his efforts to morsels of criticism, to verses for albums, and small contributions to periodicals, which (excepting only the "Popular Fallacies") it has not been thought important enough to reprint. To the editor of the "Athenaeum," indeed, he laments sincerely over the death of Munden. This was in February, 1832, and was a matter that touched his affections. "He was not an actor" (he writes), "but something better." To a reader of the present day—even to a contemporary of Lamb himself—there was something almost amounting to extravagance in the terms of his admiration. Yet Munden was, in his way, a remarkable man; and although he was an actor in farce, he often stood aloof and beyond the farce itself. The play was a thing merely on which to hang his own conceptions. These did not arise from the drama, but were elsewhere cogitated, and were interleaved, as it were, with the farce or comedy which served as an excuse for their display. The actor was to all intents and purposes sui generis.

To speak of my own impressions, Munden did not affect me much in some of his earlier performances; for then he depended on the play. Afterwards, when he took the matter into his own hands, and created personages who owed little or nothing to the playwright, then he became an inventor. He rose with the occasion. Sic ivit ad astra. In the drama of "Modern Antiques," especially, space was allowed him for his movements. The words were nothing. The prosperity of the piece depended exclusively on the genius of the actor. Munden enacted the part of an old man credulous beyond ordinary credulity; and when he came upon the stage there was in him an almost sublime look of wonder, passing over the scene and people around him, and settling apparently somewhere beyond the moon. What he believed in, improbable as it was to mere terrestrial visions, you at once conceived to be quite possible,—to be true. The sceptical idiots of the play pretend to give him a phial nearly full of water. He is assured that this contains Cleopatra's tear. Well; who can disprove it? Munden evidently recognized it. "What a large tear!" he exclaimed, Then they place in his hands a druidical harp, which to vulgar eyes might resemble a modern gridiron. He touches the chords gently; "pipes to the spirit ditties of no tone;" and you imagine Aeolian strains. At last William Tell's cap is produced. The people who affect to cheat him, apparently cut the rim from a modern hat, and place the skull-cap in his hands; and then begins the almost finest piece of acting that I ever witnessed. Munden accepts the accredited cap of Tell with confusion and reverence. He places it slowly and solemnly on his head, growing taller in the act of crowning himself. Soon he swells into the heroic size,—a great archer,—and enters upon his dreadful task. He weighs the arrow carefully; he tries the tension of the bow, the elasticity of the string; and finally, after a most deliberate aim, he permits the arrow to fly, and looks forward at the same time with intense anxiety. You hear the twang, you see the hero's knitted forehead, his eagerness; you tremble: at last you mark his calmer brow, his relaxing smile, and are satisfied that the son is saved! It is difficult to paint in words this extraordinary performance, which I have several times seen; but you feel that it is transcendent. You think of Sagittarius, in the broad circle of the Zodiac; you recollect that archery is as old as Genesis; you are reminded that Ishmael, the son of Hagar, wandered about the Judaean deserts, and became an archer.

The old actor is now dead; but on his last performance, when he was to act Sir Robert Bramble, on the night of his taking final leave of the stage, Lamb greatly desired to be present. He had always loved the actors, especially the old actors, from his youth; and this was the last of the Romans. Accordingly Lamb and his sister went to the Drury Lane; but there being no room in the ordinary parts of the house (boxes or pit), Munden obtained places for his two visitors in the orchestra, close to the stage. He saw them carefully ushered in, and well posted; then acted with his usual vigor, and no doubt enjoyed the plaudits wrung from a thousand hands. Afterwards, in the interval between the comedy and the farce, he was seen to appear cautiously, diffidently, at the low door of the orchestra (where the musicians enter), and beckon to his friends, who then perceived that he was armed with a mighty pot of porter, for their refreshment. Lamb, grateful for the generous liquid, drank heartily, but not ostentatiously, and returned the pot of beer to Munden, who had waited to remove it from fastidious eyes. He then retreated into the farce; and then he retired—forever.

After Munden's retirement Lamb almost entirely forsook the theatre; and his habits became more solitary. He had not relinquished society, nor professedly narrowed the circle of his friends. But insensibly his visitors became fewer in number, and came less frequently. Some had died; some had grown old; some had increased occupation to care for. His old Wednesday evenings had ceased, and he had placed several miles of road between London (the residence of their families) and his own home. The weight of years, indeed, had its effect in pressing down his strength and buoyancy; his spirit no longer possessed its old power of rebound. Even the care of housekeeping (not very onerous, one would suppose) troubled Charles and his sister so much, that they determined to abandon it. This occurred in 1829. Then they became boarders and lodgers, with an old person (T. W.), who was their next-door neighbor at Enfield; and of him Lamb has given an elaborate description. T. W., his new landlord or housekeeper, he says, is seventy years old; "he has something, under a competence;" he has one joke, and forty pounds a year, upon which he retires in a green old age: he laughs when he hears a joke, and when (which is much oftener) he hears it not. Having served the greater parish offices, Lamb and his sister become greater, being his lodgers, than they were when substantial householders. The children of the village venerate him for his gentility, but wonder also at him for a gentle indorsation of the person, not amounting to a hump, or, if one, then like that of the buffalo, and coronative of as mild qualities.

Writing to Wordsworth (and speaking as a great landed proprietor), he says, "We have ridded ourselves of the dirty acres; settled down into poor boarders and lodgers; confiding ravens." The distasteful country, however, still remains, and the clouds still hang over it. "Let not the lying poets be believed, who entice men from the cheerful streets," he writes. The country, he thinks, does well enough when he is amongst his books, by the fire and with candle-light; but day and the green fields return and restore his natural antipathies; then he says, "In a calenture I plunge into St. Giles's." So Lamb and his sister leave their comfortable little house, and subside into the rooms of the Humpback. Their chairs, and tables, and beds also retreat; all except the ancient bookcase, full of his "ragged veterans." This I saw, years after Charles Lamb's death, in the possession of his sister, Mary. "All our furniture has faded," he writes, "under the auctioneer's hammer; going for nothing, like the tarnished frippery of the prodigal." Four years afterwards (in 1833) Lamb moves to his last home, in Church Street, Edmonton, where he is somewhat nearer to his London friends.

Very curious was the antipathy of Charles to objects that are generally so pleasant to other men. It was not a passing humor, but a life-long dislike. He admired the trees, and the meadows, and murmuring streams in poetry. I have heard him repeat some of Keats's beautiful lines in the Ode to the Nightingale, about the "pastoral eglantine," with great delight. But that was another thing: that was an object in its proper place: that was a piece of art. Long ago he had admitted that the mountains of Cumberland were grand objects "to look at;" but (as he said) "the houses in streets were the places to live in." I imagine that he would no more have received the former as an equivalent for his own modest home, than he would have accepted a portrait as a substitute for a friend. He was, beyond all other men whom I have met, essentially metropolitan. He loved "the sweet security of streets," as he says: "I would set up my tabernacle there."

In the spring of 1834, Coleridge's health began to decline. Charles had written to him (in reply) on the 14th April, at which time his friend had been evidently unwell; for Lamb says that he is glad to see that he could write so long a letter. He was indeed very ill; and no further personal intercourse (I believe) took place between Charles and his old schoolfellow. Coleridge lay ill for months; but his faculties seem to have survived his bodily decay. He died on the 25th July, 1834; yet on the 5th of that month he was able to discourse with his nephew on Dryden and Barrow, on Lord Brook, and Fielding, and Richardson, without any apparent diminution of judgment. Even on the 10th (a fortnight only before his death) there was no symptom of speedy dissolution: he then said, "The scenes of my early life have stolen into my mind like breezes blown from the Spice Islands." Charles's sorrow was unceasing. "He was my fifty years' old friend" (he says) "without a dissension. I cannot think without an ineffectual reference to him." Lamb's frequent exclamations, "Coleridge is dead! Coleridge is dead!" have been already noticed.

And now the figures of other old friends of Charles Lamb, gradually (one by one), slip out of sight. Still, in his later letters are to be found glimpses of Wordsworth and Southey, of Rogers and Hood, of Cary (with whom his intimacy increases); especially may be noted Miss Isola, whom he tenderly regarded, and after whose marriage (then left more alone) he retreats to his last retreat, in Church Street, Edmonton.

From details let us escape into a more general narrative. The latest facts need not be painfully enumerated. There is little left, indeed, to particularize. Mary's health fluctuates, perhaps, more frequently than heretofore. At one time she is well and happy; at another her mind becomes turbid, and she is then sheltered, as usual, under her brother's care. The last Essays of Elia are published;—friends visit him;—and he occasionally visits them in London. He dines with Talfourd and Cary. The sparks which are brought out are as bright as ever, although the splendor is not so frequent. Apparently the bodily strength, never great, but sufficient to move him pleasantly throughout life, seemed to flag a little. Yet he walks as usual. He and his sister "scramble through the Inferno:" (as he says to Gary), "Mary's chief pride in it was, that she should some day brag of it to you." Then he and Mary became very poorly. He writes, "We have had a sick child, sleeping, or not sleeping, next to me, with a pasteboard partition between, who killed my sleep. My bedfellows are Cough and Cramp: we sleep three in a bed. Don't come yet to this house of pest and age." This is in 1833. At the end of that year (in December) he writes (once more humorously) to Rogers, expressing, amongst other things, his love for that fine artist, Stothard: "I met the dear old man, and it was sublime to see him sit, deaf, and enjoy all that was going on mirthful with the company. He reposed upon the many graceful and many fantastic images he had created." His last letter, written to Mrs. Dyer on the day after his fall, was an effort to recover a book of Mr. Cary, which had been mislaid or lost, so anxious was he always that every man should have his own.

In December, 1834, the history of Charles Lamb comes suddenly to a close. He had all along had a troubled day: now came the night. His spirits had previously been tolerably cheerful; reading and conversing, as heretofore, with his friends, on subjects that were familiar to him. There was little manifest alteration or falling off in his condition of mind or body. He took his morning walks as usual. One day he stumbled against a stone, and fell. His face was slightly wounded; but no fatal (or even alarming) consequence was foreboded. Erysipelas, however, followed the wound, and his strength (never robust) was not sufficient to enable him to combat successfully that inflammatory and exhausting disease. He suffered no pain (I believe); and when the presence of a clergyman was suggested to him, he made no remark, but understood that his life was in danger; he was quite calm and collected, quite resigned. At last his voice began to fail, his perceptions became confused, and he sank gradually, very gradually, until the 27th of December, 1834; and then—he died! It was the fading away or disappearance of life, rather than a violent transit into another world.

He died at Edmonton; not, as has been supposed, at Enfield, to which place he never returned as to a place of residence, after he had once quitted it.

It is not true that he was ever deranged, or subjected to any restraint, shortly before his death. There never was the least symptom of mental disturbance in him after the time (1795-6) when he was placed for a few weeks in Hoxton Asylum, to allay a little nervous irritation. If it were necessary to confirm this assertion, which is known to me from personal observation and other incontrovertible evidence, I would adduce ten of his published letters (in 1833) and several in 1834; one of them bearing date only four days before his death. All these documents afford ample testimony of his clear good sense and kind heart, some of them, indeed, being tinged with his usual humor.

Charles Lamb was fifty-nine years old at his death; of the same age as Cromwell, between whom and himself there was of course no other similitude. A few years before, when he was about to be released from his wearisome toil at the India House, he said exultingly, that he was passing out of Time into Eternity. But now came the true Eternity; the old Eternity,—without change or limit; in which all men surrender their leisure, as well as their labor; when their sensations and infirmities (sometimes harassing enough) cease and are at rest. No more anxiety for the debtor; no more toil for the worker. The rich man's ambition, the poor man's pains, at last are over. Hic Jacet. That "forlorn" inscription is the universal epitaph. What a world of moral, what speculations, what pathetic wishes, and what terrible dreams, lie enshrouded in that one final issue, which we call—DEATH.

To him who never gave pain to a human being, whose genius yielded nothing but instruction and delight, was awarded a calm and easy death. No man, it is my belief, was ever loved or lamented more sincerely than Charles Lamb. His sister (his elder by a decade) survived him for the space of thirteen years.

By strict economy, without meanness; with much unpretending hospitality; with frequent gifts and lendings, and without any borrowing,—he accumulated, during his thirty-three years of constant labor, the moderate sum of two thousand pounds. No more. That was the sum, I believe, which was eventually shared amongst his legatees. His other riches were gathered together and deposited elsewhere; in the memory of those who loved him,— and there were many of them,—or amongst others of our Anglo-Saxon race, whose minds he has helped to enrich and soften.

The property of Charles Lamb, or so much as might be wanted for the purpose, was by his will directed to be applied towards the maintenance and comfort of his sister; and, subject to this primary object, it was vested in trustees for the benefit of Miss Isola—Mrs. Moxon.

Mary Lamb's comforts were supplied, with anxiety and tenderness, throughout the thirteen years during which she survived her brother. I went to see her, after her brother's death; but her frequent illnesses did not render visits at all times welcome or feasible. She then resided in Alpha Road, Saint John's Wood, under the care of an experienced nurse. There was a twilight of consciousness in her,—scarcely more,—at times; so that perhaps the mercy of God saved her from full knowledge of her great loss. Charles, who had given up all his days for her protection and benefit,—who had fought the great battle of life so nobly,—left her "for that unknown and silent shore," where, it is hoped, the brother and sister will renew the love which once united them on earth, and made their lives holy. Mary Lamb died on the 2Oth May, 1847; and the brother and sister now lie near each other (in the same grave) in the churchyard of Edmonton, in Middlesex.

[1] This, with a small variation, is given in Mr. Thomas Moore's autobiography. I suppose I must have repeated it to him, and that he forgot the precise words.

[2] I fear that I have not, in all the foregoing instances, set forth with sufficient precision the grounds or premises upon which the jests were founded. There were, moreover, various other sayings of Lamb, which do not come into the above catalogue; as where—when enjoying a pipe with Dr. Parr, that Divine inquired how he came to acquire the love of smoking so much, he replied, "I toiled after it as some people do after virtue."— When Godwin was expatiating on the benefit of unlimited freedom of thought, especially in matters of religion, Lamb, who did not like this, interrupted him by humming the little child's song of "Old Father Longlegs won't say his prayers," adding, violently, "Throw him down stairs!"—He consoles Mr. Crabbe Robinson, suffering under tedious rheumatism, by writing, "Your doctor seems to keep you under the long cure."—To Wordsworth, in order to explain that his friend A was in good health, he writes, "A is well; he is proof against weather, ingratitude, meat underdone, and every weapon of fate." The story of Lamb replying to some one, who insisted very strenuously on some uninteresting circumstances being "a matter of fact," by saying that he was "a matter of lie" man, is like Leigh Hunt, who, in opposing the frequent confessions of "I'm in love," asserted, in a series of verses, that he was "In hate."—Charles hated noise, and fuss, and fine words, but never hated any person. Once, when he had said, "I hate Z," some one present remonstrated with him: "Why, you have never seen him." "No," replied Lamb, "certainly not; I never could hate any man that I have once seen."—Being asked how he felt when amongst the lakes and mountains of Cumberland, he replied that he was obliged to think of the Ham and Beef shop near Saint Martin's Lane; this was in order to bring down his thoughts from their almost too painful elevation to the sober regions of every-day life.

In the foregoing little history, I have set forth such facts as tend, in my opinion, to illustrate my friend's character. One anecdote I have omitted, and it should not be forgotten. Lamb, one day, encountered a small urchin loaded with a too heavy package of grocery. It caused him to tremble and stop. Charles inquired where he was going, took (although weak) the load upon his own shoulder, and managed to carry it to Islington, the place of destination. Finding that the purchaser of the grocery was a female, he went with the urchin before her, and expressed a hope that she would intercede with the poor boy's master, in order to prevent his being overweighted in future. "Sir," said the dame, after the manner of Tisiphone, frowning upon him, "I buy my sugar, and have nothing to do with the man's manner of sending it." Lamb at once perceived the character of the purchaser, and taking off his hat, said, humbly, "Then I hope, ma'am, you'll give me a drink of small beer." This was of course refused. He afterwards called upon the grocer, on the boy's behalf—with what effect I do not know.



POSTSCRIPT.

I have thus told, as far as my ability permits, the story of the life of Charles Lamb.

I have not ventured to deduce any formidable moral from it. Like Lamb himself, I have great dislike to ostentatious precepts and impertinent lessons. Facts themselves should disclose their own virtues. A man who is able to benefit by a lesson will, no doubt, discover it, under any husk or disguise, before it is stripped and laid bare—to the kernel.

Besides, too much teaching may disagree with the reader. It is apt to harden the heart, wearying the attention, and mortifying the self-love. Such disturbances of the system interfere with the digestion of a truth.

Even Gulliver is sometimes too manifestly didactic. His adventures, simply told, would have emitted spontaneously a luminous atmosphere, and need not have been distilled into brilliant or pungent drops.

No history is barren of good. Even from the foregoing narrative some benefit may be gleaned, some sympathy may be excited, which naturally forms itself into a lesson.

Let us look at it cursorily.

Charles Lamb was born almost in penury, and he was taught by charity. Even when a boy he was forced to labor for his bread. In the first opening of manhood a terrible calamity fell upon him, in magnitude fit to form the mystery or centre of an antique drama. He had to dwell, all his days, with a person incurably mad. From poverty he passed at once to unpleasant toil and perpetual fear. These were the sole changes in his fortune. Yet he gained friends, respect, a position, and great sympathy from all; showing what one poor man of genius, under grievous misfortune, may do, if he be courageous and faithful to the end.

Charles Lamb never preached nor prescribed, but let his own actions tell their tale and produce their natural effects; neither did he deal out little apothegms or scraps of wisdom, derived from other minds. But he succeeded; and in every success there must be a mainstay of right or truth to support it; otherwise it will eventually fail.

It is true that in his essays and numerous letters many of his sincere thoughts and opinions are written down. These, however, are written down simply, and just as they occur, without any special design. Some persons exhibit only their ingenuity, or learning. It is not every one who is able, like the licentiate Pedro Garcias, to deposit his wealth of soul by the road-side.

Like all persons of great intellectual sensibility, Lamb responded to all impressions. To sympathize with Tragedy or Comedy only, argues a limited capacity. The mind thus constructed is partially lame or torpid. One hemisphere has never been reached.

It should not be forgotten that Lamb possessed one great advantage. He lived and died amongst his equals. This was what enabled him to exercise his natural strength, as neither a parasite nor a patron can. It is marvellous how freedom of thought operates; what strength it gives to the system; with what lightness and freshness it endues the spirit. Then, he was made stronger by trouble; made wiser by grief.

I have not attempted to fix the precise spot in which Charles Lamb is to shine hereafter in the firmament of letters. I am not of sufficient magnitude to determine his astral elevation—where he is to dwell—between the sun Shakespeare and the twinkling Zoilus. That must be left to time. Even the fixed stars at first waver and coruscate, and require long seasons for their consummation and final settlement.

Whenever he differs with us in opinion (as he does occasionally), let us not hastily pronounce him to be wrong. It is wise, as well as modest, not to show too much eagerness to adjust the ideas of all other thinkers to the (sometimes low) level of our own.



APPENDIX.

In the following pages will be found the opinions of several distinguished authors on the subject of Charles Lamb's genius and character, and also a contribution (by himself) to the Athenaeum, made in January, 1835. All the writers were contemporary with Lamb, and were personally intimate with him. The extracts may be accepted as corroborative, in some degree, of the opinions set forth in the foregoing Memoir.

HAZLITT.

[From Hazlitt's "Spirit of the Age." Title, "Elia."]

Mr. Lamb has the very soul of an antiquarian, as this implies a reflecting humanity. The film of the past hovers forever before him. He is shy, sensitive, the reverse of everything coarse, vulgar, obtrusive, and commonplace. His spirit clothes itself in the garb of elder time; homelier, but more durable. He is borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology, is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-fashioned conduits.... There is a fine tone of chiaro-scuro, a moral perspective in his writings. He delights to dwell on that which is fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion; that piques and provokes his fancy most which is hid from a superficial glance. That which, though gone by, is still remembered, is in his view more genuine, and has given more signs that it will live, than a thing of yesterday, which may be forgotten to- morrow. Death has in this sense the spirit of life in it; and the shadowy has to our author something substantial.

Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to new customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions of self-importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical advantages, even to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does not rely upon, or ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in abhorrence: he utterly abjures and discards them. He disdains all the vulgar artifices of authorship, all the cant of criticism and helps of notoriety.

His affections revert to and settle on the past; but then even this must have something personal and local in it to interest him deeply and thoroughly. He pitches his tent in the suburbs of existing manners, and brings down his account of character to the few straggling remains of the last generation. No one makes the tour of our southern metropolis, or describes the manners of the last age, so well as Mr. Lamb,—with so fine, and yet so formal an air. How admirably he has sketched the former inmates of the South Sea House; what "fine fretwork he makes of their double and single entries!"

With what a firm yet subtle pencil he has embodied Mrs. Battle's opinions on Whist! With what well-disguised humor he introduces us to his relations, and how freely he serves up his friends!

The streets of London are his fairy-land, teeming with wonder, with life and interest to his retrospective glance, as it did to the eager eye of childhood: he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a bright and endless romance.

[From Hazlitt's "Table Talk," Vol. II.]

Mr. Lamb is the only imitator of old English style I can read with pleasure; and he is so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his authors, that the idea of imitation is almost done away. There is an inward unction, a marrowy vein both in the thought and feeling, an intuition, deep and lively, of his subject, that carries off any quaintness or awkwardness arising from an antiquated style and dress. The matter is completely his own, though the manner is assumed. Perhaps his ideas are altogether so marked and individual, as to require their point and pungency to be neutralized by the affectation of a singular but traditional form of conveyance. Tricked out in the prevailing costume, they would probably seem more startling and out of the way. The old English authors, Burton, Fuller, Coryate, Sir Thomas Browne, are a kind of mediators between us and the more eccentric and whimsical modern, reconciling us to his peculiarities. I must confess that what I like best of his papers under the signature of Elia (still I do not presume, amidst such excellence, to decide what is most excellent) is the account of Mrs. Battle's "Opinions on Whist," which is also the most free from obsolete allusions and turns of expression,—

"A well of native English undefiled."

To those acquainted with his admired prototypes, these Essays of the ingenious and highly gifted author have the same sort of charm and relish that Erasmus's "Colloquies," or a fine piece of modern Latin, have to the classical scholar.—"On Familiar Style."

[Hazlitt's "Plain Speaker," Vol. I. p. 62.]

At Lamb's we used to have lively skirmishes at their Thursday evening parties. I doubt whether the Small Coal-man's musical parties could exceed them. O for the pen of John Buncle to consecrate a petit souvenir to their memory! There was Lamb himself, the most delightful, the most provoking, the most witty and sensible of men. He always made the best pun and the best remark in the course of the evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things, in half a dozen sentences, as he does. His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a play upon words. What a keen, laughing, hair-brained vein of homefelt truth! What choice venom! How often did we cut into the haunch of letters! How we skimmed the cream of criticism! How we picked out the marrow of authors! Need I go over the names? They were but the old, everlasting set —Milton and Shakespeare, Pope and Dryden, Steele and Addison, Swift and Gay, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, Hogarth's prints, Claude's landscapes, the Cartoons at Hampton Court, and all those things that, having once been, must ever be. The Scotch Novels had not then been heard of: so we said nothing about them. In general we were hard upon the moderns. The author of the "Rambler" was only tolerated in Boswell's Life of him; and it was as much as any one could do to edge in a word for Junius. Lamb could not bear Gil Blas: this was a fault. I remember the greatest triumph I ever had was in persuading him, after some years' difficulty, that Fielding was better than Smollett. On one occasion he was for making out a list of persons famous in history that one would wish to see again, at the head of whom were Pontius Pilate, Sir Thomas Browne, and Dr. Faustus; but we black-balled most of his list! But with what a gusto would he describe his favorite authors, Donne or Sir Philip Sidney, and call their most crabbed passages delicious! He tried them on his palate, as epicures taste olives, and his observations had a smack in them, like a roughness on the tongue. With what discrimination he hinted a defect in what he admired most,—as in saying the display of the sumptuous banquet, in "Paradise Regained," was not in true keeping, as the simplest fare was all that was necessary to tempt the extremity of hunger; and stating that Adam and Eve in "Paradise Lost" were too much like married people. He has furnished many a text for Coleridge to preach upon. There was no fuss or cant about him; nor were his sweets or sours ever diluted with one particle of affectation.—"On the Conversation of Authors."

[From "Autobiography of Leigh Hunt," pp. 250-253.]

Let me take this opportunity of recording my recollections in general of my friend Lamb; of all the world's friend, particularly of his oldest friends, Coleridge and Southey; for I think he never modified or withheld any opinion (in private or bookwards) except in consideration of what he thought they might not like.

Charles Lamb had a head worthy of Aristotle, with as fine a heart as ever beat in human bosom, and limbs very fragile to sustain it. There was a caricature of him sold in the shops, which pretended to be a likeness. Procter went into the shop in a passion, and asked the man what he meant by putting forth such a libel. The man apologized, and said that the artist meant no offence. There never was a true portrait of Lamb. His features were strongly yet delicately cut; he had a fine eye as well as forehead; and no face carried in it greater marks of thought and feeling. It resembled that of Bacon, with less worldly vigor and more sensibility.

As his frame, so was his genius. It was as fit for thought as could be, and equally as unfit for action; and this rendered him melancholy, apprehensive, humorous, and willing to make the best of everything as it was, both from tenderness of heart and abhorrence of alteration. His understanding was too great to admit an absurdity; his frame was not strong enough to deliver it from a fear. His sensibility to strong contrasts was the foundation of his humor, which was that of a wit at once melancholy and willing to be pleased.... His puns were admirable, and often contained as deep things as the wisdom of some who have greater names; such a man, for instance, as Nicole, the Frenchman, who was a baby to him. Lamb would have cracked a score of jokes at Nicole, worth his whole book of sentences; pelted his head with pearls. Nicole would not have understood him, but Rochefou-cault would, and Pascal too; and some of our old Englishmen would have understood him still better. He would have been worthy of hearing Shakespeare read one of his scenes to him, hot from the brain. Commonplace found a great comforter in him, as long as it was good-natured; it was to the ill-natured or the dictatorial only that he was startling. Willing to see society go on as it did, because he despaired of seeing it otherwise, but not at all agreeing in his interior with the common notions of crime and punishment, he "dumfounded" a long tirade against vice one evening, by taking the pipe out of his mouth, and asking the speaker, "Whether he meant to say that a thief was not a good man?" To a person abusing Voltaire, and indiscreetly opposing his character to that of Jesus Christ, he said admirably well (though he by no means overrated Voltaire, nor wanted reverence in the other quarter), that "Voltaire was a very good Jesus Christ for the French." He liked to see the church-goers continue to go to church, and wrote a tale in his sister's admirable little book (Mrs. Leicester's School) to encourage the rising generation to do so; but to a conscientious deist he had nothing to object; and if an atheist had found every other door shut against him, he would assuredly not have found his. I believe he would have had the world remain precisely as it was, provided it innovated no further; but this spirit in him was anything but a worldly one, or for his own interest. He hardly contemplated with patience the new buildings in the Regent's Park; and, privately speaking, he had a grudge against official heaven-expounders, or clergymen. He would rather, however, have been with a crowd that he disliked, than felt himself alone. He said to me one day, with a face of great solemnity, "What must have been that man's feelings, who thought himself the first deist?" ... He knew how many false conclusions and pretensions are made by men who profess to be guided by facts only, as if facts could not be misconceived, or figments taken for them; and therefore, one day, when somebody was speaking of a person who valued himself on being a matter-of-fact man, "Now," said he, "I value myself on being a matter-of-lie man." This did not hinder his being a man of the greatest veracity, in the ordinary sense of the word; but "truth," he said, "was precious, and not to be wasted on everybody." Those who wish to have a genuine taste of him, and an insight into his modes of life, should read his essays on Hogarth and King Lear, his Letters, his article on the London Streets, on Whist-Playing, which he loves, and on Saying Grace before Meat, which he thinks a strange moment to select for being grateful. He said once to a brother whist-player, whose hand was more clever than clean, and who had enough in him to afford the joke, "M., if dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!"

* * * * *

FORSTER.

[From Mr. John Forsters Contribution to the New Monthly Magazine, 1835. Title, "Charles Lamb."]

Charles Lamb's first appearance in literature was by the side of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He came into his first battle, as he tells us (literature is a sort of warfare), under cover of that greater Ajax.

We should like to see this remarkable friendship (remarkable in all respects and in all its circumstances) between two of the most original geniuses in an age of no common genius, worthily recorded. It would outvalue, in the view of posterity, many centuries of literary quarrels.

Lamb never fairly recovered the death of Coleridge. He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself) until his own great spirit joined his friend's. He had a habit of venting his melancholy in a sort of mirth. He would, with nothing graver than a pun, "cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighed" upon it. In a jest, or a few light phrases, he would lay open the recesses of his heart. So in respect of the death of Coleridge. Some old friends of his saw him two or three weeks ago, and remarked the constant turning and reference of his mind. He interrupted himself and them almost every instant with some play of affected wonder or humorous melancholy on the words "Coleridge is dead." Nothing could divert him from that, for the thought of it never left him. About the same time, we had written to him to request a few lines for the literary album of a gentleman who entertained a fitting admiration of his genius. It was the last request we were to make, and the last kindness we were to receive. He wrote in Mr. ——'s volume, and wrote of Coleridge. This, we believe, was the last production of his pen. A strange and not unenviable chance, which saw him at the end of his literary pilgrimage, as he had been at the beginning,—in that immortal company. We are indebted, with the reader, to the kindness of our friend for permission to print the whole of what was written. It would be impertinence to offer a remark on it. Once read, its noble and affectionate tenderness will be remembered forever.

"When I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world,—that he had a hunger for eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve. But since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations. He was a Grecian (or in the first form) at Christ's Hospital, where I was deputy Grecian; and the same subordination and deference to him I have preserved through a life-long acquaintance. Great in his writings, he was greatest in his conversation. In him was disproved that old maxim, that we should allow every one his share of talk. He would talk from morn to dewy eve, nor cease till far midnight; yet who ever would interrupt him,—who would obstruct that continuous flow of converse, fetched from Helicon or Zion? He had the tact of making the unintelligible seem plain. Many who read the abstruser parts of his "Friend" would complain that his works did not answer to his spoken wisdom. They were identical. But he had a tone in oral delivery, which seemed to convey sense to those who were otherwise imperfect recipients. He was my fifty years old friend without a dissension. Never saw I his likeness, nor probably the world can see again. I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived. I love the faithful Gilmans more than while they exercised their virtues towards him living. What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel.

"CHAS. LAMB.

"EDMONTON, November 21, 1834."

Within five weeks of this date Charles Lamb died. A slight accident brought on an attack of erysipelas, which proved fatal; his system was not strong enough for resistance. It is some consolation to add, that, during his illness, which lasted four days, he suffered no pain, and that his faculties remained with him to the last. A few words spoken by him the day before he died showed with what quiet collectedness he was prepared to meet death.

As an Essayist, Charles Lamb will be remembered, in years to come, with Rabelais and Montaigne, with Sir Thomas Browne, with Steele, and with Addison. He unites many of the finest characteristics of these several writers. He has wisdom and wit of the highest order, exquisite humor, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry, and the most heart-touching pathos. In the largest acceptation of the word he is a humanist. No one of the great family of authors past or present has shown in matters the most important or the most trivial so delicate and extreme a sense of all that is human. It is the prevalence of this characteristic in his writings which has subjected him to occasional charges of want of imagination. This, however, is but half-criticism; for the matter of reproach may in fact be said to be his triumph. It was with a deep relish of Mr. Lamb's faculty that a friend of his once said, "He makes the majesties of imagination seem familiar." It is precisely thus with his own imagination. It eludes the observation of the ordinary reader in the modesty of its truth, in its social and familiar air. His fancy as an Essayist is distinguished by singular delicacy and tenderness; and even his conceits will generally be found to be, as those of his favorite Fuller often are, steeped in human feeling and passion. The fondness he entertained for Fuller, for the author of the "Anatomy of Melancholy," and for other writers of that class, was a pure matter of temperament. His thoughts were always his own. Even when his words seem cast in the very mould of others, the perfect originality of his thinking is felt and acknowledged; we may add, in its superior wisdom, manliness, and unaffected sweetness. Every sentence in those Essays may be proved to be crammed full of thinking. The two volumes will be multiplied, we have no doubt, in the course of a few years, into as many hundreds; for they contain a stock of matter which must be ever suggestive to more active minds, and will surely revisit the world in new shapes—an everlasting succession and variety of ideas. The past to him was not mere dry antiquity; it involved a most extensive and touching association of feelings and thoughts, reminding him of what we have been and may be, and seeming to afford a surer ground for resting on than the things which are here to-day and may be gone to-morrow. We know of no inquisition more curious, no speculation more lofty, than may be found in the Essays of Charles Lamb. We know no place where conventional absurdities receive so little quarter; where stale evasions are so plainly exposed; where the barriers between names and things are at times so completely flung down. And how, indeed, could it be otherwise? For it is truth that plays upon his writings like a genial and divine atmosphere. No need for them to prove what they would be at by any formal or logical analysis; no need for him to tell the world that this institution is wrong and that doctrine right; the world may gather from those writings their surest guide to judgment in these and all other cases—a general and honest appreciation of the humane and true.

Mr. Lamb's personal appearance was remarkable. It quite realized the expectations of those who think that an author and a wit should have a distinct air, a separate costume, a particular cloth, something positive and singular about him. Such unquestionably had Mr. Lamb. Once he rejoiced in snuff-color, but latterly his costume was inveterately black—with gaiters which seemed longing for something more substantial to close in. His legs were remarkably slight; so indeed was his whole body, which was of short stature, but surmounted by a head of amazing fineness. His face was deeply marked and full of noble lines—traces of sensibility, imagination, suffering, and much thought. His wit was in his eye, luminous, quick, and restless. The smile that played about his mouth was ever cordial and good-humored; and the most cordial and delightful of its smiles were those with which he accompanied his affectionate talk with his sister, or his jokes against her.

* * * * *

TALFOURD.

[From Talfourd's "Memorials of C. Lamb," pp. 337-8, 342-3.]

Except to the few who were acquainted with the tragical occurrences of Lamb's early life, some of his peculiarities seemed strange,—to be forgiven, indeed, to the excellences of his nature and the delicacy of his genius,—but still, in themselves, as much to be wondered at as deplored. The sweetness of his character, breathed through his writings, was felt even by strangers; but its heroic aspect was unguessed even by many of his friends. Let them now consider it, and ask if the annals of self-sacrifice can show anything in human action and endurance more lovely than its self- devotion exhibits! It was not merely that he saw through the ensanguined cloud of misfortune which had fallen upon his family, the unstained excellence of his sister, whose madness had caused it; that he was ready to take her to his own home with reverential affection, and cherish her through life; that he gave up, for her sake, all meaner and more selfish love, and all the hopes which youth blends with the passion which disturbs and ennobles it; not even that he did all this cheerfully, and without pluming himself upon his brotherly nobleness as a virtue, or seeking to repay himself (as some uneasy martyrs do) by small instalments of long repining,—but that he carried the spirit of the hour in which he first knew and took his course, to his last. So far from thinking that his sacrifice of youth and love to his sister gave him a license to follow his own caprice at the expense of her feelings, even in the lightest matters, he always wrote and spoke of her as his wiser self, his generous benefactress, of whose protecting care he was scarcely worthy. How his pen almost grew wanton in her praise, even when she was a prisoner in the Asylum after the fatal attack of lunacy, his letters of the time to Coleridge show; but that might have been a mere temporary exaltation—the attendant fervor of a great exigency and a great resolution. It was not so.

Nervous, tremulous, as he seemed—so light of frame that he looked only fit for the most placid fortune—when the dismal emergencies which checkered his life arose, he acted with as much promptitude and vigor as if he had never penned a stanza nor taken a glass too much, or was strung with herculean sinews. None of those temptations, in which misery is the most potent, to hazard a lavish expenditure for an enjoyment to be secured against fate and fortune, ever tempted him to exceed his income, when scantiest, by a shilling. He had always a reserve for poor Mary's periods of seclusion, and something in hand besides for a friend in need; and on his retirement from the India House, he had amassed, by annual savings, a sufficient sum (invested, after the prudent and classical taste of Lord Stowell, in "the elegant simplicity of the Three per Cents.") to secure comfort to Miss Lamb, when his pension should cease with him, even if the India Company, his great employers, had not acted nobly by the memory of their inspired clerk—as they did—and gave her the annuity to which a wife would have been entitled—but of which he could not feel assured. Living among literary men, some less distinguished and less discreet than those whom we have mentioned, he was constantly importuned to relieve distresses which an improvident speculation in literature produces, and which the recklessness attendant on the empty vanity of self-exaggerated talent renders desperate and merciless—and to the importunities of such hopeless petitioners he gave too largely—though he used sometimes to express a painful sense that he was diminishing his own store without conferring any real benefit. "Heaven," he used to say, "does not owe me sixpence for all I have given, or lent (as they call it) to such importunity; I only gave it because I could not bear to refuse it; and I have done good by my weakness."

* * * * *

[B. W. P. "Athenaeum," January 24, 1835.]

I was acquainted with Mr. Lamb for about seventeen or eighteen years. I saw him first (I think, for my recollection is here imperfect) at one of Hazlitt's lectures, or at one of Coleridge's dissertations on Shakespeare, where the metaphysician sucked oranges and said a hundred wonderful things. They were all three extraordinary men. Hazlitt had more of the speculative and philosophical faculty, and more observation (circumspection) than Lamb; whilst Coleridge was more subtle and ingenious than either. Lamb's qualities were a sincere, generous, and tender nature, wit (at command), humor, fancy, and—if the creation of character be a test of imagination, as I apprehend it is—imagination also. Some of his phantasms—the people of the South Sea House, Mrs. Battle, the Benchers of the Middle Temple, &c. (all of them ideal), might be grouped into comedies. His sketches are always (to quote his own eulogy on Marvell) full of "a witty delicacy," and, if properly brought out and marshalled, would do honor to the stage.

When I first became acquainted with Mr. Lamb, he lived, I think, in the Temple; but I did not visit him then, and could scarcely, therefore, be said to know him, until he took up his residence in Russell Street, Covent Garden. He had a first floor there, over a brazier's shop,—since converted into a bookseller's,—wherein he frequently entertained his friends. On certain evenings (Thursdays) one might reckon upon encountering at his rooms from six to a dozen unaffected people, including two or three men of letters. A game at whist and a cold supper, followed by a cheerful glass (glasses!) and "good talk," were the standing dishes upon those occasions. If you came late, you encountered a perfume of the "GREAT PLANT." The pipe, hid in smoke (the violet amongst its leaves),—a squadron of tumblers, fuming with various odors, and a score of quick intelligent glances, saluted you. There you might see Godwin, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Coleridge (though rarely), Mr. Robinson, Serjeant Talfourd, Mr. Ayrton, Mr. Alsager, Mr. Manning,—sometimes Miss Kelly, or Liston,— Admiral Burney, Charles Lloyd, Mr. Alsop, and various others; and if Wordsworth was in town, you might stumble upon him also. Our friend's brother, John Lamb, was occasionally there; and his sister (his excellent sister) invariably presided.

The room in which he lived was plainly and almost carelessly furnished. Let us enter it for a moment. Its ornaments, you see, are principally several long shelves of ancient books; (those are his "ragged veterans.") Some of Hogarth's prints, two after Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, and a portrait of Pope, enrich the walls. At the table sits an elderly lady (in spectacles) reading; whilst from an old-fashioned chair by the fire springs up a little spare man in black, with a countenance pregnant with expression, deep lines in his forehead, quick, luminous, restless eyes, and a smile as sweet as ever threw sunshine upon the human face. You see that you are welcome. He speaks: "Well, boys, how are you? What's the news with you? What will you take?" You are comfortable in a moment. Reader! it is Charles Lamb who is before you—the critic, the essayist, the poet, the wit, the large-minded human being, whose apprehension could grasp, without effort, the loftiest subject, and descend in gentleness upon the humblest; who sympathized with all classes and conditions of men, as readily with the sufferings of the tattered beggar and the poor chimney- sweeper's boy as with the starry contemplations of Hamlet "the Dane," or the eagle-flighted madness of Lear.

THE END