purpose. There are some novelists who write for the mere love of discoursing agreeably and analysing wittily. There are others who do not care to digress or linger, wherever they are tempted so to do; they cut and fit so as to produce a rounded, perfect plot. So there are philosophers who love to dabble in facts-to worm out curiosities of history, to make a museum, and leave others to form an opinion on what they produce. Adam Smith certainly had his own opinion on what he observed, but he was first of all the observer. In short, his forte was analysis, not synthesis. And so the chief charm of his book is description. In the very first chapter he wins the attention of the very child by rambling through a pin manufactory, and finding all the marvels of industry in a single pin. So in that wonderful chapter on Rent. His theorising is not very good, or very convincing; but each page is turned faster than the other, as we skip from the price of corn to the price of butcher's meat in Prince Henry's time; from that to affairs in Holland; from that to ancient Italy; then to Columella and the extravagant gentleman - farmers; then to Maryland through Cochin China; then to kitchen gardens, vineyards, sugar plantations, tobacco, rice, potatoes, and the

effect of these last on the beauty of

the women and the strength of the men in Ireland.

It is curious to read the notes of Wakefield, or Buchanan, or M'Culloch, on the "Wealth of Nations," and observe how upon every chapter of the text they-at least the first and last-have corrections to record. These corrections are not all satisfactory; many of them are untenable contradic tions. But they discountenance the notion reigning in some minds, that the "Wealth of Nations" is the standard by which all other systems are to be judged.

If a lecturer were appointed for the special purpose of publicly examining that book in the light of modern speculation, he would be sure no matter whether he belonged to the school of Ricardo, or Mill, or Bastiat-to find faults in every chapter. We are not like the middle age pedants, who covered the face of the earth with commentaries on Aristotle, all assuming at the outset the infallibility of that philosopher. We now judge Adam Smith as we judge Aristotle. We point the finger at every error they made; and yet we call one the father of ancient political economy, and the other the father of modern political economy.

ERIC S. Robertson.

To whatever region the Christ's Hospitallers may migrate, it is to be hoped that they will not forget the grave of their old school-fellow, Charles Lamb. The sexton at Edmonton will tell you that a party of "Blues" pay periodical visits to the churchyard, and, winding through a grove of memorial masonry of the usual ugliness, proceed to do honour to the narrow resting-place of the Lambs. What unclean beasts, with appetites more ghoulish than the ghouls, are supposed to browse in English churchyards, that the monuments of the dead should be fenced off with iron railings? The grave of Charles and Mary Lamb is neither walled nor hurdled off; it has the simple green coverlid that, one fancies, gives sounder sleep than any other a grass mound kept free from weeds by the blue-coat boys, among others. The headstone bears Cary's inscription, the footstone the initials and dates, "C. L., 1834, M.A.L. 1847."

The stones and grave are as modest and unpretending as were the pair they commemorate, and it is to be hoped that well-meaning meddlers will let them continue as they are. In 1875, the centenary of Lamb's birth, Mr. Bell, the then head master of Christ's Hospital, proposed to raise a fund for one or more of the following objects : " An English essay prize, in the shape of books or medals (which might bear on one face the profile of Lamb); a scholarship for the encouragement of the study of English litera

ture and composition; a mural or sculptural record." By another, who wrote at the same time, it was suggested that granite was the proper material for the headstone, and that a bust and tablet might find a place in the neighbouring church. Surely the man had never entered Edmonton Church-fusty, and beetling with galleries! And did he suppose that Lamb ever entered it ? The end of all these proposals has been better served by the several editions of Lamb's works published since 1875, among which is the good and cheap "Popular Centenary Edition," edited by Charles Kent.

It is said at Edmonton that Americans in large numbers visit the grave. Lamb has certainly been fully appreciated across the Atlantic. It is to the "Eliana" first collected by Mr. J. E. Babson, of Boston, U.S., that we owe the completeness of our recent editions of the works; and articles from time to time in the Atlantic Monthly by the same hand show that Mr. Babson's countrymen retain their interest in everything pertaining to the gentle essayist.

Nearly two years were spent by the Lambs at Edmonton, extending from Charles's fifty-eighth year to his sixtieth, when he died. They were almost barren of literary fruit. For the sister's sake, the household gods had been transplanted from the stir of the great city to the quiet, first of Enfield, and then of Edmonton, and they seemed to to dwindle, peak, and

pine in this retirement. Not only did Mary's illness grow upon her; but the survivors among her brother's friends, none of them men of leisure, could see very little of him at that distance from London. In those days you did not reach Edmonton in half an hour from Liverpool-street, but intrusted yourself to the tender mercies of the stage from the "Swan," Snow Hill. By this stage, no doubt, came the parcels of books hot from the press of friend and publisher Moxon. The fearful joy of peeping between the leaves of these-leaves not to be cut, for the books were to be returned in saleable condition-was one of the pleasures of these later days.

Mary's taste always ran more after novels than folios,* and the village library was ransacked in her interest; but for Charles, for whom social intercourse and troops of friends had taken the place of close literary studies, the time was out of joint. It is not surprising to hear that the hostelries about Enfield and Edmonton knew him well. To one especially, near Edmonton, bearing the queer sign of "The Cart Overthrown," and decorated with pictures of the angler's gentle craft, one can fancy his steps often directed. But his walk, say those villagers who remember him, was oftenest along the road to London.

The field walks between Edmonton and Enfield are still pleasant, and Lamb professed to enjoy them;

but it was to London that his thoughts turned, measuring the distance in miles and minutes, thinking only of when he should next go there, and when next his friends would come to see him. To the Temple clung memories of the time when he and his sister had to live on the salary of a clerkship in the East India House, beginning at a bare £70 a year; of his first appearance in print as a sonneteer in Coleridge's company; of those famous Wednesday evenings when men met, "the mere reckoning of whose names is like counting the stars in a constellation"-evenings which Talfourd has compared to the evenings at Holland House. Some of us would have enjoyed the Wednesday parties most. Cold beef on the sideboard, where everyone helped themselves, the prints cut out of all Charles's old books pasted on the walls, darling folios on the shelves, porter, punch, and cards, Hazlitt's bril liant talk, with now and then a lay sermon from Coleridge. Even busier and noisier than the Temple was that first-floor over the brazier's shop at the corner of Russell-street, Covent Garden, the home of the Lambs for six years. Authors and actors came and went all day long and after playhouse hours, till even their host unwillingly confessed that he was too little alone. The removals to Colebrooke Cottage, Islington-where George Dyer, "dear blundering old soul," stepped from their door into the New Rivert

..

-to Chase

Enfield, and

Side, finally, in the spring of 1833, to Edmonton, were for Mary Lamb's sake; but the quiet and seclusion of country life did not keep her malady in check. Absolute restraint became necessary, and this was found at the house of the Waldens, in Church-street, Edmonton. The Waldens were used to such cases, and had taken care of Mary Lamb before. They now agreed to take no other patients, and the brother and sister lodged and boarded there till Charles's death. Mary stayed with Mrs. Walden for several years longer, until she was removed to a similar establishment in St. John's Wood, where she died.

A daughter of Mrs. Walden, a school girl at the time of Charles's death, and who recalls that event as happening during one of her Christmas holidays, tells me that Mary was ill for more than six months out of the twelve at that time. She describes her as а troublesome and unhappy patient, her mind constantly running upon her mother's death. During a fit of insanity thirty-seven years before Mary Lamb had killed her mother with a table knife. Mrs. Moxon, Lamb's adopted daughter-the "Emma Isola" of his

corre

spondence tells an anecdote which sadly illustrates the relation in which Mary stood to this tragedy of her early life. During the whole of Mrs. Moxon's "residence with the Lambs she was completely ignorant of the terrible event. One night Charles and Mary Lamb and herself were seated at table. The conversation turned on the elder Lamb, when Miss Isola asked why she never heard mention of the mother. Mary thereupon uttered a sharp, piercing cry, for which Charles playfully and laughingly rebuked her, but he made no allusion to the cause." Another

informant, still living in Edmonton, remembers a cloud of feathers blowing across the road, which poor Mary had torn from the bed and was strewing out of the window. Another, the late parish clerk of Edmonton, remembered being startled, as he worked in the next garden, by Mary Lamb rattling at the bars of her window. These recollections of the villagers give a melancholy significance to Lamb's words when writing to Wordsworth in 1833: "I see little of her; alas! I too often hear her. Sunt lachrymæ rerum! and you and I must bear it."

Let it not be forgotten that when Charles died he had "borne it" for nearly forty years. Alone and unaided he had supported his sister from the day of their mother's death onwards, to save her from what John Lamb, the elder brother, thought her proper doom-lifelong confinement in an asylum. His was more than a husband's care for her. Through all these forty years he never let her leave him, except when certain signs well known to both of them foretold the approach of a severe attack. On one such occasion they were met walking hand-in-hand on the field-path to the asylum, and it was noticed that they were crying.

After Charles's death his works followed him, for Mary was awarded a pension by the authorities of the East India House as if she had been his widow.

Bay Cottage, Church-street, Edmonton, stands back from the road mid-way between the railway station and the church, and nearly opposite a building described on its walls as "a structure of hope founded in faith, on the basis of charity, 1784," a charity school for girls. The aspect of the cottage. has not changed since the Waldens owned it. Close high iron palings and a long strip of garden, crossed