Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

by a flagged pathway, separate it from the road. The houses on both sides project beyond the frontage of Bay Cottage, and darken the house and garden. There are only four windows looking to the front, two on the first-floor, one with the door on the ground-floor, and one in the roof. In the rear the house is twice as wide, extending behind its left-hand neighbour, and opening on to a walled kitchen garden, with apple trees that must have been veterans in the Lambs' time. Mary Lamb's room looked to the back; her brother used the small front sitting-room with the solitary window on the groundfloor, and (I believe) the bed-room above it. The ground-floor room is barely twelve feet square, with a beam in the low ceiling, and a deep window seat savouring of antiquity. It was from here that Lamb wrote to Wordsworth: "I am three or four miles nearer the great city" (than at Enfield); "coaches half-price less, and going always, of which I will avail myself;" and to Mrs. Hazlitt: "I am nearer town, and will get up to you somehow before long."

His thoughts and affections were in town. "But town," as he wrote from Enfield, " with all my native hankering after it, is not what it was. The streets, the shops are left; but all old friends are gone! And in London I was frightfully convinced of this as I passed houses and places, empty caskets now.

I have

ceased to care almost about anybody. The bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old clubs, that lived so long and flourished so steadily, are crumbled away." Hazlitt was dead, Coleridge dying; we hear nothing of Dyer, of Rickman, of Manning. A few of his

younger friends were left to him, Procter, Talfourd, Moxon, John Foster, and Cary, the translator of Dante. A dinner with Cary at the British Museum every third Wednesday in the month was a fixture in these day-"a zodiac of third Wednesdays irradiating by glimpses the Edmonton dulness." At other times he was very urgent for his friends to come to him. To John Foster he writes, "Come down tomorrow or Saturday, be here by two or half after; coaches from Snow Hill." And in the same letter, "Come down with Procter and Dante on Sunday."

"The Last Essays of Elia," collected from various magazines, were published by Moxon in 1833, and Lamb seems to have set himself no literary work afterwards, content to live and die as "Elia."

He never aspired to the fame of men who keep their names alive by writing much and often. As a writer for the press he was unknown. The only work he did for the Quarterly Review, a review of Wordsworth's "Excursion," undertaken out of love for the poet, cost him immense labour and mortification. He contributed to the Morning Chronicle, but only as a manufacturer of jests, and that not for long; his articles in the Examiner remained many years buried. Still he thought well of his own style as a writer of prose, and a certain amount of literary fame accrued to him before he died. Unknown admirers sent him presents of game. A second edition of his earlier essays appeared in 1833. The younger men of the literary world began to know him.*

But Charles Lamb was not meant for passive pleasures and

Among these was Macready, who met him for the first and only time at supper in 1834 (the year of his death), and records the following characteristic saying: "I should like my last breath to be inhaled through a pipe and exhaled in a pun."

*

a sunny old age. To enjoy life he must be surrounded by old friends, and these were failing him. Popularity and a name would have come, but they would have rather annoyed than solaced him. The world he cared forthe world of old associations, old habits, old friends, old hauntswas slipping from his grasp. The long watch over his afflicted sister was coming to an end; Emma Isola, "whose mirthful spirits were the youth of our house," had married his friend Moxon, and Lamb was practically alone in his household. His letters at this time were few and short, and he ended them by saying that "his hand shook." But they breathed the spirit of unselfishness: theatre orders were begged for his landlord, Wordsworth's interest was asked for "Louisa Martin who is in trouble," and "establishing a school at Carlisle." 'Mr. Tuff" is informed that Covent Garden, from its thin houses, is likely to close, and that he had better lose no time "in using the orders."

The mistress of the charity school opposite Bay Cottage is, or was till lately, living. She " was often drawn to the window by Lamb's cheery voice as he issued from Mr. Walden's, chatting loudly with anyone he chanced to meet. Otherwise he was not noticeable, except as a spare middle-sized man in pantaloons."+ One day, while making for the "Bell," John Gilpin's hostelry, pin's hostelry, "the middle-sized man in pantaloons" stumbled in the road. The fall brought on erysipelas, the erysipelas death, and · Elia' was buried, on December 27th, 1834, in a spot which, about a fortnight before, he had pointed out to his sister, on an afternoon wintry walk, as the place where he wished to be buried."

[ocr errors]

Rumour says that Lamb was very kind to the poor, visiting especially the old people in the almshouses, but the oldest of the present inmates have not lived long enough there to remember him.

HENRY F. Cox.

New editions of " Elia," after the second edition in 1833, appeared in 1835, 1839, 1840, &c.; of "The Last Essays of Elia in 1835, 1839, 1847, &c. A collection of his works was published in Paris in 1835; and Talfourd's editions of his life and works were reprinted several times in the decade succeeding his death.

+From an article of mine in the Globe.-H. F. C.

CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS.

NEW SERIES.-No. 10.

PROFESSOR MAX MÜLLER.

WHEN We think of the position held at Oxford, and throughout England, by the present occupant of the chair of Comparative Philology, who is of German birth, we are reminded of the old days when scholarship was almost cosmopolitan in the cultivated portions of Europe, and noted lecturers were able to set up their schools in university centres, by reason of the recognition not of their nationality but of their power.

Friedrich Max Müller was born at Dessau on the 6th December, 1823. His father was Wilhelm Müller, a German poet, who died young, after obtaining a great popularity in his own country, especially for his Songs of the Greeks, written and sung at the time of the Greek insurrection. To be the son of a poet, who is a lover of language, is probably to inherit a facility of style and an aptitude for linguistic study. Certainly such has been the inheritance in the case of Max Müller, whom-not to name his well-known philologic labours-most persons who read his books published in this country and do not know his birthplace, must take for an Englishman, so natural and spontaneous and powerful is his language.

precursor

Through his mother he is the great-grandson of Basedow, the reformer of national education in Germany, the friend of Goethe, and the of Pestalozzi. Professor Max Müller has lately published a short life of his great-grandfather in the "Deutsche Biographie." Though his family name is Müller, this name has long ago been changed in Germany, and in England also, into Max-Müller, for the simple reason that Müller in Germany, as Smith in England, has ceased to be a name, and it would have seemed conceited for any scholar in Germany to claim to be known by the name of Müller, pur et simple, with such rivals as Otfried Müller, Johannes Müller, Friedrich Müller, and others in the field.

a bright and old

The elements of Max Müller's education were received at the ducal school of Dessau, where he was distinguished as industrious boy, with a special talent for music. When twelve he was sent to Leipzig, continuing his studies at the Nicolai School, where nearly two centuries previously Leibniz had been a pupil. In

years

[graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
« НазадПродовжити »