to a sound belief are various and inscrutable | been disappointed (he will bear with my as the heart of man. Some believe upon saying so) at the discovery of my error. weak principles. Others cannot feel the L. H. is unfortunate in holding some loose efficacy of the strongest. One of the most and not very definite speculations (for at candid, most upright, and single-meaning times I think he hardly knows whither his men, I ever knew, was the late Thomas premises would carry him) on marriage—the Holcroft. I believe he never said one thing tenets, I conceive, of the 'Political Justice' and meant another, in his life; and, as near carried a little further. For anything I as I can guess, he never acted otherwise could discover in his practice, they have than with the most scrupulous attention to reference, like those, to some future possible conscience. Ought we to wish the character condition of society, and not to the present false, for the sake of a hollow compliment to times. But neither for these obliquities of Christianity? thinking (upon which my own conclusions "Accident introduced me to the acquaint- are as distant as the poles asunder) — nor for · ance of Mr. L. H. — and the experience of his his political asperities and petulancies, which many friendly qualities confirmed a friend- are wearing out with the heats and vanities ship between us. You, who have been mis- of youth-did I select him for a friend; but represented yourself, I should hope, have not for qualities which fitted him for that relaleut an idle ear to the calumnies which have tion. I do not know whether I flatter been spread abroad respecting this gentle- myself with being the occasion, but certain man. I was admitted to his household for it is, that, touched with some misgivings for some years, and do most solemnly aver that sundry harsh things which he had written I believe him to be in his domestic relations aforetime against our friend C.,- before he as correct as any man. He chose an ill-left this country he sought a reconciliation judged subject for a poem; the peccant with that gentleman (himself being his own humours of which have been visited on him introducer), and found it. tenfold by the artful use, which his adversaries have made, of an equivocal term. The subject itself was started by Dante, but better because brieflier treated of. But the crime of the lovers, in the Italian and the English poet, with its aggravated enormity of circumstance, is not of a kind (as the critics of the latter well knew) with those conjunctions, for which Nature herself has provided no excuse, because no temptation. -It has nothing in common with the black horrors, sung by Ford and Massinger. The familiarising of it in tale and fable may be for that reason incidentally more contagious. In spite of Rimini, I must look upon its author as a man of taste, and a poet. He is better than so; he is one of the most cordialminded men I ever knew, and matchless as a fire-side companion. I mean not to affront or wound your feelings when I say that, in his more genial moods, he has often reminded me of you. There is the same air of mild dogmatism the same condescending to a boyish sportiveness in both your conversations. His handwriting is so much the same with your own, that I have opened more than one letter of his, hoping, nay, not doubting, but it was from you, and have "L. H. is now in Italy, on his departure to which land with much regret I took my leave of him and of his little family — seven of them, sir, with their mother—and as kind a set of little people (T. H. and all), as affectionate children as ever blessed a parent. Had you seen them, sir, I think you could not have looked upon them as so many little Jonases but rather as pledges of the vessel's safety, that was to bear such a freight of love. "I wish you would read Mr. H.'s lines to that same T. H. 'six years old, during a sickness :' 'Sleep breaks at last from out thee, My little patient boy'— (they are to be found in the 47th page of Foliage')—and ask yourself how far they are out of the spirit of Christianity. I have a letter from Italy, received but the other day, into which L. H. has put as much heart, and as many friendly yearnings after old associates, and native country, as, I think, paper can well hold. It would do you no hurt to give that the perusal also. "From the other gentleman I neither expect nor desire (as he is well assured) any such concessions as L. H. made to C. What | (fearing that all was not well with you), I bath soured him, and made him to suspect were gravely to invite you (for a remedy) to his friends of infidelity towards him, when attend with me a course of Mr. Belsham's there was no such matter, I know not. I Lectures at Hackney. Perhaps I have stood well with him for fifteen years (the scruples to some of your forms and doctrines. proudest of my life), and have ever spoken But if I come, am I secure of civil treatmy full mind of him to some, to whom his ment? The last time I was in any of your panegyric must naturally be least tasteful. places of worship was on Easter Sunday last. I never in thought swerved from him, II had the satisfaction of listening to a very never betrayed him, I never slackened in sensible sermon of an argumentative turn, my admiration of him; I was the same to delivered with great propriety, by one of him (neither better nor worse), though he your bishops. The place was Westminster could not see it, as in the days when he Abbey. As such religion, as I have, has thought fit to trust me. At this instant, he always acted on me more by way of sentimay be preparing for me some compliment, ment than argumentative process, I was not above my deserts, as he has sprinkled many unwilling, after sermon ended, by no unsuch among his admirable books, for which becoming transition, to pass over to some I rest his debtor; or, for anything I know, serious feelings, impossible to be disconnected or can guess to the contrary, he may be from the sight of those old tombs, &c. But, about to read a lecture on my weaknesses. by whose order I know not, I was debarred He is welcome to them (as he was to my that privilege even for so short a space as a humble hearth), if they can divert a spleen, few minutes; and turned, like a dog or or ventilate a fit of sullenness. I wish he some profane person, out into the common would not quarrel with the world at the street; with feelings, which I could not help, rate he does; but the reconciliation must be but not very congenial to the day or the effected by himself, and I despair of living discourse. I do not know that I shall to see that day. But, protesting against ever venture myself again into one of your much that he has written, and some things churches. which he chooses to do; judging him by his conversation which I enjoyed so long, and relished so deeply; or by his books, in those places where no clouding passion intervenes -I should belie my own conscience, if I said less, than that I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing. So far from being ashamed of that intimacy, which was betwixt us, it is my boast that I was able for so many years to have preserved it entire; and I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion. But I forget my manners you will pardon me, sir - I return to the correspondence. "You had your education at Westminster; and, doubtless, among those dim aisles and cloisters, you must have gathered much of that devotional feeling in those young years, on which your purest mind feeds still — and may it feed! The antiquarian spirit, strong in you, and gracefully blending ever with the religious, may have been sown in you among those wrecks of splendid mortality. You owe it to the place of your education; you owe it to your learned fondness for the architecture of your ancestors; you owe it to the venerableness of your ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened and called in question through these practices to speak aloud your sense of them; never to desist raising your voice against them, till they be totally done away with and abolished; till the doors of Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against the decent, though lowin-purse, enthusiast, or blameless devotee, who must commit an injury against his family economy, if he would be indulged with a bare admission within its walls. You owe it to the decencies, which you wish to see maintained in its impressive services, brethren. friends, upon the old terms, again to honour and admire you. Stifle not the suggestions of your better nature with the stale evasion, that an indiscriminate admission would expose the tombs to violation. Remember your boy-days. Did you ever see, or hear of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free to all? Do the rabble come there, or trouble their heads about such speculations? It is all that you can do to drive them into your churches; they do not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas! no passion for antiquities; for tomb of king or prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would no longer be the rabble. 44 that our Cathedral be no longer an object of to their sight, may be to their humbler inspection to the poor at those times only, in Shame these sellers out of the which they must rob from their attendance Temple! Show the poor, that you can on the worship every minute which they can sometimes think of them in some other light bestow upon the fabric. In vain the public than as mutineers and mal-contents. Conprints have taken up this subject, in vain ciliate them by such kind methods to their such poor nameless writers as myself express superiors, civil and ecclesiastical. Stop the their indignation. A word from you, sir mouths of the railers; and suffer your old a hint in your journal - would be sufficient to fling open the doors of the beautiful temple again, as we can remember them when we were boys. At that time of life, what would the imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us, have suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection had been obstructed by the demand of so much silver!-If we had scraped it up to gain an occasional admission (as we certainly should have done) would the sight of those old tombs have been as impressive to us (while we had been weighing anxiously prudence against sentiment) as when the gates stood open, as those of the adjacent Park; when we could walk in at any time, as the mood brought us, for a For forty years that I have known the shorter or longer time as that lasted? Is fabric, the only well-attested charge of the being shown over a place the same as violation adduced, has been a ridiculous silently for ourselves detecting the genius of dismemberment committed upon the effigy it? In no part of our beloved Abbey now of that amiable spy, Major André. And is can a person find entrance (out of service- it for this the wanton mischief of some time) under the sum of two shillings. The school-boy, fired perhaps with raw notions of rich and the great will smile at the anti-transatlantic freedom- -or the remote possiclimax, presumed to lie in these two short words. But you can tell them, sir, how much quiet worth, how much capacity for enlarged feeling, how much taste and genius, may coexist, especially in youth, with a purse incompetent to this demand. A respected friend of ours, during his late visit to the metropolis, presented himself for admission to St. Paul's. At the same time a decentlyclothed man with as decent a wife, and ebild, were bargaining for the same indulgence. The price was only two-pence each person. The poor but decent man hesitated, desirous to go in: but there were three of them, and he turned away reluctantly. Perhaps he wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson. Perhaps the interior of the cathedral was his object. But in the state of his finances, even sixpence might reasonably seem too much. Tell the aristocracy of the country (no man can do it more impressively); instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces of money, these minims h bility of such a mischief occurring again, so "I am, sir, your humble servant, The feeling with which this letter was received by Southey may be best described "P.S.-I do not think your hand-writing I do not think many at all like ****'s. things I did think." in his own words in a letter to the publisher. close to the New River, end of Colebrook "On my part there was not even a momentary Terrace, left hand from Sadler's Wells. feeling of anger; I was very much surprised "Will you let me know the day before? and grieved, because I knew how much he "Your penitent, C. LAMB. would condemn himself. And yet no resentful letter was ever written less offensively: his gentle nature may be seen in it throughout." Southey was right in his belief in the revulsion Lamb's feelings would undergo, when the excitement under which he had written subsided; for although he would retract nothing he had ever said or written in defence of his friends, he was ready at once to surrender every resentment of his own. Southey came to London in the following month, and wrote proposing to call at Islington; and 21st of November Lamb thus replied: TO MR. SOUTHEY. "E. I. H., 21st November, 1823. In the following letter, of the same date, Lamb anticipates the meeting. TO BERNARD BARTON. "Dear B. B.,-I am ashamed at not acknowledging your kind, little poem, which I must needs like much; but I protest I thought I had done it at the moment. Is it possible a letter has miscarried? Did you get one in which I sent you an extract from the poems of Lord Sterling? I should wonder if you did, for I sent you none such. There was an incipient lie strangled in the birth. Some people's conscience is so tender! But, in plain truth, I thank you very much for the verses. I have a very kind letter from the Laureat, with a self-invitation to come and shake hands with me. This is truly handsome and noble. 'Tis worthy of my old idea of Southey. Shall not I, think you, be covered with a red suffusion? "You are too much apprehensive of your complaint: I know many that are always ailing of it, and live on to a good old age. I know a merry fellow (you partly know him) who, when his medical adviser told him he had drunk away all that part, congratulated himself (now his liver was gone) that he should be the longest liver of the two. "Dear Southey,- The kindness of your note has melted away the mist which was I have been fighting against a upon me. shadow. That accursed Q. R. had vexed me by a gratuitous speaking, of its own knowledge, that the "Confessions of a D-d' was a genuine description of the state of the writer. Little things, that are not ill meant, may produce much ill. That might have injured me alive and dead. I am in a public office, and my life is insured. I was prepared for anger, and I thought I saw, in a few obnoxious words, a hard case of repetition directed against me. I wish both magazine and review at the bottom of the sea. I shall be ashamed to see you, and my sister (though innocent) will be still more so; for the folly "The best way in these cases is to keep was done without her knowledge, and has yourself as ignorant as you can, as ignorant made her uneasy ever since. My guardian as the world was before Galen, of the entire angel was absent at that time. inner construction of the animal man; not "I will muster up courage to see you, how-to be conscious of a midriff; to hold kidneys ever, any day next week (Wednesday excepted). We shall hope that you will bring Edith with you. That will be a second mortification. She will hate to see us, but come and heap embers. We deserve it, I for what I've done, and she for being my sister. (save a sheep and swine) to be an agreeable fiction; not to know whereabouts the gall grows; to account the circulation of the blood an idle whimsey of Harvey's; to acknowledge no mechanism not visible. For, once fix the seat of your disorder, and your fancies flux into it like bad humours. Those medical gentries choose each his favourite part; one takes the lungs, another the at Colebrook-cottage, Colebrook- aforesaid liver, and refer to that, whatever row, Islington. A detached whitish house, in the animal economy is amiss. Above all, "Do come early in the day, by sun-light, that you may see my Milton. "I am use exercise, take a little more spirituous | in view. This good old man numbered liquors. learn to smoke, continue to keep a among his pupils, Gray the poet, Mr. Pitt, good conscience, and avoid tampering with and, in his old age, Wordsworth, whom he hard terms of art-viscosity, scirrhosity, and instructed in the Italian language. His little those bugbears by which simple patients are grand-daughter, at the time when she had scared into their graves. Believe the general the good fortune to win the regard of Mr. sense of the mercantile world, which holds Lamb, had lost both her parents, and was that desks are not deadly. It is the mind, spending her holidays with an aunt, who good B. B., and not the limbs, that taints by lived with a sister of Mr. Ayrton, at whose long sitting. Think of the patience of house Lamb generally played his evening tailors, think how long the Lord Chancellor rubber during his stay at Cambridge. The sits, think of the brooding hen! I protest liking which both Lamb and his sister took I cannot answer thy sister's kind inquiry; for the little orphan, led to their begging her but I judge, I shall put forth no second of her aunt for the next holidays; their volume. More praise than buy; and T. and regard for her increased; she regularly spent H. are not particularly disposed for martyrs. the holidays with them till she left school, Thou wilt see a funny passage, and yet a and afterwards was adopted as a daughter, true history, of George Dyer's aquatic in- and lived generally with them until 1833, cursion in the next 'London.' Beware his when she married Mr. Moxon. Lamb was fate, when thou comest to see me at my fond of taking long walks in the country, Colebrook-cottage. I have filled my little and as Miss Lamb's strength was not always space with my little thoughts. I wish thee equal to these pedestrian excursions, she ease on thy sofa; but not too much indul- became his constant companion in walks gence on it. From my poor desk, thy fellow- which even extended "to the green fields of sufferer, this bright November, pleasant Hertfordshire." "C. L." Southey went to Colebrook-cottage, as proposed; the awkwardness of meeting went off in a moment; and the affectionate intimacy, which had lasted for almost twenty years, was renewed, to be interrupted only by death. CHAPTER XIV. LETTERS TO AINSWORTH, BARTON, AND COLERIDGE. About this time, Lamb added to his list of friends, Mr. Hood, the delightful humourist ; Hone, lifted for a short time into political fame by the prosecution of his Parodies, and the signal energy and success of his defence, but now striving by unwearied researches, which were guided by a pure taste and an honest heart, to support a numerous family; and Ainsworth, then a youth, who has since acquired so splendid a reputation as the author of "Rookwood" and Crichton." Mr. Ainsworth, then resident at Manchester, excited by an enthusiastic admiration of Elia, had sent him some books, for which he thus conveyed his thanks to his unseen friend. TO MR. AINSWORTH. 66 LAMB was fond of visiting the Universities in the summer vacation, and repeatedly spent his holiday month at Cambridge with his sister. On one of these occasions they met "India House, 9th Dec. 1823. with a little girl, who being in a manner "Dear Sir, I should have thanked you alone in the world, engaged their sympathy, for your books and compliments sooner, but and soon riveted their affections. Emma have been waiting for a revise to be sent, Isola was the daughter of Mr. Charles Isola, which does not come, though I returned the who had been one of the esquire bedells of proof on the receipt of your letter. I have the University; her grandfather, Agostino read Warner with great pleasure. What an Isola, had been compelled to fly from Milan, elaborate piece of alliteration and antithesis! because a friend took up an English book in why it must have been a labour far above bis apartment, which he had carelessly left the most difficult versification. There is a |