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opportunity in fact offered itself within a month through the kindness of the Lambs themselves. They had heard of my being in solitary lodgings, and insisted on my coming to dine with them, which more than once I did in the winter of 1821-2.

The mere reception by the Lambs was so full of goodness and hospitable feeling, that it kindled animation in the most cheerless or torpid of invalids. I cannot imagine that any memorabilia occurred during the visit; but I will use the time that would else be lost upon the settling of that point, in putting down any triviality that occurs to my recollection. Both Lamb and myself had a furious love for nonsense; headlong nonsense. Excepting Professor Wilson, I have known nobody who had the same passion to the same extent. And things of that nature better illustrate the realities of Lamb's social life than the gravities which, weighing so sadly on his solitary hours, he sought to banish from his moments of relaxation.

There were no strangers; Charles Lamb, his sister, and myself made up the party. Even this was done in kindness. They knew that I should have been oppressed by an effort such as must be made in the society of strangers; and they placed me by their own fireside, where I could say as little or as much as I pleased.

We dined about five o'clock, and it was one of the hospitalities inevitable to the Lambs, that any game which they might receive from rural friends in the course of the week, was reserved for the day of a friend's dining with them.

In regard to wine, Lamb and myself had the same habit-perhaps it rose to the dignity of a principle-viz., to take a great deal during dinner-none after it. Consequently, as Miss Lamb (who drank only water) retired almost with the dinner itself, nothing remained for men of our principles, the rigor of which we had illustrated by taking rather too much of old port before the cloth was drawn, except talking; amoebæan colloquy, or, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, a dialogue of "brisk reciprocation." But this was impossible: over Lamb, at this period of his life, there passed regularly, after taking wine, a brief eclipse of sleep. It descended upon him as softly as a shadow. In a gross person, laden with superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagerness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a network of

aerial gossamer than of earthy cobweb-more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upwards from the flesh. Motionless in his chair as a bust, breathing so gently as scarcely to seem certainly alive, he presented the image of repose midway between life and death, like the repose of sculpture; and to one who knew his history a repose affectingly contrasting with the calamities and internal storms of his life. I have heard more persons than I can now distinctly recall, observe of Lamb when sleeping, that his countenance in that state assumed an expression almost seraphic, from its intellectual beauty of outline, its childlike simplicity, and its benignity. It could not be called a transfiguration that sleep had worked in his face; for the features wore essentially the same expression when waking; but sleep spiritualized that expression, exalted it, and also harmonized it. Much of the change lay in that last process. The eyes it was that disturbed the unity of effect in Lamb's waking face. They gave a restlessness to the character of his intellect, shifting, like Northern Lights, through every mode of combination with fantastic playfulness, and sometimes by fiery gleams obliterating for the moment that light of benignity which was the predominant reading on his features. Some people have supposed that Lamb had Jewish blood in his veins, which seemed to account for his gleaming eyes. It might be so: but this notion found little countenance in Lamb's own way of treating the gloomy mediæval traditions propagated throughout Europe about the Jews, and their secret enmity to Christian races. Lamb, indeed, might not be more serious than Shakspeare is supposed to have been in his Shylock; yet he spoke at times as from a station of wilful bigotry, and seemed (whether laughingly or not) to sympathize with the barbarous Christian superstitions upon the pretended bloody practices of the Jews, and of the early Jewish physicians. Being himself a Lincoln man, he treated Sir Hugh* of Lincoln, the young child that suffered death by secret assassination in the Jewish quarter rather than suppress his daily anthems to the Virgin, as a true historical personage on the rolls of martyrdom; careless that this fable, like that of the apprentice murdered out of jealousy by his master, the architect, had destroyed its own authority by

pure

The story which furnishes a basis to the fine ballad in Percy's Reliques, and to the Canterbury Tale of Chaucer's Lady Abbess.

ubiquitous diffusion. All over Europe the same legend of the murdered apprentice and the martyred child reappears under different names so that in effect the verification of the tale is none at all, because it is unanimous; is too narrow because it is too impossibly broad. Lamb, however, though it was often hard to say whether he were not secretly laughing, swore to the truth of all these old fables, and treated the liberalities of the present generation on such points as mere fantastic and effeminate affectations, which, no doubt, they often are as regards the sincerity of those who profess them. The bigotry, which it pleased his fancy to assume, he used like a sword against the Jew, as the official weapon of the Christian, upon the same principle that a Capulet would have drawn upon a Montague, without conceiving it any duty of his to rip up the grounds of so ancient a quarrel: it was a feud handed down to him by his ancestors, and it was their business to see that originally it had been an honest feud. I cannot yet believe that Lamb, if seriously aware of any family interconnection with Jewish blood, would, even in jest, have held that one-sided language. More probable it is, that the fiery eye recorded not any alliance with Jewish blood, but that disastrous alliance with insanity which tainted his own life, and laid desolate his sister's.

Com. "What was it?"

Resp. "Diddle, diddle, dumpkins." Com. "And was this his only observation? Did Mr. Lamb not strengthen this remark by some other of the same nature?" Resp. "Yes, he did."

Com. "And what was it?

Resp. "Diddle, diddle, dumpkins."
Com. "What is your secret opinion of
Dumpkins? Do you conceive Dumpkins to
have been a thing or a person?"

Resp. "I conceive Dumpkins to have been a person, having the rights of a person." Com. "Capable for instance of suing and being sued?"

Resp. "Yes, capable of both; though I have reason to think there would have been very little use in suing Dumpkins."

Com. "How so? Are the Committee to understand that you, the Respondent, in your own case have found it a vain speculation countenanced only by visionary lawyers, to sue Dumpkins ?”

Resp. "No; I never lost a shilling by Dumpkins, the reason for which may be that Dumpkins never owed me a shilling; but from his prænomen of 'diddle' I apprehend that he was too well acquainted with jointstock companies."

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Com. And your opinion is, that he may have diddled Mr. Lamb ?"

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Resp. "I conceive it to be not unlikely." Com. " And, perhaps, from Mr. Lamb's pathetic reiteration of his name, Diddle, diddle,' you would be disposed to infer that Dumpkins had practised his diddling talents upon Mr. L. more than once.'

Resp. "I think it probable."

Lamb laughed, and brightened up; tea was announced; Miss Lamb returned. The cloud had passed away from Lamb's spirits, and again he realized the pleasure of evening, which, in his apprehension, was so essential to the pleasure of literature.

On awaking from his brief slumber, Lamb sat for some time in profound silence, and then, with the most startling rapidity, sang out" Diddle, diddle, dumpkins;" not looking at me, but as if soliloquizing. For five minutes he relapsed into the same deep silence; from which again he started up into the same abrupt utterance of-"Diddle, diddle, dumpkins." I could not help laughing aloud at the extreme energy of this sudden communication, contrasted with the deep silence that went before and followed. Lamb smilingly begged to know what I was laugh- On the table lay a copy of Wordsworth, ing at, and with a look of as much surprise in two volumes; it was the edition of Longas if it were I that had done something un- man, printed about the time of Waterloo. accountable, and not himself. I told him (as Wordsworth was held in little consideration, was the truth) that there had suddenly oc- I believe, amongst the house of Longman; curred to me the possibility of my being in at any rate, their editions of his works were some future period or other called on to give got up in the most slovenly manner. In paran account of this very evening before some ticular, the table of contents was drawn up literary committee. The committee might like a short-hand bill of parcels. By accisay to me-(supposing the case that I out-dent the book lay open at a part of this talived him)" You dined with Mr. Lamb in ble, where the sonnet beginningJanuary, 1822; now, can you remember any remark or memorable observation which that celebrated man made before or after dinner?" I as Respondent. "Oh yes, I can.

can."

"Alas! what boots the long laborious quest”—

had been entered with mercantile speed,

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The mercurialities of Lamb were infinite, and always uttered in a spirit of absolute recklessness for the quality or the prosperity of the sally. It seemed to liberate his spirits from some burthen of blackest melancholy which oppressed it, when he had thrown off a jest: he would not stop one instant to improve it; nor did he care the value of a straw whether it were good enough to be remembered, or so mediocre as to extort high moral indignation from a collector who refused to receive into his collection of jests and puns any that were not felicitously good or revoltingly bad.

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After tea, Lamb read to me a number of beautiful compositions which he had himself taken the trouble to copy out into a blank paper folio from unsuccessful authors. Neglected people in every class won the pathy of Lamb. One of the poems, I remember, was a very beautiful sonnet from a volume recently published by Lord Thurlow-which, and Lamb's just remarks upon it, I could almost repeat verbatim at this moment, nearly twenty-seven years later, if your limits would allow me. But these, you tell me, allow of no such thing; at the utmost they allow only twelve lines more. Now all the world knows that the sonnet itself would require fourteen lines; but take fourteen from twelve, and there remains very little, I fear; besides which, I am afraid two of my twelve are already exhausted. This forces me to interrupt my account of Lamb's reading by reporting the very accident that did interrupt it in fact; since that no less characteristically expressed Lamb's peculiar spirit of kindness, (always quickening itself towards the ill-used or the downtrodden,) than it had previously expressed itself in his choice of obscure readings. Two ladies came in, one of whom at least had sunk in the scale of worldly consideration. They were ladies who would not have found much recreation in literary discussions; elderly, and habitually depressed. On their account, Lamb proposed whist and in that kind effort to amuse them, which

naturally drew forth some momentary gaieties from himself, but not of a kind to impress themselves on the recollection, the evening terminated.

We have left ourselves no room for a special examination of Lamb's writings, some of which were failures, and some were so memorably beautiful as to be uniques in their class. and the life-struggle of Lamb, that must fix The character of Lamb it is, the attention of many, even amongst those wanting in sensibility to his intellectual merits. This character and this struggle, as we have already observed, impress many traces of themselves upon Lamb's writings. Even in that view, therefore. they have a ministerial value; but separately, for themselves, they have an independent value of the highest order. Upon this point we gladly adopt the eloquent words af Sergeant

Talfourd :

"The sweetness of Lamb's 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 cloud of misfortune which had fallen upon his merely that he saw, through the ensanguined 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 ings, even in the lightest matters, he always wrote follow his own caprice at the expense of her feeland spoke of her as his wiser self, his generous benefactress, of whose protecting care he was scarcely worthy."

It must be remembered also, which the Sergeant does not overlook, that Lamb's efforts for the becoming support of his sister lasted through a period of forty years. Twelve years before his death, the munificence of the India House, by granting him a liberal retiring allowance, had placed his own support under shelter from accidents of any kind. But this died with himself: and he could not venture to suppose that, in the

event of his own death, the India House would grant to his sister the same allowance as by custom is granted to a wife. This they did; but not venturing to calculate upon such nobility of patronage, Lamb had applied himself through life to the saving of a provision for his sister under any accident to himself. And this he did with a persevering prudence, so little known in the literary class, amongst a continued tenor of generosities, often so princely as to be scarcely known in any class.

Was this man, so memorably good by lifelong sacrifice of himself, in any profound sense a Christian? The impression is, that he was not. We, from private communications with him, can undertake to say that, according to his knowledge and opportunities for the study of Christianity, he was. What has injured Lamb in this point is, that his early opinions (which, however, from the first were united with the deepest piety) are read by the inattentive, as if they had been the opinions of his mature days; secondly, that he had few religious persons amongst his friends, which made him reserved in the expression of his own views; thirdly, that in any case where he altered opinions for the better, the credit of the improvement is assigned to Coleridge. Lamb, for example, beginning life as a Unitarian, in not many years became a Trinitarian. Coleridge passed through the same changes in the same order and, here at least, Lamb is supposed simply to have obeyed the influence, confessedly great, of Coleridge. This, on our own knowledge of Lamb's views, we pronounce to be an error. And the following extracts from Lamb's letters will show, not only that he was religiously disposed on impulses self-derived, but that, so far from obeying the bias of Coleridge, he ventured, on this one subject, firmly as regarded the matter, though humbly as regarded the manner, affectionately to reprove Coleridge.

In a letter to Coleridge, written in 1797, the year after his first great affliction, he

says:

"Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance; not one Christian; not one but undervalues Christianity. Singly, what am I to do? Wesley-[have you read his life?]-was not he an elevated character? Wesley has said religion is not a solitary thing. Alas! it is necessarily so with me, or next to solitary. 'Tis true you write to me; but correspondence by letter and personal intimacy are widely different. Do, do write to me; and do some good to my mind-already how much 'warped and relaxed' by the world!"

In a letter written about three months previously, he had not scrupled to blame Coleridge at some length for audacities of religious speculation, which seemed to him at war with the simplicities of pure religion. He says:

"Do continue to write to me. I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please us two when you talk in a religious strain. Not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy than consistent with the humility of genuine piety."

Then, after some instances of what he blames, he says:

"Be not angry with me, Coleridge. I wish not to cavil: I know I cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility which best becometh the Christian character. God in the New Testament, our best guide, is represented to us in the kind, condescending, amiable, familiar light of a parent; and, in my poor mind, 'tis best for us so to consider him as our Heavenly Father, and our best friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of His character."

About a month later, he says:

"Few but laugh at me for reading my Testament. They talk a language I understand not; I conceal sentiments that would be a puzzle to them."

We see by this last quotation where it was that Lamb originally sought for consolation. We personally can vouch that at a maturer period, when he was approaching his fiftieth year, no change had affected his opinions upon that point; and, on the other hand, that no changes had occurred in his needs for consolation, we see, alas! in the records of his life. Whither, indeed, could he fly for comfort, if not to his Bible? And to whom was the Bible an indispensable resource, if not to Lamb? We do not undertake to say, that in his knowledge of Christianity he was everywhere profound or consistent, but he was always earnest in his aspirations after its spiritualities, and had an apprehensive sense of its power.

Charles Lamb is gone: his life was a continued struggle in the service of love the purest, and within a sphere visited by little of contemporary applause. Even his intellectual displays won but a narrow sympathy at any time, and in his earlier period were saluted with positive derision and contumely on the

few occasions when they were not oppressed by entire neglect. But slowly all things right themselves. All merit, which is founded in truth and is strong enough, reaches by sweet exhalations in the end a higher sensory-reaches higher organs of discernment, lodged in a selecter audience. But the original obtuseness or vulgarity of feeling that thwarted Lamb's just estimation in life, will continue to thwart its popular diffusion. There are even some that continue to regard him with the old hostility. And we, therefore, standing by the side of Lamb's grave, seemed to hear, on one side, (but in abated tones,) strains of the ancient malice-"This man, that thought himself to be somebody, is dead-is buried-is forgotten!" and, on the other side, seemed to hear ascending, as with the solemnity of an anthem-"This man, that thought himself to be nobody, is dead—is buried; his life has been searched; and his memory is hallowed for ever!"

CANNING'S ESTIMATE OF CHALMERS. When Dr. Chalmers first visited London, the hold that he took on the minds of men was unprecedented. It was a time of strong political feeling; but even that was unheeded, and all parties thronged to hear the Scottish preacher. The very best judges were not prepared for the display that they heard. Canning and Wilberforce went together, and got into a pew near the door. The elder in attendance stood alone by the pew. Chalmers began in his usual unpromising way, by stating a few nearly self-evident propositions, neither in the choicest language nor in the most impressive voice. "If this be all," said Canning to his companion, "it will never do." Chalmers went on-the shuffling of the conversation gradually subsided. He got into the mass of his subject; his weakness became strength, his hesitation was turned into energy; and, bringing the whole volume of his mind to bear upon it, he poured forth a torrent of the most close and conclusive argument, brilliant with all the exuberance of an imagination which ranged over all nature for illustrations, and yet managed and applied each of them with the same unerring dexterity, as if that single one had been the study of a whole life. "The tartan beats us," said Mr. Canning; "we have no preaching like that in England."

VOL. XVI. NO. I.

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ORIGIN OF JOHN GILPIN.-Perhaps the name of no place in the vicinity of London is so universally known as that of Edmonton, and this knowledge may be attributed to the famous visit of that "citizen of credit and renown," who once set out to see the "Bell" from "famous London town." The "Bell," which is a popular inn, still hangs out its "wide-sounding" sign, and calls the lovers of fun and poetry to do their devoirs to porter" and the genius of Cowper. The following occurs in the life of the poet, as the origin of the world-famed ballad of "John Gilpin:" "It happened one afternoon, in those years when Cowper's accomplished friend, Lady Austen, made a part of his little evening circle, that she observed him sinking into increased dejection; it was her custom on these occasions, to try all the resources of her sprightly powers for his immediate relief. She told him the story of John Gilpin, (which had been treasured in her memory from her childhood,) to dissipate the gloom of the passing hour. Its effects on the fancy of Cowper had the air of enchantment. He informed her the next morning that convulsions of laughter, brought on by his recollection of her story, had kept him waking during the greatest part of the night, and that he had turned it into a ballad! So arose the pleasant poem of John Gilpin.' To Lady Austen's suggestion, also, we are indebted for the poem of the 'Task.'"

A MISERLY MARQUESS.-A few days ago. the furniture, &c., of the château of the miserly Marquess d'Aligré, in the village of Chatou, between Paris and St. Germain, was sold by auction. This old Marquess was the richest man in France; he possessed 300 houses in Paris and other towns, fifty estates in different parts of the kingdom, and upwards of 2,000,001. capital placed in the public funds of different countries; and yet the furniture of his favorite château was old, dirty, wretched in the extreme, and would have disgraced a low lodging-house. There was not a decent picture, not a cushion or curtain, or carpet, that was not ragged; not a chair or table that was not rickety; not a piece of crockery that was not cracked.Globe.

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