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described, whether men, or things, or usages, and, in the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollections and to decaying forms of household life, as things retiring before the tumult of new and revolutionary generations; these traits in combination communicate to the papers a grace and strength of originality which nothing in any literature approaches, whether for degree or kind of excellence, except the most felicitous papers of Addison, such as those on Sir Roger de Coverly, and some others in the same vein of composition. They resemble Addison's papers also in the diction, which is natural and idiomatic, even to carelessness. They are equally faithful to the truth of nature; and in this only they differ remarkably, that the sketches of Elia reflect the stamp and impress of the writer's own character, whereas in all those of Addison the personal peculiarities of the delineator (though known to the reader from the beginning through the account of the Club) are nearly quiescent. Now and then they are recalled into a momentary notice, but they do not act, or at all modify his pictures of Sir Roger or Will Wimble. They are slightly and amiably eccentric; but the Spectator himself, in describing them, takes the station of an ordinary observer.

with the texture of the thoughts so as to modify their force or their direction. In such books, and they form the vast majority, there is nothing to be found or to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (Sit venia verbo!) But in a small section of books, the objective in the thought becomes confluent with the subjective in the thinker; the two forces unite for a joint product; and fully to enjoy that product, or fully to apprehend either element, both must be known. It is singular, and worth inquiring into, for the reason that the Greek and Roman literature had no such books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may conceive qualified for this mode of authorship, had Journalism existed to rouse them in those days; their "articles" would no doubt have been fearfully caustic. But, as they failed to produce anything, and Lucian in an after age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose, perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of writers in the class described. In the century following theirs, came Sir Thomas Brown, and immediately after him La Fontaine. Then came Swift, Sterne, with others less distinguished; in Germany, Hippel, the friend of Kant, Hamann the obscure, and the greatest of the whole body, John Paul Fr. Richter. In him, from the strength and determinateness of his nature as well as from the great extent of his writings, the philoso

a human agency and his theme as an intellectual reagency, might best be studied. From him might be derived the largest number of cases illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into the concrete; of the pure intellect into the human nature of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting; shy, delicate, evanescent; shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the colored pencillings on a frosty night from the Northern Lights, than in the better parts of Lamb.

Everywhere, indeed, in the writings of Lamb, and not merely in his Elia, the character of the writer co-operates in an under-phy of this interaction between the author as current to the effect of the thing written. To understand in the fullest sense either the gaiety or tenderness of a particular passage, you must have some insight into the peculiar bias of the writer's mind; whether native and original, or impressed gradually by the accidents of situation; whether simply developed out of predispositions by the action of life, or violently scorched into the constitution by some fierce fever of calamity. There is in modern literature a whole class of writers, though not a large one, standing within the same category; some marked originality of character in the writer becomes a co-efficient with what he says to a common result. You must sympathize with this personality in the author before you can appreciate the most significant parts of his views. In most books the writer figures as a mere abstraction, without sex or age or local station, whom the reader banishes from his thoughts. What is written seems to proceed from a blank intellect, not from a man clothed with fleshy peculiarities and differences. These peculiarities and differences neither do nor (generally speaking) could intermingle

To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his character and temperament should be understood in their coyest and most wayward features. A capital defect it would be if these could not be gathered silently from Lamb's works themselves. It would be a fatal mode of dependency upon an alien and separable accident if they needed an external commentary. But they do not. The syllables lurk up and down the writings of Lamb which decipher his eccentric nature. His character lies there dispersed in anagram; and to any attentive reader the regathering and restoration of the total word

an issue directed from that court to try the amount of power lodged in a poor desolate pair of human creatures for facing the very anarchy of storms-this obscure life of the two Lambs, brother and sister, (for the two lives were one life,) rises into a grandeur that is not paralleled once in a generation.

from its scattered parts is inevitable without an effort. Still it is always a satisfaction in knowing a result, to know also its why and how; and in so far as every character is likely to be modified by the particular experience, sad or joyous, through which the life has travelled, it is a good contribution towards the knowledge of that resulting character as a whole to have a sketch of that particular experience. What trials did it impose? What energies did it task? What temptations did it unfold? These calls upon the moral powers, which in music so stormy, many a life is doomed to hear, how were they faced? The character in a capital degree moulds oftentimes the life, but the life always in a subordinate degree moulds the character. And the character being in this case of Lamb so much of a key to the writings, it becomes important that the life should be traced, however briefly, as a key to the char-years before thee, shall be through life, each

acter.

That is one reason for detaining the reader with some slight record of Lamb's career. Such a record by preference and of right belongs to a case where the intellectual display, which is the sole ground of any public interest at all in the man, has been intensely modified by the humanities and moral personalities distinguishing the subject. We read a Physiology, and need no information as to the life and conversation of its author: a meditative poem becomes far better understood by the light of such information; but a work of genial and at the same time eccentric sentiment, wandering upon untrodden paths, is barely intelligible without it. There is a good reason for arresting judgment on the writer, that the court may receive evidence on the life of the man. But there is another reason, and, in any other place, a better; which reason lies in the extraordinary value of the life considered separately for itself. Logically, it is not allowable to say that here; and, considering the principal purpose of this paper, any possible independent value of the life must rank as a better reason for reporting it. Since, in a case where the original object is professedly to estimate the writings of a man, whatever promises to further that object must, merely by that tendency, have, in relation to that place, a momentary advantage which it would lose if valued upon a more abstract scale. Liberated from this casual office of throwing light upon a book, raised to its grander station of a solemn deposition to the moral capacities of a man in conflict with calamity-viewed as a return made into the chanceries of heaven, upon

Rich, indeed, in moral instruction was the life of Charles Lamb; and perhaps in one chief result it offers to the thoughtful observer a lesson of consolation that is awful, and of hope that ought to be immortal, viz., in the record which it furnishes, that by meekness of submission, and by earnest conflict with evil, in the spirit of cheerfulness, it is possible ultimately to disarm or to blunt the very heaviest of curses-even the curse of lunacy. Had it been whispered, in hours of infancy, to Lamb, by the angel who stood by his cradle-"Thou, and the sister that walks by ten

to each, the solitary fountain of comfort; and except it be from this fountain of mutual love, except it be as brother and sister, ye shall not taste the cup of peace on earth!"-here, if there was sorrow in reversion, there was also consolation.

Peace on

But what funeral swamps would have instantly engulfed this consolation had some meddling fiend prolonged the revelation, and, holding up the curtain from the sad future a little longer, had said scornfullyearth! Peace for you two, Charles and Mary Lamb! What peace is possible under the curse which even now is gathering against your heads? Is there peace on earth for the lunatic-peace for the parenticide-peace for the girl that, without warning, and without time granted for a penitential cry to heaven, sends her mother to the last audit?" And then, without treachery, speaking bare truth, this prophet of wo might have added

"Thou also, thyself, Charles Lamb, thou in thy proper person, shalt enter the skirts of this dreadful hail-storm: even thou shalt taste the secrets of lunacy, and enter as a captive its house of bondage; whilst over thy sister the accursed scorpion shall hang suspended through life, like Death hanging over the beds of hospitals, striking at times, but more often threatening to strike; or withdrawing its instant menaces only to lay bare her mind more bitterly to the persecutions of a haunted memory!" Considering the nature of the calamity, in the first place; considering, in the second place, its life-long duration; and, in the last place, considering the quality of the resistance by which it was met, and under what circumstances of humble re

sources in money, or friends-we have come to the deliberate judgment, that the whole range of history scarcely presents a more affecting spectacle of perpetual sorrow, humiliation, or conflict, and that was supported to the end (that is, through forty years) with more resignation, or with more absolute victory.

Charles Lamb was born in February of the year 1775. His immediate descent was humble; for his father, though on one particular occasion civilly described as a "scrivener," was in reality a domestic servant to Mr. Salt -a bencher (and therefore a barrister of some standing) in the Inner Temple. John Lamb the father belonged by birth to Lincoln; from which city, being transferred to London whilst yet a boy, he entered the service of Mr. Salt without delay; and apparently from this period throughout his life continued in this good man's household to support the honorable relation of a Roman client to his patronus, much more than that of a mercenary servant to a transient and capricious master. The terms on which he seems to have lived with the family of the Lambs, argue a kindness and a liberality of nature on both sides. John Lamb recommended himself as an attendant by the versatility of his accomplishments; and Mr. Salt, being a widower without children, which means in effect an old bachelor, naturally valued that encyclopædic range of dexterity which made his house independent of external aid for every mode of service. To kill one's own mutton is but an operose way of arriving at a dinner, and often a more costly way; whereas to combine one's own carpenter, locksmith, hair dresser, groom, &c., all in one man's person to have a Robinson Crusoe, up to all emergencies of life, always in waiting, is a luxury of the highest class for one who val

ues his ease.

A consultation is held more freely with a man familiar to one's eye, and more profitably with a man aware of one's peculiar habits. And another advantage from such an arrangement is, that one gets any little alteration or repair executed on the spot. To hear is to obey, and by an inversion of Pope's rule,

One always is, and never to be, blest.

People of one sole accomplishment, like the homo unius libri, are usually within that narrow circle disagreeably perfect, and there fore apt to be arrogant. People who can do all things, usually do every one of them ill; and living in a constant effort to deny this

too palpable fact, they become irritably vain. But Mr. Lamb the elder seems to have been bent on perfection. He did all things; he did them all well; and yet was neither gloomily arrogant, nor testily vain. And being conscious apparently that all mechanic excellencies tend to illiberal results, unless counteracted by perpetual sacrifices to the Muses

he went so far as to cultivate poetry: he even printed his poems, and were we possessed of a copy, (which we are not, nor probably is the Vatican,) it would give us pleasure at this point to digress for a moment, and to cut them up, purely on considerations of respect to the author's memory. It is hardly to be supposed that they did not really merit castigation; and we should best show the sincerity of our respect for Mr. Lamb, senior, in all those cases where we could conscientiously profess respect by an unlimited application of the knout in the cases where we could not.

The whole family of the Lambs seem to have won from Mr. Salt the consideration which is granted to humble friends; and from acquaintances nearer to their own standing, to have won a tenderness of esteem such as is granted to decaying gentry. Yet, naturally, the social rank of the parents, as people still living, must have operated disadvantageously for the children. It is hard, even for the practised philosopher, to distinguish aristocratic graces of manner, and capacities of delicate feeling, in people whose very hearth and dress bear witness to the servile humility of their station. Yet such distinctions, as wild gifts of nature, timidly and half-unconsciously asserted themselves in the unpretending Lambs. Already in their favor there existed a silent privilege analogous to the famous one of Lord Kinsale. He, by special grant from the Crown, is allowed, when standing before the King, to forget that he is not himself a king: the bearer of that Peerage, through all generations, has the privilege of wearing his hat in the Royal presence. By a general though tacit concession of the same nature, the rising generation of the Lambs, John and Charles, the two sons, and Mary Lamb, the only daughter, were permitted to forget that their grandmother had been a housekeeper for sixty years, and that their father had worn a livery. Charles Lamb, individually, was so entirely humble, and so careless of social distinctions, that he has taken pleasure in recurring to these very facts in the family records amongst the most genial of his Elia recollections. He only continued to remember, without shame, and with

a peculiar tenderness, these badges of plebeian rank, when everybody else, amongst the few survivors that could have known of their existence, had long dismissed them from their thoughts.

Probably through Mr. Salt's interest, Charles Lamb, in the autumn of 1782, when he wanted something more than four months of completing his eighth year, received a presentation to the magnificent school of Christ's Hospital. The late Dr. Arnold, when contrasting the school of his own boyish experience, Winchester, with Rugby, the school confided to his management, found nothing so much to regret in the circumstances of the latter as its forlorn condition with respect to historical traditions. Wherever these were wanting, and supposing the school of sufficient magnitude, it occurred to Dr. Arnold that something of a compensatory effect for impressing the imagination might be obtained by connecting the school with the nation through the link of annual prizes issuing from the Exchequer. An official basis of national patronage might prove a substitute for an antiquarian or ancestral basis. Happily for the great educational foundations of London, none of them is in the naked condition of Rugby. Westminster, St. Paul's, Merchant Tailors', the Charter-House, &c., are all crowned with historical recollections; and Christ's Hospital, besides the original honors of its foundation, so fitted to a consecrated place in a youthful imagination-an asylum for boy-students, provided by a boy-king-innocent, religious, prematurely wise, and prematurely called away from earth-has also a mode of perpetual connection with the State. It enjoys, therefore, both of Dr. Arnold's advantages. Indeed, all the great foundation-schools of London, bearing in their very codes of organization the impress of a double functionviz., the conservation of sound learning and of pure religion-wear something of a monastic or cloisteral character in their aspect and usages which is peculiarly impressive, and even pathetic, amidst the uproars of a capital the most colossal and tumultuous upon earth.

Here Lamb remained until his fifteenth year, which year threw him on the world, and brought him alongside the golden dawn of the French Revolution. Here he learned a little elementary Greek, and of Latin more than a little; for the Latin notes to Mr. Cary, (of Dante celebrity,) though brief, are sufficient to reveal a true sense of what is graceful and idiomatic in Latinity. We say this, who have studied that subject more than VOL. XVI. NO. I.

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most men. It is not that Lamb would have found it an easy task to compose a long paper in Latin--nobody can find it easy to do what he has no motive for habitually practising; but a single sentence of Latin, wearing the secret countersign of the "sweet Roman hand," may show sufficiently that, in reading Latin classics, a man feels and comprehends their peculiar force or beauty. That is enough. It is requisite to a man's expansion of mind that he should make acquaintance with a literature so radically different from all modern literatures as is the Latin. It is not requisite that he should practise Latin composition. Here, therefore, Lamb obtained in sufficient perfection one priceless accomplishment, which even singly throws a graceful air of liberality over all the rest of a man's attainments: having rarely any pecuniary value, it challenges the more attention to its intellectual value. Here also Lamb commenced the friendships of his life; and, of all which he formed, he lost none. Here it was, as the consummation and crown of his advantages from the time-honored Hospital, that he came to know "Poor S. T. C.”* ToV aupatiwτatov.

Until 1796, it is probable that he lost sight of Coleridge, who was then occupied with Cambridge-having been transferred thither as a "Grecian" from the house of Christ Church. That year, 1796, was a year of change and fearful calamity for Charles Lamb. On that year revolved the wheels of his after-life. During the three years succeeding to his school-days, he had held a clerkship in the South Sea House. In 1795, he was transferred to the India House. As a junior clerk he could not receive more than a slender salary; but even this was important to the support of his parents and sister. They lived together in lodgings near Holborn; and in the spring of 1796, Miss Lamb, (having previously shown signs of lunacy at intervals,) in a sudden paroxysm of her disease, seized a knife from the dinner table, and stabbed her mother, who died upon the spot. A coroner's inquest easily ascertained the nature of a case which was transparent in all its circumstances, and never for a moment indecisive as regarded the medical symptoms. The poor young lady was transferred to the establishment for lunatics at Hoxton: she soon recovered, we believe; but her relapses

The affecting expression by which Coleridge inlast illness for an inscription upon his grave; lines ill dicates himself in the few lies written during his constructed in point of diction and compression, but otherwise speaking from the depths of his heart.

were as sudden as her recoveries, and she | know. There would be no second edition continued through life to revisit, for periods of uncertain seclusion, this house of wo. This calamity of his fireside, followed soon after by the death of his father, who had for some time been in a state of imbecility, determined the future destiny of Lamb. Apprehending, with the perfect grief of perfect love, that his sister's fate was sealed for life viewing her as his own greatest benefactress, which she really had been through her advantage by ten years in age-yielding with impassioned readiness to the depth of his fraternal affection, what at any rate he would have yielded to the sanctities of duty as interpreted by his own conscience-he resolved for ever to resign all thoughts of marriage with a young lady whom he loved, for ever to abandon all ambitious prospects that might have tempted him into uncertainties, humbly to content himself with the certainties of his Indian clerkship, to dedicate himself for the future to the care of his desolate and prostrate sister, and to leave the

rest to God. These sacrifices he made in no

hurry or tumult, but deliberately, and in religious tranquillity. These sacrifices were accepted in heaven-and even on this earth they had their reward. She for whom he gave up all, in turn gave up all for him. She devoted herself to his comfort. Many times she returned to the lunatic establishment, but many times she was restored to illuminate the household hearth for him; and of the happiness which for forty years more he had, no hour seemed true that was not derived from her. Henceforward, therefore, until he was emancipated by the noble generosity of the East India Directors, Lamb's time, for nine and twenty years, was given to the India House.

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O fortunati nimium, sua si bona norint," is applicable to more people than" agricole." Clerks of the India House are as blind to their own advantages as the blindest of ploughmen. Lamb was summoned, it is true, through the larger and more genial section of his life, to the drudgery of a copying clerk-making confidential entries into mighty folios, on the subject of calicoes and muslins. By this means, whether he would or not, he became gradually the author of a great "serial" work, in a frightful number of volumes, on as dry a department of literature as the children of the great desert could have suggested. Nobody, he must have felt, was ever likely to study this great work of his, not even Dr. Dryasdust. He had written in vain, which is hot pleasant to

called for by a discerning public in Leadenhall street: not a chance of that. And consequently the opera omnia of Lamb, drawn up in a hideous battalion, at the cost of labor so enormous, would be known only to certain families of spiders in one generation, and of rats in the next. Such a labor of Sisyphus-the rolling up a ponderous stone to the summit of a hill only that it might roll back again by the gravitation of its own dullness, seems a bad employment for a man of genius in his meridian energies. And yet, perhaps not. Perhaps the collective wisdom of Europe could not have devised for Lamb a more favorable condition of toil than this very India House clerkship. His works (his Leadenhall street works) were certainly not read; popular they could not be, for they were not read by anybody; but then, to balance that, they were not reviewed. His folios were of that order, which (in Cowper's words) "not even critics criticise." Is that nothing? Is it no happiness to escape the hands of scoundrel reviewers? Many of us escape being read; the worshipful reviewer does not find time to read a line of us; but we do not for that reason escape being criticised, "shown up," and martyred. The list of errata again, committed by Lamb, was probably of a magnitude to alarm any possible compositor; and yet these errata will never be known to mankind. They are dead and buried. They have been cut off prematurely; and for any effect upon their generation, might as well never have existed. Then the returns, in a pecuniary sense, from these folios

how important were they! It is not common, certainly, to write folios; but neither is it common to draw a steady income of from £300 to £400 per annum from volumes of any size. This will be admitted; but would it not have been better to draw the income without the toil? Doubtless it would always be more agreeable to have the rose without the thorn. But in the case before us, taken with all its circumstances, we deny that the toil is truly typified as a thorn ;—so far from being a thorn in Lamb's daily life, on the contrary, it was a second rose engrafted upon the original rose of the income, that he had to earn it by a moderate but continued exertion. Let us consider what this exertion really amounted to. Holidays, in a national establishment so great as the India House, and in our too fervid period, naturally could not be frequent; yet all great English corporations are gracious masters, and indulgences of this nature could be obtained on a special appli

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