ours; but almost always easy, simple, graceful, and concise. It often reminds us of that exquisite little volume noticed by us in a former Number,* and from which we enriched our pages with the tale of the "One Night in Rome." It is a style well worthy of all commendation in these days, when grace, elegance, and simplicity, have been sacrificed to false splendour and an ambitious magnificence. Mr Lamb first of all comes before us in these volumes as a Poet. He has reprinted several compositions which formerly appeared along with those of his friends Coleridge and Lloyd, and added a few others of great merit. He is far indeed from being a great Poet, but he is a true one. He has not, perhaps, much imagination; at least he takes but short flights, but they are flights through purest ether. There is a sort of timidity about him that chains his wings. He seems to want ambition. In reading his Poems, we always feel that he might write far loftier things if he would. But in his The pathos of the following stanzas is, to our ears, much increased by the air of antique quaintness which glimmers over their structure. THE OLD FAMILIAR FACES. I HAVE had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful I have been laughing, I have been carousing, I loved a love once, fairest among women; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, ther, Friend of my bosom, thou more than a broWhy wert not thou born in my father's dwelling? So might we talk of the old familiar faces own sphere he delights us. He is the very best of those Poets who are Poets rather from fineness of perception, delicacy of fancy, and pure warmth of heart, than from the impulses of that higher creative power that works in the world of the imagination. We know that no man is more beloved by How some they have died, and some they his friends than Charles Lamb; and it is impossible to read a page of his poetry without feeling that he deserves all their love. In the following little Dialogue between a Mother and her Child, much is said in few words. A chord is touched, and it vibrates. have left me, And some are taken from me; all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. Each of the following sonnets is in its own way excellent. I. TO MISS KELLY. You are not, Kelly, of the common strain, That stoop their pride and female honour down To please that many-headed beast the town, By fortune thrown amid the actors' train, That vanish and return we know not how- XI. We were two pretty babes, the youngest she, And INNOCENCE her name. has been, The time We two did love each other's company; Time was, we two had wept to have been apart. But when by show of seeming good beguil'd, The lines entitled "Sabbath Bells" may be read with pleasure even after those of Cowper, Bowles, and Grahame, on the same subject. The cheerful Sabbath bells, wherever heard, Strike pleasant on the sense, most like the voice Of one, who from the far-off hills proclaims Forth from the walks of men, revolving oft, appears, Of controversy, where no end The sonnet which follows seems to us very beautiful, though it may provoke a smile from readers of sterner judgment. It has about it an air of fantastic beauty, yet surely the idea is natural. ON THE SIGHT OF SWANS IN KENSINGTON GARDEN. QUEEN-BIRD that sittest on thy shining nest, And thy young cygnets without sorrow hatchest, And thou, thou other royal bird, that watchest Lest the white mother wandering feet molest: Shrined are your offspring in a crystal cradle, Brighter than Helen's ere she yet had burst Her shelly prison. They shall be born at first It requires a practised ear to enjoy the delicious harmony of the following lines, which are full of a divine spirit of piety. LINES On the celebrated Picture by Lionardo da The Mother standing by, with trembling passion Of devout admiration, Beholds the engaging mystic play, and pretty adoration; Nor knows as yet the full event Of those new rites, and what that strange child-worship meant. But at her side A glory, an amenity, As if he surely knew All the blest wonders should ensue, the peculiarities of Mr Lamb's genius These specimens may suffice to shew and manner: but the charm of his Poetry pervades the whole bulk of the volume, and it is as impossible fully to comprehend that charm from a few partial passages, as it would be from a few casual smiles to understand the full expression of an intellectual and moral countenance. Before we leave Mr Lamb's Poetry, however, we must remark, that there can be no greater folly than to talk of him as being one of the Lake School of Poets. He has a more delicate taste, a more graceful and ingenious turn of mind, than any one of them; but he bears no resemblance to Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Wilson, in those peculiar talents, peculiar theories, and peculiar poetical: habits of life, in which all these poets agree, and which have given to their compositions a character so easily distinguishable from all the other Poetry between Wordsworth and Coleridge, of the age. Hunt places Mr Lamb and he might as well have placed him between Belfast and Londonderry. We regret that our scanty limits must prevent us from giving a detailed account of the Tragedy of John Woodville. It is, throughout, deficient in vigour, and now and then so very simple as to be almost silly, though even in the worst passages there is a redeeming charm in the diction and versification. It seems to have been written when its author's mind teemed with the fresh beauties of the ancient drama, and many of those beauties are transfused into the piece. Nothing can excel the delicate skill with which he has imitated the finer under tones of the best old dramatists, and many of its scenes are eminently distinguished by tenderness and pathos. The tragedy is founded on a tale of domestic sorrow, and the only female character, Margaret, is conceived and drawn in a manner worthy of Massinger himself. We cannot afford a long extract, and therefore shall give none. We wish Mr Lamb would write another tragedy. Let him put a little more force into it-widen the range of his action and characters-be less under the constraint of imitation and dismiss a few little womanish affectations and weaknesses-and he really has so much tenderness, delicacy, nature, and even passion, that if he gives himself fair play, he is sure to produce a domestic tragedy that would universally touch and affect the minds of men. We are disposed to doubt the truth of those assertions we hear on all sides, of the total decay of dramatic genius. Certainly the poetical current has not strongly set in towards the regular drama; but that is all. These are Miss Baillie's plays, at least, which will bear a comparison with our best poems. They probably approach as near to Shakspeare as Southey to Spenser, Wordsworth to Milton, Scott to Ariosto, Byron to Dante. They alone can support the tragic drama of this age against that of almost any preceding one since the restoration. Byron's drama of Manfred exhibits the powers of a giant. Millman's Fazio is also a drama of great power. Maturin's Bertram of still greater. Coleridge's Remorse, though a bad acting play, and deficient in truth, both of sentiment, passion, and character, is yet a rich and splendid poetical drama, full of beautiful imagery, and most musical with the breath of sweetest words. Wilson's City of the Plague, though rather a phantasmagorial spectacle than a dra ma, and evidently written in defiance or ignorance of all stage rules, yet displays many of the essential qualities of deepest tragedy; and the character of the sainted Magdalen is a fine and touching union of human with divine beauty, innocence, and virtue. All the great poets of the day, too, have shewn strong dramatic power in their narrative or heroic poems; and above all, Scott and Byron want little, perhaps nothing, to become surpassing tragic dramatists. We see no reason why Mr Lamb should not be classed along with those writers. He is probably better acquainted, and more deeply imbued with the spirit of the tragic genius of England than any of them. He is a man of fancy and a man of heart,why then may he not-why will he not, write a good domestic tragedy, that might take and keep possession of the stage. Another division of Mr Lamb's works consists of Letters on Various Subjects, that were formerly inserted in that unfortunate periodical publication, the Reflector, which Hazlitt and Hunt very speedily damned, not by criticising it, but by contributing to it. Some of them are lively, and all of them elegant. But to speak the truth, Mr Lamb's humour, though always somewhat original, is often very forced and unnatural. When he gets hold of an odd and outrageously absurd whim or fancy, he is beside himself, and keeps in an eternal dalliance with it till it is absolutely pawed into pieces. This fault infects all his humorous epistles more or less. That, "On the Inconveniency of being Hanged,” has some capital strokes, but it is overlaboured. A gentleman who, after having been hanged for four minutes, is cut down on the tardy arrival of a free pardon, and restored to animation, recounts to the editor of the Reflector the sad series of insults to which he is subjected, notwithstanding his admitted innocence, from the prejudices of the public respecting that ignominious form of punishment. At last, he is about to wed a young lady superior to them all, when he receives this letter: "SIR,-You must not impute it to levity, or to a worse failing, ingratitude, if, with anguish of heart, I feel myself compelled by irresistible arguments to recall a vow which I fear I made with too little consideration. I never can be yours. The reasons of my decision, which is final, are in my own breast, and you must everlastingly remain a stranger to them. Assure yourself that I can never cease to esteem you as I ought. CELESTINA.' "At the sight of this paper, I ran in frantic haste to Celestina's lodgings, where I learned, to my infinite mortification, that the mother and daughter were set off on a journey to a distant part of the country, to visit a relation, and were not expected to return in less than four months. "Stunned by this blow, which left me without the courage to solicit an explanation by letter, even if I had known where they were, (for the particular address was industriously concealed from me) I waited with impatience the termination of the period, in the vain hope that I might be per. mitted to have a chance of softening the harsh decision by a personal interview with Celestina after her return. But before three months were at an end, I learned from the newspapers, that my beloved had-given her hand to another! "Heart-broken as I was, I was totally at a loss to account for the strange step which she had taken; and it was not till some years after that I learned the true reason from a female relation of hers, to whom, it seems, Celestina had confessed in confidence, that it was no demerit of mine that had caused her to break off the match so abruptly, nor any preference which she might feel for any other person, for she preferred me (she was pleased to say) to all mankind; but when she came to lay the matter closer to her heart, she found that she never should be able to bear the sight (I give you her very words as they were detailed to me by her relation) the sight of a man in a nightcap, who had appeared on a public platform, it would lead to such a disagreeable association of ideas! And to this punctilio I was sacrificed." But There is a letter "On the Melancholy of Tailors," which, overlooking its heterodoxy, is very humorous. Town tailors may be melancholy, Mr Lamb's tailor may be melancholy, but your rural Snip, your Snip of hamlet and of grange, is in general a person of great activity, mental and bodily, and, though sober and well-conditioned, full of fun and anecdote. we have said that Mr Lamb is a good deal of a town man. A country tailor, working on his own bottom, and sitting enthroned among the family with whom he his an inmate, is a very different personage indeed from any one of fifty fractions of men placed rank and file in a sky-lighted garret in the city of London. However, let us hear Mr Lamb. "This characteristic pensiveness in them being so notorious, I wonder none of those writers, who have expressly treated of melancholy, should have mentioned it. Burton, whose book is an excellent abstract of all the authors in that kind who preceded him, and who treats of every species of this malady, from the hypocondriacal or windy to the heroical or love melancholy, has strangely omitted it. Shakspeare himself has overlooked it. I have neither the scholar's melancholy (saith Jacques), which is emulation; nor the courtier's, which is proud; nor the soldier's, which is politic; nor the lover's, which is all these:'-and then, when you might expect him to have brought in, nor the tailor's, which is so and so'-he comes to an end of his enumeration, and falls to a defining of his own melancholy. "Milton likewise has omitted it, where he had so fair an opportunity of bringing it in, in his Penseroso. "But the partial omissions of historians proving nothing against the existence of any well-attested fact, I shall proceed and en deavour to ascertain the causes why this pensive turn should be so predominant in people of this profession above all others. "And first, may it not be, that the custom of wearing apparel being derived to us from the fall, and one of the most mortifying products of that unhappy event, a certain seriousness (to say no more of it) may in the order of things have been intended to be impressed upon the minds of that race of men to whom, in all ages, the care of contriving the human apparel has been entrust. ed,-to keep up the memory of the first institution of clothes, and serve as a standing remonstrance against those vanities which the absurd conversion of a memorial of our shame into an ornament of our persons was destined to produce? Correspondent in some sort to this, it may be remarked, that the tailor sitting over a cave or hollow place, in the cabbalistic language of his order, is said to have certain melancholy regions always open under his feet. But waving further inquiry into final causes, where the best of us can only wander in the dark, let us try to discover the efficient causes of this melancholy. "I think, then, that they may be reduced to two, omitting some subordinate ones, viz. The sedentary habits of the tailor.Something peculiar in his diet. Norris's famous narrative of the frenzy of "First, his sedentary habits.-In Doctor Mr John Dennis, the patient, being ques tioned as to the occasion of the swelling in his legs, replies that it was by criticism;' to which the learned doctor seeming to demur, as to a distemper which he had never heard of. Dennis (who appears not to have been mad upon all subjects) rejoins with some warmth, that it was no distemper, but a noble art! that he had sat fourteen hours a day at it; and that the other was a pretty doctor, not to know that there was a communication between the brain and the legs. "When we consider, that this sitting for fourteen hours continuously, which the critic probably practised only while he was writing his remarks,' is no more than what the tailor, in the ordinary pursuance of his art, submits to daily (Sundays excepted) throughout the year, shall we wonder to find the brain affected, and in a manner over-clouded, from that indissoluble sympathy between the noble and less noble parts of the body, which Dennis hints at ? The unnatural and painful manner of his sitting must also greatly aggravate the evil, insomuch that I have sometimes ventured to liken tailors at their boards to so many envious Junos, sitting cross-legged to hinder the birth of their own felicity. The legs transversed thus cross-wise, or decussated, was among the ancients the posture of malediction. The Turks, who practise it at this day, are noted to be a melancholy people. It "Secondly, his diet. To which purpose I find a most remarkable passage in Burton, in his chapter entitled Bad diet a cause of melancholy.'Amongst herbs to be eaten (he says) I find gourds, cucumbers, melons, disallowed; but especially CABBAGE. causeth troublesome dreams, and sends up black vapours to the brain. Galen, loc. affect. lib. 3. cap. 6. of all herbs condemns CABBAGE. And Isaack, lib. 2. cap. 1. animæ gravitatem facit, it brings heaviness to the soul.' I could not omit so flattering a testimony from an author, who, having no theory of his own to serve, has so unconsciously contributed to the confirmation of mine. It is well known, that this lastnamed vegetable has, from the earliest periods which we can discover, constituted almost the sole food of this extraordinary race of people. BURTON, Junior." Mr Lamb has also written a farce, called Mr H., which was damned. He has done unwisely, we think, in publishing it. The hero has so ugly a name, that he calls himelf by the initial letter H., and lives in constant trepidation lest his real name be detected. On this trepidation the farce hinges. Detected it is at last,-Hogsflesh! Men of genius are apt, very apt, to mistake their talent. The author has every reason to be ashamed of this farce, yet we fear he plumes himself greatly upon it. The prologue is worth the farce itself ten times over. "IF we have sinn'd in paring down a name, All civil well-bred authors do the same. Survey the columns of our daily writersYou'll find that some Initials are great fighters. How fierce the shock, how fatal is the jar, When Ensign W. meets Lieutenant R. With two stout seconds, just of their own gizard, Cross Captain X. and rough old General Izzard! Letter to Letter spreads the dire alarms, And loses half her grossness by curtailing. Which such a pliant Vowel must not grant Of Deary, Spouse, and that old-fashioned I always leaves them things to Mrs C." As each lov'd syllable should melt away— Great Hannibal himself a Mr H.” But by much the best part of Mr Lamb's book is his serious Essays, and more especially his "Characters of Dramatic Writers contemporary with Shakspeare," the Essay on the "Tragedies of Shakspeare, and that on the "Genius of Hogarth." We observe that a writer in this Magazine has occasionally quoted passages from the first of these, in his Analytical Essays on the Old English Drama, and therefore we need not now give any additional extracts. But we cannot help remarking, that Mr Lamb, from his desire to say strong and striking things, and to represent the objects of his enthusiasm as deserving even of his idolatry, has often pushed his panegyrics on the ancient English Dramatists beyond all reasonable bounds. In some few cases, his extravagant zeal has led him into expressions of his feelings most indefensible and offensive. Mr Lamb is, we know, a man of virtue, and, we doubt not, a man of religion. He ought not, therefore, in speaking of mere human feelings and passions, ever so far to forget himself as to |