Lamb's intention of spending the rest of his days in the Middle Temple was not to be realized. The inconveniences of being in chambers began to be felt as he and his sister grew older, and in the autumn of this year they removed to lodgings in Russell Street, Covent Garden, the corner house, delightfully situated between the two great theatres. In November, 1817, Miss Lamb announced the removal to Miss Wordsworth in a letter, to which Lamb added the following:

TO MISS WORDSWORTH.

"Nov. 21st, 1817.

"Dear Miss Wordsworth, Here we are, transplanted from our native soil. I thought we never could have been torn up from the Temple. Indeed it was an ugly wrench, but like a tooth, now 'tis out, and I am easy. We never can strike root so deep in any other ground. This, where we are, is a light bit of gardener's mould, and if they take us up from it, it will cost no blood and groans, like mandrakes pulled up. We are in the individual spot I like best, in all this great city. The theatres, with all their noises. Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinoüs, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and 'sparagus. Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with a constable to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life.

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Mary has brought her part of this letter to an

orthodox and loving conclusion, which is very well, for I have no room for pansies and remembrances. What a nice holiday I got on Wednesday by favor of a princess dying! C. L."

CHAPTER XI.

[1818 to 1820.]

LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, SOUTHEY, MANNING, AND

COLERIDGE.

LAMB, now in the immediate neighborhood of the theatres, renewed the dramatic associations of his youth, which the failure of one experiment had not chilled. Although he rather loved to dwell on the recollections of the actors who had passed from the stage, than to mingle with the happy crowds who hailed the successive triumphs of Mr. Kean, he formed some new and steady theatrical attachments. His chief favorites of this time were Miss Kelly, Miss Burrell of the Olympic, and Munden. The first, then the sole support of the English Opera, became a frequent guest in Great Russell Street, and charmed the circle there by the heartiness of her manners, the delicacy and gentleness of her remarks, and her unaffected sensibility, as much as she had done on the stage. Miss Burrell, a lady of more limited powers, but with a frank and noble style, was discovered by Lamb on one of the visits which he paid, on the invitation of his old friend Elliston to the Olympic, where the lady performed the hero of that happy parody of Moncrieff's Giovanni in London. To

her Lamb devoted a little article, which he sent to the "Examiner," in which he thus addresses her:-"But Giovanni, free, fine, frank-spirited, single-hearted creature, turning all the mischief into fun as harmless as toys, or children's make believe, what praise can we repay to you adequate to the pleasure which you have given us? We had better be silent, for you have no name, and our mention will but be thought fantastical. You have taken out the sting from the evil thing, by what magic we know not, for there are actresses of greater merit and likelihood than you. With you and your Giovanni our spirits will hold communion, whenever sorrow or suffering shall be our lot. We have seen you triumph over the infernal powers; and pain and Erebus, and the powers of darkness, are shapes of a dream." Miss Burrell soon married a person named Gold, and disappeared from the stage. To Munden in prose, and Miss Kelly in verse, Lamb has done ample justice.

Lamb's increasing celebrity, and universal kindness, rapidly increased the number of his visitors. He thus complained, in wayward mood, of them to Mrs. Wordsworth:

TO MRS. WORDSWORTH.

"East-India House, 18th Feb., 1818.

"My dear Mrs. Wordsworth, I have repeatedly taken pen in hand to answer your kind letter. My sister should more properly have done it, but she having failed, I consider myself answerable for her debts. I am now trying to do it in the midst of commercial noises, and with a quill which seems more ready to

glide into arithmetical figures and names of gourds, cassia, cardemoms, aloes, ginger, or tea, than into kindly responses and friendly recollections. The reason

why I cannot write letters at home, is, that I am never alone. Plato's (I write to W. W. now) -Plato's double-animal parted never longed more to be reciprocally reunited in the system of its first creation, than I sometimes do to be but for a moment single and separate. Except my morning's walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so. I cannot walk home from office, but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. could sit and gravely cast up sums in great books, or compare sum with sum, and write 'paid' against this, and unpaid' against t'other, and yet reserve in some corner of my mind, some darling thoughts all my own'-faint memory of some passage in a book, or the

I

tone of an absent friend's voice- a snatch of Miss Burrell's singing, or a gleam of Fanny Kelly's divine plain face. The two operations might be going on at the same time without thwarting, as the sun's two motions (earth's I mean), or, as I sometimes turn round till I am giddy, in my back parlor, while my sister is walking longitudinally in the front; or, as the shoulder of veal twists round with the spit, while the smoke wreathes up the chimney. But there are a set of amateurs of the Belles Lettres-the gay science-who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, &c. -what Coleridge said at the lecture last night-who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible use reading can be to them, but to talk of, might as

well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should find

it. These pests worrit me at business, and in all its intervals, perplexing my accounts, poisoning my little salutary warming-time at the fire, puzzling my paragraphs if I take a newspaper, cramming in between my own free thoughts and a column of figures, which had come to an amicable compromise but for them. Their noise ended, one of them, as I said, accompanies me home, lest I should be solitary for a moment; he at length takes his welcome leave at the door; up I go, mutton on table, hungry as hunter, hope to forget my cares, and bury them in the agreeable abstraction of mastication; knock at the door, in comes Mr. or Mr., or Demigorgon, or my brother, or somebody, to prevent my eating alone-a process absolutely necessary to my poor wretched digestion. O, the pleasure of eating alone!-eating my dinner alone! let me think of it. But in they come, and make it absolutely necessary that I should open a bottle of orange for my meat turns into stone when any one dines with me, if I have not wine. Wine can mollify stones; then that wine turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go before bedtime. Come never, I would say to these spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often, but every time it comes by sur

(God