passport to take off the sneers of the native Enfielders against obnoxious foreigners. We are endenizened. Thus much of T. W have I thought fit to acquaint you, that you may see the exemplary reliance upon Providence with which I entrusted so dear a charge as my own sister to the guidance of the man that rode the mad horse into Devizes. To come from his heroic character, all the amiable qualities of domestic life concentre in this tamed Bellerophon. He is excellent over a glass of grog; just as pleasant without it; laughs when he hears a joke, and when (which is much oftener) he hears it not; sings glorious old sea songs on festival nights; and but upon a slight acquaintance of two years, Coleridge, is as 1 dear a deaf old man to us, as old Norris, rest his soul! was after fifty. To him and his scanty literature (what there is of it, sound) have we flown from the metropolis and its cursed annualists, reviewers, authors, and the whole muddy ink press of that stagnant pool. "Now, Gilman again, you do not know the treasure of the Fullers. I calculate on having massy reading till Christmas. All I want here, is books of the true sort, not those things in boards that moderns mistake for books, what they club for at book clubs. "I did not mean to cheat you with a blank side, but my eye smarts, for which I am taking medicine, and abstain, this day at least, from any aliments but milk-porridge, the innocent taste of which I am anxious to renew after a half-century's disacquaintance. If a blot fall here like a tear, it is not pathos, but an angry eye. "Farewell, while my specilla are sound. "Yours and yours, C. LAMB." more tender animals, as rabbits and pigeons nurtured in their garrets or cellars; or cultivating some stunted plants with an intuitive love of nature, unfed by any knowledge of verdure beyond Hoxton; their painful industry, their uneducated morals, their eager snatches of pleasure from the only quickening of their intellect, by liquors which make glad the heart of man; he would scarcely have refused the offered retainer for them. TO MR. GILMAN. "March 8th, 1830. "My dear G.,-Your friend B(for I knew him immediately by the smooth satinity of his style) must excuse me for advocating the cause of his friends in Spitalfields. The fact is, I am retained by the Norwich people, and have already appeared in their paper under the signatures of 'Lucius Sergius,' 'Bluff,' 'Broad-Cloth,' 'No-Trade-tothe-Woollen-Trade,' 'Anti-plush,' &c., in defence of druggets and long camblets. And without this pre-engagement, I feel I should naturally have chosen a side opposite to for in the silken seemingness of his nature there is that which offends me. My flesh tingles at such caterpillars. He shall not crawl me over. Let him and his workmen sing the old burthen, 'Heigh ho, ye weavers!' for any aid I shall offer them in this emergency. I was over Saint Luke's the other day with my friend Tuthill, and mightily pleased with one of his contrivances for the comfort and amelioration of the students. They have double cells, in which a pair may lie feet to feet horizontally, and chat the time away as rationally as they can. It must certainly be more sociable for them these warm raving nights. The right-hand The next letter to Coleridge's excellent truckle in one of these friendly recesses, at host, is a reply to a request from an impor- present vacant, was preparing, I understood, tunate friend of his correspondent, that he for Mr. Irving. Poor fellow! it is time he would write something on behalf of the removed from Pentonville. I followed him Spitalfields' weavers. Alien as such a task as far as to Highbury the other day, with a would have been to his habits of thought or mob at his heels, calling out upon Ermigiddon, composition, if Lamb had been acquainted who I suppose is some Scotch moderator. with that singular race, living in their high, He squinted out his favourite eye last Friday, narrow, over-peopled houses, in the thickest in the fury of possession, upon a poor woman's part of London, yet almost apart from the shoulders that was crying matches, and has great throng of its dwellers; indulging their not missed it. The companion truck, as far straitened sympathies in the fostering of the as I could measure it with my eye, would conveniently fit a person about the length of Coleridge, allowing for a reasonable drawing up of the feet, not at all painful. Does he talk of moving this quarter? You and I have too much sense to trouble ourselves with revelations; marry, to the same in Greek, you may have something professionally to say. Tell C. that he was to come and see us some fine day. Let it be before he moves, for in his new quarters he will necessarily be confined in his conversation to his brother prophet. Conceive the two Rabbis foot to foot, for there are no Gamaliels there to affect a humbler posture! All are masters in that Patmos, where the law is perfect equality; Latmos, I should rather say, for they will be Luna's twin darlings; her affection will be ever at the full. Well; keep your brains moist with gooseberry this mad March, for the devil of exposition seeketh dry places. C. L." Here is a brief reply to the questioning of Lamb's true-hearted correspondent, Barton, who doubted of the personal verity of Lamb's "Joseph Paice," the most polite of merchants. This friend's personal acquaintance with Lamb had not been frequent enough to teach him, that if Lamb could innocently "lie like truth," he made up for this freedom, by sometimes making truth look like a lie. His account of Mr. Paice's politeness, could be attested to the letter by living witnesses. TO BERNARD BARTON. "Dear B. B.,-To reply to you by return of post, I must gobble up my dinner, and despatch this in propriâ personâ to the office, to be in time. So take it from me hastily, that you are perfectly welcome to furnish A. C. with the scrap, which I had almost forgotten writing. The more my character comes to be known, the less my veracity will come to be suspected. Time every day clears up some suspected narrative of Herodotus, Bruce, and others of us great travellers. Why, that Joseph Paice was as real a person as Joseph Hume, and a great deal pleasanter. A careful observer of life, Bernard, has no need to invent. Nature romances it for him. Dinner plates rattle, and I positively shall incur indigestion by carrying it half concocted to the post-house. Let me congratulate you on the spring coming in, and do you in return condole with me on the winter going out. When the old one goes, seldom comes a better. I dread the prospect of summer, with his all-day-long days. No need of his assistance to make country places dull. With fire and candle-light, I can dream myself in Holborn. With lightsome skies shining in to bed-time I cannot. This Meschek, and these tents of Kedar-I would dwell in the skirts of Jericho rather, and think every blast of the coming in mail a ram's horn. Give me old London at fire and plague times, rather than these tepid gales, healthy country air, and purposeless exercise. Lamb's kindness to Hone was not confined to his contributions to the "Every-day Book," and the "Table Book." Those pleasant and blameless works had failed to supply an adequate income for a numerous family, and Lamb was desirous of interesting his influential friends in a new project of Hone's, to establish himself in a coffee-house conducted in a superior style. With this view, he wrote to Southey, who, nobly forgetting Hone's old heresies in politics or parodies, had made a genial reference to his late work in his "Life of Bunyan." TO MR. SOUTHEY. "May 10th, 1830. "Dear Southey,-My friend Hone, whom you would like for a friend, I found deeply impressed with your generous notice of him in your beautiful 'Life of Bunyan,' which I am just now full of. He has written to you for leave to publish a certain good-natured letter. I write not this to enforce his request, for we are fully aware that the refusal of such publication would be quite consistent with all that is good in your character. Neither he nor I expect it from you, nor exact it; but if you would consent to it, you would have me obliged by it, as well as him. He is just now in a critical situation: kind friends have opened a coffee-house for him in the City, but their means have not extended to the purchase of coffee-pots, credit for Reviews, newspapers, and other paraphernalia. So I am sitting in the skeleton of a possible divan. What right I have to interfere, you best know. Look on me as a dog who went once temporarily insane, and bit you, and now begs for a crust. Will you set your wits to a dog? are most "Our object is to open a subscription, which my friends of the willing to forward for him, but think that a leave from you to publish would aid it. "But not an atom of respect or kindness will or shall it abate in either of us, if you decline it. Have this strongly in your mind. "Those 'Every-day' and 'Table' Books will be a treasure a hundred years hence, but they have failed to make Hone's fortune. "Here his wife and all his children are about me, gaping for coffee customers; but how should they come in, seeing no pot boiling! "Enough of Hone. I saw Coleridge a day or two since. He has had some severe attack, not paralytic; but, if I had not heard of it, I should not have found it out. He looks, and especially speaks, strong. How are all the Wordsworths, and all the Southeys, whom I am obliged to you if you have not brought up haters of the name of "C. LAMB? "P.S.-I have gone lately into the acrostic line. I find genius (such as I had) declines with me, but I get clever. Do you know anybody that wants charades, or such things, for Albums? I do 'em at so much a sheet. Perhaps an epigram (not a very happy-gram) I did for a school-boy yesterday may amuse. pray Jove he may not get a flogging for any false quantity; but 'tis, with one exception, the only Latin verses I have made for forty years, and I did it 'to order.' I "Dec. 20th, 1830. "Dear Dyer, I should have written before to thank you for your kind letter, written with your own hand. It glads us to see your writing. It will give you pleasure to hear that after so much illness we are in tolerable health and spirits once more. Poor Enfield, that has been so peaceable hitherto, has caught the inflammatory fever; the tokens are upon her; and a great fire was blazing last night in the barns and haystacks of a farmer, about half a mile from us. Where will these things end? There is no doubt of its being the work of some ill-disposed rustic, but how is he to be discovered? They go to work in the dark with strange chemical preparations, unknown to our forefathers. There is not even a dark lantern, to have a chance of detecting these Guy Fauxes. We are past the iron age, and are got into the fiery age, undreamed of by Ovid. You are lucky in Clifford's Inn, where I think you have few ricks or stacks worth the burning. Pray, keep as little corn by you as you can for fear of the worst. It was never good times in England since the poor began to speculate upon their condition. Formerly they jogged on with as little reflection as horses. The whistling ploughman went cheek by jowl with his brother that neighed. Now the biped carries a box of phosphorus in his leather breeches, and in the dead of night the half-illuminated beast steals his magic potion into a cleft in a barn, and half the country is grinning with new fires. Farmer Graystock said something to the touchy rustic, that he did not relish, and he writes his distaste in flames. What a power to intoxicate his crude brains, just muddlingly awake to perceive that something is wrong in the social system,-what a hellish faculty above gunpowder! Now the rich and poor are fairly pitted. We shall see who can hang or burn fastest. It is not always revenge that stimulates these kindlings. There is a stead, he put an unfortunate question to me, love of exerting mischief! Think of a disrespected clod, that was trod into earth; that was nothing; on a sudden by damned arts refined into an exterminating angel, devouring the fruits of the earth, and their growers, in a mass of fire; what a new existence! What a temptation above Lucifer's! Would clod be anything but a clod, if he could resist it? Why, here was a spectacle last night for a whole country, a bonfire visible to London, alarming her guilty towers, and shaking the Monument with an ague fit, all done by a little vial of phosphor in a clown's fob. How he must grin, and shake his empty noddle in clouds! The Vulcanian epicure! Alas! can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilise, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat? Who shall persuade the boor that phosphor will not ignite? Seven goodly stacks of hay, with corn-barns proportionable, lie smoking ashes and chaff, which man and beast would sputter out and reject like those apples of asphaltes and bitumen. The food for the inhabitants of earth will quickly "Dear Madam,-I do assure you that your disappear. Hot rolls may say, 'Fuimus verses gratified me very much, and my sister panes, fuit quartern-loaf, et ingens gloria is quite proud of them. For the first time in apple-pasty-orum.' That the good old munching system may last thy time and mine, good un-incendiary George! is the devout prayer of thine, In 1830, Lamb took a journey to Bury St. Edmund's, to fetch Miss Isola to her adopted home, from a visit which had been broken by her illness. It was on his return that Lamb's repartee to the query of the statistical gentleman as to the prospects of the turnip crop, which has been repeatedly published, was made. The following is his own version of it, contained in a letter addressed to Miss Isola's hostess, on their arrival. To the same lady, having sent him an acrostic on his sister's name, he replied with a letter which contained one on hers, and the following notice of his own talent in the acrostic line. my life I congratulated myself upon the Rebuses and "I thought I had adroitly escaped the rather unpliable name of 'Williams,' curtailing your poor daughters to their proper "A rather talkative gentleman, but very surnames, but it seems you would not let me civil, engaged me in a discourse for full off so easily. If these trifles amuse you, I am twenty miles, on the probable advantages of paid. Though really 'tis an operation too steam carriages, which, being merely pro- much like-'A, apple-pie; B, bit it.' To blematical, I bore my part in with some make amends, I request leave to lend you credit, in spite of my totally un-engineer-like the Excursion,' and to recommend, in partifaculties. But when, somewhere about Stan- cular, the Churchyard Stories;' in the seventh book, I think. They will strengthen afterwards, when he felt the want of those the tone of your mind after its weak diet on acrostics." In 1830, a small volume of poems, the gleanings of some years, during which Lamb had devoted himself to prose, under his name of "Elia," was published by Mr. Moxon, under the title of "Album Verses," and which Lamb, in token of his strong regard, dedicated to the Publisher. An unfavour- Charles Lamb, to those who know thee justly dear This year closed upon the grave of Hazlitt. Lamb visited him frequently during his last illness, and attended his funeral. They had taken great delight in each other's conversation for many years; and though the indifference of Lamb to the objects of Hazlitt's passionate love or hatred, as a politician, at one time produced a coolness, the warmth of the defence of Hazlitt in "Elia's Letter to Southey" renewed the old regard of the philosopher, and set all to rights. Hazlitt, in his turn, as an Edinburgh Reviewer, had opportunities which he delighted to use, of alluding to Lamb's Specimens and Essays, and making him amends for the severity of ancient criticism, which the editor, who could well afford the genial inconsistency, was too generous to exclude. The conduct, indeed, of that distinguished person to Hazlitt, especially in his last illness, won Lamb's admiration, and wholly effaced the recollection of the time when, thirty years before, his play had been denied critical mercy under his rule. Hazlitt's death did not so much shock Lamb at the time, as it weighed down his spirits essays which he had used periodically to look for with eagerness in the magazines and reviews which they alone made tolerable to him; and when he realised the dismal certainty that he should never again enjoy that rich discourse of old poets and painters with which so many a long winter's night had been gladdened, or taste life with an additional relish in the keen sense of enjoyment which endeared it to his companion. CHAPTER XVIII. [1830 to 1834.] LAMB'S LAST LETTERS AND DEATH. AFTER the year 1830, Lamb's verses and essays were chiefly given to his friends; the former consisting of album contributions, the latter of little essences of observation and criticism. Mr. Moxon, having established a new magazine, called the "Englishman's Magazine," induced him to write a series of papers, some of which were not inferior to his happiest essays. At this time, his old and excellent friend, Dyer, was much annoyed by some of his witticisms,-which, in truth, were only Lamb's modes of expressing his deep-seated regard; and at the quotation of a couplet in one of his early poems, which he had suppressed as liable to be misconstrued by Mr. Rogers. Mr. Barker had unfortunately met with the unexpurgated edition which contained this dubious couplet, and in his "Memorials of Dr. Parr" quoted the passage; which, to Mr. Dyer's delicate feelings,* conveyed the apprehension that Mr. Rogers would treat the suppression as * Mr. Dyer also complained to Mr. Lamb of some suggestions in Elia, which annoyed him, not so much for his own sake as for the sake of others, who, in the delicacy of his apprehensiveness, he thought might feel aggrieved by imputations which were certainly not intended, and which they did not deserve. One passage in Elia, hinting that he had been hardly dealt with by schoolmasters, under whom he had been a teacher in his younger days, hurt him; as, in fact, he was treated by them with the most considerate generosity and kindness. Another passage which he regarded as implying that he had been underpaid by booksellers also vexed him; as his labours have always been highly esteemed, and have, according to the rate of remuneration of learned men, been well compensated by Mr. Valpy and others. The truth is that Lamb wrote from a vague recollection, |