*

with you.' It comes naturally, with a warm I cannot endure my own writings in that holiday, and the freshness of the blood. It state. The only one which I think would is a perfect summer amulet, that I tie round not very much win upon me in print is my legs to quicken their motion when I go Peter Bell. But I am not certain. You ask out a maying. (N.B.) I don't often go out a me about your preface. I like both that and maying;-Must is the tense with me now. the supplement without an exception. The Do you take the pun? Young Romilly is account of what you mean by imagination is divine; the reasons of his mother's grief very valuable to me. It will help me to like being remediless-I never saw parental love some things in poetry better, which is a little carried up so high, towering above the other humiliating in me to confess. I thought I loves-Shakspeare had done something for could not be instructed in that science (I the filial, in Cordelia, and, by implication, mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene, for the fatherly too, in Lear's resentment; beastly Peter Pindar, in a dispute on Milton, he left it for you to explore the depths of the say he thought that if he had reason to value maternal heart. I get stupid, and flat, and himself upon one thing more than another, flattering; what's the use of telling you what it was in knowing what good verse was. good things you have written, or—I hope I Who looked over your proof-sheets and left may add that I know them to be good? ordebo in that line of Virgil ? Apropos-when I first opened upon the justmentioned poem, in a careless tone, I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, What is good for a bootless bene? To which, with infinite presence of mind, (as the jest-book has it) she answered, 'a shoeless pea.' It was the first joke she ever made. Joke the second I make. You distinguish well, in your old preface, between the verses of Dr. Johnson, of the 'Man in the Strand,' and that from 'The Babes in the Wood.' I was thinking, whether taking your own glorious lines

'And from the love which was in her soul For her youthful Romilly,'

which, by the love I bear my own soul, I
think have no parallel in any of the best old
ballads, and just altering it to-

And from the great respect she felt
For Sir Samuel Romilly,'

would not have explained the boundaries of
prose expression, and poetic feeling, nearly
as well. Excuse my levity on such an occa-
sion. I never felt deeply in my life if that
poem did not make me, both lately and when
I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed
after a haunch of buck venison more than I
for a spiritual taste of that 'White Doe' you
promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will
be when drest, i. e., printed. All things read
raw to me in MS.; to compare magna parvis,

The admirable little poem, entitled "The Force of Prayer," developing the depths of a widowed mother's grief, whose only son has been drowned in attempting to leap over the precipice of the "Wharf" at Bolton

"My brother's picture of Milton is very finely painted, that is, it might have been done by a hand next to Vandyke's. It is the genuine Milton, and an object of quiet gaze for the half-hour at a time. Yet though I am confident there is no better one of him, the face does not quite answer to Milton. There is a tinge of petit (or petite, how do you spell it ?) querulousness about it; yet, hang it! now I remember better, there is not; it is calm, melancholy and poetical. One of the copies of the poems you sent has precisely the same pleasant blending of a sheet of second volume with a sheet of first. I think it was page 245; but I sent it and had it rectified. It gave me, in the first impetus of cutting the leaves, just such a cold squelch as going down a plausible turning and suddenly reading 'No thoroughfare.' Robinson's is entire I wish you would write more criticism about Spenser, &c. I think I could say something about him myself, but, Lord bless me! these 'merchants and their spicy

Abbey. The first line, printed in old English characters, from some old English ballad,

'What is good for a bootless bene?" suggests Miss Lamb's single pun. The following are the profoundest stanzas among those which excite her brother's most just admiration :

"If for a lover the lady wept,

A solace she might borrow

From death and from the passion of death;-
Old Wharf might heal her sorrow.

She weeps not for the wedding-day,
Which was to be to-morrow:
Her hope was a further-looking hope,
And hers is a mother's sorrow."

drugs,' which are so harmonious to sing of, they lime-twig up my poor soul and body, till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of a genius! I can't even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper. I 'engross' when I should 'pen' a paragraph. Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilisation, and wealth, and amity, and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and knowledge of the face of the globe; and rot the very firs of the forest, that look so romantic alive, and die into desks! Vale.

"Yours, dear W., and all yours,

"C. LAMB."

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

his fugitive poems, the former his Literary Life. Nature, who conducts every creature, by instinct, to its best end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his abode at a Chymist's Laboratory in Norfolk-street. She might as well have sent a Helluo Librorum for cure to the Vatican. God keep him inviolate among the traps and pitfalls! He has done pretty well as yet.

"Tell Miss H., my sister is every day wishing to be quietly sitting down to answer her very kind letter, but while C. stays she can hardly find a quiet time; God bless him!

"Tell Mrs. W. her postscripts are always agreeable. They are so legible too. Your manual-graphy is terrible, dark as Lycophron. 'Likelihood,' for instance, is thus typified

I should not wonder if the constant making out of such paragraphs is the cause of that weakness in Mrs. W.'s eyes, as she is tenderly pleased to express it. Dorothy, I hear, has mounted spectacles; so you have deoculated two of your dearest relations in life. Well, God bless you, and continue to give you power to write with a finger of power upon our hearts what you fail to impress, in corresponding lucidness, upon our outward eye-sight!

"Mary's love to all; she is quite well.

"I am called off to do the deposits on Cotton Wool-but why do I relate this to you, who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of deposits, of interest, of warehouse rent, and contingent fund? Adieu! "C. LAMB.

"April 9th, 1816. "Dear Wordsworth,-Thanks for the books you have given me and for all the books you mean to give me. I will bind up the Political Sonnets and Ode according to your suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain and chain them to my shelves, more Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read but don't read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my moneyborrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of this caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money they never fail to make use of it. Coleridge has been here about a fortnight. His health is tolerable at present, though beset with temptations. In the first place, the Covent Garden Manager has declined accepting his Tragedy, though (having read it) I see no reason upon earth why it might not have run a very fair chance, though, it certainly wants a prominent part for a Miss O'Neil or a Mr. Kean. However, he is going to-day to write to Lord Byron to get it to Drury. Should you see Mrs. C., who has just written to C. a letter, which I have given him, it will be as well to say nothing sold about its fate, till some answer is shaped from Drury. He has two volumes printing! together at Bristol, both finished as far as the composition goes; the latter containing

"A longer letter when C. is gone back into the country, relating his success, &c.— my judgment of your new books, &c. &c.—I am scarce quiet enough while he stays.

The next letter is fantastically written beneath a regular official order, the words in italics being printed.

"SIR, Please to state the weights and
amounts of the following Lots of
Sale, 181 for

"Your obedient Servant,
"CHAS. LAMB,

Here is a most inimitable scrawl.

the day away, a solid lump, from ten to four; matters, but in a judicious and steady super

intendence of the whole; with a wise allowance of the occasional excesses of wit and genius. In this respect, Mr. Scott differed entirely from a celebrated poet, who was induced, just a year after, to undertake the Editorship of the "New Monthly Magazine,” an office for which, it may be said, with all veneration for his poetic genius, he was the most unfit person who could be found in the wide world of letters-who regarded a maga

"LONDON MAGAZINE"-CHARACTER AND FATE OF zine as if it were a long affidavit, or a short

answer in Chancery, in which the absolute

MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS OF LAMB TO WORDSWORTH, truth of every sentiment and the propriety of

regarding himself as within the sphere of its of an English Opium Eater," held a distinopinion, if he had not died to shame it! In guished place. Mr. De Quincy, whose youth a luckless hour, instead of seeking to oppose | had been inspired by enthusiastic admiration the bitter personalities of "Blackwood" by of Coleridge, shown in contributions to "The the exhibition of a serener power, he rushed Friend," not unworthy of his master, and with spurious chivalry into a personal con- substantial contributions of the blessings of test; caught up the weapons which he had fortune, came up to London, and found an himself denounced, and sought to unmask admiring welcome from Messrs. Taylor and his opponents and draw them beyond the Hessey, the publishers into whose hands the pale of literary courtesy; placed himself "London Magazine" had passed. After the thus in a doubtful position in which he could good old fashion of the GREAT TRADE, these neither consistently reject an appeal to the genial booksellers used to assemble their conventional arbitrament of violence nor contributors round their hospitable table in embrace it; lost his most legitimate oppor- Fleet Street, where Mr. De Quincy was introtunity of daring the unhallowed strife, and duced to his new allies. Among the contrifound another with an antagonist connected butors who partook of their professional with the quarrel only by too zealous a festivities, was a gentleman whose subsefriendship; and, at last, met his death almost quent career has invested the recollection by lamentable accident, in the uncertain of his appearances in the familiarity of glimmer of moonlight, from the hand of one social life with fearful interest-Mr. Thomas who went out resolved not to harm him! Griffiths Wainwright. He was then a young Such was the melancholy result-first of a man; on the bright side of thirty; with a controversy too envenomed-and afterwards sort of undress military air, and the converof enthralment in usages, absurd in all, but sation of a smart, lively, clever, heartless, most absurd when applied by a literary man voluptuous coxcomb. It was whispered that to a literary quarrel. Apart from higher he had been an officer in the Dragoons; had considerations, it may befit a life destined for spent more than one fortune; and he now the listless excesses of gaiety to be cast on condescended to take a part in periodical an idle brawl;—" a youth of folly, an old literature, with the careless grace of an age of cards" may be no great sacrifice to amateur who felt himself above it. He was preserve the hollow truce of fashionable an artist also; sketched boldly and graphisociety; but for men of thought-whose cally; exhibited a portfolio of his own minds are their possession, and who seek to drawings of female beauty, in which the live in the minds of others by sympathy with voluptuous trembled on the borders of the their thoughts-for them to hazard a thought-indelicate; and seized on the critical departful being because they dare not own that ment of the Fine Arts, both in and out of they prefer life to death-contemplation to the Magazine, undisturbed by the presence the grave-the preparation for eternity to or pretensions of the finest critic on Art the unbidden entrance on its terrors, would who ever wrote-William Hazlitt. On this be ridiculous if it did not become tragical. subject, he composed, for the Magazine, Sir, I am a metaphysician!" said Hazlitt under the signature of "Janus Weatheronce, when in a fierce dispute respecting the cock," articles of flashy assumption - in colours of Holbein and Vandyke, words which disdainful notices of living artists were almost became things; "and nothing makes set off by fascinating references to the peran impression upon me but abstract ideas; "sonal appearance, accomplishments, and luxuand woeful, indeed, is the mockery when thinkers condescend to be duellists!

66

rious appliances of the writer, ever the first hero of his essay. He created a new sensaThe Magazine did not perish with its tion in the sedate circle, not only by his Editor; though its unity of purpose was lost, braided surtouts, jewelled fingers, and variit was still rich in essays of surpassing indi- ous neck-handkerchiefs, but by ostentatious vidual merit; among which the masterly contempt for everything in the world but vindication of the true dramatic style by elegant enjoyment. Lamb, who delighted to Darley; the articles of Cary, the admirable find sympathy in dissimilitude, fancied that translator of Dante; and the "Confessions he really liked him; took, as he ever did,