take away; but I also "too much fonding for marrow-bones." Go, wild beast,' to the khalāsī, who was going to speak, if not, you shall eat blows;' and the slave of Hoosein went off, followed by two or three grumbling and disreputable-looking vagabonds, whom I took to be Mussulmans from

the village.

After dinner I sat for a long while smoking in front of my tent. It was a beautiful star-lit night and very still, and I confess that the place, with the ruins of the old fort, its crumbling bastions and fallen curtain, looked very lonely, so that I was not sorry when I saw Murriana coming round to talk to me.

"Well, Murriana,' said I to him, 'we've come in for a good thing. There's lots of game here, and no mistake.'

"For that reason.'

"Did they see anything?'

"Maharaj,' replied he solemnly, they heard something. The place

is not a good place. It will be better to march to the Kooderee Mook. The people there are Jains-very good people.'

"Nonsense, I'm going to stop here. If you're afraid you'd better go after the Lumbanies.'

"As the sahib pleases. where the sahib stops.'

I stop

"I was rather cross at all this nonsense, and as I was sleepy to boot, I wished Murriana good-night and turned in. I have always been a sound sleeper, thank God, and am still, as some of you know, and this night, what with the cool breeze, which made the unaccustomed blanket pleasant, and the fatigue of my long stalk, I slept like the dead. About half-past two or three o'clock, however, I was awakened by a hand placed on my breast, and by the voice of Murriana whispering in no dubious wake! Listen

tell?'

trees showing up from the ravines and standing out of the white mists of the clouds below. It was very still, save for the monotonous, discordant chuck-chuck-chuck chul-la of a nightjar squatted on the little jungle path. "For goodness sake, Murriana,' said I, 'let me go to sleep. I've heard that bird of Satan often enough. I wish you'd go and be hanged!'

"Listen, listen,' said he.

"I listened intently, waked by his earnestness; and then, seemingly from the direction of a ruined outpost some distance away on the edge of the ghat, I heard faint thin cries of 'Hur, Hur, Mahadeo! Boom! Boom!' mingled with sounds like the clashing of steel, and answering shouts of Deen! Deen !' 1

66

"Oh, it's only some of those accursed Mussulmans and Mahrattas fighting. Let them fight and be hanged to them; and let me go to sleep!'

"No, sahib, no. There's no Mahratta Logue here. Get up, in the name of God! See, see!' as the light from the tent-door was darkened by, as it seemed, a passing cloud, 'it's a sahib ! What does he say?' And certainly it seemed to me (dazed as I was by my sudden awakening) that I heard a not unfamiliar voice saying faintly, 'Come, come, quick!' So I got up, put on my slippers, picked up my gun and went forth. For a moment I stood awestruck by the beauty of the scene. The stars shone with the brightness almost of the moon, and by their light I could trace the far-away reflection from the sea. The forests and plains of Canara were dark as the grave, and the crumbling walls of the fort looked black and sinister. The shouts of 'Deen! Deen!' seemed now in the ascendant, and the Mahratta war-cry had died away; but I was startled by hearing faint cries like those you hear from the wounded or the dying, after the fight is over, from a battle-field

far away.

"Come on, Murriana,' said I, 'let's

1 Religion Religion!" the war-cry of Islam.

go and see what all this row is about.'

66 6

No, no, sahib,' cried he frantically. Come away, we have no business there. Look! there's the sahib again-he's beckoning to us; and I looked, but though I could see nothing save a mist-wreath from the swampy ground between us and the near jungle, I fancied-it may have been fancy that I heard the same voice crying, 'Come, Come.' So I went on, following Murriana, though somewhat against my will, drawn as it were, in a manner which I did not quite understand then, nor indeed do I quite understand it now."

"Well?" I cried his hearers excitedly.

66

Well," replied the Major, "that's all. We passed through a little strip of jungle about three hundred yards from the fort into a bit of open, and there Murriana said that his guide vanished. I never saw anything. I asked Murriana what he saw, and he said he saw 'a sahib.'

"What was he like?'

"With respect, he was very like the Huzoor; about the same age and size.❜ If so, judging from my long experience of the looking-glass, he must have been a beauty!"

66

'Well, but-Major-Is that all?" "Very nearly. I had fortunately grabbed my cheroot case in my flight, so I sat down, and after I had comforted Murriana, who was thoroughly frightened, (and, mind you, I have often seen him face death, before and since, and never seen him cowed) I had a smoke, and a long talk with him about shaitāns, and such creatures; and then as the disturbance at the outpost had long since died away, and the false dawn had begun to glimmer, we went back to the camp."

"And was that all?" cried the disappointed chorus.

struck a light, I found my little dog, a bull-terrier of which I was very fond, and which I kept chained to the leg of my cot of nights, to save him from prowling cheetahs, stone dead. When I went out, the night being chill after the plains and he a shivery creature, he had crept under the blanket on my bed, and had been there stabbed to the heart by some miscreant, possibly in mistake for me; anyhow, there were three distinct knife-cuts through blanket and mattress, one of which had gone through poor Toby."

"But who did it?"

"I don't know; possibly some of those blackguard Mussulmans, whose dignity I had wounded. Anyhow, as none of my people would stay, we marched next morning to Kooderee Mook, where we had good sport, undisturbed by man or devil."

Then arose a great strife and a clash of tongues.

"The thing is quite clear," said the doctor oracularly. "Here's a ghost with a motive at last. The spirit of your deceased uncle, Major, came to warn you; and, in short, saved your life. By the way, did you find out anything touching his death?"

"No," replied the Major doubtfully; "but I'll tell you a curious thing. Next day I got Murriana, though sorely against his will, to come with me to the spot where the shape had vanished. It was a beautiful little open glade, hedged round with thick jungle, and clear of all the outposts of the fort.

Over this were scattered a few green mounds, and Murriana said that he thought it was an old burying-place of the Coorumbers, a wild, half-savage tribe, who wander in the jungles of Mysore and Coorg. It was on the edge of this glade, beneath a dooput tree, whose thick-woven leaves make twilight at mid-day, that he said the thing had vanished; and there we found a moss-grown stone, with what looked like a rude cross traced upon it and something like two Roman letters below, one of which might certainly have passed muster for a T."

"There! didn't I tell you so?" cried the doctor, triumphantly. "T for Thornhill. Of course it was your grandfather, or whatever he was!"

"No," said the Major quietly, "he was my maternal grandfather's cousin, and his name was Smith."

"Got you there," cried Gordon. “I should like to know how your Irish ingenuity will wriggle out of that, doctor!"

"I was about to add, when you interrupted me," said the Major drily, "that it was the first letter of the two which looked like a T, and my relative's Christian name was Thomas." "Then you believe it was his ghost?"

"I don't say that it was, and I don't say that it wasn't. I am content to say of many things, 'I don't know.' It's only you young fellows who are cocksure of everything."

MR. WALTER BAGEHOT preferred Hazlitt to Lamb, reckoning the former much the greater writer. The preferences of such a man as Bagehot are not to be lightly disregarded, least of all when their sincerity is vouched for, as in the present case, by half a hundred quotations from the favoured author. Certainly no writer repays a literary man's devotion better than Hazlitt, of whose twenty seldom read volumes hardly a page but glitters with quotable matter; the true ore, to be had for the cost of cartage. You may live like a gentleman for a twelvemonth on Hazlitt's ideas.

I do not remember whether Bagehot has anywhere given his reasons for his preference the open avowal whereof drove Crabb Robinson wellnigh distracted; and it is always rash to find reasons for a faith you do not share; but probably we may assume that they partook of the nature of a complaint that Elia's treatment of men and things (meaning by things, books) is often fantastical, unreal, even a shade insincere; whilst Hazlitt always at least aims at the centre, whether he hits it or not. Lamb dances round a subject; Hazlitt grapples with it. So far as Hazlitt is concerned, doubtless this is so; his literary method seems to realise the agreeable aspiration of Mr. Browning's 'Italian in England':

"I would grasp Metternich until
I felt his red wet throat distil
In blood thro' these two hands."

Hazlitt is always grasping some Metternich. Lamb, writing to him on one occasion about his son, wishes

1 The Works of Charles Lamb.' Edited, with notes and introduction, by the Rev. Alfred Ainger. Three volumes. London,

1883-5.

still continue to hold aloof from Hazlitt, his shaggy head and fierce scowling temper still seem to terrorise, and his very books, telling us though they do about all things most delightfulpoems, pictures, and the cheerful playhouse-frown upon us from their upper shelf. From this it appears that would a Genius ensure for himself immortality, he must brush his hair and keep his temper; but alas! how seldom can he be persuaded to do either. Charles Lamb did both; and the years as they roll do but swell the rich revenues of his praise.

Lamb's popularity shows no sign of waning. Even that most extraordinary compound, the rising generation of readers, whose taste in literature is as erratic as it is pronounced; who have never heard of James Thomson who sang The Seasons' (including the pleasant episode of Musidora bathing), but understand by any reference to that name only the striking author of The City of Dreadful Night'; even these wayward folk— the dogs of whose criticism, not yet full grown, will, when let loose, as some day they must be, cry "havoc " amongst established reputations—read their Lamb, letters as well as essays, with laughter and with love.

If it be really seriously urged against Lamb as an author that he is

fantastical and artistically artificial, it must be owned he is so. His humour, exquisite as it is, is modish. It may not be for all markets. How it affected the Scottish Thersites we know only too well, that dour spirit required more potent draughts to make him forget his misery and laugh. It took Swift or Smollet to move his mirth, which was always, three parts of it, derision. Lamb's elaborateness, what he himself calls his affected array of antique modes and phrases, is sometimes overlooked in these hasty days, when it is thought better to read about an author than to read him. To read aloud the 'Praise of Chimney Sweepers' without stumbling, or halting, not to say mispronouncing, and to set in motion every one of its carefully swung sentences, is a very pretty feat in elocution, for there is not what can be called a natural sentence in it from beginning to end. Many people have not patience for this sort of thing; they like to laugh and move on. Other people again like an essay to be about something really important, and to conduct them to conclusions they deem worth carrying away. Lamb's views about indiscriminate alms-giving, so far as these can be extracted from his paper On the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis,' are unsound, whilst there are at least three ladies still living (in Brighton) quite respectably on their means, who consider the essay entitled 'A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People' improper. But, as a rule, Lamb's essays are neither unsound nor improper; none the less they are, in the judgment of some, things of naught-not only lacking, as Southey complained they did, "sound religious feeling," but everything else really worthy of

attention.

To discuss such congenital differences of taste is idle; but it is not idle to observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a whole letters and poems no less than essays -these notes of fantasy and artifici

ality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more real, far more serious despite his jesting, more self-contained and self-restrained than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced over the most miasmatic of swamps, who was never his own man, and who died like Brian de Bois Gilbert, "the victim of contending passions." It should never be forgotten that Lamb's vocation was his life. Literature was but his byeplay, his avocation in the true sense of that much-abused word. He was not a fisherman but an angler in the lake of letters; an author by chance and on the sly. He had a right to disport himself on paper, to play the frolic with his own fancies, to give the decalogue the slip, whose life was made up of the sternest stuff, of selfsacrifice, devotion, honesty, and good

sense.

Lamb's letters from first to last are full of the philosophy of life; he was as sensible a man as Dr. Johnson. One grows sick of the expressions, "poor Charles Lamb," "gentle Charles Lamb," as if he were one of those grown-up children of the Leigh Hunt type, who are perpetually begging and borrowing through the round of every man's acquaintance. Charles Lamb earned his own living, paid his own way, was the helper, not the helped; a man who was beholden to no one, who always came with gifts in his hand, a shrewd man capable of advice, strong in council. Poor Lamb indeed! Poor Coleridge, robbed of his will; poor Wordsworth, devoured by his own ego; poor Southey, writing his tomes and deeming himself a classic; poor Carlyle, with his nine volumes of memoirs where he

"Lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong

way,

Tormenting himself with his prickles."

Call these men poor, if you feel to decent to do so, but not Lamb who Iwas rich in all that makes life valuable or memory sweet. But he used