Mrs. Morgan and Miss Brent, in Londonstreet,—(by that token we had raw rabbits for supper, and Miss B. prevailed upon me to take a glass of brandy and water after supper, which is not my habit,)—I perfectly remember reading portions of that life in their parlour, and I think it must be among their packages. It was the very last evening we were at that house. What is gone of that frank-hearted circle, Morgan, and his cos-lettuces? He ate walnuts better than any man I ever knew. Friendships in these parts stagnate.

the Doctor, as he thought, sent it me. A, the persuasive of my own, which accompanies book of like exterior he did send, but being it, will not be thrown away; if it be, he is a disclosed, how far unlike! It was the 'Well- sloe, and no true-hearted crab, and there's bred Scholar,'-a book with which it seems an end. For that life of the German conthe Doctor laudably fills up those hours juror which you speak of, ‘Colerus de Vitâ which he can steal from his medical avoca- Doctoris vix-Intelligibilis,' I perfectly retions. Chesterfield, Blair, Beattie, portions member the last evening we spent with from 'The Life of Savage,' make up a prettyish system of morality and the belleslettres, which Mr. Mylne, a schoolmaster, has properly brought together, and calls the collection by the denomination above mentioned. The Doctor had no sooner discovered his error, than he dispatched man and horse to rectify the mistake, and with a pretty kind of ingenuous modesty in his note, seemeth to deny any knowledge of the 'Well-bred Scholar;' false modesty surely, and a blush misplaced; for, what more pleasing than the consideration of professional austerity thus relaxing, thus improving! But so, when a child I remember blushing, being caught on my knees to my Maker, or doing otherwise some pious and praiseworthy action; now I rather love such things to be seen. Henry Crabb Robinson is out upon his circuit, and his books are inaccessible without his leave and key. He is attending the Norfolk Circuit,-a short term, but to him, as to many young lawyers, a long vacation, sufficiently dreary. thought I could do no better than transmit to him, not extracts, but your very letter itself, than which I think I never read any thing more moving, more pathetic, or more conducive to the purpose of persuasion. The in Egypt. Whatever thou hast been told to Crab is a sour Crab if it does not sweeten him. I think it would draw another third volume of Dodsley out of me; but you say you don't want any English books? Perhaps after all, that's as well; one's romantic credulity is for ever misleading one into misplaced acts of foolery. Crab might have answered by this time: his juices take a long time supplying, but they'll run at last, -I know they will,-pure golden pippin. A fearful rumour has since reached me that the Crab is on the eve of setting out for France. If he is in England your letter will reach him, and I flatter myself a touch of

I

* A mistake of Lamb's at which the excellent person referred to may smile, now that he has retired from

his profession, and has no business but the offices of kinduess.

"I am going to eat turbot, turtle, venison, marrow pudding,-cold punch, claret, Madeira,-at our annual feast, at half-past four this day. They keep bothering me, (I'm at office,) and my ideas are confused. Let me know if I can be of any service as to books. God forbid the Architectonican should be sacrificed to a foolish scruple of some bookproprietor, as if books did not belong with the highest propriety to those that understand 'em best. "C. LAMB."

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"26th August, 1814. "Let the hungry soul rejoice, there is corn

the contrary by designing friends, who per-
haps inquired carelessly, or did not inquire
at all, in hope of saving their money, there
is a stock of 'Remorse' on hand, enough, as
Pople conjectures, for seven years' consump
tion; judging from experience of the last
two years. Methinks it makes for the benefit
of sound literature, that the best books do
not always go off best. Inquire in seven
years' time for the 'Rokebys' and the
'Laras,' and where shall they be found ?—-
fluttering fragmentally in some thread-paper

whereas thy Wallenstein,' and thy 'Remorse,' are safe on Longinan's or Pople's shelves, as in some Bodleian; there they shall remain; no need of a chain to hold them fast-perhaps for ages-tall copies— and people shan't run about hunting for

1

them as in old Ezra's shrievalty they did for a Bible, almost without effect till the greatgreat-grand-niece (by the mother's side) of Jeremiah or Ezekiel (which was it?) remembered something of a book, with odd reading in it, that used to lie in the green closet in her aunt Judith's bedchamber.

"Thy caterer, Price, was at Hamburgh when last Pople heard of him, laying up for thee like some miserly old father for his generous hearted son to squander.

"Mr. Charles Aders, whose books also. pant for that free circulation which thy custody is sure to give them, is to be heard of at his kinsmen, Messrs. Jameson and Aders, No. 7, Laurence Pountney-lane, London, according to the information which Crabius with his parting breath left me. Crabius is gone to Paris. I prophesy he and the Parisians will part with mutual contempt. His head has a twist Allemagne, like thine, dear mystic.

"I have been reading Madame Stael on Germany. An impudent clever woman. But if 'Faust' be no better than in her abstract of it, I counsel thee to let it alone. How canst thou translate the language of cat-monkeys? Fie on such fantasies! But I will not forget to look for Proclus. It is a kind of book when one meets with it one shuts the lid faster than one opened it. Yet I have some bastard kind of recollection that some where, some time ago, upon some stall or other, I saw it. It was either that or Plotinus, or Saint Augustine's 'City of God.' So little do some folks value, what to others, a. to you, 'well used,' had been the 'Pledge of Immortality.' Bishop Bruno I never touched upon. Stuffing too good for the brains of such 'a Hare' as thou describest. May it burst his pericranium, as the gobbets of fat and turpentine (a nasty thought of the seer) did that old dragon in the Apocrypha! May he go mad in trying to understand his author! May he lend the third volume of him before he has quite translated the second, to a friend who shall lose it, and so spoil the publication, and may his friend find it and send it him just as thou or some such less dilatory spirit shall have announced the whole for the press; lastly, may he be hunted by Reviewers, and the devil jug him. Canst think of any other queries in the solution of which I can give thee satisfaction? Do you

want any books that I can procure for you? Old Jimmy Boyer is dead at last. Trollope has got his living, worth 1000l. a-year net. See, thou sluggard, thou heretic-sluggard, what mightest thou not have arrived at. Lay thy animosity against Jimmy in the grave. Do not entail it on thy posterity.

"CHARLES LAMB."

CHAPTER X.

[1815 to 1817.]

LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, SOUTHEY, AND MANNING.

It was at the beginning of the year 1815 that I had first the happiness of a personal acquaintance with Mr. Lamb. With his scattered essays and poems I had become familiar a few weeks before, through the instrumentality of Mr. Baron Field, now Chief Justice of Gibraltar, who had been brought into close intimacy with Lamb by the association of his own family with Christ's Hospital, of which his father was the surgeon, and by his own participation in the "Reflector." Living then in chambers in Inner Temple-lane, and attending those of Mr. Chitty, the special pleader, which were on the next staircase to Mr. Lamb's, I had been possessed some time by a desire to become acquainted with the writings of my gifted neighbour, which my friend was able only partially to gratify. "John Woodvil," and the number of the "Reflector" enriched with Lamb's article, he indeed lent me, but he had no copy of " Rosamund Gray," which I was most anxious to read, and which, after earnest search through all the bookstalls within the scope of my walks, I found, exhibiting proper marks of due appreciation, in the store of a little circulating library near Holborn. There was something in this little romance so entirely new, yet breathing the air of old acquaintance; a sense of and a beauty so delicate and so intense; morality so benignant and so profound, that, as I read it, my curiosity to see its author rose almost to the height of pain. The commencement of the new year brought me that gratification; I was invited to meet Lamb at dinner, at the house of Mr. William

Evans, a gentleman holding an office in Lamb insisted on my sitting with him while the India House, who then lived in Wey-he smoked " one pipe "-for, alas! for poor mouth-street, and who was a proprietor of human nature he had resumed his acquaintthe "Pamphleteer," to which I had con- ance with his "fair traitress." How often tributed some idle scribblings. My duties the pipe and the glasses were replenished, I at the office did not allow me to avail myself will not undertake to disclose; but I can of this invitation to dinner, but I went up at never forget the conversation: though the ten o'clock, through a deep snow, palpably first, it was more solemn, and in higher congealing into ice, and was amply repaid mood, than any I ever after had with Lamb when I reached the hospitable abode of my through the whole of our friendship. How friend. There was Lamb, preparing to de- it took such a turn between two strangers, part, but he staid half an hour in kindness one of them a lad of not quite twenty, I to me, and then accompanied me to our cannot tell; but so it happened. We discommon home--the Temple. coursed then of life and death, and our anticipation of a world beyond the grave. Lamb spoke of these awful themes with the simplest piety, but expressed his own fond cleavings to life-to all well-known accustomed things

and a shivering (not shuddering) sense of that which is to come, which he so finely indicated in his "New Year's Eve," years afterwards. It was two o'clock before we parted, when Lamb gave me a hearty invita tion to renew my visit at pleasure; but two or three months elapsed before I saw him again. In the meantime, a number of the

Pamphleteer" contained an Essay on the Chief Living Poets," among whom on the title appeared the name of Lamb, and some page or two were expressly devoted to his praises. It was a poor tissue of tawdry eulogies-a shallow outpouring of young enthusiasm in fine words, which it mistakes for thoughts; yet it gave Lamb, who had hitherto received scarcely civil notice from reviewers, great pleasure to find that any one

Methinks I see him before me now, as he appeared then, and as he continued, with scarcely any perceptible alteration to me, during the twenty years of intimacy which followed, and were closed by his death. A light frame, so fragile that it seemed as if a breath would overthrow it, clad in clerk-like black, was surmounted by a head of form and expression the most noble and sweet. His black hair curled crisply about an expanded forehead; his eyes, softly brown, twinkled with varying expression, though the prevalent feeling was sad; and the nose slightly curved, and delicately carved at the nostril, with the lower outline of the face regularly oval, completed a head which was finely placed on the shoulders, and gave importance, and even dignity, to a diminutive and shadowy stem. Who shall describe his countenance-catch its quivering sweetness -and fix it for ever in words? There are none, alas! to answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep thought, striving with recognised him as having a place among humour; the lines of suffering wreathed into poets. The next time I saw him, he came cordial mirth; and a smile of painful sweet- almost breathless into the office, and proness, present an image to the mind it can as posed to give me what I should have chosen little describe as lose. His personal appear- as the greatest of all possible honours and ance and manner are not unfitly characterised delights-an introduction to Wordsworth, by what he himself says in one of his letters who I learned, with a palpitating heart, was to Manning of Braham-"a compound of the actually at the next door. I hurried out Jew, the gentleman, and the angel." He with my kind conductor, and a minute after took my arm, and we walked to the Temple, was presented by Lamb to the person whom Lamb stammering out fine remarks as we in all the world I venerated most, with this walked ; and when we reached his staircase, preface:-"Wordsworth, give me leave to he detained me with an urgency which introduce to you my only admirer." would not be denied, and we mounted to the top story, where an old petted servant, called Becky, was ready to receive us. We were soon seated beside a cheerful fire; hot water Wordsworth, after his return to Westmoreand its better adjuncts were before us; and land from this visit:-

The following letter was addressed to