-give it some other play. Write an essay,--pen a character or description;—but not as I do now—with tears trickling down your cheeks." We retire with reverence before the trials of such a spirit as this.

No one in a conversation said such startling things as Lamb. No one was so witty or so sensible. No man ever had him at a disadvantage, except the man who did not understand him. He had a severe impediment in his speech, but this gave even an additional piquancy to the deep and eloquent things he said. After the stammering and hesitation, a half sentence would burst forth at the close, and set everybody laughing or thinking. And they would laugh at it, and think about it the next day, and the day after that. "Lamb probes a truth," said Hazlitt, "in a play upon words." "He was of the genuine line of Yorick," says the delightful writer of the "London Journal." He was indeed;—or still more of the family of that ever-faithful and devoted "fool" in "Lear," with his sayings of wisdom and snatches of old songs—"Young Lubin was a shepherd boy." Who that was admitted to the intimacy of his acquaintance does not remember that and many others, and feel his heart sink with grief at our recent loss, though to rise again with pride in the consciousness of having been once admitted to such a friendship? We needed not to have made the restriction. Every one who knew him knew him intimately. He had no concealment, for he had nothing to conceal. He had the faculty, as was remarked of him in the "Times" newspaper, by an old friend of his,—of turning "even casual acquaintances into friends." When you entered his little book-clad room, he welcomed you with an affectionate greeting, set you down to something, and made you at home at once. His richest feasts,

however, were those he served up from his ragged-looking books, his ungainly and dirty folios, his cobbled-up quartos, his squadrons of mean and squalid-looking duodecimos. "So much the rather their celestial light shone inward." How he would stutter forth their praises! What fine things had he to say about the beautiful obliquities of the "Religio Medici," about Burton, and Fuller, and Smollet, and Fielding, and Richardson, and Marvel, and Drayton, and fifty others, ending with the "tricenoble, chaste, and virtuous, but again somewhat fantastical and

original brained Margaret Duchess of Newcastle!" What delightful reminiscences he had of the actors, how he used to talk of them, and how he has written them down!* How he would startle his friends by intruding on them lists of persons one would wish to have seen, such odd alliances as Pontius Pilate and Doctor Faustus, Guy Faux and Judas Iscariot!—But the evenings passed with him are not for the hasty mention of such articles as this.

Mr. Lamb's personal appearance was remarkable. It quite realized the expectations of those who think that an author and a wit should have a distinct air, a separate costume, a particular cloth, something positive and singular about him. Such unquestionably had Mr. Lamb. Once he rejoiced in snuff-colour, but latterly his costume was inveterately black—with gaiters which seemed longing for something more substantial to close in. His legs were remarkably slight,—so indeed was his whole body, which was of short stature, but surmounted by a head of amazing fineness. We never saw any other that approached it in its intellectual cast and formation. Such only may be seen occasionally in the finer portraits of Titian. His face was deeply marked and full of noble lines—traces of sensibility, imagination, suffering, and much thought. His wit was in his eye, luminous, quick, and restless. The smile that played about his mouth was ever cordial and good-humoured; and the most cordial and delightful of its smiles were those with which he accompanied his affectionate talk with his sister, or his jokes against her. We have purposely refrained from speaking of that nobleminded and noble-hearted woman, because in describing her brother we describe her. Her heart and her intellect have been through life the counterpart of his own. The two have lived as one, in double singleness together. She has been, indeed, the supplement and completion of his existence. His obligations to her had extended beyond the period of his memory, and they

* See his papers on the " Old Actors." "I was always fond," he says, in the charming little story of " Barbara," which has immortalized an anecdote from the life of an eminent living actress, Mrs. Siddons, " of the society of the players; and I am not sure that an impediment in my speech (which certainly kept me out of the pulpit), even more than certain personal disqualifications, which are often got over in that profession, did not prevent me at one time of life from adopting it."

accompanied him to his grave. Yet he returned them not unfittingly! The "mighty debt of love he owed" was paid to her in full. When he says otherwise in his charming sonnets to her, he merely expresses the ever-unsatisfied longings of true affection. Coleridge and she had the first and strongest holds upon his heart. The little volume to which we referred in the commencement illustrates this in an affecting manner. In the pride of that first entrance into the world under the protection of his greater friend, he had not forgotten his sister. He dedicated all he had written to her. "The few following poems," he says, "creatures of the fancy and the feeling, in life's more vacant hours; produced for the most part by love in idleness; are, with all a brother's fondness, inscribed to Mary Ann Lamb, the author's best friend and sister." When, in after life, he had the power of acquitting his debt to her more nobly, by dedicating his whole existence to hers, he presented the offering of his poetry to Coleridge. Well might he express that strange and most touching wish, after the life they had led—" I wish that I could throw into a heap the remainder of our joint existences, that we might share them in equal division. But that is impossible!" It was indeed, and the survivor is not the most fortunate. Never more shall we see the picture they used to present—worth a hundred common-places of common existence —when they paid the occasional visits they both loved to London!—never more see the affectionate and earnest watchings on her side—the pleasant evasions, the charming deference, and the little touches of gratitude on his! We recollect being once sent by her to seek "Charles," who had rambled away from her. We found him in the Temple, looking up, near Crownoffice-row, at the house where he was born. Such was his ever-touching habit of seeking alliance with the scenes of old times. They were the dearer to him that distance had withdrawn them. He wished to pass his life among things gone by yet not forgotten. We shall never forget the affectionate "Yes, boy," with which he returned our repeating his own Striking lines,—

Ghost-like I paced round the haums of my childhood,
Earth seemed a desart I was bound to traverse!"

This paper, long as it has already proved, must not be finished without the mention of one most honourable characteristic in which Mr. Lamb has stood alone, amidst all the political strife and personal bickerings of modern literature. He put himself in personal opposition to no one. He would recognize no difference of opinion as a plea against social meeting and friendly fellowship. "It is an error," he said, in a spirit of deep philosophy, "more particularly incident to persons of the correctest principles and habits, to seclude themselves from the rest of mankind, as from another species, and form into knots and clubs. The best people, herding thus exclusively, are in danger of contracting a narrowness. Heat and cold, dryness and moisture, in the natural world, do not fly asunder, to split the globe into sectarian parts and separations; but mingling, as they best may, correct the malignity of any single predominance. The analogy holds, I suppose, in the moral world. If all the good people were to ship themselves off to terra incognitas, what, in humanity's name, is to become of the refuse?" Charles Lamb wrote in periodicals of all opinions, and held all differing friends firmly and cordially by the hand, as if indeed of one family of brothers. His friendship with Southey did not shake his intimacy with the editor of the "Examiner," or move him one jot from the side of Hazlitt. Lamb first met that great writer at Mr. Godwin's house, when one of those meaning jests he used to blurt out so often bound at once the far-sighted metaphysician to his side. Holcroft and Coleridge happened to be there, and were as usual engaged in a fierce dispute. The question between them was as to which was best, 66 man as he was, or man as he is to be," and it was at its highest when Lamb stammered out, "Give me man as he is not to be!" The friendship, however, which this saying commenced, was once interrupted for some time by some wilful fancy on the part of the irritable and world-soured philosopher. At this time Southey happened to pay a compliment to Lamb at the expense of some of his companions, Hazlitt among them. The faithful and unswerving heart of the other, forsaking not, although forsaken, refused a compliment at such a price, and sent it back to the giver. The character of William Hazlitt, which he wrote at the same time, may stand for ever as one of the proudest and

truest evidences of the wriier's heart and intellect. It brought hack, at once, the repentant offender to the arms of his friend, and nothing again separated them till Death came. Charles Lamb was, we believe, the only one of his old associates seen at the grave of Hazlitt.

His first appearance in literature was by the side of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He came into his first battle, as he tells us (literature is a sort of warfare), under oover of that greater Ajax. The small duodecimo volume in which their poems lirst appeared, and which is now exceedingly scarce, lies before us. It was printed and published in Bristol, in the year 1797, by "N. Biggs for T. Cottle." In the preface, Coleridge speaks with affectionate warmth of his "friend and old schoolfellow, Charles Lamb." "He has now communicated to me a complete collection of all his poems,—qua qui non prorsus amet, ilium omnes et virtutes et veneres odere." On the title-page there are words of more touching interest—" Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiæ et similium junctarumque Camcenarum; quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque einporis longinquitas!" The wish has been strikingly fulfilled. Their friendship in life survived all the accidents of place and time; and in death it has been but a few short months divided.

We should like to see this remarkable friendship (remarkable in all respects and in all its circumstances) between two of the finest and most original genuises in an age of no common genius, worthily and lastingly recorded. It would outvalue, in the mind of posterity, whole centuries of literary quarrels.

Lamb never fairly recovered the death of Coleridge. He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself) until his own great spirit joined his friend. He had a habit of venting his melancholy in a sort of mirth. He would, with nothing graver than a pun, "cleanse his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighed" upon it. In a jest, or a few light phrases, he would lay open the last recesses of his heart. So in respect of the death of Coleridge. Some old friends of his saw him two or three weeks ago, and remarked the constant turning and reference of his mind. He interrupted himself and them almost every instant with some play of affected wonder, or astonishment, or humourous melancholy, on the