own religious levities-how for thirty years he had never left the Devil's tail quiet for a single minute—the sneer at the waste labour with which Southey's orthodox logic has been invariably confined to converting the already converted, and proselytizing his own party, are all admirably done. Do the clergy ever mean to attend to the pious and sensible advice which Lamb gave them upon this occasion, on the impolicy (to say no more) of shutting the public out of our churches, except during the scanty period in the week consecrated to their professional services? The advice arose out of the simple account which Lamb had to render to his supposed accuser of the nature of his religious feelings. His flaming Unitarianism was burnt out. The days were over when the sole superiority which Lamb ever expected to be able to arrogate over Coleridge consisted in the fact that he had seen Priestley (the then god of their joint idolatry), which Coleridge had not. But Lamb had not gone back. More than the value of any doctrines he could have ever had to give up had passed into his temper,-penetrated and indeed constituted his mind. In religious, apparently as in other questions, his mind enlarged its capabilities and its sphere; not by theories and on generals, but through particulars, and by accretion. If he turned away from philanthropists, and schemes of universal benevolence, he did not abjure the cause, but worked on as the coral formation grows, inch by inch. For Lamb to have built up in politics, or in religion, a wall of dogmatical separation, would have been lost time. Whatever line it might have followed, he would assuredly have pulled it down, at some time or another, to let in Coleridge and Southey on this side, or Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt upon that. Lamb had gradually approached nearer and nearer to the Quakers. A great part of his reading latterly was devoted to the history of their spiritual heroes, and he at last sent in to Bernard Barton a sort of incomplete adhesion. The defensive statement which he made to Southey was as follows:—

You were pleased (you know where) to invite me to a compliance with the wholesome forms and doctrines of the Church of England. I take your advice with as much kindness as it was meant. But I must think the invitation rather more kind than seasonable. I am a Dissenter. The last sect, with which you can remember me to have made common profession, were the Unitarians. You would think it not very pertinent, if (fearing that all was not well with you) I were gravely to invite you (for a remedy) to attend with me a course of Mr Belsham's lectures at Hackney. Perhaps I have scruples to some of your forms and doctrines. But if I come, am I secure of civil treatment? The last time I was in any of your places of worship was on Easter Sunday last. I had the satisfaction of listening to a very sensible sermon of an argumentative turn, delivered with great propriety, by one of your bishops. The place was Westminster Abbey. As such religion, as I have, has always acted

on me more by way of sentiment than argumentative process, I was not unwilling, after sermon ended, by no unbecoming transition, to pass over to some serious feelings, impossible to be disconnected from the sight of those old tombs, etc. But, by whose order I know not, I was debarred that privilege even for so short a space as a few minutes; and turned, like a dog, or some profane person, out into the common street; with feelings, which I could not help, but not very congenial to the day or the discourse. I do not know that I shall ever venture myself again into one of your churches.'

Looking at her vast cathedrals and her vast revenues, truly, we sometimes think, that the Church of England may be considered as having taken out a patent for making of them as little as can be made. A character, formed in the manner we have been describing, could not fall into the common rank and file of human life, and take its place quietly as member of a class. It had become an individual by itself. Such a character would find by experiment, that what might be truths to others were not truths to it on picking to pieces steady and received maxims, they appeared to it popular fallacies or vulgar errors. The consequence of this is, that in the calculation of its means and regulation of its conduct, an original character, as far as it is original, is, by the nature of the case, deprived of the benefit of the experience of others: to that extent their experience would, by the supposition, mislead it. Yet is it less likely to go wrong by taking its own irregular instincts and headlong sympathies for a guide! Lamb accordingly made mistakes; they were far short, however, of what might at first sight have been expected. Mr Cottle, says Coleridge, had a great opinion of his judgment. That Lamb was fully aware of the 'sanity of true genius,' his paper with that title proves. His accurate observation upon others fortunately satisfied him that there were some principles which admitted of no exceptions. Of these, one was the wisdom of bearing lightly the yoke of any drudgery, by which a stable independence, however humble, should be secured; another was that great truth, which doctors so carefully conceal and cordially abhor, that valetudinarianism is the worst of all diseases. It was a singular transposition of duties that it should fall to Lamb to have to teach these lessons of wordly wisdom to a Quaker. But, in preparing them for the edification of Friend Barton, it will be seen that he dressed the dish after his own taste, and with the sauce that his soul loved. Unluckily, Lamb's survey of his fellow-creatures had not equally taught him that one of the rarest gifts of Providence is the genius for happy and graceful idleness. When the devil finds a man idle, he sets him to work, says the proverb: we should add, the limitation,-or sets to work on him, and this is an alternae almost as bad. In the first riotous transports of his emanci

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pation from Leadenhall Street, Lamb announced that the chief employment of the blest was doing nothing; the next, doing good works. A few short months passed, and we hear another story. Overwork is found to be far better than none at all; and we see him in the British Museum at his substituted taskwork among the Garrick plays; happy to be so engaged, not merely for the sake of helping Hone, but for the privilege of grinding off over it his old office hours-the same hours which the India House had kindly taken off his hands, at a time when he was little conscious of the kindness they were doing him. From the gentle exaggerations and artful contrasts by which he was wont shadowy to set off the face of things,' Lamb must have encouraged a tendency to look at subjects too much in their extremes. This is to be sowing bright seed that it may come up in disappointments. Lamb cursing the deal desk to which he was nailed in Leadenhall Street-Lamb gazing on his newly acquired freedom with incredulous delight, as on a bride whom relenting fate at last had granted him—and Lamb, soon afterwards complaining of this freedom as a burden too heavy for him to bear,— are three striking pictures. The fable of the countryman's dialogue with Death is not more instructive than the vehemence of Lamb's supplications for time, more time; and when time really comes to him, his anxiety to get rid of it by imprecations or prayers, by force or wheedling, and almost on any terms.

Out of many passages to this effect, we have space only for two or three. In Lamb's eyes the true liberty haters were the heads of offices, who had cut off red-letter days, and the half holiday on a Saturday. On Wordsworth comforting him with the wish he could give him some of his own leisure, Lamb entered by anticipation on the paradise of dainty delights which the thought suggested.

'I mean some day to attack Caryl on Job, six folios. What any man can write, surely I may read. If I do but get rid of auditing warehousekeepers' accounts, and get no worse harassing task in the place of it, what a lord of liberty I shall be! I shall dance, and skip, and make mouths at the invisible event, and pick the thorns out of my pillow, and throw' em at rich men's night-caps, and talk blank verse, hoity, toity, and sing- A clerk I was in London gay,' ," "Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban," like the emancipated monster, and go where I like, up this street or down that alley." A little later he continues,

The foul enchanter-"Letters four do form his name"-Busirare is his name in hell-that has curtailed you of some domestic comforts, hath laid a heavier hand on me, not in present infliction, but in the taking away the hope of enfranchisement. I dare not whisper to myself a pension on this side of absolute incapacitation and infirmity, till have sucked me dry,-Otium cum dignitate. I had thought in a green

years

old age (O green thought!) to have retired to Ponder's end, (emblematic name, how beautiful! in the Ware Road, there to have made up my accounts with heaven and the company, toddling about between it and Cheshunt, anon stretching, on some fine Isaac Walton morning, to Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless as a beggar; but walking, walking ever, till I fairly walked myself off my legs, dying walking! The hope is gone; 1 sit like Philomel all day (but not singing), with my breast against this thorn of a desk, with the only hope that some pulmonary affliction may relieve me.'

Afterwards, asking Bernard Barton for a poetical account of the Quaker worthies, from Fox to Woolman, as a counterpart to the Ecclesistical Sketches, he adds,

Think of it; it would be better than a series of sonnets on "Eminent Bankers." I like a hit at our way of life, though it does well for me, better than any thing short of all one's time to one's-self; for which alone 1 rankle with envy at the rich. Books are good, and pictures are good, and money to buy them therefore good, but to buy time! in other words life!' Of time, health, and riches, the first in order is not last in excellence. Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.'

Alas, the period arrived when it came to be Lamb's turn to be his own master-the hardest master that he had yet served— worse than any of those subordinate personifications of 'The Company' who had tormented him of old. He had leisure now to give or sell. Time, which at a distance had looked to him like the flower, proved, when he came near, to be the serpent under it. In a letter, signed' your forlorn Charles Lamb,' he tells Bernard Barton,

read.

The

• What I can do, and over-do, is to walk; but deadly long are the days, these summer all-day-days, with but half an hour's candle-light, and no fire-light. I do not write, tell your kind inquisitive Eliza, and can hardly I assure you no work is worse than overwork. mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome food. I bragged formerly that I could not have too much time. I have a surfeit; with few years to come, the days are wearisome. But weariness is not eternal. Something will shine out to take the load off that crushes me, which is at present intolerable. I have killed an hour or two in this poor scrawl. I am a sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him inchmeal just now. But the snake is vital."

This has brought us to a painful part of our subject. It is melancholy to think that Lamb was not, on the whole, as happy as he deserved to be; and that, for this, he had probably himself principally to blame. Instead of retiring to enjoy health and independence-independence the most honourable, because selfearned-literary leisure, the company of friends by whom he was beloved, and, the deepest of all happinesses, that of minis

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tering to the happiness of a sister whom he adored,—wherefore is it that Lamb retired on weariness, and self-reproach, and solitude? What is the meaning of his self-imposed abandonment of the society of his friends ? and of his positively shrinking from meeting with the oldest and dearest of them all, even Southey and Wordsworth, when they came to town? The reader will find the answer in the 'Confessions of a Drunkard;'-in the 'Farewell to Tobacco ;'—and in the jocund views scattered over the present volumes of The After-Dinner Trick;' of Care 'Drowning Glorious Night,'-of sceptical dogmatical faces seen by punch-light, and of the ten pipes a-night of tobacco that staggered Parr. Then follow, in due season, the morning apologies for the confused and aching head; and the yearly resolutions of reforming, executed magnanimously, however partially, at last. A more fatal price was scarcely ever paid for these indulgences. Part of the price consisted of such self-accusations as made themselves a way, for instance, in a letter written to Miss Wordsworth during one of the illnesses of his sister.

I try to think Mary is recovering, but I cannot always feel it; and mean-while she is lost to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, fest I should think wrong; so used am I to look up to her in the least and the biggest perplexity. To say all that I find her, would be more than I think any body could possibly understand, and when I hope to have her well again so soon, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser, and better than me, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death with me. She lives but for me. And I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly with my ways of going on. But even in this upbraiding of myself I am offending against her, for I know that she has cleaved to me for better, for worse; and if the balance has been against her hitherto, it was a noble trade.'

The following penitential letter to Mr Cary, the accomplished translator of Dante, and Lamb's Monthly Host at the British Museum, needs, and indeed admits of, no comment.

I protest I know not in what words to invest my sense of the shameful violation of hospitality, which I was guilty of on that fatal Wednesday. Let it be blotted from the calendar. Had it been committed at a layman's house, say a merchant's, or a manufacturer's, a cheesemonger's, or greengrocer's, or to go higher, a barrister's, a member of Parliament's, a rich banker's, I should have felt alleviation, a drop of self-pity. But to be seen deliberately to go out of the house of a clergyman drunk! a clergyman of the Church of England too! Not that alone, but of an expounder of that dark Italian Hierophant, an exposition little short of his who dared unfold the Apocalypse: divine riddles both; and, without supernal grace vouchsafed, asks not to be fingered without present blasting to the touchers, And then, from what house! not a common glebe, or vicarage (which yet