had been shameful), but from a kingly repository of sciences, human and divine, with the Primate of England for its guardian, arrayed in public majesty, from which the profane vulgar are bid fly. Could all those volumes have taught me nothing better! With feverish eyes on the succeeding dawn I opened upon the faint light, enough to distinguish, in a strange chamber, not immediately to be recognised, garters, hose, waistcoat, neckerchief, arranged in dreadful order and proportion, which I knew was not mine own. 'Tis the common symptom, on awakening, I judge my last night's condition from. A tolerable scattering on the floor 1 hail as being too probably my own, aud if the candlestick be not removed, I assoil myself. But this finical arrangement, this finding every thing in the morning in exact diametrical rectitude, torments me. Remote whispers suggested that I coached it home in triumph. Far be that from working pride in me, for I was unconscious of the locomotion. That a young Mentor accompanied a reprobate old Telemachus; that, the Trojan like, he bore his charge upon his shoulders, while the wretched incubus, in glimmering sense, hiccupped drunken snatches of flying on the bat's wing after sunset. An aged servitor was also hinted at, to make disgrace more complete, one, to whom my ignominy may offer farther occasion of revolt (to which he was before too fondly inclining) from the true faith; for, at a sight of my helplessness, what more was needed to drive him to the advocacy of independency? Occasion led me through Great Russell Street yesterday. I gazed at the great knocker. My feeble hands in vain essayed to lift it. I dreaded that Argus, who doubtless lanterned me out on that prodigious night. I called the Elginian marbles. They were cold to my suit. I shall never again, I said, on the wide gates unfolding, say, without fear of thrusting back, in a light but a peremptory air, "I am going to Mr Cary's." I passed by the walls of Balcutha. I had imaged to myself a zodiac of third Wednesdays, irriadiating by glimpses the Edmonton dulness. I dreamed of Highmore! I am de-vited to come on Wednesdays. Villanous old age, that, with second childhood, brings linked hand in hand her inseparable twin, new inexperience, which knows not effects of liquor, where I was to have sate for a sober, middle-aged-and-a-half-gentleman, literary too, the neat fingered artist can educe no notions but of a dissoluted Silenus, lecturing natural philosophy to a jeering Cromius, or a Mnasilus Pudet. From the context gather the lost name of."

Mr Talfourd, admitting the existence of this single frailty in his friend, replies to the great exaggerations current concerning it by observing, that, although Lamb had rarely the power to overcome temptation when presented, he made heroic sacrifices in flight. So far is just and reasonable. There are some things in which the prayer 'lead us not into temptation,' is man's best security. But Mr Talfourd proceeds to say, that the 'frailty itself was so intimately associated with all that was most ' endearing in his intellectual, and sweetest in his moral excel، lencies, that it would be impossible, without noticing it, to do 'justice to his virtues.' To this doctrine of association we must demur. In all honest praise of Lamb,-in every thing that can be fairly said to vindicate his character, and to extenuate his fault or faults, we rejoice from the bottom of our hearts. He

was born to be loved. But we cannot agree to build an altar for the enshrining of any theory of drunkenness, even the drunkenuess of Lamb. Every body is painfully aware that drunkenness is compatible with the highest order of genius and virtue. So much the worse; for we know also that it has a perilous tendency to ruin both. What ought to be the moral ? Surely this, that the nobler the victim the more impressive the example. The characteristic of intemperance is, that it is the gratification of our animal, at the expense of our intellectual and moral nature. Accordingly, it is the characteristic vice of savage as compared with civilized nations; and in civilized nations, of the class which is left most savage. The first stage in intemperance is to place one's self in the rank of a barbarian; the last, in the condition of a brute. Mr Talfourd says, that drinking ' with Lamb, except as far as it cooled a feverish thirst, was not ' a sensual, but an intellectual pleasure.' Drinking, we answer, is not to be called an intellectual pleasure; because, when a man has once contracted the habit of excessive indulgence in the use of ardent spirits, and the accursed weed,' one of its most miserable consequences is, a slavish dependence on them, not only of the body, but even of the mind. Subject to this sad exception, where the supposed mitigating symptom is the very heart and crisis of the disease, we are believers in the sobriety, quite as much as in the sanity of true genius. We have never known -never heard of a well authenticated instance of any man, not coming within the above melancholy limitation, who was better company in the lowest sense of the word) drunk than sober. 'The issue we all know ;-crowded jails; Sheridan a by-word, instead of perhaps Prime Minister of England; and Lamb the object of as much compassion almost as love. The case is too bad to afford of raising moral and intellectual associations in behalf of gin or brandy. The publisher has done right in reprinting the 'Confessions.' Lamb admits, in his letter to Southey, that the (Confessions' were so far a genuine description of himself, that the injuring him in saying so consisted in the fact, that it might lead to the losing him his place in his public office, and the forfeiting his life insurance.

We have referred already to Mr Cottle's account of Coleridge. Lamb owed him much. Coleridge first enlarged his literary horizon. This took place in a little room at the Cat and Salutation' in Smithfield. Coleridge afterwards zealously encouraged his juvenile attempts in verse; and in due time gave him his friendship. Lamb repaid him with generous affection. I am living in a continuous feast' (he writes to Manning). 'Coleridge has been with me now for nigh three weeks; and the

'more I see of him in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to love him, and believe him a very good man; and all those foolish impressions to the con'trary fly off like morning slumbers.'

From the account given in the 'Confessions,' we presume that Lamb laid these sad habits, so destructive of his peace, at the door of Fenwick, and the like. Fenwick was a newspaper editorthe 'Bigod' of Elia. Lamb elsewhere calls him his quondam friend and co-drinker. It has destroyed our pleasure in the representative of the great race' to follow him with a wife and four children ruined to the Fleet. At the same time, we cannot but fear that Coleridge and Lamb had some reason to reproach each other. Egg-hot' and 'Oronoko' are too much mixed up with their poetical reminiscences of the Cat and Salutation.' We have no means of learning how far the greatest misfortune in their after-lives was to be attributed to the gratifications of their boyhood. In their instances, the misery and disgrace have been incurred. It remains for youthful genius to profit by the lesson. There may be some truths respecting which the wise and good will doubt how far they should be told. There can be no doubt here. One of the letters which we are about to quote was left by Mr Coleridge as a legacy to all who might be grievously tempted, as he had been himself. The whole, indeed, are greatly to the honour of his self-abused, but struggling and aspiring nature; and, duly laid to heart, may be more extensively and practically useful than all besides he ever wrote. The letters in question were written in 1814. The two first are addressed to Mr Cottle; the last to a Mr Wade. From the connexion between Lamb and Coleridge, which we have just described, they form a proper supplement to the case of Lamb; and, as few persons, we fear, are likely to see Mr Cottle's book,* we think it desirable to give them a wider circulation, by transferring them to our pages. Mr Cottle, it appears, had heard of Coleridge's habits; and to his kind remonstrance, Coleridge replies as follows:

You have poured oil in the raw and festering wound of an old friend's conscience, Cottle! but it is oil of vitriol! I but barely glanced at the middle of the first page of your letter, and I have seen no more of it-not from resentment (God forbid!) but from the state of my bodily and mental sufferings, that scarcely permitted human fortitude to let in a new visiter of affliction. The object of my present reply is, to state the case just as it is—first, that for ten years the anguish of my spirit has

* Cottle's Early Recollections, chiefly relating to the lale S. T. Coleridge.

been indescribable, the sense of my danger staring, but the consciousness of my guilt worse, far worse than all! I have prayed, with drops of agony on my brow; trembling, not only before the justice of my Maker, but even before the mercy of my Redeemer. "I gave thee so many "talents-what hast thou done with them?" Secondly, overwhelmed as I am with a sense of my direful infirmity, I have never attempted to disguise or conceal the cause. On the contrary, not only to friends have I stated the whole case with tears and the very bitterness of shame, but in two instances I have warned young men, mere acquaintances, who had spoken of having taken laudanum, of the direful consequences, by an awful exposition of its tremendous effects on myself. Though before God I cannot lift up my eyelids, and only do not despair Thirdly, of his mercy, because to despair would be adding crime to crime, yet to my fellow men, I may say, that I was seduced into the accursed habit ignorantly. I had been almost bed-ridden for many months with swellings in my knees. In a medical journal I unhappily met with an account of a cure performed in a similar case (or what appeared to me so), by rubbing in of laudanum, at the same time taking a given dose internally. It acted like a charm, like a miracle! I recovered the use of my limbs, of my appetite, of my spirits-and this continued for near a fortnight. At length the unusual stimulus subsided-the complaint returned the supposed remedy was recurred to;-but 1 cannot go through the dreary history. Suffice it to say, that effects were produced which acted on me by terror and cowardice, of pain and sudden death, not (so help me God!) by any temptation of pleasure, or expectation or desire of exciting pleasurable sensations. On the very contrary, Mrs Morgan and her sister will bear witness so far as to say, that the longer I abstained, the higher my spirits were, the keener my enjoyments-till the moment, the direful moment, arrived, when my pulse began to fluctuate, my heart to palpitate, and such a dreadful falling abroad, as it were, of my whole frame, such intolerable restlessness and incipient bewilderment, that in the last of my several attempts to abandon the dire poison, I exclaimed in agony, which I now repeat in seriousness and solemnity, "I am too poor to hazard this." Had I but a few hundred pounds, but 200-half to send to Mrs Coleridge, and half to place myself in a private mad-house, where I could procure nothing but what a physician thought proper, and where a medical attendant could be constantly with me for two or three months (in less than that time life or death would be determined), then there might be hope. Now there is none !! O God! how willingly would I place myself under Dr Fox in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself! Go, bid a man paralytic in both arms, to rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. "Alas!" he would reply, "that I cannot move my arms, is my complaint and my misery."-(Cottle's Memoirs of Coleridge, Vol. ii. p. 165.)

'Gladness be with you for your convalescence, and equally so at the hope which has sustained and tranquillized you through your imminent peril. Far otherwise is, and hath been my state, yet I am too grateful; yet I cannot rejoice. I feel with an intensity unfathomable by words, my utter nothingness, impotence, and worthlessness, in and for myself. I have learned what a sin is, against an infinite imperishable being, such as is the soul of man. I have had more than a glimpse of what is meant by death and outer darkness, and the worm that dieth not-and that all the hell of the reprobate is more inconsistent with the love of God, than the

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blindness of one who has occasioned loathsome and guilty diseases to eat out his eyes, is inconsistent with the light of the sun. But the consolations, at least the sensible sweetness of hope, I do not possess. On the contrary, the temptation to which I have constantly to fight up against, is a fear, that if annihilation and the possibility of heaven were offered to my choice, I should choose the former. This is, perhaps, in part, a constitutional idiosyncrasy, for when a mere boy I wrote these lines:

"Oh, what a wonder seems the fear of death,
Seeing how gladly we all sink to sleep;

Babes, children, youths, and men,

Night following night for three-score years and ten." .

And in my early manhood, in lines descriptive of a gloomy solitude, disguised my own sensations in the following words :—

'My main comfort, therefore, consists in what divines call the faith of adherence, and no spiritual effort appears to benefit me so much as the one earnest, importunate, and often for hours, momently repeated prayer, I believe! Lord, help my unbelief! Give me faith, but as a mustard seed, and I shall remove this mountain! Faith! faith! faith! I believe, oh give me faith! Oh, for my Redeemer's sake, give me faith in my Redeemer! In all this I justify God, for I was accustomed to oppose the preaching of the terrors of the Gospel, and to represent it as debasing virtue, by the admixture of slavish selfishness. More see that what is spiritual can only be spiritually apprehended; comprehended it cannot. Mr Eden gave you a too flattering account of me. It is true I am restored, as much beyond my expectations almost, as my deserts; but I am exceedingly weak. I need for myself solace and refocillation of animal spirits, instead of being in a condition to offer it to others; yet, as soon as I may see you, I will call on you.

P.S. It is no small gratification to me, that I have seen and conversed with Mrs Hannah More. She is, indisputably, the first literary female I ever met with; in part, no doubt, because she is a Christian. best respects when you write.'-(Cottle, Vol. ii. p. 165.)

Make my

'Dear Sir,-For I am unworthy to call any good man friend-much less you, whose hospitality and love I have abused; accept, however, my entreaties for your forgiveness, and for your prayers. Conceive a poor miserable wretch, who for many years has been attempting to beat off pain, by a constant recurrence to the vice that reproduces it. Conceive a spirit in hell, employed in tracing out for others the road to that heaven from which his crimes exclude him! In short, conceive whatever is most wretched, helpless, and hopeless, and you will form as tolerable a notion