from Canada; the fichet from Germany; | tiger skins from India; valuable lambskins of the Kalmucks, and immense piles of wolf, horse, and sheep skins, used by the peasantry, were in the market. The Russians are very expert in the preparation of furs, and practice great frauds on their Chinese purchasers. The black fox is the highest priced fur; a pelisse of this costs from five hundred to five thousand dollars, according to quality.

In one quarter were exhibited steel work, platina boxes and ornaments of brass from Tula; another street was filled with embroidered leather and bespangled slippers from Kazan; others with Chinese toys and colors; the musks of Thibet; carpets of Heran; silks of Mascara; jewelry and fancy articles from East and West. There were sixty Cashmere shawls valued at ninety thousand dollars; only twentytwo were sold. Rubies and turquoises trom Turkestan sold to the amount of thirty-two thousand dollars. According to the Russian official statement, the imports from Europe and America, sold at this fair six years ago, amounted to three millions of dollars; those of Asia, to seven and a half millions; and those of home growth or manufacture, to the enormous sum of twenty-one millions. This vast quantity of Russian products finds its way to China, Independent Tartary and Persia. Great caravans leave Orenburg and traverse northern Asia to the frontiers of China-frequent the distant fairs of Thibet, Yarkand and Bokara; and the religion, character, language, strength, &c., of all these distant tribes is familiar to the employees of a secret department at St. Petersburg. Russian influence is rapidly extending over the East, and will continue to do so, Mr. Maxwell thinks, until arrested somewhere beyond the Indus, by the British bayonet. It is a singular fact that though her overland trade with China is unrestricted, her vessels are not permitted to enter Canton. When Krusenstem displayed the Russian flag at Whampoa, the Chinese authorities denounced him for sailing under false colors. They could not comprehend how he got there from Russia by water, and have ever since refused admittance to Russian merchant vessels.

Mr. Maxwell, travelling in company

with a distinguished official personage, under a special passport, had great advantages at Nischnei. The governor called upon him and appointed a captain, a very gentlemanly man, who wished to sell him some razors, to wait on him during his visit. Whenever he went out, a troop of mounted Cossacks cleared the way before the carriage of the Amerakanskoi, and even the gates of a populous convent were no hindrance to his curiosity. The city was a perfect Babel. The empire is estimated to contain within itself eighty different nations; most of these were represented, besides Swedes and Danes, and others from the West. There were also Chinese, Greeks, Arnauts, and Albanians from beyond the Black Sea; Servians, Croatians, and Wallachians from beyond the Danube; Kirghises and Baschirs, from the tribes of hunters and herdsmen beyond the Urals; Bucharians, Kalmucks, Turks and Tartars. The eating houses, teeming with dainties for so many palates, were thronged with noisy crowds, and rich wines flowed like water. Thousands of forlorn women, from London streets, and from the Ise of Sappho, had wandered hither, and the saloons resounded with the minstrelsy of every land. There were singing girls with harps from the banks of the Rhine and Danube; dark-skinned Muscovites, Gipseys, and Tsigani-the far-famed wild Bayaderes. These last are very beautiful, and many of them have intermarried with the noblest families in Russia.

After enjoying the hospitality of the governor at his palace, and the society of a select company of gentlemen and gentlewomen, attracted from various parts of the world to this famous fair, Mr. Maxwell embarked upon the Volga for the city of Kazan. The river is about a mile wide and, except in the time of freshets, very shallow. Its shores are diversified and often picturesque, but, being uncultivated and without forests, they seem bare and desolate. Many clumsy, rudelycarved craft, something resembling Chinese junks, were passed, each one having an image of St. Nicholas fixed conspicuously to its unwieldy stern. Women with ropes around their necks and shoulders were hauling boats against the current, while their husbands remained sleeping or singing on board.

On the morning of the fourth day of the voyage, a broad bend in the river exposed to view the domes and minarets of the Tartar capital. On landing, the travellers took a drosky and drove for a mile to the city gates. After the passports were examined they passed in over smooth wooden pavements, and through handsome streets, lined with palaces, churches, convents, and fine dwellings, to the club-house of the nobles, hotels being an improvement that has not yet reached that quarter of the globe. Here the party was hospitably lodged and remained for several days, extending their acquaintance with the inhabitants. The Tartars are a fine looking, athletic race. They are intelligent and apparently good-humored. Their dress is the turban, embroidered vest, loose trowsers, and yellow boots. They are said to be the most industrious of the Emperor's subjects. They seclude their women and practice polygamy, yet Mr. Maxwell says that a Christian stranger whose respectability entitles him to attention will be invited to enter their houses, will see the wife or wives, and will, perhaps, be surprised to witness so much domestic happiness and such a degree of social and moral refinement. The fine city of Kazan is the resort of the gentry of Eastern Russia during the winter months, but during the heat of summer is almost deserted.

While Mr. Maxwell's party was there, a great fire broke out which destroyed most of the principal buildings and drove the greater part of its population into the streets. It raged with the utmost fierceness for several days, and crowds of women and children were flying unprotected in every direction, among them hundreds of noble ladies; so that "never before had Christian men so good an opportunity for catching a Tartar," and from the impression we get of their singular personal beauty, it is rather to be regretted that they did not catch a few dozen for transplanting on the banks of the Hudson.

The fire was still raging when the party set out on their return to Nischnei. From Nischnei, which was almost deserted, they returned to Moscow, and from Moscow to St. Petersburg. From St. Petersburg Mr. Maxwell took stage, about the middle of November, to Kovno, thence through Warsaw and Cracow to Vienna, where he takes leave of the reader.

The concluding portions of the volume are no less interesting than those parts we have glanced at, but as they are more personally descriptive, and as our sketch already exceeds its proposed limits, we must pass them by with a general commendation, and a word of thanks to the author for his having presented the public with an agreeable and instructive book of travels.

G. W. P.

We can never forget the ardor of our early attachment for Charles Lamb. That young admiration, however, we are obliged to confess, has been, in a measure, outlived. We cannot, indeed, cease to feel a lively sympathy for one whose heart was so accessible to all gentle and humane impressions, and who ever bestowed so good-natured a regard upon all who bore the image of men. Nor is the memory of the dead lightly to be disturbed. Death removes its victims to a sanctuary where no profane step should be allowed to approach, where malice, and envy, and personal prejudice have no leave to intrude. Yet, to "speak only good of the dead" is a principle as absurd in itself, as it is (of course) incompatible with any truthful biography, history, or criticism. The historian ought to be impartial-equally ready to see and narrate the evil and the good. In no other way are the true ends of history attainable. False, one-sided chronicles fall by their own weight. They carry with them the proof of their own worthlessness. Subtract from human nature its depravity, and human nature itself at once disowns the picture. Take away all inherent goodness, and the falsity is equally manifest. Man, in the discipline and development ordained him in this life, is not advanced by the example of a perfect ideal alone. In his great struggles with evil, it is not without its use that he witnesses the imperfect and varying combat of his brother, both when he overcomes and when he is overcome. Facts are never unimportant, and (in their proper place) can never be neglected but with peril. We are by no means insensible to that delicacy of feeling which would prompt a son to pass as lightly as possible over the errors of a father, or to leave them altogether in silence; but not the less on this account does it seem to us unwise and highly culpable to write on the tombstone

of one who allowed his passions and appetites to destroy him, an unqualified eulogy. Men, in this world, must and will be held responsible to society for their treatment of others and of themselves. The dead, who live no longer in influence, may well be spared the recital of their follies and crimes; but he whose memory remains, and whose vital energies are still exerted in the world of living men, through the works he has left behind, is no more exempt from a rigid scrutiny and from an impartial record of his character, than if he were really alive. Truth requires that there be no shrinking from the consequences of undeniable facts.

If this is the case in matters pertaining to biography, still more evidently is it true that the works of the dead are open to free and fair investigation, and that no one is culpable for speaking unreservedly of the literary defects and of the critical transgressions of one who has, in many respects, strong claims upon our reverence and affection. If by asserting that no criticism of Shakspeare not eminently reverential ought now to be written, Coleridge means to imply that no critic of the great dramatist should be allowed to see and to portray his errors and imperfections, we must be permitted to dissent entirely from that proposition. He is no competent critic, we believe, who writes of his subject solely as an enthusiastic disciple, or as an unqualified admirer.

The temptation to disregard all these considerations is in no case stronger, we suspect, than in speaking of such men as Goldsmith, and Robert Burns, and Charles Lamb. Men of this character are always general favorites, and there is a liability in any direction rather than that of too harsh a judgment. The mass of readers are slow to discriminate, in the same character, the elements which are good from those which are evil; and accord

ingly they praise or blame, for the most part, accordingly as the qualities to them most easily discernible, impress their minds favorably or otherwise, and their admiration or their censure is mostly in unqualified terms. But to one who aspires to explore the mysteries of human character and habit, and to trace some of the hidden fountains of existence-who has a fixed idea of an eternal right and an eternal wrong, and who is able to detect the presence of each in the conduct and among the deeds of men-something more seems desirable. The admirers of Lamb cannot, we are sure, exceed us in hearty love of all that is truly worthy in his writings; and how can they be less influenced than we by any prejudice or malice? And if we speak plainly on what we deem certain fundamental defects in his mental constitution, we shall endeavor to speak as plainly of what seems truly deserving of praise.

Charles Lamb was born in London, February 18th, 1775. His early condition was humble, and from his childhood up, he was accustomed to a "subordination," amounting almost to servility, for which our republican pride feels no great sympathy, and by which an important influence was exerted in the development of his character. His father seems to have been in the employ of a barrister of the Inner Temple, in a capacity somewhat between that of steward and servant. It was here that Lamb passed the first seven years of his life. The next seven were spent in a charity school, named Christ's Hospital. Here his previous habits of implicit deference and veneration for whatever was established and for whomsoever was ostensibly his superior, was confirmed and strengthened by the circumstances in which he was placed. Of a physical constitution naturally feeble, he took scarcely any part in the vigorous sports of boyhood, and always preferred a solitary ramble to the company of his more lively and stirring schoolfellows. His gentle deportment, however, secured him the kindness-if not the highest respect of all. During all these years, his thoughts were mainly shut up within himself. He found little sympathy with those about him, and seems not to have very earnestly sought it. His brother and sister

were, the one twelve, the other ten years, older than himself. The age of his parents was such as to render their society widely removed from that which was craved by the child and the boy. Left to his own solitary meditations, his boyish dreams— compounded of much that was wild and extravagant, never looking into the future, but always lingering among the ruins of the past-gained a power over him, which not even the severe actual experience of subsequent years could entirely counteract.

At fourteen, Lamb saw his school companions departing to the university, and found himself obliged, with many bitter regrets, to relinquish the studies in which there had been so much relief from his loneliness-so much solid pleasure. But, unlike so many others in a similar condition, he did not give way to any repinings, or indulge in any useless denunciations of the existing order, He submitted to what was inevitable, and seems never to have imagined but that everything was just as it ought to be. We have said that his dreams were all of the past. His imagination delighted to revel among the mysterious and venerable works of antiquity: he saw no millennial days in the future. Childhood, boyhood, youth, are seasons during which the growing mind is nurtured upon visions of beauty, and splendor, and

awe.

All minds pass alike through this ardent and versatile state; but dreams come not alike to all. In our own day, how large is the number who, still feeding upon the visionary "elements" of their childhood, have an eye only for the future; who see no good in the past, or in the present, but only injustice and wrong; and who, so far from a noble-minded content with a state of things, however unsatisfactory, nevertheless inevitable, are forever contriving some new reform, brooding over some new system, developing some new principle of social science, which is to work a revolution in human affairs, and banish evil entirely from the world! To see only good in the past, and to shrink with dread from everything new, may be a vicious extreme, but the opposite is certainly quite as dangerous-and while it makes a man in future vision inexpressibly happy, it inevitably makes him, in present reality, inexpressibly miserable.

On leaving school, Lamb was for a while employed as an inferior clerk in an office of the South Sea Company, but, at the age of seventeen, received an appointment in the accountant's department of the East India House, in which station he remained until he was fifty years old, when he retired with a liberal pension from his employers. He died at Edmonton, near the close of the year 1734, in the sixtieth year of his age.

Such was the outward condition of the author of the celebrated "Essays of Elia." The gradual development of his literary powers, and the methods by which, in the midst of so many hindrances, he won his way to an honorable and extensive literary reputation, are topics on which, interesting as they are, it is not our purpose at present to dwell. Of the friends of his early days, (particularly Coleridge,) and of their influence in arousing and urging him forward in a literary career, nothing after all can be predicated with any certainty, which is not more or less true of the similar encouraging spirits that have beckoned on all the less independent sons of genius and misfortune. Lamb was at first, as we have seen, almost entirely without sympathy. Among his school-fellows who had removed to the University at Cambridge, he remembered Coleridge, and was still occasionally admitted to fellowship with him. He became enamored of the conversation of the more advanced scholar, and, though sympathizing not at all with his mystical tendencies, and standing entirely aloof from the visions of a Susquehanna pantisocracy, with which the heads of other members of that little group were turned, he found in him, nevertheless, many impulses and tastes in common, and the first approach (distant as they indeed always remained) to a true fellow-feeling.

Allowing something for what seems to have been a temporary mood of despondency, the following extract of a letter, written to Coleridge shortly after his marriage and removal to Bristol, probably gives a tolerably accurate view of Lamb's condition at this time:-"You are the only correspondent, and, I might add, the only friend I have in the world. I go nowhere, and have no acquaintance. Slow of speech and reserved of manners, no one seeks or cares for my society, and I am

left alone. Coleridge, I devoutly wish that fortune, which has made sport with you so long, may play one prank more, throw you into London, or some spot near it, and there snugify you for life. "Tis a selfish but natural wish for me, cast on life's plain friendless."

Lamb, at this time, was twenty-one. In the following year were published his few little poems, in the same volume with those of Coleridge and Lloyd. In the next year, he published "Rosamund Gray," a short story, full of a kind of quiet tenderness and melancholy, such as seems to have been the prevailing mood of his mind at this period. Near the close of the year 1799, (being then in his twenty-fifth year,) he completed his tragedy of "John Woodvil." This he eagerly desired to see represented on the stage, but being denied this gratification, he consoled himself by publishing it, a year or two after. Like his preceding works, however, it received no very gentle treatment from the critics, nor much favor with the public. His next effort, aside from occasional newspaper articles, was a farce, entitled “Mr. H—,” which was accepted at Drury Lane, in 1806, and once acted-nearly through. Some unimportant efforts intervene between this and the first essay of "Elia," in the London Magazine, about fifteen years later. Lamb was now forty-five years old, and in these essays (mainly written during the five years following) his genius appears in its true character, and, for the first time, fitly and naturally exhibited. All his writings that precede these seem rather as an exercise and discipline of the genial power that was struggling within him, and, with perhaps two or three exceptions among his occasional poems, would hardly have been noticed at all at this day, but for the relative importance given them by their connection with the Essays.

We have already remarked, elsewhere,* that "nothing more appropriately characterizes the poets of the days of Wordsworth and Shelley, than a stubborn persistency in thrusting upon the world their own individual peculiarities and experiences." Lamb belongs to this era, and partakes of its spirit. He seems to have been incapable of stepping beyond the

*See American Review, vol. vi. p. 306.