into foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pell-mell with past disappointments. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play once again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games, for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel."

"The elders with whom I was brought up, were of a character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution, and the ringing out of the old year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it, indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December. But now shall I confess a truth? I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and the shortest periods, like misers' farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away like a weaver's shuttle.' Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived-I, and my friends to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My household gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me.

"Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities and jests, and irony itself-do these things go out with life?

"Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?

“And you, my midnight darlings, my folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by the familiar process of reading?

"Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which point me to them here, the recognizable face; 'the sweet assurance of a look?'

"In winter, this intolerable disinclination to dying, to give it its mildest name, does more especially haunt and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a sweltering sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then we expand and burgeon. Then are we as strong again, as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts of death. All things allied to the unsubstantial wait upon that master feeling; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appearances, that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus's sickly sister, like that innutritious one denounced in the Canticles: I am none of her minions; I hold with the Persian.

sore.

"Whatsoever thwarts, or puts me out of my way, brings death into my mind. All partial evils, like humors, run into that capital plagueI have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge; and speak of the grave as of some soft arms, in which they may slumber as on a pillow. Some have wooed death-but out upon thee, I say, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate, and (with Friar John) give thee to six-score thousand devils, as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy Privation, or more frightful and compounding Positive!

"Those antidotes, prescribed against the fear of thee, are altogether frigid and insulting like thyself. For what satisfaction hath a man, that he shall lie down with kings and emperors in death,' who, in his lifetime, never greatly coveted the society of such bedfellows ? or, forsooth, that'so shall the fairest face appear?' Why, to comfort me, must Alice W

-n be a goblin? More than all, I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that such as he now is, I must shortly be.' Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the mean time I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters! Thy New Year's days are past. I survive, a jolly candidate for 1821."

could hardly, indeed, be termed allowance; the name of charity is too cold to suit it. He did not merely love his friends in spite of their errors, but he loved them errors and all; so near to him was everything human. He numbered among his associates men of all varieties of opinion-philosophical, religious, and political-and found something to like, not only in the men themselves, but in themselves as associated with their theories and their schemes. In the high and calm, but devious speculations of Godwin; in the fierce hatreds of Hazlitt; in the gentle and glorious mysticism of Cole ridge; in the sturdy opposition of Thelwall to the government; in Leigh Hunt's softened and fancy-streaked patriotism; in the gallant toryism of Stoddart; he found traits which made the individuals more dear to him. When Leigh Hunt was imprisoned in Cold Bath Fields for a libel, Lamb was one of his most constant visitors; and when Thelwall was striving to bring the Champion' into notice, Lamb was ready to assist him with his pen, and to fancy himself, for the time, a Jacobin. In this large intellectual tolerance he resembled Professor Wilson, who, notwithstanding his own decided opinions, has a compass of mind large enough to embrace all others which have noble alliances within its range. But not only to opposite opinions and devious habits of thought was Lamb indulgent; he discovered "the soul of goodness in things evil" so vividly, that the surrounding evil disappeared from his mental vision. Nothing-no discovery of error or crime-could divorce his sympathy from a man who had once engaged it. He saw in the spendthrift, the outcast, only the innocent companion of his school days or the joyous associate of his convivial hours, and he did not even make penitence or reform a condition of his regard. Perhaps he had less sympathy with philanthropic schemers for the improvement of the world than with any other class of men; but of these he numbered two of the greatest, Clarkson, the destroyer of the slave trade, and Basil Montague, the contanst opponent of the judicial infliction of death; and the labors of neither have been in vain !"*

This same love of the companionable qualities, (we must add,) with a comparative indifference as to the character and principles of his associates, may safely be affirmed to have contributed much to the fatal habits, with which the world has been made, perhaps, sufficiently familiar. How far that paper-frightful indeed in the pictures it draws-entitled "Confessions of a Drunkard," may have been a revelation of his own personal condition

* Talfourd, vol. i. pp. 318-19.

and experience, we leave it for others to conjecture. The fact, however, that his own habits afforded a sufficient ground for much that is most startling in these memorable words, cannot (and ought not to) be disguised.

We do not quite agree with Mr. Talfourd, when he asserts that Lamb's serious efforts are always the best. There are certain veins in his serious style, we admit, which are truly touching and beautiful; yet, even these oftentimes, as it seems to us, owe their peculiar charm to their immediate neighborhood (in the reader's own imagination, at least,) to the humorous element, which gives character, more than all else, to the author's genius. We know very well that with many, such of the Essays as "Mackery End,” and "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple"

wherein the heart of the author overflows with tender and pleasantly sad remembrances of childhood-have always been the favorites; and we grant to these essays a superiority over everything else of a similar kind, which we know, in any literature. But who does not love them the more especially, that they were written by Charles Lamb-and because they had their origin in the same mind as the "Dissertation upon Roast Pig," and the “Praise Rosamund of Chimney Sweepers ?" Gray" is verily altogether superior to "Mr. H;" "Hester" and the "Old Familiar Faces," we confess, are worth more to us, than the not unpleasant

Farewell to Tobacco." For an extended production purely humorous in its character, like Tristram Shandy, the genius of Lamb was, we allow, entirely inadequate. It is for the shorter efforts in this kind, and for the ever-present consciousness of the same spirit following us continually, as we read, and always ready to break out, upon the slightest occasion, into wit and mirthful feeling of the most moring character, that we award to this element of humor the prevailing influence over our minds, in all the more natural productions of "the man Elia."

That this quality of his mind had sometimes its more perfect development in the less elaborate efforts-in his letters, and in the unpremeditated words of ordinary social intercourse, rather than in the more deliberate essays-is doubtless true. We

know not where a specimen of humor can be found, more truly genuine than this from an unstudied letter to his Quaker friend, Bernard Barton. His words hover on the brink of the truest, most solemn meaning and yet it is hard to conceive anything more ludicrous than such a "moral improvement" of the execution of a thief:

"And now, my dear sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of yesterday morning prompts a sadder view. The fate of the unfortunate Fauntleroy makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes around on such of my friends as, by a parity of situation, are exposed to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become more impressive than usual with the charge of them. Who that standeth knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I am most willing

to believe, have never deviated into others' property. You think it impossible that you could ever commit so heinous an offence; but so thought Fauntleroy once; so have thought many besides him, who at last have expiated as he hath done. You are as yet upright; but you are a banker, or, at least, the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the subject; but cash must pass through your hands, sometimes to a great amount. If in an unguarded hourbut I will hope better. Consider the scandal it will bring upon those of your persuasion. Thousands would go to see a Quaker hanged

that would be indifferent to the fate of a Pres

byterian or an Anabaptist. Think of the effect it would have on the sale of your poems alone, not to mention higher considerations! I tremble, I am sure, at myself, when I think that so many poor victims of the law, at one time of their life, made as sure of never being hanged as I, in my own presumption, am ready, too ready, to do myself. What are we better than they? Do we come into the world with different necks? Is there any distinctive mark under our left ears? Are we unstrangulable, I ask you? Think on these things. I am shocked sometimes at the shape of my own fingers, not for their resemblance to the ape tribe, (which is something,) but for the exquisite adaptation of them to the purposes of picking, fingering, &c.

"No one that is so framed, I maintain it, C. L."*

but should tremble.

Humor always stands in the foreground of a serious reality, yet never throws ridicule (in any bad sense) upon the object against which it casts its fantastic, yet

* Vol. i. pp. 243--4.

inoffensive shadow. We hardly wonder to find the humorist saying, in a private letter to his friend, Anything awful makes me laugh: I misbehaved once at a funeral." We admit that this singular faculty is altogether beyond the power of our analysis. We shall attempt no such dissection, on the present occasion. We can only refer our readers to some admirable illustrations among the writings upon which we have been discoursing. Let the reader but carefully note the little dissertation on the ugliness of poor "Mrs. Conrady,' (which, unfortunately, our space will not suffer us to quote,) and he will get somewhat a farther insight into the quality of true humor, than many pages We have never met with a better exempliof critical disquisition could afford him. fication of that species of humor, which moves with ridiculous incongruities suggested by resemblance in particulars, and by startling contrast in generals, than in the essay "On the Melancholy of Tailors;" and not the least in its motto:

"Sedet, æternumque sedebit,

Infelix Theseus. VIRGIL."

We are conscious, however, that the labor of pointing out portions of these writings as especially characterized by genuine and genial humor is altogether gratuitous and unnecessary. All these passages are fresh and vivid to the familiar reader of Lamb, nor can they be passed over, even for the first time, without fixing a full

share of the reader's attention.

That Charles Lamb is destined to any permanent and prominent standing among the men of letters whom the generations are to remember, and whom the centuries are to embalm, cannot well be supposed. We are not certain that the warmest of his friends ever seriously expected itextravagantly as they have suffered themselves to talk. With a wider sweep of imagination, with broader views of human life and destiny, and with a more undivided and earnest pursuit of literature, Lamb might have had more rational claims upon posterity, and his friends a juster ground to expect for him a lasting renown. With

* Vol. ii. pp. 287--9.

† lb. p. 431.