soul exists not in this world. The Professor's poor nerves trembling with the recent shock, he hurried him away to my house to supper, and there we comforted him as well as we could. He came to consult me about a change of catastrophe; but, alas! the piece was condemned long before that crisis. I at first humoured him with a specious proposition, but have since joined his true friends in advising him to give it up. He did it with a pang, and is to print it as his.

"L."

In another letter, a few days after, Lamb thus recurs to the subject, and closes the century in anticipation of a visit to his friend at Cambridge.

TO MR. MANNING.

"As for the Professor, he has actually begun to dive into Tavernier and Chardin's Persian Travels for a story to form a new drama for the sweet tooth of this fastidious age. Has not Bethlehem College a fair action for nonresidence against such professors? Arc poets so few in this age that he must write poetry? Is morals a subject so exhausted that he must leave that line? Is the metaphysic well (without a bottom) drained dry?

"If I can guess at the wicked pride of the Professor's heart, I would take a shrewd wager that he disdains ever again to dip his pen in prose. Adieu, ye splendid theories! Farewell, dreams of political justice! Lawsuits, where I was counsel for Archbishop Fenelon versus my own mother, in the famous fire cause!

"Vanish from my mind, professors, one and all. I have metal more attractive on foot.

"Man of many snipes, I will sup with thee, Deo volente, et diabolo nolente, on Monday night, the 5th of January, in the new year, and crush a cup to the infant century.

"A word or two of my progress. Embark at six o'clock in the morning, with a fresh gale, on a Cambridge one-decker; very cold till eight at night; land at St. Mary's lighthouse, muffins and coffee upon table (or any other curious production of Turkey, or both Indies), snipes exactly at nine, punch to commence at ten, with argument; difference of opinion is expected to take place about eleven; perfect unanimity, with some haziness and dimness, before twelve. N.B. My single affection is not so singly wedded to snipes; but the curious and epicurean eye would also take a pleasure in beholding a delicate and well-chosen assortment of teals, ortolans, the

unctious and palate-soothing flesh of geese, wild and tame, nightingales' brains, the sensorium of a young sucking pig, or any other Christmas dish, which I leave to the judgment of you and the cook of Gonville.

"C. LAMB."

CHAPTER VII.

[1801 to 1804.]

John Woodvil Rejected, Published, and Reviewed-Letters to Manning, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.

THE ominous postponement of Lamb's theatrical hopes was followed by their disappointment at the commencement of the century. He was favoured with at least one interview by the stately manager of Drury Lane, Mr. Kemble, who extended his highbred courtesy even to authors, whom he invariably attended to the door of his house in Great Russell-street, and bade them "beware of the step." Godwin's catastrophe had probably rendered him less solicitous to encounter a similar peril; which the fondest admirers of "John Woodvil" will not regret that it escaped. While the occasional roughness of its verse would have been felt as strange to ears as yet unused to the old dramatists whom Lamb's Specimens had not then made familiar to the town, the delicate beauties enshrined within it would scarcely have been perceived in the glare of the theatre. Exhibiting" the depth, and not the tumults of the soul;" presenting a female character of modest and retiring loveliness and noble purpose, but undistracted with any violent emotion; and developing a train of circumstances which work out their gentle triumphs on the heart only of the hero, without stirring accident or vivid grouping of persons, it would scarcely have supplied sufficient of coarse interest to disarm the critical spirit which it would certainly have encountered in all its bitterness. Lamb cheerfully consoled himself by publishing it; and, at the close of the year 1801, it appeared in a small volume, of humble appearance, with the "Fragments of Burton" (to which Lamb alluded in one of his previous letters), two of his quarto ballads, and the "Helen" of his sister.

The daring peculiarities attracted the notice of the Edinburgh reviewers, then in the infancy of their slashing career,

and it was immolated, in due form, by the self-constituted judges, who, taking for their motto "Judex damnatur cùm nocens absolvitur," treated our author as a criminal convicted of publishing, and awaiting his doom from their sentence. With the gay recklessness of power, at once usurped and irresponsible, they introduced Lord Mansfield's wild construction of the law of libel into literature; like him, holding every prima facie guilty who should be caught in the act of publishing a book, and referring to the court to decide whether sentence should be passed on him. The article on "John Woodvil," which adorned their third number, is a curious example of the old style of criticism vivified by the impulses of youth. We wonder now, and probably the writer of the article, if he is living, will wonder with us, that a young critic should seize on a little eighteen-penny book, simply printed, without any preface; make elaborate merriment of its outline, and, giving no hint of its containing one profound thought or happy expression, leave the reader of the review at a loss to suggest a motive for noticing such vapid absurdities. This article is written in a strain of grave banter, the theme of which is to congratulate the world on having a specimen of the rudest condition of the drama, "a man of the age of Thespis." "At length," says the reviewer, "even in composition a mighty veteran has been born. Older than Eschylus, and with all the spirit of originality, in an age of poets who had before them the imitations of some thousand years, he comes forward to establish his claim to the ancient hircus, and to satiate the most remote desires of the philosophic antiquary." On this text the writer proceeds, selecting for his purpose whatever, torn from its context, appeared extravagant and crude, and ending without the slightest hint that there is merit or promise of merit in the volume. There certainly was no malice or desire to give pain in all this; it was merely the result of the thoughtless adoption, by lads of gayety and talents, of the old critical canons of the monthly reviews, which had been accustomed to damn all works of unpatronised genius in a more summary way and after a duller fashion. These very

critics wrought themselves into good-nature as they broke into deeper veins of thought; grew gentler as they grew wiser; and sometimes, even when, like Balaam, they came to curse, like him, they ended with "blessing altogether," as in the review of the "Excursion," which, beginning in the old strain, "This will never do," proceeded to give examples of its noblest passages, and to grace them with worthiest eulogy. And now, the spirit of the writers thus ridiculed, especially of Wordsworth, breathes through the pages of this very review,

and they not seldom wear the "rich embroidery" of the language of the poet once scoffed at by their literary corporation as too puerile for the nursery.

Lamb's occasional connexion with newspapers introduced him to some of the editors and contributors of that day, who sought to repair the spirit wasted by perpetual exertion in the protracted conviviality of the evening, and these associates sometimes left poor Lamb with an aching head, and a purse exhausted by the claims of their necessities upon it. Among those was Fenwick, immortalized as the Bigod of "Elia," who edited several ill-fated newspapers in succession, and was the author of many libels, which did his employers no good and his majesty's government no harm. These connexions will explain some of the allusions in the following letters.

TO MR. MANNING.

"I heard that you were going to China,* with a commission from the Wedgwoods to collect hints for their pottery, and to teach the Chinese perspective. But I did not know that London lay in your way to Pekin. I am seriously glad of it, for I shall trouble you with a small present for the Emperor of Usbeck Tartary, as you go by his territories; it is a fragment of a Dissertation on the state of political parties in England at the end of the eighteenth century,' which will, no doubt, be very interesting to his Imperial Majesty. It was written originally in English for the use of the two-and-twenty readers of The Albion' (this calculation includes a printer, four pressmen, and a devil); but, becoming of no use when The Albion' stopped, I got it translated into Usbeck Tartar by my good friend Tibet Kulm, who is come to London with a civil invitation from the Cham to the English nation to go over to the worship of the Lama.

"The Albion' is dead; dead as nail in door; and my rev enues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope. I have got a sort of an opening to The Morning Chronicle!!!' Mr. Manning, by means of that common dispenser of benevolence, Mister Dyer. I have not seen Perry, the editor, yet; but I am preparing a specimen. Shall have a difficult job to manage, for you must know that Mr. Perry, in common with the great body of the whigs, thinks The Albion' very low. I find I must rise a peg or so, be a little more decent, and less abusive; for, to confess the truth, I had arrived to an abomi

Mr. Manning had begun to be haunted with the idea of China, and to talk of going thither, which he accomplished some years afterward, without any motive but a desire to see that great nation.

nable pitch; I spared neither age nor sex when my cue was given me. N'importe (as they say in French), any climate. will suit me. So you are about to bring your old face-making face to London. You could not come in a better time for my purposes; for I have just lost Rickman, a faint idea of whose character I sent you. He is gone to Ireland for a year or two, to make his fortune; and I have lost by his going what seems to me I never can recover-a finished man. His memory will be to me as the brazen serpent to the Israelites; I shall look up to it to keep me upright and honest. But he may yet bring back his honest face to England one day. I wish your affairs with the Emperor of China had not been so urgent, that you might have stayed in Great Britain a year or two longer, to have seen him; for, judging from my own experience, I almost dare pronounce you never saw his equal. I never saw a man that could be at all second or substitute for him in any sort.

"Imagine that what is here erased was an apology and explanation, perfectly satisfactory, you may be sure! for rating this man so highly at the expense of and

and M——, and and, and -. But Mr. Burke has explained this phenomenon of our nature very prettily in his letter to a member of the National Assembly, or else in his appeal to the old Whigs, I forget which; do you remember an instance from Homer (who understood these matters tolerably well) of Priam driving away his other sons with expressions of wrath and bitter reproach, when Hector was just dead.

"I live where I did in a private manner, because I don't like state. Nothing so disagreeable to me as the clamours and applauses of the mob. For this reason I live in an obscure situation in one of the courts of the Temple.

"C L."

"I send you all of Coleridge's letters to me which I have preserved some of them are upon the subject of my play. I also send you Kemble's two letters, and the prompter's courteous epistle, with a curious critique on Pride's Cure, by a young Physician from EDINBRO',' who modestly suggests quite another kind of plot. These are monuments of my disappointment which I like to preserve.

"In Coleridge's letters you will find a good deal of amusement, to see genuine talent struggling against a pompous dis

Lamb afterward, in some melancholy mood, destroyed all Coleridge's letters, and was so vexed with what he had done that he never preserved any letters which he received afterward.