pathetic, or more conducive to the purpose of persuasion. The Crab is a sour Crab if it does not sweeten him. I think it would draw another third volume of Dodsley out of me; but you say you don't want any English books? Perhaps, after all, that's as well; one's romantic credulity is for ever misleading one into misplaced acts of foolery. Crab might have answered by this time; his juices take a long time supplying, but they'll run at last--I know they will-pure golden pippin. A fearful rumour has since reached me that the Crab is on the eve of setting out for France. If he is in England your letter will reach him, and I flatter myself a touch of he persuasive of my own, which accompanies it, will not be thrown away: if it be, he is a sloe, and no true-hearted crab, and there's an end. For that life of the German conjuror which you speak of, Colerus de Vitâ Doctoris vix-Intelligibilis,' I perfectly remember the last evening we spent with Mrs. M- and Miss B, in London-street (by that token we had rabbits for supper, and Miss B prevailed upon me to take a glass of brandy and water after supper, which is not my habit)-I perfectly remember reading portions of that life in their parlour, and I think it must be among their packages. It was the very last evening we were at that house. What is gone of that frankhearted circle, M- -, and his gos-lettuces? He ate walnuts better than any man I ever knew. Friendships in these parts stagnate.

"I am going to eat turbot, turtle, venison, marrow pudd.— cold punch, claret, Madeira-at our annual feast, at half past four this day. They keep bothering me (I'm in office), and my ideas are confused. Let me know if I can be of any service as to books. God forbid the Architectonican should be sacrificed to a foolish scruple of some book-proprietor, as if books did not belong with the highest propriety to those that understand 'em best. C. LAMB."

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"26th August, 1814.

"Let the hungry soul rejoice, there is corn in Egypt. Whatever thou hast been told to the contrary by designing friends, who perhaps inquired carelessly, or did not inquire at all, in hope of saving their money, there is a stock of Remorse' on hand, enough, as Pople conjectures, for seven years' consumption, judging from experience of the last two years. Methinks it makes for the benefit of sound literature, that the best books do not always go off best. Inquire in seven years' time for the Rokebys' and the 'Laras,' and where shall they

6

be found?-fluttering fragmentally in some thread-paper; whereas thy Wallenstein' and thy Remorse' are safe on Longman's or Pople's shelves, as in some Bodleian, there they shall remain; no need of a chain to hold them fastperhaps for ages-tall copies-and people sha'n't run about hunting for them as in old Ezra's shrievalty they did for a Bible, almost without effect, till the great-great-grand-niece (by the mother's side) of Jeremiah or Ezekiel (which was it?) remembered something of a book, with odd reading in it, that used to lie in the green closet in her aunt Judith's bed, chamber.

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Thy caterer, Price, was at Hamburgh when last Pople heard of him, laying up for thee like some miserly old father for his generous-hearted son to squander.

"Mr. Charles Aders, whose books also pant for that free circulation which thy custody is sure to give them, is to be heard of at his kinsmen, Messrs. Jameson and Aders, No. 7 Laurence Pountney-lane, London, according to the information which Crabius with his parting breath left me. Crabius is gone to Paris. I prophesy he and the Parisians will part with mutual contempt. His head has a twist Allemagne, like thine, dear mystic.

"I have been reading Madame Stael on Germany. An impudent clever woman. But if Faust' be no better than in her abstract of it, I counsel thee to let it alone. How canst thou translate the language of cat-monkeys? Fy on such fanta sies! But I will not forget to look for Proclus. It is a kind

of book, when one meets with it, one shuts the lid faster than one opened it. Yet I have some bastard kind of recollection that somewhere, some time ago, upon some stall or other, I saw it. It was either that, or Plotinus, or Saint Augustine's 'City of God.' So little do some folks value what to others, sc. to you,' well used,' had been the Pledge of Immortality. Bishop Bruno I never touched upon. Stuffing too good for the brains of such a Hare' as thou describest. May it burst his pericranium, as the gobbets of fat and turpentine (a nasty thought of the seer) did that old dragon in the Apocrypha! May he go mad in trying to understand his author! May he lend the third volume of him before he has quite translated the second, to a friend who shall lose it, and so spoil the publication, and his friend find it and send it him just as thou or some such less dilatory spirit shall have announced the whole for the press; lastly, may he be hunted by reviewers, and the devil jug him! Canst think of any other queries in the solution of which I can give thee satisfaction? Do you want any books that I can procure for you? Old Jimmy Boyer is dead

at last. Trollope has got his living, worth 1000l. a year nett. See, thou sluggard, thou heretic sluggard, what mightst thou not have arrived at. Lay thy animosity against Jimmy in the grave. Do not entail it on thy posterity.

"CHARLES LAMB."

CHAPTER X.

[1815 to 1817.]

Letters to Wordsworth, Southey, and Manning.

It was at the beginning of the year 1815 that I had first the happiness of a personal acquaintance with Mr. Lamb. With his scattered essays and poems I had become familiar a few weeks before, through the instrumentality of Mr. Barron Field, now chief-justice of Gibraltar, who had been brought into close intimacy with Lamb by the association of his own family with Christ's Hospital, of which his father was the surgeon, and by his own participation in the "Reflector." Living then in chambers in Inner Temple-lane, and attending those of Mr. Chitty, the special pleader, which were on the next staircase to Mr. Lamb's, I had been possessed some time by a desire to become acquainted with the writings of my gifted neighbour, which my friend was able only partially to gratify. "John Woodvil," and the number of the "Reflector" enriched with Lamb's article, he indeed lent me, but he had no copy of "Rosamund Gray," which I was most anxious to read, and which, after earnest search through all the bookstalls within the scope of my walks, I found, exhibiting proper marks of due appreciation, in the store of a little circulating library near Holborn. There was something in this little romance so entirely new, yet breathing the air of old ac quaintance; a sense of beauty so delicate and so intense; and a morality so benignant and so profound, that, as I read it, my curiosity to see its author rose almost to the height of pain. The commencement of the new year brought me that gratification; I was invited to meet Lamb at dinner, at the house of Mr. William Evans, a gentleman holding an office in the India House, who then lived in Weymouth-street, and who was a proprietor of the "Pamphleteer," to which I had contributed some idle scribblings. My duties at the office did not allow me to avail myself of this invitation to dinner,

but I went up at ten o'clock, through a deep snow, palpably congealing into ice, and was amply repaid when I reached the hospitable abode of my friend. There was Lamb, preparing to depart, but he stayed half an hour in kindness to me, and then accompanied me to our common home-the Temple.

Methinks I see him before me now, as he appeared then, and as he continued, with scarcely any perceptible alteration to me, during the twenty years of intimacy which followed, and were closed by his death. A light frame, so fragile that it seemed as if a breath would overthrow it, clad in clerklike black, was surmounted by a head of form and expression the most noble and sweet. His black hair curled crisply about an expanded forehead; his eyes, softly brown, twinkled with varying expression, though the prevalent feeling was sad; and the nose slightly curved, and delicately carved at the nostril, with the lower outline of the face regularly oval, completed a head which was finely placed on the shoulders, and gave importance, and even dignity, to a diminutive and shadowy stem. Who shall describe his countenance-catch its quivering sweetness-and fix it for ever in words? There are none, alas! to answer the vain desire of friendship. Deep thought, striving with humour; the lines of suffering wreathed into cordial mirth; and a smile of painful sweetness, present an image to the mind it can as little describe as lose. His personal appearance and manner are not unfitly characterized by what he himself says in one of his letters to Manning of Braham-"a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel." He took my arm, and we walked to the Temple, Lamb stammering out fine remarks as we walked; and when we reached his staircase, he detained me with an urgency which would not be denied, and we mounted to the top story, where an old petted servant, called Becky, was ready to receive us. We were soon seated beside a cheerful fire; hot water and its better adjuncts were before us; and Lamb insisted on my sitting with him while he smoked "one pipe," for-alas! for poor human nature-he had resumed his acquaintance with his "fair traitress." How often the pipe and the glasses were replenished, I will not undertake to disclose; but I can never forget the conversation; though the first, it was more solemn and in higher mood than any I ever after had with Lamb through the whole of our friendship. How it took such a turn between two strangers one of them a lad of not quite twenty, I cannot tell; but so i happened. We discoursed then of life and death, and our anticipation of a world beyond the grave. Lamb spoke of

these awful themes with the simplest piety, but expressed his own fond cleavings to life-to all well-known accustomed things and a shivering (not shuddering) sense of that which is to come, which he so finely indicated in his "Newyear's Eve" years afterward. It was two o'clock before we parted, when Lamb gave me a hearty invitation to renew my visit at pleasure; but two or three months elapsed before I saw him again. In the mean time, a number of the " Pamphleteer" contained an " Essay on the Chief Living Poets," among whom on the title appeared the name of Lamb, and some page or two were expressly devoted to his praises. It was a poor tissue of tawdry eulogies-a shallow outpouring of young enthusiasm in fine words, which it mistakes for thoughts -yet it gave Lamb, who had hitherto received scarcely civil notice from reviewers, great pleasure to find that any one recognised him as having a place among poets. The next time I saw him, he came almost breathless into the office, and proposed to give me what I should have chosen as the greatest of all possible honours and delights—an introduction to Wordsworth, who, I learned, with a palpitating heart, was actually at the next door. I hurried out with my kind conductor, and a minute after was presented by Lamb to the person whom in all the world I venerated most, with this preface:-" Wordsworth, give me leave to introduce to you my only admirer."

The following letter was addressed to Wordsworth after his return to Westmoreland from this visit:

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"9th Aug., 1815. "Dear Wordsworth-Mary and I felt quite queer after your taking leave (you W. W.) of us in St. Giles's. We wished we had seen more of you, but felt we had scarce been sufficiently acknowledging for the share we had enjoyed of your company. We felt as if we had been not enough expressive of our pleasure. But our manners both are a little too much on this side of too-much-cordialty. We want presence of mind and presence of heart. What we feel comes too late, like an after-thought impromptu. But perhaps you observed nothing of that which we have been painfully conscious of, and are every day in our intercourse with those we stand affected to through all the degrees of love. Robinson is on the circuit-our panegyrist I thought had forgotten one of the objects of his youthful admiration, but I was agreeably removed from that scruple by the laundress knocking at my door this morning, almost before I was up, with a present of