345 And gave such welcome to the same, As might beseem so bright a dame!

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)

There are few English authors with whose character and circumstances we may become so closely acquainted as with Charles Lamb's, on account of his habit of self-confession in his essays, his skill and charm as a letter-writer, and his many literary friendships. The first seven years of his life were spent at the Inner Temple, where his father had rooms as clerk and confidential servant to one of the barristers; for the next seven he was a blue coat boy' at Christ's Hospital, along with Coleridge. Lamb was passionately fond of London, where he passed nearly all his days, but in Mackery End in Hertfordshire and other essays he has given us delightful glimpses of holiday visits to the country home of his grandmother Field. It was on one of these visits that he fell in love with the fair Alice' of Dream Children, but this youthful romance was cruelly cut short. There was a strain of mental weakness in the family, and Lamb's mind gave way. Not long after his restoration, his sister Mary, the Bridget Elia' of the essays, in a sudden fit of insanity, was the cause of her mother's death; on her recovery it was necessary that some one should be responsible for her safe keeping, and to this task Charles devoted the rest of his life. At this time he was earning a small salary as a clerk in the office of the East India Company and his first efforts in literature, apart from a few sonnets and other short poems, were directed to eking out their scanty income. A Tale of Rosamund Gray, published in 1798, had no great success; he could not get his tragedy, John Woodvil, put on the stage; his comedy, Mr. H., was acted at Drury Lane and failed. He contributed witty paragraphs' to the morning papers at the rate of 'sixpence a joke, and it was thought pretty high, too,' as he tells us in the essay on Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago. Fortune first smiled upon them in the Tales from Shakspere, written for children by the brother and sister together, Charles taking the tragedies and Mary the comedies. His Specimens of English Dramatists contemporary with Shakspere was an important contribution to the criticism of the Elizabethan drama, and his position in the world of letters was now well established. Leigh Hunt, Wordsworth, Southey, Keats, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and many other famous men of the time were among his friends, and much of his leisure was spent in conversation and convivial meetings, from which he sometimes returned, as his sister says, very smoky and drinky.' His ready wit and unfailing kindliness of heart endeared him to his friends, as the charm of his personality and the delicacy of his humor have to an ever-increasing circle of readers. His most characteristic work is to be found in the Essays of Elia, which appeared in the London Magazine from 1820 to 1826.

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brained, generous Margaret Newcastle.

It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine, freethinkers — leaders, and disciples, of novel philosophies and systems; but she neither wrangles with, nor accepts, their opinions. That which was good and venerable to her, when a child, retains its authority over her mind still. She never juggles or plays tricks with her understanding.

We are both of us inclined to be a little too positive; and I have observed

bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort, upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountains, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy. We agree pretty well in our tastes and habits - yet so, as with a difference.' We 15 the result of our disputes to be almost are generally in harmony, with occasional bickerings — as it should be among near relations. Our sympathies are rather understood, than expressed; and once, upon my dissembling a tone in my voice more kind than ordinary, my cousin burst into tears, and complained that I was altered. We are both great readers in different directions. While I am hanging over (for the thousandth 25 time) some passage in old Burton, or one of his strange contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern tale, or adventure, whereof our common reading-table is daily fed with assiduously fresh sup- 30 plies. Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story- well, ill, or indifferently told - so there be life stirring in it, and plenty of good or evil accidents. 35 The fluctuations of fortune in fiction and almost in real life have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humors and opinionsheads with some diverting twist in them - the oddities of authorship please me most. My cousin has a native disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of 45 common sympathy. She holds Nature more clever.' I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologize to me for certain disrespectful insinua- 50 tions, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear favorite of mine, of the last century but one - the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous, somewhat fantastical, and

uniformly this—that in matters of fact, dates, and circumstances, it turns out, that I was in the right, and my cousin in the wrong. But where we have 20 differed upon moral points; upon something proper to be done, or let alone; whatever heat of opposition, or steadiness of conviction, I set out with, I am sure always, in the long run, to be brought over to her way of thinking.

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is

I must touch upon the foibles of my kinswoman with gentle hand, for Bridget does not like to be told of her faults. She hath an awkward trick (to say no worse of it) of reading in company at which times she will answer yes or no to a question, without fully understanding its purport- which provoking, and derogatory in the highest degree to the dignity of the putter of the said question. Her presence of mind is equal to the most pressing trials of life, but will sometimes desert her upon trifling occasions. When the purpose requires it, and is a thing of moment, she can speak to it greatly; but in matters which are not stuff of the conscience, she hath been known sometimes to let slip a word less seasonably.

Her education in youth was not much attended to; and she happily missed all that train of female garniture, which passeth by the name of accomplishments. She was tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls, they should be brought up but again 55 exactly in this fashion. I know not original- whether their chance in wedlock might