dead level of the uninteresting. We "care for none of those things."

But the works of Charles Lamb are read not merely because of their subject matter, they derive an additional interest as a revelation of himself, they are stamped with the impress of a remarkable personality. As one of his friends observed, "the syllables lurk up and down the writings of Lamb which decipher his eccentric nature, his character lies there dispersed in anagram, and to any attentive reader the regathering and restoration of the total word from its scattered parts is inevitable without an effort." This interpenetration of his work with subjective allusion partly accounts for its unique quality. "Nobody (says Professor Saintsbury) has ever succeeded in imitating him even in his most obvious quaintnesses, while the blending of those quaintnesses with a pathos that is never mere sentiment is a secret not merely undiscovered yet by imitators, but escaping even any complete analysis.”

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Charles Lamb's father was confidential clerk and general factotum to a Mr. Samuel Salt, a barrister of the Inner Temple, an easy, good-natured man, who left the management of all his affairs to his humble friend. "He was not to be trusted with himself with impunity." Lovel took care of everything. He was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his 'flapper,' his guide, stopwatch, auditor, treasurer. He did nothing without consulting Lovel, or failed in anything without expecting and fearing his admonishing. He put himself almost too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in the world." Under the name of Lovel the elder Lamb is thus described by his son. "He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty;" "the liveliest little fellow breathing;" "possessed of a fine turn for humorous poetry; "moulded heads in clay or plaster of

Paris to admiration, by dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage boards and such small cabinet toys to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire."

John Lamb married the daughter of a Mrs. Field, who occupied the position of housekeeper at an old country mansion, and seven children were born, four of whom died; the survivors being John, a thoroughly selfish, free and easy, good natured man, who does not figure largely or with much credit to himself in the family history; Mary, the afflicted sister, to whom Charles devoted his life; and the subject of this paper.

Charles Lamb was born in the Inner Temple on February 10th, 1775. His childhood was passed amid the dry and dusty surroundings of a lawyer's sanctum. His young eyes were familiarised with parchment deeds and the dull brown leather covers of huge legal books, mammoth Blackstones and elephantine Cokes, portentous monsters, awful in the eyes of a child. Escaping from their uncongenial vicinity he was free to wander at will in the retired courtyards and secluded paths skirting the Temple Gardens; or, straying beyond these sacred but dingy precincts into the adjacent narrow and busy streets, gaze wistfully at the glittering contents of shop windows, or pause to examine with awakening interest the prints and pictures displayed upon some old bookstall; for Charles was never a child in the ordinary sense of the word, he was never really young, no youthful diversions attracted his infant tastes; a tiny city hermit, as oldfashioned as Paul Dombey, he shared in few or none of the amusements of children of his own age.

Then was laid the foundation of his passionate attachment to town life. He would have sympathised with Dr. Johnson and applauded his remark, "If you have seen one green field, you have seen all green fields, let us take a walk down Fleet Street." In a letter to Wordsworth, he says:

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes-London itself a pantomime and a masquerade-all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life!

At the age of seven he obtained a presentation to Christ's Hospital, probably through the influence of his father's employer, Mr. Salt, and in one of his essays gives an amusing account of the famous Blue Coat Schoolthe detestable food-" Monday's milk porritch, blue and tasteless." "The pease soup of Saturday coarse and choking." "The Wednesday's mess of millet." The "boiled beef on Thursdays with detestable marigolds floating in the pail to poison the broth." "Our scanty mutton scrags on Fridays-and rather more savoury but grudging portions of the same flesh rotten-roasted or rare on Tuesdays." Charles, however, escaped some of these gastronomical enormities owing to the kindness of an aunt. "I remember," says he, "the good old relative (in whom love forbade pride) squatting down upon some odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters, disclosing the viands (of higher regale than those cates which the raven ministered to the

Tishbite), and the contending passions of L(amb) at the unfolding. There was love for the bringer, shame for the thing brought, and the manner of its bringing; sympathy for those who were too many to share in it and at top of all, hunger (eldest, strongest of the passions!), predominant, breaking down the stony fences of shame and awkwardness and a troubling over-consciousness."

The upper master of the school at this time was the Reverend James Boyer, a good scholar and able schoolmaster, but with too pronounced a faith in the efficacy of external stimulus for mental dulness, a faith he consistently shewed by his works, to the detriment of many a cuticle. "Nothing was more common," says Lamb, "than to see him make a headlong entry into the schoolroom from his inner recess or library, and with turbulent eye, singling out a lad, roar out 'Ods my life, sirrah' (his favourite adjuration) I have a great mind to whip you then with as sudden a retracting impulse fling back into his lair-and after a cooling lapse of some minutes (during which all but the culprit had totally forgotten the context), drive headlong out again, piecing out his imperfect sense, as if it had been some devil's litany, with the expletory yell, and I will, too.""

In his fifteenth year straitened circumstances at home made it necessary for Lamb to leave Christ's Hospital and accept a clerkship; he spent three years at the South Sea House, and then transferred his services to the accountant's office of the East India company, where he remained until pensioned off a few years before his death. “Upon the shelves of that office," he used to say, "are preserved my real works in many folio volumes, the so-called works issued to the public being only the recreation of my leisure hours."

Nowhere, probably, outside of Utopia do the square pegs

find angular holes, and the round pegs circular ones. The world employs Robert Burns to guage ale barrels, and sends Charles Lamb to an accountant's desk where, as he said, "the wood entered into his soul." "The opera

omnia of Lamb drawn up in a hideous battalion, at the cost of labour so enormous, would be known only to certain families of spiders in one generation, and of rats in the next. Such a labour of Sisyphus-the rolling up a ponderous stone to the summit of a hill only that it might roll back again by the gravitation of its own dulness— seems a bad employment for a man of genius in his meridian energies. And yet perhaps not. Perhaps the collective wisdom of Europe could not have devised for Lamb a more favourable condition of toil than this very India House clerkship."

For an event occurred a few years after he went to the India House which cast a baleful shadow across Lamb's life, and made it a lingering tragedy; he needed the steadying influence of a regular occupation, and its monotony of systematic application was perhaps a blessing in disguise. His father, suffering now from softening of the brain, had left his situation, and was living upon a pension in Little Queen Street, Holborn. His mother was ill and bedridden. There was an hereditary taint of insanity in the family. Charles himself had spent six weeks in a lunatic asylum in the early part of 1796. Amid all the family troubles, poverty, incurable sickness, mental aberration, Mary Lamb had borne the burden and heat of the day, like Martha, "encumbered with much serving." Incessant in devotion to bedridden mother and imbecile father, taking in work to add a slender pittance to the meagre income and eke out the scanty store, at length she succumbed to the terrible strain, the dreadful malady, that "leprous distilment in the blood," broke out in a