written in blood. Laughter and tears, proverbially nearly allied, were here in closest union. One of the finest spirits of the age, crushed by calamity, under pressure of poverty, engaged in titillating the risible muscles of his contemporaries for sixpence a titillation! We are reminded of the ghastly merriment at an Irish wake. There is something in the idea suggestive of the grin of a death's head. Lamb eventually found the task intolerable, he became ill and was compelled to abandon it. When free from the incubus, he wrote: "I have given up two guineas a week at the Post, and regained my health and spirits." His next venture was a five act drama in blank verse, entitled John Woodvil. It was full of beauties, rare felicities of diction, and lovely poetical images, but lacked the qualities essential to dramatic success. The Reviewers descended upon it in all their war paint, they fought and spared not, the critics of the Quarterly, and other leading reviews in those days were like Prince Rupert's cavaliers, they charged wildly and blindly, dashing and slashing, cutting their way through the authors of the period with a reckless audacity amounting almost to the morally sublime. They dispensed praise or blame, usually the latter, with an impartiality and fine disregard for the real merits of a production in a manner that reminds us of nothing so much as the periodical distribution of brimstone-andtreacle at the educational establishment of Mr. Wackford Squeers. Frequently they selected the best and most original works of their time for critical assault, and if much attention had been paid to their decisions, English literature would have been deprived of some of its chief ornaments in verse and prose. Not content with accelerating the death of Keats, they would have slain, if they could, not a few of the masterpieces of Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Charlotte Brontë, and a host of others whose names are among the glories of our literary annals, and although now a wiser spirit is working in the critical field, the old Canaanites are not quite extinct. We heard a few years ago how an amiable and keen-sighted successor of the Quarterly apostles described Robert Browning's Bells and Pomegranates with great brevity and impudence as “Rubbish.” Happily for himself and for us Lamb wisely ignored the judgment of the Reviewers, he anticipated Emerson's advice. "Shun the spawn of the press and the gossip of the hour." He persevered, but the effort was not an easy one. The shadow of a terrible crime darkened the past, the suspense of a constant apprehension embittered the present, and the future seemed to offer little but opportunity for the dreary exercise of patience. Contented as I may, to bear me on T' the not unpeaceful evening of a day Those who met the oddly-constructed figure, lean and shrivelled, arrayed in threadbare rusty black, adorned with flying ribbons, a long body with attenuated legs, a large noble head of Jewish type, with curiously twinkling eyes, stammering and stuttering in speech, might feel inclined to smile at so singular a phenomenon, but those who knew the story of his brave devotion, knew what a patient tender heart was beating there under the rusty black, knew what a pure and gentle spirit dwelt in that angular insufficient frame, never smiled, but were more inclined to weep. In 1807, he published his Tales from Shakespeare. These were the joint production of his sister and himself, and secured immediate success. Many people imagine that these tales are only suitable for the nursery, but this results from imperfect appreciation of the work achieved. For years Lamb had been an assiduous student of Eliza bethan literature, and was saturated with its spirit. It has been said that he was born two centuries after his proper time, that he was, indeed, the last of the Elizabethans. A writer in Notes and Queries observes: "Charles Lamb was a living anachronism, a seventeenth century man, mislaid and brought to life two hundred years too late. Never did author belong less to what was nominally his own time, he could neither sympathise with it nor comprehend it; his quaintness of style and antiquarianism of taste were no affectation. He belonged to the school of his contemporaries, but they were contemporaries that never met him in the streets, but were mostly to be found in Poet's Corner, or under gravestones of long ago." Nowhere was Lamb more at home than among the great dramatists of the English Augustan age. With what delight, when "Betty had lit the candles," he would draw from its sacred nook some old folio of Marlowe, Ford, Greene, Massinger, Beaumont, Fletcher or Shakespeare, and con its precious pages! One of his most conspicuous services to English literature was the impulse he gave to the study of forgotten worthies whose works had lain too long unnoticed on the upper shelves of aristocratic libraries, and his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets contemporary with Shakespeare, paved the way for a renaissance of the Tudor and early Stuart poets. The Tales from Shakespeare, even if written for the young, have been read with profit and delight by "children of a larger growth." There is an "art that conceals art" in the transparent simplicity and lucidity of their pages, in the dexterous interweaving of Shakespeare's own words, in the felicity with which a character is sometimes painted in a single sentence, in the compression that gives the whole story of a play in briefest compass without destroying the proportion of its parts. Another important service rendered to culture by Charles Lamb was the rescue of Hogarth from a condition of undeserved neglect. He published an essay on the genius of Hogarth, in which attention was directed to the power and vividness of delineation shewn by that great and original painter, and which materially assisted in establishing his fame. No edition of Hogarth is complete without Lamb's essay. He saw subtility and genius where others had found only coarseness and vulgarity, proving himself a real critic by discerning the true and the beautiful in work which less clear-sighted observers had found. false and repulsive; while fully admitting the presence in these pictures, or some of them, of features that create aversion, he says, "But I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad." "I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman who, being asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered Shakespeare, being asked which he esteemed next best, replied Hogarth. His graphic representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at his prints we read." The Essay on Hogarth and the notes that were published with the Specimens of Dramatic Poets would have ensured Lamb a niche in the Temple of Fame if he had done nothing else, but his reputation rests chiefly upon the Essays of Elia, which were contributed originally to the London Magazine, and first appeared in a collected form in 1823 De Quincey says: "The prose essays under the signature of Elia form the most delightful section amongst Lamb's works. They traverse a peculiar field of observation, sequestered from general interest, and they are composed in a spirit too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the crowd clamouring for strong sensations. But this retiring delicacy itself, the pensiveness chequered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humour that is touched with cross-lights of pathos, together with the picturesque quaintness of the objects casually described, whether men, or things, or usages, and in the rear of all this, the constant recurrence to ancient recollections, and to decaying forms of household life, as things retiring before the tumult of new and revolutionary generations, these traits in combination communicate to the papers a grace and strength of originality which nothing in any literature approaches, whether for degree or kind of excellence, except the most felicitous papers of Addison." Lamb was now of mature age, and the Essays consequently exhibit his power at its greatest development. He pours out in them all the curious erudition obtained in the course of a lifetime passed among books, many of them books of a rare description, seldom included in a bookseller's catalogue. "I love," said he, "out of the way humours and opinions, heads with some diverting twist in them, the oddities of authorship please me most." We learn without surprise of his "hanging for the thousandth time over some passage in old Burton." We can understand the pathetic regret with which he would point to a vacant space on his shelves whence some old favourite, Isaak Walton or the like, had been abstracted by a ruthless borrower. "The human species," he says, "according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races-the men who borrow, and the men who lend. To these two original diversities may be reduced all those imperfect classifications of Gothic and Celtic tribes, white men, black men, red men. All the dwellers upon earth, Parthian's and Medes and Elamites, flock hither and do naturally fall in with one or other of these primary |