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devoted an article in the Quarterly to the Humorist and his Companions. (18) Alexander Ireland gave a tolerably accurate chronological list of Charles Lamb's writings. (19) J. E. Babson, of Chelsea, U.S., a diligent student of Lamb, collected together from the periodicals under the title of "Eliana some thirty essays and sketches, most of which had been previously overlooked.

The most recent of all the commentators upon Lamb, Mr. Carew Hazlitt, in his miscellaneous volume, published in 1874, has taken occasion not only to denounce with some show of reason the occasional literary falsifications of Talfourd, both in the Sketch of the Life and in the Final Memorials; but, in a wholly uncalled-for manner and with the most unjustifiable acrimony, to denounce also what he does not shrink from designating Mr. Procter's moral falsifications: meaning, as he goes on to explain immediately, a wilful distortion of biographical facts. Forty years after the grave had closed over Lamb, Mr. Hazlitt insisted, in fact, to put his statement quite plainly, first, that Elia was a drunkard, and secondly, that in the latter portion of his life he was deranged. The first assertion, to express it mildly, is a monstrous . exaggeration. The second is proved by a mass of incontrovertible evidence to be utterly untrue. Charles Lamb's frame was feeble, and, as Talfourd said in 1857, a small portion of wine affected it. He was constitutionally afflicted besides with an impediment in his speech, and it can therefore be small matter for wonder when we find Procter writing that a trivial quantity of strong liquid yet further disturbed it. Lamb himself playfully boasted that he kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. His readiness to indulge in the luxury of excessive self-depreciation was shown indeed repeatedly, as when he wrote to Bernard Barton, "I am accounted by some people a good man! How cheap that character is acquired! Pay your debts; don't borrow money, nor twist your kitten's neck off, nor disturb the congregation, &c., and the business is done. I know things (for thoughts are things) of myself which would make every friend I have fly me as a plague patient. I once set a dog upon a crab's leg that was shoved out under a mass of seaweeds-a pretty little feeler! Oh, pah, how sick I am of that. And a lie, a mean one, I once told. I stink in the midst of respect." His surviving friends aver in his regard to this day, as his other friends, now dead and gone, wrote of him years ago, quite distinctly and absolutely, that he was not given to intemperance. As for his sanity, down to the very last his dead and living intimates were and are equally positive. Those who have recently asserted otherwise either knew him personally not at all, or were mere chance acquaintances. Besides which, in their very manner of declaring him to have been at the last demented, they have contrived to throw the most serious doubts upon their own general accuracy. Mr. Carew Hazlitt, for example, who is so very positive as to the humorist having been deranged towards the close of his career, speaks of him (p. 139) as an inmate of Hoxton Asylum in the winter of 1796-97, meaning 1795-96, being thus distinctly out in his reckoning by a whole twelvemonth. Mr. S. C. Hall, again, who is so very decidedly of opinion that Lamb was "maddish' towards the end of his existence, talks of him in the same breath as having been under the care of one Mrs. Redford, a woman accustomed to take charge of insane persons, at Bay Cottage, Enfield-Bay Cottage being, in point of fact, the tenement in which Charles Lamb died, in the full possession of his faculties, not at Enfield, but four miles away from Enfield, in Church Street, Edmonton. The Essayist's sanity, however, down to the very last, is capable of being very clearly demonstrated. Documentary evidence, in fact, is adducable that his mind preserved its serenity, even during those last four months which were so inexpressibly saddened for him by the afflicting circumstance of the death of Coleridge. That his intellect preserved its equipoise under that severe shock is visible in every line of his beautiful letter to the Rev.

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James Gillman, of Highgate, on Lamb's first hearing of their common bereavement; a letter written on the 5th August, 1834, from Mr. Walden's, at Edmonton. It is legible again that complete sanity of Elia (which only within these last few years has been so cruelly questioned) in the perfectly coherent and graceful verses, vide infra, p. 93, penned by him on the 8th of the following October, and addressed to Margaret W Similarly that same sanity is clearly recognizable by all who list in those inimitably humorous Thoughts on Presents of Game, &c., which were published in the Athenæum, vide infra, pp. 436-37, as shortly before the Essayist's death as the goth of November. Nay, as if to put the fact of his unquestionable sanity down to the very latest, beyond the reach of contradiction, there is the charming pleasantry running all through Elia's playful epistle to Mr. Childs, of Bungay, a letter penned by the humorist only a day or two before he met with his slight but fatal accident. That accident came to him out of his exceeding love for pedestrianism. Fourteen miles a day he would easily accomplish, gliding over the ground with (as Talfourd described it) "a shadowy step," on limbs so slender that Thomas Hood spoke of them as his "immaterial legs." His walking excursions at one time were rendered almost ludicrously erratic and exhaustive, by reason of the vagaries of his then constant attendant, Dash, a huge and handsome dog, the gift of Hood, but a gift that Mary Lamb eventually entreated Patmore to accept, "if only out of charity," for otherwise, as she wrote serio-comically, "he'll be the death of Charles." Incidentally, in one of the humorist's letters to Patmore, while enquiring after his old favourite Dash (then no longer his, but his correspondent's) Charles Lamb might almost be said to have prophetically poked his fun at those who were years afterwards posthumously to throw doubts upon his own sanity! "Are his [Dash's] intellects sound?" he asks. "Does he wander a little in his conversation?" The italics are Lamb's. 'You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, to St. Luke's with him. All the dogs here are going mad, if you believe the overseers; but. I protest they seem to me very rational and collected. But nothing is so deceitful as mad people to those who are not used to them. Try him with hot water: if he won't lick it up, it is a sign-he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally or perpendicularly? That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield. Has he bit any of the children yet? If he has, have them shot, and keep him for curiosity, to see if it was the hydrophobia.' Excellent fooling, this; and in his instancereading it, now, forty years afterwards-fooling that has about it so pathetic' an application!

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The abounding frolic fun of his letters equals, at moments almost surpasses, the otherwise matchless humour of Elia. Hear him in one of these delightful epistles run a droll idea nearly to death with a Shaksperian abandonne, "I am flatter," he writes to Bernard Barton, "I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge 's wig when the head is in it;

a cypher-an O. My wick hath a thief in it, and I can't muster courage to snuff it. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. Í have not volition enough left to dot my i's, much less to comb my eyebrows. My hand writes, not I, just as chickens run about a little when their heads are off. O for a vigorous fit of gout, of cholic, of toothache !—an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organ; pain is life-the sharper the more evidence of life. I sleep in a damp bedroom, but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find any visible amendment." A misfortune--at these moments of supreme internal enjoyment arising out of his exquisite sense of the ridiculous-he records with a sort of relish. Writing of Mr. H.'s damnation, he says almost with a smack of the lips, "Hang em! how they hissed.

It was not a hiss neither; it was a sort of frantic yell, like a congrega

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tion of mad geese, with roarings something like bears, mows and mops like apes, sometimes snakes that hissed me into madness. 'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations." Everybody knows Sydney Smith's commiserative allusions (when talking with the missionary bound for New Zealand) to the cold clergyman on the sideboard, and the dry little boy in the toast-rack, his remarks ending with a hope that if his friend were eaten by the cannibals, he might at the least disagree with them! Yet in all this Sydney had been unwittingly anticipated. For Charles Lamb, in a precisely similar strain, had already written dissuasively to Manning, then bound for China, "Some say they are cannibals, and then conceive a Tartar fellow eating my friend, and adding the cold malignity of mustard and vinegar! 'Tis terrible to be weighed out at fivepence the pound." Never wrote wit or humorist more exhilarating nonsense when interchanging merry greetings with a kindred spirit. Instance the close of his sportive letter challenging Hood to rival junkettings-"O the curds-and-cream you shall eat with us here! O the turtle-soup and lobster-salads we shall devour with you there! O the old books we shall peruse here! O the new nonsense we shall trifle over there! O Sir T. Browne here! O Mr. Hood and Mr. Jerdan there! Thine C. (Urbanus), L. (Sylvanus)-(Elia Ambo).' Among all his letters, however, as delectable, as simply inimitable as any that could be named is one dated 19th July, 1827, and addressed to P. G. Patmore, then in Paris, beginning :-"Dear P.-I am so poorly! I have been to a funeral where I made a pun to the consternation of the rest of the mourners.' All through it Oh, I am so poorly!" runs like a réfrain. "Mary is gone out for some soles," he writes, adding immediately, "I suppose it's no use to ask you to come and partake of 'em; else there's a steam vessel." The letter jerks from one theme to another. 'We hope," he observes one while, "the French wines do not disagree with Mrs. Patmore. By the way, I like her." Another while, "Christ, how sick I am!-not of the world, but of the widow's shrub. She's sworn under 6000/., but I think she perjured herself. She howls in E la, and I comfort her in B flat. You understand music?" And so on from one freakish extravagance of thought and phrase to another. "No shrimps!' (That is in answer to Mary's question about how the soles are to be done.)" Another while, We had a merry passage with the widow at the Commons. She was howling--part howling and part giving directions to the proctor-when, crash! down went my sister through a crazy chair, and made the clerks grin, and I grinned, and the widow tittered-and then I knew that she was not inconsolable." And thereupon he trails off-with an eye to the astonishing of his correspondent--a conglomeration of grave-faced imaginary news about their intimates. "Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it a rather agreeable excrescence ---like his poetry-redundant. Hone has hanged himself for debt. Godwin was taken up for picking pockets. Becky takes to bad courses. Her father was blown up in a steam machine. The coroner found it Insanity. I should not like him to sit on my letter." His familiar correspondence, like his familiar conversation, was mostly remarkable for its startling surprises, for those abrupt incongruities of idea or of expression, which were wit-flashes as sudden as rifle shots from an ambuscade. His oddest thoughts at these times must evidently out, whatever the consequence. Asked by an old lady, for example, how he liked babies? Quoth he instantly, to her consternation, "B-boiled, ma'am !" Listening to the extravagant praises lavished upon some one by a good-natured matron who was holding forth at great length about her paragon to Elia's secret disgust, the humorist, on hearing her wind up her eulogium at last with "I know him, bless him!" blurted out to the wonderment of all present, Well, I don't; but d-d-damn him at a hazard!" Those were still swearing times, it ought for Lamb s credit's sake to be remembered. Indeed, when Acres observed, in "The Rivals," damns have had their day," he was certainly made by Sheridan to

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speak by anticipation; that expletive-always, for some odd reason a strange favourite with Lamb-long surviving the Regency. It is altogether a mistake, however, seriously to charge Elia, as some have done, with profanity. words, under the incentive of his wit, were occasionally extravagant; but his heart, in its innermost recesses, was essentially reverent. If out of the very depth of his scorn for the Frenchman who was one day in his hearing profanely contrasting Voltaire's" character with that of Our Lord, Charles Lamb shrank not from stammering out his assent that "Voltaire was a very good Jesus Christ-for the F-French!" he could upon fitting occasion rebike any one who talked slightingly about religion, as where, turning to a young man who had been speaking flippantly of holy things in the presence of Irving and Coleridge, he asked with poignant irony, as the party broke up, "Pray, did you come here in a hat, sir, or a t-turban?

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Turning to a consideration of Lamb himself, however, after a cursory glance thus at his sayings and writings, it is easy enough to realize the aspect of the man from the portraits and descriptions which have happily come down to us from the last generation. Surmounting a curiously fragile-looking frame --which was clothed completely and almost clerically in black, including black small-clothes and black silk stockings, overlapped when out of doors with black cloth gaiters-was a head pronounced by Leigh Hunt "worthy of Aristotle," and spoken of by Hazlitt as "a fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence." The eyes were softly brown, yet glittering. The face was oval in its lower portion. The forehead was expanded. The nose was slightly curved and delicately carved at the nostrils. N. P. Willis, in his “ Pencillings," alludes with especial emphasis to the Essayist's "beautiful deep-set eyes, aquiline nose, and very indescribable mouth.' His enchanting smile, by the way, is the first characteristic named in the epitaph inscribed upon his tombstone. It is, besides this, the crowning peculiarity mentioned by Talfourd in the latter's wistful ejaculation, "Alas! how many even of his own most delicate fancies, rich as they are in feeling and in wisdom, will be lost to those who have not present to them the sweet broken accents and the half-playful, half-melancholy smile of the writer." Several portraits of Charles Lamb are preserved, of more or less excellence. Robert Handcock's chalk drawing pencilled about the year 1797, depicts him in profile, as he was with the comely bloom upon him of one or two-and-twenty. grotesque caricature of him, scratched upon copper in 1825 by "his friend Brook Pulham "-as Sir Fretful Plagiary would have called him, one of his d-d good-natured friends-must have been ludicrously like, exaggerating his aquiline nose into a hooked conch, and dwindling his slim figure to the uttermost extremity of attenuation. Another etching, published in Fraser's Magazine, represents him among his darling books, a candle before him, a tumbler of grog at his elbow-a home sketch, unlike the last (which, as has been said, was merely grotesque), being, in a word, simply delightful. As, indeed, should be any truthful limning of one of whom Forster declared (within a few weeks after Lamb's interment) that he was "the most entirely delightful person' he had then (in 1835) ever known. Long afterwards, in his "Life of Landor," the same keen and generous observer spoke of Elia with precisely the same enthusiasm, as "that most lovable of men, who had not an infirmity that his sweetness of nature did not make one think must be akin to a virtue. Hazlitt, pencil in hand, depicted Lamb with a noble, beautiful head, frilled round the neck, almost as though in masquerade. As familiar to the public at large as any vera effigies of the humorist that could be named is T. Wageman's full-front portraiture-wrinkled, bright-eyed, curly-headed—a likeness prefixed to Moxon's 1840 edition of the works, in double-columned imperial octavo. F. S. Cary's portrait is hardly so satisfactory, or, in other words, so readily recognizable. In many respects, the one approaching about the nearest to a resemblance-to what Hamlet terms so felicitously a counterfeit present

ment-was that painted somewhere about the early part of 1827 by Henry Meyer, from sittings given to him in the artist's then studio at 3, Red Lion Square, near Holborn. The original picture, which was of life-size, was afterwards copied by Henry Meyer in a sort of miniature kit-kat replica, now in the possession of Sir Charles Dilke, into whose hands it has come by inheritance from his grandfather. It is from this charming picture, in the background of which may be recognized the portico of the old East India House in Leadenhall Street, now no longer in existence, that the engraving has been made that forms the frontispiece to this Popular Centenary Edition. For the loan of the painting for this purpose I have to make my heartiest acknowledgments to Sir Charles Dilke, who also most generously placed at my command (to do whatever I liked with for the purposes of this Edition) all the choice manuscripts and proofs of Lamb which have in the same manner passed into his possession. From these rare fragments of the Essayist's correspondence, it will be seen that I have availed myself of the privilege of having more than one delightful passage carefully fac-similed. Through what I cannot but regard as a happy accident, the skilled master of the burin to whose hands Meyer's portrait of Charles Lamb was entrusted, for the purpose of having it engraved here as the frontispiece, recognized the picture upon the instant as one he perfectly remembers seeing painted eight-and-thirty years ago, when he himself, as a stripling, was beginning his career as one of Henry Meyer's pupils. While he plied his graver upon this steel plate, he could recall to mind perfectly well, so he assures me, the sittings given to his old master by the Essayist while the picture was being painted. In that vivid remembrance, it may be seen from the engraving itself, that Mr. Joseph Brown handled the burin as Izaak Walton recommended his brother anglers to handle the bait, as if he loved it. There, in the frontispiece, is visible at a glance the blithe, benignant face of the Master Humorist. Here, in the carefully ordered mass of his varied writings, the rare, wise, brilliant, and, in many ways, incomparable genius of the author is yet more vividly recognizable. In Elia especially Charles Lamb's voice is audible. Though dead, he there speaketh! He whom Procter justly pronounced one of the rarest and most delicate of the humorists of England!" Of whom Leigh Hunt said so well that "he was of the genuine line of Yorick !" And whose mastery of the subtle science of criticism was such that Algernon Swinburne, surely no mean authority upon either head, has, in his Life of William Blake,' declared Lamb emphatically to be "the most supremely competent judge and exquisite critic of lyrical and dramatic art that we have ever had!" Lamb's judgment, nevertheless, needless to add, was not infallible. While he doated upon Beaumont and Fletcher, Byron and Shelley had for him, strange to say, no attraction whatever. While he delighted in the novels of Smollett and Fielding and Richardson, he cared not one snap of the fingers for Walter Scott's Waverley romances. The books he took most to he dubbed lovingly his midnight darlings. His own works, to those who revel in his humour, come distinctly under that category. As an essayist, he is not simply admired--he is beloved and idolized.

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