great excellencies, he has almost as great defects." Lamb probably had these judgments in mind.

Page 103. Lamb's footnote. The story in the Arabian Nights is that of Sidi Nournan.

Page 118. "The Revenge." A play by Edward Young, 1721.

Page 126. Lamb's note to "A New Wonder." "The Rogue; or, The Life of Guzman de Alfarache," 1622. Translated by James Mabbe from the Spanish of Mateo Aleman, Vida y Lechos del picaro Guzman de Alfarache, Part I., 1599; Part II., 1605. Lamb refers to the book again in the present volume (see page 245) and also elsewhere. Mr. John Hollingshead remembers reading Lamb's copy, in Mary Lamb's rooms, after her brother's death.

Page 142. Hecate's speech at the foot. Hecate, not too correctly, quotes Ovid (Metamorphoses, VII., 199-207, omitting line 204). The translation is: "When I have willed, the rivers, to the marvel of their banks, run backward to their founts; I still the tossed, I toss the still waters with my spell; clouds I scatter, clouds I gather; winds I banish and I summon; I burst the gorge of adders by words and by incantation; I remove forests, I bid mountains to quake, the earth to bellow, and ghosts to issue from their graves. Thee too, O Moon, I draw!”

Page 144. Lamb's note to "The Witch." In this connection it is interesting to quote what Lamb wrote a few years later on "Macbeth's" witches in his essay "On the Tragedies of Shakspeare

"It requires little reflection to perceive, that if those characters in Shakspeare which are within the precincts of nature, have yet something in them which appeals too exclusively to the imagination, to admit of their being made objects to the senses without suffering a change and a diminution,-that still stronger the objection must lie against representing another line of characters, which Shakspeare has introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients of their hellish composition savour of the grotesque, yet is the effect upon us other than the most serious and appalling that can be imagined? Do we not feel spell-bound as Macbeth was? Can any mirth accompany a sense of their presence? We might as well laugh under a consciousness of the principle of Evil himself being truly and really present with us. But attempt to bring these beings on to a stage, and you turn them instantly into so many old women, that men and children are to laugh at. Contrary to the old saying, that 'seeing is believing,' the sight actually destroys the faith: and the mirth in which we indulge at their expense, when we see these creatures upon a stage, seems to be a sort of indemnification which we make to ourselves for the terror which they put us in when reading made them an object of belief,-when we surrendered up our reason to the poet, as children to their nurses and their elders; and we laugh at our fears,

as children who thought they saw something in the dark, triumph when the bringing in of a candle discovers the vanity of their fears. For this exposure of supernatural agents upon a stage is truly bringing in a candle to expose their own delusiveness. It is the solitary taper and the book that generates a faith in these terrors: a ghost by chandelier light, and in good company, deceives no spectators,—a ghost that can be measured by the eye, and his human dimensions made out at leisure. The sight of a well-lighted house, and a welldressed audience, shall arm the most nervous child against any apprehensions: as Tom Brown says of the impenetrable skin of Achilles with his impenetrable armour over it, Bully Dawson would have fought the devil with such advantages.'

The words at the close of Lamb's note are a quotation from page 139.

Concerning Middleton and Lamb Mr. Swinburne has written :

The first word of modern tribute to the tragic genius of Thomas Middleton was not spoken by Charles Lamb. Four years before the appearance of the priceless volume which established his fame for ever among all true lovers of English poetry by copious excerpts from five of his most characteristic works, Walter Scott, in a note on the fifty-sixth stanza of the second fytte of the metrical romance of Sir Tristrem, had given a passing word of recognition to the "horribly striking" power of "some passages" in Middleton's masterpiece: which was first reprinted eleven years later in the fourth volume of Dilke's Old Plays. Lamb, surprisingly enough, has not given a single extract from that noble tragedy: it was reserved for Leigh Hunt, when speaking of its author, to remark that there is one character of his (De Flores in The Changeling') which, for effect at once tragical, probable, and poetical, surpasses anything I know of in the drama of domestic life." The praise is not a whit too high: the truth could not have been better said (Introduction to " 'Middleton," Mermaid Series). Page 145. Lamb's footnote. Lamb's footnote. The 117th Spectator (July 14, 1711) describes Sir Roger de Coverley's meeting with Moll White, the old woman with the reputation of a witch. The conclusion runs :—

When an old Woman begins to doat, and grow chargeable to a Parish, she is generally turned into a Witch, and fills the whole Country with extravagant Fancies, imaginary Distempers, and terrifying Dreams. In the mean time, the poor Wretch that is the innocent Occasion of so many Evils begins to be frighted at her self, and sometimes confesses secret Commerce and Familiarities that her Imagination forms in a delirious old Age. This frequently cuts off Charity from the greatest Objects of Compassion, and inspires People with a Malevolence towards those poor decrepid Parts of our Species, in whom Human Nature is defaced by Infirmity and Dotage.

Page 151. "The Revenger's Tragedy." Lamb quoted from Vindici's address to the skull of his dead Lady in his "Confessions of a Drunkard" (see Vol. I., page 137).

Page 160. Lamb's footnote. The words between inverted commas in this note form an instance of Lamb's gift of compressed quotation. The original passage is in "Hamlet," II., ii., 617-621

I have heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions.

A little earlier (590) is the line—

Make mad the guilty and appal the free.

Mr. Swinburne has written as follows of this passage and of Lamb's praise of it :

But the crowning example of Cyril Tourneur's unique and incomparable genius is of course to be found in the scene which would assuredly be remembered, though every other line of the poet's writing were forgotten, by the influence of its passionate inspiration on the more tender but not less noble sympathies of Charles Lamb. Even the splendid exuberance of eulogy which attributes to the verse of Tourneur a more fiery quality, a more thrilling and piercing note of sublime and agonising indignation, than that which animates and inflames the address of Hamlet to a mother less impudent in infamy than Vindici's, cannot be considered excessive by any capable reader who will candidly and carefully compare the two scenes which suggested this comparison.

Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, second series, contains the following fine sonnet on Cyril Tourneur :

Page 162,

:

CYRIL TOURNEUR

A sea that heaves with horror of the night,

As maddened by the moon that hangs aghast
With strain and torment of the ravening blast,
Haggard as hell, a bleak blind bloody light;
No shore but one red reef of rock in sight,

Whereon the waifs of many a wreck were cast
And shattered in the fierce nights overpast

Wherein more souls toward hell than heaven took flight;
And 'twixt the shark-toothed rocks and swallowing shoals
A cry as out of hell from all these souls

Sent through the sheer gorge of the slaughtering sea,
Whose thousand throats, full-fed with life by death,

Fill the black air with foam and furious breath;

And over all these one star-Chastity.

"The Devil's Law Case." Mr. Swinburne remarks:

Few readers will care to remember much more of "The Devil's Law Case" than the admirable scenes and passages which found favour in the unerring and untiring sight of Webster's first and final interpreter or commentator, Charles Lamb (Studies in Prose and Poetry, page 51).

Page 179. Lamb's footnote. "Native and endowed [indued] unto that element" is the Queen's phrase, of Ophelia drowning ("Hamlet," IV., vii., 180, 181).-Luke's iron crown was the punishment devised for Luke Dosa, who, with his brother George, led a revolt against the Hungarian nobles in the sixteenth century. He was done to death by a red-hot crown placed on his head in ironical reference to his assumption of the title of king. The brazen bull was constructed by Perillus, a mechanic for Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum. Malefactors were thrust within it and a fire lighted beneath. The cries that they made resembled the bellowings of a bull.-Procrustes was the Attican brigand who laid his victims on his bed, and forced them exactly to fit it, either by stretching them on the rack, or abbreviating them with a hatchet.—The phrase on "horror's head horrors accumulate" is from "Othello" (III., iii., 370).—"Terrify babes with painted devils" is from "The White Devil" (see page 186, line 8). Lady Macbeth says (II., ii., 54, 55)—

VOL. IV.-39

'Tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil.

Page 180. A Fable. Lamb rewrote this fable in verse, probably at about the same time as the Specimens were published, and included it in Poetry for Children, 1809 (see Vol. III., page 393, and note).

Page 181. Webster's Dedication. Lamb did not copy the text very carefully. In the fourth line he omitted the words which I have enclosed in square brackets. Dyce also gives slight variations in two of the Latin passages, and "liven" for "enliven " in line 16.

It may perhaps be interesting to point out that the first Latin quotation in Webster's dedication (from Martial, Epig. XIII., 2, 8) was used by Southey as a motto for the three-volume edition of his poems in 1815, at the suggestion of Coleridge. It was also used by Tennyson for the Poems by Two Brothers, in 1827.

Page 190. Lamb's footnote. The translation of Don Quixote, from which Lamb quotes, is Skelton's (see Book II., Chapter VI.). The three lines of poetry are from Shakespeare's 95th sonnet.

Page 192. Lamb's footnote. Ariel's dirge on Ferdinand's drowned father, in Act I., Scene 2, of "The Tempest," though common property, may be placed here as the pendant to Webster's :

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell :
Burthen. Ding-dong,

Ariel. Hark! now I hear them,-ding-dong, bell.

Page 195. Lamb's note to "The Lover's Melancholy." The story of the nightingale and the lute player is in the sixth prolusion of Book II. of Strada's Prolusiones Academica. Crashaw's version is called "Music's Duel," a part of the long poem "The Delight of the Muses."

Page 218. Lamb's note to "The Broken Heart." It was this criticism that provoked Gifford's famous and infamous reference to Lamb as a poor maniac," in the Quarterly for December, 1811. The epithet came about thus. Weber, Sir Walter Scott's private secretary, issued an edition of Ford in 1811, in which he quoted Lamb's eulogy of "The Broken Heart." Gifford, in reviewing Weber's book, said that he had "polluted his pages with the blasphemies of a poor maniac, who it seems once published some detached scenes from The Broken Heart. For this unfortunate creature every feeling mind will find an apology in his calamitous situation." I reproduce here Mr. Dykes Campbell's commentary on this attack, in the same article from which I have already quoted.

This passage [says Mr. Dykes Campbell] has no meaning at all if it is not to be taken as a positive statement that Lamb suffered from chronic mental derangement; yet Gifford when challenged confessed that when he wrote it he had known absolutely nothing of Lamb, except his name! It seems to have struck neither Gifford nor Southey [who had intervened with an indignant protest] that this was no excuse at all, and something a good deal worse than no

excuse that even as an explanation it was not such as an honourable man would have cared to offer. Gifford added a strongly-worded expression of his feeling of remorse on learning that his blows had fallen with cruel effect on a sore place. Both feeling and expression may have been sincere, for, under the circumstances, only a fiend would be incapable of remorse. But the excuse or explanation is open to much suspicion, owing to the fact (revealed in the Murray "Memoirs") that Lamb's friend Barron Field had been Gifford's collaborator in the preparation of the article in which the offending passage occurs. Field was well acquainted with Lamb's personal and family history, and while the article was in progress the collaborators could hardly have avoided some exchange of ideas on a subject which stirred one of them so deeply. Gifford may have said honestly enough, according to his lights, that only a maniac could have written the note quoted by Weber, a remark which would naturally draw from Field some confidences regarding Lamb's history. This is, of course, pure assumption, but it is vastly more reasonable and much more likely to be in substantial accordance with the facts than Gifford's statement that when he called Lamb a poor maniac, whose calamitous situation offered a sufficient apology for his blasphemies, he was imaginatively describing a man of whom he knew absolutely nothing, except that he was "a thoughtless scribbler." If, as seems only too possible, Gifford deliberately poisoned his darts, it is also probable that he did not realise what he was doing. It would be unfair to accept Hazlitt's picture of him as a true portrait; but Lamb's apology for Hazlitt himself applies with at least equal force to the first editor of the Quarterly. "He does bad actions without being a bad man." Perhaps it is too lenient, for though Gifford's attack on Lamb was undoubtedly one of the bad actions of his life, it was, after all, a matter of conduct. The apology, whether truthful or the opposite, reveals deep-seated corruption of principle, if not of character.

Lamb's contempt for Gifford, fostered by other insults, began with this slander. The history of his account against Gifford will be found in the notes to Vol. I., see pages 432, 447, 476.

Concerning Lamb's note upon Ford Mr. Swinburne has written :—

Whenever the name of the poet Ford comes back to us, it comes back splendid with the light of another man's genius. The fiery panegyric of Charles Lamb is as an aureole behind it. That high-pitched note of critical and spiritual enthusiasm exalts even to disturbance our own sense of admiration; possibly, too, even to some after injustice of reaction in the rebound of mind. Certainly, on the one hand, we see that the spirit of the critic has been kindled to excess by contact and apprehension of the poet's; as certainly, on the other hand, we see the necessary excellence of that which could so affect and so attach the spirit of another man, and of such another man as Lamb. And the pure excess of admiration for things indeed admirable, of delight in things indeed delightful, is itself also a delightful and admirable thing when expressed to such purpose by such men (Essays and Studies, 1875, page 276).

And again :

"Ford was of the first order of poets:" such is the verdict of his earliest and greatest critic. To differ from Lamb on a matter of judgment relating to any great name of the English drama is always hazardous; it is a risk never to be lightly run, never to be incurred without grave reluctance; and to undervalue so noble a poet as Ford, a very early and close favourite of my own studies, must be even further from my wish than to depreciate the value of such a verdict in his favour. Yet perhaps it would be more accurate to say merely that his good qualities are also great qualities-that whenever his work is good it is greatly good-that is to say that he was altogether one of the few greatest among great men who stand in that very first order of poets (Ibid., page 303).

Lowell, in his Old English Dramatists, said that Lamb's comment on the closing scene of "The Broken Heart" was worth more than all Ford ever wrote.

Writing to Wordsworth on October 13, 1804, Lamb says, "Ford is the man after Shakspeare."

The quotations in Lamb's note are both from Milton. The first is a rendering of the line in Paradise Regained, IV., 266 :—

High actions and high passions best describing,

and the other is from Samson Agonistes, lines 613-615.