would be agreeable, at our Lady's next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out (when you stand a tiptoe) over the Thames and Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King's Bench Walks in the Temple. There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance, and shall be able to lock my friends out as often as I desire to hold free converse with my immortal mind-for my present lodgings resemble a minister's levée, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call 'em) since I have resided in town. Like the country mouse that had tasted a little of urbane manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self, without mouse-traps and time-traps. By my new plan I shall be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the country, and in a garden in the midst of enchanting (more than Mahomedan paradise) London, whose dirtiest drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardware men, pastry-cooks, St. Paul's Church-yard, the Strand, Exeter Change, Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse! These are thy gods, O London! Ain't you mightily moped on the banks of the Cam? Had you not better come and set up here? You can't think what a difference. All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At least, I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal-a mind that loves to be at home in crowds.'

In a letter to Wordsworth, of somewhat later date, replying to an invitation to visit the Lakes, he dwells on the same passionate love for the great city—the "place of his kindly engendure " - not alone for its sights and

sounds, its print-shops, and its bookstalls, but for the human faces, without which the finest scenery failed to satisfy his sense of beauty. "The wonder of these sights," he says, "impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider what must I have been doing all my life not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?"

"What must I have been doing all my life?" This might well be the language of tender retrospect indulged by some man of sixty. It is that of a young man of sixand-twenty. It serves to show us how much of life had been crowded into those few years.

CHAPTER IV.

DRAMATIC AUTHORSHIP AND DRAMATIC CRITICISM.

[1800-1809.]

LAMB was now established in his beloved Temple. For nearly nine years he and his sister resided in Mitre Court Buildings, and for about the same period afterwards within the same sacred precincts, in Inner Temple Lane. Of adventure, domestic or other, his biographer has henceforth little to relate. The track is marked on the one hand by his changes of residence and occasional brief excursions into the country, on the other by the books he wrote and the friendships he formed.

He had written to his friend Manning, as we have seen, how his acquaintance had increased of late. Of such acquaintances Manning himself is the most interesting to us, as having drawn from Lamb a series of letters by far the most important of those belonging to the period before us. Manning was a remarkable person, whose acquaintance Lamb had made on one of his visits to Cambridge during the residence at that University of his friend Lloyd. He was mathematical tutor at Caius, and, in addition to his scientific turn, was possessed by an enthusiasm which in later years he was able to turn to very practical purpose, for exploring the remoter parts of China and Thibet. Lamb had formed a strong admiration for Manning's gen

ius. He told Crabb Robinson in after years that he was the most "wonderful man" he had ever met. Perhaps the circumstance of Manning's two chief interests in life being so remote from his own, drew Lamb to him by a kind of "sympathy of difference." Certainly he made very happy use of the opportunity for friendly banter thus afforded, and the very absence of a responsive humour in his correspondent seems to have imparted an additional richness to his own. Meantime, to add a few guineas to his scanty income, he was turning this gift of humour to what end he could. For at least three years (from 1800 to 1803) he was an occasional contributor of facetious paragraphs, epigrams, and other trifles to the newspapers of the day. "In those days," as he afterwards told the world in one of the Elia essays (Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago)," every morning paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke and it was thought pretty high too-was Dan Stuart's settled remuneration in these cases. The chat of the day, scandal, but above all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant." Dan Stuart was editor of the Morning Post, and Lamb contributed to this paper, and also to the Chronicle and the Albion. Six jokes a day was the amount he tells us he had to provide during his engagement on the Post, and in the essay just cited he dwells with much humour on the misery of rising two hours before breakfast (his days being otherwise fully employed at the India House) to elaborate his jests. "No Egyptian task-master ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing;

we make twice the number every day in our lives as a matter of course, and claim no sabbatical exemptions. But then they come into our head. But when the head has to go out to them, when the mountain must go to Mahomet!" A few samples of Lamb's work in this line have been preserved. One political squib has survived, chiefly perhaps as having served to give the coup de grace to a moribund journal, called the Albion, which had been only a few weeks before purchased ("on tick doubtless," Lamb says) by that light-hearted spendthrift, John Fenwick, immortalized in another of Lamb's essays (The Two Races of Men) as the typical man who borrows. The journal had been in daily expectation of being prosecuted, when a (not very scathing) epigram of Lamb's on the apostacy of Sir James Mackintosh, alienated the last of Fenwick's patrons, Lord Stanhope, and the "murky closet," "late Rackstraw's museum," in Fleet Street, knew the editor and his contributors no more. Lamb was not called upon to air his Jacobin principles, survivals from his old association with Coleridge and Southey, any further in the newspaper world. "The Albion is dead," he writes to Manning, "dead as nail in door-my revenues have died with it; but I am not as a man without hope." He had got a new introduction, through his old friend George. Dyer, to the Morning Chronicle, under the editorship of Perry. In 1802 we find him again working for the Post, but in a different line. Coleridge was contributing to that paper, and was doing his best to obtain for Lamb employment on it of a more dignified character than providing the daily quantum of jokes. He had proposed to furnish Lamb with prose versions of German poems for the latter to turn into metre. Lamb had at first demurred, on the reasonable ground that Coleridge, whose gift of verse was