ius. The inventiveness of it all; the simplicity with which the most daring flights of fancy are hazarded; the amazing improbability of the assertion that it was the common people" who called the ambassador "Shaw nonsense;" the gravity with which it is set down that it is not necessary in England to teach children the degrees of rank beyond royalty—all this is delightful in the extreme, and the power to enjoy it may be taken as a test of the reader's capacity for understanding Lamb's place as a humourist.

The eight years spent in Inner Temple Lane were, in Talfourd's judgment, the happiest of Lamb's life. His income was steadily rising, and he no longer had to bear the pressure of inconvenient poverty. Friends of a higher order than the "friendly harpies" he has told us of, who came about him for his suppers, and the brandy-and-water afterwards, were gradually gathering round him. Hazlitt, and Crabb Robinson, and Procter, and Talfourd were men of tastes and capacities akin to his own. The period was not a fertile one in literary production. The little collection of stories for children, called Mrs. Leicester's School, written jointly with his sister, and the volume of Poetry for Children, also a joint production, constitute-with one notable exception-the whole of Lamb's literary labours during this time. The exception named is the contribution to Leigh Hunt's periodical, the Reflector, of two or three masterly pieces of criticism, which may be more conveniently noticed later in this memoir.

Meantime the cloud of domestic anxiety was still unlifted. Mary Lamb's illnesses were frequent and embarrassing. An extract from a letter to Miss Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth's sister (October, 1815), tells once more the often-told tale, and shows the unaltered patience and seriousness of her brother's faithful guardianship. The pass

age has a further interest in the picture it incidentally draws of the happier days of the brother and sister: "I am forced to be the replier to your letter, for Mary has been ill, and gone from home these five weeks yesterday. She has left me very lonely and very miserable. I stroll about, but there is no rest but at one's own fireside, and there is no rest for me there now. I look forward to the worse half being past, and keep up as well as I can. She has begun to show some favourable symptoms. The return of her disorder has been frightfully soon this time, with scarce a six months' interval. I am almost afraid my worry of spirits about the East India House was partly the cause of her illness, but one always imputes it to the cause next at hand; more probably it comes from some cause we have no control over or conjecture of. It cuts great slices out of the time, the little time, we shall have to live together. I don't know but the recurrence of these illnesses might help me to sustain her death better than if we had no partial separations. But I won't talk of death. I will imagine us immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a few weeks we may be making our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the Pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past the theatres, to look at the outside of them, at least, if not to be tempted in. Then we forget that we are assailable; we are strong for the time as rocks;-'the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs.'"

5*

CHAPTER VI.

RUSSELL STREET, COVENT GARDEN.THE ESSAYS OF ELIA.

[1817-1823.]

In

IN the autumn of 1817 Lamb and his sister left the Temple, their home for seventeen years, for lodgings in Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, the corner of Bow Street, and the site where Will's Coffee-house once stood. "Here we are," Lamb writes to Miss Wordsworth in November of this year, "transplanted from our native soil. I thought we never could have been torn up from the Temple. deed it was an ugly wrench, but like a tooth, now 'tis out, and I am easy. We never can strike root so deep in any other ground. This, where we are, is a light bit of gardener's mould, and if they take us up from it, it will cost no blood and groans, like mandrakes pulled up. We are in the individual spot I like best in all this great city. The theatres with all their noises; Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and 'sparagus. Bow Street, where the thieves are examined within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this

way, with a constable to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life.”

During the seventeen years in the Temple Lamb's worldly fortunes had improved. His salary from the India House was increasing every year, and he was beginning to add to his income by authorship. He was already known as critic and essayist to an appreciative few. Friends were gathering round him, and acquaintances who enjoyed his conversation and his weekly suppers (Wednesday evening was open house in the Temple days) were increasing in rather an embarrassing degree. Ever since he had had a house of his own, he had suffered from the intrusion of such troublesome visitors. A too easy good-nature on his part may have been to blame for this. He took often, as he confesses, a perverse pleasure in noticing and befriending those whom others, with good reason, looked shyly on, and as time went on he began to find very little of his leisure time that he could call his own. It may have been with some hope of beginning a freer life on new soil that he resolved to tear himself from his beloved Temple. If so he was not successful. A remarkable letter to Mrs. Wordsworth, a few months only after his removal to Russell Street, tells the same old story of well-meaning intrud"The reason why I cannot write letters at home is that I am never alone." "Except my morning's walk to the office, which is like treading on sands of gold for that reason, I am never so. I cannot walk home from office, but some officious friend offers his unwelcome courtesies to accompany me. All the morning I am pestered. Evening company I should always like, had I any mornings, but I am saturated with human faces (divine forsooth), and voices all the golden morning; and five evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in com

ers.

pany, but I assure you that it is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one to myself. I am never C, L., but always C. L. & Co. He, who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself." "All I mean is that I am a little over-companied, but not that I have any animosity against the good creatures that are so anxious to drive away the harpy solitude from me. I like 'em, and cards, and a cheerful glass; but I mean merely to give you an idea, between office confinement and after-office society, how little time I can call my own." It is not difficult to form an idea from this frank disclosure, of the hindrances and the snares that beset Lamb's comfort and acted harmfully on his temper and habits. It was fortunate for him that at this juncture he should have been led to discover where his powers as a writer indisputably lay, and to find the exact opportunity for their exercise.

In this same year, 1818, a young bookseller, Charles Ollier, whose acquaintance he had recently made, proposed to him to bring out a complete collection of his scattered writings. Some of these, John Woodvil and Rosamund Gray, had been published separately in former years, and were now out of print. Others were interred among extinet magazines and journals, and these were by far the most worthy of preservation. The edition appeared in the year 1818, in two handsome volumes. It contained, besides John Woodvil and Rosamund Gray, and a fair quantity of verse (including the Farewell to Tobacco), the Recollections of Christ's Hospital, the essay on The Tragedies of Shakspeare, considered with reference to their fitness for stage representation, and that on The Genius and Character of Hogarth, these two last having originally appeared in Leigh Hunt's magazine, the Reflector. The edition was