translations, epilogues and prologues, epigrams and political squibs, which have been of late years carefully gleaned by editors of Lamb, are not here included, and the volume makes no claim, in their sense of the word, to possess the merit of completeness. Without suggesting or believing that even the lightest trifles of a humorist like Lamb are not worthy of preservation, I yet cherish a strong opinion that when a writer has himself chosen for the people "of his best," that best should be at least kept separate from matter of less worth. Acting on the same principle, I have left for a concluding volume (should it be called for) those slighter prose essays and jeux d'esprit which have been collected of late years, and entitled not, I think, very felicitously, Eliana.

I have arranged the poems as far as possible in chronological order. Lamb put so much of his personal history into his verse that when so presented it forms a delightful running commentary upon his life and education. In his early sonnets we read of his happy holiday seasons with his grandmother, Mrs. Field, at Blakesware, and the first and only love romance of his life. Then we are reminded of such alleviations of his sad and monotonous family story as were afforded by a rare excursion to the seaside or the more frequent visit to the theatre, or best of all by his correspondence or occasional meetings with Coleridge and Lloyd. Then, for a while, the verse becomes darkened by domestic calamity, and the sonnet measure of Bowles gives place to the blank verse of Cowper, whose pious example seems to have given courage to Lamb's own deep sense of need to express itself in verse. But as we read on, we trace mind and spirit recovering from their great shock, and braced by new friendships and fresh literary interests and sympathies. A fleeting passion for Hester Savory inspires his sweetest lyric, and his struggle with the seductions of his "sweet enemy," Tobacco, produces the first and most remarkable of those poems in which he shewed himself the disciple of Wither and Jonson and the

later Elizabethans, and "sealed himself," as was said in that elder time, "of the tribe of Ben." And lastly, when poverty and domestic anxiety no longer press, and his unique genius is gradually revealed to himself as well as to others- -as life becomes gladdened and enriched by the sympathy of admiring friends, Wordsworth and Hunt, Barton and Hood, Talfourd and Crabb Robinson, his verse still flows, reflecting with the same genial transparency the changed condition of things. And when towards the end, "genius declines with him," to use his own expression, but he "grows clever "—when, moreover, his fame is fixed and secure and there is no need to write, save for his friends' gratification, since "cash at Leadenhall" means 66 corn in Egypt "—he is always ready to make happy by an acrostic or some other poetical conceit all the young ladies among his friends and neighbours who come round him with their albums.

As I have just intimated, the chronological order enables us to trace the succession of literary influences under which his verse was produced. Beginning, as his friend Coleridge also began, from an emotional impulse given by the sonnets of Bowles, he passes for a while under the dominion of Cowper, but his studies in a widely different poetic school begin very shortly to assert themselves, and to retain control over him for the rest of his life. In 1805, when he wrote his Farewell to Tobacco, he confided to Wordsworth that it was George Wither who had supplied him with the metre and in part with the manner of his verse. And from this time onward the seven-syllabled trochaic couplet of the Shepherd's Hunting becomes his "darling measure," as it had been Wither's. It was in fact one of the commonest lyric measures of the great Elizabethans. Lamb knew it well from Shakspere's "On a day (alack the day)," and Beaumont's Lines on the Tombs, and many a song and epigram of Fletcher and Jonson. But it was exceptionally characteristic of Wither, and from the day that Lamb came under its spell, it is clear that no other

metre came so naturally to him or seemed to fit so well his peculiar gift. His most distinctive verse-such as his lines to Thornton Hunt, or on the death of Thomas Hood's infant child-is henceforth composed in it. And

it denotes, I think, a confident assurance in Lamb of a certain kinship with the Elizabethans, that he felt no misgivings that the same verdict might be passed upon him as upon a despised singer of Queen Anne's day, and that his Muse might also be labelled Namby-Pamby. He knew, as he has so finely said of Ambrose Philips, that it is the poet who makes the metre, not "the metre the poet ;" and he felt that in his degree (however modestly he might estimate that degree) he possessed a faculty that would make itself felt, as in Wither and Fletcher, through the jingle of the short line and the rapidly recurring rhyme. In his verse, therefore, as in the best of his serious prose, I still think that Lamb may be reckoned as among the last of the Elizabethans.

A kind and generous reviewer of my Edition of Elia has taken exception to my use of this phrase, and given reasons for thinking that Lamb was as much indebted to the literary influences of the eighteenth century as to those of the sixteenth and seventeenth. In this opinion I am quite at one with my critic, but I cannot agree with him that Lamb, while having much in common with the last century humorists, ever shewed himself a despiser or disparager of their excellences. The careless depreciation of the eighteenth century, now so common, had hardly begun in Lamb's day, and if it had, he would have been the last to countenance it. Although Lamb had his perversenesses and prejudices as a critic, it was always against individuals and never against classes or schools of writers, still less against the centuries which produced them. He was intimately acquainted with the poets, essayists, and novelists of the last century. Pope's couplets he seems to have had by heart, and was never weary of quoting and applying them; Defoe and Swift, Addison and Steele, were to him dear and familiar friends.

When he declares that "the pen of Yorick and none since his could have drawn entire" the character of his brother, James Elia, or dwells with such loving emphasis on the well-worn “Circulating Library Tom Jones or Vicar of Wakefield, speaking of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight," it is impossible to mistake the writer's own devout affection for these masterpieces of the imagination. In his earliest prose essays he adopts quite naturally the form and manner of the Tatler, when he sits down to address his views of men and things to "Mr. Reflector." But when he is most decidedly the literary successor of the great masters who built the Essay upon Steele's happy venture, he bears upon him no less decidedly the traits of a very different ancestry. And he remains, and seems likely to remain, the last of the moderns whose affinity with the genius of the Elizabethan age enabled him to write, at one moment, in the "soluta oratio"-the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of Jeremy Taylor; and at another with the closely-blended wit and tenderness of the later Euphuists; and in both so to write as one who was "to the manner born." "Hang the age!" exclaimed Lamb one day, when some Editor objected to his style as out of harmony with the taste of the day-"Hang the age! I will write for Antiquity!" And in a sense this remained always his habit. Even in the lightest and hastiest of his effusions some flavour of the antique, in metre or in manner, always clung to him. The attraction he felt for the Acrostic was clearly due to the circumstance that it was a favourite amusement of the Elizabethans, and it was really with a fond reminiscence of the metrical conceits

"That so did take Eliza and our James,"

that he was always ready to enshrine in this manner the names of his young lady friends. I may be allowed to quote in this place a hitherto unprinted copy of album verses, kindly given me by Mrs. Augustus de Morgan,

the daughter of Lamb's old acquaintance, the Rev. William Frend. Mrs. de Morgan-then Miss Sophia Frend-had set up an album, after the pleasant fashion of those days, and had applied to Lamb to write the introductory verses. The following was his response to the invitation, and I copy the verses from the original manuscript :

TO THE BOOK.

Little Casket! Storehouse rare

Of rich conceits to please the Fair!
Happiest he of mortal men-

(I crown him monarch of the pen)—
To whom Sophia deigns to give
The flattering prerogative
To inscribe his name in chief,
On thy first and maiden Leaf.
When thy pages shall be full
With what brighter wits can cull
Of the Tender or Romantic-
Creeping Prose, or Verse Gigantic-
Which thy spaces so shall cram
That the Bee-like Epigram
(Which a two-fold tribute brings,
Honey gives at once, and stings)
Hath not room left wherewithal
To infix its tiny scrawl;

Haply some more youthful swain,
Striving to describe his pain
And the Damsel's ear to seize

With more expressive lays than these,
When he finds his own excluded
And these counterfeits intruded,
While, loitering in the Muses' bower
He overstaid the eleventh hour
Till the Tables filled-shall fret,
Die, or sicken with regret
Or into a shadow pine:

While this triumphant verse of mine

Like to some favoured stranger-guest
Bidden to a good man's Feast

Shall sit-by merit less than Fate-
In the upper Seat in State!

A trifle, evidently thrown off in haste, and more lax in the metre than is usual with him, but yet in cadence, in