ears shrinking perchance from discord- of the old poem of 'The Nuthrowne Mayde.’ comes the grave naturalist, Linnæus per- For example, at the dénouement of the ballad chance, or Buffon, and gravely sets down the Prior makes Henry rant out to his devoted hare as a timid animal. Why Achilles, or EmmaBully Dawson, would have declined the preposterous combat.

"In fact, how light of digestion we feel after a hare! How tender its processes after swallowing! What chyle it promotes! How ethereal! as if its living celerity were a type of its nimble coursing through the animal juices. The notice might be longer. It is intended less as a Natural History of the Hare, than a cursory thanks to the country 'good Unknown.' The hare has many friends, but none sincerer than

"ELIA."

A short time only before Lamb's fatal illness, he yielded to my urgent importunity, and met a small party of his friends at dinner at my house, where we had provided for him some of the few articles of food which now

In me behold the potent Edgar's heir,
Illustrious Earl; him terrible in war.
Let Loire confess, for she has felt his sword,
And trembling fled before the British lord.'

And so on for a dozen couplets, heroic, as
they are called. And then Mr. Lamb made
us mark the modest simplicity with which
the noble youth discloses himself to his
mistress in the old poem :—

'Now, understand,

To Westmoreland,
Which is my heritage,
(in a parenthesis, as it were,)
I will you bring,

And with a ring,
By way of marriage,
I will you take,
And lady make,
As shortly as I can.
So have you won
An Earle's sɔn,
And not a banish'd man.'

« How he loved these old rhymes, and with what justice!"

In December Mr. Lamb received a letter from a gentleman, a stranger to him,Mr. Childs, of Bungay, whose copy of "Elia" had been sent on an oriental voyage, and who, in order to replace it, applied to Mr. Lamb. The following is his reply :

seemed to hit his fancy, and among them the hare, which had supplanted pig in his just esteem, with the hope of exciting his very delicate appetite. We were not disappointed; he ate with a relish not usual with him of late years, and passed the evening in his happiest mood. Among the four or five who met him on this occasion, the last on which I saw him in health, were his old friends Mr. Barron Field, Mr. Procter, and Mr. Forster, the author of the "Lives of Eminent English Statesmen," a friend of comparatively recent date, but one with whom Lamb found himself as much at home as if he had known him for years. Mr. Field, in a short but excellent memoir of Lamb, in the "Annual Biography and Obituary" of 1836, has "Dear Sir,-The volume which you seem brought this evening vividly to recollection; to want, is not to be had for love or money. and I have a melancholy satisfaction in quoting a passage from it as he has recorded it. After justly eulogising Lamb's sense of "The Virtue of Suppression in Writing," Mr. Field proceeds :—

TO MR. CHILDS.

"Monday. Church-street, EDMONTON, (not Enfield, as you erroneously direct yours).

I with difficulty procured a copy for myself. Yours is gone to enlighten the tawny Hindoos. What a supreme felicity to the author (only he is no traveller) on the Ganges or Hydaspes (Indian streams) to meet at smutty Gentoo ready to burst with laughing "We remember, at the very last supper at the tale of Bo-Bo! for doubtless it hath we ate with him, he quoted a passage from been translated into all the dialects of the Prior's Henry and Emma,' illustrative of East. I grieve the less, that Europe should this discipline; and yet he said that he loved want it. I cannot gather from your letter, Prior as much as any man, but that his whether you are aware that a second series 'Henry and Emma' was a vapid paraphrase of the Essays is published by Moxon, in

N

Dover-street, Piccadilly, called 'The Last the following Saturday his remains were laid Essays of Elia,' and, I am told, is not inferior | in a deep grave in Edmonton churchyard, to the former. Shall I order a copy for you, and will you accept it. Shall I lend you, at the same time, my sole copy of the former volume (Oh! return it) for a month or two? In return, you shall favour me with the loan of one of those Norfolk-bred grunters that you laud so highly; I promise not to keep it above a day. What a funny name Bungay is ! I never dreamt of a correspondent thence. I used to think of it as some Utopian town, or borough in Gotham land. I now believe in its existence, as part of merry England.

tion, make you "doubt truth to be a liar."
He would touch the inmost pulse of pro-
found affection, and then break off in some
jest, which would seem profane "to ears
polite," but carry as profound a meaning to
those who had the right key, as his most
pathetic suggestions; and where he loved
and doted most, he would vent the over-
flowing of his feelings in words that looked
like rudeness. He touches on this strange
resource of love in his "Farewell to Tobacco,"
in a passage which may explain some startling
freedoms with those he himself loved most
dearly.

"Irony all, and feign'd abuse,
Such as perplext lovers use,
At a need, when in despair,
To paint forth the fairest fair;
Or in part but to express
That exceeding comeliness
Which their fancies doth so strike,
They borrow language of dislike;
And, instead of dearest Miss,'
Jewel, honey, sweetheart, bliss,
And those forms of old admiring,
Call her cockatrice and siren,
Basilisk, and all that's evil,
Witch, hyena, mermaid, devil,
Ethiop, wench, and blackamoor,
Monkey, ape, and twenty more;
Friendly traitress, loving foe,-
Not that she is truly so,

But no other way they know
A contentment to express,
Borders so upon excess,
That they do not rightly wot
Whether it be pain or not."

trait in some recollections of Lamb, with which she has furnished me, relates, that once when she was speaking to Miss Lamb of Charles, and in her earnestness Miss Lamb had laid her hand kindly on the eulogist's shoulder, he came up hastily and interrupted them, saying, Come, come, we must not talk sentimentally," and took up the conversation in his gayest strain.

Many of Lamb's witty and curious sayings have been repeated since his death, which are worthy to be held in undying remembrance; but they give no idea of the general tenor of his conversation, which was far more singular and delightful in the traits, which could never be recalled, than in the epigrammatic turns which it is possible to quote. It was fretted into perpetual eddies of verbal felicity and happy thought, with little tranquil intervals reflecting images of exceeding elegance and grace. He sometimes poured out puns in startling succession; sometimes curiously contrived a train of sentences to introduce the catastrophe of a pun, which, in that case, was often startling from its own demerit. At Mr. Cary's one day, he introduced and kept up an elaborate dissertation on the various uses and abuses of the word nice; and when its variations were exhausted, showed what he had been driving at by exclaiming, "Well! now we have held a Council of Nice." "A pun," said he in a Thus, in the very excess of affection to his letter to Coleridge, in which he eulogised sister, whom he loved above all else on earth, the Odes and Addresses of his friends Hood he would sometimes address to her some and Reynolds, "is a thing of too much words of seeming reproach, yet so tinged consequence to be thrown in as a makewith a humorous irony that none but an weight. You shall read one of the Addresses entire stranger could mistake his drift. His twice over and miss the puns, and it shall be anxiety for her health, even in his most quite as good, or better, than when you convivial moments, was unceasing. If, in discover them. A pun is a noble thing per company, he perceived she looked languid, he se. O never bring it in as an accessory! A would repeatedly ask her, "Mary, does your pun is a sole digest of reflection (vide my head ache?" "Don't you feel unwell?" and 'Aids' to that awaking from a savage state); would be satisfied by none of her gentle it is entire; it fills the mind; it is as perfect assurances, that his fears were groundless. as a sonnet; better. It limps ashamed in He was always afraid of her sensibilities the train and retinue of humour. It knows being too deeply engaged, and if in her it should have an establishment of its own. presence any painful accident or history was The one, for instance, I made the other day; discussed, he would turn the conversation I forget which it was." Indeed, Lamb's with some desperate joke. Miss Beetham, the author of the "Lay of Marie," which Lamb esteemed one of the most graceful and truly feminine works in a literature rich in female genius, who has reminded me of the

choicest puns and humorous expressions could not be recollected. They were born of the evanescent feeling, and died with it; " one moment bright, then gone for ever." The shocks of pleasurable surprise were so

rapid in succession, and the thoughts suggested -saw Lamb smoking the strongest prepaso new, that one destroyed the other, and left ration of the weed, puffing out smoke like only the sense of delight behind. Frequently some furious Enchanter, he gently laid down as I had the happiness of seeing him during his pipe, and asked him, how he had acquired twenty years, I can add nothing from my his power of smoking at such a rate? Lamb own store of recollection to those which replied, "I toiled after it, sir, as some men have been collected by others, and those toil after virtue." Partly to shun the I will abstain from repeating, so vapid temptations of society, and partly to preserve would be their effect when printed com- his sister's health, he fled from London, pared to that which they produced when, stammered out, they gave to the moment its victory.

where his pleasures and his heart were, and buried himself in the solitude of the country, to him always dismal. He would even deny It cannot be denied or concealed that himself the gratification of meeting WordsLamb's excellences, moral and intellectual, worth or Southey, or use it very sparingly were blended with a single frailty; so inti- during their visits to London, in order that mately associating itself with all that was the accompaniments of the table might not most charming in the one, and sweetest in entice him to excess. And if sometimes, the other, that, even if it were right to with- after miles of solitary communing with his draw it wholly from notice, it would be own sad thoughts, the village inn did invite impossible without it to do justice to his him to quaff a glass of sparkling ale; and if virtues. The eagerness with which he would when his retreat was lighted up with the quaff exciting liquors, from an early period presence of some old friend, he was unable to of life, proved that to a physical peculiarity refrain from the small portion which was too of constitution was to be ascribed, in the first much for his feeble frame, let not the stoutinstance, the strength of the temptation with limbed and the happy exult over the consewhich he was assailed. This kind of corporeal quence! Drinking with him, except so far need; the struggles of deep thought to over- as it cooled a feverish thirst, was not a come the bashfulness and the impediment of sensual, but an intellectual pleasure; it speech which obstructed its utterance; the lighted up his fading fancy, enriched his dull, heavy, irksome labours which hung heavy on his mornings, and dried up his spirits; and still more, the sorrows which had environed him, and which prompted him to snatch a fearful joy; and the unbounded craving after sympathy with human feelings, conspired to disarm his power of resisting when the means of indulgence were actually before him. Great exaggerations have been prevalent on this subject, countenanced, no doubt, by the "Confessions" which, in the prodigality of his kindness, he contributed to his friend's collection of essays and authorities against the use of spirituous liquors; for, although he had rarely the power to overcome the temptation when presented, he made heroic sacrifices in flight. His final abandonment of tobacco, after many ineffectual attempts, was one of these-a princely sacrifice. He had loved smoking, "not wisely, but too well," for he had been content to use the coarsest varieties of the " great plant." When Dr. Pair,-who took only the finest tobacco, used to half fill his pipe with salt, and smoked with a philosophic calmness,

humour, and impelled the struggling thought or beautiful image into day; and perhaps by requiring for him some portion of that allowance which he extended to all human frailties, endeared him the more to those who so often received, and were delighted to bestow it.

Lamb's indulgence to the failings of others could hardly indeed be termed allowance; the name of charity is too cold to suit it. He did not merely love his friends in spite of their errors, but he loved them errors and all; so near to him was everything human. He numbered among his associates, men of all varieties of opinion-philosophical, religious, and political-and found something to like, not only in the men themselves, but in themselves as associated with their theories and their schemes. In the high and calm, but devious speculations of Godwin; in the fierce hatreds of Hazlitt; in the gentle and glorious mysticism of Coleridge; in the sturdy opposition of Thelwall to the government ; in Leigh Hunt's softened and fancy-streaked patriotism; in the gallant Toryism of Stod

dart; he found traits which made the indi- his school-days or the joyous associate of his viduals more dear to him. When Leigh convivial hours, and he did not even make Hunt was imprisoned in Cold Bath Fields penitence or reform a condition of his regard. for a libel, Lamb was one of his most constant Perhaps he had less sympathy with phivisitors—and when Thelwall was striving to lanthropic schemers for the improvement bring the "Champion" into notice, Lamb of the world than with any other class of was ready to assist him with his pen, and to men; but of these he numbered two of the fancy himself, for the time, a Jacobin.* In greatest, Clarkson the destroyer of the this large intellectual tolerance, he resembled slave-trade, and Basil Montague the conProfessor Wilson, who, notwithstanding his stant opponent of the judicial infliction of own decided opinions, has a compass of mind death; and the labours of neither have been large enough to embrace all others which in vain ! have noble alliances within its range. But To those who were not intimately acquainted not only to opposite opinions, and devious with Lamb, the strong disinclination to conhabits of thought, was Lamb indulgent; he template another state of being, which he discovered "the soul of goodness in things sometimes expressed in his serious conversaevil" so vividly, that the surrounding evil tion, and which he has solemnly confessed in disappeared from his mental vision. Nothing his "New Year's Eve," might cast a doubt -no discovery of error or of crime-could divorce his sympathy from a man who had once engaged it. He saw in the spendthrift, the outcast, only the innocent companion of

on feelings which were essentially pious. The same peculiarity of nature which attached him to the narrow and crowded streets, in preference to the mountain and the glenwhich made him loth to quit even painful

The following little poem-quite out of Lamb's circumstances and unpleasant or ill-timed usual style was written for that journal.

THE THREE GRAVES.

Close by the ever-burning brimstone beds,
Where Bedloe, Oates, and Judas hide their heads,
I saw great Satan like a sexton stand,
With his intolerable spade in hand,
Digging three graves. Of coffin-shape they were,
For those who, coffinless, must enter there,

With unblest rites. The shrouds were of that cloth
Which Clotho weaved in her blackest wrath;

The dismal tint oppress'd the eye, that dwelt

Upon it long, like darkness to be felt.

The pillows to these baleful beds were toads,
Large, living, livid, melancholy loads,

Whose softness shock'd. Worms of all monstrous size
Crawl'd round; and one upcoil'd, which never dies,
A doleful bell, inculcating despair,

Was always ringing in the heavy air.
And all around the detestable pit

Strange headless ghosts and quarter'd forms did fit;
Rivers of blood from living traitors spilt,

By treachery stung from poverty to guilt.

I ask'd the fiend, for whom those rites were meant?
"These graves," quoth he, "when life's brief oil is
spent,

When the dark night comes, and they're sinking bed-
wards,

I mean for Castles, Oliver, and Edwards."

+ Lamb only once met that remarkable person,-who has probably more points of resemblance to him than any other living poet, -and was quite charmed with him. They walked out from Enfield together, and strolled happily a long summer's day, not omitting,

however, a call for a refreshing draught. Lamb called for a pot of ale or porter-half of which would have been his own usual allowance; and was delighted to hear the Professor, on the appearance of the foaming tankard, say reproachfully to the waiter, "And one for me!"

company; the desire to seize and grasp all that was nearest, bound him to earth, and prompted his sympathies to revolve within a narrow circle. Yet in that very power of adhesion to outward things, might be discerned the strength of a spirit destined to live beyond them. Within the contracted sphere of his habits and desires, he detected the subtlest essences of Christian kindliness, shed over it a light from heaven, and peopled it with divine fancies and

"Thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality."

Although he numbered among his associates freethinkers and sceptics, he had a great dislike to any profane handling of sacred subjects, and always discouraged polemical discussion. One evening, when Irving and Coleridge were in company, and a young gentleman had spoken slightingly of religion, Lamb remained silent; but when the party broke up, he said to the youth who had thus annoyed his guests, "Pray, did you come here in a hat, sir, or in a turban?"

The range of Lamb's reading was varied, but yet peculiar. He rejoiced in all old English authors, but cared little for the moderns, except one or two; and those whom he loved as authors because they were his