tion.

its worst mischief by overwhelming my reason. I have recovered, but feel a stupor that makes me indifferent to the hopes and fears of this life. I sometimes wish to introduce a religious turn of mind, but habits are strong things, and my religious fervors are confined, alas! to some fleeting moments of occasional solitary devoA correspondence, opening with you, has roused me a little from my lethargy, and made me conscious of existence. Indulge me in it; I will not be very troublesome. At some future time I will amuse you with an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turns my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy; for while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad. All now seems to me vapid, comparatively so."

In another of his letters at this period, he incloses some lines to Cowper, congratulating the poet on his recovery to sanity. It is pleasant to see how readily he sympathizes with one who had so much in common with himself. He foresees that Coleridge will think the line,

"Cowper, of England's bards the wisest and the best,'

hardly just. The " inspired charity boy" was probably too full of dim aspirations to relish the homely beauties of the Task. It was fortunate for Lamb that his admiration for his lofty friend did not mislead his judgment. His letters at this time are generally made up of acute observations on books and poetry.

But the great blow which crippled him for life came upon him next year, and sadly interrupted his literary studies. It is briefly told in the following extract of a letter to Coleridge:

My poor, dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she must be removed to an hospital. God has preserved me my senses; I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris, of the Blue-coat School, has been very kind to us, and we have no other friend; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of

How perfectly sincere and resolute is this-"Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with." For those who are disposed to nurse their afflictions, there is a volume of reproof in these few sentences.

The following extracts from other letters show the state of mind in which he continued to endure his grief :

"God be praised, Coleridge, wonderful as it is to tell, I have never once been otherwise than collected and calm; even on the dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference-a tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was a religious principle that most sup ported me? I allow much to other favorable circumstances. I felt that I had something

else to do than to regret.”

"On the very second day, (I date from the day of horrors,) as is usual in such cases, there were a matter of twenty people, I do think, supping in our room; they prevailed with me to eat with them, (for to eat I never refused.) They were all making merry in the room! Some had come from friendship, some from busy curiosity, and some from interest; I was going to partake with them, when my recollection came that my poor dead mother was lying in the next room-the very next room; a mother who, through life, wished nothing but her children's welfare. Indignation, the rage of grief, something like remorse, rushed upon my mind. In an agony of emotion I found my way mechanically to the adjoining room, and fell on my knees by the side of her coffin, asking forgiveness of Heaven, and sometimes of her, for forgetting her so soon. Tranquillity returned, and it was the only violent emotion that mastered me, and I think it did me good."

The same letter contains a circumstantial statement of the condition of his affairs, how he hoped to dispose of his father, aunt, and sister, and their slender means of

support for all which we must refer the reader to the volume. We only quote to show the spirit in which Lamb faced his dark present and hopeless future, and the effect his sufferings wrought upon him. Whenever he mentions his sister he writes as if she made a part of himself:

"I hope that I shall through life never have

less recollection, nor a fainter impression, of what has happened than I have now. It is not a light thing, nor meant by the Almighty to be received lightly. I must be serious, circumspect, and deeply religious through life; and by such means may both of us escape madness in future, if it so please the Almighty!"

Happily for Lamb, what he then understood by being "deeply religious," he was spared mental strength to outlive. It was the first trait in his character to be deeply excitable, almost miraculously so, compared with other men, by emotions, and no less keen and quicksighted in his perceptions. Whatever took hold of him, suddenly shot into a blaze and burnt out, leaving only a charred relic. All griefs and passions sublimed at once, through his over-warm affections, into his intellect, and became purified of all their grosser parts. They did not merely touch him; they pierced through and through. Thus his love drove him to madness; and in all his life after we hear no more of the passion, except when he shows he understood it perfectly. So with his religious feelings. It is easy to see that had he continued in the frame of mind indicated above, he must have gone the way of poor Cowper. But he doubtless perceived in this tendency to extremes of feeling something morbid—a taint of insanity, against which he had peculiar reason to be guarded. This and the society of such friends as few men ever had, or were more worthy to have, together with a most iron determination, and the pressure of necessity, enabled him to keep himself in check. But the check, though it held, seemed insecure enough. It just held him from bursting away into the region of tears. He lived on the verge where laughing and crying come together, and as he could not cry, he laughed. His portrait at the beginning of this volume harmonizes with this fundamental quality

of him no less than do his letters.

One more extract will show how near even his strong mind came to breaking down under the deadly sentimentalism that often usurps the place of a simple Christian faith. Whether Coleridge, at this time of his life, (when Lamb was in doubt whether to direct his letter "Mr." or "Rev.," and so left off both,) was just the adviser he should have had may be questioned:

"To you I owe much, under God. In my brief acquaintance with you in London, your conversations won me to the better cause, and rescued me from the polluting spirit of the world. Imight have been a worthless character without you; as it is, I do possess a certain improvable portion of devotional feelings, though when I view myself in the light of divine truth, and not according to the common measure of human judgment, I am altogether corrupt and sinful. This is no cant. I am very sincere.

These last afflictions, Coleridge, have failed to soften and bend my will. They found me unprepared. My former calamities produced in me a spirit of humility and a spirit of prayer. I thought they had sufficiently disciplined me; but the event ought to humble me; if God's judgments now fail to take away from trials ought I not to expect? me the heart of stone, what more grievous I have been

very querulous, impatient under the rod-full of little jealousies and heart-burnings. I had well nigh quarrelled with Charles Lloyd-and for no other reason, I believe, than that the good creature did all he could to make me happy. The truth is, I thought he tried to force my mind from its natural and proper bent; he continually wished me to be from home; he was drawing me from the consideration of my poor dear Mary's situation, rather than assisting me to gain a proper view of it with religious conselations."

"I am recovering, God be praised for it, a healthiness of mind, something like calmness --but I want more religion-I am jealous of human helps and leaning places. I rejoice in your good fortunes. May God at last settle you! You have had many and painful trials; humanly speaking, they are going to end; but we should rather pray that discipline may attend us through the whole of our lives. A careless and a dissolute spirit has advanced upon me with large strides-pray God that my present afflictions may be sanctified to me!"

But he was now enlarging the circle of his friends, and this spirit was not destined to utterly overwhelm him. His strong sense breaks away from it with impatient bounds, and his cheerful temper leads him into gaieties that make him more modest. In such passages as the above we have, instead of true piety, an extreme consciousness of self, but very little consciousness of sin. In coming from this to a healthy condition, Lamb's perception of the ludicrous carries him to the verge of irreverence; yet we know he remained a believer all his life, and did not, like some of his learned friends, "box the compass" of religious faith till he had no faith left.

We can see how the following should be quite as consistent with true Christianity as the extract just given :

"When we die, you and I must part; the sheep, you know, take the right hand, and the goats the left. Stripped of its allegory, you must know, the sheep are I, and the Apostles and the Martyrs, and the Popes, and Bishop Taylor and Bishop Horsley, and Coleridge, &c. &c.; the goats are the Atheists and the Adulterers, and dumb dogs, and Godwin and M. g, and that Thyest æan crew-yaw! how my saintship sickens at the idea! "You shall have my play and the Falstaff letters in a day or two. I will write to Lloyd by this day's post.

"God bless you, Manning. Take my trifling as trifling--and believe me seriously and deeply your well-wisher and friend."

The truth was, Lamb was unable to entertain the thought of a heaven which would not include all his friends; and the reconciling his religious belief with his affections was probably what made him so silent with respect to the former.

But we have followed the letters till we have now reached the period of Lamb's life, when his genius was beginning to expand into full flower. Elia lives again in the rest of the volume, and utters such a world of good things that we will forget, since he desires it, and because we cannot help it, all his troubles and struggles, in the exhilaration of his boundless mirth. First of all we must confess to a warm interest in the worthy George Dyer, who, in these letters and those of the former collection, is made to live.

TO MR. SOUTHEY.

"I showed my Witch,' and 'Dying Lover,' to Dyer last night, but George could not comprehend how that could be poetry which did not go upon ten feet, as George and his predecessors had taught it to do; so George read me some lectures on the distinguishing qualities of the Ode, the Epigram, and the Epic, and went home to illustrate his doctrine, by correcting a proof sheet of his own Lyrics. George writes odes where the rhymes, like fashionable man and wife, keep a comfortable distance of six or eight lines apart, and calls that observing the laws of verse.' George tells you, before he recites, that you must listen with great attention or you'll miss the rhymes. I did so, and found them pretty exact. George, speaking of the dead Ossian, exclaimeth, Dark are the poet's eyes.' I humbly represented to him that

6

his own eyes were dark, and many a living bard's besides, and suggested to him, ' Clos'd are the poet's eyes.' But that would not do. I found there was an antithesis between the

darkness of his eyes and the splendor of his genius; and I acquiesced."

TO MR. MANNING.

"To come to the point then, and hasten into the middle of things; have you a copy of your Algebra to give away? I do not ask it for myself; I have too much reverence for the Black Arts, ever to approach thy circle, illustrious Trismegist! But that worthy man, and excellent poet, George Dyer, made me a visit yesternight, on purpose to borrow one, supposing, rationally enough, I must say, that you had made me a present of one before this; the omission of which I take to have proceeded only from negligence; but it is a fault. I could lend him no assistance. You must know he is just now diverted from the pursuit of the BELL LETTERS by a paradox, which he has heard his friend (that learned mathematician) maintain, that the negative quantities of mathematicians were mere nuge, things scarcely in rerum naturâ, and smacking too much of mystery for gentlemen of Mr. Friend's clear Unitarian capacity. However, the dispute once set agoing, has seized violently on George's pericranicks; and it is necessary for his health that he should speedily come to a resolution of his doubts. He goes about teasing his friends with his new mathematics; he even frantically talks of purchasing Manning's Algebra, which shows him far gone, for, to my knowledge, he has not been master of seven shillings a good time. George's pockets and -'s brains are two things in nature which do not abhor a vacuum.

Now, if you could step in, on this trembling suspense of his reason, and he should find on Saturday morning, lying for him at the Porter's Lodge, Clifford's Inn-his safest address-Manning's Algebra, with a neat manuscription in the Llank leaf, running thus, FROM THE AUTHOR !' it might save his wits and restore the unhappy author to those studies of poetry and criticism, which are at present suspended, to the infinite regret of the whole literary world. N. B.-Dirty covers, smeared leaves, and dog's ears, will be rather a recommendation than otherwise. N. B. He must have the book as soon as possible, or nothing can withhold him from madly purchasing the book on tick. . . . Then shall we see him sweetly restored to the chair of Longinus-to dictate in smooth and modest phrase the laws of verse; to prove that Theocritus first introduced the Pastoral, and Virgil and Pope brought it to its perfection; that Gray and Mason (who always hunt in couples in George's brain) have shown a great deal of poetical fire in their lyric poetry; that Aristo