4. THE GREAT LIGHTS OF THE SOCIAL WORLD

EXTINGUISHED.

(FROM THE "FUNERAL SERMON FOR THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES," PUBLISHED IN 1817.)

THE first particular which strikes the attention in this solemn visitation, is the rank of the illustrious personage, who appears to have been placed on the pinnacle of society for the express purpose of rendering her fall the more conspicuous, and of convincing as many as are susceptible of conviction, that "man at his best estate is altogether vanity." The Deity himself adorned the victim with his own hands, accumulating upon her all the decorations and ornaments' best adapted to render her the object of universal admiration. He permitted her to touch whatever this sublunary scene presents that is most attractive and alluring,' but to grasp nothing; and after conducting her to an eminence whence she could survey all the glories of empire as her destined possession, closed her eyes in death. That such an event should affect us in a manner very superior to similar calamities which occur in private life is agreeable to the order of nature, and the will of God; nor is the profound sensation it has produced to be considered as the symbol of courtly adulation. The catastrophe itself, it is true, apart from its peculiar circumstances, is not a rare occurrence. There is no sorrow which imagination can picture, no sign of anguish which nature agonised and oppressed can exhibit, no accent of woe, but what is already familiar to the ear of fallen, afflicted humanity; and the roll which Ezekiel beheld, flying through the heavens, inscribed within and without with " sorrow, lamentation, and woe," enters, sooner or later, into every house, and discharges its contents in every bosom. But in the private departments of life, the distressing incidents which occur are confined to a narrow circle. The hope of an individual is crushed, the happi

(1) Decorations, ornaments; attractive, alluring. These pairs of words conduce, perhaps, more to show than use, and, like all superfluous decoration, so far defeat their own object. Ornaments immediately after adorned, rather hurts the ear, and though decorations and alluring may refer more strictly to artificial, and ornaments and attractive to natural, adornments, yet the distinction is rather too fine for ordinary notice.

(2) Closed her eyes in death. The exquisite cadence here demands attention. To appreciate fully this and other finely wrought passages, they should be read aloud. The voice should aid in interpreting the writer.

(3) In a manner very superior, is not good. "That such an event should affect us much more deeply than," &c., would, perhaps, be an improvement.

ness of a family is destroyed; but the social system is unimpaired, and its movements experience no impediment, and sustain no sensible injury. The arrow passes through the air, which soon closes upon it, and all is tranquil. But when the great lights and ornaments of the world, placed aloft to conduct its inferior movements, are extinguished, such an event resembles the apocalyptic vial' poured into that element (i.e., into the air) which changes its whole temperature, and is the presage of fearful commotions, of thunders, lightnings, and tempests.

CHARLES LAMB.2

1. ATTACHMENT TO LONDON SCENES AND LIFE.3 (FROM "THE LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB," WRITTEN IN 1801.)

To Mr. Wordsworth.

I OUGHT before this to have replied to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't now care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers

(1) Observe the mysterious grandeur of this sentence, and the striking rhetorical effect of the introduction of the "apocalyptic vial." The aptness of Hall's scriptural quotations is remarkable, as seen in several parts of these extracts, and the degree to which scriptural facts and doctrines stimulated and fed his imagination is also very noticeable.

(2) About the striking originality of Lamb's writings there can be no doubt, and considered as the productions of a man who was not a professed littérateur at all, but the greater part of whose life was spent on sitting on a desk stool, until the wood of it, as he said, "entered into his soul," they are very remarkable works. His style cannot be described by any one epithet, it is emphatically "the man."

(3) It is well known that Johnson had the same tastes exactly as those here so piquantly displayed by Lamb. He once said to Boswell, "The happiness of London (i.e. of living in London) is not to be conceived of but by those who have been in it." Another time he said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life;" and he, like Lamb, regarded Fleet Street and the Strand as a sort of modified, perhaps rather inferior kind of Elysium, which it was a rare privilege to be permitted to enjoy. Modern notions differ somewhat from these.

can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle round about Covent Garden: the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles, life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimesLondon, itself a pantomime and a masquerade-all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me with a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into nightwalks 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 ?

My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books) to groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a bookcase which has followed me about like a faithful dog (only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved,-old chairs, old tables, streets, squares where I have sunned myself, my old school (the Blue Coat School), these are my mistresses,-have I not enough without your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy the mind; and, at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of nature, as they have been confidently called; so ever fresh and green and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in the great city. Give my kindest love, and my sister's, to D. and yourself. And a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite.' Thank you for liking my play.

(1) In allusion to Wordsworth's poem, "The Pet Lamb."

C. L.

2. ON THE POPULAR FALLACY THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB.

(FROM ESSAYS OF ELIA," PUBLISHED IN 1833.)

WE could never quite understand the philosophy of this arrangement, or the wisdom of our ancestors in sending us for instruction to these woolly bedfellows. A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but to shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can. Man found out long sixes. Hail candle-light! without disparagement to sun or moon, the kindliest luminary of the three, if we may not rather style thee their radiant deputymild viceroy of the moon! We love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep by candle-light. They are everybody's sun and moon. This is our peculiar and household planet. Wanting it, what savage unsocial nights must our ancestors have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fastnesses (castles)! They must have lain about and grumbled at one another in the dark. What repartees could have passed, when you must have felt about for a smile, and handled a neighbour's cheek to be sure that he understood it? This accounts for the seriousness of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlanterned nights. Jokes came in with candles. We wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had any. How did they sup? What a melange of chance carving they must have made of it! here one had got a leg of a goat, when he wanted a horse's shoulder-there another had dipt his scooped palm in a kid-skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's milk. There is neither good eating nor drinking in fresco 2 (the dark). Who, even in these civilised times, has never experienced this, when at some economic table he has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the flavour till the lights came? The senses absolutely give

(1) Jokes, &c. What a world of fun is suggested by this simple remark, dropped out, as it were, casually from the pen of the good-natured writer! The arch suppressio veri, as if nothing could have been written by daylight, the things he wishes you not to see, but yet winks at your seeing, as well as those he shows you, all form part of the entertainment.

(2) Fresco, Ital., corresponding to Fr. frais, and our fresh, used as a substantive meaning cool air, thereby associating duskiness or gloom, as above. This, however, is not an Italian sense of the word, but has been added to it in England, by the not unnatural connection in our country between "open air" and "cloudy sky."

and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal in the dark, or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga? Take away the candle from the smoking man; by the glimmering of the left ashes he knows that he is still smoking, but he knows it only by an inference; till the restored light coming in aid of the olfactories, reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then how he redoubles his puffs, how he burnishes (brightens up)! There is absolutely no such thing as reading, but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours; but it was labour thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teazing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper the writer digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is reported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are abstracted works

"Things that were born, when none but the still night,
And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes."

Marry, daylight-daylight might furnish the images, the crude material; but for the fine shapings, the true turning and filing (as mine author hath it), they must be content to hold their inspiration of the candle. The mild internal light, that reveals them, like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sunshine.2 Night and silence call out the starry fancies. Milton's "Morning Hymn on Paradise," we would hold a good wager, was penned at midnight, and Taylor's richer description of a sunrise smells decidedly of the taper. Even ourself in these our humbler lucubrations,4 tune our best measured cadences (prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors," or the wild sweep of winds at

(1) Reciprocally. This word is necessary here to the sense. A. may give and B. may take, these being their respective functions; but if reciprocally, then each both gives and takes in turn.

(2) An admirable conceit. The delicate graces of composition are extinguished by sunshine, and can only show themselves by candle-light! "Night and silence call out the starry fancies." How exquisitely the writer, conscious as he must have been, of almost unlimited capacity of working this vein-the Celtic attribute (to use Matthew Arnold's illustration) of his nature-subordinates it to the imperative claims of taste and art.

(3) See the passage referred to, p. 336.

(4) Lucubrations, a happily chosen word, fr. Lat. lucubrare, to study by lamplight.