THE

WORKS

OF

CHARLES LA M B.

TO WHICH ARE PREFIXED,

HIS LETTERS,

AND

A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE

BY

THOMAS NOON TALFOURD,

ONE OF HIS EXECUTORS.

IN TWO VOLUME 8.

VOL. II.

NEW-YORK:

HARPER & BROTHERS, 82 CLIFF-ST.

EHREND CAMPUS

C.

217198

PR4860

A2 1845

V2

ΤΟ

MARTIN CHARLES BURNEY, ESQ.

FORGIVE ME, BURNEY, if to thee these late
And hasty products of a critic pen,

Thyself no common judge of books and men,
In feeling of thy worth I dedicate.

My verse was offer'd to an older friend;

The humbler prose has fallen to thy share:
Nor could I miss the occasion to declare,
What, spoken in thy presence, must offend-
That, set aside some few caprices wild,

Those humorous clouds that flit o'er brightest days,
In all my threadings of this worldly maze,
(And I have watch'd thee almost from a child,)
Free from self-seeking, envy, low design,

I have not found a whiter soul than thine.

PREFACE.

BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA.

THIS poor gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to nature.

To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if there ever was much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.

I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well founded. Crude they are, I grant you-a sort of unlicked, incondite things-villanously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his if they had been other than such; and better it is that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; as in a former essay (to save many instances) -where, under the first person, (his favourite figure,) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connexionsin direct opposition to his own early history. If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another-making himself many, or reducing many unto himself-then is the skilful novelist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all; who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly?

My late friend was in many respects a singular char