Imatges de pàgina
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His smaller poems are mostly of the same medi-
tative and intellectual character. An English
scene is thus described :

Clifton, in vain thy varied scenes invite-
The mossy bank, dim glade, and dizzy height;
The sheep that starting from the tufted thyme,
Untune the distant churches' mellow chime;
As o'er each limb a gentle horror creeps,
And shake above our heads the craggy steeps,
Pleasant I've thought it to pursue the rower,
While light and darkness seize the changeful oar,
The frolic Naiads drawing from below
A net of silver round the black canoe.
Now the last lonely solace must it be

To watch pale evening brood o'er land and sea,
Then join my friends, and let those friends believe
My cheeks are moistened by the dews of eve.

The Maid's Lament is a short lyrical flow of picturesque expression and pathos, resembling the effusions of Barry Cornwall:

I loved him not; and yet, now he is gone,
I feel I am alone.

I checked him while he spoke ; yet could he speak,
Alas! I would not check.

For reasons not to love him once I sought,

And wearied all my thought

To vex myself and him: I now would give
My love could he but live

Who lately lived for me, and when he found
'Twas vain, in holy ground

He hid his face amid the shades of death!
I waste for him my breath,
Who wasted his for me; but mine returns,
And this lone bosom burns
With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep,

And waking me to weep

Tears that had melted his soft heart: for years
Wept he as bitter tears!

Merciful God!' such was his latest prayer,
'These may she never share!'

Quieter is his breath, his breast more cold

Than daisies in the mould,

Where children spell athwart the churchyard gate
His name and life's brief date.

Pray for him, gentle souls, whoe'er ye be,
And oh! pray, too, for me!

We quote one more chaste and graceful fancy :

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this time he contributed largely to the columns of the Examiner weekly journal. Though living the life of a recluse, he was an acute observer of public events, and an eager though inconsistent and impracticable politician. In 1853, he issued a volume of essays and poetical pieces, entitled The Last Fruit off an Old Tree; and in 1858, another volume of the same kind, called Dry Sticks fagoted by Walter Savage Landor. For certain grossly indecent verses and slanders in this work, directed against a lady in Bath, the author underwent the indignity of a trial for defamation, was convicted, and amerced in damages to the amount of £1000. Shortly before this, Mr Landor had published a declaration that of his fortune he had but a small sum left, with which he proposed to endow the widow of any person who should assassinate the Emperor of the French! Thus poor, old, and dishonoured, Mr Landor again left England-a spectacle more pitiable, considering his high intellectual endowments, his early friendships, and his once noble aspirations, than any other calamity recorded in our literary annals. After some months of wretchedness at Fiesole,' says a memoir of Landor in the English Cyclopædia, 'his friends came to his rescue. A plain but comfortable lodging was found for him at Florence, his surviving brothers undertook to supply an annuity of £200, which Robert Browning generously saw duly employed as long as he remained in Florence. And thus one more gleam of sunshine seemed to settle on the "old man eloquent." Though deaf and ailing, he continued to find solace in his pen. He wrote and published occasional verses, and two or three more Imaginary Conversations, in which the old fire burned not dimly; collected some earlier scraps, which appeared as Heroic Idylls, and was still working in his 90th year at new Conversations, when, on the 17th of September 1864, death ended his labours and sorrows.' A biography of Landor by John Forster, was published in 1869.

The writings of Walter Savage Landor have been said to bear the stamp of the old mocking paganism.' A moody egotistic nature, ill at ease with the common things of life, had flourished up in his case into a most portentous crop of crotchets and prejudices, which, regardless of the reprobation of his fellow-men, he issued forth in prodigious confusion, often in language offensive in the last degree to good taste. Eager to contradict whatever is generally received, he never stops to consider how far his own professed opinions may be consistent with each other: hence he contradicts himself almost as often as he does others. Jeffrey, in one of his most brilliant papers, has characterised in happy terms the class of minds to which Mr Landor belongs. 'The work before us,' says he, 'is an edifying example of the spirit of literary Jacobinism-flying at all game, running a-muck at all opinions, and at continual cross-purI poses with its own. This spirit admits neither of equal nor superior, follower nor precursor: "it travels in a road so narrow, where but one goes abreast." It claims a monopoly of sense, wit, and wisdom. All their ambition, all their endeavour is, to seem wiser than the whole world besides. They hate whatever falls short of, whatever goes beyond, their favourite theories. In the one case, they hurry on before to get the start of you; in the other, they suddenly turn back to hinder you, and

defeat themselves. An inordinate, restless, incorrigible self-love is the key to all their actions and opinions, extravagances and meannesses, servility and arrogance. Whatever soothes and pampers this, they applaud; whatever wounds or interferes with it, they utterly and vindictively abhor. A general is with them a hero, if he is unsuccessful or a traitor; if he is a conqueror in the cause of liberty, or a martyr to it, he is a poltroon. Whatever is doubtful, remote, visionary in philosophy, or wild and dangerous in politics, they fasten upon eagerly, "recommending and insisting on nothing less;" reduce the one to demonstration, the other to practice, and they turn their backs upon their own most darling schemes, and leave them in the lurch immediately.' When the reader learns that Mr Landor justifies Tiberius and Nero, speaks of Pitt as a poor creature, and Fox as a charlatan, declares Alfieri to have been the greatest man in Europe, and recommends the Greeks, in their struggles with the Turks, to discard firearms, and return to the use of the bow, he will not deem this general description far from inapplicable in the case of Landor. And yet his Imaginary Conversations and other writings are amongst the most remarkable prose productions of our age, written in pure nervous English, and full of thoughts which fasten themselves on the mind and are joy for ever.' It would require many specimens from these works to make good what is here said for and against their author; we subjoin a few passages affording both an example of his love of paradox, and of the extraordinary beauties of thought and expression by which he leads us captive.

a

Conversation between Lords Chatham and Chesterfield. Chesterfield. It is true, my lord, we have not always been of the same opinion, or, to use a better, truer, and more significant expression, of the same side in politics; yet I never heard a sentence from your lordship which I did not listen to with deep attention. I understand that you have written some pieces of admonition and advice to a young relative; they are mentioned as being truly excellent ; wish I could have profited by them when I was composing mine on a similar occasion.

Chatham. My lord, you certainly would not have done it, even supposing they contained, which I am far from believing, any topics that could have escaped your penetrating view of manners and morals; for your lordship and I set out diversely from the very threshold. Let us, then, rather hope that what we have written, with an equally good intention, may produce its due effect; which indeed, I am afraid, may be almost as doubtful, if we consider how ineffectual were the cares and exhortations, and even the daily example and high renown, of the most zealous and prudent men on the life and conduct of their children and disciples. Let us, however, hope the best rather than fear the worst, and believe that there never was a right thing done or a wise one spoken in vain, although the fruit of them may not spring up in the place designated or at the time expected. Chesterfield. Pray, if I am not taking too great a freedom, give me the outline of your plan.

Chatham. Willingly, my lord; but since a greater man than either of us has laid down a more comprehensive one, containing all I could bring forward, would it not be preferable to consult it? I differ in nothing from Locke, unless it be that I would recommend the lighter as well as the graver part of the ancient classics, and the constant practice of imitating them in early youth. This is no change in the system, and no larger an addition than a woodbine to a sacred grove.

Chesterfield. I do not admire Mr Locke. Chatham. Nor I-he is too simply grand for admiration-I contemplate and revere him. Equally deep and clear, he is both philosophically and grammatically the most elegant of English writers.

Chesterfield. If I expressed by any motion of limb or feature my surprise at this remark, your lordship, I hope, will pardon me a slight and involuntary transgression of my own precept. I must entreat you, before we move a step further in our inquiry, to inform me whether I am really to consider him in style the most elegant of our prose authors.

Chatham. Your lordship is capable of forming an opinion on this point certainly no less correct than mine. Chesterfield. Pray assist me.

Chatham. Education and grammar are surely the two driest of all subjects on which a conversation can turn; yet if the ground is not promiscuously sown, if be covered is not bare, and, above all, if the plants are what ought to be clear is not covered, if what ought to choice ones, we may spend a few moments on it not unpleasantly. It appears then to me, that elegance in prose composition is mainly this: a just admission of topics and of words; neither too many nor too few of either; enough of sweetness in the sound to induce us to enter and sit still; enough of illustration and reflection to change the posture of our minds when they would tire; and enough of sound matter in the complex to repay us for our attendance. I could perhaps be more logical in my definition and more concise; but am I at all erroneous?

Chesterfield. I see not that you are.

find nothing idle or redundant in him. Chatham. My ear is well satisfied with Locke: I

Chesterfield. But in the opinion of you graver men would not some of his principles lead too far?

Chatham. The danger is, that few will be led by them far enough: most who begin with him stop short, and, pretending to find pebbles in their shoes, throw themselves down upon the ground, and complain of their guide.

Chesterfield. What, then, can be the reason why Plato, so much less intelligible, is so much more quoted and applauded?

Chatham. The difficulties we never try are no difficulties to us. Those who are upon the summit of a mountain know in some measure its altitude, by comparing it with all objects around; but those who stand at the bottom, and never mounted it, can compare it with few only, and with those imperfectly. Until a short time ago, I could have conversed more fluently about Plato than I can at present; I had read all the titles to his dialogues, and several scraps of commentary; these I have now forgotten, and am indebted to long attacks of the gout for what I have acquired instead.

Chesterfield. A very severe schoolmaster! I hope he allows a long vacation.

Chatham. Severe he is indeed, and although he sets no example of regularity, he exacts few observances, and teaches many things. Without him I should have had less patience, less learning, less reflection, less leisure; in short, less of everything but of sleep.

Chesterfield. Locke, from a deficiency of fancy, is not likely to attract so many listeners as Plato.

Chatham. And yet occasionally his language is both metaphorical and rich in images. In fact all our great philosophers have also this property in a wonderful degree. Not to speak of the devotional, in whose writings one might expect it, we find it abundantly in Bacon, not sparingly in Hobbes, the next to him in range of inquiry and potency of intellect. And what would you think, my lord, if you discovered in the records of Newton a sentence in the spirit of Shakspeare?

Chesterfield. I should look upon it as upon a wonder, not to say a miracle: Newton, like Barrow, had no feeling or respect for poetry.

Chatham. His words are these: 'I don't know what I may seem to the world; but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of Truth lay all undiscovered before me.'

Chesterfield. Surely nature, who had given him the volumes of her greater mysteries to unseal; who had bent over him and taken his hand, and taught him to decipher the characters of her sacred language; who had lifted up before him her glorious veil, higher than ever yet for mortal, that she might impress her features and her fondness on his heart, threw it back wholly at these words, and gazed upon him with as much admiration as ever he had gazed upon her.

Conversation between William Penn and Lord

Peterborough.

Peterborough. The worst objection I myself could ever find against the theatre is, that I lose in it my original idea of such men as Cæsar and Coriolanus, and, where the loss affects me more deeply, of Juliet and Desdemona. Alexander was a fool to wish for a second world to conquer: but no man is a fool who wishes for the enjoyment of two; the real and the ideal : nor is it anything short of a misfortune, I had almost said of a calamity, to confound them. This is done by the stage: it is likewise done by engravings in books, which have a great effect in weakening the imagination, and are serviceable only to those who have none, and who read negligently and idly. I should be sorry if the most ingenious print in the world were to cover the first impression left on my mind of such characters as Don Quixote and Sancho: yet probably a very indifferent one might do it; for we cannot master our fancies, nor give them at will a greater or less tenacity, a greater or less promptitude in coming and recurring. You Friends are no less adverse to representation by painting than by acting.

Penn. We do not educate our youth to such professions and practices. Thou, I conceive, art unconcerned and disinterested in this matter.

Peterborough. Nearly, but not quite. I am ignorant of the art, and prefer that branch of it which to many seems the lowest; I mean portraiture. I can find flowers in my garden, landscapes in my rides, the works of saints in the Bible, of great statesmen and captains in the historians, and of those who with equal advantages had been the same, in the Newgate Calendar. The best representation of them can only give me a high opinion of the painter's abilities fixed on a point of time. But when I look on a family picture by Vandyke; when I contemplate the elegant and happy father in the midst of his blooming progeny, and the partner of his fortunes and his joy beside him, I am affected very differently, and much more. He who there stands meditating for them some delightful scheme of pleasure or aggrandisement, has bowed his head to calamity, perhaps even to the block. Those roses gathered from the parterre behind, those taper fingers negligently holding them, that hair, the softness of which seems unable to support the riot of its ringlets, are moved away from earth, amid the tears and aching hearts of the very boys and girls who again are looking at me with such unconcern.

Faithfulest recorder of domestic bliss, perpetuator of youth and beauty, vanquisher of time, leading in triumph the Hours and Seasons, the painter here bestows on me the richest treasures of his enchanting art.

Grandiloquent Writing.

Magnificent words, and the pomp and procession of stately sentences, may accompany genius, but are not always nor frequently called out by it. The voice ought not to be perpetually, nor much, elevated in the ethic

and didactic, nor to roll sonorously, as if it issued from a mask in the theatre. The horses in the plain under Troy are not always kicking and neighing; nor is the dust always raised in whirlwinds on the banks of Simois and Scamander; nor are the rampires always in a blaze. Hector has lowered his helmet to the infant of Andromache, and Achilles to the embraces of Briseis. I do not blame the prose-writer who opens his bosom occasionally to a breath of poetry; neither, on the contrary, can I praise the gait of that pedestrian who lifts up his legs as high on a bare heath as in a corn-field.

Milton.

As the needle turns away from the rising sun, from the meridian, from the occidental, from regions of fragrancy and gold and gems, and moves with unerring impulse to the frosts and deserts of the north, so Milton and some few others, in politics, philosophy, and religion, walk through the busy multitude, wave aside the importunate trader, and, after a momentary oscillation from external agency, are found in the twilight and in the storm, pointing with certain index to the pole-star of immutable truth. . . . I have often been amused at thinking in what estimation the greatest of mankind were holden by their contemporaries. Not even the most sagacious and prudent one could discover much of them, or could prognosticate their future course in the infinity of space! Men like ourselves are permitted to stand near, and indeed in the very presence of Milton: what do they see? dark clothes, gray hair, and sightless eyes! Other men have better things: other men, therefore, are nobler! The stars themselves are only bright by distance; go close, and all is earthy. But vapours illuminate these; from the breath and from the countenance of God comes light on worlds higher than they; worlds to which he has given the forms and names of Shakspeare and Milton.*

EDWIN ATHERSTONE.

EDWIN ATHERSTONE (1788-1872) was author of The Last Days of Herculaneum (1821), and The Fall of Nineveh (1828), both poems in blank verse, and remarkable for splendour of diction and copiousness of description. The first is founded on the well-known destruction of the city of Herculaneum by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the first year of the emperor Titus, or the 79th of the Christian era. Mr Atherstone has followed the account of this awful occurrence given by the younger Pliny in his letters to Tacitus, and has drawn some powerful pictures of the desolating fire and its attendant circumstances. There is perhaps too much of terrible and gloomy painting, yet it enchains the attention of the reader, and impresses the imagination with something like dramatic force. Mr Atherstone's second subject is of the same elevated cast: the downfall of an Asiatic empire afforded ample room for his love of strong and magnificent description, and he has availed himself of this license so fully, as to border in many passages on extravagance and bombast. The following passage, descriptive of the

A very few of Mr Landor's aphorisms and remarks may be added: He says of fame: Fame, they tell you, is air; but without air there is no life for any; without fame there is none for the best.' The happy man,' he says, 'is he who distinguishes the boundary between desire and delight, and stands firmly on the higher ground; he who knows that pleasure is not only not possession, but is often to be lost, and always to be endangered by it.' Of light wit or sarcasm, he observes: Quickness is amongst the least of the mind's properties. I would persuade you that banter, pun, and quibble are the properties of light men and shallow capacities; that genuine humour and true wit require a sound and capacious mind, which is always a grave one.'

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splendour of Sardanapalus's state, may be cited as a happy specimen of Mr Atherstone's style:

Banquet in Sardanapalus's Palace.

The moon is clear-the stars are coming forth-
The evening breeze fans pleasantly. Retired
Within his gorgeous hall, Assyria's king
Sits at the banquet, and in love and wine
Revels delighted. On the gilded roof

A thousand golden lamps their lustre fling,
And on the marble walls, and on the throne
Gem-bossed, that high on jasper-steps upraised,
Like to one solid diamond quivering stands,
Sun-splendours flashing round. In woman's garb
The sensual king is clad, and with him sit
A crowd of beauteous concubines. They sing,
And roll the wanton eye, and laugh, and sigh,
And feed his ear with honeyed flatteries,
And laud him as a god.

Like a mountain stream,

Amid the silence of the dewy eve
Heard by the lonely traveller through the vale,
With dream-like murmuring melodious,
In diamond showers a crystal fountain falls.

Sylph-like girls, and blooming boys,
Flower-crowned, and in apparel bright as spring,
Attend upon their bidding. At the sign,
From bands unseen, voluptuous music breathes,
Harp, dulcimer, and, sweetest far of all,
Woman's mellifluous voice.

Through all the city sounds the voice of joy
And tipsy merriment. On the spacious walls,
That, like huge sea-cliffs, gird the city in,
Myriads of wanton feet go to and fro:
Gay garments rustle in the scented breeze,
Crimson, and azure, purple, green, and gold;
Laugh, jest, and passing whisper are heard there;
Timbrel, and lute, and dulcimer, and song;
And many feet that tread the dance are seen,
And arms upflung, and swaying heads plume-crowned.
So is that city steeped in revelry.

...

Then went the king,

Flushed with the wine, and in his pride of power
Glorying; and with his own strong arm upraised
From out its rest the Assyrian banner broad,
Purple and edged with gold; and, standing then
Upon the utmost summit of the mount-
Round, and yet round-for two strong men a task
Sufficient deemed-he waved the splendid flag,
Bright as a meteor streaming.

At that sight
The plain was in a stir: the helms of brass
Were lifted up, and glittering spear-points waved,
And banners shaken, and wide trumpet mouths
Upturned; and myriads of bright-harnessed steeds
Were seen uprearing, shaking their proud heads;
And brazen chariots in a moment sprang,
And clashed together. In a moment more
Up came the monstrous universal shout,
Like a volcano's burst. Up, up to heaven
The multitudinous tempest tore its way,
Rocking the clouds: from all the swarming plain
And from the city rose the mingled cry,
'Long live Sardanapalus, king of kings!
May the king live for ever!' Thrice the flag
The monarch waved; and thrice the shouts arose
Enormous, that the solid walls were shook,
And the firm ground made tremble.

CHARLES LAMB.

CHARLES LAMB, a poet and a delightful essayist, of quaint peculiar humour and fancy, was born in London on the 10th February 1775. His father was in humble circumstances, servant and friend to one of the benchers of the Inner Temple;

but Charles was presented to the school of Christ's Hospital, and from his seventh to his fifteenth year he was an inmate of that ancient and munificent asylum. Lamb was a nervous, timid, and thoughtful boy while others were all fire and play, he stole along with all the self-concentration of a monk.' He would have obtained an exhibition at school, admitting him to college, but these exhibitions were given under the implied if not expressed condition of entering into holy orders, and Lamb had an impediment in his speech, which proved an insuperable obstacle. In 1792 he obtained an appointment in the accountant's office of the East India Company, residing with his parents; and 'on their death,' says Serjeant Talfourd, he felt himself called upon by duty to repay to his sister the solicitude with which she had watched over his infancy, and well, indeed, he performed it. To her, from the age of twenty-one, he devoted his existence, seeking thenceforth no connection which could interfere with her supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and to comfort her.' A sad tragedy was connected with the early history of this devoted pair. There was a taint of hereditary madness in the family; Charles had himself, at the close of the year 1795, been six weeks confined in an asylum at Hoxton, and in September of the following year, Mary Lamb, in a paroxysm of insanity, stabbed her mother to death with a knife snatched from the dinner-table. A verdict of lunacy was returned by the jury who sat on the coroner's inquest, and the unhappy young lady was placed in a private asylum at Islington. Reason was speedily restored. 'My poor dear, dearest sister,'

writes Charles Lamb to his bosom-friend Coleridge, the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty's judgments on our house, is restored to her senses; to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has passed, awful to her mind and impressive, as it must be, to the end of life, but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgment, which, in this early stage, knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy, and the terrible guilt of a mother's murder.' In confinement, however, Mary Lamb continued until the death of her father, an imbecile old man ; and then Charles came to her deliverance. He satisfied all parties who had power to oppose her release, by his solemn engagement that he would take her under his care for life, and he kept his word. 'For her sake he abandoned all thoughts of love and marriage; and with an income of scarcely more than 100 a year, derived from his clerkship, aided for a little while by the old aunt's small annuity, set out on the journey of life at twenty-two years of age, cheerfully, with his beloved companion, endeared to him the more by her strange calamity, and the constant apprehension of the recurrence of the malady which caused it. The malady did again recur at intervals, rendering restraint necessary, but Charles, though at times wayward and prone to habits of excessor rather to over-sociality with a few tried friends --seems never again to have relapsed into aberration of mind. He bore his trials meekly, manfully, and with prudence as well as fortitude. The first compositions of Lamb were in verse,

* Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, by T. N. Talfourd.

Forest Scenes.

To see the sun to bed, and to arise,
Like some hot amourist with glowing eyes,
Bursting the lazy bonds of sleep that bound him,
With all his fires and travelling glories round him.
Sometimes the moon on soft night-clouds to rest,
Like beauty nestling in a young man's breast,
And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep
Admiring silence while these lovers sleep.
Sometimes outstretched, in very idleness,
Nought doing, saying little, thinking less,
To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,
Go eddying round; and small birds how they fare,
When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn,
Filched from the careless Amalthea's horn;
And how the woods berries and worms provide,
Without their pains, when earth has nought beside
To answer their small wants.

To view the graceful deer come tripping by,
Then stop and gaze, then turn, they know not why,
Like bashful younkers in society.

To mark the structure of a plant or tree,
And all fair things of earth, how fair they be.

He

prompted, probably, by the poetry of his friend a genial and befitting field. They are all,' says Coleridge. A warm admiration of the Elizabethan his biographer, Serjeant Talfourd, 'carefully dramatists led him to imitate their style and elaborated; yet never were works written in a manner in a tragedy named John Woodvil, which higher defiance to the conventional pomp of style. was published in 1801, and mercilessly ridiculed A sly hit, a happy pun, a humorous combination, in the Edinburgh Review as a specimen of the lets the light into the intricacies of the subject, rudest state of the drama. There is much that is and supplies the place of ponderous sentences. exquisite both in sentiment and expression in Seeking his materials for the most part in the Lamb's play, but the plot is certainly meagre, and common paths of life-often in the humblest-he the style had then an appearance of affectation. gives an importance to everything, and sheds a The following description of the sports in the grace over all.' In 1825 Lamb was emancipated forest has a truly antique air, like a passage in from the drudgery of his situation as clerk in the Heywood or Shirley: India House, retiring with a handsome pension, which enabled him to enjoy the comforts, and many of the luxuries of life. In a letter to Wordsworth, he thus describes his sensations after his release: I came home for EVER on Tuesday week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three; that is, to have three times as much real time-time that is my own-in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift. Holidays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys, with their conscious fugitiveness, the craving after making the most of them. Now, when all is holiday, there are no holidays. I can sit at home, in rain or shine, without a restless impulse for walking. I am daily steadying, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my own master, as it has been irksome to have had a master.' removed to a cottage near Islington, and in the following summer, went with his faithful sister and companion on a long visit to Enfield, which ultimately led to his giving up his cottage, and becoming a constant resident at that place. There he lived for about five years, delighting his friends with his correspondence and occasional visits to London, displaying his social racy humour and active benevolence. In 1830 he committed to the press a small volume of poems, entitled Album Verses, the gleanings of several years, and he occasionally sent a contribution to some literary periodical. In December 1834, whilst taking his daily walk on the London road, he stumbled against a stone, fell, and slightly injured his face. The accident appeared trifling, but erysipelas in the face came on, and proved fatal on the 27th December 1834. He was buried in the churchyard at Edmonton, amidst the tears and regrets of a circle of warmly attached friends, and his memory was consecrated by a tribute from the muse of Wordsworth. His sister survived till May 20, 1847. A complete edition of Lamb's works was published by his friend Mr Moxon, and his reputation is still on the increase. For this he is mainly indebted to his essays. We cannot class him among the favoured sons of Apollo, though in heart and feeling he might sit with the proudest. The peculiarities of his style were doubtless grafted upon him by his constant study and lifelong admiration of the old English writers. Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Jeremy Taylor, Browne, Fuller, and others of the elder worthies (down to Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle), were his chosen companions. knew all their fine sayings and noble thoughts; and, consulting his own heart after his hard day's plodding at the India House, at his quiet fireside

In 1802 Lamb paid a visit to Coleridge at Keswick, and clambered up to the top of Skiddaw. Notwithstanding his partiality for a London life, he was deeply struck with the solitary grandeur and beauty of the lakes. Fleet Street and the Strand,' | he says, 'are better places to live in for good and all than amidst Skiddaw. Still, I turn back to those great places where I wandered about participating in their greatness. I could spend a year, two, three years among them, but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away? A second dramatic attempt was made by Lamb in 1804. This was a farce entitled Mr H., which was accepted by the proprietors of Drury Lane Theatre, and acted for one night; but so indifferently received, that it was never brought forward afterwards. Lamb saw that the case was hopeless, and consoled his friends with a century of puns for the wreck of his dramatic hopes.' In 1807 he published a series of tales founded on the plays of Shakspeare, which he had written in conjunction with his sister, and in the following year appeared his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakspeare, a work evincing a thorough appreciation of the spirit of the old dramatists, and a fine critical taste in analysing their genius. Some of his poetical pieces were also composed about this time; but in these efforts Lamb barely indicated his powers, which were not fully displayed till the publication of his essays signed Elia, originally printed in the London Magazine. In these his curious reading, nice observation, and poetical conceptions found

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