and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuffled than decisively stept; and a lady once remarked he never could fix which side of the garden-walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both; a heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much-suffering man. . . . I still recollect his 'object' and 'subject' . . . and how he sang and snuffled them into om-m-ject,' and 'sum-m-ject' with a kind of solemn shake or quaver as he rolled along." And once more: "He began anywhere; you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation; instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards an answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way— but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the flame of some radiant new game on this hand or on that into new courses, and ever into new."

There is a story, very likely untrue, but very amusing and exaggeratedly characteristic of Coleridge's length of discourse. Lamb, the story runs, once met him in a crowded street, was caught by the button, and drawn into a doorway. Thereupon the Sage of Highgate, still holding to the button, began a dissertation, and, after his manner, closed his eyes "as he rolled along." Lamb was interested enough, but his business was pressing, so he cut off the button and escaped. Hours later, it is said, he returned to find Coleridge still holding the button, still in impassioned utterance.

Not long before his death, Coleridge was blessed by a hitherto unknown serenity. But it was not for a great while. On July 20,1834, he fell ill, and for a few days suffered much. At the last, however, he was quiet and happy. He died on July 25, and was buried beneath Highgate Church. "His great spirit haunts me," wrote Wordsworth years later. "Never saw I his likeness,

nor probably the world can see again ;" and under the stress of more immediate grief he paid this tribute to his friends Coleridge and Lamb:

"Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source;

"The rapt One, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

"Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother
From sunshine to the sunless land."

CHARLES LAMB

"I WAS born," says Lamb, "and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple." These words tell a great part of Lamb's story. No other man except Dr. Johnson gives one such intimate, easy acquaintance with the innermost places of the "city," from Fenchurch Street to Temple Bar. And from no other life do we get so delightful and familiar a glimpse of the literary people of his day-the day of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, and Keats. But the quality which Lamb possesses above all others is the power to give, in his letters, real life and substance to the lesser writers of his day; with him we meet that whole society of strange and fascinating men and see them again moving about the streets of London - such men as Hazlitt, Landor, and Leigh Hunt; Lloyd, the misanthropic poet; H. C. Robinson, the indefatigable diarist; Godwin, the bankrupt philosopher; Tom Hood, "that half Hogarth," as Lamb called him; Haydon, the florid artist; Taylor and Hessey, proprietors of the London Magazine and friends of genius; Moxon, the publisher; the Cowden Clarkes, of Enfield, friends of Keats; Fanny Kelly and Charles Kemble, from the stage; and Talfourd, lawyer, dramatist, and first biographer of Lamb. And how many others, forgotten but for Charles Lamb, come to life at his name! Barton, the Quaker poet; Thomas Manning, the first Englishman to enter Llassa, Thibet; Valentine Le Grice, friend of boyhood days and brilliant punster; James Kenney,

the dramatist; George Burnett, Pantisocrat, who died in a work-house; Thomas Barnes, editor of The Times; the Burneys, incomparable at whist; and poor George Dyer, kindly, half-mad poet, hugging "his intolerable flannel vestment closer about his poetic loins "—a fellow infinitely picturesque. Of most of these and of many more Lamb was the intimate friend; by every one he was beloved.

It is this lovable quality in Lamb, in fact, which is his most striking characteristic. "Val" Le Grice noticed and every one repeats it because it is so true — that men rarely spoke of Lamb except as "Charles Lamb," and Le Grice found therein a subtle touch of affection. To no other writer can " gentle" be more aptly applied.

The quaint humor of Lamb, best seen in his Elia essays, has become proverbial. But many, remembering only jests, think of him far too often as a mere wag, a professional wit. Such persons of course miss the real cause of his fame; they fail to grasp the far deeper humor which plays along the borderland of pathos, the humor which really distinguishes a man in a century. Few men have made more puns, few men have had a more instinctive relish for "excellent fooling; " but Lamb's most genuine humor has a touch of sadness in it; Elia is "full," as Barry Cornwall put it, " of a witty melancholy;" and those who knew Lamb said he was at his best when serious. "No one," says Hazlitt, “ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things, in half a dozen sentences." A volume of anecdotes, however amusing, cannot hide the pathos of his life.

Charles Lamb was born in Crown Office Row in the Temple, London, on February 10, 1775. His father,

John Lamb, was in the service of one Samuel Salt, a "bencher" of the Inner Temple. Of this parent (under the name of Lovel) Charles Lamb gives an account in one of his Elia essays: "He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and 'would strike.' . . . L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble . possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry-next to Swift and Prior, moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage boards, and such small cabinet toys, to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the merriest quips and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire." Charles Lamb's mother was an Elizabeth Field, of Blakesware, in Hertfordshire; and it is from this connection that Lamb's interest in that county arose, whence his essays on "Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire," "Mackery End," and all the delightful reminiscence of "Grandmother Field." Of the six children only two besides Charles survived infancy: John and Mary, twelve and ten years his seniors. John went early into the South Sea House and practically separated from his family. Of Mary more presently.

Charles was a nervous, imaginative boy. "The nighttime solitude," he says, "and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life so far as memory serves in things so long ago without an assurance, which realized its own