The Union with Ireland. On the general policy of this measure [the Act of Union of Great Britain with Ireland] we have never ventured an opinion: though the means which have been adopted to carry it into effect have received from us all the abhorrence which we could express! (For no safe expression could convey all which we felt and still feel.) The vindictive turbulence of a wild and barbarous race, brutalised by the oppression of centuries, was to be coerced; and no better expedient suggested itself than to permit, or at best to connive at, a system of retaliation! To give an example of horrors, under the pretext that they were only following one; by the vices of a government, to occasion the vices of popular rage, and by retaliations, to inflame that rage into madness; to iron and strait-waistcoat the whole country by military law, and then gravely entreat the inhabitants to exercise their free will and unbiassed judgments; these were the measures intended to smooth and prepare the way to a great national union, founded in assent and cemented by affection! However wise and benignant the plan might have been in itself, it certainly becomes questionable whether it may not be unsafe and impolitic at present, in consequence of the agitation produced by the mad and sanguinary precurrences. This consideration has doubtless influenced many in their opposition to it; while others have found their national pride attacked and stabbed in the vitals by the idea that their country was to lose its individual being and character, and without heart or lungs of its own, to be fed, like a wen, by the circuitous circulation of a nobler body. Yet still, when we contemplate the materials of which the Orange Confederacy is composed, we experience some degree of surprise at the strength and obstinacy of their opposition. A virtuous opposition it cannot be ! We know that faction too well. With them public depravity is not softened down even by the hopeful vice of hypocrisy :general sympathy in corruption supersedes the necessity of a vizard. Jobbers, place-hunters, unconditional hirelings, whatever their immediate conduct may be, they will gain no credit from honest men for their motives. Desperate state-harpies, they are now opening against ministers the ravenous mouths, that had been even now devouring ministerial bounties; and presume to fight for their country with talons impeded by their country's spoils, polluted by their country's blood! Timeo Danaos vel dona ferentes. These men recall to our mind the fable of the magician, who, having ordered his ministering imps to destroy the infernal abodes, was himself torn in pieces by them, and carried off in a whirlwind. (Contributed 15th January 1800 to the Morning Post; reprinted in Essays on His Own Times, 1850.) Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit. There are truths so self-evident, or so immediately and palpably deduced from those that are, or are acknowledged for such, that they are at once intelligible to all men who possess the common advantages of the social state; although by sophistry, by evil habits, by the neglect, false persuasions, and impostures of an anti-Christian priesthood joined in one conspiracy with the violence of tyrannical governors, the understandings of men may become so darkened and their consciences so lethargic that a necessity will arise for the republication of these truths, and this too with a voice of loud alarm and impassioned warning. Such were the doctrines proclaimed by the first Christians to the Pagan world; such were the lightnings flashed by Wickliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, Latimer, and others across the Papal darkness; and such in our own times the agitating truths with which Thomas Clarkson and his excellent confederates, the Quakers, fought and conquered the legalised banditti of men-stealers, the numerous and powerful perpetrators and advocates of rapine, murder, and (of blacker guilt than either) slavery. Truths of this kind being indispensable to man, considered as a moral being, are above all expedience, all accidental consequences; for as sure as God is holy, and man immortal, there can be no evil so great as the ignorance or disregard of them. It is the very madness of mock prudence to oppose the removal of a poisoned dish on account of the pleasant sauces or nutritious viands which would be lost with it! . . . The sole condition, therefore, imposed on us by the law of conscience in these cases is, that we employ no unworthy and heterogeneous means to realise the necessary end, -that we entrust the event wholly to the full and adequate promulgation of the truth, and to those generous affections which the constitution of our moral nature has linked to the full perception of it. Yet evil may, nay it will, be occasioned. Weak men may take offence, and wicked men avail themselves of it; though we must not attribute to the promulgation, or to the truth promulgated, all the evil of which wicked men -predetermined, like the wolf in the fable, to create some occasion-may choose to make it the pretext. But that there ever was, or ever can be, a preponderance of evil, I defy either the historian to instance or the philosopher to prove. 'Let it fly away, all that chaff of light faith that can fly off at any breath of temptation; the cleaner will the true grain be stored up in the granary of the Lord,' we are entitled to say with Tertullian; and to exclaim with heroic Luther, Scandal and offence! Talk not to me of scandal and offence. Need breaks through stone walls, and recks not of scandal. It is my duty to spare weak consciences as far as it may be done without hazard of my soul. Where not, I must take counsel for my soul, though half or the whole world should be scandalised thereby.' Luther felt and preached and wrote and acted as beseemed a Luther to feel and utter and act. The truths which had been outraged he re-proclaimed in the spirit of outraged truth, at the behest of his conscience and in the service of the God of truth. He did his duty, come good, come evil! and made no question on which side the preponderance would be. In the one scale there was gold, and impressed thereon the image and superscription of the universal Sovereign. In all the wide and ever-widening commerce of mind with mind throughout the world, it is treason to refuse it. Can this have a counter weight? The other scale indeed might have seemed full up to the very balance-yard; but of what worth and substance were its contents? ... of spring, and sow their fields in confident faith of the ripening summer and the rewarding harvest-tide! But the loss is confined to the unenlightened and the prejudiced-say rather, to the weak and prejudiced of a single generation. The prejudices of one age are condemned even by the prejudiced of the succeeding ages; for endless are the modes of folly, and the fool joins with the wise in passing sentence on all modes but his own. Who cried out with greater horror against the murderers of the Prophets than those who likewise cried out, Crucify him Crucify him!-Prophet and Saviour, and Lord of life, Crucify him! Crucify him!-The truth-haters of every future generation will call the truth-haters of the preceding age by their true names: for even these the stream of time carries onward. In fine, truth considered in itself, and in the effects natural to it, may be conceived as a gentle spring or water-source, warm from the genial earth, and breathing up into the snow-drift that is piled over and around its outlet. It turns the obstacle into its own form and character, and as it makes its way increases its stream. And should it be arrested in its course by a chilling season, it suffers delay, not loss, and waits only for a change in the wind to awaken and again roll onwards. (From The Friend, No. 4, Sept. 7, 1803-slightly altered in 1818; in Essay' viii. of The Friend as published in 1850.) Ariel and Caliban. If a doubt could ever be entertained whether Shakespeare was a great poet, acting upon laws arising out of his own nature, and not without law, as has sometimes been idly asserted, that doubt must be removed by the character of Ariel. The very first words uttered by this being introduce the spirit, not as an angel, above man; not a gnome, or a fiend, below man; but while the poet gives hin the faculties and the advantages of reason, he divests him of all mortal character, not positively, it is true, but negatively. In air he lives, from air he derives his being, in air he acts; and all his colours and properties seem to have been obtained from the rainbow and the skies. There is nothing about Ariel that cannot be conceived to exist either at sunrise or at sunset: hence all that belongs to Ariel belongs to the delight the mind is capable of receiving from the most lovely external appearances. His answers to Prospero are directly to the question, and nothing beyond; or where he expatiates, which is not unfrequently, it is to himself and upon his own delights, or upon the unnatural situation in which he is placed, though under a kindly power and to good ends. Is there anything in nature from which Shakespeare caught the idea of this delicate and delightful being, with such child-like simplicity, yet with such preternatural powers? He is neither born of heaven, nor of earth; but, as it were, between both, like a Mayblossom kept suspended in air by the fanning breeze, which prevents it from falling to the ground, and only finally, and by compulsion, touching earth. This reluctance of the Sylph to be under the command even of Prospero is kept up through the whole play, and in the exercise of his admirable judgment Shakespeare has availed himself of it, in order to give Ariel an interest in the event, looking forward to that moment when he was to gain his last and only reward—simple and eternal liberty. Another instance of admirable judgment and excellent preparation is to be found in the creature contrasted with Ariel-Caliban; who is described in such a manner by Prospero as to lead us to expect the appearance of a foul, unnatural monster. He is not seen at once: his voice is heard; this is the preparation: he was too offensive to be seen first in all his deformity, and in nature we do not receive so much disgust from sound as from sight. After we have heard Caliban's voice he does not enter, until Ariel has entered like a waternymph. All the strength of contrast is thus acquired without any of the shock of abruptness, or of that unpleasant sensation which we experience when the object presented is in any way hateful to our vision. : The character of Caliban is wonderfully conceived: he is a sort of creature of the earth, as Ariel is a sort of creature of the air. He partakes of the qualities of the brute, but is distinguished from brutes in two ways: —by having mere understanding without moral reason; and by not possessing the instincts which pertain to absolute animals. Still, Caliban is in some respects a noble being the poet has raised him far above contempt: he is a man in the sense of the imagination : all the images he uses are drawn from nature, and are highly poetical; they fit in with the images of Ariel. Caliban gives us images from the earth, Ariel images from the air. Caliban talks of the difficulty of finding fresh water, of the situation of morasses, and of other circumstances which even brute instinct, without reason, could comprehend. No mean figure is employed, no mean passion displayed, beyond animal passion and repugnance to command. (From Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare.) Hamlet. The seeming inconsistencies in the conduct and character of Hamlet have long exercised the conjectural ingenuity of critics; and, as we are always loth to suppose that the cause of defective apprehension is in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or lusus of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakespeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakespeare's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have some connection with the common fundamental laws of our nature may be assumed from the fact that Hamlet has been the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered. In order to understand him, it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds. Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect ;— for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself, Shakespeare, thus mutilated or diseased, under given circumstances. In Hamlet he seems to have wished to exemplify the moral necessity of a due balance between our attention to the objects of our senses and our meditation on the workings of our minds—an equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds. In Hamlet this balance is disturbed his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakespeare places in circumstances under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment :-Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of Macbeth; the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity. (From Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare.) The Defects of Wordsworth's Poetry. The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity-(at all events striking and original)— to a style not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that style which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species: first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. ... The second defect I can generalise with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to establish the proba bility of a statement in real life, where nothing is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. ... Third, an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils results. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathise. In this class I comprise occasional pro lixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression of thought. Fifth and last, thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal; for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. by the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of Omphale. This, (From the Biographia Literaria, Chap. ix.) The Excellences of Wordsworth's Poetry. First, an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. The second characteristic excellence of Mr Wordsworth's works is a correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments, won, not from books, but from the poet's own meditative observation. They are fresh, and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element, 'Makes audible a linked lay of truth, Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay, Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!' Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one which is not rendered valuable by some just and original reflection. Third, the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs: a frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens. This beauty, and as eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire. Fourth, the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its objects, but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. Fifth, a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate (Spectator, haud particeps), but of a contemplator from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature, no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remain legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. Here the man and the poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. Such as he is: so he writes. (From the Biographia Literaria, Chap. ix.) The Inspiration of the Scriptures. 'Tell me first, why it [plenary inspiration] should not be received! Why should I not believe the Scriptures throughout dictated, in word and thought, by an infallible Intelligence?' and I admit the fairness of the retort; and eagerly and earnestly do I answer: For every reason that makes me prize and revere these Scriptures ;-prize them, love them, revere them, beyond all other books! Why should I not? Because the Doctrine in question petrifies at once the whole body of Holy Writ with all its harmonies and symmetrical gradations,-the flexile and the rigid, -the supporting hard and the clothing soft, the blood which is the life,—the intelligencing nerves, and the rudely woven, but soft and springy, cellular substance, in which all are embedded lightly bound together. This breathing organism, this glorious panharmonicon, which I had seen stand on its feet as a man, and with a man's voice given to it, the Doctrine in question turns at once into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but one voice, and the same ;and no man uttered it, and never in a human heart was it conceived. Why should I not? Because the Doctrine evacuates of all sense and efficacy the sure and constant tradition, that all the several books bound up together in our precious family Bibles were composed in different and widely distant ages, under the greatest diversity of circumstances, and degrees of light and information, and yet that the composers, whether as uttering or as recording what was uttered and what was done, were all actuated by a pure and holy Spirit, one and the same . . . one Spirit working diversely, now awakening strength, and now glorifying itself in weakness, now giving power and direction to knowledge, and now taking away the sting from error ! . Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord; curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof—sang Deborah. Was it that she called to mind any personal wrongs-rapine or insult that she or the house of Lapidoth had received from Jabin or Sisera? No; she had dwelt under her palm tree in the depth of the mountain. But she was a mother in Israel; and with a mother's heart, and with the vehemency of a mother's and a patriot's love, she had shot the light of love from her eyes, and poured the blessings of love from her lips, on the people that had jeoparded their lives unto the death against the oppressors ; and the bitterness, awakened and borne aloft by the same love, she precipitated in curses on the selfish and coward recreants who came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord, against the mighty. As long as I have the image of Deborah before my eyes, and while I throw myself back into the age, country, circumstances, of this Hebrew Bonduca in the not yet tamed chaos of the spiritual creation;-as long as I contemplate the impassioned, high-souled, heroic woman in all the prominence and individuality of will and character,—I feel as if I were among the first ferments of the great affections-the proplastic waves of the microcosmic chaos, swelling up against-and yet towards-the outspread wings of the dove that lies brooding on the troubled waters. So long all is well,-all replete with instruction and example. In the fierce and inordinate I am made to know and be grateful for the clearer and purer radiance which shines on a Christian's paths, neither blunted by the preparatory veil, nor crimsoned in its struggle through the all-enwrapping mists of the world's ignorance: whilst in the selfoblivion of these heroes of the Old Testament, their elevation above all low and individual interests,—above all, in the entire and vehement devotion of their total being to the service of their divine Master, I find a lesson of humility, a ground of humiliation, and a shaming, yet rousing, example of faith and fealty. But let me once be persuaded that all these heart-awakening utterances of human hearts-of men of like faculties and passions with myself, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, triumphing— are but as a Divina Commedia of a superhuman—O bear with me, if I say-Ventriloquist ;-that the royal Harper, to whom I have so often submitted myself as a many-stringed instrument for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse, while every several nerve of emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh-and-blood of our common humanity, responded to the touch, --that this sweet Psalmist of Israel was himself as mere an instrument as his harp, an automaton poet, mourner, and supplicant ;-all is gone,-all sympathy, at least, and all example. I listen in awe and fear, but likewise in perplexity and confusion of spirit. (From Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, 1840.) Taste, an Ethical Quality. Modern poetry is characterised by the poets' anxiety to be always striking. There is the same march in the Greek and Latin poets. Claudian, who had powers to have been anything-observe in him this anxious, craving vanity! Every line, nay, every word, stops, looks full in your face, and asks and begs for praise! As in a Chinese painting, there are no distances, no perspective, but all is in the foreground; and this is nothing but vanity. I am pleased to think that, when a mere stripling, I had formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling. (From Anima Poeta, 1895, p. 165.) The Night is at Hand. (1828.) The sweet prattle of the chimes-counsellors pleading in the court of Love-then the clock, the solemn sentence of the mighty judge-long pause between each pregnant, inappellable word, too deeply weighed to be reversed in the High-Justice-Court of Time and Fate. A more richly solemn sound than this eleven o'clock at Antwerp I never heard-dead enough to be opaque as central gold, yet clear enough to be the mountain air. (From Anima Poeta, 1895, p. 307.) For a brief but accurate and exhaustive biography, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Narrative, by J. Dykes Campbell (a reprint of the Introductory Memoir to the Poetical Works, 1893; Macmillan, 1894); and for a list of authorities on the life of S. T. Coleridge, vide ibid., page [ix.]. For an attempt to systematise Coleridge's philosophical teaching, see Spiritual Philosophy, by T. H. Green (1865). The question of Coleridge's indebtedness to German metaphysics is ably and temperately discussed by the late Professor Hort in Cambridge Essays (1856), and by Principal Shairp in Studies in Poetry and Philosophy (1868). For an unfavourable estimate of his originality and independence as a thinker, see New Essays towards a Critical Method, by J. M. Robertson (1897, pp. 154-161). For a general estimate of Coleridge as thinker and poet, see Mill's Dissertations (1859, vol i.); Coleridge, by H. D. Traill (Men of Letters' series, 1884); Brandl's S. T. Coleridge and the English Romantic School (1887); and 'Coleridge' in Pater's Appreciations (1890). See also the essay in Mr Swinburne's edition of Christabel (1869), and the introductions to editions or selections of the poems by Mr Stopford Brooke (1895), Dr Garnett (1897), and Mr Andrew Lang (1898). ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE. Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849), eldest son of the preceding, was born at Bristol and educated by the Rev. John Dawes at Ambleside and at Merton College, Oxford. He obtained a secondclass in the final schools, was elected probationary Fellow of Oriel, but at the end of the first year was rejected on the score of intemperance (1820). He spent the next two years in London writing for the London Magazine, &c., attempted school-keeping at Ambleside, retired to Grasmere, and in 1831 removed to Leeds, where he wrote a series of lives of the Worthies of Yorkshire and Lancashire, republished (1833) as Biographia Borealis. The first of two projected volumes of Poems was also published at Leeds (1833). The rest of his life was spent at Grasmere and (1840-49) at the Nab Cottage, Rydal. His last work was a Life of Massinger prefixed to an edition of Massinger and Ford. His days were spent in fitful study, lonely reverie, and wanderings over the Lake Country. His intemperance notwithstanding, 'Li'le Hartley' (he was very short) was admired and loved by all who knew him. Untimely old,' he retained to the last the warmth and the simplicity of boyhood. His Poems (e.g. Leonard and Susan) and a dramatic fragment, Prometheus, were published with a Memoir by his brother Derwent (1800-83; first Principal of St Mark's College, Chelsea) in 1851 (2 vols.). Essays and Marginalia (2 vols.) were also published in 1851. His poetry is never without a certain tender grace, but it is in the sonnet that he reached eminence. The following is one of two famous sonnets on 'Prayer': There is an awful quiet in the air, And the sad earth, with moist imploring eye, And nought is seen beneath the pendent blue, So have I dream'd !-Oh, may the dream be true!- Sara Coleridge (1802-52), sister of the preceding, was brought up in Southey's house. In 1822 she translated Dobrizhöffer's Latin Account of the Abipones, and in 1825 the 'Loyal Servant's' Chevalier Bayard. She married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1829). Her original works were Pretty Lessons for Good Children (1834) and Phantasmion, a fairy-tale (1837); but her intellectual powers are best shown in her essay on Rationalism appended to her father's Aids to Reflection in 1843, and her 'Introduction' to the Biographia Literaria (1847). Her Memoirs and Letters were published by her daughter in 1873. Charles Lamb was born on the 10th of February 1775, in Crown Office Row, in the Temple, London, where his father was clerk and confidential servant to Samuel Salt, a wealthy bencher of the Inner Temple. To John Lamb and his wife there were born in the Temple seven children, of whom three only survived their early childhood-Charles, his sister Mary, ten years older than himself, and a yet older brother, John. Charles received his first schooling at a humble academy out of Fetter Lane, but at seven years of age he obtained through his father's patron a presentation to Christ's Hospital, where he remained for the next seven years. His school experiences and the friendships he formed, notably that with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, three years his senior, are familiar to all readers of the Essays of Elia. At the age of fourteen he left school with a fair amount of scholarship and an intensified love of reading. He might have stayed and become a 'Grecian,' and so proceeded to the university. But the exhibitions were given on the understanding that the holder was to take holy orders, and Lamb's unsurmountable stammer barred him from that profession. Lamb left Christ's Hospital in November 1789. At that time his brother John held a post in the South Sea House, of which Salt was a deputygovernor, and Charles was soon presented through the kind offices of this friend to a humble situation in the same company; but early in 1792 he obtained promotion in the shape of a clerkship in the accountant's office of the India House, where he remained for more than thirty years. In this same year Salt died. The occupation of his old clerk and servant was at an end; and with his legacies from his employer, Charles's salary, and whatever Mary Lamb could earn by needlework, in which she was proficient, the family of four (for the brother John was living a comfortable bachelor life elsewhere) retired to humble lodgings. In 1796 we find them in Little Queen Street, Holborn, and it was there that the terrible disaster occurred, destined to mould the career and character of Charles Lamb for the whole of his future life. There was a strain of inherited insanity in the children. The father, who had married late in life, was growing old and childish; the mother was an invalid, and the stress and anxiety of the many duties devolving on Mary Lamb began to tell upon her reason. In an attack of mania, induced by a slight altercation with a little apprentice girl at work in the room, Mary Lamb snatched up a knife from the dinner-table, and stabbed her mother, who had interposed in the girl's behalf. Charles was himself present, and wrested the knife from his sister's hand; and with him the whole direction of affairs for the sister's future remain.ed. After the inquest Mary would in the natural course have been transferred |