willed passion of young Shelley and his Mary, defying law and every obstacle-romance and poetry if you please -how are they all a million times below the merest shadows on the pavement of that brother and sister !—— "Lamb, the frolic and the gentle," Elia, the whimsical, the tender, whose every tear suggests a smile, and every laugh a tear. Never were there two people more dearly consecrated to humanity by love and misery, and sacred patience and pain. The very affection with which we regard them is a reason why we can say but little about them. Their lives are not to be described, nor are the essays of Elia to be quoted. Every worthy reader has his little niche for them, separate and sacred. Talfourd, in his Final Memorials, gives us a touching inscription written by Coleridge against the title of a poem dedicated in his youth to those dear friends. It is the poem in which, from his "lime tree bower"—where he was confined by an accident while they were visiting him at Nether Stowey—he follows in imagination their breezy walk "on springy heath, along the hill-top edge," or threading the echoing dale among the woods, then emerging forth beneath wide heaven to see the brightness of the champaign lying before them, fields and meadows, and steepled villages, and the "smooth clear blue" of the sea "Yes, they wander on In gladness all; and thou, methinks, most glad, In the great city pent, winning thy way With sad yet patient soul through evil and pain, Against this, long long after, Coleridge, in his shipwrecked and lonely shelter at Highgate, wrote the following inscription: THE LITERARY HISTORY OF Ch. and Mary Lamb, 1797. 37 years. This little record, like a stone upon a grav a grave, a memorial and pledge of something -expresses the very soul of veneration, pity, ness which their names call forth-a pity whi remorse for why should the rest of us pass so much more easily than they? Lamb, the friend of Coleridge, and through the poetical brotherhood, began his own litera a gentle strain of poetry, among which are s well known by quotation, which have real mel as meaning. Such is "Hester," an address to which embodies that warm human incredulity which is one of the most strange yet most u sentiments, the resistance of the immortal in most heartrending evidence of fact. She has be dead, yet no force can make him think of h grave together; "My sprightly neighbour, gone before To that unknown and silent shore ! Some summer morning: "When from thy cheerful eyes a ray He P But verse was not Lamb's method. tragedy, "John Woodvil," which was massacr Edinburgh Review-not without reason: his frie selves all deprecating the unlucky poem, and no one striking a blow for it. Later he tried a farce-" Mr. H——,” which was accepted by the manager at Drury Lane, and acted, but failed. Mary is a little cut at the ill success of Mr. H——,” Lamb writes; "I know you'll be sorry-but never mind. We are determined not to be cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then we must thrive. A smoking man must write smoky farces." "We are pretty stout about it," he says to another correspondent; "have had plenty of condoling friends: but after all we had rather it succeeded." These little failures, however though the shock of the hisses ("Hang the word, I write it like kisses; how different!" he writes) must have had no small effect upon Lamb's nervous, sensitive, and love-loving nature—were of small importance in his life. As soon as Elia stepped out into the world (in the pages of the London Magazine) his gentle immortality was secure. Never was there more delightful playing with life and all its mysteries and depths, more soft and laughing banter, more tender thoughtfulness. Especially when he spoke of himself, and his own restrained and subdued life, was Lamb exquisite; the "sort of double singleness" in which he and his sister lived, their harmony, their little differences, their diversified tastes, their mutual recollections-nothing could be more delicately set down; and when he rises into the fun of the roast pig, or expatiates with humorous tenderness upon "the innocent blacknesses," the poor little sweeps for whose hard lot no alleviation of machinery in the shape of long-jointed brushes had yet been thought of-or falls into the vein of delicate sentiment in which he discourses with his "dream children," there is no more delightful companion. Tragedy and farce alike might refuse him; but here was a path of his own not obtrusive, inviting but little the fancy of the multitude, where he was supremer De THE LITERARY HISTORY OF Quincey talks of him as one of those authors found to rest much of the interest which sur upon their essential non-popularity. But we sent that Elia is unpopular. His book has delicate aroma which suits the most cultivated, thing of native fragrance which appeals to th as well. I There are many impatient readers who are of this kind of literature at all; who, indeed be called readers at all, but on the one side mines, out of which they mean to draw sub vantage or on the other like the easy audi Eastern story-teller-romance-devourers, se excitement, if not in act and deed, in na history, in something that thrills and tingles with the keen vicissitudes of a rapid tale. reader, wherever found, can fail to acknowledg of Elia. He is, in the best sense of the wo writes for writing's sake-not because he ha tell us, but because it is a pleasure to him to m with us, to jest and sigh and trifle, to play some trick upon us, to transport us in a moment, tingly, from laughter into weeping, to play u strings of our hearts. Writing of this descrip to be considered by the ignorant the easiest of of literary composition. But it is not so; i the most difficult of all, rejecting compulsor scribed subjects, and following its own swee nothing else. Something of Addison is in La thing of the Browns and Burtons in whom he He wanted no subject to discourse upon, tolerate any bondage. He liked to wander would, to talk as he liked. He had his dai another description-folios to write, as he say library of them, which nobody read. And literary work represented to him, not a life's toil, but the most exquisite diversion, a pleasant communion with minds. unknown, and equally pleasant agitation and agreeable excitement of possible controversy and discussion with the friends visible who would meet, and note, and criticise. It gave expression to all the higher aims of his life, and to the gentle genius not great enough for action, which yet was true genius in its way. He was, beside such amount of classic lore as came from his early-abandoned studies, a scholar in English: for there seems no reason why the word should not be applied to the student of our own wealthy literature as well as to any other. His Specimens of English Dramatic Poets was one of the first efforts made to revive the knowledge-sometimes, as contemporary critics declared, not much to edification in a moral point of view, but of great importance in that of poetry of the lesser lights of the Shakspearian age; and shows the finest critical perception, as well as the most delicate poetical enthusiasm. Lamb was, in short, a man of native culture, differing as much from the Hazlitts and Holcrofts as night from day, though all his intellectual training had been accomplished at Christ's Hospital before he was fifteen. But there are men who are born with this fine quality-educazione, as the Italians say-an accomplished mind, as our grandfathers called it-whatever their external means of training may be. Nothing beyond this happened to Lamb in his happymelancholy life. He retired from his office after more than thirty years' service, on a pension, and thought himself blessed; but afterwards wearied, as so many men do, for the wholesome harsh routine which had given a backbone to his life. And all through this long course of years the vicissitudes of his domestic existence continued the same. Periodically Mary "fell ill." That "Mary sends her love from home," that "Mary is well," is the |