Baffled, beaten, and disappointed, they fall back. An occasional intoxication which hurt no one but himself, which blinded him to no duty, which led him into no extravagance, which in no way interfered with the soundness of his judgment, the charity of his heart, or the independence of his life, and a shower of bad puns-behold the faults of Elia! His virtues-noble, manly, gentle-are strewn over every page of his life, and may be read in every letter he ever wrote.

Charles Lamb was born in Crown Office Row, in the Temple, on the 18th of February, 1775. His father, John Lamb, was a barrister's clerk. The lots of barristers' clerks vary as widely as the habits of their employers. Some make fortunes for themselves; others only tea for their masters. Their success in life is not wholly dependent upon their own exertions. Rewarded as they are by a kind of parasitical fee growing out of those paid to the barrister they serve, they wax or wane-grow fat or lean along with their chief. Theirs is thus a double dependence. From a herd of the newly-called, how is the fledgling clerk to single out a Scott, a Palmer, or a Cairns? John Lamb was clerk

to Mr. Samuel Salt, who, albeit a Bencher of his Inn, does not seem ever to have enjoyed, if that be the right word, a practice in the Courts. You may search the Law Reports of his period in vain for his name. The duties *of John Lamb were rather those of a private secretary, or confidential upper servant, than of a barrister's clerk, properly so called. He collected his master's dividends-a more gentlemanlike occupation than dunning attornies for fees, marked but not paid. Salt was a man of ample fortune and of kind heart. He is immortalised in the Essay on "Some of the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple." It was he who procured for Charles a nomination to Christ's Hospital, whither the boy proceeded on the 9th of October, 1782, and where he remained until November, 1789, when he left school for good, being then only in his fifteenth year. At Christ's Lamb received a purely classical education of the old-fashioned type. "In everything that relates to science," so he writes with obvious truthfulness, "I am a whole encyclopædia behind the rest of the world. I should scarcely have cut a figure amongst the franklins or country gentlemen in King

John's days. I know less geography than a schoolboy of six weeks' standing. To me a map of old Ortelius is as authentic as Arrowsmith. I do not know whereabout Africa merges into Asia; whether Ethiopia lies in one or other of those great divisions; nor can form the remotest conjecture of the position of New South Wales or Van Dieman's Land." A civil servant of to-day could hardly afford to make such pleasant confessions. No boy ever profited more, or lost less, by an old-fashioned education than Lamb. His head, so he tells us, had not many mansions, nor spacious, but he had imagination, taste, and spirit, and he imbibed the old humanities at every pore. He never could have written "The Essays of Elia," or anything like them, had he been robbed of the birthright of every man of letters. He is not a cheap and easy author. Leaving school as he did before he was fifteen, he never proceeded beyond the vestibules of the ancient learning; and this, perhaps, was also well. His stutter saved him from the Universities, and he was thus enabled through life to preserve a romantic attachment for these seminaries of sound learning and true religion.

Literature has no reason to deplore that Lamb never, save in his imagination, proceeded a Master of Arts. Some portion-it would be impossible to say what-of his charm proceeds from the fact of his having been a lettered clerk in the mercantile rather than the ecclesiastical sense of the term. He has thus become the patron saint, the inspiring example, of those whom fate, perhaps not so unkind as she seems, has condemned to know "the irksome confinement of an office," and who have left to them but the shreds and patches of the day for the pursuits in which their souls rejoice.

After leaving Christ's, Lamb spent a little more than two years in the South Sea House, where his elder and only brother John had a clerkship; but in April, 1792, through the influence probably of Mr. Salt, he obtained a place in the Accountant's Office of the East India Company, at whose desks he sat until 1825, when, to use his own celebrated phrase, he went home-for ever. His salary went on slowly increasing from something under £100 to £600 a year. Apart from the old and probably fictitious story about his coming late and going home proportionately early,

there is no reason to suppose that Lamb was otherwise than an efficient public servant, as that class of person goes. He did no more than was expected of him, and had no scruples about conducting his private correspondence on office paper. He wrote a very clear hand, and was in all business matters a precise and punctual person. His code of honour was the highest, and through life he maintained a curious and passionate hatred of bankrupts.

He had been three years in the service of the Company when the great tragedy-Elizabethan in its horror-of his life befell him. Old John Lamb and his wife, their daughter Mary, an aunt, and Charles, were living huddled together in an obscure lodging in Little Queen Street, Holborn. An exceedingly ugly church now stands upon the site of the houses. Mary Lamb, who was ten years her younger brother's senior, was a dressmaker on a small scale. She always had what her mother, who does not seem greatly to have cared for her, called "moithered " brains, and on this fateful day, the 23rd of September, 1796, just before dinner, she seized a case-knife which was lying on