our respective nights, and make ourselves merry at the expense of the public. The chief tenets which distinguish our society, and which every man among us is bound to hold for gospel, are

That the public, or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf, obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius, in his senses, would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick their pockets; and, that failing, we are at full liberty to vilify and abuse them as much as ever we think fit.

That authors, by their affected pretences to humility, which they made use of as a cloak to insinuate their writings into the callous senses of the multitude, obtuse to every thing but the grossest flattery, have by degrees made that great beast their master; as we may act submission to children, 'till we are obliged to practise it in earnest. That authors are and ought to be considered the masters and preceptors of the public, and not vice versa. That it was so in the days of Orpheus, Linus, and Museus; and would be so again, if it were not that writers prove traitors to themselves. That, in particular, in the days of the first of those three great authors just mentioned, audiences appear to have been perfect models of what audiences should be; for though, along with the trees and the rocks and the wild creatures which he drew after him to listen to his strains, some serpents doubtless came to hear his music, it does not appear that any one among them ever lifted up a dissentient voice. They knew what was due to authors in those days. Now every stock and stone turns into a serpent, and has a voice.

That the terms "courteous reader" and "candid auditors," as having given rise to a false notion in those to whom they were applied, as if they con

ferred upon them some right which they cannot have, of exercising their judgments, ought to be utterly banished and exploded.

These are our distinguishing tenets. To keep up the memory of the cause in which we suffered, as the ancients sacrificed a goat, a supposed unhealthy animal, to Esculapius, on our feast nights we cut up a goose, an animal typical of the popular voice, to the deities of Candour and Patient Hearing. A zealous member of the society once proposed that we should revive the obsolete luxury of viper-broth; but, the stomachs of some of the company rising at the proposition, we lost the benefit of that highly salutary and antidotal dish.

The privilege of admission to our club is strictly limited to such as have been fairly damned. A piece that has met with ever so little applause, that has but languished its night or two, and then gone out, will never entitle its author to a seat among us. An exception to our usual readiness in conferring this privilege is in the case of a writer who, having been once condemned, writes again, and becomes candidate for a second martyrdom. Simple damnation we hold to be a merit; but to be twice damned we adjudge infamous. Such a one we utterly reject, and blackball without a hearing :—

"The common damned shun his society."

Hoping that your publication of our regulations may be a means of inviting some more members into our society, I conclude this long letter.

I am, sirs, yours,

SEMEL-DAMNATUS.*

* The germ of this article is contained in the following passage from a letter to Manning, (then sojourning among the Mandarins,) in which Lamb, half humorously, half pathetically,

CHARLES LAMB'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.*

CHARLES LAMB, born in the Inner Temple, 10th of February, 1775; educated in Christ's Hospital;

describes the reception the town gave his famous and unfortunate farce," Mr. H." :—

"So I go creeping on since I was lamed with that cursed fall from off the top of Drury Lane Theatre into the pit, something more than a year ago. However, I have been free of the house ever since, and the house was pretty free with me upon that occasion. Hang 'em, how they hissed! It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese; with roaring sometimes like bears; mows and mops like apes; sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness. 'Twas like Saint Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us! that God should give his favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them! Heaven therefore be pleased to make the teeth rot out of them all! Make them a reproach, and all that pass by them to loll out their tongue at them! Blind mouths! as Milton somewhere calls them."-EDITOR.

*This, the briefest, and perhaps the wittiest and most truthful, autobiography in the language, was published in the New Monthly Magazine a few months after its author's death, with the following preface or introduction from the pen of some unknown admirer of Elia :

"We have been favoured, by the kindness of Mr. Upcott, with the following sketch, written in one of his manuscript collections by Charles Lamb. It will be read with deep interest by all, but with the deepest interest by those who had the honour and the happiness of knowing the writer. It is so singularly characteristic, that we can scarcely persuade ourselves we do not hear it, as we read, spoken from his living lips. Slight as it is, it conveys the most exquisite and perfect notion of the personal manner and habits of our friend. For the intellectual rest, we lift the veil of its noble modesty, and

afterwards a clerk in the Accountants' Office, EastIndia House; pensioned off from that service, 1825, after thirty-three years' service; is now a gentleman at large; can remember few specialities in his life worth noting, except that he once caught a swallow flying (teste sua manu). Below the middle stature; cast of face slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his complexional religion; stammers abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism, or a poor quibble, than in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libelled as a person always aiming at wit; which, as he told a dull fellow that charged him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dulness. A small eater, but not drinker; confesses a partiality for the production of the juniper-berry ; was a fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and then a casual puff. Has been guilty of obtruding upon the public a tale, in prose, called "Rosamund Gray;" a dramatic sketch, named "John Woodvil;" a "Farewell Ode to Tobacco," with sundry other poems, and light prose matter, collected in two slight crown octavos, and pompously christened his works, though in fact they were his recreations. His true works may be found on the shelves of Leadenhall Street, filling some hundred folios. He is also the true Elia, whose Essays are extant in a little volume, published a year or two since, and rather better known from that name without a meaning than from any thing he has done, or can hope to do, in his own name. He was also the first to draw the public attention to the old English dramatists, in a

can even here discern them. Mark its humour, crammed into a few thinking words-its pathetic sensibility in the midst of contrast-its wit, truth, and feeling, and, above all, its fanciful retreat at the close, under a phantom cloud of death."EDITOR.

work called "Specimens of English Dramatic Writers who lived about the Time of Shakspeare,' published about fifteen years since. In short, all his merits and demerits to set forth would take to the end of Mr. Upcott's book, and then not be told truly.

WHEN I heard of the death of Coleridge, it was without grief. It seemed to me that he long had been on the confines of the next world, that he had a

Some

To any body.-Please to fill up these blanks. + Disraeli wrote a book on the Quarrels of Authors. body should write one on the Friendships of Literary Men. Should such a work be ever written, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be honourably mentioned therein, Among all the friendships celebrated in tale or history, there is none more admirable than that which existed between these two eminent men. The, "golden thread that tied their hearts together was never broken. Their friendship was never "chipp'd or diminished;" but, the longer they lived, the stronger it grew. Death could not destroy it.

Lamb, after Coleridge's death, as if weary of "this green earth," as if not caring if "sun and sky and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests and irony itself," went out with life, willingly sought "Lavinian shores."

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Lamb," as Mr. John Forster says in his beautiful tribute to his memory," never fairly recovered the death of Coleridge. He thought of little else (his sister was but another portion of himself) until his own great spirit joined his friend. He had