Anchor in his scaly rind Soon the difference they find; Is he Regent of the Sea? Buffon, Banks, or sage Linnæus. By his oily qualities, This (or else my eyesight fails), This should be the Prince of Whales. The devastation of the Parks in the summer of 1814, by reason of the rejoicings on the visit of the Allied Sovereigns, produced the following letter from Lamb to Wordsworth. TO MR. WORDSWORTH. "Aug. 9th, 1814. "Save for a late excursion to Harrow, and a day or two on the banks of the Thames this summer, rural images were fast fading from my mind, and by the wise provision of the Regent all that was countryfied in the parks is all but obliterated. The very colour of green is vanished, the whole surface of Hyde Park is dry crumbling sand (Arabia Arenosa), not a vestige or hint of grass ever having grown there; booths and drinkingplaces go all round it, for a mile and a half I am confident-I might say two miles, in circuit the stench of liquors, bad tobacco, dirty people and provisions, conquers the air, and we are all stifled and suffocated in Hyde Park. Order after order has been issued by Lord Sidmouth in the name of the Regent (acting in behalf of his Royal father) for the dispersion of the varlets, but in vain. The ris unita of all the publicans in London, Westminster, Marylebone, and miles round, is too powerful a force to put down. The Regent has raised a phantom which he cannot lay. There they'll stay probably for ever. The whole beauty of the place is gone that lake-look of the Serpentine — it has got foolish ships upon it- but something whispers to have confidence in nature and its revival At the coming of the milder day, These monuments shall all be overgrown, Meantime I confess to have smoked one delicious pipe in one of the cleanliest and goodliest of the booths; a tent rather 'Oh call it not a booth!' erected by the public spirit of Watson, who keeps the Adam and Eve at Pancras, (the ale-houses have all emigrated, with their train of bottles, mugs, cork-screws, waiters, into Hyde Park-whole ale-houses, with all their ale!) in company with some of the Guards that had been in France, and a fine French girl, habited like a princess of banditti, which one of the dogs had transported from the Garonne to the Serpentine. The unusual scene in Hyde Park, by candlelight, in open air, good tobacco, bottled stout,-made it look like an interval in a campaign, a repose after battle. I almost fancied scars smarting, and was ready to club a story with my comrades, of some of my lying deeds. After all, the fireworks were splendid; the rockets in clusters, in trees and all shapes, spreading about like young stars in the making, floundering about in space (like unbroke horses,) till some of Newton's calculations should fix them; but then they went out. Any one who could see 'em, and the still finer showers of gloomy rain-fire that fell sulkily and angrily from 'em, and could go to bed without dreaming of the last day, must be as hardened an atheist as . "Again let me thank you for your present, and assure you that fire-works and triumphs have not distracted me from receiving a calm and noble enjoyment from it, (which I trust I shall often,) and I sincerely congratulate you on its appearance. "With kindest remembrances to you and household, we remain, yours sincerely, "C. LAMB and Sister." The following are fragments of letters to Coleridge in the same month. The first is in answer to a solicitation of Coleridge for a supply of German books. TO MR. COLERIDGE. "13th Aug. 1814. "Dear Resuscitate, -There comes to you by the vehicle from Lad-lane this day a volume of German; what it is I cannot justly say, the characters of those northern nations having been always singularly harsh and unpleasant to me. It is a contribution of Dr. towards your wants, and you would have had it sooner but for an odd accident. I wrote for it three days ago, and any man I ever knew. Friendships in these parts stagnate. the Doctor, as he thought, sent it me. A the persuasive of my own, which accompanies book of like exterior he did send, but being it, will not be thrown away; if it be, he is a disclosed, how far unlike! It was the Well- sloe, and no true-hearted crab, and there's bred Scholar,'-a book with which it seems an end. For that life of the German conthe Doctor laudably fills up those hours juror which you speak of, 'Colerus de Vitâ which he can steal from his medical avoca- Doctoris vix-Intelligibilis,' I perfectly retions. Chesterfield, Blair, Beattie, portions member the last evening we spent with from The Life of Savage,' make up a Mrs. Morgan and Miss Brent, in Londonprettyish system of morality and the belles- street,- (by that token we had raw rabbits lettres, which Mr. Mylne, a schoolmaster, for supper, and Miss B. prevailed upon me has properly brought together, and calls the to take a glass of brandy and water after collection by the denomination above men- supper, which is not my habit,)—I perfectly tioned. The Doctor had no sooner discovered remember reading portions of that life in his error, than he dispatched man and horse their parlour, and I think it must be among to rectify the mistake, and with a pretty their packages. It was the very last evening kind of ingenuous modesty in his note, we were at that house. What is gone of seemeth to deny any knowledge of the that frank-hearted circle, Morgan, and his 'Well-bred Scholar;' false modesty surely, cos-lettuces? He ate walnuts better than and a blush misplaced; for, what more pleasing than the consideration of professional austerity thus relaxing, thus improving! But so, when a child I remember blushing, being caught on my knees to my Maker, or doing otherwise some pious and praiseworthy action; now I rather love such things to be seen. Henry Crabb Robinson is out upon his circuit, and his books are inaccessible without his leave and key. He is attending the Norfolk Circuit, a short term, but to him, as to many young lawyers, a long vacation, sufficiently dreary.* I thought I could do no better than transmit to him, not extracts, but your very letter itself, than which I think I never read any "26th August, 1814. thing more moving, more pathetic, or more "Let the hungry soul rejoice, there is corn conducive to the purpose of persuasion. The in Egypt. Whatever thou hast been told to Crab is a sour Crab if it does not sweeten the contrary by designing friends, who perhim. I think it would draw another third haps inquired carelessly, or did not inquire volume of Dodsley out of me: but you say at all, in hope of saving their money, there you don't want any English books? Per- is a stock of Remorse' on hand, enough, as haps after all, that's as well; one's romantic Pople conjectures, for seven years' consumpcredulity is for ever misleading one into tion; judging from experience of the last misplaced acts of foolery. Crab might have two years. Methinks it makes for the benefit answered by this time: his juices take a of sound literature, that the best books do long time supplying, but they'll run at last, not always go off best. Inquire in seven -I know they will, - pure golden pippin. years' time for the 'Rokebys' and the A fearful rumour has since reached me that Laras,' and where shall they be found?the Crab is on the eve of setting out for fluttering fragmentally in some thread-paper France. If he is in England your letter will-whereas thy 'Wallenstein,' and thy 'Rereach him, and I flatter myself a touch of * A mistake of Lamb's at which the excellent person referred to may smile, now that he has retired from his profession, and has no business but the offices of kindness. "I am going to eat turbot, turtle, venison, marrow pudding,-cold punch, claret, Madeira,-at our annual feast, at half-past four this day. They keep bothering me, (I'm at office,) and my ideas are confused. Let me know if I can be of any service as to books. God forbid the Architectonican should be sacrificed to a foolish scruple of some bookproprietor, as if books did not belong with the highest propriety to those that understand 'em best. C. LAMB." TO MR. COLERIDGE. morse,' are safe on Longman's or Pople's shelves, as in some Bodleian: there they shall remain; no need of a chain to hold them fast-perhaps for ages-tall copiesand people shan't run about hunting for them as in old Ezra's shrievalty they did for | want any books that I can procure for you? a Bible, almost without effect till the great- Old Jimmy Boyer is dead at last. Trollope great-grand-niece (by the mother's side) of Jeremiah or Ezekiel (which was it?) remembered something of a book, with odd reading in it, that used to lie in the green closet in her aunt Judith's bedchamber. "Thy caterer, Price, was at Hamburgh when last Pople heard of him, laying up for thee like some miserly old father for his generous-hearted son to squander. "Mr. Charles Aders, whose books also pant for that free circulation which thy custody is sure to give them, is to be heard of at his kinsmen, Messrs. Jameson and Aders, No. 7, Laurence Pountney-lane, London, according to the information which Crabius with his parting breath left me. Crabius is gone to Paris. I prophesy he and the Parisians will part with mutual contempt. His head has a twist Allemagne, like thine, dear mystic. "I have been reading Madame Stael on Germany. An impudent clever woman. But if Faust' be no better than in her abstract of it, I counsel thee to let it alone. How canst thou translate the language of cat-monkeys? Fie on such fantasies! But I will not forget to look for Proclus. It is a kind of book when one meets with it one shuts the lid faster than one opened it. Yet I have some bastard kind of recollection that some where, some time ago, upon some stall or other, I saw it. It was either that or Plotinus, or Saint Augustine's City of God.' So little do some folks value, what to others, sc. to you, well used,' had been the 'Pledge of immortality.' Bishop Bruno I never touched upon. Stuffing too good for the brains of such 'a Hare' as thou describest. May it burst his pericranium, as the gobbets of fat and turpentine (a nasty thought of the seer) did that old dragon in the Apocrypha! May he go mad in trying to understand his author! May he lend the third volume of him before he has quite translated the second, to a friend who shall lose it, and so spoil the publication, and may his friend find it and send it to him just as thou or some such less dilatory spirit shall have announced the whole for the press; lastly, may he be hunted by Reviewers, and the devil jug him. Canst think of any other queries in the solution of which I can give thee satisfaction? Do you has got his living, worth 1000l. a-year net See, thou sluggard, thou heretic-sluggard what mightest thou not have arrived at. Lay thy animosity against Jimmy in the grave. Do not entail it on thy posterity. "CHARLES LAMB." CHAPTER X. [1815 to 1817.] LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, SOUTHEY, AND MANNING. It was at the beginning of the year 1815 that I had first the happiness of a personal acquaintance with Mr. Lamb. With his scattered essays and poems I had become familiar a few weeks before, through the instrumentality of Mr. Baron Field, now Chief Justice of Gibraltar, who had been brought into close intimacy with Lamb by the association of his own family with Christ's Hospital, of which his father was the surgeon, and by his own participation in the "Reflector." Living then in chambers in Inner Temple-lane, and attending those of Mr. Chitty, the special pleader, which were on the next staircase to Mr. Lamb's, I had been possessed some time by a desire to become acquainted with the writings of my gifted neighbour, which my friend was able only partially to gratify. "John Woodvil," and the number of the " Reflector" enriched with Lamb's article, he indeed lent me, but he had no copy of "Rosamund Gray," which I was most anxious to read, and which, after earnest search through all the bookstalls within the scope of my walks, I found, exhibiting proper marks of due appreciation, in the store of a little circulating library near Holborn. There was something in this little romance so entirely new, yet breathing the air of old acquaintance; a sense of beauty so delicate and so intense; and a morality so benignant and so profound, that, as I read it, my curiosity to see its author rose almost to the height of pain. The commencement of the new year brought me that gratification; I was invited to meet Lamb at dinner, at the house of Mr. William 66 he smoked "one pipe"-for, alas! for poor human nature-he had resumed his acquaintance with his fair" traitress." How often Evans, a gentleman holding an office in Lamb insisted on my sitting with him while the India House, who then lived in Weymouth-street, and who was a proprietor of the Pamphleteer," to which I had contributed some idle scribblings. My duties the pipe and the glasses were replenished, I at the office did not allow me to avail myself of this invitation to dinner, but I went up at ten o'clock, through a deep snow, palpably congealing into ice, and was amply repaid when I reached the hospitable abode of my friend. There was Lamb, preparing to depart, but he staid half an hour in kindness to me, and then accompanied me to our common home the Temple. will not undertake to disclose; but I can never forget the conversation: though the first, it was more solemn, and in higher mood, than any I ever after had with Lamb through the whole of our friendship. How it took such a turn between two strangers, one of them a lad of not quite twenty, I cannot tell; but so it happened. We discoursed then of life and death, and our anticipation of a world beyond the grave. Lamb spoke of these awful themes with the simplest piety, but expressed his own fond cleavings to life-to all well-known accustomed things 66 Methinks I see him before me now, as he appeared then, and as he continued, with scarcely any perceptible alteration to me during the twenty years of intimacy which followed, and were closed by his death. A and a shivering (not shuddering) sense of light frame, so fragile that it seemed as if a that which is to come, which he so finely breath would overthrow it, clad in clerk-like indicated in his "New Year's Eve," years black, was surmounted by a head of form afterwards. It was two o'clock before we and expression the most noble and sweet. parted, when Lamb gave me a hearty invitaHis black hair curled crisply about an ex- tion to renew my visit at pleasure; but two panded forehead; his eyes, softly brown, or three months elapsed before I saw him twinkled with varying expression, though again. In the meantime, a number of the the prevalent feeling was sad; and the nose Pamphleteer" contained an Essay on the slightly curved, and delicately carved at the Chief Living Poets," among whom on the nostril, with the lower outline of the face title appeared the name of Lamb, and some regularly oval, completed a head which was page or two were expressly devoted to his finely placed on the shoulders, and gave im- praises. It was a poor tissue of tawdry portance, and even dignity, to a diminutive eulogies - a shallow outpouring of young and shadowy stem. Who shall describe his enthusiasm in fine words, which it mistakes countenance catch its quivering sweetness for thoughts; yet it gave Lamb, who had - and fix it for ever in words? There are hitherto received scarcely civil notice from none, alas! to answer the vain desire of reviewers, great pleasure to find that any one friendship. Deep thought, striving with recognised him as having a place among humour; the lines of suffering wreathed into poets. The next time I saw him, he came cordial mirth; and a smile of painful sweet- almost breathless into the office, and proness, present an image to the mind it can as posed to give me what I should have chosen little describe as lose. His personal appear as the greatest of all possible honours and ance and manner are not unfitly characterised delights - an introduction to Wordsworth, by what he himself says in one of his letters who I learned, with a palpitating heart, was to Manning of Braham-" a compound of the actually at the next door. I hurried out Jew, the gentleman, and the angel." Ile with my kind conductor, and a minute after took my arm, and we walked to the Temple, was presented by Lamb to the person whom Lamb stammering out fine remarks as we in all the world I venerated most, with this walked; and when we reached his staircase, preface: Wordsworth, give me leave to he detained me with an urgency which introduce to you my only admirer." would not be denied, and we mounted to the top story, where an old petted servant, called Becky, was ready to receive us. We were soon seated beside a cheerful fire; hot water Wordsworth, after his return to Westmoreand its better adjuncts were before us; and land from this visit : The following letter was addressed to TO MR. WORDSWORTH. "Aug. 9th, 1815. "Dear Wordsworth, - Mary and I felt quite queer after your taking leave (you W W.) of us in St. Giles's. We wished we had seen more of you, but felt we had scarce been sufficiently acknowledging for the share we had enjoyed of your company. We felt as if we had been not enough expressive of our pleasure. But our manners both are a little too much on this side of too-muchcordiality. We want presence of mind and presence of heart. What we feel comes too late, like an after-thought impromptu. But perhaps you observed nothing of that which we have been painfully conscious of, and are every day in our intercourse with those we stand affected to through all the degrees of love. Robinson is on the circuit. Our panegyrist I thought had forgotten one of the objects of his youthful admiration, but I was agreeably removed from that scruple by the laundress knocking at my door this morning, almost before I was up, with a present of fruit from my young friend, &c. There is something inexpressibly pleasant to me in these presents, be it fruit, or fowl, or brawn or what not. Books are a legitimate cause of acceptance. If presents be not the soul of friendship, undoubtedly they are the most spiritual part of the body of that intercourse. There is too much narrowness of thinking in this point. The punctilio of acceptance, methinks, is too confined and strait-laced. I could be content to receive money, or clothes, or a joint of meat from a friend. Why should he not send me a dinner as well as a dessert? I would taste him in the beasts of the field, and through all creation. Therefore did the basket of fruit of the juvenile Talfourd not displease me; not that I have any thoughts of bartering or reciprocating these things. To send him anything in return, would be to reflect suspicion of mercenariness upon what I know he meant a free-will offering, Let him overcome me in bounty. In this strife a generous nature loves to be overcome. You wish me some of your leisure. I have a glimmering aspect, a chink-light of liberty before me, which I pray God prove not fallacious. My remonstrances have stirred up others to remonstrate, and, altogether, there is a plan for separating certain parts of business from our department; which, if it take place, will produce me more time, i. e. my evenings free. It may be a means of placing me in a more conspicuous situation, which will knock at my nerves another way, but I wait the issue in submission. If I can but begin my own day at four o'clock in the afternoon, I shall think myself to have Eden days of peace and liberty to what I have had. As you say, how a man can fill three volumes up with an essay on the drama, is wonderful; I am sure a very few sheets would hold all I had to say on the subject. "Did you ever read Charon on Wisdom?' or Patrick's Pilgrim? If neither, you have two great pleasures to come. I mean some day to attack Caryl on Job, six folios. What any man can write, surely I may read. If I do but get rid of auditing warehousekeepers' accounts and get no worse-harassing task in the place of it, what a lord of liberty I shall be ! I shall dance, and skip, and make mouths at the invisible event, and pick the thorns out of my pillow, and throw 'em at rich men's night-caps, and talk blank verse, hoity, toity, and sing-A clerk I was in London gay,' Ban, ban, Ca-Caliban,' like the emancipated monster, and go where I like, up this street or down that alley. Adieu, and pray that it may be my luck. C. LAMB," "Good bye to you all. The following letter was inclosed in the same parcel with the last. TO MR. SOUTHEY. "Aug. 9th, 1815. "Dear Southey, — Robinson is not on the circuit, as I erroneously stated in a letter to W. W., which travels with this, but is gone to Brussels, Ostend, Ghent, &c. But his friends, the Colliers, whom I consulted respecting your friend's fate, remember to have heard him say, that Father Pardo had effected his escape (the cunning greasy rogue), and to the best of their belief is at present in Paris. To my thinking, it is a small matter whether there be one fat friar more or less in the world. I have rather a taste for clerical executions, imbibed from early recollections of the fate of the excellent Dodd. I hear Bonaparte has sued his habeas corpus, |