stead, he put an unfortunate question to me, as to the 'probability of its turning out a good turnip season,' and when I, who am still less of an agriculturist than a steam philosopher, not knowing a turnip from a potato ground, innocently made answer, that I believed it depended very much upon boiled legs of mutton,' my unlucky reply set Miss Isola a laughing to a degree that disturbed her tranquillity for the only moment in our journey. I am afraid my credit sank very low with my other fellowtraveller, who had thought he had met with a well-informed passenger, which is accident so desirable in a stage-coach. We were rather less communicative, but still friendly, the rest of the way."

an

love of exerting mischief! Think of a disrespected clod, that was trod into earth; that was nothing; on a sudden by damned arts refined into an exterminating angel, devouring the fruits of the earth, and their growers, in a mass of fire; what a new existence! What a temptation above Lucifer's! Would clod be anything but a clod, if he could resist it? Why, here was a spectacle last night for a whole country, a bonfire visible to London, alarming her guilty towers, and shaking the Monument with an ague fit, all done by a little vial of phosphor in a clown's fob. How he must grin, and shake his empty noddle in clouds! The Vulcanian epicure Alas! can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilise, and then burn the world? There is a march of science; but who shall beat the drums for its retreat? Who shall persuade the boor that phosphor will not ignite? Seven goodly stacks of hay, with corn-barns proportionable, lie smoking ashes and chaff, which man and beast would sputter out and reject like those apples of asphaltes and bitumen. The food for the inhabitants of earth will quickly "Dear Madam, -I do assure you that your disappear. Hot rolls may say, 'Fuimus verses gratified me very much, and my sister panes, fuit quartern-loaf, et ingens gloria is quite proud of them. For the first time in apple-pastry-orum.' That the good old my life I congratulated myself upon the munching system may last thy time and mine, good un-incendiary George! is devout prayer of thine,

the

In 1830, Lamb took a journey to Bury St. Edmund's, to fetch Miss Isola to her adopted home, from a visit which had been broken by her illness. It was on his return that Lamb's repartee to the query of the statistical gentleman as to the prospects of the turnip crop, which has been repeatedly published, was made. The following is his Own version of it, contained in a letter addressed to Miss Isola's hostess, on their arrival.

To the same lady, having sent him an acrostic on his sister's name, he replied with a letter which contained one on hers, and the following notice of his own talent in the acrostic line.

shortness and meanness of my name. Had it been Schwartzenberg or Esterhazy, it would have put you to some puzzle. I am afraid I shall sicken you of acrostics, but this last was written to order. I beg you to have inserted in your county paper, something like this advertisement. To the nobility, gentry, and others, about Bury.— C. Lamb respectfully informs his friends and the public in general, that he is leaving off business in the acrostic line, as he is going into an entirely new line. Rebuses and charades done as usual, and upon the old terms. Also, epitaphs to suit the memory of any person deceased.'

"I thought I had adroitly escaped the rather unpliable name of Williams,' curtailing your poor daughters to their proper "A rather talkative gentleman, but very surnames, but it seems you would not let me civil, engaged me in a discourse for full off so easily. If these trifles amuse you, I am twenty miles, on the probable advantages of paid. Though really 'tis an operation too steam carriages, which, being merely pro- much like-‘A, apple-pie; B, bit it.' To blematical, I bore my part in with some make amends, I request leave to lend you credit, in spite of my totally un-engineer-like the 'Excursion,' and to recommend, in partifaculties. But when, somewhere about Stan- cular, the Churchyard Stories;' in the

colourable, and refer the revival of the lines | be not so, I never knew what I wrote, or

to his sanction. The following letter was written to dispel those fears from his mind.

TO MR. DYER.

"Feb. 22nd, 1831.

meant by my writing, and have been penning libels all my life without being aware of it. Does it follow that I should have exprest myself exactly in the same way of those dear old eyes of yours now, now that Father Time "Dear Dyer,-Mr. Rogers, and Mr. Rogers' has conspired with a hard task-master to put friends, are perfectly assured, that you never a last extinguisher upon them? I should as intended any harm by an innocent couplet, soon have insulted the Answerer of Salmasius, and that in the revivification of it by blun- when he awoke up from his ended task, and dering Barker you had no hand, whatever. saw no more with mortal vision. But you To imagine that, at this time of day. Rogers are many films removed yet from Milton's broods over a fantastic expression of more calamity. You write perfectly intelligibly. than thirty years' standing, would be to sup- Marry, the letters are not all of the same pose him indulging his 'pleasures of memory' size or tallness; but that only shows your with a vengeance. You never penned a line proficiency in the hands, text, german-hand, which for its own sake you need, dying, wish court-hand, sometimes law-hand, and affords to blot. You mistake your heart if you variety. You pen better than you did a think you can write a lampoon. Your whips twelvemonth ago; and if you continue to are rods of roses. Your spleen has ever had improve, you bid fair to win the golden pen for its objects vices, not the vicious; abstract which is the prize at your young gentlemen's offences, not the concrete sinner. But you academy. But you must be aware of Valpy, are sensitive, and wince as much at the con- and his printing-house, that hazy cave of Trosciousness of having committed a compliment, phonius, out of which it was a mercy that as another man would at the perpetration you escaped with a glimmer. Beware of of an affront. But do not lug me into the MSS. and Variæ Lectiones. Settle the text same soreness of conscience with yourself. for once in your mind, and stick to it. You I maintain, and will to the last hour, that I have some years' good sight in you yet, if you never writ of you but con amore. That if do not tamper with it. It is not for you (for any allusion was made to your near-sighted- us I should say), to go poring into Greek conness, it was not for the purpose of mocking tractions, and star-gazing upon slim Hebrew an infirmity, but of connecting it with We have yet the sight scholar-like habits: for, is it not erudite and scholarly to be somewhat near of sight, before age naturally brings on the malady? You could not then plead the obrepens senectus. Did I not moreover make it an apology for a certain absence, which some of your friends may have experienced, when you have not on a sudden made recognition of them in a casual street-meeting? and did I not strengthen your excuse for this slowness of recognition, by further accounting morally for the present engagement of your mind in worthy objects? Did I not, in your person, make the handsomest apology for absent-of-mind people that was ever made? If these things

points.

Of sun, and moon, and star, throughout the year,
And man and woman.

You have vision enough to discern Mrs. Dyer from the other comely gentlewoman who lives up at staircase No. 5; or, if you should make a blunder in the twilight, Mrs. Dyer has too much good sense to be jealous for a mere effect of imperfect optics. But don't try to write the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments, in the compass of a halfpenny: nor run after a midge, or a mote, to catch it; and leave off hunting for needles in bushels of hay, for all these things strain the eyes. The snow is six feet deep in some parts here. I must put on jack-boots to get at the post-office with this. It is not good for weak eyes to pore upon snow too much. It lies in drifts. I wonder what its drift is; only that it makes good pancakes, remind Mrs. Dyer. It turns a pretty green It glares too much

world into a white one.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE

ATHENÆUM." "Dear Sir,-Your communication to me of the death of Munden made me weep. Now, Sir, I am not of the melting mood. But, in these serious times, the loss of half the world's fun is no trivial deprivation. It was my loss (or gain shall I call it) in the early time of my play-going, to have missed all Munden's acting. There was only he and Lewis at Covent Garden, while Drury Lane was exuberant with Parsons, Dodd, &c., such a comic company as, I suppose, the stage

for an innocent colour methinks. I wonder why you think I dislike gilt edges. They set off a letter marvellously. Yours, for instance, looks for all the world like a tablet of curious hieroglyphics in a gold frame. But don't go and lay this to your eyes. You always wrote hieroglyphically, yet not to come up to the mystical notations and conjuring characters of Dr. Parr. You never wrote what I call a schoolmaster's hand, like C————; nor a woman's hand, like S; nor a missal hand, like Porson; nor an all-of-the-wrong-side sloping hand, like Miss H-; nor a dogmatic, Mede-and- never showed. Thence, in the evening of Persian, peremptory hand, like R; but my life I had Munden all to myself, more you ever wrote what I call a Grecian's mellowed, richer, perhaps, than ever. I canhand; what the Grecians write (or used) at not say what his change of faces produced in Christ's Hospital; such as Whalley would me. It was not acting. He was not one of have admired, and Boyer have applauded, my 'old actors.' It might be better. His but Smith or Atwood (writing-masters) power was extravagant. I saw him one would have horsed you for. Your boy-of- evening in three drunken characters. Three genius hand and your mercantile hand are farces were played. One part was Doseyvarious. By your flourishes, I should think I forget the rest; but they were so discrimiyou never learned to make eagles or cork-nated that a stranger might have seen them screws, or flourish the governor's names in the writing-school; and by the tenor and cut of your letters, I suspect you were never in it at all. By the length of this scrawl you will think I have a design upon your optics; but I have writ as large as I could, out of respect to them; too large, indeed, for beauty. Mine is a sort of deputy Grecian's hand; a little better, and more of a worldly hand, than a Grecian's, but still remote from the mercantile. I don't know how it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since school-days. I can never forget I was a deputy Grecian! And writing to you, or to Coleridge, besides affection, I feel a reverential deference as to Grecians still. I keep my soaring way above the Great Erasmians, yet far beneath the other. Alas! what am I now? what is a Leadenhall clerk, or India pensioner, to a deputy Grecian? How art thou fallen, O Lucifer! Just room for our loves to Mrs. D., &c. C. LAMB."

all, and not have dreamed that he was seeing the same actor. I am jealous for the actors who pleased my youth. He was not a Parsons or a Dodd, but he was more wonderful. He seemed as if he could do anything. He was not an actor, but something better, if you please. Shall I instance Old Foresight, in 'Love for Love,' in which Parsons was at once the old man, the astrologer, &c. Munden dropped the old man, the doater which makes the character- but he substituted for it a moon-struck character, a perfect abstraction from this earth, that looked as if he had newly come down from the planets. Now, that is not what I call acting. It might be better. He was imaginative; he could impress upon an audience an idea-the low one, perhaps, of a leg of mutton and turnips; but such was the grandeur and singleness of his expressions, that that single expression would convey to all his auditory a notion of all the pleasures they had all received from all the legs of mutton and turnips they had ever eaten in their lives. Now, this is not acting, nor The death of Munden reviving his recol- do I set down Munden amongst my old actors. lections of "the veteran comedian," called He was only a wonderful man, exerting his forth the following letter of the 11th vivid impressions through the agency of the February, 1832, to the editor of the "Athe-stage. In one only thing did I see him act næum," whom Lamb had, for a long time, numbered among his friends.

- that is, support a character; it was in a wretched farce, called 'Johnny Gilpin,' for

Dowton's benefit, in which he did a cockney. | which we have ever felt. They seem to come The thing ran but one night; but when I up from a depth of emotion in the heart, and say that Liston's Lubin Log was nothing to burst through the sturdy casing of manner it, I say little: it was transcendent. And with a strength which seems increased tenhere let me say of actors, envious actors, that fold by its real and hearty obstacle. The of Munden, Liston was used to speak, almost workings of his spirit seem to expand his with the enthusiasm due to the dead, in terms frame, till we can scarcely believe that by of such allowed superiority to every actor measure it is small: for the space which he on the stage, and this at a time when Munden fills in the imagination is so real, that we was gone by in the world's estimation, that it almost mistake it for that of corporeal dimenconvinced me that artists (in which term Isions. His Old Dosey, in the excellent farce of include poets, painters, &c.), are not 80 Past Ten O'clock,' is his grandest effort of envious as the world think. I have little this kind, and we know of nothing finer. He time, and therefore enclose a criticism on seems to have a heart of oak' indeed. His Munden's Old Dosey and his general acting.* description of a sea-fight is the most noble by a friend. C. LAMB." and triumphant piece of enthusiasm which we remember. It is as if the spirits of a whole crew of nameless heroes were swelling in his bosom.' We never felt so ardent and proud a sympathy with the valour of England as when we heard it. May health long be his, thus to do our hearts good-for we never saw any actor whose merits have the least resemblance to his even in species; and when his genius is withdrawn from the stage, we shall not have left even a term by which we can fitly describe it."

"Mr. Munden appears to us to be the most classical of actors. He is that in high farce, which Kemble was in high tragedy. The lines of these great artists are, it must be admitted, sufficiently distinct; but the same elements are in both, the same directness of purpose, the same singleness of aim, the same concentration of power, the same ironcasing of inflexible manner, the same statuelike precision of gesture, movement, and attitude. The hero of farce is as little affected with impulses from without, as the retired Prince of Tragedians. There is something solid, sterling, almost adamantine, in the building up of his most grotesque characters. When he fixes his wonder-working face in any of its most amazing varieties, it looks as if the picture were carved out from a rock by Nature in a sportive vein, and might last for ever. It is like what we can imagine a mask of the old Grecian Comedy to have been, only that it lives, and breathes, and changes. His most fantastical gestures are the grand ideal of farce. He seems as though he belonged to the earliest and the stateliest age of Comedy, when instead of superficial foibles and the airy varieties of fashion, she had the grand asperities of man to work on, when her grotesque images had something romantic about them, and when humour and parody were themselves heroic. His expressions of feeling and bursts of enthusiasm are among the most genuine

A little article inserted in "The Champion" before Lamb wrote his essay on the Acting of Munden. Lamb's repetition may cast on it sufficient interest to excuse its repetition here.

The following letter is

TO MR. CARY.

"Assidens est mihi bona soror, Euripiden evolvens, donum vestrum, carissime Cary, pro quo gratias agimus, lecturi atque iterum lecturi idem. Pergratus est liber ambobus, nempe Sacerdotis Commiserationis,' sacrum opus a te ipso Humanissimæ Religionis Sacerdote dono datum. Lachrymantes gavisuri sumus; est ubi dolor fiat voluptas; nec semper dulce mihi est ridere; aliquando commutandum est he! he! he! cum heu! heu! heu!

"A Musis Tragicis me non penitus abhorruisse testis sit Carmen Calamitosum, nescio quo autore linguâ prius vernaculâ scriptum, et nuperrimè a me ipso Latine versum, scilicet, Tom Tom of Islington.' Tenuistine!

'Thomas Thomas de Islington,

Uxorem duxit Die quâdam Solis,
Abduxit domum sequenti die,
Emit baculum subsequenti,
Vapulat illa posterâ,

Egrotat succedenti, Mortua fit crastinâ.'