11. Cold is my tired heart, I have no charity.

2. Painfully trav'lling thus over the rugged road. 7. O begone, measure, half-Latin, half-English then. 12. Dismal your dactyls are, God help ye, rhyming ones!" 1

Many of you will recall how irresistibly these unfortunate experiments in metre" by poor Southey appealed to the parodying-instinct of his enemies. Canning and Frere both had their fling at them in the Anti-Jacobin; Byron has his allusion in the familiar line,

God help thee, Southey, and thy readers too :

but Lamb, you see, had been before them, and yet, because he was an all-round, and not a onesided critic, he passed for a blind worshipper of the young Jacobins. "Messrs. Lamb and Lloyd," says Byron in a note to the mention of their names in English Bards, "the most ignoble followers of Southey and Co." How little he knew!

Or again, notice the following curious criticism and prediction concerning a too-well-known 1 [The lines are as follows, the first, second, and fourth stanzas being by Southey, the third by Coleridge :

Weary way-wanderer, languid and sick at heart,
Travelling painfully over the rugged road,
Wild-visaged wanderer, ah, for thy heavy chance!
Sorely thy little one drags by thee barefooted,
Cold is the baby that hangs at thy bending back,
Meagre and livid and screaming its wretchedness.
Woe-begone mother, half anger, half agony,

As o'er thy shoulder thou lookest to hush the babe,
Bleakly the blinding snow beats in thy haggard face.
Thy husband will never return from the war again,

Cold is thy hopeless heart even as charity

Cold are thy famished babes; God help thee, widowed one.]

At

effusion of Coleridge's. In 1796 Coleridge had published his first little volume of poems. the end of that year a second edition is in preparation, and its author is consulting Lamb as to what poems are to be retained from the former, and what new ones are to be added. Coleridge was (oddly enough) for omitting the musical and buoyant stanzas imitated from Ossian, called the "Complaint of Ninathoma," and beginning,

How long will ye round me be swelling,

O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea?

and Lamb earnestly pleads for their being allowed to stand:

:

Let me protest strongly against your rejecting the Complaint of Ninathoma," on page 86. The words, I acknowledge, are Ossian's, but you have added to them the "music of Caril." If a vicarious substitute be wanting, sacrifice (and 'twill be a piece of self-denial too) the "Epitaph on an Infant," of which its author seems so proud, so tenacious. Or if your heart be set on perpetuating the four-line wonder, I'll tell you what to do: Sell the copyright of it at once to a country statuary; commence, in this manner, Death's prime poet-laureate; and let your verses be adopted in every village round, instead of those hitherto famous ones,

Afflictions sore long time I bore,
Physicians were in vain.

You will not need telling that Lamb referred to the quatrain,

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,

Death came with timely care,

to which Coleridge had allotted a whole page of his former edition, and of which he had indeed shown himself "tenacious," for it had already appeared twice before, in the Morning Post and in the Watchman. Coleridge was, perhaps, a little nettled at his friend's frank criticism, for he rejected "Ninathoma" (though he restored it in later editions) and retained the epitaph. But Lamb's playful prediction was destined to be fulfilled. No country statuary ever secured a monopoly of the lines, but they will be found, as you know, in almost every churchyard in the kingdom.

In

So far we have only discovered that Lamb possessed that easy and common critical faculty which detects the weaknesses of a writer; but side by side may be found abundant proof that he recognised at once the strength and value of the new poetry, while other critics were only perplexed by its novelty and uncertain what to think. 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge published their little joint volume, the Lyrical Ballads, containing among other now familiar and classical poems, the "Ancient Mariner." Even Southey, it appears, was offended by Coleridge's masterpiece, and Lamb writes to him, in November of that year,

to remonstrate :

If you wrote that review in Critical Review, I am sorry you are so sparing of praise to the "Ancient Mariner"; so far from calling it, as you do, with some wit but more severity, A Dutch Attempt, etc.,

etc.," I call it a right English attempt, and a successful one, to dethrone German sublimity. You have selected a passage fertile in unmeaning miracles, but have passed by fifty passages as miraculous as the miracles they I never so deeply felt the pathetic as in

celebrate. that part,

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware.

It stung me into high pleasure, through sufferings. Lloyd does not like it; his head is too metaphysical, and your taste too correct; at least, I must allege something against you both to excuse my own dotage—

So lonely 'twas, that God Himself

Scarce seemèd there to be.

But you allow some elaborate beauties-you should have extracted 'em. The "Ancient Mariner" plays more tricks with the mind than that last poem, which is yet one of the finest written.

"That last poem," here referred to, is no other than the immortal poem of Wordsworth's, which had been placed last in the little joint volumethe "Lines written above Tintern Abbey." The world was long in making up its mind on the subject, for the professional reviewers of that day would have nothing to say to it; but Lamb's judgment has prevailed, that most assuredly among England's finest poems is that which contains the lines,

For I have learned

To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

But Lamb could do more, as a critic, than see the ridiculous on the one hand, and the sublime on the other. He could judge of details, and he could discriminate. Two years after this letter to Southey, Wordsworth brought out a second volume of the Lyrical Ballads, and sent it to Lamb, who writes back :

I had already

Thanks for your letter and present. borrowed your second volume. What most please me are the "Song of Lucy" [he means, of course, "Lucy Gray"]; . . . Simon's sickly daughter, in the "Sexton," made me cry. Next to these are the description of the continuous echoes in the story of "Joanna's Laugh," when the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem alive; and that fine Shakspearean character of the "happy man" in the "Brothers

that creeps about the fields

Following his fancies by the hour, to bring
Tears down his cheek or solitary smiles
Into his face, until the setting sun
Write Fool upon his forehead.

I will mention one more-the delicate and curious feeling in the wish for the "Cumberland Beggar

" that

he may have about him the melody of birds, altho' he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a