pen, and makes a drop of ink more eloquent than oral multitudes of words.

Enjoying the imaginative companionship of Coleridge, it is not to be wondered at, that he should expand in his leisure, into poetry. His staid occupations, the solemn drudgery of business books,--the prospective entries for the adjustment of that period when masters and accountants make the annual 'compt, should naturally seem to have been for him the most uncongenial. Yet his duties were performed with such strict, unerring nicety, that it became proverbial. His free spirit, however, was subjected to no such restriction. In his writings, he was ever provident of words,-but he possessed the extraordinary faculty of crowding a world of meaning into a phrase or a sentence. He had the power of placing, within the "circumscription and confine" of an adjective or an adverb, more real meaning, than many a grandiloquent author, with a more brilliant reputation, could produce in a page. The swelling flourishes which appeal to the natural ear and the animal passions, he disdained; he was disposed to those quiet influences, that sway equally the reason and the affections. His poetry,for which he has had but half his merited reputation,-shows this, to a remarkable degree. The spirit for this species of composition was fostered in him by a devotion to the productions which emanated from the brightest minds in that stainless period of English literature, the Elizabethan age. With Shakspeare and his contemporaries, he was in soul at least as much a boon companion, as if he had walked with the former to and fro the Globe theatre, time out of mind. When some one criticised some of his writings for their quaintness, he exclaimed in a most whimsical pet-" Hang the moderns,-I write for antiquity!" And so he did. With an exquisite taste, formed by enlarged and discriminative reading of the English classics in poetry and prose, he knew how to revel in the daintiest pastures of the former, and to cull their sweetest flowers at will, while he gathered the rich quintessence of the last, without "mounting the airy stilts of abstraction," in imitation of the authors to whom he was so much indebted for the fine confluence of his thoughts. With the noble writer of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, and Religio Medici, as one can frequently perceive by the structure of his sentences and the turn of an occasional period, he was peculiarly familiar. And, indeed, we cannot but think that his evident partiality for this author did not a little contribute to the bent of his social and intellectual inclinings. The associates of Lamb, we find, were fit, and few ;-and upon these, with whom he could make free, and who could relish his glorious aptitudes, he communicated himself unreservedly,-he analyzed for their amusement his own mental conformation ;

unfolded the springs of his affections, as if he wore his heart like a breast-plate, open to the eye,-and kept nothing from them, -not even those conceits of motive, which the hollow and disingenuous world is so apt,-and as the world goes, so properlyto conceal. Supposing himself, as he confesses in Elia, dull to the uninitiated, he made few ventures, he intimates, for verbal excellence; but he constantly advises us, as he writes, by the riches of personal and literary reminiscence, with allusions to which his pages teem, how much he had to say, on such occasions, "and could, an' if he would." His thoughts were often of a nature so dreamy and fantastical, that the reader frequently seems to have met with something very like them in some vision of his own; yet they are so chastened, rendered reasonable and almost real, by that sedate faculty with which even his most capricious facetiæ were strung together, that the line of demarcation between fact and fancy admits of most arbitrary decisions. How much he resembled in these things the author he so loved, may best be told in the words of that sublime though unequal spirit, from whose stores the "Hydriotaphia," and "Garden of Cyrus," proceeded. "I was born," says he, "in the planetary hour of Saturn, and I think I have a piece of that leaden planet in me. I am no way facetious, nor disposed for the mirth and galliardize of company; yet in one dream I can compose a whole comedy, behold the action, apprehend the jests, and laugh myself awake at the conceit thereof: were my memory as faithful as my reason is then fruitful, I would never study but in my dreams; and this time also would I choose for my devotions: but our grosser memories have then so little hold of our abstracted understandings, that they forget the story, and can only relate to our awaked souls, a confused and broken tale of that that hath passed." Any one who will read the "Dream Children, a Revery," of Lamb, or that curious and well-antlered tale of his, where in his vision he thought he had "suddenly got into Ardennes," will perceive how well the comic thoughts of the slumbering physician of Norwich, were often expressed by the essayist Elia, with such an intermingled dash of waking reason, as made them seem like truth.

While it has mainly been the point of critics hitherto, especially since the death of Lamb, when mentioning his writings, to dwell chiefly upon the essays of Elia, it is a delightfuller task, if we may fashion one of his comparative adjectives, to trace the unfoldings of his genius and taste in the poetic art. In this regard, he has not yet had justice. Steeped to the lips in the noblest masters of the old English drama,-one who

'Sir Thomas Browne.

walked in the fields, and held sweet counsel, at least in fancy, with Barlow and Decker and Heywood and Marston; with Tourneur and Ford and Greville, and he of the learned sock, -O, rare Ben Jonson,-with a mind of his own, fruitful and full of growing, how could he choose but discourse eloquent music in his dramatic writings? It is true, they failed on the stage; but they abound with genuine inklings of nature, with touches of passion which thrill as we read, though they may not startle like the modern clap-trap dramas, where murder, incest, rob. bery, and every thing else atrocious is commingled in one absurd melange-suited to depraved tastes, to which indeed it relishes like something "slab and good." The old five-act repasts at theatres, are become intolerable to modern predilection; it yearns for the terrific, and would "sup full of horror." Happily,-if we may pervert a term for the nonce-the supply is more than equal to the demand.

We regret exceedingly that we have not space in this article, to embrace many of the fresh and racy letters which Mr. Talfourd has collected from the friends with whom Lamb held such an extended and cordial correspondence. He was, indeed, the prince of letter-writers. "His eye begot occasion for his wit;" he had the faculty of bringing a friend to his side as it were, through the post; and the pictures and conceits with which his epistles are studded, would form galleries and volumes of themselves. We equally regret from the same reasons, that we cannot give place to some of those elaborated sonnets which are so replete with feeling. Gentleness is their prevailing characteristic, at the first reading; but there is a deeper undertone beneath, which speaks to the heart. Whether the progenitors of our author may have been "shepherds on Lincolnian plains," we cannot judge; but the grace of their calling certainly fell upon the spirit of the accountant; his sentences come before the eye, sheep come up from the washing, even shorn; whereof every one beareth twins, and not one is barren among them."

as

In the only sketches which our limits permit us to make from his correspondence, we must include the following philosophical and pleasant allusion to the fate of a farce which he had the ill luck to present to the audience of a London theatre, and which received "the deep damnation of their bah!"

"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 St. 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 breaths through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labours of their fellowcreatures, who are desirous to please them!"

The felicitous coolness with which Lamb received the condemnation of his dramatic writings, in so far as their stage effectiveness was concerned, shows how much he relished their construction as an art, in which one can develope the strong points of human affection, suggested by personal trial, or by the fine perceptions of truth. In his poetry, Lamb was no mannerist; or if he could have been so called, it was because his manner was his own. He reigned and rejoiced among the actors of the past; and in truth, his best home was among "departed spirits." For one so chained to the Actual of the hour, he was strangely imaginative. Among his sonnets, we find the following. It is replete with fancy, and stirs with life.

"Oh! I could laugh to hear the midnight wind,
That, rushing on its way with careless sweep,
Scatters the ocean waves. And I could weep
Like to a child. For now to my raised mind
On wings of winds comes wild-eyed Phantasy,
And her rude visions give severe delight.
Oh, winged bark! how swift along the night
Pass'd thy proud keel! nor shall I let go by
Lightly of that drear hour the memory,
When wet and chilly on thy deck I stood,
Unbonneted, and gazed upon the flood,
Even till it seem'd a pleasant thing to die-
To be resolved into th' elemental wave,

Or take my portion with the winds that rave.""

Meditating certain extracts from John Woodvill, a critic curious to trace the sources of thought in the subject of his praise, would delight to follow Lamb back to those musty and blackletter recesses, whence, as from a dark and seemingly inscrutable cleft in a rock, flowed forth his well or fountain of dramatic poetry. But it would require many quotations to illustrate the justice of the comment. We, therefore, simply quote one passage,-not so much that it was beloved of its author, as that it is a special favourite of ours. Simon, a rural character, is asked. "What sports do you use in the forest?"—and thus replies:

:

"Simon.-Not many; some few, as thus :-
To see the sun to bed, and to rise,
Like some hot amourist, with glowing eyes,
Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him,
With all his fires and travelling glories round him.

Sometimes the moon on soft night clouds to rest,
Like beauty nestling in a young man's breast,
And all the winking stars, her handmaids, keep
Admiring silence, while those lovers sleep.
Sometimes outstretch'd, in very idleness,
Naught doing, saying little, thinking less,
To view the leaves, thin dancers upon air,
Go eddying round; and small birds, how they fare,
When mother Autumn fills their beaks with corn,
Filch'd from the careless Amalthea's horn;
And how the woods berries and worms provide
Without their pains, when earth has naught beside
To answer their small wants.

To view the graceful deer come tripping by,
Then stop, and gaze, then turn, they know not why,
Like bashful younkers in society.

To mark the structure of a plant or tree,

And all fair things of earth, how fair they be."

From the correspondence of Lamb, our gleanings must be brief. Taking it for granted, that the republished American volumes will be generally spread abroad, the privation here is less to be regretted. Yet we cannot omit the following picture of a chronic influenza. Every body who remembers the cockney humorist's description of riding in an omnibus, where a woman was passenger, with a male child on her lap, the proprietor of แ a large fat face, with big eyes, and a cold in its head," can recognize the faithfulness of the depicted complaint, even though it be unaccompanied with any pathological directions:

:( TO BERNARD BARTON.

"Dear B. B.-Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day-mare-'a whoreson lethargy,' Falstaff calls it,-an indisposition to do any thing, or to be any thing-a total deadness and distaste -a suspension of vitality-an indifference to locality-a numb, sopori fical, good-for-nothingness-an ossification all over-an oysterlike insensibility to the passing events-a mind-stupor-a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you ever have a very bad cold; with a total irresolution to submit to water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot and my excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and, to my thinking, it's three-and-twenty furlongs from hence to the end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say; nothing is of more importance than another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge's wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it; a cipher, an O! I acknowledge life at all only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest. I am weary of the world, and the world is weary of me. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just now coming out upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality, yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection. If you told me the world would be at an end to-morrow, I should