don streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter not one known one were remaining." He traces the changes in streets, their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his friends, "the very streets, he says," writes Mary, "altering every day." London was to him the new, better Eden. "A garden was the primitive prison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness

sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, play-houses, satires, epigrams, punsthese all came in on the town part, and thither side of innocence." To love London so was part of his human love, and in his praise of streets he has done as much for the creation and perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth ("by whose system," Mary Lamb conjectured, "it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved") has done by his praise of flowers and hills.

And yet, for all his "disparagement of heath and highlands," as he confessed to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciation of natural things, once brought before them, as he was in his appreciation of the things of art and the mind and man's making. He was a great walker, and sighs once, before his release from the desk: "I wish I were a caravan driver or a penny post man, to earn my bread in air and sunshine." We have seen what he wrote to Wordsworth about his mountains, before he had seen them. This is what he writes of them to Manning, after he has seen them: "Such an impression I never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. . . . In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before." And to Coleridge he writes: "I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the last day I live. They

haunt me perpetually." All this Lamb saw and felt, because no beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But he wrote of it only in his letters, which were all of himself; because he put into his published writings only the best or the rarest or the accustomed and familiar part of himself, the part which he knew by heart.

IV.

Beyond any writer pre-eminent for charm, Lamb had salt and sting. There is hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says, briefly: "Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by Affectation"; but then he is also never more himself than when he expands and develops, as in this rendering of the hisses which damned his play in Drury Lane:

It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a congregation of mad geese, with roaring something 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 favorite 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 the 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 labors of their fellow creatures who are desirous to please them!

Or it may be a cold in the head which starts the heroic agility of his tongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is

so incredibly fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer; "The shake, which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite through the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad, keeps double motion, like the earth-running the primary circuit of the tune, and still revolving upon its own axis"; and he can condense into six words the whole lifehistory and the soul's essential secret of Coleridge, when he says of him, in almost the last fragment of prose that he wrote, "he had a hunger for eternity."

To read Lamb makes a man more humane, more tolerant, more dainty; incites to every natural piety, strengthens reverence; while it clears his brain of whatever dull fumes may have lodged there, stirs up all his senses to wary alertness, and actually quickens his vitality, like high pure air. It is, in the familiar phrase, “a liberal education"; but it is that finer education which sets free the spirit. His natural piety, in the full sense of the word, seems to me deeper and more sensitive than that of any other English writer. Kindness, in him, embraces mankind, not with the wide engulfing arms of philanthropy, but with an individual caress. He is almost the sufficient type of virtue, so far as virtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in him which is not the bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had an unsocial origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noble things, or light up an unsuspected "soul of goodness in things evil."

No man ever so loved his friends, or was so honest with them, or made such a religion of friendship. His character of Hazlitt in the "Letter to Southey" is

the finest piece of emotional prose which he ever wrote, and his pen is inspired whenever he speaks of Coleridge. "Good people, as they are called," he writes to Wordsworth, "won't serve. I want individuals. I am made up of queer points and want SO many answering needles." He counts over his friends in public, like a child counting over his toys, when some one has offered an insult to one of them. He has delicacies and devotions towards his friends, so subtle and so noble that they make every man his friend. And, that love may deepen into awe, there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that paradox of his position, by which he supports that by which he is supported.

It is, then, this "human, too human" creature, who comes so close to our hearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or at least in the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact, flawless in technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of "prose as a fine art" looks up with an admiration which may well become despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his "ghastly vest of white patchwork," "the apparition of a dead rainbow"; what is it that gives to a style, which no man can analyze, its "terseness, its jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?" Those are his own words, not used of himself; but do they not do something to define what can, after all, never be explained?

cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common letter into sane prose... Ten thousand times I have confessed to you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any compre hensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader however partial, can find any story.

"My brain," he says, in a letter to Wordsworth, "is desultory, and snatches off hints from things." And, in a wise critical letter to Southey, he says, summing up himself in a single phrase: "I never judge system-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars."

Is he, in these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, really apologizing for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne, who (it is Lamb that says it) "anticipated all the discoveries of succeeding essayists,” affected no humility in the statement of almost exactly the same mental complexion. "I take the first argument that fortune offers me," he tells us; "they are all equally good for me; I never design to treat them in their totality, for I never see the whole of anything, nor do those see it who promise to show it to me. . . . In general I love to seize things by some unwonted lustre." There, in the two greatest of the essayists, one sees precisely what goes to the making of the essayist. First, a beautiful disorder: the simul

taneous attack and appeal of contraries, a converging multitude of dreams, memories, thoughts, sensations, without mental preference, or conscious guiding of the judgment; and then, order in disorder, a harmony more properly musical than logical, a separating and return of many elements, which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of "Elia" called "Old China,” and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyze it. You will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant, lovely last sentence, is like the refrain which returns at the end of a poem.

Lamb was a mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; he saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney, a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked exceptions, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his excesses something of "the good clerk."

Lamb seemed to his contemporaries notably eccentric, but he was nearer than them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from the very heart of light, and returned thither after the circuit. Where Coleridge lost himself in clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearest short-cut, and, having reached the goal, went no step beyond it.

And he was a bee for honey, not, like Coleridge, a browsing ox. To him the essence of delight was choice; and choice, with him, was readier when the prize was far-fetched and dear bought: rarity of manners, books, pictures, or whatever was human or touched hu

manity. "Opinion," he said, "is a species of property; and though I am always desirous to share with my friends to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keep some tenets and some property properly my own." And then he found, in rarity, one of the qualities of the best; and was never, like most others, content with the good, or in any danger of confusing it with the best. He was the only man of that great age, which had Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and Shelley, and the rest, whose taste was

flawless. All the others, who seemed to be marching so straight to so determined a goal, went astray at one time or another; only Lamb, who was always wandering, never lost sense of direction, or failed to know how far he had strayed from the road.

The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the tragic The Monthly Review.

pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and, also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike, was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporizing with the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling; madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense. In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the intellect. I know one who read the essays of "Elia" with intense delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She had seen so well through the fun to its deep inner meaning that the fun had not detained her. She had found in all of it nothing but a pure intellectual reason, beyond logic, where reason is one with intuition. Arthur Symons.

On an evening in August, Mr. Julius Inchcape, a retired City gentleman residing at Herne Hill, drove up to the entrance arch at St. Pancras in a hansom. Refusing the services of a porter, he received his modest travelling-bag, paid the driver, and took a first-class ticket for Whichester. Then he walked briskly to platform No. 3, under the impression that his movements during the next twenty-four hours were clearly mapped out before him.

But even the most curious experiences in life have a way of coming upon us without warning or presentiThe Living Age Jan. 31, 1905.

The eight

ment, and Mr. Inchcape's adventures began almost immediately. thirteen was at the platform, and he had only comfortable time to select a compartment. With the perversity common to so many travellers, he did not take the first that offered itself, but walked on to the next, and paused at the open door to glance within. Observing that it was already occupied by two gentlemen, he was just about to pass on when a raucous voice spoke out:

"You can't come here. This is reserved!"

Mr. Inchcape was astonished, not so

The

much by the words as by the shrill rudeness and violence of the tone. The speaker was an old man sitting in the farther corner of the compartment-an old man somewhat large in build and with a heavy white moustache. other passenger sat within arm's-length of the door, and was much younger. "Do you hear-you?" cried the angry voice again. "This carriage is reserved! You can't come in! You can't come in! It is reserved!"

More than ever amazed and indignant, Mr. Inchcape glanced at the younger man for an explanation. Under the circumstances, he took it for granted that the two were travelling in company. The person thus mutely appealed to, however, took no trouble to explain his companion's incivility. Instead, he gazed straight over Mr. Inchcape's head with that insultingly unconscious stare which sometimes seems to be one of the most valued accomplishments of gentility.

Then, naturally, Mr. Inchcape broke out. "I did not intend to come in here, sir," he cried, addressing the heavy white moustache. "And you are not a gentleman, sir! And you have a vile temper, sir!" And having thus delivered himself and created a distinct sensation in the vicinity, he walked back stormily to the compartment he had previously rejected.

It was empty, and he could express his feelings without hindrance. "Confound him!" he said aloud. "Confound him! Some foreign boor, by his accent. Confound him!" And he closed the door with a decisive crash.

and it bore in bold characters the legend "Reserved."

"Well, upon my word!" muttered Mr. Inchcape, as the train moved slowly away. He saw the official step back with a look which was almost apologetic, and in a moment more had lost sight of him altogether. "Well, upon my word! If I'm not mistaken, this label was intended for that other compartment-the one with the Boor in it. It serves him right!"

He began to smile at the mistake, wondered how it had come about, and proceeded to contemplate it with considerable enjoyment. Indeed, this unexpected incident quite restored the equanimity of the very genial and good-natured old gentleman, and in a few minutes he settled himself smilingly into his corner, took up his selection of newspapers, and began to divide his attention between them and the pleasant prospects of his journey.

In one of those limited gardens which are the rule at Herne Hill, Mr. Inchcape cultivated roses. He did not cultivate them, as some of his neighbors did, to flaunt them in the faces of his fellow-men, but with a genuine love of flowers, which had grown year by year since he had retired from business. Occasionally this hobby led him to make excursions abroad, and at this moment he was on his way to Whichester to attend a great Horticultural Exhibition which was to be opened there to-morrow by a representative of Royalty. He intended to spend a good day among the flowers, and was going down this evening so that he might be on the ground as early as possible, fresh for the day's programme.

With what may be called a pleasing sub-consciousness of these careful arrangements, Mr. Inchcape read his papers and spent his leisure harmlessly and perhaps profitably until Padgworth was reached. By this time it was dark, but the label on Mr. Inchcape's win