"I reckon myself a dab at proseverse I leave to my betters," Lamb once wrote to Wordsworth; and, in a letter to Charles Lloyd, he tells him, by way of praise, "your verses are as good and as wholesome as prose." "Those cursed Dryads and Pagan trumperies of modern verse have put me out of conceit of the very name of poetry," he has just said. At the age of twenty-one he talks of giving up the writing of poetry. "At present," he writes to Coleridge, "I have not leisure to write verses, nor anything approaching to a fondness for the exercise. . . . The music of poesy may charm for awhile the importunate teasing cares of life; but the teased and troubled man is not in a disposition to make that music." Yet, as we know, Lamb, who had begun with poetry, returned to the writing of poetry at longer or shorter intervals throughout his whole life: was this prose-writer, in whom prose partook so much of the essence of poetry, in any real or considerable sense a poet?

The name of Lamb as a poet is known to most people as the writer of one poem. "The Old Familiar Faces" is scarcely a poem at all; the metre halts, stumbles, there is no touch of magic in it; but it is speech, naked human speech, such as rarely gets through the lovely disguise of verse. It has the raw humanity of Walt Whitman, and almost hurts us by a kind of dumb helplessness in it. A really articulate poet could never have written it; here, the emotion of the poet masters him as he speaks; and you feel, with a strange thrill, that catch in his breath which he cannot help betraying. There are few such poems in literature, and no other in the work of Lamb.

I.

For Lamb, with his perfect sincerity, his deliberate and quite natural simplicity, and with all that strange tragic material within and about him (already coming significantly into the naïve prose tale of "Rosamund Gray") was unable to work directly upon that material in the imaginative way of the poet, unable to transform its substance into a creation in the form of verse. He could write about it, touchingly sometimes, more or less tamely for the most part, in a way that seems either too downright or too deliberate. "Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge," he wrote, with his unerring tact of advice, "or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression. I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus." This simplicity, which was afterwards to illuminate his prose, is seen in his verse almost too nakedly, or as if it were an end rather than a means.

Lamb's first master was Cowper, and the method of Cowper was not a method that could ever help him to be himself. But, above all, verse itself was never as much of a help to him as it was a hindrance. Requiring always, as he did, to apprehend reality indirectly, and with an elaborately prepared ceremony, he found himself in verse trying to be exactly truthful to emotions too subtle and complex for his skill. He could but set them down as if describing them, as in most of that early work in which he took himself and his poetry most seriously. What was afterwards to penetrate his prose, giving it that savor which it has, unlike any other, is absent from his almost saltless verse. There is the one

inarticulate cry, the "Old Familiar Faces," and then, for twenty years and more, only one or two wonderful literary exercises, like the mad verses called "A Conceipt of Diabolical Possession," and the more intimate fantasy of the "Farewell to Tobacco" ("a little in the way of Withers"), with one love-song, in passing, to a dead woman whom he had never spoken to.

The Elizabethan experiments, "John Woodvil," and, much later, "The Wife's Trial," intervene, and we see Lamb under a new aspect, working at poetry with real ambition. His most considerable attempt, the work of his in verse which he would most have liked to be remembered, was the play of "John Woodvil.” "My tragedy," he wrote to Southey, at the time when he was finishing it, "will be a medley (as I intend it to be a medley) of laughter and tears, prose and verse, and in some places rhyme, songs, wit, pathos, humor, and, if possible, sublimity; at least, it is not a fault in my intention if it does not comprehend most of these discordant colors." It was meant, in short, to be an Elizabethan play, done, not in the form of a remote imitation, but with "a colloquial ease and spirit, something like" Shakespeare, as he says. As a play, it is the dream of a shadow. Reading it as poetry, it has a

No crime, but unforeseen, and sent to punish

The less offence with image of the greater,

Thereby to work the soul's humility. And when John Woodvil, after his trial, begins "to understand what kind of creature Hope is," and bids Margaret "tell me if I over-act my mirth," is there not a remembrance of that mood which Lamb had confessed to Cole

Some

ridge, just after his mother's funeral, when he says, "I was in danger of making myself too happy?" touch of this poignant feeling comes into the play here and there, but not vividly enough to waken it wholly out of what Southey called its "lukewarm” state. The writing has less of the Elizabethan rhetoric and more of the quaint directness, the kindly nature, the eager interest in the mind, which those great writers whom Lamb discovered for the modern world had to teach him, than any play written on similar models. I am reminded sometimes of Heywood, sometimes of Middleton; and even when I find him in his play "imitating the defects of the old writers," I cannot but confess with Hazlitt that "its beauties are his own, though in their manner." Others have written more splendidly in the Elizabethan manner, but no one has ever

with literary experiment: an echo, and yet so intimate; real feelings in old clothes. The subject probably meant more to Lamb than people have usually realized. I do not doubt that he wrote it with a full consciousness of its application to the tragic story which had desolated his own household, with a kind of generous casuistry, to ease a somewhat uneasy mind, and to be a sort of solace and defence for Mary. The moral of it is:

And not for one misfortune, child of chance,

After one much later and slighter experiment in writing plays "for antiq. uity," Lamb went back to occasional writing, and the personal note returns with the "Album Verses" of 1830. Lamb's album verses are a kind of amiable task-work, done easily, he tells us, but at the same time with something painfully industrious, not only in the careful kindness of the acrostic. The man of many friends forgets that he is a man of letters, and turns amateur out of mere geniality. To realize how much he lost by writing in verse rather than in prose, we have only to