compare these careful trifles with the less cared for and infinitely more exquisite triflings of the letters. The difference is that between things made to please and things made for pleasure. In the prose he is himself, and his own master; in the verse he is never far enough away from his subject to do it or himself justice; and, tied by the metre, has rarely any fine freak or whimsical felicity such as came to him by the way in the mere turn of a sentence in prose.

More than of any poet we might say that a large part of his poems were recreations. We might indeed, but with a different meaning, say as much of Herrick. To Herrick his art was his recreation, but then his recreation was his art. He has absolute skill in the game, and plays it with easy success. Lamb seems to find playing a task, or allows himself to come but indifferently through it. His admiration for "Rose Aylmer" was not surprising, for there, in that perfectly achieved accident, was what he was for ever trying to do.

Yet, at times, the imprisoned elf within him breaks forth, and we get a bubble of grotesque rhymes, as cleverly done as Butler would have done them, and with a sad, pungent jollity of his own; or, once at least, some inspired nonsense, in parody of himself, the

best express

Mind of quiet Quakeress,

but also the solemn fancy of the lines "In My Own Album," in which a formal and antique measure is put to modern uses, and the jesting figure of "My soul, an album bright," is elaborated with serious wit in the manner of the "metaphysical" poets. And it is under the same covers, and as if done after the same pattern, that we find the most completely successful of his poems, the lines "On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born." The subject was one which could not but awaken all his faculties, stirring in him pity, compassionate wonder, a tender whimsicalness; the thought of death and the thought of childhood being always sure to quicken his imagination to its finest utterance. There is good poetical substance, and the form, though not indeed original, is one in which he moves with as natural an air as if he were actually writing two hundred years ago. It was in this brief, packed, "matterful" way, full of pleasant surprises, that his favorite poets wrote; the metre is Wither's, with some of the Woven subtleties of Marvel.

With Lamb, more than with most poets, the subject-matter of his work in verse determines its value. He needs to "load every rift with ore," not for the bettering, but for the mere ex

silly,

Pouring a watering-pot over a lily;

together with, at least once, in the piece of lovely lunacy called "The Ape," a real achievement in the grotesque. His two task-masters, "Work" and "Leisure," both inspire him to more than usual freedom of fancy. And it is among the "Album Verses" that we find not only those "whitest thoughts in whitest dress," which, for the Quakeress, Lucy Barton,

view of his own poems he protests, in the name of Vincent Bourne, against "the vague, dreamy, wordy, matterless poetry of this empty age," and finds satisfaction in Bourne's Latin verses because "they fix upon something." For him that "something" had to be very definite, in the subject-matter of his own verse; and it was not with the mere humility of self-depreciation that he wrote to Coleridge in 1796: "Not that I relish other people's poetry less-their's comes from 'em without effort, mine

is the difficult operation of a brain scanty of ideas, made more difficult by disuse." He was a poet to whom prose was the natural language, and in verse he could not trust himself to rove freely, though he had been born a gipsy of the mind.

Even in his best work in verse Lamb has no singing voice. The poetry of those lines "On an Infant Dying as Soon as Born" is quite genuine, and it has made for itself a form adequate to its purpose; but the verse, after all, is rather an accompaniment than a lifting; and "la lyre," it has been rightly said, "est en quelque manière un instrument ailé." He speaks in metre, he does not sing; but he speaks more delicately in metre than any one else not born a singer.

II.

There is something a little accidental about all Lamb's finest work. Poetry he seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but the supreme criticism of the "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets" arose out of the casual habit of setting down an opinion of an extract just copied into one's note-book, and the book itself, because, he said, "the book is such as I am glad there should be." The beginnings of his miscellaneous prose are due to the "ferreting" of Coleridge. "He ferrets me day and night," Lamb complains to Manning in 1800, to do something. He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressing occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulips. . . . He has lugged me to the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the anatomist of melancholy"; which was done, in the consummate way we know, and led in its turn to all the rest of the prose. And Barry Cornwall tells us that "he was almost teased into writing the 'Elia' essays."

He had begun, indeed, deliberately, with a story, as personal really as the poems, but, unlike them, set too far from himself in subject and tangled with circumstances outside his knowledge. He wrote "Rosamund Gray" before he was twenty-three, and in that "lovely thing," as Shelley called it, we see most of the merits and defects of his early poetry. It is a story which is hardly a story at all, told by comment, evasion, and recurrence, by "little images, recollections, and circumstances of past pleasures" or distresses; with something vague and yet precise, like a dream partially remembered. Here and there is the creation of a mood and moment, almost like Coleridge's in the "Ancient Mariner"; but these flicker and go out. The style would be laughable in its simplicity if there were not in it some almost awing touch of innocence; some hint of that divine goodness which, in Lamb, needed the relief and savor of the later freakishness to sharpen it out of insipidity. There is already a sense of what is tragic and endearing in earthly existence, though no skill as yet in presenting it; and the moral of it is surely one of the morals or messages of "Elia": "God has built a brave world but methinks he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they may."

Lamb had no sense of narrative, or, rather, he cared in a story only for the moments when it seemed to double upon itself and turn into irony. All his attempts to write for the stage (where his dialogue might have been so telling) were foiled by his inability to "bring three together on the stage at once," as he confessed in a letter to Mrs. Shelley; "they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw them.” Narrative he could manage only when it was prepared for him by another, as in the "Tales from Shakespeare" and

"The Wanderings of Ulysses." Even in "Mrs. Leicester's School," where he came nearest to success in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have less than the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb's: of "The Father's Wedding-Day," which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called "with the sole exception of the 'Bride of Lammermoor,' the most beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern." There is something of an incomparable kind of story-telling in most of the best essays of "Elia," but it is a kind which he had to find out by accident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly through letter-writing. "Us dramatic geniuses," he speaks of, in a letter to Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it was this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessential part of himself. "Truth," he says in this letter, "is one and poor, like the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that multiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not believe it could be put to such purposes." It was to his correspondents, indeed to the incitement of their wakeful friendship, that he owes more perhaps than the mere materials of his miracles.

of the letters, those works of nature, and almost more wonderful than works: of art, are to be taken on oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of sober-seeming truth, are an anticipation, and were of the nature of a preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays. What began in mischief ends in art.

III.

"I am out of the world of readers,” Lamb wrote to Coleridge, "I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up into the old things." "I am jealous for the actors who pleased my youth," he says elsewhere. And again: "For me, I do not know whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the usual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since seems of any value or importance compared to the colors which imagination gave to everything then." In Lamb this love of old things, this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which imagination came to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves all through his life that child's attitude of wonder, before "this good world, which he knows-which was created so lovely, beyond his deservings." He loves the old, the accustomed, the things that people have had about them since they could remember. "I am in love," he says in the most profoundly serious of his essays, "with this green earth; the face of town and country; and the sweet security of streets." He was a man to whom mere living had zest enough to make up for everything that was contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not unhappy. Happiness came to him out of the little

were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living, and his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he left to others to remember him by.

Lamb's religion, says Pater, was "the religion of men of letters, religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last century"; and Hood says of him: "As he was in spirit an Old Author, so was he in faith an Aneient Christian." He himself tells Coleridge that he has "a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit," and, later in life, writes to a friend: "Much of my seriousness has gone off." On this, as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more into himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent with him. "Such religion as I have," he said, "has always acted on me more by way of sentiment than argumentative process"; and we find him preferring churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done. To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not lightly, or with anything but a strange complexioned kind of gratitude, that he asked: "Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself-do these things go out with life?"

It was what I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of him, as he says of the fox in the fable: "He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold."

And this moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a "spirit of youth in everything," an irrational, casuistical, "matter-of-lie" persistence in the face of all logic, experience and sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the most religious sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy.

Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid out before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of the most precious, and after books came pictures. "What any man can write, surely I may read!" he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios. "I like books about books," he confesses, the test of the book-lover. "I love," he says, "to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me." He was the finest of all readers, far more instant than Coleridge; not to be taken unawares by a Blake ("I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age," he says of him, on but a slight and partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the "Lyrical Ballads" are confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" as "the best piece in it," and can define precisely the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of escape, to Manning: "It is full of original thought, but it does not often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression." I choose these instances because the final test of a critic is in his reception of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found it much easier to be right, before every one else, about Webster, and Ford, and Cyril Tourneur, than to

be the accurate critic that he was of Coleridge, at the very time when he was under the "whiff and wind" of Coleridge's influence. And in writing of pictures, though his knowledge is not so great nor his instinct so wholly "according to knowledge," he can write as no one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that his very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantly detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of a would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin.

Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has been no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, so intimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he speaks of the stage, as in that tiny masterpiece, "On the Acting of Munden," which ends the book of "Elia," with its great close, the Beethoven soft wondering close, after all the surges: "He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace materials of life, like prime val man with the sun and stars about him." He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of Miss Kelly. When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the very wires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in love with Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words that might apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying of Mrs. Jordan, that "she seemed one whom care could not come near; a privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness.” Then he goes on: "This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit, escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed: her smiles, if I may use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are vis

itors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she does so, I am not sure that she is not greatest." Is not this, with all its precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a poetry made up of no poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but "of imagination all compact," poetry in substance?

"The

Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. earth, and sea, and sky (when all is said)," he admitted, "is but as a house to live in"; and, "separate from the pleasure of your company," he assured Wordsworth, "I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles-life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade-all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life." There, surely, is the poem of London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death), "Lon

me.