Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power A presence that disturbs me with the joy 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 : Thanks for your letter and present. I had already 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 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 fiction upon herself, first substituting her own feelings for the Beggar's, and, in the same breath, detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish. The "Poet's Epitaph" is disfigured, to my taste, by the common satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse epithet of "pin-point" in the sixth stanza. I may interrupt Charles Lamb for a moment to tell you that Wordsworth originally wrote the stanza thus: Wrapt closely in thy sensual fleece, O turn aside, and take, I pray, Whether owing to Lamb's objection here made or not, in subsequent editions Wordsworth altered it to the shape in which all his readers know it, Thy ever-dwindling soul away. "All the rest," Lamb proceeds, "is eminently good, and your own." I must not quote further from this remarkable letter, except to cite this just and admirable remark: "I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his 'Ancient Mariner' 'A Poet's Reverie'; it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver's declaration that he is not a lion, but only the scenical representation of a lion. What new idea is gained by this title but one subversive of all credit-which the tale should force upon us of its truth?" Coleridge himself never delivered a criticism more astute and to the point than this; and this second title, "A Poet's Reverie," disappeared from all succeeding editions. Unquestionably the only sound principle of arranging the letters of such a correspondent as Lamb is the chronological. For thus, as we read on, we are in fact reading an autobiography, embellished with a thousand anecdotes, confidences, and touches of character and feeling that would never have seen the light in an autobiography written intentionally for publication. But there is an interest also in noting, as I have pointed out, the different veins of thought and style that run through the letters addressed to different friends. The letters to Coleridge have a character of their own; and so with those to Manning and to Bernard Barton. These three groups of letters are the most remarkable in the collection. To the general reader, Manning and Barton are perhaps best known through their friendship with Lamb, although both, in their widely different ways, were noticeable men. Thomas Manning, indeed, until the publication ten years since of his Journals of Travel, with a short memoir prefixed, was an almost unknown name to this generation except as Charles Lamb's correspondent, and the letters to him are so full of raillery and the wildest frolics of the imagination that it would be difficult to read Manning aright from them alone. But Manning was a remarkable man. The son of a Norfolk clergyman, with a strong turn for both mathematics 1800. and metaphysics, he went up to Caius College, Cambridge, and would have taken the highest mathematical honours but for an invincible objection to degrees, with the oaths and tests then attached to them. He wrote divers mathematical treatises, and continued to reside at Cambridge, though without a degree, and while there became known to Lamb, who was visiting his old companion Charles Lloyd at that University. Lamb made Manning's acquaintance about the year The mingled simplicity and enthusiasm of the man-his abstruse studies and his eccentricities, the fact that his tastes (mathematical, metaphysical, and Oriental) were all so alien from Lamb's own, had evidently a strange fascination for him from the very first, and a correspondence sprang up which continued for many years. a character as Manning's drew out Lamb's finest qualities of humour and sympathy. It was not, likeness but unlikeness in his friends that at once stimulated his fancy and warmed his heart towards them. He loved Manning and laughed at him. He confided to him his closest family and personal sorrows; and in the very same letter, perhaps, would bring the whole varied artillery of his fun to play upon his friend's hobbies. Such When Lamb first knew Manning, the dominant passion of his life was already working irrepressibly in his breast-the desire to explore the then unknown mysteries of China and Tartary. The plan he formed and carried out, with extraordinary pluck and perseverance, was to begin the study of the Chinese language in England, carry it on in Paris, under the tuition of a great French Orientalist, pass some years in Canton, and when he should have acquired the art of perfectly deporting himself as a Celestial, to make his way, with a confidential native servant, to the sacred capital of Thibet, the abode of the Grand Lama, the very fountainhead of Buddhism. This exploit, so difficult and so hazardous, Manning achieved. He went out to China in 1806, was in Canton till 1810, made his memorable journey to Lhasa in 1810-1811, returned to Canton, where he again resided for some years, and finally returned to England in 1818. In Lamb's letters we follow him through all his changes of abode-from his quiet rooms at Cambridge to his residence in Paris (which he had to leave suddenly when war broke out in 1803), and so to Canton. "I heard that you were going to China," Lamb writes in August 1801, "with a commission from the Wedgwoods to collect hints for their pottery, and to teach the Chinese perspective." Eighteen months later, Manning's schemes were taking more definite shape, for Lamb writes to him in Paris, in tones of serious alarm : MY DEAR MANNING-The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity, but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake, don't think any more of "Independent Tartary." What are |