exchanged between men in the centuries before --indeed we know of many such but with few exceptions they have perished. The reason is a simple one. In early days, letters were scarce because they were so difficult to send. In these later days (it sounds paradoxical), they are getting rarer just because they are so easy to send. For as there are "books that are no books" (biblia abiblia), so there are "letters" (to be counted by the million) that are no letters," in any sense that literature or art can recognise. In these days of ours, they must be persons of a rare selfcommand and force of character who habitually write letters that, however well they may serve the purpose for which they were written, the world will not willingly let die.

There are of course many reasons for thisthe cheapness of postage and the multiplication of posts among the chief. The singular increase in the numbers of magazines and reviews clamorous for anything that a writer of repute will send them which causes that the clever and charming things, which a hundred years ago would have gone into a letter, now become "copy," and go into a printed article or essay-supplies another reason. The increasing wear and tear of life, reducing leisure and making brevity in letterwriting a primary consideration, supplies a third. At the same time it is to be remembered that there have been persons endowed with a peculiar faculty for expressing their best talent and noblest

selves in this particular form, and as there have been, so there may be again. Let us hope for the best.

It is an interesting theme, but I must pass it by, to dwell with you upon one notable and charming practiser of the art the " unpremeditated art," to use Shelley's phrase of familiar letter-writing. The letters of Lamb have a great variety of interest for us. Taken together and read in order, they form of themselves an autobiography. Of his childhood and youth; his school-time and his holiday seasons; his family and his home surroundings; and the books that trained and fostered his genius-of all these things the Essays of Elia tell us fully, and his letters complete the story. They begin in the year that he came of age (1796), and with a few regrettable intervals, not easy to explain, they continue in regular order until within a few days of his death, eight-and-thirty years after. I cannot recall any incident in his life (or Mary's, which is the same thing) that the letters do not deal with. All the joys and sorrows of their "dual loneliness"—all their literary pursuits, with the attendant triumphs or disappointments-will be found chronicled there. There is not one of the many sides of his singularly composite being that does not come in turn to the front. Every mood is reflected, from the deep anguish of family bereavement to the lightest vein of raillery, and even the most rollicking horse-play. For Lamb wrote differently

to different persons. This is as it should be, Letters, to be worth anything, should tell us something about the person they are written to. If a writer is in genuine sympathy with his correspondent, the letter inevitably reflects something of the nature of the friend addressed. And then, what a circle of friends and intimates Charles Lamb was privileged to have! Other famous collections of letters in our literature are memorable because of the writer, and derive but little interest from the persons addressed. Take those of the poet Cowper, perhaps the closest parallel in kind with Lamb's, and among the most fascinating and delightful reading in our literature. What do we know or care about young Mr. Unwin, or Mr. Hill, or even about Hayley or the Rev. Mr. Newton? They are really only familiar to us at all because Cowper numbered them among his correspondents. So also, I think most of you know the name of Mason chiefly through Gray's letters, and Sir Horace Mann mainly through Walpole's. But think of the chief names in the roll of Lamb's letter-writing friends-Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Manning, Leigh Hunt, and Hazlitt; not to mention Bernard Barton, Godwin, Barry Cornwall, and Thomas Hood. And, as I have said, Lamb wrote differently to these different friends. Those who know and love his letters from long familiarity can recognise this variety of touch-even when the subjects of the letters are nearly akin as he gossips

with Coleridge or Manning, with Southey or Barton.

I do not know that I can do better than illustrate from the letters themselves some of the rarer and more noticeable faculties of Lamb. And it is remarkable, as I have elsewhere observed, that the intellectual accomplishment which asserts itself earliest is just that which ordinarily it takes years, with their increasing experience and wider reading and study, to mature—I mean the critical faculty. Lamb's earliest letters that have survived begin when he was just of age, and his two chief correspondents for the next three years were young men like himself—one his old schoolfellow, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, three years his senior, and the other, whom he had come to know through Coleridge, and who was associated with Coleridge by so many close ties, Robert Southey. All three were starting on a literary career, full of ambition: two of them with the intention of making it their profession, the other, happily for himself, settling down to that desk in Leadenhall which was to prove (though he knew it not) his best blessing and safeguard for thirty years to come. Apart from the family matters-sad and terrible they were discussed in these letters, the chief topics dealt with are literary and critical. Coleridge and Southey forward to their friend their verses, their lyrics and eclogues, for his opinion and suggestions; and he in turn submits to them

his sonnets and elegies, plaintive and tender after his model William Lisle Bowles. Coleridge and Southey, each endowed with a poetic gift far stronger and richer than Lamb's, yet at once recognise in their companion—no university man like themselves, lowly in his home and traditions, humble in his life's occupation-this rare and precious gift of critical insight. These earliest letters of Lamb show how amply justified was their confidence in his powers. If the art of poetical criticism could be made matter of instruction, I know no better introduction to the study than these scattered criticisms of his, first upon Coleridge and Southey's verse, and afterwards upon Wordsworth's, and generally upon all poetry, ancient and modern, quoted or referred to incidentally in these familiar letters. Lamb was among the first to detect the great powers of Coleridge and Wordsworth before the wit of the Anti-Jacobin and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers had done their utmost crush those writers, and while the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews were yet unborn. This boy of twenty-one was already showing that, together with the keenest eye for the weaker side of these poetical reformers, with a true humourist's enjoyment of what was absurd or puerile in their methods, that enjoyment in no way disturbed his appreciation of their genius. With all his prejudices and petulances (and Lamb had plenty of these) the distinguishing feature of

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