which you may have seen. His poems were have been sold hitherto only in manuscript." Tiger, tiger, burning bright There which is glorious; but alas! I have not the book, for the man is flown-whither I know not-to Hades, or a madhouse. But I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age." There was another painter of that period whom the public reckoned one of the "most extraordinary persons of the age," but whom Lamb had no liking for. This was John Martin, the designer of " Belshazzar's Feast," and "Joshua Staying the Sun," and other subjects of a grandiose kind, engravings of which may still be found, I think, hanging in the best parlour of many a country home. But the whirligig of time, and the spread of art-education, have brought the world round to Lamb's point of view. How he hits the nail on the head, when he tells Barton Martin's "Belshazzar" I have seen. Its architectural effect is stupendous, but the human figures, the squall ing, contorted little antics that are playing at being frightened, like children at a sham ghost, who half know it to be a mask, are detestable. Then the letters are nothing more than a transparency lighted up, such as a lord might order to be lit up on a sudden at a Christmas gambol, to scare the ladies. The type is as plain as Baskerville's-they should have been dim, full of mystery, letters to the mind rather than to the eye. . . . Just such a confused piece is his "Joshua,” frittered into a thousand fragments, little armies here, little armies there-you should see only the Sun and Joshua. If I remember he has not left out that luminary entirely, but for Joshua, I was ten minutes finding him out. What noble common-sense appears in such criticism as this, and I think the term not unfitly describes Lamb's criticism generally, even in matters more serious and important than pictures and poems. Strange that this jester, this bookman, this too often flippant handler of themes which pious men shrink from touching, yet so often sees farther than his contemporaries into the moral heart of things. A testimonial was actually proposed, in 1828, in honour of Thomas Clarkson, and it was to take the form of a monument to be erected on the road between Cambridge and London, on the precise spot where the great philanthropist first stopped to rest, and formed the resolution of devoting his life to the abolition of the slave-trade. Basil Montagu's wife writes to Lamb for a subscription, which Lamb sends, but with these words of comVOL. II D ment, surely deserving to be printed in letters of gold :— DEAR MADAM-I return your list with my name. I should be sorry that any respect should be going on towards Clarkson, and I be left out of the conspiracy. Otherwise I frankly own that to pillarise a man's good feelings in his lifetime is not to my taste. Monuments to goodness, even after death, are equivocal. I turn away from Howard's, I scarce know why. Goodness blows no trumpet, nor desires to have it blown. should be modest for a modest man-as he is for himself. The vanities of life-art, poetry, skill military-are subjects for trophies; not the silent thoughts arising in a good man's mind in lonely places. We We have modulated, you see, into a more serious key, but it is one just as characteristic of Lamb's individuality as any we have touched on this evening. Common repute sets him down as a humourist, and often enough a reckless one. The world remembers him as a Yorick, with his "jibes, his gambols, and his flashes of merriment." He made many enemies by these things, uttered in season and out of season, in his lifetime, and I daresay they offend many grave persons still. But the flippancies of a man of genius are rarely without some flavour of that genius. When Lamb was travelling once in a stage-coach, with evident marks on him of an influenza, and a fellow-traveller remarked sympathetically, "You have a very bad cold, sir," Lamb replied, "Well, it's the b-b-best I've got." I daresay that old gentleman went home and related how he had met a very odd man-all but uncivil indeedin the coach. Thomas Carlyle, as he recorded, thought Lamb very "ill-mannered," and no wonder, if the story be true of what took place on the occasion of one of those visits to Lamb at Enfield. Carlyle was watching the movements of a flock of pigeons with some curiosity, and Lamb inquired (we can imagine with what gravity): " Mr. Carlyle, are you a p-p-p-poulterer ?" But I think this flow of "cockney wit," "diluted insanity," or what not, was one of Lamb's safety-valves under the pressure of his anxious life. As we listen to these witty and amusing letters, we might easily forget how lonely was the "lonely hearth" from which for the nine years after he retired from the India House they were written. Too often at the end of some whimsical romance, or some penetrating piece of criticism, we come upon saddest confidences as to domestic trials. The earlier letters often end with Mary sends love," or "Adieu, with both our loves," and then we know that all was well with the pair. But as time goes on such postscripts become rarer, and we have instead, "Dear Moxon, I have brought my sister to Enfield, being sure that she had no hope of recovery in London. Her state of mind is deplorable beyond. any example." Or to Bernard Barton: "Dear B. B., your handwriting has conveyed much pleasure to me in respect of Lucy's restoration. Would I could send you as good news of my poor Lucy! But some wearisome weeks I must remain lonely yet." And again to Wordsworth: "Your letter, save in what respects your dear sister's health, cheered me in my new solitude. Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. I look back upon her earlier attacks with longing. Nice little durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete restoration -shocking as they were to me then. In short, half her life she is dead to me, the other half is made anxious with fears and lookings forward to the next shock." "One," he says most pathetically in another letter, one does not make a household." But that lonely figure had to constitute Lamb's household, with exceptions fewer and fewer, till the end came; and we feel that those who then loved him best could hardly have wished that end long deferred. It What constitutes the abiding fascination of Lamb's personality? Not his funny sayingslet the "funny man" of every generation lay this well to heart. His humour ? Yes-for his humour was part and parcel of his character. is character that makes men loved. It was the rare combination in Lamb of strength and weakness. He was "a hero, with a failing.” heroism was greater than many of us could hope to show. Charity, in him, most assuredly fulfilled the well-known definition. It suffered long and was kind; it thought no evil; and it never vaunted His |