Whitehead, about the very time of which I speak.

'Dash it!' said the tall fellow, after a pause; 'mine aint a lively trade, or one as makes much money, and it's for the sake of them that's at home I'm here to-day; but if this is any use-and he felt in his waistcoat pocket-take it, governor, and may it do you some good. You can pay me when you're all right again, you know.' And he pressed a half-sovereign into my hand. It was my turn to cry now, but I didn't. I took down his name and address in 'Syro-Phoenician,' and I grasped his honest hand, and the pair went off. The short man felt in his pocket, too, and muttered something about having given change at the last place he called at. That half-sovereign saved us all ; it was the turning point in my life. The next day I got my coat back, and went out and obtained work. I paid the half-sovereign back almost directly, and added handsome interest too, when my fat benefactor had lost his rosy colour and some two stone of his weight with fever and trouble some three years after that distress for poor-rates was put in. Excuse me, but the tears that would not come then will find their way now, when I think of that little affair, though it was twenty years ago; but I've never told the story to a living soul before, as I have now to you. And now you must have a glass with me; it's pretty near my time in the 'Lords.'”

CHARLES LAMB AT HIS DESK.

F CHARLES LAMB personally, of his dress, his style, his conversation, we know more than we know of any of his contemporaries. His slight, spare figure, his

spindle legs-Tom Hood said they were immaterialhis head, which Leigh Hunt said was worthy of Aristotle, his pile of forehead, his curved nose, his hazel eye, sparkling with wit, and his half playful, half melancholy smile, have been noted in a dozen sketches; and with the help of these nothing is easier than to picture to ourselves the author of the "Essays of Elia," in his black dress, the proper costume, as he thought, of an author, with his shuffling gait "a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel "-hurrying along Cheapside and Fleet Street from the India House to the Temple, between four and five in the afternoon, looking in at the office of Barry Cornwall or of Talfourd to stutter out an invitation to supper, to play a rubber of whist, to smoke a pipe, and to hear Coleridge talk metaphysics over a glass of grog, or Wordsworth recite his poetry, under the inspiration of a glass of water. And those pleasant social gatherings of his in his Temple Chambers, how vividly they reproduce themselves as we glance through the pages of Elia ! His low-roofed rooms, in Inner Temple Lane, with their smoke-begrimed ceilings, their prints of Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, and Hogarth in black frames, his old high-backed chairs, and his long plain book cases filled with moth-eaten folios of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, all tossed. together, are as well known to us as the furniture, books, and pictures of our own rooms; and the imagination, without an effort, repeoples these rooms with the old familiar forms, Coleridge with his splendid head, his large grey eyes, and his musical voice, looking, as Lamb said, like an archangel a little damaged; the tall gaunt form of Wordsworth, with a green shade over his eyes; Godwin, the author of the most sensational works of his day, with his thin voice and finical manners, but with a head that Phidias might have chiselled; Tom Barnes, the Editor of the Times; Hazlitt, with his critical contentious tongue, and his slouching gait; Leigh Hunt, with his flowing locks and his benevolent smile; the gaunt form of George Dyer; Charles Kemble, with his majestic air, Talfourd, The Crabb, Liston, Burney--the Burney whom Lamb has immortalised by his

mot-"If dirt was trumps, what a hand you would have, Michael!" -and Mary Lamb, with her old-fashioned dress, and her capacious cap, the very soul of good nature, looking with a half-humorous, halfreproachful expression at her brother as he lays down his cards to mix his second tumbler.

But of Charles Lamb as an author, of Charles Lamb at his desk, we know less than we know even of Coleridge.

Here and there in his letters we come across a hint as to when and where this or that sonnet was written. Thus the verses "To my Sister" were written, as he tells Coleridge, in one of his lucid intervals in the course of six weeks which he "spent very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton" about the beginning of 1796. The verses opening with the line "The Lord of Light shakes off his drowsyhed" were written during a walk down into Hertfordshire; and

"When last I roved these winding wood-walks green"

was written "within a day or two of the last, on revisiting a spot where the scene was laid of my first sonnet, 'that mocked my step with many a lonely glade !'"

The sonnet, "We were two pretty babies," a sonnet that he valued more than any of these trifles which were thrown off under the inspiration of Cowley in his summer strolls, was composed in that very wood I had in mind when I wrote 'Methinks how dainty sweet;' and Cowley's exquisite "Elegy on the death of his friend Harvey" suggested the phrase of "we two."

"Was there a tree that did not know

The love betwixt us two?"

Most of these sonnets were inspired partly by the recollection of Coleridge's eloquence in the quiet little sanded parlour at the "Salutation and Cat," and partly by Lamb's own passion for "the fairhaired maid" of Islington, whose shadow now and then flits across the page of Lamb's correspondence; and apart from any merits of their own, every lover of Charles Lamb will prize these versicles, as we prize those of Shakespeare and of Milton, because in them, more than in any other of his writings, we have the reflection of the man, of his thoughts, and his feelings, and the dream of his passions in the dawn of his life. It was on this account, and indeed on this account alone, that Lamb thought them worth preservation. "I love my sonnets," he says, protesting against some of Coleridge's emendations, "I love my sonnets because they are the reflected images of my own feelings at different times. Το

instance, in the thirteenth- How reason reeled,' &c.—are good lines, but must spoil the whole with me, who know it is only a fiction of yours, and that the 'rude dashings' in fact did not 'rock me to repose.' I grant the same objection applies not to the former sonnet; but still I love my own feelings; they are dear to memory, though they now and then wake a sigh or a tear."

We can

But with the exception of hints like these it is surprising how little we can trace the hand of Charles Lamb in his essays and farces. We know all his favourite books as well as we know our own. take down one by one all those "ragged veterans" which he treasured so affectionately. We can turn to the open page in the Life of Sir Philip Sydney where he laid down his book, with the corner of the leaf doubled down, "for ever." But where are the MSS. of his contributions to the Reflector and the London Magazine? When, where, and how did he write the Essays of Elia? Questions like these we ask and ask in vain; for Lamb, like Handel, kept a lock and key on his desk, shut himself up when he was at work, gave orders to his maid that he was not at home, and, unlike Sheridan, guarded against the inquisitive eye of his biographer by burning all his rough drafts, if he had any, all his first attempts, and all his unfinished essays and plays.

We have, however, one compensation for this loss, and that is the article on "Newspapers Thirty-five years Ago." That article contains a striking and vivid sketch of Charles Lamb at work, when-to use his own expression-he was making his "first callow flights in authorship," writing "John Woodvil;" "hitting off a few lines almost extempore" in imitation of Burton; and conjuring "visionary guineas, the deceitful wages of unborn scandal," by scribbling pasquinades on "Mr. Pitt, Mr. Wilberforce, Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Devil, &c.," to add a trifle to an income then barely sufficient for the decent support of himself and his sister, in their Chancery Lane garret. "In those days," says Lamb, speaking of the first years of the century,

every Morning Paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke-and it was thought pretty high toowas Dan Stuart's settled remuneration in these cases. The chat of the day, scandal, but above all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant." Through the influence of Coleridge with Dan Stuart, "one of the finest tempered of editors, frank, plain, and English all over," Charles Lamb had been installed as Chief Jester of the Morning Post. It was his duty in that capa

city to send in half-a-dozen jokes a day; and a fashion of flesh, or rather pink-coloured hose for the ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture when Lamb entered upon his probation, established his reputation at once in that line. He was pronounced "a capital hand." "Oh, the conceits which we varied upon red in all its prismatic differences from the trite and obvious flower of Cytherea, to the flaming costume of the lady that has her sitting upon 'many waters.' Then there was the collateral topic of ankles. What an occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of touching that nice brink, and yet never tumbling over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something 'not quite proper;' while, like a skilful posture-master, balancing betwixt decorums and their opposites, he keeps the line, from which a hair's-breadth deviation is destruction; hovering in the confines of light and darkness, or where both seem either;' a hazy uncertain delicacy; Autolycus-like in the play, still putting off his expectant auditory with 'Whoop, do me no harm, good man!'" The fashion, however, did not last. "The ankles of our fair friends in a few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female whims followed, but none as pregnant, so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than single meanings;" and when pink stockings ceased to be worn, even Charles Lamb's coy sprightliness lost the touch of piquancy that had given point to his wit. But the morning tale of bon mots had still to be sent in. They did not cease with the fashion. Lamb compares his irksome task to the slavery of Egypt; and considering that the wit often found himself driven to play with some "rugged intractable subject; some topic impossible to be contorted into the risible; some feature, upon which no smile could play; some flint, from which no process of ingenuity could procure a scintillation," the task of the Jews was fool's play in comparsion. "Half-a-dozen jests a day (bating Sundays, too) why, it seems nothing! We make twice the number every day in our lives, as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then," as Lamb adds, "they come into our head. But when the head has to go out to them-when the mountain must go to Mahomet !"

What, however, made this toil of easy writing all the harder in the case of Charles Lamb, was the fact that he spent nine hours a day at this time at the India House, that is, from eight till five, and that his father insisted upon his playing cribbage with him after dinner in the evening, and that, consequently, the only time that Lamb could thus spare for the concoction of jokes, his supplementary livelihood, that supplied him in every want beyond mere bread and cheese-was exactly that part of the day, which (as we have heard of No Man's