The list of his friends includes Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Godwin, Bernard Barton, Talfourd, Southey, Thelwall, Manning, Charles Lloyd, H. C. Robinson, Dyer, Barry Cornwall, and a host of others. All these men, celebrated or unknown, with their conflicting opinions, various oddities, and repelling differences, seem to have gathered round Charles Lamb as a common centre where the discordant elements could meet in harmony. It was this made Lamb's Wednesday evenings so delightful.

There is a weakness of Charles Lamb's, closely connected with his social habits, which ought not to be unnoticed his fondness for spirituous liquors. This failing of his has often been greatly exaggerated, but there is no doubt it existed. The fact seems to be that Lamb had a constitutional craving for exhilarating drinks; and the relief they gave him from the dreadful anxiety and depression caused by his sister's precarious health and oftenrecurring illness, tempted him to indulge in them to an extent which,-while it would have been moderation to a stronger man, to his delicate and sensitive organization. was excess. It was not the mere excitement of drinking that fascinated him: it was the relaxation, the forgetfulness of care, the confidence, the ready flow of words to embody the conceptions of his ever-fruitful fancy, that gave an almost irresistible charm to brandy-and-water At one time, he and his sister resolved to give up alcoholic drinks altogether. As for Mary, he informed Miss Wordsworth," she has taken to water like a hungry otter. I, too, limp after her in lame imitation, but it goes against me a little at first. I have been acquaintance with it now for full four days, and it seems a moon. I am full of cramps and rheumatisms, and cold internally, so that fire won't warm me; yet I bear all for virtue's sake." Total abstinence plainly did not agree with him, and was soon given up. Another of Lamb's weaknesses was smoking. Of this habit, after several fruitless attempts, he really succeeded in breaking himself. His "Farewell to Tobacco," written during one of these ineffectual struggles, shows with what feelings Lamb regarded the "GREAT PLANT."

Some fragments of Lamb's stammering talk, in which thought and feeling and quaint humour so strangely mingled, have been preserved. They are, naturally, almost all pieces of broad fun, and can give no idea of the ordinary style of his conversation. The maddest quibble even he ever attered was surely the answer he gave to a lady who had been boring him with a rather fatiguing dissertation upon her love for her children: "And pray, Mr. Lamb," said she at last, "how do you like children?" "B-b-boiled, ma'am !"

In 1825 Lamb was released from his drudgery at the India House, and retired upon a pension amounting to two-thirds of his salary. He survived nine years. The illness that ultimately proved fatal was caused by a fall, which induced erysipelas in the head. He sank rapidly, and died on the 27th of December, 1834, only five days after the accident occurred. His sister Mary survived him several years.

I think Charles Lamb's right place in literature is with Goldsmith, and a few others, among writers that we love. There may be loftier niches in the Temple of Fame, but none, we may be sure, in which Elia would rather have chosen to stand. We read Shakespeare, and the deepest impression left on our mind is a feeling of wonder that one human mind could ever have conceived and written his plays and poems. Do we love Shakespeare? Does any one ever feel intimate with him? Do we attempt to shape him in the mind's eye at all? Is he not rather an abstraction -the dramatist-the vague outlines of whose form we never try to resolve into something clear and definite? Of course we have all seen pictures of Shakespeare: massive features, surmounted by a lofty forehead; a pointed beard. We recognise him at a glance. But does the familiar face ever rise up before us in reading his plays? Do we ever think of Shakespeare then? And do we feel anything like the pleasure in a portrait of Shakespeare that we do in looking at Goldsmith's ugly face, redeemed by its touching expression of impending pain?

Do we love Milton? I think not. We reverence him. When we read his sonnet on his blindness, or on his deceased wife, is not the natural emotion of pity for the man

altogether overwhelmed by our admiration of the power of the poet? It would not be so if we really loved him. Dc we feel anything like the interest in Shakespeare's or in Milton's life that we do in Goldsmith's? And does not the interest we do feel arise from curiosity rather than affection? We may know too much of them. They do not appeal to us as men, but as writers. We can derive no additional pleasure from their works by knowing their history; but it might be a severe shock to discover that they were subject to the common weaknesses and failings of mankind. It is better our thoughts of them should be vague.

But with Goldsmith and Charles Lamb it is not so. We cannot know too much of them. We cannot spare one touch from the picture; not even a defect. They appeal to us not only as writers, but as men. We do not feel it a shock to discover their weaknesses. They live in their writings; they become our friends; they possess our hearts by virtue of their complete humanity; they reconcile us with the imperfections of our common nature; their very failings endear them to us the more.

There may be a literary immortality superior to this, but there can hardly be one more attractive. The heights on which Shakespeare and Milton stand are lofty, unattainable, dazzling but cold; they are too high for sympathy to reach. For Charles Lamb we love to anticipate a warmer placea home in the popular heart. The Essays will be like the books of which Elia speaks so delightfully :-" How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading are the sullied leaves and worn-out appearance, nay, the very odour (beyond russia), if we would not forget kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old circulating-library Tom Jones' or 'Vicar of Wakefield!' How they speak of the thousand thumbs that have turned over their pages with delight! Who would have them a whit less soiled? What better condition could we desire to see them in?"

H. S.

A

1

at hirs

THE ESSAYS OF ELIA.

READ

THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE.

EADER, in thy passage from the Bank-where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself)-to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly-didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left, where Threadneedle Street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out-a desolation something like Balclutha's.*

This was once a house of trade-a centre of busy inter ests. The throng of merchants was here - the quick pulse of gain--and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces-deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers-directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend) at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished giltleather coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long

* I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate.OSSIAN,

B

since dry; the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of Queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty;-huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated ;dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, and soundings of the Bay of Panama! The long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might defy any, short of the last, conflagration:—with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an "unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal-long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE.

Such is the SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. At least such it was forty years ago, when I knew it a magnificent relic! What alterations may have been made in it since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take for granted, has not freshened it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were then battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day-books, have rested from their depredations, but other light generations have succeeded, making fine fretwork among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfotation of dirt!) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the mode of book-keeping in Queen Anne's reign; or, with less hallowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous HOAX, whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon with the same expression of incredulous admiration and hopeless ambition of rivalry as would become the puny face of modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot.

Peace to the manes of the BUBBLE! Silence and destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial!

Situated, as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living commerce-amid the fret and fever of speculation— with the Bank, and the 'Change, and the India House about