and the stillness. But I did not sleep well, and I must come back to my own bed. I am going to try and get a friend to come and be with me to-morrow. I am completely shipwrecked. My head is quite bad. I almost wish that Mary were dead. God bless you. Love to Sara and Hartley.-Monday. C. LAMB."

The prospect of obtaining a residence more suited to the peculiar exigencies of his situation than that which he then occupied at Pentonville, gave Lamb comfort, which he expressed in the following short letter;

TO MR. MANNING.

"1800.

"Dear Manning,-I feel myself unable to thank you sufficiently for your kind letter. It was doubly acceptable to me, both for the choice poetry and the kind, honest prose which it contained. It was just such a letter as I should have expected from Manning.

"I am in much better spirits than when I wrote last. I have had a very eligible offer to lodge with a friend in town. He will have rooms to let at midsummer, by which time I hope my sister will be well enough to join me. It is a great object to me to live in town, where we shall be much more private, and to quit a house and a neighbourhood where poor Mary's disorder, so frequently recurring, has made us a sort of marked people. We can be nowhere private except in the midst of London. We shall be in a family where we visit very frequently; only my landlord and I have not yet come to a conclusion. He has a partner to consult. I am still on the tremble, for I do not know where we could go into lodgings that would not be, in many respects, highly exceptionable. Only God send Mary well again, and I hope all will be well! The prospect, such as it is, has made me quite happy. I have just time to tell you of it, as I know it will give you pleasure. Farewell. C. LAMB."

This hope was accomplished, as appears from the following letter:

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

"1800.

"Dear Coleridge, Soon after I wrote to you last, an offer was made me by Gutch (you must remember him, at Christ's you saw him, slightly, one day with Thomson at

our house) to come and lodge with him, at his house in Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane. This was a very comfortable offer to me, the rooms being at a reasonable rent, and including the use of an old servant, besides being infinitely preferable to ordinary lodgings in our case, as you must perceive. As Gutch knew all our story and the perpetual liability to a recurrence in my sister's disorder, probably to the end of her life, I certainly think the offer very generous and very friendly. I have got three rooms (including servant) under £34 a year. Here I soon found myself at home; and here, in six weeks after, Mary was well enough to join me. So we are once more settled. I am afraid we are not placed out of the reach of future interruptions. But I am determined to take what snatches of pleasure we can between the acts of our distressful drama. I have passed two days at Oxford, on a visit which I have long put off, to Gutch's family. The sight of the Bodleian Library, and, above all, a fine bust of Bishop Taylor, at All Souls', were particularly gratifying to me; unluckily, it was not a family where I could take Mary with me, and I am afraid there is something of dishonesty in any pleasures I take without her. She never goes anywhere. I do not know what I can add to this letter. I hope you are better by this time; and I desire to be affectionately remembered to Sarah and Hartley.

I expected before this to have had tidings of another little philosopher. Lloyd's wife is on the point of favouring the world.

"Have you seen the new edition of Burns? his posthumous works and letters? I have only been able to procure the first volume, which contains his life-very confusedly and badly written, and interspersed with dull pathological and medical discussions. It is written by a Dr. Currie. Do you know the well-meaning doctor? Alas, ne sutor ultra crepidam!

Godwin is

"I hope to hear again from you very soon. gone to Ireland on a visit to Grattan. Before he went I passed much time with him, and he has showed me particular attention: N.B.-A thing I much like. Your books are all safe only I have not thought it necessary to fetch away your last batch, which I understand are at Johnson's, the bookseller, who has got quite as much room, and will take as much care of them as myself—and you can send for them immediately from him.

"I wish you would advert to a letter I sent you at GrassVOL. I.-17

mere about Christabel, and comply with my request con

tained therein.

'Love to all friends round Skiddaw.

C. LAMB."

CHAPTER IV.

Miscellaneous Letters to Manning, Coleridge, and Wordsworth.-1800 to

1805.

It would seem from the letters of 1800 that the natural determination of Lamb "to take what pleasure he could between the acts of his distressful drama" had led him into a wider circle of companionship, and had prompted sallies of wilder and broader mirth, which afterward softened into delicacy, retaining all its whim. The following passage, which concludes a letter to Manning, else occupied with merely personal details, proves that his apprehensions for the diminution of his reverence for sacred things were not wholly unfounded, while amid its grotesque expressions may be discerned the repugnance to the philosophical infidelity of some of his companions he retained through life. The passage may perhaps be regarded as a sort of desperate compromise between a wild gaiety and religious impressions obscured but not effaced; and intimating his disapprobation of infidelity, with a melancholy sense of his own unworthiness seriously to express it.

TO MR. MANNING.

Coleridge inquires after you pretty often. I wish to be the pander to bring you together again once before I die. When we die, you and I must part: the sheep, you know, take the right hand, and the goats the left. Stripped of its allegory, you must know, the sheep are I, and the Apostles, and the Martyrs, and the Popes, and Bishop Taylor, and Bishop Horsley, and Coleridge, &c., &c.; the goats are the Atheists, and the Adulterers, and dumb dogs, and Godwin, and Mg, and that Thyestaan crew-yaw! how my saintship sickens at the idea!

"You shall have my play and the Falstaff letters in a day or two. I will write to Lloyd by this day's post.

"God bless you, Manning. Take my trifling as trifling: and believe me sincerely and deeply your well-wisher and friend, C. LAMB."

In the following letter Lamb's fantastic spirits find scope freely, though in all kindness, in the peculiarities of the learned and good George Dyer:

TO MR. MANNING.

"August 22d, 1800. "Dear Manning,-You needed not imagine any apology necessary. Your fine hare and fine birds (which just now are dangling by our kitchen blaze) discourse most eloquent music in your justification. You just nicked my palate; for, with all due decorum and leave may it be spoken, my worship hath taken physic to-day, and, being low and puling, requireth to be pampered. Foh! how beautiful and strong those buttered onions come to my nose. For, you must know, we extract a divine spirit of gravy from these materials, which, duly compounded with a consistence of bread and cream (y'clept bread-sauce), each to each, giving double grace, do mutually illustrate and set off (as skilful gold-foils to rare jewels) your partridge, pheasant, woodcock, snipe, teal, widgeon, and the other lesser daughters of the ark. My friendship, struggling with my carnal and fleshly prudence (which suggests that a bird a man is the proper allotment in such cases), yearneth sometimes to have thee here to pick a wing or so. I question if Norfolk sauces match our London culinaric.

your

George Dyer has introduced me to the table of an agreeable old gentleman, Dr. A-, who gives hot legs of mutton and grape pies at his sylvan lodge at Isleworth, where, in the middle of a street, he has shot up a wall most preposterously before his small dwelling, which, with the circumstance of his taking several panes of glass out of bedroom windows (for air), causeth his neighbours to speculate strangely on the state of the good man's pericranicks. Plainly, he lives under the reputation of being deranged. George does not mind this circumstance; he rather likes. him the better for it. The Doctor, in his pursuits, joins agricultural to poetical science, and has set George's brains mad about the old Scotch writers, Barbour, Douglas's Æneid, Blind Harry, &c. We returned home in a return post-chaise (having dined with the Doctor), and George kept wondering and wondering, for eight or nine turnpike miles, what was the name, and striving to recollect the name of a poet anterior to Barbour. I begged to know what was remaining of his works. There is nothing extant of his works, sir, but, by all accounts, he seems to have

been a fine genius.' This fine genius, without any thing to show for it, or any title beyond George's courtesy, without even a name, and Barbour, and Douglas, and Blind Harry now are the predominant sounds in George's pia mater, and their buzzings exclude politics, criticism, and algebra-the late lords of that illustrious lumber-room. Mark, he has never read any of these bucks, but is impatient till he reads them all at the Doctor's suggestion. Poor Dyer! his friends should be careful what sparks they let fall into such inflammable matter.

"Could I have my will of the heathen, I would lock him up from all access of new ideas; I would exclude all critics that would not swear me first (upon their Virgil) that they would feed him with nothing but the old, safe, familiar notions and sounds-the rightful aborigines of his brain -Gray, Akenside, and Mason. In these sounds, reiterated as often as possible, there could be nothing painful, nothing distracting.

"God bless me! here are the birds, smoking hot!

"All that is gross and unspiritual in me rises at the sight.

"Avaunt friendship, and all memory of absent friends! "C. LAMB."

In the following letter the exciting subjects of Dr. Aand Dyer are further played on:

TO MR. COLERIDGE.

'August 26th, 1800. George Dyer is the only literary character I am happily acquainted with; the oftener I see him the more deeply I admire him. He is goodness itself. If I could but calculate the precise date of his death, I would write a novel on purpose to make George the hero. I could hit him off to a hair. George brought a Dr. A to see me. The Doctor is a very pleasant old man, a great genius for agriculture, one that ties his breeches-knees with packthread, and boasts of having had disappointments from ministers. The Doctor happened to mention an epic poem by one. Wilkie, called the 'Epigoniad,' in which he assured us there is not one tolerable line from beginning to end, but all the char

* This passage, thus far, is printed in the former volumes; the remainder was then suppressed (with other passages now for the first time published) relating to Mr. Dyer, lest they should give pain to that excellent per son then living.