+

Doe' you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when dressed, i. e., printed. All things read raw to me in MS.; to compare magna parvis, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. The only one which I think would not very much win upon me in print is Peter Bell. But I am not certain. You ask me about your preface. I like both that and the supplement without an exception. The account of what you mean by imagination is very valuable to me, It will help me to like some things in poetry better, which is a little humiliating to me to confess. I thought I could not be instructed in that science (I mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene, beastly Peter Pindar, in a dispute on Milton, say he thought that if he had reason to value himself upon one thing more than another, it was in knowing what good verse was. Who looked over your proof-sheets, and left ordebo in that line of Virgil?

:

"My brother's picture of Milton is very finely painted, that is, it might have been done by a hand next to Vandyke's. It is the genuine Milton, and an object of quiet gaze for the half-hour at a time. Yet, though I am confident there is no better one of him, the face does not quite answer to Milton. There is a tinge of petit (or petite, how do you spell it?) querulousness about it; yet, hang it! now I remember better, there is not; it is calm, melancholy, and poetical. One of the copies of the poems you sent has precisely the same pleasant blending of a sheet of second volume with a sheet of first. I think it was page 245; but I sent it and had it rectified. It gave me, in the first impetus of cutting the leaves, just such a cold squelch as going down a plausible turning and suddenly reading No thoroughfare. Robinson's is entire I wish you would write more criticism about Spenser, &c. I think I could say something about him myself, but, Lord bless me! these merchants and their spicy drugs,' which are so harmonious to sing of, they lime-twig up my poor soul and body, till I shall forget I ever thought myself a bit of a genius! I can't even put a few thoughts on paper for a newspaper. I 'engross' when I should 'pen' a paragraph. Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffic, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization, and wealth, and amity, and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and knowledge of the face of the globe; and rot the very firs of the forest, that look so romantic alive, and die into desks! Vale.

Yours, dear W., and all yours,

C. LAMB."

TO MR. WORDSWORTH.

"April 9th, 1816.

I

"Dear Wordsworth,-Thanks for the books you have given me and for all the books you mean to give me. will bind up the Political Sonnets and Ode according to your suggestion. I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain, and chain them to my shelves, more Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read, but don't read; and some neither read nor meant to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. I must do my money-borrowing friends the justice to say that there is nothing of caprice or wantonness of alienation in them. When they borrow my money, they never fail to make use of it. Coleridge has been here about a fortnight. His health is tolerable at present, though beset with temptations. In the first place, the Covent Garden manager has declined accepting his tragedy, though (having read it) I see no reason upon earth why it might not have run a very fair chance, though it certainly wants a prominent part for a Miss O'Neil or a Mr. Kean. However, he is going to-day to write to Lord Byron to get it to Drury. Should you see Mrs. C., who has just written to C. a letter, which I have given him, it will be as well to say nothing about its fate till some answer is shaped from Drury. He has two volumes printing together at Bristol, both finished as far as the composition goes; the latter containing his fugitive poems, the former his Literary Life. Nature, who conducts every creature, by instinct, to its best end, has skilfully directed C. to take up his abode at a Chymist's Laboratory in Norfolk-street. She might as well have sent a Helluo Librorum for cure to the Vatican. God keep him inviolate among the traps and pitfalls! He has done pretty well as yet.

"Tell Miss H. my sister is every day wishing to be quictly sitting down to answer her very kind letter, but while C. stays she can hardly find a quiet time; God bless him!

"Tell Mrs. W. her postscripts are always agreeable. They are so legible too. Your manual-graphy is terrible, dark as Lycophron. Likelihood,' for instance, is thus typified ... I should not wonder if the constant making out of such paragraphs is the cause of that weakness in

* Here is a most inimitable scrawl.

Mrs. W.'s eyes, as she is tenderly pleased to express it. Dorothy, I hear, has mounted spectacles; so you have deoculated two of your dearest relations in life. Well, God bless you, and continue to give you power to write with a finger of power upon our hearts what you fail to impress, in corresponding lucidness, upon our outward eye-sight! "Mary love to all; she is quite well.

"I am called off to do the deposits on Cotton Wool-but why do I relate this to you, who want faculties to comprehend the great mystery of deposits, of interest, of warehouse rent, and contingent fund? Adieu!

C. LAMB. "A longer letter when C. is gone back into the country, relating his success, &c.-my judgment of your new books, &c., &c. I am scarce quiet enough while he stays.

"Yours again,

C. L."

The next letter is fantastically written beneath a regular official order, the words in italics being printed.

SIR, Please to state the weights and amounts of the fol

lowing Lots of

sold
“Your obedient Servant,

Sale, 181 for

"CHAS. LAMB.

"Accountant's Office, 26th April, 1816.* "Dear W.,-I have just finished the pleasing task of correcting the revise of the poems and letter. I hope they will come out faultless. One blunder I saw and shuddered at. The hallucinating rascal had printed battered for battened, this last not conveying any distinct sense to his gaping soul. The Reader (as they call 'em) had discovered it, and given it the marginal brand, but the substitutory n had not yet appeared. I accompanied his notice with a most pathetic address to the printer not to neglect the correction. I know how such a blunder would batter at your peace.' With regard to the works, the Letter I read with unabated satisfaction. Such a thing was wanted-called for. The parallel of Cotton with Burns I heartily approve. Iz. Walton hallows any page in which his reverend name appears. 'Duty archly bending to purposes of general benevolence' is exquisite. The poems I endeavoured not to understand, but to read them with my eye alone, and I think I succeeded. (Some people will do that when they come out, you'll say.) As if I were to luxuriate to-morrow at some picture-gallery

*This is shown by the post-mark to be an error; it should be 1818.

I was never at before, and going by to-day by chance, found the door open, and having but five minutes to look about me, peeped in; just such a chastised peep I took with my mind at the lines my luxuriating eye was coursing over unrestrained, not to anticipate another day's fuller satisfaction. Coleridge is printing Christabel,' by Lord Byron's recommendation to Murray, with what he calls a vision, 'Kubla Khan,' which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it; but there is an observation, ‘Never tell thy dreams,' and I am almost afraid that 'Kubla Khan' is an owl that won't bear daylight. I fear lest it should be discovered by the lantern of typography and clear reducting to letters no better than nonsense or no sense. When I was young, I used to chant with ecstacy 'MILD ARCADIANS EVER BLOOMING,' till somebody told me it was meant to be nonsense. Even yet I have a lingering attachment to it, and I think it better than 'Windsor Forest,' Dying Christian's Address,' &c. Coleridge has sent his tragedy to D. L. T.; it cannot be acted this season, and by their manner of receiving, I hope he will be able to alter it to make them accept it for next. He is, at present, under the medical care of a Mr. Gilman (Killman ?), at Highgate, where he plays at leaving off laud-m; I think his essentials not touched; he is very bad, but then he wonderfully picks up another day, and his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged. Will Miss H. pardon our not replying at length to her kind letter? We are not quiet enough; Morgan is with us every day, going betwixt Highgate and the Temple. Coleridge is absent but four miles, and the neighbourhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him or the Author of the Excursion, I should, in a very little time, lose my own identity, and be dragged along in the current of other people's thoughts, hampered in a net. How cool I sit in this office, with no possible interruption farther than what I may term material! There is not as much metaphysics in thirty-six of the people here as there is in the first page of Locke's Treatise on the Human Understanding,' or as much poetry as in any ten lines of the Pleasures of Hope,' or more natural Beggar's Petition.' I never entangle myself in any of their speculations. Interruptions, if I try to write a letter even, I have

dreadful. Just now, within four lines, I was called off for ten minutes to consult dusty old books for the settlement of obsolete errors. I hold you a guinea you don't find the chasm where I left off, so excellently the wounded sense closed again and was healed.

"N.B.-Nothing said above to the contrary, but that I hold the personal presence of the two mentioned potent spirits at a rate as high as any; but I pay dearer; what amuses others robs me of myself; my mind is positively discharged into their greater currents, but flows with a willing violence. As to your question about work; it is far less oppressive to me than it was, from circumstances ; it takes all the golden part of the day away, a solid lump, from ten to four; but it does not kill my peace as before. Some day or other I shall be in a taking again. My head aches, and you have had enough. God bless you!

"C. LAMB."

CHAPTER VII.

The "London Magazine."-Character and Fate of Mr. John Scott, its Editor.- Glimpse of Mr. Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, one of its Contributors.-Miscellaneous Letters of Lamb to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others. [1818 to 1825.]

LAMB's association with Hazlitt in the year 1820 introduced him to that of the "London Magazine," which supplied the finest stimulus his intellect had ever received, and induced the composition of the Essays fondly and familiarly known under the fantastic title of Elia. Never was a periodical work commenced with happier auspices, numbering a list of contributors more original in thought, more fresh in spirit, more sportive in fancy, or directed by an editor better qualified by nature and study to preside, than this "London." There was Lamb, with humanity ripened. among town-bred experiences, and pathos matured by sorrow, at his wisest, sagest, airiest, indiscreetest, best; Barry Cornwall, in the first bloom of his modest and enduring fame, streaking the darkest passion with beauty; John Hamilton Reynolds, lighting up the wildest eccentricities and most striking features of many-coloured life with vivid fancy; and, with others of less note, Hazlitt, whose pen, unloosed from the chain which earnest thought and metaphysical dreamings had woven, gave radiant expression to