worked away with a sixpenny fan till she scudded only under bare poles. Mr. Whittington wore out the ferule of a new nine-and-sixpenny umbrella. Gratitude did great damage on the joyful occasion.

The old performer, the veteran, as he appropriately called himself in the farewell speech, was plainly overcome; he pressed his hands together, he planted one solidly on his breast, he bowed, he sidled, he cried! When the noise subsided (which it invariably does at last) the comedy proceeded, and Munden gave an admirable picture of the rich, eccentric, charitable old bachelor baronet, who goes about with Humphrey Dobbin at his heels and philanthropy in his heart. How crustily and yet how kindly he takes Humphrey's contradictions ! How readily he puts himself into an attitude for arguing! How tenderly he gives a loose to his heart on the apprehension of Frederick's duel. In truth he played Sir Robert in his very ripest manner, and it was impossible not to feel in the very midst of pleasure regret that Munden should then be before us for the last time.

In the farce he became richer and richer. Old Dozey is a plant from Greenwich. The bronzed face and neck to match-the long curtain of a coat-the straggling white hair--the propensity, the determined attachment to grog,-are all from Greenwich. Munden as Dozey seems never to have been out of action, sun, and drink. He looks (alas! he looked) fireproof. His face and throat were dried like a raisin, and his legs walked under the rum-and-water with all the indecision which that inestimable beverage usually inspires. It is truly tacking, not walking. He steers at a table, and the tide of grog now and then bears him off the point. On this night, he seemed to us to be doomed to fall in action, and we therefore looked at him, as some of the Victory's crew are said to have gazed upon Nelson, with a consciousness that his ardour and his uniform were worn for the last time. In the scene where Dozey describes a sea-fight, the actor never was greater, and he seemed the personification of an old seventy-four! His coat hung like a flag at his poop! His phiz was not a whit less highly coloured than one of those lustrous visages which generally superintend the head of a ship! There was something cumbrous, indecisive, and awful in his veerings! Once afloat, it appeared impossible for him to come to his moorings; once at anchor, it did not seem an easy thing to get him under weigh!

The time, however, came for the fall of the curtain, and for the fall of Munden! The farce of the night was finished. The farce of the long forty years' play was over! He stepped forward, not as Dozey, but as Munden, and we heard him address us from the stage for the last time. He trusted, unwisely we think, to a written paper. He read of "heart-felt recollections" and "indelible impressions." He stammered and he pressed his heart, and put on his spectacles, and blundered his written gratitudes, and wiped his eyes, and bowed and stood, and at last staggered away for ever! The plan of his farewell was bad, but the long life of excellence which really made his farewell pathetic overcame all defects, and the people and Joe Munden parted like lovers! Well! Farewell to the Rich Old Heart! May thy retirement be as full of repose as thy public life was full of excellence! We must all have our farewell benefits in our turn,

THE ESSAYS OF ELIA.

THE DEATH OF MUNDEN.

YOUR communication to me of the death of Munden made me weep. Now, sir, I am not of the melting mood; but, in these serious times, the loss of half the world's fun is no trivial deprivation. It was my loss (or gain shall I call it?), in the early time of my playgoing, to have missed all Munden's acting. There was only he and Lewis at Covent Garden, while Drury Lane was exuberant with Parsons, Dodd, &c., such a comic company as, I suppose, the stage never showed. Thence, in the evening of my life, I had Munden all to myself, more I cannot say what his change mellowed, richer, perhaps, than ever. It was not acting. He was not one of my of faces produced in me. "old actors." It might be better. His power was extravagant. I saw him one evening in three drunken characters. Three farces were played. One part was Dozey-I forget the rest-but they were so discriminated that a stranger might have seen them all, and not have I am jealous for the dreamed that he was seeing the same actor. actors who pleased my youth. He was not a Parsons or a Dodd, but he was more wonderful. He seemed as if he could do anything. He was not an actor, but something better, if you please. Shall I instance Old Foresight in "Love for Love," in which Parsons was at once the old the doaterman, the astrologer, &c. Munden dropped the old man, which makes the character-but he substituted for it a moon-struck character, a perfect abstraction from this earth, that looked as if he had newly come down from the planets. Now, that is not what I He was imaginative; he could call acting. It might be better. impress upon an audience an idea-the low one perhaps-of a leg of mutton and turnips; but such was the grandeur and singleness of his expressions, that that single expression would convey to all his auditory a notion of all the pleasures they had all received from all the legs of mutton and turnips they had ever eaten in their lives. Now, this is not acting, nor do I set down Munden amongst my old actors. He was only a wonderful man, exerting his vivid impressions through the agency of the stage. In one only thing did I see him act, that is, support a character; it was in a wretched farce called " Johnny Gilpin," for Dowton's benefit, in which he did a Cockney. The thing ran but one night; but when I say that Lubin's Log was nothing to it, I say little; it was transcendent. And here let me say of actors-envious actors-that of Munden Liston was used to speak almost with the enthusiasm due to the dead, in terms of such allowed superiority to every actor on the stage, and this at a time when Munden was gone by in the world's estimation, that it convinced me that artists (in which term I include poets, painters, &c.) are not so envious as the world think. I have little time, and therefore enclose a criticism on Munden's Old Dozey and his general acting, by a gentleman who attends less to these things than formerly, but whose criticism I think masterly.

LAST ESSAYS OF ELIA.

A CHARACTER OF THE LATE ELIA.1

BY A FRIEND (LAMB HIMSELF).

THIS gentleman, who for some months past had been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final tribute to Nature. He just lived long enough (it was what he wished) to see his collected into a papers volume. The pages of the "London Magazine" will henceforth know him no more.

Exactly at twelve last night his queer spirit departed, and the bells of Saint Bride's rang him out with the old year. The mournful vibrations were caught in the dining-room of his friends T. and H., 2 and the company, assembled there to welcome in another first of January, checked their carousals in mid-mirth and were silent. Janus wept. The gentle Pr, in_a_whisper, signified his intention of devoting an elegy; and Allan C.,5 nobly forgetful of his countryinen's wrongs, vowed a memoir to his manes full and friendly as a "Tale of Lyddalcross.”

To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if there was ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years and a half's existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.

I am now at liberty to confess that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well founded. Crude they are, I grant you, a sort of unlicked, incondite things, villanously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had not been his if they had been other than such; and better it is that a writer should be natural in a self-pleasing quaintness than to affect a naturalness (so called) that should be strange to him. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know that what he tells us as of himself was often true only (historically) of another; as in his third essay (to save many instances), where, under the first person (his favourite figure), he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country boy

1 From the "London Magazine," 1823. It was partly reprinted as a preface to the Second Series of Elia, 1833.

2 Taylor and Hessey, the publishers of the "London Magazine."

3 Wainwright, editor of the "London Magazine."

4 Procter, better known as Barry Cornwall.

5 Cunningham.

placed at a London school, far from his friends and connections, in direct opposition to his own early history. If it be egotism to imply and twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another, making himself many, or reducing many unto himself, then is the skilful novelist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all, who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly?

My late friend was in many respects a singular character. Those who did not like him hated him, and some, who once liked him, afterwards became his bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little concern about what he uttered, and in whose presence. He observed neither time nor place, and would ever out with what came uppermost. With the severe religionist he would pass for a freethinker, while the other faction set him down for a bigot, or persuaded themselves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood him, and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure-irony. He sowed doubtful speeches and reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. He would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest, and yet, perhaps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The informal habit of his mind, joined to an inveterate impediment of speech, forbade him to be an orator, and he seemed determined that no one else should play that part when he was present. He was petit and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow, till, some unlucky occasion provoking it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not altogether senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which has stamped his character for the evening. It was hit or miss with him; but, nine times out of ten, he contrived by his device to send away a whole company of his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his utterance, and his happiest impromptus had the appearance of effort. He has been accused of trying to be witty, when in truth he was but struggling to give his poor thoughts articulation. He chose his companions for some individuality of character which they manifested. Hence not many persons of science, and few professed literati, were of his counsels. They were, for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune; and as to such people commonly nothing is more obnoxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. To my knowledge this was a mistake. His intimados, to confess a truth, were, in the world's eye, a ragged regiment. He found them floating on the surface of society, and the colour, or something else in the weed, pleased him. The burrs stuck to him, but they were good and loving burrs for all that. He never greatly cared for the society of what are called good people. If any of these were scandalised (and offences were sure to arise), he could not help it. When he had been

remonstrated with for not making more concessions to the feelings of good people, he would retort by asking, what one point did these good people ever concede to him? He was temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. Marry! as the friendly vapour ascended, how his prattle would curl up sometimes with it! The ligaments which tongue-tied him were loosened, and the stammerer proceeded a statist!

I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice that my old friend is departed. His jests were beginning to grow obsolete and his stories to be found out. He felt the approaches of age, and, while he pretended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the ties left to bind him. Discoursing with him latterly on this subject, he expressed himself with a pettishness which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shacklewell, some children belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed and courtesied, as he thought, in an especial manner to him. "They take me for a visiting governor," he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important and parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sat gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses; but, such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings.

He left little property behind him. Of course, the little that is left (chiefly in India bonds) devolves upon his cousin Bridget. A few critical dissertations were found in his escritoire, which have been handed over to the editor of this magazine, in which it is to be hoped they will shortly appear, retaining his accustomed signature.

He has himself not obscurely hinted that his employment lay in a public office. The gentlemen in the export department of the East India House will forgive me if I acknowledge the readiness with which they assisted me in the retrieval of his few manuscripts. They pointed out in a most obliging manner the desk at which he had been planted for forty years; showed me ponderous tomes of figures, in his own remarkably neat hand, which, more properly than his few printed tracts, might be called his "Works." They seemed affectionate to his memory, and universally commended his expertness in book-keeping. It seems he was the inventor of some ledger which should combine the precision and certainty of the Italian double entry (I think they called it) with the brevity and facility of some newer German system; but I am not able to appreciate the worth of the discovery. I have often heard him express a warm regard for his associates in office, and