favorite authors, some of whom I have since criticised more at large. Whether those observations will survive me I neither know nor do I much care; but to the works themselves, "worthy of all acceptation," and to the feelings they 5 have always excited in me since I could distinguish a meaning in language, nothing shall ever prevent me from looking back with gratitude and triumph. To have lived in the cultivation of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly relished such names, is not to have lived quite in vain. 10 There are other authors whom I have never read, and yet whom I have frequently had a great desire to read from some circumstance relating to them. Among these is Lord Clarendon's History of the Grand Rebellion, after which I have a hankering from hearing it spoken of by good judges, from 15 my interest in the events and knowledge of the characters from other sources, and from having seen fine portraits of most of them. I like to read a well-penned character, and Clarendon is said to have been a master in this way. I should like to read Froissart's Chronicles, Holinshed and 20 Stowe, and Fuller's Worthies. I intend, whenever I can, to read Beaumont and Fletcher all through. There are fiftytwo of their plays, and I have only read a dozen or fourteen of them. A Wife for a Month and Thierry and Theodoret are, I am told, delicious, and I can believe it. I should like 25 to read the speeches in Thucydides, and Guicciardini's History of Florence, and Don Quixote in the original. I have often thought of reading The Loves of Persiles and Sigismunda and the Galatea of the same author. But I somehow reserve them, like "another Yarrow." I should also like 30 to read the last new novel (if I could be sure it was so) of the author of Waverley; no one would be more glad than I to find it the best.

Charles Lamb.

1775-1834.

NEW YEAR'S EVE.

(From The Essays of Elia, 1823.)

Every man hath two birthdays: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper 5 birthday hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand anything in it beyond cake and orange. But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever regarded the first of January with 10 indifference. It is that from which all date their time and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Of all sounds of all bells-(bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven)-most solemn and touching is the peal 15 which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without gathering up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected-in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies. It 20 takes a personal color; nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary when he exclaimed,

"I saw the skirts of the departing Year."

It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of us seems to be conscious of in that awful leave-taking. I am 25 sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night; though some of my companions affected rather to manifest an exhilaration

at the birth of the coming year than any very tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. But I am none of those who

"Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest."

I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties; new books, new faces, new years-from some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I have almost ceased to hope, and am sanguine only in the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into foregone visions and 10 conclusions. I encounter pellmell with past disappointments. I am armor-proof against old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, old adversaries. I play over again for love, as the gamesters phrase it, games for which I once paid so dear. I would scarce now have any of those untoward 15 accidents and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. Methinks it is better that I should have pined away seven of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair hair and fairer eyes of Alice Wn, than that so passionate a love- | 20 adventure should be lost. It was better that our family should have missed that legacy which old Dorrell cheated us of than that I should have at this moment two thousand pounds in banco and be without the idea of that specious old /

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rogue,

In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox when I say that, skipping over the intervention of forty years, a man may have leave to love himself without the imputation of self-love?

If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is introspective and mine is painfully so-can have a less respect for his present identity than I have for the man Elia. I know him to be light and vain and humorsome; a * addicted to * * * notorious * ; averse from 35 counsel, neither taking it nor offering it;

.

* *

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be

sides; a stammering buffoon; what you will; lay it on, and spare not; I subscribe to it all, and much more than

thou canst be willing to lay at his door-but for the child Elia-that "other me," there, in the background-I must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master— with as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty as if it had been a child of some other house 5 and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient smallpox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's, and wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched its sleep. I know how it shrank 10 from any the least color of falsehood.-God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated.-I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful! From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself-and 15 not some dissembling guardian, presenting a false identity, to give the rule to my unpractised steps and regulate the tone of my moral being!

That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly 20 idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause: simply that, being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and, having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory, and adopt my own early idea as my heir and favorite? If these specula- 25 tions seem fantastical to thee, reader-(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy and am singularly conceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom-cloud of Elia.

The elders with whom I was brought up were of a char-30 acter not likely to let slip the sacred observance of any old institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar ceremony. In those days the sound of those midnight chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around me, never failed to bring a 35 train of pensive imagery into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. Not childhood alone, but the young man till

thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and if need were he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagina5 tion the freezing days of December. But now,-shall I confess a truth? I feel these audits but too powerfully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and shortest periods, like miser's farthings. In proportion as the years both lessen and 10 shorten, I set more count upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to pass away "like a weaver's shuttle.' Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. [I care not to be carried with the tide 15 that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth: the face of town and country, the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the 20 age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends; to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes me. My house25 hold-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood. They do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me.

Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices 30 of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candlelight, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself-do these things go out with life?

Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are 35 pleasant with him?

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all,